Vedic Religion

Whatever the religions may have been which were practised by the other peoples of ancient India, the documented religious history of the sub-continent begins with the arrival of the Aryas in the north-western regions.

In the Hindu understanding, the Veda consists of eternally existing (however that may be defined by individual schools) sacred scriptures. These are ‘revealed’ at the beginning of each cosmic age to seers (rsis) who ‘see’ the Veda and teach it orally to their disciples (who thus ‘hear’ it). From this mode of transmission, the Veda is also known as sruti (lit. ‘hearing’), a term denoting primary, ultimate revelation. Moreover, Vyasa, one of the primordial sages, is regarded as the compiler of these scriptures, putting them together as a definitive corpus. This consists of four main traditions (Rg-, Sama-, Yajur- and Atharva-Veda) which in turn are divided into four genres (Samhita, Brahmana, Aranyaka and Upanisad). This corpus constitutes the highest religious authority and pervades all forms of Hindu­ism, however variegated they may appear on the surface.

But for the scholar, this monolithic block of ‘the Veda’ falls apart into chronologically different stages and socially separate layers of a literary development that may have lasted for perhaps as long as a thousand years. The latter half of the second millennium bce has emerged as the most likely period for the beginnings of Vedic literature. For such a date there are few other documents of comparable bulk in the history of religion anywhere else in the world. Yet here we are dealing with religious documents in an unusual sense, for these are not written sources (like, for example, Sumerian cuneiform tablets).

Frequently, the term ‘Veda’ (or ‘Vedas’, for the four traditions Rg-, Sama-, etc.) is used in a more restricted sense. Instead of denoting the entire corpus, it excludes the latest of the genres, that is the Upanisads. To speak of ‘Vedas and Upanisads’ has indeed certain advan­tages, for it highlights the major differences between the earlier hymns and the later Upanisads. The latter group of texts reflects a type of religion which is very different from early Vedic ritualism.

The centre of the religious practice of the Aryas was the sacrifice: rituals performed around and through the fire. The symbolism and the motivation behind such sacrifices can without difficulty be derived from the theme of‘hospitality’, an important element in nomadic life all over the world. Thus the sacrifice is a meal, but it is shared not only between members of a group of Aryas, but also with beings of a different order called devas. The sacrificial meal aims to establish bonds of loyalty and mutual responsibility between men and devas. But who are those devas? To determine what ‘deva’ here means is almost identical with defining Vedic religion—a task which scholarship is far from having completed. Certainly these devas are ‘beings’ of some kind; they are normally invisible to the human eye, possess individual names and many personal characteristics. They are more powerful than man, and in many ways interfere in his life, both in a positive and negative manner. They can be addressed by man, be propitiated and requested to grant specific favours. Yet at the same time, they also manifest a puzzling association with natural phenomena, such as fire, rain, thunder­storm, etc. In these contexts, they are more like ‘things’ or ‘events’. But if we acknowledge that we are dealing here with an archaic form of thought which does not yet make a clear conceptual distinction between a ‘person’ and other forms of agents observable in nature, at least this ambiguity need not cause undue problems.

But there is one further problem here: the Sanskrit word deva is etymologically related to the Latin deus and the Greek theos, a fact that produced the conventional translation of deva as ‘god’. The description of the devas offered above makes it clear to what an extent the devas are ‘natural’ beings and not ‘supernatural’. To derive an understanding of Vedic religion from the nature of the devas alone would thus be very misleading. In fact, early scholars went even further and thought they had discovered suggestions here as to the ‘origin of religion’ itself. The strong association of the devas with natural phenomena was seen as evidence that nature, when ‘personified’ and ‘deified’, gives rise to religion. Yet logically the concept of ‘god’ itself cannot be derived from, only projected upon, natural phenomena. Moreover, the link between deva and deusltheos was also developed in a different direction, but again without yielding fruitful results (at least as far as an understanding of Vedic religion in its own right is concerned). In this case, the common linguistic heritage from the Indo-European past was seen as the paradigm also of a common religious past. This may well have been the case, and the reconstruction ofit is certainly an exciting enterprise in its own right. But as a religious system, Vedic religion developed its identity precisely because it moved away from that common heritage. Sanskrit agni (fire) may be related to the Latin ignis, and the Greek god Ouranos may reveal some similarities with the deva Varuna.

The devas themselves makes up a motley crowd. Attempts at counting them by listing different proper names have almost reached the figure 1,000. Most of these are male, with only a few and insignificant female devas, that is, dev is. However, only a few devas are really central to Vedic refigion. Not surprisingly, the sacrificial fire itself, under the name of Agni, is one such deva. Through him man communicates with the other devas, for offerings addressed to them are handed over to him. Simi­larly, since the dead are cremated, Agni conveys people into the dark and rather nebulous realm of Yama, the deva of death. And it is Agni who carries the nourishment to the ancestors (pitrs, literally ‘fathers’) living in that realm. To provide this nourishment regularly (through the monthly sraddha ritual) is the primary duty of any son. But the sacrifice is not just a conveyance of food. It also involves the production and offering of a liquid called soma, which is the material manifestation of the deva Soma. No definite conclusions about the identity of the plant from which the juice was derived have been reached by scholars. But it is clear that the liquid extracted from it possessed hal­lucinogenic properties. In this strictly controlled ritual context, a portion of the soma was also drunk by the human participants. The degree to which this has any bearing on the kind of poetry which was produced for these rituals has not yet been ascertained.

A very different kind of deva is Indra. He is the most frequently invited guest to the sacrifice, and in the way he is described we can see many features of the aggressive, conquering Aryas themselves. Then there is Varuna, a much less transparent figure. Both he and Indra are associated with the natural order, Indra using his valour to remove obstruc­tions to it and Varuna supervising the actions of man and punishing any transgressions. It has become customary to list even in the shortest catalogues of Vedic devas two further figures, Visnu and Rudra/J>iva.

There cannot be any doubt that Vedic religion had its mythology—traditional stories about devas and their past deeds—but our understanding of it is very imperfect. This has to do with the nature of our sources. Besides the offerings of food and of soma, the sacrifice involved recitation of poems addressed to the devas. An invitation to come and join the meal is expressed in such a poem, usually dedicated to one particular deva or a smaller group of them. These poems also flatter the deva(s) because of heroic deeds done or grand qualities like liberality. Suggestions are made as to the rewards desired by the sacrificer for his efforts. Given this literary form, we cannot expect a coherent narrative of whole myths; we find only sporadic frag­ments and allusions. Judging from later literature, it would appear that such fragments did not actually derive from one single, coherent mythology and that many different versions were current at the time. The freedom of poetic imagination and mythological inventiveness must have been considerable.

From an unknown date onwards, such poems com­posed for the sacrifice began to be collected, initially within priestly families as treasured heirlooms. Eventually such collections were put together as one bulky corpus, which now constitutes the main part of the Rg-Veda (rc, rg: hymn). In addition to the ‘recitation’ (performed by thehotr-priest), a much more musical mode evolved which became associated with another class of priests, i.e. the udgdtr. No new poetry was created for this, and thus the Sama-Veda contains mostly material already found in the Rg-Veda. Very different material was collected in a third corpus, the Yajur-Veda. Here we find the sacrificial formulas, and, depending on the recension, also the details of ritual acts, which made up the ritual function of the adhvaryu-priests.

These three Vedas thus arose from the functional differentiation within the priesthood responsible for the Vedic fire-sacrifice. But there is a fourth collection, the Atharva-Veda. In the first half at least we find material of a very different kind, which may well be contemporary with the early hymns of the Rg-Veda. ‘Popular religion’ is perhaps the best label to describe it. Rituals are presented to us here which do not involve the devas at all and which are perceived to be effective merely through their accurate performance, joining the correct verbal formulas to the appropriate ritual action. No professional priest is necessary, and the results aimed for are even more down-to-earth than that which the fire-sacrifice is supposed to yield (for example, winning the love of a woman).

This presence of two rather different religious-ritual traditions in the same society is interesting; it might also have had implica­tions for the subsequent developments. For we notice that in the course of time the devas—after all very unpredictable and free agents—become less and less important and the sacrifice itself moves into the centre of the religious view of the world. In terms of underlying rationale, such a view is compar­able with what we find in the Atharva-Veda. Thus at least hypothetically one might be able to speak of a transfer of popular ideas on to the hieratic sacrifice. But what is clear is that in the course of time the structure of the sacrifice became enormously complicated. Consequently a whole specialist literature evolved which dealt with these ritual details (adding accounts of the origin of rituals etc.). These sometimes very lengthy texts were called the Brahmanas. At a certain stage, a third genre was formulated, the Aranyakas. It seems that, for reasons of their particularly powerful and thus potentially dangerous nature, certain rituals could only be performed in the forest (aranyaka: belonging to the forest), away from house and home. Material on these was collected outside the Brahmanas.

The amount of textual material that has been dis­cussed by now is quite staggering. For in the course of time, the three types of priests differentiated further into more than a dozen separate ‘branches’ (s'dkhds), each one with its own independent Brahmana (and Aranyaka). In this form it has been handed down from generation to generation. That texts which in print fill many hundreds of pages should be learnt by heart in toto is by itself an amazing achievement of human memory. That it should be done with almost perfect accuracy is sheer genius. We can infer this accuracy among other things from the fact that the type of language found here corresponds to what linguists would expect historically, that the grammar is consistent over the whole corpus and that different versions agree essentially. To achieve such precision, various devices were invented. Thus the texts were learnt not just once (that is, as actually recited), but many times over: having them split up into separate, individual words, arranging the words in various patterns of ba, de, etc. That such dedication, over many years of study, should be shown to this material, clearly suggests that the Vedas themselves had acquired extreme religious status.

What does all this add up to in terms of religion? In the past, Vedic religion has often been described as ‘polytheism’, to which a second evolutionary stage, called ‘henotheism’ was added. This concept derives from a stylistic peculiarity found in many Vedic hymns, where one deva is addressed with the attributes (and names) of many other devas. Whilst this second presumed stage is of limited significance, ‘monotheism’, which scholars postulated as the third and final evolutionary stage of religion, did not grow out of the Vedas at all. Instead, the development took a different direction. Thus instead of pursuing the discussion of the devas further, it seems preferable to listen in to the discussions which the ancient Indians themselves had about these matters. For indeed the Vedic Indians did ask questions about the nature of man and the world and about what principles ordered and governed them. Already at an early stage, a concept rta evolved which denoted some cosmic order or harmony. Varuna in particular was its guardian, acting as the agent of retribution for any infringement of rta. This suggests that behind the multiplicity of devas, some unifying principle, abstract and impersonal, was envisaged. Similarly we find the concept brah­man, denoting at this early stage a particular ‘sacred’, cosmic power. In fact it was this power which accounted for the efficacy of the sacrifice, since it was located within the brahmin priest, and that in turn because he had absorbed it by learning the Vedas. Such conceptions were then developed along much more conscious, searching lines. A great interest in the world, in the laws governing it and in its origin and structure, came to the fore. The sacrifice was used as a major conceptual model for exploring these issues. A search began for the one principle underlying and controlling all other forces in the world. For, and this appears to be the motivation, if this one could be controlled or manipulated ritually, total control over the world and man’s destiny could be gained. In a large number of ‘creation myths’, a whole spectrum of suggestions of such a one principle is made. What better way to demonstrate the power of the one over the many than to show how out of the one the many evolved? Well-known examples are Vac (Speech, that is the Vedas), Skambha (the cosmic axis), Purusa (‘Man’, the sacrificial victim, out of whose dismembered body the world with its beings and social classes evolved). It is clear from the multiplicity of such conceptions that we are not dealing here with any kind of normative (‘Hindu’) account of creation comparable with what we find in the book of Genesis. But eventually all these extremely variegated speculations settled on brahman, a term that now also denotes the one at the beginning and at the centre of all the many things and beings that make up the universe. It goes without saying that this must have added enormously to the prestige of the priests and of their sacrifices where brahman was located in a very special way. All these speculations found their textual home within the Vedic literature discussed above: as Book X and part of Book I of the Rg-Veda, as the second half of the Atharva-Veda and in scattered form in the different Brahmanas. In the fight of these observations, the role of the devas cannot exclusively be regarded as central to Vedic religion. Neither in the perception of the sacrifice as ‘automatic’ nor in the way a single ultimate principle is envisaged do personal features or deva­figures play any decisive role.

It is often said that the Veda is to the Hindus what the Bible is to Christianity. But for all practical purposes, such a comparison is at most misleading, if not totally inappropriate. Whilst it is certainly true that any reasonable description of Hinduism would have to refer constantly to ‘the Veda’, it would only be slightly exaggerated to say that its actual content is irrelevant (at least as far as the hymns and the sacrificial material are concerned). The reality of the Veda is primarily conceptual. Certainly the fact that they are not a written scripture is important here. But to explain why this was not done requires a look at the social context. They were the carefully guarded ‘religious knowledge’ of a certain group of people, and thus not a proclamation of beliefs addressed to the whole of Indian society. Moreover, parallel to a decrease in the linguistic comprehensibility went an increase of the purely functional role of this literature. Both in grammar and vocabu­lary, the earlier Vedic hymns are in a pre-classical form of the Sanskrit language. In the course of time, these hymns thus became increasingly more incomprehensible, even to those people who knew classical Sanskrit or whose mother tongue was derived from it. Their style and poetic conven­tions and their allusive mythology also became increasingly remote and archaic. But this created no obvious problems, for as was observed above, the actual content was of no importance, once a more reflex conception of brahman as central cosmic power had evolved. What remained important was the learning of the hymns, for brahman would thereby be absorbed, and the recitation of them, for brahman would thereby be applied to a ritual act. The Brahmanas are far more easily accessible, but their relevance for the profes­sional priest as his handbook is a primarily practical one. Moreover, what­ever new forms of religion evolved during the following millennia, none could claim to be ‘orthodox’, or acquire social respectability, unless some connection with the Veda could be shown, however tenuous, putative or artificial this link might be. Much of what to the uncritical observer appears as the ‘continuity of the Vedic tradition’ in Hinduism reveals itself at closer inspection as a secondary recourse back to the ancient past, and not as historically grown extensions.

In many other ways did the Vedas stimulate further intellectual and religious developments. A whole range of academic disci­plines evolved, all of which derived from concerns connected with the Veda, and are thus known as the Veddhgas, the ‘limbs’ of the Veda: for example, astronomy (to determine the precise time and date for a sacrifice), grammar (to maintain the comprehensibility at least of the ritual treatises) and geometry (for the precise construction of altars). But more important, because it was of far greater general relevance, was the formulation of the ideal of a ‘Vedic life’. In particular two such disciplines concerned themselves with the study of domestic rituals and with life in society. The earliest textual expressions of these subjects are the various grhya- and dharma-sutras which we still find included in the repertoire of the various sdkhds. Of particular interest here is the concept of‘dharma’ (a development of that ofrta). But the ‘classical’ view ofdharma and thus of the orthodox, Vedic life is not merely a development of Vedic religion, but a relatively late synthesis of two very different traditions. Traceable as far back as c. 800 bce, that is when Vedic literature had reached the stage indicated above, we find a very different kind of religious reality. This is the ‘renouncer tradition’, and we must turn to it, before pursuing the topic of the ideal religious, Vedic life.