Atharva Veda

The Atharva Veda stands somewhat apart from the other three. Named for the atharvan, a class of priest, it is a collection not primarily of sacrificial liturgy but of charms, spells and incantations for the concerns of everyday life, healing sickness, ensuring long life, winning love, securing success, cursing enemies, blessing a house or a field, easing childbirth. Alongside this magico-medical material it also contains some of the most speculative and philosophical hymns in Vedic literature.

For this reason it was, for a long time, not universally accepted as a Veda at all: the older formula spoke of the "three Vedas" (trayi vidya), and the Atharva's canonical standing was contested and came later. Its great value to historians is precisely its subject matter: where the Rig, Sama and Yajur Vedas show the high public sacrifice of the priestly elite, the Atharva Veda opens a window onto the popular religion, domestic anxieties and folk medicine of early Vedic society. It, too, is finally counted as shruti, the fourth Veda.

Two recensions of the Atharva Veda have come down to the present, and they did not survive in equal condition. The Shaunaka recension is the better preserved and the one in common use in India today, transmitted continuously enough that its text is considered reasonably secure. The Paippalada recension fared far worse: for a long time it was known mainly by reputation and by a single incomplete, badly damaged birch-bark manuscript from Kashmir, difficult even for specialists to read in full.

A far more complete version of the same recension survived independently in Odisha, copied onto palm-leaf manuscripts by Brahmin families who kept transcribing it for their own use with little awareness of its wider significance, and it was this regional manuscript tradition, brought to wider scholarly attention in the twentieth century, that finally allowed the Paippalada text to be reconstructed in something close to its full extent. The two recensions overlap heavily in content, spells, charms and speculative hymns, but differ enough in wording and arrangement that comparing them tells scholars something about how a scripture transmitted orally for a very long time before being fixed in writing can still fork into genuinely different textual lines. The Atharva Veda's textual history is a case study in how narrowly a scripture can come to depend on manuscripts a small community happened to keep.