Before postmodern literary criticism emerged, it was common for Westerners to think that a literary work is a distinct entity, with a beginning, climax, and ending. This idea was established in ancient Greece, and Indian ideas about the Rigveda form an excellent contrast with it.
Both Homeric poems are unified stories. They’re structured by plots that focus on a problem that the main characters must solve. The Iliad begins with the most physically skilled Greek warrior, Achilles, withdrawing from the war with the Trojans when the Greeks’ leader, Agamemnon, insulted his honor and stole his concubine, Briesis. An ego clash between two guys treating a woman like property isn’t good for the reputation of Western literature’s dead white males, but you can conjure up vivid images of the event. The epic ends with an equally compelling scene. The Trojans, with tears streaming down their cheeks, bury their best warrior, Hector, who gave his life while trying to defend them from the Greeks.
The Odyssey recounts the crafty warrior Odysseus’s journey home after the war. And what a journey! He sails throughout the western side of the known world, encounters fantastic creatures from the giant one-eyed cyclops to Calypso, who holds him prisoner on her island for seven years, tries to make him her husband, and offers him immortality. But during his travails he longs to return to his wife and home. He finally arrives and vanquishes the intruders in his house, who had been vying for his wife and property after assuming that he was dead. The Odyssey is about a nostos, or return. Odysseus returned to family and community—to what’s tangible and cozy.
So both Homeric poems have a goal, and this propels their stories and unifies them. Winning the war and returning home are worldly outcomes that the characters focus on. But the Rigveda doesn’t have a definite plot or ending. Instead, it’s a collection of hymns that people used in rituals for different occasions. It’s not linear, like the Homeric poems’ plots. Its horizons are more open-ended and less bound to temporal and spatial limits. It is not mainly descriptive—its main purpose is not to vividly describe people, places, or events. It’s efficacious instead. It attunes its reciters, chanters, and listeners with the universe’s fundamental energies, which are supposedly expressed through the Sanskrit language’s vibrations. The Homeric writings are intensely visual instead, and their characters interact with each other much more. The oldest texts in both cultures were created with different assumptions about the purpose of language and poetic verses.
Rather than being seen as a distinct entity with a conclusion, the Rigveda was expanded into an enormous corpus of texts that has included many more books, as though profuse flows of metaphysical energies are embodied in the verses and they flow to the other texts to give them their meaning.
The Samaveda uses the Rigveda’s hymns and focuses on the music of chants by a class of priests called the Udgatar. The Yajurveda contains formulas for actions in Vedic rituals. A yajus is a phrase or sentence uttered while performing a particular action during a ritual, such as preparing the consecrated ground or placing an offering into a fire. The Atharaveda was compiled from earlier Vedic hymns and from other formulas (which probably came from folk customs) into chants for medicinal and magical uses. It was named after a class of priests called Atharvans, who often conducted rituals for cures, curses, agricultural abundance, love magic, and war. All texts were redacted into the four Vedas by 600 BCE. People now had a pan-Vedic liturgy that consolidated traditions of different clans and priestly families.
Many more works were then added to this corpus. Brahmanas were appended, and they explained how to correctly perform rituals. They also defined the social classes more sharply than the Rigveda did before its later verses. They often structured the universe into three basic classes of categories, with the Brahmin caste in the most prestigious and often associated with Agni, the earth, the east, the Rigveda, a poetic meter from the Rigveda called gayatri, and several other aspects of the universe. The second group of categories was associated with kings and warriors, with the atmosphere as the associated cosmic region, Indra as the representative god, the south as the direction of focus, summer, the Yajurveda as the ritual text, and another meter. The third category included the Samaveda, the west, the rainy season, and a different poetic meter. These were related to common people. Brahmanas thereby often represented the Vedas in an overtly structured way. They enumerated a system of primary categories, based them on the Vedas and the energies they channel, and placed them into a social hierarchy with Brahmins at the top.
The Aranyakas and Upanishads were then written, and they included more philosophic reflections. The Vedic tradition was expanding from rituals to deliberate intellectual inquiry.
The Vedangas (six disciplines that arose from studying the Vedas) were also composed. The name means limbs of the Vedas. One, the Nirukta, is about etymology—it speculates on the origins of words in the Vedas. The others focus on phonetics, rituals, grammar, poetic meters, and astrology. The Vedangas were first mentioned in the Upanishads, and each later became elaborated on. Vedic literature went on and on.
And on. The two main Sanskrit epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, have been considered to be rooted in the Vedas. Two of the six ancient philosophic systems (the Purva Mimamsa and the Uttara Mimamsa) that are thought to be based on the Vedas detail correct adherence to their traditions. The Homeric poems arrive at conclusions with concrete images, but the Vedas have unbounded continuity. Homeric works are stories about distinct characters. The Vedas express an immense cosmic field that includes all life forms, and they channel its energies. The composition of the Homeric poems has usually been located in one bard, and Greeks by the fifth century BCE wrote biographies that chronicled his life, including the places he visited. The Vedas were heard or seen by rishis; they weren’t composed by a human author. Instead, they have existed since the beginning of the universe and their energies pervade it.
Both cultures developed different assumptions about what a text is way back when they were composing their earliest opuses. Their ideas were highly developed in their earliest stages, and people have followed them ever since.