The Vedas and Upanishads for Children Read online

  *Yes, yes, we know – human memory is notoriously unreliable. But the guardians of the sacred knowledge – the Chosen Ones – were those whose ordinary minds had become extraordinary simply through the unwavering discipline and training their owners had put them through. Remember Sherlock Holmes’s ‘Memory Palace’, a many-tiered RAM in his head, organized and catalogued so finely that he could always reach for one particular memory and pull it out when he needed it? Yup, this was that kind of thing, except there wasn’t just one ‘born genius’ like Holmes in ancient India, there were hundreds, who had become ‘geniuses’ through practice.

  And what have we figured out so far? There are conflicting theories, but one of the most popular ones over the last few decades is that these people were horse-riding tribes of nomadic goatherds and cattle-herders from Central Asia (the area roughly occupied by today’s Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan) who found their way to India (specifically the Punjab and its surrounds) around 1500 BCE. In their literature, these tribes referred to themselves as Arya (say aar-ya) – ‘the noble ones’.

  Experts who lean towards this theory believe that the reason that Arya tribes left Central Asia was because overgrazing and drought had made their original homelands, the grasslands called the steppes, unlivable for themselves and their animals. To ensure less crowding and better opportunities for all in their search for new pastures, they say, the Arya split up. One branch went east towards Mongolia, one west towards Anatolia (Turkey) and one south towards Bactria (the area north of the Hindu Kush mountains). From Bactria, the Arya divided again, one branch moving west towards Iran, and the other east towards India. This second branch – whose people these experts refer to as the Indo-Aryans or the Indo-Iranians – settled first in the Punjab and later in the Gangetic plains.

  The timing of the grand entrance of these mystery people – the Arya – onto the Indian history stage is crucial. We first encounter them around the same time that the people of the Harappan Civilization – who had lived and thrived on the banks of the Indus and her tributaries in the Punjab for over a thousand years – abandoned their vast, flourishing cities and mysteriously disappeared. (Want to know a little more about the Harappans? Check out ‘Pashupati’s People’ on page 54.)

  This little detail leads to the other popular theory, this one more recent, about the origin of the Arya. What if the chariot-driving, horse-riding, dog-loving, weapon-wielding Arya were not foreigners at all, but Harappans themselves who had quit their riverside cities after a great flood and spread out across northern India and further west and east, to re-emerge centuries later as the composers of the Vedas? Or what if they were an entirely different indigenous set of Indian people?

  Let us leave that question to the scholars and academics to wrangle over. What is not disputed is that it was the Arya who introduced the Iron Age into India (the Harappans had only known the use of the softer bronze and copper) and that it was also they who gave India and the world the oldest of the languages in the Indo-European family of languages, the perfectly formed ‘mother language’ Sanskrit. (That isn’t an exaggeration, by the way; the anglicized name for the language – Sanskrit – actually comes from the words ‘samskruta’, which literally means ‘perfectly formed’! In fact, in the beginning, ‘samskruta’ was the adjective used to describe the language of the ancient texts – the language itself was simply called ‘bhasha’, or language. So ‘samskruta bhasha’ simply meant ‘the perfectly formed language’.)

  As the pastures in the north-west were consumed and the rivers that sustained their crops changed course or dried up because of changes in climate, the Arya, having now split into five main tribes, began to move slowly east across northern India. Over the next thousand years, they colonized the Doab – the fertile land between the two great rivers Ganga and Yamuna – and became farmers. Each Arya tribe split into clans as they went along, fighting each other to establish their own little areas of control, called janapadas. By the 6th century BCE, the many little janapadas had been consolidated into sixteen larger ‘kingdoms’ called mahajanapadas, which stretched between the Himalayas in the north and the Vindhyas in the south, and from the western (Arabian) sea to the eastern sea (the Bay of Bengal). The Arya referred to their new land as Aryavarta (say aar-yaa-varta) – Abode of the Noble Ones.

  One of the mahajanapadas was Kuru (does that name ring a bell?), which, the Mahabharata tells us, was the land of the... yup, the Pandavas and the Kauravas! Another was faraway Gandhara, in today’s Afghanistan, from where the beautiful princess Gandhari was brought to Kuru as the bride of the blind prince Dhritarashtra. A third was Kosala, the kingdom of the Ikshvakus, whose most famous king was... right, Rama from the Ramayana! There was also the mahajanapada of Magadha, from where Ashoka Maurya and the Guptas ruled, and that of Kashi, with its holy cities of Varanasi (revered as a pilgrimage centre for thousands of years) and Sarnath (where Buddha gave his first sermon).*

  *Isn’t this all a bit confusing? Weren’t Ashoka and the Guptas people who actually existed while Rama and the Kuru princes were merely characters in stories? Well, here’s the thing – Hindus classify the Ramayana and Mahabharata not under the Puranas, which are considered stories, but under a separate genre called Itihasa (from iti-ha-asa – Sanskrit for ‘this is how it happened’), or history. Even though they accept that every single event mentioned in the epics may not have happened exactly in that way, they firmly believe that the main thread of the narratives describes real events, people, kingdoms and dynasties.

  But back to the Arya. The Arya tended not to stay in the same place for too long, at least in the beginning. Their on-the-go lifestyle made it somewhat pointless for them to build great cities or temples or palaces, and it seems they truly did not care for such things.** After all, the scholarly ones among them carried all they needed to know in their heads, and as for the others, their greatest wealth – horses and cattle – were fully capable of moving with them.

  **Well-planned cities and a script (that we haven’t yet been able to decipher) were two hallmarks of the Harappan Civilization. Considering that such an advanced civilization had been around in India for a thousand years before the Arya appeared on the scene, it seems somewhat insane that we would have to wait another thousand years after that for other cities to be built and a new script to be developed. But from all the evidence we have so far, that seems to be what happened!

  What the Arya did care about, however, was pleasing their gods. Like all other early agrarian civilizations, they lived equally in awe of the formidable power and beauty of Mother Nature, and fear at her capriciousness. Naturally, just like the Egyptians, Chinese and Mesopotamians, they turned the elements – the sun, the earth, the rain, the rivers, the dawn, the thunder – into gods, and set about composing extravagant hymns of praise to each one. After all, if the gods were not kept happy, how could the Arya hope to ensure that the rain fell at the right time and the rivers did not flood (or dry up!) and the sun shone just so and the earth gave forth enough of herself to sustain their crops, their animals and themselves? (Who were the gods of the Arya? Are they the same gods Hindus worship today? Find out in Chapter 3: ‘The Gods of Big Things’ on page 42.)

  Realizing that, at the end of the day, even the most flattering praise was merely lip service, and the gods would probably expect something more solid, the Arya devised elaborate sacrifices called yagnas. There were different yagnas to wrest different boons – long life, success in war, a bountiful harvest, many fine sons – from the gods, but they were all accompanied by the chanting of songs of praise and they were almost always conducted in the presence of the sacred fire, Agni. Into Agni’s all-consuming maw went the various offerings – ground rice, cooked pulses, milk, soma (Soma? Wozzat? To find out, check out ‘“Theobroma” Soma – Elixir of the Gods’ on page 38), and the all-important ghrita, aka desi ghee (and you wondered why ghee is such an indispensable ingredient in the Indian kitchen!) – that were believed to please
the gods.

  In the beginning, animal sacrifices were also a huge part of yagnas. Thousands of animals, including cattle and horses (these animals were dearest and most precious to the Arya, so giving them up to the gods was a huge sacrifice), were offered to the gods.

  Phew. Yagnas sound like a serious amount of work, right? But the payback was worth it – if a yagna was done right, Agni the divine messenger would ensure that the offerings were conveyed dutifully to the gods being propitiated, leaving them with no choice but to rain the right blessings down on the earthly petitioners. (Yup, that was the belief then – you had the power to persuade the gods to do what you wanted, assuming you performed all the prescribed rituals in the correct way!)

  Now, how could the yajamana (say yaja-maana) – the king or merchant who hosted the yagna and provided all the money needed for the firewood, the offerings, the sacrificial animals and everything else – ensure that the yagna was conducted in exactly the right way? He requested the scholars, the ritual experts who knew all the mantras by heart, to come and officiate at the ceremonies. For this service, he paid them a generous fee. Simple!

  So if worship and yagnas were such a big part of Arya life, didn’t they require, like the Egyptians, special temples where sacred ceremonies could be conducted? Nope. Whether the yagna was a small private one for one’s immediate family or a ginormous community one with thousands of people attending, all it required, apart from a sacrificial post where animals could be butchered, was a yagna kunda, a fire altar, which was a pit to contain the firewood and oilseeds that sustained the sacred fire for the duration of the ceremony. Pits were built and consecrated (i.e., made pure for worship by the sprinkling of holy water, the chanting of mantras and other rituals) just before the yagna, and must have been dismantled soon after, since no remains of ancient fire altars have ever been found (these people were clearly sticklers for the ‘Leave No Trace’ policy that modern conservationists urge us to follow when we go camping and hiking).

  Yagna kunds were of many different shapes that were variations of the square

  The square was considered to be the sacred geometrical shape for the kunda. But instead of settling for a simple square, the Arya played around with the basic shape to come up with all kinds of interesting variations – a kunda could be a right-angled rhombus (a square standing on one of its corners), a rectangle (two squares placed side by side), a set of triangles (each of which was a square cut in half), or a many-pointed star (which, if you think about it, is nothing but a rotating square). The most interesting shape that we know of, used for the most important yagnas, and built out of a specified number of bricks, each made to specified dimensions (ancient Indians were nothing if not nerdy, especially where numbers were concerned) was the hawk- or falcon-shaped altar.*

  *Can you come up with your own cool shapes for yagna kundas, using just squares? To make it more challenging, try and come up with patterns in which the number of squares used is a multiple of nine – nine squares, or eighteen, or twenty-seven, or 108... Nine was a number sacred to the Arya, so any number whose digits added up to nine also made the cut. Try it!

  As different groups of people developed expertise in different skills, Arya society divided itself into four divisions, or classes, called varnas. Those who knew the Vedas and the rituals became the priests – they were called the brahmins. Clan leaders who defended the tribe, protected their cattle, fought wars and hosted yagnas for the well-being of their people became, along with the soldiers they led, the warrior class – they were called the kshatriyas. The farmers who grew the crops that sustained their people and the merchants who carried the grain to distant lands for trade, thus filling the coffers of the tribe and ensuring there was enough money for yagnas and wars, were the third band – they were called the vaishyas. Those who worked with their hands, creating useful and/or artistic products out of leather and gold and wood and clay and iron, or serving the people of the three other classes – as charioteers, grooms for horses, lady’s maids, cooks, butchers, and so on – formed the fourth group: they were called the shudras.

  The brahmins were intellectuals who thought deep thoughts and knew the Vedas verbatim. But they had very few practical skills for earning a livelihood. In order to survive, they smartly forged an alliance with the ones who wielded the real power – the kings. Since it was the duty of the king to conduct yagnas, and no yagna could be performed without someone (usually, several someones) who knew the Vedas officiating, the brahmins (who were the smallest varna in terms of numbers) ensured that they were always employable.

  It is easy to see how these two varnas – comprising the Smart Ones and the Powerful Ones – raced to winner and runner-up positions, respectively, on the varna podium.

  Of course it was money that made the world go round even then, and the people who controlled that part were the vaishyas. They zoomed into third place in the varna race, leaving the shudras far behind at fourth place.

  And thus it came to pass that a society whose divisions had originally been based simply on the kind of work people did, with no one group considered higher or lower than any other, turned into one in which one or more divisions (today we call them ‘castes’) lorded it over the others, claiming that the ‘lower’ castes neither could nor should ever aspire to do the jobs of the ‘higher’ castes. For instance, in later Arya society, a butcher’s son was stuck with being a butcher for life, never mind how capable he himself was of committing the Vedas to memory, simply because no one would agree to teach them to him!*

  *Remember the story from the Mahabharata where the great Acharya Drona refused to accept a boy called Ekalavya as his student, simply because he came from the Nishada tribe, whose people were hunters and fishermen? It didn’t even matter to the Acharya that Ekalavya was a prince of his tribe, for Drona was far too busy teaching kshatriya princes, the ‘real’ blue bloods. And when Ekalavya went on to display the kind of mastery of his craft that made him a threat to Drona’s favourite student Arjuna? Shudder! You know how that story ended.

  What’s more, the dominant varnas claimed that this kind of discrimination was authorized by the Vedas – and therefore the gods – themselves. As you can imagine, that kind of claim was incredibly easy for them to get away with, because only the brahmins knew the Vedas in the first place – everyone else simply had to believe what they said, or have the wrath of the gods – and the priests – visited upon their heads.

  It was possibly partly to question and challenge this kind of patent unfairness that had crept into Arya society that the Upanishads were composed, beginning circa 7th century BCE. The sages of the Upanishads sat down, re-examined the Vedas and returned declaring that the true message of the Vedas was that all creatures were equal, since they were all simply manifestations of the same Universal Energy. They suggested that many things mentioned in the Vedas were not meant to be taken literally, but metaphorically. Sacrifice your ego, said the Upanishads, not animals; offer hard work and dedication to the sacred fire inside you, instead of soma and ghrita into a real fire. And rest assured that this kind of yagna will make the gods just as happy and the rewards that flow down to you as a result just as generous.

  While the Upanishads attempted to reform the Arya religion from the inside, two other movements that came up soon after took the opposite route. They rejected many things about the Arya religion (the Vedas, the yagnas, the animal sacrifices, the caste system) while still retaining some of its core beliefs, broke away, and became two new religions. These religions also believed in ahimsa (non-violence) and the equality of all creatures. They were called – you guessed it! – Jainism and Buddhism.

  In the centuries after, the Vedic religion of the Arya, now revived by the wisdom and liberal ideas of the Upanishads, crossed the Vindhyas and made its way into the southern peninsula, taking with it Vedic chants and rituals, and the Sanskrit language. As its influence spread beyond Aryavarta, it sprawled and proliferated like a great banyan, putting down roots as it went, and
inviting all the gods, goddesses, beliefs, philosophies, practices and traditions it encountered along the way to come and set up home under its vast and generous canopy. By and by, over centuries, it metamorphosed into the chaotic, glorious, impossible-to-define and uniquely Indian celebration of unity in diversity that we now call Hinduism.*

  Hinduism is still a work in progress, one that is being ceaselessly reformed, reinterpreted, revised, recast, and yes, challenged, by anyone who wants to have a go – gurus, politicians, academics, film-makers, artists, philosophers, historians and any number of common people. And while it has changed immeasurably as it has grown and spread, perhaps the most remarkable thing about this old, old religion-that-isn’t-really-a-religion** is how much of it has remained the same over the last 3,500 years.

  Agni is still the witness and the accepter of offerings at yagnas conducted as part of Hindu religious ceremonies (if you have ever attended a Hindu wedding, you have been witness to a yagna!), the yagna kunda is still a simple portable container (most people now prefer to stick with a straightforward square), priests are still invited to officiate at important religious events, ancient Vedic mantras (yup, the same songs of praise we talked about earlier) are still chanted at modern-day ceremonies, and very few people (apart from the priests) still understand what is being chanted!

  You see why those ancient cattle-herders, whoever they were, were absolute rock stars? They gave this land a set of all-time greatest hits whose staying power is yet to be beaten!