The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  Turning from the people to their gods, we will begin with the pluralism and multiplicity of the Vedic pantheon and the open-mindedness of its ideas about creation. Then we will consider divine paradigms for human priests and kings, the Brahminical god Agni (god of fire) and the royal gods Varuna (god of the waters) and Indra (the king of the gods). We will conclude with ideas about death and reincarnation that, on the one hand, show the same pluralistic range and speculative open-mindedness as the myths of creation and, on the other hand, set the scene for a major social tension among Hindus in centuries to come.

  THE TRANSMISSION OF THE RIG VEDA

  We have just considered at some length the question of the prehistory of the people who composed the Rig Veda, people who, sometime around 1500 BCE, in any case probably not earlier than the second millennium BCE,1 were moving about in what is now the Punjab, in Northwestern India and Pakistan. They lived in the area of the Seven Rivers (Sapta Sindhu), the five tributaries of the Indus plus the Indus itself and the Sarasvati. We can see the remains of the world that the people of the Indus Valley built, but we are blind to the material world of the Vedic people; the screen goes almost blank. The Vedic people left no cities, no temples, scant physical remains of any kind; they had to borrow the word for “mortar.”2 They built nothing but the flat, square mud altars for the Vedic sacrifice3 and houses with wooden frames and walls of reed stuffed with straw and, later, mud. Bamboo ribs supported a thatched roof. None of this of course survived.

  But now at last our sound reception is loud and, for the most part, clear. Those nomads in the Punjab composed poems in an ancient form of Sanskrit; the oldest collection is called the Rig Veda (“Knowledge of Verses”). We can hear, and often understand, the words of the Vedas, even though words spoken so long ago are merely clues, not proofs, and interpretation, with all its biases, still raises its ugly head at every turn. The social and material world is vividly present in Vedic texts. What sort of texts are they?

  The Rig Veda consists of 1,028 poems, often called mantras (“incantations”), grouped into ten “circles” (“mandalas”). (It is generally agreed that the first and last books are later additions, subsequent bookends around books 2-9.) The verses were rearranged for chanting as the Sama Veda (“Knowledge of Songs”) and, with additional prose passages, for ritual use as the Yajur Veda (“Knowledge of Sacrifice”); together they are known as the three Vedas. A fourth, the Atharva Veda (“Knowledge of the Fire Priest”), devoted primarily to practical, worldly matters, and spells to deal with them, was composed later, sharing some poems with the latest parts of the Rig Veda.

  The Rig Veda was preserved orally even when the Indians had used writing for centuries, for everyday things like laundry lists and love letters and gambling IOUs.4 But they refused to preserve the Rig Veda in writing.bb All Vedic rituals were accompanied by chants from the Sama Veda, which the priests memorized. The Mahabharata (13.24.70) groups people who read and recite the Veda from a written text (rather than memorize it and keep it only in their heads) with corrupters and sellers of the Veda as people heading for hell. A Vedic text states that “a pupil should not recite the Veda after he has eaten meat, seen blood or a dead body, had sexual intercourse, or engaged in writing.”5 It was a powerful text, whose power must not fall into the wrong hands. Unbelievers and infidels, as well as Pariahs and women, were forbidden to learn the Vedas, because they might defile or injure the power of the words,6 pollute it like milk kept in a bag made of dogskin.

  The oral text of the Rig Veda was therefore memorized in such a way that no physical traces of it could be found, much as a coded espionage message would be memorized and then destroyed (eaten, perhaps—orally destroyed) before it could fall into the hands of the enemy. Its exclusively oral preservation ensured that the Rig Veda could not be misused even in the right hands: you couldn’t take the Rig Veda down off the shelf in a library, for you had to read it in the company of a wise teacher or guru, who would make sure that you understood its application in your life. Thus the Veda was usually passed down from father to son, and the lineages of the schools or “branches” (shakhas) that passed down commentaries “from one to another” (param-para) were often also family lineages, patriarchal lineages (gotras). Those who taught and learned the Rig Veda were therefore invariably male Brahmins in this early period, though later other classes too may have supplied teachers, and from the start those who composed the poems may well have been more miscellaneous, even perhaps including some women, to whom some poems are attributed.

  The oral nature of the Rig Veda (and of the other Vedas too) was expressed in its name; it was called shruti (“what is heard”), both because it was originally “heard” (shruta) by the human seers to whom the gods dictated it but also because it continued to be transmitted not by being read or seen but by being heard by the worshipers when the priests chanted it.7 The oral metaphor is not the only one—ancient sages also “saw” the Vedic verses—but it does reflect the dominant mode of transmission, orality. It made no more sense to “read” the Veda than it would simply to read the score of a Brahms symphony and never hear it.

  Now, one might suppose that a text preserved orally in this way would be subject to steadily encroaching inaccuracy and unreliability, that the message would become increasingly garbled like the message in a game of telephone, but one would be wrong. For the very same sacredness that made it necessary to preserve the Rig Veda orally rather than in writing also demanded that it be preserved with meticulous accuracy. People regarded the Rig Veda as a revealed text, and one does not play fast and loose with revelation. It was memorized in a number of mutually reinforcing ways, including matching physical movements (such as nodding the head) with particular sounds and chanting in a group, which does much to obviate individual slippage. According to the myth preserved in the tradition of European Indology, when Friedrich Max Müller finally edited and published the Rig Veda at the end of the nineteenth century, he asked a Brahmin in Calcutta to recite it for him in Sanskrit, and a Brahmin in Madras, and a Brahmin in Bombay (each spoke a different vernacular language), and each of them said every syllable of the entire text exactly as the other two said it. In fact this academic myth flies in the face of all the available evidence; Müller produced his edition from manuscripts, not from oral recitation. (It is of these manuscripts that Müller remarks, “The MSS. of the Rig-veda have generally been written and corrected by the Brahmans with so much care that there are no various readings in the proper sense of the word.”8) Yet like many myths, it does reflect a truth: People preserved the Rig Veda intact orally long before they preserved it intact in manuscript, but eventually it was consigned to writing (as were the originally oral poems the Mahabharata and the Ramayana).

  Sanskrit, the language of authority, was taken up by the various people in India who spoke other languages. At the same time, Dravidian and Austro-Asiatic languages (such as the Munda languages) began to enter Vedic Sanskrit. As usual, the linguistic traditions invented one another; Sanskrit influenced Tamil, and Tamil influenced Sanskrit. The Vedic tradition shows its awareness that different groups spoke different languages when it states that the four priests in the horse sacrifice address the horse with four different names, for when it carries men, they call it ashva (“horse”); when it carries Gandharvas,bc they call it vajin (“spirited horse”); for antigods, arvan (“swift horse”); and for gods haya (“racehorse”).9 Presumably they expect each of these groups to have its own language,10 which is evidence of a consciousness of multilingualism11 or multiple dialects.

  THE VIOLENCE OF SACRIFICE

  Theirs was a “portable religion,”12 one that they carried in their saddlebags and in their heads. As far as we can reconstruct their rituals from what is, after all, a hymnal, they made offerings to various gods (whom we shall soon encounter below) by throwing various substances, primarily butter, into a fire that flared up dramatically in response. The Vedic ritual of sacrifice (yajna) joined at the hip the visible world of humans
and the invisible world of gods. The sacrifice established bonds (bandhus), homologies between the human world (particularly the components of the ritual) and corresponding parts of the universe. Ritual was thought to have effects on the visible and invisible worlds because of such connections, meta-metaphors that visualize many substances as two things at once—not just a rabbit and a man in the moon, but your eye and the sun.

  All the poems of the Rig Veda are ritual hymns in some sense, since all were sung as part of the Vedic ceremony, but only some are self-consciously devoted to the meaning of the ritual. The verses served as mantras (words with powers to affect reality) to be pronounced during rituals of various sorts: solemn or semipublic rituals (royal consecrations and sacrifices of the soma plant), life cycle rituals (marriage, funeral, and even such tiny concerns as a baby’s first tooth),13 healing rituals, and both black and white magic spells (such as the ones we will soon see, against rival wives and for healthy embryos). Yet even here pride of place is given to the verbal rather than to the physical aspect of the sacrifice, to poems about the origins and powers of sacred speech (10.71, 10.125). The personal concerns of the priests also inspire considerable interest in the authors of the poems (most of whom were priests themselves): The priest whose patron is the king laments the loss of his royal friend and praises faith and generosity, while other priests, whose tenure is more secure, express their happiness and gratitude (10.33, 101, 117, 133, 141).

  Although detailed instructions on the performance of the rituals were spelled out only in the later texts,bd the Rig Veda presupposes the existence of some protoversion of those texts. There were animal sacrifices (such as the horse sacrifice) and simple offerings of oblations of butter into the consecrated fire. The more violent sacrifices have been seen as a kind of “controlled catastrophe,” 14 on the “quit before you’re fired” principle or, more positively, as life insurance, giving the gods what they need to live (soma, animal sacrifices, etc.) in order that they will give us what we need to live.

  FAST-FORWARD: THE THREE ALLIANCES

  At this point, it might be useful to pause and group ideas about the relationships between humans and gods (and antigods) in the history of Hinduism into three alliances. The three units are not chronological periods but attitudes that can be found, to a greater or lesser degree, across the centuries. It would be foolhardy to tie them to specific times, because attitudes in Hinduism tend to persist from one period to another, simply added on to new ideas that one might have expected to replace them, and archaic ideas are often intentionally resurrected in order to lend an air of tradition to a later text. Nevertheless such a typology has its uses, for each of the three alliances does begin, at least, at a moment that we can date at least relative to the other alliances, and each of them dominates the texts of one of three consecutive periods.

  In the first alliance, which might be called Vedic, gods and antigods (Asuras) are opposed to each other, and gods unite with humans against both the antigods, who live in the sky with the gods, and the ogres (Rakshases or Rakshasas), lower-class demons that harass humans rather than gods. The antigods are the older brothers of the gods, the “dark, olden gods” in contrast with “the mortal gods of heaven,”15 like the Titans of Greek mythology; the Veda still calls the oldest Vedic gods—Agni, Varuna--Asuras. The gods and antigods have the same moral substance (indeed the gods often lie and cheat far more than the antigods do; power corrupts, and divine power corrupts divinely); the antigods are simply the other team. Because the players on each side are intrinsically differentiated by their morals, the morals shift back and forth from one category to another during the course of history, and even from one text to another in any single period: As there are good humans and evil humans, so there are good gods and evil gods, good antigods and evil antigods. In the absence of ethical character, what the gods and antigods have is power, which they can exercise at their pleasure. The gods and antigods are in competition for the goods of the sacrifice, and since humans sacrifice to the gods, they are against the antigods, who always, obligingly, lose to the gods in the end. It is therefore important for humans to keep the gods on their side and well disposed toward them. Moreover, since the gods live on sacrificial offerings provided by devout humans, the gods wish humans to be virtuous, for then they will continue to offer sacrifices.

  The Vedic gods were light eaters; they consumed only a polite taste of the butter, or the animal offerings, or the expressed juice of the soma plant, and the humans got to eat the leftovers. What was fed to the fire was fed to the gods; in later mythology, when Agni, the god of fire, was impregnated by swallowing semen instead of butter, all the gods became pregnant.16 Not only did the gods live upon the sacrificial foods, but the energy generated in the sacrifice kept the universe going. The offerings that the priest made into the fire kept the fire in the sun from going out; if no one sacrificed, the sun would not rise each morning. Moreover, the heat (tapas) that the priest generated in the sacrifice was a powerful weapon for gods or humans to use against their enemies. Heat is life, in contrast with the coldness of death, and indeed Hindus believe that there is a fire in the belly (called the fire that belongs to all men) that digests all the food you eat, by cooking it (again). When those fires go out, it’s all over physically for the person in question, as it is ritually if the sacrificial fires go out; you must keep the sacrificial fire in your house burning and carefully preserve an ember to carry to the new house if you move.

  But since antigods had no (legitimate) access to sacrificial tapas, the best that they (and the ogres) could do in their Sisyphean attempt to conquer the gods was to interfere with the sacrifice (the antigods in heaven and the ogres on earth) in order to weaken the gods. Though humans served as mere pawns in these cosmic battles, it was in their interest to serve the gods, for the antigods and ogres would try to kill humans (in order to divert the sacrifice from the gods), while the gods, dependent on sacrificial offerings, protected the humans. In the Upanishads, the gods and antigods are still equal enemies, though the antigods make an error in metaphysical judgment that costs them dearly.17 Throughout the history of Hinduism, beginning in the Vedas, the antigods and ogres often serve as metaphors for marginalized human groups, first the enemies of the Vedic people, then people excluded from the groups that the Brahmins allowed to offer sacrifice. This first Vedic alliance is still a major force in Indian storytelling today, but it was superseded, in some, though not all, ways, by two more alliances.

  To fast-forward for just a moment, the second alliance begins in the Mahabharata and continues through the Puranas (medieval compendiums of myth and history). In this period, the straightforward Vedic alignment of forces—humans and gods versus antigods and ogres—changed radically, as sacrificial power came to be supplemented and sometimes replaced by ascetic and meditative power. Now uppity antigods and ogres, who offer sacrifices when they have no right to do so or ignore the sacrificial system entirely and generate internal heat (tapas) all by themselves, are grouped with uppity mortals, who similarly threaten the gods not with their acts of impiety but, on the contrary, with their excessive piety and must be put back in their place. Often the threatening religious power comes from individual renunciants, a threat to the livelihood of the Vedic ecclesia and an open door to undesirable (i.e., non-Brahmin) types, a kind of wildcat religion or pirated religious power. For like the dangerous submarine mare fire, these individual ascetics generate tapas like power from a nuclear reactor or heat in a pressure cooker; they stop dissipating their heat by ceasing to indulge in talking, sex, anger, and so forth; they shut the openings, but the body goes on making heat, which builds up and can all too easily explode. (Later Tantra goes one step further and encourages adepts to increase the heat by generating as well as harnessing unspent desire.)

  Old-fashioned sacrifice too now inspires jealousy in the gods, who are, paradoxically, also sacrificers. Indra, who prides himself on having performed a hundred horse sacrifices, frequently steals the stallion of kings
who are about to beat his record. (We have seen him do this to King Sagara, resulting in the creation of the ocean.) The result is that now it is the gods, not the antigods, who wish humans to be diminished by evil. The idea that to be too good may be to tempt fate, threaten the gods, or invite the evil eye is widespread, well known from Greek tragedies, which called this sort of presumption hubris (related in concept, though not etymology, to the Yiddish hutzpah). The second alliance is full of humans, ogres, and antigods that are too good for their own good.

  The balance of power changed again when, in the third alliance, devotion (bhakti) entered the field, repositioning the Vedic concept of human dependence on the gods so that the gods protected both devoted men and devoted antigods. This third alliance is in many ways the dominant structure of local temple myths even today. But that is getting far ahead of our story.

  CATTLE AND HORSES: INDIANS AS COWBOYS

  What the Vedic people asked for most often in the prayers that accompanied sacrifice was life, health, victory in battle, and material prosperity, primarily in the form of horses and cows. This sacrificial contract powered Hindu prayers for many centuries, but the relationship with horses and cows changed dramatically even in this early period.