Have you heard about the Vedas?

They are our primary scriptures.

All our other scriptures like Ramayana, Mahabharata, Puranas, Bhagavad Gita, they are all based on the Vedas.

But there is one thing very peculiar about the vedas.

They are not books as you understand them.

What do books contain?

Knowledge.

You are an expert in a certain subject, say the history of India.

So you can write a book about the history of India, a book of 200 or 300 or 500 pages.

But before you wrote that book also that knowledge was there inside your head.

Where did that come from?

From other sources.

Not from another single book, may be from many sources.

That means knowledge existed even before the book was written.

So let’s say there is a Vedic scholar.

He knows the Vedas.

He knows the whole Vedas by heart.

He can chant all the mantras without looking at the book.

Where did he learn this from?

From his Guruji.

They don’t teach and learn like how you do in schools.

Hoe does someone learn music?

Not from a book.

The music teacher would sing, you will listen to that and then try to sing after her.

If there is a mistake, she would correct you.

The same method is followed in learning Vedas also, without the need for books.

Like how there are rules in singing, the saregama, shruti, taal and all that, there are rules for reciting the vedas also.

There are swaras like saregama in the vedas also.

Swaras, then the tempo, all these are important in memorizing and chanting vedas.

Those mantras that you hear these days, like Gayatri Mantra, Mrityunjaya Mantra, someone sings them giving their own tune with music instruments, they are not following the pattern originally given in the Vedas.

That is why they don’t work.

What if someone sings our national anthem in a different tune, like rock music, will you like it?

So everything works if you follow the prescribed system.

You can write your own lyrics and compose it whichever way you want, no problem.

But Veda mantras are meant to be chanted with their own swaras and tempo and specific ways of pronunciation.

Most of these mantra songs, the pronunciation is also wrong.

Some of them say pushiti vardhanam in Mrityunjaya Mantra.

It is pushti; not pushiti.

So many mistakes they make.

This is because they have not learned from a proper source.

Coming back.

The present Vedic scholar learned by listening to his Guruji.

His Guruji learned from his Guruji.

Like that going back and back how far can you go?

Some 200 crores of years.

That is when Brahma created the world.

How did our Sages find out that the world was created so many years back?

By looking at planetary movements, they calculated.

At the time of creation, all the planets were at one point together.

Then they started moving at different speeds.

They got separated from each other.

From their present position and speed, the Sages calculated that the world was created 200 crores of years back.

But how did Brahma know what to create?

All that information about everything is contained in Vedas.

So a super God called Parmatma, Parabrahma gave Veda to Brahma and said: create the world, all the knowledge that you need are in these mantras.

It was not a book.

It was just mantras.

So even before the world came into existence, Vedas existed as mantras, as sound.

These mantra are eternal.

This knowledge is eternal.

It doesn’t change.

Veda is pure knowledge.

It is not stories, it is not about a particular God; when he was born, what all he did.

Vedas are pure knowledge.

Then a few thousand years back when the technology of paper, ink, printing all that developed, even the veda started getting written and printed like other books.

Vedas are taught orally without the use of books.

Even today even if books are available, the traditional Vedic gurukuls don’t use them.

They still use the traditional method.