Ṛg Veda
The oldest layer of the Vedic corpus: over a thousand hymns to the powers of nature and consciousness. The seed of everything later, including the question of what the one thing behind the many might be.
c. 1500–1200 BCE
- When
- c. 1500–1200 BCE
- Where it sits
- Śruti — the revealed foundation
Its Nāsadīya hymn ends not with an answer about the origin of things but with an admission that perhaps nobody knows — the tradition's licence for honest enquiry.
The full-length study of this text is still being written. The summary above is complete, and the originals below are the whole thing rather than a description of it.
The text itself
Complete originals, in free copies wherever one exists.
Commentaries worth trusting
Read by teachers within the tradition, not summaries of it.
- The Vedas and their goal — Swami Vivekananda Vivekananda reads the Vedic hymns as records of experience rather than decrees, and says so in plain words in the Jnana Yoga volumes.
This text sits inside a shelf with a shape. See how the whole corpus is organised, or start from today's message.