{"it":{"id":"TX024","kind":"text","sub":"Vedic","name":"Rigveda 10.90 (Purusha Sukta)","place":"Pune","date":"c.1000 BCE","oldest":"oral; mss. 11th c. CE+","inst":"BORI Pune","lang":"Vedic Sanskrit","src":[222],"lat":18.53,"lon":73.833,"tags":["Asia"],"sum":"Rigveda 10.90 describes the universe and society made from one sacrificed cosmic being.","why":"It is the only Rigveda hymn to name the four classes of society. Scholars see those verses as a late layer, while many Hindus read the hymn as a picture of cosmic unity.","nfacts":0,"nsrc":1,"yt":"Map body parts to classes.","rel":["TX023"],"hook":"One hymn of 16 verses builds the whole world from the body of a sacrificed cosmic man."},"S":{"222":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purusha_Sukta"]},"rec":{"id":"TX024","alias":[],"ms":[],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"pas":[],"tr":[],"mo":[],"tl":[],"wit":[],"tx":{"mainstream_reading":"Ritual cosmogony; justification of social order.","alternative_reading":"none prominent","alt_proponent":"n/a","mistranslation_or_dispute":"Griffith 1896 PD.","key_theme":"cosmic man sacrificed to create world and varnas","language":"Vedic Sanskrit","physical_object_institution":"BORI Pune","composition_date":"c.1000 BCE","oldest_ms_date":"oral; mss. 11th c. CE+","b":"V"},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"S0585","t":"en.wikipedia.org","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purusha_Sukta"},{"id":"VTX024-2","t":"Rig Veda 10.90, Purusha Sukta (Griffith trans.), sacred-texts","u":"https://sacred-texts.com/hin/rigveda/rv10090.htm"}],"sum":"# The Purusha Sukta: The World Made From a Sacrificed Giant\n\nThe fire is ready. Seven fencing sticks have been set around it, and three times seven layers of fuel stacked inside. The gods have gathered, with the ancient beings called the Sadhyas and the seers. On the sacred grass lies the victim, anointed with oil, and the victim is so vast that he fills everything there is and reaches beyond it. His oil, the poet says, is spring. Summer is the wood. Autumn is the offering. Then the gods begin the sacrifice, and from his body the world is made.\n\nThis is the scene at the centre of the Purusha Sukta, hymn 90 of the tenth book of the Rigveda, India's oldest sacred text. In sixteen short verses it describes how the universe, the gods, the animals, the sacred chants and human society itself were carved out of one cosmic being. It may be the most influential short poem ever composed in India, and for some of the most troubling reasons.\n\n## The cosmic man\n\nThe hymn opens with an image that has stayed in the Indian imagination for three thousand years. In Ralph Griffith's translation from the 1890s: \"A thousand heads hath Purusha, a thousand eyes, a thousand feet. On every side pervading earth he fills a space ten fingers wide.\" Purusha means \"man\" or \"person,\" but this person is everything. \"This Purusha is all that yet hath been and all that is to be.\" All creatures are only one quarter of him; \"three-fourths eternal life in heaven.\" He is both inside the world and above it, a being who contains creation and still exceeds it, which is why later philosophers would read the hymn as a statement about the unity of all things.\n\nThe Rigveda as a whole is a collection of 1,028 hymns in Vedic Sanskrit, composed roughly between 1500 and 1000 BCE and passed on by memory with extraordinary precision long before it was written. The Purusha Sukta is dated toward the end of that span, around 1000 BCE, and it belongs to the tenth book, one of the youngest. Versions of it also appear in the other three Vedas, in later ritual texts, and expanded in the Bhagavata Purana and the Mahabharata. It is still recited in Hindu worship today.\n\n## Dividing the body\n\nFrom the great sacrifice, the hymn says, came everything. \"The dripping fat was gathered up\" and from it were formed \"the creatures of the air, and animals both wild and tame.\" From it were born the Rig verses and the Sama chants, the spells and charms, the sacrificial formulas of the Yajus. Horses came from it, and cattle, goats and sheep.\n\nThen the poet asks a precise question. \"When they divided Purusha how many portions did they make? What do they call his mouth, his arms? What do they call his thighs and feet?\" And he answers: \"The Brahman was his mouth, of both his arms was the Rajanya made. His thighs became the Vaisya, from his feet the Sudra was produced.\"\n\nThe rest of the cosmos follows. \"The Moon was gendered from his mind, and from his eye the Sun had birth.\" The gods Indra and Agni came from his mouth, the wind from his breath. Mid-air came from his navel, the sky from his head, the earth from his feet, the four directions from his ears. \"Thus they formed the worlds.\" And the act itself became the model for every ritual after it: \"these were the earliest holy ordinances.\"\n\n## One verse and a social order\n\nVerse 12 is the reason this hymn matters so much. It is the only place in the entire Rigveda where the four varnas, the classes of society, are named together: the Brahmins, the priests, from the mouth; the Rajanyas, the warrior rulers later called Kshatriyas, from the arms; the Vaishyas, farmers and traders, from the thighs; and the Shudras, the servants and labourers, from the feet. The order runs from head to toe.\n\nIn later centuries that verse became a charter. Commentators and lawgivers cited it as proof that the ranking of human beings was built into the cosmos at its creation, that a person's place in society was as fixed as the place of the feet below the head. A single line of poetry gave divine sanction to an order that has shaped the lives of hundreds of millions of people.\n\nThat is why the question of when the verse was composed has been fought over so hard. Scholars such as Vijaya Nagarajan, Stephanie Jamison and Joel Brereton place the verses on social classes in the latest layer of the Rigveda. Nagarajan calls them an \"interpolation\" meant to give \"divine sanction\" to an unequal division of society that already existed. Jamison and Brereton note that \"there is no evidence in the Rigveda for an elaborate, much-subdivided and overarching caste system,\" and that the varna system seems \"embryonic,\" \"a social ideal rather than a social reality.\" The historian Suvira Jaiswal and the reformer B. R. Ambedkar also regarded the hymn as a later addition. Some connect it to the growing power of the Kuru kingdom, where a priestly elite and its royal patrons had every reason to want their position written into the origin of the world.\n\n## Unity or hierarchy?\n\nMany Hindus read the hymn very differently, not as a ladder but as a body. On this view the point of verse 12 is that every part of society comes from the same being and belongs to the same whole, just as the mouth and the feet are equally parts of one person. The Purusha Sukta is the foundation of whole schools of devotional philosophy, which see in it the unity of human, cosmic and divine reality, all arising from one source.\n\nBoth readings start from the same image, and that image is not unique to India. The idea of a primordial giant whose body becomes the world turns up far away, in the Norse story of Ymir, whose flesh became the earth and whose skull became the sky, and in the Chinese tale of Pangu, whose body formed the mountains and rivers. The pattern is old, and widespread, and nobody has fully explained why so many peoples imagined the world as the remains of a single enormous being who was there before anything else. Some modern writers have even tried to read the cosmic giant as a literal being from the sky, though nothing in the text requires it.\n\nWhat the hymn does require is a sense of scale. Purusha is not a god among gods. He is the material of everything, and the gods themselves are only the priests who perform the sacrifice.\n\nPicture the end of that first ritual as the poet imagines it: the fire burned down inside its seven fencing sticks, the vast body gone, and in its place a finished world, sun and moon set in the sky, wind moving, animals grazing, and four lines of people standing where the mouth, the arms, the thighs and the feet had been.","qs":["A single hymn of 16 verses gave religious backing to a social order still felt across India today. How much power can one ancient text hold over billions?","If the class verses were a late addition, does that change how much authority they should carry?","The same hymn is read as cosmic unity and as social ranking. Who decides which reading counts?"]},"img":null,"md":{"h":"img/m/TX024-16x9.webp","w":1600,"hh":900,"alt":"Rigveda 10.90 (Purusha Sukta), Pune — Hymn 10.90 of the Rigveda (Purusha sukta), verses 1 and 2 with commentary, page of Rig-Veda-sanhita, the Sacred Hymns…","by":"Unknown authorUnknown author","lic":"Public domain","lu":"","p":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Rig_Veda.jpg","g":false,"ct":true,"cap":"","sec":[{"src":"img/t/TX024.webp","by":"Unknown authorUnknown author","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Rig_Veda.jpg","cap":"The Rig Veda.jpg"}]},"hh":[{"v":"c.1000 BCE","h":"Date","s":[298]},{"v":"oral","h":"Oldest surviving copy: oral; mss. 11th c. CE+","s":[298]},{"v":"Vedic Sanskrit","h":"Language","s":[298]},{"v":"BORI Pune","h":"Where the physical copy is held","s":[298]}],"hs":{"298":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purusha_Sukta"]}}