| Religion: | Historical Vedic religion Hinduism |
| Language: | Vedic Sanskrit |
| Period: | Vedic period –1200 BCE (Rigveda), –900 BCE (Yajurveda, Samaveda, Atharvaveda) |
| Verses: | 20,379 mantras[1] |
| Wikisource: | The Vedas |
thumb|upright=1.2|The Vedas are ancient Sanskrit texts of Hinduism. Above: A page from the Atharvaveda.
The Vedas ([2] or,[3]) are a large body of religious texts originating in ancient India. Composed in Vedic Sanskrit, the texts constitute the oldest layer of Sanskrit literature and the oldest scriptures of Hinduism.[4] [5] [6]
There are four Vedas: the Rigveda, the Yajurveda, the Samaveda and the Atharvaveda.[7] Each Veda has four subdivisions – the Samhitas (mantras and benedictions), the Brahmanas (commentaries on and explanation of rituals, ceremonies and sacrifices - Yajñas), the Aranyakas (text on rituals, ceremonies, sacrifices and symbolic-sacrifices), and the Upanishads (texts discussing meditation, philosophy and spiritual knowledge).[8] [9] [10] Some scholars add a fifth category – the Upāsanās (worship). The texts of the Upanishads discuss ideas akin to the heterodox sramana traditions. The Samhitas and Brahmanas describe about daily rituals and are generally meant for Brahmacharya and Gr̥hastha stages of the Chaturashrama system, while the Aranyakas and Upanishads are meant for the Vānaprastha and Sannyasa stages, respectively.
Vedas are ("what is heard"), distinguishing them from other religious texts, which are called ("what is remembered"). Hindus consider the Vedas to be apauruṣeya, which means "not of a man, superhuman" and "impersonal, authorless", revelations of sacred sounds and texts heard by ancient sages after intense meditation.
The Vedas have been orally transmitted since the 2nd millennium BCE with the help of elaborate mnemonic techniques. The mantras, the oldest part of the Vedas, are recited in the modern age for their phonology rather than the semantics, and are considered to be "primordial rhythms of creation", preceding the forms to which they refer. By reciting them the cosmos is regenerated, "by enlivening and nourishing the forms of creation at their base."
The various Indian philosophies and Hindu sects have taken differing positions on the Vedas. Schools of Indian philosophy that acknowledge the importance or primal authority of the Vedas comprise Hindu philosophy specifically and are together classified as the six "orthodox" (āstika) schools. However, śramaṇa traditions, such as Charvaka, Ajivika, Buddhism, and Jainism, which did not regard the Vedas as authoritative, are referred to as "heterodox" or "non-orthodox" (nāstika) schools.[11]
The Sanskrit word "knowledge, wisdom" is derived from the root vid- "to know". This is reconstructed as being derived from the Proto-Indo-European root , meaning "see" or "know."
The noun is from Proto-Indo-European , cognate to Greek Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: (ϝ)εἶδος "aspect", "form" . This is not to be confused with the homonymous 1st and 3rd person singular perfect tense , cognate to Greek Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: (ϝ)οἶδα ((w)oida) "I know". Root cognates are Greek ἰδέα, English wit, Latin videō "I see", Russian ве́дать (védat) "to know", etc.[12]
The Sanskrit term as a common noun means "knowledge". The term in some contexts, such as hymn 10.93.11 of the Rigveda, means "obtaining or finding wealth, property", while in some others it means "a bunch of grass together" as in a broom or for ritual fire.
The term "Vedic texts" is used in two distinct meanings:
The corpus of Vedic Sanskrit texts includes:
While production of Brahmanas and Aranyakas ceased with the end of the Vedic period, additional Upanishads were composed after the end of the Vedic period. The Brahmanas, Aranyakas, and Upanishads, among other things, interpret and discuss the Samhitas in philosophical and metaphorical ways to explore abstract concepts such as the Absolute (Brahman), and the soul or the self (Atman), introducing Vedanta philosophy, one of the major trends of later Hinduism. In other parts, they show evolution of ideas, such as from actual sacrifice to symbolic sacrifice, and of spirituality in the Upanishads. This has inspired later Hindu scholars such as Adi Shankara to classify each Veda into karma-kanda (कर्म खण्ड, action/sacrificial ritual-related sections, the Samhitas and Brahmanas); and jnana-kanda (ज्ञान खण्ड, knowledge/spirituality-related sections, mainly the Upanishads').
Vedas are ("what is heard"), distinguishing them from other religious texts, which are called ("what is remembered"). This indigenous system of categorization was adopted by Max Müller and, while it is subject to some debate, it is still widely used. As Axel Michaels explains:
Among the widely known śrutis include the Vedas and their embedded texts—the Samhitas, the Upanishads, the Brahmanas and the Aranyakas. The well-known smṛtis include Bhagavad Gita, Bhagavata Purana and the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, amongst others.
Hindus consider the Vedas to be apauruṣeyā, which means "not of a man, superhuman" and "impersonal, authorless." The Vedas, for orthodox Indian theologians, are considered revelations seen by ancient sages after intense meditation, and texts that have been more carefully preserved since ancient times. In the Hindu Epic Mahabharata, the creation of Vedas is credited to Brahma.[23] The Vedic hymns themselves assert that they were skillfully created by Rishis (sages), after inspired creativity, just as a carpenter builds a chariot.
The oldest part of the Rig Veda Samhita was orally composed in north-western India (Punjab) between 1500 and 1200 BCE, while book 10 of the Rig Veda, and the other Samhitas were composed between 1200 and 900 BCE more eastward, between the Yamuna and the Ganges rivers, the heartland of Aryavarta and the Kuru Kingdom . The "circum-Vedic" texts, as well as the redaction of the Samhitas, date to –500 BCE.
According to tradition, Vyasa is the compiler of the Vedas, who arranged the four kinds of mantras into four Samhitas (Collections).
See also: Vedic period.
The Vedas are among the oldest sacred texts. The bulk of the Rigveda Samhita was composed in the northwestern region (Punjab) of the Indian subcontinent, most likely between 1500 and 1200 BCE, although a wider approximation of 1700–1100 BCE has also been given. The other three Samhitas are considered to date from the time of the Kuru Kingdom, approximately 1200–900 BCE. The "circum-Vedic" texts, as well as the redaction of the Samhitas, date to –500 BCE, resulting in a Vedic period, spanning the mid 2nd to mid 1st millennium BCE, or the Late Bronze Age and the Iron Age. The Vedic period reaches its peak only after the composition of the mantra texts, with the establishment of the various shakhas all over Northern India which annotated the mantra samhitas with Brahmana discussions of their meaning, and reaches its end in the age of Buddha and Panini and the rise of the Mahajanapadas (archaeologically, Northern Black Polished Ware). Michael Witzel gives a time span of to –400 BCE. Witzel makes special reference to the Near Eastern Mitanni material of the 14th century BCE, the only epigraphic record of Indo-Aryan contemporary to the Rigvedic period. He gives 150 BCE (Patañjali) as a terminus ante quem for all Vedic Sanskrit literature, and 1200 BCE (the early Iron Age) as terminus post quem for the Atharvaveda.
The Vedas were orally transmitted since their composition in the Vedic period for several millennia. The authoritative transmission of the Vedas is by an oral tradition in a sampradaya from father to son or from teacher (guru) to student (shishya), believed to be initiated by the Vedic rishis who heard the primordial sounds. Only this tradition, embodied by a living teacher, can teach the correct pronunciation of the sounds and explain hidden meanings, in a way the "dead and entombed manuscript" cannot do. As Leela Prasad states, "According to Shankara, the "correct tradition" (sampradaya) has as much authority as the written Shastra," explaining that the tradition "bears the authority to clarify and provide direction in the application of knowledge."
The emphasis in this transmission is on the "proper articulation and pronunciation of the Vedic sounds", as prescribed in the Shiksha, the Vedanga (Vedic study) of sound as uttered in a Vedic recitation, mastering the texts "literally forward and backward in fully acoustic fashion." Houben and Rath note that the Vedic textual tradition cannot simply be characterized as oral, "since it also depends significantly on a memory culture." The Vedas were preserved with precision with the help of elaborate mnemonic techniques, such as memorizing the texts in eleven different modes of recitation (pathas), using the alphabet as a mnemotechnical device, "matching physical movements (such as nodding the head) with particular sounds and chanting in a group" and visualizing sounds by using mudras (hand signs). This provided an additional visual confirmation, and also an alternate means to check the reading integrity by the audience, in addition to the audible means. Houben and Rath note that a strong "memory culture" existed in ancient India when texts were transmitted orally, before the advent of writing in the early first millennium CE. According to Staal, criticising the Goody-Watt hypothesis "according to which literacy is more reliable than orality," this tradition of oral transmission "is closely related to Indian forms of science," and "by far the more remarkable" than the relatively recent tradition of written transmission.
While according to Mookerji understanding the meaning (vedarthajnana or artha-bodha) of the words of the Vedas was part of the Vedic learning, Holdrege and other Indologists have noted that in the transmission of the Samhitas the emphasis is on the phonology of the sounds (śabda) and not on the meaning (artha) of the mantras. Already at the end of the Vedic period their original meaning had become obscure for "ordinary people," and niruktas, etymological compendia, were developed to preserve and clarify the original meaning of many Sanskrit words. According to Staal, as referenced by Holdrege, though the mantras may have a discursive meaning, when the mantras are recited in the Vedic rituals "they are disengaged from their original context and are employed in ways that have little or nothing to do with their meaning." The words of the mantras are "themselves sacred," and "do not constitute linguistic utterances." Instead, as Klostermaier notes, in their application in Vedic rituals they become magical sounds, "means to an end."