“Dating the Vedas” (SB 4.2.31)

TRANSCRIPT:  Srimad-Bhagavatam, Canto 4, Chapter 2, Text 31. “Dating the Vedas.” Alachua – October 14, 1998 / (042)

[Text 31]:

The Vedas give the eternal regulative principles for auspicious advancement in human civilization which have been rigidly followed in the past. The strong evidence of this principle is the Supreme Personality of Godhead, who is called Janārdana, the well-wisher of all living entities

Purport by Śrīla Prabhupāda:

In the Bhagavad-gītā the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Kṛṣṇa, has claimed that He is the father of all living entities, regardless of form. There are 8,400,000 different species of life forms, and Lord Kṛṣṇa claims that He is the father of all. Because the living entities are parts and parcels of the Supreme Personality of Godhead, they are all sons of the Lord, and for their benefit, because they are hovering under the impression that they can lord it over material nature, the Vedas are given to them for their guidance. Therefore the Vedas are called apauruṣeya, for they are not written by any man or demigod, including the first living creature, Brahmā. Brahmā is not the creator or author of the Vedas. He is also one of the living beings in this material world; therefore he does not have the power to write or speak the Vedas independently. Every living entity within this material world is subject to four deficiencies: he commits mistakes, he accepts one thing for another, he cheats, and he has imperfect senses. The Vedas, however, are not written by any living creature within this material world. Therefore they are said to be apauruṣeya. No one can trace out the history of the Vedas. Of course, modern human civilization has no chronological history of the world or the universe, and it cannot present actual historical facts older than three thousand years. But no one has traced out when the Vedas were written, because they were never written by any living being within this material world. All other systems of knowledge are defective because they have been written or spoken by men or demigods who are products of this material creation, but Bhagavad-gītā is apauruṣeya, for it was not spoken by any human being or any demigod of this material creation; it was spoken by Lord Kṛṣṇa, who is beyond the material creation. That is accepted by such stalwart scholars as Śaṅkarācārya, not to speak of other ācāryas such as Rāmānujācārya and Madhvācārya. Śaṅkarācārya has accepted that Nārāyaṇa and Kṛṣṇa are transcendental, and in Bhagavad-gītā also Lord Kṛṣṇa has established, ahaṁ sarvasya prabhavo mattaḥ sarvaṁ pravartate: “I am the origin of everything; everything emanates from Me.” This material creation, including Brahmā and Śiva and all the demigods, has been created by Him, for everything has emanated from Him. He also says that the purpose of all the Vedas is to understand Him (vedaiś ca sarvair aham eva vedyaḥ). He is the original veda-vit, or knower of the Vedas, and vedānta-kṛt, or compiler of Vedānta. Brahmā is not the compiler of the Vedas.

In the beginning of Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam it is established, tene Brahmā hṛdā: the Supreme Absolute Truth, the Personality of Godhead, instructed Brahmā in the Vedic knowledge through his heart. Therefore the evidence that Vedic knowledge is free from the defects of mistakes, illusions, cheating and imperfection is that it is spoken by the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Janārdana, and has thus been followed from time immemorial, beginning from Brahmā. The Vedic religion or the principles of the Vedas have been followed by the highly cultured population of India since time immemorial; no one can trace out the history of Vedic religion. Therefore it is sanātana, and any blasphemy against the Vedas is calculated to be atheism. The Vedas are described as setu, which means “a bridge.” If one wants to attain his spiritual existence, one has to cross an ocean of nescience. The Vedas are the bridge by which to cross such a great ocean.

 [4:32]

The Vedas describe how to divide the human race into four divisions according to quality and working capacity. This is a very scientific system, and it is also sanātana, for no one can trace out its history and it has no dissolution. No one can stop the system of varṇa and āśrama, or the castes and divisions. For example, whether or not one accepts the name brāhmaṇa, there is a class in society which is known as the intelligent class and which is interested in spiritual understanding and philosophy. Similarly, there is a class of men who are interested in administration and in ruling others. In the Vedic system these martially spirited men are called kṣatriyas. Similarly, everywhere there is a class of men who are interested in economic development, business, industry and moneymaking; they are called vaiśyas. And there is another class who are neither intelligent nor martially spirited nor endowed with the capacity for economic development but who simply can serve others. They are called śūdras, or the laborer class. This system is sanātana — it comes from time immemorial, and it will continue in the same way. There is no power in the world which can stop it. Therefore, since this sanātana-dharma system is eternal, one can elevate himself to the highest standard of spiritual life by following the Vedic principles.

It is stated that formerly the sages followed this system; therefore to follow the Vedic system is to follow the standard etiquette of society. But the followers of Lord Śiva, who are drunkards, who are addicted to intoxicants and sex life, who do not bathe and who smoke gāñjā, are against all human etiquette. The conclusion is that persons who rebel against the Vedic principles are themselves the evidence that the Vedas are authoritative, because by not following the Vedic principles they become like animals. Such animalistic persons are themselves evidence of the supremacy of the Vedic regulations.

So, the Vedas are being discussed in modern scholarship, the term Veda is generally taken to refer to the four Vedas: Ṛg Veda, Yajur, Atharva, and Sāma Veda.  Other Sanskrit literatures in India are classed under different categories, such as Itihāsas and Purāṇas and so forth. The Vedas are said to be apauruṣeya. Puruṣa means a person so apauruṣeya would mean not from a person. So, typically this is applied to those four original Vedas. However, the concept of Veda is evidently broader than that; for example, Śrīla Prabhupāda here refers to the Bhagavad-gītā in the same terms. He uses the phrase apauruṣeya in connection with the Bhagavad-gītā also. Now strictly speaking, apauruṣeya would mean not coming from a person, and since Kṛṣṇa is a person, that would not mean not coming from Kṛṣṇa either. So, that would mean, then, that the Vedas are eternal or co-eternal with Kṛṣṇa. Of course, there's no real contradiction there, because if Kṛṣṇa is eternal, and the Vedas are eternal, and Kṛṣṇa has been eternally speaking the Vedas, then it becomes a question of which came first – the chicken or the egg. You simply have the eternal Vedas being spoken by the eternal Kṛṣṇa.

Śrīla Prabhupāda makes a distinction, though, with regard to created beings. He uses this word “creature,” saying Brahmā is not the creator or the author of the Vedas. A creature is a created being who has a history that can be traced back to a certain point in time. Of course, the soul also has no history, but the body, mind, and intelligence of a given creature or created being does have a history. So Śrīla Prabhupāda is saying here that Brahmā is not the creator or author of the Vedas. So what that would mean then is that when Brahmā speaks the Vedas, this information must be coming to Brahmā from an eternal source, namely from Kṛṣṇa. So, there's the idea, then, that information can pass into the material domain from a transcendental source. So it may appear that when Brahmā is speaking the Vedas, that he is composing them or creating them, but actually he's transmitting information which is coming from a higher source. Likewise, the very form of Brahmā itself, that is his bodily form with its different capacities and so forth, is also coming from a higher source. So the knowledge that he is speaking, as well as the form through which he is speaking it, both have to come from some source, which is eternal. 

[10:29]

The... of course, contrary theory that you find, very popular today, is that you start with an absence of knowledge and an absence of organized form and so forth, and by some random process, form and organization come about. So that of course is the theory of evolution. So the concept of the Vedas as apauruṣeya goes hand-in-hand with the concept of the living species as being created by an eternal living being, who has no source or origin, but is simply always existing. Of course, this is a statement within the category of time, but Kṛṣṇa is even outside of material time. So in modern scholarship, dates are assigned to these various Vedic literatures and basically not much progress has been made in the field of modern scholarship as far as I’ve been able to see. Back in the 19th century there was a scholar named Max Muller, who assigned dates to Vedic literatures, and basically he would have put the Ṛg Veda at about 1200 BC. And then the other three Vedas would be around 1000 BC, and different Brahmānas and Āraṇyakas and Upaniṣads and so forth came in subsequent centuries down to maybe 600 BC or thereabouts. And according to that dating system, the Mahābhārata would come somewhat later maybe a couple centuries BC and most of the Purāṇas they would date to the Christian era. That's the dating accepted by scholars. And pretty much in the universities, that's what you have to live with today.

It's interesting that you'll very frequently see it stated today that Max Muller is really not relevant anymore, and that his ideas have been basically repudiated, and that he himself made a statement to the effect that no one can really say how old these literatures are. But at the same time, in the scholarly field, those are really the only dates that anyone repeats. So one repeats those dates for lack of anything better. In one sense that confirms what Prabhupāda says here about the fact that no one can trace out the origin of the Vedas. Basically, the historical evidence for tracing this out is really not available. The field of Indology, based on linguistic analysis of texts and so forth, really hasn't advanced much since the days of Max Muller himself. And apart from that, you have archaeology which deals with artifacts, bones, and potsherds and so forth. But archaeology has not really been able to shed any light on the origin of Sanskrit literature. 

There are various theories associating different languages with different cultures revealed by the archaeologists, such as the Indus Valley culture; some would say that Sanskrit was spoken in that civilization and others would say that some South Indian form of language may have been spoken there. But no one has been able to resolve the controversy. Nonetheless, you have the idea within modern scholarship that everything goes back a few thousand years and before that you come to a more primitive stage in which people hadn't thought of all these things yet. And as you go back, a few hundred thousand years before that, you come to a more primitive race of human being with a more sloping brow and so forth, until you finally get back to the apes and finally you reach the primordial soup, if you go back far enough.

[15:06]

So, the basic point of course that Śrīla Prabhupāda is making is that the Vedas are eternal. That means the information had to come into the material domain at some point in time or at some points in time. And such information may still come into the material domain. Now Śrīla Prabhupāda didn't specifically mention the Bhāgavatam in this purport but surely that also is included under the category of Vedic literature or Veda. The Bhāgavatam itself refers to itself as the fifth Veda along with Itihāsas and various other Purāṇas. So the idea would be that this is also Vedic knowledge. In the future, other Vedic knowledge may also come to be revealed within human society. For example, one may ask what the status, let's say, of the Caitanya-caritāmṛta would be, which is only 500 years old. Certainly, we assign that equal status to the Bhāgavatam. But that's apparently a fairly recent work, but the principle is still there that knowledge can come into this world from another source. So, there are many different points made in the purport, but I guess I’ll stop there. Are there any questions? Yeah? 

Question:  [unclear]

Answer:  Max Mueller... the question is: what is the basis for Max Mueller's dates? Well, basically his argument was that you can divide the Vedic literature into a series of stages based on the texts themselves. And he postulated that each stage would correspond to a stage in civilization in India. And he argued that: well, a given stage must take a certain amount of time. So, he assigned a period of 200 years for each stage, because the argument was that: well, you had to have the authors of the texts come up with the original texts and then they had to be followed for some time and become traditional. So, that might take a couple of hundred years, let's say. So, on that basis, starting with the time of Buddha, which was assigned to about 600 BC, one works backwards by jumps of 200 years and so that way he wound up with the Ṛg Veda at around 1200 BC. So that's the way that was calculated. And you can see it's a pretty shaky calculation really. I mean, how do you know that a stage in the society should take 200 years? What if it's 300? Well, in that case you push things back... well, let's see... let's say, well at least you push things back several hundred years earlier. So, it's a highly speculative way of calculating the dates. Yeah?

Q:  As these scriptures are beyond the modes of nature, generally when there's something written it also has to be understood the context it was written from. Is there some understanding of how it could be? I was thinking of the first question in the “Prayers by the Personified Vedas” where it says if you have… it says if you’re coming into the material world from the spiritual world, how is it that it can be understood to be put down on paper with pencil and pen – things that are made up of material elements. Again, it's transcendental… [unclear] 

A:  So, the question is: how could something spiritual come into the material world? How could it become manifest in material form? Yeah, that.. that's basically the question. Of course, what is the distinction between spiritual and material? If something is coming from the spiritual realm into the material realm, what sort of transformation does it have to undergo, going from spiritual to material? Basically, in one sense, everything material is spiritual in the sense it's be that the material world is also made up from Kṛṣṇa's energy. But that energy, the external energy of the Lord, is deployed or manipulated in such a way as to basically create a temporary situation. Basically, what it is is a virtual reality, you might say, in which the key feature is that the different parts making up that reality are in constant change, constant flux, whereas the characteristic of spiritual existence is eternality. 

[20:56]  

So, something which eternally exists in the spiritual world, once that is transmitted into the material realm, it will become caught up in the material flux, and become subject to change. So, in that case you could say, “Well, how is it then eternal?” Well, that which comes into the material world could only be characterized as eternal if it is renewed periodically from the eternal source. So, you have Kṛṣṇa saying that he spoke the Bhagavad-gītā, because the original message had been lost. So that would be the distinction between spiritual and material, that the information from the spiritual realm coming into the material realm then is in danger of being lost, and so it has to be restored. And of course we have so many references to the Vedas being lost, for example, and being restored on various occasions. Yeah?

Question:  I think you also mentioned the eternal. Kṛṣṇa says in the Bhagavad-gītā that the eternal nature is the self. Is that actually only understood by realization by developing devotion, which is also eternal, so that the temporary mind has limited access to the eternal knowledge, unless it adapts to the process of submission to Kṛṣṇa, which can reveal the eternal nature of the self?

Answer:  Yeah, if the self is not there, no one is going to appreciate the message – only the self can do so. Yes? 

Q:  [unclear]

A:  How can the scholars not take into account the chronology of yugas given in the Bhāgavatam for example? Well, the situation that you find in modern scholarship is that basically scholarship starts with two things. One, of course: the theory of evolution. And number two is the historical chronology based on the civilizations of classical antiquity in the West. The Romans, the Greeks; going back further the Babylonians, the Hebrew civilization, and so forth. History is really based on those nations and the information that we have concerning their origins. And that only goes back… well, it really only goes back maybe to 1000 BC or so. And that's in fact the figure Śrīla Prabhupāda gave. He said there's only history going back 3,000 years. So, at that point, archaeology takes over and the archaeologists can extend things back to maybe 500... 5000, 6000 BC or thereabouts using their techniques of dating. They do not find much in the way of civilization earlier than let's say at the very maximum 700... 7000 BC roughly speaking. So when the scholars approach chronology, they work within this framework. And when they are confronted with, for example, the yuga cycle of 4,320,000 years, they will immediately discount that as entirely fictitious. Because as far as they're concerned, the human race did not exist over a period of 4,320,000 years. What to speak of even longer periods such as the manvantara period, which is 71 yuga cycles and so forth. 

[25:41]

So, that is basically the situation of modern scholarship. Basically, you find a great deal of controversy regarding where to put things within the last few thousand years. This, of course, includes the idea that languages such as Sanskrit are only a few thousand years old, and so on and so forth. So, that is the situation in the scholarly realm. Yes? 

Q:  [unclear]

A:  Right. Yes, there was certainly a Christian element behind Indology when it was started up by people like Max Muller and William Jones, somewhat earlier, and so forth. It's interesting the methods of scholarship which these authors employed against the Vedic literature for the sake of converting the Hindus also were applied against the Bible, with the result that you have a general advancement of secularism. So now in the world of scholarship, people are not openly promoting the biblical view. They may privately be promoting that, in some cases, but openly you cannot promote that anymore. But they're just basically promulgating a secular viewpoint based on the theory of evolution. So, that's the situation in academia. Yeah? 

Q:  [unclear]

A:  Well, yes there are predictions of future knowledge, at least on a broad scale, in the Bhāgavatam, because for example the future history of the manvantaras is given. And of course, within this period of the manvantaras, there are many pralayas, times of annihilation. So the basic historical pattern described in the Bhāgavatam is one of cycles: cycles of creation and annihilation. So for example, at the end of this Kali-yuga, the Vedas will not be known in human society. So in the next Satya-yuga, then they have to be restored. Then again, another Kali-yuga will come and then again, another Satya-yuga, and so forth. So, you have cyclic creation and annihilation. That's the idea. Yeah? 

Q:  [unclear]

A:  In the academic world, what is the status of the idea that the cradle of civilization is India? Generally speaking, that idea is not accorded very much credence. 

Q:  [unclear]

[29:48]

A:  Yes, I looked at the article by Klostermeier. Let me just give the basic background. This is the reality in the world of scholarship. Basically, the oldest civilization is regarded as being in the near East, you'll be glad to know. So, pretty much the Sumerians are still given credit for having the oldest civilization. The earliest development of settled village life based on agriculture is still pretty much assigned to the Fertile Crescent area and to the mountains up in Iran, Zagros Mountains and that area, going into Asia Minor. In India, you have the Indus Valley Civilization. There are old sites which tend to be over on the side of Pakistan, such as Mehrgarh, which go back maybe 5000 BC or 6,000 BC or so. So these are quite old, but not really older than corresponding sites in the Near East and Asia Minor area. So that's pretty much the picture. The Indus Valley Civilization is certainly accepted as having been contemporary with at least part of Sumerian civilization and the subsequent Babylonian civilization and so forth. 

Now, regarding the status of, say, the Indus Valley Civilization is Vedic, this is highly controversial and political. Now, Klostermeier’s article, which is in the ISKCON Communications Journal, he was basically following the views of this... what is... David Frawley and Subash Kak. Basically he was following their view. Now what they have done is put together a history of Vedic civilization within the framework of scholarly chronology. In other words they have nothing to do with yuga cycles of millions of years or anything like that. And if you mentioned such things to them, they will kick you out right away, as I learned myself. So... but they're creating a chronology for Vedic civilization within the framework of accepted scholarship in archaeology and so forth. So, basically what they want to do is take the so-called Indus Valley Civilization and extend it a bit. They will make it the Indus-Sarasvati civilization. They'll say that they have identified the old bed of the Sarasvati River mentioned in the Vedas. They will say that this river dried up may be as far back as 1900 BC. So that means the Vedas had to be at least that old because they glorify the Sarasvati. And they would like to say this was the Vedic civilization. 

So more or less a lot of people in the Indological field will respond to this by saying, “Yes, here we have more partisan statements from the Hindu chauvinists. And this is not really supported by solid scholarship,” and so on and so forth. As far as I can see, at the very least they have put together a coherent hypothesis for Vedic civilization, at least extending it back to maybe 4,500 BC or thereabouts. So at least they put together a hypothesis, which more or less agrees with the archeologists and the historians. They haven't proven it – but then one may ask if anyone has proven anything, in this whole field. Basically, it's very hard to find proof in this area. So, they have a hypothesis that reconciles things with the archaeologists, you might say. And certainly, it’s something that one can think about.

All glories to Srila Prabhupada.