“Who knows for certain? Who shall here declare it? Whence was it born, and whence came this creation? The gods were born after the world’s creation: Then who can know from whence it has arisen? None knoweth whence this creation has arisen: And whether He has or has not produced it: He who surveys it in the highest heaven, He only knows, or perhaps even he may know not.” – Rig Veda, (Creation Hymn).1
The earliest religion of indigenous persons living on the Indian subcontinent was in all likelihood “an animistic and totemic worship of multitudinous spirits dwelling in stones and animals, and trees and streams, in mountains and stars.”2 Sometime in the second millennium before Christ, a people known as the Aryans (likely from the Caspian region – the word arya means noble) descended on this land (as they did Persia and Greece) bringing with them a religious creed which then mixed with local beliefs to inform the Vedas.
The word veda means knowledge, and thus a Veda is a Book of Knowledge. The four Vedas took the form of hymns and ritual texts which were orally transmitted for two thousand years until finally written down between the 4th and 6th centuries C.E.3 Not surprisingly the earliest gods of the Vedas were elements and forces of nature, for example Vishnu, the sun, and Agni, fire. The description of the gods and their rank in the divine hegemony changed over time as animism turned into anthropomorphic polytheism and eventually monism, in effect, allowing us to see “religion in the making.”4
One important example is “Varuna, who began as the encompassing heaven, whose breath was the storm, and whose garment was the sky” but who evolved into “the most ethical and ideal deity of the Vedas, watching over the world through his great eye, the sun, punishing evil, rewarding good, and forgiving the sins of those who petitioned him. In this aspect Varuna was the custodian and executor of the eternal law called Rita; this was at first the law that established and maintained the stars in their courses; gradually it became also the law of right, the cosmic and moral rhythm which every man must follow if he would not go astray and be destroyed.”5
There are four extant Vedas: (1) Rig Veda – hymns of praise, (2) Sama Veda – melodies and music, (3) Yahur Veda – sacrificial formulas, and (4) Atharva veda – magic formulas, superstition, and folklore. Each is divided into four sections: (1) Mantras or hymns, (2) Brahmanas or manuals of ritual, prayer, and incantation for priests, (3) Aranyaka – ‘forest texts’ for hermits, and (4) the Upanishads for philolsophers.6 The religion of the Vedas is often called Brahmanism to distinguish it from later Hinduism.7
(continued next post)
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1Koller, John M., Oriental Philosophies. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1970. ISBN 684-13668-6, page 21.
2Durant, Will, Our Oriental Heritage. Simon and Schuster, New York, 1963. ISBN0-671-54800-X, page 402.
3Hardy, Grant, Great Minds of the Eastern Intellectual Tradition. The Great Courses, Chantilly, Virginia, 2011. Page 6.
4Durant, Will, Our Oriental Heritage. Simon and Schuster, New York, 1963. ISBN0-671-54800-X, page 403.
5Ibid., pages 403-403. We see here what seems a universal in the growth of religions: the amoral and unpredictable features of primitive animism gradually give way to a recognition of cosmic order which reverberates in a second kind of order, that of human behavior in society – morality and ethics – and only then is this retroactively ascribed or accredited to the divine.
6Ibid., pages 407.
7Hardy, Grant, Great Minds of the Eastern Intellectual Tradition. The Great Courses, Chantilly, Virginia, 2011. Page 6.
