The Origin and Antiquity of the Vedas: Shruti

The Dating: Who wrote the Vedas? This is an oftrepeated question by the scholars, and the critics of the Vedas. Naturally. When most writers use the 'copy and paste' technique to see their name in print, it is natural for the world to wonder how someone could create such a great thing and not leave their name behind! Since our childhood, we have grown to see the name of the creator associated with the creation. But in India, the concept of the Creator is impersonal, and hence it has been the tendency of the great creators of art, poetry and music to remain anonymous. According to them, the personal degrades, whereas the impersonal elevates. 

 The Vedas, and their recorders are as impersonal as God Himself.  

 No single person, or a group of persons wrote the Vedas. As mentioned, the ancient rishis (sages) in the depths of their meditation and also in their transcendental state of mind came face to face with truths which they recorded as The Vedas. 

These truths were passed from the father to the son, or from the teacher to the disciple orally. Mostly these truths stayed with the families whose ancestors had discovered them. With time, more and more revelations were added to the existing mass, which made it difficult to manage the work through oral tradition. After some time, addition to the existing mass of knowledge was stopped, and every new finding was recorded in some other kind of work. 

 All this information comes to us from the tradition and writings of the ancient times. Indian scholars neither know, nor care to know the dates related to the Vedas: when they were composed, which section was composed earlier, when their writing began, etc. The system of such dating began from the times of Max Muller, and continues with the Western scholars. Unfortunately, even for them it is a daunting task. Max Muller fixed the date of the first composition at 1500 BCE, which has now been greatly questioned. Interestingly, there has been a discovery in Asia Minor of the names of the Vedic deities Mitra, Varuna, and Indra, in an inscription of about 1400 BCE. 

 According to some Indian Vedic scholars like Tilak, who based their calculations on astronomical data, the Vedas were composed at least 8000 years ago. Swami 9,000 years ago." 

 One serious problem in fixing the date of the Vedas is the ludicrous Aryan invasion  theory, according to which Aryans came to India around 2000 BCE, and destroyed the existing civilisation to settle down there. However, this theory and the dates related to it have been refuted by the modern scholars. Swami Vivekananda also debunked this theory strongly, and wrote: 

 'Whenever the Europeans find an opportunity, they exterminate the aborigines and settle down in ease and comfort on their lands; and therefore they think the Aryans must have done the same! The Westerners would be considered wretched vagabonds if they lived in their native homes depending wholly on their own internal resources, and so they have to run wildly about the world seeking how they can feed upon the fat of the land of others by spoliation and slaughter; and therefore they conclude the Aryans must have done the same! But where is your proof? 

Guess-work? Then keep your fanciful guesses to yourselves! In what Veda, in what Sukta, do you find that the Aryans came into India from a foreign country? Where do you get the idea that they slaughtered the wild aborigines? What do you gain by talking such nonsense? ' 

 Another interesting reason for this problem of dating is the prejudices in the minds of the European scholars, who were all Christians. According to Christianity, the earth, the sun, the stars and everything was created in 4032 BCE (according to the Bible, and the year calculated by the great scientist Newton himself!). Naturally it was impossible for them to believe in a culture which went beyond the official date of the Lord's act. 

 For our studies, fixing the date of the Vedas is no issue at all. Suffice it to say that the Vedas were revealed to the sages, who passed on the wisdom to their disciples orally. Writing appeared in India around the 5th century BC in the form of the Brahmi script, but texts of the length of the Rig Veda were not written down until much later. Very few manuscripts ( a maximum of 80) are available of this work, since most families carried the whole thing in their head. The oldest surviving manuscript dates to the 11th century.  

 The sages took extraordinary precautions to preserve from loss or corruption the sacred text, which was being passed orally. The first step towards this was the of Sandhi (conjunction). 

There are other rules too. The two methods of memorisation came to be known as:  Samhitāpātha, which  has all Sanskrit rules of sandhi applied and is the text used for recitation; and the Padapātha has each word isolated and is used for memorisation. 

 Padapātha was followed by other and more complicated methods of reciting the text, and by various works called Anukramanis or 'Indexes', which enumerate from the beginning to the end of the Rig Veda the number of stanzas contained in eachhymn, the deities, and the metres of all the stanzas of the Rig Veda. It is due to  these various precautions that the text of the Vedas have been handed down for thousands of years with a fidelity that finds no parallel in any other literature. 

 Since these were learnt by listening, these were called Shruti (heard). 

Other than the Vedas, every other literature which had spiritual connotation was termed Smriti. Throughout the history of India, Shrutis occupied the highest position in matters of respect and authority. In matters of chance conflict between the statements of the two, the words of the Shrutis were accepted as correct. 

 What is amazing about these works is that they were passed on from generation to generation for 8000 years or so, and were preserved in families all over India. 

When in the nineteenth century, Max Muller compiled the whole work for its first printing, the world was amazed to see that there was not a single alphabet's discrepancy between the manuscripts of any two families, though they lived separated by thousands of miles and had maintained them orally! This meant that even the most ancient manuscripts were no more authentic than what the Brahmins of the period were reciting from memory. 

 The world still wonders at the prodigious memory of the Brahmins who preserved a whole library of books in their head, generation after generation for thousands of years! This was the reason why the burning of libraries and the destruction of books in India by the invaders could not destroy the Vedas, and Hinduism was saved from annihilation.