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.

Around the Vedas grew a set of supporting texts meant to help people recite and perform them correctly, covering subjects such as pronunciation, grammar, metre and ritual. Some of these practical manuals turn out to matter for the history of mathematics. Vedic rituals required fire altars of exact shapes and areas, built from bricks laid in precise patterns. To construct them, priests needed reliable geometry, and the instructions were recorded in works called the Sulba Sutras, meaning rules of the cord, after the measuring cords used to mark out the ground.

These texts give methods for making right angles with cords, for turning a square into a circle of roughly the same area, and for building a square with double the area of another. One of them states clearly that the diagonal of a rectangle produces an area equal to the areas produced by its two sides together, the relationship now taught as Pythagoras' theorem. They also give an approximation for the square root of two that is accurate to about five decimal places. Religious practice and mathematical skill developed side by side.

Each Veda is itself built in layers that grew over centuries. At the core is the Samhita, the collection of hymns, chants or ritual formulas, and this is what people usually mean by the Rig Veda or the Sama Veda. Attached to it are the Brahmanas, prose texts explaining how and why rituals should be performed, and the Aranyakas, sometimes called forest books, which reflect on the hidden meaning of ritual. The Upanishads come last, which is why they are known as Vedanta, the end of the Veda, a name later taken up by a major school of Hindu philosophy.

The hymns themselves address a crowded pantheon. Indra, a storm and warrior god, receives more Rig Veda hymns than any other figure, while Agni, the god of fire who carries offerings to the other gods, is addressed in the very first hymn. An entire book of the Rig Veda is devoted to Soma, a sacred plant drink and deity. One verse, the Gayatri mantra, a prayer to the sun god Savitr asking him to inspire the mind, is still recited daily by many Hindus and is traditionally taught at the sacred thread ceremony.

The checking methods used by Vedic reciters can be shown with a simple example. Take a line of four words and call them a, b, c and d. The continuous text, the samhita, is a b c d. In the word-by-word recitation, each word is separated and given in its basic form. In the step method, words are recited in overlapping pairs: ab, bc, cd. More demanding patterns weave words backwards and forwards. The jata pattern runs ab, ba, ab, then bc, cb, bc, while the ghana pattern runs ab, ba, abc, cba, abc, and so on through the line.

Because each word appears many times beside different neighbours, a slip in one place clashes with the others and is easy to catch. The reciters also preserve pitch. Vedic Sanskrit had a system of raised, lowered and falling accents, and many traditions mark them with small movements of the hand or head as the text is chanted, helping to fix the melody as well as the words. These practices are still taught in traditional schools today, and in 2003 UNESCO recognised the tradition of Vedic chanting as a masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity.

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.