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The Religion of the Veda: The Ancient Religion of India (from Rig-Veda to Upanishads) c6: Lecture the First. India the Land of Religions—The Veda

The Religion of the Veda: The Ancient Religion of India (from Rig-Veda to Upanishads) c6

Language
English

Contents

Lecture the First. India the Land of Religions—The Veda

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Multiplicity of Hindu religions—Brahmanism—Buddhism—Profound hold of religion upon the Hindu mind—Hindu life dominated by religious institutions—The four stages of life—The institution of caste—Caste then and now—Symptoms of revulsion against caste—Other pernicious religious institutions—Continuity of India's religious history—Date of the conception of *ṛta*, or "cosmic order"—Close relationship of the religions of India and Persia—Slight connection between India and Persia in secular history—The Parsis in India—Close relation between Veda and Avesta—The Veda and the Indo-European period—The Veda as a whole—The date of the Veda—Its great uncertainty—Nature of Vedic tradition—The Çrotriyas or "Oral Traditionalists"—Uncertain character of Vedic life and institutions—Origin of the Veda—Contents of Vedic literature as a whole—The four Vedas—The Rig-Veda—The books of the Rig-Veda—Theme and character of the Rig-Veda—A hymn to Goddess Dawn—The Yajur-Veda—Character of the *yajus*-formulas—The Sāma-Veda—Origin and purpose of the Sāma-Veda—The Atharva-Veda—Contents of the Atharva-Veda—Religious quality of the Atharva-Veda—Two Atharvan hymns—The Brāhmaṇa Texts—Some legends of the Brāhmaṇas—The Āraṇyakas, or "Forest Treatises"—The Upanishads—Literary history of the Upanishads—The Upanishads in the West—Critical estimate of the Upanishads.

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INDIA is the land of religions in more than one sense. It has produced out of its own resources a number of distinctive systems and sects, two of which, at least, are of world-wide interest and importance.

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Brahmanism, in its manifold aspects, is to this day the religion of about 200 millions of people in India herself, a matter of interest on the face of it. But its universal importance lies with the Brahmanical systems of religious philosophy, especially the two known respectively as Vedānta and Sānkhya. These are two religio-philosophical, or theosophical systems which essay to probe the twin riddle of the universe and human life. They do this in so penetrating a way as to place them by the side of the most profound philosophic endeavors of other nations. The beginnings of this philosophy are found in the so-called Upanishads, a set of treatises which are part of the Veda. The Upanishads contain the higher religion of the Veda. The essence of higher Brahmanical religion is Upanishad religion. The religion of the Upanishads is part of the theme of these lectures.

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Buddhism started in the bosom of Brahmanism. Its radical reforms, concerning both doctrine and practical life, are directed in good part against Brahmanism. Yet Buddhism is a religion genuinely Hindu in its texture. It shares with Brahmanism its dominant religious ideas. Transmigration of souls, pessimism, and the all-absorbing desire to be released from an endless chain of existences, linked together by successive deaths,—these are the axioms of both Brahmanism and Buddhism. After spreading over the continent of India Buddhism crossed over into Ceylon, Farther India, and the islands of the Asiatic Archipelago. To the north it passed into and across the great Himālaya Mountains to Nepaul, Thibet, Turkestan, China, Korea, and Japan. In its various forms it is to this day one of the world's great religions. There are no absolutely reliable statistics as to the number of Buddhists upon the surface of the earth; 300 millions may be regarded as a conservative estimate of the number of people who either are Buddhists, or whose religion has been shaped by Buddhist ideas. Brahmanism and Buddhism, both Hindu products, together supply the religious needs of 500 millions of the earth's inhabitants.

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In another sense India is the land of religions. Nowhere else is the texture of life so much impregnated with religious convictions and practices. At a very early time belief in the transmigration of souls (metempsychosis), whose precise origin in India is still something of a problem, planted itself down in the Hindu mind as the basis and fundamental axiom of all speculations about the soul and future life. This of itself is merely a theory. The practical importance of this theory is, that it is coupled almost from the start with a pessimistic view of life. According to this the everlasting round of existences is a nuisance, and release from it an imperative necessity. It would be difficult to find anywhere else a purely speculative notion which has taken so firm a hold upon practical life. It pervades the Hindu consciousness in a far more real and intimate way than its great rival, the belief in an eternal future life, pervades the religious thought of the Western world.

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From the beginning of India's history religious institutions control the character and the development of its people to an extent unknown elsewhere. Hindu life from birth to death, and even after death in the fancied life of the Fathers, or Manes in heaven, is religious, or sacramental throughout. It is surrounded by institutions and practices, and clouded by superstitions which are discarded only by them that have worked their way to the highest philosophical aspects of religion.

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The religious life of the Brahmanical Hindu is divided into the four stages¹ of religious disciple; godfearing and sacrificing householder; contemplative forest-dweller; and wandering, world-abandoning ascetic. Such at least is the theory of their religious law. Even though practice at all times fell short of this mechanical and exacting arrangement, yet the claim is allowed that life is an essentially solitary religious pilgrimage, the goal being personal salvation. There is no provision in such a scheme for the interests of the State and the development of the race. Unintentionally, but none the less effectively, they are left out of account, leaving a corresponding blank in India's national character.

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¹ Called *āçrama*, literally, "hermitages."

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Over this hovers, like a black cloud, another institution, the system, or rather the chaos, of caste. Its grotesque inconsistencies and bitter tyranny have gone far to make the Hindu what he is. The corrosive properties of this single institution, more than anything else whatsoever, have checked the development of India into a nation. They have made possible the spectacle of a country of nearly 300 millions of inhabitants, governed by the skill of 60,000 military and 60,000 civilian foreigners.

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In olden times there were four castes: the Brahman, or priestly caste; the Kshatriya, or warrior caste; the Vaiçya, or merchant and farmer caste; and the Çūdra, or servitor caste. Then came many cross-castes, the result of intermarriages between members of the four original castes. Such marriages are now strictly taboo. Gradually, differences of occupation, trade, and profession, and, to a considerable extent also, difference of geography, established themselves as the basis of caste distinction, until the number of castes became legion. At the present time there are nearly 2000 Brahman castes alone. According to an intelligent Hindu observer of our own day¹ the Sārasvata Brahmins of the Panjab alone number 469 tribes; the Kshatriyas are split up into 590; the Vaiçyas and Çūdras into even more. There is a Hindustani proverb, "eight Brahmins, nine kitchens." In the matter of food and intermarriage all castes are now completely shut off one from the other. A tailor may not, as is the custom with all other peoples, invite his neighbor, an honest shoemaker, to share his humble fare. The son of the shoemaker may not woo and wed the blooming daughter of the barber. Even a minor deviation, some new trick of trade, will at once breed a new caste. In certain parts of India fisher-folk who knit the meshes of their nets from right to left may not intermarry with them that knit from left to right. In Cuttack, the most southerly district of Bengal, there is no intercourse between potters who turn their wheels a-sitting and make small pots, and them that stand up for the manufacture of large pots. A certain class of dairymen who make butter from unboiled milk have been excluded from the caste, and cannot marry the daughters of milkmen who churn upon more orthodox principles. Even as late a census as that of 1901 reports, and in a way gives its sanction to the Cimmerian notion that the touch of the lower caste man defiles the higher:

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¹ Rai Bahadur Lala Baij Nath, B. A., of the North-western Province Judicial Service, and Fellow of the University of Allahabad, in his very interesting little book, *Hinduism, Ancient and Modern* (Meerut, 1889), p. 9.

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While a Nayar can pollute a man of a higher cast only by touching him, people of the Kammalan group, including masons, blacksmiths, carpenters, and workers in leather, pollute at a distance of twenty-four feet, toddy drawers at thirty-six feet, Palayan or Cheruman cultivators at forty-eight feet; while in the case of the Paraiyan (Pariahs) who eat beef, the range of pollution is stated to be no less than sixty-four feet.¹

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¹ Quoted from *New Ideas in India*, by the Rev. Dr. John Morrison (Edinburgh, 1906), p. 33.

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Thus Hindu society is split into infinitely small divisions, each holding itself aloof from the other, each engaged in making its exclusiveness as complete as possible. Members of a lower caste cannot rise into a higher caste; the individual is restricted to such progress only as is possible within the confines of his caste. To the Pariah the door of hope is shut forever. There is little chance for national or patriotic combination.

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Moreover the laws, or rather the vagaries of caste have taken largely the place of practical religion in the mind of the average Hindu who has not emancipated himself through higher philosophy. The supreme law which really concerns him in his daily life is, to eat correctly; to drink correctly; to marry correctly. The broader, more usual, dictates of religion, such as worship of the gods and ethical conduct, are not ignored, but they take a distinctly secondary place. India has at all times put the stamp of religion upon much that Europe counts as social habit, or social institution. There is not, and there seems never to have been, fixed creed in India. Hinduism has always been tolerant, liberal, latitudinarian in matters of abstract belief; tyrannous, illiberal, narrow-minded as regards such social practices as can be in any way connected with religion. Fluidity of doctrine, rigidity of practice may be regarded as the unspoken motto of Hindu religion at all times.

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Fortunately there are not wanting signs of a revulsion of feeling which bids fair to sweep the entire system of caste with all its incredible foolishness off the face of the earth. The great Hindu reformer Rāja Rammohun Roy declared as early as the year 1824 that "caste divisions are as destructive of national union as of social enjoyment." The late Svāmī Vivekānanda, the brilliant representative of Hinduism at the "Parliament of Religions," held in Chicago in connection with the Universal Exposition in 1893, passed the last years of his too short life (he died in 1902) in a suburb of Calcutta, doing philanthropic work, denouncing caste and the outcasting of those who had crossed the ocean, and recommending the Hindus to take to the eating of meat. The voices of other reformers are lifting. Especially the two great native religious reform associations, the Brāhma Samāj, or Theistic Association of Bengal, and the Ārya Samāj, or Vedic Association of the United Provinces and the Panjab, different as are their aims in other respects, are marshalled on the side of opposition to caste, as an anachronism, anomaly, and bar to social and national progress.

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The dreadful institution of Suttee, or widow-burning abolished in 1829, under the administration of Lord William Bentinck, by decree of government; the car of Juggernaut; the sect of the Thugs; and the practice of self-hypnosis to the point of prolonged trance or apparent death, are evidences of the frenzying quality of Hindu religion, and the way it has of overshadowing individual sanity and public interest. There has been, and there still is, too much so-called religion in India: Brahmanical hierarchy, sacerdotalism, asceticism, caste; infinitely diversified polytheism and idolatry; cruel religious practices; and bottomless superstition. All this the higher Hindu religions, or rather religious philosophies, blow away as the wind does chaff. In their view such religiosity is mere illusion or ignorance, to save from which is their profession. But they can save only the illumined of mind. On the real life of India the great philosophies are merely a thin film. Anyhow they have not as yet penetrated down to the Hindu people, and we may question whether India’s salvation will come that way, rather than through the growth of social and political intelligence which so gifted a people is sure, in the long run, to obtain.

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The student of the History of Religions has good reason to think of India as the land of religions in yet another sense. Not only has India produced out of its own mental resources many important religions and theosophic systems, but it has carried on these processes continuously, uninterrupted by distracting outside influences. The Moghul conquests in Northern India introduced Mohammedanism to a limited extent, and Mohammedanism fused with Hinduism in the hybrid religion of the Sikhs. A small number of Zoroastrian Parsis, driven from Persia during the Mohammedan conquest, found a friendly refuge for themselves and the religion of Zarathushtra (Zoroaster) in the West of India. Aside from that there is no record of permanent outside influence on a larger scale, until, in the last century, the above-mentioned Brāhma Samāj, a kind of religious Volapük, or Esperanto, undertakes, in the most praiseworthy spirit, upon a universal theistic platform, to blend and harmonise the best in Hindu religious thought, with the best that may be found in other religions. In this way Hindu religion is more strictly native than any of the great religions of mankind. This is no doubt due mainly to India's geographical isolation, and to her insular secular history. It has had the merit of keeping her religious development continuous and organic. Every important idea has a traceable past history; every important idea is certain to develop in the future. We may say that a body of 3500 years of organic religious growth lies more or less open before the eyes of the student of India's religions, to dissect, to study, and to philosophise upon.

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This great period of time has of late become definite in a rather important sense. Within recent years there were discovered at Tel-el-Amarna, in Upper Egypt, numerous cuneiform tablets containing letters from tributary kings of Babylonia, Assyria, Mitani, Phœnicia, and Canaan, addressed to certain Egyptian Pharaohs, their liege lords. These tablets have thrown much new light upon the history of Western Asia. There is among them a letter written by a king of Mitani in Syria, Dushratta by name. In this letter figure among others the names of his brother Artashuvara and his grandfather Artatama. These names are obviously Iranian (Persian), or “Iranoid”; with the tablets themselves they date back to at least 1600 B.C.¹ The names Artashuvara and Artatama open out with the syllables *arta-*, familiar to Western students of history as part of the numberless Persian names like Artaxerxes, Artaphernes, etc. This stem *arta* is identical with *arta-* of the Western Iranian, Achemenidan inscriptions, with *asha* of the Avesta, and with *ṛta* of the Veda. The word means “cosmic order,” or “order of the universe.” We shall find it later on, figuring as one of the most important religious conceptions of the Rig-Veda. We have here at any rate a definite lower date for the idea; it is likely to have existed a long time before 1600 B.C. From the point of view of the history of religious ideas we may, in fact we must, begin the history of Hindu religion at least with the history of this conception. Broad as the ocean, and as uninterrupted in its sweep there lies before us a period of thousands of years of the religious thought and practice of the most religious people in the history of the world.

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¹ See the author, *American Journal of Philology*, xxv., p. 8; F. Hommel in *Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Böhmischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften*, 1898, Number vi.

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Now this brings us face to face with the tried and true fact that the religious history of India does not really begin at the time when the Veda, the earliest literature, was composed, but that it begins much earlier. In the first place, it shares a fairly clear common life with the ancient religion of Iran (Persia) in a prehistoric time, the so-called Indo-Iranian or Aryan period.¹ The reconstruction of these common religious properties is purely prehistoric. It partakes of the fate of all prehistoric studies; it is not definite, but more or less hazy. Yet, such as it is, it counts fairly with the best that may be achieved in this way. It is based upon the plainly evident relationship between the Hindu Veda and the Persian Avesta, the most ancient sacred books of the two peoples. No student of either religion questions that they drew largely from a common source, and therefore mutually illumine each other.

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¹ See below page 119.

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I am sure that the full meaning of this last statement will appear clearer after a word of explanation. Students of profane history are accustomed to see ancient Persia with her face turned westward. It is to them the Persia that conquers, or controls through her satrapies, Assyria and Babylonia, Palestine, Egypt, or parts of Asia Minor. It is to them the Persia that falls down before Greece. In the day of her greatest glory Darius I. Hystaspes carved into the Behistan rock, 300 feet above the ground, the hugh trilingual cuneiform inscription, in which he claims suzerainty over twenty-three countries. To all intents and purposes he claims the earth for his own. Among the countries mentioned are parts adjacent to the extreme north-west of India: Drangiana, Arachosia, Gandhāra, etc. Between 500-330 b.c., the rule of the Achemenidan Persian dynasty had without doubt sent out its loosely attached satrapies to the land of the Indus River. But this did not result in the permanent attachment of one country to the other. Again, the so-called Graeco-Parthian rulers, successors of Alexander the Great in the Persian countries of Parthia and Baktria, from about 200 b.c. to 200 a.d., established principalities in the north-west of India, notably the Indo-Parthian kingdoms of Taxila and Arachosia.¹ But this political relation, again, proved unstable and transient.

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¹ See Vincent Smith, *The Indo-Parthian Dynasties*, in *Journal of the German Oriental Society*, vol. lx., p. 49 *ff.*

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A small number of Parsis, after the Mohammedan conquest of Persia, fled to India with their priests, sacred fire, and the manuscripts of the Avesta, their holy scriptures. Their descendants, about 80,000 in number, still adhere to their ancient religion. They form one of the most esteemed, wealthy, and philanthropic communities on the west shores of India, notably in the city of Bombay. It is not of record that they had even the faintest idea that they were fleeing into the hospitable bosom of a people related by blood and language, or that the Hindus who gave them shelter knew that they were receiving their very own kin. As far as we know, the Aryan Hindus at any rate, throughout their history, are entirely unconscious of the important fact that, across the mountains to the north-west of their country, dwelt at all times a branch of their own stock—the other half of the so-called Indo-Iranians or Aryans.

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And yet, the languages of the Hindu Veda and the Persian Avesta, the respective bibles of the two peoples, are mere dialects of the same speech. Students regularly enter upon the study of the Avestan language through the door of the Veda. Entire passages of the Avesta may be turned into good Vedic merely by applying certain regular sound changes. It is said sometimes that there is less difference between the Veda and the Avesta than between the Veda and the later Hindu Epic, the Mahābhārata. This is, in my opinion, an exaggeration, but it is significant that the statement could be made at all. The early religions and the religious institutions of the Hindus and Persians show, to be sure, far greater independence from one another than their languages, but they are, nevertheless, at the root much the same. So it has come to pass that a not at all mean part of the Vedic Pantheon and Vedic religious ideas begin before the Veda. Or, to put it even more paradoxically, Indian religion begins before its arrival in India.

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Yet further, beyond the common period of the Hindus and the Persians, there is a still remoter period which is not entirely closed to our view. It is the common Indo-European time, the time when the Hindus and Persians still shared their language and home with the remaining members of the same stock, the Hellenes, Italians, Celts, Teutons, and Slavs. In this altogether prehistoric time there also existed certain germs of religion, and some of these germs grew into important features of the later religions of these peoples. The religion of the Veda is indebted to this early time to an extent that is not negligible. We shall see later on in what way the two layers of prehistoric religious matter have contributed to and affected the shaping of Vedic thought. For the present it will be advantageous to turn to the Vedic religion of historic times, so that there may be some basis for discriminating between what is old and what is new. And as it would not be gracious to presume too much knowledge of so remote a theme as the Veda, we must first describe briefly the documents of which consists the Veda, the most ancient literary monument of India, the most ancient literary document of the Indo-European peoples—the foundation for all time of India's religious thought.

The Veda

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The word *veda* means literally "knowledge," that is, "sacred knowledge." It is derived from *vid*, "to know," and connected with Greek (*F*)*οἶδα*, Gothic *wait*, German *weiss*, English *wit*, "to know." The term Veda is used in two ways: either as the collective designation of the entire oldest sacred literature of India, or as the specific name of single books belonging to that literature. So then, on the one hand, we speak of *the* Veda as the bible of ancient India; or, on the other hand, we speak of Rig-Veda, Atharva-Veda, etc., as individual books of that great collection. The number of books which, in one sense or another, are counted as Veda is a hundred or more. The Hindus themselves were never very keen about canonicity; quasi-Vedic books, or, as we should say, Pseudo-Vedic books were composed at a very late date, when the various and peculiar sources of early inspiration had dried up; they kept pouring new, mostly sour wine into the old skins. The huge Concordance of the Vedas, which it has been my fate to publish this year (1906), absorbs about 120 texts more or less Vedic.

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It is truly humiliating to students of ancient India to have to answer the inevitable question as to the age of the Veda with a meek, "We don't know." As regards their texture, the books of the Veda claim great antiquity with no uncertain voice. One should like to see this intrinsically archaic quality held up by actual dates; those same, almost fabulous, yet perfectly authentic dates that are being bandied about in the ancient history of Assyria, Babylonia, and Egypt. The late Professor William D. Whitney left behind the witty saying that Hindu dates are merely ten-pins set up to be bowled down again. This is not altogether so. Buddha died 477 B.C. Alexander invaded India in 326 B.C. In the year 315 B.C. Candragupta, or Sandrakottos, "Alexander-Killer," as Greek writers ominously mouthed over his name, led a successful revolt against Alexander's prefects and established the Maurya dynasty in Pātaliputra, the Palibothra of the Greeks, the Patna of to-day. The most important date in Hindu secular history is that of Candragupta's grandson, the famous Buddhist Emperor Açoka or Piyadassi, who ruled India from north to south around about 250 b.c. His edicts, carved into rock all over his great empire, show us the singular spectacle of a great ruler who used his power to propagate his religion peacefully. His inscriptions upon pillars and rocks boast not of victory or heroic deed; they exhort his people to virtue, warn against sin, and plead for tolerance and love of humanity. This is an important date in the history of India, but an even more important date in the history of good manners.

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Unquestionably a century or two must have passed between the conclusion of the Vedic period and the beginnings of Buddhism. Buddhist literature presupposes Brahmanical literature and religion in a stage of considerable advancement beyond the Vedas. We are, therefore, reasonably safe in saying that the real Vedic period was concluded about 700 b.c. We are further on safe ground in demanding a number of centuries for the much stratified language, literature, and religion of the Veda. But how many? It is as easy to imagine three as thirteen or twenty-three. Only one thing is certain. Vedic ideas are very old. I have noted the fact that the concept *ṛta*, "cosmic or universal order," is found in cut and dried Iranian names in Western Asia as early as 1600 b.c. I am, for my part, and I think I voice many scholars, now much more inclined to listen to an early date, say 2000 b.c., for the beginnings of Vedic literary production, and to a much earlier date for the beginnings of the institutions and religious concepts which the Veda has derived from those prehistoric times which cast their shadows forward into the records that are in our hands. Anyhow, we must not be beguiled by that kind of conservatism which merely salves the conscience into thinking that there is better proof for any later date, such as 1500, 1200, or 1000 b.c., rather than the earlier date of 2000 b.c. Once more, frankly, we do not know.

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Vedic tradition is in some respects the most remarkable in recorded history. From the entire Vedic period we have not one single piece of antiquarian or archæological material, not one bit of real property; not a building, nor a monument; not a coin, jewel, or utensil;—nothing but winged words. Even the manuscripts of these precious texts, splendid as we know their authority to be on inner evidence are of comparatively recent date. We do not know when the Vedas were first committed to writing. Even if they were written down during the Vedic period itself, as I think altogether likely, the early manuscripts were certain to perish in the furious Indian climate. They must, in that case, have been saved by diligent copying and recopying. The majority of the manuscripts upon which are based our editions of Vedic texts date from recent centuries. Manuscripts that date back to the fourteenth century of our era are rare; only a very few go back to the twelfth.

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Here, however, enters one of the curiosities of Hindu religious life. The adherents of a certain Veda or Vedic school, no matter whether the text of that school was reduced to writing or not, must, in theory, know their texts by heart. These are the so-called Çrotriyas or "Oral Traditionalists." They live to this day, being, as it were, living manuscripts of their respective Vedas. The eminent Hindu scholar, the late Shankar Pandurang Pandit, tells us in the preface to his great Bombay edition of the Atharva-Veda how he used three of these oral reciters of the Atharva-Veda out of a total of only four that were at that time still alive in the Dekkhan; and how their oral authority proved to be quite as weighty as the written authority of his manuscripts. These living manuscripts were respectively, Messrs. Bāpujī Jīvanrām; Keçava Bhat bin Dājī Bhat; and Venkan Bhatjī, the last "the most celebrated Atharva Vaidika in the Dekkhan.” Mr. Pandit cites them by *sigla*, quite in the manner of inanimate manuscripts, respectively, as Bp, K, and V. They are, I believe, now all dead.

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We are waiting now for the time when the India Exploration Society shall step out from its existence on paper, and take hold of the shovel and the spade. With bated breath we shall then be watching to see whether great good fortune will make it possible to dig through the thick crust of centuries that are piled upon the Vedic period. If so, it will be something like the revelation of the Mycenæan age that was found at the root of Hellenic civilisation. Until that time Vedic life and institutions, reported only by word of mouth, must remain an uncertain quantity. The hymns of the Veda are to a considerable degree cloudy, turgid, and mystic; taken by themselves they will never yield a clear picture of human life that fits any time or place. We have from the entire Vedic period no annals except priestly annals, or such at least as have been edited by priests. It is as though we relied upon cloister chronicles alone for our knowledge of the politics and institutions of a certain time. Or, to use an even homelier comparison, as though we had to reconstruct the social conditions of a more modern time from an intercepted boarding-school correspondence. The poets, or priestly writers of the Veda are entirely preoccupied with their own interests; if we want anything like secular records of India we must look to a later time.

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We do not even know exactly what a term as familiar as *rāja* (*rēx*) "King," meant in those early days. Was a Rāja a great potentate, or merely a tribal chieftain? We know that the early Vedic period was a cattle-raising age. The lowing of kine was lovely music to the ear of the Vedic poet. But there were also workers in metals, chariots, navigation of some kind, gold, jewels, and trade. This is all too vague, and to some extent introduces uncertain quantities into our estimation of Vedic religion.

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At an unknown date then, as we have had to confess reluctantly, Aryan tribes or clans (*viç*¹) began to migrate from the Iranian highlands to the north of the Hindu-Kush Mountains into the north-west of India, the plains of the river Indus and its tributaries, the Panjab, or the land of the five streams.²

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¹ From this word is derived *vaiçya*, the later name of the third, or agricultural and merchant caste.

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² Professor E. W. Hopkins, *Journal of the American Oriental Society*, vol. xix., pp. 19–28, argues that the majority of the Vedic hymns were composed farther east than the Panjab, in the region of the modern city of Amballa, between the rivers Sarasoutī and Ghuggar.

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The river Ganges, so essential to a picture of India in historical times, and even more bound up with all Western poetic fancies about India, is scarcely mentioned in the Rig-Veda. This same text is full of allusions to the struggles of the fair-skinned Aryas with the dark-skinned aborigines, the Dasyus. The struggle is likely to have been bitter. The spread of Aryan civilisation was gradual, and resulted finally in the up-building of a people whose civilisation was foreign and superior, but whose race quality was determined a good deal by the overwhelmingly large, native, dark-skinned, non-Aryan population. At the beginning of our knowledge of India we are face to face with an extensive poetical literature, in set metres. This is crude on the whole, even when compared with classical Sanskrit literature of later times. Yet, it shows, along with uncouth naïveté and semi-barbarous turgidity, a good deal of beauty and elevation of thought, and a degree of skill bordering on the professional, in the handling of language and metre. That this product was not created out of nothing on Indian soil follows from the previously mentioned close connection with the earliest product of Persian literature, the Avesta.¹ Even the metric types of Veda and Avesta are closely related.

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¹ See above, p. 13.

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Vedic literature, in its first intention, is throughout religious, or it deals with institutions that have come under the control of religion. It includes hymns, prayers, and sacred formulas, offered by priests to the gods in behalf of rich lay sacrificers; charms for witchcraft, medicine, and other homely practices, manipulated by magicians and medicine-men, in the main for the plainer people. From a later time come expositions of the sacrifice, illustrated by legends, in the manner of the Jewish Talmud. Then speculations of the higher sort, philosophic, cosmic, psycho-physical, and theosophic, gradually growing up in connection with and out of the simpler beliefs. Finally there is a considerable body of set rules for conduct in every-day secular life, at home and abroad, that is, a distinct literature of customs and laws. This is the Veda as a whole.

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The Veda consists, as we have seen, of considerably more than a hundred books, written in a variety of slightly differentiated dialects and styles. Some of the Vedic books are not yet published, or even unearthed. At the base of this entire canon, if we may so call it, lie four varieties of metrical composition, or in some cases, prayers in sacred, solemn prose. These are known as the Four Vedas in the narrower sense: the Rig-Veda, the Yajur-Veda, the Sāma-Veda, and the Atharva-Veda. These four names come from a somewhat later Vedic time; they do not coincide exactly with the earlier names, nor do they fully correspond to the contents of the texts themselves. The earlier names refer rather to the different styles of composition, than to canonical collections. They are *ṛcaḥ*, "stanzas of praise"; *yajūṅshi*, "liturgical stanzas and formulas"; *sāmāni*, "melodies"; and *atharvāṅgirasaḥ*, "blessings and curses." The book which goes by the name of Rig-Veda contains not only "stanzas of praise," but—in its later parts—also "blessings and curses," as well as most of the stanzas which form the text to the *sāman*-melodies of the Sāma-Veda. The Atharva-Veda contains *ṛcaḥ*, "stanzas of praise," and *yajūṅshi*, "liturgical stanzas," mostly worked over for its own purposes, as well as its very own "blessings and curses." The Yajur-Veda also contains materials of the other Vedic types in addition to its main topic, the liturgy. The Sāma-Veda is merely a collection of a certain kind of *ṛcaḥ*, or "stanzas of praise," which are derived with some variants and additions from the Rig-Veda, and are here set to music which is indicated by musical notations.

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The Rig-Veda is, on the whole, the oldest as well as the most important of the four collections. Its language is a priestly, very high, or very literary speech. This we may call by distinction the hieratic language of the Veda. It is based upon a very old popular dialect, into which the poets, to serve their own needs, have introduced many new words and speech-forms. So, for instance, the great liking of the hieratic language for verbs derived from nouns, the so-called denominative or denominal verbs, surrounds the style of the Rig-Veda with an air of turgidity and stiltedness which is far from being archaic. A hieratic poet prefers to say "give battle" (*pṛtanāyati*, *pṛtanyati*), rather than "fight"; "cultivate the gods" (*devayati*), rather than "be pious"; "show a kind disposition" (*sumanasyate*), rather than "be friendly," etc.

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A little over 1000 hymns, containing about 10,000 stanzas, equal in bulk to Homer's poems, are divided into ten *mandalas*, "circles," or, as we should say, books. Inside of these books the hymns are arranged according to a regular scheme: first, in the order of the number of hymns addressed to a particular god, beginning with the largest number and continuing in a descending scale. Next, each god's hymns are arranged according to the length of each single hymn, again in a descending scale. Six of these ten books (ii–vii), the so-called "family-books," form the nucleus of the collection. Each of these is supposed to have been composed by a different Rishi, poet or seer, or rather by some family of poets who would fondly derive their descent from such a Rishi. The hymns themselves state this repeatedly—such and such a poet has seen¹ such and such a hymn—: the exact value of this claim is not easily estimated. The names of these traditional Rishis have a good ring in India at all times. They are in the order of Books ii–vii, Gṛtsamada, Viçvāmitra, Vāmadeva, Atri, Bharadvāja, and Vasishtha. The eighth book and the first fifty hymns of the first book are ascribed to the family of Kanva; they are marked off even superficially from the rest, because they are arranged strophically in groups of two or three stanzas. These form the bulk of those stanzas which, set to music, reappear in the Sāma-Veda. The ninth book, a kind of Bacchic collection or text-book, is addressed to the deified plant *soma*, and the liquor pressed from it.² This *soma* drink furnishes by far the most precious libation to the gods. They are supposed to intoxicate themselves with it unto great deeds of valor. The remainder of the first book and the entire tenth book are more miscellaneous in character and problematic as to intention and arrangement. To some extent, though by no means entirely, they are of later origin and from a different sphere, in part of distinctly popular character, very much like and often identical with the hymns of the Atharva-Veda.

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¹ That is, has had revealed to him.

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² See below, p. 145.

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On the whole and in the main, as we shall see, the Rig-Veda is a collection of priestly hymns addressed to the gods of the Vedic Pantheon. The chanting of these hymns is regularly accompanied by libations of the intoxicating drink called *soma*, and of melted butter, or ghee (*ghṛta*). The enduring interest of the Rig-Veda as literature lies in those old priestly poets’ vision of the beauty, the majesty, and the power of the gods, and in the myths and legends told of them, or, more often, merely alluded to in connection with them. But the paramount importance of the Rig-Veda is after all not as literature, but as philosophy. Its mythology represents a clearer, even if not always chronologically earlier stage of thought and religious development than is to be found in any parallel literature. On one side at least it is primitive in conception, and constructive under our very eyes: how a personal god develops by personification out of a visible fact in nature (anthropomorphosis) no literary document in the world teaches as well as the Rig-Veda. The original nature of the Vedic gods, however, is not always clear, not as clear as was once fondly thought. The analysis of these barely translucent, or altogether opaque characters makes up a chapter of Vedic science as difficult as it is important. In any case enough is known to justify the statement that the key-note and engrossing theme of Rig-Vedic thought is worship of the personified powers of nature.

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In order to make good this last statement, and at the same time by way of fore-taste of the Rig-Veda, I present here some stanzas of one of its finest hymns.¹ It is addressed to the goddess Ushas, Dawn personified, whom the Vedic poets sing with special warmth and liking; the metre imitates the original:

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¹ Rig-Veda 1. 113 in *Professor* A. A. Macdonell's translation, in his *History of Sanskrit Literature*, p. 83. I have taken the liberty of making a few slight alterations.

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This light hath come, of all the lights the fairest,

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The brilliant brightness hath been born, far-shining, Urged on to prompt the sun-god's shining power, Night now hath yielded up her place to morning.

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The sisters' pathway is the same unending,

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Taught by the gods, alternately they tread it. Fair-shaped, of different forms, and yet one-minded, Night and Morning clash not, nor yet do linger.

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Bright bringer of delights, Dawn shines effulgent,

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Wide open she hath thrown for us her portals. Arousing all the world, she shows us riches, Dawn hath awakened every living creature.

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'T is Heaven's Daughter hath appeared before us,

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The maiden dazzling in her brilliant garments. Thou sovereign mistress of all earthly treasure, Auspicious Dawn, flash thou to-day upon us!

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On heaven’s frame she hath shone forth in splendor ;
The goddess hath cast off the robe of darkness.
Awakening the world, with ruddy horses,
Upon her well-yoked chariot Dawn approacheth.

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Showering upon it many bounteous blessings,
She spreads her brilliant lustre—all may see her.
Last of the chain of mornings that have passed by,
First of bright morns to come Dawn hath arisen.

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Arise ! the breath of life again hath reached us !
Dread darkness slinks away and light is coming !
She hath blazed a pathway for the sun to travel,
We have found the place where men prolong existence.

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The Rig-Veda presupposes a tolerably elaborate and not uninteresting ritual, or scheme of priestly practices, in connection with the hymns addressed to the gods. How this may be read between the lines of the Rig-Veda’s poetry I hope to show quite clearly later on. The Yajur-Veda represents the exceeding growth of this ritualism, or sacerdotalism, as time went by. Gradually the main object, namely, devotion to the gods, is lost sight of: solemn, pompous performance, garnished with lip service, occupies the centre of the stage. This performance is supposed to have magic or mystic power of its own, so that its every detail is all-important. It regulates mechanically the relation of man to the divine powers by its own intrinsic power, but yet a power controlled and guided by the wonderful technique of the priests, and their still more wonderful insight into the meaning of all the technical acts. A crowd of priests---seventeen is the largest number---conduct an interminable ceremonial full of symbolic meaning down to its smallest minutiæ. The priests seat themselves on the sacrificial ground strewn with blades of sacred *darbha*-grass, and mark out the altars on which the sacred fires are built. They handle and arrange the utensils and sacrificial substances. And then they proceed to give to the gods of the sacrifice, each his proper oblation and his proper share. Even the least and most trivial act has its stanza or formula, and every utensil is blessed with its own particular blessing. These stanzas and formulas, to which a description of the rites is more or less directly attached, make up the numerous redactions of this Veda.

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The Yajur-Veda is a later collection in the main, though it contains much substance that is old, old enough, indeed, to be prehistoric. But like all other Vedic collections, its redaction, at any rate, presupposes the Rig-Veda. A good many verses of the Rig-Veda reappear in the Yajur-Veda, usually not in the exact form of the Rig-Veda, but taken out of their connection, and altered and adapted to new ends which were foreign to the mind of the original composers. There are also many new verses in the Yajur-Veda which are in the main ritualistic rather than hymnal, concerned with technical details of the sacrifice rather than with the praise of the gods.

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But the characteristic element of this Veda are the *yajus*, or formulas in prose, often more or less rhythmic prose. To these this Veda owes its name. They are, by the way, unquestionably the oldest prose on record in the literatures of the Indo-European peoples. These formulas are often brief and concise, mere dedications or swift prayers, accompanying an action, and sometimes hardly addressed to any one in particular. So, for instance, "Thee for Agni" (*agnaye tvā*), or "This to Agni" (*idam agneḥ*), indicate that an object is dedicated to the god Agni. Or, "Thee for strength" is the briefest prayer, or rather magically compelling wish, that the use of a certain article may give strength to the sacrificer. But they swell out from this brevity to long solemn litanies that betray at times such a measure of good sense as may at best be expected in these doings. Often, however, they are sunk in the deepest depths of imbecility, mere verbiage intent upon silly puns on the names of the things used at the sacrifice. When an animal victim is tied to the post the priest addresses the rope with the words, "Do not turn serpent, do not turn viper!"

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The Hindus have always had reason to fear serpents; they must have at times been stung by serpents whom they mistook for ropes, because the two things are often correlated in their literature. A Hindu figure of speech (or kenning) for serpent is "toothed rope."¹ For instance, a theosophic text of Upanishad character establishes the following comparison: "As a rope which is not clearly seen in the dark is mistaken for a serpent, so the unenlightened mistake the character of their own self."² That is to say, they do not comprehend the divine nature of their self. This is sensible, and there is sense also in the following: Kings are conceived as rulers of the earth. Therefore, at the ceremony of consecration the king looks down upon the earth, and prays: "O mother Earth, do not injure me, nor let me injure thee!" But often prayer passes over into litany, here as in other secondary stages of religious literature. The following is an all too typical case: "May life prosper through the sacrifice! May life's breath prosper through the sacrifice! May the eye prosper through the sacrifice! May the ear prosper through the sacrifice! May the back prosper through the sacrifice!’ And finally—O deepest bathos!—‘May the sacrifice prosper through the sacrifice!’”¹

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¹ See the author in *Hymns of the Atharva-Veda* (*Sacred Books of the East*, vol. xlii.), pp. 147, 368.

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² *Māndūkya-Kārikā*, 2. 17. *Cf.* the adage in *Petronius*, 45: *colubra restem non parit*, "a serpent does not beget a rope."

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¹ *Cf.* Winternitz, *Geschichte der Indischen Litteratur*, Part First, p. 155 *ff.*

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The many thousand formulas of this sort which occur in the Yajur-Veda and its accessory literature are now for the first time collected in my Vedic Concordance. I am sure that the enduring impression which they leave upon the mind, aside from their partial foolishness, is that of a formalism and mental decay upon the very brink of dissolution. The practices which accompany these formulas, though they contain much that is natural and vigorous, are also covered up by silly details of formalism, so that it is often difficult to discover their real human meaning. It is remarkable, however, that new life springs up on this arid waste. It is as though this phase of Hindu religion had prepared itself by its very excesses for a salutary and complacent hara-kiri. In its last outcome, in the very same Brahmanical schools where all this folly runs riot, spring up the Upanishads, those early theosophic treatises of India which pave the way for her enduring philosophies. The Upanishads in reality, though not professedly, sweep aside the ritual like cobwebs, and show the Hindu mind, not yet perfectly trained, but far from choked; and quite capable of carrying on the development of Hindu religions to the really great results which they eventually reach.

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The Sāma-Veda is of all the Vedas the least clear as regards its origin and purpose. As a literary production it is almost entirely secondary and negative. The Sāma-Veda is interesting chiefly, because it is the Veda of music. In addition it contains some original practices to which tradition has attached a number of legends unknown in the other Vedic schools. There are no connected hymns in this Veda, only more or less detached verses, borrowed in the main from the Rig-Veda. Even the sense of these verses is subordinated to the music to which they are set. The verses are grouped in strophes which, when accompanied by their music, are known as *sāmāni*, “melodies.” The *sāman*-stanzas are preserved in three forms. First, in the Rig-Veda, as ordinary poetry accented in the usual way, and not accompanied by melodies. They are contained mostly in the first fifty hymns of the first book, and in Books viii and ix. Most of these stanzas are composed in the metre *gāyatrī*, or in strophes known as *pragātha*, which are compounded of *gāyatrī* and *jagatī* verse-lines. Both the words *gāyatrī* and *pragātha* are derived from the verb *gai*, “sing,” and show that the stanzas and strophes composed in these metres were from the start intended to be sung.

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Secondly, they occur in the Sāma-Veda itself in a form called *ārcika*, that is, "collection of stanzas." This is a kind of libretto, or text-book containing the stanzas which are to be memorised for "making upon them," as the Hindus say, the *sāman*-melodies. Here also there is a system of accents, peculiar in its notation, but apparently still with reference to the unsung *sāmans*. In the third *sāman*-version, the Gānas¹ or song-books, we find the real *sāmans* as they are to be sung. Here not only the text but also the musical notes are given. Still this is not a complete *sāman* yet. In the middle of the sung stanzas certain phantastic exclamatory syllables are introduced, the so-called *stobhas*, such as *om*, *hau*, *hai*, *hoyi*, or *him*; and at the end of the stanzas certain concluding exclamations, the so-called *nidhanas*, such as *atha*, *ā*, *īm*, and *sāt*.² They remind us in a way of the Swiss and Tyrolese "yodels" which are introduced into the songs of these countries as a sort of cadenzas, intended to heighten the musical effect.

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¹ The word *gāna*, again, is derived from the root *gai*, "sing."

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² The Pancaviñça Brāhmaṇa relates that the poet Kanva was for a good while puzzled to find a *nidhana* for his *sāman*, until he heard a cat sneeze *ash*! Then he took *ash* for the *nidhana* of his *sāman*.

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The Sāma-Veda is devoted a good deal to the worship of Indra, a blustering, braggart god, who has to befuddle himself with *soma*, in order to get the necessary courage to slay demons. He, and he alone, has in the Rig-Veda the epithet *ṛcīshama*, that is, "he for whom the *sāmans* are composed upon the the *ṛks*," or, as we should say, "out of the *ṛks*."¹ It seems likely that the Sāma-Veda is built up out of remnants of savage Shamanism—the resemblance between the words Sāman and Shamanism, however, is accidental. Shamanism, as is well known, attempts to influence the natural order of events by shouts, beating of tam-tams, and frantic exhortation of the gods. The Brahmans were in the habit of blending their own priestly practices and conceptions with a good deal of rough material which they found current among the people. The *sāman* melodies, too, betray their popular origin in that they seem to have been sung originally at certain popular festivals, especially the solstitial festivals.² The exclamations interspersed among the words of the text are likely to be substitutes for the excited shouts of the Shaman priests of an earlier time. It is perhaps worth while to note that in later Vedic times the Sāma-Veda is held in small regard. The Brahmanical law-books prescribe that the recitation of Rig-Veda and Yajur-Veda must stop whenever the shout of *sāmans* is heard. One of these law-books, for instance, counts the barking of dogs, the bray of asses, the howling of wolves, and the sound of the *sāman* as noises so obnoxious or defiling that, when heard, the study of the other Vedas must stop.¹

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