Aitareya Brahmana


The Aitareya Brahmana is the Brahmana of the Shakala Shakha of the Rigveda, an ancient Indian collection of sacred hymns. This work, according to the tradition, is ascribed to Mahidasa Aitareya.

Authorship

of Vijayanagara, a 14th century commentator, attributes the entire Aitareya Brahmana to a single man: Mahidasa Aitareya. In his introduction to the text, Sayana suggests that "Aitareya" is a matronymic name. Mahidasa's mother was "Itaraa", whose name is derived from the Sanskrit word "itara". She was one of the wives of a great rishi. The rishi preferred sons from his other wives over Mahidasa. Once he placed all his other sons on his lap, but ignored Mahidasa. On seeing tears in the eyes of her son, Itara prayed to the earth goddess Bhūmi, her kuladevi. Bhūmi then appeared and gifted Mahidasa the knowledge contained in the Aitareya Brahmana.
This story is considered as spurious by scholars such as Arthur Berriedale Keith and Max Müller. Mahidasa is mentioned in other works before Sayana, such as the Chandogya Upanishad and the Aitareya Aranyaka. But none of these works mention Sayana's legend. The Aitareya Aranyaka is undoubtedly a composite work, and it is possible that the Aitareya Brahmana also had multiple authors. According to AB Keith, the present redaction of the work may be ascribed to Mahidasa, but even that cannot be said conclusively.

Identification with Asvalayana Brahmana

The Asvalayana Srautasutra and Asvalayana Grhyasutra, attributed to the sage Asvalayana, are the srautasutra and grhyasutra associated with the Aitareya Brahmana. Some Sanskrit texts also mention a text called Asvalayana Brahmana. For example, Raghunandana, in his Malamasatattva, quotes a verse from what he calls the Asvalayana Brahmana. The verse is a slight variation of an Aitareya Brahmana verse.
The common view is that the Asvalayana Brahmana is simply another name for the Aitareya Brahmana. However, according to another theory, it might be a now-lost, similar but distinct Brahmana text.

Date of composition

The Aitareya Brahmana with some certainty dates to the 1st millennium BCE, likely to its first half.
Published estimates include the following:
Forty adhyayas of this work are grouped under eight pañcikās. The following is an overview of its contents:
;Section 2.7
Astronomy played a significant role in Vedic rituals, which were conducted at different periods of a year. The Aitareya Brahmana states the sun stays still for a period of 21 days, and reaches its highest point on vishuvant, the middle day of this period. The gods feared that at this point, the sun would lose its balance, so they tied it with five ropes. The vishuvant is mentioned as an important day for rituals. The text also mentions that the sun burns with the greatest force after passing the meridian.
The Aitareya Brahmana states:
According to Subhash Kak, this implies that according to the author of the verse, the sun does not move and it is the earth that moves, suggesting heliocentrism and rotation of a spherical Earth. According to Jyoti Bhusan Das Gupta, this verse implies that the author "clearly understood that days and nights were local rather than a global phenomenon". Das Gupta adds that the text's interest in the sun's position appears to be "purely ritualistic", and the verse cannot be conclusively taken as an evidence of the author's recognition of the earth as a sphere. According to K. C. Chattopadhyaya, the verse simply implies that the sun has two sides: one bright and the other dark.
;Section 3.44
In section 3.44, among other things, the Aitareya Brahmana states :
Aitareya Brahmana being a Vedic corpus text and scripture in Hinduism, and the lack of any Mount Meru theories in that text, the medieval era commentators such as Sayana had significant difficulty in reconciling the Vedic era and medieval era cosmographic theories. The medieval era Indian scholars kept the spherical and disc shape cosmography in the Puranas, while the astronomy texts for time keeping assumed the spherical assumptions.

In linguistics

The king and the god is a text based on the "king Harishcandra" episode.
It has been used to compare different reconstructions of Proto-Indo-European language.