The Boy, the Tree, and the Chariot With No Wheels

Somebody’s Father Has Gone to Sit Under a Tree

Most of the Rig Veda is public. Poets praise gods in front of patrons, ask for cattle, horses, rain, sons and a place at the front of the line, and sign off with a formula their family has used for generations. The register is confident, competitive and loud. Then, in the long tail of the tenth book, where the short hymns pile up and the metre settles into plain eight-syllable lines, you come across this:

yasmin vṛkṣe supalāśe devaiḥ sampibate yamaḥ

“In the tree with the good leaves, where Yama drinks together with the gods, there our father, the lord of the house, goes seeking after the ancient ones.”

RV 10.135, verse 1. My rendering from the Saṃhitā text; compare Griffith (1896), “In the Tree clothed with goodly leaves where Yama drinketh with the Gods.” [1]

Six verses follow. In the second, somebody says that he watched the father go, that he resented watching, and that he wanted him back. In the third, a boy is addressed directly and told that he is standing on a new chariot he made with his mind, a chariot with no wheels and a single shaft, which points in every direction and which he cannot see. In the fourth, the chariot rolls away from the poets and a chant rolls after it and the whole thing ends up, somehow, on a ship. In the fifth and sixth, someone asks who fathered the boy, who set the chariot rolling, and how the anudeyī came about, a word that occurs four times in the entire Rig Veda and that nobody has been able to pin down. In the seventh, we are back with Yama, in a hall, and a reed pipe is being blown.

That is the whole hymn. The collection has other hymns about dying, and the funeral sequence in the tenth book is longer and better known, but those are liturgy: they address the corpse, the fire, the mourners, the ground. This one sounds like something overheard. A household is short one person, a child is somewhere in the middle of it, and the verses never step back to explain the situation to anybody outside the room. What makes RV 10.135 worth an afternoon is not that it solves anything but that the tradition carried it, syllable by syllable, for three thousand years, long after anybody could say with confidence what it meant.

Seven Verses, in Order

Reading the hymn straight through is the fastest way to feel the problem. Here is what each verse puts on the table and what it withholds.

Two features of that table matter more than the individual puzzles. The first is that Yama shows up only at the two ends, in verses 1 and 7, which means the hymn is framed by death and filled with something else. The second is that verses 3 to 6 are not describing; they are asking. The Rig Veda has a whole genre of competitive riddling, and the questions here have the shape of riddle questions, but there is no audience in sight, no prize, and no triumphant answer in the last verse. The questions simply stop.

Methods note. The word counts in this article come from searching the Saṃhitā text in transliteration, which means sandhi can hide a form (the acakram of verse 3 is joined to the preceding ratham in the printed text) and a generous search can produce false positives. Treat the numbers as close rather than exact. The occurrences of anudeyī are confirmed independently: Monier-Williams lists the feminine at RV 10.85.6 and 10.135.5 to 6, and the neuter anudeya at RV 6.20.11, which is precisely what a search of the text returns. [2]

The Tree Where the Dead Drink

Start with the setting, because it is the one part of the hymn that connects to something larger. The Rig Veda’s world of the dead is not systematic. There is no map, no judgment scene, no inventory of punishments. What there is, mostly in the funeral hymns of the tenth book, is a pasture, a path, and a first man who found both:

“Yama first found for us a place to dwell in: this pasture never can be taken from us. Men born on earth tread their own paths that lead them whither our ancient Fathers have departed.”

(RV 10.14.2, translation Griffith 1896) [1]

That hymn, the central text on Yama as the first mortal, sends the dead along a road already worn by the Fathers, past two four-eyed dogs, to a place where Yama sits with Varuṇa and the ancestors enjoy themselves. Our hymn compresses all of that into one image: a tree, with good leaves, where Yama is drinking with gods. It is not a throne room. It is shade and company and something to drink, which is roughly what a tired traveller in the Punjab would have wanted most.

The adjective is worth a moment. Supalāśa, “having good leaves”, occurs in only one other verse, where Soma juices flow to Indra “as birds rest on the fair-leaved tree” (RV 10.43.4). [1] Both times the good-leaved tree is a place where something settles and is fed. H. W. Bodewitz, who spent a career sorting out what the Vedic texts actually claim about the hereafter rather than what later tradition read back into them, insisted that the yonder world of the earliest layer resists tidy description: it is sometimes up, sometimes down, sometimes a pasture, and the Fathers who live there are not quite ghosts and not quite gods. [3] The tree in our hymn is a good example of the problem. It is concrete enough to picture and too small to build a theology on.

Aside. The temptation to read this tree as a cosmic world-tree, the Indian cousin of Yggdrasil, is strong and should be resisted. The Rig Veda does have a cosmic tree image in the great riddle hymn, where two birds sit in one tree and one eats the fig while the other watches (RV 1.164.20), and the riddle hymn is explicitly in the business of cosmology. This hymn is not. Here the tree is where somebody’s father went.

Verse 2 is the emotional centre and the least obscure line in the hymn. The speaker says he looked at the departing father asūyan, grudgingly, resentfully, and that the father was going pāpayā, “by the bad way”, and that afterwards he longed for him again. Griffith’s Victorian English makes it stiff. The Sanskrit is not stiff. It is the sound of somebody who watched a death happen and did not want to.

Who Is the Boy?

Verse 3 switches to the vocative: kumāra, “boy”. From there to the end of verse 6, the hymn is about him.

Children are strangely scarce in the Rig Veda. They are constantly asked for: hymn after hymn requests sons, heroes, offspring, progeny stretching into the future. But a child who actually does something appears in roughly sixteen verses out of more than ten thousand, and in most of those the child is a simile or a god in disguise.

Look at the fourth row. Arbhako na kumārako ‘dhi tiṣṭhan navaṃ ratham: “like a little boy, a child, standing up on a new chariot”. That is a real glimpse of Bronze Age family life, a toddler scrambling onto a cart because a cart is the most exciting object in the compound, and the poet reaches for it to describe a god. Now put it beside verse 3 of our hymn, which uses the same two words, navaṃ ratham, “a new chariot”, and the same verb, adhi tiṣṭhasi, “you stand upon it”. The ordinary image has been taken and bent:

yaṃ kumāra navaṃ ratham acakraṃ manasākṛṇoḥ

ekeṣaṃ viśvataḥ prāñcam apaśyann adhi tiṣṭhasi

“The new chariot without wheels that you, boy, made with your mind, the one-shafted one that faces in every direction: you are standing on it without seeing it.”

RV 10.135, verse 3. My rendering; compare Griffith (1896), “Thou mountest, though thou dost not see, O Child, the new and wheel-less car.” [1]

The boy is on the cart. The cart has no wheels. He is riding it and cannot see it.

As for who he was, the tradition did what traditions do. The Anukramaṇī, the old index that assigns an author, a deity and a metre to every hymn, names the seer of 10.135 as Kumāra Yāmāyana, which means “the Boy, descendant of Yama”. [4] That is not a historical person. That is the hymn’s own first word turned into a name and given a patronymic from the hymn’s own deity, which is exactly the procedure the index follows whenever it has nothing to go on, as the catalogue of impossible authors shows at length. The index is telling us that by the time anybody compiled it, the hymn had already stopped being legible. Nobody remembered whose boy this was.

A Vehicle Made Out of Thought

Here is where the hymn stops being merely sad and starts being strange.

A chariot built manasā, “by the mind”, is not unique to this hymn. The Ṛbhus, the three artisan brothers who worked their way up to divinity by sheer craftsmanship, do exactly this:

“Ye Sapient Ones who made the lightly-rolling car out of your mind, by thought, the car that never errs.”

(RV 4.36.2, translation Griffith 1896) [1]

And a few hymns earlier they make “a light car moving every way” for the Aśvins, and horses for Indra “harnessed by a word” (RV 1.20.2-3). [1] The Vedic imagination is entirely comfortable with vehicles that are manufactured mentally, because for these poets a hymn is itself a manufactured object: the standard metaphor has the poet as a carpenter joining a chariot, fitting the parts, testing the run. A chariot made by thought is a poem.

Set out like that, the boy’s chariot belongs to a recognised Vedic class of objects: the impossible thing described in technical detail, which in this literature is usually a sign that the poet is talking about the ritual or the poem rather than about carpentry. The problem is deciding which.

Wendy Doniger, who put the hymn in her Penguin anthology under the title “The Boy and the Chariot”, reads it as a son whose father has died, who follows him in imagination, and who is answered by the father: the chariot is the thing in which the boy is already travelling after him, and it is a ritual object, not a wooden one. [5] A related line of reading, which goes back to Sāyaṇa’s instinct to make every obscure Rigvedic image a ritual image, identifies the chariot with the funeral fire or the offering itself, the vehicle that actually carries a dead man to Yama. On that reading the hymn is spoken at or near a cremation, and the boy’s mind-made cart is the pyre seen from inside the family’s grief.

There is a third possibility that the text supports better than it is usually given credit for. Verse 4 says the boy rolled the chariot viprebhyas pari, away from the inspired poets, and that a sāman, a chant, rolled along behind it. A thing that leaves the poets and is chased by a melody is, on the face of it, a hymn. If the chariot is the hymn, then verse 3 says something genuinely eerie: the boy made a poem with his mind, it has no wheels because it has no mechanism, it faces every direction because words do, and he is riding it without being able to see it, which is what anyone does who speaks in grief and does not know what they are saying.

Aside. I am not claiming that reading as the right one. The honest position on this hymn is that the Sanskrit permits several reconstructions and that the surviving commentarial tradition, which is where we would normally look for help, is visibly guessing. What the three readings share is more interesting than what divides them: all of them take the chariot to be something built rather than something found, and all of them put a child in charge of it.

graph TD
    A["RV 10.135, seven verses"] --> B["v1-2: father goes to Yama's tree"]
    A --> C["v3-4: the boy's mind-made chariot"]
    A --> D["v5-6: who made it? the anudeyi"]
    A --> E["v7: Yama's hall, the reed is blown"]
    B --> F["Grief: 'I wanted him back'"]
    C --> G["Reading 1: funeral fire"]
    C --> H["Reading 2: the rite itself"]
    C --> I["Reading 3: the hymn itself"]
    D --> J["Word attested four times in all"]

The Word That Will Not Settle

Verses 5 and 6 turn on anudeyī. The Rig Veda uses the stem four times in total: the neuter anudeya once, at RV 6.20.11, and the feminine anudeyī three times, twice here and once in the wedding hymn. Four occurrences is not enough context to fix a meaning, and the lexicographers have known it for a hundred and fifty years. Monier-Williams records both of the competing guesses in a single entry: “a bride’s maid”, following Grassmann and Sāyaṇa, and, from the Petersburg dictionary of Böhtlingk and Roth, simply “gift”. [2][6][7]

What makes this more than a footnote is the other verse it lives in. The wedding hymn of Sūryā, the long bridal text that still supplies the liturgy at Hindu weddings, says this:

raibhy āsīd anudeyī nārāśaṃsī nyocanī

sūryāyā bhadram id vāso gāthayā eti pariṣkṛtam

“The Raibhī verse was the anudeyī, the Nārāśaṃsī the attendant; Sūryā’s lovely garment went adorned with song.”

RV 10.85.6. My rendering; Griffith has “Raibhi was her dear bridal friend.” [1]

The same rare word appears in the wedding hymn and in the hymn about a dead father, and one translator rendered it “bridal friend” in the first place and “funeral gift” in the second, which is a fair summary of the state of knowledge.

Notice also that both hymns end their relevant verse with the same unusual participle: Sūryā’s garment is pariṣkṛta, adorned, by song, and in the last verse of our hymn Yama is gīrbhiḥ pariṣkṛtaḥ, adorned with songs. A bride dressed by singing, a lord of the dead dressed by singing. The two rites are built from comparable parts, a point that comes through in Stephanie Jamison’s study of Vedic ritual, where the wedding is a transfer conducted with an apparatus of escort, gift and display; the funeral moves a person out of a household too, and reaches for some of the same words to do it. [8] The overlap here is small and could be coincidence; the Rig Veda is a large text and rare words do cluster by accident. But if it is not coincidence, then whoever composed these seven verses reached for the language of a wedding to talk about a death, and that is a very human thing to do.

Verse 6 then does something that no translation can hide: it answers the question with an engineering description. “As the anudeyī came to be, from that the tip was born; in front the base was stretched out, behind the way out was made.” Front, base, tip, exit. Somebody is describing the construction of an object, and we do not know which object. It could be the chariot. It could be the pyre. It could be the womb, which is the one reading that would make the question “who begot the boy?” in verse 5 a real question rather than a rhetorical one, and which the Rig Veda’s vocabulary of gestation would support. The text does not say.

What the Commentators Did With It

By the time we have commentary, the hymn is already a problem to be managed.

Sāyaṇa, writing in the fourteenth century with the whole weight of the ritual schools behind him, connects it to the story of Naciketas: the boy whose father in a fit of temper gives him to Death, who goes to Yama’s house, waits three nights at the door, and comes back with three boons and a teaching. [9] It is a reasonable move. The ingredients match up: a boy, a father, Yama, a road to the house of the dead. Sāyaṇa also preserves an alternative in which the reciter is simply a boy called Kumāra and the Yama of the hymn is the sun, a reading he attributes to Yāska’s Nirukta, the oldest surviving work of Sanskrit etymological analysis. [9][10]

The Naciketas connection is chronologically backwards, or at least unprovable. The story is told in the Brāhmaṇa literature and reaches its famous form in the Kaṭha Upaniṣad, where Yama, pressed by a child who will not be fobbed off with cattle and long life, finally explains what happens at death and then delivers the image every later Indian text would reuse: the self is the rider in a chariot, the body the chariot, the intellect the charioteer, the senses the horses. [11] A boy at Yama’s door, and a chariot standing for something that cannot be seen. Our hymn has both, several centuries earlier, with no doctrine attached to either.

graph TD
    A["RV 10.135"] --> B["Yaska: Yama as the sun"]
    A --> C["Sayana: the Naciketas story"]
    A --> D["Doniger 1981: son follows dead father"]
    A --> E["Chariot as funeral fire"]
    C --> F["Katha Upanisad: boy at Yama's door"]
    F --> G["Chariot of the self"]
    D --> H["Grief, not doctrine"]

Three cautions are worth stating plainly. First, a commentator writing two and a half thousand years after a hymn was composed is a witness to how the hymn was read in his own time, not to what it meant. Second, the pull toward the Upaniṣads is strong and distorting; it is easy to turn every obscure Rigvedic image into a seed of later philosophy, and the chariot that turns up in the Kaṭha is a teaching device in a text with a doctrine to teach, while this one is not. Third, the fact that a hymn resists translation is not evidence that it is profound. The Rig Veda contains a good many words nobody can translate, and the usual reason is loss of reference: the words were ordinary and the world they pointed at is gone.

The Reed in Yama’s Hall

The last verse goes back to where the hymn started and adds one detail that has no parallel anywhere in the collection:

idaṃ yamasya sādanaṃ devamānaṃ yad ucyate

iyam asya dhamyate nāḷīr ayaṃ gīrbhiḥ pariṣkṛtaḥ

“This is Yama’s seat, which they call the dwelling of the gods. This reed of his is blown; he is adorned with songs.”

RV 10.135, verse 7. My rendering; compare Griffith (1896), “Here minstrels blow the flute for him.” [1]

Nāḍī, the reed or pipe, appears here and, so far as a search of the text can show, nowhere else in the Rig Veda. The collection is not short of musical instruments: there is the vāṇa, there is the war drum, there is the rattle in the gambler’s hymn. But the single Rigvedic mention of a wind instrument being blown happens in the house of the dead.

It is a very specific kind of ending. A man has gone somewhere; the place he has gone to has music in it; there is drinking under a tree. Whatever the boy and the chariot were, the hymn chooses to close on the thought that the destination is furnished and sociable. The Rig Veda does not threaten its dead. That machinery, the judgment, the hells, the elaborate bureaucracy that later made Yama into an accountant with ledgers, is not here yet.

What a Hymn Looks Like When the World Behind It Is Gone

There is an argument, made best by scholars working on Vedic performance, that the Rig Veda is full of things we cannot see because the hymns were designed to work in a setting we cannot reconstruct: the invisible parts were carried by the voice, the moment and the shared knowledge of everybody present. [12] On that view a hymn like this one is not obscure by design. It is obscure the way one side of a phone call is obscure.

That is the quietly radical thing about RV 10.135. Vedic transmission is famous for its accuracy: generations of reciters preserved the text phoneme by phoneme, accent by accent, with verification systems that caught drift before it could spread. What this hymn shows is that the accuracy was unconditional. The reciters were not preserving what they understood. They preserved a text that had already slipped out of reach, including a word they could not define, in a hymn whose plot they could not reconstruct, attributed to an author they had to invent. And so we still have it: seven verses in which a household is short one person, a child is doing something with a vehicle that does not exist, and somebody watched a man walk away by the bad road and wanted him back.

The Rig Veda is usually sold to new readers on its grandeur, and the grandeur is real; the creation hymn is one of the hardest things any ancient literature produced. But grandeur is not what makes a text survive contact with a reader. This does. Read 10.135 straight through, then read RV 10.85 for the wedding it borrows a word from, then RV 10.18, where the mourners draw a line in the dirt between themselves and the dead and tell each other to live a hundred autumns. Three hymns, one vocabulary, a wedding and a funeral and a child in the middle. The parts we cannot translate are not the parts that land.