Lafayette faculty are experts in their fields. Interests among the 188 members range across the full spectrum of scientific, technological, and humanistic knowledge. In “From the Classroom,” faculty members give insight into their particular subject, providing a window on the intellectual rigor that characterizes the environment of academic excellence at Lafayette. This issue features an excerpt from Contemporary Hinduism: Ritual, Culture, and Practice by Robin Rinehart. Published by ABC-Clio in 2004. Reprinted with permission.

Hymns of Hinduism

Hinduism is the name given to the predominant religious tradition in India. In 2001, there were at least eight hundred million Hindus worldwide, making Hinduism the world’s third largest religion after Christianity and Islam. Hindu was originally a geographic designation Persians used for the people who lived beyond the Sindh River in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent, but the term was gradually adopted as a way of distinguishing between practitioners of Islam and others in India. The English term Hinduism designating a particular religion did not come into usage until the time that the British ruled India (Hawley 1991). Because the term did not originate among the people who have come to call themselves Hindus, some scholars both in India and the West have argued that it is an artificial label. Even so, millions of people in India and throughout the world identify themselves as Hindus. . . .

The religion now known as Hinduism encompasses a vast range of practices and beliefs. It has no one founder and no centralized organization. Hindus throughout history have expressed multiple perspectives on the nature of divinity or ultimate reality: monotheism, polytheism, even henotheism (belief in one god without denying the existence of others). The richness and diversity of Hinduism mean that we cannot expect to find one list of specific beliefs or practices that would necessarily apply to all Hindus, nor one text that defines all of Hinduism. Generally, Hindus have tended to see diverse views as complementary rather than contradictory. Julius Lipner suggests that we think of Hinduism as being like a banyan tree, which sends out aerial roots that appear to be individual tree trunks even though they are part of the same tree (Lipner 1994, 5-6). In the same way, different aspects of Hinduism may seem to be unconnected or even contradictory, but many Hindus assert that there is an underlying unity amidst the diversity. . . .

One of the most important and most controversial sources of information about the early development of Indian civilization and Hinduism is the archeological remains of the Indus Valley (or Harappan) civilization located in the northwest of the subcontinent in the area around the Indus River and beyond. The Indus Valley civilization was at its peak from about 2300-2000 B.C.E., then went into decline and essentially disappeared by 1500 B.C.E. The archeological evidence reveals a well-developed, primarily urban society. The two main early excavation sites, Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, were planned cities with water and sewer systems. British and Indian archeologists first began to excavate Indus Valley sites after they were discovered in the 1920s. . . .

The first analyses of this civilization and its people proposed by archeologists have been called into question in recent years, and a number of debates continue on both technical and political grounds. The major points of controversy concern who the people of the Indus Valley were and what relation they had to a group of people who called themselves the Aryans. . . .

There are many unanswered questions about the religion of the Indus Valley, but we know far more about the Aryans from the Vedas, a set of four compositions preserved orally. Although printed editions of the Vedas are now available in the original Sanskrit as well as in translation, it is essential to remember that the Aryans memorized the Vedas and passed them down orally from generation to generation. The Aryans used the verses of the Vedas as part of a system of ritual sacrifice understood to guarantee the proper functioning of the world.

There are four samhitas (collections) of hymns that include the term Veda in their titles: the Rig Veda, Yajur Veda, Sama Veda, and Atharva Veda. (The term Veda is often used to refer specifically to these four samhitas or collections, but it may also refer to these four samhitas along with the texts that were appended to them: the Brahmanas, the Aranyakas, and the Upanishads.)

The Yajur Veda and Sama Veda contain much material from the Rig Veda, though organized differently. The fourth, the Atharva Veda, is focused more on rites for health, financial success, and children. As with many other religious texts throughout the world, there are different views about the origins of the Vedas. Within the Hindu tradition itself the view is that the Vedas are not the product of human composition. Some Hindu sources describe them as the linguistic representation of the sounds that create and sustain the cosmos; other Hindu sources describe them as the creation of a god. Textual scholars, however, have generally assumed that they were composed by humans, and they look at the language and other details of the Vedas to try to determine when and where they might have been composed. Most agree that the earliest and most important of the four Vedas, the Rig Veda, was probably composed sometime between 1500 and 1200 B.C.E. in the northwestern region of the subcontinent.

The

Robin Rinehart gave Aditi Mahendroo '04 lessons on how to speak Hindi

primary use of the hymns of the Vedas is in rituals that involve offering various substances into a sacrificial fire. Because the verses themselves are understood to represent sounds that create and sustain the cosmos, they are considered to be enormously powerful, and those who know and recite these hymns can harness that creative power through the precise performance of various sacrifices. Thus the Aryans placed enormous emphasis on exact memorization and transmission of the Vedas, and although there are variant versions of some passages in the Vedas, for the most part they were preserved with very little of the change typically associated with orally transmitted traditions. Even so, the Vedic hymns do not provide a complete picture of the mythology of the Aryans; many hymns refer to what are clearly longer and more detailed myths that though they are now lost must have been familiar to the Aryans, and were transmitted orally. Many of the Vedic hymns praise various gods (and a few goddesses), describing their exploits and their association with particular dimensions of the functioning of the cosmos. Recitation of these hymns in the proper ritual context was meant to help one be in harmony with or gain power over the forces the particular god controlled.

A number of hymns of the Rig Veda are addressed to Indra, a powerful god who reigns over the region between the earth and sky, slaying enemies with his thunderbolt. Indra is a heroic figure celebrated for overcoming a serpent-demon who had captured the waters of life, as well as for his fondness for the exhilarating juice made from the soma plant. The plant soma, too, is invoked as a god in Vedic hymns, and preparation and consumption of soma extract was an important part of some Vedic rituals. (The identity of the soma plant remains uncertain; it may have had intoxicating or hallucinogenic properties and is described in the Vedas as conferring immortality.) Agni, the god of fire, is another important figure in Vedic mythology. Vedic rituals center on making offerings of various substances (such as grains, dairy products, and soma) into a fire while chanting the appropriate Vedic hymns. Agni is understood to be present in the sacrificial fire itself, carrying the offerings to their destination and bringing the gods to the sacrifice. Aryan families who performed Vedic rituals needed to maintain at least one sacrificial fire.

In addition to gods and a few goddesses associated with particular dimensions of the functioning of the cosmos, the Vedic hymns express a cosmic principal known as rita, which is governed by the kingly god Varuna. Rita is the law, rule, the proper order of the cosmos, the idea that things fit together. Vedic ritual, then, is a means of keeping one’s actions in line with rita and making sure the world functions smoothly in the way it was meant to when it was created. There is a wide range of rituals, from those performed daily and seasonally by individuals for the well-being of family and business, to much more elaborate undertakings stretching several days or more and requiring a number of specialists. The Vedic system emphasizes the regular, correct performance of particular ritual practices. . . .

As the society of northern India grew more complex, people began to ask a variety of questions about the efficacy of the intricate Vedic rituals, and larger questions about the origin, nature, and purpose of the universe and life itself. A very famous hymn from the Rig Veda’s tenth chapter illustrates the growing speculative trend, asking how creation first came about and whether the gods themselves even know because they were born after the creation of the universe. The closing lines read, “No one knows whence this creation has come into being. Perhaps it formed itself. Perhaps not. Only he who looks down from the highest heaven truly knows. Or maybe he does not know.” (Mahony 1998, 57). Hindu tradition preserves a number of different accounts of creation, and this particular hymn shows a willingness to acknowledge that it may not be possible to know precisely how the universe came into existence.