Cows of Angirasa

 

Angirasa mean the radiant one or the one with a radiant body. A yogi is capable of attaining this illumination. The Rigvedic hymns refer to sage Angirasa who received several cows as a gift from Lord Indra after he released them from the demons, known as Panis, who held them in captivity. Meaning this marshi received many  Lights of Wisdom. You need this wisdom from Indra to transcend.

The disciple, Saunaka, asks Angiras, Oh Guru “what is that by the knowing of which all this becomes known?"

Angiras replies that there are two kinds of knowledge, and a seeker should acquire them both. They are called the lower knowledge and the Higher Knowledge.

The lower knowledge includes the teachings of all the Vedas (the sections dealing with rituals and sacrifices) and their auxiliaries; it endows a man with knowledge of the manifested universe and enables him to enjoy material prosperity on earth and happiness in heaven.

By means of the Higher Knowledge one realizes the Imperishable Truth. Brahman, the goal of the Higher Knowledge, is the ultimate cause of the universe and all beings. The aspirant for Immortality must obtain the Knowledge of Brahman, by means of which, alone, can he conquer time, space, and death.

The discipline for the intuitive knowledge is the practice of truthfulness, chastity of body and mind, and concentration. This knowledge cannot be attained through mere study of the scriptures or through intellect, nor by one who is weak, slothful, or attached to worldly values.

Angiras, or Angirā Rishi is a great sage who is credited with having formulated ("heard") most of the fourth Veda, the Atharva Veda. The wife of Angiras is Surūpa, and the two bore three sons: Utathya, Samvartana and Brihaspati. In the Rigveda, Agni is also sometimes referred to as Angiras, or as a descendant of Angiras (RV 1.1). Mandala 6 of the Rigvedais attributed to a family of Angirasas. In the Rigveda there is a description of Lord Indra, driving out the cows from the cave where they had been imprisoned by the demon Vala, or by multiple demons (the Panis). Indra gifted the cows to the Angirasas (RV 3.31, 10.108, and 8.14).

Birth of Angirasa Maharshi

In order to assist him in the process of Creation, Lord Brahma created his first sons: the Manasaputras and Prajapatis. After some time, by his will (ichha), he gave birth to another son from his budhhi (thus the son is called Manasa putra - a child borne out of divine intellect). This son is Angirasa. Brahma granted him a great divine glow, tejas, which is not a physical glow, but rather a transcendental emanation that can fill the three worlds.

Lord Brahma said:

• "O Angirasa, you are my third "manasa putra" (the one born out of divine intellect). My creation is multiplying with several worlds and species. Humans and other species are growing in numbers and generations. And welfare of this creation is your purpose. Your mission is to come to me whenever I remember or recall you and fulfill my word from time to time. Whatever I design as your duty for the welfare the creation, you must do. You must now go on a very long and unbroken penance and bequeath its fruit to the welfare of all beings in the creation. You must remain so till I order you again, to take up family life (Grihasta Ashrama)."
  

Angirasa replied,

• "You are the reason for my birth and of all this creation. And therefore, you are my almighty Lord. You create us with infinite and unconditional love. You are all knowing. You are omnipotent. You created me with a purpose in mind. Though you do not need anybody's assistance, you are asking me to do this penance. I shall consider it as your grace and opportunity to serve you. I will obey your every word."

Angira proceeded to perform intense penance. Turning his senses inward and meditating on Para-Brahman, his tejas increased infinitely by his penance. Having attained many divine qualities, powers, and riches, and control over many worlds, Angiras still remained oblivious to material desires, and did not stop his tapas. He thus attained the state of brahmarshi. The great Rishi had visions of many Vedic mantras and brought them to the Earth, where he is known as the source of a great number of Vedic hymns and mantras. The whole creation was blessed by the wisdom from his Word.

The Inner Wisdom

The Vedic hymns is an invocation to certain “Nature’s” gods, for ends which are held by the seers, as they call themselves as Rishis,to be supremely desirable (vara, vāra). The boons of the gods are summed up in the words rayi, rādhas, which may mean physically wealth or prosperity, and psychologically a felicity or enjoyment which consists in the abundance of certain forms of spiritual wealth. Man contributes as his share of the joint effort the work of the sacrifice, the Word, the Soma Wine and the ghṛta or clarified butter. The Gods are born in the sacrifice, they increase by the Word, the Wine and the Ghrita and in that strength and in the ecstasy and intoxication of the Wine they accomplish the aims of the sacrificer. The chief elements of the wealth thus acquired are the Cow and the Horse; but there are also others, hiraṇya, gold, vīra, men or heroes, ratha, chariots, prajā or apatya, offspring. The very means of the sacrifice, the fire, the Soma, the ghṛta, are supplied by the Gods and they attend the sacrifice as its priests, purifiers, upholders, heroes of its warfare,—for there are those who hate the sacrifice and the Word, attack the sacrificer and tear or withhold from him the coveted wealth. 

The chief conditions of the prosperity so ardently desired are the rising of the Dawn and the Sun and the downpour of the rain of heaven and of the seven rivers,—physical or mystic,—called in the Veda the Mighty Ones of heaven. But even this prosperity, this fullness of cows, horses, gold, men, chariots, offspring, is not a final end in itself; all this is a means towards the opening up of the other worlds, the winning of Swar, the ascent to the solar heavens, the attainment by the path of the Truth to the Light and to the heavenly Bliss where the mortal arrives at Immortality.

Veda is a worship of the personified sun, moon, stars, dawn, wind, rain, fire, sky, rivers and other deities of Nature, the propitiation of these gods by sacrifice, the winning and holding of wealth in this life, against hostile demons and mortal plunderers, and after death man’s attainment to the Paradise of the gods. The cows were the radiances or illuminations of a divine Dawn, the horses and chariots were symbols of force and movement, gold was light, the shining wealth of a divine Sun—the true light, ṛtaṁ jyotiḥ; both the wealth acquired by the sacrifice and the sacrifice itself in all their details symbolised man’s effort and his means towards a greater end, the acquisition of immortality. The aspiration of the Vedic seer was the enrichment and expansion of man’s being, the birth and the formation of the godheads in his life-sacrifice, the increase of the Force, Truth, Light, Joy of which they are the powers until through the enlarged and ever-opening worlds of his being the soul of man rises, sees the divine doors (devīr dvāraḥ) swing open to his call and enters into the supreme felicity of a divine existence beyond heaven and earth. This ascent is the parable of the Angiras Rishis.

All the gods are conquerors and givers of the Cow, the Horse and the divine riches, but it is especially the great deity Indra who is the hero and fighter in this warfare and who wins for man the Light and the Force. Therefore Indra is constantly addressed as the Master of the herds, gopati; he is even imaged as himself the cow and the horse; he is the good milker whom the Rishi wishes to milk and what he yields are perfect forms and ultimate thoughts; he is Vrishabha, the Bull of the herds; his is the wealth of cows and horses which man covets. “O people, these that are the cows, they are Indra; it is Indra I desire with my heart and with my mind.” This identification of the cows and Indra is important and we shall have to return to it, when we deal with Madhuchchhandas’ hymns to that deity.

Rishis image the acquisition of this wealth as a conquest effected against certain powers, the Dasyus, some times represented as possessing the coveted riches which have to be ravished from them by violence, sometimes as stealing them by Panis, who has then to discover and recover the lost wealth by the aid of the gods. Vala dwells in a lair, a hole (bila) in the mountains; Indra and the Angiras Rishis have to pursue him there and force him to give up his wealth; for he is Vala of the cows, valaṁ gomantam. The Panis also are represented as concealing the stolen herds in a cave of the mountain which is called their concealing prison, vavra, or the pen of the cows, vraja, or sometimes in a significant phrase, gavyam ūrvam, literally the cowry wideness or in the other sense of go “the luminous wideness”, the vast wealth of the shining herds. To recover this lost wealth the sacrifice has to be performed; the Angirases or else Brihaspati and the Angirases have to chant the true word, the mantra; Sarama the heavenly hound has to find out the cows in the cave of the Panis; Indra strong with the Soma wine and the Angirases, the seers, his companions, have to follow the track, enter the cave or violently break open the strong places of the hill, defeat the Panis and drive upward the delivered herds.

In Vedas the cows are stolen and hidden by demons. But it is not always Indra who recovers the herds by fighting epic battles. A hymn to Agni, the second of the fifth Mandala, in which the Rishi applies the image of the stolen cows to himself in a language which clearly portrays its symbolism. Agni, long repressed in her womb by mother Earth who is unwilling to give him to the father Heaven, held and concealed in her so long as she is compressed into limited form (peṣī), at length comes to birth when she becomes great and vast (mahiṣī). The birth of Agni is associated with a manifestation or vision of luminous herds. “I beheld afar in a field one shaping his weapons who was golden-tusked and pure-bright of hue; I give to him the Amrita (the immortal essence, Soma) in separate parts; what shall they do to me who have not Indra and have not the word? I beheld in the field as it were a happy herd ranging continuously, many, shining; they seized them not, for he was born; even those (cows) that were old, become young again.” But if these Dasyus who have not Indra, nor the word, are at present powerless to seize on the luminous herds, it was otherwise before this bright and formidable godhead was born. “Who were they that divorced my strength (maryakam; my host of men, my heroes, vīra) from the cows? for they (my men) had no warrior and protector of the kine. Let those who took them from me, release them; he knows and comes driving to us the cattle.”

Indra is not, then, the only god who can break up the tenebrous cave and restore the lost radiances. There are other deities to whom various hymns make the attribution of this great victory. Usha is one of them, the divine Dawn, mother of these herds. “True with the gods who are true, great with the gods who are great, sacrificial godhead with the gods sacrificial, she breaks open the strong places, she gives of the shining herds; the cows low towards the Dawn!” (VII.75.7). Agni is another; sometimes he wars by himself as we have already seen, sometimes along with Indra—“Ye two warred over the cows, O Indra, O Agni” (VI.60.2)—or, again, with Soma,—“O Agni and Soma, that heroic might of yours was made conscient when ye robbed the Pani of the cows” (I.93.4). Soma in another passage is associated in this victory with Indra; “This god born by force stayed, Indra as his comrade, the Pani” and performed all the exploits of the gods warring against the Dasyus (VI.44.22). The Ashwins also are credited with the same achievement in VI.62.11, “Ye two open the doors of the strong pen full of the kine” and again in I.112.18, “O Angiras, (the twin Ashwins are sometimes unified in a single appellation), ye two take delight by the mind and enter first in the opening of the stream of the cows,” where the sense is evidently the liberated, outflowing stream or sea of the Light.

Brihaspati is more frequently the hero of this victory. “Brihaspati, coming first into birth from the great Light in the supreme ether, seven-mouthed, multiply-born, seven-rayed, dispelled the darknesses; he with his host that possess the stubh and the Rik broke Vala into pieces by his cry. Shouting Brihaspati drove upwards the bright herds that speed the offering and they lowed in reply” (IV.50). And again in VI.73.1 and 3, “Brihaspati who is the hill-breaker, the first-born, the Angirasa…. Brihaspati conquered the treasures (vasūni), great pens this god won full of the kine.” The Maruts also, Rishis of the Rik like Brihaspati, are associated, though less directly in this divine action. “He whom ye foster, O Maruts, shall break open the pen” (VI.66.8), and elsewhere we hear of the cows of the Maruts (I.38.2). Pushan, the Increaser, a form of the sun-god is also invoked for the pursuit and recovery of the stolen cattle, (VI.54); “Let Pushan follow after our kine, let him protect our war-steeds…. Pushan, go thou after the kine…. Let him drive back to us that which was lost.” Even Saraswati becomes a slayer of the Panis. And in Madhuchchhandas’ hymn (I.11.5) we have this striking image, “O lord of the thunderbolt, thou didst uncover the hole of Vala of the cows; the gods, unfearing, entered speeding (or putting forth their force) into thee.”

Is there a definite sense in these variations which will bind them together into a single coherent idea or is it at random that the Rishis invoke now this and now the other deity in the search and war for their lost cattle? If we will consent to take the ideas of the Veda as a whole instead of bewildering ourselves in the play of separate detail, we shall find a very simple and sufficient answer. This matter of the lost herds is only part of a whole system of connected symbols and images. They are recovered by the sacrifice and the fiery god Agni is the flame, the power and the priest of the sacrifice;—by the Word, and Brihaspati is the father of the Word, the Maruts its singers or Brahmas, brahmāṇo marutaḥ, Saraswati its inspiration;—by the Wine, and Soma is the god of the Wine and the Ashwins its seekers, finders, givers, drinkers. The herds are the herds of Light and the Light comes by the Dawn and by the Sun of whom Pushan is a form. Finally, Indra is the head of all these gods, lord of the light, king of the luminous heaven called Swar,—he is, we say, the luminous or divine Mind; into him all the gods enter and take part in his unveiling of the hidden light. We see therefore that there is a perfect appropriateness in the attribution of one and the same victory to these different deities and in Madhuchchhandas’ image of the gods entering into Indra for the stroke against Vala. Nothing has been done at random or in obedience to a confused fluidity of ideas. The Veda is perfect and beautiful in its coherence and its unity.

Moreover, the conquest of the Light is only part of the great action of the Vedic sacrifice. The gods have to win by it all the boons (viśvā vāryā) which are necessary for the conquest of immortality and the emergence of the hidden illuminations is only one of these. Force, the Horse, is as necessary as Light, the Cow; not only must Vala be reached and the light won from his jealous grasp, but Vritra must be slain and the waters released; the emergence of the shining herds means the rising of the Dawn and the Sun; that again is incomplete without the sacrifice, the fire, the wine. All these things are different members of one action, sometimes mentioned separately, sometimes in groups, sometimes together as if in a single action, a grand total conquest. And the result of their possession is the revelation of the vast Truth and the conquest of Swar, the luminous world, called frequently the wide other world, urum u lokam or simply u lokam. We must grasp this unity first if we are to understand the separate introduction of these symbols in the various passages of the Rig Veda.

In Vedas we find that in this image of the cavern-pen in the hill, as elsewhere, the Cow and Horse go together. We have seen Pushan called upon to seek for the cows and protect the horses. The two forms of the Aryan’s wealth always at the mercy of marauders? But let us see. “So in thy ecstasy of the Soma thou didst break open, O hero (Indra), the pen of the Cow and the Horse, like a city” (VIII.32.5). “Break open for us the thousands of the Cow and the Horse” (VIII.34.14). “That which thou holdest, O Indra, the Cow and the Horse and the imperishable enjoyment, confirm that in the sacrificer and not in the Pani; he who lies in the slumber, doing not the work and seeking not the gods, let him perish by his own impulsions; thereafter confirm perpetually (in us) the wealth that must increase” (VIII.97.2 and 3). In another hymn the Panis are said to withhold the wealth of cows and horses. Always they are powers who receive the coveted wealth but do not use it, preferring to slumber, avoiding the divine action (vrata), and they are powers who must perish or be conquered before the wealth can be securely possessed by the sacrificer. And always the Cow and the Horse represent a concealed and imprisoned wealth which has to be uncovered and released by a divine puissance.

The conquest of the shining herds is also associated the conquest or the birth or illumination of the Dawn and the Sun, but this is a point whose significance we shall have to consider in another chapter. And associated with the Herds, the Dawn and the Sun are the Waters; for the slaying of Vritra with the release of the waters and the defeat of Vala with the release of the herds are two companion and not unconnected myths. In certain passages even, as in I.32.4, the slaying of Vritra is represented as the preliminary to the birth of the Sun, the Dawn and Heaven, and in others the opening of the Hill to the flowing of the Waters. For the general connection we may note the following passages: VII.90.4, “The Dawns broke forth perfect in their shining and[p.146] unhurt; meditating they (the Angirases) found the wide Light; they who desire opened the wideness of the cows and the waters for them flowed forth from heaven”; I.72.8, “By right thought the seven Mighty Ones of heaven (the seven rivers) knew the truth and knew the doors of bliss; Sarama found the strong wideness of the cows and by that the human creature enjoys”; I.100.18, of Indra and the Maruts, “He with his shining companions won the field, won the Sun, won the waters”; V.14.4, of Agni, “Agni, born, shone out slaying the Dasyus, by the Light the Darkness; he found the cows, the waters and Swar”; VI.60.2, of Indra and Agni, “Ye two warred over the cows, the waters, Swar, the dawns that were ravished; O Indra, O Agni, thou unitest (to us) the regions, Swar, the brilliant dawns, the waters and the cows”; I.32.12, of Indra, “O hero, thou didst conquer the cow, thou didst conquer the Soma; thou didst loose forth to their flowing the seven rivers.”

The Soma intoxication is the strength in which Indra conquers the cows; e.g. III.43.7, the Soma “in the intoxication of which thou didst open up the cowpens”; II.15.8, “He, hymned by the Angirases, broke Vala and hurled apart the strong places of the hill; he severed their artificial obstructions; these things Indra did in the intoxication of the Soma.” Sometimes, however, the working is reversed and it is the Light that brings the bliss of the Soma wine or they come together as in I.62.5, “Hymned by the Angirases, O achiever of works, thou didst open the dawns with (or by) the Sun and with (or by) the cows the Soma.”

From these examples it will appear how closely the different symbols and parables of the Veda are connected with each other and we shall therefore miss the true road of interpretation if we treat the legend of the Angirases and the Panis as an isolated myths which we can interpret at our pleasure without careful regard to its setting in the general thought of the Veda and the light that that general thought casts upon the figured language in which the legend is recounted.