Indian Philosophy v1.c8.s1.2

v1.c8.s1.2

THE Vedas are the earliest documents of the human mind that we possess. Wilson writes: “When the texts of the Ṛg and Yajur Vedas are completed, we shall be in the possession of materials sufficient for the safe appreciation of the results to be derived from them, and of the actual condition of the Hindus, both political and religious, at a date co-eval with that of the yet earliest known records of social organisation—long anterior to the dawn of Grecian civilisation—prior to the oldest vestiges of the Assyrian Empire yet discovered—contemporary probably with the oldest Hebrew writings, and posterior only to the Egyptian dynasties, of which, however, we yet know little except barren names; the Vedas give us abundant information respecting all that is most interesting in the contemplation of antiquity."'¹ There are four Vedas: Ṛg, Yajur, Sāma and Atharva. The first three agree not only in their name, form and language, but in their contents also. Of them all the Ṛg-Veda is the chief. The inspired songs which the Aryans brought with them from their earlier home into India as their most precious possession were collected, it is generally held, in response to a prompting to treasure them up which arose when the Aryans met with large numbers of the worshippers of other gods in their new country. The Ṛg-Veda is that collection. The Sāma-Veda is a purely liturgical collection. Much of it is found in the Ṛg-Veda, and even those hymns peculiar to it have no distinctive lessons of their own. They are all arranged for being sung at sacrifices. The Yajur-Veda, like the Sāma, also serves a liturgical purpose. This collection was made to meet the demands of a ceremonial religion. Whitney writes: "In the early Vedic times the sacrifice was still, in the main, an unfettered act of devotion, not committed to the charge of a body of privileged priests, not regulated in its minor details, but left to the free impulses of him who offered it, accompanied with Ṛg and Sāma hymns and chants, that the mouth of the offerer might not be silent while his hands were presenting to the divinity the gift which his heart prompted. . . . As in process of time, however, the ritual assumed a more and more formal character, becoming finally a strictly and minutely regulated succession of single actions, not only were the verses fixed which were to be quoted during the ceremony, but there established themselves likewise a body of utterances, formulas of words, intended to accompany each individual action of the whole work to explain, excuse, bless, give it a symbolical significance or the like. . . . These sacrificial formulas received the name of Yajus, from the root Yaj, to sacrifice. . . . The Yajur-Veda is made up of these formulas, partly in prose and partly in verse, arranged in the order in which they were to be made use of at the sacrifice."'² The collections of the Sāma and the Yajur Vedas must have been made in the interval between the Ṛg-Vedic collection and the Brāhmaṇical period, when the ritualistic religion was well established. The Atharva-Veda for a long time was without the prestige of a Veda, though for our purposes it is next in importance only to the Ṛg-Veda, for, like it, it is an historical collection of independent contents. A different spirit pervades this Veda, which is the production of a later era of thought. It shows the result of the compromising spirit adopted by the Vedic Aryans in view of the new gods and goblins worshipped by the original peoples of the country whom they were slowly subduing.