Bharadvaja, the Vedic sage behind a yoga pose and a cow hymn
Yoga students who twist into Bharadvajasana are honouring a seer from India's oldest scripture. The family of poets that carried his name composed much of the Rigveda, including the earliest hymn celebrating the cow as sacred, and later tradition credited him with everything from archery manuals to a surprisingly physical theory of conception.
In the Rigveda, Bharadvaja is less a single man than the founder of a clan of pastoralist priests, represented by around sixteen seers. Hymns ascribed to the family make up most of the sixth of the Rigveda's ten books, with more scattered through the fourth, ninth and tenth, though many were probably written by distant descendants. The early Bharadvajas worshipped Pushan, a herders' god. As later hymns promoted Pushan into the wider pantheon as a brother or helper of Indra, the family rose with him, becoming ritual specialists for herding tribes and winning their verses a place in the canon.
His name is usually glossed as bringing nourishment, and he is listed among the seven great seers of Vedic tradition. Buddhist scripture remembers him too: in one Pali text the Buddha names ten early sages whose ancient verses were still being chanted, and Bharadvaja is among them.
Later literature made him a patron of learning. The medical classic Charaka Samhita says he asked Indra for the science of healing because illness was preventing people from pursuing spiritual life, and it records his view that an embryo arises from the physical union of parents at the right point in the cycle, not from wishes, prayers or mystical forces. Treatises on archery, phonetics, ethics and ritual all bear his name, and his ritual manuals rank among the oldest of their kind.
The epics fold him into their family trees. The Mahabharata makes him the father and weapons teacher of Drona, the great warrior-tutor of the rival princes. In the Ramayana, Rama, Sita and Lakshmana visit his hermitage as their fourteen-year exile begins; he invites them to stay, but they press on to Chitrakuta, and he points the way.
Source: Bharadvaja
