How old is vedic religion

However, the religious practices and deities are not uniformly consistent in these sacred texts, probably because the Aryans themselves were not a homogenous group. While spreading through the Indian Subcontinent, it is probable that their initial religious beliefs and practices were shaped by the absorption of local religious traditions.

According to the hymns of the Rig Veda, the most important deities were Agni, the god of Fire, intermediary between the gods and humans; Indra, the god of Heavens and War, protector of the Aryans against their enemies; Surya, the Sun god; Vayu, the god of Wind; and Prthivi, the goddess of Earth.

Agni, God of Fire. Agni, the Indian God of Fire from the ancient Vedic religion, shown riding a ram. The Caste System, or groups based on birth or employment status, has been part of the social fabric of the Indian Subcontinent since ancient times. The castes are thought to have derived from a hymn found in the Vedas to the deity Purusha, who is believed to have been sacrificed by the other gods.

The passage describing the classes of people derived from the sacrifice of Purusha is the first indication of a caste system. Today the castes still exist in the form of varna, or class system, based on the original four castes described in the Vedas.

A fifth group known as Dalits, historically excluded from the varna system, are ostracized and called untouchables. The caste system as it exists today is thought to be a product of developments following the collapse of British colonial rule in India.

Written by Natasha Wanderly. What Is The Vedic Religion? The Search For Hindu Origins. This is for good reason. In fact, the basis of the whole religion implies at least 3 assumptions: That there actually does exist a basic concept of Vedic religion. That something can be understood about that concept. That it is perhaps time we take a much grander and more general survey of this world-shaping religion. Publications Pages Publications Pages. Recently viewed 0 Save Search. The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable 2 ed.

Find at OUP. Read More. Your current browser may not support copying via this button. Subscriber sign in You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Philological work An Outline of Vedic Religion and Ritual. Overviews of Vedic Religion Ritual Classical ritual The development of ritual The individual rituals Domestic ritual Recent developments Deities and Mythology.

Vedic mythology The principal Vedic gods The "Philosophy" of Vedic Religion. Early Vedic Middle Vedic: The power of ritual The Religious Life: Personal and popular religious experience. Personal religious experience Popular religion Abbreviations, Literature The Vedic period is the earliest period of Indian history for which we have direct textual evidence, but even with this evidence it is difficult to fix even imprecise chronological limits to the period, much less to establish absolute dates within the period.

The content of these texts is wholly religious though "religion" more broadly defined than is modern custom. It may also be added that to call this period "Vedic Hinduism" is a contradiction in terminis since Vedic religion is very different from what we generally call "Hindu religion", - at least as much Old Hebrew religion is from medieval and modern Christian religion. However, Vedic religion is treatable as a predecessor of Hinduism. It should also be emphasized that both the composition and the transmission of the texts was completely oral for the entire Vedic period and some considerable time afterwards [5] -- hence the critical importance of the schools in their preservation.

From the beginning the various schools were favored by particular tribes, and later on by particular dynasties. Due to their preservation in various parts of India, a fairly wide spectrum of religious thought of this early period has survived to this day, and we do not have to rely on the authoritative texts of a single school of thought.

Because of these circumstances we are in a reasonably good position to study Vedic Hinduism -- we have voluminous texts regarding the religion from various points of view: verbal material internal to the ritual, extremely detailed "handbooks" laying out ritual practice, exegesis of the ritual, both exoteric and esoteric, as well as various views of mythology.

However, because of the means of preservation -- through schools at once orthodox and intellectual in bent -- we have little access to information about either heterodox or popular religious practices, but only to the orderly and cerebral system of an entrenched priestly class.

We are also almost entirely bereft of information about secular and indeed religious history, or political and social matters and their relations to religion, except as filtered through a priestly lens, and as reported occasionally, often as asides, in their texts. Before we treat Vedic religion in detail, it might be well to give a thumbnail characterization.

The religion of this roughly year period, though not static, is reasonably unified. From the very first, it shows a highly developed ritual, with particular emphasis on the power of the word. As the religion develops in the Vedic period, it moves in two superficially contradictory directions -- on the one hand to an increasingly elaborate, expensive, and specialized system of rituals; on the other towards abstraction and internalization of the principles underlying ritual and cosmic speculation on them.

But the beginnings of both trends can be seen in the earlier texts. The texts. Any study of Vedic religion thus must begin with the texts. Fortunately, due to the care with which most of the texts were transmitted and to the last years or so of intensive and painstaking philological work, we are reasonably lucky, in that most of the important texts exist in usable though generally not, strictly speaking, critical editions, that many possess careful translations [6] with, at least, minimal commentary, and that the vocabulary and the grammar morphology and syntax of the texts have been and continue to be subject to the scientific scrutiny that is a necessary precondition for even first order textual interpretation.

Serious lacunae will be noted below. Michaels Before proceeding to a catalogue of the important texts, we should first discuss the categories of texts and their organization into schools. Vedic literature is ritual literature -- dividable into two major types: a liturgical material internal to the ritual, used in performance.

Almost all of the verse and some of the prose fits into this category. Because their traditional names sometimes misrepresent the type of text contained within, it is useful to speak first of text-type.

The upaniSad -text-type proceeds further on this speculative path. However, from the point of view of linguistic development -- always a good yardstick for discovering the historical development of text layers -- we have to distinguish the following text layers which do not always coincide with the traditional division of Vedic texts given just now: 1.

Each school began as a set of adherents to a particular Veda in a relatively small area of northern India becoming further splintered as time went on. On these schools, see especially Renou ; Tsuji , Witzel a. They were composed by a number of bards or bardic families, over a period of several hundred years, at the very least, as linguistic and stylistic evidence shows.

Aufrecht The standard current translation is that of K. Geldner written already in the Twenties , into German, which supersedes earlier ones such as that of H. Grassmann There is also an almost complete French translation by L. Renou , and the first volume of a Russian translation by T. Elizarenkova has recently appeared Unfortunately there is no complete modern English translation, though there are unsatisfactory and outmoded ones by H.

Griffith There are also useful translations of selected hymns, such as that of W. O'Flaherty a and Maurer which includes much of the preceding scholarship. An up-to-date, philologically sound translation of the entire text, incorporating the grammatical and semantic progress that has been made in recent decades, would be extremely welcome.

Grassmann , which lists all the occurrences of all but the most common words in the RV, with definitions, grammatical identification, and contextual information; the Prolegomena and the Noten of H. Oldenberg and , respectively , one of the leading Western Indologists, E. Arnold's treatise on Vedic meter , one of the first attempts to develop an internal chronology of the text, and also several of Bloomfield's reference works Concordance, Repetitions, Variants, see below.

There are two extant recensions of the AV, differing considerably from each other. The standard edition is that of Roth and Whitney , corrected repr.

Lindenau A nearly [12] complete English translation of this text exists by W. Whitney , as well as a partial translation by M. Bloomfield that remains valuable, and a popular one by Griffith Barret, in a series of articles , save for one book done by F.

Edgerton On this basis, Raghu Vira published the text from Lahore as well. However, only books have been edited D. Bhattacharyya , D. Bhattacharya The editing and publication of the AVP based on both versions is an eagerly awaited event in Vedic studies. Parpola Because of its dependence on the RV, -- only 75 of its Mantras are not found in the RV -- an independent translation of this text is not particularly crucial.

Nonetheless, several exist, e. The Yajur Veda is a complex entity, consisting of several partly parallel texts, most of which mix mantras i.

Yet it is generally considered -- see e. Caland, b, pp. The standard edition is that of A. Weber , which includes the variants of VSK. A separate edition of the VSK has been prepared by D. Satavalekar and a new edition is in progress, prepared by the indefatigable B.

Sharma There is a rather unsatisfactory English translation by Griffith Weber and translated into English by Eggeling The Black YV is more complex. Maharashtra and Kashmir. Witzel , forthc. Only the TS has been translated into English, by Keith There are the editions prepared at Calcutta R. Srinivasacharya, ; the latter has some South Indian phonetic peculiarities. The TB has been partly translated into English in a series of articles by P.

Dumont A late c. Sarma Both have been translated into English by Keith The JB is an immense, unfortunately corrupt, and very rich text, that has not yet been sufficiently worked on see Ehlers Caland edited and translated significant portions of it into German , and added many passages in an English rendering in his translation of the PB b , as did, to a lesser extent, Oertel in a series of articles Only in did a complete edition appear that of Raghu Vira and Lokesh Chandra , unfortunately still riddled with misprints and corruptions.

Bodewitz , of the Agnihotra and Soma sections, accompanied by detailed philological though not particularly pioneering commentary. Doniger O'Flaherty has translated some of the narrative portions, however, mostly a recapitulation of those translated by Oertel and Caland, with a Freudian commentary. A complete, philologically grounded translation of the JB, would contribute mightily to our understanding of middle Vedic religion, but it may be premature to desire one without an accurate text.

For a preliminary critical reading of the text the old manuscript from Gujarat printed by Lokesh Chandra and Caland's remarks in his translation, referring to another old MS at Leiden, [18] are invaluable. The text has been translated and copiously annotated, with many valuable references to and partial translations of JB, by Caland a.

Most of them have been edited by B. Gaastra The SV and AV have no text named in this way. Its performance and even its acquisition by learning is regarded as too dangerous to be carried out inside the village and has to be done "where the houses of the village cannot be seen any more. However, the last sections of this Up. Thieme is the first to have correctly understood the structure of this text.

Apte and Bhim Dev and transl. The Taitt. Abhyankar et al. Turning now to the UpaniSads, we are faced with a dilemma regarding both the actual number of texts belonging to this category as well as their attribution to the four Vedas. Shastri The standard edition, which contains many useful cross references and a word index but which is not a critical one, is that by Limaye and Vadekar Occasionally they also report mystical insights e. Otherwise the speculations frequently take up a ritualistic topic and develop it into a discussion on the ultimate.

The word "UpaniSad", literally "sitting close by at the proper place", has found many interpretations, see Schayer , Falk b. Usually the UpaniSads are divided into three broad layers: the older prose UpaniSads, the middle level of verse UpaniSads and the later UpaniSads some of which were composed only in the middle ages.

The late UpaniSads are traditionally attributed to the AV. Names such as that of the KauS. Many of the older UpaniSads have recently been edited or translated again in general, see Santucci , pp. Brereton; ed.

Oertel , new ed. From the Middle level, the verse UpaniSads: Kena tr. Rau ; disc. Alsdorf ; also Maitr. Renou b, disc. Tsuji All the other UpaniSads, mostly attached, quite secondarily, to the Atharvaveda, belong to a much later, definitely post-Vedic period. Until very recently, most of the UpaniSads had been translated Deussen , etc.

As will be pointed out below, this is a wrong approach from the point of view of the development of Indian thought. The UpaniSads are the secondary collections of a whole array of late Vedic teachers see Ruben belonging to various Vedic schools; they do not form a single body of texts but represent multiple strands of tradition, often quite individualistic ones.

Charpentier , cf. Rau Indeed, N. AA KA. Aitareya- KauS. UpaniSad Kena-Up. Yajurvedic texts Atharvavedic texts. MS KaThB from other. UpaniSad Up. These still are the boundaries of Vedic India given by Manu see below.

Where this is not the case, as in the AV, schools have disappeared during the middle ages. Often it is only the medieval commentaries or the Paddhatis, detailed, real step by step descriptions, that solve the remaining puzzles.

In fact, the Baudh. We therefore refer to the appended table for reference. The bibliographical details and a short discussion of each text can be found in the survey by Kashikar They are of special interest as they contain the earliest geometry of India; in addition, they are based on an independent development of the mathematical sciences that began from clear, and unusual, maxims see Michaels , for all further details of editions and translations; cf. Khadilkar Kleine Schriften, , passim.

Notably some of the mantras connected with the rites of marriage, death and upanayana can be found on the RV and AV see below ch. Witzel a as they mention the river along which their adherents live. This difference in time is significant. Moreover, certain legal provisions in these dharma texts and their exact phraseology are also found in the earliest Vedic prose and provide evidence for a legal "code" of some formality even in this period see Jamison , pp.

This has not been found; his case can be sustained, however, by a similar development in the related KaTha school. Their earliest, but so far unused MSS. Efforts to understand them by the historical development of the text or as interpolations are misguided. Doniger and Smith liv ff. Manu merely leaves out the sources of these statements and does not offer a solution to these positions as they always can be justified in theological discussion.

Research Tools. There are several critical research tools that pertain to all or most of Vedic literature. Bloomfield's Vedic Concordance indexes every Vedic mantra found in editions at the time, [28] and the passage s in which it occurs, allowing the researcher to trace the ritual usage of and commentary on virtually every liturgical utterance in the corpus. Bloomfield, Edgerton and Emeneau's Vedic Variants , based on the collections of the Concordance, allows the development and variation of the language to be traced and the authenticity and relative chronology of particular mantras to be evaluated.

This allows lexical, grammatical, and a large variety of philological and cultural studies to be carried out on the whole Vedic corpus with far greater ease than before. In addition, a number of individual texts have concordances or partial concordances as part of their text editions, e. Simon's Index verborum to the KS The Vedic Index of Macdonell and Keith is a compendium of the information that can be extracted from Vedic texts on daily life, customs, technology, and personal and geographical names -- though it specifically excludes mythological and ritual names and terminology from consideration.

Finally, there are some special dictionaries of Vedic ritual terminology Renou , Sen , a word list of rare words and of those not listed in the dictionary of Monier Williams i. Present day Vedic recitation has been described by, among others, Staal , Howard , The amount of space just devoted to text editions, translations, and purely philological research tools may seem excessive, but it should not be forgotten that a major barrier to the understanding of Vedic religion has always been the difficulty of Vedic language and expression.

In fact, by no means all Vedic texts have been edited and even less have been translated. The grammar of Vedic differs in important ways, especially in the verb, from Classical Sanskrit cf. Renou , Gonda Lexical items often have entirely different meanings and usually have entirely different connotations. The syntax, especially of the mantras, can be contorted and elliptical.

Since we must rely entirely on texts, it is imperative that we interpret them correctly. But since we lack an unbroken native commentatorial tradition, -- we often have to rely on what can be gleaned from the parallel versions in the various schools -- much of this work of interpretation has fallen to modern philologists.

Progress comes in very small steps -- a new understanding of the meaning of a word, the identification of a particular verb form, the elucidation of a syntactic construction -- but without it the broader work of interpretation to be discussed in the next sections could not be accomplished. It is not possible to mention all those who have made or are making significant contributions in this philological area; we will make simply make reference to a few of the more prominent and productive of these scholars, e.

Oldenberg , repr. Hoffmann , , P. Kuiper , forthc. Brown , N. Tsuji , , Heesterman , Malamoud We especially miss a collection of the articles of M. Bloomfield and L. Renou for the latter's bibliography see Renou and Tsuji Philological work.