The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c28.s4.1

v1.c28.s4.1

The Rigveda shows quite clearly that the conception of prayer for aid to a god without the performance of any sacrifice was quite natural and intelligible. The heroes of its narratives of the deeds of the Açvins in special seem to have been specially eager in their prayers for the aid they desired. But the priests were, from the earliest period of the later Saṁhitās and probably earlier, ready to find the exact formulae with which the deity should be addressed in every stage of trouble, and, what was still more important, to lay down the nature of the necessary offering. Hence we find even in the Taittirīya Saṁhitā⁵ an elaborate account of the different offerings to be made to the gods for a vast variety of cases of special desires: the verses used by the priests for the Anuvākyās and Yājyās are taken from the Rigveda, many however in a very far from natural way, showing that the only interest of the composers of these lists of offerings was to find some verse, which by connexion of sound or sense might be thought appropriate. On the other hand the ritual still here and there allows the offering of prayers which were not immediately dictated by the necessity of accompanying libations: thus in the Agniṣṭoma the morning litany, the Prātaranuvāka with its address to Agni, to the Dawn, and to the Açvins is independent of any actual libations. In the domestic⁶ ritual the rule is laid down that the student is to perform the devotion to the twilight, both night and morning in the wood: after the twilight is over, he has to repeat the three sacred words Bhūḥ, Bhuvaḥ, and Svar, and the Sāvitrī verse: the sacred words denote, the first earth, the third heaven, but the intermediate expression has no obvious relation to the intermediate space, save in so far as it may be a compound, as suggested by Oldenberg,⁷ of the two elements of the first and third words. In another form of ritual the prayer is connected not with a libation, but with a ceremonial reverence to the fire, the Upasthāna, where by the mention of his devotion to the fire the votary intends, in the naïve conception of the Brāhmaṇas, to call the attention of the god to the fact of his existence and doubtless also of his needs.¹