The Vedas and Upanishads for Children E-Book

Roopa Pai

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 466

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Three thousand years ago, deep inside the forests of India, a great 'thought revolution' was brewing. In those forest labs, the brightest thinker–philosophers contemplated the universe, reflected on ancient texts called the Vedas and came up with startling insights into questions we still don't have final answers to, like: • What is the universe made of? • How do I know I'm looking at a tree when I see one? • Who am I? And where did they put those explosive findings? In a sprawling body of goosebumpy and fascinating oral literature called the Upanishads! Intimidated? Don't be! For this joyful, fun guide to some of India's longest-lasting secular wisdoms, reinterpreted for first-time explorers by Roopa Pai, is guaranteed to keep you turning the pages.

Leseprobe

The Vedas and Upanishads

FOR CHILDREN

ROOPA PAI is the author of several books for children, including the much-acclaimed, award-winning bestseller, The Gita for Children. Her books, on topics as diverse as history, mathematics, science, economics and sci-fi fantasy, are enjoyed by adults just as much as they are by children.

Of all the Mahavakyas in the Upanishads, her favourite is ‘Prajnanam Brahma – Knowledge is God’.

SAYAN MUKHERJEE is an illustrator living in Kolkata and working from his studio. After working in advertising for almost nine years, he went solo with his passion – illustrations. He loves children’s books and loves to create art for kids. Besides Hachette India, he works with publishers like Penguin Random House India, Juggernaut, Tulika Books, Speaking Tiger and Pratham Books, among others. He has a number of sketchbooks and carries them wherever he travels, to preserve some beautiful memories.

Other Books by ROOPA PAI

The Gita for Children

Ready! 99 Must-Have Skills for the World-Conquering Teenager(and Almost-Teenager)

THE TARANAUTS SERIES

Taranauts 1: The Quest for the Shyn Emeralds

Taranauts 2: The Riddle of the Lustr Sapphires

Taranauts 3: The Secret of the Sparkl Amethysts

Taranauts 4: The Race for the Glo Rubies

Taranauts 5: The Mystery of the Syntilla Silvers

Taranauts 6: The Key to the Shimr Citrines

Taranauts 7: The Search for the Glytr Turquoises

Taranauts 8: The Magic of the Dazl Corals

To all the readers of this book...Don’t settle for being human – discover the Godthat you really are.

CONTENTS

Before We Begin

THE KNOWLEDGEFirst off, the Vedas

  1.   So What’s the Big Deal about the Vedas?

  2.   Nature Songs of the Cattle-Herders

  3.   The Gods of Big Things

  4.   A-One, A-Two, A-One, Two, Three, Four

  5.   A Feast of Hymns

THE SECRETNext up, the Upanishads

  6.   So What’s the Big Deal about the Upanishads?

  7.   Mastermind!

  8.   Shankara’s Faves – The Top Ten Upanishads

  9.   Isha: The Upanishad of the Sameness of All Things

10.   Kena: The Upanishad of ‘Whence-Came-It-All’?

11.   Katha: The Upanishad of the Secret of Eternal Life

12.   Prashna: The Upanishad of the Peepul Tree Sage

13.   Mundaka: The Upanishad of the Big Shave

14.   Mandukya: The Upanishad of the Frog

15.   Taittiriya: The Upanishad of the Partridges

16.   Aitareya: The Upanishad of the Glory of Being Human

17.   Chandogya: The Upanishad of the Sacred Metre

18.   Brihadaranyaka: The Great Forest Upanishad

And, in Conclusion

Acknowledgements

Select Bibliography

Image Copyright Information

BEFORE WE BEGIN

Hello, hello! It’s lovely to meet you!

You are standing there (or sitting here) reading this for one of two reasons. You have either:

(a)   bought this book (or your parents have thrust it on you, believing this is an ‘improving’ book), OR

(b)   you are browsing through it at a bookstore or library, wondering if it’s worth taking home.

Whatever your reason, chances are that, like many people, you only have a vague understanding of what the Vedas and Upanishads are. So let’s very briefly ‘define’ the two first.

The Vedas are some of the oldest texts known to humankind. They are considered sacred texts and mainly comprise hymns of praise to the elements that sustain us – the sun, the rain, the fire, the wind, the water. Oh, and they came out of the land that we today call India. (To get the Veda 101, flip to The Knowledge, on page 1.)

The Upanishads are part of the Vedas, and therefore, also thought to be sacred. They are the last and newest ‘layer’ of the Vedas (this is India we are talking about, so even this ‘new’ layer was added about 2,700 years ago), but they are not hymns at all – in fact, many are stories, and / or conversations between teacher and student. And what are these stories and conversations mainly about? Unravelling the answers to very fundamental questions, the kind that human beings of all regions and races have struggled with forever. Questions that, astoundingly enough, we still have no clear answers to, despite all the progress we’ve made in the last 3000 years! (To get up close and personal with the Upanishads, go to The Secret, on page 123.)

What are some of these fundamental questions? Let’s see now.

•   Where did the universe come from?

•   Who am I?

•   What is the purpose of my life?

•   Is there a God, and if so, who/where/in what form is He/She/It?

•   What is death?

•   How can I be hundred per cent happy all the time?

•   How do I decide what the right thing to do is in a particular situation?

(Are these questions that bother you? If yes, keep reading!)

Of all the different answers people across the world have come up with to these questions, it seems that the old, old answers of the Upanishads are among the most convincing, for a significant number of Indians – and non-Indians – swear by them to this day. If you’d like to find out what some of those answers are, this book is a good place to start. You can decide what YOU feel about them once you have finished reading. You may end up agreeing with the ancients, you may disagree vehemently, or you may be on the fence, BUT – get this – the sages would be happy with you whichever you are – an agree-er, a disagree-er, or a doubter!

To the agree-ers, the sages would say, ‘Glad you agree! But agreeing is not enough. You have to try out our recommendations – on the secret of happiness, say – and find out if it actually works for you. Oh, and don’t forget to come back and tell us – and everyone else – what you discover, for the point of knowledge is to share it.’

To the disagree-ers, they would say, ‘Wonderful! Why don’t you spend some time thinking about the same questions? Read other texts that have different answers, talk to tonnes of wise people who have other ideas, process all of it through your own head and heart – and when you think you have some answers, come back to us? We love a good debate!’

To the fence-sitters, they would say, ‘Ah, sceptics! Those who question everything, who will not believe what someone else says is the truth, who are not content until they find the answers for themselves. We totally respect your kind – as long as you just don’t sit there on that fence, but actively seek the truth yourself. We’d love to know what you find out, when you do!’

Because, you see, the sages of the Upanishads were never in the business of making other people believe what they themselves knew for a fact. Instead, they were ardent seekers of the secrets of the universe, and they were on this great quest simply to satisfy their own curiosities. Once the secrets had been revealed to their trained, disciplined minds in a sudden, unexpected flash of inspiration, however, they couldn’t wait to share them with everyone.

Here’s the remarkable part, though – these sages did not want wealth, or power, or even fame in return. In fact, so unconcerned were they about such things that they did not even attach their names to their magnum opuses, the hard-won results of their years and years of intense thought experiments!

What the sages did hope to achieve by sharing the secrets they had discovered was to inspire people to seek the truth for themselves. What they dearly wanted was to help their fellow humans realize that life could be a joy if it was lived the right way, and that the human spirit was limitless, chock-full of untapped power and potential.

My friends, they wanted to tell us, you are all prisoners in a ‘misery yard’, which has such high walls that you believe, mistakenly, that the yard is the world. But we – we have been beyond the walls, and we have found there a world of utter bliss.You can get there too, and guess what – you don’t even have to be dead for that to happen! All you need is the courage to commit to the journey and to all the hardships you will encounter along the way. Here, we’ve drawn you a rough roadmap to that world beyond the walls – use it!

That’s what the Upanishads are about – a rough roadmap to living in such happiness in this world that it begins to feel like Heaven itself. And this little book is a first, very basic key to the map.

So, what do you think? Feel like taking a stroll down ye olde Indian route to joy and freedom? What are you waiting for, then – turn the page!

THE KNOWLEDGE

First off, the Vedas

SO WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL ABOUT THE VEDAS?

Right. Let’s kick this section off with a fun quiz, designed to test how much – if anything – you know about the Vedas. It’s multiple-choice, and there’s no negative marking, so just go ahead and fearlessly tick the option you think is closest to the truth. Easy-peasy!

PS: The answers come right after the questions. No peeking!

1.  So what are the Vedas, anyway?

a.  The. Most. Ancient. Sanskrit. Texts. Ever. (Also, the most ancient Indian texts ever)

b.  Among the oldest existing texts in ANY Indo-European language*

c.  The most fundamental sacred texts of many Hindus

d.  A vast, and somewhat random, collection of Sanskrit poetry, philosophical stories, spells, incantations, mantras, musical notations, how-to guides for all kinds of rituals, and more

e.  All of the above

*Indo–European languages include, in order of the number of native speakers, Spanish, English, Hindustani (Hindi–Urdu), Portuguese, Bengali, Punjabi, Russian, German, French, Italian, Persian and over 400 more, including – duh! – Sanskrit. PS: South Indian languages are among those classified as Dravidian languages.

Did you guess (e) – all of the above? That’s the right answer! Bet you got that right because you’re the sort of person who picks ‘all of the above’ when that option exists. But that’s perfectly fine – now you know what the Vedas are, somewhat.

Now, did you notice that the word ‘texts’ was used a lot in the answer options? You will be hearing that word a lot in this book – get used to it. Why do we have to call the Vedas texts, though? Can’t we simply call them ‘books’ instead? Nope. Because they weren’t really ‘books’ – no one wrote them out or printed them on paper/birch bark/palm leaves and then bound the pages together. Not for a long, long time, anyway. Plus, the dictionary definition of ‘text’ is ‘written or printed work, regarded in terms of its content rather than its physical form’. That makes ‘texts’ the most appropriate word to describe the Vedas – and the Upanishads too – because, in the beginning – wait for it – neither had a physical form at all!

No, seriously. For almost 2,000 years, the 20,000-plus verses of the Vedas were passed from generation to generation purely via oral transmission – they were never written down! Do you realize what that means? Both teachers and students had to know them by heart! (Want to attempt that as a project for your next summer vacay?) The oldest Veda, the Rig, was probably written down for the first time as recently as 500 ce. What is even more fascinating is the accuracy with which the texts, and the ‘tunes’ they were set to, were conveyed from teacher to student. (How did the ancients ensure that the oral transmission of their most sacred texts didn’t turn into a game of Chinese whispers? Find out in ‘Learning the Vedas by Heart (and Ear and Tongue and Mind)’ on page 14.) It is those verses, intoned exactly as they were 3,500 years ago, that you hear at Hindu pujas, weddings and funerals, in Hindu temples, schools and homes, and in the ‘Vedic chanting’ classes now trending across the globe. Gives you the goosebumps, wot?

2.  What does the word ‘Veda’ literally mean?

a.  Holy

b.  Word of God

c.  Knowledge

d.  Duty

If you ticked anything other than (c), sorry! The word ‘Veda’ does not mean Holy, or Word of God, or Duty. The root word of Veda is ‘vid’, which is also the root word of vidya, which, as you probably know, means knowledge. (That’s why this whole section is called – ta-daa! – ‘The Knowledge’.)

3.  In all, how many Vedas are there? (If you are the sort who pays attention in social sciences class, you’ve got this one nailed.)

a.  16

b.  4

c.  9

d.  3

Yup, (b) is the right answer. There are officially four Vedas. In chronological order, they are the Rig Veda, the Yajur Veda, the Sama Veda and the Atharva Veda (sometimes called the Atharvana Veda). Apparently, this last, the Atharva, is a bit of an interloper that sneaked in later – in the old, old texts, the Vedas are referred to as the Trayi Vidya – the three-fold knowledge, not four-fold.

4.  Who ‘composed’ the Vedas? (Why is the word composed enclosed in quotation marks? You’ll find out below.)

a.  A bunch of nameless rishis b. Veda Vyasa

c.  Valmiki

d.  Agastya

And the answer is... (a)! Unlike the Mahabharata, which is believed to have been composed by Vyasa, and the Ramayana, said to have been composed by Valmiki, the Vedas were put together, over centuries, by several anonymous rishis or sages. However, Vyasa (whose name literally means ‘compiler’) is believed to be the one who collected the vast and sprawling body of literature we know today as the Vedas. He then classified all the different, random bits of it, decided which portions went together and compiled those into chunks, and then divided those chunks into four separate Vedas. For accomplishing this mammoth task in such an efficient, organized manner, he was given the title ‘Veda Vyasa’ – the compiler of the Vedas.

Oh, and about the quotation marks around ‘composed’. They are there because the Vedas are actually considered to be ‘authorless’ – i.e., texts that were not ‘composed’ by anyone, not even by that bunch of nameless rishis. Instead, it is believed, the Vedas were revealed to these rishis when they were in the kind of deep trance that is achievable only through years and years of disciplined meditation. This makes the Vedas part of what is called Shruti, or ‘heard’ literature. In contrast, other ancient Hindu texts, like the Puranas, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, are part of Smriti, or ‘remembered’ literature.

Hindus believe that Smriti texts were composed by humans, and came out of everything their authors had seen, experienced, understood and remembered. Such texts are allowed to be tweaked, edited, added to and/or rewritten all the time, since everyone’s experience is different, no one’s memory is hundred per cent accurate, and no human work is without flaws. Shruti texts, on the other hand, are believed to contain eternal, universal truths that could possibly have had divine origins. (Divine origins? Does that mean the ancient rishis heard the Vedas being recited by a disembodied voice in the sky? Find out in ‘How to “Hear” the Song of the Universe’ on the facing page.)

That’s why it was so important that Shruti texts be preserved exactly as they were ‘received’. Got that? Good.

5.  Around how many years ago were the Vedas composed?

a.  10,000 years ago

b.  2,000 years ago

c.  5,000 years ago

d.  3,500 years ago

If your train of thought while answering this question went something like – We’ve already had a, b, c and e as the correct options in previous questions, so (d) is a dead ringer for the right answer this time, you would be on the right, um, track. The Rig Veda, the oldest of the four Vedas, has been indeed dated to circa 1500 bce, which makes the Vedas about 3,500 years old.

LESSONS FROM THE VEDAS

HOW TO ‘HEAR’ THE SONG OF THE UNIVERSE

Fun fact: It involves sacrifices, and ancient rituals like discipline, focus and a heck of a lot of hard work

We just talked about how the Vedas are part of what many Hindus consider sacred literature called ‘Shruti’ or ‘heard’ wisdom, and how it is believed that these texts were not composed by humans at all but were revealed (via confidential sources, suspected to be divine) to certain rishis who were considered worthy of it.

How do you imagine these revelations happened? Did the rishis hear a voice from the sky speaking the Vedas, while bathing them in golden ‘God-light’? Or was it an inner voice (located approximately in the region of each rishi’s gut) that revealed the universe’s greatest secrets to him? Metaphorically speaking, neither answer is too far off the mark! It was most likely a combination of the two, happening at the same time, give or take the God-light.

What does that mean? To understand that, you must first understand who these rishis were. Very often, rishis are depicted as people who grew weary of the world and its trials and tribulations, and ‘retired’ (notice how the word ‘tired’ is already in it?) to the forests to pursue a life of meditation and quiet contemplation. But here’s the thing – true rishis were not escaping the world at all! In fact, it was the world, with its infinite wonders and apparent randomness, which fascinated and engaged them more than anything else. These men and women were intellectuals whose thoughts went well beyond the perimeter of their careers and home-fires and their own small lives. These seekers of truth had a burning desire to unlock the mysteries of the world – What is the purpose of life? What happens to us after death? Is there a God? For them, going to the forest was a huge sacrifice, but one they were very willing to make – it was a way to get away from distractions, so that they could focus all their energies on this one great quest.

When you are willing to make such big sacrifices and are so focused on your goal, all kinds of magic happens. We see examples of it all around us all the time, whether we are talking about the greatest scientists or sportspeople or musicians. Even though science is rigorous, and rational, and methodical, the greatest scientific discoveries are often made by a leap of imagination, an ‘I-feel-it-in-my-gut’ sixth sense. The world’s best sportspeople, when they are in their element, are no longer human but superhuman. The world’s best musicians are able to transport us to realms we have never dared to suspect actually exist – places where logic and rationale and science become irrelevant and only emotions abound; when the guitarist in your favourite band gets into his stride at a concert you are watching live, you scream and weep for no reason you can explain, you want to hug strangers.

When people talk about such moments, they use the word ‘inspired’ a lot – it was an inspired guess, they may say, an inspired stroke. They cannot themselves explain how it happened – how they connected two unrelated things in a way no one had before, how they knew exactly where to position themselves for that ‘impossible’ catch on the boundary. Almost always, they are also reluctant to take credit for their idea or achievement entirely, especially because they know of so many other talented people who were working just as hard as them towards the very same goal, but did not get there. ‘It suddenly came to me,’ they say, their voices full of wonder, ‘I just knew.’

It was possibly the same with the rishis of Shruti literature. One fine day, years and years after they had begun pursuing their quest by doing all the right things – training their minds, learning to focus their energies, not checking WhatsApp more than once a year, eating right, keeping fit (hey, try sitting – or standing – in one position for hours and hours every day, meditating, and see if you can do it without eating healthy and being fit!) – they had a moment of pure inspiration. They ‘heard’ the song of the universe – the answers to the big questions came to them, they knew.

Exciting, right? Now for the more important question. Can you learn how to hear the song too? Can those wise rishis teach you to how to get to that flash of inspiration in whatever quest of excellence you are engaged in – math, dancing, poetry, basketball?

Before we go there, let us try and understand what inspiration is. In the modern world, psychologists break inspiration down to a combination of instinct (a hardwired-in-our-DNA, natural response to the world, which all animals have, and which comes from inside); reason (a learned response to the world, which only humans are capable of, and comes from outside); and intuition (or gut-feel, or sixth sense), which is a combination of the two, a way to leap from Step A to Step E without ever going through Steps B, C and D.

The rishis of ancient India had different words to describe the same phenomenon. They preferred to think of inspiration as a benediction that came from a divine source. Was this source outside of them, or inside? For the rishis, who believed that the Universal Energy that pervades everything in the universe (Brahman) was exactly the same as the indestructible energy they carried inside themselves (Atman), the answer was a no-brainer. From both inside and outside, of course!

If you think about it, they were completely spot-on. Inspiration – for a play you are writing for your school’s annual day, your science project, a ‘fusion’ dish (like a dosaffle – dosa batter cooked in a waffle iron and topped with cinnamon-sugar and ghee) that you have just invented – comes both from outside (let’s say from current affairs, Elon Musk and Masterchef Australia, respectively) and inside. After all, it is in your mind that you connect something you already know (dosa) with something you’ve seen on a cooking show (waffles). Add your intuition about tastes and textures to the mix, and you bring the two together in a unique, special way.

But if someone asked you to give them a step-by-step account of how you actually came up with the idea for a dosaffle, would you be able to do it? Not really, right?

And that’s why, just like a scientist cannot give you a formula for making a scientific discovery, and a musician cannot tell you exactly how to write a great piece of music, the rishis of the Upanishads do not pretend that they can teach you how to find inspiration. Like the others, they can only tell you what they did to get to that point in their own quest, caution you about the difficulties you may encounter along the way and give you tips for how to get over them, besides coaching you in technique and ritual and discipline (and diet!). They might also add an important injunction: Keep your mind open, turn your receivers on, or you may not hear the messages the universe is sending you at all! Then, with a pat on your back and a blessing on your head, they will send you on your way.

Because, you see, the long and winding road to that blinding, exhilarating stroke of inspiration – Shruti – has to be journeyed alone. You will have to make the sacrifices, you will have to practise the discipline, you will have to keep the faith. And then, maybe, just maybe, and only if you are considered worthy, you will ‘hear’ the universe singing to you. Maybe, just maybe, the magic will happen, and you will be rewarded with the ultimate inspiration –a brief, tantalising, breathtaking glimpse of the Brahman within you, without you.

Seems like something worth trying for, don’t you think?

LEARNING THE VEDAS BY HEART(AND EAR, AND TONGUE, AND MIND)

Or, how to ensure perfect transmission of knowledge when you can’t check back with Wikipedia

How do you make sure great lessons for all humanity stay uncorrupted for thousands of years, when you can’t write them down because your language has no script?

You would design a system in which only a few were entrusted with the sacred knowledge. You would put the chosen ones through years of intense training. And you would create a fail-proof (or close enough) system to ensure that they retained everything they had learnt.

And that’s exactly what the Vedic seers did – they created the ultimate ancient Indian coaching class! It was called the Vedic gurukul. What were the main features of this ancient school? Read on to find out.

1.  A most stringent admission process. The gurukul entrance test was tough as nails and completely transparent – gurus interviewed each candidate, evaluating each one on his inclination for hard work, ability to follow instructions and aptitude for this particular kind of rigorous study (with bonus points awarded for a naturally curious and questioning mind) before deciding which ones to pick. There was also the small matter of eligibility – only boys, and that too only brahmin, kshatriya and vaishya boys,* were eligible to apply. (Shudras were kept out of the admission process entirely. Not many girls lined up for admission either, but the thirty-one women rishis on record indicate that they were not entirely absent.)

*The four main varnas, or occupational groups – today, the word ‘caste’ is used to mean varna – in ancient India were the brahmins (scholars and thinkers), kshatriyas (kings and warriors), vaishyas (merchants and farmers) and shudras (craftsmen and labourers). While boys of the first three varnas went into gurukuls for their education, shudra boys – sons of potters, carpenters, weavers, goldsmiths, leather workers, sculptors and others who worked with their hands, went into ‘vocational training’ with their dads and uncles and learnt the family trade. Girls of all varnas learnt to cook and keep house with their mothers, apart from training in music, art and dance.

If you believe academic learning is superior to every other kind, this sounds like girls and shudras being ‘relegated’ to the B league. However, many modern educationists firmly believe that a ‘holistic education’ is one that gives the arts and crafts as much importance as academic learning, for it creates a more equitable society, where ‘makers’ – sculptors, weavers, chefs – and artistes – dancers, musicians, designers – are respected just as highly, and paid as much, as professors and bankers and software engineers. Food for thought, eh?

The real downside of the gurukul system was that a lot of scary-smart girls and shudras never got the opportunity to try their luck at academics. And although some gurukuls also taught the arts and crafts, it is likely that many brahmin and kshatriya boys keen on dance and jewellery design did not find avenues to explore their creativity.

Sure, there is far less discrimination today on the basis of gender and caste in education, but overall, is the 21st century world less discriminatory than the one 3,500 years ago? What do you think?’

2.  Loads of extracurricular activities. Boys were admitted into the fully residential programme when they were around twelve years old, and parents were informed that they could pick up their wards from the gurukul main gate at noon, exactly twelve years later. Until then, students occupied themselves not just with studying the scriptures but also helping the guru’s wife around the house, herding and milking the cows, tending to the farm and vegetable patch, collecting and chopping firewood, and serving their foster parents (did you think they were lucky to get away from annoying parents for twelve whole years? Ha! In life, there is never any getting away from parents) in whatever ways they could.

When they left the gurukul, most of the raw, unschooled twelve-year-olds had transformed into well-read, well-mannered, self-reliant young men who were proficient in debate, logic and critical analysis. They refused to accept ‘facts’ without examining and questioning them, but were open to changing their opinions on things as and when they came across convincing new data. They could think for themselves, live without luxuries and do all the work around the house (although they usually ended up letting their wives do it as soon as they were married).

3.  Small class sizes. Most gurus took no more than twelve students every twelve years. Apart from the minor difficulty of feeding twelve growing boys (gurukul education was absolutely free) and figuring out where they would sleep, teachers preferred a small student group so that they could give each boy their full and focused attention. Also, since a lot of learning was based on hearing – very, very clearly – every word the guru said, a small class made sense.

4.  The right learning environment. Nope, they weren’t thinking air-conditioned school buses or ‘smart classrooms’, actually. Gurukuls were usually located deep within quiet virgin forests, far away from the distractions of city and village life. Living and studying in the midst of nature and observing her in her many moods and seasons developed in the students a deep and enduring love for her, and a sense of oneness with the vast and wondrous universe they were part of – which was one of the main ‘desired learning outcomes’ of Vedic education in the first place.

5.  Get the basics right. Here’s an important fact – as far as the Vedas are concerned, it isn’t just the words but also their sounds, and tones, that are considered critical to the meaning and power of the verses (that was part of the reason they continued to be taught by a guru well after scripts were developed and the verses were written down). Since each syllable of the verses was supposed to be pronounced a particular way, sung at a particular note position and held for a particular duration, teaching students the right way to chant each hymn and mantra was vital. Once they had got this bit right, students went on to the next phase: training and disciplining their minds through – here’s the fun part – memorization* of the Vedic hymns.

Only when they had done years of this did students get to more complex stuff like logical thinking, critical analysis of texts, introspection, the art of (respectful) debate, and so on.

*Ever wonder why ‘mugging’ and doing over and replicating the teacher’s notes – to the last word – in the exams is such a big part of the Indian education system? It’s tradition – that’s the way things have been done for 3,500 years! Now you know.

6.  Patterns and sequences, tricks and techniques! Straight-up memorization is one thing and works well if you have a good head for it, but imagine if you didn’t have a book or Wikipedia to go back to and check if you had got it right! You would have had to have some way of cross-checking the accuracy of your recitation – with yourself. After all, this was the only way to make the sacred texts available to the next generation, so the gurus had to make sure their students had it committed to memory perfectly.

And that’s why students were taught many different styles of chanting the same mantra. In each style, the words of the mantra were strung together in different patterns. Every time a mantra was chanted, the student had to chant it in several different styles so that his memory was reinforced and not one word was ever lost.

Of the chanting styles, there were two main ones – Prakriti and Vikriti. In the Prakriti style, the words of the mantra were chanted in their natural order, with Word 2 following Word 1, Word 3 following Word 2, and so on. In the Vikriti style, the words went back and forth a bit.

Boggled? Fret not. Let’s forget the Vedic mantras for a moment. Let’s think about how you would recite/sing the world’s most famous song – ‘Happy Birthday To You’ – using the Vedic chanting method.

First, let’s try two methods of Prakriti-style chanting:

•   Method 1: Samhita Patha (in which you sing the words exactly in their original order): Happy / Birthday / To / You. Straightforward enough, right?

•   Method 2: Krama Patha (in which words are chanted in pairs, in the pattern 12-23-34 and so on, until the end of the mantra): Happy Birthday / Birthday To / To You. Weird, but still easy enough.

On to two methods of Vikriti-style chanting!

•   Method 1: Jata Patha (in which words go back and forth in pairs, in the following pattern – 12-21-12 / 23-32-23 / 34-43-34 and so on, until the end of the mantra): In our example, the first line would go: Happy Birthday-Birthday Happy-Happy Birthday / Birthday To-To Birthday-Birthday To /To You-You To-To You.

Hmmm. Some serious word jugglery there, demanding a great deal of mental focus to get it right.

•   Method 2: Ghana Patha (by far the most complex method, in which the words are recited in twos and threes, in the following pattern – 12-21-123-321-123, and so on – until the end of the mantra). Here’s how the first line of ‘Happy Birthday’ would go: Happy Birthday-Birthday Happy-Happy Birthday To-To Birthday Happy-Happy Birthday To / Birthday To-To Birthday-Birthday To You-You To Birthday-Birthday To You.

Say whaaaaaa??

Now for the big question. What’s the point of concentrating so hard to recite words in the wrong order when they don’t even make sense that way? Well, the main point, of course, is the ability to check back with a different pattern to make sure you have all the words of a mantra. But there is another, equally important, point.

You see, when you focus hard on something, like getting words to fit into a complex pattern, your mind becomes completely occupied. Since the words don’t make sense when they are not said in order, your mind simply cannot go into auto-pilot. Closing your eyes – i.e., cutting off the external stimuli coming to you through one of your sense organs – helps focus your mind even further. In that moment of deep absorption, you see nothing but the patterns, hear nothing but your own voice repeating powerful and mystical words (and we don’t mean Happy Birthday!) over and over again, in the prescribed notes of the musical scale.

If you think about it, it is the perfect practice for learning to turn your awareness inwards, for training the mind to be (at least briefly) still. And while a still mind is the hardest thing to achieve, the Vedic seers tell us it is also the first step towards getting to know yourself as you really are, to finding the most powerful, most divine part of yourself. When you have made that connection, the ancients tell us, all your energies will converge, with laser-like precision, to help you achieve your goal, whatever it is.

Right. So just because they say that, it is your duty to believe them? Naaah. It would make those rishis much happier if you tried this mind-focusing thing for yourself before you agreed (or disagreed) with them. They have done their bit by sharing their mind-blowing, transcendental experiences with you, and by devising all kinds of clever ways to ensure that the knowledge comes to you intact, over millennia. Now the ball is in your court. Toss it up, dribble it around, lob it back, let it lie – the choice is entirely yours to make.

NATURE SONGS OF THE CATTLE-HERDERS

A brief introduction to the composers of India’s all-time greatest hits

Surprising as it may seem to us today, the Vedas, which are the oldest and among the most beautiful hymns to the nature gods that we have, did not come to us from a society of scholars who had read fat books, maxed their exams, or graduated from universities. They came instead from simple people who lived close to the land, slept under the stars, and had a close connection with their horses and dogs, and the sheep, goats and cattle that they herded.

Who exactly were these people? Where did they come from? No one is hundred per cent sure – after all, we’re talking about people who lived 3,500 years ago. What’s more, these people did not believe in permanence – they did not write things down, draw pictures on rocks for us to puzzle over thousands of years later, or build anything that would last a century, leave alone millennia. They only left us their words, thousands and thousands of them, and their thoughts – about how the universe worked and what the purpose of human life was and why we should not be afraid of death. And they made pretty darn sure that we would get to hear all those words and all those thoughts (well, a LOT of them, anyway) long after they had composed them, by not putting them down on perishable material like paper or bark or cloth; instead, they put them in the best safekeeping boxes in the world – people’s memories.* All we know, or think we know, about these people comes from analyzing these words and thoughts.

*Yes, yes, we know – human memory is notoriously unreliable. But the guardians of the sacred knowledge – the Chosen Ones – were those whose ordinary minds had become extraordinary simply through the unwavering discipline and training their owners had put them through. Remember Sherlock Holmes’s ‘Memory Palace’, a many-tiered RAM in his head, organized and catalogued so finely that he could always reach for one particular memory and pull it out when he needed it? Yup, this was that kind of thing, except there wasn’t just one ‘born genius’ like Holmes in ancient India, there were hundreds, who had become ‘geniuses’ through practice.

And what have we figured out so far? There are conflicting theories, but one of the most popular ones over the last few decades is that these people were horse-riding tribes of nomadic goatherds and cattle-herders from Central Asia (the area roughly occupied by today’s Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan) who found their way to India (specifically the Punjab and its surrounds) around 1500 bce. In their literature, these tribes referred to themselves as Arya (say aar-ya) – ‘the noble ones’.

Experts who lean towards this theory believe that the reason that Arya tribes left Central Asia was because overgrazing and drought had made their original homelands, the grasslands called the steppes, unlivable for themselves and their animals. To ensure less crowding and better opportunities for all in their search for new pastures, they say, the Arya split up. One branch went east towards Mongolia, one west towards Anatolia (Turkey) and one south towards Bactria (the area north of the Hindu Kush mountains). From Bactria, the Arya divided again, one branch moving west towards Iran, and the other east towards India. This second branch – whose people these experts refer to as the Indo-Aryans or the Indo-Iranians – settled first in the Punjab and later in the Gangetic plains.

The timing of the grand entrance of these mystery people – the Arya – onto the Indian history stage is crucial. We first encounter them around the same time that the people of the Harappan Civilization – who had lived and thrived on the banks of the Indus and her tributaries in the Punjab for over a thousand years – abandoned their vast, flourishing cities and mysteriously disappeared. (Want to know a little more about the Harappans? Check out ‘Pashupati’s People’ on page 54.)

This little detail leads to the other popular theory, this one more recent, about the origin of the Arya. What if the chariot-driving, horse-riding, dog-loving, weapon-wielding Arya were not foreigners at all, but Harappans themselves who had quit their riverside cities after a great flood and spread out across northern India and further west and east, to re-emerge centuries later as the composers of the Vedas? Or what if they were an entirely different indigenous set of Indian people?

Let us leave that question to the scholars and academics to wrangle over. What is not disputed is that it was the Arya who introduced the Iron Age into India (the Harappans had only known the use of the softer bronze and copper) and that it was also they who gave India and the world the oldest of the languages in the Indo-European family of languages, the perfectly formed ‘mother language’ Sanskrit. (That isn’t an exaggeration, by the way; the anglicized name for the language – Sanskrit – actually comes from the words ‘samskruta’, which literally means ‘perfectly formed’! In fact, in the beginning, ‘samskruta’ was the adjective used to describe the language of the ancient texts – the language itself was simply called ‘bhasha’, or language. So ‘samskruta bhasha’ simply meant ‘the perfectly formed language’.)

As the pastures in the north-west were consumed and the rivers that sustained their crops changed course or dried up because of changes in climate, the Arya, having now split into five main tribes, began to move slowly east across northern India. Over the next thousand years, they colonized the Doab – the fertile land between the two great rivers Ganga and Yamuna – and became farmers. Each Arya tribe split into clans as they went along, fighting each other to establish their own little areas of control, called janapadas. By the 6th century bce, the many little janapadas had been consolidated into sixteen larger ‘kingdoms’ called mahajanapadas, which stretched between the Himalayas in the north and the Vindhyas in the south, and from the western (Arabian) sea to the eastern sea (the Bay of Bengal). The Arya referred to their new land as Aryavarta (say aar-yaa-varta) – Abode of the Noble Ones.

One of the mahajanapadas was Kuru (does that name ring a bell?), which, the Mahabharata tells us, was the land of the... yup, the Pandavas and the Kauravas! Another was faraway Gandhara, in today’s Afghanistan, from where the beautiful princess Gandhari was brought to Kuru as the bride of the blind prince Dhritarashtra. A third was Kosala, the kingdom of the Ikshvakus, whose most famous king was... right, Rama from the Ramayana! There was also the mahajanapada of Magadha, from where Ashoka Maurya and the Guptas ruled, and that of Kashi, with its holy cities of Varanasi (revered as a pilgrimage centre for thousands of years) and Sarnath (where Buddha gave his first sermon).*

*Isn’t this all a bit confusing? Weren’t Ashoka and the Guptas people who actually existed while Rama and the Kuru princes were merely characters in stories? Well, here’s the thing – Hindus classify the Ramayana and Mahabharata not under the Puranas, which are considered stories, but under a separate genre called Itihasa (from iti-ha-asa – Sanskrit for ‘this is how it happened’), or history. Even though they accept that every single event mentioned in the epics may not have happened exactly in that way, they firmly believe that the main thread of the narratives describes real events, people, kingdoms and dynasties.

But back to the Arya. The Arya tended not to stay in the same place for too long, at least in the beginning. Their on-the-go lifestyle made it somewhat pointless for them to build great cities or temples or palaces, and it seems they truly did not care for such things.** After all, the scholarly ones among them carried all they needed to know in their heads, and as for the others, their greatest wealth – horses and cattle – were fully capable of moving with them.

**Well-planned cities and a script (that we haven’t yet been able to decipher) were two hallmarks of the Harappan Civilization. Considering that such an advanced civilization had been around in India for a thousand years before the Arya appeared on the scene, it seems somewhat insane that we would have to wait another thousand years after that for other cities to be built and a new script to be developed. But from all the evidence we have so far, that seems to be what happened!

What the Arya did care about, however, was pleasing their gods. Like all other early agrarian civilizations, they lived equally in awe of the formidable power and beauty of Mother Nature, and fear at her capriciousness. Naturally, just like the Egyptians, Chinese and Mesopotamians, they turned the elements – the sun, the earth, the rain, the rivers, the dawn, the thunder – into gods, and set about composing extravagant hymns of praise to each one. After all, if the gods were not kept happy, how could the Arya hope to ensure that the rain fell at the right time and the rivers did not flood (or dry up!) and the sun shone just so and the earth gave forth enough of herself to sustain their crops, their animals and themselves? (Who were the gods of the Arya? Are they the same gods Hindus worship today? Find out in Chapter 3: ‘The Gods of Big Things’ on page 42.)

Realizing that, at the end of the day, even the most flattering praise was merely lip service, and the gods would probably expect something more solid, the Arya devised elaborate sacrifices called yagnas. There were different yagnas to wrest different boons – long life, success in war, a bountiful harvest, many fine sons – from the gods, but they were all accompanied by the chanting of songs of praise and they were almost always conducted in the presence of the sacred fire, Agni. Into Agni’s all-consuming maw went the various offerings – ground rice, cooked pulses, milk, soma (Soma? Wozzat? To find out, check out ‘“Theobroma” Soma – Elixir of the Gods’ on page 38), and the all-important ghrita, aka desi ghee (and you wondered why ghee is such an indispensable ingredient in the Indian kitchen!) – that were believed to please the gods.

In the beginning, animal sacrifices were also a huge part of yagnas. Thousands of animals, including cattle and horses (these animals were dearest and most precious to the Arya, so giving them up to the gods was a huge sacrifice), were offered to the gods.

Phew. Yagnas sound like a serious amount of work, right? But the payback was worth it – if a yagna was done right, Agni the divine messenger would ensure that the offerings were conveyed dutifully to the gods being propitiated, leaving them with no choice but to rain the right blessings down on the earthly petitioners. (Yup, that was the belief then – you had the power to persuade the gods to do what you wanted, assuming you performed all the prescribed rituals in the correct way!)

Now, how could the yajamana (say yaja-maana) – the king or merchant who hosted the yagna and provided all the money needed for the firewood, the offerings, the sacrificial animals and everything else – ensure that the yagna was conducted in exactly the right way? He requested the scholars, the ritual experts who knew all the mantras by heart, to come and officiate at the ceremonies. For this service, he paid them a generous fee. Simple!

So if worship and yagnas were such a big part of Arya life, didn’t they require, like the Egyptians, special temples where sacred ceremonies could be conducted? Nope. Whether the yagna was a small private one for one’s immediate family or a ginormous community one with thousands of people attending, all it required, apart from a sacrificial post where animals could be butchered, was a yagna kunda, a fire altar, which was a pit to contain the firewood and oilseeds that sustained the sacred fire for the duration of the ceremony. Pits were built and consecrated (i.e., made pure for worship by the sprinkling of holy water, the chanting of mantras and other rituals) just before the yagna, and must have been dismantled soon after, since no remains of ancient fire altars have ever been found (these people were clearly sticklers for the ‘Leave No Trace’ policy that modern conservationists urge us to follow when we go camping and hiking).

Yagna kunds were of many different shapes that were variations of the square

The square was considered to be the sacred geometrical shape for the kunda. But instead of settling for a simple square, the Arya played around with the basic shape to come up with all kinds of interesting variations – a kunda could be a right-angled rhombus (a square standing on one of its corners), a rectangle (two squares placed side by side), a set of triangles (each of which was a square cut in half), or a many-pointed star (which, if you think about it, is nothing but a rotating square). The most interesting shape that we know of, used for the most important yagnas, and built out of a specified number of bricks, each made to specified dimensions (ancient Indians were nothing if not nerdy, especially where numbers were concerned) was the hawk- or falcon-shaped altar.*

*Can you come up with your own cool shapes for yagna kundas, using just squares? To make it more challenging, try and come up with patterns in which the number of squares used is a multiple of nine – nine squares, or eighteen, or twenty-seven, or 108... Nine was a number sacred to the Arya, so any number whose digits added up to nine also made the cut. Try it!

As different groups of people developed expertise in different skills, Arya society divided itself into four divisions, or classes, called varnas. Those who knew the Vedas and the rituals became the priests – they were called the brahmins. Clan leaders who defended the tribe, protected their cattle, fought wars and hosted yagnas for the well-being of their people became, along with the soldiers they led, the warrior class – they were called the kshatriyas. The farmers who grew the crops that sustained their people and the merchants who carried the grain to distant lands for trade, thus filling the coffers of the tribe and ensuring there was enough money for yagnas and wars, were the third band – they were called the vaishyas. Those who worked with their hands, creating useful and/or artistic products out of leather and gold and wood and clay and iron, or serving the people of the three other classes – as charioteers, grooms for horses, lady’s maids, cooks, butchers, and so on – formed the fourth group: they were called the shudras.

The brahmins were intellectuals who thought deep thoughts and knew the Vedas verbatim. But they had very few practical skills for earning a livelihood. In order to survive, they smartly forged an alliance with the ones who wielded the real power – the kings. Since it was the duty of the king to conduct yagnas, and no yagna could be performed without someone (usually, several someones) who knew the Vedas officiating, the brahmins (who were the smallest varna in terms of numbers) ensured that they were always employable.

It is easy to see how these two varnas – comprising the Smart Ones and the Powerful Ones – raced to winner and runner-up positions, respectively, on the varna podium.

Of course it was money that made the world go round even then, and the people who controlled that part were the vaishyas. They zoomed into third place in the varna race, leaving the shudras far behind at fourth place.

And thus it came to pass that a society whose divisions had originally been based simply on the kind of work people did, with no one group considered higher or lower than any other, turned into one in which one or more divisions (today we call them ‘castes’) lorded it over the others, claiming that the ‘lower’ castes neither could nor should ever aspire to do the jobs of the ‘higher’ castes. For instance, in later Arya society, a butcher’s son was stuck with being a butcher for life, never mind how capable he himself was of committing the Vedas to memory, simply because no one would agree to teach them to him!*

*Remember the story from the Mahabharata where the great Acharya Drona refused to accept a boy called Ekalavya as his student, simply because he came from the Nishada tribe, whose people were hunters and fishermen? It didn’t even matter to the Acharya that Ekalavya was a prince of his tribe, for Drona was far too busy teaching kshatriya princes, the ‘real’ blue bloods. And when Ekalavya went on to display the kind of mastery of his craft that made him a threat to Drona’s favourite student Arjuna? Shudder! You know how that story ended.

What’s more, the dominant varnas claimed that this kind of discrimination was authorized by the Vedas – and therefore the gods – themselves. As you can imagine, that kind of claim was incredibly easy for them to get away with, because only the brahmins knew the Vedas in the first place – everyone else simply had to believe what they said, or have the wrath of the gods – and the priests – visited upon their heads.

It was possibly partly to question and challenge this kind of patent unfairness that had crept into Arya society that the Upanishads were composed, beginning circa 7th century BCE. The sages of the Upanishads sat down, re-examined the Vedas and returned declaring that the true message of the Vedas was that all creatures were equal, since they were all simply manifestations of the same Universal Energy. They suggested that many things mentioned in the Vedas were not meant to be taken literally, but metaphorically. Sacrifice your ego, said the Upanishads, not animals; offer hard work and dedication to the sacred fire inside you, instead of soma and ghrita into a real fire. And rest assured that this kind of yagna will make the gods just as happy and the rewards that flow down to you as a result just as generous.

While the Upanishads attempted to reform the Arya religion from the inside, two other movements that came up soon after took the opposite route. They rejected many things about the Arya religion (the Vedas, the yagnas, the animal sacrifices, the caste system) while still retaining some of its core beliefs, broke away, and became two new religions. These religions also believed in ahimsa (nonviolence) and the equality of all creatures. They were called – you guessed it! – Jainism and Buddhism.

In the centuries after, the Vedic religion of the Arya, now revived by the wisdom and liberal ideas of the Upanishads, crossed the Vindhyas and made its way into the southern peninsula, taking with it Vedic chants and rituals, and the Sanskrit language. As its influence spread beyond Aryavarta, it sprawled and proliferated like a great banyan, putting down roots as it went, and inviting all the gods, goddesses, beliefs, philosophies, practices and traditions it encountered along the way to come and set up home under its vast and generous canopy. By and by, over centuries, it metamorphosed into the chaotic, glorious, impossible-to-define and uniquely Indian celebration of unity in diversity that we now call Hinduism.*

Hinduism is still a work in progress, one that is being ceaselessly reformed, reinterpreted, revised, recast, and yes, challenged, by anyone who wants to have a go – gurus, politicians, academics, film-makers, artists, philosophers, historians and any number of common people. And while it has changed immeasurably as it has grown and spread, perhaps the most remarkable thing about this old, old religion-that-isn’t-really-a-religion** is how much of it has remained the same over the last 3,500 years.