The Four Vedas -- An Overview of Hinduism's Oldest Scriptures

Long before any of it was written down, a body of hymns, rituals and teachings was being memorised syllable by syllable, teacher to student, in the households of priestly families in north-western India. That body of sound is the Veda, from the root vid, "to know". Hindus have called it shruti, "what was heard", because tradition holds that the rishis did not compose it but received it -- heard it in deep insight -- and passed it on unchanged. Everything else in Hindu literature, the epics and Puranas and law books included, is smriti, "what is remembered", and counts as authoritative only where it agrees with the Veda.

There are four Vedas. Most scholars place the oldest hymns, those of the Rigveda, in the second millennium BCE, with the later layers of all four collections taking shape over many centuries after. Tradition regards them as without beginning. Both agree on one thing that matters for how the Vedas are read: they were spoken and sung long before they were read.

Each Veda is not a single book but a library in layers. At the centre is the Samhita, the collection of hymns or formulas. Around it grew the Brahmanas, prose texts that explain the ritual and the meaning behind each act. Then come the Aranyakas, the "forest books", which turn the ritual inward and treat it as meditation. Last are the Upanishads, which ask what lies behind the ritual and its gods altogether, and answer with Brahman, the one reality, and Atman, the Self. Because the Upanishads come at the end of the Veda, their teaching is called Vedanta, "the end of the Veda".

This layering explains why one tradition can hold both elaborate fire rituals and the teaching that ritual cannot give the highest goal. The Mundaka Upanishad says so plainly: it lists the four Vedas and their six auxiliary sciences as the "lower knowledge", and calls the knowledge by which the imperishable is grasped the "higher".

How do you keep a text exact for three thousand years without writing it down? The Vedic answer was to memorise it several times over, in different patterns. Students learnt the continuous text (samhita-patha), then each word separately (pada-patha), then words in overlapping pairs (krama-patha), and in the most demanding methods, such as jata and ghana, in pairs repeated forwards and backwards. A mistake in one pattern shows up against the others. Pitch accents were marked by hand movements as the verses were chanted. The result is one of the most precise oral traditions known, and in 2008 UNESCO inscribed the Vedic chanting tradition on its list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

The Vedas also produced the first Indian sciences. To chant correctly, perform the rite at the right moment and build the fire altar to the right measurements, six auxiliary disciplines grew up: phonetics, ritual, grammar, etymology, metre and astronomy -- the six Vedangas. Panini's grammar and the geometry of the Shulba Sutras both began here.

Most Hindus today meet the Vedas not as whole books but in pieces that never left daily life: the Gayatri mantra from the Rigveda, recited at dawn; the Purusha Sukta and Shri Sukta at pujas; the Rudram from the Krishna Yajurveda in Shiva temples; Vedic verses at every wedding and funeral. And through the Upanishads, the Vedas' philosophical end, they shape the questions Hindu thought still asks: what is real, what is the Self, and how is it known.