2. “Indian Philosophy is a mighty ocean which is difficult to navigate. No people on earth has a philosophical and religious literature which can compare with Indian Literature in the size, richness and manifoldness of its contents.” Erich Frauwallner, History of Indian Philosophy, vol. 1, trans. V. M. Bedekar (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1973 [1953], 3.
3. “The division into historical periods is especially difficult in India where it is almost impossible to determine with any precision or certitude the dates of most major historical events, whether they be the reign of kings, the birth of leaders, or the writing of texts.” Patrick Olivelle, TheAsrama System (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 129.
4. Lariviere quote cited by Patrick Olivelle, trans. and ed., Dharmasutras: The Law Codes ofAncient India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), xxxii.
5. Milman Parry, The Making ofHomeric Verse: The CollectedPapers ofMilman Parry, ed. Adam Parry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). Albert Lord further developed Parry’s ideas after his early death. See Albert Bates Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964).
6. Interestingly, Lord, Parry’s successor, felt that oral poetry was basically free improvisation and that, therefore, the Vedic hymns “could not be oral in any except the most literal sense” (The Singer of Tales, 280). Perhaps Lord already sensed that the Vedic tradition, in differing from most oral cultures, had the functional equivalent of literacy.
7. See William A. Graham, Beyond the Written Word: OralAspects of Scripture in the History of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Graham discusses what we have called the hyperorality of the Vedic texts (67-75) but makes the point that in all the great religious traditions, scripture as spoken and heard has priority over scripture as written, even when the latter is greatly respected.
8. Hartmut Scharfe, in trying to explain the ban on writing, says, “Sayana wrote in the introduction to his Rgveda commentary that `the text of the Veda is to be learned by the method of learning it from the lips of the teacher and not from a manuscript.”’ Hartmut Scharfe, Education in Ancient India (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 8. Oral transmission was thus deeply embedded in the personal relation between teacher and student.
9. Michael Witzel suggests that non-Sanskrit “loanwords in the RV show that village life, music and dance, and low level religion (Small Tradition) are indigenous, thus not IndoAryan.” Personal communication.
10. Steve Farmer et al., “The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization,” Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies 11, no. 2 (2004): 1-39.
11. Asko Parpola, “Study of the Indus Script,” Transactions of the International Conference ofEastern Studies 50 (2005): 28-66.
12. R. A E. Coningham argues that, though much was lost after the high point of Harappan culture, including the signs that may have been a script, the decline during the second millennium BCE was not as extreme as often imagined. He concludes that “the foundations for the emergence of the Early Historic [mid-first millennium BCE] city were already being laid during the second millennium BC.” See Coningham, “Dark Age or Continuum? An Archeological Analysis of the Second Emergence of Urbanism in South Asia,” in TbeArchaeology of Early Historic South Asia: The Emergence of Cities and States, ed. F. R. Allchin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 72.
13. Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice, trans. W. D. Halls (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964 [1898]); Sylvain Levi, La doctrine du sacrifice dans les Brahmanas (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966 [1898]).
14. Paul Mus, Barabudur: Sketch of a History of Buddhism Based on Archaeological Criticism of the Texts, trans. Alexander W. Macdonald (New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, Sterling Publishers, 1998 [1935]), xxiii. The other book was Emile Senart’s edition and translation of the Brbad-aranyaka Upani;ad.
15. I also found a charming anecdote about a fellow student of Dumont that reveals the teaching not only of Mauss, but of the whole Durkheimian school: “Toward the end of the year in which he was to take his diploma in ethnology, a fellow student told me that a strange thing had happened to him. He said something like this: `The other day, while I was standing on the platform of a bus, I suddenly realized that I was not looking at my fellow passengers in the manner I was used to; something had changed in my relation to them. There was no longer “myself and the others”; I was one of them. For a while I was wondering what was the reason for this strange and sudden transformation. All at once I realized: it was Mauss’ teaching.’ The individual of yesterday had become aware of himself as a social being; he had perceived his personality as tied to his language, attitudes and gestures whose images were reflected by his neighbors. This is the essential humanist aspect of the teaching of anthropology.” Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980 [1966]), 7-8.
16. Michael Witzel, “Tracing the Vedic Dialects,” in Dialectes dans les litteratures IndoAryennes, ed. Colette Caillat (Paris: College de France, Institut de Civilisation Indienne: Depositaire exclusive: Edition-diffusion de Boccard, 1989), 124.
17. Michael Witzel, “The Development of the Vedic Canon and Its Schools: The Social and Political Milieu,” in Inside the Texts beyond the Texts: New Approaches to the Study of the Vedas, ed. Michael Witzel (Cambridge, Mass.: Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University, 1997), 263.
18. Stephanie W. Jamison and Michael Witzel, “Vedic Hinduism,” in The Study of Hinduism, ed. Arvind Sharma (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 65-113; this article was written in 1992/95, and a long version (1992) is available at www.people.fas.harvard .edu/-witzel/vedica.pdf. Long version, p. 63, slightly edited, removing references and such. This almost book length essay is the best general introduction to Vedic religion that I have come across.
19. Ibid., 53.
20. Walter H. Maurer, Pinnacles ofIndia’s Past: Selections from the Rgveda, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: John Benjamins/University of Pennsylvania Studies on South Asia, 1986), 67. Jamison and Witzel recommend this and Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty’s The Rig Veda: An Anthology (London: Penguin 1981) as two useful translations of selected hymns in the absence of a modern scholarly translation of the entire text. But Joel Brereton and Stephanie Jamison will bring out such a complete translation in the near future.
21. Michael Witzel, “Early Indian History: Linguistic and Textual Parameters,” in The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia: Language, Material Culture and Ethnicity, ed. George Erdosy (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995), 93.
22. Ibid., 109.
23. Michael Witzel, “Rgvedic History: Poets, Chieftains and Politics,” in Erdosy, IndoAryans, 339.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., 337.
26. Ibid., 338.
27. Michael Witzel, “How to Enter the Vedic Mind? Strategies in Translating a Brahman Text,” in Translating, Translations, Translators: From India to the West, trans. Enrica Garzilli, Harvard Oriental Series, Opera Minora, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University, 1996), 5.
28. Michael Witzel, “Early Sanskritization: Origins and Development of the Kuru State,” in Recbt, Stoat and Verwaltung im klassiscbe Indien [The State, the Law, and Administration in Classical India], ed. Bernhard Kolver (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1997), 30.
29. Michael Witzel, “The Realm of the Kurus: Origins and Development of the First State in India,” Nihon Minami Ajia Gakkai Zenoku Taikai, Hokobu Yoshi [Summaries of the Congress of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies] (Kyoto, 1989), 2. The Soma ritual will be discussed further below.
30. George Erdosy, “City States of North India and Pakistan at the Time of the Buddha,” in Allchin, Archaeology, 99. This statement summarizes his discussion in the previous chapter of the same book, “The Prelude to Urbanization: Ethnicity and the Rise of Late Vedic Chiefdoms,” 75-98.
31. Erdosy, “The Prelude,” 82-83.
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32. Maurer, Pinnacles ofIndia’s Past, 10-11.
33. Ibid., 76.
34. Frits Staal, Exploring Mysticism: A Methodological Essay (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).
35. Maurer, Pinnacles ofIndias Past, 76.
36. Brahman is a term that can apply to a god, to absolute reality, to a class of scriptures, and to the priestly class. I follow the usage of some but not all Indologists in calling the latter group Brahmins to avoid terminological confusion.
37. It is interesting to note that in the Indian constitution the name of the country is given as “India” or “Bharat.” This choice of “Bharat” as a name for the country probably reflects the prestige of the great Indian epic, the Mahabadrata, which looks back to this early period but was composed considerably later.
38. Witzel, “Early Sanskritization,” 46.
39. Ibid., 47. The last section of chapter 4 of this book deals at length with the political and ritual situation in Hawaii.
40. Claessen and Skalnik say that it is almost impossible to “pinpoint the precise moment of the birth of the state,” and speak of “inconspicuous processes” that slowly produce institutions that only in retrospect can be recognized as characteristic of the state. Henri J. M. Claessen and Peter Skalnik, eds., The Early State (The Hague: Mouton, 1978), 620-621. This was the case in Hawaii and probably in Middle Vedic Kuruksetra as well.
41. Erdosy, “The Prelude,” 80.
42. Ibid., 86.
43. Witzel, “Early Sanskritization,” 42-43.
44. Witzel, “Realm of the Kurus,” 4.
45. Witzel, “Early Sanskritization,” 45. Such “roaming” was also the case in Hawaii, where too there were no cities. The same may have been true in very early Egypt. Bruce Trigger has divided early states into two types: territorial and city-states. In territorial states it was the court, not the city, that provided the center, and the court was often peripatetic. See Bruce G. Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 92-119.
46. Probably “order” or “class” is the best translation of varna in the early period, though later “caste” is not entirely wrong.
47. Jan Gonda explains the beginning of this verse as follows: “It is the first expression of the idea that the creation of the universe is the self-limitation of the transcendent Person (Purusa), `who is this All,’ manifesting himself in the realm of our experience.” Gonda, Vedic Literature (Weisbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1975), 137. Maurer explains the end of the verse as indicating that the gods (the immortals), who derive from Purusa, are in need of (sacrificial) food, whereas Purusa is “quite independent of the need of any sustenance at all.” Pinnacles ofIndias Past, 273. Or, as we will see, he is his own sustenance.
48. Maurer comments on this verse that this is the “evolved Purusa” now being sacrificed by his creatures, the gods, to the primeval Purusa. Pinnacles oflndia’s Past, 274.
49. Ibid., 271-272.
50. See Chapter 5, note 92, where Eric Voegelin is quoted as defining mythospeculation as “speculation within the medium of the myth.”
51. O’Flaherty, The Rig Veda, 32.
52. Ibid., 31-32.
53. Ibid., 31.
54. Georges Dumezil, Les dieux souverains des indo-europeens (Paris: Gallimard, 1977). Nagy also draws from the work of Emile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1973 [1969]).
55. Gregory Nagy, Greek Mythology and Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 276.
56. W. Montgomery Watt, “The Tribal Basis of the Early Islamic State,” Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei 359, no. 54 (1962): 153.
57. Nagy, Greek Mythology and Poetics, 277.
58. Ibid., 281.
59. The development of early states took different directions in the two cases, with the Greeks developing a polis (city-state?) that in some respects reverted to tribal egalitarianism at a more complex level, whereas the Vedic Aryans moved in the direction of stronger emphasis on hierarchy, as was almost always the case in early states. See ibid., 279.
60. O’Flaherty, Rig Veda, 111.
61. Nagy, Greek Mythology and Poetics, 277 n. 9. This version of the RV verse is my construction of how it would have gone following Nagy’s argument in this note.
62. Romila Thapar notes that the early Vedic literature indicates that rajanya and vise were originally senior and junior lineages in the same kinship group, that the ksatra and the vise “should eat from the same vessel,” and that “the ksatra is created out of the vise.” It is therefore clear that originally the two were “superior and inferior statuses in the same species.” See Thapar, From Lineage to State: Social Formations in the Mid-First Millennium B.C. in the Ganga Valley (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984), 31.
63. Erdosy, “The Prelude,” 89.
64. Patrick Olivelle, trans., Upanisads (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 341 n. 4.5.
65. Hartmut Scharfe, “Sacred Kingship, Warlords, and Nobility,” in Ritual, State and History in South Asia: Essays in Honour off C. Heesterman, ed. A. W. van den Hoek, D. H. A. Kolff, and M. S. Oort (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 311-312.
66. Hermann Kulke, “The Rajasuya: A Paradigm of Early State Formation?” in van den Hoek, Kolff, and Oort, Ritual, State and History, 188-199.
67. Witzel, “Early Sanskritization,” 40-41.
68. Theodore Proferes gives an argument for the dating of the original rite in his “Kuru Kings, Tura Kava~eya, and the -tvaya Gerund,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental andAfrican Studies 66, no. 2 (2003): 212-214. This rite survived among certain groups of South Indian Brahmins until virtually the present. In 1975 Frits Staal recorded a complete performance of the ritual. See his Agni, the Vedic Ritual of the FireAltar, 2 vols. (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1984).
69. Proferes, “Kuru Kings,” 217.
70. Ibid., 216-217.
71. Ibid., 217.
72. Erdosy, “The Prelude,” 87. Romila Thapar, however, points out that the socially stabilizing influence of the ritual system was not without its costs. The resources devoted to ritual could not be utilized for state building, and the relative autonomy of the subchiefs limited the sovereignty of the “king” (paramount chief) to the extent that Thapar describes as “an arrested development of the state.” From Lineage to State, 67.
73. Witzel, “Early Sanskritization,” 47.
74. Ibid., 39-40. A unified system of ritual appropriate to each status level would be an outcome similar to the processes of ritual reform that we noted in China before the Warring States period.
75. Hubert and Mauss in their book Sacrifice avoid the ambiguity in the Vedic sacrificial system between the person for whom the sacrifice is performed and the priest performing the sacrifice by calling the former the “sacrifier” and the latter the “sacrificer,” but this usage has not been followed by later authors.
76. Mysore Narasimhachar Srinivas, Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952); and Srinivas, The Cohesive Role of Sanskritization (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989).
77. Witzel, “Early Sanskritization,” 51.
78. “We are, I believe, entitled to call the Kuru realm the first state in India. To quote W. Rau, who has described the social and political conditions of the YV Samhita and Brahmana period in such detail: `The Indians of the Brahmana period lived in political organizations which, with good reasons, can be called states.”’ Ibid., 51-52. In his work on early India, Witzel frequently cites Wilhelm Rau, Staat and Gesellschaft im alten Indien, nach den Brahmana-Texten dargestellt (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1957).
79. See the great two-volume work of Frits Staal, ed., Agni, the Vedic Ritual of the Fire Altar (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1984). It is worth noting that the 1975 performance took twelve days, whereas in the Middle Vedic period it would have taken a year: in this case one day for one month.
80. Staal does not actually make this claim, but
it can be found on the Web in connection with the performance he recorded.
81. Tsuji Naoshiro, “The Agnicayana Section of the Maitrayani-Samhita with Special Reference to the Manava Srautasutra,” in Staal, Agni, 2:135.
82. Jan Heesterman, “Other Folk’s Fire,” in Staal, Agni, 2:76-77.
83. Agni is of course fire, and cayana is the “piling up” of the bricks that will make the altar.
84. Ibid., 78.
85. Staal, Agni, 1:558.
86. Ibid., 196.
87. Ibid., 128.
88. Ibid., 306-307.
89. Ibid., 65. It is worth noting that every brick is not only a part of Prajapati’s body, but a verse of the Veda.
90. Ibid., 65. Staal, it should be noted, puts no stock in this kind of Brahmanic speculation, finding it completely unhelpful in understanding the ritual, and noting that the Nambudiri Brahmins who performed the 1975 ritual gave no such explanations, just saying this is the way they have always done it. For Staal it is the rules that count, a kind of ritual syntax, not the meaning, which is ephemeral and largely irrelevant. But it all depends on what one is looking for.
91. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, in a brief review of early Western views, which she entitles “The Western Scorn for the Brahmanas,” quotes Max Muller, one of the nineteenth-century founders of the study of early Indic religion, as writing in 1900: “However interesting the Brahmanas may be to students of Indian literature, they are of small interest to the general reader. The greater portion of them is simply twaddle, and what is worse, theological twaddle.” Some years earlier Muller had even called the Brahmanas “the twaddle of idiots and the ravings of madmen.” For this and similar quotations, see her Tales of Sex and Violence: Folklore, Sacrifice, and Danger in the Jaiminiya Brahmana (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 3-6.
92. Brian K. Smith, Reflections on Resemblance, Ritual, and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 31. It is worth remembering that “equations” are common in ritual thought: for many Christians the bread and the wine in the (sacrificial) ritual of the Eucharist are the body and blood of Christ. And in John 14, when Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life,” Christians have understood that as more than metaphorical.
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