Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c9.5

c9.5

Its Evolution and Contents. The Rigveda itself exhibits an evolution and the history of the Rigveda is a history of the culture of the age. The Rigveda, in the form in which we have it now, is a compilation out of old material, a collection and selection (*saṁhitā*) of 1,017 hymns (or 1,028 hymns, if eleven of Maṇḍala viii, added later, are counted) out of the vast literature of hymns which had been accumulating for a long period. As Macdonell puts it: "Some hundreds of years must have been needed for all the hymns found in the Rigveda to come into being." Bloomfield [*JAOS*, xxix, 288] even considers the so-called oldest parts of the Rigveda as "the last precipitate, with a long and a tangled past behind it of a literary activity of great and indefinite length". Dr. M. Winteritz also concludes: "Centuries must have elapsed between the composition of earliest hymns and the Saṁhitā of the Rigveda." Accordingly, the Rigveda Saṁhitā itself refers to the works of the earlier and later authors [*pūrvaiḥ* and *nūtanaiḥ* (i, 1, 27)], to Agni being worshipped in bygone ages (*pūrve*) by Ṛishis by their hymns (*gīrbhiḥ*) [x, 98, 9] and also to hymns extemporized for the occasion [*stomaṁ jana-yāmi navyam* in i, 109, 2, etc.].