Vedas
The Vedas, sometimes collectively called the Veda, are a large body of religious texts originating in ancient India. Composed in Vedic Sanskrit, the texts constitute the oldest layer of Sanskrit literature and the oldest scriptures of Hinduism.
There are four Vedas: the Rigveda, the Yajurveda, the Samaveda and the Atharvaveda. Each Veda has four subdivisions – the Samhitas, the Brahmanas, the Aranyakas, and the Upanishads. Some scholars add a fifth category – the Upāsanās. The texts of the Upanishads discuss ideas akin to the heterodox śramana traditions. The Samhitas and Brahmanas describe daily rituals and are generally meant for the Brahmacharya and Gr̥hastha stages of the Chaturashrama system, while the Aranyakas and Upanishads are meant for the Vānaprastha and Sannyasa stages, respectively.
Vedas are ', distinguishing them from other religious texts, which are called '. Hindus consider the Vedas to be apauruṣeya, which means "not of a man, superhuman" and "impersonal, authorless", revelations of sacred sounds and texts heard by ancient sages after intense meditation.
The Vedas have been orally transmitted since the 2nd millennium BCE with the help of elaborate mnemonic techniques. The mantras—the oldest part of the Vedas—are recited in the modern age for their phonology rather than their semantics, and are regarded as "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."
The various Indian philosophies and Hindu sects have taken differing positions on the Vedas. Schools of Indian philosophy that acknowledge the importance or primal authority of the Vedas comprise Hindu philosophy specifically and are together classified as the six "orthodox" schools. However, śramaṇa traditions, such as Charvaka, Ajivika, Buddhism, and Jainism, which did not regard the Vedas as authoritative, are referred to as "heterodox" or "non-orthodox" schools.
Etymology and usage
The Sanskrit word ' "knowledge, wisdom" is derived from the root vid- "to know". This is reconstructed as being derived from the Proto-Indo-European root weyd-, meaning "see" or "know".The noun is from Proto-Indo-European weydos, cognate to Greek εἶδος "aspect", "form". This is not to be confused with the homonymous 1st and 3rd person singular perfect tense ', cognate to Greek οἶδα "I know". Root cognates are Greek ἰδέα, English wit, Latin videō "I see", Russian ве́дать "to know", etc.
The Sanskrit term as a common noun means "knowledge". The term in some contexts, such as hymn 10.93.11 of the Rigveda, means "obtaining or finding wealth, property", while in some others it means "a bunch of grass together" as in a broom or for ritual fire.
Vedic texts
Vedic Sanskrit corpus
The term "Vedic texts" is used in two distinct meanings:- Texts composed in Vedic Sanskrit during the Vedic period.
- Any text considered as "connected to the Vedas" or a "corollary of the Vedas".
- The Samhitas, are collections of metric texts. There are four "Vedic" Samhitas: the Rig Veda, Yajur Veda, Sama Veda and Atharva Veda, most of which are available in several recensions. In some contexts, the term Veda is used to refer only to these Samhitas, the collection of mantras. This is the oldest layer of Vedic texts, which were composed between –1200 BCE, and 1200–900 BCE for the other Samhitas. The Samhitas contain invocations to deities like Indra and Agni, "to secure their benediction for success in battles or for welfare of the clan." The complete corpus of Vedic mantras as collected in Bloomfield's Vedic Concordance consists of some 89,000 padas, of which 72,000 occur in the four Samhitas.
- The Brahmanas are prose texts that comment on and explain the solemn rituals as well as expound on their meaning and many connected themes. Each of the Brahmanas is associated with one of the Samhitas or its recensions. The oldest dated to about 900 BCE, while the youngest Brahmanas, were complete by about 700 BCE. The Brahmanas may either form separate texts or can be partly integrated into the text of the Samhitas. They may also include the Aranyakas and Upanishads.
- The Aranyakas, "wilderness texts" or "forest treaties", were composed by people who meditated in the woods as recluses and are the third part of the Vedas. The texts contain discussions and interpretations of ceremonies, from ritualistic to symbolic meta-ritualistic points of view. It is frequently read in secondary literature.
- Older Principal Upanishads, composed between 800 BCE and the end of the Vedic period. The Upanishads are largely philosophical works, some in dialogue form. They are the foundation of Hindu philosophical thought and its diverse traditions. Of the Vedic corpus, they alone are widely known, and the central ideas of the Upanishads are still influential in Hinduism.
- The texts considered "Vedic" in the sense of "corollaries of the Vedas" are less clearly defined, and may include numerous post-Vedic texts such as the later Upanishads and the Sutra literature, such as Shrauta Sutras and Gryha Sutras, which are smriti texts. Together, the Vedas and these Sutras form part of the Vedic Sanskrit corpus.
Śruti and smṛti
Vedas are ', distinguishing them from other religious texts, which are called '. This indigenous system of categorisation was adopted by Max Müller and, while it is subject to some debate, it is still widely used. As Axel Michaels explains:Among the widely known śrutis include the Vedas and their embedded texts – the Samhitas, the Upanishads, the Brahmanas and the Aranyakas. The well-known smṛtis include Bhagavad Gita, Bhagavata Purana and the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, amongst others.
Authorship
Hindus consider the Vedas to be apauruṣeyā, which means "not of a man, superhuman" and "impersonal, authorless". The Vedas, for orthodox Hindu theologians, are considered revelations seen by ancient sages after intense meditation, and texts that have been more carefully preserved since ancient times. In the Hindu Epic Mahabharata, the creation of Vedas is credited to Brahma. The Vedic hymns themselves assert that they were skillfully created by Rishis, after inspired creativity, just as a carpenter builds a chariot.The oldest part of the Rig Veda Samhita was orally composed in north-western India between 1500 and 1200 BCE, while book 10 of the Rig Veda, and the other Samhitas were composed between 1200 and 900 BCE more eastward, between the Yamuna and the Ganges rivers, the heartland of Aryavarta and the Kuru kingdom. The "circum-Vedic" texts, as well as the redaction of the Samhitas, date to –500 BCE.
According to tradition, Vyasa is the compiler of the Vedas, who arranged the four kinds of mantras into four Samhitas.
Chronology, transmission, and interpretation
Chronology
The Vedas are among the oldest sacred texts. The bulk of the Rigveda Samhita was composed in the northwestern region of the Indian subcontinent, most likely between 1500 and 1200 BCE, although a wider approximation of 1700–1100 BCE has also been given. The other three Samhitas are considered to date from the time of the Kuru kingdom, approximately 1200–900 BCE. The "circum-Vedic" texts, as well as the redaction of the Samhitas, date to –500 BCE, resulting in a Vedic period, spanning the mid 2nd to mid 1st millennium BCE, or the Late Bronze Age and the Iron Age. The Vedic period reaches its peak only after the composition of the mantra texts, with the establishment of the various shakhas all over Northern India which annotated the mantra samhitas with Brahmana discussions of their meaning, and reaches its end in the age of Buddha and Panini and the rise of the Mahajanapadas. Michael Witzel gives a time span of to –400 BCE. Witzel makes special reference to the Near Eastern Mitanni material of the 14th century BCE, the only epigraphic record of Indo-Aryan contemporary to the Rigvedic period. He gives 150 BCE as a terminus ante quem for all Vedic Sanskrit literature, and 1200 BCE as terminus post quem for the Atharvaveda.Transmission
The Vedas were orally transmitted since their composition in the Vedic period for several millennia. The authoritative transmission of the Vedas is by an oral tradition in a sampradaya from father to son or from teacher to student, believed to be initiated by the Vedic rishis who heard the primordial sounds. Only this tradition, embodied by a living teacher, can teach the correct pronunciation of the sounds and explain hidden meanings, in a way the "dead and entombed manuscript" cannot do. As Leela Prasad states, "According to Shankara, the "correct tradition" has as much authority as the written Shastra", explaining that the tradition "bears the authority to clarify and provide direction in the application of knowledge".The emphasis in this transmission is on the "proper articulation and pronunciation of the Vedic sounds", as prescribed in the Shiksha, the Vedanga of sound as uttered in a Vedic recitation, mastering the texts "literally forward and backward in fully acoustic fashion". Houben and Rath note that the Vedic textual tradition cannot simply be characterised as oral, "since it also depends significantly on a memory culture". The Vedas were preserved with precision with the help of elaborate mnemonic techniques, such as memorising the texts in eleven different modes of recitation, using the alphabet as a mnemotechnical device, "matching physical movements with particular sounds and chanting in a group" and visualising sounds by using mudras. This provided an additional visual confirmation, and also an alternate means to check the reading integrity by the audience, in addition to the audible means. Houben and Rath note that a strong "memory culture" existed in ancient India when texts were transmitted orally, before the advent of writing in the early first millennium CE. According to Staal, criticising the Goody-Watt hypothesis "according to which literacy is more reliable than orality", this tradition of oral transmission "is closely related to Indian forms of science" and "by far the more remarkable" than the relatively recent tradition of written transmission.
While according to Mookerji, understanding the meaning of the words of the Vedas was part of the Vedic learning, Holdrege and other Indologists have noted that in the transmission of the Samhitas, the emphasis is on the phonology of the sounds and not on the meaning of the mantras. Already at the end of the Vedic period their original meaning had become obscure for "ordinary people", and niruktas, etymological compendia, were developed to preserve and clarify the original meaning of many Sanskrit words. According to Staal, as referenced by Holdrege, though the mantras may have a discursive meaning, when the mantras are recited in the Vedic rituals "they are disengaged from their original context and are employed in ways that have little or nothing to do with their meaning". The words of the mantras are "themselves sacred", and "do not constitute linguistic utterances". Instead, as Klostermaier notes, in their application in Vedic rituals they become magical sounds, "means to an end". Holdrege notes that there are scarce commentaries on the meaning of the mantras, in contrast to the number of commentaries on the Brahmanas and Upanishads, but states that the lack of emphasis on the "discursive meaning does not necessarily imply that they are meaningless". In the Brahmanical perspective, the sounds have their own meaning, mantras are considered as "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 of the mantras will be efficacious, irrespective of whether their discursive meaning is understood by human beings." Frazier further notes that "later Vedic texts sought deeper understanding of the reasons the rituals worked", which indicates that the Brahmin communities considered study to be a "process of understanding".
A literary tradition is traceable in post-Vedic times, after the rise of Buddhism in the Maurya period, perhaps earliest in the Kanva recension of the Yajurveda about the 1st century BCE; however oral tradition of transmission remained active. Jack Goody has argued for an earlier literary tradition, concluding that the Vedas bear hallmarks of a literate culture along with oral transmission, but Goody's views have been strongly criticised by Falk, Lopez Jr,. and Staal, though they have also found some support.
The Vedas were written down only after 500 BCE, but only the orally transmitted texts are regarded as authoritative, given the emphasis on the exact pronunciation of the sounds. Witzel suggests that attempts to write down the Vedic texts towards the end of 1st millennium BCE were unsuccessful, resulting in smriti rules explicitly forbidding the writing down of the Vedas. Due to the ephemeral nature of the manuscript material, surviving manuscripts rarely surpass an age of a few hundred years. The Sampurnanand Sanskrit University has a Rigveda manuscript from the 14th century; however, there are a number of older Veda manuscripts in Nepal that are dated from the 11th century onwards.