The Hindus (30 page)

Where did the potentially revolutionary ideas of karma and renunciation come from? We can identify both Vedic and non-Vedic sources. Let’s begin with the Vedic.

In the Upanishads, as in the
Rig Veda
, the body of the dead man returns to the elements—his eye to the sun, the hair of his body to plants, the hair of his head into trees, his blood and semen into water, and so forth—but the Upanishadic sages regard this as the beginning, not the end, of the explanation of death. The sage Yajnavalkya listed the correspondences between the parts of the body and the cosmos, whereupon his pupil asked, “What happens to the person then?” The person is the individual soul, the atman, or self, which is identical with the
brahman
, the world soul (sometimes also called atman, often transcribed as Atman to distinguish it from the individual soul), as salt becomes identical with water into which it is dissolved (BU 2.4.12). This is the central teaching of the Upanishads, a doctrine of pantheism (or panentheism, the world made of god), most famously expressed in the phrase generally translated “You are that” (
tat tvam asi
) (CU 6.8.7)
¹⁰
In answer to his pupil’s question, the Upanishad continues, Yajnavalkya drew him aside in private: “And what did they talk about? Nothing but karma. They praised nothing but karma. Yajnavalkya told him: ‘A man becomes something good by good karma and something bad by bad karma’ (BU 3.2.13).”

The first and most basic meaning of “karma” is action. The noun “karma” comes from the verb
kri
, cognate with the Latin
creo
, “to make or do,
^cu
to make a baby or a table or to perform a ritual.” It is often contrasted with mind and speech: One can think, say, or do (
kri
) something, with steadily escalating consequences. The second meaning of “karma” is “ritual action,” particularly Vedic ritual action; this is its primary connotation in the
Rig Veda
. Its third meaning, which begins to be operative in the Upanishads, is “morally charged action, good or bad,” a meter that is always running, that is constantly charging something to one’s account. And its fourth meaning, which follows closely on the heels of the third, is “morally charged action that has consequences for the soul in the future, that is retributive both within one’s life and across the barrier of redeath”: You become a sheep that people eat if you have eaten a sheep. (We saw the germ of this theory in the Brahmana descriptions of people soundlessly screaming in the other world and in statements that sacrifice generates merit that guarantees an afterlife in the other world.) In this sense, karma is action whose retributive moral charge determines the nature of your future rebirths. Consequences have consequences, and first thing you know, you’re born as a sheep.

Turned on its head, this link led to a fifth meaning of
karma
, not as the cause of future lives but as the result of past lives and the agenda for this life, the inescapable role in life that one was born to play, one’s work, or innate activity. Euro-Americans believe too that we often cannot remember the past causes of present circumstances and that the present will influence the future, but the Hindu view differs from this in extending the past and future beyond the boundaries of this life span. F. Scott Fitzgerald, of all people, captured the spirit of karma in the final sentence of
The Great Gatsby:
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” In Hinduism we are also borne back ceaselessly into the future.

The last (sixth) meaning of karma is the implication that good and bad karma may also be transferred from one person to another under certain circumstances, not merely between parents and children (as we saw in the Vedic poem to Varuna) and between sacrificial priest and patron, but between any people who meet. This transfer may take place either intentionally or unintentionally: The dharma texts say that if someone lets a guest depart unfed, the guest will take away the host’s good karma and leave behind his own bad karma.
¹¹
In the Brahmana story of Nachiketas, Nachiketas remains in the house of Death for three nights without eating and then tells Death that in effect, on the three nights of fasting he ate “your offspring, your sacrificial beasts (
pashus
), and your good deeds (
sadhu-krityam
).” This last is an example of the transfer of good karma; unfed, Nachiketas “eats” (which is to say, consumes) Death’s good deeds (which is to say, he siphons off Death’s good karma) as well as his children and cattle. This blackmail is what forces Death to tell Nachiketas his secrets.

It is not always clear which of these meanings of karma is intended in any particular passage in the Upanishads (or in other texts). Moreover, the idea of karma was certainly not accepted by everyone as the final solution to the problem of death (or the problem of evil); many other, conflicting ideas were proposed and widely accepted, alongside the karma theory.
¹²

The Upanishads continue to speak of “recurrent death” (BU 3.2.10, 3.3.2) and now describe the process in cruel detail (BU 4.3.36, 4.4.2). For heaven is no longer the end of the line, as it was in some of the Brahmanas; it is simply another place that eventually everyone leaves. The Upanishads spell out the assumption, sketched in the Brahmanas, that we all are on the wheel of redeath, transmigration (samsara, “flowing around”). From the very start, the idea that transmigration occurred was qualified by two other ideas: that some people wanted to get out of it and that there was a way to do this, a restoration not merely for one of life’s mistakes but for life itself, a way to put the fix in on death. When the Upanishads retell the story of Nachiketas, Death explains to the boy the process of dying and going to heaven in much greater detail, and at the end, Nachiketas “became free of old age and death, and so will anyone who knows this teaching (KU 1-2, 6.18).” Significantly, where the Brahmanas promise the conquest of redeath to anyone who knows the ritual, the Upanishad promises it to anyone who knows the teaching, a shift from a way of acting to a way of knowing.

The theory of reincarnation, a recycling not of tin cans but of souls, may reflect an anxiety of overcrowding, the claustrophobia of a culture fenced in, a kind of urban Angst (
amhas
). The Upanishadic discussion of the doctrine of transmigration begins when a teacher asks his pupil, “Do you know why the world beyond is not filled up, even when more and more people continuously go there?” and it ends with the statement “As a result, that world up there is not filled up (CU 5.10.8; BU 5.1.1 and 6.2.2)”
^cv
The idea of an overcrowded earth is a part of the myth of the four Ages (people live too long in the first Age and become too numerous) and recurs in the
Mahabharata
as a justification for the genocidal war (when the overburdened earth begins to sink beneath the cosmic waters).
¹³
Is this fear of crowds related to the shock of the new experience of city life in the Ganges Valley? Were there already slums in Kashi (as there may already have been in Harappa)? If a fear of this sort is what inspired the theory of reincarnation, who precisely was it who was afraid?

The “second urbanization,” the spread of paddy rice cultivation into the Ganges Valley, producing a surplus that could support cities, the emergence of societies along the Ganges, created an unprecedented proximity of people. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, said that the Indians were the most populous country on earth (5.3). Population densities had significantly increased, the result of a combination of the incorporation of indigenous peoples, a soaring birthrate, and the creation of agricultural surpluses.
¹⁴
This led to a burgeoning of all the things that people who like to sleep on their saddlebags at night don’t like about sleeping indoors, things that are for them a cultural nightmare. The movements to renounce the fleshpots of the Ganges Valley may have been inspired in part by a longing to return to the good old days preserved in the texts, when life was both simpler and freer, more heroic.
¹⁵
Such a longing is reflected in the name of the Aranyakas (“Jungle Books”), in the village settings of so much of the Upanishads, and in the forest imagery that abounds in the writings of the early sects, both inside and outside Hinduism. Within the cities the Buddha sat in an isolated spot under a tree to obtain enlightenment, and he first preached in a deer park. The Upanishads seem to have been composed by people who left the settled towns for rustic settings where master and student could sit under some tree somewhere, the ancient Indian equivalent of the bucolic liberal arts college; the renunciants are said to live in the wilderness, in contrast with the conventional Vedic sacrificers who live in villages. No individuals in the Ganges Valley could have remembered the old days up in the Punjab, but there was certainly a group memory, or at least a literary memory, of an idealized time when people lived under the trees and slept under the stars, a cultural memory of wide-open spaces. Many of the old rituals and texts too, such as the tales of cattle raids, no longer made sense but still exerted a nostalgic appeal.

A striking insight into the psychology of the forest dweller stage comes from an unexpected source, Philip Roth’s 1998 novel
I Married a Communist
, in a passage describing a shack that the hero, Ira, retreats to in times of trouble:

Beneath the specifically American concerns lies an understanding of ways in which, in ancient India too, the forest offers individual purification from the corruption of collective urban life.

The whole tradition was becoming individualistic, not just renunciant; we begin to see a transition from group to individual, a perceived need for personal rituals of transformation, forming a certain sort of person, not just a member of the tribe. At the same time, collective rather than individual choices needed to be made in order to start and maintain alternative societies, such as Buddhism, and monastic communities, as well as to engage in the highly collective enterprise of growing rice.

Reincarnation addressed this social problem and formulated it in terms of individual salvation. It seldom, if ever, occurred to anyone, then or at any time before the nineteenth century in India,
^cw
to attempt to change the world; but many people made judgments against it and opted out or tried to solve the problem of suffering within the individual. The new religious movements located the problem of the human condition, of human suffering, within the individual heart and mind (where Freud too located it), rather than in a hierarchical society (where Marx located it). The Upanishads emphasize a more personal religious experience than the one addressed by the Brahmanas.
¹⁷
In this way, at least, these movements were individualistic—“Look to your own house” (or, in the Buddha’s metaphor, “Get out of your burning house”
^cx
)—rather than socially oriented, as nonrenunciant Hinduism was—“Your identity is meaningful only as one member of a diverse social body.” This in itself was a tremendous innovation.

The Upanishads assume, like the Vedas and Brahmanas, that people pass into heaven or hell when they die, but they are far more concerned with the fate of the dead beyond heaven or hell. Here is how the
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
describes the possible trajectories of people who have died and are being cremated:

This text tells us that people within the Vedic fold at this time had a choice of two ways of being religious.

The people of the wilderness end up in the world of
brahman
, the divine substance of which the universe is composed.
Brahman
, which in the
Rig Veda
designates sacred speech, is the root of a number of words in later Sanskrit distinguished by just one or two sounds (or letters, in English):
brahman
(the divine substance of the universe); Brahma (the creator god); Brahmin or Brahman (a member of the first or priestly class
^cy
); Brahmana (one of a class of texts that follow the Vedas and precede the Upanishads); and Brahma-charin (“moving in
brahman
,” designating a chaste student). The world of
brahman
is a world of monism (which assumes that all living things are elements of a single, universal being),
^cz
sometimes equated with monotheism, in contrast with the world of rebirth, the polytheistic world of sacrifice to multiple gods. The doctrine of the Upanishads is also sometimes characterized as pantheism (in which god is everything and everything is god) or, at times, panentheism (in which god encompasses and interpenetrates the universe but at the same time is greater than and independent of it). It views the very substance of the universe as divine and views that substance and that divinity as unitary. The pluralistic world has a secondary, illusory status in comparison with the enduring, real status of the underlying monistic being.