The Hindus (24 page)

The poem assumes that on the one hand, one may not be blamed, or perhaps not entirely blamed, for errors committed under the influence of passionate emotions, and on the other hand, one may be punished not only for conscious errors but also for errors committed unconsciously, in sleep, or even by other people (both one’s parents and one’s children). The idea that one person can be punished for the crime of another person is the flip side of an idea implicit in the Vedic sacrifice, which the priest performs for the benefit of someone else, the sacrificial patron (
yajamana
, in Sanskrit). This idea becomes much more important in later Hinduism, in texts that characterize the Vedic transaction as one in which the ritual transfers to the sponsor the good karma that the priest generates. Eventually—to fast-forward for a moment—the idea of the transfer of good karma in a ritual act with effects in this life develops into the idea of the moral consequences of any act, not only in this life but also in future lives.

Just as the Vedic poets speculate in various contrasting, even conflicting ways about the process of creation, so too do they vary in their speculations about death and in the questions they ask about death. The poets view death and sleep as a part of chaos, in contrast with the ordering of life in the hierarchy of social classes.
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Death in the Vedas is something to be avoided as long as possible; one hopes only to escape premature death, never to live forever; the prayer is that people should die in the right order, that children should not die before their parents (10.18.5). Surprisingly for a document so devoted to war and sacrifice, both of which involve killing, the
Rig Veda
actually says relatively little about death. What it does say, however, is comforting: For the virtuous, death is a hazy but pleasant place.

The poet says, speaking of the creator, “His shadow is immortality—and death,” and he prays, “Deliver me from death, not from immortality (7.59.12).” By “immortality” the ancient sages meant not an actual eternity of life—even the gods do not live forever, though they live much longer than we do, and they never age—but rather a full life span (usually conceived of as seventy or a hundred years). When it comes to the inevitable end of that span, the
Rig Veda
offers varied but not necessarily contradictory images of a rather muted version of life on earth: shade (remember how hot India is), lots of good-looking women (this heaven is imagined by men), and good things to eat and drink. There is also some talk about a deep pit into which evil spirits and ogres are to be consigned forever, but no evidence that human sinners would be sent there (7.104).

The poems also propose many different nonsolutions to the insoluble problem of death, many different ways that the square peg of the fact of death cannot be fitted into the round hole of human rationality. These approaches are often aware of one another; they react against one another and incorporate one another, through the process of intertextuality. And there is general agreement on some points, such as that the dead person would go to the House of Clay, to be punished, or to the World of the Fathers, to be rewarded.
⁷³

The
Rig Veda
is more concerned with the living than with the dead, as is clear from the way texts address mourners (10.18), but they also address the corpse: “Leaving behind all imperfections, go back home again; merge with a glorious body (10.14.8).” Despite this “glorious body” with which the dead person unites, another poem expresses concern that the old body be preserved and confidence that this will be so. The poem begins by addressing the funeral fire: “Do not burn him entirely, Agni, or engulf him in your flames. Do not consume his skin or his flesh. When you have cooked him perfectly, only then send him forth to the fathers (10.16.1).” Not only is the fire not to destroy the body, but it is to preserve it.
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Speaking to the dead man, the poem says: “Whatever the black bird has pecked out of you, or the ant, the snake, or even a beast of prey, may Agni who eats all things make it whole (10.16.6).” (Something very similar was said of and to the sacrificial horse, as we have seen.)

When this poem addresses the dead man, it speaks of the ultimate cosmic dispersal of the old body: “May your eye go to the sun, your life’s breath to the wind. Go to the sky or to earth, as is your nature; or go to the waters, if that is your fate. Take root in the plants with your limbs (10.16.3).” (This dismembermentis reversed in “Poem of the Primeval Man” (10.90): “The moon was born from his mind; from his eye the sun was born.”) And then it asks Agni to let the dead man “join with a body (10.16.5).”

The fate of the dead was a site of contention that was not tackled head-on until the Upanishads began to meditate philosophically on the ritual and mythology of the Vedas, and it was not fully explored until the full flourishing of Indian philosophy. Yet ever dogged by hindsight, our unshakable bête noire, we might note even in the Vedic poems some rather vague intimations of transmigration.
⁷⁴
“Take root in the plants with your limbs (10.16.3)” might be a hint of the sort of rebirth in plants that the Upanishads are going to describe in detail, especially when that verse is coupled, later in that same poem, with a rather suggestive, if cryptic, allusion to rebirth: “Let him reach his own descendants, dressing himself in a life span (10.16.5).” This verse can be interpreted to mean that Agni shold let the dead person come back to his former home and to his offspring.
⁷⁵
The dead in the Upanishads come back to the earth in the form of rain, and that idea may be encoded here too. Though a line in another poem, which expresses several rather different views of the fate of the dead, reverts to the idea of heaven, it also hints at the importance of the record of good deeds—which is to say, good karma: “Unite with the fathers, with Yama [king of the dead], with the rewards of your sacrifices and good deeds, in the highest heaven (10.14.7).” But these are, at best, but the early, murky stirrings of a doctrine that will become clear only in the Brahmanas and Upanishads.

CHAPTER 6

Concerns for the relationship between humans and animals, and with retribution in “the other world,” are central issues in the Brahmanas. Many new ideas are introduced in the form of folktales, some of which are alluded to, but not narrated, in the
Rig Veda
, while others may come from non-Vedic parts of Indian culture.

Where the
Rig Veda
expressed uncertainty and begged the gods for help, the Brahmanas (mythological, philosophical, and ritual glosses on the Vedas) express confidence that their infallible Vedic verses (mantras) can deal with all dangers. Troubled by the open-ended refrain of the
Rig Vedic
creation poem that could only ask, “Who is the god whom we should honor with the oblation?” the Brahmanas invented a god whose name was the interrogative pronoun Who (
ka
, cognate with the Latin
quis
, French
qui
). One text explained it: The creator asked the god Indra (whose own existence, you may recall, was once in doubt), “Who am I?,” to which Indra replied, “Just who you just said” (i.e., “I am Who”), and that is how the creator got the name of Who.
³
So too in one Vedic ceremony,
⁴
when the ritual subject goes to heaven and comes back again, he must say, on his return, “I am just who I am.” Read back into the Vedic poem (as it was in later Vedic commentaries
⁵
), this resulted in an affirmative statement: “Indeed, Who
is
the god whom we should honor with the oblation,” somewhat reminiscent of the famous Abbott and Costello routine “Who’s on first?” But this sacerdotal arrogance closed down some of those openings through which fresh theological air had flowed. The question became the answer.

What can account for this dramatic shift in tone, from questions to answers? In part, it was caused by a major change in the living conditions of the authors of these texts. For the Brahmanas were composed during one of the most significant geographical and social shifts in the history of Hinduism, a period that has been called the second urbanization
⁶
(the first being that of the Indus Valley), a time of social and intellectual transformation so extreme that it could well be called revolutionary. Let us, as usual, ground our discussion of the religious texts in a quick snapshot of the material lives of their authors.

From about 1100 to 1000 BCE, Vedic texts begin to mention the Doab (“Two Waters”), the land between the Ganges and the Yamuna (Jumna), the site of the city of Hastinapur (east of the present Delhi), and the scene in which most of the
Mahabharata
is set. Then, in about 900 BCE, we find references to an area farther down in the western and middle Ganges Valley, where people built palaces and kingdoms. Just as the migrations of the Vedic people into the Punjab probably took place gradually, through several different incursions, so too the move to the Ganges took place incrementally over several centuries. The political changes were correspondingly gradual. Though the Vedas refer to kings, they were really rulers of relatively small, and transitory, political units, numerous small chiefdoms; so too the leaders of the early political units on the Ganges were said to be “kings in name only” (
raja-shabdin
), and a later Buddhist text mocked them, remarking that each one said, “I am the king! I am the king!”
⁷
Now, however, a few big, powerful kingdoms begin to emerge.

Among the first cities were Kashi, later known as Varanasi (or Benares, the capital of Koshala/Videha), and, southeast of Hastinapur and west of Kashi, the city of Kaushambi (in Vatsa, now Uttar Pradesh), whose stratigraphy suggests a founding date of between 1300 and 1000 BCE.
⁸
The Brahmanas must have been composed a few centuries after the founding of these cities, for considerable time must have passed since the composition of the
Rig Veda
(even of the first and last books, one and ten, which are already noticeably later than the other eight), since the language of the Brahmanas is significantly different, somewhat like the shift from Beowulf to Chaucer in early English. The Brahmanas cite Vedic verses and explain them, describing the circumstances under which those verses were first created. Not only the language but the nature of the texts changed: Between 1000 and 500 BCE, Vedic rituals spawned more and more commentaries, and by the sixth century BCE the different schools, or branches (
shakhas
), had been well established.
⁹

During the first millennium BCE, the Vedic people settled down and built things to last. They continued to move east across North India and to take control of the river trade, forests, and rich deposits of minerals.
¹⁰
First they moved east from the Punjab to Magadha (Bihar) and the lower Ganges and later, in a backflow, west from the Ganges to Gujarat. The main crop now shifted from wheat to rice, which yielded a far greater surplus, and they used water buffalo in its cultivation. Eventually they formed cities and states, building urban societies along the Ganges, utilizing the agricultural surplus of wet rice and other crops that benefited from irrigation and control of the river floodings.

They moved partly in search of deposits of iron, which they developed from about 800 BCE (though a better quality was developed by about 600
¹¹
); its use was predominant in the western Ganges plain in the first millennium BCE and spread from the Indo-Gangetic watershed to the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna.
¹²
In the
Rig Veda
, the word
ayas
means “bronze”; later the
Atharva Veda
distinguishes red
ayas
(“bronze”) from dark
ayas
(“iron”). First used for pins and other parts of horse harnesses, as well as for weapons, iron was not imported but was developed in India, primarily from rich lodes in what is now southern Bihar.
¹³

The surplus that became available along the banks of the Ganges meant a new kind of social and economic power. It meant the organization and redistribution of raw materials and the greater stratification of society, in part because the growing of rice is a complex process that requires a higher degree of cooperation than was needed for herding or for simpler forms of agriculture. As labor became more specialized, sharper lines now divided each of the three top classes one from another and divided all of them from the fourth class, of servants.

More extensive kingship also meant more extravagant sacrifices, which in turn required still more wealth. New forms of political and social organization required new forms of ritual specialization. The early cities were ritual complexes, living statements about royal power.
¹⁴
The great kingship rituals such as the royal consecration rites and the horse sacrifice responded to a perceived need for an outward justification of the power exercised by “the emerging kingdoms with their increasingly stratified societies and their multi-lingual, multicultural and multi-racial populations.”
¹⁵
The ceremony of royal consecration became a highly elaborate affair, involving a period of symbolic exile, a chariot race, and a symbolic gambling match, all of which were to have long-lasting resonances in the narrative literature. And such complex sacrifices required a more complex math, astronomy, geometry; they also led to a more precise knowledge of animal anatomy.
¹⁶
Above all, the importance laid upon the precise words used in the rituals, the mantras, inspired the development of an elaborate system of grammar, which remained the queen of the sciences in India (as theology was for medieval Christianity). The more complex sacrifices also required a more complex priesthood, leading to questions about the qualifications of those claiming the title.