ABSTRACT
The Vedic texts contain no Hindu dogma, no basis for a "creed" of Hinduism, no clear guidelines for the "Hindu way of life". They offer only vague and questionable analogues to those ideas and ways of orientation that have become basic presuppositions of later Hinduism. In dealing with the Veda, the Hindu tradition combines strict commitment to textual and phonetic details with an extraordinary freedom of speculation. The "real" and original Veda is thus contrasted with the extant Vedic texts and invoked against their "orthodox" and inflexible guardians, and a dynamic sense of tradition is brought into confrontation with a static and archival one. The language of the Veda is primeval reality. It reflects a wider sense of identity, a sense of coherence in a shared context and of inclusion in a common framework and horizon, and it refers us to some fundamental implications of the elusive reality of "Hinduism".
