part0024

I n this book I have presented Vedic literature in a straightforward way according to the direct meaning of the texts. It is natural for many people to question the justification for this and ask whether or not there might be other, better ways of interpreting Vedic literature. In this appendix I will briefly address this issue.

1. Strict followers of the major sampradāyas. A sampradāya is a school of thought based on the Vedic literature as presented by a great ācārya, or teacher. The major sampradāyas all take for granted the existence of the Supreme Controller (God), the soul, the subtle body, transmigration, subtle and spiritual worlds, and superhuman beings who inhabit these worlds. They also accept the validity of Vedic historical accounts. Some of the sampradāyas disagree with the others about the nature of God, but they all accept the Vedic literature as the authority on which conclusions should be based.

2. Those who adopt the accommodational approach to Vedic literature. In Christian apologetics, “accommodation is an interpretive device or principle which allows an interpreter to preserve valid meaning found in a text without a sterile literalism.” 1 The method is to regard the text as genuine knowledge expressed in figurative language and perhaps overlain with fanciful poetic embellishments. With the introduction of Western science into India, the Vedic world view encountered a strong challenge. Many modern Hindus have responded by using the accommodational approach to bring the Vedic literature into line with modern science.

3. Those who regard the Vedic literature as mythology. People in this group tend to see this literature as a body of fantasy that was built up gradually by prescientific poets. This view is held by many scholars who study Vedic literature in fields such as Indology, anthropology, and comparative religion.

I will now briefly discuss the approaches to textual interpretation used by myself and by the people in these three groups. First of all, I would like to distinguish between a direct presentation of a text, a literal interpretation, and a figurative interpretation. In a direct presentation, one considers the text as it is, without insisting that one fully understands what it means. In a literal interpretation, one assumes that one can fully understand the text according to the dictionary definitions of its words. In a figurative interpretation, one interprets words according to indirect meanings.

When studying a text from an unfamiliar cultural tradition, I would recommend making a direct presentation. I would not recommend trying to insist too strongly on a literal or figurative interpretation—at least not at first. The reason is that it is not easy to understand the meaning of written material coming from another culture.

The true meaning of a text can be defined as the meaning intended by the author. The true meaning may be literal from the viewpoint of the author, or it may be figurative. But if we try prematurely to arrive at our own literal or figurative interpretation of the text, we may completely miss the author’s intended meaning.

What was the author’s understanding of his own words? If the author was working within an established cultural tradition, then he presumably used words according to the meanings accepted in that tradition. But a person who approaches the tradition from a foreign vantage point may not find it so easy to understand those meanings. To understand them, the outsider may have to immerse himself in that cultural tradition for a long time and gradually grasp meanings through usage and context.

Some meanings may differ so strongly from what a person is accustomed to thinking that he will fail to grasp them for a long time. He will tend to take words out of the context understood by the author and force them into a context dictated by his own cultural conditioning. This may cause him to reject the text as absurd, and such rejection can create an impediment to true understanding.

For example, consider the Vedic statement that beings called Devas live in Svargaloka. What does Svargaloka mean? According to Apte’s Sanskrit-English dictionary, it means “1. the celestial region, 2. paradise.” 2 Based on modern ideas of astronomy, we may think that this refers to some region of outer space. We may therefore think that it’s absurd to say that Devas live in Svargaloka, since that would mean they must be floating out in space along with comets and cosmic rays.

In earlier chapters I have interpreted Svargaloka as referring to a higher-dimensional domain that cannot be included in ordinary three-dimensional space. But what is the justification for introducing this idea?

The dictionary doesn’t help us here, because the English words “celestial region” and “paradise” do not tell us whether the region in question is three-dimensional or higher-dimensional. There is no point in delving into the deeper meanings of “celestial” or “paradise,” since these meanings relate to Western culture rather than Vedic culture.

If we turn to the Vedic texts, we find that they don’t directly resolve this issue, since, to my knowledge, there are no Sanskrit words that directly correspond to the term “higher-dimensional.” So what is the justification for introducing this term? My reason for bringing in the mathematical idea of higher-dimensional space is that it provides a consistent explanation of many detailed points in Vedic texts involving modes of travel and relations between places in the universe. 3 I suspect that this idea brings us closer to the intended meaning of the Vedic texts than the idea of Svargaloka as an ordinary region of outer space above our heads. However, I am sure that it is only an approximation. To appreciate the true meaning, one would have to become deeply acquainted with the Vedic world view.

Is this idea of Svargaloka as higher-dimensional a literal interpretation, or is it figurative? The answer is that it is a figurative use of the English term “higher-dimensional,” but it is an attempt to approximate the true meaning of Svargaloka intended by the Vedic authors. In general, my recommendation is to directly present the original texts while trying to appreciate their intended meaning on the basis of overall context. This is a slow process, and one’s understanding at any given time should be regarded as tentative.

Someone might object that the Vedic texts must have been composed by primitive people. Therefore Svargaloka could not refer to something as sophisticated as a higher-dimensional realm. It must simply refer to the sky immediately over people’s heads.

The problem with this is that even people who are widely regarded as primitive, such as the Australian aborigines, have sophisticated ideas that a Westerner may find hard to grasp. What is an aborigine’s understanding of the sky? It may turn out to be something quite difficult for us to understand. This is even more true of the Vedic literature, which is undoubtedly sophisticated in many ways.

The question might be raised that if it is difficult to ascertain the true meanings of Vedic texts, isn’t it wise to consult authorities who have deeply studied these matters and stick to the interpretation they recommend? No doubt this is a good idea, but what authorities shall we select? The three options listed above introduce three sets of possible authorities: (1) the traditional sampradāyas, (2) persons who try to accommodate traditional ideas to modern ideas, and (3) Indological scholars.

If we at all want to understand the original intended meaning of the Vedic literature, we cannot neglect group (1). In most of the traditional sampradāyas, the emphasis is on direct presentation. I have particularly studied the teachings of the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava sampradāya, which was founded by Caitanya Mahāprabhu in the 16th century and descends from the earlier school of Madhvācārya.

I have seen on many occasions that if a commentator in this school comes across two points in a text that seem contradictory, he will simply present them as they are, contradiction and all. Someone might say that this is not an intelligent thing to do. But the intention of the commentator is to simply preserve the tradition as it is. Understanding may or may not come, but that understanding should be based on the original texts forming the basis for the tradition.

In contrast, the approach of people in group (2) is to try to make the Vedic literature acceptable by indirectly interpreting Vedic statements that seem to disagree with modern ideas. This involves interpreting some statements figuratively and dismissing others as embellishments made by overimaginative poets.

Consider how a person with a modern education might react to the story of Arjuna’s abduction by Ulūpī (see Chapter 6 ). If this person is a Hindu, he might want to accept that Arjuna existed as a historical personality. But he might object that the story of Arjuna being pulled into Nāgaloka by Ulūpī must be a fanciful poetic concoction. According to the story, Arjuna was pulled down into the Ganges, but instead of hitting the river bottom, he entered the world of the Nāgas. An educated person tends to reject this, because he knows such things are impossible.

However, the UFO data reviewed in this book contains many modern accounts in which a person seems to be taken through solid matter by a mysterious being. Arjuna’s abduction by Ulūpī may seem to be within the realm of possibility for a person acquainted with this data. At the same time, such a person may continue to regard other features of Arjuna’s story as impossible.

Since our ideas about what seems possible may change as our knowledge changes, we cannot use these ideas as the basis for a fixed indirect interpretation of the Vedic literature. Therefore, instead of presenting such an interpretation, it is better to present the Vedic texts as they are and allow understanding of their meaning to gradually emerge. This is particularly true in a book like this one, in which the introduction of empirical UFO evidence may tend to change one’s idea of what is possible or impossible.

But the objection can be raised that many scholars in universities regard the Vedic literature as unscientific mythology having no basis in reality. Therefore, it cannot help us understand the UFO phenomenon. Extensive study of this literature in comparison with UFO data probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby.

It would not be difficult to find scholars in the field of Indology who would support this position. But I should point out that the established views of scholars in this field are perhaps not as objective and impartial as one might hope. In fact, this field has a history of religious and ethnic bias. To see this, it is helpful to consider the early history of Indology.

When the British began to colonize India in the 18th century, they came into contact with the Vedic teachings. This immediately gave rise to a conflict between their own Christian faith and the religion of the Hindus. This conflict involved both a perceived threat to Christianity from Hinduism and an opportunity to spread Christianity by converting the Hindus. The threatening aspect of Hinduism was pointed out by the early Indologist John Bentley in his criticism of an Englishman (probably John Playfair) who had written in praise of the Vedic writings. Bentley wrote,

By his attempt to uphold the antiquity of Hindu books against absolute facts, he thereby supports all those horrid abuses and impositions found in them, under the pretended sanction of antiquity. . . . Nay, his aim goes still deeper; for by the same means he endeavors to overturn the Mosaic account, and sap the very foundation of our religion: for if we are to believe in the antiquity of Hindu books, as he would wish us, then the Mosaic account is all a fable, or a fiction. 4

A strategy was adopted of translating the Vedic books into English so that they could be used to convince the Hindus of the inferiority and falsity of their religion. For this purpose, Colonel Boden willed a large sum of money to Oxford University on August 15, 1811, to endow a chair in Oriental Studies. Monier Williams, who held this chair until his death in 1899, wrote,

The special object of his [Boden’s] munificent bequest was to promote the translation of the scriptures into English . . . to enable his countrymen to proceed in the conversion of the natives of India to Christian Religion. 5

The German scholar Friedrich Max Müller came to England to take up this work, and he published many translations of Vedic texts which are still considered standard today. Müller wrote to his wife in 1886,

I hope I shall finish the work, and I feel convinced, though I shall not live to see it, yet the edition of mine and the translation of the Veda will hereafter tell to a great extent on the fate of India and on the growth of millions of souls in the country. It is the root of their religion, and to show them what the root is, I feel sure, is the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last three thousand years. 6

The technique used by Müller and his colleagues was one which is familiar to anyone who has studied the UFO field: ridicule what you don’t understand and explain it away in ordinary terms. For example, the “gods” are personified natural forces converted into vain idols by wily priests who perpetrated pious frauds.

Today, Indologists are not generally concerned with converting the Hindus to Christianity. However, they have inherited a legacy of ridicule and misunderstanding from the founders of their field which continues to exert its influence. I will close by quoting a remark from the standard English translation of the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, by Horace H. Wilson (originally published in 1865). Regarding the Purāṇas, Wilson said,

They may be acquitted of subservience to any but sectarial imposture. They were pious frauds for temporary purposes: they never emanated from any impossible combination of the Brahmans to fabricate for the antiquity of the entire Hindu system any claims which it cannot fully support. A very great portion of the contents of many, some portion of the contents of all, is genuine and old. The sectarial interpolation or embellishment is always sufficiently palpable to be set aside, without injury to the more authentic and primitive material. 7

Here Wilson uses the kind of negative language that is typical of the founders of Indology. But he admits that the Purāṇas contain genuine and old material. This so-called “primitive” material may provide us with a novel perspective on reality that will help elucidate the nature of the UFO phenomenon .