Rig-Veda

see also: Etymology of Rig-Veda

The Rig-Veda (ऋग्वेदः in Sanskrit) is oldest of the Hindu texts called Vedas. The Rig-Veda is dedicated mainly to the god Agni, fire and crowned priest. Its anthems with the divinities of the drinkings and the elements result from the Rishi S.

It is, like each of the 3 other Veda (Yajur-Veda, Sama-Veda and Atarva-Veda), divided into four parts:

Samhita : contains the Mantra S and the anthems;
Brahmana : liturgical texts and of ritual;
Aranyaka : the theological section;
Upanishad : the speculative section.

The considerable mass of the texts vedic is divided into four corresponding corpora, at least into theory, with various liturgical specializations : the song (Sama-Veda), the ordinary one of the worship (Yajur-Veda), the magic (Atharva-Veda), the solemn recitation (Rig-Veda).

Each one of these corpora wants to be complete and includes/understands indeed parts in worms (named Samhitas, i.e. “collections”), treaties ritual, comments exegetic, books of wisdom, etc

The most important sections, those which are in charge of greatest spiritual effectiveness the, are Samhitas where the poems are collected: poetry (chandas) is, indeed, a charm in itself. However it is that, for example, the majority of the stanzas appearing in Yajur-Veda result from Samhita of Rig-Veda (Rgveda), which thus seems the heart of the vedic revelation.

Rigveda-Samhita (or Riksamhita; or, by abbreviation, Rig-Veda) is presented in the form of a collection of 1028 anthems (sukta: “thing quite known as”) grouping on the whole a little more than thousand Stanza S (rc, word which one finds in rgveda).

Each poem is dedicated either to a god (Indra, Agni, Varuna…), that is to say to the twin gods who are the has' svins, sometimes with several divinities (one meets there anthems “with all the gods”).

There exists also a small number of ballades and some poems speculative (cosmogonies, praise of the divine Word, Harmony between the men).

The meters used are comparatively numerous, most current being the Anu' stubh (stanza of four octosyllabic worms), the Trishtubh (four worms hendecasyllabic) and the Gayatri (three octosyllabic worms), which one says that she is crowned between all (undoubtedly because initiatory the prayer known as Savitri, “the instigator”, is a gayatri extracted from an anthem to the Sun of Rig-Veda).

With the eyes of the Hindus, Rig-Veda is “nonhuman”: there exists of any eternity and, at the beginning of each cosmic cycle, it is revealed with the men in a miraculous way. Those which receive this revelation, in the form of “visions”, are called Rishis (rsi). Samhita of Rig-Veda gives the names of some of them, such Vishvamitra, Uddalaka, Gritsamada, Atri, Vasi' stha, Bhrigu. But these characters are mythical, and the tradition presents them like demigods living out of time and space.

The problem of the dating of the anthems is not less difficult: these texts are written in a very antiquated Sanskrit that the philological comparison with the other Indo-European languages invites to locate at the beginning of thousand-year-old IIe; however, certain stanzas can have been made up quite front, while many others date from thousand-year-old Ier. Final compilation had to be done about the year 1000, because the gun was already closed at the time of the appearance of the Bouddhisme (Life S.).

Although these anthems have an exclusively liturgical destination (it is about a literature of technicians of the worship), they do not miss a poetic value: religious enthusiasm, boldness of the thought and the expression, richness of the vocabulary contribute to hold the attention of the reader in spite of the monotony of these thousand canticles, which are all of similar invoice and celebrate the divine virtues uniformly.

Let us recall finally that the anthems are not all Rig-Veda, but only the Samhita of this corpus, which also includes/understands, as it is of rule, the ritual treaties ( Kalpa-Sutras ), such those of the school shankhayana, the Brahmanas (comments exegetic), for example, the Aitaréya-Brahmana and the Kau' sitaky-Brahmana , of the Aranyakas and the Upanisads (thus, the Aitaréya-Upanisad and the Kausitaky-Upanisad ).

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