Vedanga

The Vedanga (Sanskrit: वेदाङ्ग vedāṅga, "limbs of the Veda") are six auxiliary disciplines in Hinduism that developed in ancient times, and has been connected with the study of the Vedas. These are:

The character of Vedangas has roots in ancient times, and the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad mentions it as an integral part of the Brahmanas layer of the Vedic texts. Individually, these auxiliary disciplines of study are traceable to the 2nd millennium BCE, and the 5th-century BCE scholar Yaska quotes the Vedangas. However, it is unclear when and where a list of six Vedangas were first conceptualized.

The Vedangas likely developed towards the end of the vedic period, around or after the middle of the 1st millennium BCE. These auxiliary fields of Vedic studies emerged because the language of the Vedic texts composed centuries earlier grew too archaic to the people of that time. The Vedangas were sciences that focused on helping understand and interpret the Vedas that had been composed many centuries earlier.

Vedangas developed as ancillary studies for the Vedas, but its insights into meters, structure of sound and language, grammar, linguistic analysis and other subjects influenced post-Vedic studies, arts, culture and various schools of Hindu philosophy. The Kalpa Vedanga studies, for example, gave rise to the Dharma-sutras, which later expanded into Dharma-shastras.

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