IB World Religions 4.3.1. Key Texts: the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and the Laws of Manu Notes

4.3.1. Key Texts: The Vedas, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and the Laws of Manu

The four Vedas

1. Hindus use the word Veda (knowledge) both for a body of texts and for the authority those texts carry, and the core collections are four.
2. The Rig Veda gathers 1,028 hymns in ten books, addressed to deities including Agni (fire), Indra (storm and war) and Soma (the ritual plant and the god of it).
3. The Sama Veda sets Rig Vedic verses to melody for chanting at sacrifice, while the Yajur Veda supplies the formulas an officiating priest speaks as he performs the ritual actions.
4. The Atharva Veda stands somewhat apart. It gathers charms, healing spells and household rites, and it was accepted as a fourth Veda later than the other three.
5. Each Veda has a samhita (collection) at its core and an attached priestly office. The hotr recites from the Rig, the udgatr sings the Sama and the adhvaryu works from the Yajur.
6. Hindus who never read a line of these texts still treat them as the tradition's final authority, which is why a school is judged orthodox by whether it accepts them.

Divine origin of the Vedas

1. Hindu tradition does not treat the Vedas as authored works. They are held to be apaurusheya (not of human making), perceived rather than composed.
2. The seers who received them are called rishis, and the texts speak of them as having seen or heard the hymns rather than invented them.
3. Mimamsa philosophers take the strongest position available. On their account the Vedas are eternal and beginningless and have no author at all, not even a divine one.
4. Other schools, Nyaya among them, hold that the Vedas were spoken by Ishvara (the Lord), so their reliability rests on a speaker who neither errs nor deceives.
5. The tenth and latest book of the Rig Veda holds the collection's speculative and dialogue hymns. The Nasadiya Sukta (X.129) asks who could possibly know how creation happened, and ends by suggesting that perhaps even its highest overseer does not.
6. Because the sounds themselves are held to carry power, exact recitation matters more than comprehension, and a mantra pronounced wrongly is treated as ineffective rather than merely inelegant.

The principal Upanishads

1. The Upanishads form the closing layer of Vedic literature, which is why the tradition also calls them Vedanta, the end of the Veda.
2. Their concern shifts away from the mechanics of sacrifice toward Brahman (ultimate reality), atman (the self) and the relation between the two.
3. Around a dozen are counted as principal, largely because the great commentators chose to write on those and not on others.
4. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad is the oldest and the longest. Its sage Yajnavalkya describes ultimate reality only by denial, in the formula neti neti, not this, not this.
5. The Chandogya Upanishad carries the teaching of Uddalaka Aruni to his son Shvetaketu, which returns nine times to the same sentence, tat tvam asi, you are that.
6. The Svetasvatara Upanishad is markedly more theistic, presenting the one reality as a personal lord identified with Rudra or Shiva, and devotional schools cite it often for that reason.
7. The name is traditionally read as sitting down close to a teacher, and the texts keep that shape: a pupil asks, a teacher answers, and a third party sometimes objects.

The Bhagavad Gita

1. The Bhagavad Gita (song of the Lord) runs to 700 verses in eighteen chapters, set inside the sixth book of the Mahabharata.
2. It opens with Arjuna laying down his bow rather than fight a battle against his own kinsmen, and it is his charioteer Krishna who answers him.
3. Krishna's reply moves from duty to metaphysics. He argues that the atman is never slain, that Arjuna's sva-dharma as a warrior still stands, and that action done without attachment to its results does not bind the doer.
4. The text sets out three routes to moksha (liberation): karma yoga (action), jnana yoga (knowledge) and bhakti yoga (devotion). It commends the third most warmly of the three.
5. In the eleventh chapter Krishna shows Arjuna the vishvarupa, his universal form, and Arjuna's terror at the sight is among the most quoted passages in all Hindu literature.
6. Much of the text's standing comes from its commentators. Shankara, Ramanuja and Madhva each wrote on it, and each read it as supporting a different account of how the self stands to God.

The Laws of Manu

1. The Laws of Manu, in Sanskrit the Manusmriti, is a dharmashastra or treatise on duty, attributed to Manu and usually placed between the second century BCE and the third century CE.
2. Its roughly 2,700 verses cover the sources of dharma, the duties of the four varnas, the four ashramas, marriage, food, purity, penance, kingship and law.
3. On ritual it is unusually precise, prescribing the householder's daily rites, the age at which each varna should receive the upanayana, and the conduct required at meals and at death.
4. Its statements about women are among the most argued over in Hindu literature. It declares in one place that the gods rejoice where women are honoured, and in another that a woman is not fit for independence, and Hindus quote both.
5. Nineteenth-century colonial courts drew on it heavily in constructing an administrable "Hindu law", which handed one text an authority it had never held across the whole subcontinent.
6. Hindus differ sharply over its standing today. Some treat it as authoritative smriti, while others hold that a smriti text binds only where it does not conflict with shruti or with conscience.

The key texts in use

1. Most Hindus meet these texts through recitation, ritual and retelling rather than through private reading, and many know long passages without owning a copy.
2. The Gayatri mantra, a single verse of the Rig Veda (III.62.10), is the Vedic line most widely used. It is conferred at the upanayana and repeated at dawn and dusk.
3. The Gita is read at funerals and memorial gatherings, and its second chapter, on the self that is never destroyed, is among the passages most often chosen.
4. Upanishadic sentences serve as mahavakyas (great sayings) in teaching lineages, where a pupil is given one and expected to hold and turn it over for years.
5. Printing and translation changed access sharply. The Upanishads reached Europe through a Persian version rendered into Latin by Anquetil-Duperron in 1801, and cheap Indian editions of the Gita have circulated in the millions since the nineteenth century.
6. Hindus in India and the diaspora now use recorded chanting, temple discourse and phone applications alongside printed editions, and mass Gita recitation events draw very large crowds.