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Studies in Iudian Philosophy
. Although the ritualistic links of the Vedic hymns with sacrifice, which was a major or even the central concern of the Brāhmanic religion in the later Vedic period, are oby the inspiration which lies behind them was of a much deepe nature. The bulk of the Rgvedic hymns originated before the ritualistic period anyway and even though they were later used and sometimes further adapted for ritual, their original purpose was spiritual.
In all high religions the ritualistic and ecclesiastic phase in their history followed the original spiritual beginnings of a movement which formed around or in the wake of a teacher who was a prophetic figure or a spiritually enlightened perso. nality, sometimes regarded as an incarnation of God. There is no clear reason why the Vedic religion should be regarded as an exception to this rule. Hinduism has always claimed that the Vedas are a product of divine revelation which was transmitted to the people by ancient rșis. These ancient seers were already in Vedic times regarded as 'path-finders” (RV 1,72, 2; 1, 105, 15) who had won immortality and thereby become equal in status and power to gods (RV 10, 56, 6).4 Thus they become elevated far above ordinary people to whom they transmitted some of their insights through their inspired hymns. They reached the heights of immortality through the development of a special faculty of a visionary or meditative character called dhiti to whose investigation Jan Gonda dedicated a whole book.5 It was this mystical vision which enabled them to grasp the substance and meaning of the eternal law (sta, cf. RV 4, 23, 8) which governed the whole of manifested reality as well as its emergence from the unmanifest.
In the process of transmitting this vision of sta to their less spiritually minded contemporaries, the seers produce d their message on more than one level. The transmission of a vision is not the vision itself, it is a projection of the ori ginal vision into a specific area of human activity and understanding. Besides the poetica), mythological and legendary projection of this vision there was also the area of religious
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