Ecological Readings in the Veda

The Vedas are indisputably among the oldest of mankind’s documents. Which Dr. Marta Vannucci rummages through to address a highly enigmatic question: How man evolved as Man: thinking, discriminating, thought-communicating? Or, yet more specifically, how did he come to identify cause-effect relationships of living-beings: both among themselves and with their environment? In looking for answers, she discovers profound biological, physiological, and ecological insights in Vedic writings — which she projects here, with coherent analyses and prolific textual references. Dr Vannucci, who has studied Indian sacred texts for about twenty years, is perhaps the first ever biologist to explore the ecological validity of Vedas. With her critical Florentine mind and five-decade-long involvement in scientific methodologies, she interprets the complex Vedic verses in her thematic effort to decipher the ancient “code” with a “bio-ecological key” -spelling out, contextually, the Matter-Energy principles (embodied in Lord Agni) and Life-Hope principles (personified by Lord Savitr). Also setting out a comparative perspective on Vedic expressions of ecology and its contemporary worldview, the author suggests that the essential difference between the two stems not from the perception of reality, but from the manner of their theorizing. It is a painstakingly documented work, with a large-scale glossary of Sanskrit/ technical words and extensive bibliographic references. And also a foreword by a cultural scholar of Dr Kapila Vatsyayan’s eminence.