Journeys into Vedic Thought
Long-form, researched essays on the deities, language, ritual and history of the Rig Veda. All free to read.
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Karma Was a Verb First: What the Rigveda Actually Says About What You Do
The Rigveda uses the word karman thirty-six times and never once means what you think. Its ethical vocabulary comes from the workshop, not the courtroom: the word for a good deed is sukṛtá, 'well-made'. And in one verse, a dying man is told to go meet the deposit he left in heaven.
Four Verbs in the Past Tense: The Rigveda's Only First-Person Report of Immortality
Somewhere around 1200 BCE a poet wrote down four verbs and claimed, in the past tense, that he and his companions had already become deathless. Nobody has ever agreed on what he meant. The argument runs from Sayana in the fourteenth century to a Dutch Indologist in 1994, and it turns on a single grammatical form.
A Hundred Autumns: The Rigveda's Argument Against Dying
The Rigveda's word for immortality is a negative: a-mṛta, not-dead. Even the gods had to earn it, some of them by doing excellent metalwork. And the poets who coined the word spent almost no time asking for heaven. They asked, over and over, for a hundred more autumns of this.