Thanks for the added context. I’m wondering, by “nowhere else”, what of the Babylonians and such, and the Chinese: did they not have money by this time?
This is from one of his articles, not the one I linked before:
In both Greece and northern India archaeology, supplemented by textual evidence, has demonstrated the relatively rapid spread of coins in sufficiently high numbers, and of sufficiently low value to be widely used in everyday life. In the Greek city-states this is known to have begun in the early sixth century. In India the chronology is much more obscure. Recent research points to the second half of the fifth century. In Greece there is a clear temporal as well as a spatial correlation between the spread of coinage and the intellectual revolution. In northern India there is a spatial correlation; for demonstrating a temporal correlation the evidence is insufficient, but does not exclude it. We should also note the possibility that the use of coinage (in trade) may have come to northern India indirectly from the Greeks, and the probability that in both societies some precious metal monetisation preceded the intoduction of coinage.
Along with such uncertainties there is the near certainty that at the end of the fifth century the two societies most pervaded by coined money were (as a result of geographical and political factors that I cannot discuss here) the Greek polis and the northern states of India, in advance of the ancient urban civilisations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Levant.Again, the only possible exception is China, whose early coinage and philosophical cosmology I briefly discuss in my aforementioned book → (The Origins of Philosophy in Ancient Greece and Ancient India. A Historical Comparison (Cambridge University Press 2020))
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Thanks, that’s excellent context. Given that the historical situation around the time of the Buddha is so unclear, it’s important to carefully interpret evidence, as Jayarava has initiated in the thread on gold-plating.
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I’m currently working on a post all about the RgVedic concepts that surround Soma, immortality, ritual, cremation, cognition, and rebirth. I’ve been inspired to study this in more depth, consider different angles of the question, and try and learn enough detail to present a helpful basic overview. However, I would like to comment here with some more resources surrounding rebirth/karma in the early Veda that I had mostly not left in other comments. These are separate from Jurewicz (2008, 2010) who provides what is probably the most through analysis of the philosophy of the text in history and demonstrates how the rebirth eschatology she reconstructs from the 10th Mandala is consistent with all of the RgVeda as a whole and in fact explains certain previously obscure parts of it.
- Killingley D., 1997. ‘The paths of the dead and the five fires’. In: P. Connolly, S. Hamilton
(Eds.). Indian Insights: Buddhism, Brahmanism and Bhakti. Papers from the Spalding
Symposium on Indian Religions. London: Luzac Oriental, 1-20 - Tull H. W., 1989. The Vedic Origins of Karma. Cosmos as Man in Ancient Indian Myth and
Ritual. New York: State University of New York Press - Bergaigne A. 1963. La religion védique d’après les hymnes du Rig-Veda. 3 vols. Paris:
Librairie Honoré Champion (first edition 1878–83). - Oberlies T., 1998. Die Religion des Çgveda. Erster Teil. Das religiöse System des Çgveda.
Wien: Institut für Indologie der Universität Wien. - Dange S. A. 2000. Images from Vedic Hymns and Rituals. New Delhi: Aryan Books
International - Obeyesekere G., 2002. Imagining Karma. Ethical transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist,
and Greek Rebirth. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press - Lévi, Sylvian, 1966. La doctrine du sacrifice dans les Brāhmaṇas. Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1898.
and Second Edition. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. - Heestermann J. C., 1957. The ancient Indian royal consecration. The rājasūya described
according to the yajus texts and annoted. ‘s-Gravenhage: Mouton and Co. - Krishan, Yuvaraj, 1997. The Doctrine of Karma: Its Origins and Development in Brāhmaṇical,
Buddhist and Jaina Traditions. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, Pvt. Ltd. - Renou L. 1956. Hymnes spéculatifs du Veda. Paris: Gallimard.
- Kaelber W.O. 1975. ‘Tapas, Birth, and Spiritual Rebirth in the Veda’. History of Religions
15, 2: 343–386.
Many of these scholars’ findings are based on separate areas of research. For instance, Heesterman sees the ideas of transmigration in the royal consecration rituals/beliefs; Obeyesekere sees it as implied based on research of non-Indic rebirth and the development of it over time in Vedic texts; Dange and Jurewicz analyze the passages from the 10th Mandala and see the same ideas underlying other passages, as does Oberlies; Krishan and Lévi look at the descriptions of karma/ritual action and reward and the consumption of this.
Also, I’d like to call MN 93 to our attention: Here, the Buddha explicitly converses with brahmins who believe in rebirth, and he uses their own beliefs to disprove that one is a brahmin from one’s parents, thereby convincing them. Also, in DN 13, two brahmins tell the Buddha that various Brahmanical schools teach differing paths to union with Brahmā. This agrees with the surviving texts we have today from these schools that teach variations between rebirth paths and paths to union with brahma(n)/the Sun according to knowledge and ritual and so on; this disagreement would mean that some schools’ explanation for union with Brahmā would count for general rebirth in another, causing the brahmins to approach the Buddha who was an expert in this matter. This relates to the discussion with @Sunyo on brahmins believing in or denying rebirth.
The article by Kaelber (1975) is a good read in relation to MN 93 and relates to @sujato’s somewhat recent post on the gandhabba and semen. The semen, contained within the father, was understood as the child/embryo itself that was placed into the mother where it was heated or brooded on and grew to maturation; in other words, the father carried the son/person being born within him. There is an extremely prevalent idea throughout the Veda (from the RgVeda down through the Upaniṣads) that a father is reborn in his son, or that the son is equivalent with the father. MN 93 is presenting these same ideas, and yet assuming that the seed in the father is being reborn. We may also say: why is there an ancient association with sons and being reborn, and also talk of coming down from the Sun to rejoin your offspring? It seems, as many of these scholars suggest and demonstrate textually, that rebirth was a part of Vedic society for a long time (even if there were other ideas of immortality co-existing).
EDIT: I am also now looking through the Atharvaveda and its analysis in regards to rebirth. The Atharvaveda is very relevant to the Buddhist-Brahmanism relationship as several scholars have already noted. Here too, the same ideas of rebirth in the form of rain/water from the Sun are expressed. I won’t go into it here and will save it for a later post to give it justice.
Here too I leave a passage from the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa on rebirth conceived in very similar terms to the Jaiminīya Brāhmaṇa:
ŚB 10.4.3.10-11
té yá evám etád vidúḥ | yé vaitát kárma kurváte mr̥ tvā́ púnaḥ sámbhavanti té
sambhávanta evā̀mr̥ tatvám abhisámbhavanty átha yá eváṃ ná vidur yé vaitát
kárma ná kurváte mr̥ tvā́ púnaḥ sámbhavanti tá etásyaivā́nnam púnaḥ-punar
bhavanti | (10)
sa yád agníṃ cinuté | etám evá tád ántakam mr̥ tyúṃ saṃvatsarám prajā́patim
agním āpnoti yáṃ devā́ ā́pnuvann etám úpadhatte yáthaivaìnam adó devā́
upā́dadhata | (11)
And they who so know this, or they who do this holy work, come to life again
when they have died, and, coming to life, they come to immortal life. But they
who do not know this, or do not do this holy work, come to life again when
they die, and they become the food of him (Death) time after time. (10)
But when he builds the fire-altar, he thereby gains Agni, Prajāpati, the Year,
Death, the Ender, whom the gods gained; it is him he lays down even as the
gods thus laid him down.
Again, I’m starting to see that this whole idea of rebirth being absent until the Upaniṣads seems to be like the situation on the history of Buddhist sects: several scholars seem to have ended up believing and citing the same ideas that can be misproven with more thorough readings of the texts and their philosophies. What’s worse, in the early Upaniṣads (BU, CU, KU, AU, TU), the concepts surrounding rebirth are evoked metonymically (i.e. used indirectly for figurative language to describe something tangential) without explanation, suggesting that these concepts were widespread in the time of the pre-Buddhist Upaniṣads (otherwise they would be unintelligible to the audience). The Upaniṣads are drawing from the Brāhmaṇa period of course, where we see these ideas also. I think it is one giant academic myth that has been slowly busted, TBH.
Mettā 
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For casual reading, Ch.2 of Richard Gombrich’s What the Buddha Thought introduces Seaford’s work with mutual comments between the authors.
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TBH sounds like a few posts in there! if you’re creating a series on the same topic, make a tag to help us find them!
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It’s great reading all this, a lot of stuff that I did not know about regarding the Vedas. It would be cool if there was a kind of primer for non-expert Buddhists on Vedic ideas, to fill out the background that so many of us miss when reading the suttas. It seems like this kind of thing would go a long way to helping people better understand the suttas.
Also, the same is needed with information about early Jainism / sramana religions. I think in this case there is less scholarship being done on it, but it is just as important.
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Thanks everybody for the thoughtful and friendly contributions. 
I hope I can return in kind.
@Jayarava, that’s true, some do. But as you know the classification of “Vedas” is somewhat messy. I hoped this would have been clear from my post, but to clarify, by “the Vedas” I meant the earlier strata, not the Upanishads. Because of course rebirth is present in the Upanishads, nobody would deny that.
I agree, “Old Indic-speaking Indo-Europeans entering the subcontinent ca 1500 BCE did not believe in a cyclic afterlife.” My suggestion is—though this can of course never be known absolutely—that their non-rebirth beliefs may have survived in India for longer than is commonly assumed, that only after the Buddha they got essentially swept away.
@Vaddha, thanks also. It’s hard to respond to any specifics if you tell us it takes hundreds of pages to understand, so here are some more general thoughts:
Also, it is somewhat of a ‘big ask’ to ask for a clear, abstract, philosophical statement about the nature of the afterlife process in the RgVeda—these types of texts are simply not how the RgVeda operates.
But the Rig Veda often is extremely direct and plain, though, arguable even more so than the Pali suttas. For example, some prayers to the gods are things like “let us defeat our enemies”, “grant us cows and horses”, “give us great riches”, “let us live a hundred years”, and so on. Now, why would it certainly be “intentionally ambiguous”, as you said, when the context is more “mystical”, like the afterlife? To say, “grant me a good rebirth”, for example, would not be a weird or complicated wish, nor would or “let me be born in a wealthy family” or any of the endless ways such wishes could have been worded very plainly. But this never happens. (While even in the Pali Canon, although it is much more pessimistic about life and not about wanting things, we do find such wishes.)
However, there actually are very plain wishes about the afterlife in the Rig Veda, but they are always things like “may I be immortal”, “bring me to the permanent, deathless world”, “send him to the Fathers”, and so forth. Or for example RV10 says that Agni lifts one to immortality (rather than rebirth) of the Fathers, where one bears another body in heaven. None of these statements are very ambiguous at all, so I’d say there actually are clear philosophical statements about the afterlife in the Rig Veda. But none of them plainly refer to rebirth, which I personally think would be odd if rebirth was indeed a significant belief of the early Vedic society. Why would rebirth be ambiguous, while so many other things are not?
(I mean, I’m not concerned about the supposed underlying rebirth process even, I’m just asking about one clear reference to something like “another birth”. If that is already a “big ask”, I don’t know what to say… then I feel sorry for the priests who recited these texts, 
for if it’s indeed all so cryptic, then they surely also must have had no clue of what the composers originally had in mind. 
Then they were wishing for a permanent immortal heaven but it was actually just more rebirth!)
This prevalent Vedic theme of immortality (amrita), which happens after a single life, is the opposite of rebirth. That’s exactly why the Buddha used the same concept (amata, the Deathless) to refer to nibbāna, the end of rebirth. Just for these reasons alone I’m skeptical about Lopez’s assertion that the concept of immortality started shifting in relatively early Vedic times to include rebirth, which is the very antithesis of immortality. Also, in Buddhism, it’s actually the continuation of consumption of the four nutriments that leads to rebirth, and if you stop consuming the four metaphorical nutriments, rebirth and existence will end. But in Lopez’s thought, it is the opposite. If you stopped eating heavenly food, you actually got more existence in another life. That seems somewhat unintuitive with the obvious underlying concept of “food = life”.
What I think is more intuitive is that “again dying” refers to a permanent death in the heaven realms, as even Lopez and Shushan admit may be what’s meant, not rebirth. This would also explain why these texts indeed mention “again dying” but never “again born”. “The theory of rebirth does not appear in the Vedas; but the theory of re-death appears at a very early stage indeed,” is Wendy Doniger O’flaherty’s opening line in Karma and Rebirth in the Vedas and Puranas (an essay in Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions). Then, quoting a certain David M. Knipe, she says the quest for immortality reflects a “desire to prevent the dissolution of an after-life for the deceased [i.e. a permanent ‘re-death’] […] The need to provide ritual food for the deceased ancestors would then be based on the desire to keep them there in some sort of heaven […] to prevent them from suffering ‘repeated death’.” I.e. from oblivion or alike.
(That may be exactly why the Buddha told us to stop consuming the metaphorical nutriments, which to Brahmins would have sounded like a crazy idea! Because unlike the Brahmins his aim actually was to stop existence altogether!)
About the later development of these ideas of re-death Doniger O’flaherty then says: “It may be that ancient Indian ideas about [re]death predate and indeed predetermine the later theory of [re]birth.” Keith likewise wrote: “There can be no doubt that [in the Vedas] the repeated death is [only] in the next world, not in this: it is applied to the Fathers […] It remained only to transfer [this idea of repeated death] to the present world and the effect of transmigration was reached. But though this step is taken in the Upanisads it is by no means universally to be found there. […] The earliest notice of the doctrine of transmigration preserved for us, apart from a few very dubious allusions in the Çatapatha Brahmana, is to be traced in the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad.”
So, while many things are very unambiguous in the Vedas, there is no unambiguous mention of “again birth” or something like that prior to the Upanishad, nor is rebirth very evident in other ways. That’s just the state of the matter, otherwise so many scholars wouldn’t be claiming that rebirth isn’t found in the early Vedas, and we wouldn’t be having this discussion! This absence of rebirth continues in the Brahmanas, at least in general. “The Upanisads hold in some degree at least the doctrine of transmigration,” wrote again Keith, “[but] these views are not those of the Brahmanas, which, taken all in all, know not transmigration. […] The Brahmanas contain on the whole no acceptance of the doctrine of transmigration: the soul aims at the [permanent] world of the Fathers as before.” More recent scholars have echoed these views, so I would not say any of these things are long uncontroversial.
I also think we disagree on what counts as “unambiguous”. 
To see rebirth in some of these texts we must be willing to rely on metaphors and inferences, as I said before, and as you seemed to agree. But then I would also quote Shushan: “When are we to take something literally, and when are we to consider it as metaphorical; and how are we to identify symbols, and interpret and understand the symbolism?” Those are not easy questions to answer, surely. It’s definitely not impossible to put on certain tinted glasses (e.g. the glasses of the Upanishads) and read the metaphors through those lenses, as Reat warned against in my opening post. It’s a human tendency to see patterns in chaos. I tend to be more reserved about various connections some scholars you’ve mentioned are making.
That said, some references to the JB you gave seem more compelling references to rebirth, at least at first glance. I would need to study them more to be convinced, because in each passage it would seem to hinge on only one or two words for me. Either way, this already moves us into the Brahmana period, probably centuries after the earliest Vedas, by which time the Aryans would have thoroughly cross-pollinated with other cultures, including I assume the native Indians (correct me if I’m wrong). Also, even if we do have rebirth in some pre-Upanishadic passages, the idea still remains marginal there.
I may read some of those books you mentioned one day, perhaps they are more compelling. For now I remain unconvinced that rebirth was a concept of any real significance to the early Brahmins (perhaps even to many of the later Brahmins) and still think it was totally absent in at least the earliest layers of the Vedas, especially the Rig Veda.
Because Jurewicz’ interpretation of those Rig Vedic verses (since you keep referring to them) were unconvincing to me. Curious grammar aside, the very translations she argues against actually seem much more contextually appropriate. The context is cremation, so what’s going on is the person leaving this world for the Fathers, not them coming back from there (just like the smoke of the cremation fire only goes up, not down) and to speak about “bodily remains” at a cremation also seems more suitable than “offspring”. (That’s just some quick thoughts to not get into the weeds.)
Her suggestion that a certain verb can evoke multiple meanings at once seems also somewhat farfetched. If I say “I’m going home” it means I go to my house, and if I say “I’m going out” it means I am going from my house, but these different usages do not give us any good reason for the phrase ‘am going’ to ever imply both ‘to’ and ‘from’ in some other context. I don’t see why it would be any different in the case she is discussing. That’s not really how language tends to work generally, where we derive the meaning from the direct context in question, not by evoking “the images and concepts stored in memory”. In this case, one naturally goes to the Fathers at one’s cremation, not coming back from there.
The translations she disputes are also less “weighty” in meaning, so to speak, by which I mean they don’t infer a conceptually heavy idea (that of rebirth) which is absent in the earlier parts of the RV. In other words, the comparatively simpler concepts and greater consistency with the rest of the text speak in their favor as well. Regardless, if I’m wrong—and since I’m outside of my own area of expertise (which is Pali, not Sanskrit) I may well be—rebirth still would be a fringe concept in the Rig Veda itself, far outweighed by the single-afterlife ideas.
You mentioned Obeyesekere a couple times too, but in that article he himself even says that “in the Rg Veda the chief place for the dead is heaven. The soul at death, driven by a chariot or on wings, takes the route of the fathers and reaches a place of eternal rest.” That is, the Fathers is a permanent abode, not a way to rebirth, like Jurewicz suggests.
To all:
To me it seems not unreasonable to assume that rebirth was the belief of India pre Aryan migration, but that the Aryans brought in other ideas with the Vedas, as Jayarava also said. The two different belief systems then blended together, resulting in inconsistent texts like the Upanishads. I think it’s also telling that the Upanishads have conflicting rebirth beliefs, and (if true) that some passages even “clearly reject rebirth” (wrote Jayatilleke, I’m not sure which passages he refers to). It shows that there was controversy about these ideas even among the Brahmins themselves. It would be natural for such controversies to have arisen when different beliefs about the afterlife met one another. It wouldn’t very naturally happen if the Aryans of the Rig Veda held rebirth beliefs and then migrated to a place which had similar beliefs. In various suttas it’s also clear that ancient India was a melting pot of different beliefs about the afterlife. Some of the wrong views such as those of in DN1 also very much fit the Vedic ideas of a single human life resulting in one immortal afterlife, although they are worded more abstractly there than in the Vedas. E.g. “a permanent healthy percipient Self after death”, seems to mean after a single death, and references to such a Self having a body (“form”) are similar also to the aims of some Rig Vedic prayers (although they don’t call it a Self).
Now, a lot of early Vedic concepts, like specific sacrifices, the names of Gods, the priest class, the idea of amata, etc. all survived rather unscathed into the Buddha’s time, perhaps a whole millennium or more after their initial conception! So it’s not at all far-fetched to assume the earliest Brahmanical afterlife beliefs would have survived as well, at least among more traditional brahmins (who may well have made up the majority of Brhamins). And to me it very much seems this belief was not that of rebirth.
I’m saying this to again question the common assumption that rebirth was the clear majority belief of India at the Buddha’s time. We’ll never know for sure wheter it wa or wasn’t, but I don’t think that we should just assume things without question, as is often done.
What does it matter? Pragmatically not much, perhaps, but how you look at the society of the time does influence the way you read the suttas, and how you interpret the Vedas influences the way you look at the Buddha’s responses to them. I shared some ideas on the four nutriments already. As another example, perhaps the Buddha talked about rebirth a lot not because everybody already believed it, but to actually convince people of it. After all, there is little reason to teach things everybody already agrees with. 
For those reasons, like Venerable Sujato, I’m also happy this discussion is here. But Imma leave it for now! Because it doesn’t seem fair to argue further without having read some of the referred sources, and I don’t have access to them (nor the willingness right now, to be honest). I hope others will also consider reading some of the works I have mentioned—while keeping in mind that it is logically impossible to prove the absolute absence of things, e.g. the absence of rebirth in certain texts, and that there also isn’t too much to say about things being absent. Also, I encourage everybody to read at least a translation of the Rig Veda for themselves, and make a judgement based on that. When I did so myself, I didn’t see rebirth anywhere, like many more learned scholars.
Thanks everybody for the contributions. Hopefully the discussion continues, and hopefully somebody else will further (and more skillfully) argue for the views I supported, because I think they have some merit.
Perhaps it’s not what you mean by a “primer”, but very comprehensive (and open access) is Keith’s The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads. (But as for the discussion we’re having here, keep in mind that he presents only one side.)
For the Upanishads Olivelle wrote a great general introduction in his translations to the Early Upanishads. His translations are very readable as well, and definitely read the Bhrdaranyaka and Chandogya. (Again, for this discussion about rebirth in the early Vedas please note Olivelle also has voiced similar thoughts as Keith.)
Be forewarned that the Vedas and Upanishads, being the creation of various clans and religious leaders rather than a single individual, as is basically the case of the early Buddhist suttas, are much, much less uniform than the suttas. Don’t expect one single coherent doctrine, which is also a reason a short primer is unlikely to do these texts much justice.
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I understand where you’re coming from in coming to the conclusions you do, and I think it best to respect your wish not to continue the discussion. I’ll leave some remarks in response with no obligation to continue if you don’t wish Personally, and I mean no offence with this, I think you are underqualified to judge what seems most ‘reasonable’ or realistic about what these texts mean without having read and studied them in more depth. Some of your assumptions would seem logical but do not hold their weight in this context. For instance, asking for cows often can and does refer to the rising sun and the release of writer’s block to compose poetry; it is not so straightforward. To suggest that it is farfetched to consider the intentional polysemy in a word, etc. all seem to me just an unfamiliarity with the genre—and that is perfectly fair. I’ve quoted passages from the JB and SB which refer to rebirth, and the ‘uncontroversial’ reference was to the JB five fires specifically—not rebirth in the RgVeda or as a common belief. I quoted one small excerpt to try and make the analyses more tangible; the interpretation of this model does not depend on a few words (at all).
I’d also add that all the mentions of immortality are won only by male brahmins who perform specific rituals and have deep knowledge of the Veda—what about the rest of the population or people who do not end up meeting these criteria? Moreover, the RgVeda mentions the poets attaining literal immortality on earth in the Soma sacrifice, which they then descend from after the ritual. Mentions of the afterlife are not common in the text as both sides of scholars mention. If ritual is understood as a literal journey to the immortal world and the attainment of amrta (and it was), why would the afterlife conception not be the same—especially when the underlying model of reality in the RgVeda is about constant transformation between Agni and Soma (idealized in the form of Sun and Rain)? We can also ask why the models for rebirth as rising up and descent down with rain and so forth is found throughout all strata of Vedic texts, etc. through to the Upanisads that assume them as background.
I’d be curious to know what Upanisadic passage denies rebirth. JUB, BU, CU, AU, TU, KU, etc. all talk of rebirth and often in very similar ways compatible with earlier tradition. That is, all the pre-Buddhist Upanisads, which also require the context of the Veda they are situated within (and thus are not removed from earlier philosophy spouting their own).
I think it’s good to be skeptical and to inquire for ourselves, and if you get the time / access I highly recommend reading Jurewicz’s second book especially (Fire, Death, and Philosophy). You may change your mind, or not, but it’s good to assess either way You quoted Obeyesekere to support the idea of no rebirth, and yet the book builds up to him concluding that rebirth probably did exist in Vedic society beforehand but, for whatever reason, was not recorded in the selective RgVeda as far as he saw at the time.
I could probably quote dozens of esteemed scholars who say that the second Buddhist council was at the time of Asoka between the Sthaviravadins and Mahasamghikas—but our understanding has changed as we investigate deeper. There are still dozens of RgVedic passages whose meaning is yet to be reconstructed. That other scholars previously thought otherwise is no surprise. It is also an inference that what appears literal is in fact literal, or that what appears figurative is so—what we find most plausible according to our own background and exposure to external media is not necessarily what a ~3.000y.o. text finds plausible. You seem somewhat surprised that the RgVeda would have intentional ambiguity and interpretation, and yet this is precisely the background for the composition of the text and its philosophical narratives: it is meant to be interacted with in this way. Still, I do not want to claim that rebirth is obvious in these texts, and I apologize if it came across that way because of my personal understanding regarding the consistency of the philosophical models in the texts. It is true that many scholars have said otherwise, and this is perfectly valid.
Thank you for the interest and inspiration to question our beliefs / dig deeper! This has been a fruitful line of inquiry for me at least I am still exploring, and I agree that there is a diversity of beliefs and active philosophical development going on I agree we cannot say much about how widespread rebirth was amongst brahmins at the time, as before, because even if the texts talked about it often from Day 1, they are still very specialized philosophical texts—they do not necessarily reflect your average person’s beliefs.
Mettā!
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Thanks. I actually do agree with you that I’m not the most well-read in this topic, nor can I read Sanskrit particularly well, which is why you’ll notice I mostly quoted scholars who I do belief to be more informed than me, and already admitted this was not my area of expertise. This is not offending at all for you to suggest because it is true. That by itself doesn’t disprove anything I suggested, though.
I also read some scholars’ counter-arguments too, but those I read didn’t make as much sense to me. Perhaps it is worth a deeper look, but not for now.
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Just so you know, the Aryan migration didn’t happen. It’s a Western myth that’s been debunked through archaeological, genetic and other evidence. Plus, there’s no solid indication that there’s any such thing as an Aryan “race.” Arya isn’t a term denoting race. The rsi used it to refer to themselves.
Vedic sanskrit is indo-iranian, (so a category of indo-european). Persian Old Avestan is close to it, but not as old. I think they may have used the Avesta to decipher vedic sanskrit originally. Not to get into language issues, that would be just too much. But just fyi, the Aryan migration didn’t happen.
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I’ve just read a great article on an epithet for Agni in the RgVeda, Jātavedas, which appears in this same hymn often cited as seeming to refer to rebirth. Here too the author says that the passage seems to refer already to transmigration, and he discusses too how Jātavedas is closely associated with the continuation of the Vedic man via ritual which brings immortality in off spring. A short but good read (and available for free if you have a google account on Jstor!):
Jātavedas in the Ṛgveda: The God of Generations.
(Important themes: Jātavedas as the life-giving fire, that which protects the body from annihilation, as that which re-sows/scatters what it burnt, which protects continual off-spring and children so as to keep a continual lineage of generations, and that which protects the vitality of the Vedic man via this off-spring/children—understood as bringing immortality to the father of them, etc.).
This is another paper which traces transmigration from the RgVeda through to the Upanisads, assessing counter claims and so forth:
An Investigation into the Development of Afterlife Beliefs inEarly Vedic Literature Leading to the Appearance of the Doctrineof Transmigration.
This is a great resource going through even the development of ideas in the RgVeda. Highly recommended.
I think Obeyesekere (2002) is really onto something in speculating about simple rebirth eschatologies being likely in the early Vedic period. Notice how immortality is not a heavenly existence, but is rather the existence of off-spring and children, and how the ancestors seem to be loosely associated with a kind of other-world to which they may travel. This is precisely how these un-ethicized rebirth eschatologies work cross-culturally: ancestors go to a special ancestor-realm, and are eventually re-born in their family lineage somehow. This remains speculative for the early period considering, as the author demonstrates, the RgVeda doesn’t really talk about afterlife at all. However, many scholars consistently point to this idea seeming to underlie much of the discussion even in the RgVeda to varying degrees. It works well with the conflicting ideas we find, and later terminology: there seem to be different ‘paths’ people take that were still being discovered and debated; some more associated with ancestors and rebirth/death, and the other with immortal heaven and deities. We see this come together in things like the division between pitryāna and devayāna only in later texts, but present already in the RgVeda and old portions of the Atharvaveda.
The same ideas discussed here hold true: questions about immortality, long life, annihilation, ritual/knowledge, rebirth, different forms of afterlife, etc. were rampant and very diverse. That rebirth was the norm is by no means apparent, and yet it seems to always be lurking somewhere in the subconscious of the texts to varying degrees. Note that the author’s discussion of ksatriya involvement in transmigration doctrines has been assessed in more breadth by Jurewicz, who notes several Brahmanic / Upanisadic instances where transmigration is purely Brahmanical and/or unassociated with outside ksatriyas.
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I think the authority of the Suttas is sufficient enough to show there are no notable discussions I can recall between the Brahmins and the Buddha on the subject. My loose understanding is the Brahmins believed in the human world, the world of the ancestors (“Manes”) & heavenly/Brahma world. 
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Bronkhorst’s statement is true: at the time, this was being put into question. But trends in scholarship come and go. The idea that karma/rebirth are foreign to the Veda is demonstrably false. Certainly there is a depiction of influence from ksatriyas in some Upanisads as the doctrine of transmigration evolved closer to an ethicized universal model (and this was what drove much ‘criticism’ at a certain point in time), but even in the RgVeda and Atharvaveda there’s mention of reaping the results of one’s actions and there being higher/lower realms based on one’s actions. Moreover, the importance of non-brahmanic influence has been shown to be less central than it might seem for various reasons.
In the Satapatha Brāhmana there are two paths of afterlife: one immortal in heaven and one of rebirth, depending on one’s ritual actions and Vedic knowledge. We see the same thing in the Jaiminiya Brahmana, etc. The model of Five Fires underlies much of Brahmanic thinking and even RigVeda thinking but to a slightly more simple degree. I plan on posting more concrete analyses of relevant issues soon
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Possibly but do the Vedas contain rebirth in the lower realms or rebirth as human?
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The Vedas tend to present a very basic rebirth eschatology when they do talk of it. Even in the early Upanisads like the Chāndogya Upanisad you have some weird gaps in the system and it really is only for brahmins. In the Atharvaveda — a much more popular text — there are lower realms and things. But things are not always consistent. It really just depends, it seems. I’d imagine people had a spattering of vaguely coherent views on this depending on who and where they were, but it’s something I’m looking into some more.
But again, this is drifting away from the Suttas. At least I personally have no confidence the Chāndogya Upanisad was fully completed when the Buddha was alive. Kind regards. 
None of the early Vedic ideas you mentioned necessitate a rebirth. All of these can, and have been, explained in other ways. You can reap the results of your actions also without rebirth, for example, in a permanent heaven or hell.
As for a coming and going trends in scholarship, that says little; but of course. However, this view has existed for at least a century and has been repeated recently. It is not a coming and going thing. Also, it is not a minor matter, like the dating of the Buddha, but concerns the entire afterlife belief of a whole set of religious texts. That their afterlife belief is questioned by so many in the first place, should be telling that it simply not obvious. That should be clear, unless we think so many scholars (who know the texts better than most of us here) are blind or something. 
I mean, I have no dogs in this fight. Of course it’s fine with me if you disagree with these scholars. But saying things like they are “sorely mistaken” and “demonstrably false”, these are just empty expressions which add nothing to the discussion. I could just as easily say the opposite, that it is demonstrably true and that they are sorely right, and nobody is any wiser. At least we can start with an acknowledgement that there are disagreements for good reasons.
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I have already quoted passages in this thread which are from the Brahmanas and teach rebirth. That is a demonstration that the idea that only the Upanisads onwards teach this idea is mistaken. Jurewicz has also demonstrated that it was not only ksatriyas who taught rebirth models and that the same models come from brahmins and are actually normalized within the context of the teaching in even earlier texts (JUB being a good example).
I’m writing a post on the Agnicayana at the moment. It is not even about rebirth much of the time, and yet being steeped in the text the concept of cyclic cosmology and the Five Fires underlies the whole thing. It’s like people who read a couple suttas and come to conclusions: they can deny rebirth. But when you read through the details and philosophy of many different portions of the text in different contexts, it becomes clear that the roots of these ideas are much older. It may not be the same as Buddhist transmigration or even a wide-spread standard, but it is very much there.
I also have clarified that I do not mean to say rebirth is obvious in the RgVeda. I will say though: Jurewicz’ reading is supported by more than a century of other scholars who read the same thing; her treatment of the RgVeda is probably the most thorough analysis of the philosophy in history and it is widely praised and acknowledged; and recent research by Hayakawa (2014) — Circulation of Fire in the Veda — reaffirms much of the exact same conclusions she made on the general model of fire transformation and the Sun raining Soma/life-giving ‘semen’ which makes way for rebirth. Whether or not we think these ideas were commonplace in the RgVedic period is another matter, but in the Brahmana texts too they are explicit and they build / comment on the same ideas in the RgVeda in astonishingly detailed ways.
But yes: I have and do acknowledge that there has been disagreement and that there are intelligent scholars on both sides, and with good reasoning. For centuries very famous scholars would say the Brahmanas were the ‘twaddling of idiots’ (Max Muller), that they were non-sensical or psychotic, etc. And yet we recently have been able to reconstruct the tools to derive the extremely profound and coherent meaning from them. There’s a lot of work to be done in understanding and debating these texts.
Mettā
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As far as I recall neither Bronkhorst nor other scholars worded it that strictly, as Upanishads versus all that went before, with a strict delineation between Upanishads and the rest. Perhaps we’re confused by definition. “The Vedas” is often understood to refer just to the Rig, Sama, Yajur and Atharva—the earliest texts—and not to include the Brahmanas. (The dating of which is controversial and I suppose hard but they were surely quite a bit later.)
In either case, even if some scholars do word it that way, that is not what I intended. With “the vedas” in the title I meant primarily the Rig etc.
The fact that the Buddha does not mention the Brahmanas or Upanishads (he does not even seem to know of the Atharva Veda) also indicates that these texts were, if not composed later, of less significance at his time than the three Vedas.
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