Shatapatha Brahmana
Satapatha Brahmana
Every element of the elaborate Vedic sacrifice, down to the individual bricks of the fire altar, encodes a cosmological truth, so that performing the ritual correctly is itself an act of understanding the structure of the universe.
- ritual detail as encoded cosmology
- the Agnicayana fire-altar construction
- an early Indian flood myth (Manu)
- culminates in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
The longest and most important Brahmana, attached to the White Yajurveda, explaining Vedic ritual (including the Agnicayana fire-altar construction and the horse sacrifice) line by line while interweaving myth, cosmology, and etymology. It preserves an early Indian flood myth centered on Manu and, in its concluding books, contains the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, marking the hinge between sacrifice-centered Vedic religion and the introspective metaphysics that follows it. Its very name, meaning 'of a hundred paths,' refers to its hundred lectures (adhyayas), and it survives in two recensions, the Madhyandina and the Kanva, which differ in arrangement though not fundamentally in doctrine.
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