Shruti Revelation.

As already remarked elsewhere, all religions that have sacred books, and, in consequence, an immutable canon of law and belief, claim for them a superhuman origin. 1 They are to be accepted, obeyed, believed in, as being supernaturally dictated or revealed to their human authors by the Deity. The body of Scriptures which the Hindus gather under this head is unusually large, as it comprises not only the mantras of the Vedas but the whole of the Brahmanas, including the  philosophical UPANISHADS. They call it Shruti, “ what was heard,” in opposition to SMRITI or “ what was remembered,”—only remembered, and therefore liable to error, to be respected as invested with a sort of secondary sacredness, but not necessarily and implicitly believed, as a matter of salvation. All the law books, including the great code of Manu, are Smriti, so are the Itihasas , the Puranas , and another important class, of which anon. It would seem to the unbiassed mind as though the Rig-Veda alone, being the corner-stone and fountain-head of India’s entire spiritual life, would be entitled to be enshrined in it as Shruti— revealed, repeated from “what was heard ” by the Rishis who were the chosen vessels and instruments of the divine message to men. This would be logical, but would not have suited the Brahmans at all. This most ambitious and crafty of all priesthoods made such exorbitant, nay monstrous demands on the credulity, docility, and liberality of the people over which they claimed—though they may never have quite established— absolute power, both spiritual and temporal, that not even such a contemplative, indolent, physically enervated race as the once vigorous Aryas were changed into by a long sojourn amid the relaxing, debilitating influences of semi-tropical  Eastern Hindustan, would have submitted to them tamely and unresistingly, had they not become imbued with the conviction that they were obeying the will of Heaven. Now all these things that the Brahmans claimed for themselves were not in the Rig-Veda,—to begin with the claim to revelation itself, which the old poets did not put forth for their hymns, of which, indeed, they emphatically speak as their own creation, boasting that they made this orthat new song, “ as the carpenter fashions a wagon.” It had all to be spun out of embryonic hints contained in scattered texts, meanings made out, twisted, and made to fit where needed. The text was nothing, the interpretation was everything. This  supplied by the Brahmanas, and so it came to pass that a huge body of literature—larger than we even yet can realize, since many Brahmanas have been lost or not yet found—by a host of authors, of a score of different theological schools, and ranging over between five and eight hundred years, was enveloped in one shroud of mystery and sacredness and labelled Shruti, “ Revealed.” Of course such a high-handed proceeding could not but give rise to contradictions and glaring inconsistencies. Thus, the Brahmanas are continually referred to by the names of their authors or at least schools, and spoken of as “ old ” or “ new,” which is downright heresy, as Shruti can, properly speaking, be neither old nor new, having pre-existed, unaltered, through all eternity. But theological casuistry will thread its way out of worse difficulties.

Smriti Tradition

The Vedangas

Smriti,—which might be comprehensively paraphrased by “ venerable tradition ”—embraces a vast range of subjects and of time, as we have seen. But there is one set of literary productions of this extensive class which specially belongs to the Vedas, and supplements the Brahmanas and Upanishads. They are manuals on certain principal subject-matters connected with and partly contained in them and which go to the making of the perfect Vedic lore required of every Brahman. These subject matters are six in number, and, by their nature, show the kind and minuteness of the study to which the Veda—especially the Rig-Veda of course—has been subjected from very early times. They come under the following heads :

1. Phonetics (pronunciation and accentuation),—SlKSHA.

2. Metre—Chhandas.

3. Grammar—VYAKARANA.

4. Explanation of words (etymology, homonyms,and the like)—NlRUKTA.

5. Astronomy—JYOTISHA.

6. Ceremonial—Kalpa.

An exhaustive knowledge of these six things is considered so essential to a full understanding of the Veda and the proper idea of the infinitely complicated forms of worship evolved out of the Rig, that they are said to belong to it organically as members to a body, and are very realistically called Vedangas, “ limbs of the Veda,” as necessary to its articulate perfection.

The Sutras.

It follows from this that, in speaking of “ the six Vedangas ” we do not mean six distinct books or treatises, as is sometimes superficially concluded, but six subject-matters which are contained in the Veda as part of its substance and which are to be abstracted thereout and developed for purposes of study. We continually apply a similar process to' Homer, or to Shakespeare. We might just as well speak of Homeric accentuation, Homeric metre, Homeric grammar, Homeric mythology, Homeric astronomy, Homeric worship, and say that these six subjects or studies are “the pillars of Homeric scholarship.” It further follows that, if there were six Vedangas, the numbers of works or manuals treating of them could multiply indefinitely—which is just what did  happen. One feature, however, was common to all these works ; as they were only meant to specialize and epitomize knowledge which for the most part was already scattered, in a loose and desultory form, through the Brahmanas, they were compiled in short paragraphs or aphorisms compact and concise —a sort of telegraphic memorandum style, — in which brevity often degenerates into obscurity and at times into an almost unintelligible jargon, that provides enough hard nuts to crack for a few more generations of special students. These collections are called SUTRAS, literally “ strung together,”  or rather “ sewn together,” from the root siv or syd, “ to sew".

Shrauta-Sutras and Smdrta-Sutras.

Great importance attached to the study of language and metre.

The Hindu scholars must have found this epitomic hand-book style particularly convenient and helpful to the memory, for they applied it tomany other than specially Vedic subjects: law, philosophy, medicine, crafts. These subjects belonging to the “ remembered ” or “traditional ” half of classi- cal literature, Sturiti, the Sutras that treat of them are designated as SMARTA-SUTRAS, to distinguish them from those that treat of matters connected with “ revelation,” or “ what was heard,”  Shruti, and which go by the general name of Shrautra-Sutras. Of these, as of Brahmanas, there are several sets annexed to each Veda, and they embrace a large variety of subjects, minute subdivisions of the general matter classed under the headings of the Vedangas, till we actually find a set of Sutras on the art of adapting the words of the sacred hymns to music. It may be confidently asserted that India is the only country in the world where grammar, prosody, versification, are a portion of the nation’s sacred literature, and indeed partly of its revealed scriptures, since the bulk of the material worked over by the Sutra-compilers in their peculiar style, is really found in the Brahmanas and, in one case, in the Veda itself—meaning the prose portions of the Yajur- Veda. However incongruous and almost grotesque this may appear at the first glance, if unexplained, it becomes quite logically intelligible when the connection is made plain and pursued from the start.

The periods of Vedic Literature.

The sacredness attaching to these branches of study, usually considered as emphatically a part of the layman’s education, accounts for the extraordinary pains and care early bestowed on them, and which culminated in the most elaborate, profound, subtle, and finished investigations of language ever achieved by any people. It will be noticed that such questions makeup four out of the six Vedangas: Phonetics, Metre (or versification and prosody), Etymology (comprising homonyms and synonyms), and Grammar proper. In the intricate system of sacrificial rites, based on forms pure and simple, into which the once beautiful Vedic worship quickly and surely degenerated, one misplaced accent, one mis-pronounced word, one falsely given quantity, was supposed not only to destroy the beneficial virtue of a sacrifice, but actually to turn it against the sacrificer. Yet how easy  to commit such a slip when using only half intelligible words and forms in a language which, from being at all times a more or less artificial, literary idiom, was fast coming to be a dead one ! What wonder then if nice points of grammar and prosody became of vital importance, and exercised for centuries the choicest faculties, the unremitting efforts of the national intellect ; if each theological school fiercely vindicated and clung to its own version of a passage— nay, its own pronunciation, its own accentuation of this or that word, producing a long and varied series of scientifically elaborated treatises (Sutras), the larger number of which, judging from quotations in those that were preserved, have evidently been lost, only the best having survived the natural selection of unwritten literature, the productions of which must stand or fall exclusively on their own merits.

 We have now arrived at the end of a survey, not incomplete, if necessarily brief, of what can, in the stricter sense, be called Vedic Literature. In a wider sense, all the literature of India may, theoretically, be said to come under that head, since the Veda—the Rig-Veda in the last instance—pervades and dominates her spiritual life, even as her own Himalaya sways and regulates the conditions of her material existence. But the special and distinctive Vedic literature is that which follows directly from the Veda and revolves around it, treating only of such matters as it either contains or suggests. It naturally falls into three very obvious main divisions : I, the Mantra period—the period of collecting the songs with no special object beyond that of preserving them he Brahmana period—the period of commentary and a certain amount of exegesis, with the patent object of establishing the supremacy of the Brahman caste the Sutra period—the period  of concise special treatises for practical use at school and sacrifice. Chronologically, these periods do not strictly succeed one another, any more than the socalled culture ages—of stone, of brass, of iron—but overlap both ways over and over. Thus, if the second period corresponds to a well-defined stage of the Aryas’ conquest of India—that of their advance eastward and their establishment in the valleys of the Ganga and Yamuna—the third may be said to straggle down actually into modern times, since the monumental commentary on the Rig-Veda, the Brahmans’ standard authority, was written by SAYANA as late as the fourteenth century of our era.