The Hindus (33 page)

Renunciants are sometimes called Shramanas (“toilers,” designating wanderers, ascetics), in contrast with Brahmanas (the Sanskrit word for Brahmins; the name of Shramanas stuck in part because of the felicitous assonance).
^dj
“Shramana” at first often referred to ascetics both within and without the Hindu fold,
³⁴
including Ajivikas, Nastikas, Lokayatas, and Charvakas.
³⁵
But the
Brihadaranyaka
groups Shramanas with thieves, abortionists, Chandalas and Pulkasas (two Pariah groups), and ascetics (BU 4.3.22), and eventually the word “Shramana” came to mean anyone low or vile or, finally, naked.

Shramanas and Brahmins were said to fight like snakes and mongooses
³⁶
or as we would say, like cats and dogs. Many Brahmins loathed the non-Vedic Shramanas (Buddhists and Jainas), who had entirely rejected, in favor of forest meditation, the sacrificial system that was the Brahmin livelihood. But the Shramanas within the Hindu fold, who still paid lip service, at least, to the Vedas and sacrifice but rejected the householder life (also a factor in Brahmin livelihood), were even more loathsome, a fifth column within the ranks. Both Shramanas and Brahmins must have been the source, and the audience, for the Upanishads, some of which they would have interpreted in different ways. Thus Brahmins, or the upper classes more generally, would take “renounce karma” to mean renouncing Vedic ritual, while to the Magadhi crowd that the Buddha preached to, it would have meant renouncing the fruits of actions of all kinds. Largely in response to the Shramana challenge, the Brahmins themselves absorbed a great deal of the renunciant ideal
³⁷
and came to epitomize one sort of renouncer—a paradigm of purity, self-denial, and self-control—even while they excoriated the other sort of renouncer, the low-caste drifter.

But in addition to the Brahminic and Shramanic strains enriching the Upanishads, there was, as always, the great Indian catchall of “local beliefs and customs,”
³⁸
or that ever-ready source of the unknown, the Adivasis or aboriginals, to whom more than one scholar attributes “some more or less universal Hindu beliefs like rebirth and transmigration of the
jiva
[soul] from animal to human existence.”
³⁹
There is also always the possibility of infusion of ideas from the descendants of the Indus Valley Civilization, an unknowable pool of what might be radically different ideas, a tantalizing source that some would, and others would not, distinguish from the Adivasis and Dravidians. But another, better answer for the source of these ideas about individual salvation, better perhaps than a pool whose existence can’t be proved, might be simply to admit that some individual, some brilliant, original theologian whose name is lost to us, composed some of the Upanishads. Lining up the usual suspects like this—a natural development from Vedic ideas (no genius required); Kshatriyas; some brilliant person in the Vedic camp; the IVC and its descendants; Adivasis—is often nothing more than confessing, “I can’t find it in the Veda.”

The criterion of individual intellectual talent colors an Upanishadic story of a Brahmin with two wives, who are distinguished not by their class (as multiple wives often are) but by their minds:

And he explains the doctrine of the self to her and goes away. Katyayani never even appears.
^dk
Presumably she (like Martha in the gospel story) takes care of the house (which, also presumably, she will inherit when their husband abandons both wives to take the ascetic path) while the other woman talks theology.

Some women therefore took part in the new theological debates, though none is depicted as an author. Gargi, the feistiest woman in the Upanishads,
^dl
is a staunch defender of Yajnavalkya. On one occasion she questions him about a series of increasingly important worlds, culminating in the worlds of
brahman
. Then Yajnavalkya says, “Don’t ask too many questions, Gargi, or your head will shatter apart!” And she shuts up (BU 3.6) (as do, on other occasions, several men who are threatened with having their heads shatter
⁴⁰
). Another time, she asks Yajnavalkya two questions in front of a group of distinguished Brahmins; she likens herself to “a fierce warrior, stringing his unstrung bow and taking two deadly arrows in his hand, rising to challenge an enemy,” an extraordinarily masculine, and violent, simile for a woman. When he answers her, at some length, she cries out, “Distinguished Brahmins! You should count yourselves lucky if you escape from this man without paying him anything more than your respects. None of you will ever defeat him in a theological debate (BU 3.8).” This is one tough lady, cast from the same mold as Urvashi and, later, Draupadi. (A later text even suggests that in addition to his other two wives, Yajnavalkya was also married to Gargi.
⁴¹
)

Women also had other options. Buddhism offered women security within a socially approved institution as well as a double liberation, on both the worldly and the spiritual planes, glorying in the release not just from rebirth but from the kitchen and the husband.
⁴²
Yet the Buddhists did not value nuns as highly as monks; there is even a tradition that the Buddha himself cautioned against admitting women, which, he warned, would spell the downfall of the order in India within five hundred years,
⁴³
a prophecy that did, more or less, come true.

This period also saw the beginning of the composition of a large literature of supplementary Sanskrit texts, the Shrauta Sutras (c. 500 BCE), which describe the solemn, public rites of the Vedas (the
shruti
), always performed by Brahmins, and the Grihya Sutras (c. 300 BCE), the texts of the household (
griha
), describing the domestic and life cycle rites, often performed by householders who were not necessarily Brahmins. The Grihya Sutras regulated and normalized domestic life, bringing about the penetration of ritual regulation into the daily life of the household, on a scale not seen before. We may look at this development in two different ways, both as a greater power among householders who now had many rituals that they could perform without the help of a Brahmin and as the extension of Brahmin power, through the codification of texts about householders’ rituals that had not previously been under Brahmin regulation.
⁴⁴
While the earlier Shrauta Sutras had made mandatory large-scale ritual performances, in some of which (such as the horse sacrifice) the sacrificer’s wife had to be present and even to speak, though not to speak Vedic mantras, the Grihya Sutras that regulated daily practices to be performed in the home required the more active participation of the sacrificer’s wife and other members of the household. This too may explain the proactive behavior of some of the women in the Upanishads.

Low or excluded people are often associated with animals, like Raikva and Satyakama with geese and bulls, and the fact that certain animals actually proclaim new Upanishadic doctrines tells us something important about the porosity of the class structure in religious circles at this time.

Dogs are satirically transformed from the lowest to the highest caste in an Upanishadic passage that may have been inspired by the Vedic poem likening priests (who begin their prayers with the sacred syllable “Om!”) to frogs singing in the rainy season:

Apparently they are rewarded, for the passage concludes with a statement that anyone who understands the secret meaning of the word “hum” (a meaning that the text supplies) “will come to own and to eat his own food.” To have dogs, the most impure of animals, impersonate Brahmins makes this remarkable satire, so reminiscent of Orwell’s
Animal Farm
, truly bolshie. For dogs are already stigmatized as eaters of carrion; when someone annoys Yajnavalkya by asking where the heart is lodged, he replies, impatiently, “In the body, you idiot! If it were anywhere other than in ourselves, dogs would eat it, or birds would tear it up (BU 3.9.25).” The author of this text may be poking fun at Brahmins or pleading for more sympathy for dogs (and therefore for the lower castes), or both or none of the above.

At the other end of the animal spectrum, the horse’s continuing importance in the Upanishads is a constant reminder of the Kshatriya presence in these texts. A horse auspiciously opens the very first line of the very first Upanishad: “The head of the sacrificial horse is the dawn; his eye is the sun; his breath the wind; and his gaping mouth the fire common to all men. . . . When he yawns, lightning flashes; when he shakes himself, it thunders; and when he urinates, it rains. His whinny is speech itself (BU 1.1.1).” The Vedic Dawn Horse (
Eohippus
) has cosmic counterparts; his eye is the sun just as, in the funeral hymn in the
Rig Veda
, the eye of the dead man is dispersed (back) to the sun, and the sun is born from the eye of the Primeval Man. The stallion’s gaping mouth of flame is later echoed in the submarine mare with fire in her mouth.

Another equine image, the chariot as a metaphor for the control of the senses, familiar from the Brahmana story of Vrisha, reappears now: “A wise man should keep his mind vigilantly under control, just as he would control a wagon yoked to unruly horses (SU 2.9).” A more extended passage explains this metaphor:

The senses must be harnessed, yoked, yogaed.
^dm
(Sometimes anger rather than desire is the sense that must be controlled, and desire is positioned as the charioteer; desire reins in anger like a charioteer with horses.)
⁴⁵
For horses, like the senses, straddle the line between wild and tame, always under hair-trigger control like that mare who holds the doomsday flame in her mouth. Indeed the image of the driver of the chariot gives way in later texts to the image of the tiny elephant driver (the mahout) who is barely able to control the enormous rutting elephant on which he rides. Eternal vigilance is the price of
moksha
.

Animals also appear in the lists of unwanted rebirths, in comparison with the two preferable options of rebirth as upper-class humans and Release from rebirth entirely. Dogs in particular represent the horrors of low birth; people who behave badly can expect to enter a nasty womb, like that of a dog. Significantly, the Good Animals, horses and cows, do not appear in the rebirth lists as likely options. One might assume that the belief that we might become reincarnate as animals contributes to the rise of vegetarianism in India, but no sympathy is extended to the animals in the rebirth lists, nor do the early Upanishads betray as many misgivings about eating animals (even reincarnated and/or talking animals) as the Brahmanas did toward the animals in the Other World. Yet the belief that humans and animals were part of a single system of the recycling of souls implies the fungibility of animals and humans and could easily sound a warning: Do not kill/eat an animal, for it might be your grandmother, or your grandchild, or (in the other world) you. For you are who you ate, and you may become whom you eat.

Nonviolence toward animals is mentioned only glancingly, twice, in the early Upanishads and then not as a word (such as
ahimsa
) but as a concept. The
Brihadaranyaka
stipulates that on a particular night, “a man should not take the life of any being that sustains life, not even that of a lizard (BU 1.5.14).” But presumably this is permissible on other nights. And the very last passage of the
Chandogya
states that the man who studies the Veda, becomes a householder, rears virtuous children, reins in his senses, “and refrains from killing any creature except on special occasions”
^dn
reaches the world of
brahman
and does not return again (CU 8.15.1). Here nonviolence against animals is specifically connected with the householder life, the path of rebirth, and is qualified in the usual way: There are occasions when it is good to eat animals, such as hospitality to honored guests.
⁴⁶

Yet most Indian traditions of reincarnation advise the renouncer to avoid eating meat,
⁴⁷
and renouncers were likely to be vegetarians; to renounce the flesh is to renounce flesh. Morever, since the renouncer renounces the sacrificial ritual (karma), he thereby loses one of the main occasions when it is legal to kill animals.
⁴⁸
The Brahmanas and Upanishads sow the seeds for the eventual transition away from animal sacrifice. Where Indra in the Vedas ate bulls and buffalo, now the gods neither eat nor drink but become sated by just looking at the soma nectar (CU 3.6.1), just as the king merely smells the odor of the burning marrow in the horse sacrifice. Even in the Vedic ritual, vegetable oblations (rice and barley) were the minimally acceptable lowest form of the sacrificial victim, the
pashu
, but the original animal victim lingers on in the way that the Vedic texts treat even the rice cake like an animal: “When the rice cake [is offered], it is indeed a
pashu
that is offered up. Its stringy chaff, that is the hairs; its husk is the skin; the flour is the blood; the small grains are the flesh; whatever is the best part [of the grain] is the bone.”
⁴⁹