I should not be surprised if even some of those who are doing me the honour of reading my Recollections of Auld Lang Syne, and who in this volume of recollections of my Indian Friends, have so often come across the name of Veda, were to say in their secret heart, What in all the world can that Veda be to which this misguided man has devoted the whole of his life? I have been asked such a question before now, and it is perhaps not unreasonable that I should try to answer it here. For after all, was not the Veda the first of my Indian friends? Was it not the bridge that led me from West to East, from Greece and Italy to India, nay, from Dessau to Oxford, from Germany to England? Whatever other people may say about the misguided man who sacrificed everything to the Veda, I still count the Veda among my best friends, and I sometimes regret that my duties as Professor of Comparative Philology in the University of Oxford should during my later years have withdrawn my full allegiance from it. What then is the Veda?
The Vedas, as we possess them, are four systematically arranged collections of hymns and verses, and the Veda is often used in the sense of these four Vedas taken together. The first and most important Veda is the Rig-Veda, which has often, and not without some truth, been called the only true Veda. It contains 1,017, or with some additions, the Vâlakhilya-hymns, 1,028 hymns, each on an average containing about ten verses. They are all addressed to Devatâs or deities, and whatever subject is addressed in these hymns, down to bows, arrows, and stones, is supposed to become, ipso facto, a Devatâ, while the poet is called the seer or Rishi. The metres are numerous and strictly regulated, though there is more freedom in them than in the later artificial poetry of India.
The hymns of the Rig-Veda were meant to be recited at sacrifices, and this is no doubt the explanation of their careful preservation during many centuries, by means of a strictly regulated oral tradition.
The second, the Sâma-Veda, is a much smaller collection of hymns, most of them borrowed from the Rig-Veda, but different in character so far as they were meant to be sung at the ancient sacrifices.
The third, the Yagur-Veda, consists of sacrificial formulas and of verses to be repeated in a low voice by a class of priests who were entrusted chiefly with the manual work required for the performance of sacrifices.
The fourth, the Atharva-Veda, probably collected at a later time, contains, besides many hymns from the Rig-Veda, a large number of popular verses used for magical and medicinal purposes, some of them possibly of great antiquity, particularly if we adopt the principle that whatever is very silly is necessarily very old.
Taken as a whole these hymns, particularly those of the Rig-Veda, are certainly older than any other poetry we possess in India, nay, older than any literary composition we possess of any of the Aryan nations in Asia or Europe. Their real interest, however, consists not only in their age, but in the simplicity and naturalness of their poetical addresses to the most striking phenomena of nature by which the Aryan settlers found themselves surrounded in India, and in which and behind which they recognised unseen agents by whom both their physical and their moral life were powerfully influenced.
If all books have their fates, the oldest book of the world, the Veda, has certainly had the most extraordinary fate. It was known to exist and people began to write about it, long before it had been seen or handled by any European. I remember Baron Bunsen telling me how his chief object in arranging to go to India with his pupil, Mr. Astor, was to see whether there really was such a book in existence. By consulting the Lettres édifiantes he might have known that it was in existence as a real book, and had been seen and handled by some of the Catholic missionaries in India. But though seen, not a line of it had ever been published, still less translated, because native scholars, willing as they might be to help missionaries and others in reading the Laws of Manu, the Mahâbhârata and Râmâyana, were most decidedly unwilling to help them to an understanding of the Veda. There were, no doubt, many reasons for it, one of them being possibly that there were few, if any, Brâhmans at the beginning of this century who were able to translate the Veda themselves. There were many who knew it or large portions of it by heart, and could recite the hymns at sacrifices and public or private gatherings, but they did not even profess that they understood it. They were proud to know it by heart and by sound, and there were some who actually thought that the hymns would lose their magic power, if recited by one who understood their meaning. Manuscripts were never very numerous, and even when one of them fell into the hands of Europeans, they soon found that, without a commentary, the hymns baffled all endeavours at translation.
During all that time the most exaggerated ideas were spread about the Vedas. The Brâhmans themselves declared that they contained the oldest divine revelation, that they were not the compositions of human authors, but the work of Brahman, the Supreme Spirit, who had revealed them to inspired sages or Rishis, seers. European scholars were carried away for a time by the hope that they would find in these Vedas, if not the jabberings of the Pithecanthropoi, at least the earliest flashes of thoughts of an awakening humanity, the faint echoes of a primordial wisdom going back to the very beginning of human life on earth, “when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy.”
When at last not only the texts but the immense Sanskrit commentary also of the most important, the Rig-Veda, had been published, people began to see that there was little of primeval, mysterious wisdom to be found in the Vedic hymns, but only the simplest thoughts that must have passed through the minds of the Rishis when they began to ponder on the great phenomena of nature which every morning and night, every spring and winter were unfolded before their eyes. No superhuman revelation was required for that kind of poetry. Nothing could be clearer than that the constant themes of these Vedic songs were sunrise and morning, day and night, earth and the rivers, storms, lightning, rain, sunset and night. Even this was for a time stoutly denied by writers who did not know the Sanskrit alphabet. But what else was there to interest the ancient Âryas? It is true that even the Brâhmans themselves protested against the Western scholars, whose translations seemed to reduce their sacred hymns to the low level of mere descriptions of nature[[11]]. We are not and never have been, they said, mere sun-worshippers or fire-worshippers, or rain-worshippers, but sun, fire, and sky were only symbols to us of the Godhead, of one and the same Divine Being in His manifold manifestations. In one sense they were certainly right, but I doubt whether many of the much abused Western scholars had ever denied this. Many things have to be taken as understood, and Western scholars evidently took it for granted that when the Vedic poets addressed their hymns to the dawn, to the sun, the sky, the storm-winds, the earth, or the rain, they did not simply mean the fiery ball that rose in the morning and vanished at night, or the blue sky, or the soil on which they stood, or the rain that had fertilised the soil. The very fact that they addressed these phenomena of nature with the pronoun of the second person, changed them at once into persons, or what were called Devatâs, deities, and thus the saying of one of their old grammarians, Yâska, is justified, that whatever object is addressed in these Vedic hymns is to be called its Devatâ—or deity. Later on it came to be recognised that there was even a deeper ground for this deification, and that the necessities of language, that is, of thought, did not allow at first of any names being formed, except names of agent. Dyaus, masc., for instance, the lighter, was earlier than Dyaus, fem., what is lighted up, the sky.