Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/288

 272 The Religion of the Veda

parted, discommoding the'body quite a good deal. But when the breath was on. the point of departing, “ just as the proud steed from the Indus would pull and tear the pegs of his tether, so it pulled and tore the other vital powers.” And they yielded the palm to the airman. Hence a text declares: “From the dimmz all the members spring into existence. Of all things that come into existence the airman is the ﬁrst.”

The dimmer, or breaths, are ﬁnally conceived as coming from a single (ﬁrmer/z, the universal breath, or self, or ago. A Brahmana text declares: “Ten (kinds of) breath dwell in man ; the universal airman is the eleventh: all the breaths are contained in him.” That is, the ﬂame, after its supreme place in the own self has been permanently ﬁxed, is trans- ferred on exactly the same terms to the universe outside of man. The (frame, the lord of breaths, is at the same time the lord of the gods, the creator of all beings; all the worlds are an emanation of his great universal self: ﬁnally the demon is the all.

It is easy to see that with all the reﬁnement of the term airman in its ﬁnal outcome, it certainly has a strong physical touch, at least in the beginning of its use. The ﬁnal shaping of the idea consisted in associating, or rather fusing, with this arrange another conception, coming from a totally different quarter,