What are the Vedas?

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What are the Vedas?

 

Veda means knowledge. The original knowledge is the teachings of the

Vedas. In the conditioned state our knowledge is subjected to many

deficiencies. There are four defects that a conditioned soul has:

committing mistakes, subject to illusion, cheating propensity and

imperfect senses. These deficiencies make us unfit for having perfect

knowledge. Therefore we accept the Vedas as they are.

 

Vedas are apaurusheya, which means they are not compilations of human

knowledge. Vedic knowledge comes from the spiritual world, from Lord

Krishna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead. In the beginning the

first living creature was Brahma. He received the Vedic knowledge

from Krishna.

 

Vedas are compared to desire tree because they contain all things

knowable by man. They deal with mundane necessities as well as

spiritual realization. Above and beyond all departments of knowledge

there are specific directions for spiritual realization. Regulated

knowledge involves a gradual raising of the living entity to the

spiritual platform, through varna (brahmana - intellectual,

kshatriya - ruler, vaishya - merchant, shudra - worker) and asrama

(brahmacharya - student, grihastha - family, vanaprastha - retired,

sannyasa - mendicant). The highest spiritual realization is knowledge

that the Personality of Godhead is the reservoir of all pleasures,

spiritual tastes.

 

Formerly there was only the Veda of the name Yajur. The sacrifices

mentioned in the Vedas were means by which the people's occupations

according to their orders of life (namely brahmacharya, grihastha,

vanaprastha and sannyasa) could be purified. To simplify the process

and make them more easily performable, Vyasadeva (the empowered

incarnation of Krishna) divided the one Veda into four, Rg (prayers),

Yajur (hymns for oblations), Sama (same prayers and hymns in meters

for singing), Atharva (body/world maintenance and destruction) in

order to expand them among men.

 

Thus the original source of knowledge is the Vedas. There are no

branches of knowledge either mundane or transcendental, which do not

belong to the original texts of the Vedas. They have simply been

developed into different branches. They were originally rendered by

great seers. In other words, the Vedic knowledge broken into

different branches by different disciplic successions (known as

shakhas) has been distributed all over the world. No one, therefore,

can claim independent knowledge beyond the Vedas.

 

The texts of the Vedas are known as Samhitas. Within these Samhitas

there are portions known as Mantras, which contain prayers in the

form of potent sound compounds revealed to great seers for different

purposes. In the Vedic civilization three orders of life lived in the

forests. Only grihasthas inhabited the cities. The regulated

knowledge for living in the city, is revealed in the books known as

Brahmanas, whereas the regulated knowledge for living in the forest

is revealed in the books known as Aranyakas.

 

ref: http://www.indiadivine.org/vedas1.htm