Why is the Veda called Apauruṣeyā?

Indian philosophical wisdom starts with an undifferentiated reservoir of knowledge called the Veda, which was later grouped into four major branches. The knowledge incorporated in the Vedas is not limited to just a spiritual quest. They deal with all aspects of human life, from the most mundane to the most spiritual. The word Veda is derived from the root word, vid which means to know.

It is said that the wisdom incorporated in the Veda was not authored by a human agent. There is a great controversy about this assertion. How can something be written or passed-on by a non-human or a super-human agency? The statement seems like a logical fallacy.

This idea of Apauruṣeyā (अपौरुषेय), of the Veda can be explained as follows. An author is a person who has authority in that particular subject matter. At one level, this is a categorical statement and at another level, we can say that the authorship of the person is only assigned to him, when in fact he is only a human channel through which that particular information flowed. Consider the example of Isaac Newton who is said to have discovered gravity. He developed elaborate theories on this subject matter and is therefore unequivocally considered the authority on the subject of gravity. However, this statement can also be interpreted from another angle. Newton only discovered that which is already present in nature, happening by its own intelligence. He is only a human agent who “picked up” the phenomenon called gravity. In doing so, and developing further on this phenomenon, Newton paved great advancements in the field of physics.

Dmitri Mendeleev was a Russian chemist, who in his dream was said to have “conceived” the entire periodic table of elements. “I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper,” Mendeleev recounted in his diary. His “revelation” ushered enormous advancements the field of chemistry.

Another example is that of the ingenuity of Srinivasa Ramanujan. A little-known mathematician Ramanujan, who in his short lifespan of merely 32 years, made some revolutionary and surprising discoveries. He was a self-taught, poor Brahmin from India with no formal education, who had a belief that fell far outside the bounds of organized study. He once told Cambridge mathematician Godfrey Hardy that, “A formula had no meaning unless it expressed a thought of God.” While mathematicians in general were trained to systematically prove each of their theorems with extensive methodology, Ramanujan was a man of intuition. Ramanujan’s results were (as Hardy put it) “arrived at by a process of mingled argument, intuition, and induction, of which he was entirely unable to give any coherent account.” Once Ramanujan was asked about a new equation he had derived. His reply was that it was a Hindu goddess who had appeared in his dream and helped him solve that problem.

History is replete with such individuals who gained authority in their fields by overcoming many odds. But why is it that only certain individuals were able to decipher nature’s mysteries while other are oblivious to them? It can be said that the real authority of this knowledge lies in the underlying intelligence which is responsible for, in our examples, the gravity, the organization of chemical elements, or the complex patterns whereas the human agents (in this case Newton, Mendeleev or Ramanujan respectively) with their unique abilities were able “tune into” and “pick-up” these phenomena from nature by means of “revelations,” which transcend the ordinary sense perception.

So, at one level, the author of the subject matter is a human agent, and at another level, the real authority is the super-human or non-human intelligence that is responsible for the particular phenomenon that occurs in nature. In ancient India, there existed human agents, the rishis, who developed unique abilities attuned to “pick-up” the phenomena that occurred in nature and record them, which became the vast repertoire of knowledge called the Veda.