The Ṛgveda and its tenth book
The Ṛgveda is a collection of 1,028 hymns arranged in ten books, or maṇḍalas. Books two to seven are each kept by one family of ṛṣis. The tenth book gathers some of the Veda’s most reflective hymns: the Nāsadīya (10.129), the Hiraṇyagarbha (10.121), and the Puruṣa Sūkta (10.90).
The tradition calls the Veda apauruṣeya, not made by any person. Its hymns were not composed but seen: the ṛṣis are mantra-draṣṭāras, seers of the mantras, and each hymn is remembered with the name of the ṛṣi who saw it. The Puruṣa Sūkta has been passed down orally, memorised syllable by syllable with its pitch accents, teacher to student, long before anyone wrote it down.
Seer, subject and metre
The Anukramaṇī, the traditional index of the Ṛgveda, gives every hymn a seer, a subject and a metre. For 10.90:
- Seer (ṛṣi): Nārāyaṇa. The name means ‘resting on the waters’ or ‘son of man’. Later tradition identifies Nārāyaṇa with Viṣṇu, and the Puruṣa of the hymn with him.
- Subject (devatā): Puruṣa, the cosmic being.
- Metre: verses 1 to 15 in anuṣṭubh (four lines of eight syllables), verse 16 in triṣṭubh (four lines of eleven).
The same hymn in other Vedas
The Puruṣa Sūkta travelled. Versions of it appear in:
- the Vājasaneyi Saṃhitā of the Śukla Yajurveda (31.1–16), followed by six more verses, often called the Uttara-Nārāyaṇa;
- the Atharvaveda (Śaunaka 19.6), with the verses in a different order;
- the Taittirīya Āraṇyaka (3.12) of the Kṛṣṇa Yajurveda, the version most often chanted in South India today, with further verses beginning vedāham etam puruṣaṃ mahāntam, “I know this great Puruṣa.”
Its spread across the Vedic schools shows how central it became to the ritual tradition.
The ritual world behind it
The hymn speaks the language of yajña, the fire sacrifice. Sacred grass (barhis) is spread, melted butter (ājya) is poured into the fire, fuel sticks (samidh) are laid, and enclosing sticks (paridhi) are set around the fire. Seen this way, the hymn is a ritual text as much as a cosmology: it tells the priests that each sacrifice they perform repeats the first one, by which the world was made.
Later Brāhmaṇa texts describe a puruṣamedha, a ‘sacrifice of a person’, modelled on the hymn. In the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa (13.6) the people bound as offerings are released unharmed, and the rite becomes symbolic.
Why it matters
Few hymns have had more influence. Its picture of one Puruṣa underlying all things runs into the Upaniṣads and the Gītā; its ritual is still chanted daily; and its verse 12 became the scriptural root of the idea of four varṇas, with consequences, good and bad, that are still argued over.