As Staal has explained the Brahmanic teaching, the construction of the fire altar in the Agnicayana ritual is the reconstitution of the cosmos, because it is putting Prajapati’s body back together. And in early Vedic thought it was the entire round of sacrifices that kept the cosmos going. One of the simplest rituals, the Agnihotra, performed in the early morning and the evening, guards “the fire (as identical with the sun) overnight and its rekindling the next morning, effecting the rising of the sun.“96 We have not discussed so far, but will have to consider it further later, the analogous forming of the person as well as the cosmos, which Smith describes as “anthropogony,” which is also effected by a series of rituals, life-cycle rituals that mark the development of personhood. Ritual also had to do with the individual’s ultimate fate. One function of the Agnicayana was to make the sacrificer immortal, the bird form of the altar being interpreted, among other things, as the bird that will take the sacrificer to heaven, of course not at the end of the ceremony, but at the end of his life.
One aspect of the Middle Vedic ritual system that would have lasting consequences for the future was how fundamentally hierarchical it was. Smith points out that both the rituals themselves and those who participate in them are ranked hierarchically and in the same way. He cites Staal as pointing to the fundamentally hierarchical structure of Vedic ritual: “The sequence [of the ritual order] is hierarchical. There is increasing complexity. A person is in general only eligible to perform a later ritual in the sequence, if he has already performed the earlier ones. Each later ritual presupposes the former and incorporates one or more occurrences of one or more of the former rituals.“97
Smith points out that the more complex rituals are higher because they incorporate and recapitulate simpler ones. I have noted that the Agnicayana is, among other things, a soma ritual, but have not mentioned that Soma is involved in the ritual as well as Agni, and that the day after Agni is conveyed to the brick altar, Soma together with Agni (they are sometimes combined into one god, Agnisoma), is conveyed to the altar.98 The Agnicayana thus encompasses simpler soma rituals. But, as Smith points out, this hierarchical principle of encompassment was also central to the caste system. He cites Louis Dumont’s classic work, Homo Hierarchicus, as showing that the higher castes “encompass” the lower ones, going on to say, “Although Dumont does not fully work this out, what seems to be implied here is an ontology of ‘relative completeness,’ the Brahmin being the `more complete’ instance of human being while others, relative to the Brahmin, are `less The completeness at issue is, of course, ritual completeness. The Brahmin can participate in ritual in ways that the Ksatriya cannot, and so on down the line. As we will see, the great rituals, such as the Agnicyana, became marginal even in the late centuries of the first millennium BCE, but the hierarchical principle remained in place.
We must now comment briefly on that marginalization and what it did to the ritual system, even though that development occurred in the period that will be considered in more detail later on. For reasons that are not entirely clear, but that perhaps have to do with the growth of a more effective state, not an “early state,” but a full-scale urban (archaic?) state, the need for the complex ritual system and the competition it fostered to maintain social stability may have been lessened by more effective administrative structures and stronger capacities for royal enforcement of desired ends. But Brian Smith helps us see that this change meant, not the demise of the ritual system or its central place in religious life, but a transformation that on the surface seems to be a reversal of the hierarchical order. In this new understanding, those who could no longer celebrate the solemn s`rauta rites could nonetheless, in their household worship (the domestic or grhya sacrifices), still keep alive the entire Vedic ritual system, now reduced to its “quintessential kernel-five `great’ sacrifices that may be performed with a piece of wood, a glass of water, some flowers and fruits, and by saying By maintaining the exalted status of the Brahmins and the importance of sacrifice as a validation of that status, this reduced domestic system kept the traditional understanding of the religio-social system alive and left the door open for further innovations that would open new possibilities without questioning the fundamental assumptions of Indic society.
The syllable mentioned in the previous quotation would seem to be another case of less is more. Om is the syllable that was believed to sum up the entire teaching of the voluminous Vedic texts in one “word.” I put “word” in quotes because om has no meaning other than its sound: it is a mantra of the simplest kind. Nonetheless we could call it, following Frits Staal, prelinguistic language.101 Again we are reminded of the fact that we are in an oral culture. Om makes sense as spoken; it is a powerful form of speech. Words, whether meaningful or not, were central to Vedic thought: words were things and had extraordinary consequences.102 Not just words, but poetic meters could be personalized, viewed as divine, and were active in the world. In an entirely oral culture, the spoken word had consequences: one could indeed “do things with words.”
Speech itself was personalized as the goddess Vac, who in RV 10.125 speaks of her own greatness: “I bring forth the Father at the head of this world” (v. 7), and “Only I blow like the wind, reaching all creatures beyond the heaven, beyond the earth here-so much have I become by my greatness” (v. 8). Maurer, in his comment on this hymn, points out that it “is a glorification of this Sacred Speech of the sacrificial rite, as a creative principle and the substrate of all existing things, including the gods.“103 “Principle” and “substrate” may accurately describe what is being said in these verses unless we take them as referring to a static condition, for the very idea of the Sacred Speech, which is so essential to the sacred sacrifice, is that it is active, creative, constructive. We are still here dealing with practice more than theory.
The same can be said of two more terms that have been taken as metaphysical absolutes when their original use seems to have been linguistic and active. One of these is rta, which has been commonly translated as “cosmic order” or “cosmic harmony,” but Jamison and Witzel argue it is best translated as “active, creative truth, realization of truth, Wahrheitsverwirklichung.” They point out that its opposite is “deceiving, cheating action,” and so it is best thought of as the power of active truth, rather than “cosmic order.””’
Even more clearly linguistic is a term that appears early but will have an enormously significant history: the neuter term brahman, which in its earliest uses, and often even in the Upanishads, means “formulation,” particularly “the capturing in words of a significant and non-self-evident truth.“105 In its masculine form, Brahma was a god, often the highest god, even higher than Prajapati, but in the neuter form, the fundamental reality of the world. Actually, things were even more complicated, as the neuter form brahman could also be considered a god. Jan Gonda indicates that the question of whether ultimate reality is personal or impersonal was not a concern of the authors of the ancient Vedic texts, however much it is of interest to us.106 Still, it is worth remembering that in its earliest use brahman is as a form of speech-creative, powerful speech.
We can now consider how to characterize Vedic thought at the stage of the Brahmanas. Although they foreshadow the insights of the Upanisads, as both Sylvain Levi and Paul Mus have emphasized, they remained at the level of practice, of the mimetic and narrative, of mythopoeia and mythospeculation, but not of theory.107 They thus do not represent the axial breakthrough. The sacrificer is still embedded in the social world-status is almost everything and the purpose of the rituals was most frequently the improvement of status within a fixed hierarchy. It is only with the renouncer, who leaves the world of sacrifice and status, that we find the axial individual. Thus, Vedic thought at the level of the Brahmanas remained archaic in terms of the typology of this book. There were, as in other archaic societies, forms of mythospeculation that verged on axial insights but still remained archaic. What it means that so much of later “Hindu” culture is basically c
ontinuous with the Vedic culture we have described in this section is something we will need to take into account later on.
The Late Vedic Breakthrough
It would be very helpful to know just what kind of society produced the Upanisads, but we are left with guesses and inferences. Late Vedic society of about the sixth century BCE, when we assume the early Upanisads were composed, was on the verge of urbanization or just beginning that process. Archaeologists date the first cities in the Ganga (Ganges) plain to the late sixth century or early fifth century.108 Patrick Olivelle, the most recent translator of the Upanisads, tells us in his introductory remarks about the social background of the Upanisads that it is uncertain if “the urbanization of the Ganges valley occurred before or after the composition of the early prose Upanisads.” There is no definite evidence of cities, “but there are very few agricultural metaphors and images in the Upanisads, while examples derived from crafts such as weaving, pottery, and metallurgy are numerous.” Olivelle sums up by saying, “It appears to me that, by and large, their social background consists of court and crafts, rather than village and agriculture.“109 There had been a significant advance in technology over the Rgveda, and the world known to the Upanisads was much broader than even that of the Brahmanas. Figures from the Kuruksetra region appear in these early Upanisads, but the scenes are often placed in the more easterly regions of the Ganga valley, such as Videha or Kosala, where kingdoms and cities were appearing or about to appear. Witzel does not consider the date of 500 BCE as impossible for the early Upanisads.lto
We can hypothesize, therefore, that the Upanisads represent a point where the Middle Vedic “arrested development of the state” (Romila Thapar) was giving way to new state formations. Population was growing, agricultural surpluses were increasing, extensive trade networks were developing, and the older settled village society was coming under pressure. Without being able to date either the Upanisads or state formation with any exactitude, we are left with speculation: namely, that the Upanisads suggest a response to a rapidly changing and unsettling environment. Olivelle suspects that the emergence of “new ideas and institutions, especially asceticism and celibacy,” imply an urban or urbanizing environment.”’ Much more than that we cannot say.
If, as we will argue, the Upanisads represent the emergence of an axial breakthrough, or something very like it, we should still not overemphasize its difference from what preceded it. Jamison and Witzel speak of a “height ened continuation” of the intellectual tradition of the One new to this literature, as I am, is struck with how much in the Upanisads is familiar from older texts: concern for “equations,” for the proper performance of rituals, even spells for the attainment of quite worldly ends. The great speculative insights for which the Upanisads are famous seem to be nuggets in the midst of quite different material. Still, Jamison and Witzel point out something else new in the form as well as the content of the Upanisads: “The early Upanisads, with their dialogue form, the personal imprint of the teacher, the questioning and admissions of innocence-or claims of knowledge-from the students, seem to reintroduce some of the uncertainties of the late RV, give the sense that ideas are indeed speculation, different attempts to frame solutions to real puzzles.“113
When Jamison and Witzel use the word “reintroduce,” they refer to a long tradition of questioning and debate that goes back to the poetic contests recorded in the RV, where each poet tried to present a problem that his rival could not solve. Jan Gonda notes that riddles and contests over their solution are frequently found among tribal peoples, and have a variety of uses, often in connection with ritual. 114 So when we find such riddles in the RV, we cannot be sure whether they are a remnant of tribal practice or the beginnings of speculation that will have such remarkable development later on. The early poetic contests become developed in the Brahmanic period as the brahmodya, which Wayne Whillier describes as “a ritualized, purely priestly extension of the poetic debates,””’ so there was some continuity between the RV and the Upanisads. When Jamison and Witzel speak of “the uncertainties of the late RV,” they are undoubtedly referring to hymns such as the famous Nasadiyasukta (Creation hymn), RV 10.129:
1. There was neither non-existence nor existence then; there was neither the realm of space nor the sky which is beyond. What stirred? Where? In whose protection? Was there water, bottomless deep?
2. There was neither death nor immortality then. There was no distinguishing sign of night nor of day. That one breathed, windless, by its own impulse. Other than that there was nothing beyond.
3. Darkness was hidden by darkness in the beginning; with no distinguishing sign, all this was water. The life force that was covered with emptiness, that one arose through the power of heat.
4. Desire came upon that one in the beginning; that was the first seed of mind. Poets seeking in their heart with wisdom found the bond of existence in non-existence.
5. Their cord was extended across. Was there below? Was there above? There were seed-placers; there were powers. There was impulse beneath; there was giving-forth above.
6. Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe. Who then knows whence it has arisen?
7. Whence this creation has arisen-perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not-the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows-or perhaps he does not know.116
To continue the questioning, do we have here only the challenge of a primitive poet to his competitors to see who can be silenced, having no answer, or do we have the beginning of high Vedic metaphysics? Tradition gave the latter answer, but probably both have some truth. It is worth noting that this creation hymn has echoes in other cultures: the reference to water at the beginning in Genesis 1:2, and to desire (eros) being there at the beginning in Hesiod’s Zheogony.
As is not unusual at times of rapid social change, the Upanisads depict lively discussions, not limited by caste or gender barriers that would later be harder to cross. There are so many Ksatriyas involved in discussions that there was a theory at one time that the Upanisads represented a kind of ksatriya alternative position to that of the Brahmins. That view has been pretty well shot down, but the fact that Ksatriyas and Brahmins participated together in active discussion is not doubted. In some cases ksatriya kings were even accepted as teachers by Brahmins. Further, there is more than one instance of women taking an active part in discussions. None of this means that everything was turned upside down-I have already stressed continuities with the earlier tradition. But even though the continuities are obvious, there were also new insights, often not entirely clear because so intertwined with older ideas, that would have the greatest importance in future developments.
Joel Brereton usefully describes some of the main themes in the Upanisads.‘17 He draws on the Aitareya Upanisad to illustrate the theme of correlation, already evident in what we learned about the Agnicayana ritual, where the god Agni is equated with the fire on the altar, the bird that gives the altar its shape, soma, one of the major offerings, and finally with the sacrificer himself. In the Aitareya Upanisad, the cosmic man at the beginning of creation (RV 10.90) has become identified with the original self, the dtman, from whose mouth comes “speech and then fire; from its nostrils, breath and wind; from its eyes, sight and sun,” and so forth. But these newly created realities fall into the sea in a state of disorganization. “They need an order, and to find it, they enter into the human form once again. Fire becomes speech and enters the mouth; wind becomes breath and enters the nostrils; the sun becomes sight and enters the eyes, and so on.” Finally, “the self itself enters into the newly created human form. In this way, the self, which is the origin of all, becomes the self of each human being … Both physically and spiritually, therefore, the human being is a perfect microcosm.“118 Although this microcosmic/macrocosmic correlation is expressed in a number of ways in the Upanisads, the way that would have the great
est consequences would be phrased as the identity of brahman, which we noted above was rooted in the idea of powerful speech in the Rgveda but had become the term for the highest god or for ultimate reality itself, and atman, the self of every person, but also the Self of the world and so identified with brahman.
But correlations that had worked at the level of sacrificial rites in the Brahmanas, where the identity of the sacrificer with Agni could lead to the immortality of the sacrificer, were now posed as a matter of knowledge, but salvific knowledge, closely guarded and difficult to understand. Sacrificial action (karma) in the Brahmanas becomes knowledge (jndna), although these were both part of the Vedic tradition, the karmakanda and the jnanakdnda- that is, the “works portion” and the “knowledge portion.””’ Karma will have other meanings, some of which emerge for the first time in the Upanisads, but the older meaning is never quite lost. But our first task is to try to understand the new emphasis on knowledge.
One of the earliest Upanisads puts it bluntly. In response to a question about knowing brahman, and brahman knowing the Whole, the answer is given:
In the beginning this world was only brahman, and it knew only itself (dtman) thinking: `I am brahman.’ As a result, it became the Whole. Among the gods, likewise, whosoever realized this, only they became the Whole. It was the same also among the seers and among humans … If a man knows `I am Brahman’ in this way, he becomes this whole world. Not even the gods are able to prevent it, for he becomes their very self (atman).
The text goes on to say that the gods then lose the sacrifices that the human who knows this would have offered, and so: “The therefore, are not pleased at the prospect of men coming to understand
Even in this rather crude form, we see at least the beginning of a move beyond mythospeculation. We are still in the world of the gods, even annoyed gods, and brahman seems more god than abstraction, and yet there is incipiently a level of abstraction that moves beyond narrative into conceptual thinking. In many other places even in the early Upanisads this transition has become clearer.
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