Satapatha Bramhana Part 03

SR No.: 007679
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Julius Eggeling
Publisher: Oxford
Publication Year: 1894
Total Pages: 2382
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 45 MB

Page 530

INTRODUCTION.
Ixiii
the scheme of religious action, and the interdependence of the three Vedic types. There is a Rig-veda, but no Rigvedic religion, as even recent writers on the religions of India unfortunately tend to assume: the absence of så mans would in principle leave Vedic religion just as much mutilated as the absence of riks; the categories are the three parts of a trio whose melody is carried by each in turn.
A comprehensive vision was never wanting, though the Search for a word for 'religion,' or religious practice, as a whole was at first not very successful. The Brahmanatexts still struggle with the notion of the superiority of him that knows all the Vedas, and they consequently posit a sarvavidya? which is superior to a knowledge of each of the Vedas. The most successful attempt at describing the religious literature and action as a whole is the word brahma, and, correspondingly, he who knows the religion as a whole is a brahmán. Each of these words appears occasionally in the fourth place, brahma after the trayi; brahmán in company with the priests of the trayî. In a sense the bráhma is a fourth Veda, but it is not co-ordinate with the other three ; it embraces and comprehends them and much else besides; it is the religious expression and religious action as a whole, and it is the learned esoteric understanding of the nature of the gods and the mystery of the sacrifice as a whole (brahma in brahmodya and brahmavâdin). Needless to say, this fourth Veda, if we may so call it, has primarily no connection with the Atharvan, not even in the Atharva-samhità itself (XI,8,23; XV, 3,7; 6, 3), nor in the Upanishads of that Veda (e.g. Nrisimhapůrvatâpanî Up. V, 2): the claim that the Atharvan is the Brahma-veda belongs to the Atharvan ritual. In the Upanishads this brahma, still frequently contrasted with the ordinary Vedas, is taken up eagerly, extolled above all other knowledge, and in a way personified, so that it furnishes one of the main sources of the various conceptions which finally precipitate themselves in the pantheistic
* Tait. Br. III, 10, 11, 4; Tait. År. X, 47; cf. Sat. Br. XIV, 6, 7, 18; 9, 4, 17.
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