वेदों की प्राचीनता एवं काल-निर्णय / ओरायन (लोकमान्य बाल गंगाधर तिलक - खगोलीय वैदिक शोध)

PRIMITIVE ARYAN CULTURE AND RELIGION. 447 and victory over their enemies, condemning evil practices like gambling with dice (X, 34), or have described events, which on their face seem to be the events of the day; side by side with passages where the poet says that he has made (kṛi), generated (jan), or fabricated (taksh) a new (navyasî or apūrvya) hymn, much in the same way as a carpenter fashions a chariot (I, 47, 2; 62, 13; II, 19, 8; IV, 16, 20; VIII, 95, 5; X, 23, 6; 39, 14; 54, 6; 160, 5; &c.); or with hymns in which we are plainly told that they are composed by so and so, the son of so and so, (I, 60, 5; X, 63, 17; 67, 1; &c.), there are to be found in the Ṛig-Veda itself an equally large number of hymns where the Ṛiṣhis state in unmistakable terms that the hymns sung by them were the results of inspiration from Indra, Varuṇa, Soma, Aditi, or some other deity; or that the Vedic verses (ṛichaḥ) directly emanated from the Supreme Puruṣha, or some other divine source; or that they were given by gods (devatta), or generated by them and only seen or perceived (pashyat) by the poets in later times, (I, 37, 4; II, 23, 2; VII, 66, 11; VIII, 59, 6; X, 72, 1; 58, 8; 90, 9; &c.). We are also told that Vâch (Speech) is nityâ or eternal (VIII, 75, 6, also cf. X, 125); or that the gods generated the divine Vâch and also the hymns (VIII, 100, 11; 101, 16; X, 88, 8). The evidence of the Vedic hymns does not, therefore, enable us to decide the question one way or the other; but if the composition of the hymns is once ascribed to human effort, and once to divine inspiration or to the gods di- rectly, it is clear that at least some of these old Ṛiṣhis believed the hymns to have been sung under inspiration or generated directly by the goddess of speech or other deities. We may reconcile the former of these views with the passages where the hymns are said to be made by human effort, on the supposition that the poets who sang the hymns believed themselves to be acting under divine inspiration. But the explanation fails to account for the statement