Hindus: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (The Library of Religious Beliefs and Practices)

by Julius Lipner

  Based on the judgement that the authoritative Upaniṣads (the ‘Vedānta’) noted above provided the most insightful and salvific teachings of the Veda, there arose from soon after the beginning of the Common Era, a highly important philosophical–theological movement also called the Vedānta. Those who adhered/adhere to this trend of thought are called Vedāntins (sometimes ‘Vedantists’). Though the Vedāntins all refer to the Upaniṣads as a prime source of their religious doctrine, they do not all come up with the same conclusions. Because the Vedic texts (including the Upaniṣads) are often so terse, they lend themselves to various interpretations. This gave rise to different Vedantic schools of thought, espousing doctrines that ranged from forms of monism (belief that ultimately there is but one Reality, and that all creaturely differentiation is provisional and/or illusory), through forms of bhedābheda – the view that the creature is really both different (bheda) and non-different (abheda) from the Supreme Reality, depending on one's point of view – to types of dualism, viz. the belief that the creature remains, in all states, ontologically different from the Supreme Being (or God).

  All these different theological schools or sampradāyas share this in common: they maintain that the final goal of the Vedas is not the external performance of the solemn ritual, but its contemplative interiorization which culminates in the insights of the Upaniṣads. The upaniṣads reveal the method and the goal of this interiorizing process. They reveal the nature of Brahman, of our true self (ātman), and of the inner relationship between the two in spite of the misleading influences of this delusive world. This is the inner meaning of the yajña, the solemn ritual, which is the navel (nābhi) of the axis of being, the bridge between this world and immortality. The classical Vedantic schools may not have disputed that the external performance of the yajña continued to be of great importance for life in this world – appropriately executed it saw to material and other success (the birth of offspring, good health, victory in battle, a plentiful harvest, rain in due season, the regular succession of the seasons etc.) – all this was good, and some of it even necessary to maintain right order in the world and the very conditions required to foster the Vedantins’ religious objectives, but this was not the sacrificial ritual's final goal. The yajña-complex properly understood, with its hidden truths of meditation, homologies, restraint of the senses, etymologies, led to the disruption of the cycle of rebirth and the attainment of immortality (in the form either of communion with a God or the dissolution of the individual in the one Source of all). Because they relied on the interpretation of the Upaniṣads as the driving force of their theological project, the Vedantins were also called collectively, the Uttara Mīmāṃsakas, viz. Exegetes (Mīmāṃsakas) of the Later (uttara) part of the Veda, of which the upaniṣads were the culmination.

  They were reacting to the position of the powerful Pūrva Mīmāṃsakas, the Exegetes of the Prior (pūrva) texts of the Veda. These thinkers were loyal to the performance of the sacrificial ritual, and they were dismissive of ideas that sought to interiorize and so sublate this performance. Of what significance was this interior journey? they asked; what was the point of some doubtful cognition of a transcendent being – unprovable, indefinable, ungraspable – called Brahman, and of the quest to seek union with this being? It was the performance of the ritual that brought tangible fruits – purity from pollution as an act of self-definition, cosmic stability, and material well-being. To this end they prized the earlier (pūrva) portions of the Veda, the Saṃhitās and Brāhmaṇ in particular (and those texts, called Śrautasūtras, that supported the performance of the solemn ritual by detailed descriptions). These earlier texts of the Veda were called the karma-kāṇḍa, the ‘action’ (karma) ‘part’ (kāṇḍa), because they were concerned with what needed to-be-done (kārya), i.e. with the recitation of the verses and formulae of the ritual and the accompanying bodily movements, and with the minutiae of preparing and executing it. The texts that focused on the interiorization of the solemn ritual, viz. on what one should know about it in order to transmute it interiorily and so produce its true effect, were called the jñāna-kāṇḍa, the ‘knowledge part, i.e. the Āraṇyakas and Upaniṣads. The Vedantins were advocates of the religious superiority of these later (uttara) texts of the Veda, as bringing to a head the whole purpose of Vedic revelation.10

  For the Hindus, this was a very important debate, for consider what was at stake: the very purpose of the sacred text, which, when properly understood and acted upon, was alone able to provide the realization of human destiny. What could be more important, more practical, more well worth spending time upon than this? If one missed the point of the scriptures, one missed out on the proper end and scope of human existence. Both groups of thinkers were part of the Hindu establishment, led largely by Brahmins, but they did not think they were engaged in some exercise of institutional navel-gazing, in some pointless debate akin to trying to determine how many angels could dance upon the head of a pin!

  So did this mean that the pūrva Mīmāṃsakas rejected the ‘jñāna-kāṇḍa? No. Just as the Vedantins did not reject the kāṇḍa of the Veda and gave its teachings the status of a lesser knowledge which could lead to behaviour that acted as a means to the higher wisdom of the upaniṣads, so the pūrva Mīmāṃsakas found a purpose for the jñāna-kāṇḍa. After all, the Āraṇyakas and Upaniṣads were accredited parts of the Veda, which had been handed down for generations. But the pūrva Mīmāṃsakas regarded them as largely artha-vāda, discourses that in some way – by their stories and narratives and so on – gave context to and added motivation for the performance of the ritual. They were not necessarily veridical.

  In essence, of course, this was a debate about the nature of the sacred word: the Sanskritic language of the Veda, which had already been revered, prized, cosseted, for centuries. What was the sacred utterance about? Was it essentially ‘cognitive’? Did it provide genuine information that was vital for attaining the goal of human existence which familiar sources of knowledge such as the senses and empirically-based inference could not supply, knowledge about such things as the hidden workings of the devas and devīs, the transcendent Brahman that was the goal of life in this world, and so on? Or was the sacred utterance essentially ‘noncognitive’, a special case of language in general, whose function was primarily to prescribe a course of action for our survival and welfare and only secondarily to provide the necessary information to behave in the recommended way? The Vedantins were ‘cognitivists’, and the pūrva Mīmāṃsakas ‘prescriptivists’.11

  We shall not pursue this debate here. No doubt it was a debate among a Brahmin elite, but it had a high profile in the intellectual discourse of this elite, and persisted for centuries.12 By the time its intensity was spent (a few centuries after the beginning of the second millennium C.E.), it had helped inculcate in ever widening circles of the populace, the two ideals associated with both camps: (a) the importance of the practice of ritual, though this had largely (but not entirely, as we shall see), been transmuted into the ritual of pūjā or the worship of the image in temples and homes, and (b) respect for disciplines of self-denial. Of course, as we have already noted, ascetic practice had been around since early Vedic times, but by their continuous debates with the now ubiquitous Buddhists and Jains who advocated asceticism, and by their teaching visits around the land, the Vedantins and their chief followers, in particular, gave added impetus to the ideal of renunciation as an integral part of Hindu ways of life. For these Brahmins, Ritualists or no, had their ear to the ground: their livelihood as priests and keepers of sacred lore depended upon it.

  For both Ritualists and Vedantins, however, the voice of scripture – Vedic utterance – had creative power. In spite of their differences, both camps agreed that the Vedas were not composed by either divine or human authors at some point in time;they are eternal (nitya) and ‘given’, ‘not personally derived’ (viz. a-pauruṣeya, from puruṣa, ‘person’). The Vedantins maintained that the Vedas derived fr
om the Supreme Being, Brahman, not indeed as compositions, but as a manifestation of Brahman’s inner potency. They viewed the cosmos as undergoing periodic origination and dissolution after huge intervals of time, as an endless process. As part of this process the Vedas have been produced, withdrawn, and re-produced beginninglessly by Brahman, like the act of breathing in and breathing out, an image used by the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad (2.4.10), to which the Vedāntin Śaṃkara refers in his discussion of the matter.13 This act of manifesting the Vedas, of ‘revelation’, is a natural process, so to speak, not an act of deliberate composition.

  In other words – and here the pūrvapūrva Mīmāṃsakas were in agreement – the Sanskritic utterance of the Veda, the very sounds of the words and their successive order in the texts, are preexistent and pre-ordained. As such, they have an inner power to produce, to ‘realize’ being. The Mīmāṃsakas, both Pūrva and Uttara, generally held the view that Vedic naming-words, that is, those words that refer to natural beings, like gau (ox), aśva (horse), vṛkṣa (tree), are innately and eternally connected, not directly to individual instances of such beings, but to a kind of concrete-universal, a metaphysical generic contour of each class of being, called the āhrti (or ākāra), which was something like a Platonic Form. Thus even though individual objects come and go, and even if, by some calamity, all the existing individuals subsumed by a particular āhrti were to be obliterated at any one time, the āhrti itself could not be destroyed, and by virtue of its continuing connection with the Vedic word could enable further specimens of its class to be regenerated. Let us not get drawn further into the complexities of this theory, which was subject to ongoing debate in various schools of thought. The point is that for this influential body of thinkers, the Mīmāṃsakas, the Sanskritic utterance – in its Vedic context – had an innate power which when released in the appropriate way would produce real effects. These thinkers were re-affirming, though in terms of a new interpretation, the essential characteristic of Vedic utterance as containing transformative power, celebrated by the poets of old. By continuing to encapsulate hidden alignments between microcosmic and macrocosmic structures of reality, the Vedic Word was not an empty sound or a mere conveyor of ideas: it resonated with being.

  How did the Mīmāṃsakas explain the role of the poets whom they regarded as first promulgating the Vedic hymns? In general, they maintained that the Vedic text was intuited, not so much by the mind's eye as by the mind's ear of primeval sages or Rishis – there are several lists of (usually) seven names – who transmitted this knowledge to human successors, which was then accurately preserved down the ages. As you can imagine, various mythic narratives arose in the Hindu tradition, on a more popular level, to explain some of the key intervening stages of this transmission and its creative function. Here we must mention the role of Brahmā (identified later with the figure of Prajāpati, and to whom various names were applied in later tradition such as Hiraṇyagarbha, ‘the Golden Seed/Womb, etc.). [Note the distinction between ‘brahmān’, a neuter noun in Sanskrit, referring to the verbal power of the ritual, or to the Supreme Being of the Upaniṣads, and ‘Brahmā, a masculine noun with a long ‘a’ at the end, which denotes a celestial who functions as a demiurge – a promulgator of being – and whose activities are described through a rich mythology in more popular texts such as the Purāṇas (repositories of folklore), various epics and so on.] Brahmā is pictured as having four heads, each facing a cardinal point of the compass, and four hands (with the Vedic text in one hand), with a swan or flying goose, the symbol of discerning wisdom, in attendance. His consort is Vāc (sacred utterance personified) or Sarasvatī (the Goddess of learning).

  Here is how the Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa (ca.300–900 C.E.) describes Brahmā’s generative function:

  From his first [i.e. eastern] mouth, Brahmā measured out the Gāyatrī metre, the Ŗg [Veda] ... and the Agniṣṭoma among the sacrifices. Then from his southern mouth he emitted the sacrificial formulas [yajurs], the Tristubh metre, the Chandas metre ... Then from his western mouth he emitted the chants [sāmans], the Jagatī metre ... And from his fourth [northern] mouth he emitted the ... Atharva [Veda] ... the Anustubh and Vairaja metres ... [Brahmā] measured out the verses, the formulas and the chants so that the sacrifice may be accomplished. Beings, high and low, were born from the limbs of Brahmā, for [he is] the Lord of beings [Prajāpati], who emits creation's stream, having first produced the fourfold order of the gods, the sages, the ancestors, and human beings.

  (1.2.8.50–6)14

  There are several things to note here. Note first, that even after the rise of schools of devotional theism in the first millennium C.E., an important place continues to be given to the Vedic ritual, at least as having normative symbolic value. Further, it is implied by the text that – in contrast to the Abrahamic faiths which conceive of creation as the production of being ‘out of nothing’ – Hindus favour different models of originative production. In mythic terms, these have to do with dismemberment of a primeval figure, or sexual union, or measurement, or proliferation from a seed, or development from a womb etc. This does not mean that Hindus have not developed a theological doctrine of ‘creation’ in the strong sense of this term, according to which the creature depends absolutely on a self-existent Reality both for coming into being and then continuing in existence. In Vedānta, for instance, such doctrines have a long pedigree; but this has been formulated in such a way as to establish an ontological continuum between the creative Source and its products. Brahmān here becomes the womb of being from which all creatures proliferate. Emotionally and theologically, this establishes an ontological ‘umbilical cord’ between the Begetter and the begotten (not easily discernible in the Abrahamic doctrine of creation). This is why, in the mythic context quoted above, Brahmā is said to have ‘measured out’ (nirmame) or ‘emitted’ (asiṛjat) various things in his productive capacity. And, the point is, that he does this to large extent by demonstrating the efficacy of his creative speech. Thus, even in the popular mind, this attribute of the sacred Sanskritic word, viz. that it has an inherent creative and revealing power, had widespread currency.

  The theologians integrated this popular conception into their more rational and coherent deliberations. This is how the south Indian Vedantic theist, Rāmānuja (eleventh century C.E.) described the process of the repeated ‘creation’ of creaturely being (note that the ultimate sustaining and creative power is Brahmān or the Supreme Spirit, acting through the agency of Brahmā):

  When the time comes to bring the cosmic dissolution to a close, the Adorable One, the Supreme Person, remembering the world as previously configured, decides to proliferate. Having differentiated the whole mass of conscious and non-conscious being previously collapsed within Him as His residual potency, He brings into being [the hierarchy of the powers involved in the creative process up to] Hiraṇyagarbha [viz. Brahmā] as in previous [world-emissions]. Then, having manifested the Vedas arranged precisely in their traditional order, He imparts them as before to Hiraṇyagarbha, instructing him with regard to the production of the world in the form of the devas and so on, while He Himself indwells all things as their inner Self.

  (Commentary on Brahmā Sūtra 1.3.29)

  Once manifested/produced in this way, Brahmā gets busy. Rāmānuja continues:

  Because the [Vedic] words ‘Indra,‘Vasiṣṭha’ etc. which refer to devas and sages refer also to their generic forms, one can speak of the creation of these beings by means of the various appropriate words, once the meaning of these words has been brought to mind. This is why even though we have scriptural passages that refer to Vasiṣṭha, etc. as ‘makers’ of the Vedic texts ... we can still speak of the Veda as eternal. So Prajāpati [Brahmā], having first thought out the configurations (ākṛti) and powers of the sages as ‘makers’ of the various portions, hymns and texts by means of the relevant Vedic words, produces [the sages] according to their forms and endowed with their respective powers, and commissions them t
o recall the various texts etc. And they, for their part, endowed by Prajāpati with their various powers, practise the austerities appropriate to each, and without having to study the mantras and so on produced by the previous Vasiṣṭhas, etc. with their full-fledged potencies, perceive (paśyanti) them accurately as regards their accents and syllables. So one can reconcile both the eternity of the Vedas and the fact that their texts were produced!

  (Commentary on Brahmā Sutra 1.3.28)

  This shows us that for the Vedantins, the structure of the world, and the kinds of beings in it in the different realms, are pre-ordained to be the same in each successive cycle. This cannot be changed even on the whim of the Supreme Being, for these are manifestations of the divine essence, as it were, rather than of the divine will. Does this leave room for genuine freedom of creaturely action, we may ask? We shall consider this question when we take up the topic of karma and rebirth in Chapter 12.

  But it was not only for the Mīmāṃsakas, Vedic exegetes par excellence, that the sacred word had the power to bring things into being. This belief about the creative potency of the primeval Word is widespread in Hinduism, and has reverberated throughout the tradition from earliest times to the present day. Let us consider some other groups who shared this stance. It was strong among a group of thinkers whom we can characterize as philosopher-grammarians. A seminal thinker of this tradition was Bhartṛhari (ca. sixth century C.E.). According to Bhartrhari, the highest form of being is the soundless Word, which is imbued with the power (śakti) to burst forth (sphuṭ) into creative expression. The Word-burst-forth (sphoṭa) is the immanent ground of the hierarchical manifestation, not only of all existing things, but also of all meaning, down to the most basic levels. The Sphoṭa is also called the Śabda-Brahman or Word -Brahman, an idea that may have derived from the upaniṣads, or a common pool of wisdom (see the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Up. 4.1.2, and the Maitrī Up. 6.22). Bhartrhaṛi's most famous work, the Vākyapadīya, is a profound and extensive treatise, and continues to be studied today, not only for its historical value, but also for insights into the nature of language in general and religious language in particular.