The Grihya-Sutras- The Rules of Vedic Domestic Ceremonies (Part-II)

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We begin our introductory remarks on the literature of the Grihya-sûtras with the attempt to collect the more important data which throw light on the development of the Grihya ritual during the oldest period of Hindu antiquity.

There are, as it seems, no direct traces of the Grihya ceremonies in the most ancient portion of Vedic literature. It is certain indeed that a number of the most important of those ceremonies are contemporaneous with or even earlier than the most ancient hymns of the Rigveda, as far as their fundamental elements and character are concerned, whatever their precise arrangement may have been. However, in the literature of the oldest period they play no part. It was another portion of the ritual that attracted the attention of the poets to whom we owe the hymns to Agni, Indra, and the other deities of the Vedic Olympus, viz. the offerings of the Srauta-Ritual with their far superior pomp, or, to state the matter more precisely, among the offerings of the Srauta-Ritual the Soma offering. In the Soma offering centred the thought, the poetry, and we may almost say the life of the Vasishthas, of the Visvamitras, &c., in whose families the poetry of the Rigveda had its home. We may assume that the acts of the Grihya worship, being more limited in extent and simpler in their ritual construction than the great Soma offerings, were not yet at that time, so far as they existed at all, decked out with the reciting of the poetic texts, which we find later on connected with them, and which in the case of the Soma offering came early to be used. Probably they were celebrated in simple unadorned fashion what the person making the offering had to say was doubtless limited to short, possibly prose formulas, so that these ceremonies remained free from the poetry of the above-mentioned families of priests ¹. We think that the character of the verses given in the Grihya-sûtras, which had to be repeated at the performance of the different ceremonies, justifies us in making these conjectures. Some of these verses indeed are old Vedic verses, but we have no proof that they were composed for the purposes of the Grihya ceremonies, and the connection in which we find them in the Rigveda proves rather the contrary. Another portion of these verses and songs proves to have been composed indeed for the very Grihya ceremonies for which they are prescribed in the texts of the ritual: but these verses are more recent than the old parts of the Rig-veda. Part of them are found in the Rigveda in a position which speaks for their more recent origin, others are not contained in the Rigveda at all. Many of these verses are found in the more recent Vedic Samhitas, especially in the Atharva-veda a Samhita which may be regarded in the main as a treasure of Grihya verses; others finally have not as yet been traced to any Vedic Samhitâ, and we know them from the Grihya-sûtras only. We may infer that, during the latter part of the Rigveda period, ceremonies such as marriage and burial began to be decked out with poetry as had long been the case with the Soma offering.