FRITS STAAL Discovering the Vedas Origins, Mantras, Rituals, Insights PENGUIN BOOKS Contents Dedication List of Illustrations and Tables Preface Transliteration of Sanskrit PART I: ORIGINS AND BACKGROUNDS One or Many? 1. Geography of the Vedas and their Language The Rigveda and the Indus Civilization • Mitanni Vedic and Indic Genetics • Geography and Indo-European • The Iranian Wedge and the BMAC • The Tarim Mummies 2. Archaeology and the Oral Tradition Diversities of Reliability • Carts, Chariots and the Mind • Indic Representations of Spoke-Wheeled Chariots • Sintashta • Attested Locations on the Way to India • Note on Aryan and Race PART II: THE VEDAS Constructing an Edifice 3. Civilization and Society Absence of Caste in the Vedas • Vedic Evidence and Scholarly Discussions • Varying Terminologies and the first ‘Vedic Villages’ • Rathakāra and a Note on Women 4. The Four Vedas Early Vedic • Middle Vedic • Late Vedic • The Apotheosis of Schools 5. Rigveda Gods, Composers and Metres • Agni • Indra • Soma • A Speculative Poem • The Scientific Study of the Veda 6. Sāmaveda Singing in Villages and Forests 7. Yajurveda The Role of the Yajurveda • The Ritual Arena • Yajurveda Mantras and Brāhmaṇas 8. Atharvaveda The Thesis of Kautsa 9. Brāhmaṇas and Āraṇyakas Villages, Forests and the Ecology • Brāhmaṇas and Āraṇyakas • Locating Obscurities, Esotericisms and Irrationalities 10. Upaniads Generalities • Karma, Rebirth and Life after Death • Karma, Jñāna and Bhakti • ‘In That Way You Are’ • Dhyāna, Meditation and the End of the Vedas • The Two Main Contributions of the Upaniṣads PART III: ANALYSING THE VEDAS How to Discover 11. Mantras The Meaninglessness of Mantras • Language, Syntax and Recursiveness • Steps Beyond Kautsa • Pragmatics, Speech Acts and Bird Song • The Gāyatrī Mantra 12. Ritual Mantra and Kalpa • The Exclusion of Śrauta from Anthropology in English • Self-Embedding and Other Animals • How the Priests Work Together • Human Sacrifice 13. Secrets of the Sadas Soma Sequences • Moving South and East • Never Seeing Eye to Eye • Facing All Directions • Epilogue PART IV: WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THE VEDAS? Analysis and Discovery 14. Sūtra: Vedic Sciences The Concept of Science and its Ancient History • The Traditional List and the Concept of Sūtra • The Science of Ritual • Geometry • Numbers and Infinity • ‘Vedic Mathematics’ • The Prātiśākhyas and the Padapāha • The Sound Pattern of Language • Notations and Artificial Languages • Astronomy and Astrology 15. Vedic Insights Towards Universality • The Powers of Language • The Limitations of Language • Conclusions PART V: BUDDHISM AND THE VEDAS After the Vedas 16. Buddhism Why Buddhism? • History, Geography and an Inkling of Nirvṇa • About the Vedas and Buddhism • Entering the Order, Women and Sexualities • Ahiṃsā and the Public Domain • Eschatology and Karmic Arithmetic • Conceptual Problems • Dharma and Cakra • The First University and Buddhist Logic • Final Conclusions Illustrations Footnotes List of Illustrations Fourteen: Sūtra: Vedic Sciences Appendix I. Liu Hui’s Proof of Baudhāyana’s Theorem Appendix II. Euclid’s Proof of Baudhāyana’s Theorem Readings Source Notes Bibliography Copyright Page For Saraswathy, Parvati Jeannette and Frederik Nanoo Staal List of Illustrations * Map. Attested Locations on the Way to India. Figure 1. Geography of the Vedas: Rivers Figure 2. The Rigveda and the Other Three Vedas: Tribes Figure 3. The Indus Civilization between 2100 and 1600 BCE Figure 4. Two Pages of Kikkuli’s Treatise Figure 5. Indo-Aryan, the Language of the Vedas Figure 6. Togolok-21, BMAC, reconstructed by Viktor Sarianidi Figure 7. Carts from Harappa (2100–1600 BCE) Figure 8. Wheels from Harappa (2600–1900 BCE) Figure 9. Panel from Sanchi with Spoked Wheels Figure 10. Rock Paintings from Mirzapur Figure 11. Spoked Wheel from the Sun Temple at Konarak Figure 12. Procession Cart with Solid Wheels from a Temple at Kumbakonam Figure 13. Sintashta Graves (between 2200 and 1800 BCE) Figure 14. Ceiling Panel of Sage Vidyāraṇya Figure 15. Ritual Arena for the Soma Ceremonies Figure 16. The Ritual Arena as a Historical Map Figure 17. Facing Opposite Directions in the Sadas Figure 18. Looking East Into the Sadas Figure 19. The History of Ancient and Medieval Science Figure 20. Squares and Oblongs in Proto-geometry Figure 21. The New Domestic Altar Figure 22. First Layer of the Piling of Agni Figure 23. The Theorem of Baudhāyana Figure 24. The Sound Pattern of Language Figure 25. Karmic Arithmetic or Tit-for-tat I: Ridiculing Ugly People Figure 26. Karmic Arithmetic or Tit-for-tat II: Despising Low-class Musicians. List of Tables Table 1. The Four Vedas 80–81 Table 2. The Excellent Chariot with bha Syllables I Table 3. The Excellent Chariot with bha Syllables II Preface He who studies understands, not the one who sleeps. Rigveda 5.44.13 The beings of the mind are not of clay. Byron, Childe Harold The Vedas are often regarded as abstract and mysterious sacred books. If there is one thing the Vedas are not, it is books: they are oral compositions in a language that was used for ordinary communication; and were handed down by word of mouth like that language itself. Though the Rigveda is said in English to consist of ten ‘books’, it is a misleading mistranslation of Sanskrit maṇḍala which means ‘cycle’. The expression ‘sacred book’ is also an erroneous appellation. It is applicable to the Bible or Qur’ān and was insisted upon by missionaries and colonial administrators who could not imagine anything else. It is less easy to explain why this misleading construction has been thoughtlessly embraced by moderns. It is true that the Vedic poets were regarded as inspired and their speech was considered a powerful agent. The Rigveda says: ‘Soma unpressed has never elated Indra, nor its pressed juices unaccompanied by sublime language (bráhman)’ (RV 7.26.1). It nowhere says that the Veda is revealed or śruti, literally ‘what is heard.’ It is heard only in the sense that it is transmitted from father to son or from teacher to pupil. The Vedas are an Oral Tradition and that applies especially to two of the four: the Veda of Verse (Rigveda) and the Veda of Chants (Sāmaveda). Another anachronistic idea is that the Vedas are apaurueya, ‘of non-human origin’. They never regard themselves as such. The idea comes from the Pūrva Mīmāṃsā, a philosophical system that arose several centuries after the end of the Vedas. The Rigveda was composed by poets, human individuals whose names were household words even before there were households: Viśvāmitra, ‘Friend of All’, Bharadvāja, ‘Bearing Strength’, Dīrghatamas, ‘Seeing Far Into Darkness’. These poets were not addressed by gods. They used the bráhman of Vedic invocations to address gods. I have translated bráhman as ‘language’ and not ‘speech’, a common rendering, for reasons that will become increasingly clear in the course of this book. My book will demonstrate that the Vedas are not one or all of a piece. It is easier to say what they are not than what they are. The Vedas had no founder or supreme authority, no popes or pontiffs, and neither were they associated with temples or icons. They refer to a variety of priests with distinct ritual tasks (sixteen in the classical Śrauta ritual), but no hymns or prayers, English words often met with in translations. There are gods, on earth and in heaven, but they do not dispense grace (with the possible exception of Varuṇa, who came from Bactria). They do not expect loving devotion or bhakti. The Vedas are not a religion in any of the many senses of that widespread term. They have always been regarded as storehouses of ‘knowledge’, that is: veda. But they are more than that. They embody a civilization. The idea of writing a book about the Vedas that addresses both the scholar and the interested lay reader came from Romila Thapar. It was also inspired by Wendy Doniger’s Rigveda selections published in Penguin Classics, a book that was written ‘for people, not for scholars.’ That selection of ‘one hundred and eight hymns’, a tenth of the Rigveda which is the first and earliest of the four Vedas, contains beautiful translations and a mass of scholarship. The Vedas are often puzzling; sometimes abstract or mysterious; they may also be muddled; but those are the exceptions, not the rule. They overflow with information, much of it concrete. Part I of my book extracts such information from the Oral Tradition but also from archaeology. It deals with Vedic people and their language, what they thought and did, and where they went and when. Part II, almost twice as long as any of the others, provides essential information about the