The Vedas

The oral transmission of the Vedas is a piece of engineering. Beyond ordinary recitation of the connected text, the schools developed a series of permuted recitations in which the same words are chanted in deliberately scrambled orders: word by word in isolation, then in overlapping pairs, then in pairs run forward and backward, and in still more elaborate patterns that repeat every word many times in different company. A reciter who has learned several of these has effectively stored the text in multiple independent encodings, so an error in one is exposed by the others.

The purpose is exactness rather than understanding. Accent, vowel length and pitch are preserved as strictly as the words, because in a tradition where the sound is what performs the ritual, a mispronunciation is a defect in the rite and not merely in the recitation. The result is a transmission whose fidelity over very long periods is measurable against manuscript and comparative evidence, and it has few parallels anywhere. The living recitation traditions have been recognised internationally as heritage in their own right, which places the value in the practice of carrying the text rather than in any copy of it. That is the correct emphasis: the manuscripts are secondary to the mouths.

The division into four is not a division of subject matter. It is a division of labour at the sacrifice, where different priests had different offices and each needed his own material. The Rig collection supplies the verses of invocation recited by the priest who calls the gods, the Sama supplies the same material set to melody for the priest who sings, and the Yajur supplies the formulas muttered by the priest who performs the physical acts of the offering. Each collection is shaped by its function, which is why the Sama is largely Rig verse arranged for chant rather than new composition.

The fourth collection sits differently. Its contents run to healing, protection, cursing, household concerns and speculation, matters at some distance from the solemn public rite, and for a long period the authoritative body was spoken of as threefold knowledge, with this collection outside it. Its acceptance as the fourth Veda was a development rather than a starting point, and the tradition preserved traces of the argument. Each collection then further divides by school, and each school carried its own recension with its own text and its own ritual manuals. Most of those schools are lost, known only by name or by citation, so what survives is a fraction of what existed and not a complete original.