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.

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. The text survives in two broad lines of transmission, distinguished in the tradition by colour. The so-called Black, or Krishna, Yajurveda interleaves the formulas with prose explanation of how and why they are used; the White, or Shukla, Yajurveda separates the formulas into a clean collection and consigns the commentary to attached prose works. Several schools, or shakhas, preserved their own recensions, of which a number come down to the present.

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 memorised with elaborate techniques designed to fix every syllable and accent, and the precision of that transmission is something modern philologists have confirmed with some astonishment. Scholarship places the composition of the Yajurveda’s core in roughly the early first millennium before the Common Era, after the Rigveda, in the period when the sacrificial system was being systematised into the vast and exacting ritual science the later texts describe.

Attached to the Yajurveda schools are some of the most influential of the Upanishads — among them the Isha, the Taittiriya, and the Katha — the speculative dialogues in which the Vedic corpus turns from the mechanics of sacrifice toward questions about the self and the ground of things. That turn became the seedbed of Vedanta and of much that later Hindu philosophy built upon. 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 sacrificial fires it served are rarely lit now in their full form; the words survive, still recited, still studied.

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

→ Related: Mishnah · Jataka