Samaveda

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The Samaveda is the third of the four Vedas, the foundational scriptures of Vedic India, and the one given over to melody. Its name joins sāman, a chant or sung formula, with veda, knowledge: it is the knowledge of how the sacred words are sung. Where the Rigveda preserves hymns as text and the Yajurveda the muttered formulae that direct the act of sacrifice, the Samaveda exists to be performed aloud — and almost none of its words are its own. Of its roughly 1,875 verses, all but about seventy-five are lifted straight from the Rigveda, above all from that collection’s eighth and ninth books, and re-set for singing. The eighth book is rich in the short, brisk strophes addressed to Indra; the ninth is the Soma-maṇḍala, given over entirely to hymns sung over the pressing of the sacred draught. That the chant-Veda should draw most heavily on exactly these two books is no accident: its whole reason for being is the Soma sacrifice, and these are the hymns that ritual most wanted to hear sung.

This dependence is the first thing to grasp and the first thing it qualifies. A reader who comes to the Samaveda expecting fresh hymns finds, instead, a collection that is almost entirely quotation — and yet the tradition reckons it a Veda in its own right, equal in standing to the others. The paradox dissolves once it is seen that the Samaveda’s content is not the words but the operation performed upon them. The Rigvedic verse is the raw material; the sāman is what the chant-tradition makes of it. Two priestly cultures stand behind the same line of text: the hotṛ’s, which keeps the verse as metered speech, and the udgātṛ’s, which dissolves the meter into melody. The seventy-odd verses with no Rigvedic source — mostly the late additions and the ritual fragments needed to round out a chant — are the exception that proves how thoroughly the rest is borrowed. The Samaveda is, in the most literal sense, the Rigveda heard rather than read.

What singing does to a verse

What distinguishes the Samaveda is therefore not its words but their setting. A verse that lies inert on the page is, in this tradition, not yet the thing itself; the sāman is the verse made audible, and the audible form is a different object from the written one. The collection comes down in two parts. The first is the ārcika, the bare verses — the Pūrvārcika, an older anthology arranged by the deity invoked and, within that, roughly by meter, followed by the Uttarārcika, ordered to track the sequence of the rites themselves. The second part is the gāna, the song-books, and it is here that the Veda becomes properly musical.

The gāna prescribe how each verse is to be drawn out, repeated, broken, and inflected so that it can be sung. A single Rigvedic line, set as a sāman, is stretched far past its written length: vowels are prolonged, syllables doubled and folded back on themselves, whole phrases reordered, and into the melodic line are threaded the stobha — interpolated, often semantically empty sounds (hā u, o vā, and their many cousins) whose function is purely musical, to carry pitch and rhythm where the words have run out. The stobha are the seam where text becomes song. They belong to no sentence and mean nothing in themselves; they exist so that the melody can breathe, holding a note open or marking a turn that the words alone could not sustain. A sung sāman is thus a composite object — Rigvedic verse, prolongation, repetition, and stobha interwoven — and the analytic tradition gives names to its parts, dividing each chant into five (sometimes seven) movements from the opening prastāva through the central udgītha to the closing nidhana, each assigned to a particular singer or sung in a particular way. The result is that a verse the eye could read in a breath becomes, sung, something the page could never have predicted: a single half-line may unfold across a long architecture of held tones and returning phrases.

The song-books themselves divide by venue and purpose. The Grāmageya, the village songs, hold the melodies for the settled public rites and are the first a singer learns; the Āraṇyaka, the forest songs, carry chants of greater potency that were to be learned and recited away from the settlement, their separation marking them as too charged for ordinary ground. From these two basic repertoires are derived the Ūha and Ūhya song-books, which take the standard melodies and re-fit them to the exact sequence of verses a given sacrifice demands — the same tune transposed onto a different text, so that the singer who has mastered the model can apply it to any rite that calls for it. The relation between the four is one of pattern and application: the Grāmageya and Āraṇyaka supply the melodic templates, the Ūha and Ūhya show how to bend a template to circumstance. To know the ārcika is to know the texts; to know the gāna is to know the Veda.

The udgātṛ and the great Soma rites

The chant had an office and a performer. In the elaborate Soma sacrifices, the central public rituals of the high Vedic period, the work was divided among classes of priest, one for each of the three liturgical Vedas and a fourth presiding. The hotṛ recited the Rigvedic invocations; the adhvaryu handled the physical acts and murmured the Yajurveda formulae that direct them; the brahman oversaw the whole and silently corrected its errors, holding the rite together in his attention; and the udgātṛ, the raiser of song, sang the sāmans aloud, together with his assistants the prastotṛ and pratihartṛ, at the prescribed moments of the rite — for the longer chants were not solo performances but were apportioned among several singers, each taking his named section. For this priesthood the Samaveda is in effect the working manual: not a book of doctrine but a score, the repertoire and the rules for its performance, organized so that a trained singer could find and execute the right chant at the right turn of a sacrifice that might run for days. The melody was not ornament added to the offering; in the tradition’s understanding the sāman was itself an instrument of the rite, a force that moved upon the gods, and a mistake in its singing was a fault in the sacrifice no less grave than a mistake in the act.

The setting for this was above all the agniṣṭoma, the model Soma sacrifice and the template from which the longer Soma rites were elaborated, in which the pressing of the Soma draught was accompanied at fixed points by sequences of sāmans — the great chants of the morning, midday, and third pressings, each with its prescribed melodies. Here the borrowing from the Rigveda’s ninth book becomes legible as a structural fact rather than a literary one: the Soma hymns were sung because Soma was being pressed, and the Samaveda is the form those hymns took once the pressing required them to be sung rather than spoken. The whole apparatus of ārcika and gāna, of village and forest songs, of templates and their applications, exists to put the right sāman into the right hand at the right instant of an offering whose gravity admitted no improvisation.

Age and the discipline of memory

Scholarship places the formation of this material in the later second and earlier first millennium BCE. Michael Witzel, the leading historian of the Vedic canon, locates the Samaveda’s collected layer chronologically after the Rigveda and roughly contemporary with the Yajurveda and Atharvaveda, in the range of about 1200 to 1000 BCE — though he stresses that no Vedic text admits absolute dating, only relative sequence. What can be said with more confidence is that the chant was carried, for many centuries before it was ever written, entirely in the body: handed master to pupil by exact oral repetition, guarded against drift by mnemonic disciplines so severe that the melodic shape of the sāmans — their precise pitches, durations, and ornaments — has been transmitted with little change across a span that makes the Samaveda among the oldest continuously performed musical traditions of which any record survives. It comes down in several śākhās or schools, of which three recensions endure: the Kauthuma and the closely related Rāṇāyanīya, current across the north and west, and the Jaiminīya or Talavakāra, preserved chiefly in the south, in Kerala and Tamil country, whose melodic style diverges sharply from the others and is reckoned the more archaic. Each carries its own Saṃhitā, its own Brāhmaṇa, and its own Upanishad. By the tradition’s own account the single primordial Veda was sorted into its four collections by Vyāsa, the arranger, who is named Veda-vyāsa for precisely this act of division — assigning the sung material to a disciple, Jaimini, from whom the southern recension takes its name. Whether read as memory of an actual editorial moment or as the tradition’s way of figuring the unity behind its four-fold scripture, the ascription marks the chant-Veda as one quarter of a whole that was always understood to belong together, divided only so that it could be carried by distinct lines of priests.

The doctrine of the heard

Indian tradition holds the Vedas to be śruti — that which is heard: uncreated and without human author, received by the ancient seers rather than composed by them. The verb is exact. The Veda is not what the seers wrote but what they heard — a sound already present in the order of things, caught and relayed by those whose hearing was clear enough. On this understanding the Samaveda’s melodies are not a later human ornament laid over the Rigveda’s hymns but belong to the revelation itself: the chant is part of what was heard, and to sing the sāman correctly is to reproduce a sound that has the authority of the cosmos behind it. This is reported here as the tradition’s own account of what its scripture is, the frame from inside which the discipline of exact transmission makes sense — for if the sound itself is revelation, then to let it drift is to lose the thing revealed. From this premise later Indian thought drew a long consequence: that the form of the sound carries power independent of its sense, a conviction that runs forward through the speculative traditions of nada-yoga, where the cosmos is understood as woven of vibration and sound is treated as a ladder, and into the philosophical settlements of Vedānta and the broader currents of Hindu thought and tantra, in which the Veda’s status as heard sound becomes a question about the relation of word, world, and the absolute.

The Chāndogya and the meditation on song

Attached to the Samaveda is one of the oldest and longest of the principal Upanishads, the Chāndogya, whose very name derives from chandoga, the singer of sāmans. It is, fittingly, the Upanishad of the chanters, and it opens not with a metaphysical claim but with an instruction to meditate upon the syllable Om — which it calls the udgītha, the high chant, the most exalted portion of the sāman and the part the udgātṛ sings. The text then performs a characteristic ascent: the essence of all beings is earth, the essence of earth water, of water the plants, of plants speech, of speech the Rigveda, of the Rigveda the Samaveda, and of the Samaveda the udgītha — Om — so that the single syllable the singer raises is made the inmost essence of everything. Here the Veda of chant becomes also the setting for the first sustained speculation on what the chanting means: a meditation on sound, on the sacred syllable, and on the identity of the self with the ground of all things, carried out in the technical vocabulary of the men whose craft was song. The same impulse that preserved the sāman note-perfect for three millennia is what turns, in the Chāndogya, to ask what a perfectly sung sound finally is.

Textual scholarship and the sound preserved

The chant-Veda has been read along two distinct lines. As a text, it entered modern scholarship through Ralph T. H. Griffith, whose Hymns of the Samaveda (1893) remains the standard complete English verse rendering and is the version most widely consulted; it is in the public domain and freely available, and a digital edition is held in the open archive maintained by Wikisource. The framing chronology — the Samaveda’s place after the Rigveda and the architecture of the Vedic schools that carried it — was set out by Michael Witzel in The Development of the Vedic Canon and its Schools (1997), still the reference treatment of how the śākhās formed and transmitted their recensions. The Chāndogya and the other early Upanishads are read today through Patrick Olivelle’s critically edited The Early Upaniṣads (Oxford, 1998), which dates the Chāndogya among the earliest, pre-Buddhist Upanishadic prose while warning that any closer precision than a few centuries is illusory; in the encyclopedia’s own holdings the Chāndogya can be read in F. Max Müller’s nineteenth-century Sacred Books of the East translation, hosted in the Library.

A second line treats the Samaveda not as a text at all but as living music. Wayne Howard’s Sāmavedic Chant (Yale University Press, 1977), built from fieldwork among the surviving lineages of singers, is the major ethnomusicological study of the tradition as it is actually performed, documenting the divergence between the Kauthuma and Jaiminīya styles and the notation systems by which the pitch-contours were fixed. It is from this tradition of chant that Indian theory has long traced the descent of its classical music: the seven notes of the later sargam are held to derive from the falling scale of sāmagāna, and the elaboration of a single tone into a phrase in the rāga is read as the inheritance of what the gāna first did to a Vedic verse. The comparative parallel of overtone and harmonic chant in Tibet and Inner Asia stands as an independent instance of the same discovery — that the voice trained on a sacred text can become an instrument in its own right.

The tradition that grew from these texts continued to hold that the form of the sound mattered as much as its sense — that the rite was carried not only by what was said but by how it was made to be heard.

→ In the library: The Upanishads (Müller, SBE I & XV — incl. the Chāndogya, the Samaveda's Upanishad)

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