Light - Vision - Enlightenment

The Vedas are among the most ancient texts of human culture, preserving the mythological notions, ritual practices, religious beliefs, spiritual values and pre-philosophical reflections of the ancient Indo-Aryans. The Vedas predetermined the trends in the development of the entire Indian spiritual culture for centuries to come; they are the yardstick against which later religious and philosophical teachings are measured, even as they deny their authority and sacredness. The Vedas - as Panikar, one of their most penetrating scholars, writes - are "like the uncovering of depths that still echo in the heart of modern man, so that he may become more aware of his own human heritage, and thus of the origins of his own existence."

The monograph, the second edition of which has been made possible by the East-West Press, combines a philological analysis of the core corpus of Vedic texts with an in-depth scholarly interpretation of the mythology, rituals, and religious-philosophical ideas of the Vedic ariyas, in which their foundational religious-magical, ontological, and gnoseological concepts are articulated.