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University of Oregon

Conjectures on a Structural Principle of Vedic Poetry
Author(s): Leonard Nathan
Source: Comparative Literature, Vol
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2 (Spring, 1976), pp
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LEONARD NATHAN

Conjectures on

A Structural Principl
Of Vedic Poetry

N AN ARTICLE titled "Euclid and Panini," J
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Staal
"that the mathematical method is characteristic of much of western

philosophy, whereas the grammatical method is characteristic of much
of Indian philosophy
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Later in the same article, he reminds us that

in India, "grammar was called the Veda of the Vedas, the science of
sciences
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Mathematics could be said to have
served the same function for western thought
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I don't mean
to say that Indian poetry has been inspired by the science of grammar,
any more than western poetry has been the product of geometry
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2 (April 1965), 99
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, p
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3 I use "paradigm" in the sense developed by Professor Thomas S
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See
his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962)
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174
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VEDIC POETRY

mean that it is possible that the habit of mind that ch

mathematics as a model for discursive thinking mig
utterance in a special way and that, further, the ha

thought grammatically would produce a poetry fundam
in many respects from that of a habit of mind which th
cally, if it is understood that "grammatically" and "ma

this context mean characteristic ways of organizing ve
either for expression or for understanding expression
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That control involved, amo
the fixed relation between ritual and word, and the ne
preserving both the rite and the word
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Which is, perhaps, anoth
that western culture lost touch with whatever cere
might have had long before Indian culture even ima
thing was possible
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If this is so, we
expect the compositions themselves to be different in

from those composed according to a different parad
that, in fact, such is the case
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174
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

mathematical structure differ in many ways, the m
our purpose, being that grammar does not aim at t

unity of mathematics
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While discourse based on habits
the mathematical paradigm would most likely aim
structure, that based on the grammatical woul
sentence as the structural entity deserving most at
At this point I must introduce a personal exper
puzzle at the seeming lack of structural integrity o
especially those not held together by obvious struc
narrative (as in the so-called "Hymn of Creatio
or by the more frequent repetition-with-varia
by the mere brevity that creates by brevity a s

X
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4 I say "seeming lack of structure" be

looking for what was never intended and looking f
chial western view which expects, to use the word
geometric or mathematical development in its poet

whose overriding character is the unity we have
this expectation of unity that must lie behind A

advantage to tragedy over epic because of the form
is concentrated is always more effective than what

period
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"6

Tradition abounds with such dicta, and the Ro

give the conception a more vital representation by
does not at all lessen the belief in the necessity of t
out unity, there are so many mere fragments; and
was, as I have been using the term, mathematical: a

clusion was implicit in its own premises, in its
whose principle could be abstracted by a careful
as they develop
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The following, the opening of a "Hymn to Dionysus," is chosen because
it is a fragment and because it is rather bad verse
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5 Aristotle, The Poetics, trans
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Hamilton Fife, Loeb Classical Library
(Cambridge, Mass
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115
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H
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Fairclough, Loeb
Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass
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453
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174
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VEDIC POETRY

does not keep the reader from understanding pretty m

ing; that it is bad means it exhibits its trade secret
revealing the mathematical method rather nakedly
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And othe
were born in Thebes; but all these lie
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The
a mountain most high and richly grown with woods, far off i
streams of Aegyptus
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That this poet

his method allows us to see clearly how his mind is
structural units whose placement is aesthetic, that
effect; thus the catalog leads up to and makes more
which then (though the part is lost) must be treated

The structure is not mathematical or logical in the pur
terms; it is so if we think of them broadly as terms su
of self-contained, unitary, and developmental coherenc

While it is true that western poetry has not always
about its compositional habits or so overtly attentive
ture, until the twentieth century aesthetic coheren
value for the poet and his audience alike
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Wh
or critic or both are being fooled in this situation, i
that western readers still expect, no matter how elli
poems that develop along a line of consistent, single pu
inevitable end
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7 Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, trans
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, 1943), p
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125

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He cannot, as he might with a wester
crudely, predict what is going to happen between

of a Vedic hymn, unless, like the "'Hymn To Creation
rative structure, and even here he is at least surprised

to be a structural anticlimax (though a marvelous
gods may work)
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And it is here that I should like to
latter relation may be the very one that determin

Vedic hymns
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129, where the orde
easily perceivable as steps in the process of creation
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I don't m

Vedic composers were inevitably bound to a particular
posed, or even to rites in general, though this was ve

8Scholars such as Winternitz, Renou, and Gonda have dw
ritual character of Vedic hymns
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And while it has b
Vedic hymns are equally adumbrated by ritual practice, th

difference to my position which assumes, first a certai
compositional principles underlying nearly all the hymns

formulation; and, second, that this uniformity derived from

the ceremonial
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VEDIC POETRY

I do mean to suggest that the habit of mind I have ca
really based on a paradigm of the world as ceremony
may have been in the beginning of all things, hymns

flect that ceremony: a highly organized and schem

ately elaborated by men to achieve specific ends
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If in the West the principle governing
was internal, "organic," in India it lay (by wester

side the verse which would follow ritual thinking in a
ment, distich by distich
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9

Hence the importance of grammatical apprehension, of grammatical method; for Vedic compositions are not meant to stand as individual

poems (if some seem to, it makes no difference to this thesis), but as
part of a world of action, of ritual
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Yet the
word "outside" is misleading; it implies an "inside," as with western
poems, but I submit that there is no inside-outside to Vedic hymns;
they belong to an action in spirit, if not in fact, and that action-or
its ends-supplies all structural principles to all its parts
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" What should belong to the
action (not the hymn as an aesthetic whole) determines what material
shall enter specific compositions and where it shall be placed
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But even he, alluding to materials that have been
thought to indicate a "poesie profane dans la Veda," asserts that "tout est assujetti a la norme sacree
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274)
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Again in Religions
of Ancient India Renou says as much
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10), he concludes that "on the whole the
raison d'etre of the hymns lies in the cult" (p
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17-18)
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But these performances did not, so far as we know,
determine principles of composition; nor did they prove a major determinant in
the literary tradition for the way in which Homer was to be understood
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

expression, related to but not dependent upon
of the culture
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This is why the hymns are coll
are composed and understood distich by distich,

to one another by the principle of belonging, a sens

determined by the larger context of the ceremo
that those who titled the Rgveda conceived it to be

not poems
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I do suggest, though, that it is a mist
them anything like the organic structure of ma
coherence; to do so may be to find what is not th
recompose them into western poems
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It is perhaps best at this point to look at a Vedic hymn with a view to
clarifying what I mean by the compositional principle of belonging and
the necessity for understanding that principle in terms of grammatical

rather than mathematic development, as I have used these terms
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85 ("To Varuna") because it is a hymn that
has puzzled me in the past (when I was looking for a western structure), and because it seems fairly typical of a large class of hymns that
are clearly precatory and probably, therefore, connected to ceremonial
action
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Varuna has flung out the air over woods, made the
horse gallop, the cow give milk,
Stiffened the heart, set fire under seas, sun in
the sky, and soma on peaks
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Does He want milk? Varuna moistens the sky, the land,
and the earth to the tip of her roots;
Mountains assume black clouds that are rent by
heroic strokes
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VEDIC POETRY

It is here we pronounce the terrible arts of the
Who conceives the whole,
Who, standing in middle space, measures out earth
the sun with His rule
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If we have hurt any who did us a good, some friend,
a comrade, a brother,
A neighbor, or stranger, O Varuna, wash us clean of
that evil
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10

To all appearances the structure of this hymn seems to be a simple
three-step process; the preamble indicates intent to hymn a particular

god, the ensuing distichs catalog his attributes, and the conclusion
requests his favor
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To this point the
description might have fitted many Homeric as well as many Vedic
hymns
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As I have said, there is in the
Homeric variety, even at its least impelling, an effort at what I have
called mathematical structure in which development is more important
than any of its parts
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No such
principle seems to be implicit in Rgveda V
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Indeed the common signs
of such a principle are wholly absent: for instance, what one might call

foregrounding and backgrounding,12 in which one element is selected
in the development (Nysa in the "Hymn to Dionysus") as paramount
and established as such by clear emphasis (usually through its climactic

position in the order, but also by other devices), so that all other ele10 "The Indian Poetic Tradition," trans
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Misra, L
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H
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11 The three-step mode is one of the basic ones for the compositions of prayers
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Thus it can be employed with either the grammatical or the

mathematical, mode
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Willard Trask (Princeton, 1953), particularly Ch
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11-13
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

ments (the other shrines in the "Hymn to Dion
nated to it
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The western reader mig

between the description of a god whose domain i
and a request dependent on a god of mercy
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By his st

must seem rather unstructured
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It is difficult to see any other link beyond
this and the fact that the epithets all establish Varuna's power and scope

(not unique to Him among deities)
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From the
point of view of a mathematical aesthetics-that is, a western point of
view-distichs three and four could be interchanged with no serious
loss of sense or impact
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In short, nothing intrinsic
holds the distichs together aside from the general principle of belonging
to the intent and the topic
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85 is not calculating his effects in
terms of expectations which include an ear for developing relations
of part with part; he is rather working with an expectation which is
precisely aware of what belongs to the topic and which has an ear satisfied only by an adequate accumulation of what belongs
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Like

any deeply embedded cultural sense, it was probably hardly explicable
even to those who possessed it, as mysterious as the western sense of
satisfaction when a proposition proves lucid, economical, self-consistent,
and perhaps even true
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85 may be more than compensated for by what
I have called grammatical significance
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This suggests that perhaps the
auditor's attention is not to be given to development, but to the completed local unit itself as it arises
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Possibly the ritual
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13 The resu

omous small units in the form of individual distichs
that the grammatical imagination, as distinct from

imagination, could hold and in which it could feel secu

Vedic poetry is profound, in that, point by point, i

student move deeply into it, instead of being thrust ah

forward urgency say, of the Greek hexameter (the
meric hymn)
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85 is not structurally

in the light of what its author intended
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A linear accumulation of such local fore-

grounds gives magnitude and reach to the hymn (sometimes augmented
by narrative or repetitional elements) and its syntactic structure gives
it depth
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85 is connected to actual ritual
(as distinguished from other hymns that obviously are), perhaps not
at all, directly, but I would suggest that it was composed within a ritual
frame of mind and that its formal qualities are affected decisively by

that fact
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Typically, the symbolic mode of Indian thought tends toward explaining intrinsic meanings, whereas the western symbolic mode tends toward comprehending
a breadth of phenomena
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In explicitly religious symbolism in the
West one looks for "deep" explanations
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It would not be hard, even for a westerner, to imagine a vast lore
lying behind each distich of Rgveda V
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Such

ritual occasions serve a different function from occasions in which the critic tried

to explain why the hymns were valuable, apart from the fact that they were given
by divine agency
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

symbol for a whole narrative itself, the sum of which

as that is possible in words, an account of the god

then be the duty of the Vedic composer to present su

inviting his audience, in the silence between lines,
whole out of what lives behind the words
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Then,
Vedic composition, based on ritual habits of mind, becomes at best a
method for moving the auditor through or behind the words to the
reality, while western composition aims to bring, as much as possible,
the reality into the words
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These remarks apply to the general class of Vedic compositions and
western poems
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I have

already indicated a number from the Vedic tradition: the narrative
hymn, the short hymn whose effect is unitary because it is short, and the

hymn that works by repetition
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67, in which the lines are repeated with slight variations or in Atharva Veda 1
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This type of
formula appears in Imany forms as the precatory "may," as in Rgveda
1
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7
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13, the sophistication of the composer can go far
beyond a rudimentary magic formula
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'5 But these apparent excep14 The varieties of intention in the hymns, as I have noted, are more considerable than implied here
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See, for instance, Atharva Veda, VI
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75
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and trans
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(Delhi, 1962), II, 1001-02
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VEDIC POETRY

tions in most instances are better understood in the ritual context than

by recourse to western aesthetic criteria; they therefore affirm the
habit of composition based on the principle of belonging more clearly
than do more typical hymns
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'6 It may be straining the parallel too hard,
but it is tempting to see compositional principles based on religious
habits of mind, whether in the East or the West, inevitably leading to
exactly the kind of verse that we have been describing as characteristic

of the Vedic hymns-with this major difference: the medieval poetry
of the West (and I speak here generally of the Latin literary tradition
and its imitators, not the popular or underground poetry of the time)
lacks the richness and profundity of Vedic hymns, simply because the

western religious tradition lacked the richness and profundity of the
Vedic culture, if only because the latter was far more mature and pervasive in the life of its people
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Thus it seems more than

accident that the literary tradition that grows out of the Vedas and
dominates poetic composition for so many centuries should locate as its

central concern the creation and understanding of rasa
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If one assumes
that the habit of mind that came out of Vedic composition and under-

standing carried on into later tradition, then much seems explained:
negatively, the lack of critical interest in overall structure; the best
critics seemed satisfied with the more general notion of aucitya or pro-

priety (the principle of belonging?) which did not demand developmental ordering so much as appropriateness of material to the topic
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See for example, XIX
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Here, also, ritual efficacy seems to

have dictated the ordering of parts
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Carleton
Brown (Oxford, 1939)
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174
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

Positively, this view explains why the same critics see
will give them a way of treating depth (as distinguish
matical structural development)
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Some concepts (in the most
alamkara-as decorative figures-begin to make sen

at least, who see decorative figures as inferior to "org
value is their intrinsic relation to their context
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17

One can also point to the poems themselves for c

In the Gita Govinda, for instance, one function of the

isolate the smaller units
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Jayadeva does not conceive of this task as in
even making an already invented one new through

sion, or psychological insight
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In this tradition, a m

be bound by formula, but a good poet would be a
formula to get more depth or a depth of a different

any who had told the story before
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What was important
meaning and beauty of each part as part of a whol

parts-the key to so much western poetry-would distr
view, from what was important, which is not tension
but the full presence of reality, that reality lying behi
pearances which have so compelled the western poet, e
perhaps more today than ever before
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University of California, Berkeley

17 See S
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De, Sanskrit Poetics As a Study of Aesthet

particularly Ch
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23
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174
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