Yajurveda

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The Yajurveda is one of the four Vedas, the oldest layer of Sanskrit sacred literature, and the one composed for use rather than recitation alone: a collection of the formulas, the yajus, that a priest pronounces while performing the acts of the fire sacrifice. Where the Rigveda gathers hymns of praise and the Samaveda sets verses to melody, the Yajurveda is the handbook of the adhvaryu — the officiant who builds the altar, kindles the fire, pours the offerings, and murmurs the right words at the right moment of each rite. With the Atharvaveda, the fourth and latest of the collections, these four make up the Vedic canon; but the Yajurveda alone is keyed throughout to the hand. It is the Veda one does not read so much as do.

Its language reflects that purpose. Alongside metrical verses, much of the Yajurveda is in prose, often terse and elliptical, fitted to the gestures it accompanies rather than meant to stand on its own. A formula names what the hand is doing as the hand does it — taking up the spoon, anointing the post, loosing the victim, feeding the flame — and assumes the gesture as its missing half. Read off the page, with no fire and no altar, the words can seem fragmentary, almost cryptic; spoken in place, each is the audible face of an act. The gods most often addressed are the same powers the older Veda knew: Agni, the fire that is itself the priest and the mouth by which offerings reach the unseen; Soma, the pressed and deified plant whose pressing is the great sacrifice’s living center; Indra the storm-king; and Varuna, keeper of the cosmic order the rite is meant to uphold.

The text survives in two broad lines of transmission, distinguished in the tradition by color. The so-called Black, or Krishna, Yajurveda interleaves the formulas with prose explanation of how and why they are used — the words to say and the reasoning that justifies them run together on the same page, the sacrifice annotated as it is recited. Its best-preserved recension is the Taittiriya Samhita, named for the sage Tittiri, arranged in seven kandas subdivided into chapters and short sections; the Maitrayani, the Katha or Kathaka, and the Kapisthala lines belong to the same Black family, and prevail chiefly in the south of the subcontinent. The White, or Shukla, Yajurveda separates the formulas into a clean collection — the Vajasaneyi Samhita, in forty chapters — and consigns the commentary to attached prose works, so that the mantras stand by themselves and the explanation is kept apart. Two recensions of the White line come down nearly identical, the Madhyandina and the Kanva, dominant in the north. Where the Black school gives the rite as a single braided thing, word and gloss together, the White school draws a line between the formula that is uttered and the reasoning that surrounds it — two solutions to the same problem of how to fix a liturgy in memory and hand it on intact. Several schools, or shakhas, preserved their own recensions, of which a number come down to the present; many more are known only as names cited in later texts, the rest lost with the families that carried them.

Tradition holds the Vedas to be shruti — “that which is heard,” knowledge not authored by men but apprehended by ancient seers and transmitted without alteration. Vedic learning was for many centuries an oral discipline: the texts were memorized with elaborate techniques designed to fix every syllable and accent, words drilled forward, backward, and in interlocking permutations so that any slip would break an audible pattern and be caught. The precision of that transmission is something modern philologists have confirmed with some astonishment, the Veda standing among the best-preserved ancient texts known — guarded as exact sound long before it was ever a manuscript. On the tradition’s own reckoning this is not antiquarian carefulness but the condition of the rite’s working at all: a formula said wrong is no formula. The Yajurveda is in that sense a score for a performance in which there is no margin for error, the margin itself held to be where efficacy lives.

Scholarship places the composition of the Yajurveda’s core in roughly the early first millennium before the Common Era — after the Rigveda, in the centuries spanning the Iron Age of the northern subcontinent, conventionally bracketed between about 1200 and 800 BCE. This was the period in which the sacrificial system was being systematised into the vast and exacting ritual science the later texts describe. The setting most often named is the early Kuru realm, the first large polity of the Vedic world, whose kings and priests gathered the inherited hymns into ordered collections and built around them the elaborate srauta liturgy — the solemn public sacrifices, distinct from the simpler domestic rites — that became the backbone of orthodox practice. The Yajurveda is, in a sense, the document of that consolidation: where the Rigveda is a body of praise inherited and arranged, the Yajurveda is the working machinery of the ritual order the Kuru priesthood assembled, the formulae cut to the shape of an altar newly standardised.

Each Yajurvedic school carries its own ritual exegesis in an attached Brahmana — a prose work expounding the meaning, the legend, and the exact procedure of the rites. The White line is served by the Shatapatha Brahmana, the Brahmana of a hundred paths, one of the largest and most discussed of all such works; the Black line by the Taittiriya Brahmana and related texts, in which, characteristically, the boundary between formula and commentary is again hard to draw. Through these Brahmanas the Yajurveda becomes the principal literary witness to how the great Vedic sacrifices were actually conducted — the building of the fire-altar, the consecration of the king, the year-long and multi-year rites — described not as antiquities but as a living technology of order, the means by which the cosmos was kept turning and the sacrificer set in right relation to the powers that turn it.

Attached to the Yajurveda schools, in turn, are some of the most influential of the Upanishads — the speculative dialogues in which the Vedic corpus turns from the mechanics of sacrifice toward questions about the self and the ground of things. The Isha, brief and dense, is nothing less than the fortieth and final chapter of the Vajasaneyi Samhita itself: the White Yajurveda closes the very collection of ritual formulas with a meditation on the one that pervades all and the renunciation that holds it, so that the manual of sacrifice ends by turning past sacrifice. The Taittiriya and the Katha belong to schools of the Black line — the Katha, in the figure of a boy who bargains with Death for the secret of what survives it, among the most quoted of all the Upanishads. That turn from rite toward reflection became the seedbed of Vedanta — vedanta meaning the Veda’s end or culmination — and of much that later Hindu philosophy and its tantric and devotional currents built upon. The same root fed, far downstream, the Bhagavad Gita and, in the modern age, the reformed Vedanta carried to a global audience. The Yajurveda thus sits at a hinge: a manual for an archaic liturgy of fire and offering, and at the same time a root from which a long tradition of metaphysics grew.

The Yajurveda in print

The Black and White lines reached English readers through separate hands, and the divide between them survives even in translation. The White Yajurveda was rendered complete by Ralph T. H. Griffith (1826–1906) — the same Indologist who gave the English-reading world its standard verse Rigveda — as The Texts of the White Yajurveda, translating the Vajasaneyi Samhita with the help of the medieval commentator Mahidhara, and published at Benares in 1899; it remains the most accessible complete Yajurveda in English. The Black line waited until 1914, when the Scottish Sanskritist Arthur Berriedale Keith (1879–1944) produced The Veda of the Black Yajus School, entitled Taittiriya Sanhita for the Harvard Oriental Series — to this day the only complete English rendering of a Black Yajurveda, and a scholar’s text rather than a reader’s, carrying the prose exegesis intact. The systematic modern study of how these schools relate, where each was rooted, and when each took shape belongs above all to Michael Witzel, whose survey of the Vedic canon and its schools, written with Louis Renou, maps the shakhas onto the geography and politics of the early first millennium and locates the Yajurveda squarely in the consolidating world of the Kuru kingdom. For the speculative close of the corpus — the Isha, the Katha, the Taittiriya among them — Max Müller’s nineteenth-century Upanishads, held in the library, remains a foundational scholarly entry point.

The sacrificial fires the Yajurveda served are rarely lit now in their full form, and the multi-year rites its Brahmanas describe in such detail are rarer still. Yet the recensions are recited still where the lines survive, the accent kept by the old methods. And the same collections that fix the adhvaryu’s formulas carry, at their far edge, the Isha, the Katha, and the Taittiriya — the speculative dialogues in which the questions came to outrun the rite that had occasioned them. The handbook of the offering became the ground from which Vedanta grew: the manual of how to hold the cosmos in order by a measured word and a steady hand ends by asking what that word, and that order, finally are.

→ In the library: The Upanishads (Müller, 1879–84) — the Vedic corpus's speculative close

→ Related: Mishnah · Jataka · Rigveda · Samaveda · Atharvaveda · Vedanta Advaita Visistadvaita Dvaita · Hindu Vedanta Tantra · Neo Vedanta · Bhagavad Gita · Agni · Soma · Indra · Varuna · Iron Age