Layers of a Veda

When someone says “the Rig Veda,” they usually mean its hymns. But to the tradition, a Veda is a whole body of literature: the hymns themselves, and then prose texts that explain them, and then texts that meditate on what the explanations mean. The Map of the Texts showed these four layers on a single shelf, and The Four Vedas opened each Veda’s hymns. This page goes down through the layers one by one.

Four layers, one Veda

Tap each layer in turn. Notice how the focus moves — from words spoken at the fire, to the reasons behind the rite, to its inner meaning, to the Self that every rite was secretly about:

The neat sequence is a useful map, but the real texts are messier. The Kṛṣṇa (“black”) Yajurveda mixes explanation into its Saṃhitā; the Bṛhadāraṇyaka is both an Āraṇyaka and an Upaniṣad, and forms the last part of a Brāhmaṇa; the short Īśa Upaniṣad is the final chapter of a Saṃhitā. The layers overlap, because each grew out of the one before. The tradition calls the Saṃhitās mantra and everything after them brāhmaṇa in the broad sense — so a Veda, in the classical definition, is “mantra and brāhmaṇa.”

Saṃhitā: the words of power

A Saṃhitā (“that which is put together”) is a collection of mantras arranged for use. The Ṛgveda Saṃhitā gathers hymns of praise; the Sāmaveda sets verses to melody; the Yajurveda supplies the formulas murmured during the actions; the Atharvaveda collects prayers and charms for daily life. Each Veda also had several schools of transmission (śākhās), and each school had its own Saṃhitā — the Taittirīya, Maitrāyaṇī and Kāṭhaka Saṃhitās of the Black Yajurveda, for example, or the Vājasaneyī Saṃhitā of the White.

What matters about a Saṃhitā is not first its meaning but its sound. The words must be recited perfectly, with the right pitch-accents, at the right moment. That is why the chanting techniques described on the Map of the Texts were developed: to keep the Saṃhitā unchanged, syllable by syllable.

Brāhmaṇa: why the ritual works

The Brāhmaṇas are long prose works, among the oldest Sanskrit prose anywhere. (On the three similar-sounding words Brahman, Brahmā and Brāhmaṇa, see Atman & Brahman.) They tell the priests what to do — where to stand, which mantra accompanies which offering — but above all they explain why. Their key idea is the bandhu, a hidden “connection”: the altar is the year, the fire is the breath, the sacrificer is the cosmic person, and so acting rightly on one moves the other. The god Prajāpati, who dismembered himself to create the world and is put back together in the building of the fire altar, stands at the centre of much of this thinking.

The best-known Brāhmaṇas are:

• Aitareya and Kauṣītaki (also called Śāṅkhāyana) Brāhmaṇas — of the Ṛgveda.
• Pañcaviṃśa (or Tāṇḍya) and Jaiminīya Brāhmaṇas — of the Sāmaveda.
• Taittirīya Brāhmaṇa — of the Black Yajurveda.
• Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, “of a hundred paths” — of the White Yajurveda, and the largest of all.
• Gopatha Brāhmaṇa — of the Atharvaveda.

The Brāhmaṇas also preserve some of the tradition’s oldest stories, told to explain a rite. The most famous is a flood:

The little fish asks Manu to raise it, promising to save him from a coming flood. It grows great; Manu builds a ship; when the waters rise he ties the ship to the fish’s horn and is drawn to a northern mountain. Alone of all creatures he survives, and from his offering of butter and milk a woman, Iḍā, is born, through whom humanity begins again. In the Brāhmaṇa the fish is not yet named as a god; the Purāṇas later identify it as Matsya, the first avatāra of Vishnu. Other Brāhmaṇa stories have travelled just as far: the love of King Purūravas and the nymph Urvaśī (Śatapatha), retold centuries later by Kālidāsa, and the boy Śunaḥśepa, nearly sacrificed and saved by his hymns to the gods (Aitareya, book 7).

The world of the Brāhmaṇas was also a world of exclusions, and it is better to say so plainly. The great rites could be sponsored only by married men of the three upper varṇas, performed only by Brahmin priests; the sponsor’s wife had a real but limited ritual role, and Śūdras were excluded altogether.

Āraṇyaka: the ritual turned inward

The Āraṇyakas, “forest books,” take their name from araṇya, wilderness. Many scholars think this was because they dealt with rites thought too potent or secret to be learned inside the village. The surviving ones include the Aitareya and Kauṣītaki Āraṇyakas of the Ṛgveda and the Taittirīya Āraṇyaka of the Black Yajurveda — whose first book, the Aruṇa Praśna, is still chanted with sun salutations in South Indian homes and temples.

In these texts something new happens. The rite is not only performed but meditated upon. Fire offerings are re-imagined as offerings into the breath; the sacrifice becomes a pattern to be held in the mind. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka — the “great forest book” — opens by turning the horse sacrifice, the grandest royal rite of all, into a vision of the universe:

The horse is no longer only an animal led to the altar. It is the cosmos itself — and a person who understands this has, in a sense, already performed the rite.

Upaniṣad: the end of the Veda

The movement inward reaches its summit in the Upaniṣads. Here the questions are no longer how to make the rite succeed, but who it is that acts, what survives death, and what the reality behind all the gods might be. Some passages even look back on the ritual world with open scepticism:

Yet the Upaniṣads never simply throw the ritual away. They are still part of the Veda, still recited by the same families of priests, and they still use ritual imagery everywhere. The next page, The Principal Upanishads, opens them in detail.

Which text belongs to which Veda

Each Veda carries its own set of layers. Tap a Veda to see its main surviving texts:

Action and knowledge

Later thinkers sorted the layers into two great portions: the karma-kāṇḍa, the “section on action” (Saṃhitās and Brāhmaṇas), and the jñāna-kāṇḍa, the “section on knowledge” (the Upaniṣads), with the Āraṇyakas as a bridge. Some teachers add a third, the upāsanā-kāṇḍa on meditation, for the Āraṇyakas. A later scheme The texts themselves do not divide so cleanly. But the question of which portion matters most split the interpreters of the Veda into two schools, both called Mīmāṃsā, “inquiry.” Their founding works even begin with matching sentences — athāto dharma-jijñāsā, “now, then, the inquiry into dharma” (Jaimini’s Mīmāṃsā Sūtra 1.1.1), and athāto brahma-jijñāsā, “now, then, the inquiry into Brahman” (the Brahmasūtra 1.1.1).

The ritual manuals

As the Brāhmaṇas grew vast and the rites more intricate, each school compressed its practice into short handbooks called sūtras (“threads”). These belong to the Vedāṅga of ritual, the kalpa, and they are Smṛti, not Śruti. Tap each kind:

These manuals are why ritual families still identify themselves by their sūtra as well as their Veda. Community practice Many Tamil Brahmin families, in India and in Malaysia, describe themselves as followers of the Āpastamba sūtra of the Taittirīya (Black Yajur) school, and their priests use its household rites at weddings and upanayanas.

When were the layers composed?

For the tradition, all four layers are equally Śruti, eternal and unauthored. Historians, working from language and content, see them as laid down over roughly a thousand years. All dates are approximate and debated:

1. c. 1500–1000 BCEThe SaṃhitāsThe Ṛgveda first; the other collections, and the Yajurveda’s prose formulas, somewhat later.
2. c. 1000–700 BCEThe BrāhmaṇasThe ritual is systematised; the Śatapatha is among the latest and largest.
3. c. 700–500 BCEĀraṇyakas and the oldest UpaniṣadsThe Bṛhadāraṇyaka and Chāndogya, probably before the Buddha.
4. c. 600–200 BCEThe Śrauta and Gṛhya SūtrasEach school condenses its practice into handbooks; the Dharmasūtras follow, c. 3rd–1st century BCE.

Which layer?

Questions people often ask

Key terms on this page

Sources & further reading

• Jan Gonda, Vedic Literature (A History of Indian Literature, vol. 1, Harrassowitz, 1975).
• Michael Witzel, “Vedas and Upaniṣads,” in Gavin Flood (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism (2003).
• Julius Eggeling (trans.), The Śatapatha-Brāhmaṇa, Sacred Books of the East vols. 12, 26, 41, 43, 44 (1882–1900) — Manu and the fish at 1.8.1.
• Brian K. Smith, Reflections on Resemblance, Ritual, and Religion (Oxford University Press, 1989) — on the Brāhmaṇas’ “connections.”
• Patrick Olivelle, Upaniṣads (Oxford World’s Classics, 1996) — introduction on the place of the Upaniṣads in the Veda.
• Frits Staal, Agni: The Vedic Ritual of the Fire Altar (Asian Humanities Press, 1983) — the 1975 Nambudiri Atirātra.
• Francis X. Clooney, Thinking Ritually: Rediscovering the Pūrva Mīmāṃsā of Jaimini (De Nobili, 1990).