The Sanskrit Epics, page 978
In nearly all the other poems dealing with the origin of the world, not the gods collectively but an individual creator is the actor. Various passages in other hymns show that the sun was regarded as an important agent of generation by the Rishis. Thus he is described as “the soul of all that moves and stands” (i. 115, 1), and is said to be “called by many names though one” (i. 164, 46). Such statements indicate that the sun was in process of being abstracted to the character of a creator. This is probably the origin of Viçvakarman, “the all-creating,” to whom two cosmogonic hymns (x. 81–82) are addressed. Three of the seven stanzas of the first deserve to be quoted: —
What was the place on which he gained a footing?
Where found he anything, or how, to hold by,
What time, the earth creating, Viçvakarman,
All-seeing, with his might disclosed the heavens?
Who has his eyes and mouth in every quarter,
Whose arms and feet are turned in all directions,
The one god, when the earth and heaven creating,
With his two arms and wings together welds them.
What was the wood, and what the tree, pray tell us,
From which they fashioned forth the earth and heaven?
Ye sages, in your mind, pray make inquiry,
Whereon he stood, when he the worlds supported?
It is an interesting coincidence that “wood,” the term here used, was regularly employed in Greek philosophy to express “original matter” (hūlē).
In the next hymn (x. 82), the theory is advanced that the waters produced the first germ of things, the source of the universe and the gods.
Who is our father, parent, and disposer,
Who knows all habitations and all beings,
Who only to the gods their names apportions:
To him all other beings turn inquiring?
What germ primeval did the waters cherish,
Wherein the gods all saw themselves together,
Which is beyond the earth, beyond that heaven,
Beyond the mighty gods’ mysterious dwelling?
That germ primeval did the waters cherish,
Wherein the gods together all assembled,
The One that in the goat’s1 source is established,
Within which all the worlds are comprehended.
Ye cannot find him who these worlds created:
That which comes nearer to you is another.
In a cosmogonic poem (x. 121) of considerable beauty the creator further appears under the name of Hiraṇyagarbha, “germ of gold,” a notion doubtless suggested by the rising sun. Here, too, the waters are, in producing Agni, regarded as bearing the germ of all life.
The Germ of Gold at first came into being,
Produced as the one lord of all existence.
The earth he has supported and this heaven:
What god shall we with sacrifices worship?
Who gives the breath of life and vital power,
To whose commands the gods all render homage,
Whose shade is death and life immortal:
What god shall we with sacrifices worship?
What time the mighty waters came containing
All germs of life and generating Agni,
Then was produced the gods’ one vital spirit:
What god shall we with sacrifices worship?
Who with his mighty power surveyed the waters
That intellect and sacrifice engendered,
The one god over all the gods exalted:
What god shall we with sacrifices worship?
The refrain receives its answer in a tenth stanza (added to the poem at a later time), which proclaims the unknown god to be Prajāpati.
Two other cosmogonic poems explain the origin of the world philosophically as the evolution of the existent (sat) from the non-existent (asat). In the somewhat confused account given in one of them (x. 72), three stages of creation may be distinguished: first the world is produced, then the gods, and lastly the sun. The theory of evolution is here still combined with that of creation: —
Even as a smith, the Lord of Prayer,
Together forged this universe:
In earliest ages of the gods
From what was not arose what is.
A far finer composition than this is the Song of Creation (x. 129): —
Non-being then existed not, nor being:
There was no air, nor heaven which is beyond it.
What motion was there? Where? By whom directed?
Was water there, and fathomless abysses?
Death then existed not, nor life immortal;
Of neither night nor day was any semblance.
The One breathed calm and windless by self-impulse:
There was not any other thing beyond it.
Darkness at first was covered up by darkness;
This universe was indistinct and fluid.
The empty space that by the void was hidden.
That One was by the force of heat engendered.
Desire then at the first arose within it,
Desire, which was the earliest seed of spirit.
The bond of being in non-being sages
Discovered searching in their hearts with wisdom.
Who knows it truly? who can here declare it?
Whence was it born? whence issued this creation?
And did the gods appear with its production?
But then who knows from whence it has arisen?
This world-creation, whence it has arisen.
Or whether it has been produced or has not.
He who surveys it in the highest heaven,
He only knows, or ev’n he does not know it.
Apart from its high literary merit, this poem is most noteworthy for the daring speculations which find utterance in so remote an age. But even here may be traced some of the main defects of Indian philosophy — lack of clearness and consistency, with a tendency to make reasoning depend on mere words. Being the only piece of sustained speculation in the Rigveda, it is the starting-point of the natural philosophy which assumed shape in the evolutionary Sānkhya system. It will, moreover, always retain a general interest as the earliest specimen of Aryan philosophic thought. With the theory of the Song of Creation, that after the non-existent had developed into the existent, water came first, and then intelligence was evolved from it by heat, the cosmogonic accounts of the Brāhmaṇas substantially agree. Here, too, the non-existent becomes the existent, of which the first form is the waters. On these floats Hiraṇyagarbha, the cosmic golden egg, whence is produced the spirit that desires and creates the universe. Always requiring the agency of the creator Prajāpati at an earlier or a later stage, the Brāhmaṇas in some of their accounts place him first, in others the waters. This fundamental contradiction, due to mixing up the theory of creation with that of evolution, is removed in the Sānkhya system by causing Purusha, or soul, to play the part of a passive spectator, while Prakṛiti, or primordial matter, undergoes successive stages of development. The cosmogonic hymns of the Rigveda are not only thus the precursors of Indian philosophy, but also of the Purāṇas, one of the main objects of which is to describe the origin of the world.
1 The sun is probably meant.
Chapter VI
The Rigvedic Age
THE SURVEY OF the poetry of the Rigveda presented in the foregoing pages will perhaps suffice to show that this unique monument of a long-vanished age contains, apart from its historical interest, much of æsthetic value, and well deserves to be read, at least in selections, by every lover of literature. The completeness of the picture it supplies of early religious thought has no parallel. Moreover, though its purely secular poems are so few, the incidental references contained in the whole collection are sufficiently numerous to afford material for a tolerably detailed description of the social condition of the earliest Aryans in India. Here, then, we have an additional reason for attaching great importance to the Rigveda in the history of civilisation.
In the first place, the home of the Vedic tribes is revealed to us by the geographical data which the hymns yield. From these we may conclude with certainty that the Aryan invaders, after having descended into the plains, in all probability through the western passes of the Hindu Kush, had already occupied the north-western corner of India which is now called by the Persian name of Panjāb, or “Land of Five Rivers.”1 Mention is made in the hymns of some twenty-five streams, all but two or three of which belong to the Indus river system. Among them are the five which water the territory of the Panjāb, and, after uniting in a single stream, flow into the Indus. They are the Vitastā (now Jhelum), the Asiknī (Chenab), the Parushṇī (later called Irāvatī, “the refreshing,” whence its present name, Ravi), the Vipāç (Beäs), and the largest and most easterly, the Çutudrī (Sutlej). Some of the Vedic tribes, however, still remained on the farther side of the Indus, occupying the valleys of its western tributaries, from the Kubhā (Kabul), with its main affluent to the north, the Suvāstu, river “of fair dwellings” (now Swat), to the Krumu (Kurum) and Gomatī, “abounding in cows” (now Gomal), farther south.
Few of the rivers of the Rigveda are mentioned more than two or three times in the hymns, and several of them not more than once. The only names of frequent occurrence are those of the Indus and the Sarasvatī. One entire hymn (x. 75) is devoted to its laudation, but eighteen other streams, mostly its tributaries, share its praises in two stanzas. The mighty river seems to have made a deep impression on the mind of the poet. He speaks of her as the swiftest of the swift, surpassing all other streams in volume of water. Other rivers flow to her as lowing cows hasten to their calf. The roar and rush of her waters are described in enthusiastic strains: —
From earth the sullen roar swells upward to the sky,
With brilliant spray she dashes up unending surge;
As when the streams of rain pour thund’ring from the cloud,
The Sindhu onward rushes like a bellowing bull.
The Sindhu (now Sindh), which in Sanskrit simply means the “river,” as the western boundary of the Aryan settlements, suggested to the nations of antiquity which first came into contact with them in that quarter a name for the whole peninsula. Adopted in the form of Indos, the word gave rise to the Greek appellation India as the country of the Indus. It was borrowed by the ancient Persians as Hindu, which is used in the Avesta as a name of the country itself. More accurate is the modern Persian designation Hindustan, “land of the Indus,” a name properly applying only to that part of the peninsula which lies between the Himālaya and Vindhya ranges.
Mention is often made in the Rigveda of the sapta sindhavaḥ, or “seven rivers,” which in one passage at least is synonymous with the country inhabited by the Aryan Indians. It is interesting to note that the same expression hapta hindu occurs in the Avesta, though it is there restricted to mean only that part of the Indian territory which lay in Eastern Kabulistan. If “seven” is here intended for a definite number, the “seven rivers” must originally have meant the Kabul, the Indus, and the five rivers of the Panjāb, though later the Sarasvatī may have been substituted for the Kabul. For the Sarasvatī is the sacred river of the Rigveda, more frequently mentioned, generally as a goddess, and lauded with more fervour than any other stream. The poet’s descriptions are often only applicable to a large river. Hence Roth and other distinguished scholars concluded that Sarasvatī is generally used by the poets of the Rigveda simply as a sacred designation of the Indus. On the other hand, the name in a few passages undoubtedly means the small river midway between the Sutlej and the Jumna, which at a later period formed, with the Dṛishadvatī, the eastern boundary of the sacred region called Brahmāvarta, lying to the south of Ambāla, and commencing some sixty miles south of Simla.
This small river now loses itself in the sands of the desert, but the evidence of ancient river-beds appears to favour the conclusion that it was originally a tributary of the Çutudrī (Sutlej). It is therefore not improbable that in Vedic times it reached the sea, and was considerably larger than it is now. Considering, too, the special sanctity which it had already acquired, the laudations supposed to be compatible only with the magnitude of the Indus may not have seemed too exaggerated when applied to the lesser stream. It is to be noted that the Dṛishadvatī, the “stony” (now Ghogra or Ghugger), in the only passage in which the name occurs in the Rigveda, is associated with the Sarasvatī, Agni being invoked to flame on the banks of these rivers. This is perhaps an indication that even in the age of the Rigveda the most easterly limit of the Indus river system had already acquired a certain sanctity as the region in which the sacrificial ritual and the art of sacred poetry were practised in the greatest perfection. There are indications showing that by the end at least of the Rigvedic period some of the Aryan invaders had passed beyond this region and had reached the western limit of the Gangetic river system. For the Yamunā (now Jumna), the most westerly tributary of the Ganges in the north, is mentioned in three passages, two of which prove that the Aryan settlements already extended to its banks. The Ganges itself is already known, for its name is mentioned directly in one passage of the Rigveda and indirectly in another. It is, however, a noteworthy fact that the name of the Ganges is not to be found in any of the other Vedas.
The southward migration of the Aryan invaders does not appear to have extended, at the time when the hymns of the Rigveda were composed, much beyond the point where the united waters of the Panjāb flow into the Indus. The ocean was probably known only from hearsay, for no mention is made of the numerous mouths of the Indus, and fishing, one of the main occupations on the banks of the Lower Indus at the present day, is quite ignored. The word for fish (matsya), indeed, only occurs once, though various kinds of animals, birds, and insects are so frequently mentioned. This accords with the character of the rivers of the Panjāb and Eastern Kabulistan, which are poor in fish, while it contrasts with the intimate knowledge of fishing betrayed by the Yajurveda, which was composed when the Aryans had spread much farther to the east, and, doubtless, also to the south. The word which later is the regular name for “ocean” (sam-udra), seems therefore, in agreement with its etymological sense (“collection of waters”), to mean in the Rigveda only the lower course of the Indus, which, after receiving the waters of the Panjāb, is so wide that a boat in mid-stream is invisible from the bank. It has been noted in recent times that the natives in this region speak of the river as the “sea of Sindh;” and indeed the word sindhu (“river”) itself in several passages of the Rigveda has practically the sense of “sea.” Metaphors such as would be used by a people familiar with the ocean are lacking in the Rigveda. All references to navigation point only to the crossing of rivers in boats impelled by oars, the main object being to reach the other bank (pāra). This action suggested a favourite figure, which remained familiar throughout Sanskrit literature. Thus one of the poets of the Rigveda invokes Agni with the words, “Take us across all woes and dangers as across the river (sindhu) in a boat;” and in the later literature one who has accomplished his purpose or mastered his subject is very frequently described as “having reached the farther shore” (pāraga). The Atharva-veda, on the other hand, contains some passages showing that its composers were acquainted with the ocean.
Mountains are constantly mentioned in the Rigveda, and rivers are described as flowing from them. The Himālaya (“abode of snow”) range in general is evidently meant by the “snowy” (himavantaḥ) mountains which are in the keeping of the Creator. But no individual peak is mentioned with the exception of Mūjavat, which is indirectly referred to as the home of Soma. This peak, it is to be inferred from later Vedic literature, was situated close to the Kabul Valley, and was probably one of the mountains to the south-west of Kashmir. The Atharva-veda also mentions two other mountains of the Himālaya. One of these is called Trikakud, the “three-peaked” (in the later literature Trikūṭa, and even now Trikōta), through the valley at the foot of which flows the Asiknī (Chenab). The other is Nāvaprabhraṃçana (“sinking of the ship”), doubtless identical with the Naubandhana (“binding of the ship”) of the epic and the Manoravasarpaṇa of the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa, on which the ship of Manu is said to have rested when the deluge subsided. The Rigveda knows nothing of the Vindhya range, which divides Northern India from the southern triangle of the peninsula called the Dekhan;2 nor does it mention the Narmadā River (now Nerbudda), which flows immediately south of and parallel to that range.
From these data it may safely be concluded that the Aryans, when the hymns of the Rigveda were composed, had overspread that portion of the north-west which appears on the map as a fan-shaped territory, bounded on the west by the Indus, on the east by the Sutlej, and on the north by the Himālaya, with a fringe of settlements extending beyond those limits to the east and the west. Now the Panjāb of the present day is a vast arid plain, from which, except in the north-west corner at Rawal Pindi, no mountains are visible, and over which no monsoon storms break. Here there are no grand displays of the strife of the elements, but only gentle showers fall during the rainy season, while the phenomena of dawn are far more gorgeous than elsewhere in the north. There is, therefore, some probability in the contention of Professor Hopkins, that only the older hymns, such as those to Varuṇa and Ushas, were composed in the Panjāb itself, while the rest arose in the sacred region near the Sarasvatī, south of the modern Ambāla, where all the conditions required by the Rigveda are found. This is more likely than the assumption that the climate of the Panjāb has radically changed since the age of the Vedic poets.
