Max Mueller introducing the Vedas to Europe (pre-1867) in a lecture

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"Chips from a German Workshop" by Max Muller, Oxford University

Press, 1867

Chapter 1: "Lecture on the Vedas or the Sacred Books of the

Brahmans, Delivered at Leeds, 1865", pages

17-18

"In no country, I believe, has the theory of

revelation been so minutely elaborated as in India. The name for revelation in Sanskrit is Sruti,

which means hearing; and this title distinguished the Vedic hymns and, at a

later time, the Brahmanas also, from all other works, which however sacred and

authoritative to the Hindu mind, are admitted to have been composed by human

authors. The Laws of Manu, for instance, are not revelation; they are not

Sruti, but only Smriti, which means recollection of tradition. If these laws or any other work of authority

can be proved on any point to be at variance with a single passage of the Veda,

their authority is at once overruled.

According to the orthodox views of Indian theologians, not a single line

of the Veda was the work of human authors.

The whole Veda is in some way or the other the work of the Deity; and

even those who saw it were not supposed to be ordinary mortals, but beings

raised above the level of common humanity, and less liable therefore to error

in the reception of revealed truth. The

views entertained by the orthodox theologians of India

are far more minute and elaborate than those of the most extreme advocates of

verbal inspiration in Europe. The human element, called paurusheyatva in

Sanskrit, is driven out of every corner or hiding place, and as the Veda is

held to have existed in the mind of the Deity before the beginning of time..."