The Unifying Vedic Seeds of Suffering
The Origins, Beliefs and Practices of the Disciples of Vedic Purity
“Centralists identify a single, pan-Indian, more or less hegemonic, orthodox tradition, transmitted primarily in Sanskrit language, chiefly by members of the brahmanic class … The pluralists, by contrast, envision a decentered profusion of ideas and practices all tolerated and incorporated under the big tent of Hinduism.” (Davis, 1999)
Disciples of the One True Vedic Faith pre-date the localized communal schism of the 1700s BCE between what would later become Hinduism and Zoroastrianism. But they also embody a purity of practice which aspires to an original Vedic faith, prior to its evolution into individual, localized interpretation, and deviation, and seeks to offer a unifying path home across and between the separate faiths it became. They adhere to a belief derived from the original term Veda’s root vid, ‘to know’, and interpret its origin as aspiration to knowledge of the highest sort, knowledge of faith (Davis, 1999). They draw direct lineage from the original Indo-Aryan tribes, gather and sustain their beliefs and rituals through the nomadic oral traditions of the early Vedic people and its translation into Vedic Sanskrit, and their epic texts reflect the embryonic inter-tribal conflict between the original Avestan and Vedic speaking peoples.
The One True Vedic Faith, or Vedic Purity, transcends both the subsequent descendant religious dialects of Hinduism and Zoroastrianism, but also opens a space of common ground which reconciles and rejects different individualized and local practice in Hinduism and Zoroastrianism in efforts to return to an original belief of the Vedic people, and the divine seed from which all other Vedic faiths flourish. If Hinduism is a ‘conglomeration of religions’ (Davis, 1999), then Vedic Purity seeks to revert and reframe this diversity. I will outline the origins, beliefs, and practices of the followers of the Vedic Purity, draw comparison with Hindu and Zoroastrian practice, and offer speculation as to the future of the faith itself.
To practitioners of Vedic Purity, its origins are distinct and clearly defined. The early Indo-Aryan people, nomadic in nature, concentrated their worship on that with which they were close. Their experience centered around migration from place to place, the herding of livestock, the weather, the stars, and their immediate surroundings in Central Asia (McDaniel, 2022a). Yet inter-tribal conflict between rival herding tribes, often centered around fraternal and inter-familial disagreements over livestock and territorial ownership, resulted in a distinct and permanent split where the original followers of the One True Vedic Faith divided into those who crossed the Indus River into what would become modern India, and those who migrated towards Persia. While acknowledging this pluralist perspective, the One True Vedic Faith seeks to unite and return all descendants of the original Vedic faith to the seed from which all divinity and energy germinates. It appeals in equal measure to contemporary retroactive conversion, conversion back from Hindus, Zoroastrians, and by more recent standards, Sikhs.
These subsequent geographical differences exacerbated existing fraternal division, resulting in use of different oral and written language, but also the evolution of different creation myths across Hinduism and Zoroastrianism, and their effects are still pronounced and visceral today. Those who chose to remain in place, much smaller in number, continue to practice the original precepts of Vedic Purity today and their practice actively seeks the reunification of the original community prior to its devolution into Hinduism and Zoroastrianism. Interpretations of the struggle between rival fraternal splinters is one of the central tenets of the epic Mahabharata, which advocates for a path of resolution and restitution motivated by war (McDaniel, 2022b), and which Vedic Purists acknowledge as part of the line of descent, but actively reject.
Contrary to Zoroastrianism, Vedic Purity advocates a position of faith free of founding creators and draws upon the central metaphor of the seed from which to draw its practice and beliefs. It motivates that all faith, energy, and good in the universe germinates from an original Vedic seed. That all divinity and creation is pollinated through the necessity of pure Vedic human activity, and that the seed is the true calling of all Hindus and Zoroastrians. It advocates a pluralist perspective that different descendant faiths may practice their aspirations and paths towards reconciliation with the seed in different ways, but ultimately seek a return to the original Vedic seed upon death. Conversion to Vedic Purity is possible, but only from descendant faiths, and inter-faith marriage, for example between Christians and Vedic Purity practitioners is forbidden. As a result, and echoing contemporary Zoroastrian culture, Vedic Purist communities have remained small over centuries.
Vedic Purists assert that one’s seed germinates upon birth, and through the suffering of life and the elemental forces of heat, light and the nourishment of water, threads a path through life where one’s desired outcome is simply to return to the maternal safety and wombic reassurance of the original Vedic seed. The One True Faith rejects Vedic deviation into practices of physical austerity and asceticism found in Hinduism and Zoroastrianism (McDaniel, 2022a) as simply regional dialects of a shared Vedic faith, and earthly corruptions attempting to manipulate the seed’s original elemental composition. However, for Hindus seeking an alternate path of liberation or moksha free of physical austerity and asceticism, or Zoroastrians seeking simpler alternatives of practice with the same outcomes of divine communion, it can prove appealing. The seed is a syncretic expression of diversity of practice and allows for these differences based on environmental context and necessity, but it forbids the express circumvention of physical behavior in attempts to generate heat, light and water as a means of reconciling with the original seed in ways that seek to cut corners on the path of belief.
Similarly, the beliefs of The One True Vedic Faith do not assert or recognize individual myths or their descendant beliefs or the lineage of creation myths. They do not assert a personified ultimate cosmic power outside of the principle of the Vedic seed, and do not draw divine relationships as in Zoroastrianism between light and dark, good and evil, or personified interpretations of the gods (McDaniel, 2022c). They do, however as in Hinduism and Zoroastrianism, recognize and revere the elemental forces and practices necessary to cause the seed to flourish in life, and the natural environmental rituals which cause it to mature. In this sense, the notion of the Vedic seed echoes that of the Hindu concept of one’s atman, or soul, and its aspiration to connect with the brahma, or oversoul by casting out divine connections, or bandhus through the rituals and behaviors of one’s life (McDaniel, 2022d). As with both Hinduism and Zoroastrianism’s focus on karmic reduction in life, Vedic Purity practitioners also assert that all life is predicated on the reduction of suffering caused by the germination of the seed. They seek to return to the seed itself upon death. Individualized elemental interpretations of what it takes to reconcile with the original Vedic seed are most thoroughly articulated in the four branches of early Vedic texts, the Samhitas, the Brahmanas, the Aranyakas and the Upanishads, which draw out the elemental forces of heat, light and nourishment as a means of acting upon the original seed to not only make it grow but ease one’s suffering through life.
These early Vedas, especially in Hinduism begin to personify and ritualize the elements into gods of water, fire and nourishment in the Samhitas, and offer practical instruction for manipulating these forces in the Brahmanas and Aranyakas (McDaniel, 2022d), but it’s in the Upanishads that we get the clearest articulation of the Vedic principle of the seed, that which contains the atman, but also the very energy universe itself, and from which all subsequent cosmology evolves. The parable of Yajnavalkya’s conversation with a student, where he divides, and divides again a piece of fruit, reducing it to its original seed, is a literal but also metaphoric means of articulating the imperceptibility of the energy which allows the tree to grow (McDaniel, 2022e), and which exists at the very core of Vedic Purity. That all Vedic practice, irrespective of individualized belief inside of Hinduism, Zoroastrianism or Sikhism, motivates at its root a pan-faith unifying elemental desire to commune with the divinity held within the original seed and that life itself is simply a conduit for returning to it.
The practices by which followers of the One True Vedic Faith reconcile these elements vary in complexity and ritualized behavior, but all center around the notion of the elemental focused observation, not manipulation, of self and environment. They believe that observation and contemplation of heat, not through asceticism but through the nurturing, nourishment and consistency of flame is central to the sustaining of one’s faith. That through consistent meditation, one loses oneself to the flame, and is through this able to commune with the element of flame itself. As in Zoroastrianism, families seek to maintain ongoing shrines containing eternal flames in their homes, frequently over many generations (McDaniel, 2022c), but such behavior also diminishes activities where families can travel together. There must always be someone at home to observe and nourish the fire and has often precluded larger communal outreach and growth. These activities also extend to non-invasive methods of agriculture echoed in Zoroastrianism, where the soil is tilled, but food grown underground and devoid of light is forbidden to be consumed. As such, the Vedic Purist diet consists primarily of fruit and grains, and other vegetables which consolidate their growth through the elemental combination of heat, light and water. Underground foodstuffs do not require light in which to grow, and as such are viewed as impure and not for consumption. The growth and maturation of seeds into food becomes a metaphor for what one puts in one’s body and one’s communion with the seed, but also how one aspires to live one’s life.
The unifying pan-faith desire across Hinduism and Zoroastrianism to return to a pure Vedic seed, the atomic unit of existence and faith, that which is purest and the ultimate reduction and validation of the divine in the universe, is starkly characterized by the suffering and struggle of life itself. That the growth from seed into nourishing food, or from birth to death through heat, light and water is itself an intensely painful cycle, ultimately finite, and that the nature of what one’s seed germinates into still rests with the agency of both Hindus and Zoroastrians. But the Vedic seed is where its believers feel safest, their lives spent in service of a return to its cosmic maternal security, finally free of the samsara of earthly existence. This return occurs upon death, where the elements of heat, light and water finally converge into a liberating moksha, and where the seed of one’s life is simply carried off into the wind, awaiting germination in the next life.
Burial is ecologically non-invasive, mirroring agricultural practice, and affords sensitivity and acknowledgement of both the cremation of Hinduism and the sky burial ritual of Zoroastrianism (McDaniel, 2022c). The disciple is simply cast into the warm waters of the Karun River at dawn, again consolidating the elemental forces of heat, light and the nourishment of water on what becomes one’s final journey back to the seed. The river becomes a sacred metaphor for the passage of life, but also a literal receptacle of lineage and documentation of its disciples.
But in conclusion, such unifying aspiration is not without challenge. The premise of Vedic purity has received objection from both Hindu and Zoroastrian followers centered on its embrace but simplification of the original Vedic texts, and in particular its interpretation of the Upanishads. For Zoroastrians the lack of identifiable founder, or personification of evil in the world has been problematic, and for Hindus the adjustment of worship from physical austerity to simple meditative observation, and its dismissal of asrama as a ritual means of organizing one’s aims in life has also caused many to remain with their current faith.
The One True Vedic Faith aspires to a unifying, communal purity in Vedic tradition, and seeks to revert the tribal schisms of the 1700s BCE which resulted in the development of Hinduism and Zoroastrianism. Rejecting such later deviation, but embracing its desire to unite, there is intense focus upon spending one’s life in communion with the Vedic seed, practiced through observational elemental rituals of heat, light and the nourishment of water, and the rejection of harsh physical austerity and ascetic practice. Vedic Purity disciples follow a simple, highly localized existence, and while accepting of pluralist perspectives and diversity of practice, are highly disciplined in diet, lifestyle, and their expressions of faith in much the same ways as contemporary Hindus and Zoroastrians. Their faith seeks to draw both Hindus and Zoroastrians home, and in celebrating that which is purest in life, the very cosmological seed from which all energy germinates, they bring not just themselves but all Vedic people closer to the divine, and to the very unifying energy of the universe itself.
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