There is something remarkable about the structure of the Rig Veda that deserves examination even before entering into the content of the hymns: the fact that this structure is not arbitrary. It is not the result of an administrative classification carried out after the fact by editors concerned with order. It reflects an organisation that makes sense on several levels simultaneously, that says something about the history of the text’s composition, about the families that produced it, and about the way the Vedic Indians conceived of the relationship between form and content in a sacred text.
The Rig Veda is divided into ten mandalas, this Sanskrit word meaning circle, wheel, cycle. This metaphor of the circle is not decorative. It says that the mandalas are not chapters in the linear sense of a modern book, sections that follow one another in a progressive order from beginning to end. They are cycles, autonomous wholes that can be read and recited independently of one another, each with its own centre of gravity, its own tonality, its own history. Together they form a whole, but this whole is organised according to a logic different from that of an ordinary narrative text.
Mandalas two through seven are the oldest, and they form the historical heart of the Vedic corpus. We have called them in other articles the family mandalas, because each of them is associated with a particular lineage of rishis: the second with the Gritsamada, the third with the Vishvamitra, the fourth with the Vamadeva, the fifth with the Atri, the sixth with the Bharadvaja, the seventh with the Vasishtha. This organisation by family is not a historical curiosity. It reflects the way Vedic knowledge was transmitted: within the framework of family lineages that were the custodians and guarantors of their portion of the sacred corpus. Each family had its hymns, its favoured gods, its style, its own ways of entering into relationship with the divine.
The internal chronology of these six ancient mandalas is perceptible in the vocabulary and the style, even if it is difficult to establish with precision. The sixth mandala, attributed to the Bharadvaja, is generally considered the oldest, followed by the third, the seventh, the fourth, the second and the fifth. These differences in antiquity translate into variations in vocabulary, in the complexity of metaphors, in the repertoire of gods invoked. The oldest hymns are often the most direct, the most immediate in their way of expressing spiritual experience. The more recent hymns show a more developed poetic and philosophical elaboration.
The first mandala is the longest in the corpus and the most heterogeneous. It is composed of three parts from different eras, which explains its stylistic diversity. The first part is contemporary with the oldest family mandalas. The second and third parts were added later, during the intermediate period of Vedic civilisation. The first mandala functions in some ways as a general introduction to the corpus, bringing together hymns to many different gods in a variety of styles and metres that gives the reader a sense of the richness of the whole.
The eighth mandala is primarily associated with the Kanva family, with contributions from other families. It is distinguished by a particular predilection for certain metres, notably the Gayatri and its variants, and by a lyrical quality that is its own. The hymns to the Ashvins are particularly numerous and beautiful there. The ninth mandala is unique in the entire corpus: it is entirely devoted to soma pavamana, the soma that purifies itself by flowing through the wool filter. It is the only mandala dedicated to a single god, or rather to a single deified plant, and this uniqueness says something about the central importance of soma in Vedic spirituality. It is also, along with the first and the tenth, one of the longest mandalas.
The tenth mandala is the most recent, added after the disappearance of soma and the collapse of the civilisation of the 7 Rivers. It is also the most heterogeneous, the most philosophical, the most proto-metaphysical in the corpus. In it one finds cosmogonic hymns of remarkable depth, such as the celebrated Nasadiya Sukta, the hymn of creation, which questions the origin of the universe with an intellectual freedom and an epistemological honesty that few ancient texts achieve. One also finds there the first mentions of castes, the first moral lessons, the first traces of what would become institutionalised Hindu religion. It is the mandala of transition, the mandala of the passage from one era to another.
Within each mandala, the hymns are organised according to an order that is not random. Within a single mandala, the hymns are grouped by the god invoked, and within each group they are classified in descending order of number of stanzas: the longest hymns first, the shortest last. This organisation allows easy navigation within the corpus for someone who knows the system, and it reflects the meticulous care that the compilers brought to the ordering of the text.
The total number of hymns is 1028, distributed across 10552 stanzas. These figures are not approximations. They have been counted, verified and transmitted with the same precision as the text itself, because in the Vedic tradition, the structure of the text is part of the text. To modify a figure, to add or remove a hymn, is to alter the integrity of the corpus as a whole.
The metres are a fundamental dimension of the structure of the Rig Veda that most translations, by reducing the hymns to prose, almost entirely erase. The Vedic hymns are not rhymed prose texts. They are rigorous poetic compositions, in which each syllable has a precise duration, short or long, and in which the arrangement of these syllables according to defined patterns produces the characteristic rhythm of each metre. The principal metres of the Rig Veda are the Gayatri, the Anushtubh, the Trishtubh and the Jagati.
The Gayatri is the shortest and most sacred metre. It is composed of three verses of eight syllables each, twenty-four syllables in total. Its brevity and regularity give it a particular density and percussion, and its association with the rising sun and the Light makes it the metre of awakening and revelation. Hymn 3.62.10, the Gayatri par excellence, is recited still today by hundreds of millions of Indians every morning. It owes this permanence not only to its spiritual content but to the particular quality of its rhythm, that way of striking the three beats equally and regularly like a beating heart.
The Anushtubh, with its four verses of eight syllables, would become the epic metre par excellence, that of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. In the Rig Veda, it is used for hymns of greater narrative suppleness, in which the regularity of the rhythm allows the development of a narrative or an argument across several stanzas without losing poetic tension. The Trishtubh, with its four verses of eleven syllables, is the most widely used metre in the Rig Veda, particularly in the hymns to Indra. Its broader and more majestic rhythm is associated with the power and energy of the warrior gods. The Jagati, with its four verses of twelve syllables, is the most expansive metre, associated with the sky and with space, and its use in certain cosmological hymns says something about the way the rishis conceived of the relationship between the form of the poem and the nature of what it expressed.
These metres are not interchangeable. To choose one metre over another for a hymn is already to say something about the nature of what one wishes to express, about the god being invoked, about the moment of the sacrifice for which the hymn is intended. Vedic metrics is a semiology in its own right, a system of meaning that functions in parallel with the semantic system of words, adding a layer of meaning that prose translation cannot transmit. This is one of the reasons the rishis insisted that a text recited orally, with its metre preserved, was fundamentally different from a text read silently in translation.
The structure of the Rig Veda is therefore itself a teaching. It says that the sacred expresses itself in form as much as in content, that precision is not an obstacle to depth but its condition, and that the organisation of a text reflects the worldview of those who composed it. A text without rigorous structure in a tradition that believes form and content to be inseparable is inconceivable. The Rig Veda is structured down to its smallest details because its authors knew that every detail matters, that reality manifests in precise forms as much as in great visions, and that to respect the form is to honour the reality it expresses.
Le Rig Veda 
Laisser un commentaire