How to Discover
We have studied origins and backgrounds in Part I and focused on the Vedas in Part II. The reader should by now be familiar with the subject matter of this book. Part I answered the old questions about Indo-European, Indo-Aryan and other contributions to Indic civilization. Discovering the Vedas depends on the answer to a second and more important question that has never been asked: what have the Vedas contributed to Indic intellectual history? It is clear that the Upaniṣads influenced the philosophies of the Vedānta; and that mantras and rituals are the chief channels through which Vedic contributions entered what came to be known as Hinduism. The second question is concerned with deeper analytical issues. We must do what sage Uddālaka Āruṇi told his son Śvetaketu (‘White Flame’) to do in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad (CU 6.12):
‘Bring a banyan fruit.’
‘Here it is, sir.’
‘Cut it up.’
‘I’ve cut it up, sir.’
‘What do you see there?’
‘These quite tiny seeds, sir.’
‘Now, take one of them and cut it up.’
‘I’ve cut one up, sir.’
‘What do you see there?’
…
The reader will see in Chapter 15 what Śvetaketu saw inside the tiny seed. We have to look deeper in a similar spirit and take off cover after cover as ‘discovering’ implies. It is like peeling an onion, with the difference, that we will never know whether the last cover we peeled off was the final one.
The intimate connections between mantras and rituals will be examined in Chapters 11 and 12. Chapter 13 provides another link to the geography of Part I. It shows that the movement of the composers from west to east coincided with a development in the ritual proceedings themselves: they started ‘facing east’ and ended, on the Agnicayana altar, to face all directions. The Vedic contribution to Indic intellectual history lies in that move towards universality.