[Music] foreign foreign [Music] so what you have heard now many people think some Mantra is being uttered for a for a Hindu ritual actually this is the first two mantras from rigveda samhita and in the 10th mandala there is a very famous which has seven mantras and these seven mantras indeed talk about the origin of the universe so there are a lot of people all over the world actually reading these seven mantras and trying to understand what it is coming talking about the origin of the universe so this is a sample from The Vedic Corpus since we are going to talk about vedicarpas I thought let me just recite this Mantra to tell you that there are a lot of such very important and interesting things which are part of The Vedas so now the question is what are Vedas we'll start from there the word Veda is generally derived from the Sanskrit root with with means to know so Veda in some way is a set of knowledge vast body of knowledge and what is this knowledge this is about eternal spiritual values and principles practices for gainful and happy living and these are actually ideas revealed to the rishis through the deep meditation and of course these are preserved and transmitted through an oral tradition therefore Vedas are called Shruti suti means that which is heard so this is what Vedas is in a nutshell now Hindu tradition occurs Vedas the highest position in its canonical literature I would say rather than Hindu tradition I'll say sanatana Dharma tradition occurs Vedas the highest position in its canonical literature and it is revered as a basic scriptures it's also considered the Fountain Head of Indian culture and human civilization and you may be surprised to know UNESCO has recognized Vedas as a Heritage for preservation see normally what happens Heritage is some building some Monument ah you know some kind of you know old structure and so on but this is nothing but an assemblage of sound but UNESCO felt that this must be preserved as a Heritage that's a very interesting about Vedas and of course there has been a lot of Western approach in the last 200 plus years to study The Vedas and for them it is more an intellectual and a linguistic exercise because they have not been part of the culture so they may not know the cultural angle but it is more as an intellectual and a linguistic exercise now there are three broad issues addressed in Vedas it's easy to put it in roughly three sort of compartments the first one one can call it as karma Kanda basically it it's about a lot of things that we can do in our day to day life how to lead a life from morning to evening but if you look at it it basically nudges an individual to obtain purity of mind at the end of the day as we actually engage in the world so those kind of ideas I may call it as karma Kanda then you have what is called a second set called upasana upasana means focusing on something so upasana helps an individual develop single pointedness of Mind through contemplation and focus therefore the you know there are exercises to contemplate and focus on something that kind of ideas are there which is very important to us at some point in time it is very very important for us and the third is yanakanda which indeed opens the mind of an individual to its limits and facilitates much deeper inquiry about oneself about nature about you know the universe so many things that we always want to know such ideas are also there which we call it as nyanakanda now before we go further let me show you a quick graphic because in Vedic living one of the primary thing is doing sacrifices so I am just showing you here a nice pictorial representation of the Enya so basically there is an eggnog the altar is there right that's where the aghuti everything they do and it is done by the ajamana and his hejamana patni his wife because they are they are the adhikaris they are the one who are going to do the egnya and you see there there are four groups of people you have hotrugana which means there is a hota who is sort of a captain and three assistants for them similarly you have adver again and adveryu who is the head and three more people to assist you have udga you have the udgata again three of his assistants and brahmagana there is one Brahma and assisted by three people so four into four sixteen these so the 18 people make up the structure and each one of them come from a particular Veda for example the hotar Gana is from rigveda the adver yugana is from is from samaveda and the brahmagana is from and all of them have specific roles to play so essentially it is a nice sort of a project management kind of a structure where there are definite roles people take responsibilities and you know for example the brahmagana is like a supervisory role they need to make sure what the other three ganas are doing or doing properly and if there are issues and real-time challenges they will have to refer back to the brahmagana and so they take responsibility for quality control so many of what we talked today were all in existence so I thought I will just show you so all that I have now done to you is very quickly introduced to you that there are four Vedas by showing this ignia I have only tried to tell you that there are four Vedas I think we need to understand it in a little more detail which we will do going forward [Music] foreign