Meaning and the Measure of Time

A man stands up in the schoolroom and says the thing no one is supposed to say. The verses you chant, he tells the teacher, mean nothing. They are sound, and sound only, and the science you are building to explain them is a science of air.

His name, as we have it, is Kautsa. We will come back to him, because his objection is the hinge on which this chapter turns. Two of the six limbs of the Veda are charged with protecting two things the recitation cannot live without. One protects the meaning of the words. The other measures the time of the rite. Lose either, and the chant becomes what Kautsa accused it of being.

A science of meaning

By the middle of the first millennium BCE the Veda had a problem its own preservers could see. The hymns were old. The language had moved on. Words that once sat in ordinary speech had gone dark, and a reciter could carry a syllable perfectly across generations without any idea what it named.

This is the territory of nirukta, the etymology Vedanga, the science of meaning. The word itself means something like “explanation” or “derivation.”

Its monument is a single text. The Nirukta of Yaska is the oldest surviving treatise on etymology and semantics anywhere in the Indian tradition, and possibly anywhere. Yaska is hard to date with confidence. He is generally placed before or around the grammarian Panini, which puts him around the fifth century BCE or earlier, though the relation to Panini is debated and we should not pretend it is settled.

The Nirukta is not a free-standing dictionary. In form it is a commentary on an older work, the Nighantu, an ancient glossary of mostly Vedic words arranged across five chapters. The Nighantu lists. The Nirukta explains. Yaska takes the hard, obscure terms and asks where they come from.

His answer is a method, and the method is the whole point. Words, for Yaska, are accounted for by the action they express. To learn what an obscure word means you trace it back to its verbal root, its dhatu, the root that names a doing. A thing is called what it is called because of what it does, or what is done with it, or what happens through it. Find the action and you have found the meaning.

It is a powerful tool and a dangerous one, because roots can be stretched to reach almost any conclusion, and Yaska knew this. He uses it anyway, with care, because for the words that had gone dark there was nothing else.

That was the practical work. Then came the man who said the work was pointless.

The man who said the Veda meant nothing

In the first book of the Nirukta, at sections fifteen and sixteen, Yaska stops the technical exposition and records an attack on the entire enterprise. The translation here, and throughout, is Lakshman Sarup’s public-domain rendering of 1920 to 1921.

The objection is blunt. In Sarup’s words: “‘If (the object of the science) is to ascertain the meaning of Vedic stanzas, it is useless,’ says Kautsa, ‘for the Vedic stanzas have no meaning.’”

Anarthaka. Without meaning. Without purpose. That is the charge.

Kautsa, as Yaska reports him, did not leave it as a slogan. He built a case. The word-order of the mantras is rigidly fixed, so they cannot function like ordinary speech. The ritual act is already commanded by the Brahmana texts, so the accompanying mantra adds nothing the priest does not already know to do. Some mantras say impossible things, addressing plants and tools as if they could hear: “Save him, O plant!” and “Do not injure him, O Axe!” Some contradict each other outright. One verse declares “There was but one Rudra and no second”; another speaks of “Rudras, who on earth are thousands without number.” Some verses state only what everyone already knows. And some words are simply, hopelessly obscure.

Read coldly, it is a serious argument. It says the chant is a closed mechanical object whose words have no live relation to sense.

We should be honest about who is making it. Yaska names Kautsa, and that is nearly all we have. Whether Kautsa was a specific historical opponent, the marker for a whole school of opinion, or a figure Yaska set up in order to knock down, we do not know. Later tradition associates the position with a ritualist instinct that prizes the sound of the mantra over its sense, the chant as efficacious noise. That association is plausible and it is not proof. The safest thing is to take Kautsa exactly as the text gives him: a voice, on the page, saying the Veda has no meaning.

Yaska’s reply is one of the oldest defences of meaning in the world.

Yaska’s answer

He begins with the simplest possible move. In Sarup’s translation: “Vedic stanzas are significant, because (their) words are identical (with those of the spoken language).”

The mantras are made of the same words people use to talk. Words that mean things in speech do not stop meaning things when arranged in a hymn. The burden, Yaska is saying, is on the man who claims that ordinary meaningful words become meaningless the moment they enter a sacred text.

Then he turns the obscurity argument back on the objector, and this is the line that has outlived everything else in the book. A mantra that seems empty is not therefore empty. In Sarup’s rendering: “it is not the fault of the post if the blind man does not see it; it is the fault of the man himself.”

The post is there. The man cannot see it. The defect is in the seer.

That single image reframes the whole quarrel. Where Kautsa saw meaninglessness in the text, Yaska saw failure in the reader. The remedy is not to abandon the search for sense. The remedy is the science of nirukta itself, the discipline that opens the blind man’s eyes.

He drives it home a little later, at section eighteen, with two more sentences that read like a verdict on rote learning. “He is the bearer of a burden only: the blockhead who, having studied, does not understand the meaning of the Veda.” And then the image that has never lost its edge: “Whatever is learnt without its being understood is called mere cramming; like dry logs of wood on an extinguished fire, it can never illuminate.”

Dry wood on a dead fire. Memory without meaning gives no light.

This is the deeper stake of the chapter’s first half. Volume V opened by describing the six Vedangas as the limbs that let the Veda be used (see Volume V, Chapter 1). Chapter 3 showed grammar locking the form of the words in place (see the grammar Vedanga). Yaska is defending something prior to both. He is defending the claim that there is a what to recover at all. The Veda, the corpus this whole library is built around (see the cornerstone on the Vedas), is a thing that says something. Strip that and the perfect machine of grammar is preserving a void.

Yaska won the argument, in the sense that the tradition kept his book and not Kautsa’s. But the chant still had a second need, and it had nothing to do with meaning.

A science of time

A sacrifice performed on the wrong day is the wrong sacrifice. The new-moon and full-moon rites, the solstice observances, the turning points of the ritual year: each had to fall at its appointed moment, and the moments were astronomical. Someone had to watch the sky and keep the count.

This is jyotisha, the astronomy Vedanga, the science of the lights of the heavens. Its purpose, in its Vedic form, is narrow and clear. One studies jyotisha to know when to sacrifice.

Its oldest surviving text is the Vedanga Jyotisha, attributed to the sage Lagadha, the earliest extant Indian astronomical and calendrical work. It comes down in two short recensions, the Arca tied to the Rigveda with about thirty-six verses, and the Yajusha tied to the Yajurveda with about forty-three. Both are terse to the point of obscurity, which is its own irony in a volume so concerned with recovering sense.

The text makes its own rank explicit. In its opening verses it sets jyotisha above its fellow Vedangas with one of the more memorable images in the technical literature. As the crests stand on the heads of peacocks, as the gems stand on the hoods of serpents, so does jyotisha stand at the head of all the auxiliary sciences. The verse number shifts between recensions, so it is safer to say the text crowns itself in its own opening lines than to pin it to a count.

The reason for the boast is the calendar, and the calendar is a real piece of engineering.

The five-year wheel

The trouble is old and universal. The moon and the sun do not keep the same time. Twelve lunar months run to roughly three hundred and fifty-four days. The solar year runs to roughly three hundred and sixty-five. Left alone, the two drift apart, and a festival fixed to the moon slides backward through the seasons until it lands in the wrong part of the year.

The Vedanga Jyotisha solves it with a wheel of five years. This five-year cycle is the yuga of the astronomers, and here a warning is needed at once, because the word will mislead. This yuga is a small calendrical unit. It is not the vast cosmic maha-yuga of the Puranas, the world-ages running to hundreds of thousands of years. Same word, entirely different scale. Do not let one stand in for the other.

Inside the five-year wheel the text counts with precision. The cycle holds one thousand eight hundred and thirty civil days, the savana days, the ordinary sunrise-to-sunrise days a person actually lives. It holds sixty-two synodic months, the months measured from new moon to new moon. It holds one thousand eight hundred and sixty tithis, the lunar days, each a thirtieth of a lunar month and so a little shorter than a civil day. To make the lunar count and the solar count meet, extra months are slotted in, the intercalary months or adhikamasa, inserted so that the lunar year is pulled back into step with the sun.

That is the whole apparatus, and its only job is to answer one question. On what day does the rite fall.

Which brings us to the most misread fact about jyotisha, and the place where this chapter has to be most careful.

The thing it is not

The Vedanga Jyotisha contains no horoscopes. It has no zodiac signs, no twelve houses, no reading of a person’s fate from the planets at birth. It is a ritual calendar and nothing more. Anyone who opens it expecting the astrology sold in the modern world will find a manual for counting days and months toward a sacrifice.

Horoscopic astrology, the casting of nativities, came later, and it came from outside. The technical name in Sanskrit is jataka, the science of the birth-moment. It is a development of the early centuries of the Common Era, and it arose under Hellenistic, that is Greek, influence.

The smoking gun is in a title. The foundational surviving text of Indian horoscopy is the Yavanajataka, attributed to Sphujidhvaja, and the name says where it came from. Yavana means “Greek,” or strictly “Ionian,” the Sanskrit word for the Greeks. Jataka means “nativity.” Nativity according to the Greeks. The borrowing is written into the cover.

David Pingree, in his 1978 edition and translation in the Harvard Oriental Series, reconstructed the chain: a Greek horoscopy text was rendered into Sanskrit, and that rendering was later versified by Sphujidhvaja, whom Pingree dated to around 269 or 270 CE. A caution belongs here, because the field has moved. Pingree’s second-to-third-century date rested on his own emendation of the text and has been challenged; Bill M. Mak has argued for a date in the fourth to sixth century CE. The exact figure is contested. The direction is not. Either dating puts the Yavanajataka centuries after the Vedanga Jyotisha and squarely after contact with the Greek world. The vocabulary confirms it from the inside: later Indian astrology runs on loanwords, hora from the Greek hora, kendra from kentron, the very names of the zodiac signs carried over from Greek.

So the two things called jyotisha in casual speech are separated by something close to a thousand years and by a frontier of cultural contact. On one side, Lagadha’s ritual calendar of the Vedic period. On the other, the horoscopic art of the early centuries CE, Greek in its bones. To collapse them into one ageless “Vedic astrology” is among the commonest errors made about this material, and the texts themselves will not allow it.

That leaves one harder question, about the calendar’s own age.

How old is the calendar

The Vedanga Jyotisha describes the winter solstice at a position the sky no longer holds. Because the heavens shift slowly over the centuries, that description can be turned into a date, and the figure that comes back is old: a configuration consistent with roughly 1400 BCE, with some computations landing nearer 1180 BCE.

Here the scholars divide, and the division is worth stating plainly rather than smoothing over. One camp reads the astronomy as dating the text. On this view the Vedanga Jyotisha is about as old as the sky it describes, somewhere in the range of 1370 to 1150 BCE; T.K.S. Sastry and R. Kochhar argue along these lines. The other camp separates the data from the document. David Pingree held that the solstice points to around 1180 BCE but that its bearing on the date of the actual text “is not evident,” placing the surviving recension around 400 to 300 BCE. Michael Witzel, on stylistic grounds, puts the text in the last centuries BCE. Santanu Chakraverti has it composed after 700 BCE while preserving a solstice correct for about 1400 BCE.

The careful reading holds both halves apart. The astronomical content reflects observations of roughly 1400 to 1200 BCE. The surviving text was very likely redacted considerably later, commonly placed around 500 to 300 BCE. Whether the early observation dates the composition is genuinely disputed, and the honest answer is that we do not yet know.

What is not disputed is the function. From whenever it was first observed to whenever it was finally fixed in verse, the work has one office: to tell the priest when.

Meaning and time. The two things the recitation could not supply for itself, recovered by two of its own limbs. Yaska answered the man who said the words were empty. Lagadha’s heirs answered the sky.

There remain the limbs that govern the act itself, the measured laying of the bricks and the pouring of the offering, and to those the next chapter turns (see the ritual Vedanga).

The post was always there. It only waited for someone who could see.