There is in the Rig Veda a mandala that stands apart from all the others with a clarity that even a relatively uninformed reader ends up perceiving: the tenth. Not because it would be inferior to the others, not because it would have been poorly composed or poorly transmitted, but because it belongs to a different era, a different world, a different way of thinking and feeling. Between the ninth mandala, with its hymns to soma pavamana of remarkable intensity and coherence, and the tenth, there is a rupture that one senses before even analysing it. Something has changed. Something important has been lost, and something new, different, sometimes troubling, has appeared in its place.
This change has a cause that we have examined in other articles: the progressive disappearance of soma between 2200 and 2100 BCE, linked to the great drought that struck the entire intertropical zone of the planet and to the drying up of the Sarasvati. The tenth mandala is the text of the post-soma era, composed by rishis who, for the most part, no longer knew the direct experience that the ancient mandalas describe with a precision and an intensity that leave no doubt about their lived authenticity. The rishis of the tenth mandala inherited an extraordinary tradition, they knew its texts, they practised its rituals, but they had lost its most direct access: the dissolution of the ego in the fire of soma, the entry into the Light, the encounter with Brahman in the fullness of immediate experience.
This loss translates in the tenth mandala into several innovations, or rather several evolutions, some of which are of remarkable depth and beauty, and others of which are the first traces of what would become, centuries later, the most problematic aspects of the Hindu tradition.
The first and most spectacular of these innovations is the birth of philosophy in the proper sense of the word. The ancient mandalas have no need to philosophise. They have direct experience, and they describe it with the precision and intensity of someone speaking of what they have lived. The tenth mandala, deprived of this direct experience or having at least largely lost it, begins to think, to question, to speculate. And this passage from experience to thought produces some of the most extraordinary texts in all of ancient literature.
The Nasadiya Sukta, hymn 10.129, is the most celebrated example of this new way of thinking. It questions the origin of the universe with an intellectual freedom and an epistemological honesty that are absolutely without equivalent in the sacred texts of Antiquity. It begins with a series of negations: in the beginning, there was neither being nor non-being, neither air nor sky beyond. And it ends with a question that remains open, suspended in the air like the most beautiful of paradoxes: who knows from where this creation came? The gods themselves appeared after it. Perhaps the one who contemplates it from the highest heaven knows, perhaps he does not know. This last line is without doubt one of the most honest and courageous in the entire history of religious thought: the sacred text itself admits that it does not know. That even the gods perhaps do not know. It is an epistemological modernity that takes one’s breath away.
The Purusha Sukta, hymn 10.90, is another major innovation of the tenth mandala, but of a very different nature from the Nasadiya Sukta. It describes the creation of the world from the sacrifice of a primordial being, the Purusha, whose different body parts give birth to the different elements of the cosmos and the different categories of human society. It is in this hymn that the four Varnas, the castes, are mentioned for the first time in all of Vedic literature. The brahmins are born from his mouth, the Rajanyas from his arms, the Vaishyas from his thighs, the Shudras from his feet. This social cosmology, which links human inequalities to an original cosmogonic act, is a radical innovation relative to the first nine mandalas, in which nothing of the kind exists. It is the beginning of the metaphysical justification of social hierarchies, a shift whose consequences would be felt for millennia.
The notion of reincarnation makes its appearance in the tenth mandala, equally absent from the older mandalas. This appearance is profoundly significant. In the ancient mandalas, the immortality spoken of in the hymns is the immortality of the experience of Brahman, lived here and now, in the body, in the sacrifice, in the exaltation of soma. It is not a promise for after death. It is a reality accessible in this life, in this body, at this precise occasion of the sacrifice. When soma disappears, when this immediate and lived immortality is no longer accessible, something must be promised to those who suffer and die without having known mystical ecstasy. Reincarnation is this promise: what you could not reach in this life, you may perhaps reach in the next. It is a generous consolation, and it gave birth to some of the most profound reflections on the nature of existence that human thought has ever produced. But it also says, implicitly, that direct access to Brahman is no longer guaranteed in this life.
Morality makes its entrance in the tenth mandala in a way that is completely foreign to the ancient mandalas. In the first nine mandalas, there are no commandments, no prohibitions, no judgements about what is good or bad. The only implicit rule is: participate in the sacrifice, drink soma, seek Brahman. Everything else follows naturally from this experience. But when direct experience is no longer accessible, when the dissolution of the ego no longer occurs regularly and collectively through soma, the behaviours that flowed naturally from this experience must be replaced by rules. One can no longer count on inner transformation to produce the desirable behaviours. They must be imposed from outside, through morality and law. This is the birth of religion in the institutional sense of the word, and the tenth mandala is its first document.
The nuptial and funerary hymns of the tenth mandala constitute another important innovation. The wedding hymns, notably the celebrated Vivaha Sukta, and the funerary hymns that accompany cremation, introduce into the Vedic corpus a ritual dimension of daily life that was absent from the ancient mandalas, concentrated on the collective sacrifice and the experience of Brahman. These hymns say that the Vedic tradition is adapting, that it seeks to accompany all the moments of human life, not only the great spiritual ceremonies. It is a remarkable adaptation, and these hymns have a beauty and a human depth that make them particularly moving. The funerary hymn that accompanies the body toward the cremation fire, that speaks to the dead with a gentleness and a tenderness that bear no resemblance to the usual lamentations of ancient funerary texts, is one of the most touching texts in the entire corpus.
There are also in the tenth mandala hymns of a philosophical and speculative character that have no equivalent in the ancient mandalas, and that directly prefigure the great Upanishads. Hymn 10.90, the Purusha Sukta, hymn 10.129, the Nasadiya Sukta, but also hymn 10.125, the Devi Sukta in which Speech speaks in the first person of its own cosmic nature, are texts that already belong to the world of philosophy rather than that of sacrifice. They no longer ask the gods to come drink soma and grant their gifts to the sacrificer. They question the nature of reality, the structure of the cosmos, the identity of the ultimate principle. It is a fundamental shift that announces the centuries of philosophical thought that would follow.
What the tenth mandala tells us, in the end, is that human thought, confronted with the loss of direct access to fundamental experience, does not collapse. It transforms. It seeks other paths, other ways of saying and understanding what eludes it. Some of these new paths are extraordinary: the speculative philosophy of the Nasadiya Sukta, the cosmic poetry of the Devi Sukta, the human tenderness of the funerary hymns. Others are more ambiguous: the castes, codified morality, the promise of another life as a substitute for the direct experience of this one. The tenth mandala contains all of this at once, in its complexity and in its contradictions, as a pivotal moment in human history often does: by carrying simultaneously the best of what has just ended and the first forms of what is about to begin.
Le Rig Veda 
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