yuyodhyasmajjuhurāṇameno bhūyisthām te nama uktim vidhema.
अग्ने - O Agni; नय lead; सुपथा by a good path; राये - wealth; अस्मान् - us; विश्वानि all; देव- O God; वयुनानि ways; विद्वान् - knower; युयोधि – remove; अस्मत् - from us; जुहुराणम् - crookedly attracting; एनः - sin; भूयिष्ठाम् -best; ते - to you; नम उक्तिम् - prayer; विधेम – offer
O Agni! Lead us on to 'wealth' by a good path, as Thou knowest, O God, all the many ways. Remove the crooked attraction of sin from us. We offer Thee our best salutations.
Let bhaktas understand that true Vedānta is no enemy to them; let true Vedāntins come to feel ashamed of themselves when they cry down bhakti in the name of their sacred faith, the religion of Vedānta. At the time of the Vedas, Agni was the God; here the prayer is an invocation to Agni devatā - the fire God.
Here, in this stanza, Lord Agni has been invoked to lead us to wealth. The materialist need not understand that this wealth means the sterling or the dollar! It is not the wealth of the economist that is meant here, but it is the riches of the spiritual seeker that is in the mind of the rsis. Wealth is thus to be understood as standing for bliss or mukti or beatitude. The seeker's death bed request is only for the attainment of the supreme felicity. The rest of the expressions are amply self-evident.
~Chinmayananda
O god Agni, knowing all things that are manifested, lead us by the good path to the felicity; remove from us the devious attraction of sin. To thee completes speech of submission we address.
There is in and behind all our errors, sins and stumblings a secret Will, tending towards Love and Harmony, which knows where it is going and prepares and combines our crooked branchings towards the straight path which will be the final result of their toil and seeking. The emergence of this Will and that Light is the condition of immortality.
This Will is Agni. Agni is in the Rig-veda, from which the closing verse of the Upanishad is taken, the flame of the Divine Will or Force of Consciousness working in the worlds. He is described as the immortal in mortals, the leader of the journey, the divine Horse that bears us on the road, the "son of crookedness" who himself knows and is the straightness and the Truth. Concealed and hard to seize in the workings of this world because they are all falsified by desire and egoism, he uses them to transcend them and emerges as the universal in Man or universal Power, Agni Vaishwanara, who contains in himself all the gods and all the worlds, upholds all the universal workings and finally fulfils the godhead, the immortality. He is the worker of the divine Work. It is these symbols which govern the sense of the two final verses of the Upanishad.
~Aurobindo
O Fire, lead us by the good path for the enjoyment of the fruit of our action. You know, O god, all our deeds. Destroy our sin of deceit. We offer, by words, our salutations to you.
FIRE: During Vedic times twice-born householders worshipped fire and offered their oblations in it. Fire was considered as the intermediary god through whom oblations to the other gods were made.
The following is adapted from Sankara's commentary: "Some take exception to our interpretation of these verses. We shall now try briefly to answer their objections. The objector asks why one should not, by knowledge, mean the Knowledge of the Supreme Self, and by immortality, the ultimate Liberation. The Upanishad here explicitly lays down, they say, the injunction to pursue together the Knowledge of the Supreme Self and ritualistic worship. The words of scripture are the final authority. Though Knowledge and ignorance (ritualistic worship) are said to produce contradictory results, yet this objection cannot stand in view of the clear statement of the Upanishad referred to above.
"To this objection we answer that Knowledge and ignorance cannot, by any means, be reconciled, because they are contradictory both as to their nature and as to their ultimate result. The cause of ignorance is false identification of Atman with the body and the rest, but true Knowledge is completely different. The result of ignorance is entanglement in the world, and that of Knowledge, liberation from the world. Therefore they cannot be harmonized. It cannot be contended that Knowledge and rituals may be pursued alternately, because no sooner does a man attain Self-Knowledge than his identification of the Self with the body disappears."
~Nikhilananda
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