Sir William Jones, A Hymn to Narayena

Sir William Jones (see the headnote to Jones's Palace of Fortune, just above) wrote A Hymn to Narayena in the spring of 1785 and published it later the same year in the first issue of Asiatick Miscellany (Calcutta). It was reprinted and praised in several London magazines over the next couple of years, and is generally considered to be Jones's best effort in a lyric form (in this instance a type of Pindaric ode). Jones's lengthy "Argument" summarizes the content, which may be seen to have much in common with later expressions of mystical pantheism in Romantic lyrics by, among others, Wordsworth ("Tintern Abbey," NAEL 8, 2.258–62) and Percy Shelley ("Mont Blanc" and "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," NAEL 8, 2.762–68).

The Argument

A complete introduction to the following Ode would be no less than a full comment on the Vayds and Purans of the Hindus, the remains of Egyptian and Persian Theology, and the tenets of the Ionick and Italick Schools; but this is not the place for so vast a disquisition. It will be sufficient here to premise, that the inextricable difficulties attending the vulgar notion of material substances, concerning which

"We know this only, that we nothing know,"

induced many of the wisest among the Ancients, and some of the most enlightened among the Moderns, to believe, that the whole Creation was rather an energy than a work, by which the Infinite Being, who is present at all times in all places, exhibits to the minds of his creatures a set of perceptions, like a wonderful picture or piece of musick, always varied, yet always uniform; so that all bodies and their qualities exist, indeed, to every wise and useful purpose, but exist only as far as they are perceived; a theory no less pious than sublime, and as different from any principle of Atheism, as the brightest sunshine differs from the blackest midnight. This illusive operation of the Deity the Hindu philosophers call, Maya, or Deception; and the word occurs in this sense more than once in the commentary on the Rig Vayd, by the great Vasishtha, of which Mr. Halhed has given us an admirable specimen.

The first stanza of the Hymn represents the sublimest attributes of the Supreme Being, and the three forms, in which they most clearly appear to us, Power, Wisdom, and Goodness, or, in the language of Orpheus and his disciples, Love: the second comprises the Indian and Egyptian doctrine of the Divine Essence and Archetypal Ideas; for a distinct account of which the reader must be referred to a noble description in the sixth book of Plato's Republick; and the fine explanation of that passage in an elegant discourse by the author of Cyrus, from whose learned work a hint has been borrowed for the conclusion of this piece. The third and fourth are taken from the Institutes of Menu, and the eighteenth Puran of Vyasa, entitled Srey Bhagawat, part of which has been translated into Persian, not without elegance, but rather too paraphrastically. From Brehme, or the Great Being, in the neuter gender, is formed Brehma, in the masculine; and the second word is appropriated to the creative power of the Divinity.

The spirit of God, call'd Narayena, or moving on the water, has a multiplicity of other epithets in Sanscrit, the principal of which are introduced, expressly or by allusion, in the fifth stanza; and two of them contain the names of the evil beings, who are feigned to have sprung from the ears of Vishnu; for thus the divine spirit is entitled, when considered as the preserving power: the sixth ascribes the perception of secondary qualities by our senses to the immediate influence of Maya; and the seventh imputes to her operation the primary qualities of extension and solidity.

The Hymn