The Entrance Mandala shows the wheel of the cosmos, of which the center is the great original and ever-present sacrifice: “this sacrifice is the navel of the world” (RV I, 164, 35), as is written in the inner wheel below the circle containing the 5 beings fit for sacrifice according to old aryan belief. “Man verily is sacrifice” (SB I, 3, 2, 1) and “with desire for heaven may he sacrifice” is written in the upper part of the same 5-spoked wheel “on which all beings stand” (RV I, 164, 13), symbolizing the fivefold world--5 elements, 5 senses, etc. (cf. Upanishads). The universe, divided into 6 world spaces (RV I, 164, 6)--3 for sky-heaven, 3 for earth--is surrounded and set in motion by the 12-spoked wheel of time (RV I, 164, 11) which is divided into 12 sections representing the 12 moons of the lunar year, each of which contains two halves, the dark and the bright.
Note: Man, with capital M, stands for the human being (of both sexes) as distinct from the Gods and other living beings. When corresponding to the German man, the French on, or the English one, however, the word has not been capitalized. In the translated texts, except for Part VII, and a few other exceptions, “man” has also not been capitalized. Since the English language has not (yet?) introduced an utrum, as an androgynous gender, the pronoun will have to be the morphologically masculine.
He who knows not the eternal syllable of the Veda, the highest point upon which all the Gods repose, what business has he with the Veda?
Only its knowers sit here in peace and concord.
RV I, 164, 39
One of the most stupendous manifestations of the Spirit is undoubtedly that which has been handed down to us under the generic name of the Vedas. The Vedic Epiphany belongs to the heritage of mankind, and therefore its deepest function is best served, as is that of many of the religious and cultural values of mankind, not by scrupulously preserving it, as if we were zealous guardians of a closed and almost hidden treasure, but by sharing it in a spirit of fellowship with humanity at large. This sharing, however, should be neither a profanation under the pretext of bringing profit to others nor an exploitation under the guise of scholarship and scientific knowledge. Rather, it should be a living communication, or even a communion, but one that is free from any tinge of propaganda or proselytization. It is, then, not mere information that these pages intend to convey; it could be that their message has transforming power.
This anthology aims at presenting the Vedas as a human experience that is still valid and capable of enriching and challenging modern Man, as he seeks to fulfill his responsibility in an age in which, for better or for worse, he is inseparably linked with his fellows and can no longer afford to live in isolation. Experiences cannot be transmitted but they can be described, and they can thus serve as stimuli to trigger our own experiences. An experience, as the word itself suggests, is something we go through, a threshold we cross, an enclosure into which we trespass, a nonrefundable outlay, an irreversible process. This anthology is also an invitation to appropriate for ourselves the basic experience of Vedic Man, not because it is interesting or ancient, but because it is human and thus belongs to us all. Indeed, among the many experiences of mankind, the Vedic experience is one that will evoke a responsive movement in that part of us which is numbed by the heavy pressures of modern life. We do not claim that what we have termed the Vedic Experience is precisely identical to that of Vedic Man. We may not be in a position to appropriate the intimate personal experience of a past generation. Our main concern is to make possible the Vedic experience of modern Man and to describe what modern Man may usefully understand and assimilate by reenacting an experience that, because it is part of the total human experience, has left behind it clues and traces which may be important to follow. Thus it is our own personal Vedic experience that “happens.” The objection to the present Sanskrit title is that according to the strictest tradition the Brahmanas and Upanishads are not mantras. For this reason shrutimanjari and vedamanjari were also considered, as well as amnayamanjari. The final choice, mantramanjari, is based on two reasons, both of which call for explanation. As already suggested, it is hoped that this anthology may present the Vedas as a monument of universal religious--and thus deeply human--significance. Yet in so doing we do not want to hurt the feelings or invade the rights of the different religions of the world, especially of those grouped under Hinduism. The Vedas, like the Bible or the Qur’an, are linked forever to the particular religious sources from which they historically sprang. Eclecticism here would be a damaging procedure. We do not intend to loosen the roots from their historical identity, but we believe that this rootedness does not preclude further growth. We do not dispute the rights of the past but only the freezing of living traditions. In this sense the word “mantra” seems better able to sustain growth than the words amnaya, veda, and shruti. By not choosing a more traditional word, we respect the rights of orthodoxy; yet by our choice of the word mantra we claim the right to interpret a traditional value in a way that permits precisely what tradition intends, namely, that it be transmitted to subsequent generations in a way that is still relevant and important to them. Mantra stands here for the sacred, and manjari (a word of decidedly profane usage meaning cluster of blossoms) for the secular dimension of Man. A manjari (margarita) is also a pearl. The aim and character of this study may perhaps be best explained by commenting on the four concepts contained in the subtitle.
1 You do not pluck flowers, much less arrange them in a bouquet, simply for yourself alone. Similarly you do not collect mantras for selfish purposes, much less compose a manjari for solipsistic enjoyment. Furthermore, when you decide to arrange a bunch of flowers you do not confine yourself to one single color or one single scent. An anthology is a whole universe. It presents a whole world of objects and of subjects. Moreover, you do not pick the upper portions only, beautiful though they may be; you take hold of the plant deep down near its root, for you may want to put the flowers in water or even in your own garden, so that they may flourish longer and perhaps even blossom again. Nor is this all. The water and the light which are so essential to growth or transplantation both come from outside.
A Vedic anthology seems to be appropriate in our age, when the world is so much in need of serene and balanced wisdom and when the Indian tradition has so powerful an appeal, especially for the younger generation, despite the fact that it is generally known only from secondary or even more remote sources. A Vedic anthology may make direct and fruitful knowledge of the Vedas available to a wider range of people than the small elite of pandits and indologists. The situation of the Vedas today is comparable with that of the Bible in the West a couple of centuries ago, especially in Roman Catholic circles. Theoretically the Bible was central to their entire spirituality, but in actual practice it was almost unknown, and Christian life was fostered mainly from secondary sources. Tradition helped Man to maintain a living contact with “the Word of God,” but one of its sources was largely ignored. The Vedas are still too much neglected, not only in the world at large but also in their country of origin. A bouquet of flowers also has something to do with love and gallantry, because it is usually presented to somebody as a gift symbolizing service, admiration, dedication, and, ultimately, love. This anthology is no different. It is offered to the world at large, to those who have no contact whatsoever with the world of the Vedas as well as to those who, though coming from that same tradition, have lost direct contact with their sources. It is a bouquet of living flowers. Yet a bouquet is not the whole flower-covered valley or the actual field where the flowers grow. It is the sacrificial offering of the meadow which deprives itself of its own ornament in order to offer it to the beloved. An anthology will always remain an anthology. It is plucked from the soil where it grew, from the language in which it was first couched, from the life by which it was sustained, and yet transplants to fresh soil and even grafts onto different plants are possible. What, after all, is the original meaning of “culture”? Finally, a bouquet is a selection, a representative choice, for if it is to be of special worth all the flowers of the field must be represented in it. It is the same with an authentic anthology, and here lies the crux of the matter: this anthology claims to represent the canon, as one might say, of the whole shruti or Indian revelation; it purports to contain the central message of the Vedas, to embody their essence, their rasa. Just as a complete bouquet contains all seven colors of the rainbow and all the fragrance of the fields, this anthology seeks to encompass the whole range of the Vedic experience and to convey the main body of the Vedic Revelation. The criterion of selection obviously cannot be purely sectarian; it must be universally acceptable and it must spring from a simple human experience. The patten adopted here seems to be the most basic pattern offered by nature, by Man, by life on earth, and by history. It is the pattern that seems to be built into the very core of being itself. It is as much a geological pattern as a historical and cultural one. Significantly enough, it seems to be also the same initiatory pattern that is found almost universally. There is a preparation before a given community comes into the fullness of life; there are growth and decay, and also a way of renewal that will facilitate the continuation and survival of the particular group. Yet most peoples and cultures live their lives without much self-reflection of this type. Part VII of this volume, without introductions and without notes, reflects this situation. The seven parts of this anthology follow this pattern:
I. Dawn and Birth. Preparation for emergence into existence, the tilling of the ground, or preexistence and bursting into being, into life.
II. Germination and Growth. The beginning, the striving, the affirmation of identity, the settling down in the realm of existence.
III. Blossoming and Fullness. The acme, the reaching of plenitude, of maturity, the zenith.
IV. Fall and Decay. The beginning of the downward path, the discovery that nothing resists the acids of time and that nobody is immune from the corrosion of existence.
V. Death and Dissolution. The destiny of all existing things, and the price that must be paid for having been alive and for having been a bearer of existence in time and space.
VI . New Life and Freedom. The marvelous mystery of being, the reemergence of life out of the ordeal of death, the disclosure that life is immortal, that being is unfathomable, and that bliss and reality are capable of self-renewal.
VII. Twilight. The last part of this anthology, like the ribbon that ties the bouquet, has an altogether different character from the rest. It binds together all that has been explained and integrates all that has been described. It brings back the living unity that the glare of the single aspects may have endangered.
The structure of the parts is not difficult to grasp. Each part is introduced by at least one mantra or antiphon and consists of two or more sections, which in turn have various subsections of several chapters, all of them numbered for easy reference and provided with a double title, English and Sanskrit. The chapters constitute the text proper. The introductions to parts, sections, subsections, and chapters are not intended as commentaries or interpretations of the texts. They are simply designed to introduce the reader to the understanding of the Vedic texts.
There is an inbuilt order in the structure of every part. Some features are easily detectable, such as the chronological order used whenever possible without disturbing the internal unity of the part, section, or chapter. But the function of any structure is to sustain the construct without being unnecessarily conspicuous. We do not feel the need now to spell out the strenuous preliminary work of digging the foundations, selecting the texts, arranging and rearranging them, and changing the presentation according to the findings, for it is not a question of superimposing a scheme but of discovering a pattern.
Clearly the main emphasis is on the texts; they speak for themselves and impart ideas that cannot be included in any introduction. This book, therefore, is neither a commentary nor a treatise on the Vedas, but a version of the Vedas themselves, accompanied by classifications and explanations. In a way the latter are part of the translation itself, and thus the version of the actual text can be more literal and can better convey its complex meaning. Reading the text may not always be easy, and the meaning may not always be apparent at first sight. Thus not only attention and concentration are required, but also what the Vedic tradition requested from the students of Vedic lore: dedication and commitment, not, of course, to a particular view or to a sectarian interpretation but to the truth as one sees it. In other words, this book is not an easy one to be taken lightly; much less is it a mere object of curiosity. It demands prayer, or meditation. It is a book to turn to when one is confronted with an existential personal problem. Since the answers it gives come from the deepest layers of mankind’s experience, it does not allow us to be satisfied with the superficial answers that may emerge out of a limited individual memory or from contemporary and collective experiences. It is wise to remember that human memory and experience do not need to be reduced to those of the individual. One’s real age is not necessarily to be reckoned by the number of times one’s eyes have seen the sun encircle the earth. The Vedic experience may perhaps refresh a man’s memory of his life on earth; it may be a reminder that he himself as well as his ancestors (though not only in and through them) has accumulated the most extraordinary experiences and has reached a depth of vision, feeling, and life which he now urgently needs to rediscover if he is to succeed in breasting the waves of the ocean of technology, science, and other modern devices which threaten his very survival. The Vedic experience may perhaps disclose, not an alternative to the modern view of life and the world, which would probably solve no problem and would certainly prove alienating, but an already existing, although often hidden, dimension of Man himself. It does not simply give “information” about notions of the past, but truly “in-forms” the present by allowing that dimension to appear and actually revealing it as a constituent part of Man’s personhood. It is not only my individual past that is present in me; the history of Man too has accumulated in the cave of my heart, to use a Upanishadic expression; or, to put the same thought in another way, it is in the dendrites of my nervous system and in the DNA molecules. All these things are far older than my actual chronological age.
2 This anthology is not a book on Indian philosophy or even on Hindu spirituality, and much less is it a typical work of Indology, at least in the strict and perhaps nearly obsolete sense of that term. It is not an attempt to scrutinize the past for its own sake. It is rather an account of the Vedic Revelation, understood as an unveiling of depths that still resound in the heart of modern Man, so that he may become more conscious of his own human heritage and thus of the springs of his personal being. Thus the Vedic experience introduces nothing alien to modern Man, but helps him to realize his own life and emphasizes an often neglected aspect of his own being. In this sense the Vedas occupy a privileged position in the crystallized culture of Man. They are neither primitive nor modern. Not being primitive, they present a depth, a critical awareness, and a sophistication not shown by many other ancient cultures. Not being modern, they exhale a fragrance and present an appeal that the merely modern does not possess. This anthology deals with what is here called Vedic lore, not with the whole of Indian religiousness ar exclusively with Brahmanism. Rather it deals with that portion of the human experience which is expressed in condensed form in these amazing documents of the shruti, the product of the encounter of two cultures in the second millennium BC which gave birth to more than one world view.
Vedic studies have not always been free of ideological and religious enthusiasms of both a positive and a negative kind. This quality imparted liveliness to the study of the Vedas but it has also sometimes resulted in unnecessary religious bias and political overtones. Thus, while some have seen in the Vedas only the product of a “Vedic galimatias” or of a primitive mentality disposed toward magic, others have discovered the supreme manifestation of truth and the final unsurpassable revelation.
This book aims, insofar as possible, at being free of all peculiar preconceptions and particular value judgments. The shruti must be rescued from the monopoly of a single group, whether it be a scholarly group of pandits and indologists or an active religiopolitical faction, though of course the Vedas may legitimately be viewed from any of these perspectives. We dare to hope, however, that the vantage point of this anthology is more universal and more central. It sees the Vedas as a revelation, as a disclosure of something that enriches the human experience without elaborating on the nature of that something. We have tried to avoid particular religious or philosophical assumptions without going to the opposite extreme of regarding the Vedas as mere “objective” documents for purely scholarly research. We do not speculate about the message of one of the most ancient documents of the Indo-European world. Innumerable schools in the East from time immemorial and several generations of scholars in the West have carried on the laborious but rewarding task of Vedic interpretation. No student of the Vedas today can ignore the work done by past generations of sages and indologists of both East and West. As compiler of this anthology, I have had to learn from all schools, ancient and modern, in order to understand what the Vedas say; I have used tools I myself would have been incapable of forging. My chief concern is to give the results of my reading with objective authenticity. Very few people today accept the possibility of an essential objectivity, that is, of a presuppositionless system and an objective world of concepts to which everybody has access. On the other hand, there are people today who would like to learn what the Vedas have to teach them. These people may not care for nor believe in essential objectivity. Yet they have an existential attitude that rejects merely subjective intentions of an apologetic or propagandistic nature; these people want to be confronted with the text itself, not simply because it flatters them or reinforces what they wish to hear, but because they are ready to consider the Vedic Revelation as a living document. Such an attitude relegates to second place what religionists or scholars think about the matter. It does not despise scholarship, but it is a postscholastic attitude.
Let us consider, for example, the nature of the Gods. Many well-known hypotheses about the Gods have been put forward by both Indian and foreign students. Although this book does not stress the idea of the Vedic Gods as cosmic powers, neither does it regard them as mere expressions of Man’s psyche. It does not assume that there is one God with sundry little gods acting as his serving spirits or demons; nor does it, by the use of purely historical data, trace the origins of the Gods to certain prehistoric powers acting in history in or through the minds and beliefs of different cultural periods. This, however, does not mean that it views the Gods with a skeptical eye, as if they were merely subjective factors. On the contrary, it assumes that the Gods are real, but it does not elaborate on either the nature or the degree of their reality Moreover, this anthology aspires to speak a language that makes sense to the “believer” as well as to the “agnostic,” to those who give one interpretation to the phenomena as well as to those who give another.
In order to avoid speaking of God in the plural, which monotheism cannot tolerate, it became normal for European languages to write the plural with a small letter, while reserving the capital for the singular, just as we write beings and Being. And indeed the Gods are not the plural of the monotheistic God. We would have preferred to write simply devas for Gods, but the problem of the singular would have remained. Is deva God or merely a god? Certainly it depends on the context. Even then, where does one draw the dividing line between symbols of the divine representing God or one aspect or one name of him and the minor deities which may even include the sense organs? Because of this difficulty we have decided to keep the ambivalence of the word and write it with a capital letter, except when it clearly refers to a plainly human feature and is thus translated differently. Contemporary Man tends so much to politicize everything, even though he may do so under the cloak of sociology, that it seems important to stress that this anthology is not to be classified as pro-or anti-Aryan, in favor of or against either Brahmanism or popular forms of religion, in support of or opposed to the idea that India is mainly Vedic India or of the notion that there is such a thing as an Indo-European commonwealth. We have taken no sides on any of these issues. Within the Indian context, for instance, we do not set out to prove that the most important factor in the religiousness of the people of India is the Vedas or that the Vedas constitute Brahmanic wisdom. Yet we do not affirm the reverse. Within the global context we do not insist on the higher value of written tradition or of the so-called greater or major religions; nor do we assert that Indo-European Man has achieved a monument of civilization unparalleled by other cultures. This study simply says what it says without implying anything about what it does not say. To commend one path or to praise one people or to present the positive aspects of one particular religious form is not to denigrate or to minimize other values and other insights. This anthology has only one context--humanity itself. The Vedic Revelation belongs to Man and it is as a document of Man that it is here presented. We know well, however, that human texture is still unfinished and thus our context is also limited. The recognition of this limitation keeps us open and humble but also hopeful and serene.
Two paradoxical and dissimilar ideas may be mentioned here as examples of what we mean. The first is an orthodox and the second a heterodox notion, and yet both seem to tend in the same direction, at least for the purpose of this anthology.
We refer, first, to the traditional notion of the apauruseya or non-authorship, either human or divine, of the Vedas. This theory is often been ridiculed as a contradiction of common sense and as a denial of causal thinking; or it has been taken as simply holding that the Vedas have no “author” who has written them and no “mind” that has thought them. Without entering into the almost endless subtleties of the Mimamsa, we can simply say that at the core of this conception there is a desire to purify our relationship with the text and to avoid any kind of idolatry. Any one of us is the author of the Vedas when we read, pray, and understand them. Nobody is the author of living words except the one who utters them. The Vedas are living words, and the word is not an instrument of Man but his supreme form of expression. What has no author, according to the apauruseya insight, is the relation between the word and its meaning or object. The relationship is not an artificial or extrinsic relation caused by somebody. There is no author to posit the type of relationship which exists between the word and its meaning. To do this we would require another relationship and so on ad infinitum. When a word ceases to be a living word, when it ceases to convey meaning, when it is not a word for me, it is not Veda, it does not convey real or saving knowledge.
This conception, paradoxically enough, rescues the Vedas from the grip not only of a certain God functioning as a primal scribe, but also of the Hindu tradition, which cannot be said to be the author of the Vedas. The Vedas without an author cease to be an authoritative book. Only when you become their “author,” when through assimilation you are able to utter them, when you yourself are the proper origin, the auctor of the text, do the Vedas disclose their authentic “authority.” The Vedic Revelation is not the voice of an anthropomorphic Revealer nor the unveiling of the veil that covers reality. In point of fact, the shruti is that which is heard (rather than seen), so that the metaphor of unveiling may sometimes be misleading, because it is not by lifting up the veil (and thus seeing the naked reality) that we are going to discover the real, but by realizing that the veil covers and conceals and that the discovery of this fact constitutes the actual revelation. To reveal in this sense is not to unveil, to lift up the veil, but to “reveal” the veil, to make us aware that what we see and all we can see is the veil, and that it is left to us to “guess”--or, as we would say, to “think”--reality, which is made manifest precisely by the veil that covers it. We cannot separate the veil from the thing that is veiled, just as we cannot separate a word from its meaning, or what is heard from what is understood. If I were to lift up the veil of maya I would see nothing. We can see only if we see the veil of maya and recognize it for what it is. The shruti is shruti when that which is actually heard is not merely the sound but all that there is to be heard, perceived, understood, realized. Our own discovery, our process of discovery, is part of the revelation itself. Only in the spirit are the Vedas Vedas. And now we can understand why for centuries they were neither written down nor expounded to outsiders.
The Vedic Revelation is not primarily a thematic communication of esoteric facts, although a few of its sayings, as, for example, certain passages of the Upanisads, disclose some truth that is unknown to the normal range of human experience. But for the most part the Vedic Revelation is the discrete illumination of a veil, which was not seen as a veil but as a layer, one might almost say a skin, of Man himself. The Vedic Revelation unfolds the process of Man’s “becoming conscious,” of discovering himself along with the three worlds and their mutual relationships. It is not the message of another party speaking through a medium, but the very illumination of the “medium,” itself the progressive enlightenment of reality. It is not a beam of light coming from a lighthouse or a powerful reflector; it is dawn. It is the revelation of the Word, of the primordial Word, of the Word that is not an instrument, or even a sign, as if it were handling or pointing to something else. It is the revelation of the Word as symbol, as the sound-and-meaning aspect of reality itself. If there were somebody who had spoken the Word first, by what other word could he communicate the meaning of the original to me? I must assume that the Word speaks directly to me, for the Vedas reveal in an emphatic manner the character of reality.
In short, the fact that the Vedas have no author and thus no anterior authority, the fact that they possess only the value contained in the actual existential act of really hearing them, imparts to them a universality that makes them peculiarly relevant today. They dispose us to listen and then we hear what we hear, trusting that it is also what was to be heard.
Second, we refer to a particular example of the universal paradox that by rejecting a value we can in fact enhance it. It is simply a pious exaggeration to say that Hinduism and Indian philosophy are directly nurtured by the Vedas and are a continuation of the Vedic spirit. In hardly any other culture in the world has the fountainhead been paid more lip service but received less real attention. It is a well-known fact, long recognized and now confirmed by recent studies, that Indian philosophical systems, not only the nastikas, that is the so-called heterodox ones, but also the most orthodox ones, have drawn very few of their reflections from the Vedas. Most of the philosophical systems were developed outside the world of Vedic speculation. Even the two Mimamsas make only selective and limited use of Vedic material. Mimamsa deals only with the karma-kanda or active injunctions of the Vedas, and that from a very particular point of view; the mantras are neglected or are reduced to indicative sentences (which later speculation endeavored to interpret by means of hermeneutical rules), and the Brahmanas are reduced to weighty injunctions, the Upanisadic part being practically ignored. The Uttara-mimamsa or Vedanta, on the other hand, deals almost exclusively with the Upanisads, and even then not as a whole but from a highly specialized perspective, regarding them as embodying saving knowledge which is reduced to the realization of Brahman. Furthermore, the Upanisads, which tradition considers part of the shruti, incorporate in their structure very little of the four Vedas. It is true that they are supposed to continue them and in point of fact form part of them, but nevertheless their atmosphere is quite different. Many important Upanisads, for instance, the Kena and Mandukya do not cite a single Vedic mantra though of course there are implicit references. Even the others, when they occasionally do quote the Vedas, adopt the same cryptic and peculiar manner as later tradition does with the Upanisads themselves. It is a fact that the Vedas are only partly integrated into later Indian traditions, and yet this very fact gives them a certain universality far beyond the frontiers of Indian culture. They are of Aryan origin but they include undeniably non-Aryan elements; a controversial fact that makes this amazing human document both an imposing monument of cross-cultural interaction and a specific achievement of human vitality. Yet, when all is said and done, one cannot deny the particular color and character not only of the Indo-European stock but also of the Indian subcontinent. To stress this fact we have followed the usual tradition concerning components of the shruti, although, for reasons arising from both external and internal considerations, we have included the Bhagavad Gita and Grhya Sutras, which certainly do not belong to the traditional shruti. The continuity in Indian tradition is as important as the break we have just mentioned. Yet, just as Hinduism is more an existence than an essence, so too this continuity is not doctrinal but existential. There is a certain physical continuity, an almost bodily belonging, a karmic continuity, which is far more important than doctrinal homogeneity. An essential feature of any real anthology is that it presents, in the manner of a bouquet, both unity and variety. There is no question about the variety of themes and climates in the Vedic Epiphany, where practically the whole range of human experience is mirrored. Internal unity and harmony, however, are no less important, as emphatically affirmed even in ancient times. The famous fourth aphorism of the Brahma Sutra (I, 1, 4) says, for example, tat tu samanvayat: “This, indeed, [is] in accordance with the harmony” (of the shruti). That is, all passages of the Vedic Revelation have a single purport or ultimate concern, which is (the realization of) Brahman; each text is “in harmony” with the whole. This samanvaya, connoting harmony, reconciliation, equanimity, and serenity, is not merely a logical or mental construct, as if the whole shruti were a single doctrinal block; nor does it refer simply to unity of intention or purport, for no intention can be totally separated from the ideas it embodies and the aims it intends. The Scriptures do not all teach the same doctrine or possess the same explicit intention, and yet there is a unifying myth, a higher harmony, an existential reconciliation. The bouquet is one, precisely because and not in spite of the fact that it is composed of many flowers.
There are thus both break and continuity in Indian tradition, depending on the angle from which the problem is viewed. In Europe one should avoid confusing Spain with Sweden, but as viewed from India both countries are unmistakably European. The same point could be made about the Vedas and the Indian tradition.
It was only after great hesitation that we decided to omit some texts and to split others up, putting their parts in different places in the book. The use of the notes, however, offers the possibility of a continuous reading, and the notes and the introductions sometimes give the gist of omitted paragraphs. The omissions were not made in order to fit the texts into a Procrustean bed of a preconceived scheme; either the omitted texts are repetitious, or they contribute no substantially new insight, or they are of minor relevance to the overall picture of the Vedic experience. Any gardener knows that if, by mistake, he cuts off parts of a rare plant, in the end the plant will grow stronger and healthier and that the so beautiful landscape will serve as a reminder of his mistake. In rather the same way I am seriously suggesting that this first attempt on our part will be justified only if more competent people plow the field again, turn our efforts upside down, and finally cause them to flourish in a better form. In order to preserve the identity of the Vedic Revelation and to avoid confusing it with subsequent movements, we avoid direct reference to subsequent developments in the Indian philosophical systems. We eschew above all any comparison with similar or corresponding spiritual movements in other cultures. It has to be confessed that the temptation has been severe and that during the ten years and more that the book has been in preparation an immense amount of material has been gathered which could be of great interest to comparative studies. But I myself have restrained from overstepping the limits of this book, which aims at discovering what the Vedic experience means for modem Man, without forcing him into comparisons and evaluations. It is perhaps difficult to imagine the intellectual and spiritual asceticism required for such restraint, to understand what it means, for example, to refrain from quoting parallel passages, purposely to disregard the intriguing resemblances to pre-Socratic ideas, to renounce relating the famous maxim of Anaximander, and to let slip the chance of helping to dispel the superficial confrontation between religions by quoting texts and ideas from other sources. To have done otherwise might have been to make a contribution to other fields, but it would have distorted the message of the shruti by subordinating it to particular, even if important, problems. The reader may discover for himself some of the hidden threads that constitute, as in the weaving process, the connecting links within the whole fabric of human experience. After all, this work is only an introduction to the texts and does not set out to comment on the meaning of the selected passages. To do that I would need not readers but companions here in Varanasi on the Ganges, so that we might spend together months and years of peaceful fellowship, until such time as dawn might become midday, or midday turn into a moonless night, but always under the stars and above the river.
3 One may spend much time studying Vedic lore, but our whole enterprise would have little meaning if it was detached from persons and their environment. Our point of reference is modern Man. Yet, as the etymology of the adjective suggests, we do not forget the fleeting and transitory character of what we call modem Man: the contemporary human being in his present though frail mood, Man as he is just now and for the time being: modo. Modern Man will soon be modern no longer, and yet we have no key to Man other than modern Man himself; all other “men” are simply abstractions, for they have already disappeared or have not yet come to be. Even when we come to know our past we do it in terms of modern categories. It is only by accepting the limitations of our concreteness that we can be rooted in truth, and it is only by being true to our own identity that we can become more universal. Thus it is useless to strive after a general validity, which would be artificial and at best limited to the intellectual sphere. Modern Man may be passing and transient but he is our only real point of reference, because we still live in space and time. He is the gate to the depths of everlasting Man, but the moment we make him into a concept it is this very modern concept that mediates the understanding. Precisely because we think that Man is more than modern Man we try to help him to become aware of some of his roots. Needless to say, not every inhabitant of our planet today is modern Man, cultures are diachronic, and there are many modernities. The modern Man we have in mind is the average reader of a contemporary Western language--a serious, humiliating, but unavoidable limitation. Two settings, among many others that could equally well be emphasized, are here kept in mind when speaking of modern Man: secularism and the transcultural situation. Modern Man is a secular Man, which does not mean that he is not religious or that he has lost the sense of the sacred. The statement means only that his religiousness and even any sense of sacredness he may possess are both tinged with a secular attitude. “Secular attitude” means a particular temporal awareness that invests time with a positive and real character: the temporal world is seen as important and the temporal play of Man’s life and human interactions is taken seriously; the saeculum, the ayus, is in the foreground. Man can survive on earth, both as a species and as a person, only if he pays careful attention to everything secular. Otherwise he will be swallowed up by the machinery of modern society or the mechanism of cosmic processes. Secular Man is the citizen of a temporal world. Furthermore, modern Man, owing perhaps to the changes that have taken place in human geography and history, can no longer belong to a homogenous or isolated culture. He is bombarded by ideas, images, and sounds from all four corners of the world. He may have a superficial and even erroneous knowledge of other people, yet cultures mix, ideas intermingle, religions encounter one another, and languages interact and borrow from one another as perhaps never before in human history. The culture of modern Man may not be very stable; in fact he may even be threatened with the loss of all culture, but he is undoubtedly transculturally influenced--and this is true not only for minority groups but for the passive and suffering majority as well. The fact that we do not comment or explain, much less make comparisons, may allow the Vedic symbols to become living symbols once again and thus to be grafted onto the living growth of modern Man’s cultures. Man is in urgent need of developing a global culture. This cannot be done by dialectical methods (useful adjuncts though these may be) but by a rhythmic, natural process. Growth requires assimilation. To assimilate a living symbol is not to interpret it or even to understand it on the merely mental plane. Many traditions refer here to eating the symbol, while other cultures refer to learning and reading, for to read means to select, to gather, not to amass heaps of data, but to collect--and recollect--in that interior center where the assimilation takes place and requires time. Certainly it takes time to read, to pick up, to gather both oneself and others. Our part is to offer a bouquet or, perhaps, a single flower. “The flower is Brahman,” says one text (CU III, 5, 1).
How is this offering to be made? Faith is required, but it is not enough to offer the bouquet in the vertical direction. Truth is also needed. There is also a horizon on the horizontal plane. “Faith and Truth are the most sublime pair,” says one text (AB VII, 10). In concrete and prosaic words: How is wisdom to be made available? How is it to be made assimilable for those who desire to receive it? Chanting the Vedas to the Gods or reciting them in closed circles may not be enough.
Here we are obliged to take note of a lurking and threatening problem. Instead of elaborating a hermeneutical theory, however, this anthology endeavors to put the theory into practice, to make the “hermeneutical devices” work. We may recall here that Brahman is only one-fourth visible. Within the visible fourth, however, we would like to present some practical and concrete reflections regarding the actual hermeneutical procedure of this anthology: the translation.
The Veda speaks its own new language. Now language is the revelation of the Spirit. Each language has new words and every word represents the disclosure of a new reality. Each language has also a new order in putting words together, and each of these relationships represents a new perspective for looking at reality. Each word is the physical and metaphysical crystallization of centuries of human experience. Through authentic words we can enter into communion with mankind and discover our own links with other people and with the universe. Each texture of words is like fabric on a loom. It has its own color and pattern and through it we share reality with the rest of mankind.
An anthology may be superficially conceived as a mere selection of texts with philological notes added where the translator felt obliged to lay bare his own conscience in regard to the usage of a certain term. But a minimal knowledge of present-day semantics, a certain, even cursory, acquaintance with semantic fields, structures of meaning, morphological senses, etymological limits, semantic shifts, polysemy, and other problems of modern linguistics, some understanding of the issues raised by anthropology and comparative studies in philosophy and religion, and, more especially, a conviction of the symbolic character of every human manifestation, more particularly the linguistic one--in short, an awareness of the impossibility of presenting word-for-word translations or even of achieving the same result by more elaborate paraphrases led the compiler to take the risk, first, of considering the introductions as integral parts of the translation and, second, of treating the criterion of selection as another constituent element of the translation. In this instance philological accuracy consists in human fidelity, and the “correct” version is the outcome of a correct shift of symbols, of such a sort that the reader is brought close to reenacting culturally the Vedic experience for himself.
I am fully aware of the risk, the imperfection, and the limits of such an enterprise. The aim of any translation is not to be a mere transposition of signs. Its purpose is to enable the reader to assimilate the offered material into his or her own life. It aims at making the materials homogenous and so intelligible to the reader. Any translation is provisional in the sense that it is only for the time being, until the moment when illumination comes by itself, the translation is forgotten, and the reader is converted, that is, convinced.
Even so, a certain technique, a particular methodology, and a whole cluster of disciplines are needed. We have used as many forms of interdisciplinary help as possible, but they, like the good ingredients of a tasty dish, remain discreetly in the background, content to enhance the rasa, the piquancy, and the flavor; here their function is to promote the understanding of the underlying intuitions. We are not saying that the Vedic fare we offer is predigested or restricted to what we ourselves consider palatable. On the contrary, we present, insofar as possible, the total experience of Vedic Man against the present-day human horizon, in order to make the former intelligible and to enrich, challenge, and perhaps eventually transform the latter. We do not feel a need either to sweeten or otherwise to tamper with the contents of the Vedas, though passages that seem to be less important are given less prominence than other texts.
Furthermore, it is time to give up any claim to a monolithic understanding of cultures and any insistence on the univocal meaning of terms. There is no single word today to convey in another language “Geist,” “esprit,” and “mind”; much less can we claim that manas, rita, and prana have a single English equivalent each time we come across them. Thus neither a word-for-word nor a paragraph-for-paragraph translation will really satisfy our needs; only the whole shruti, the entire Vedic experience, can be conveyed in a meaningful way so that it can enter into our own personal experience. We have to learn another language or another world view, no longer as we used to learn a foreign idiom, but as we learn our own language. Children learning to speak do not refer to an objectified world, nor do they relate the particular word of one language to a corresponding word in another language; they assimilate, they understand, they use a word to express a state of consciousness and eventually a reality which is not disconnected from the word they are using. They learn their own language without a previous term of reference, but in direct connection with the experience conveyed in the word, an experience intimately connected with the voice, the appearance, the sympathy, and the particular relationship that subsists between themselves and the person speaking and, more generally, the world around them from which they learn the expression.
It is also time to overcome the unauthentic hermeneutical device of interpretation by proxy. We mean the pseudo interpretation based on a paradigm of intelligibility which is not one’s own, but which one assumes belongs to the “other,” the “native,” the “primitive.” In this way we show generosity and condescension in accepting other people’s views because they make sense for them, though not for us. If we try to report other people’s beliefs without in some way sharing in them, we prevent ourselves from expressing what we think is the correct interpretation. Nor can we truly report the interpretation of others, for what they believe to be true we have rejected. In other words, the belief of the believer belongs to the phenomenon itself. Our own interpretation has to face the challenge of meeting both our own convictions and those of the representatives of the document we interpret. Without the former we would not really interpret; we would simply be reporting what for us are nonsensical statements. Without the latter we would not truly interpret; we would be merely expressing our own ideas in the language of a foreign culture. In short, our supreme concern here has been to offer an interpretation of the Vedas which makes sense to modern Man and yet does not distort, but only translates, the insights of Vedic Man. We can make the Vedas understandable to the extent that without distorting them we can make them somewhat acceptable.
There are no fixed and immutable translations; words are much more alive than we tend to think, and all of them have a personal “face.” Thus the difficulty is not for us to find out what is the best translation of, say, atman, but to confront the same problem that confronted Vedic Man. The ambivalence of words and concepts constitutes proof that we are dealing with subjects that are still alive. The tragedy of a dead language, as somebody long ago remarked, is that you do not have the luxury of allowing yourself to make innovations, for if you did so nobody would understand you. The beauty of a living language is that you can afford to make mistakes. Not only will somebody point them out to you, but those very mistakes may be incorporated into the treasury of experience conveyed by a particular sentence. No amount of modern semantics--to give one example--can blot out the often “scientifically” incorrect etymologies of Yaska and Sayana. Yet they belong as much to the meaning and history of the word as do grammatically correct ones. These reflections should not, of course, be taken as an excuse for inaccurate or approximate translations. On the contrary, they should add to our sense of responsibility to find on each occasion the right words, the proper atmosphere.
The problem of translation, however, has another facet. Nearly all Westem languages, including English, have been molded by the Jewish-Helleno-Christian tradition against a Gothic, Celtic, or other indigenous background. We may translate Agni as “Lord” in order not to mislead the reader, or we may write down “Fire”; in both instances (in spite of the capital letter) the translation is perhaps legitimate, provided that the reader is informed of the original word. But if we translate gandharva by “angel” or apsaras by “spirit,” are we not utilizing equally religion-bound concepts? Are we not saying that the English language is indefectibly bound to one particular tradition? We could speak of “the good fortune of having been invited to a certain inauguration,” but would it be proper to translate this statement as “we have been summoned by the grace of Laksmi to a certain function performed according to shastric principles laid down by a pandit, after recognition of the mangalic moments disclosed by the flying of birds”? Why should the augur, the Roman religious official, and the goddess Fortune be accepted as universalized terms and not the Indian terminology? To reply that nobodv will understand the latter sentence deserves only the answer that outside the Western cultural milieu everybody will half understand the former, or else they will reduce it to banality.
We could perhaps put the same problem in terms of the special relationship between proper and common names. Transcultural translations disturb or even destroy the otherwise neatly defined difference between these two types of nouns. Substantives like “grace,” “revelation,” “democracy,” and even “lord” and “god” are undoubtedly common names within a certain cultural area. Yet the moment we speak of Vedic Revelation, the God of Hinduism, the Grace of Visnu, Russian Democracy, the Lord Buddha, and the like, more than one thoughtful person will feel uneasy. He has more or less unconsciously converted those common names into proper names, and he is tied to a particular understanding of them. By “grace” he will understand Christian grace, by “god” and “revelation” the conception of the divinity and its disclosure according to the Semitic religions, while with regard to “democracy” he will have in mind the British model. He will argue further that if we do not delimit in some way the meaning of terms we will fall into an anarchic chaos in which a word can mean anything. The same can be said the other way around. Are the words agni, karman, dharma, mantra, brahman, and the like the exclusive property of the Indian religions? When we say “god” or karman must we have so orthodox a view as to exclude any other understanding of the term? Words are more than mere labels, and thus we cannot deny the fact that words have their proper orthodoxies. We cannot accept as a criterion of translation the existence of a “thing in itself” apprehended differently by two interpretations of the same word. How do we know that they, in point of fact, refer to the same “thing” (even assuming that such a “thing” was a valid hypothesis)? It is here that this anthology may make an indirect contribution to modern language--understood as an expression of human consciousness--by introducing into one language the riches of another and thus allowing for a more universal language, without at the same time whittling away the concreteness that all living languages possess. “Grace” may not always necessarily mean what a Christian theology of grace says it means, but there must be something--which, we repeat, is not a thing, and certainly not a “thing” called grace--which makes the use of this word permissible when speaking of Varuna, for instance, and meaningless when referring to a certain conception of karman. Brahman is undoubtedly not God and yet there is a peculiar homology between these two names, which does not exist between either one of them and the word “banana,” for example. The interplay between words and meanings is one of the most exacting and fascinating challenges of our present world situation.
In this regard we should obviously avoid the two extremes of anachronistic and “katachronic” interpretations. The former means to introduce old and obsolete notions into contemporary situations; the latter means to interpret a thing of the past with inadequate categories of the present day. And yet any reading of a text is a reading out of it as much as into it. The connection cannot be a logical one. It has to be an existential or, rather, a mythical connection. But we must stop here lest we overstep our self-imposed discipline by theorizing too explicitly.
For a long time it was forbidden to translate the Vedas or to teach them to the noninitiated. Nowadays, however, there is a universal trend, deeply rooted in the very nature of modern Man, which abhors artificial esoterisms and sectarian separations. Is it simply unfaithfulness to ancient traditions to say that circumcision, baptism by water, and upanayana are only signs of the real initiation by the Spirit (to use another debatable word)? So long as the symbolism of the Vedas was alive, so long as it needed no transmythologization in order to be understood and lived, translation amounted to a betrayal; but when Vedic symbolism is no longer alive, survival may well demand emigration, that is, translation.
The process of translation is not only transcultural. It begins within a particular culture. The work of the great bhasyakaras or commentators consists precisely of such translations, including the translation of the proper names of the tradition itself. When those names cease to stand for a living symbol within a “lived” myth, they are “trans-lated,” that is, “shifted,” so as to designate henceforward the same “reality” but beyond its proper or native horizon. Usas, for example, may no longer be considered the daughter of Prajapati, the Goddess of the myth, but simply Dawn, or perhaps only dawn. Yet by this very shift Usas has arrived where the dawn still dawns but where the daughter of Prajapati is no longer known or acknowledged and, having traveled to such distant shores, she herself will perhaps help see to it that our dullness of perception is removed and that dawn is reinstated in a more colorful and relevant form, not perhaps as the daughter of Prajapati but certainly as Dawn, as a symbol of hope, in our contemporary world. Furthermore, the connection between words and meanings is to be sought in the sphere of rite, and that is why Man cannot live without rituals, for he cannot live without words either. For instance, one sutra says: “May the ‘Goddess,’ who fashioned this garment . . .” (HGS I, 1, 4, 2); but may not “angel,” “woman,” “mother,” “sister,” or even “machine” eventually be a permissible rendering of the word “Goddess” in this text?
After the foregoing remarks about literal translation not being the proper way to render the meaning and message of a text, it may sound somewhat contradictory to say that the utmost care has been taken to provide a faithful translation. In order to offer the Vedic experience in the most truthful manner, we have abstained from flights of fancy and whimsical interpretations and have remained soberly close to the texts, which are sometimes echoed and further translated in the introductions.
A word should be said about the names of the Gods. Through the different hymns and parts of this anthology a certain harmony has been kept in the use of the proper names of the Gods and the common epithets of the divine. Proper names have often been avoided in order to eschew an unnecessarily esoteric flavor. Thus terms like “Lord,” “God,” “power,” and the like have been used to designate proper names like Agni, Indra, and so on. Always, however, the original name is given in the corresponding note so as to prevent confusion. This flexibility may allow for different readings according to the background of the reader or hearers.
At this juncture it may be useful to define the function of the notes. Precisely because this work is an end in itself and not a mere means for further investigation, because the texts are meant to be used for meditation and prayer, and because the Veda deserves the reverence due a human document at least 3,000 years old, we have refrained from distracting the reader with references to the notes, which are therefore not put at the bottom of the page but at the end of the texts. In this way the reader is less influenced by the explanations, however useful they may be, and can incorporate the text into his personal life without unnecessary intermediaries. It is proper at this moment to thank the many excellent translators who have undertaken a parallel task of giving versions of the Vedas in modern European languages. We have profited from as many as we could lay hands on and from time to time we have adopted their suggestions. It would seem improper to insist on hammering out a slightly different phrase or a more recondite term if some of the known translators have already had a felicitous inspiration. Moreover, we have discovered that this practice has been normal since time immemorial, for there is already an almost universally accepted way of rendering the original of some well-known texts.
4 We have been saying that the reader is urged to study the texts in the classical sense of the word “study,” which includes not only intellectual effort but also voluntary commitment and human enthusiasm. We would like to suggest that the introductions be studied twice, before the texts as prologues and after the texts as epilogues. The “scriptures” themselves require much more than just reading and attention. They must become real to us by our own act of representation. Much of what we have said so far would be seriously weakened if it were not encouraged by the faith and hope that beyond the theoretical understanding of the Vedas, existential participation in and liturgical reenactment of their message are really possible. The ultimate aim of this anthology is not to offer merely a new translation of the Vedas. The title expressly says not Vedic translation but “Vedic Experience.” It is possible, certainly, to translate a poem by Mirabai into a Karnatik melody, a Kathakali dance into a poem, or the Sanskrit Vedas into English idiom. But the intention of this mantramanjari is not ‘translation’ but representation; that is, its goal is an existential reenactment. It does not desire to turn the symphony into a poem, but to play the music again, even though the instruments are not the same and the skill of the original composer is missing. We do not want to put the music into words or to translate the words into dance. Our aim is to speak the words, to play the music, to perform the dance, to utter the prayers, to sing the songs, to wonder, love, doubt, suffer, hope, and believe along with those documents of human history which we call the Vedas. Even if the instruments are poor and the key is not the same, we may still perceive the original not by a ‘translation’ but by a reenactment that allows us both to hear the shruti directly and perhaps even to transmit its vibrations, just as it was heard long ago by the ancients and as we may continue to hear it insofar as our ears are open to those same vibrations. The aim of this anthology is to make available to modern Man the riches of the elders and thus to globalize human experience. If there is one thing that characterizes and even distinguishes the Vedic experience, it is its sacrificial character, its overall feature of orthopraxis.
The Vedic experience does not move on a merely theoretical level; it does not carry a doctrinal message, but a universal form of human celebration. Modern Man is inclined today to accept the idea that he is not saved by reason alone or liberated by willpower alone. He seeks an active participation in the overwhelming dynamism of the universe, in which his involvement is possible only if it is actively passive. And this could be said to be the core of the experience of Vedic Man: that he is called upon to perform the sacrifice that makes the world and even the Gods subsist. We do not intend to introduce a new rite, much less to suggest a new religiousness. It is our hope that this anthology will stimulate already existing forms of worship; that it will be at the disposal of those who feel the need to celebrate with friends around them and ancestors behind them in an original and innovative way or else in more traditional forms. No particular form of worship is here favored. It is only assumed that Man is a celebrating being and that sometimes he does not feel it proper to confine himself to solos. For these reasons and others that we are about to explain our style is intended for recitation and liturgical use.
To make a text available for contemporary celebration does not mean that the text is forced to say something it does not really say. We simply surmise, first, that certain of these texts could be relevant and, second, that such an effort is worthwhile. Modern Man, either because he has been isolated by a long process of individualization or because he has been hustled and precipitated into modernity--whatever that may be--urgently needs to celebrate his fellowship with his neighbors and also with the whole of reality. The Vedic Revelation may become a real discovery of new dimensions of life, if it is taken as a celebration of Man.
Celebration does not always mean jumping for joy nor is it always a festival of song and dance. It may include more inward and sober elements. It does, however, invariably contain the awareness that my acts have a deeper, more transcendent, meaning than that which meets the eye, even though I myself may not be able to put this meaning into words. Celebration conveys a sense of cosmic solidarity, of human fellowship, and often of a divine accompaniment by reason of which all our actions are liturgical, meaningful, and expressive, both expressing what now is and creating what is about to be. Celebration is the awareness of the rhythms of life and the festive observance of their frequent recurrence. There is no celebration without recurrence. What happens again and again is the proper subject matter of celebration, as the word celeber suggests. We do not need to subscribe to a cyclical or spiral conception of time, but we do need a certain rhythmic consciousness in order truly to celebrate, that is, to transcend the petty routine of daily life which is so easily reduced, if there is no spirit of celebration, to a dispirited and humdrum mediocrity. Vedic Man is fundamentally a celebrating Man, but he does not celebrate his own victories or even a nature festival in company with his fellowmen; rather, he concelebrates with the whole universe, taking his place in the cosmic sacrifice in which all the Gods are engaged together. Other cultures can boast of better warriors, craftsmen, and adventurers. Vedic Man presents this markedly liturgical attitude to life, this extraordinary power of celebration. Even the frequently irritating minutiae of later periods are nothing but exaggerations of a liturgical and festive consciousness. Contemporary celebration should be truly contemporary, not a throwback to ancient rites or a mere adaptation of past rituals. It is not a question of imitating olden times. Such imitation would be artificial, self-defeating, and in any event impossible. Contemporary celebration must be spontaneous, creative, and authentic. It can be neither planned nor forced. It simply grows when the time is ripe. The only thing that stifles Man’s power to celebrate is superficiality, which can have several causes but only one main remedy: contemplation, pure love, or, in traditional words, a life of prayer. This anthology is not a book of prayers, but it is an introduction to prayer (jnana, dhyana, anubhava). It is an invitation to a full human life, a life that is not exhausted either by merely doing or even by being in a two-dimensional spatiotemporal way, but that is fulfilled only by a total becoming of all that one can possibly be. Yet it is with a certain intention that the subtitle speaks of “contemporary” celebration. This is an indication that the temporal factor cannot be eliminated or neglected, as if Man were a nontemporal being who merely skims the surface of a temporal world. One extreme would not justify the other. The celebration of Vedic Man may be excellent, but it certainly would not satisfy our needs nor would we fulfill our human duty just by going back to the past. This anthology, far from advocating this course, suggests almost the opposite. It takes the past and sets it before us in the future so that we may walk more hopefully with the light step and the ultimate unconcern of the truly liberated Man. So much for the bouquet. As for the flowers, we simply entrust them to you, reader, with the hope that you may want to make a garland out of them.
“May he delight in these my words”
I ask as a fool who knows not his own spirit:
Where are the hidden traces left by the Gods?
1 There are no absolute beginnings in human history. Every historical period has an origin and every culture starts from somewhere outside itself. The novum that appeared in the north of the Indian peninsula about, or soon after, 2000 B.C. was the result of an extraordinary and fruitful encounter between the invading Aryans, speaking an Indo-European language, and the indigenous population who are believed to have spoken a language ancestral to the Dravidian languages.
In order to place the Vedic experience in its proper context the following considerations may be useful.
The first oral (and later written) result of this cross-cultural encounter was what we call the Vedas, that is, the entire body of Vedic literature. It is chanted, spoken, and now also written in the old Indo-Aryan language known as Vedic; Vedic is ancestral to the literary Sanskrit, which was formalized by the grammarian Panini around the middle of the first millennium B.C. Vedic literature is regarded as “revelation” or shruti (that which is heard) and gives us the first meaning of the word “Veda.” The second meaning of the term is restricted to the four most important parts of that literature, transmitted by four separate schools and often referred to as the four Vedas: Rig Veda, Sama Veda, Yajur Veda, and Atharva Veda. Their age has been a matter of dispute. The most probable dates lie between 1500 and 1200 B.C. for the oldest parts, and down to 600 B.C. for the later. There is still a third and yet more restricted meaning of the word “Veda;” it is used to refer to what is probably the most ancient part of each Veda, the Samhitas or hymns and prayers that make up the first of the four broad stages into which the Vedas (in the second meaning of the term) are generally divided.
1. The Samhitas or mantras are the hymns belonging to the earliest stage. As the word Samhita implies, they represent the basic collection of hymns and as such are the oldest materials in each school. The oldest and most important is the Rig Veda Samhita, which contains more than 10,000 verses in the form of a little more than 1,000 hymns. These are written in various meters. Each of the Samhitas provides the texts for one of the groups of priests of the Vedic rituals. Thus the Rig Veda belonged to the Hotr priests and was recited by them at the sacrifices. The Sama Veda contains chants and melodies (saman), chanted by the priests of that name. With the exception of 75 stanzas, the text is borrowed and rearranged from the Rig Veda. The Yajur Veda consists of sacrificial formulas of the Adhvaryu priests, and many of these also are taken from the Rig Veda. It has come down to us in several recensions, the Krisna or “Black” Yajur Veda whose Samhitas are the Taittiriya, the Maitrayani, and the Kathaka, and the “White” or Shukla Yajur Veda whose Samhita, is the Vajasanei. The Atharva Veda is somewhat removed from the other three by virtue of the “popular” character of many of the prayers against ills, incantations, and spells which it contains. It also has, however, a number of hymns with an important philosophical content.
2. The Brahmanas form the second broad stage, attached to the various branches of the Samhitas. Clearly later works, as their language reveals, they are written largely in prose and give lengthy explanations and descriptions of the rituals and prayers connected with the sacrifice. They contain more than simple instructions for rituals, and much of the explanatory matter is of a symbolic character.
3. The Aranyakas, or “forest treatises,” are in a sense continuations of the Brahmanas, dealing with the speculations and spirituality of forest dwellers (vanaprastha) those who have renounced the world. They represent a step toward interiorization, as the hermit in the forest could not perform the elaborate rituals demanded of the householder. Like the Brahmanas, they are attached to the various branches and schools of the Samhitas.
4. The Upanisads are the fourth or final stage of the process, and are known therefore as the Vedanta, or “end of the Veda.” They represent the mystical and philosophical culmination of the Vedas. They contain the teachings of the great masters which point toward the path of moksa or liberation.
With the passing of time a further literature grew up whose main concern was the exegetic study of the Vedas. It is grouped under six headings as Vedangas, or “limbs of the Vedas.” The Vedangas include the study of phonetics, and correct pronunciation of the Vedas, of metrics, etymology, grammar, and astronomy, needed to ensure the correct timing of the sacred rites. The sixth Vedanga is concerned with kalpa, or the correct ways of performing the rituals. The basic texts are written in the form of sutras, brief aphoristic statements phrased with great economy of words. With the further passing of time there were added extended studies, in the form of shastras or treatises. Thus, under the heading of kalpa there are several branches of sutras dealing with domestic rituals, including the performance of the samskaras or sacraments associated with birth, marriage, death, and so on; with the great public sacrifices; and with dharma or the rules and laws governing the behavior of the individual in society. From the latter emerged the whole later legal literature known as Dharma-shastra.
2 The various Indian scripts in which Sanskrit is written down--nowadays most commonly the Devanagari--are, to use the word in its popular sense, phonetic: that is, every sound of the language has its own unique sign, so that, for example, long and sholt vowels are distinguished (contrast Latin or Greek) and the written consonants always have the same value (contrast English get/gentle, etc.). Conversion of this admirable accuracy into the Roman script requires the use of a number of diacritical marks, which the nonspecialist reader may find troublesome. The present note is intended to provide a rough guide only.
VOWELS
a has the value of the u in the English word but.
a has the value of the a in the English word father.
i has the value of the i in the English word bit.
i has the value of the i in the English word machine.
u has the value of the u in the English word full.
u has the value of the u in the English word rule.
e has the value of the ay in the English word play.
o has the value of the o in the English word home.
ai has the value of the y in the English word my.
au has the value of the ow in the English word how.
r is not the consonant r but a vowel pronounced like the ri of rich.
l is not the consonant l but a vowel pronounced like the li of lick.
CONSONANTS
The general reader may ignore the distinction between the aspirated and unaspirated forms of consonants. Similarly, the distinction between the dentals t, d, n, l and the retroflexes t, d, n, l (the Rigvedic equivalent of noninitial d, not the vowel l described above) is best disregarded.
g always has the sound of the g in get, never that of the g in gentle.
c is pronounced as the ch of cheese.
sh and s are pronounced as the sh of shudder.
m at the end of a word and before p or b is pronounced as m, elsewhere as n.
The other consonants are pronounced as their English equivalents are.
3 The Vedas are not primarily a written document; they are not even a set of thoughts or a collection of injunctions. They are primordially spoken language, a set of words with meaning, sound, and power. Traditionally the Vedas have to be chanted or recited. Vedic recitation stands for the total and sincere (because also public, or at least audible) participation of the person for whom the Veda is “Veda,” that is, knowledge, insight, and ultimately liberation.
The Brahmana of the Sama Veda gives us a feeling of the central place of recitation. It consists mainly of detailed instructions regarding fasts and other austerities to be undertaken before and during the recitation of the Sama Veda, which is, as we have already said, a musical version of parts of the Rig Veda for ritual purposes. To prepare oneself by a twelve-day fast, for instance, before the cultic recitation of the sacred text is more than mere superstition, for it implies an integral participation in a total act. The traditional name for this participation is “sacred action.” No action is sacred, and thus real and effective, unless it is performed by the whole being and ultimately incorporates the entire reality. Not only Gods, Men, and the world have to take part in it, but the whole Man has to be involved, his body not excluded. Furthermore, the participation of the Gods, the mind, the body, water, and earth, and the like is closely interrelated. The entire universe vibrates at the sound of an authentic prayer. All is interconnected and thus the fasting of the body is related to the cleansing of the mind, for only a clean mind can healthily sustain a bodily fast. Just as there cannot be a good song if the singer does not feel the raga, the emotion of the text, so there cannot be a proper understanding of the prayer if the body is not involved in it equally with the mind.
Modern Man, who reads without pronouncing and often believes he is able to understand without commitment, may find it difficult and even impossible to accept such an interpretation. Whether modern Man is right or wrong is beside the point. Our present concern is to understand the nature of Vedic Revelation. We may now add some more technical remarks.
The Vedic accent which is marked in the Samhitas of the four Vedas and also in the Taittiriya and the Shatapatha Brahmanas is a musical accent. The Vedas have been transmitted orally for centuries and it is owing to the art of memorization and recitation that they have been scrupulously preserved with fewer corruptions than the texts, which have been transmitted in written form. The recitation belongs to the very nature of the Vedic Word which is actualized in the sound vibrations. The sacramental character of the Word is seen in its necessary connection with sound as its physical element. The shruti indeed, needs to be heard.
There are three accents corresponding to three different pitches: (1) the udatta or raised accent which corresponds to the higher pitch; (2) the svarita or sounding accent, the middle pitch, and (3) the anudatta or not raised accent, the lower pitch.
There are, however, differences in recitation according to the Veda, the shakha or branch of the Veda, and the particular school. The Sama Veda has developed, besides the simple recitation, an elaborated musical chant, using five to seven notes. The chandas or Vedic meter is measured by the number of syllables. The unit of the meter is the pada or foot, that is, a fourth of a rc or stanza. This pada should not be confused with the Greek foot. The quantitative measurement by long and short syllables is another feature of the Vedic meter, but it is not related to the accent. The glossary gives a description of the most important meters (Gayatri, Tristubh, Jagati, Viraj, etc.).