In this chapter I will discuss the problem of the beginning of abstract thinking as it is attested in the Ṛgveda. It is an ancient Indian text from the fifteenth to the thirteenth centuries BCE, composed in Sanskrit. Its final redaction was done probably in the seventh century BCE. The Ṛgveda (similarly to other early Indian texts) was composed and transmitted orally for centuries. Its earliest known manuscript is dated to the eleventh century CE.

In his paper ‘The Linguistic Task of the Presocratics’ Havelock (1983) reconstructs the beginnings of abstract concepts in Pre-Socratic philosophy. He shows how the concepts of dimension and space, body and matter, void, change, motion, etc., were created. He claims that the beginning of abstract thought is connected with the beginning of literacy. He shows how the Pre-Socratics used their earlier oral tradition, how they extended the meanings of words and broke the rules of traditional syntax in order to produce more abstract meanings.

My analysis will show that the way chosen by the Pre-Socratic philosophers is not the only possible way of creating abstract concepts. Moreover, my claim is that abstract thought is not necessarily connected with literacy because, as I have just mentioned, the early Indian texts were composed and transmitted orally.

The most general definition of the abstract concept is that it is a concept that does not refer to any concrete experience. We do not find many such concepts in the Ṛgveda. The main instances are sát (being/truth), ásat (non-being/untruth) and ṛtá, which is translated as ‘truth, order, cosmos’. (For ṛtá see also Chaturvedi in this volume.) While sát and ásat appear rarely and mostly in abstract contexts, ṛtá often appears in contexts which evoke concrete concepts connected with everyday life experience. For example, we can read about its horn, milk, udder, womb, etc. The expressions ‘horn of truth’ or ‘udder of cosmos’ sound strange, but the concept denoted by the word ṛtá must be such as to justify them. What is also intriguing is that the word ṛtá is the past participle of the verb ṛ-, ‘to go’, and literally means ‘something that has gone’.