The Vedas, Brahmanas, and the Shruti-Smriti Distinction

The Vedic corpus is built from four collections. The Rigveda, the oldest, was composed in archaic Vedic Sanskrit roughly between 1500 and 1200 BCE and consists of 1,028 hymns (suktas) organized into ten books (mandalas). The Samaveda largely rearranges Rigvedic verses into melodies (saman) chanted during soma sacrifices, surviving in the Kauthuma, Ranayaniya, and Jaiminiya recensions. The Yajurveda supplies the liturgical formulas (yajus) recited by the adhvaryu priest while performing ritual actions, and survives in two major branches, the Shukla (White, Vajasaneyi) and the Krishna (Black, with its Taittiriya, Maitrayani, and Katha recensions). The Atharvaveda, the latest of the four, gathers spells, charms, and healing incantations alongside philosophically significant material such as the Prithvi Sukta and early cosmogonic speculation. Each Veda is traditionally layered into four textual strata: Samhita (hymns and mantras), Brahmana (ritual exegesis), Aranyaka (forest texts), and Upanishad (philosophical treatises), a structure that maps the historical movement of Vedic religion from public sacrifice toward interior inquiry.