Only the Sound Is Heard: The Rig Veda's God With No Shape

A god you can hear and never see

The Rig Veda opens with Agni, which is unsurprising: fire is the priest, the mouth, the one who carries offerings up. The second hymn of the collection is the one worth stopping at. RV 1.2 begins vāyav ā yāhi darśata, “Vāyu, come, you who are good to look at.” Three verses of coaxing follow, all of them addressed to the wind.

Nine maṇḍalas later, at the far end of the corpus, a poet finishes a four-verse hymn to the same power with a line that quietly contradicts that opening epithet:

ghóṣā íd asya śṛṇvire ná rūpám

“His sounds alone are heard. His form, never.”

Rigveda 10.168, verse 4. Translated from the Sanskrit.

The Rig Veda is a text of watchers. Its composers are called ṛṣi, and the standard verb for what they do to a hymn is paś, to see. Dawn is described down to the colour of her cattle, Indra down to his tawny beard and his belly full of soma, the ritual fire down to the way its smoke bends. Against that habit of looking, a hymn that says outright that its subject has no visible shape is a strange object, and it is not an isolated slip. The wind material in the Rig Veda is consistently the place where these poets handle a power that is undeniably real, undeniably strong, and permanently out of sight.

What they do with it is more interesting than agnosticism. They give it the first drink.

Two words, and they do not overlap

Sanskrit gives the Rig Veda two words for wind, and the poets keep them apart with a discipline that becomes obvious only when you count.

Vāta (Sanskrit: वात) is the wind you stand in. It blows, it raises dust, it bends the trees, it arrives from a direction. Vāyu (वायु) is the wind you invite to a ritual: a person with a chariot, a team, a taste in drink, and a place in a seating order. Both go back to the same Proto-Indo-European root *h₂weh₁-, “to blow”, and both survive into Iranian with the same division of labour. Macdonell noticed the split in 1897 and it has been standard ever since. [3]

The counts show how sharp it is.

Maṇḍala 9 is the giveaway. The book of Soma Pavamāna, eleven hundred verses describing juice running through a wool filter, names Vāyu twenty-eight times and the physical wind three. Maṇḍala 10, the latest layer, reverses it. Where the subject is ritual, the wind is a guest with a name. Where the subject is the world, it is a force with a direction.

And the two words do not meet. In the 180-odd verses where one or the other appears, there is exactly one verse where both stand together. I will come back to it at the end, because of all the places in the Rig Veda it could have occurred, it occurs in the strangest.

Methods note. The figures above come from a pattern search over the romanised Saṃhitā text, counting free-standing forms of each noun. The text is transmitted in sandhi, with words fused at their boundaries, so the counts are floors rather than totals: compounds such as vātajūta, “wind-driven”, and forms swallowed into a neighbouring word are not included, and the finite verb vāti, “it blows”, is counted separately. The single verse holding both names was found with a deliberately looser pattern, which is the conservative direction for that particular claim. For exact figures the tool is Lubotsky’s Ṛgvedic Word Concordance, which lists every form with its frequency and its pāda. [12]

The gods yielded him the first drink

Now the fact that makes the wind material worth an article. In the Rig Veda’s soma ritual, the first cup does not go to Indra, who is the subject of a quarter of the collection and who needs soma more than anyone. It goes to Vāyu.

The text says so in the flattest possible way:

túbhyaṃ hí pūrvapītáye devā́ devā́ya yemire

“For you, god, the gods have yielded the first drinking.”

Rigveda 1.135, verse 1. Translated from the Sanskrit.

This is not a stray compliment. There is a technical vocabulary for it, built on pūrva, “first”, and the root pā, “drink”, and it clusters where you would expect: in the hymns actually addressed to Vāyu.

That last one is a piece of ritual technology hiding in an epithet. Śucipā, “drinker of the clear”, records the fact that Vāyu’s portion is drawn off before the juice is mixed with milk. He gets it raw, unblended and early, at the top of the morning pressing, the moment the stones stop. Readers who have followed the mechanics of that pressing in the soma workshop will recognise how narrow a window that is.

The precedence is strange enough that the later ritual literature felt obliged to explain it. The Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa knows a cup called the aindravāyava, jointly Indra’s and Vāyu’s, and accounts for the joint ownership with a story: the cup was Vāyu’s, and Indra negotiated his way into a share. [8] The Taittirīya Saṃhitā gives the underlying reason in a sentence, while prescribing a white animal for anyone who wants to prosper: “Vāyu is the swiftest deity.” [9]

Speed, not force. The Rig Veda’s own poets get there first, and they say it with an image I find hard to improve on. In RV 4.48.2, Vāyu arrives with his teams, indrasārathiḥ, “with Indra as his charioteer”. The god who splits mountains is driving. The god you cannot see is the passenger.

Aside. Two hierarchies run through the Rig Veda and they are not the same hierarchy. One is mythological: who kills the dragon, who props apart heaven and earth, who is called upon in battle. The other is procedural: who is addressed first, who drinks first, whose cup is drawn before the milk goes in. Indra dominates the first and is a latecomer in the second. Confusing the two is how readers end up with a “chief god” the text never quite names. The formalised pairing of Indra and Vāyu belongs to the same grammar of divine couples discussed in the Rig Veda’s dual deities.

Vāyu also owns a word. Niyut, the term for his harnessed teams, appears in about fifty-seven verses, and roughly half of them are his; outside his orbit it is rare enough to function as a signature. His teams are counted in the way the Rig Veda counts when it wants to signal excess: ninety-nine in one verse, a hundred in the next, a thousand in the one after (RV 4.48.4 to 5). A god with no body has the largest stable in the pantheon.

The hymn that describes what it cannot see

RV 10.168 is four verses long and is one of the most quietly radical things in the collection. Read it as a problem in method. How do you describe something that leaves no image on the eye?

The poet’s answer is to describe everything the wind touches.

vā́tasya nú mahimā́naṃ ráthasya rujánn eti stanáyann asya ghóṣaḥ divispṛ́g yāty aruṇā́ni kṛṇván utó eti pṛthivyā́ reṇúm ásyan

“Now, the greatness of Vāta’s chariot: it goes breaking things, and its noise is thunder. It travels touching the sky, turning things red, and it goes along the earth flinging up dust.”

Rigveda 10.168, verse 1. Translated from the Sanskrit.

Nothing in that verse is the wind. Breakage, noise, reddened sky, lifted dust: every item is a trace. The second verse adds more traces, the dusts and vapours that “hurry along after” him like women going to a gathering. The third verse locates him by exclusion, moving on paths in the antarikṣa, the middle space, never settling on any day, and then asks the question the hymn has been circling:

apā́ṃ sákhā prathamajā́ ṛtā́vā kvà svij jātó kúta ā́ babhūva

“Friend of the waters, firstborn, holder of the order: where on earth was he born? Out of what did he come to be?”

Rigveda 10.168, verse 3. Translated from the Sanskrit.

Then the last verse, with its admission about sound and form, and a closing line that does not resolve anything: tasmai vātāya haviṣā vidhema, “to that Vāta let us do honour with our offering.” No answer, and the ritual proceeds anyway.

What makes this more than a pretty nature poem is the epistemology it takes for granted. The poet builds a complete portrait of a being out of nothing but its effects on other things, states plainly that the being itself is not available to inspection, and treats the inference as sound enough to justify pouring butter into a fire for it. That is a recognisable intellectual move, and it sits a few hymns away from the more famous suspension of judgment in the Nāsadīya Sūkta. The difference is that 10.129 doubts whether anyone can know how the world began. 10.168 does not doubt the wind at all. It doubts only that the wind can be seen, which is a much more precise claim, and a correct one.

Two winds, one of them from the Sindhu

Away from the ritual ground, the wind does practical work, and the most surprising register in the whole dossier is medical.

RV 10.137 is a short healing hymn, and its second verse is one of the few places where Rigvedic weather becomes geography:

dvā́v imaú vā́tau vāta ā́ síndhor ā́ parāvátaḥ dakṣáṃ te anyá ā́ vātu párānyo vātu yád rápaḥ

“Two winds are blowing here: from the Sindhu, from the far distance. Let the one blow strength into you; let the other blow away whatever is damaged.”

Rigveda 10.137, verse 2. Translated from the Sanskrit.

Two winds, from two quarters, with two jobs. Anyone who has spent a May in the Punjab knows the dry furnace wind out of the west, and anyone who has waited out June knows the other one. The hymn does not name a season and I will not force one onto it, but the verse takes for granted that winds come in kinds, that a person can tell them apart, and that one of them carries something worth having. The same hymn’s therapeutic vocabulary sits inside the larger Rigvedic pharmacy examined in the Rig Veda’s medicine.

The claim is made without hedging five hymns from the end of the collection. RV 10.186 is three verses and it is addressed to Vāta, not Vāyu, which is to say to the wind you can feel rather than the god at the ritual.

vā́ta ā́ vātu bheṣajáṃ śambhú mayobhú no hṛdé | prá ṇa ā́yūṃṣi tāriṣat

“Let the wind blow medicine, healing and ease for our heart. Let him carry our lives further.”

utá vāta pitā́si na utá bhrā́tota naḥ sákhā | sá no jīvā́tave kṛdhi

“And, Wind, you are our father, and our brother, and our friend. Make it so that we may live.”

yád adó vāta te gṛhé ‘mṛ́tasya nidhír hitáḥ | táto no dehi jīváse

“In your house, Wind, over there, the store of the deathless is laid up. Give us some of it, to live on.”

Rigveda 10.186, verses 1 to 3. Translated from the Sanskrit.

Three things are worth noticing in nine lines. The wind has a house, which is more domesticity than the Rig Veda usually grants a natural force. The store of amṛta, deathlessness, is kept there rather than with Indra or Soma, the two gods normally associated with it. And the relationship asked for is not the usual patron-and-client arrangement of Vedic hymnody but kinship: father, brother, friend, in that order, with no sacrificial fee mentioned.

It is also, in a corpus of 1,028 hymns, one of the shortest. Almost the last thing the Rig Veda does is ask the air for a remedy.

Breath

The bridge from wind to breath is in the Sanskrit before it is in the philosophy. RV 10.168.4 calls Vāta the ātmā devānām, and ātman in the Rig Veda still means breath, the thing that goes in and out, well before it means the self that later Indian philosophy spends a millennium arguing about. The wind is what the gods breathe with.

The identification runs in both directions. In the Puruṣa hymn, the cosmic body’s parts become the world’s parts, and the line is unambiguous: prāṇād vāyur ajāyata, “from his breath Vāyu was born” (RV 10.90.13). And in the funeral liturgy, when the body is committed to the fire, each part goes back to its source:

sū́ryaṃ cákṣur gachatu vā́tam ātmā́

“Let the eye go to the sun, the breath to the wind.”

Rigveda 10.16, verse 3. Translated from the Sanskrit.

Read against the Rig Veda’s funeral hymns, that line is doing physics as much as theology. A person is an assembly on loan. The eye is solar stuff, the breath is atmospheric stuff, and death is a return of components, not an annihilation.

graph TD
    P["PIE root *h2weh1- 'blow'"] --> A["Vedic vata: physical wind"]
    P --> B["Vedic vayu: the god"]
    P --> C["Avestan vata and Vayu"]
    P --> D["Latin ventus, Gothic winds"]
    A --> E["RV 10.168: no visible form"]
    A --> F["RV 10.186: wind as medicine"]
    B --> G["First cup of soma"]
    B --> H["atman and prana"]
    C --> I["Ram Yasht: ambivalent god"]
    C --> J["Later: good Vay, bad Vay"]
    H --> K["Chandogya: wind the absorber"]
    G --> L["Aindravayava cup"]

The Upaniṣads pick up exactly this thread and push it. The saṃvarga vidyā of Chāndogya Upaniṣad 4.3 turns the wind into a principle of absorption: when the fire goes out it goes into the wind, when the sun sets it goes into the wind, when the moon sets it goes into the wind, when water dries it goes into the wind. Then the same structure is repeated inside the body with breath in the wind’s place, absorbing speech, sight, hearing and mind as a person falls asleep. [13] The move is not a new idea so much as the Rigvedic intuition made systematic: the thing you cannot see is what everything else resolves into. Readers tracking that line of Vedic attention will find its earlier stages in the Rig Veda’s vocabulary of mind.

The best story in the reception, though, is the one where the wind is humiliated. In the third section of the Kena Upaniṣad the gods have won a battle and are congratulating themselves, not knowing that the power behind the victory was Brahman. A mysterious presence appears. Agni is sent to identify it, boasts that he can burn anything, and is handed a blade of grass, which he cannot burn. Then the wind steps up, announces himself with both of his names, “I am Vāyu, I am Mātariśvan”, claims he can blow anything away at all, and cannot move the same blade of grass. [14] The swiftest deity, the one the other gods let drink first, meets a piece of straw and fails.

The same god, darker, in Iran

Indo-Iranian material usually rewards a sideways glance, and the wind rewards it more than most. The Avesta preserves both names, vāta- for the physical wind and Vayu for the divinity, which tells us the split is older than either tradition. [11]

Then the theologies part company. The Vedic Vāyu is a benign and slightly indulged figure: he arrives in a chariot, he drinks clear soma, he is the father and brother of RV 10.186. The Iranian Vayu is something else. His hymn is Yašt 15, conventionally called the Rām Yašt after a minor divinity who barely appears in it, and the god at its centre is an ambivalent power addressed by heroes who need something badly. [10] Later Zoroastrian tradition splits him outright into a good Vay and a bad Vay, and gives him the space between: the void between the realm of Ohrmazd and the realm of Ahriman, through which the soul of the dead must pass. One Vay carries the righteous upward. The other is death. [11] [15]

Stig Wikander’s 1941 monograph Vayu remains the study that put the Indian and Iranian evidence side by side, and its reading of the Iranian god as a figure of the in-between, of thresholds and transitions, has held up better than some of its wider conclusions about warrior brotherhoods. [10] What the comparison licenses is modest and worth stating precisely. The Indo-Iranians inherited a wind god who was fast, who occupied the middle space between earth and sky, and who had something to do with the passage of the dead. India kept the speed and the middle space and made him a guest at the ritual. Iran kept the passage of the dead and made him a gatekeeper. The Vedic wind takes the first cup; the Iranian wind takes everyone.

What the Rig Veda does not say about the wind

Three cautions, because the material invites overreach.

The Rig Veda does not have a theory of air as an element. The four or five elements of later Indian physics are a much later systematisation, and reading vāyu in the Saṃhitā as “the element air” imports a vocabulary the poets did not have. [4]

It does not treat invisibility as a mark of divinity in general. Most Vedic gods are conspicuously visible: that is the point of Dawn, of fire, of the sun. Vāta is the exception, and the hymn that admits it is at the late end of the collection, in a maṇḍala that also contains the corpus’s most searching questions about origins. Whether the admission reflects a genuine shift in how the poets thought or simply the survival of an unusual poem, we cannot tell from four verses.

And it does not make the wind supreme. Vāyu drinks first and Indra still runs the mythology. The precedence is a matter of sequence, not of rank, which is exactly the sort of distinction a ritual culture keeps track of carefully and an outside reader flattens. The division of ritual labour across the priesthood, set out in the seven cups, works the same way: order is not the same thing as importance, and confusing them will mislead you about the whole system.

The one verse where both names meet

Back to the fact I left hanging. In the whole Rig Veda, vāta and vāyu share a verse exactly once, and it happens in RV 10.136, the hymn to the long-haired muni, the wildest four minutes in the collection.

vā́tasyā́śvo vāyóḥ sákhātho devéṣito múniḥ

“Horse of Vāta, friend of Vāyu, the muni whom the gods have driven.”

Rigveda 10.136, verse 5. Translated from the Sanskrit.

Both names, one line, describing a human being. The ascetic of the Keśin hymn, who drinks poison with Rudra, wears the wind as a garment and flies, is the one thing in the corpus that belongs to both wind vocabularies at once: mounted on the physical wind, companion to the god of it. If you want a sense of what that hymn is doing, the long-haired ascetic of RV 10.136 takes it apart properly. For our purposes the coincidence is enough. The text keeps the felt wind and the invited god in separate compartments for ten thousand verses, and the single place the partition fails is a description of somebody in an altered state.

I said at the start that the Rig Veda’s poets are watchers, and that a god without a visible form sits oddly in their world. The resolution they found is worth carrying out of the text. They did not decide the wind was unreal because it could not be seen, and they did not decide it was more real for being invisible, which is the move a later mysticism would make. They took the evidence they had, which was noise, dust, bent plants, a reddened sky and the fact that they were breathing, and they built a person out of it, and then they handed that person the first cup. That is not piety. It is inference, done in metre, by people who were paying attention.

Read RV 10.168 outdoors on a day when the weather is changing. Four verses take under a minute. Then read RV 10.186, which takes thirty seconds, and notice that the last thing a poet asks of the invisible is not knowledge but a longer life and something out of the medicine chest.