The Age of the Sages

by Mark W Muesse

  The Vedas

  The basis of our knowledge of the Aryans is the canonical collections known as the Vedas. Today, orthodox Hindus—who think of themselves as the heirs of the Aryan people—regard the Vedas as their oldest and most sacred scripture. Most Hindus believe that the Vedas are divine knowledge containing the deep secrets of the universe. They call the Vedas shruti, a word that means “revelation.” According to traditional Hindu belief, the Vedas have no author but were revealed to certain ancient sages by reality itself.

  The Vedas are divided into four collections. The oldest and most important of these, is the Rig Veda. The Rig Veda contains over a thousand songs to various gods and goddesses. Some scholars have argued that it may be over thirty thousand years old, but most believe it to have a far more recent origin, between 2300 and 1200 bce. In any event, it is clearly preaxial. All of the Vedas were kept in oral tradition for centuries and probably not written down until well after the Axial Age.

  What the Vedas tell us is that religion in Indo-Aryan life was principally a matter of ritual and sacrifice. As with the Indus culture, Aryan rituals seems to have been very much a this-worldly activity, focused primarily on cosmic maintenance–obtaining the necessary goods for a happy and comfortable existence here and now. The Vedas contain instructions, prayers, and hymns composed for the purpose of performing these rituals. To gain an understanding of the Vedic world, we will look at some of these rituals, why they were performed, and to whom they were addressed. We will begin with this question: Who were the gods for whom Vedic ceremonies were enacted?

  The Devas

  Tradition says there are thirty-three gods and goddesses in the Vedas, though that number is not exact. These gods, known in Sanskrit as devas, were believed to dwell on earth, in heaven, and in the midspace between them, a tripartite view of the world, not unlike the Iranians’. Most devas were understood to have specific functions or realms associated with them. Indra was the god of war. He led the Aryans into battle and served as the model soldier. According to Zoroaster, Indra was one of the principal devas associated with druj, that is, chaos and evil. Like other devas, Indra also ruled a province of nature—the waters of heaven that brought the monsoons. Agni was the divine fire, who lived on earth in the domestic hearth and in plants; he also dwelled in midspace as lightning and in heaven as the sun. Because of his versatility, Agni was the mediator between gods and humans and therefore figured prominently in Aryan rituals. The Vedas also mention Surya, the god of the sun; Yama, the king of death; Ushas, the goddess of the dawn; Kubera, the deva of wealth and prosperity; Varuna, the guardian of rita; and a host of lesser divine beings of different ranks and qualities, including the asuras (the Sanskrit term for the Avestan ahuras), which the Vedas considered evil.

  At various stages in the history of Vedic religion, some devas were more prominent than others. Although there were many gods, when the Aryans worshipped, they often treated one god or goddess as the supreme deity. Generally, the Aryans worshipped the devaor devi whose favors were needed at the moment. As Aryan interests and needs evolved, so did worship practices. We can discern, for instance, that the war deva Indra was much more important in early Vedic period than later, when the Aryans were more settled and more concerned with agriculture and ranching.

  Humanity

  Later we will investigate how the Aryans related to their gods, but first we must understand how these people viewed themselves and their place in the universe. After all, much of what was at stake in the Axial Age was the transformation of human self-understanding.

  One of the most telling observations about the Vedic views on human nature and destiny is that the preaxial Vedas had precious little to say on the subject. Very few statements explicitly address this question, so we must rely on inference. It is apparent that the Aryans did not spend much time analyzing themselves and developing a systematic self-understanding. This point becomes even more obvious when we compare the sparse early Vedic speculation on human nature with the incredible energy spent on self-scrutiny in the axial era. The Vedas were much more interested in the praise of the gods and the performance of sacrifices and other rituals than in attempting to understand what it means to be human. It may be even more accurate to say it was primarily through ritual that the Aryans understood the meaning of being human.

  One place where we can discern some sense of the Aryan perspective on the human self is in the few hymns in the Rig Veda that concern death. We should not be too surprised to discover Aryan reflections on the essence of being human in this context. In the face of death, whether that of our individual selves or that of others, we humans almost reflexively raise questions about the essential nature of who we are and what our lives mean. When it rises to consciousness, the prospect of death has a profound way of prompting us to think about the real significance of our lives.

  In this handful of Vedic hymns, we discover fairly wide-ranging speculation about what occurs at death. In one hymn alone,[2] several fates for the human individual are mentioned as possibilities. In one verse, the individual is believed to travel to heaven, carried by the cremation fires, where he or she joins the gods and the ancestors in a pleasant postmortem existence. In another verse in the same hymn, the individual is seen as dissolving into the elements of the natural world. Addressing the dead person, the hymn says: “May your eye go to the sun, your life’s breath to the wind. Go to the sky or to the earth, as is your nature; or go to the waters, if that is your fate. Take root in the plants with your limbs.”[3] Still later, the same hymn suggests that perhaps the corpse is “cooked” by the funeral pyre to make it a fit sacrifice to be consumed by the gods. Other Vedic hymns suggest that the soul descends to the “house of clay,” the underworld ruled by the god of death, Yama. Obviously, the Vedas do not reach agreement about the ultimate destination of human beings.

  Furthermore, these hymns reach no consensus about the makeup of the human personality or about what determines one’s final destiny. Occasionally, the hymns refer to the atman, which is often identified as the self, soul, or even the breath, and to the manas, which is a rather vague idea indicating the mind, the heart, or the life-spirit that animates the body. Just as these realities are not well developed as ideas in the Vedas, their relationship to the body is not spelled out. The Vedas are also not clear about what determines one’s fate. Sometimes, it appears as if the correct performance of sacrifices and other rituals decides one’s destiny; sometimes it seems as if other deeds, such as fighting in battle or giving gifts to the priests, makes this determination; and sometimes it seems as if one’s ultimate fate has no relationship at all to how one lived his or her life. One thing is fairly clear: the preaxial Vedas make no unambiguous and certain pronouncements that individual destiny—if there is one—is related to moral choices in the way that Zoroaster linked decision and fate.

  The Aryans surely regarded death as an occasion for grief because life on earth is valuable and precious and something to be held onto for as long as possible. Yet, nothing indicates that death was terrifying to the Aryans, and nothing suggests that life after death—if indeed there was thought to be one—might be torturous or unpleasant. We might also observe, anticipating our next chapter, that the Rig Veda says nothing explicitly of what comes to be called reincarnation, the notion that the spiritual essence of the person resumes life in a new body an infinite number of times. The concept of a cyclical existence is an axial development that received widespread acceptance only as the Vedic tradition gave rise to what was later called Hinduism.

  Up to this point, our examination of the Aryans has focused on their beliefs: what they thought about the divine world, themselves, and their ultimate destinies. But this picture of Vedic life is still incomplete, because we have not yet explored the very important matter of ritual. When we take up this topic in the next chapter, we will be investigating the dimension of Aryan religion that brings together the divine and human realms. Our turn to ritual will take us into the very heart
of preaxial religious life in ancient India and will provide us with the basis for understanding the dramatic transformations that occurred when the Axial Age began.

  * * *

  An excellent resource is Edwin Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).↵

  TheRig Veda, 10.16, trans. Doniger, 46. ↵

  The Rig Veda, 10.16.3, trans. Doniger, 49. ↵

  5

  The Start of the Indian Axial Age

  Our first look into the religious environment of ancient India revealed a world of gods and goddesses controlling the various aspects of existence that were of particular concern to the inhabitants of the Indus Valley and their Aryan successors. The interest that the Aryans and Indus dwellers had in their gods seemed to focus on the ways these powerful beings could help sustain and improve human life on earth. Gods and goddesses might be called upon to render aid in a battle, stave off disease, or enable reproduction.

  The essential means for making these appeals to the divine was through ritual. Ritual was of vital importance in preaxial India, especially to the Aryans, whose entire scripture was dedicated to its proper practice. For the first part of this chapter, we will focus on the nature of these ceremonies, attending especially to the beliefs about how they accomplished their intended purpose. It is important to understand the dynamics of preaxial ritual in order to grasp the impulses that led to the reevaluation and reinterpretation of ritual in the Axial Age. By the end of this chapter, we will have seen how new ideas began to emerge in Indian religion that provided the foundations for Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.

  “Ritual was of vital importance in preaxial India, especially to the Aryans, whose entire scripture was dedicated to its proper practice.”

  Vedic Ritual

  The Vedas reveal that the Aryans did not have a highly developed or consistent self-understanding, and they are rather vague about how the Aryans understood human nature or the ultimate destiny of the individual. However, we should not infer from this that the Aryans were somehow incapable of sophisticated or systematic thinking. When we come to Vedic ritual practices, it becomes abundantly evident that these ancients were able to think in complex and abstract ways. In fact, the Aryans devoted intense intellectual energy to understanding and practicing their rituals.

  To illustrate the complexity of the belief structure supporting their rituals, let us consider an intriguing passage from the Rig Veda that describes the world’s creation. This myth is one of a half-dozen creation stories in the Rig Veda alone; obviously, the Aryans were not greatly troubled by having several different cosmogonies.

  This well-known story describes the ritual dismemberment of a primordial person. This myth is a late addition to the Vedas, which puts it closer to the start of the Axial Age than other Vedic material. But the narrative clearly echoes a very ancient creation theme: the idea that the world is created by the gods through sacrifice. That theme, we recall, was also part of the Avestan cosmogony. In the Vedic version, the sacrificial victim is called the Purusha, who is described as a massive cosmic man with a “thousand heads, a thousand eyes, [and] a thousand feet,” larger than the physical universe itself:

  When the gods spread the sacrifice with the Man as the offering, spring was the clarified butter, summer the fuel, autumn the oblation.

  They anointed the Man, the sacrifice born at the beginning, upon the sacred grass. With him the gods . . . sacrificed.

  From that sacrifice in which everything was offered, the melted fat was collected, and he[1] made it into those beasts who live in the air, in the forest, and in villages.

  From that sacrifice in which everything was offered, the verses and chants were born, the metres were born from it, and from it the formulas were born.

  Horses were born from it, and those other animals that have two rows of teeth; cows were born from it, and from it goats and sheep were born.

  When they divided the Man, into how many parts did they apportion him? What do they call his mouth, his two arms, and thighs and feet?

  His mouth became the [Priest]; his arms were made into the Warrior, his thighs the [Producers], and from his feet the servants were born.

  The moon was born from his mind; from his eye the sun was born. Indra and Agni came from his mouth, and from his vital breath the Wind was born.

  From his navel the middle realm of space arose; from his head the sky evolved. From his two feet came the earth, and the quarters of the sky from his ear. Thus they set the worlds in order.[2]

  One important aspect of this hymn is the way it established reciprocal relationships among the sacrifice, the act of creation, and the elements of the world. Because it was the primordial mode of creation, sacrifice was the method of renewing creation, of recreating and maintaining the world periodically when necessary. Performing sacrifice, as the gods did at the beginning of all time, renewed and invigorated the world. The priests who thus performed sacrifices—and this was clearly the way the Aryans understood it—were reenacting creation itself, making themselves tantamount to gods.

  It may be difficult for those of us in the modern world to completely grasp this ancient need to participate actively in the process of cosmic regeneration. We tend to think the world proceeds on its own. We do not perform ceremonies to help the sun come up in the morning or to ensure that the change of seasons is regular and timely. We do not rely on rituals to coax seeds to sprout and produce an abundant crop. But the ancient world often viewed the human relationship to the natural world quite differently. For many ancients, the powers responsible for the well-being of life often needed human assistance. In the Iranian tradition, we noted this belief in the practice of pouring libations of milk into water or animal fat into the fire. The human and divine worlds maintained a symbiotic relationship. Each relied on the other for the maintenance of life.

  The formation of the parts of the world out of the ritual dismemberment of the first human also implies a system of relationships between the ritual and the greater world beyond it. If, as the story suggests, the seasons are identified with the components of the sacrifice (and that is the meaning of that very cryptic phrase, “spring was the clarified butter, summer the fuel, autumn the oblation”), then by manipulating these aspects of the ritual, the priests were effectively controlling the seasons themselves. The technical term for this belief is sympathetic magic. Sir James Frazer, one of the early theorists on magic and religion and the author of an influential book entitled The Golden Bough, explained it this way: “things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.”[3] Because everything that is was once connected to the Purusha and because the Purusha is sympathetically connected to the ritual, the performance of ritual sacrifice was understood to have effects in the world beyond. One might liken this manner of thinking to the way voodoo dolls are supposed to affect the person they represent: a pin stuck in the doll is believed to cause pain to the one it symbolizes.

  Finally, the myth of the Purusha has implications for the understanding of caste, which is mentioned in the hymn for the first time in the Vedas. In chapter 1, we witnessed the gradual evolution of the caste system among the Aryans, beginning with the simple distinction of priests and producers among the earliest Indo-Iranians. Then we saw the addition of the warrior caste as the cattle-rustling and village-raiding life became more popular, creating a three-tiered society of priests, warriors, and the producers. When the Aryans migrated to the Indian subcontinent, the fourth and lowest tier in the system was added. This caste, designated as the “servants” by the Vedas, probably comprised the remaining indigenous people from the old Indus Valley Civilization.

  The story of the Purusha suggests that the stratification of humanity into priests, warriors, producers, and servants is both intended by the gods and embedded in the very fabric of the cosmos. This account of the divine origin of caste is part
of the ideological structure that has kept this system in place for over three thousand years. Caste is not regarded as a mere social construction but as a fundamental element in the nature of reality. To challenge the system would be like opposing the gods or defying physical laws, and the consequences would be dire.

  These principles were the basis for the Aryans’ understanding of the necessity of ritual and its effectiveness. As we might expect, the Aryans performed different kinds of rituals and for different reasons. Like many ancient cultures—and a number of societies still today—Vedic religion prescribed rituals to assist individuals during times of crisis (for example, sickness), through transitions (for example, birth, marriage, or death), and on auspicious days (for example, the new moon or harvest time). Rituals also provided protection from demons and snakes, promoted good luck in gambling, and caused misfortune for one’s enemies.

  But the most important rituals for Aryan religious life may have been the shrauta rites, particularly the fire sacrifice. These rituals were more elaborate than other ceremonies and were performed with less frequency. Shrauta rites were conducted for various occasions, such as a coronation. Wealthy persons could also pay to have the ritual performed on their behalf. Only members of the Brahmin, or priestly, class were able to enact these kinds of ceremonies. The shrauta ritual required great skill, and only those with training as a Brahmin had the requisite expertise. Indeed, as these rituals grew in importance for the Aryans, the Brahmins grew in power and prestige.