Vedas

• 1. Introduction

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  The Vedas were never written to be read. For most of their existence they had no pages at all. Composed in Vedic Sanskrit, they are the oldest layer of Sanskrit literature and the oldest scriptures of Hinduism, and they have been carried in human memory since the 2nd millennium BCE. Hindus call them apauruseya, meaning not of a man, superhuman, impersonal, authorless. They are sruti, what is heard, set apart from the texts called smrti, what is remembered. There are four of them, the Rigveda, the Yajurveda, the Samaveda and the Atharvaveda, and a single misremembered syllable was treated as a failure. So how do you preserve a text without writing it down? Why would a culture distrust the written page so deeply that it forbade committing these words to manuscript? And what did it mean to believe that reciting a sound could regenerate the cosmos itself?

• 2. Sounds Older Than Meaning

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  The mantras are the oldest part of the Vedas, and they are recited today for their phonology rather than their meaning. Already by the end of the Vedic period their original sense had become obscure for ordinary people. Etymological compendia called niruktas were developed to preserve and clarify what many Sanskrit words had once meant. In the transmission of the Samhitas, the emphasis falls on the sound, the sabda, and not on the artha, the meaning of the mantras. According to Staal, when mantras are recited in Vedic rituals they are disengaged from their original context and used in ways that have little to do with their meaning. The words themselves are sacred. As Klostermaier notes, in ritual they become magical sounds, a means to an end. In the Brahmanical view the mantras are primordial rhythms of creation, preceding the forms to which they refer. By reciting them the cosmos is regenerated, by enlivening and nourishing the forms of creation at their base. As long as the purity of the sounds is preserved, the recitation will be efficacious, whether or not any human being understands its discursive meaning. Frazier observes that later Vedic texts sought deeper understanding of why the rituals worked, treating study itself as a process of understanding.

• 3. The Memory Machine

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  Up to eleven different modes of recitation, called pathas, were used to lock the same text in place. The authoritative transmission ran in a sampradaya, from father to son or from guru to shishya, believed to be initiated by the rishis who first heard the primordial sounds. Only a living teacher could teach the correct pronunciation and explain hidden meanings, in a way that what Leela Prasad calls a dead and entombed manuscript never could. The Shiksha, the Vedanga of sound, prescribed the proper articulation, training students to master the texts literally forward and backward in fully acoustic fashion. Mnemonic techniques went far beyond rote repetition. Reciters used the alphabet as a mnemotechnical device, matched physical movements such as nodding the head with particular sounds, chanted in groups, and visualised sounds using mudras, hand signs. These hand signs gave an additional visual confirmation and let the audience check the reading integrity alongside the audible means. One method, a mesh recitation, took every two adjacent words and recited them in their original order, then in reverse, then in the original order again. The texts were then proof-read by comparing the different recited versions. Houben and Rath argue this tradition cannot simply be called oral, since it depends significantly on a memory culture. Staal, criticising the Goody-Watt hypothesis that literacy is more reliable than orality, called this oral transmission by far the more remarkable. The Rigveda was redacted into a single text during the Brahmana period without any variant readings within its school.

• 4. The Forbidden Page

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  The Vedas were written down only after 500 BCE, and even then the written version held no authority. Only the orally transmitted texts were regarded as authoritative, given the emphasis on the exact pronunciation of the sounds. Witzel suggests that attempts to write the Vedic texts toward the end of the 1st millennium BCE were unsuccessful, and resulted in smriti rules explicitly forbidding the writing down of the Vedas. A literary tradition becomes traceable only in post-Vedic times, after the rise of Buddhism in the Maurya period, perhaps earliest in the Kanva recension of the Yajurveda around the 1st century BCE. Even then, oral transmission remained active. The manuscript materials themselves were fragile, birch bark and palm leaves, so surviving manuscripts rarely surpass an age of a few hundred years. The Sampurnanand Sanskrit University holds a Rigveda manuscript from the 14th century, while a number of older Veda manuscripts survive in Nepal, dated from the 11th century onwards. All printed editions of the Vedas that survive today are likely the version that existed around the 16th century CE.

• 5. The Fourfold Canon

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  The Rigveda Samhita is the oldest extant Indic text, a collection of 1,028 hymns and 10,600 verses organised into ten books called mandalas. Its poets came from different priestly groups and worked over several centuries between roughly 1500 and 1200 BCE, in the Punjab region called Sapta Sindhu. Its structure follows clear principles. It begins with a small book addressed to Agni, Indra, Soma and other gods, with deity collections arranged by decreasing number of hymns, and the meter itself moves systematically from jagati and tristubh to anustubh and gayatri. The Yajurveda Samhita is a compilation of prose offering formulas, spoken by a priest while an individual performed ritual actions such as those before the yajna fire. It splits into the Black, Krishna, and the White, Shukla, where black implies the un-arranged motley collection of verses and white the well arranged one. The Samaveda Samhita consists of 1549 stanzas taken almost entirely from the Rigveda, with only 75 mantras of its own, and its purpose was liturgical, the repertoire of the singer priests. The Atharvaveda came last, compiled probably around 900 BCE, with about 760 hymns and roughly 160 shared with the Rigveda. Sometimes called the Veda of magical formulas, an epithet other scholars reject, it preserves spells to remove maladies believed to be caused by demons, and herb and nature derived potions as medicine. Kenneth Zysk calls it one of the oldest surviving records of the earliest forms of folk healing of Indo-European antiquity. The first three Vedas formed the original triple science of reciting hymns, performing sacrifices, and chanting songs.

• 6. From Ritual To Insight

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  Each Veda was subdivided into four layers, and they were read at different stages of life. The Samhitas and Brahmanas describe daily rituals, generally meant for the Brahmacharya and Grhastha stages of the Chaturashrama system, while the Aranyakas and Upanishads were meant for the Vanaprastha and Sannyasa stages. The Brahmanas are prose commentaries that explain the proper methods and meaning of the Samhita rituals, and incorporate myths, legends and sometimes philosophy. A total of 19 Brahmana texts have survived, two with the Rigveda, six with the Yajurveda, ten with the Samaveda and one with the Atharvaveda. The Chandogya Brahmana, one of the oldest, opens with eight ritual hymns for marriage and the birth of a child, including a mutual marriage pledge by which bride and groom bind themselves to each other. The Aranyakas, the wilderness texts, were composed by people who meditated in the woods as recluses, and they mix instructions on ceremonies with symbolic meta-rituals. The Upanishads form the last composed layer, commonly called Vedanta, meaning either the last chapters of the Vedas or the highest purpose of the Veda. Their central concern is the connection between parts of the human organism and cosmic realities. The concepts of Brahman, the Ultimate Reality from which everything arises, and Atman, the essence of the individual, are central to them. Knowing the correspondence between Atman and Brahman permits an integrative vision of the whole. This inspired Adi Shankara to divide each Veda into karma-kanda, the action and ritual sections, and jnana-kanda, the knowledge and spirituality sections. Of the entire Vedic corpus, the Upanishads alone are widely known.

• 7. Schools, Branches And Beliefs

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  There was likely no single accepted Vedic scripture in the 2nd millennium BCE, only a canon of various texts accepted by each school. Witzel and Renou note that each branch, or shakha, probably represented an ancient community of a particular area or kingdom, and each followed its own canon. Most of these texts were lost. The Rigveda that survives today comes from one extremely well preserved school of Sakalya, from a region called Videha in modern north Bihar, south of Nepal. The schools did not even agree on the nature of the divine. Some believed in polytheism with many gods serving different natural functions, with Indra, Agni, and Yama as popular subjects of worship. Others held henotheistic beliefs, worshipping one god while accepting that others existed, and still others were monotheistic, agnostic, or monistic, holding that an absolute reality goes beyond the gods and transcends everything that exists. Beyond the Vedic schools, whole traditions took differing positions on the authority of these texts. The schools that acknowledged it are classed as orthodox, astika, and together comprise Hindu philosophy. The sramana traditions that rejected it, Charvaka, Ajivika, Buddhism and Jainism, are called heterodox, nastika. Even some traditions within Hinduism rejected the Vedas. The Anandabhairava Tantra states that the wise man should not elect as his authority the word of the Vedas, which is full of impurity, produces but scanty and transitory fruits and is limited. Modern figures split too. The Arya Samaj and Brahmo Samaj accept the authority of the Vedas, while social reformer B. R. Ambedkar rejected it.

• 8. The Vedas Beyond The Vedas

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  Some post-Vedic texts call themselves the fifth Veda, and the earliest such reference appears in the Chandogya Upanishad, in hymn 7.1.2. The Natyasastra makes the claim for drama and dance, declaring that from all the Vedas Brahma framed the Natya Veda. From the Rig Veda he drew the words, from the Sama Veda the melody, from the Yajur Veda gesture, and from the Atharva Veda the sentiment. In ancient Tamil country the Vedas were called Marai or Vaymoli, where Marai literally means hidden, a secret, mystery. The Vedas find their earliest literary mention in Sangam literature, dated to the 5th century BCE. The Pattinappalai records that the four Vedas were chanted by the priests of Ancient Tamilakam. In one poem the Brahmins recite the Vedas, and even their parrots are described as singing the Vedic hymns. The people of these Vedic villages did not eat meat nor raise fowls, living on rice, salad leaves boiled in ghee, pickles and vegetables. The Vedas also crossed into Western scholarship. The study of Sanskrit in the West began in the 17th century, and in the early 19th century Arthur Schopenhauer drew attention to the Upanishads. English translations of the Samhitas appeared in the Sacred Books of the East series edited by Muller between 1879 and 1910. In 2007, Rigveda manuscripts were selected for inscription in UNESCO's Memory of the World Register, written recognition for a text that spent most of its life refusing the page.