Q1.
a. What are the Vedas?
Answer
Take the question as the book takes it here — not “what do they teach?” but “what kind of texts are these?”
Veda ← Sanskrit vid = 'knowledge' → vidyā, learning
Number: four — Ṛig Veda, Yajur Veda, Sāma Veda, Atharva Veda
Contents: thousands of hymns — prayers in the form of poems and songs
Composed by: rishis (male seers or sages) and rishikas (female ones)
Language: an early form of Sanskrit
Place: the Sapta Sindhava region (Chapter 5)
Date of the Ṛig Veda, the oldest: proposed between the 5th and the 2nd millennium BCE
Form: recited orally — not written
Number: four — Ṛig Veda, Yajur Veda, Sāma Veda, Atharva Veda
Contents: thousands of hymns — prayers in the form of poems and songs
Composed by: rishis (male seers or sages) and rishikas (female ones)
Language: an early form of Sanskrit
Place: the Sapta Sindhava region (Chapter 5)
Date of the Ṛig Veda, the oldest: proposed between the 5th and the 2nd millennium BCE
Form: recited orally — not written
The one fact people get wrong. The Vedas were not a book that somebody wrote down. They were committed to memory through rigorous training and passed on orally, generation after generation. Between the 5th and the 2nd millennium BCE is a very wide window, but even the shortest estimate gives “anything between 100 and 200 generations” of pure memory — “with hardly any alterations”.
Why the book stops to say this: we normally treat 'ancient text' and 'ancient manuscript' as the same thing. Here they are not. The Vedas are the most ancient texts of India and among the most ancient in the world, and yet for most of their life they existed in no physical form at all — only in trained human memory. That is why the True or false statement “The Vedic hymns were written on palm-leaf manuscripts” is false.
Did you know? The reason the transmission stayed so accurate is that reciters learned each hymn several times over in different scrambled orders as well as the plain one, so that any slip showed up at once. UNESCO recognised this in 2008, calling Vedic chanting “a masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity”.