The Ṛg Vedaऋग्वेद

The Ṛg Veda (Sanskrit ṛc, “verse of praise”, + veda, “knowledge”) is the oldest of the four Vedas, the foundational scriptures of Hinduism, and the oldest surviving text of any Indian language. It is a collection of 1,028 hymns (sūktas), about 10,600 verses in all, arranged in ten books called maṇḍalas. They were composed in an archaic form of Sanskrit by hereditary families of poet-priests in the north-west of the Indian subcontinent — the land of the seven rivers, the Sapta Sindhu, roughly modern Punjab and its surroundings — over several centuries around 1500–1000 BCE. For most of their history they were never written down. They were memorised and recited, generation after generation, with a fidelity that has no parallel in the ancient world, so that a Brahmin chanting a hymn to Agni in Kerala today pronounces it, in all likelihood, almost exactly as it was pronounced three thousand years ago.

Most of the Ṛg Veda is liturgy: hymns that praised the gods and called them to a fire-sacrifice, where they were offered butter, grain and the intoxicating drink soma. But it is also poetry of great power and strangeness, and in its later layers it begins to ask the questions that Indian philosophy would pursue for the next three millennia. Its last book contains the Nāsadīya Sūkta, a hymn of creation that ends by wondering whether even the highest god knows how the world began — perhaps the first expression of philosophical doubt in world literature. It contains the Puruṣa Sūkta, in which the universe is made from the sacrifice of a cosmic man — and from which later India drew its justification of the four social classes. And it introduces the idea of ṛta, a cosmic and moral order underlying everything, which would grow into the central Indian idea of dharma.

Background

The Vedas

Veda means “knowledge”, from the same Indo-European root as Latin videre, “to see”, and English wit and wise. In Hindu tradition the Vedas are śruti, “what was heard”: not composed by any human author but eternal, “seen” or “heard” by inspired seers (ṛṣis) at the beginning of each cosmic age. All other sacred literature — the epics, the law books, the Purāṇas — is smṛti, “what is remembered”, human tradition that derives its authority from the Veda.

There are four Vedas. The Ṛg Veda is the book of hymns. The Sāma Veda sets mostly Ṛg Vedic verses to melodies for chanting. The Yajur Veda contains the prose formulas spoken by the priest who performs the physical actions of the sacrifice. The Atharva Veda, later and once of lower status, collects spells and charms — for healing, love, protection against snakes and enemies — together with some remarkable speculative hymns.

Each Veda in turn grew in layers. The oldest is the saṃhitā, the collection of hymns or formulas. Then came the brāhmaṇas (c. 900–700 BCE), enormous prose manuals explaining the meaning of the rituals; the āraṇyakas, “forest books”, on the more esoteric rites; and finally the Upaniṣads (from c. 800 BCE), the philosophical dialogues that close the Veda and are therefore called Vedānta, “the end of the Veda”. When people speak of “the Ṛg Veda” they usually mean the Ṛg Veda Saṃhitā, the hymn collection itself.

Who composed it

The hymns are attributed to named poets and to the families of seers who preserved them. The six “family books”, Books 2 to 7, are each the property of a single lineage — the Gṛtsamadas, Viśvāmitras, Vāmadevas, Atris, Bharadvājas and Vasiṣṭhas — and these are the oldest parts. Book 8 belongs mainly to the Kaṇva family. Book 9 collects all the hymns to Soma, gathered from the other books. Books 1 and 10 were added last; Book 10 especially contains the cosmological, philosophical and secular hymns that read so differently from the rest.

The composers called themselves Ārya, “noble” or “hospitable”, a word that originally named a linguistic and cultural community rather than a race. Their language belongs to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family, the same family as Greek, Latin, Persian, German and English. Vedic pitṛ is Latin pater and English father; Vedic dyaus pitṛ, “father sky”, is Greek Zeus patēr and Latin Iuppiter. The Ṛg Veda is closely related in language and religion to the oldest Iranian scripture, the Avestan Gāthās of Zarathustra.

Where it came from

How the Indo-Aryan language arrived in South Asia is one of the most contested questions in Indian history. The mainstream view among linguists, archaeologists and geneticists is that Indo-Aryan speakers migrated into the north-west of the subcontinent from Central Asia in the second millennium BCE, after the decline of the Indus Valley (Harappan) civilisation (c. 2600–1900 BCE), mixing with the existing population; ancient DNA studies published since 2018 have supported a movement of steppe ancestry into South Asia in this period. A minority of Indian scholars defend an “out of India” or indigenous origin, identifying the Vedic people with the Harappans. The hymns themselves describe a semi-pastoral people who valued cattle and horses, fought with chariots, knew bronze but not yet iron, and moved between the Kabul River in Afghanistan and the Gaṅgā–Yamunā region. The river most often praised, after the Indus, is the Sarasvatī — “best of mothers, best of rivers, best of goddesses” — which many identify with the now-dry Ghaggar-Hakra channel.

Preservation: a library made of memory

Perhaps the most remarkable fact about the Ṛg Veda is how it was preserved. Writing was not used in India until the Mauryan period (3rd century BCE), and even after that, Brahmin tradition held that the Veda must be learned from the mouth of a teacher, not from a book; to write it down was almost a sacrilege. The text survived instead in human memory, through a system of extraordinary redundancy.

A student first learned the saṃhitāpāṭha, the continuous text, in which words run together according to the rules of sound-combination (sandhi). Then the padapāṭha, attributed to the grammarian Śākalya, in which each word is pronounced separately. Then progressively more elaborate patterns: kramapāṭha (words in overlapping pairs: ab, bc, cd…), jaṭāpāṭha (“braid”: ab ba ab, bc cb bc…), and ghanapāṭha (“dense”: ab ba abc cba abc…), among eleven methods in all. Every syllable carried a pitch accent, marked by hand gestures. A mistake in one pattern would be caught by the others.

The result is that the Ṛg Veda was transmitted with a fidelity the Homeric poems — fixed in writing around the same time it was still being sung — never enjoyed. The German Indologist Max Müller, who published the first printed edition of the text with Sāyaṇa’s commentary (1849–74), remarked that if every manuscript were lost, the text could be recovered from the memory of living reciters.

The gods

The Vedic world is crowded with gods (devas, “shining ones”), most of them powers of nature or of the sacrifice. They are not ranked in a fixed hierarchy: a poet addressing one god often praises him as the greatest of all, a habit Max Müller called henotheism — the worship of one god at a time as supreme.

Indra, to whom about a quarter of the hymns are addressed, is the storm god and warrior king of the gods, a hard-drinking hero who wields the thunderbolt (vajra). His great deed is the slaying of Vṛtra, a serpent or dragon who had imprisoned the waters behind a mountain; Indra, strengthened by soma, splits the serpent and releases the rivers to run to the sea. The hymn that tells it (1.32) begins: “Let me now proclaim the heroic deeds of Indra, the first that the thunderbolt-wielder performed.” Indra also frees the cows hidden in a cave by the Paṇis, and leads the Āryas in battle against their enemies, the dāsas or dasyus.

Agni, the fire, is the second great god — about two hundred hymns, and the very first hymn of the collection: agnim īḷe purohitam, “I praise Agni, the household priest”. Agni is the fire of the hearth and of the sacrifice, the messenger who carries offerings up to the gods in his smoke, and the god present in every home. He is born from the friction of two fire-sticks, and he is also the lightning and the sun.

Soma is both a plant and a god. The juice of the soma plant, pressed between stones, filtered through wool and mixed with milk, was drunk by the priests and offered to the gods; it brought ecstasy, vision and the feeling of immortality. “We have drunk the soma; we have become immortal; we have gone to the light; we have found the gods” (8.48.3). All 114 hymns of Book 9 are sung while it is being pressed. Its botanical identity is unknown; proposals include ephedra, a hallucinogenic mushroom (Amanita muscaria), and the Syrian rue.

Varuṇa, the sovereign god of the sky and of waters, is the guardian of ṛta, the cosmic order, and of oaths; he sees everything, binds wrongdoers with his noose, and to him are addressed the most personal hymns of confession and longing for forgiveness. He is paired with Mitra, god of contracts and friendship. Other gods include Sūrya and Savitṛ (the sun), Uṣas (the dawn, a radiant young woman, to whom some of the loveliest hymns are addressed), the Aśvins (twin horsemen and healers), the Maruts (storm gods), Rudra (a fierce, wild god of disease and healing, ancestor of Śiva), Viṣṇu (who measures the universe in three strides — a minor god here who would become one of Hinduism’s greatest), Yama (the first man to die, king of the dead), and Vāc (Speech personified).

Ṛta: the order of the world

Behind the gods stands an impersonal principle: ṛta, “that which is fitted together”, the order of the cosmos. Ṛta makes the sun rise, the seasons turn, the rivers flow; it is also the order of the sacrifice and of truthful speech. The gods themselves are its guardians, “born of ṛta”. Its opposite is anṛta, falsehood and disorder. The word has a cognate in the Avestan aša, “truth”, which suggests the idea is older than the Ṛg Veda itself.

Ṛta is the ancestor of much in Indian thought. As the idea of a natural order that is at once physical, ritual and moral, it was gradually replaced in later texts by Dharma, which kept its meaning of “right order” but placed it in human duty and society. The ritual theorists of the brāhmaṇas took the idea further: the sacrifice does not merely please the gods; it sustains the universe — a view that would culminate in the Mīmāṃsā school, for which the Vedic injunction itself is the source of all order.

The sacrifice

The hymns were not written to be read but to be performed at the yajña, the fire sacrifice. A patron (yajamāna), usually a chief or wealthy householder, hired priests to build an altar and kindle the sacred fires, to recite hymns, chant melodies and pour offerings. The gods were invited to come, sit on the strewn grass, drink the soma and grant cattle, sons, long life, victory and fame. The relationship is one of exchange, of hospitality: dadāmi te, dehi me — “I give to you; give to me”.

The great public rituals grew enormously complex. The aśvamedha, the horse sacrifice performed by kings to proclaim their sovereignty, involved letting a horse wander for a year, followed by an army; any land it entered had to submit or fight. The agniṣṭoma soma sacrifice required sixteen priests. These rituals, codified in the later brāhmaṇas and śrautasūtras, are the context for the Upaniṣads’ later rebellion: the forest sages asked what the sacrifice really means, and moved it inward, into the breath and the mind.

The philosophical hymns

Most of the Ṛg Veda praises and petitions gods. But in Book 1 and especially Book 10, the poets begin to speculate about the origin of the world, the nature of the gods, and the one reality behind the many.

“Truth is one”

A long riddle-hymn attributed to the poet Dīrghatamas (1.164) is full of enigmas about the year, the sun, speech and the cosmos. One verse would be quoted for three thousand years:

They call him Indra, Mitra, Varuṇa, Agni, and he is heavenly, noble-winged Garutmān. Truth is one; the wise speak of it in many ways (ekaṃ sad viprā bahudhā vadanti): they call it Agni, Yama, Mātariśvan. (1.164.46)

Here, already, the many gods are seen as names of a single reality — the seed of the Upaniṣadic Brahman and of modern Hindu pluralism. Swami Vivekananda, Gandhi and Radhakrishnan all quoted the line as the essence of Indian tolerance. The same hymn contains the famous image, later taken up by the Muṇḍaka and Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣads, of two birds on one tree: “Two birds, companions and friends, cling to the same tree. One of them eats the sweet fig; the other, not eating, looks on.” Later readers saw in them the individual self, tasting the fruits of action, and the universal Self, the silent witness.

The Hymn of Creation (Nāsadīya Sūkta)

The most famous hymn of the Ṛg Veda, and perhaps the most astonishing poem of the ancient world, is the Nāsadīya Sūkta (10.129), named after its first words, nāsad āsīt, “there was not non-existence”. In seven verses it imagines the state before creation:

There was neither non-existence nor existence then; there was neither the realm of space nor the sky which is beyond. What stirred? Where? In whose protection? Was there water, bottomlessly deep?

There was neither death nor immortality then. There was no distinguishing sign of night nor of day. That One breathed, windless, by its own impulse. Other than that there was nothing beyond.

Darkness was hidden by darkness in the beginning; with no distinguishing sign, all this was water. The life force that was covered with emptiness, that One arose through the power of heat (tapas).

Desire came upon that One in the beginning; that was the first seed of mind. Poets seeking in their heart with wisdom found the bond of existence in non-existence.

Their cord was extended across. Was there below? Was there above? There were seed-placers; there were powers. There was impulse beneath; there was giving-forth above.

Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe. Who then knows whence it has arisen?

Whence this creation has arisen — perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not — the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows — or perhaps he does not know.

(Translation adapted from Wendy Doniger.)

The hymn moves from a state beyond the opposites — neither being nor non-being, neither death nor immortality — to a single “One” (tad ekam) breathing without breath, to darkness, heat, desire and mind, and then to the separation of above and below. It then does something no other creation myth does: it doubts itself. The gods cannot know, because they came after creation. Perhaps the overseer in the highest heaven knows — or perhaps not.

Readers have found in this hymn the beginning of Indian metaphysics: the Upaniṣadic “One without a second”, the Sāṃkhya evolution of the world from an undifferentiated principle, and the Buddhist refusal to answer unanswerable questions. The physicist Carl Sagan read it on his television series Cosmos (1980). The Indian television series Bharat Ek Khoj, based on Nehru’s Discovery of India, set a Hindi version of it to music as its opening song.

The Hymn of the Cosmic Man (Puruṣa Sūkta)

The second great cosmological hymn (10.90) describes the creation of the world through the sacrifice of Puruṣa, a primordial cosmic Man with a thousand heads, a thousand eyes and a thousand feet, who pervades the earth and extends ten fingers beyond it. “Puruṣa is all this, whatever has been and whatever is to be.” The gods sacrificed him, with himself as the offering, and from his body came the world: the moon from his mind, the sun from his eye, Indra and Agni from his mouth, the wind from his breath, the sky from his head, the earth from his feet. And:

When they divided the Man, into how many parts did they apportion him? What do they call his mouth, his two arms and thighs and feet? His mouth became the Brāhmaṇa; his arms were made into the Rājanya (warrior); his thighs the Vaiśya (common people); and from his feet the Śūdra (servant) was born. (10.90.11–12)

This is the first mention anywhere of the four varṇas — the classes of priests, warriors, producers and servants — and the only one in the Ṛg Veda. Scholars generally regard it as one of the latest hymns in the collection. Later law books, above all the Manusmṛti, used it as divine sanction for a hierarchical social order, and it has been central to debates over caste ever since. B. R. Ambedkar argued in Who Were the Shudras? (1946) that the verse was a late interpolation used to justify a system with no basis in the original Vedic religion; reformers such as Dayānanda Sarasvatī read it as describing classes by aptitude rather than birth. The hymn also matters philosophically: the idea that the world is the body of a single cosmic being, sacrificed and dispersed into the many, anticipates the Upaniṣadic identification of the universe with Brahman, and Rāmānuja’s later teaching that the world is the body of God.

Other speculative hymns

The Hiraṇyagarbha Sūkta (10.121) speaks of a “golden embryo” that arose in the beginning and became the lord of all creation, each verse ending with a question: “Who is the god whom we should worship with oblation?” (kasmai devāya haviṣā vidhema) — so persistent that later tradition made Ka, “Who?”, into the name of a god. The Vāk Sūkta (10.125), spoken in the first person by the goddess Speech, declares that she supports all the gods and carries Soma: “I am the queen, the gatherer of riches… whom I love I make formidable, a sage, a seer.” It is the beginning of India’s long reverence for language, which would lead to Pāṇini’s grammar and Bhartṛhari’s philosophy of the word. The Hymn to Faith (10.151), the hymns to Manyu (anger) and to the Earth (in the Atharva Veda) explore the inner life and the natural world.

The human voice

Not all of the Ṛg Veda is liturgy. Some of its most memorable hymns are secular, personal or dramatic.

The Gambler’s Lament (10.34) is the monologue of a man ruined by dice. He describes the nuts used as dice — “born in a high place, whirling on the board” — as more intoxicating than soma; his wife has left him, his mother-in-law hates him, his creditors hound him; “the gambler’s wife is abandoned and grieves, and his mother grieves for the son who wanders who knows where”. He resolves to stop, but hears the dice rattling and goes “like a woman to her lover”. The god Savitṛ finally tells him: “Play not with dice; till your field.” It is the first poem about addiction, and a distant ancestor of the dice game in the The Mahābhārata.

There are dialogue hymns that seem to come from lost dramas: between Yama and his twin sister Yamī, who tries to seduce him so that the human race can be born, and is refused (10.10); between Purūravas and the nymph Urvaśī, who has left her mortal husband (10.95) — a story Kālidāsa later turned into a play; between Indra and the Maruts, and between the sage Agastya and his wife Lopāmudrā, who demands that he stop his austerities and make love to her.

The funeral hymns of Book 10 show how the Vedic people faced death. The dead are cremated, and Agni is asked to carry them to the world of the fathers, where Yama rules: “Go forth on the ancient paths by which our fathers went… unite with the fathers, with Yama… leaving behind all imperfection, go home again.” Another hymn bids the earth receive the bones of the dead gently: “Open up, earth; do not crush him. Be easy to enter and easy to rest in. Cover him, earth, as a mother wraps her son in the hem of her skirt.” There is no idea yet of karma or rebirth; those doctrines appear only in the Upaniṣads.

The wedding hymn (10.85), recited at Hindu weddings to this day, tells of the marriage of Sūryā, daughter of the Sun, and blesses the bride: “Be a queen over your father-in-law, a queen over your mother-in-law.”

From the Ṛg Veda to the Upaniṣads

The Ṛg Veda is the beginning of a long movement in Indian thought from outward ritual to inward knowledge. In the hymns, the sacrifice is performed to please the gods. In the brāhmaṇas, the sacrifice becomes a cosmic machine that sustains the universe, and its correct performance becomes all-important. In the āraṇyakas, its meaning is meditated upon. In the Upaniṣads, the sacrifice is internalised: the true fire is breath, the true offering is the self, and the true knowledge is that the Self (ātman) is identical with the ultimate reality (Brahman). The question of the Nāsadīya hymn — what was the One before all things? — is answered in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad: “In the beginning this world was simply what is existent — one only, without a second.”

At the same time, the Ṛg Veda remained the supreme authority for the orthodox (āstika) schools of Indian philosophy. Those that accepted it — Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Sāṃkhya, Yoga, Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta — were orthodox; those that rejected it — Buddhism, Jainism and the materialist Cārvāka (Lokāyata) — were heterodox (nāstika). The Mīmāṃsā school developed sophisticated theories of language and interpretation to defend the claim that the Veda is eternal and authorless (apauruṣeya), its words not spoken by any person, human or divine.

Reception

For centuries the Ṛg Veda was known in India mainly as sacred sound — recited in rituals, its meaning understood by few. The fourteenth-century scholar Sāyaṇa, working at the court of the Vijayanagara empire, wrote the only complete traditional commentary, explaining every word in ritual terms.

Its discovery by Europeans in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was one of the great intellectual events of the age. Sir William Jones, a judge in Calcutta, observed in 1786 that Sanskrit bore to Greek and Latin “a stronger affinity… than could possibly have been produced by accident”, founding comparative linguistics and the idea of the Indo-European language family. The German Romantics hailed the Veda as the voice of the childhood of humanity. Max Müller devoted twenty-five years at Oxford to the first printed edition, paid for by the East India Company, and made “the Vedas” a household word in Europe.

In India, nineteenth-century reformers made the Ṛg Veda a battlefield over the nature of Hinduism. Dayānanda Sarasvatī, founder of the Ārya Samāj (1875), proclaimed “Back to the Vedas”: the Veda, rightly understood, taught monotheism and science, and condemned idol-worship and caste by birth. Sri Aurobindo read it as a psychological and spiritual allegory. The nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak, in The Arctic Home in the Vedas (1903), argued from its astronomical references that the Vedic people came from the far north. Nehru, in The Discovery of India (1946), called the Ṛg Veda “the first book of humanity” and the Nāsadīya hymn its finest expression.

For modern scholars, the Ṛg Veda remains a primary source for the history of language, religion and society in early South Asia, and for comparative Indo-European studies. Joel Brereton and Stephanie Jamison’s complete English translation (2014), the first in over a century, reveals the hymns as intricate, riddling, self-conscious poetry: not the naïve nature-worship the Victorians imagined, but the work of master craftsmen competing to say the unsayable.

The Ṛg Veda in conversation

The line most worth knowing is ekaṃ sad viprā bahudhā vadanti — “truth is one; the wise call it by many names” (1.164.46) — the classic Indian statement that different religions may name one reality. For intellectual honesty about ultimate questions, nothing beats the last line of the creation hymn: the one who looks down from the highest heaven “only he knows — or perhaps he does not know”. And when caste is debated, it is worth knowing that the four varṇas appear exactly once in the Ṛg Veda, in a single late hymn.