The Hindus (32 page)

The Upanishadic sages take the Vedic themes and run with them in new directions and far. Indeed, they openly challenge the Vedas; one sage quotes the Vedic line about existence coming from nonexistence (10.72.1-5) but then remarks: “How can that possibly be?” and argues instead: “In the beginning, this world was simply what is existent [CU 6.2.2].” The
Rig Veda
passage cited in the
Brihadaranyaka
mentions a slightly different version of the two paths: the path of the fathers and the path of the immortal gods. But in the
Rig Veda
, living creatures on these paths go not through the smoke to the moon or through the flame to the sun, but between the mother (both the female parent and the earth) and the father (both the male parent and the sky) (RV 10.88.15; BU 6.2.2).

Much of Upanishadic thought represents a radical break with the Vedas. Though the realization that each soul was one with the infinite soul was hardly breaking news in the Upanishads, the earlier Vedic sources hardly mention this idea and certainly do not develop it systematically. What was particularly new was the suggestion, only in the later Upanishads, that understanding the equation of atman and
brahman
was a call to action: You must change your life.
^de
Most people did not change their lives. But eventually, as the lower classes gained more money, time, and education, some of them had the resources to act on ideas that they might have nourished for a long time and break away from the Vedic world entirely.
²³
Aspects of the Upanishads certainly appealed to people who no longer wished, or were never allowed, to play ball with the Brahmins. Although the early Upanishads, as we have seen, regard renunciation as a live option only for
some
people, the later texts, the Renunciation Upanishads (
Samnyasa Upanishads
), encouraged a person heading for the path of Release (or Freedom) to seek
moksha
as soon as possible,
²⁴
to make a vertical takeoff from any point in his life. For such a person,
moksha
is just another word for nothing left to lose.
^df

We have some knowledge of the people who might have contributed these new ideas. The Upanishads refer to already existing renunciants who operated within the Vedic tradition, and Buddhist texts tell us that such people were also there before the time of the Buddha, who, in the story of his enlightenment, meets a sick man, an old man, a dead man, and then a renunciant,
²⁵
perhaps a Vedic renunciant. The fringe mystics that the
Rig Veda
mentions, the Vratyas and the long-haired ascetic, may also have belonged to some of these motley and marginalized Vedic groups. The Upanishads attest to the existence of ascetic traditions that, by the sixth or fifth century BCE, had developed within the bounds of Vedic tradition, though not necessarily within the Brahmin class.
²⁶
Speculation about the nature and purpose of Vedic ritual began eventually, for some thinkers, to subordinate ritual action to spiritual knowledge, which could be attained by asceticism, world renunciation, or the disciplines that came to be known as yoga, designed to transform behavior through their emphasis on refining, controlling, and transforming the mind and the body.
²⁷

Some people rejected the world of heaven that the Vedas promised them but remained within the Hindu fold, on the path to Release; others suspected that the Brahmins could not keep their promises of either path and left the Vedic world entirely, to become Buddhists or Jainas. Some non-Brahmins who were still not ready to leave the Vedic fold entirely may have been reacting against the excesses of the priests, seeking, through asceticism or meditation, freedom from an increasingly regulated society or from a religious life dominated by elaborate and expensive rituals that the Brahmins monopolized.
²⁸
Other non-Brahmins may have been keen to introduce into the Vedic mix ideas, perhaps even ideas about karma and death, that have left no trace elsewhere, while at the same time they hoped in that way to crash the Brahmin party at last. Within Hinduism, the transition was from meditating on the Vedic sacrifice
while
doing it (in the Brahmanas and early Upanishads) to meditating upon the sacrifice
instead of
doing it (from the time of the Renunciation Upanishads), a move implicit in the renunciation of the householder life.

The Upanishads attribute some of their new doctrines to an important group of non-Brahmins within the Vedic world, Kshatriyas. It is a king, Jaivali Pravahana of Panchala, who teaches the doctrine of the two paths to the young Brahmin Shvetaketu. In the
Brihadaranyaka,
Shvetaketu approaches the king “while people are waiting upon him,” and he later refers to the king (out of his earshot) as a “second-rate prince” (
rajanya-bandhu
). The king insists that both Shvetaketu and his father must beg him to be their teacher, as they do, and before he teaches them, he says, “This knowledge has never before been in the possession of a Brahmin. But I will reveal it to you, to keep you or an ancestor of yours from doing harm to me (BU 6.3.8).” (Note that he still acknowledges the Brahmins’ power to curse.) In the
Chandogya
, the king adds, “As a result, throughout the world government has belonged exclusively to royalty (CU 5.3.6).” In the
Kaushitaki
, Shvetaketu’s father explicitly regards his royal teacher (another king) as an “outsider,” and the king praises the father for swallowing his pride (KauU 1.1-7). The eclectic Upanishadic kings as gurus, such as Janaka of Videha (BU 3.1.1.1, 2.1.1), may have been drawing upon that legacy when they summoned the leading philosophers of their day, holy men of various schools and persuasions (surely including some Brahmins), to compete in their salons and to debate religious questions at royal gatherings.

Of course the kings in these texts may never have existed; they may simply have been dreamed up by Brahmin authors, purely a literary convention, a fantasy.
^dg
Texts record sentiments, not events. But it is surely significant that such a positive fantasy, if it is just a fantasy, about royal sages found its way into the texts of the Brahmin imaginary; certainly it is telling that the Upanishads attributed to the Kshatriyas ideas questioning the centrality of the ritual and thus challenging the power of the Brahmins. When the Brahmin Gargya asks King Ajatashatru of Kashi to be his teacher, the king says, “Isn’t it a reversal of the norm for a Brahmin to become the pupil of a Kshatriya?” But he does it anyway (BU 2.1.15). These passages may represent a Kshatriya reaction to the Brahmin takeover during the preceding centuries, the period of the Brahmanas.

Nor were Kshatriyas the only non-Brahmins who contributed new ideas to the Upanishads:

Janashruti is a rich man and a king. Raikva is, by contrast, evidently a homeless person or a street person. He is also a man who despises cows and gold (two things that Brahmins always like best) and who likes women. It is extremely cheeky of him to call Janashruti a Shudra. Raikva is said to be a gatherer, which may refer to his knack of gathering up everyone else’s good karma,
^dh
as a successful gambler gathers up the dice of the losers, another early example of the transfer of karma from one person to another. But “gathering” may also refer to Raikva’s poverty, for he may have been a gleaner (like Ruth in the Hebrew Bible), gathering up the dregs of the harvest after everyone else has taken the real crop, or even, like so many homeless people, gathering up other people’s garbage for his own use. The two meanings work well together: The man who lives on richer people’s garbage also lives off their good deeds. (Much later, in the
Mahabharata
[14.90], several people, including a mongoose, tell King Yudhishthira about the great virtue of “the way of gleaning.”) At first the steward presumably searches for a Brahmin, for he has to be specifically instructed to search elsewhere. That Janashruti can understand the talking animals (wild geese, which often carry messages in Hindu mythology) is evidence of his high spiritual achievement, but the non-Brahmin Raikva is higher still; his secret knowledge (about the wind and breath as gatherers) trumps Janashruti’s ace of Vedic generosity.

An innovator of unknown paternal lineage and hence questionable class appears in the story that immediately follows the tale of Raikva, the story of Satyakama Jabala, the hero of the vignette at the head of this chapter. For Satyakama’s mother had slept with many men. (“I got around a lot” [
bahu aham caranti
] has the same double meaning in Sanskrit as it has in English—to move from one place to another and from one sexual partner to another—as well as a third, purely Indian meaning that is also relevant here: to wander as a mendicant.) An ancient Indian text that makes the son of such a woman a spiritual leader is a feminist tract. Such a text also takes truth rather than birth as the criterion of Brahminhood, though it still maintains that only a Brahmin, however defined, may learn the Veda. (Here we may recall the Brahmana statement “Why do you inquire about the father or the mother of a Brahmin? When you find knowledge in someone, that is his father and his grandfather.”)
²⁹
Satyakama needs to know his male lineage in order to prove that he was born in a family that has a right to learn the Veda; by conventional rules, he cannot matriculate in Varanasi U and sign up for Upanishads 108 unless he knows who his father is. But this text says it is enough for him to know who he himself is. Eventually Satyakama’s teacher sends him out to herd a hundred lean, weak cows. They thrive and increase to a thousand, and after some years the bull speaks to him, and so do the fire, and a goose, and a cormorant, each telling him one foot of the
brahman
, here imagined as a quadruped (CU 4.4-8). His ability to make weak cows into strong cows is a Vaishya trait, but his ability to converse with these animals is a sign of his extraordinary religious talent, rare in any class.

Though the idea of karma seems to have strong Vedic roots, strong enough that it seems almost inevitable that someone would have come up with it sooner or later (it was, one might say, the karma of the Upanishads to have that idea), ideas such as the identity of the atman with
brahman
, transmigration, and the Release from transmigration through renunciation and asceticism don’t have such strong Vedic ties and send us out, like Janashruti’s steward, to look for non-Vedic sources.

There were already in existence at this time a number of ascetic movements that were non-Vedic either in coming from some other, indigenous pool of ideas or in rejecting the Vedas, and these movements too may have come into, or influenced, the Upanishads.
³⁰
The karma theory may have developed many of its crucial details within Jainism and moved from there to Buddhism and Hinduism;
³¹
the Jainas have always taken vegetarianism to the greatest extremes, taking pains to avoid injuring even tiny insects, and this too heavily influenced Hindus. The breakaway groups not only abhorred sacrifice but also rejected the Veda as revelation and disregarded Brahminical teachings and Brahminical claims to divine authority,
³²
three more crucial points that distinguished them from Hindus, even from those Hindus who were beginning to take up some of the new doctrines and practices. The Buddhists also denied the existence of an individual soul, scorned the gods (particularly Indra
^di
) as insignificant and/or ridiculous and, like the authors of some of the Upanishads, argued that conduct rather than birth determined the true Brahmin, all significant departures from Hindu doctrines. Moreover, Buddhist monks lived together in monasteries, at first only during the rainy season and later at other times as well, while the Hindu renouncers during this period renounced human companionship too and wandered alone.

A number of groups engaged in friendly intellectual combat at this time. There were probably early adherents of what were to become the six major philosophical schools of Hinduism: Critical Inquiry (Mimamsa ), Logic (Nyaya), Particularism (Vaisheshika), Numbers (Sankhya), Yoga, and Vedanta. Ajivikas (contemporaries of the Jainas and Buddhists) rejected free will, an essential component of the doctrine of karma. Lokayatas (“This Worldly” people, also called Materialists and Charvakas, followers of a founder named Charvaka) not only rejected the doctrine of reincarnation (arguing that when the body was destroyed, the spirit that had been created specifically for it dissolved back into nothingness) but believed that physical sense data were the only source of knowledge and that the Vedas were “the prattling of knaves, characterized by the three faults of untruthfulness, internal contradiction, and useless repetition.”
³³
But most of what we know of the Materialists comes from their opponents and almost surely does not do them justice. Even the permissive
Kama-sutra
(c. second century CE) gives a simplistic version of the Materialist position: “Materialists say: ‘People should not perform religious acts, for their results are in the world to come and that is doubtful. Who but a fool would take what is in his own hand and put it in someone else’s hand? Better a pigeon today than a peacock tomorrow, and better a copper coin that is certain than a gold coin that is doubtful (1.2.21-23).’ ” The Materialists, as well as the Nastikas, common or garden-variety atheists (people who say “There is no (
na-asti
) [heaven or gods]”), were among a number of rebellious intellectual movements that gained momentum in the vigorous public debates of the fifth century BCE.