The Riddle at the Heart of the Veda: Dirghatamas and the Cosmic Enigmas of RV 1.164

Fifty-Two Verses No One Fully Understands

Somewhere around the middle of the second millennium BCE, a poet named Dirghatamas composed a hymn that has been confounding readers for three thousand years. RV 1.164, the last and longest hymn in the Dirghatamas cycle (RV 1.140 to 1.164), runs to 52 verses and addresses itself to the Visvedevas, the “All-Gods,” which in practice means it addresses everything. It asks who saw the first being come into existence. It describes a one-wheeled chariot with twelve spokes and 720 sons. It places two birds in the same tree, one eating, one watching. It declares that speech has four quarters, only one of which humans ever use. And then, in a verse that would echo through the Upanishads and into the constitutions of modern nations, it announces that reality is one, though the wise call it by many names.

The hymn’s traditional title, the Asya Vamasya Sukta (roughly, “Hymn of the Wondrous One”), only adds to the mystery: scholars have debated whether vama here means “lovely,” “wondrous,” or “left-handed.” The Anukramani (the ancient index of Rigvedic hymns) assigns the poem to a bewildering variety of deities, which is less a sign of confusion than a recognition that this hymn refuses to sit within a single ritual slot [1]. It belongs to the brahmodya tradition: the ancient practice of competitive riddling among priests during the Vedic sacrifice, where cosmic knowledge was tested through enigmatic questions and layered answers [2].

What follows is an attempt to read the hymn closely, tracing its major images and the scholarly arguments they have provoked. The goal is not to solve the riddles (the hymn resists that), but to show why they remain worth asking.

The Blind Seer: Who Was Dirghatamas?

The name itself is a provocation. Dirghatamas (Sanskrit: दीर्घतमस्) means “Long Darkness,” and the tradition insists he was born blind. The Anukramani identifies him as Dirghatamas Aucathya, son of Ucathya and Mamata, belonging to the ancient Angirasa lineage of rsis. He is credited with composing 25 hymns in the first Mandala (RV 1.140 to 1.164), a substantial body of work that moves from relatively conventional praise of Agni to the philosophical deep waters of the hymn under discussion.

The later legendary tradition, preserved in the Mahabharata’s Adi Parva, elaborates a remarkable biography. Brihaspati, the divine priest, cursed the child with blindness before birth. Dirghatamas lived a full hundred years, was set adrift on a river by his own sons, and was rescued by King Bali of Anga, for whom he fathered six sons who gave their names to the eastern kingdoms: Anga, Vanga, Kalinga, Pundra, Suhma, and Odra [3]. The detail of the river-voyage and the blindness read like mythic refractions of themes that appear in the hymns themselves: darkness and illumination, exile and knowledge, the inability to see and the capacity to perceive what is hidden.

Aside. The legendary biography of Dirghatamas belongs to a much later stratum than the hymns and should not be used to date or interpret them directly. The Anukramani attributions are themselves post-Rigvedic (likely Brahmana-period or later). What we can say is that the tradition recognised something unusual about these poems and constructed a biography to match.

Two cautions are worth stating. First, we cannot assume the same poet composed all 25 hymns attributed to Dirghatamas; the Anukramani is an index, not a biography. Second, even if a single poet lies behind RV 1.164, the hymn as we have it may incorporate material from the brahmodya tradition that circulated independently before being gathered into this composition [4].

The Wheel of Time: Verses 2, 11, and 12

The hymn opens with a description of a grey-haired priest whose “brother midmost of the three is lightning,” a triad that likely refers to the three forms of Agni (fire): on earth, in the atmosphere (as lightning), and in the sky (as the sun). But it is in the second verse that the hymn’s characteristic method becomes clear:

Seven to the one-wheeled chariot yoke the Courser; bearing seven names the single Courser draws it. Three-naved the wheel is, sound and undecaying, whereon are resting all these worlds of being.

(RV 1.164.2, after Griffith)

The number seven recurs obsessively through the opening verses: seven yoke-horses, seven names, seven male children, seven sisters. These are the poet’s way of encoding the structure of the Vedic week, the seven metres of Vedic poetry, and the seven priests of the sacrifice. The “one-wheeled chariot” is the solar year, an image the hymn develops in verses 11 and 12 with precision:

Formed with twelve spokes, by length of time, unweakened, rolls round the heaven this wheel of during Order. Herein established, joined in pairs together, seven hundred Sons and twenty stand, O Agni.

(RV 1.164.11, after Griffith)

The arithmetic is exact. Twelve spokes are the twelve months. The 720 sons, “joined in pairs,” are 360 days paired with 360 nights. The “wheel of rta” (cosmic order) is the solar year itself, turning without weakening. Verse 12 adds a further layer: the “Sire” is “five-footed” (the five seasons, in some Vedic reckonings) and “twelve-formed” (the twelve months again), and he inhabits “heaven’s farther half, rich in waters” [5].

This is not numerology in the modern, occult sense. It is a poet encoding a calendrical system within a mythic image, expecting his audience of fellow priests to decode each layer during the ritual performance. The hymn is, in one register, an astronomical almanac disguised as a riddle.

The Two Birds: Verse 20

No image in the Rigveda has generated more commentary than the two birds of verse 20:

dva suparna sayuja sakhaya samanam vrksam pari sasvajate tayor anyah pippalam svadv atty anasnann anyo abhi cakasiiti

“Two birds, companions joined together, clasp the same tree. One of the two eats the sweet pippala fruit; the other, not eating, looks on.”

Rigveda 1.164, verse 20. After Jamison & Brereton (Oxford 2014), with diacritics standardised.

The verse was famous enough to be quoted verbatim in the Mundaka Upanishad (3.1.1) and the Svetasvatara Upanishad (4.6), where it became the canonical image of the jivatman (individual soul, the bird that eats) and the paramatman (supreme self, the bird that watches). That later reading has become so dominant that it is difficult to recover what the verse might have meant in its original Rigvedic context.

Scholarly opinion divides along several lines. W. Norman Brown, in his important 1968 study, read the two birds as Agni and the Sun, two forms of the same cosmic fire principle, with the tree representing the sacrificial post or the cosmic axis [6]. Willard Johnson, in a 1976 article that helped define the field, argued that the image belongs to the “Vedic speculative symposium” and that the two birds represent the active participant in the sacrifice (who “eats” the offering) and the silent knower who witnesses [7]. Per-Johan Norelius, in a more recent study, follows Hillebrandt and Kuiper in identifying the two birds as the sun and the moon perched on the world-tree, with the “figs” (pippala) as soma or amrta [8].

Aside. The word pippala in verse 20 is significant. It refers to the fruit of the asvatttha (ficus religiosa), the same tree under which the Buddha would later attain enlightenment. That a fig-tree stands at the centre of this cosmological riddle suggests the deep cultural persistence of tree-symbolism in South Asian thought.

The honest answer is that the riddle is deliberately polyvalent. It operates simultaneously on several levels (cosmic, ritual, philosophical), and the point is not to choose one meaning but to perceive multiple meanings at once. This is precisely what the brahmodya tradition demanded: the winning answer was the one that revealed the deepest bandhu, the hidden connection between the microcosm of the ritual and the macrocosm of the universe [9].

“Who Has Seen the Primordial One?”: The Unanswerable Questions

Verse 4 poses a question that the hymn never answers:

“Who has seen the primeval being at the time of his being born? What is that endowed with substance which the unsubstantial sustains? From earth are the breath and blood, but where is the soul? Who may repair to the sage to ask this?”

(RV 1.164.4, after Griffith, adapted)

The question “how does the boneless support the bony?” (asthanvantam yad anastha bibharti) is a cosmogonic puzzle: how does the formless principle give rise to, and sustain, the world of form? The verse does not answer. It sends the questioner to a sage, who presumably sends him to another. This is not evasion; it is method. The hymn teaches by refusing closure, by insisting that the question is more valuable than any formula that claims to resolve it.

Verse 6 amplifies the vertigo: “I ask, unknowing, those who know, the sages: what is that ONE who in the Unborn’s image hath established and fixed firm these worlds’ six regions?” The “Unborn” (aja) is a concept that will become central to later Indian philosophy; here it appears as a cosmogonic given, something prior to the differentiated world. The six regions are the four cardinal directions plus zenith and nadir.

Joel Brereton, in his influential 1999 study of RV 10.129 (the Nasadiya Sukta), argued that the function of Vedic enigma is “edifying puzzlement”: the hymn does not aim to deliver doctrine but to produce a state of reflective uncertainty in the listener, an uncertainty that is itself spiritually productive [10]. This insight applies with equal force to RV 1.164. The hymn’s unanswered questions are not failures of theology; they are the theology.

graph TD
    A["RV 1.164<br/>Riddle Hymn"] --> B["Cosmogonic Questions<br/>(vv. 4-6)"]
    A --> C["Calendar Riddles<br/>(vv. 2, 11-12)"]
    A --> D["Two Birds Image<br/>(vv. 20-22)"]
    A --> E["Speech Theology<br/>(vv. 39, 41, 45)"]
    A --> F["Monistic Declaration<br/>(v. 46)"]
    B --> G["'Who saw the primordial?'"]
    B --> H["'Boneless supports the bony'"]
    C --> I["12 spokes = months"]
    C --> J["720 sons = days+nights"]
    D --> K["One eats, one watches"]
    E --> L["Four quarters of speech"]
    E --> M["Thousand-syllabled in heaven"]
    F --> N["Ekam sad: 'Truth is one'"]

The Cow, the Buffalo, and the Thousand Syllables: Speech as Cosmic Principle

The middle sections of the hymn (roughly verses 26 to 42) shift from astronomical riddles to questions about speech, knowledge, and the relationship between language and reality. This is where the hymn becomes most difficult and, for historians of Indian thought, most important.

Verse 39 contains a line that would reverberate through all subsequent Vedic theology:

“The Rcs (verses) rest in the imperishable syllable (aksara) in the supreme heaven (parame vyoman), where all the gods have taken their seat. What use is the Veda to one who does not know that?”

(RV 1.164.39, after Griffith, adapted)

The word aksara means both “imperishable” and “syllable.” The verse is arguing that the Vedic hymns themselves are grounded in a transcendent, indestructible reality; unless the reciter knows that ground, the recitation is empty. This is a remarkable claim for a text that depends on precise oral transmission: the poet is saying that phonetic accuracy, though necessary, is not sufficient. You must know what the sounds point to.

Verse 41 introduces the “buffalo” (gauri, a term that can also mean “cow” or “speech”) who lows, producing waters, and who is “one-footed, two-footed, four-footed, eight-footed, nine-footed, the thousand-syllabled in the sublimest heaven.” Sayana, following Yaska’s Nirukta, identifies this figure as Vac (Speech) in her aspect as Sarasvati, the goddess of the mid-region, whose sound is the sound of thunder producing rain [11]. The escalating “feet” represent the metres of Vedic poetry: gayatri has three feet of eight syllables, tristubh four feet of eleven, and so on, accumulating toward the “thousand-syllabled” that is the totality of sacred speech in its cosmic, unmanifested form.

Verse 45 makes the theology of speech explicit:

catvari vak parimita padani tani vidur brahmana ye manisiinah guha triini nihita nengayanti turiiyam vaco manushya vadanti

“Speech has been measured out in four quarters. The wise Brahmanas know them. Three, hidden in secret, cause no motion. Humans speak the fourth quarter of speech.”

Rigveda 1.164, verse 45. After Jamison & Brereton (Oxford 2014), with diacritics standardised.

Three-quarters of reality is linguistically inaccessible. Humans operate with the surface layer of language; beneath it lie three hidden registers that only the initiated can perceive. This verse became the foundation for the later grammatical-philosophical tradition of sabdabrahman (Brahman as sound), developed by Bhartrhari in the fifth century CE, and for the Tantric classification of speech into four levels: vaikhari (articulate speech), madhyama (mental speech), pasyanti (visionary speech), and para (transcendent speech) [12]. The germ of all that speculation is here, in this single verse of RV 1.164.

“They Call It Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni”: Verse 46 and the Birth of Monism

The most famous line of the entire hymn, and one of the most quoted verses in all of Hindu philosophy, is verse 46:

indram mitram varunam agnim ahur atho divyah sa suparno garutman ekam sad vipra bahudha vadanty agnim yamam matarisvanam ahuh

“They call it Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni, and it is the heavenly, nobly-winged Garutman. The real is one; the wise call it by many names: they call it Agni, Yama, Matarisvan.”

Rigveda 1.164, verse 46. After Jamison & Brereton (Oxford 2014), with diacritics standardised.

The phrase ekam sad vipra bahudha vadanti (“the real is one; the wise call it by many names”) has been read as an early statement of monism, of henotheism, and of religious pluralism. Max Muller used it to coin the term “henotheism” (worship of one god at a time without denying the existence of others). The verse was cited in the proceedings of the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago and has appeared in Indian political speeches and constitutional arguments ever since.

Three observations about what this verse does and does not say. First, it is not a philosophical treatise; it is a line in a riddle hymn. The context is the brahmodya, where the priest demonstrates mastery by collapsing apparent distinctions into a single hidden unity. The statement is performative: it wins the contest by showing the deepest bandhu. Second, the verse says sat (“the real,” “what exists”), not Brahman or Atman; it is ontological, not yet theological in the Upanishadic sense. Third, the verse does not deny the gods; it reframes them as names, perspectives, or aspects of a single reality. The gods are real; their separateness is what is being questioned [13].

The Brahmodya Tradition: Context and Stakes

To read RV 1.164 as philosophy alone is to miss half the poem. The hymn belongs to the brahmodya (Sanskrit: ब्रह्मोद्य, literally “utterance of brahman”), a formalised riddling contest staged between priests during the Vedic sacrifice. George Thompson, in a foundational 1997 study, demonstrated that the brahmodya involved a formulaic interrogation sequence: one priest posed a deliberately obscure question, and a rival responded with an equally coded answer. The contest tested mastery of the “dominant cultural and poetic code” and established personal authority within the ritual hierarchy [14].

The stakes were not merely intellectual. The Jaiminiya Brahmana and the Upanishads preserve episodes where a losing contestant who refuses to concede forfeits his head. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad’s famous debate between Yajnavalkya and his rivals at the court of King Janaka follows this pattern exactly: Yajnavalkya answers every riddle, and Sakalya, who presses one question too far, dies when his head falls off [15]. The brahmodya is philosophy under mortal pressure.

Willard Johnson, in a series of studies beginning in 1976, made a useful distinction between a “riddle” proper (a question with a definite answer) and an “enigma” (a statement designed to express an intrinsically mysterious reality). Many verses in RV 1.164 are enigmas rather than riddles: their point is not to be solved but to induce a perception of hidden connections [7]. This is what separates the hymn from a crossword puzzle. The priest who “answers” the enigma does not close it down; he opens another layer.

Jan Houben, in a 2000 study published in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, argued that many of the obscure verses in RV 1.164 become clearer when placed in the context of the Pravargya ritual, a specific rite involving the heating of a milk-pot that is explicitly referenced in the Rigveda. Houben showed that the imagery of the cow, the heated vessel, the rising milk, and the “buffalo who lows” all correlate with specific ritual actions performed during the Pravargya [16]. This does not make the philosophical readings wrong; it means the hymn operates on both the ritual and the speculative planes simultaneously.

From Riddle Hymn to Upanishadic Philosophy

The relationship between RV 1.164 and the later Upanishads is not one of simple ancestry. The verses did not “develop into” Upanishadic thought the way a seed develops into a tree. Rather, the Upanishadic thinkers reached back into the Rigvedic corpus, selected certain verses that resonated with their concerns, and recontextualised them.

The two-birds verse (1.164.20) appears in the Mundaka Upanishad (3.1.1) and the Svetasvatara Upanishad (4.6) with the same wording but a transformed meaning. In its Rigvedic setting, the image is one element in a 52-verse brahmodya, a riddle among riddles. In the Upanishadic setting, it becomes the central teaching: the individual soul, entangled in action and suffering, needs only to turn its attention to the witnessing soul beside it to achieve liberation. The Upanishads did not misread the Rigveda; they read it selectively, foregrounding one meaning from the hymn’s deliberate polysemy.

The “four quarters of speech” (1.164.45) similarly became foundational for later linguistic philosophy. The verse’s claim that three-quarters of speech are hidden informed the grammatical tradition of Panini and the metaphysical linguistics of Bhartrhari, whose Vakyapadiya (fifth century CE) developed the doctrine that Brahman manifests as language at four descending levels of articulation [12].

The cosmogonic questions of verses 4 to 6 find their most direct echo in RV 10.129, the Nasadiya Sukta, which pushes the same interrogative mode to its logical limit: “Who really knows? Who can here declare it? Whence was it born, whence this creation?” Both hymns share the conviction that honest questioning is preferable to premature doctrine. But RV 1.164 is the earlier text, and it establishes the template that the Nasadiya Sukta later radicalises.

Methods note. Dating individual Rigvedic hymns relative to one another is notoriously difficult. The standard view places the “family books” (Mandalas 2 to 7) as the oldest core, with Mandalas 1, 8, 9, and 10 as later accretions. RV 1.164 belongs to the “supplement” portion of Mandala 1, which may be roughly contemporary with some of the speculative hymns of Mandala 10. The chronology is uncertain enough that one should not build arguments on the assumption that 1.164 “came first” in any simple sense [17].

Earth, Kinship, and the Altar: Verses 33 to 35

The hymn is not all cosmic abstraction. Verse 33 pivots sharply toward the concrete and the personal:

“Dyaus is my father, my begetter; kinship is here. This great earth is my kin and mother. Between the wide-spread world-halves is the birthplace; the father laid the daughter’s germ within it.”

(RV 1.164.33, after Griffith)

The poet locates himself between heaven and earth, claiming both as parents. The image is cosmological (heaven-father, earth-mother is among the oldest Indo-European theological motifs; Dyaus Pitr is cognate with Greek Zeus Pater and Latin Iuppiter), but it is also an assertion of the poet’s own place in the order of things. He is not a detached observer of riddles; he is embedded in the reality he describes.

Verse 35 answers several of the hymn’s own questions with a startling directness:

“This altar is the earth’s extremest limit; this sacrifice of ours is the world’s centre. The stallion’s seed is Soma; this Brahman is the supreme heaven where speech abides.”

(RV 1.164.35, after Griffith, adapted)

The ritual space and the cosmic space are identified. The vedi (altar) is the edge of the known world. The sacrifice is the axis mundi. Soma is the generative force. And brahman (here meaning the sacred utterance, not yet the Absolute of the Upanishads) is the highest heaven, the dwelling-place of speech. This verse is the brahmodya in miniature: it collapses the distance between here and there, between the ritual fire-pit and the structure of the cosmos.

Hearing the Hymn Whole

The scholarly literature on RV 1.164 is vast. Brown (1968) read it as a sacerdotal ode centred on Agni, the Sun, Sacrifice, and Vac (speech) [6]. Houben (2000) placed it in the context of the Pravargya ritual [16]. Johnson (1976) saw it as evidence of a “Vedic speculative symposium” [7]. Thompson (1997) used it to map the brahmodya as a discourse form [14]. Brereton (1999), writing about the closely related Nasadiya Sukta, provided the theoretical framework of “edifying puzzlement” that applies equally well here [10]. Jamison and Brereton (2014), in the most authoritative modern translation, handle the hymn with careful agnosticism, offering multiple possible readings and flagging uncertainty without pretending to resolve it [1].

No single reading captures the hymn. This is not a deficiency in the scholarship; it is a feature of the text. RV 1.164 is a brahmodya writ large: it poses its riddles to every generation of readers and waits to see what they make of them. The rishis of the Rigveda were not proto-philosophers groping toward clarity. They were poets who understood that the most important truths resist formulation, that the question asked in the right spirit is more valuable than the answer delivered with false confidence.

Read the hymn yourself. Read it in Griffith’s Victorian English (available free online), in Jamison and Brereton’s precise modern rendering, or in Geldner’s careful German. Read it next to RV 10.129, and notice how 1.164 embeds its questioning in concrete images (wheels, birds, cows, the altar) while 10.129 strips the question down to pure abstraction. Notice how the hymn oscillates between the technical language of the astronomical calendar and the language of existential bewilderment. Notice verse 37, quietly tucked among the cosmic riddles: “I do not know if I am the same as this (universe). Bewildered, fettered in my mind, I wander.”

That line, more than any answer the hymn offers, is its truest achievement.