The Religion of the Veda

...but rather the singers paid by them, who have emerged victorious in the competition among colleagues vying and intriguing for a lucrative commission, and who now practice their professional craft with a sober virtuosity for a sacrificial ritual The German Opfer refers here to the Yajna, the central ritual sacrifice of Vedic religion, which became increasingly elaborate and regulated by precise rules. whose overloaded complexity must, by its very nature, stifle all power and momentum. Where, in such a setting, could true, deep tones of the inner self originate? Where the broad, keen insights into the orders of existence? Where, within these narrow and shallow circumstances at the courts of small, rivaling dynasts, could one find the earnestness and pride of a great national consciousness shining through the religious ritual?

The external form which the singers of the Rigveda Rigveda: The oldest of the four Vedas, the foundational scriptures of Hinduism, composed in an archaic form of Sanskrit. gave to their poems bore a character of simplicity that was not at odds with the essentially naive artificialities of the content. The language possessed little more than the elementary basic forms of sentence structure, which had not yet acquired the flexibility to express more complex movements of thought with their side-currents and counter-currents. Furthermore, the narrow scope of the verses—which almost consistently end with a completed sentence—hindered the construction of larger intellectual frameworks. This was especially true of the Gāyatrī The Gāyatrī is a highly significant Vedic meter consisting of three sections of eight syllables each. meter, which was particularly favored for song texts. The poets lacked the skill to organize and master the organic structure of such larger works. One idea was simply strung to another through constant repetition, just as chance dictated; individual elements were usually only touched upon with an allusion or a laudatory reference, rather than being unfolded in their full content. Whenever the poetic language departed from this simplicity of expression, it tended to lose itself in confused and unclear convolutions rather than rising to a freely moving variety. A pleasant interruption in the monotonous alternation of praises...