35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

396
EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
they are largely empty gestures, excuses for a party. But if society in
general has degenerated, many members of Indian society continue
to cherish Vedic ideals. OM is still chanted; and Brahman, a neutralgender
noun, remains a name for God. Language, our making, also
contains the seeds of our downfall, fragmenting the One Reality.
The Vedic seers seemed to know this, too, which is why their hymns
constantly urge man never to lose sight of the unity in creation. In
a dualistic world, language is merely a tool by which one can
eventually understand the underlying unity of reality.
A postal clerk you meet in a third-class Indian train carriage will
expound such matters if you let him. Swathed in the motley
bandages of Hinduism, the invisible man of Vedism is present yet on
Indian streets and probably will be until the golden age returns and
the Womb of Light swallows all her children.
The last mahayagna, the last truly major Vedic sacrifice, was held
in 1946, as the world reeled drunkenly out of an orgy of bloodshed,
genocide, and unprecedented destruction culminating in
Hiroshima and the prospect that the next bender the planet went on
might be its last. India, too, was on the brink of civil war and chaos
then, Hindu fighting Muslim, blood literally flowing in the streets,
and the British nobly deciding that, since there wasn’t much left to
steal anyway, after a two-hundred-year looting spree, this was a good
time to leave the colony to sort out its own problems.
A great female Bengali saint, Ananda Mayi Ma, supervised the
mahayagna. It was performed on the banks of the Ganges at Benares,
and lasted without interruption for three years, from January 14,
1946, until January 14, 1949. It included ten million sacred offerings
and ten million chantings of gayathri, the supreme Vedic mantra,
the plea to be led from the unreal to the Real. In keeping with the
ideals of the ancient yagnashalas, this unimaginably complex
undertaking was to ‘promote the welfare of the entire world.’ Only
in India could such a project be realised in the twentieth century.
To become steeped in Vedism and also to be in Benares during
this process was, for me, to come as close to the soul of India as I
imagine is possible for a Westerner.
Kashi, Varanasi, or Banaras still enjoys at least four names, and
was even briefly renamed Muhammadabad by the Moghul emperor