Blavatsky's Criticism of Max Müller's “Matsya Sukta”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Down to Earth Series · 13 pages

From Lucifer Vol. VII (41), January 1891, pages 413–17, reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings XIII pages 104–10 under the title “A Criticism on a Critic.” The occasion was Max Müller's article “Christianity and Buddhism” in the January 1891 New Review; the reply opens with the motto “Criticize criticism only,” reproduces Müller's “Matsya Sukta” in full, and answers it under numbered heads set out in an abstract at the front.

Blavatsky opens by saying she is glad to have been noticed, professing respect for Müller's labours in the science of language while reserving her opinion of his competence to deal with the records of Āryan religion and philosophy, and entering a protest in the name of the native pandits and of the Sanskrit and Pali scholars of the Society. The criticism that follows runs through a numbered series. The Oxford Orientalist and chief defender of Hinduism is charged with making fun of the first Avatara of Vishnu for the amusement of his friends, and with a parody intended to corrupt the Vedas. The claim to the title of Rishi is answered on doctrinal grounds — that since in every creation the Vedas are revealed to the same men, there is no room for new Rishis — and on the ground that the Vedic Mantras are not the creation of any existing being, so that calling the poem a Sukta was an audacity, and that bereft of Viniyoga it serves no purpose. The technical charges follow: that a great Vedic scholar used the Vedic form of the Gayatri metre while failing to mark his words with their proper accents; that the poem exposes an undistinguished scholarship in Sanskrit and a marked deficiency in grammar; and that in eight lines it manages to take passages from the Rigveda, which she calls the most disreputable thing a Sanskrit poet can do. The closing heads turn to his handling of Lakshmi.

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