Hinduism: A Short History (9 page)

Even a non-specialist reader of ancient Indian literature will notice the effort to link macrocosm and microcosm, astronomical and physiological processes, to find correspondences between the various realms of beings, and to order the universe by establishing broad classifications. Vedic sacrifices – the central act of Vedic culture – were to be offered on precisely built geometrically constructed altars and to be performed at astronomically exactly established times. It sounds plausible to expect a correlation between the numbers of bricks prescribed for a particular altar and the distances between stars observed whose movement determined the time of the offerings to be made. Subhash Kak has advanced a great deal of fascinating detail in that connection in his essays on the “Astronomy of the Vedic Altar.” He believes that while the Vedic Indians possessed extensive astronomical knowledge which they encoded in the text of the
Ṛgveda
, the code was lost in later times and the Vedic tradition interrupted.

INDIA, THE CRADLE OF CIVILIZATION?

Based on the early dating of the
Ṛgveda (c.
4000 B.C.E.), and on the strength of the argument that Vedic astronomy and geometry predates that of the other known ancient civilizations, some scholars, like N. S. Rajaram, Georg Feuerstein, Subhash Kak and David Frawley, have made the daring suggestion that India was the “cradle of civilization.”
¹⁶
They link the recently discovered early European civilization (which predates Ancient Sumeria and Ancient Egypt by over a millennium) to waves of populations moving out or driven out from north-west India. Later migrations, caused either by climatic changes or by military events, would have brought the Hittites to Western Asia, the Iranians to Afghanistan and Iran, and many others to other parts of Eurasia. Such a scenario would require a complete rewriting of Ancient World History -especially if we add the claims, apparently substantiated by some material evidence, that Vedic Indians had established trade links with Central America and Eastern Africa before 2500 B.C.E. NO wonder that the “New Chronology” arouses not only scholarly controversy but emotional excitement as well. Much more hard evidence will be required to fully establish it, and many claims may have to be withdrawn. But there is no doubt that the “old chronology” has been discredited and that much surprise is in store for students not only of Ancient India, but of the Ancient World as a whole.

A CROWN WITNESS FOR THE NEW CHRONOLOGY?

A beautifully sculpted bronze head found near Delhi, named “Vasiṣtha’s Head”
¹⁷
by a collector, was dated through radio-carbon testing to around 3700 B.C.E. – the time when, according to Hicks and Anderson, the Battle of the Ten Kings took place (Vasiṣtha is mentioned in the
Ṛgveda
as the advisor to King Sudās). A further factor speaking for the “Vedic” character of the Indus civilization is the occurrence of (Vedic) altars in many sites. Fairly important also is the absence of a memory of a migration from outside India in all of ancient Indian literature: the Veda, the Brāhmaṇas, the Epics and the Purāṇas. Granting that the Vedic Saṃhitās were ritual manuals rather than historic records, further progress in revising Ancient Indian history could be expected from a study of
Itihāsa-Purāṇa
, rather than from an analysis of the
Ṛgveda
. In combination with the evaluation of the ever-growing amount of artifacts from the region and a comparison with the findings of the students of early European history, a reinterpretation of the Epics and the older Purāṇas should bring about a more adequate understanding of Vedic India and the history of civilization in South Asia than is available at present.

NOTES

1.

   One of the prominent Indian scholars who quite early rejected the Āryan invasion theory was Aurobindo Ghose. In

, written between 1914 and 1916, he points out that the text of the Veda has no reference to any such invasion.

2.

   Abbé Dubois,

, third ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906 (reprint 1959).

3.

   In 1767 James Parsons had published a long work entitled

, using samples from over a dozen languages extending from Irish to Bengali.

4.

   Dubois,

, p. 101.

5.

   The argument was entirely linguistic-speculative; wild contradictory assertions were made from the same linguistic basis by various authors. Among them there was neither agreement on methodology nor on the interpretation of “linguistic facts.”

6.

   Max Müller,

, p. 35.

7.

   G. Feuerstein, S. Kak, and D. Frawley,

. Wheaton, 111.: Quest Books, 1996.

8.

   Could one also suggest that

, usually translated “Ancient (Books)” contains a reference to

= city, embodying the “city-traditions” ?

9.

   A. Seidenberg, “The Geometry of the Vedic Rituals,” in

, vol. II, ed. Frits Staal. Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1983, pp. 95–126.

10.

   Philip von Zabern (ed.),

. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philip von Zabern, 1987.

11.

   The same sequence is also given in a table on “General Chronology of South Asia” on p. 24 of J. M. Kenoyer,

(Karachi: American Institute of Pakistan Studies, Oxford University Press, 1998) setting a “Mesolithic transition” period 10,000–6500 B.C.E. between a South Asian “Epi-Paleolithic” and the “Indus Valley Transition.”

12.

   N. S. Rajaram, “The Puzzle of Origins: New Researches in History of Mathematics and Ancient Ecology,”

, Oct. 1994-March 1995, pp. 150–171.

13.

   A remark on “Chronology” by J. M. Kenoyer in

may be pertinent: “In general the formation of large urban centers such as Mohenjo Daro and Harappa, located in the core areas of the Indus Valley, can be dated from around 2600 to 1900 B.C.E. In speaking of cultures, however, 700 years is an extremely long time, spanning nearly 30 generations. Many important changes in social organization, politics, language and even religion took place during the lives of these cities. We know that in Mesopotamia and Egypt many kingdoms rose and fell within a period of even 100 years, and along with changes in politics there was often a change in the religious order” (p. 25).

14.

   As Walter S. Fairservis has said: “One of the most complex, important and indeed vexing problems confronting South Asian archeologists today is the relationship of early Vedic culture(s), as described in the

, to archeological remains.” “The Harappan Civilization and the Ṛgveda,” in M. Witzel (ed.),

, Cambridge 1997, pp. 61–68. At the end of his article Fairservis lists a number of cultural traits attested in the Ṛgveda and paralleled in Harappan cultural remains. He also insists that “rather than there being a gap between the later 3rd Millennium remains and those of the 2nd Millennium, suggestive of the demise of the earlier and the sudden appearance of the later, in fact some artifactual material is contemporaneous and thus a continuity existed” (p. 61).

15.

   Subhash Kak,

. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan, 1994.

16.

. Wheaton, 111.: Quest Books, 1995.

17.

   A photograph and discussion of its age is to be found in G Feuerstein et al.,

. 71.

4

A SHORT HISTORY OF VEDIC RELIGION

THE
Ṛ
GVEDA
AND ITS INTERPRETERS

Although there exist considerable divergences among scholars as L regards the age of the hymns of the
Ṛgveda
, as shown before, there has never been any serious doubt that they represent the oldest accessible stratum of Hindu literature. Despite their great antiquity they are still accepted as the basic scripture of the
Sanātana Dharma
and thus are probably the oldest religious text still used by a living religion.

The text of the
Ṛgveda
was preserved by oral tradition over thousands of years and the hymns before us are essentially the same as those recited thousands of years ago at the great
vaidic yajñas
. Especially with regard to content the tradition has been most scrupulous. As A. A. Macdonell wrote: “Excepting simple mistakes of tradition in the first period and more due to grammatical theories in the second period, the old text of the
Ṛgveda
shows itself to have been preserved from a very remote antiquity with marvellous accuracy even in the smallest details.”
¹

The practical importance of the Vedic hymns is still very great. Thus S. N. Dasgupta writes:

Even at this day all the obligatory duties of the Hindus at birth, marriage, death, etc. are performed according to the old Vedic ritual. The prayers that a Brahmin now says three times a day are the same selections of Vedic verses as were used as prayer verses two or three thousand years ago. A little insight into the life of an ordinary Hindu of the present day will show that the system of image worship is one that has been grafted upon his life, the regular obligatory duties of which are ordered according to the old Vedic rites. Thus an orthodox Brahmin can dispense with image worship, if he likes, but not so with his daily Vedic prayers or other obligatory ceremonies. Even at this day there are persons who bestow immense sums of money for the performance and teaching of Vedic sacrifices and rituals. Most of the Sanskṛt literatures that flourished after the Vedas base upon them their own validity and appeal to them as authority. Systems of Hindu philosophy not only owe their allegiance to the Vedas but the adherents of each of them would often quarrel with others and maintain its superiority by trying to prove that it and it alone was the faithful follower of the Vedas and represented correctly their views. The laws which regulate the social, legal, domestic and religious customs and rites of the Hindus, even to the present day, are said to be mere systematized memories of old Vedic teachings and are held obligatory on their authority.

Through various devices – the most important being the constitution of an official
Pāda
text – and aids for memorizing the hymns, a very high degree of faithfulness in the transmission of the canonical text was achieved.
³

With regard to the meaning of the hymns, however, there have been, from very early times, different views. Vedic interpretation is one of the most difficult and fascinating branches of Indological studies.
⁴

Shrimat Anirvan suggests that from the very beginning there were two schools of Vedic interpretation: one exoteric, ritualistic, and naturalistic; the other esoteric, spiritualistic, and mystical.
⁵
Though the earliest Vedic interpretation in the
Brāhmaṇas
is “nothing but a simple paraphrase set in a ritual context, not only inadequate but in some cases misleading,”
⁶
Yāska in his
Nirukta
(fifth century B.C.E.) refers to a mystical interpretation parallel to the ritualistic one. So he comments on
Ṛgveda
X, 71, 5: “It speaks of the meaning as being the flower and the fruit of the Word. Exoterically, knowledge of the rituals and of the gods are respectively the flower and the fruit; but esoterically, the knowledge of the gods and of the Self are the fruit of the Word.”
⁷

The
Nirukta
is generally concerned only with part of the Vedic hymns and restricts itself mainly to explanations of difficult and obsolete Vedic words. Yāska is the last of these interpreters and provides a summary of the scholarship of his predecessors. He explicitly mentions several other early Vedic interpreters with whom he is not always in agreement. One of these, a certain Kautsa, declared in his time already that Vedic interpretation was hopeless, since the hymns were obscure, unmeaning, and mutually contradictory.
⁸

The history of Indian religious orthodoxy is, in a way, a history of Vedic interpretation. The ritualistic, naturalistic, and pragmatic interpretation of the Vedas was perfected in Pūrva-Mīmāṃsā; the mystical, spiritual, and philosophical interpretation was taken up by the Upaniṣads and developed into Uttara-Mīmāṃsā or Vedānta.

About 2000 years after Yāska there arose the great medieval commentator Sāyaṇa, whose school gave the last extant complete interpretation of the
Vedas
and the
Brāhmaṇas
in a systematic way. There was a time when Vedic scholars thought that Sāyaṇa had established simply a school of interpretation of his own, but the discovery in recent times of the works of several pre-Sāyaṇa commentators made it certain “that Sāyaṇa has been following a continuous tradition of Vedic exegesis beginning from the time of Yāska.”
⁹
Sāyaṇa established the meaning of the hymns by referring them to the ceremonies and rites that made use of them.

A new chapter in Vedic interpretation opened with the beginning of Western Indology. The interest of European scholars in the Veda was sparked by the prevalent historical bent of mind. Questions of “origins” were discussed in all branches of learning and scholars were busy collecting evidence for the development of human culture. Max Müller, who devoted the best part of his life to the editing of the text of the
Ṛgveda
and to the study of its content wrote: “the Veda would never have engaged the serious attention of a large class of scholars, if this ancient literary relic had not been found to shed the most unexpected light on the darkest periods in the history of the most prominent nations of antiquity.”
¹⁰
Since Sāyaṇa’s commentary was universally accepted by orthodox Brahmins and since it was the only known complete commentary which helped to give meaning to dark and difficult passages, early European Vedic scholarship relied upon it. With regard to the nature of the Vedic gods, Sāyaṇa’s interpretation and the then prevailing evolutionist outlook combined to stamp them as “personifications of the powers and phenomena of nature.”
¹¹