What Are the Vedas?

There are four Vedas: the Rig Veda, the Sama Veda, the Yajur Veda and the Atharva Veda. Each is a collection rather than a single book, gathering hymns, chants, ritual instructions and later philosophical material.

The Rig Veda is the oldest and best known, made up of over a thousand hymns addressed to various deities. The Sama Veda arranges material for singing, the Yajur Veda focuses on ritual formulas, and the Atharva Veda includes a wider range of everyday concerns.

Before the Vedas were written, they were transmitted orally with extraordinary precision. Specialists learned enormous quantities of text and were trained in techniques designed to catch errors, including reciting words in alternative orders so any change would be obvious.

This is one of the reasons scholars treat the transmission as unusually reliable. The system was built to resist drift, and comparison of recitation traditions from widely separated regions shows remarkably little variation.

The material inside the Vedas is more varied than many expect:

• •Hymns of praise to deities associated with fire, storms, dawn and order
• •Detailed instructions for performing rituals correctly
• •Chants arranged for musical recitation
• •Later sections of philosophical enquiry known as the Upanishads

In Hindu tradition the Vedas are described as shruti, meaning that which was heard, and they hold the highest scriptural authority. Later texts, including the great epics and the Puranas, occupy a different category.

The philosophical sections at the end of the Vedic material, the Upanishads, have been especially influential. They shift the focus from ritual towards questions about the self, reality and their relationship, and much later Hindu philosophy grows directly out of them.

Vedic Sanskrit is one of the most important sources in historical linguistics. Because the hymns were preserved so precisely, they give scholars a remarkably early and reliable window into an Indo-European language.

Comparing Vedic Sanskrit with ancient Greek, Latin, Old Persian and other languages was central to establishing that these languages share a common ancestor, a discovery made in the late eighteenth century that founded modern comparative linguistics. The Vedas therefore matter to fields well outside religious studies, which is an unusual reach for a body of ritual poetry.

One hymn from the tenth book of the Rig Veda, the Nasadiya Sukta or Hymn of Creation, gives a fair sense of why these texts still interest philosophers. It asks what existed before existence and non-existence, before death and immortality, and it ends not with an answer but with the suggestion that even the highest god in heaven may not know how the universe began, 'or perhaps he does not know'. A ritual collection that closes its account of creation with an open question is unusual in ancient literature, and the later Upanishads pick up exactly that willingness to leave a question standing.

Dating the Vedas is difficult because oral texts leave no manuscripts. Most scholars place the composition of the Rig Veda between about 1500 and 1200 BCE, in the Punjab region, with the other three collections and the Upanishads following over the next several centuries. The earliest surviving written copies are more than two thousand years younger than the hymns they record.

The Vedas are the four oldest Hindu scriptures, preserved with remarkable accuracy by oral transmission long before writing, and they contain hymns, ritual and the philosophical enquiry that shaped much of later Indian thought.