Ask almost any Hindu family what the oldest scripture of their faith is and the answer comes at once: the Vedas. Yet most of us have heard the word far more often than we have read a line of the text. The Vedas are chanted at weddings and funerals, invoked when a new home is blessed, and quoted every morning in the Gayatri that many of us learned from a grandparent. They are at once the most revered and the least read books in the tradition.
This is an attempt to open the door a little: what the Vedas are, what each contains, how they are organised, and how so much sound survived so long before anyone wrote it down.
What "Veda" means
The Sanskrit word veda comes from the root vid, "to know". Veda means knowledge, and in the tradition it means knowledge of the deepest kind: of the order behind the world (rita), of the powers that sustain it, and of the self that seeks it.
Hindus call the Vedas shruti, "that which is heard". Tradition holds that they were not composed by anyone, human or divine, but were heard by the ancient seers, the rishis, in states of deep absorption. A rishi is therefore a mantra-drashta, one who saw the mantra, not one who wrote it. This is why the Vedas are called apaurusheya, "not of human authorship". Everything else in the vast Hindu library, however loved, is smriti, "that which is remembered": the epics, the Puranas, the law books, the Gita in its setting within the Mahabharata. Smriti explains, applies and retells; shruti is the source it points back to. Where the two seem to differ, the traditional rule is that shruti prevails.
Scholars place the oldest hymns somewhere between roughly 1500 and 1200 BCE, with later portions composed over the following centuries. The tradition does not date them at all, regarding them as eternal and revealed afresh at the start of each cycle of creation. Both views can sit in the same reader without quarrel.
The four collections
There is really one Veda, divided for practical purposes into four. Tradition says the sage Vyasa, "the arranger", made the division so that different priests could carry different parts of the fire ritual, the yajna.
The Rig Veda is the oldest and the foundation of the rest: a little over a thousand hymns (suktas) in ten books (mandalas), addressed to Agni, Indra, Varuna, Soma, Ushas the dawn and many others, recited by the hotri priest. Alongside praise and petition, the tenth mandala holds some of the earliest philosophical poetry in any language, including the Nasadiya Sukta on the origin of the universe, which ends not with an answer but with a doubt: perhaps even the one who surveys it from the highest heaven knows, or perhaps he does not.
The Yajur Veda is the priest's handbook. Its name comes from yajus, a sacrificial formula, and it holds the words spoken by the adhvaryu, the priest who performed the physical acts of the ritual. It comes to us in two forms: the Krishna or "Black" Yajur Veda, in which mantras and explanatory prose are mixed together, and the Shukla or "White" Yajur Veda, in which they are kept apart. The Taittiriya school of the Black Yajur Veda is still strong in South India; the White is more common in the north.
The Sama Veda is the Veda of melody. Nearly all its verses are taken from the Rig Veda, but set to music and sung by the udgatri priest. Tradition regards it as the root of Indian classical music, and Krishna in the Gita says, "Among the Vedas I am the Sama Veda."
The Atharva Veda stands a little apart. Linked with the sages Atharvan and Angiras, it was for some time not counted among the Vedas at all, and older texts speak of "the three Vedas" (trayi vidya). It contains hymns for healing, protection, prosperity and marriage, together with some strikingly profound philosophical hymns. It brings us closer to the household than the other three.
The four layers
Each Veda is not one book but a stack of books, composed across centuries and serving different purposes.
- Samhita (collection): the core mantras and hymns. When people say "the Rig Veda" they usually mean its Samhita.
- Brahmana: prose explaining how and why the rituals are performed, with myths and etymologies woven in.
- Aranyaka (forest text): composed for those who had withdrawn from household life, where the ritual becomes something to meditate on rather than only perform.
- Upanishad: the philosophical conclusion, the Vedanta or "end of the Veda", where the questions turn inward to the self (atman) and the ground of all being (brahman).
The first two layers are often called the karma-kanda, the portion concerned with action, and the last two the jnana-kanda, the portion concerned with knowledge. The Aitareya Upanishad belongs to the Rig Veda, the Chandogya and Kena to the Sama, the Brihadaranyaka, Taittiriya, Katha and Isha to the Yajur, and the Mundaka, Mandukya and Prashna to the Atharva.
Kept alive by the voice
For most of their life the Vedas were never written down. Writing was considered a poor medium for a text whose meaning depended on exact sound, and many traditional teachers still hold that a Veda learned from a book is not truly learned.
Instead, families and schools (shakhas) developed a system of memorisation unmatched anywhere. Students learned each hymn with its three pitch accents and then learned it again in patterned recitations. In the pada-patha each word is recited separately; in the krama-patha the words are chained in pairs; in the more elaborate jata and ghana patterns they are recited forwards, backwards and forwards again in interlocking sequences. A chanter who could recite the ghana of a text carried a built-in error check: any slip would break the pattern. UNESCO has recognised this tradition of Vedic chanting as part of the intangible heritage of humanity.
The result is that a hymn recited today in Kerala and one recited in Varanasi agree syllable for syllable, with no central authority ever having enforced the text.
The Gayatri: one verse from the Rig Veda
The best-known Vedic verse in the world is a single stanza from the third mandala of the Rig Veda, hymn 62, verse 10, whose seer is Vishvamitra. It is addressed to Savitr, the sun as the power that stirs all things into life:
tat savitur varenyam bhargo devasya dhimahi dhiyo yo nah prachodayat
We meditate on the adorable light of the divine Savitr; may he inspire our understanding.
"Gayatri" is the name of its metre, twenty-four syllables in three lines of eight. Because this verse became the Gayatri above all others, the name of the metre became the name of the mantra. The opening om bhur bhuvah svah that most of us chant before it is not part of the Rig Vedic verse but a later prefix from the Yajur tradition, invoking the three worlds. Traditionally the Gayatri is given at the upanayana, the thread ceremony, and repeated at dawn, noon and dusk; today many families, including many women, chant it daily regardless of ritual initiation.
Where to begin reading
Nobody should start with the Samhitas cover to cover. Begin with a good translation of the tenth mandala of the Rig Veda, which holds the Nasadiya Sukta, the Purusha Sukta and the hymn to Vak, speech. Then read one short Upanishad: the Isha is only eighteen verses, and the Katha tells of the boy Nachiketa who asks Death itself what happens after death. Listen to recorded chanting with the text open, so that sound and meaning arrive together. And keep in mind the line from the Rig Veda that Hindus quote more than any other: ekam sat vipra bahudha vadanti, "Truth is one; the wise speak of it in many ways."