The Vedas

 

The Veda is a vast body of Sanskrit poetry, ritual treatises, dialogues and philosophical discourses which are the oldest surviving literature of India, and among the oldest literature anywhere in the world. It was composed over a period of many centuries by inspired “seers”, or rishis, probably (in the form we have now) beginning in the second millennium before our era. At the same time the Veda, or ‘knowledge’, is considered to have no date or human author, since the rishis did not invent but ‘saw’, in experiences of enlightenment, eternal truths which they transmitted in the form of sacred speech. The Veda is called ‘the breath of the Supreme’. Its holy words embody the same Power as that which created the universe, for “the goddess Speech, the imperishable, is the first-form of Truth, mother of the Veda, the hub of Immortality.”