What are the Vedas? And why do we talk About them in a Buddhist site?

If we really want to understand Buddhism (theoretically, not in a Zen-like style), we must learn about the history of India. We must learn about a particular kind of history, the religious history. If there is something that defines Indian religion, it is the influence of the Vedas. The Vedas are the oldest surviving religious texts in India.

Modern historians say the earliest hymns in the Vedas are from about 1500 to 1000 B.C. According to Hindu tradition, the wisdom embodied in the Vedas is timeless because it has no origin. It existed prior to this world and embodies an eternal law that transcends even the gods. The words of the Vedas, according to traditional conviction, were revealed to ancient sages called Rishis in a distant past.
The Vedas form a rather unusual collection of literature. It is not narrative like the Bible. It tells no grand story of gods and humans. The Vedas are more like a liturgy manual. It includes hundreds of hymns addressed to various deities, as well as myths, some spells and a bit of philosophical speculation. (Honestly, quite boring to read for the most part).

Some Hindus even maintain that the Vedas contains all knowledge, even the principles of nuclear physics and the distance between heavenly bodies (try to deduce that from the hymns). A few even claim that the reason the West attained such rapid technological and scientific progress is because Westerners appropriated Vedic knowledge when its contents where revealed in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The Vedas, Sanskrit, Iran and Ireland. What?

These hymns were composed, or heard, if that is the correct verb to use, in an early form of the Sanskrit language. This is a language that is closely related to Latin and Greek and to many of the languages in Europe.

The people who spoke Sanskrit called themselves the Aryans. The word Aryan in classical Sanskrit means simply a noble person, and it is found in the names of two countries in the modern world. You might ask yourselves whether you can think of them before I say them.

One of the countries is Iran. The other one is Ireland. Many people say I’m crazy because I say this, but believe me. If you aren’t so sure, ask your local Sanskrit teacher.

Much of European civilization, like the civilization of India, is derived from the traditions of these ancient people, who might had migrated out of central Asia in the middle of the second millennium BCE and settled as far West as Ireland and far South as India.

The Familiar Gods of the Vedas

The hymns of the Vedas were sung in ritual actions to invoke and to praise the gods, or devas. The word deva is related to the word divine and Theos.

Many of these gods are also closely related as individuals to the gods of classical Greek and Latin mythology. The Vedic god Dyaus, for example, who is a great god of the heavens, is related to Zeus. The god of rain, known as Indra, is related to Thor, the god of thunder in Norse mythology. The god of fire called Agni is related with our word ignite.

How These Hymns Were Used

The hymns of the Vedas were sung by the priests and the Brahmin as part of a complex sacrificial ritual (because of that, there is no need to explain it in detail here).

These sacrifices still go on today in India, as the Vedas are still chanted and they are in some sense the core identity of the Brahmin cast in India. The Brahmin are the ancient priestly cast that was in one time and in many respects still today the custodians of the great religious traditions of ancient India.

By now, you may a have some knowledge of what the Vedas are and what they represent for India, but how are they related to Buddhism? Is it its sacred book? Like the Bible? No! Buddhism actually rejects the notions of the Vedas. The vedas, however, influenced the Buddha in his thinking and manners. This is why we need to know this information, to understand better the Buddha. How the Buddha was influenced we will see in another article.

The Upanishads and the Three Essences

As the Hindu tradition evolved, the original hymns of the Veda attracted a large body of commentary and explanation. The final level of commentary in the classical corpus is found in the Upanishads, a body of texts later known sometimes as the Vedanta, a word that perhaps may be familiar to many of you, a word that simply means the end of the Veda, the end of the Vedic collection.

The First Essence: Being

The Upanishads tell stories of priests who try to find unity in the fragmented world of the Vedic tradition. They focus their speculation on three areas of life. They identify first the essence of the external world, they look out beyond themselves into the forces of nature, to the wind, to the sun, to the power that make the plants grow.

They attempted to touch the essence that gave that its reality or its life. They word they used to name it, we translate sometimes as Being, sometimes as reality, the word itself is simply “sat”. It is actually the present participle of the Sanskrit word to be, that is the same as our word is. This may not seem entirely recognizable to you, but the “s” in the word sat is the same “s” as in our word “is”. So sat is “issing”. It is being, it is existence. It is reality.

The Second Essence: Atman

Then, they looked inside, in our own personalities. They tried to put the finger somehow in what it was that made themselves what they were. What was the essence of their own personality. And they spoke, as people often do in India, about the power breath. Breath is important in the practice of a lot of different forms of Indian meditation. To focus on your breath, to focus in the source of your life.

A lot of the speculation in the Upanishads spoke about breath as the source of energy and personality. But as they worked with the concept and worked with their own awareness of themselves, they came to speak of something that went even a little deeper that the mere movement of the air, of the energy in and out of the body. They spoke about their own Atman. Their own self. The essence of the personality in the classical Upanishads is called Atman or Self.

The Third Essence: Brahman

These were priests who engaged in sacrificial rituals. That was important for them. They were concerned with the essence of the prayers they spoke and the ritual gestures and actions that they performed. Again there were many possibilities. One was a particular secret syllable. The secret syllable “OM”, that often appears and often is used in Vedic ritual. But again, they focused on something that was even more fundamental. That was the word “Brahman”, a word that originally referred to the prayer itself and then came to name the power that laid behind the prayer.

So, they had worked on three separate areas. The external world, that you might call the macrocosmos, the cosmos in the largest sense. The personality or the microcosmos, our own microworld, microworld of our sense. And then this world of ritual that mediates in some way between the personality and the larger world. The world of ritual, the world of sacrifice, the world that lies in the middle between the personality and this larger, structured cosmos.

In the next article, we will talk about another important concept in the Upanishads that influenced the Buddhist tradition.

This article is part of the series about The Buddha’s Religious Background.

The Classic Vedic Question

In my last post I talked about the Vedas, their origin and meaning. Now I want to advance in
my study of their importance for Buddhist thought.

One of the last hymns of the Vedic collection poses what I like to think of as the classic Vedic question. A question that really troubled these Brahmins, as they thought it puzzled over the meaning of their sacrifice.

They tried to find ways to make it more powerful and to connect more deeply to the realities that they were trying to touch. Let me paraphrase this hymn a bit, at least some portions of it, so you can get an impression of its content and also begin to feel the force of the Vedic question:

“There was then neither non-existence nor existence. There was no sky, there were no heavens. What was it that covered everything? What was it protection? Was it a bottomless depth of waters? There was neither death nor immortality then. Neither day nor night. The One breath, though, inspired by its own potentiality. Beside it nothing existed. Who is there who knows? Who knows? Who can tell its origin? Who can tell source of this creation? The gods are on the far side of the creation. Who knows them? Where it came from and how it came into being? Where this creation came from and how it came into being. Perhaps the higher overseer in heaven knows. Or perhaps he doesn’t know”.

This is hymn number 129 from the tenth book of the Rigveda. One of the late hymns in this early Vedic corpus.

Beyond the Gods

You can see, if you read carefully the words of this hymn, that these early priests are asking questions about the origins of the world. About where we came from, where the diversity of the world arose. And the questions are taking them beyond the gods, this is rather curious for us in the Western world. Where all of this come from? Including the diversity of the gods themselves.

They wanted to know where everything came from and the emphasis on this sentence is on the word know. They want to know it. And you can feel, just like a suggestion in these words, not stated explicitly, you can feel that they are convinced that if they know the source of this creative impulse, they will somehow connect themselves as individuals back to their source and it will give them a sense of power and control over the nature of the cosmos.

This hymn is just a fragmentary expression of the Vedic imagination, but it helps us feel and to get a taste of that impulse that drove the Vedic Brahmins to wonder about the origins of the cosmos, and tried to make the origin of the cosmos in some way available to themselves as actors in this religious world.

This article is part of the series about The Buddha’s Religious Background.