Page 219
United in their praise-songs, united in holy chants,
united in lustre, divinely elected,
the Seven Sages, God-like, serene,
following the path of the fore-fathers,
took up the reins in succession
like one seated on a chariot.[2]
The main Vedic text is that of the Rig Veda, which consists of some 10,552 stanzas--a number that may have influenced Sri Chinmoy's choice of 10,000 as his goal for Flower-Flames. The Rig Veda is a huge concordance of lofty utterances, hymns, songs and mantras. "Poetry and philosophy run abreast in the Vedas," Sri Chinmoy affirms.[3] These seer-poets of the Vedas were held to be not only word-builders but world-builders.[4] As the self-chosen representatives of humanity, they spoke on behalf of all men in their praise of the gods. "It would be wise to realise, " writes J. Gonda in The Vision of the Vedic Poets,
"that there was in those ancient times no hard and fast line between 'religion' and 'poetics', between a 'prophet', a poet, a divine man, and a 'philosopher'.[5]"
It was the custom for such poets to sit in worship before a fire altar dedicated to Agni, the Indian god of fire, from whom they received the inspiration for noble thought and the creation of verses. Intellectually powerful and endowed with spiritual knowledge, the Vedic poets were conscious of a force residing within them, a radiant godliness or lustre. They did not speak words of their own inventing, but became as mouthpieces through which this force manifested itself. Because of this widely accepted divine origin, the words of the Vedic poets were considered to have a potency beyond that of ordinary speech. The remarkable history of the Vedas, passed down for centuries through flawless oral transmission, testifies to the value they have been accorded by the Indian people, who refer to the verses as "mantras," that is, incantations or word groups which are a dynamic revelation of truth. Verses selected from the Vedas are committed to memory by the seekers, who claim them as personal prayers.
