Vedas

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Vedas

The Vedas are the ancient sacred scripture of India, known as sruti, "that which is heard." Though "seen" rather than heard in the ecstatic visions of the early sages who first sang these hymns, they have been transmitted orally from teacher to student for thousands of years. With intensive complex techniques of memorization unparalleled anywhere, practitioners could memorize by heart thousands of lines of text. On the basis of archaeological evidence and interpretation of the texts, most scholars date the Vedas to approximately 1500 b.c.e. However it should be noted that an intense debate has raged for the last several years, with some partisans giving dates as early as 5000 or even 7000 b.c.e. In any case, traditional medieval Indian scholarship instituted an exegetical trend asserting the timelessness of the Vedas. These books are authorless (apaurusheya); they do not come from any human hand or mouth, but rather at the dawn of each new cycle of the world, they reappear as the primordial wisdom to be "heard."

There are four major books of the Vedas, the Rg Veda, with 1026 hymns, songs sung to the gods in the sacrifice; the Yajur Veda, which deals especially with the Vedic fire ritual; the S?ma Veda, consisting mostly of hymns taken from the Rig Veda, but elaborately sung to a scale of seven notes rather than the three notes used for other Vedic recitation; and the Atharva Veda, the Veda associated with the sorcerer Angiras, abounding in magic incantations for a host of mundane concerns, such as luring away the poison from a snakebite, warding away miscarriage, bewitching the boy next door to fall in love, reversing someone else's magic spell, and so on.

Each of these four Vedas chronologically subdivides into four sections of three types. The Brahmana portions explain the ritual. The Aaranyaka portions are transitional texts of philosophical and mystical speculation; and the Upanishads, known as Vedanta, the end of the Vedas, both chronologically and teleologically, speak of secret mystical teachings—the oneness that pervades the whole and the secret parallels between the cosmos and the human body.

What role do the Vedas play in contemporary American culture? The first murmurings were heard in the wake of nineteenth-century American enthusiasm for the mysticism of the Upanishads, which filtered into American culture via the writings of authors like Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson. For their American readers, these mystical teachings opened a world unseen, a mystic unity with all of life, a diffuse mysticism—the "oceanic feeling" that Freud found so distasteful. In fact, Leaves of Grass, with its celebratory catalogue of life, in many ways echoes the Black Yajur Veda piece Camakam, extremely popular in India even today, where the poet sings a celebratory catalogue of nature and the human body, of leaves and streams, the rocky pathway and the easy one, the eddying whirlpool and the eye, speech, the ear, the mind—all embraced within himself. The metaphor underlying this diffuse mysticism is especially the image of dissolving, as in the Chandogya Upanishad (6.13.1–3), where salt dissolves in water to be everywhere present, on all sides, but nowhere discretely seen.

Eventually, and especially pronounced in the 1960s, this diffuse and transcendent mysticism solidified itself in American consciousness in the pervasive image of the meditating yogi, scarcely clad and complete with long beard and an otherworldly mysticism, challenging what was felt as the West's materialist obsession. Probably the best representative of this Vedantic mystic ascetic is Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, made famous by the Beatles. He founded a popular movement that swept across the nation in the early 1970s, and his Veda is the mystic counterpoint to the science of the modern Western world; his Maharishi Vedic University offers not only courses on management and the sciences, but also courses like Validation of Experiences of Higher States of Consciousness through the Vedic Literature and Modern Scientific Research. The Vedantic perspective here follows the exegesis of medieval schools like Shankara's Advaita Vedanta, where the world is illusory, a transient and incoherent toy that Maya, the inexpressible power of illusion, creates.

Salvation lies in transcendence of the vicissitudes of this impermanent world. This presentation of the Vedas is most prominent in America, found in institutions like the Vedanta society and the Ramakrishna Mission (despite the fact that its eponymous founder himself embraced a tantric this-worldly devotion to the goddess Kali), to Dayananda Saraswati in Pennsylvania, to the Rishikesh-based Shivananda and his disciples, Satchidananda, Vishnudevananda, and especially the late charismatic Chinmayananda, an exreporter who had a transformative experience after meeting his guru Shivananda, and who drew crowds of thousands of students to talks at universities across the United States—and also to lesser known teachers, like Acarya Peter, of German extraction, who teaches to a dedicated flock outside Washington, D.C. More recently, beginning in the later 1980s newer apostles of a Vedantic mysticism have begun to germinate in the American landscape, from the South Indian "hugging saint" Ammachi to a host of American-born teachers like Gangaji and Andrew Cohen, who, after "getting" the message of the Ch?ndogya Upanishad, the great statement "you are that!" (Ch?ndogya 6.5.1ff), returned from India to spread the message to wisdom-hungry America.

Whether a notion of the illusory maya of the world is really espoused by Vedic texts, and particularly by the circa-sixth-century Vedanta, is debatable. But it should be added that at least since the charismatic teacher of the eighth century c.e., Shankara, an asceticism stressing the illusoriness of the world has been a prominent indigenous interpretation of the late Vedic literature. We can also spy a Vedantic perspective on the world seeping into the New Age movement with writers like Ken Wilber embracing the timeless mysticism of Shankara's Upanishads as embodied in the twentieth century mystic Ramana Maharshi. The book he would take, if stranded on a desert island, would be Talks with Ramana Maharshi (One Taste, 1999).

The New Age has gravitated toward the Vedas in another way also, in a practical this-wordly say, via a growing interest in what is traditionally known as Vedanga, the "limbs of the Veda." This includes especially Ayurveda, an indigenous medical system of India especially using herbs in treatment; and in jyotisha, Vedic astrology. Both have become quite popular in New Age circles, and Ayurvedic books on healing, like those of Deepak Chopra, are beginning to edge into the mainstream.

Finally we need to consider the impact of the Vedas on a newer section of America's population. Beginning with the great "brain drain" in the mid-1960s, numbers of well-educated Indians began migrating to the United States, especially in the computer software industry. And these immigrants have imported their religious traditions by building temples (mathas) in pockets of the United States like the Venkateshara Temple in Pittsburgh and its satellite in Chicago and especially the Srngeri Matha in Pennsylvania, which incorporates the traditional Vedic recitation of its namesake in India. In many of these temples and especially those with South Indian affiliation, a traditional Vedic recitation is included as part of the liturgy. These are just a few notable examples of a burgeoning phenomenon in the United States, one that is beginning to be recognized as a part of the American religious landscape, as evidenced by the fact that President Bill Clinton recently attended the inauguration of a new South Indian temple to the god Murugan.