The Religion of the Veda: The Ancient Religion of India (from Rig-Veda to Upanishads) c7.4

c7.4

For a generation or two since the real beginnings of the study of the Veda, say fifty years ago, and enduring more faintly to the present day, the imagination of scholars thought it saw in the hymns of the Rig-Veda the earliest spontaneous outbursts of the primitive mind, face to face with the phenomena of nature. The poets of the Rig-Veda were supposed to be simple sons of nature. Awe-struck and reverent, they were supposed to be pondering, without ulterior motive of any kind, the meaning of day and night; of dawn, sun, and moon; of sky, thunder, and lightning; of atmosphere and wind; of earth and fire. The Rig-Veda was the "Aryan Bible," containing the earliest flashes of the religious thought of awakening humanity. This stately gathering of more than a thousand hymns was viewed as a historical collection. Just as the hymns were composed by poets, so the collection and redaction of the Rig-Veda was supposed to have been undertaken by persons of literary taste and redactorial diligence, apparently in order to save these precious monuments for the æsthetic delight of posterity.