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THE FOUNDATIONS OF INDIAN PHILOSOPHY And so it is that the Vedic hymns originally belonged exclusively to certain great family lines. Of the ten books of the Řg-veda (which is the oldest of the Vedas and indeed the oldest extant document of any of the Indo-European traditions) 21 the second and those following it are the so-called “Family Books." They contain groups of potent verses which formerly were the guarded property of the ancient families of priests, scers, and holy singers. The ancestors of the various clans composed the stanzas in order to conjure gods to the sacrifice, propitiate them, and win their favor-the hymus having been revealed to those ancestral singers during their intercourse (in vision) with the gods themselves. The owners then occasionally marked their property, either by letting their names appear somewhere in the verses or, as was more frequently the case, by a characteristic closing stanza, which would be generally recognized as an earmark. Just as the ranging herds of the cattlebreeding Aryan families in Vedic times were distinguished by some brand or cut on the car, flank, or elsewhere, so likewise the hymns-and with the same aristocratic sense of the force, and consequent preciousness, of property.
For if the wisdom that produces a special art and mastery is to be guarded jealously, then the higher the powers involved the more careful the guardianship must beand this particularly when the powers are the gods themselves, the moving forces of nature and the cosmos. Cautious, complex rituals designed to conjure then and link them to human purposes occupied in Vedic (as also in Homeric) antiquity precisely the place held today by such sciences as physics, chemistry, medicine, and bacteriology. A potent hymn was as precious for those people as the secret of a new super-bomber is for us, or the blueprint of the latest device for a submarine. Such things were valuable not only for the art of war but also for the commercial competition of the times of peace.
21 Cf. supra, p. 8, Editor's note.
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| SR No. | 007309 |
| Book Title | Philosophies of India |
| Original Sutra Author | N/A |
| Author | Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell |
| Publisher | Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd |
| Publication Year | 1953 |
| Total Pages | 709 |
| Language | English |
| Classification | Book_English |
| File Size | 34 MB |