Welcome · The Veda you cannot read
From The Sāmaveda — The Veda That Is Sung, taught by Acharya T Krishnatrey. This lesson is free to read.
<pre data-block="statement"> 🕉️ Three of the four Vedas can be written down without loss. The Sāmaveda cannot. Its words are almost entirely borrowed. Of its 1875 mantras, all but roughly seventy-five to a hundred are ṛcas already standing in the Ṛgveda — above all in maṇḍalas 8 and 9. Open the Sāmaveda expecting new poetry and you will be disappointed. That is because the words were never the point. The Sāmaveda is a book of melodies. A sāman is not a verse; a sāman is a tune, with its own name, and the verse is only the thing it is sung on. When a sāman is performed the ṛc underneath is stretched, repeated, broken apart and threaded with syllables that mean nothing at all — hāu, auhoyi, huṃ — until the words have become music. Kṛṣṇa says in the Bhagavadgītā, वेदानां सामवेदोऽस्मि — "of the Vedas I am the Sāmaveda." This is the Veda that a tradition of reciters chose to call the most beautiful of the four, and it earned that on sound alone. </pre>