Rigveda

“ Thus it is evident that the Çākalas not only possessed the best tradition of the text of the Rigveda, but handed down the only recension, in the true sense, which, as far as we can tell, ever existed.
The text of the Rigveda, like that of the other Saṃhitās, as well as of two of the Brāhmaṇas (the Çatapatha and the Taittirīya, together with its Āraṇyaka) , has come down to us in an accented form. The peculiarly sacred character of the text rendered the accent very important for correct and efficacious recitation. ”

“ The Rigveda contains no traces of it beyond a couple of passages in the last book which speak of the soul of a dead man as going to the waters or plants. It seems hardly likely that so far-reaching a theory should have been developed from the stray fancies of one or two later Vedic poets. ”

“ The possibility of assigning nearly every power to every god rendered the [70] identification of one deity with another an easy matter. Such identifications are frequent enough in the Rigveda. For example, a poet addressing the fire-god exclaims: “Thou at thy birth, O Agni, art Varuṇa; when kindled thou becomest Mitra; in thee, O Son of Might, all gods are centred; thou art Indra to the worshipper” (v. 3, 1) . ”

“ The hymns of the Rigveda consist of stanzas ranging in number from three to fifty-eight, but usually not exceeding ten or twelve. These stanzas (often loosely called verses) are composed in some fifteen different metres, only seven of which, however, are at all frequent. Three of them are by far the commonest, claiming together about four-fifths of the total number of stanzas in the Rigveda.
There is an essential difference between Greek and Vedic prosody. Whereas the metrical unit of the former system is the foot, in the later it is the line (or verse) , feet not being distinguished. ”

“ The evolution of religious thought in the Rigveda led to the conception of a creator distinct from any of the chief deities and superior to all the gods. He appears under the various names of Purusha, Viçvakarman, Hiraṇyagarbha, or Prajāpati in the cosmogonic hymns. ”

“ Again, snake-worship, which is unknown to the Rigveda, now appears as an element in Indian religion. That, however, which impresses on the Yajurveda the stamp of a new epoch is the character of the worship which it represents. The relative importance of the gods and of the sacrifice in the older religion has now become inverted. In the Rigveda the object of devotion was the gods, for the power of bestowing benefits on mankind was believed to lie in their hands alone, while the sacrifice was only a means of influencing their will in favour of the offerer. ”

“ But with regard to the higher religious ideas relating to the gods, it represents a more recent and advanced stage than the Rigveda. It contains, indeed, more theosophic matter than any of the other Saṃhitās. For the history of civilisation it is on the whole more interesting and important than the Rigveda itself.
The Atharva-veda is extant in the recensions of two different schools. ”

“ Besides the higher gods the Rigveda knows a number of mythical beings not regarded as possessing the divine nature to the full extent and from the beginning. The most important of these are the Ṛibhus who form a triad, and are addressed in eleven hymns. Characteristically deft-handed, they are often said to have acquired the rank of deities by their marvellous skill. ”

“ The completeness of the picture it supplies of early religious thought has no parallel. Moreover, though its purely secular poems are so few, the incidental references contained in the whole collection are sufficiently numerous to afford material for a tolerably detailed description of the social condition of the earliest Aryans in India. Here, then, we have an additional reason for attaching great importance to the Rigveda in the history of civilisation.
In the first place, the home of the Vedic tribes is revealed to us by the geographical data which the hymns yield. ”

“ The Yajurveda resembles the Sāmaveda in having been compiled for application to sacrificial rites only. But while the Sāmaveda deals solely with one part of the ritual, the soma sacrifice, the Yajurveda supplies the formulas for the whole sacrificial ceremonial. Like the Sāmaveda, it is also connected with the Rigveda; but while the former is practically altogether extracted from the Rigveda, the Yajurveda, though borrowing many of its verses from the same source, is largely an original production. Thus somewhat more than one-fourth only of the Vājasaneyi Saṃhitā is derived from the Rigveda. ”

“ Few of the rivers of the Rigveda are mentioned more than two or three times in the hymns, and several of them not more than once. The only names of frequent occurrence are those of the Indus and the Sarasvatī. One entire hymn (x. 75) is devoted to its laudation, but eighteen other streams, mostly its tributaries, share its praises in two stanzas. The mighty river seems to have made a deep impression on the mind of the poet. He speaks of her as the swiftest of the swift, surpassing all other streams in volume of water. Other rivers flow to her as lowing cows hasten to their calf. ”

“ There are four of them, the Rigveda, the Yajurveda, the Samaveda, and the Atharvaveda. Devout Hindoos believe that these books have always existed—that they [6] are co-eternal with God. Scholars agree that they are very old, that the Rigveda, the oldest of the four, and one of the oldest books extant, was composed between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago. ”

“ In reality, however, the practice of the poets of the Rigveda hardly amounts to more than the exaggeration—to be found in the Homeric hymns also—with which a singer would naturally magnify the particular god whom he is invoking. ”

“ In 1830 he issued his ‘Rig-vedæ Specimen,’ and his spare time thenceforward was devoted to preparing a text and Latin translation of the ‘Rigveda,’ the first volume of which (‘Rigveda Sanhita lib. prim.’) was published by the Oriental Translation Fund in 1838—after the young scholar's premature death. He had been reinstated at University College as professor of Sanskrit in 1836, but recognition came too late. Overwork, and the struggle for bare subsistence, had broken his health. At the last he decided to return to his family in Germany, but died in Maddox Street, London, on 12 Sept. ”

“ The four Vedas are "collections," called saṃhitā, of hymns and prayers made for different ritual purposes. They are of varying age and significance. By far the most important as well as the oldest—for it is the very foundation of all Vedic literature—is the Rigveda, the "Veda of verses" (from ṛich, "a laudatory stanza") , consisting entirely of lyrics, mainly in praise of different gods. It may, therefore, be described as the book of hymns or psalms. ”

“ Of a supplementary character are also the class of writings called Anukramaṇīs or Vedic Indices, which give lists of the hymns, the authors, the metres, and the deities in the order in which they occur in the various Saṃhitās. To the Rigveda belonged seven of these works, all attributed to Çaunaka, and composed in the mixture of the çloka and trishṭubh metre, which is also found in Çaunaka's Rigveda Prātiçākhya. There is also a General Index or Sarvānukramaṇī which is attributed to Kātyāyana, and epitomises in the Sūtra style the contents of the metrical indices. ”

“ While the Rigveda deals almost exclusively with the higher gods as conceived by a comparatively advanced and refined sacerdotal class, the Atharva-veda is, in the main, a book of spells and incantations appealing to the demon world, and teems with notions about witchcraft current among the lower grades of the population, and derived from an immemorial antiquity. These two, thus complementary to each other in contents, are obviously the most important of the four Vedas. ”

“ Many stories are to be found in Indian literature which when found elsewhere are judged to be products of savage imagination, and the fact that the Rigveda ignores some of them and refines others, simply shows that the authors of that collection were on a higher level than their people in point of cultivation and of piety, as the psalmists and the prophets of Israel were in advance of theirs. ”

“ In this transitional age must have been composed the more ancient poems which are lost, and in which the style of the earliest preserved hymns, already composed with much skill, was developed. The poets of the older part of the Rigveda themselves mention predecessors, in whose wise they sing, whose songs they desire to renew, and speak of ancestral hymns produced in days of yore. As far as linguistic evidence is concerned, it affords little help in discriminating periods within the Rigveda except with regard to the tenth book. ”

“ But the Rigveda did a great work for India in cultivating gods who were moral, and to whom man was drawn by higher than selfish motives. Gods who are just and who watch man's conduct, and do not fail to reward him according to his deeds, must quicken the conscience of those who believe in them, and gods who are able to help the weak and to forgive the penitent must make their people also merciful. In all the aberrations of Indian religion the high moral standard set by the Vedic gods is never lost sight of. ”

“ Prominent among the gods of the Rigveda are the Maruts or Storm-gods, who form a group of thrice seven or thrice sixty. They are the sons of Rudra and the mottled cloud-cow Pṛiçni. At birth they are compared with fires, and are once addressed as "born from the laughter of lightning." They are a troop of youthful warriors armed with spears or battle-axes and wearing helmets upon their heads. ”

“ There is, moreover, some reason to believe that the Sāmaveda as a collection is older than at least the Taittirīya and the Vājasaneyi recensions of the Yajurveda. For the latter contain verses, used also as Sāman chants, in a form which shows the variations of the Sāmaveda in contrast with the Rigveda. This is all the more striking as the Vājasaneyi text has an undoubted tendency to adhere to the readings of the Rigveda. ”

“ In the later Vedas, the Brāhmaṇas, and the subsequent literature, the name has become simply a designation of wind. [89]
The position occupied by the god Rudra in the Rigveda is very different from that of his historical successor in a later age. He is celebrated in only three or four hymns, while his name is mentioned slightly less often than that of Vishṇu. He is usually said to be armed with bow and arrows, but a lightning shaft and a thunderbolt are also occasionally assigned to him. He is described as fierce and destructive like a wild beast, and is called “the ruddy boar of heaven.” ”

“ It also for the first and only time in the Rigveda mentions the four castes; for it is here said that Purusha’s mouth became the Brahman, his arms the Rājanya (warrior) , his thighs the Vaiçya (agriculturist) , and his feet the Çūdra (serf) .
In nearly all the other poems dealing with the origin [134] of the world, not the gods collectively but an individual creator is the actor. Various passages in other hymns show that the sun was regarded as an important agent of generation by the Rishis. ”

“ A crowd of priests conducts a vast and complicated system of external ceremonies, to which symbolical significance is attributed, and to the smallest minutiæ of which the greatest weight is attached. In this stifling atmosphere of perpetual sacrifice and ritual, the truly religious spirit of the Rigveda could not possibly survive. Adoration of the power and beneficence of the gods, as well as the consciousness of guilt, is entirely lacking, every prayer being coupled with some particular rite and aiming solely at securing material advantages. ”

“ In its main contents the Atharva-veda is more superstitious than the Rigveda. For it does not represent the more advanced religious beliefs of the priestly class, but is a collection of the most popular spells current among the masses who always preserve more primitive notions with regard to demoniac powers. The spirit which breathes in it is that of a prehistoric age. A few of its actual charms probably date with little modification from the Indo-European period ”

“ The Nīti-manjarī, or “Cluster of Blossoms of Conduct,” which has not yet been published, is a collection of a peculiar kind. The moral maxims which it contains are illustrated by stories, and these are taken exclusively from the Rigveda. It consists of about 200 çlokas, and was composed by an author named Dyā Dviveda who accompanied his work with a commentary. In the latter he quotes largely from the Bṛihåddevatā, Sāyaṇa on the Rigveda, and other authors. ”

“ No other religion has ever known its like.
As the domestic ritual is almost entirely excluded from the Brāhmaṇas, the authors of the Gṛihya Sūtras had only the authority of popular tradition to rely on when they systematised the observances of daily life. As a type, the Gṛihya manuals must be somewhat later than the Çrauta, for they regularly presuppose a knowledge of the latter.
To the Rigveda belongs in the first place the Çānkhāyana Gṛihya Sūtra. ”

“ This action suggested a favourite figure, which remained familiar throughout Sanskrit literature. Thus one of the poets of the Rigveda invokes Agni with [144] the words, “Take us across all woes and dangers as across the river (sindhu) in a boat;” and in the later literature one who has accomplished his purpose or mastered his subject is very frequently described as “having reached the farther shore” (pāraga) . The Atharva-veda, on the other hand, contains some passages showing that its composers were acquainted with the ocean. ”