THE VEDA

THE VEDA


The Sanskrit word veda means “knowledge.” It stems from the verb vid, “to know, to
understand,” a distant forebear of the Latin videre, “to see,” which in turn spawned a host of
common English words like vision and view, wisdom and advice, evident, survey, history and
story.
We can think of the Veda (with a capital “V”) as a big book, actually more like an anthology of
mostly separate books, which was composed over the course of thousands of years by a host of
anonymous authors. A Hindu might describe it, the Book. That’s because, like our Christian
fundamentalists, who venerate the Torah and their Bible as the Word of God, Hindus believe that
the Veda embodies the “breath” of their creator God, Brahma. This breath was “heard” (shruti)
at the beginning of the world by seven or so inspired sages, who then transmitted this sacred
knowledge
The Veda is thought to have a couple hundred chapters–actually mostly separate books of widely
varying length–but only about three dozen of these usually get any attention from Western
scholars. We can compare the arrangement of these books, rather inelegantly, to a four-layer
cake. The bottom layer consists of four books or “collections” (samhita, “put together”), two of
which–the Rig and Atharva Vedas–are anthologies of metrical hymns, technically known as
mantras or suktas (“good speech”).
The Rig (from ric, meaning “praise”) is the heart of Hindu worship. It’s divided into 10 chapters
(mandala, “cycles”) sharing just over 1,000 hymns. To give you some idea about how many
hymns this is, my edition of the Rig runs to 650 pages of eye-achingly small print. While the
sheer number of hymns is mighty impressive, what’s really remarkable is that the whole shebang
existed well before the inception of writing in India. This means that all of these hymns were
stored in the memory banks of the priests, and passed along more or less accurately for centuries
from one generation to the next by word of mouth. I’m staggered by this feat of memorization
every time I can’t find the keys I put down absentmindedly five minutes earlier.
The Atharva is the samhita family’s black sheep. Some traditionalists turn up their noses at the
Atharva, and refuse to include it in the family at all. While its three siblings are the domain of the
noble Brahmin priests, the Atharva is the working person’s Veda, mostly a book of magic, white
as well as black, and sorcery, without any role in the sacrifice.
The other two collections–the Yajur and Sama Vedas–are closely allied with the Rig, the three
together are called the “threefold knowledge” (trayi-vidya). The Yajur and Sama were composed
specifically as liturgical guides. The former, while it includes about 700 hymns from the Rig, is a
primarily a how-to manual that describes in detailed prose how to duly set the stage for and
perform the sacrifice. The latter, which takes most of its hymns from the Rig, is essentially a
song book, setting the hymns to melodies (saman), and instructing the officiating priest on the
correct intonation of the words.
Most of the Vedic gods are embodiments of natural forces or elements, such as fire and water,
sun and storm, heaven and earth. A few others represent abstractions, like Varuna, the guardian
of rita (“right, proper, honest; enlightened; divine law; righteousness”), the divinely-mandated
moral order of the Universe. And one god, Soma, is the personification of a very special plant, so
special that the ninth cycle of the Rig, traditionally known as the Soma Mandala, consists of
about 120 hymns dedicated to this plant-turned-god.
There are also hymns that speculate about the creation and destiny of the world, about death and
the after-life, about the sacrifice, and that invoke the “blessed dead” (the pitara, “Fathers”). The
Rig even includes various spells and incantations, and a couple of riddles, one of which, the
Riddle of the Sacrifice (1.164), contains these cryptic but beautiful lines:
Who hath beheld him as he sprang to being, seen how the boneless One supports
the bony?
Where is the blood of earth, the life, the spirit? Who may approach the man who
knows, to ask it?
Unripe in mind, in spirit undiscerning, I ask of these the Gods’ established places;
For up above the yearling Calf the sages, to form a web, their own seven threads
have woven,
I ask, unknowing, those who know, the sages, as one all ignorant for the sake of
knowledge ...
The Rig’s hymns give us a glimpse into the Vedic world, its local geography and history, its
social and family structure, the peoples’ clothing and adornments, their food and drink, their
occupations–warrior seems to be high on the list–and how they amused themselves. One of the
most popular pastimes was gambling–see those two birds over there perched on that limb? I’ll
bet you five cows the one on the right flies away first–and one of the most popular gambling
games was a form of dice-throwing (the dice were made from nuts). Amid all the high-minded
and enigmatic poetry in the Rig, there’s a hymn that most of us can immediately empathize with.
Sometimes called the Lament of the Gambler (10.34), it reminds us that, while we’re separated
by a few thousand of years from the people of the Veda, in the end we’re not so different after
all:
For the die’s sake, whose single point is final, mine own devoted wife I alienated.
My wife holds me aloof, her mother hates me: the wretched man finds none to
give him comfort. ...
The gamester seeks the gambling-house, and wonders, his body all afire, Shall I
be lucky? ...
Dice, verily, are armed with goads and driving-hooks, deceiving and tormenting,
causing grievous woe.
“Her mother hates me”! Could this be, in nascent form, the mother of all bad mother-in-law
jokes?
In case you’re wondering, and I know you are, the Rig wasn’t in the forefront of the women’s
liberation movement. Goddesses play a minor role in the hymns, the gods’ consorts being no
more than shadowy appendages with no individual characteristics of their own. The chief
goddesses seem to be:
Ushas, the goddess of the dawn, who “spreads herself out, driving back the formless
black abyss” (1.92);
Sarasvati (“flowing”), the sacred river, who is “Marked out by majesty among the Mighty
Ones, in glory swifter than the other rapid Streams, / Created for victory like a chariot, Sarasvati
must be extolled by every sage” (6.61);
Vac (“Speech”), who breathes a “strong breath like the wind and tempest,” and holds
“together all existence” (10.125).
The modern study of the samhitas, which began in the mid-nineteenth century, isn’t without
some controversy. Western scholars have tended to treat the books with a certain amount of
disrespect, appreciating them mostly for the window they provide onto Vedic culture, but
disparaging their spiritual content. To these men, the samhitas, in the words of Sri Aurobindo,
are the product of a “primitive and largely barbaric society crude in its moral and religious
conceptions, rude in its social structure and entirely childlike in its outlook upon the world that
environed it” (The Secret of the Veda, 23). This opinion, of course, makes traditionalists bristle;
for them, the Veda incarnates the Word of Brahma. Aurobindo leads the charge against this
stand, arguing that the language of the samhitas has a double value, woefully misunderstood by
literal-minded Western scholars. On the one hand, yes, the sages of the samhitas did worship
multiple gods, and nature and natural forces; but on the other hand, at the same time, the many
gods are merely faces of a single deity, and the samhitas are ultimately “intended to serve for
spiritual enlightenment and self-culture” (ibid., 30).
What kind of knowledge is contained in the Veda? To be sure, not your everyday, garden variety
kind. Much as our Christian fundamentalists venerate the Torah and their Bible as the Word of
God, Hindus hold that the Veda embodies sacred knowledge that’s “not of human origin”
(apaurusheya). It’s the “breath” of the creator god, Brahma, “heard” (shruti) in the beginning of
the world by the first inspired sages. Because of this, the Veda occupies an exclusive niche in
Hindu spiritual literature. All the other scriptures–and there are lots of them–take a back seat
because they’re “remembered” (smriti), in other words, authored by human teachers.
Scholars guesstimate that the Veda is somewhere between 3200 and an amazing 6000 years old,
but conservatives are unimpressed. Trying to fix the Veda in time is futile, they say, because the
knowledge it contains is timeless. The Veda existed before the creation of the current world, and
will continue to exist after this world disappears.
While to the conservatives, the Rig’s hymns ares divinely inspired, liberal scholars have a much
different tale to tell about their composition. Long ago, well before the hymns were collected in
one book, everyday Indians honored their gods through a fire sacrifice. The gods were invited
over to the household fire-altar, given a nice comfy grass mat to sit on, offered some food and
other gifts, and regaled with poetry and song, much of it made up on the spot. Of course, these
sacrifices weren’t always entirely altruistic. They would often end with the sacrificer soliciting
some favor, typically more cows, sons, or rain.
While the pious householder continued to perform his simple domestic sacrificial chores, the
public sacrifice became the bailiwick of a small group of professional poet-priests, men who
were considered to be especially adept at versifying and earning the gods’ good graces. Their
body of work was carefully preserved and guarded–after all, it was their legacy and livelihood–
and passed along in their family from generation to generation. Finally these hymns were
collected in the so-called “family books” (chapters 2 through 7), which are the core of the Rig.

VEDIC YOGA

So is there any mention of Yoga in the samhitas, more particularly in the Rig? Though the
evidence is rather slim, both Georg Feuerstein and fellow scholar David Frawley believe so.
Vedic (or what Feuerstein calls Archaic) Yoga, he writes, is “less individualistic [than it is today]
and, like shamanism, more intrinsically linked to the weal of the community rather than the
salvation of the individual. Its principal concern was to discover through inspired inner vision
(dhi) and ecstatic attunement the cosmic order (rita) and then to help preserve that order in the
realm of human interaction through appropriate attitudes and actions.” (?)
Feuerstein bases his case for Vedic Yoga on a number of hymns from the Rig that hint at what
seem suspiciously like yogic “activities.” For example, he detects a potential forerunner of later
generations of yogins in the wandering ascetic celebrated in the Hymn of the Long-haired One
(10.136, translation by Jeanine Miller). He certainly looks and acts the part of a yogin, the way
he’s described:
The long-haired one is said to gaze full on heaven, the long haired one is said to
be that light.
The wind-girt sages have donned the yellow robe of dust; along the wind’s course
they glide when the gods have penetrated them.
It’s entirely possible that, while Yoga as we know wasn’t practiced in Vedic times, many of our
Yoga exercises were born in the rituals of the Vedic sages and priests. Certainly the sacrifice
demanded alertness and precision of speech, breath and movement, and a mind “harnessed”
intently on the god being solicited. Indeed, in the Chandogya Upanishad (1.10.8), it’s said that if
a priest sings a hymn “without knowing the divinity” connected with it, his “head will fall off,”
no doubt a powerful incentive to concentrate on the matter at hand.
Feuerstein also ventures that the priest’s need to consciously control his breath when singing the
saman may have induced a profound shift in awareness, and foreshadowed our work with the
breath in pranayama. And I found an offhand remark by one scholar that’s very tantalizing. He
mentions that, when singing the saman, the Udgatri emphasized various notes “by means of
movements of the hands and fingers” (Winternitz, History of Indian Literature, 167). It occurred
to me that these gestures be the precursors of hand seals (mudras), like the well-known “wisdom
seal” (jnana-mudra), in which the practitioner touches the tips of the index fingers and thumbs,
and stretches out the other fingers on each hand.
The other three layers of the Veda cake are stacked on top of these four books. Traditionally only
the four samhitas (and sometimes the next layer up, the Brahmanas) are counted as the Veda,
but for our purposes we’ll include the books in all four layers. I should also point out that we’ve
been picturing the four layers as distinctly separate; but in truth the boundaries between the top
three layers–the Brahmanas, Aranyakas, and Upanishads–are quite fluid. Several of the
Upanishads, for example, are embedded in one of the Aranyakas.

YAJUR VEDA

The Yajur (yajus, “sacrificial formula”) exists in two versions called the Black (krishna) Yajur-
Veda (or the Taittiriya Samhita) and the White (shukla) Yajur Veda (Vajasaneyi Samhita). While
the Black and White are treated as separate books, there really isn’t much difference in content
between them. According to one scholar, the Black has some theological discussions of the
sacrifices that the White doesn’t.
There’s a legend recounting how the Yajur was split. Once upon a time there was a Yajur priest
by the name of Vaisampayana, the son of Vyasa, the legendary “author” not only of the Rig-
Veda, but the great epic poem, the Mahabharata, the longest poem in the world. Vaisampayana
had committed some offense, and asked his 27 disciples to help him with his penance. One
disciple, Yajnavalkya, insisted that he expiate his sin by himself. Vaisampayana, miffed at this
impertinence, cursed Yajnavalkya, who then immediately, um, disgorged all the Yajur material
he’d learned in, uh, tangible form.
When Vaisampayana ordered the other disciples to clean up the mess, they transformed
themselves into partridges (tittiri) and swallowed what Yajnavalkya had regurgitated. The
resulting book was called the Black Yajur-Veda, apparently because it was “soiled” or stained
with blood, or the Taittiriya Samhita, literally the “collection of the partridges.” Yajnavalkya
then prayed to the Sun, who appeared to Yajnavalkya in the shape of a horse (vajin), and
imparted a new and improved version of the Yajur. So this book was called the White Yajur
Veda or the Vajasaneyi Samhita, literally the “collection of the horse.”

SAMA VEDA
The Sama (saman, “song of praise”) includes a large number of melodies, many of them of
ancient and popular origin. Some may date back to a time when songs were sung during solstice
or national festivals; others, believed to have magical powers, may have originated with wizardpriests.
In fact there’s a chapter attached to the Sama that’s partly a handbook of magicallypotent
samans.

ATHARVA VEDA

Atharva is a word that comes from Atharvan, the name of a fire priest, a reputed contributor to
this book, and the son of the creator god Brahma. He’s occasionally depicted as a randy old guy
with fire-scorched skin. The spells and charms in the Atharva are divided into two groups. One is
malevolent (abhicara), spells to unhinge your enemies with some horrible illness or impossibly
bad luck–I’m sure you already have someone in mind you’d like to target. The other is remedial
(bheshajani), charms to treat various virulent diseases, personified–maybe a better word is
demonified–as flesh-eating ogres (pishacha) and devils (rakshasa). Here’s one rebuking the
dreaded fever demon, Takman:
And thou thyself who makest all men yellow, consuming them with burning
heat...
Thou, Fever! Then be weak and ineffective. Pass hence into the realms below or
vanish.
There are also charms for successful childbirth (especially for sons); for love affairs and the
revival of virility, the Vedic equivalent of Viagra; for a long life, up to a “hundred autumns”; to
expiate sins and create family harmony; to bring farmers rain, to protect shepherds and their
herds from wild animals and merchants from robbers. There’s even a charm to bring good luck
to gamblers, which our woebegone friend from earlier might have tried when he visited the
“gambling-house,” though apparently it didn’t work very well.

BRAHMANA

The Brahmanas, so named because they were written by and for Brahmin priests, are prose
commentaries that, by all accounts, are nearly as titillating as modern-day law books. There are
about a dozen Brahmanas, each one appended to one of the samhitas, and each with two parts: a
“rule” (vidhi) part, which details rules or regulations for the proper conduct of the rather complex
ceremonies or sacrifices; and an expository part (artha-vada), a what-not of explanations for the
origins of the rituals and the legends connected with them.

ARANYAKA

The third layer of the Veda cake consists of the four surviving Aranyakas, the “forest” (aranya)
books. Scholars assume these books were written by forest hermits, living rather spartan lives
outside the pale not only of Vedic ritualism, but Vedic culture in general. They were, to use a
modern phrase, true non-conformists. In the Aranyakas
Unlike the pedantic Brahmanas, to which they are appended, the Aranyakas are meditations on
the inner or psychological and mystical meaning and symbolism of the sacrifice.