Page:Monier Monier-Williams - Indian Wisdom.djvu/61



To begin, then, with the Mantra portion. By this is meant those prayers, invocations, and hymns which have been collected and handed down to us from a period after the Indian branch of the great Indo-European race had finally settled down in Northern India, but which were doubtless composed by a succession of poets at different times (perhaps between 1500 and 1000 years B.C.). These compositions, though very unequal in poetical merit, and containing many tedious repetitions and puerilities, are highly interesting and important, as embodying some of the earliest religious conceptions, as well as some of the earliest known forms, of the primitive language of that primeval Aryan race-stock from which Greeks, Romans, Kelts, Teutons, Russians, and Poles are all offshoots.

They are comprised in five principal Samhitas or collections of Mantras, called respectively Rik, Atharvan, Saman, Taittirlya, and Vajasaneyin. Of these the Rig- veda-samhita — containing one thousand and seventeen hymns — is the oldest and most important, while the Atharva-veda-samhita is generally held to be the most recent, and is perhaps the most interesting. Moreover, these are the only two Vedic hymn-books worthy of being called separate original collections1; and to these, therefore, we shall confine our examples.

1 The Atharva-veda (admirably edited by Professors Roth and Whitney) does not appear to have been recognized as a fourth Veda in the time of Manu, though he mentions the revelation made to Atharvan and An-giras (XI. 33). In book XI, verse 264, he says, Rico yajuyshi canyani samdni vividhani fa, esha jneyas tri-vrid vedo yo vedainam sa veda-vit. The Sama-veda and the two so-called Samhitas or collections of the Yajur-veda (Taittirlya and Vajasaneyin or Black and White) all borrow largely from the Rik, and are merely Brahmanical manuals, the necessity for which grew out of the complicated ritual gradually elaborated by the Hindu Aryans. A curious allusion to the Sama-veda occurs in Manu IV. 123 &c., 'The Rig-veda has the gods for its deities, the Yajur-veda has men for its objects, the Sama-veda has