Rigveda
The oldest layer of the tradition; hymns to Rudra, the Gayatri to Savitr, and the Devi Sukta of Vak.
A quick reference entry. For the full account, follow the guides below.
Appears in
- What are the Vedas? Scriptures
There are four of them. The Rigveda, the Samaveda, the Yajurveda and the Atharvaveda.
- Who is Shiva? Deities
The archer in the mountains Rudra is a minor figure in the Rigveda by sheer hymn-count.
- What is a Mantra? Worship
Speech as a goddess For that you have to go back to the oldest layer of the record, the Rigveda, and to a hymn where speech herself stands up and talks.
- The Unwritten Library Treatise
For roughly three thousand years, the most important texts in India were never written down. They were heard, memorized syllable by syllable, and carried across a…
- What is Sanatana Dharma? Essentials
What can be said without an "if" is that its oldest text, the Rigveda , was composed well over three thousand years ago, and that the tradition has been continuously alive ever since.
- The Search for the Original Treatise
Müller's edition of the Rigveda with Sayana's medieval commentary appeared in six volumes between 1849 and 1874.
- The Nasadiya Sukta: the hymn that ends in doubt Journal
This is the Nasadiya Sukta , the 129th hymn of the tenth book of the Rigveda .
- Sarasvati: The River That Vanished History
In the Rigveda there is a river that overwhelms every other.
- Shabda-Brahman: The Word as the Absolute Treatise
In one of the last hymns of the Rigveda, the oldest book in India, a voice speaks, and the voice is not a poet's.
- The Gayatri Treatise
The Gayatri is Rigveda 3.62.10 , a single verse embedded in a hymn ascribed to the seer Vishvamitra , one of the great rishis.
- Is Sanskrit the mother of all languages? Journal
The inversion Now turn the question around, because the strongest evidence against Sanskrit as universal mother is inside Sanskrit's own oldest text. The Rigveda contains words borrowed from Dravidian.
- Devas and Asuras Deities
In the third book of the Rigveda there is a hymn of twenty-two verses, and every one of them ends on the same line.
- The order the ledger runs on Treatise
It rests on an older and stranger conviction, sung in the earliest hymns of the Rigveda , that the universe is orderly all the way down.
- The Aitareya Upanishad: the Self that entered through the skull Treatise
The Aitareya Upanishad, of the Rig Veda and embedded in the Aitareya Aranyaka (chapters 2.4 to 2.6), is a three-part prose text. It tells how the Self, alone in the…
- The Gayatri Mantra Worship
What the verse says It is Rigveda 3.62.10, in the third mandala , the Vishvamitra book.
- The Mahamrityunjaya Mantra Worship
The words are a single verse of the Rigveda, the twelfth and final verse of a hymn in the seventh book, and there is a small surprise in its setting.
- The Vedic Gods: Indra, Agni, and the world of the Rigveda Essentials
The book is the Rigveda, a collection of more than a thousand hymns in an archaic Sanskrit, composed by families of poet-priests somewhere in the northwest of the subcontinent, roughly between 1500 and 1200 bef…
- The Book That Was Never Written Treatise
The oldest of the four collections, the Rigveda ( rig-vay-da ), the "Veda of verses," contains 1,028 hymns gathered into ten books, running to something on the order of ten thousand verses and roughly forty tho…
- The Four Fires Treatise
The first word of the Rigveda, as the tradition has arranged it, is agnim .
- The Seers Who Heard Treatise
A name sits at the head of almost every hymn in the Rigveda.
- When, and Whose Treatise
The book in front of every other book has no first page. You can open the Rigveda.
- Rita: The Cosmic Order at the Root of Dharma Essentials
Open the oldest book the tradition possesses, the Rigveda , and one word turns up on almost every page.
- Who is the Goddess? Deities
A voice in the oldest book The Rigveda is the oldest layer of the tradition, its hymns composed across centuries in the second millennium before the common era and fixed by oral transmission long before they we…
- Who is Vishnu? Deities
In the older books of the Rigveda , the hymn collection that the tradition holds to be the oldest of the Vedas and that scholars place around 1500 to 1200 BCE, the gods who command the most verses are Indra the…