Vedas
The oldest scriptures of Hinduism, from ritual hymns to the first philosophy of the self
The Vedas are the oldest surviving texts of any living religion. Their earliest hymns were composed around 1500 BCE – before Homer, before the Hebrew Bible, before Confucius – and they have been recited, essentially unchanged, ever since. For more than a thousand years they were not written down at all. Generations of priests memorised them syllable by syllable, with the accents, and developed elaborate cross-checking techniques to make sure that not a single sound was lost. When scholars finally compared manuscripts from opposite ends of India, they found the texts virtually identical. Nothing comparable exists anywhere else in the world.
But the Vedas are not a single book, and they are not what most people expect of a “scripture.” They contain no commandments, no founder, no creed, and very little that resembles a systematic doctrine. What they do contain is a journey: from hymns sung around a sacrificial fire to the first sustained philosophical questions about the nature of reality and the self. The whole of later Indian philosophy – including Buddhism and Jainism, which rejected the Vedas – can be read as a long argument with them.
What the word means
Veda comes from the Sanskrit root vid, “to know” – the same root as the Latin videre, “to see,” and the English wit and wisdom. The Vedas are, literally, “knowledge.” In Hindu tradition they are classified as shruti, “that which is heard,” as opposed to smriti, “that which is remembered.” Smriti texts – the epics, the law books, the Puranas – have human authors and can be revised. Shruti has no author. The Vedas are held to be apaurusheya, “not of human origin”: eternal truths that the ancient seers (rishis) did not compose but perceived, in states of heightened vision, and then put into words. For the orthodox schools of Hindu philosophy, accepting the authority of the Vedas is the single criterion that separates orthodoxy (astika) from heterodoxy (nastika).
This is worth pausing on, because it shapes how the texts were treated. If the Vedas are revealed knowledge, then every syllable matters, and the task of the tradition is not to improve them but to preserve and interpret them. That is why they survived.
A page from a Rigveda manuscript in Devanagari script. The hymns themselves date from around 1500--1200 BCE; the manuscripts are much later, as the texts were transmitted orally for well over a millennium. Photo: Ms Sarah Welch, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Who composed them, and when
The Vedas were composed in Vedic Sanskrit by Indo-Aryan speaking peoples who settled in the north-west of the Indian subcontinent, in the region of the Punjab and the upper Ganges, during the second millennium BCE. Their society was pastoral and semi-nomadic, organised around cattle, chariots, warfare and above all the sacrifice (yajna), the ritual offering into fire by which humans maintained their relationship with the gods and, through the gods, with the order of the cosmos.
Dating is approximate, because an oral tradition leaves no manuscripts. The scholarly consensus runs roughly as follows:
- c. 1500–1200 BCE: the hymns of the Rigveda, the oldest layer.
- c. 1200–900 BCE: the other three Vedic collections (Samaveda, Yajurveda, Atharvaveda).
- c. 900–600 BCE: the Brahmanas, prose commentaries on the ritual.
- c. 700–300 BCE: the principal Upanishads, the philosophical texts.
The whole period is called the Vedic age. It ends roughly when the Buddha and Mahavira begin teaching, and when the centre of Indian civilisation shifts eastward to the Ganges plain and its new cities and kingdoms.
The Vedas were not written down until very late – probably not before the early centuries CE, and the oldest surviving manuscripts are medieval. Thirty Rigveda manuscripts at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, dating from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, were added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2007. Writing was always considered inferior to recitation. A famous verse of the Mahabharata ranks those who sell the Vedas, those who corrupt them and those who write them down together among the damned.
The structure: four Vedas, four layers
The Vedic corpus is best pictured as a grid. There are four Vedas, and each of the four has (at least in principle) four layers of text, composed at successive periods and serving different purposes.
The four Vedas
The Rigveda (“Knowledge of the Verses”) is the oldest and most important. It is a collection of 1,028 hymns (suktas) in about 10,600 verses, arranged in ten books (mandalas), addressed to the gods: Indra the warrior and storm-god, Agni the fire, Soma the sacred plant and its intoxicating juice, Varuna the guardian of cosmic order, Ushas the dawn, and many others. Books 2 to 7, the “family books,” are the oldest core, each attributed to a particular clan of poet-priests. Books 1 and 10 are later, and Book 10 contains the Rigveda’s most philosophical hymns, including the creation hymns that anticipate the Upanishads.
The Samaveda (“Knowledge of the Chants”) consists almost entirely of Rigvedic verses rearranged and set to melodies for singing during the Soma sacrifice. It is the source of Indian classical music’s claim to a sacred origin. Of its 1,875 verses, all but 75 are from the Rigveda.
The Yajurveda (“Knowledge of the Sacrificial Formulas”) contains the prose formulas (yajus) that the officiating priest murmured while performing the ritual actions. It survives in two main recensions: the “Black” (Krishna), in which verses and prose commentary are mixed, and the “White” (Shukla), in which they are separated. It is the Veda most closely tied to the mechanics of the sacrifice.
The Atharvaveda (“Knowledge of the Atharvan priests”) is the odd one out. For a long time only three Vedas were recognised, and the Atharvaveda was admitted later. It contains spells, charms and incantations for everyday life – for curing fever, winning love, destroying enemies, ensuring a safe childbirth – alongside some of the most striking speculative hymns in the whole corpus. It gives a glimpse of popular religion that the more priestly collections leave out, and it is a major source for the history of Indian medicine.
The four layers
Each Veda contains, in theory, four kinds of text, composed roughly in this order:
- Samhitas – the collections of hymns, chants and formulas themselves. When people say “the Rigveda” without qualification, they usually mean the Rigveda Samhita.
- Brahmanas – prose explanations of the ritual: what each act means, why it must be performed exactly so, and what myth underlies it. They are dense and, to modern readers, often baffling, but they contain the beginnings of a theory of the cosmos as a web of hidden correspondences (bandhu) between ritual, body and universe. The Shatapatha Brahmana is the most important.
- Aranyakas – “forest texts,” so called because they dealt with matters too dangerous or esoteric to be taught in the village. They form a bridge between ritual and philosophy, reinterpreting the sacrifice as something to be meditated on rather than performed.
- Upanishads – the philosophical culmination, discussed below. They are also called Vedanta, “the end of the Veda,” both because they come last and because they were taken to be its ultimate meaning.
Tradition also divides the whole into two parts: the karma-kanda, the “section on action,” covering ritual (Samhitas and Brahmanas), and the jnana-kanda, the “section on knowledge,” covering philosophy (Aranyakas and Upanishads). The relationship between the two – whether ritual is a preparation for knowledge, an alternative to it, or something superseded by it – became one of the great debates of Indian thought.
The Upanishads
If the Rigveda is the most important Veda historically, the Upanishads are the most important philosophically. The word probably means “sitting down near” – the posture of a student at a teacher’s feet – and the texts often take the form of dialogues: between teacher and pupil, father and son, husband and wife, king and sage, and, in one memorable case, a boy and Death himself.
There are more than two hundred texts called Upanishads, but about a dozen are recognised as the oldest and most authoritative, the principal (mukhya) Upanishads. The most important are:
- Brihadaranyaka (“Great Forest”) – the longest and probably the oldest, attached to the White Yajurveda. It contains the teachings of Yajnavalkya, the first great philosopher of India whose name we know, including his dialogue with his wife Maitreyi on what survives death and his famous negative definition of the Self: neti, neti, “not this, not this.”
- Chandogya – attached to the Samaveda. It contains the dialogue between Uddalaka Aruni and his son Shvetaketu that culminates in the phrase tat tvam asi, “you are that,” and the parable of the salt dissolved in water.
- Taittiriya, Aitareya, Kaushitaki, Kena – early and middle-period texts, developing the doctrine of the Self and the layers of the person.
- Katha – the story of the boy Nachiketas, who goes to the realm of Death and demands to know what happens after dying. It contains the image of the Self as the rider in a chariot whose horses are the senses.
- Isha, Mundaka, Prashna, Mandukya – shorter, later texts in verse. The Mandukya, only twelve verses long, analyses the four states of consciousness (waking, dreaming, dreamless sleep, and a fourth beyond them) and became central to the Advaita school.
- Shvetashvatara – later, theistic, and the first to identify the ultimate reality with a personal god, Rudra-Shiva. It anticipates the devotional religion of the Bhagavad Gita.
The Bhagavad Gita itself, though technically part of the Mahabharata and therefore smriti rather than shruti, is often treated as an honorary Upanishad and is one of the three “foundations” (prasthana-traya) of Vedanta, together with the Upanishads and the Brahma Sutras.
Detail from a Rigveda manuscript in Devanagari script. Source: Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
The big ideas
Rita: the cosmic order
The earliest Vedic hymns are not philosophy, but they contain the seed of it in the concept of rita: the order that governs the cosmos, the seasons, the movements of the sun and the right conduct of human beings alike. Rita is maintained by the sacrifice and guarded by the god Varuna. It is the ancestor of dharma, the central ethical concept of later Hinduism, and it expresses an intuition that runs through all Indian thought: that the moral order and the natural order are one order, and that to act rightly is to act in harmony with the way things are.
The sacrifice and its interiorisation
For the Brahmanas, the sacrifice is not a gift to the gods but the engine of the universe. The world itself was created by a primordial sacrifice – in the Purusha Sukta (Rigveda 10.90), the gods dismember a cosmic Man and make the sky from his head, the earth from his feet, and the four social classes from his mouth, arms, thighs and feet. By performing the ritual correctly, the priest re-enacts creation and keeps the cosmos running. This idea of hidden correspondences between the ritual, the human body and the universe is then turned inward by the Aranyakas and Upanishads: the real sacrifice is not the fire on the altar but the fire of knowledge within. “The breath is the sacrificial fire,” says the Chandogya. This move – from external rite to inner realisation – is the pivot on which the whole Vedic tradition turns.
The questioning of the gods
What is remarkable about the late Rigveda is how openly it doubts. The Nasadiya Sukta, the “Hymn of Creation” (Rigveda 10.129), begins with a world before being and non-being, before death and immortality, before day and night, and ends not with an answer but with a shrug of cosmic proportions:
“Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation?The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe. Who then knows whence it has arisen?Whether God’s will created it, or whether He was mute; perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not –He who surveys it in the highest heaven, he alone knows. Or perhaps he does not know."– Rigveda 10.129.6–7
Another hymn (10.121) asks after each verse, “To which god shall we offer our oblation?” – and the god, Ka, turns out literally to be named “Who?” Already in the Veda, then, the gods are being pushed aside in favour of something more fundamental: a single principle behind the many.
Brahman: the one reality
That principle the Upanishads call Brahman. The word originally meant the sacred power in the ritual formula; it comes to mean the ultimate reality underlying everything, the ground of being that is not a god among gods but the source and substance of all that exists. Brahman is described both positively – as being, consciousness and bliss (sat-chit-ananda, a later formula) – and negatively, as beyond all description: “not this, not this.” It is not a creator standing outside creation. It is what creation is made of.
Atman: the self
The Upanishads' second great term is atman, the self. Not the ego, not the personality, not the body or the mind, but the pure witness that is present in all experience and is never itself an object of experience – “the unseen seer, the unheard hearer, the unthought thinker,” as Yajnavalkya puts it. The Katha Upanishad’s chariot image is the clearest statement: the body is the chariot, the senses the horses, the mind the reins, the intellect the driver, and the atman is the passenger who rides but does not steer.
Tat tvam asi: the identity of the two
The decisive claim of the Upanishads, and the thought for which they are most famous, is that these two – the ultimate reality of the universe and the innermost self of the person – are the same. The Chandogya puts it in a story. Uddalaka asks his son Shvetaketu to put a lump of salt in water and come back in the morning. Then he asks him to find the salt. The boy cannot; it has dissolved. “Taste the water from this end. How is it?” “Salty.” “From the middle?” “Salty.” “From that end?” “Salty.” The salt is everywhere in the water, though invisible. “In the same way, my son, you do not perceive the Being here, but it is here all the same. That which is this finest essence – the whole world has that as its self. That is reality. That is the self. You are that (tat tvam asi), Shvetaketu.”
This identity is the heart of what later became Vedanta. The great commentator Shankara (c. 700 CE) read it as strict non-dualism (advaita): there is only Brahman, and the appearance of a separate world and separate selves is a kind of ignorance. Ramanuja (c. 1100) read it as “qualified non-dualism”: the self is part of Brahman, as a limb is part of a body, but not simply identical with it. Madhva (c. 1250) read it dualistically. The arguments continue.
Karma, samsara, moksha
The Upanishads are the first texts to set out clearly the framework that nearly all later Indian philosophy, Buddhist and Jain as well as Hindu, would share. Karma, originally meaning ritual action, comes to mean action in general and the law by which every action bears fruit for the one who performs it. Samsara is the cycle of birth, death and rebirth driven by karma. Moksha is liberation from the cycle. And the way to liberation, for the Upanishads, is not ritual and not good works but knowledge – the direct realisation that one’s self is Brahman, after which there is nothing further to desire and no further reason to be reborn. “He who knows Brahman becomes Brahman.”
Om
Finally, the syllable Om (or Aum), which first appears in the Upanishads as the sound that encapsulates the whole of the Veda and the whole of reality. The Mandukya Upanishad maps its three sounds onto the three states of consciousness and its silence onto the fourth, the self beyond all states. It is still the most widely used sacred sound in India and the opening of nearly every Hindu prayer.
Relative importance and influence
Within the tradition, the ranking is clear. The Rigveda is foundational and the most revered; the Samaveda and Yajurveda are technical adjuncts to it; the Atharvaveda is accepted but slightly less prestigious. Among the layers, the Samhitas carry the highest ritual authority, but the Upanishads have had by far the greatest intellectual influence. Six orthodox schools of Hindu philosophy (darshanas) all claim Vedic authority, but only one of them, Vedanta, is primarily a reading of the Upanishads – and it is Vedanta, in its various forms, that came to dominate Hindu thought and that most people today mean when they speak of “Hindu philosophy.”
The other schools took different parts of the Veda as their centre. Mimamsa devoted itself to the ritual portions and developed, in the process, a sophisticated philosophy of language and a theory of the eternity of the Veda. Samkhya and Yoga developed the analysis of the person that the Upanishads had begun. Nyaya and Vaisheshika turned to logic and atomism. And the great heterodox movements defined themselves against the Veda: the Buddha rejected its authority, its ritual and its doctrine of a permanent self, while keeping its framework of karma and liberation; the Jains did the same with a different metaphysics; the materialist Charvakas mocked the Vedas as “the babble of knaves.”
Outside India, the Upanishads were first translated into Persian in the seventeenth century, under the Mughal prince Dara Shikoh, and from Persian into Latin in 1801–02 by the French orientalist Anquetil-Duperron. Through that Latin translation they reached Schopenhauer, who called them “the most rewarding and elevating reading there can possibly be in the world” and kept a copy by his bed; his philosophy of the will and of compassion is deeply shaped by them. Through Schopenhauer and the German Romantics they influenced Nietzsche, Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman. Max Müller’s monumental edition of the Rigveda (1849–74) founded modern Indology. In the twentieth century the Upanishads shaped T. S. Eliot (The Waste Land ends with words from the Brihadaranyaka), Aldous Huxley, Erwin Schrödinger (who found in tat tvam asi an answer to the puzzle of consciousness in physics), and the whole stream of Western interest in yoga and meditation.
Within India itself, the Vedas were central to the nineteenth-century Hindu reform movements – the Arya Samaj’s slogan was “Back to the Vedas” – and to the thought of Vivekananda, Aurobindo and Radhakrishnan, through whom Vedanta became the face Hinduism presented to the world. They remain the ultimate court of appeal in Hindu orthodoxy, though most Hindus have never read them and daily religious practice draws far more on the epics, the Puranas and the devotional poets.
Relevance to life
The Vedas were composed by and for ritual specialists in a Bronze Age pastoral society. What can they say to anyone now?
Look behind the many for the one. The Vedic poets began with dozens of gods and ended by asking what lies behind them all. This is the basic philosophical move – the refusal to be satisfied with surfaces, the suspicion that the apparent variety of things conceals a simpler truth. You do not have to accept the Upanishads' answer to practise their question: what is the one thing that all this is really about?
You are not what you observe. The Upanishadic analysis of the self as the witness, never the object, is a tool you can use. When you are anxious, you can notice that something in you is aware of the anxiety and is not itself anxious. When you are angry, something observes the anger. The texts invite you to identify with the observer rather than the observed. Whatever you make of the metaphysics, this is the core insight of every meditative tradition since, and it works.
Be comfortable with not knowing. The most honest line in all of scripture may be the Nasadiya Sukta’s “Or perhaps he does not know.” The Vedas model a relationship to the great questions that is neither dogmatic certainty nor dismissive scepticism, but a sustained, curious, humble asking. There is something freeing in a sacred text that admits it does not have the final answer.
Ritual matters – as long as you know what it is for. The Vedic tradition took the small, repeated, exactly-performed act with the utmost seriousness, and then asked what it was really about. Our own lives are full of rituals we perform without asking that question – morning routines, family traditions, professional ceremonies. The Vedic lesson is not to abolish them but to find the correspondence: what inner reality is this outer action meant to enact?
Knowledge, not performance, liberates. The whole arc of the Vedas moves from doing the right thing to understanding what is true. The Upanishads' claim is that no amount of correct action, by itself, will set you free; only seeing clearly will. In an age of productivity and performance metrics, this is a quietly subversive thought. It suggests that the most important work is the work of understanding, and that it cannot be delegated or measured.
The salt in the water. Uddalaka’s lesson to Shvetaketu is, among other things, a lesson in how to look. The most important things are often not visible as objects at all; they are dissolved in everything, present everywhere, tasted rather than seen. To look for the meaning of your life as if it were a thing you might find somewhere may be the wrong way to look. It may be in every part, like salt in water.
Where to start reading
- The Upanishads, translated by Patrick Olivelle (Oxford World’s Classics) – the best scholarly translation of the twelve principal Upanishads, with an excellent introduction. For a freer, more poetic version, Eknath Easwaran’s translation is widely loved.
- The Rig Veda: An Anthology, translated by Wendy Doniger (Penguin Classics) – 108 hymns well chosen to show the range of the collection, including the creation hymns of Book 10. Start here rather than with the complete text.
- The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India, translated by Stephanie Jamison and Joel Brereton (Oxford, 3 vols.) – the complete, definitive modern translation, for those who want everything.
- The Bhagavad Gita – not a Veda, but the most accessible way into the world-view the Upanishads created. Laurie Patton’s translation (Penguin) or Winthrop Sargeant’s with Sanskrit text.
- Chandogya Upanishad, Book 6 and Katha Upanishad – if you read only two Upanishadic texts, read these: the salt-in-water dialogue and the story of Nachiketas and Death.
For context, Gavin Flood’s An Introduction to Hinduism (Cambridge) is the standard overview; Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History is longer and more opinionated; Sue Hamilton’s Indian Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction places the Vedas within the development of Indian thought.
Read more
- The Vedas – Encyclopaedia Britannica. A concise overview of the four Vedas and their layers.
- Upanishads – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. On the philosophy of the principal Upanishads.
- Shankara – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. On the most influential interpreter of the Upanishads.
- Rigveda – Memory of the World – UNESCO’s entry for the Rigveda manuscripts inscribed in 2007.
- Rigveda (Griffith translation, 1896) – the complete Victorian translation, out of copyright and free online. Dated but serviceable for reference.
- The Upanishads (Max Müller translation, 1879–84) – Müller’s translation in the Sacred Books of the East, also free online.
