The only explanation left then is coincidence.
Or the possibility that the two traditions are after all related – not directly, but through a shared legacy from a more ancient and perhaps even forgotten common ancestor …
An institution for saving the Vedas
What is particularly striking about the Indian tradition is the way that the story of Manu and the Seven Sages is bound up with the ancient yuga theory of the cyclical destruction and rebirth of worlds. To this extent it is reminiscent of the story of the inundation of Dwarka; however, in Dwarka’s case we hear of only a single city being destroyed while in the case of the flood of Manu – a true pralaya – the waters overtake the whole earth and (improbably!) reach high enough to maroon a ship in the Himalayas.
The Sanskrit texts make it clear that a cataclysm on this scale, though a relatively rare event, is expected to wash away all traces of the former world and that the slate will be wiped clean again for the new age of the earth to begin. In order to ensure that the Vedas can be repromulgated for future mankind after each pralaya the gods have therefore designed an institution to preserve them – the institution of the Seven Sages, a brotherhood of adepts possessed of unerring memories and supernatural powers,55 practitioners of yoga, performers of the ancient rituals and sacrifices, ascetics, spiritual visionaries, vigilant in the battle against evil, great teachers, knowledgeable beyond all imagining, who reincarnate from age to age56 as the guides of civilization and the guardians of cosmic justice.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start with first principles.
The Seven Godlike Sages
The earliest surviving written references to the Seven Sages are in the Rig Veda. But as with Manu it is apparent from the nature of the compositions that an initiated audience has been assumed and that no attempt has been made to render a full connected narrative (quotations from the Griffith translation);57
Our fathers then were these, the Seven Sages … (4, 42, 8)
They value One, only One, beyond the Seven Sages … (10, 82, 2)
Those Gods of old, Seven Sages who sat them down to their austere devotion … (10, 109, 4)
So by this knowledge men were raised to Sages, when ancient sacrifice sprang up, our Fathers. With the mind’s eye I think that I behold them who first performed this sacrificial worship. They who were versed in ritual and meter, in hymns and rules, were the Seven Godlike Sages. Viewing the path of those of old, the [later] sages have taken up the reins like chariot-drivers. (10, 130, 6 and 7)
There are many additional accounts of individual rishis – and of their deeds, their knowledge, their powers, etc., but the four passages cited above contain the only direct and explicit references to the Seven Sages [Sapta Rishis) in the entire half-million-word corpus of the Rig Veda. The references are tantalizingly brief. Yet they are at the same time surprisingly rich in information – rich enough, I think, to allow us to make a few tentative deductions about Vedic beliefs on this subject:
The Seven Sages were considered in some way as the ‘fathers’ of those rishis who controlled the rituals and recited the Vedas in later times.
The Seven Sages were held in enormously high esteem, second only to ‘the One, the only One’ – the supreme divine power in the universe.
The Seven Sages had formerly been mortal men and had been elevated, through their possession of ‘knowledge’, at the time ‘when ancient sacrifice sprang up’ – presumably at the dawn of the Vedic religion.
The Seven Sages were in some way ‘Gods’ or at any rate ‘Godlike’.
The Seven Sages performed austerities.
The Seven Sages were ritual specialists who knew the ancient rules of metre and memorization that made it possible to preserve and transmit the ‘verses of knowledge’ for the benefit of future mankind.
Later generations of sages who continued to perform the ritual functions and to memorize and recite the verses of knowledge – i.e. the Vedas – were (in the words of one nineteenth-century commentator) ‘only imitators of those who preceded them’.58 It appears that one of the techniques used by subsequent generations to follow ‘the path of those of old’ may have involved yogic visualization (in the ‘mind’s eye’) of the primal gathering of ‘the Seven Godlike Sages … who first performed this sacrificial worship’.
Makers of the Vedas
As with the story of Manu and the flood, the overlapping story of the brotherhood of Seven Sages who survive the deluge in the Ark with Manu is a difficult jigsaw puzzle scattered across thousands of pages of ancient Sanskrit texts. The leading expert on the subject is Dr John Mitchiner, whose Ph.D. thesis at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies was on the Sanskrit traditions of the Seven Sages and who later published the definitive book, Traditions of the Seven Rsis59 (he uses the Sanskrit term throughout, being a stickler for detail, and not satisfied that the English words ‘sage’ or ‘seer’ perfectly translate all the nuances of the Sanskrit rsi or rishi).60
Mitchiner points out that a fundamental connection exists in Indian thought between the Sages and the origins of the Vedas – so fundamental that an inquiry into the latter inevitably ends up being an inquiry into the former as well:
The Seven Rsis are … frequently described as being those who composed, are most conversant with and supremely knowledgeable in the Vedas – as makers of the Vedas, knowers of the Vedas and masters of the Vedas … [They are] thought to be composers of Vedic hymns, and … to come to the earth periodically in order to renew Vedic knowledge among men; they are further depicted as teaching the Vedas and other sacred works to various individuals and pupils, and as praising the learning, study and recitation of the Vedas.61
Despite the apparent clarity of the statement, the relationship between the Seven Sages and the composition of the Vedas is and always has been difficult to unravel. According to the doctrine of India’s yuga system as set out by the great nineteenth-century Hindu savant Bal Ganghadar Tilak:
The Vedas were destroyed in the deluge, at the end of the last age. At the beginning of the present age the Sages, through tapas [meditation and yogic austerities], reproduced in substance, if not in form, the antediluvian Vedas, which they carried in their memory by the favour of god.62
So on the one hand we are to understand that it is the role of the Seven Sages to ‘reproduce’ and repromulgate the ‘antediluvian’ Vedas (which themselves were believed to have been the result of an earlier such process of reproduction and repromulgation). On the other hand, and confusingly, there are other hymns in which the Sages are referred to as ‘making’, or ‘generating’ or ‘fashioning’ – i.e. composing – the Vedas.63 Last but not least there are passages which leave no doubt that the hymns were believed originally, in some remote epoch, to have been ‘inspired’, ‘given’, or ‘generated’ by the gods and are thus, in essence, revealed knowledge.64
Secret communication
During the long journeys both intellectual and physical that I have made in India I have learned to live with a certain level of ambiguity. Remember that the Hindu religion is the child of the Vedas and that in this religion what we think of as ‘reality’ (i.e. ‘the world of form’, the material universe) is held to be maya – an illusion or mass hallucination sustained by ignorance and dispersable only by the special knowledge, insight or gnosis that is concealed within the Vedas.65 Since this knowledge was intended to be earned through individual study and personal asceticism, and yet was conveyed in publicly recited hymns, it was necessary for it to be coded in some way, or for it to make use of cues, images or ideas that might have one set of meanings for the laity and a totally different set of meanings and associations for those on the path to gnosis. That such a system of coding or secret communication was in use is confirmed by the Rig Veda itself in Book 1, Hymn 164, Verse 45 (Griffith translation):
Speech hath been measured out in four divisions, the Brahmans who have understanding [gnosis] know them. Three keep in close concealment ca
use no motion; of speech men speak only the fourth division.66
Wilson translates the same passage this way:
Four are the definite grades of speech: those Brahmans who are wise know them: three deposited in secret indicate no meaning; men speak the fourth grade of speech.67
The new and the old
There are enough similar hints68 scattered here and there throughout the ancient Sanskrit texts to justify a cautious approach to the ambiguities about the Seven Sages and their role in either merely ‘reproducing’, or actually ‘composing’, Vedic hymns – while these hymns are at the same time understood to consist of revelations from the gods.
Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who devoted his scholarly life to unravelling the Vedas and who approached the subject with an extremely lucid and open mind, suggests that there is a way to reconcile these seemingly conflicting utterances. This involves making a distinction
between the expression, language, or form on the one hand and the contents, substance or subject matter of the hymns on the other; and to hold that while the expression was human, the subject matter was believed to be ancient or superhuman. There are numerous passages in the Rig Veda where the bards speak of ancient poets (purve rishayah), or ancient hymns (1.1.2; 6.44.13;.7.29.4; 8.40.12; 10.14.15, etc.] … [or where a hymn is said to be] new [navyasi], yet the god or the deity to whom it is addressed is old [pratna) or ancient (6.22.7; 62.4; 10.91.13, etc.). This shows that the deities whose exploits were sung in the hymns were considered to be ancient deities. Nay, we have express passages where not only the deities but their exploits are said to be ancient, evidently meaning that the achievements spoken of in the hymns were traditional and not witnessed by the poet himself.69
The Rig Veda is therefore best understood as a multi-layered construct containing some extremely ancient information (which is either repeated verbatim, as handed down from antiquity, or in various ways spoken of, or referred to, in later compositions) and also a fair amount of much less ancient information associated, perhaps, with the various stages and locales of repromulgation and dissemination of the Vedas. Moreover, while linguists and historians can debate endlessly about the origins, authorship and antiquity of these amazing compositions and of the later bodies of texts that descend from them, the compositions themselves are absolutely clear on all these points.
The Vedic palimpsests
The Vedas describe themselves as being in essence primordial, having been revealed to mankind by the gods. After that initial revelation, when the Vedas entered human space and time, a mechanism had to be found to protect the path to gnosis enshrined within them from the vicissitudes of the material world – of which the greatest and most deadly of all is the pralaya, the cataclysm, that separates one age of the earth from the next. The function of the Seven Sages is to ensure that the Vedas are not lost during these periodic episodes of destruction; instead, they are to preserve the hymns in their memories, survive the flood, and repromulgate the entire corpus again to the new age of men.
It is important to note, in the Vedas, and the later explanatory hymns as we know them today, that this was already understood to have happened many times before70 – in other words these Vedas were not believed, even by those who recited them in antiquity, to be the first Vedas but rather a younger recension separated by countless aeons from the original, salvaged from the most recent pralaya by the Seven Sages in the Ark of Manu, brought to ‘the Place of the Ship’s Descent’ in the Himalayas, and from there repromulgated to the present race of men. Moreover, further study of the texts makes it perfectly clear that even these events are cast far in the past in the Vedic scenario – that the time of the flood, Manu and the Seven Sages was itself perceived as having occurred long, long ago by those who said they were the descendants of Manu and by those later sages who spoke of the Seven Sages as their ‘Fathers’. Tilak summarizes the issue in the following way:
The Vedic Rishis were themselves conscious of the fact that the subject-matter of the hymns sung by them was ancient or antediluvian in character, though the expressions used were their own productions.71
The hymns are therefore ‘oral palimpsests’, each imposed on top of an earlier hymn which itself has been ‘reproduced’ from an earlier hymn, which was reproduced from an even earlier hymn – and so on, back into the night of prehistory. Often the older layers of the palimpsest show through in the younger compositions so that everything is jumbled – like archaeological strata that have been turned over with earth-moving machinery indiscriminately mixing older and more recent artefacts.
As we will see in a later chapter, progress has been made in separating the truly ancient from the more recent information tangled up in the Vedic hymns – and the results have been surprising.
Meanwhile, in summary, it is at least clear that the essential task of the Seven Sages, whose own story is set in the remotest antiquity, was that having learned the Vedas from the Sages of an even earlier age they should survive the cataclysm and go forth at the beginning of the new age72 to ‘repromulgate the knowledge inherited by them, as a sacred trust, from their forefathers’.73 According to the Matsya Purana: ‘What the Seven Sages heard from the Sages of the preceding age, that they narrated in the next age.’74
Connections hidden in the stars?
There are repeated hints in the Sanskrit texts concerning something that sounds very much like a lineage of Sages – or perhaps a monastic order or a cult known as ‘the Seven Sages’ which was believed to have replenished its ranks in each generation. Indeed, in some of the texts detailed lists are provided of many groups of Seven Sages and of the past ages of the earth in which they lived.75 The Mahabaratha makes explicit mention of ‘the many Seven Sages’.76 There are even different groups of Seven Sages assigned to different regions – particularly to northern and southern India77 – which apparently were believed to have coexisted in different areas at the same time. Out of all this confusion, however, the names Visvamitra, Jamadagni, Bharadvaja, Gotama, Atri, Vasistha and Kasyapa are most frequently mentioned in the early literature as comprising the ‘main’ group of Seven Sages,78 with Agastaya sometimes cited as an eighth.79 But another group of seven ‘Great Sages’ (with Atri and Vasistha overlapping), is given at least equal prominence: Marici, Atri, Angiras, Pulastya, Pulaha, Kratu and Vasistha.80
It is this latter group that is assigned most often to southern India. But at the same time, curiously and strikingly, there are traditions that associate its members very firmly and vividly with seven stars in the northern sky – specifically the stars that form the prominent ‘Big Dipper’, or ‘Plough’, within the larger circumpolar constellation of the Great Bear.81 The identification of this constellation with a bear is extremely ancient and found in many supposedly unconnected cultures.82 This may shed light on an otherwise peculiar passage in the Satpatha Brahmana which informs us: ‘The Seven Rishis were in former times called the Rikshas [bears].’83 Mitchiner comments:
In later times the term rksa came to be given a more general meaning, denoting … any star … This more general meaning is, however, in all probability derivative of the original and more specific meaning denoting the shining stars of the Bear or Ursa Major.84
The identification of the Seven Sages with this particular group of stars, so apparent in the Indian tradition, is peculiarly resonant of the well-known ancient Egyptian belief in the stellar destiny of the soul.85 I cannot help but be reminded of the Pharaoh’s wish, repeated countless times in the Pyramid Texts, that if in this lifetime his spirit has been ‘perfected’ then it should upon his death be transformed into a star in the sky.86
Two areas of the sky were favoured for stellar rebirth by the ancient Egyptians – the region of the constellation of Orion in the southern sky and the region of the circumpolar, never-setting, ‘Imperishable’ stars – particularly Kochab87 in the Big Dipper – in the northern sky. Regarding a circumpolar destiny we read in Utterance 419 of the Pyramid Texts: ‘Arise … raise yourself that you may trave
l in company with the spirits … Cross the sky … Make your abode among the imperishable stars …’88 Regarding a destiny in Orion we read in Utterance 466: ‘O King, you are this great star, the companion of Orion, who traverses the sky with Orion.’89
I do therefore find it odd, to say the least, that ancient India’s Seven Sages are given a stellar ‘manifestation’ as the Big Dipper at the heart of the circumpolar region of the sky, just where the Egyptian Pharaohs wanted to go. Even odder, however, as Mitchiner reports, is that one of the Sages, Visvamitra, is said in both the Ramayana and the Mahabaratha to have transferred a king of ancient India named Trisanku to the sky in bodily form ‘where he now shines as the constellation of Orion’.90
Knowledge and balance
Just like the Heliopolitan priesthood who oversaw the construction of the Great Pyramid of Egypt, what the Sanskrit texts suggest to me is the possibility that the ‘Seven Sages’ of ancient India were not a small group of remarkable individuals but an institution that persevered through time – perhaps for many thousands of years – that recruited new members in each generation, and that was dedicated to the preservation and transmission to the future of a body of spiritual knowledge from the remote past.
Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization Page 20