The Vedas are a collection of hymns and other ancient religious texts written in India between about 1500 and 1000 BCE. It includes elements such as liturgical material as well as mythological accounts, poems, prayers, and formulas considered to be sacred by the Vedic religion. The origin of the Vedas can be traced back as far as 1500 BCE, when a large group of nomads called the Aryans, coming from central Asia, crossed the Hindu Kush Mountains, migrating into the Indian subcontinent. This was a large migration and used to be seen as an invasion. This invasion hypothesis, however, is not unanimously accepted by scholars today.
The basic Vedic texts are the Samhita “Collections” of the four Vedas:
Rig-Veda “Knowledge of the Hymns of Praise”, for recitation.
Sama-Veda “Knowledge of the Melodies”, for chanting.
Yajur-Veda “Knowledge of the Sacrificial formulas”, for liturgy.
Atharva-Veda “Knowledge of the Magic formulas”, named after a kind of group of priests.
The Rig-Veda is the largest and most important text of the Vedic collection; it includes 1028 hymns and it is divided into ten books called mandalas. It is a difficult text, written in a very obscure style and filled with metaphors and allusions that are hard to understand for a modern reader. The Sama-Veda has verses that are almost entirely from the Rig-Veda, but are arranged in a different way since they are meant to be chanted. The Yajur-Veda is divided into the White and Black Yajur-Veda and contains explanatory prose commentaries on how to perform religious rituals and sacrifices. The Atharva-Veda contains charms and magical incantations and has a more folkloristic style.
Sama-veda is adopted from a plant name Soma, which was used in rituals like yagya. As shown in the left image.
the Vedas present a multitude of gods, most of them related to natural forces such as storms, fire, and wind. As part of its mythology, Vedic texts contain multiple creation stories, most of them inconsistent with each other. Sometimes the Vedas refer to a particular god as the greatest god of all, and later another god will be regarded as the greatest god of all.
Some elements of the religion practised by the natives of India before Vedic times still persist in the Vedas. The Pre-Vedic religion, the oldest known religion of India, which was found in India before the Aryan migrations, was apparently an animistic and totemic worship of many spirits dwelling in stones, animals, trees, rivers, mountains, and stars. Some of these spirits were good, others were evil, and great magic skill was the only way to control them. Traces of this old religion are still present in the Vedas. In the Atharva-Veda, for example, there are spells to obtain children, to avoid abortion, to prolong life, to ward off evil, to woo sleep, and to harm or destroy enemies.
Gods & Mythology
Despite the fact that the Rig-Veda deals with many gods, there are some who get a lot of attention. More than half the hymns invoke just three top-rated gods of the moment: Indra (250 hymns), Agni (200 hymns), and Soma (just over 100 hymns).
The Vedas also have a hymn to Purusha, a primordial deity who is sacrificed by the other gods: Purusha’s mind became the Moon, his eyes the Sun, his head the Sky, and his feet the Earth. In this same passage we have one of the first indications of a caste system with its four major divisions:
The Brahmans, or priests, came from Purusha’s mouth
The Kshatriyas, or warrior rulers, from Purusha’s arms
The Vaishyas, or the commoners (land-owner, merchants, etc.), from Purusha’s thighs.
The Shudras, or labourers and servants, from Purusha’s feet.
Later Vedic Period
During Vedic times, it was widely believed that rituals were critical to maintain the order of the cosmos and that sacred ceremonies helped the universe to keep working smoothly. In a sense, ceremonies were seen as part of a deal between humans and the gods: Humans performed sacrifices and rituals, and the gods would return their favour under the form of protection and prosperity.
(Origin of Brahmanas)
Nature, however, remains indifferent to religious rituals, so when events went awry, society blamed the priests’ incompetence. Priests were not willing to admit their helplessness in trying to master nature and would say that the gods ignored poor quality offers. The solution, the priests said, required more royal support. Brahman priests refused to have their privileges cut, so they developed a new literature which specified, sometimes in a very detailed way, how rituals had to be performed, the precise quantity and quality of material to be used, and the exact pronunciation of sacred formulas. This new set of texts, known as the Brahmanas, was attached to the Vedic collection around the 6th century BCE. The priests claimed that if sacrifices were performed exactly as they said, then the gods would be compelled to respond. When these new rituals also proved to be useless, many sectors of Indian society believed that this whole business of ritual and sacrifice had been taken too far.
(Origin of Upanishads)
During the later Vedic period (from c. 800 to c. 500 BCE), the priestly class was seriously questioned. The rituals, the sacrifices, the detailed rulebooks on ceremonies and sacrifices, all of these religious elements were being gradually rejected. Some of those who were against the traditional Vedic order decided to engage in the pursuit of spiritual progress, living as ascetic hermits, rejecting ordinary material concerns and giving up family life. Some of their speculations and philosophy were compiled into texts called The Upanishads. A number of practices were linked to this new spiritual approach: meditation, celibacy, and fasting, among others.
[The Upanishads are ancient Sanskrit texts of spiritual teaching and ideas of Hinduism. They are the part of the oldest scriptures of Hinduism, the Vedas, that deal with meditation, philosophy, and spiritual knowledge; other parts of the Vedas deal with mantras, benedictions, rituals, ceremonies, and sacrifices]
Around the 7th century BCE, India saw the growth of a culture of world-renunciation, which was a reaction against the Vedic tradition. This culture is the common origin of many Indian religions considered to be “heretical” by the Indian traditional priestly class. Charvaka, Jainism, and Buddhism, among other movements, originated around this time, encouraged by the gradual decay of the priestly orthodoxy. This would result in the end of the Vedic hegemony, shifting the focus of religious life from external rites and sacrifices to internal spiritual quests in the search for answers.
The authority of the Vedas eventually diminished to give way to a new religious synthesis in India that would dominate Indian society for the centuries to come.
The Puranas (meaning "of ancient times") were a genre of important Hindu, Jain and Buddhist religious texts, with stories of the history of the universe from creation to destruction, genealogies of kings, heroes, sages, and demigods, and descriptions of Hindu cosmology, philosophy, and geography.
Vedic religion had a strict code of rituals where the kings, the aristocrats and the rich merchants would contribute as the cost of organising such worship was very high and time-consuming. The mode of worship was prayer to the elements like fire and rivers, worship of heroic gods like Indra, chanting of hymns and carrying out sacrifices. Sacrifice was the offering of food, objects or the lives of animals to the gods as an act of propitiation or worship. In Vedic times, Yagya commonly included the sacrifice of milk, ghee, curd, grains, and the soma plant—animal offerings were less common.
Length of VEDAS
A beautiful story in the Yajurveda (Taittiriya Brahmana 3.10.11) narrates the infinite extent of the Vedas themselves. Some Rishis in the Hindu tradition are said to have lived a very long life. One of them was Rishi Bharadvaja. A beautiful story is narrated on his love for the study of the Vedas. He spent his extra-ordinary long life of 300 years studying the Vedas. Pleased with his devotion to the scriptures, Indra appeared before the Rishi and asked: “If I were to increase your life by another 300 years, what would you want to do?”
The Rishi replied, “I would spend the next 100 years again in studying the Vedas.”
Indra then created three mountains of sand in front of the Rishi, and said, “These three mountains represent Rik, Yajus and Samans, the three types of Vedic mantras. And from each mountain, your study is but a fistful of sand because endless are the Vedas (anantā vai vedāh).”
Rishi Bharadvaja was amazed, and asked Indra to show him the true path. Indra recommended him to worship the Divine in the form of the Sun through a special religious ceremony. He said that worshipping Bhagavān was equivalent in merit to mastering the three mountains of sand worth Vedic knowledge.
The point of the above story was that even with the large life spans of people in the earlier yugas, it was impossible to know what the Vedas contained.
