What are the Vedas?

ORIGINS AND BACKGROUND OF HINDUISM

The word "Hinduism" comes from the Indus River, which flows through what is now Pakistan. In the third millennium B.C., the great civilization of Mohendo‑jaro flourished there, populated by the darkskinned Dravidians. From what archaeologists have been able to discover, the Dravidians had a polytheistic fertility religion that centered upon worship of the forces of nature and use of rituals, merging human sexuality with the hope for abundant crops.

About 2000 B.C., the light‑skinned and warlike Aryans came over the Caucasus Mountains and conquered the people of the Indus Valley. The Aryans also had a polytheistic religion, and some of the most popular Dravidian gods received new Aryan names but retained their old functions. The Aryans wrote down their hymns, prayers, mythic stories and chants into the Vedas, Brahamanas, Aranyakas and Upanishads, composed between 2000 and 700 B.C., and known as the Vedic literature.

These writings are considered by Hindus to be supernaturally inspired and are as sacred to them as the Bible is to Christians.'

Dravidian polytheistic fertility religion and the early Aryan Vedic polytheistic religion laid the foundations of what later became Hinduism. While the earliest Vedas were blatantly polytheistic and devoted to rituals and sacrifice, the later Vedas showed a movement toward pantheism (from the word "pan," meaning "everything," and "theos," meaning "God"). According to pantheism, God did not create the world; God is the world, along with everything in it.

Although the earlier Hindu scriptures had mentioned many gods, the highest goal, according to the later Vedic literature, was union with Brahma, the impersonal absolute. The priests of Brahma became known as the Brahmins, who performed the ritual duties for the community, which were demanded in the early Vedic writings to appease the many gods. The Brahmins also maintained a monopoly on the higher truths of pantheistic Brahmanism. Brahmins grew more and more powerful until they became the highest social class.

Around 500 B.C., still more writings were added to the Hindu scriptures. Their purpose was to establish Varna, a rigid caste system, or social hierarchy. One hymn tells how four castes of people came from the head, arms, thighs and feet of the creator god, Brahma. The four castes were the Brahmins (priests); the Kshatriyas (warriors and nobles); Vaisyas (merchants and artisans); and Shudras (slaves). Each caste was then subdivided into hundreds of subcastes, arranged in order of rank. Only Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Vaisyas were allowed to take full advantage of all that the Hindu religion has to offer, but the Shudras were not allowed to hear the Vedas or to use them to try to find salvation.

Was there anything abiding for the Israelite under law? They had no divine person manifested. The object of the law was to await redemption (save in figure); they had not received Christ, still less His propitiation. The mission of the Lord Jesus was to manifest God and the Father to the believer in the Son, and the gift of the Spirit was only after He died and rose and ascended to send Him from heaven. It was therefore altogether unprecedented even for converted men. In general too false religions do not even pretend to it. Whatever playing into lusts and passions, with high-flown rhapsodies there may be in the Koran of Mahomet, there is no revelation of God Himself; there is the revelation of a bundle of lies. So it was in all the ancient "Vedas," as Hindus call their sacred books; and still more with the Buddhists, who were atheists though trifling with polytheists. Brahmanism is polytheistic; but Buddhism is a system of atheism in its pantheistic form, and therefore avowedly has no personal God to reveal any more than its rival has the one true God.

Heathen religious bodies have their sacred books, that answer to them as the Bible answers to the Christians. It is often claimed that they are as good in their way as the Bible. However the Bible need not fear comparison.

The Mohammedans have their Koran, the Hindus their Vedas, the Parsees their Zend Avesta, the Buddists their Tripitaka, and Confucian Texts.

And we know it is the only remedy for sin. A brother tells how, when traveling in India some time ago, he was brought in contact, on the train, with a cultivated Brahmin. After some little discussion concerning Christianity and the religions of India, the Brahmin offered the brother a few pages of his sacred books, the Vedas, to read. He read them, and was surprised at the exalted and beautiful poetry they contained. When he returned them, he was asked his opinion of them. He confessed frankly that he was surprised at finding them to contain such very fine poetry and sentiment. "But," said he, "it lacks what all your sacred books, and all your religions, outside the Bible and Christianity, lack." "What is that?" the native asked. "They contain no remedy for sin," was the reply. Yes, that's the lack with culture, godless education, rationalism, ritualism, and all the makeshifts and substitutes for the gospel in the land to-day — they provide no remedy for sin. And the sin-question is the burning question for a guilty race to stand up to and have settled. And nothing can settle it but the blood. "And the blood of Jesus Christ, God's Son, cleanseth us from all sin." So in his dream the butler sees what stands for the blood, and gets his liberty and reinstatement into Pharaoh's favor.

Dr. Williams asks, How many years are needed to develop modern French out of Latin? — say nine hundred, that is, from six hundred to Francis I. Well, what then? How many, the divergence of the members of the Indo-European family? Probably, very various; some very early, some much later. The dispersion of the Aryan race is beyond history; and they seem to have had already dialects. The only supposed date is within Septuagint chronology. The Vedas do not go more than to about fourteen hundred years before Christ, leaving one thousand years within even Hebrew chronology to the flood. Circumstances influence the growth of dialects immensely. A tribe moves from a mountain to a plain, or to another climate; the names caused by local circumstances disappear — plants, cattle, terms connected with culture and the like, all change. When long remaining in one place, a language changes; but it is easily seen it is in its forms by civilization. When tribes are entirely separate, with little intercourse, they become distinct languages very rapidly, though grammatical forms are analogous, or the style, as in North America. When a language is widely diffused, and there is much communication, it remains one, and is only developed according to a pretty constant rule, generally of abbreviation of forms. But if nine hundred or a thousand years sufficed to change or form a new language, that time can well be allowed to the history of the Sanskritian or Zend — not more than there is room for in scriptural chronology. Take notice, too, that all this reasoning sets out with treating the history of the tower of Babel as a fable. It is not a nicety of interpretation, but a total rejection of the whole theory.

139 But I should think, while confessing that I am no comparative philologist, that Dr. Williams can know little or nothing about the matter. He says (and all the world is always to understand that the new theology brings from its stores well-authenticated results, mentioned as if every tolerably well-read man should be aware of it): "When again we have traced our Gaelic and our Sanskrit to their inferential pre-Hellenic stem," etc. Now I apprehend this sentence betrays total ignorance of the whole subject. Hellenism or Greek, as well as Latin, is a comparatively modern daughter of Sanskrit itself; Zend, as its twin sister, has its mixed or corrupted mediaeval derivation in Pehlvi, and its direct one in modern Persian and the Teutonic languages. Sanskrit is not traced to a pre-Hellenic stem. It is the root or stem of Hellenistic and Latin language, Zend and Sanskrit are very closely allied dialects of what is often now called Aryan — Zend north of the Himalayas, Sanskrit south. The classical Sanskrit of the Vedas is still more closely allied to Zend than the common Sanskrit. Zend is hard in pronunciation, Sanskrit soft. Gaelic or Irish is held by some able philologists to be the closest existing representative of Sanskrit in the West, with the richest vocabulary of words. Others cite the Lithuanian as having the closest resemblance. This is from the use of soft instead of hard sounds in both, which characterizes Sanskrit, as contrasted with Zend. But Irish is pronounced hard and gutturally. Lithuanian German is very soft; but, as is well known, southern German differs from northern in the hardness of its guttural pronunciation. The aspirates and ellipses in Erse arise from the utterance stopping half-way between the preceding and following sound. If you examine bata (battha), mo wata, ar mbata, you will find the change — that w is half-way between o and b, and in between r and b. It is an imperfect, undefined utterance.

It is curious how false philosophy always is. How, taking man as he is, God is left out, and man is supposed to begin, i.e., to have been created with no connection with, or knowledge of, or relation to God at all. A most absurd and low idea, as if God would have left man, in making him, capable of progress towards, but wholly, absolutely, incognisant of anything but himself, to make out a God as he could! 'Men were in this state' - but how? I may go back to enquire what they would do when they had not God at all, but have no ground or right to assume it was an original state, and there is no experience of men, as such, coming to it. Some glimmerings only of a few, and these wretched, but no people. There are testimonies of dreadful descent. The Vedas have much more of one supreme God than the Mahabharata or the Puranas. Men have gone down, not up, when there was a revelation, and Buddhism is an extreme case, when the misery of men's state was thought only to be met by losing self as an existence with no God - only gods as bad as men.

A more difficult way to achieve moksha is the path of knowledge (inana), which includes self‑renunciation and meditation on the supreme pantheistic reality of Hinduism. This very aesthetic path is open to men only in the highest castes, and it is described in the Upanishads, a series of philosophical treatises composed beginning around 600 B.C. The Upaninshad texts teach that the world as we experience it is mere maya (illusion) and that Brahma is the only thing that really exists and has meaning.

256 Page 327. 'The Vedic hymns bring before us a people to whom the death of the sun is a present reality, for whom no analogy has suggested the idea of a continuous alternation of day and night, and who know not, as the fiery chariot of the sun sinks down in the west whether they shall ever see again the bright face of him who was their friend.' It seems to me absurd to make the working of imagination to be the real thought, as that the sun died when it went down. When these things turned into idolatry and myths, then, of course, all was personified, and filled superstition because God was unknown, and imagination, never faith nor affections, connected with it. How well the Apostle, the Spirit of God says, 'By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, and that the things which are seen were not formed of those which do appear!' Still man's mind constantly ran up into the inalienable thought of God, the testimonium animoe, not indeed Christianoe, but of a divine Being, supreme and only God.

Page 332. 'The simple utterances of the Vedic poets show even more forcibly that the genuine belief in one almighty Being who is at once our Father, our Teacher, and our Judge, had its home first in the ancient Aryan land. It was a conviction to which they were guided by all that they saw or could apprehend of outward phenomena as well as by the irrepressible yearnings which stirred their hearts. For such yearnings and for such a consciousness in the Hebrew tribes we look in vain, before the Babylonish captivity.' How perfectly what accounts for all the beginning with one true God, which must be if there be one, and turning to idolatry, not discerning, not liking to retain God in their knowledge, is left out here! It is rather a contempt of Scripture for a clergyman, but whence came the yearnings if men began as barbarians, intelligent brutes, and only acquired ideas of God, their original state being that they thought the Sun died out and out every evening? And how then did they make one god of it? Is it not evident that the thoughts of one supreme God still remained in the human mind, though overlaid by idolatry? And how the confession that the Greeks had no idea of sin shows, along with their worthless levity, the progress of demoralisation with that of formal idolatry and anthropomorphism!

257 Page 337. 'The Vedic gods are pre-eminently transparent. Instead of one acknowledged king, each is lord in his own domain; each is addressed as the maker of all visible things, while their features and characteristics are in almost all cases interchangeable. Dyaus and Indra, Varuna and Agni are each in his turn spoken of as knowing no superior, and the objects of their chief care are not the children of men, but the winds, the storms, the clouds, and the thunder, which are constantly rising in rebellion against them. No sooner is one conflict ended than another is begun, or rather the same conflict is repeated as the days and seasons come round.' 'The true religious instinct must point to the absolute rule of one righteous God, and cannot itself originate the idea of many independent centres of action.' That the acknowledgment of one true God turned into the recognition of power in the heavens, Sun and various elements in respect to their influence on the interests of men, is evident. But that Dyaus, Varuna and Indra at first individually supplanted one another, just as Ouranos (Earth), Kronos (Time) and Zeus did, cannot, I think, be questioned - supplanted by more human and grosser forms, as Vishnu and Siva, though these, as all Indian gods, are treated by their votaries as supreme. Brahma was but Brahm - a more intellectual conception.

Page 339. 'If we find that, when examined, the functions of the Hindu and Hellenic deities become, if the expression may be used, more and more atmospheric - if they become the powers which produce the sights of the changing sky - if their great wars are waged in regions far above the abodes of men, the last blow is given to the theory which by the most arbitrary of assumptions finds the root of all mythology in the religious instincts of mankind.' No blow is given at all, still less to the original knowledge of one true God turned into idolatry but never lost, and phenomena made poetry of in connection with idolatry. The instinctive recognition of One Supreme runs through all idolatry. The religious instinct is what remained of this. There is a great want of scope of mind in this book.