The Rig Veda
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Selection or partial work
- Authorship:
- Anonymous or composite
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text · 3 illegible passages, excluded from answers
- Extent:
- ~110,000 words · 504 passages
Cite this work
- APARig Veda. (n.d.). The Rig Veda. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/rig-veda/the-rig-veda
- MLARig Veda. "The Rig Veda." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/rig-veda/the-rig-veda.
- ChicagoRig Veda. The Rig Veda. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/rig-veda/the-rig-veda.
What it is about
The Rigveda, the oldest text of India and among the oldest in the world: one thousand and twenty-eight hymns in Vedic Sanskrit, transmitted orally with a precision that is hard to credit.
Context and history
It was composed around the second millennium BC and preserved for centuries without writing, memorised by priestly families using cross-recitation techniques that made any error detectable: the text we read is probably more faithful than that of many medieval European manuscripts. The hymns are invocations to Agni, Indra, Varuna, Soma and others, for fire rituals. What strikes the modern reader is their strangeness: they are texts of a culture we have no way of reconstructing whole, and many passages are obscure even to the ancient Indian commentators. The famous hymn 10.129, on the origin of the world, ends by saying that perhaps not even the god who watches it from above knows.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
1 Not one of you, gods, is small, not one a little child; all of you are truly great. ^ 2 "'Therefore you are worthy of praise and of sacrifice, you thkty-three gods of Manu, arrogant and powerful. ^ Protect us, help us and speak for us ; do not lead us into the ^stance far away from the path of our father Manu. ^ You gods who are all here and who belong to all men, give far-reachmg shelter to us and to our cows and horses. CREATION The R/^ Veda refers glancingly to many different theories of creation. Several of these regard creation as the result - often apparently a mere by-product - of a cosmic battle, such as those mentioned in the hymns to Indra, or as a result of the apparendy immotivated act of separating heaven and earth, an act attributed to several different gods. These aspects of creation are woven m and out of the hymns m the older parts of the Rjg Veda, books a through 9 But in the subsequent tenth book we encounter for the first time hymns that are entirely devoted to speculations on the ongms of the cosmos. Some of these hymns seek the ongms of the existence of existence itself (10.129) or of the creator himself (10.121). Others speculate upon the sacrifice as the origin of the earth and the people m it (10.90), or upon the ongms of the sacrifice (10.130, 10.190). Sacrifice is central to many concepts of creation, particulady to those exphady linked to sacrificial gods or instruments, but it also appears as a supplement to other forms of creation such as sculpture (10.81-2) or anthropomorphic birth (10.72). 10.129 Creation Hymn (Nasadiya) This short hymn, though hngnistically simple (with the exception of one or two troublesome nouns), is conceptually extremely provo← Back to Rig Veda