Rig Veda
ऋग्वेदः
Also Rigveda, Rik Samhita.
Veda Vedic Sanskrit Probably composed between about 1500 and 1000 before the common era
What it is
The Rig Veda is the oldest surviving text in any Indo European language still in religious use, a collection of hymns addressed to gods invoked at a fire. It was transmitted orally for perhaps three thousand years before being written, by a method of memorisation so redundant that the text is considered better preserved than most manuscripts: syllables were learnt in multiple permuted orders so that an error in one ordering would be caught by the others. Much of what it says about its own gods, Indra, Agni, Soma and Ushas, is no longer the living religion, and the hymns are still recited daily.
Its shape
Ten mandalas, books, of one thousand and twenty eight hymns and about ten thousand six hundred verses. Books two to seven are the family books, each attributed to a lineage of seers and generally held to be the oldest; book nine is given entirely to Soma; books one and ten are latest, and book ten holds the Purusha Sukta and the Nasadiya Sukta. The whole is recited in several patha styles, samhita, pada, krama, jata and ghana, which are the permutations the preservation depends on.
What it argues about
These are not settled texts
Two of its hymns are argued about more than the rest of it combined. The Purusha Sukta in book ten describes a cosmic being sacrificed, from whose mouth, arms, thighs and feet came the four varnas, and it is the earliest text cited for the caste order; its position in the latest book and its difference in style from the family books is why many scholars read it as a late interpolation, and that reading is itself politically charged. The Nasadiya Sukta, a few hymns away, asks where creation came from and ends by saying that perhaps the one who oversees it in the highest heaven knows, or perhaps he does not know. A collection that contains both the charter of a hierarchy and a flat admission that nobody knows anything is not a text with a single position.
Episodes worth knowing
The hymn that does not know
The Nasadiya Sukta opens by saying that then there was neither existence nor non existence, neither air nor sky beyond it, and asks what covered it and where. It goes on through several verses of questions. It ends by saying that the gods came after this creation, so who then knows whence it arose; and that the one who oversees it in the highest heaven, he surely knows, or perhaps he does not know. That a foundational religious text ends its creation hymn with the possibility that God does not know is quoted constantly, by believers and others, and is one of the few things about the Rig Veda that everybody likes.
Remembered in eleven ways
The text was preserved without writing by teaching it in permuted recitations: pada patha separates each word, krama joins them in overlapping pairs, jata recites each pair forwards, backwards and forwards again, and ghana does a more complex pattern still. A reciter trained in ghana can reconstruct the samhita exactly, and an error introduced anywhere fails to agree across the orderings. Comparison of recensions preserved thousands of kilometres apart shows differences of a handful of syllables. The method, rather than any manuscript, is why the text survived.
Whose telling
There is no single text
- Sakala recension
- The surviving sakha of the Rig Veda; several others are named in the tradition and are lost.
- Sayana, fourteenth century
- The great commentary, produced under Vijayanagara patronage, and still the first reference for how the tradition reads a verse.
- Max Muller, 1849 to 1874
- Edited and printed the text with Sayana in Europe, which is how it entered Western scholarship and also how a good deal of colonial era misreading entered with it.
- Oral tradition today
- Still recited by Vedic pathashalas in several sakhas; UNESCO listed the tradition of Vedic chanting in 2008.
Where the regions differ
- Tamil
- Kerala
- Telugu
- Kannada
- North
- Maharashtra
- Bengal
- Punjab
- Assam
- Sri Lanka
- Nepal
- Gujarat
- Odisha
- Mithila
- Kashmir
- Tulu Nadu
- manipur
- rajasthan
- konkani
- sindhi
- jharkhand
- himalayan
- kodava
- North India
- The pathashalas of Kashi and the north keep several recensions, and the Vedic chanting tradition is taught in the traditional schools.
- Tamil Nadu
- Aavani Avittam is the day the Yajurvedins renew the thread and begin the year’s study; the Rig Vedins keep their own day.
- Kerala
- The Nambudiri tradition preserves one of the oldest surviving styles of Vedic recitation and the Athirathram fire rite.
- Maharashtra
- The Vaidika Samshodhana Mandala at Pune did much of the modern critical work on the Vedic texts.
Connected to
Deities
Festivals
Related works