INTRODUCTION TO VEDAS-
THE TIMELESS
WISDOM
Traditionally, the Vedic literature as such
signifies a vast body of sacred and esoteric knowledge concerning eternal
spiritual truths originally revealed to the seers (
rishis) through states of higher
consciousness during intense meditation. They have been accorded the position
of revealed scriptures and are revered in Hindu religious tradition. This vast ancient secular literature
has been applauded both by the Western as well as Indian scholars.
They agree on Vedas being the oldest texts known to
humankind. Nonetheless Vedas remain the most meticulously preserved texts
available today. The unique methods devised from very inception of Vedas have
ensured that Vedas are available even today in the same original form. Many
scholars have called this the greatest wonder of human civilization.
The
Rig-Veda
is an ancient Indian sacred collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns.
It is counted among the four canonical sacred texts (śruti) of Hinduism known as the Vedas. The three others are known as Sama-, Yajur- and Atharva-vedas. Some of its verses are still
recited as Hindu prayers, at religious functions and other occasions, putting
these among the world's oldest religious and philosophical texts in continued use. These are the holy
scriptures of the Aryans and later day Hindus for whom they are highly
venerated. The Rig-veda has been
granted a world heritage status.
The Ageless Vedas
According to the tradition, the Vedas are divine revelations and not
written or composed by any human beings. Further, they are ageless in the sense
that nobody knows when they were revealed. The Western scholars tried to fix
the date of the Vedas but there was
no unanimity among them. The statement of the famous Indologist Max Müller –
“whether the Vedic hymns were composed in 1000, or 1500 or 2000 or 3000 years
BCE, no power on earth will ever determine”-
is highly significant.
Dayanand Saraswati accepted the Vedas as his rock of firm foundation.
According to him, all the sciences meant for the good of mankind flow from the
fountainhead of the Vedas since the
creation of the universe.. The Vedas
as such radiated the light and
illuminated the world by teaching those universal and eternal truths and
principles that help mankind to realize the nature and the co-relation of God
with soul and the creation. The various branches of knowledge were just the off shoots sprung from the
first nucleus named as the Vedas. And thus he re-discovered the radical theory
in his life time about which the ancient sages or code-giver Manu said,
"all knowledge flows from the Vedas.”As
the tradition itself explains, the essence of Vedic knowledge had been given to
humanity by the ultimate Divinity at the time of the universal creation and has
always been in existence.
Philological and linguistic evidences indicate that the Rig-Veda was composed in the
north-western region of the Indian subcontinent. There are strong linguistic and cultural
similarities with the early Iranian Avesta .Here,
it will be relevant to take note of observations made by Max Müller:
How
were these poems composed- for they are composed in very perfect meter and how
after having been composed were they handed down from times immemorial entirely
by memory… This may sound startling,
but what will sound more startling, and yet it is a fact that can easily be
ascertained by anybody who doubts it.
There are students in India called Srotriyas
who learn the Vedas by heart, and
they learn it from their teacher- not from any manuscript- and after a time
they teach again to their pupils…
I
have had such students in my room at
Oxford, who not only could repeat these hymns, but who repeated them with the
proper accent, nay who when looking through my printed edition of the Rig-Veda could point out a misprint
without the slightest hesitation.
… and the fixed text was preserved with
unparalleled fidelity for centuries by oral tradition alone. In order
to achieve this the oral tradition prescribed very structured enunciation, involving
breaking down the Sanskrit compounds into stems and inflections, as well as certain
permutations. This interplay with sounds gave rise to a scholarly tradition of morphology
and phonetics.
The oral tradition still continued into recent times.
Structure
Recensions
The
major Rigvedic shakha ("branch",
i. e. recension) that has survived is known as Śākala.The Śākala recension
has 1,017 regular hymns, and an appendix of 11 vālakhilya
hymns which are now customarily included in the 8th mandala (as 8.49–8.59), for a total of 1028 hymns.
Brahmanas
The Brahmanas (not to be confused with Brahmins – one of the Hindu castes) are the ancillary texts which
contain explanations of mantras or
rituals, which give guidance to people as to how the sacrificial rites are to
be performed. They are explanations of the method of using the mantras in Yajnas or other rites. Details for various ceremonies like birth,
naming, study, marriage, death are in this portion.The Rig-veda
has three Brahmanas: namely ; Aitreya , Sankhayana and kusheetika. A count of syllables in the
Rig Veda makes it to be 432,000; but
counting the number of syllables is not so easy and straightforward.
Rishis
Tradition
associates a rishi (the composer) with each ṛic of the Rig-Veda. Most sūktas are attributed to single composers. The "family
books" (2-7) are so-called because these have hymns by members of the same
clan in each book; but other clans are also represented in the Rig-Veda. In all, 10 families of rishis account for more than 95% of the ṛicas; for each of them the Rig-Veda includes a lineage-specific āprī hymn
(a special sūkta of the Rig-Veda).
Manuscripts
There
are, for example, 30 manuscripts of the Rig-Veda
at the Bhandarkar Oriental
Research Institute, collected in the 19th century by Georg Bühler,
Franz Kielhorn and others, originating from different parts of India.. They are
in the Sharada and Devanagari
scripts, written on birch bark and paper. The oldest of them is dated to A.D.
1464. The 30 manuscripts were added to UNESCO's
"Memory of the World" Register in 2007 .
Max
Müller used 24 manuscripts then available to him in Europe, while the Pune
Edition used over five dozen manuscripts; hence the total number of extant
manuscripts known then must surpass perhaps eighty at least.
Contents
The Rigvedic hymns are dedicated to
various deities, chief of whom being Indra. The hymns mention various other minor gods,
persons, concepts, phenomena, and contain fragmentary references to possible
historical events, notably the struggle between the early Vedic people (known
as the Vedic Aryans, a sub-group of the Indo-Aryans) and their enemies, It contains the Nadistuti
sukta which is in
praise of rivers and is important for the reconstruction of the geography of
the Vedic civilization and the Purusha
sukta which has great
significance in the Hindu social tradition. The Saraswati river is mentioned in
all the books of the Rigveda,
except the fourth.
The Nasadiya
sukta (RV.10.129), is decidedly
the most celebrated hymn for the scholars in the West, which deals with
Creation. To the Vedic sages, Creation
indicated that point before which there was no Creator, the line between
indefinable nothingness and something delineated by attributes and function, at
least like the moment before the Big Bang Theory. These concepts are full of high Wisdom and Truth, far removed
from mere religion.
The marriage hymns (10.85) and
the hymns for the Death ( RV.10.10-18) still are of great
importance in the performance of the household rituals. The Rig-Veda
is far more archaic than any other Indo-Aryan text. For this reason, it was in
the centre of attention of Western scholarship from the times of Max Müller and Rudolf Roth onwards. The Rig- Veda records an early stage of Vedic religion. The text in the following centuries
underwent pronunciation revisions and standardization. After their composition,
the texts were preserved and codified by an extensive body of Vedic priesthood.
The
Rigveda talks about an advanced
civilized predominantly urban and maritime society which has used variety of
ships, boats and 75 different types of houses which includes hutments and
palaces.
with horse-drawn chariots, oxen-drawn wagons, and metal (bronze)
weapons. The geography described is consistent with that of the Greater Punjab: Rivers flow north to south, the mountains are
relatively remote but still visible and reachable.
Since
the 19th and 20th centuries, many
scholars and reformers have attempted to re-interpret the Vedas to conform to
modern and established moral and spiritual norms.
Vedas-dateline
Dr. B. G. Siddharth, Director General,
B. M. Birla Planetarium, Hyderabad,puts the Rig-Veda before 10,000 BCE. B.G.Tilak says, “The Vedic hymns were sung in
post-glacial times, 8000 BCE. by poets who had inherited their knowledge or
contents thereof from their antediluvian forefathers
How
Ancient is Vedic Civilization
About the antiquity of the Vedic
civilization, the well respected scholar Kenneth Chandler says.; The ancient Vedic tradition was indigenous to
the land of India, possibly overlapping the Indus and Saraswati valley
civilizations and extending into the Himalayas, where the tradition continued
unbroken for perhaps tens of thousands of years
Translations
The
first ever authentic and elaborate translation of the Vedas was completed by the great scholar Sayana, a minister in the
kingdom of Vijayanagara,around A.D. 1380, from the Vedic into the classical
language.
The
first published translation of any portion of the Rig Veda in any Western language was into Latin,
by Friedrich August
Rosen who was working from manuscripts brought back
from India by Colebrooke.
H. H. Wilson was
the first to make a complete translation of the Rig Veda into English,
published in six volumes during the period 1850-88. Wilson's version was based
on the commentary of Sayana.
