How to Make Friends With a God

Ten Cows for a God

Somewhere in the Punjab, three thousand years ago, a poet of the Gautama family reached the tenth verse of a hymn to Indra, and made a joke that has been embarrassing commentators ever since.

ka imaṃ daśabhir mamendraṃ krīṇāti dhenubhiḥ | yadā vṛtrāṇi jaṅghanad athainaṃ me punar dadat

“Who for ten milch-kine purchaseth from me this Indra who is mine? When he hath slain the Vṛtras let the buyer give him back to me.”

Rigveda 4.24, verse 10. Griffith (1896), diacritics standardised.

A god is being offered for sale, at a stated price, with a return clause. Readings have ranged from allegory (the ten cows are the ten senses) through sarcasm to ritual shop-talk (this is how you hire a priest), and none of them is obviously right. The verse itself is unbothered. It sits in RV 4.24, a hymn otherwise concerned with who has been generous to whom, and it is followed immediately by another hymn that opens with a question in exactly the same register:

ko adya naryo devakāma uśann indrasya sakhyaṃ jujoṣa

“Who today, manly and god-loving, has eagerly taken pleasure in the friendship of Indra?”

Rigveda 4.25, verse 1. Author’s rendering.

Friendship. Not worship, not obedience, not love, not fear. The word is sakhyá (Sanskrit: सख्य), the abstract noun from sákhi, “companion,” and it is the relationship Rigvedic poets ask a god for by name more often than any other. It runs through 226 of the collection’s 1,028 hymns. It is chosen rather than felt, paid for rather than assumed, inherited from one’s father, and, as several poets discover, entirely capable of being withdrawn.

What follows is an attempt to take that word seriously: where it comes from, what it obliged people to do, and what happened when it broke.

Methods note. The counts here are mine, made by regular expression over the romanised Saṃhitā text of the Rigveda as digitised at sacred-texts.com (the same text that backs this site), matching any word beginning sakh. That gives 358 verses out of 10,528, roughly $358/10528 \approx 3.4\%$, distributed over 226 hymns. Grassmann’s Wörterbuch zum Rig-Veda (1873) remains the authority for exact lemma counts, and a philologist working from Aufrecht’s critical text would land on slightly different totals.[1] Treat the numbers as close approximations that establish an order of magnitude, not as a concordance.

A Word That Means Going Along

Sákhi is old, and it declines like nothing else in the language. Its nominative is sákhā, its accusative sákhāyam, a strong-stem pattern that Whitney’s grammar files among the irregular i-stems and that comparative linguists read as the fossil of a very archaic formation.[2] Words behave like that when they are too common and too old to be tidied up.

The root underneath is sac, “to accompany, to follow, to attend on,” from Proto-Indo-European *sekʷ-. The same root, with the same suffix, produced Latin socius, an ally or partner, which is where English gets “society,” “social” and “associate.”[3] Vedic friendship, etymologically, is not warmth. It is the state of being someone who goes along with you.

The Old Persian entry is worth pausing over. The dynasty of Cyrus and Darius took its name from an ancestor called Haxāmaniš, a compound that Iranian scholarship standardly parses as “having the mind of a friend,” where haxā- is the exact Iranian twin of Vedic sákhi-.[4] The empire that fought Greece and the hymn that offers Indra for ten cows are using the same word. One made it a royal name; the other made it a theology.

Aside. A traditional Indian analysis, still repeated in devotional writing, parses sakhi as samāna plus khyā, “one of the same view.” It is a good description of what friendship feels like and a poor account of where the word came from. Vedic etymology of this kind is interpretation rather than history; on the Rigveda’s own appetite for such wordplay, see The Poet as Carpenter.

Who Owes Whom

The Rigveda has a dense vocabulary for relationships, and sakhi occupies a specific slot in it. Gotama, in Maṇḍala I, stacks three of those terms on Agni in a single breath.

tvaṃ jāmir janānām agne mitro asi priyaḥ | sakhā sakhibhya īḍyaḥ

“The kinsman, Agni, of mankind, their well beloved Friend art thou, A Friend whom friends may supplicate.”

Rigveda 1.75, verse 4. Griffith (1896).

Griffith’s English flattens the point. The Sanskrit says Agni is jāmi (kin by birth), mitra (a partner under contract) and sákhā (a chosen companion) all at once: three distinct ways of being bound to someone, piled onto one god because he sits in the household hearth and is therefore family, contract and ally simultaneously.

Paul Thieme’s Mitra and Aryaman (1957) argued that the Ādityas are personified social relations: Mitra the contract itself, Aryaman the custom of hospitality, and, elsewhere in the family, Bhaga the share that falls to you.[5] Joel Brereton’s The Ṛgvedic Ādityas (1981) put the case on firmer textual ground.[6] What the sakhi material adds is that the horizontal relationship, the one between people who were not born into each other’s households, was not left to the gods to personify. It was used directly, by poets, on gods.

Notice what this implies. A Rigvedic worshipper approaching Indra is not approaching a father, a king or an owner. He is approaching someone with whom an alliance might be made, in the way that a herding lineage makes an alliance with another herding lineage: by declaring it, by feeding it, and by expecting a return. For the kin terms on the other side of the table, see Jāmi, and for the stranger who arrives at your door with claims of his own, Atithi.

Friendship Is Something You Do

The verb the poets use with sakhyá is the giveaway. They do not fall into friendship; they choose it, with the root vṛ, the same verb used for electing a priest to an office and, in later usage, for a woman choosing a husband.

adabdhasya svadhāvato dūtasya rebhataḥ sadā | agneḥ sakhyaṃ vṛṇīmahe

“We ever claim the friendship of Agni, the singing messenger, Of God-like nature, void of guile.”

Rigveda 8.44, verse 20. Griffith (1896).

Vṛṇīmahe, “we choose for ourselves.” The formula recurs: the Aśvins are chosen “for dear friendship” at RV 4.41.7, Soma is chosen “for friendship, for partnership” at RV 9.66.18, and at RV 9.31.6 the poets simply announce, indo sakhitvam uśmasi, “Indu, we want your companionship.” Elsewhere the relationship is a place you can physically approach: devānāṃ sakhyam upa sedimā vayam, “we have sat down beside the friendship of the gods” (RV 1.89.2).

Friendship in this idiom is a performative. Saying it, in the right metre, over a pressed and offered drink, is part of what brings it into existence.

The distribution of the vocabulary tells a second story. It is heaviest not in the late, speculative parts of the collection but in the old family books, and densest of all in Maṇḍala IV, the book that offers Indra for ten cows.

And the gods so addressed are not evenly chosen. Of the 358 verses, 144 fall in hymns the tradition assigns to Indra, 39 to Agni, 31 to Soma Pavamāna, the rest scattered across the Viśvedevas, the Aśvins, Pūṣan, Varuṇa and the Ṛbhus. The pattern is legible: the gods you befriend are the ones who do things for you in this world, not the ones who judge you. Varuṇa, the watcher who keeps accounts, gets five.

Against all of that, set the one place in the Rigveda where a poet reaches for the servile register instead. It is a Varuṇa hymn, traditionally attributed to Vasiṣṭha:

araṃ dāso na mīḷhuṣe karāṇy ahaṃ devāya bhūrṇaye ‘nāgāḥ

“Slavelike may I do service to the Bounteous, serve, free from sin, the God inclined to anger.”

Rigveda 7.86, verse 7. Griffith (1896).

One verse, hedged with na, “like,” because the poet is reaching for a simile rather than a status. Set one simile against 226 hymns and the shape of Rigvedic religion becomes clear without anyone having to argue for it. The later Indian vocabulary of self-surrender is not yet here; the posture on offer is a handshake.

The Price of a Friend

Choosing a friend costs something, and the Rigveda is blunt about it in a way that later devotional literature is not. The hymn that follows the sale offer, six verses in:

nāsuṣver āpir na sakhā na jāmiḥ

“No brother, kin, or friend to him who pours not.”

Rigveda 4.25, verse 6. Griffith (1896).

Three relationship words, all denied, to the man who does not press soma. The next verse makes the point in commercial terms: Indra does not conclude sakhyá with a rich paṇi (the Rigveda’s word for a hoarder who withholds from the ritual, probably connected with paṇ-, “to bargain”) who has no pressing to show for his wealth (RV 4.25.7). Wealth alone buys nothing. Participation does.

Read straight, this is uncomfortable. It sounds like a protection racket with liturgy. Read in context it is something more interesting: a society in which no relationship outside the bloodline was assumed to exist unless it was continually enacted, applying the same rule upward. Friendship that costs nothing and is renewed by nothing is not, in this world, a relationship at all. The poets extend their gods no exemption from that rule, and they expect none themselves.

They also send invoices. One of the most startling verses in Maṇḍala V is a direct question to Indra about arrears:

kiṃ te brahmāṇo gṛhate sakhāyo ye tvāyā nidadhuḥ kāmam indra

“What have thy friends received from thee, the Brahmans who, faithful, rest their hopes on thee, O Indra?”

Rigveda 5.32, verse 12. Griffith (1896).

At RV 8.21.8 a poet puts it more smoothly: he knows Indra’s friendship and he knows its rewards, and it is the rewards he is now asking for. The audit is polite, but it is an audit. On the economics of praise poetry and the gifts it was paid with, see Debt in the Rigveda; on the collision between this bargaining and outright scepticism, The Rigveda’s Doubt.

graph TD
    A["Choose: vṛṇīmahe sakhyāya"] --> B["Press and offer soma"]
    B --> C["Sakhya established"]
    C --> D["God's side: cattle, sons, victory"]
    C --> E["Poet's side: praise, oblation, renewal"]
    D --> F["Renewed each pressing"]
    E --> F
    F --> G["Inherited by sons"]
    F --> H["Or: abandoned for better allies"]
    H --> I["RV 6.47.17, 1.165, 10.34"]

Friendships You Inherit

Because sakhyá is enacted rather than felt, it can be transmitted. A poet does not begin from scratch with Agni; he begins with the friendship his fathers already built, and his first worry is that the god has forgotten it.

mā no agne sakhyā pitryāṇi pra marṣiṣṭhāḥ

“O Agni, break not our ancestral friendship, Sage as thou art, endowed with deepest knowledge.”

Rigveda 1.71, verse 10. Griffith (1896).

Sakhyā pitryāṇi, “the paternal friendships,” plural. The relationship is an asset of the lineage, like cattle or a hymn repertoire, and like them it can be neglected or lost. Indra-Agni are asked to drink “for the sake of your ancient auspicious friendships” (RV 1.108.5); Agni is reminded that he had friends “of old, the midmost and the most recent” (RV 6.21.5); the Aśvins are told that their house is ancient and their friendship kindly, and then invited to form it again, punaḥ kṛṇvānāḥ sakhyā śivāni (RV 3.58.6).

That last phrase is the practical theology of the whole system in three words. Making friendship again. Not remembering it, not celebrating it: remaking it, this morning, with this pressing.

Aside. It is tempting to read sakhyá as evidence of an unusually intimate or egalitarian religion, and the temptation should be resisted. The same Indra who is a friend is described, a few verses away, as smashing fortresses and crushing anyone who fails to offer. Vedic friendship is closer to a treaty between unequal powers than to modern companionship: think of the alliances a small kingdom makes with a large one, which are real, binding, mutually profitable and never symmetrical. For the political vocabulary in the background, see Sabhā and Samiti.

How a Friendship Ends

Here the Rigveda becomes unexpectedly modern, because a relationship that has to be maintained is a relationship that can fail, and the poets know all the ways.

The coldest verse belongs to Maṇḍala VI:

parā pūrveṣāṃ sakhyā vṛṇakti vitarturāṇo aparebhir eti

“He loves no more the men he loved aforetime: he turns and moves away allied with others.”

Rigveda 6.47, verse 17. Griffith (1896).

This is not a complaint about human fickleness. It is a description of Indra, offered admiringly, in a hymn praising him. The god changes friends. He goes with whoever is pressing now. A poet who understood this would understand that his own position was always provisional, and the hymns show poets who understood it perfectly.

Then there is the quarrel. In the Agastya group of hymns in Maṇḍala I, Indra and the Maruts, normally inseparable, fall out in dialogue. The hymns give us only the speeches; the story usually told around them, of an offering meant for the Maruts and diverted to Indra, comes from the later tradition rather than from the verses. Indra’s line is the line of every soured alliance:

kva syā vo maruta svadhāsīd yan mām ekaṃ samadhattāhihatye

“Where was that nature then of yours, O Maruts, that ye charged me alone to slay the Dragon?”

Rigveda 1.165, verse 6. Griffith (1896).

Where were you when I needed you. Five hymns later, in RV 1.170, the Maruts are reduced to asking the human poet Agastya why he is neglecting them: brother, why do you look past us, when you are our friend? We know your mind; you do not intend to give us anything. And in a Marut hymn of Maṇḍala VIII, someone asks them the question that finishes the affair: ko vaḥ sakhitva ohate, “who now counts on your friendship?” (RV 8.7.31). The gods quarrel exactly the way allies quarrel, over attendance, credit and gifts.

The last of these is the one that should be better known. In the great hymn on the origin of language, the poet turns aside to pass judgement on a particular kind of person:

yas tityāja sacividaṃ sakhāyaṃ na tasya vācy api bhāgo asti

“No part in Vāk hath he who hath abandoned his own dear friend who knows the truth of friendship. Even if he hears her still in vain he listens: naught knows he of the path of righteous action.”

Rigveda 10.71, verse 6. Griffith (1896).

The penalty for deserting a friend is not hell, not divine anger, not social exclusion. It is aphasia of a particular kind: the man still hears speech, and it means nothing to him. For a tradition whose entire technology is the spoken formula, this is the heaviest sentence available. Betrayal makes you deaf to the thing that makes people human.

Maṇḍala X circles the same idea from the side of food. Na sa sakhā yo na dadāti sakhye, “he is no friend who gives nothing to his friend who comes to him for sustenance” (RV 10.117.4), in a hymn that has no deity at all and simply reasons, ending with the observation that riches roll from one man to another like chariot wheels. The cross-reference to that hymn’s meal ethics is in What the Vedic People Ate.

And there is one request for friendship in the Rigveda that is simply refused. Yamī opens the dialogue with her twin brother Yama by saying she would like to turn her sakhā to sakhyá, using the word as a decorous cover for what she is actually proposing. Yama’s answer uses it back at her:

na te sakhā sakhyaṃ vaṣṭy etat

“Thy friend loves not the friendship which considers her who is near in kindred as stranger.”

Rigveda 10.10, verse 2. Griffith (1896).

Your friend does not want this friendship. The word stretches to cover courtship, and then snaps back. Read the whole exchange alongside the funeral hymns, where Yama has become the first of the dead.

Aside. One absence is worth recording. Searching the Saṃhitā text for feminine forms of the word turns up essentially nothing: the Rigvedic sakhi is a man or a god, and the classical Sanskrit sakhī, a woman’s female companion and a fixture of later poetry and drama, is not yet in evidence. Yamī, tellingly, has to borrow the masculine term to make her case, and is refused with it. On what else the collection leaves out about women’s lives, see Hidden Women of the Rigveda.

Two Birds, and What Came After

The image the tradition remembered longest is not an argument at all. It sits inside Dīrghatamas’s riddle hymn, in a verse the Upaniṣads later borrowed and Vedānta never stopped discussing:

dvā suparṇā sayujā sakhāyā samānaṃ vṛkṣaṃ pari ṣasvajāte | tayor anyaḥ pippalaṃ svādv atty anaśnann anyo abhi cākaśīti

“Two Birds with fair wings, knit with bonds of friendship, in the same sheltering tree have found a refuge. One of the twain eats the sweet Fig-tree’s fruitage; the other eating not regardeth only.”

Rigveda 1.164, verse 20. Griffith (1896).

Sayujā sakhāyā: yoked together, companions. Whatever the verse originally described (the sun and the moon, the sacrificer and the priest, two aspects of one self, all have been proposed), its grip on later thought comes from the pairing of intimacy with asymmetry. Two beings on one branch, bound as companions, doing entirely different things. That is sakhyá seen from the inside.

The afterlife of the word is where the distance between the Rigveda and later Hinduism becomes measurable. In the eleventh chapter of the Bhagavad Gītā, Arjuna, having just seen Krishna’s cosmic form, apologises for the way he has been talking to him:

sakheti matvā prasabhaṃ yad uktaṃ, “whatever I said rashly, thinking you a friend.”[7] He lists the offences: calling him Krishna, calling him Yādava, calling him sakhā, joking with him at meals. The old Rigvedic address has become a fault requiring forgiveness.

Later devotional theology recovers it, but as a mode rather than a default. Rūpa Gosvāmin’s sixteenth-century Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu classifies sakhya as one of the standard attitudes a devotee may take toward God, alongside servitude, parental affection and erotic love.[8] By then friendship is a temperament you may be granted. In the Rigveda it was the working arrangement.

graph LR
    A["Rigveda: sakhya as default"] --> B["Chosen, paid for, renewable"]
    A --> C["Gods as allies, not masters"]
    D["Gita 11.41: apology"] --> E["Friendship becomes presumption"]
    F["Bhakti theology"] --> G["Sakhya as one mode among five"]
    B --> D
    C --> D
    E --> F

What the Word Was Protecting

Strip the theology away and sakhyá is a technology for living among people you are not related to. Pastoral lineages in the Punjab of the second millennium BCE had kinship for the inside and hostility for the outside, and needed something for the large space in between: the neighbouring family whose cattle you did not raid, the poet you hosted, the chief you followed into a fight. The word they used for that middle space is the word they then used for the gods.

Two consequences follow, and both cut against how the Rigveda is usually described.

The first is that the collection’s religion is far less hierarchical than its reputation. The stance the hymns take toward the sky is the stance of a smaller party in an alliance, one that bargains, complains, keeps accounts and occasionally jokes about the exchange rate. There is no self-abasement in it, because self-abasement was not yet a religious posture. It arrives later.

The second is that Rigvedic friendship is much harder work than the modern kind. It has no interior. Nowhere does a poet say that he feels affection for Indra; what he says is that he has chosen him, fed him, inherited the arrangement from his fathers and expects it to hold. Whether any of the poets liked their gods is not a question the text answers, and probably not a question it thought to ask. Friendship was what you did at dawn, with a pressing stone, in the presence of witnesses, over and over, because a relationship you stop performing is a relationship that has ended.

That is a colder account of friendship than most people now hold. It is also, if you have ever watched a friendship dissolve for no reason other than that nobody kept doing it, an uncomfortably accurate one.

Read RV 4.24 and RV 4.25 back to back, as one movement. The first hymn haggles and jokes about the price of a god; the second asks, in the very next breath, who has taken pleasure in his friendship. The poet saw no contradiction, and the fact that we do is the most useful thing the pair of hymns can tell us about the distance between their world and ours.