The Cushion of the Gods: What the Rig Veda Does With a Handful of Cut Grass

A man whose grass is cut

The Rig Vedic poets had a standard way of saying that somebody was devout, and it had nothing to do with belief, purity, or inner states. They called him vṛktabarhiṣ, “one whose grass is twisted,” or more loosely, one who has cut and spread the grass. The compound turns up in twenty-six verses, always as a compliment, often as a credential. Mitra “gives food that fulfils the ordinance to the man whose grass is cut” (RV 3.59.9). Agni grants shelter “to the man who spreads the grass” (RV 5.2.12). Indra is asked to punish the lawless and hand them over “to the one whose grass is strewn” (RV 1.51.8). In the moral bookkeeping of these hymns, your standing with the gods is indexed to whether you went out this morning with a knife and came back with an armful of stalks.

The object behind the epithet is the barhís (Sanskrit: बर्हिस्), a layer of cut grass spread on the ground at the place of offering. It is the least impressive thing in the Vedic repertoire. It is also, by a wide margin, the thing the Rig Veda mentions most.

stṛṇīta barhir ānuṣag ghṛtapṛṣṭhaṃ manīṣiṇaḥ | yatrāmṛtasya cakṣaṇam

“Strew the grass in unbroken order, ghee-backed, you men of inspired thought: there, where the immortal is seen.”

Rigveda 1.13, verse 5. My rendering from the Sanskrit, compared with Griffith (1896); diacritics standardised. [1][3]

Follow the grass through the collection and three things happen in sequence. It stops being scenery and becomes the hinge of the whole ritual idea. It gets addressed in the vocative, as a god. And then, when you look at where the word came from, it turns out not to be a grass word at all.

The commonest thing in the room

Suppose you had to reconstruct the Vedic sacrifice from the Rig Veda alone, with no later manuals, and you decided to start by counting. What objects does the text actually keep in view?

Table 1. Ritual objects by the number of verses that name them, counted on the romanised Śākala text of all ten maṇḍalas.

The shape of that list is the surprise. The two items at the top, grass and butter, are both things you consume and replace: one cut fresh, one poured away. The objects that dominate later ritual theory sit at the bottom. The vedí, the shallow excavated altar whose geometry the later Śulba literature works out in detail, is named in about a dozen verses, and some of those forms could belong to the verb “to know” rather than to the altar. The yū́pa, the post to which the animal victim is tied, appears three times, and two of the three are similes: a praise-song standing firm “like a post of the house” (RV 1.51.14), a hymn raised “like a solid post” (RV 8.23.24). Only RV 1.162, the horse sacrifice hymn, has carpenters actually hewing one.

Methods note. These counts are my own, made by pattern search over a romanised Saṃhitā text, matching each stem with its case forms and then reading the hits. Vedic is transmitted in sandhi, with words fused across boundaries, so every figure here is a floor rather than a total, and a few are inflated by homonyms: I have excluded barhiṣṭha, “highest,” which looks like the grass word and comes from a different root, and flagged vedí because forms of √vid intrude. Proportions survive this noise even where single numbers do not. The share of hymns touching the grass works out to

$$\frac{142}{1028} \approx 0.14$$

or one hymn in seven, against the standard count of 1,028 hymns and 10,552 verses established by Aufrecht’s edition. [1]

A chair for a guest who may not come

Why does grass outrank everything else? Because the Rig Vedic rite is organised as hospitality, and hospitality starts with somewhere to sit. The formula repeats with almost tiresome regularity: sīda barhíṣi, “sit on the grass”; ā sādaya barhíṣi, “seat them on the grass.” Agni’s job description, in a text where he is the one who goes and fetches, is to “bring the celestial host and seat them here upon the grass” (RV 1.31.17). [2]

What follows is the guest list, and it is more varied than the standard account of Vedic religion would predict.

Table 2. The seating plan, with the verse that assigns each place.

Notice what the arrangement assumes. The grass goes down before anyone arrives, and nothing in the hymns guarantees arrival. The poets are specific about the risk: they ask the gods not to pass them by, they complain about rivals with better grass, they beg Dawn to “protect our grass from human reproach” (RV 7.75.8). Rudra, of all deities, is asked to grant two things in one breath, a share in the grass and a name among the living (RV 7.46.4). The grass is not only furniture; it is a position in the world that can be won or lost.

Once, in the seventh maṇḍala, the image softens into something closer to a nursery than a banquet hall.

ā putrāso na mātaraṃ vibhṛtrāḥ sānau devāso barhiṣaḥ sadantu

“Like babies carried to their mother, let the gods sit down on the top of the grass.”

Rigveda 7.43, verse 3. My rendering from the Sanskrit, compared with Griffith (1896). [1][3]

Gods who have to be carried, set down, and settled. A mat is the kind of object that makes that picture possible, and an altar built of brick is not. For the wider grammar of Vedic hospitality, with its rules for the stranger at the door, see the piece on the guest, the stranger and the obligation of the host.

Where the dead sit

The most economical use of the grass in the whole collection is a compound applied to the ancestors. In the funeral sequence of the tenth maṇḍala, the Fathers are not defined by where they live, what they look like, or what they know. They are defined by their seat.

barhiṣadaḥ pitara ūty arvāg imā vo havyā cakṛmā juṣadhvam

“Fathers who sit on the grass, come near with your help: we have made these offerings for you, take pleasure in them.”

Rigveda 10.15, verse 4. My rendering from the Sanskrit, compared with Griffith (1896). [1][3]

Barhiṣád, “grass-sitter,” becomes a standing term for one category of the dead. The same hymn asks them to come and sit, in their own places, and eat what has been laid out on the grass (RV 10.15.11). Later ritual keeps this distinction physical rather than conceptual: in the household manuals the grass for offerings to the gods points east, and for the Fathers it points south. [9] The dead and the living gods get different seating, laid out with the same substance in a different direction. On the Rig Veda’s treatment of death and the first mortal, see the funeral hymns and the kingdom of Yama.

When the furniture gets a vote

Here the grass does something no cup or ladle does. It starts being spoken to.

The Rig Veda contains a small set of hymns, ten by the usual count, built as a fixed litany of invocations known as the Āprī sequence. Each verse calls on one element of the rite in turn: the kindled fire, Narāśaṃsa, Agni as the one brought near, then the grass, then the doors, then Night and Dawn, the two divine hotṛs, the three goddesses, Tvaṣṭṛ, the lord of the forest, and the final cries of svāhā. The structure is analysed in detail in the companion piece on the Āprī hymns and the litany of the sacrifice. What matters here is that the fourth slot belongs to a pile of cut grass, and the poets fill it by talking to the grass directly.

deva barhir vardhamānaṃ suvīraṃ stīrṇaṃ rāye subharaṃ vedy asyām | ghṛtenāktaṃ vasavaḥ sīdatedaṃ viśve devā ādityā yajñiyāsaḥ

“O divine grass, growing, rich in good men, strewn for wealth, bearing well on this altar: anointed with ghee, sit down on it, Vasus, all gods, Ādityas worthy of the rite.”

Rigveda 2.3, verse 4. My rendering from the Sanskrit, compared with Griffith (1896). [1][3]

Nine of the ten Āprī hymns put the grass in that slot. The tenth, RV 5.5, keeps the slot and drops the noun, which tells you how obvious the referent was: verse 4 simply says ūrṇamradā vi prathasva, “spread yourself out, you who are soft as wool,” and the audience knew what was being asked to spread. Elsewhere the grass is not merely addressed but given work to do:

aheḷatā manasā deva barhir indrajyeṣṭhān uśato yakṣi devān

“With unresentful mind, O divine grass, bring here the willing gods whose chief is Indra.”

Rigveda 10.70, verse 4. My rendering from the Sanskrit, compared with Griffith (1896). [1][3]

Read that twice. The seat is asked to fetch the guests, and asked politely, with the warning that it should not be annoyed. The lexicographers noticed this long ago: Cappeller’s dictionary lists barhis as “sacrificial grass personified,” enumerated among the deities of the prayāja and anuyāja offerings. [15] In the Rig Veda’s own idiom the grass can also be protected by goddesses rather than protecting them: three of them, seated, are asked to “guard this grass, our flawless refuge” (RV 2.3.8).

This is worth separating from a familiar misreading. Nothing here says that Vedic people worshipped vegetation. The logic runs the other way. In these hymns, anything that does real work in the rite can be addressed as a power, including the doors, the ladle, the pressing stones, and the fee paid to the priest. The Rig Veda’s habit of elevating functions into addressees is examined in the piece on the abstract deities, Manyu, Śraddhā and Dakṣiṇā. The grass earns its vocative the same way: it is the part of the apparatus that makes attendance possible.

Eastward, in three layers

The hymns are not manuals, and they rarely explain procedure. But they leak it constantly, and if you collect the leaks you can reconstruct most of the operation.

graph LR
    A[Cut the stalks] --> B[Bind into a bundle]
    B --> C["Strew with tips east"]
    C --> D["Sprinkle with ghee"]
    D --> E["Seat the gods"]
    E --> F["Prastara set aside"]

Diagram 1. The sequence of operations the Rigveda implies and the later manuals spell out.

The grass is strewn prācīnam, “forward” or eastward (RV 1.188.4, RV 9.5.4). It is laid ānuṣák, in unbroken succession, not scattered (RV 1.13.5). It is ghṛtapṛṣṭha, “ghee-backed,” which is to say sprinkled with clarified butter before anyone sits on it (RV 7.2.4; on the substance itself, see the hymn to clarified butter). It is piled: the Aśvins are invited onto grass that is triṣadhastha, with three seats or three layers (RV 1.47.4), and a hymn to the same twins locates the singing in a hall where the grass is tribarhis, threefold (RV 1.181.8). The men who spread it do so on their knees (RV 7.2.4). And at least one poet puts himself in the picture, holding the knife:

vṛñje ha yan namasā barhir agnāv ayāmi sruc ghṛtavatī suvṛktiḥ | amyakṣi sadma sadane pṛthivyā aśrāyi yajñaḥ sūrye na cakṣuḥ

“When with homage I twist the grass for Agni, when the ghee-filled ladle and the well-turned hymn are raised, then the seat is fixed in the seat of the earth, and the rite is set sunward like an eye.”

Rigveda 6.11, verse 5. My rendering from the Sanskrit, compared with Griffith (1896). [1][3]

Now set those scattered hints beside the household manuals compiled centuries later, and the continuity is almost dull in its exactness.

Table 3. The grass procedure as the hymns hint at it and as the ritual literature codifies it.

The Brāhmaṇa passage is worth lingering on because of how it reasons. The band that ties the grass bundle is undone deliberately, and the text explains that the priest does it while thinking that the patron’s wife will give birth without difficulty; the band is then set down on the right hip of the altar, “for this represents his waist-band.” [10] The grass has become a garment, the altar a body, and the untying an act of sympathetic obstetrics. That is Brāhmaṇa thinking rather than Rig Vedic thinking, and the difference is instructive: the hymns treat the grass as furniture for guests, the later prose treats it as a system of equivalences. The earlier text is the one that sounds practical.

Aside. The temptation is to read the manuals back into the hymns and announce that the Rig Vedic rite “was” the classical śrauta rite in miniature. Resist it in both directions. The hymns know the eastward tips and the layered pile, which is more procedural continuity than the sceptical position allows; they show no sign of the elaborate equivalences, the measured altar, or the fixed roster of seventeen priests. What survives is the gesture. What changes is the theory built on top of it.

Which grass?

Here is a gap that nobody seems to mind. In 185 verses about cut grass, the Rig Veda never once says what plant it is cutting.

The two names the later tradition uses, darbha and kuśa, do not occur in the Saṃhitā at all in that sense. A search for kuśa returns only aṅkuśa, the elephant goad. Darbha is absent. Grass as fodder has its own word, tṛṇa, and it belongs to a different world: the cow told to “eat grass and drink clean water” (RV 1.164.40), the mouthful of grass in the sacrificial horse’s mouth (RV 1.162.8). One named grass, ulapa, appears once, being eaten by a fire (RV 10.142.3). Another, balbaja, appears once as loot in a gift list, which is the Rig Veda’s way of telling you that a grass could be a commodity:

śataṃ veṇūñ chataṃ śunaḥ śataṃ carmāṇi mlātāni | śataṃ me balbajastukā aruṣīṇāṃ catuḥśatam

“A hundred reeds, a hundred dogs, a hundred tanned hides, a hundred tufts of balbaja grass for me, and four hundred red mares.”

Rigveda 8.55, verse 3. My rendering from the Sanskrit. [1]

The identification problem that follows is a problem about names, not about botany. In classical and modern usage darbha and kuśa are generally applied to Desmostachya bipinnata, a tough perennial tussock grass of plains and riverbanks, the one still cut for ritual across South Asia. [16] Part of the modern Indian literature attaches darbha instead to Imperata cylindrica, and the two grasses overlap in habitat and in Sanskrit naming. Since the Rig Veda names neither, the honest statement is that the hymns describe a function and leave the species to local supply. Jan Gonda’s monograph on Vedic grasses, still the only book-length treatment, needs separate chapters for kuśa, for darbha, and then for the two together, which is a good index of how tangled the nomenclature is. [5] Six grass names, with uncertain identifications, also appear in the strange little charm against the unseen biters at RV 1.191, discussed in the piece on the unseen ones and the poison charm.

The word is not a grass word

Etymology usually confirms what you already suspected. Not this time.

Barhís looks as though it should come from the root bṛh, “to be big, to grow high,” which would make the grass “the tall stuff.” The dominant modern reconstruction says otherwise. Mayrhofer’s etymological dictionary of Old Indo-Aryan glosses barhíṣ- as the grass bedding spread for the offerings, and the comparative evidence points to a root meaning “to swell” rather than “to grow tall.” [12] The clinching cognate is Iranian: Avestan barəziš- means “cushion,” a word the Sasanian priests rendered into Middle Persian as bāliš, and bāliš is still the Persian word for a pillow. [13] On this account the Vedic term for the gods’ grass seat belongs to the same family as the words for padding, bolsters and bulging bags, and its literal sense is closer to “the soft thing you put under someone” than to anything botanical.

Which reframes the whole practice. The hymn that calls the grass ūrṇamradā, “soft as wool” (RV 5.5.4), is not reaching for a simile. It is restating the noun.

Table 4. The two word families that keep getting confused, and one Italic relative of the Vedic verb.

The confusion in that table has a long history, so it is worth stating plainly. The Zoroastrian barsom, the bundle of twigs a priest holds during the inner liturgies, is not the same word as barhís. Encyclopaedia Iranica derives barsom from Avestan barəsman-, built on the root barəz, “to grow high,” the cognate of Sanskrit bṛh, and notes that writers who identify the barəsman with kuśa grass are mistaken, for the decisive reason that the barəsman was never used as a seat for divine beings. [14] Two ritual traditions descended from one Indo-Iranian ancestor thus kept different halves of the same gesture. India kept the seat, spread on the ground. Iran kept the bundle, held in the hand.

graph TD
    R1["Root: swell, pad"] --> V["Vedic barhis: strewn seat"]
    R1 --> A["Avestan barezis: cushion"]
    A --> P["Middle Persian balis: pillow"]
    R2["Root: grow high"] --> B["Sanskrit brh: be great"]
    R2 --> C["Avestan baresman: twig bundle"]
    C --> D["Middle Persian barsom"]
    V -.->|"often confused"| C

Diagram 2. Two word families, two ritual objects, one persistent mix-up.

The verb has its own long reach. Vedic stṛ-, “to strew,” the word used of the grass in nearly every one of these verses, is the inherited root that gives Latin sternere, “to spread.” [12] From that verb Rome built the name of a rite: the lectisternium, literally the “couch-strewing,” at which images of the gods were laid on spread couches and a meal was set before them. [17] Two societies with no contact in the period that matters, working from the same verb, arrived at the same ceremonial problem and the same answer. If you want a god to eat with you, first you spread something for the god to recline on.

Aside. Reconstructions of this root differ in their details. The 2017 study that sets out the Iranian evidence gives the Proto-Indo-European form as a “swell” root and notes that Mayrhofer’s entry on barhíṣ- sits in volume two of the dictionary; other reference works reconstruct the same family with a slightly different vowel grade. [12][13] Nothing in the argument above depends on which vowel is right. What matters is the semantic company the word keeps, and that company is cushions.

The one part of the rite that leaves no trace

Now a consequence that runs the other way, from text to spade.

Almost everything else in Table 1 is, in principle, archaeologically visible. Pottery survives in enormous quantity. Metal survives. Bone survives, and animal bone with cut marks has carried much of the argument about Vedic and post-Vedic sacrifice. A post leaves a post hole; an excavated altar leaves a cut. Cut grass leaves nothing. It is gathered on the morning of the rite, spread on bare ground, sprinkled with butter, sat on by nobody visible, and then burned or discarded. The single most frequently named object in the Rig Veda is the one object that could never be recovered from a trench.

That is not an argument for anything mystical. It is an argument about sampling. When the material record of the early Indo-Aryan world looks thin against the textual one, part of the gap is that the texts describe an apparatus made largely of organic consumables: grass, wood, butter, milk, pressed plant juice. Wilhelm Rau’s reconstruction of early Vedic material culture had to work almost entirely from vocabulary for exactly this reason. [18] The same mismatch shows up in the Rig Veda’s architecture, where a dozen words for dwellings have left remarkably little that can be excavated, discussed in the house that archaeology cannot find.

There is also a dark little joke in the record. The most violent line in the Rig Veda’s account of the Battle of the Ten Kings is built from this gentle object. Of Indra destroying twenty-one enemy peoples the poet says dasmo na sadman ni śiśāti barhiḥ, “as a skilled man in the hall mows down the grass” (RV 7.18.11). The comparison only works because everyone in the audience had done the mowing.

Still being cut

Two survivals, one in each tradition, and then a last look at the hymn that thinks biggest about the grass.

In the household manuals, the priest reaches into the spread grass and takes two blades out of it, each a span long, and these become the pavitra, the purifier, used to strain water and clarified butter. [9] The seat supplies its own filter. From that practice descends the ring of grass worn on the right hand during offerings, familiar to anyone who has watched a domestic rite in South Asia, and the bundles of darbha still cut for the ceremonies for the dead. In the Zoroastrian tradition the barsom is also still in use, though the twigs of pomegranate or haoma have been replaced by thin metal wires, each about nine inches long, one of the few ritual objects to have been quietly re-engineered in a different material while keeping its name. [14]

And then there is RV 10.110, an Āprī hymn that takes the morning’s chore and makes it planetary.

prācīnaṃ barhiḥ pradiśā pṛthivyā vastor asyā vṛjyate agre ahnām | vy u prathate vitaraṃ varīyo devebhyo aditaye syonam

“Eastward, in the forward direction of the earth, this grass is cut at the break of these days. It spreads out wider and further still, a soft place for the gods and for Aditi.”

Rigveda 10.110, verse 4. My rendering from the Sanskrit, compared with Griffith (1896). [1][3]

Griffith heard a garment in that verse and translated the second line as a robe to clothe the earth at dawn. Whether or not the Sanskrit will carry the robe, the hymn is doing something unmistakable: it takes a patch of cut stalks a few feet across and lets it keep spreading until it is coextensive with the ground. In the cosmic sacrifice of RV 10.90, where the first being is dismembered to make the world, the gods still need somewhere to put him, and the verse says they anointed him barhíṣi, on the grass. The machinery of creation includes a mat.

What makes this material worth a modern reader’s attention is not that it is old. It is that the Rig Veda’s most ubiquitous object encodes a social reflex rather than a doctrine. Before anyone asks for cattle or sons or rain, before the fire is lit, somebody goes out, cuts grass, brings it back, twists it, lays it down facing east, and butters it, on the chance that a guest who cannot be compelled might sit. Three thousand years of theology have been built on that gesture, and the gesture itself has barely changed: a surface offered to someone who may not come. The horse sacrifice is gone. The soma plant is unidentifiable. The grass is still being cut this morning, somewhere, by someone whose vocabulary for it descends from a word that meant cushion.

Read RV 2.3 straight through, slowly, and watch the poet work down the list of things to be invited: fire, the one who praises men, the grass, the doors, the night and the dawn, the two celestial priests, the three goddesses, the shaper, the tree. Then notice that the grass is the only item on that list you could make yourself, this afternoon, with a knife and twenty minutes. For the other survivals of the Vedic ritual vocabulary into living practice, see the Rigveda’s trees and the world carved from wood and homage as a portable offering.