Surya

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Before the sun has crowned the horizon, a red light spreads across the eastern sky, and the singers of the dawn are already awake. They are not waiting for warmth. They are waiting to be seen. For the brightness climbing over the rim of the world is an eye, and when it opens it takes in everything at once — the householder rising, the cattle stirring, the deeds done in the dark of the night just ended. Nothing in the world of the living is hidden from it. The hymn calls this brightness the eye of the gods, and gives the eye a name.

The sons of the boundless

In the Rigveda, the oldest layer of the tradition’s memory — a body of more than a thousand hymns dated by scholars to about 1500–1200 BCE and kept, in the three and a half millennia since, by a recitation so exact that the verses of the sun survive syllable for syllable — the sun is not one thing only. It is honored under several names, each catching a different turn of the solar day.

Surya is the visible disk: the wheel of fire that the eye can find in the sky. Savitr — the name means the impeller, the one who sets things in motion — is the rousing and the resting power of the sun, the god golden-handed and golden-tongued who quickens men to their work at dawn and lays them down at dusk. Pushan is the sun as herdsman and guide, the keeper of paths and protector of cattle and travelers, who finds what is lost and brings the dead along their road. These are not rivals. They are aspects, and the later tradition would draw them together as facets of the one great Sun. But the Rigveda already feels the pull toward unity: the hymns slide between Surya and Savitr as if the singer could not always say where the disk ended and its impelling power began.

Pushan deserves a word of his own, for he is the gentlest of the solar powers. Where Surya measures and Savitr drives, Pushan tends. He is the herdsman of the sky, the keeper of roads and the knower of ways, who guards the cattle on their grazing and the traveler on his journey, who finds the strayed beast and the lost thing, and who — this is his solemn office — conducts the dead along the far path to the fathers. His teeth are said to be of meal, for he is the god of a pastoral people who eats soft food; his chariot is drawn by goats. In him the sun is not the all-seeing judge but the bright companion who knows the country and will not let the traveler wander. That the same luminous power could be felt as the unsleeping witness, the rousing impeller, and the patient guide tells how richly the one sun was apprehended.

Surya, Savitr, and Pushan are counted among the Adityas, the sons of Aditi — whose name means the unbound, the limitless — the mother of a class of luminous, sovereign gods. In the Rigveda the Adityas are a small company, usually six or eight, headed by Varuna and Mitra, the guardians of the cosmic order; the round number of twelve Adityas, one for each month and each a station of the sun, is a later, classical reckoning, not a Rigvedic one. To call Surya an Aditya is therefore to place him among the keepers of rta, the true order by which the seasons turn and the sun keeps its road. He does not merely shine. He measures.

A Gupta-period image of Aditya (Surya) from Garhwa, near Allahabad. Photograph by Joseph David Beglar, 1870. Public domain (Wikimedia Commons).

The eye that measures the days

One verse stands at the head of the sun’s own hymn and holds the whole conception in a line. The brilliant presence of the gods has risen, the eye of Mitra, Varuna, and Agni; the soul of all that moves and is unmoving, the Sun has filled the air and earth and heaven. So opens the hymn to Surya at Rigveda 1.115.1, in the rendering long familiar to English readers. The single image carries the god’s two offices at once. He is an eye — the organ by which the sky-gods of the contract and the oath, Mitra and Varuna, together with Agni the fire, look upon the world and see whether their order is kept. And he is the soul of all that stirs and all that stands still, the animating brightness without which nothing would move at all.

To be the eye of Mitra and Varuna is no small thing. These are the gods before whom oaths are sworn, who bind the false and loose the true; the sun is the witness they keep in the sky. The far-seer beholds the deeds of all beings, and from the witness there is no hiding. This is why the dawn-singers wait to be seen. The light that finds them is also a judge, and to be looked upon by it is to be entered, each day, into a reckoning that the eye does not forget.

He measures, too. The sun’s crossing marks the day; his rising and setting cut time into its joints. He is the far-traveler who never tires of the road, who comes up unfailing in the east though no one harnesses him in the night. The Vedic mind, which heard in the regular sunrise the keeping of a promise, found in Surya the visible proof that rta held — that the order was not broken, that the world was, this morning again, still true.

There is a hardness to this conception that later sweetness should not be allowed to soften. The eye that sees all is not partial; it sees the householder and the thief alike, and what it sees it carries to the gods who punish the breaking of an oath. In a religion built around the spoken word — the vow, the hymn, the formula uttered exactly — a witness who never closes is the guarantor of every promise. Surya is that guarantor. He is also, in the imagery of the hymns, the steed and the bird and the wheel: a swift horse running the sky, a flying eagle, a shining wheel that the gods set rolling in the heaven. The singer reaches for whatever moves fast and far and high, because the thing he is naming is the swiftest and farthest and highest that the eye can find.

Seven horses and the red driver

The sun travels. He does not hang. The hymns set him in a chariot, and the chariot is drawn by horses — in the formula most often seven, the mares of the sun, sometimes spoken of as a single mare with seven names or a seven-named team. Later reflection read the seven horses as the seven colors folded into the one white light, and as the seven days; the Rigveda is content with the number and the swiftness. The wheels of this chariot are the turning of the days, and the road it runs is the vault of the sky.

Driving the team is the charioteer of the dawn. In the developed mythology he is Aruna — the reddish one, the ruddy — the personified red light that runs before the sun and softens its glare so that the eye can bear the coming blaze. The classical and epic tradition gives Aruna a body and a story: he is the elder brother of Garuda, born prematurely from the egg of Vinata and so left incomplete, without legs, and yet it is he, the legless one, who governs the horses of the sun. That charioteer with no legs is a later, post-Vedic figure; the Rigveda itself does not name Aruna as Surya’s driver. What the oldest hymns know is the red of the dawn as a power in its own right — kin to Ushas, the dawn-goddess who is the sun’s herald and is sometimes called his bride, sometimes his mother, opening the gates each morning for the brightness behind her.

A carved chariot-wheel of the Konark Sun Temple, Odisha, where the whole temple is built as the sun’s seven-horse car. Photograph by Asitmonty, 2009. Public domain (Wikimedia Commons).

The most repeated prayer

If Surya is the eye, Savitr is the voice that asks the eye to quicken the mind. The single most cherished verse of the whole tradition is addressed not to Surya the disk but to Savitr the impeller — the solar power that rouses thought as it rouses the sleeping. It stands at Rigveda 3.62.10, in the hymn-book of the seer Vishvamitra, and it is composed in the meter called gayatri, after which the verse itself came to be called the Gayatri, or the Savitri. Rendered into plain English, it prays: May we attain that excellent glory of Savitr the god, that he may quicken our thoughts. It asks the sun to set the worshipper’s intelligence in motion the way the dawn sets the day in motion — the outer light answering to an inner one.

This verse is recited at the joints of the day, at dawn and at dusk and at noon, the three sandhyas, the seams where night and day meet. Of all the verses of the Veda it is the one most often spoken; for those who carry the daily rite, it has been the steady companion of the morning and the evening across the centuries, turning attention from the clatter of the world toward the quiet light. That a prayer to the impelling sun should be the most repeated utterance of the tradition says something about how the sun was understood: not merely as the thing that lit the fields, but as the source of insight, the kindler of the very thought that prays.

The grammar of the prayer is worth dwelling on, because it overturns an expectation. One might suppose that a worshipper would ask the sun for warmth, for harvest, for long days. Instead the most cherished of all the solar prayers asks for thought — that the god quicken or impel the understanding, set the mind moving as the rising sun sets the limbs of the sleeper moving. The word at the verse’s heart is the verb of impelling, the same root that gives Savitr his name. The sun is asked to do to the mind what it does to the world: to wake it. Here the outer light and the inner light are not compared; they are made one act. To see the dawn rightly is to be illumined within. This is the seed from which the later inwardness would grow, when the Upanishads turned from the disk in the sky to the witness behind the eye and called both by the name of light.

The sun heals as well as enlightens. In the hymns Surya is asked to drive away sickness and the yellow pallor of disease, to take the jaundice into the birds and the wild grasses and leave the worshipper whole. The brightness that exposes also cures. It is one gesture: to be seen by the sun is to be set right.

A Rigveda manuscript page in Sanskrit, Devanagari script — the verses to Surya and Savitr were sung and memorized for centuries before any were set in script. Photograph by Ms Sarah Welch, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons).

The god of the chosen

A faith that began as one voice among many in the chorus of the Veda became, in time, a devotion in its own right. There arose worshippers who took the Sun not as one god among the gods but as their chosen deity, the supreme — the Saura tradition, the sun-worshippers, who held Surya to be the visible form of the absolute and a path to the realization of Brahman. In the later ordering of household worship that the Smarta tradition arranged — the panchayatana, the worship of five deities set around a center — Surya stands as one of the five great gods, beside Shiva, Vishnu, the Goddess, and Ganesha, so that the sun has its honored place at the heart of the domestic rite.

The Saura devotion left its mark in stone. Across the land rose sun-temples, oriented so that the building itself caught the first light. Two survive as the great witnesses. At Modhera, in Gujarat, the Chaulukya king Bhima I raised a sun-temple about 1026–1027 CE, in the wake of Mahmud of Ghazni’s raids into western India — an act read by many as both piety and a statement of endurance. It is built so that at the equinox the dawn light enters the gateway, runs the length of the assembly hall, and falls upon the spot in the inner sanctum where the image of Surya once stood: the god’s own ray reaching in to touch the god’s own seat.

The Sun Temple at Modhera, Gujarat, built under the Chaulukya king Bhima I, c. 1026–1027 CE. Photograph by Dhaval264, CC BY-SA 3.0 (Wikimedia Commons).

At Konark, on the Odisha coast, the Eastern Ganga king Narasimhadeva I built in the thirteenth century — his reign is dated about 1238–1264 CE — the most astonishing of them: a temple conceived not as a house for the sun but as the sun’s own chariot, the whole vast structure carved into the form of a wheeled car, its sides bearing great stone wheels and a team of horses straining to draw it across the sky. The wheels are sundials; the carvings catch the light through the day. Inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1984, the chariot-temple at Konark makes in stone exactly what the oldest hymns made in sound: the sun as a god going forth in his car. The seer sang the chariot; the mason built it.

The witness behind the later sun

The sun did not fade from the tradition when the Veda gave way to the epics and the Puranas. He was given a fuller story — a wife, Saranyu; sons who carried his light into the human world, among them Yama the first of the dead and Manu the ancestor of men, and the rescuing horse-twins, the Ashvins, born of the sun. Heroes were named his children. In the great war-poem, the warrior born of the sun’s light is a son of Surya. The Upanishads, turning inward, made the outer sun a figure for the inner light, the self that sees; the meditation on the solar disk became a meditation on the witness within. The classical solar figures of the later pantheon all stand in the long shadow — or rather the long light — of this Vedic god.

But the oldest layer keeps its own gravity. Strip away the chariot’s later driver, the twelve-fold count of months, the temple and the carved wheel, and what remains in the Rigveda is starker and stranger: a brightness that rises each morning as the eye of the gods of the oath, that fills heaven and earth and air, that beholds without forgetting and measures without tiring. The singers who waited at the eastern edge of the dark were not waiting only for the day. They were waiting for the gaze that, opening, made the world true again — and for the impelling light that, in seeing them, might also quicken the thought with which they sang it back.

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