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The Head Beneath the Altar
HINDU MYTHOLOGY AND THE CRITIQUE OF SACRIFICE
By Brian Collins Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2014 Brian Collins
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61186-116-7
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
I wander afield, thriving in sturdy thought, Through unpathed haunts of the Pierides, Trodden by step of none before. I joy To come on undefiled fountains there, To drain them deep; I joy to pluck new flowers, To seek for this my head a signal crown From regions where the Muses never yet Have garlanded the temples of a man: First, since I teach concerning mighty things, And go right on to loose from round the mind The tightened coils of dread religion; Next, since, concerning themes so dark, I frame Songs so pellucid, touching all throughout ...
—Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, Book I, "The Infinity of the Universe"
But although his fury and sarcasm leave the Vedic seers unscathed, he takes aim at modern anthropologists with exuberant zeal ... In their presence, Girard incessantly repeats "Molière's inexhaustible comment, 'Ah! qu'en termes galants ces choses-là sont mises!' ['How elegantly those things are phrased!']."
—Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch
India is the birthplace of the religious traditions of Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Sikhism. It has served as a pilgrimage place and source of spiritual renewal for Chinese monks in the fifth century, Tibetan royalty in the tenth century, and the Western counterculture since at least the early twentieth century. India's gift to the world, in the words of the nineteenth century Hindu reformer Swami Vivekananda, is religion. But India is also the site of some of the last century's worst episodes of violent conflict, including the bloody 1947 partition of India and Pakistan and the successive wars between the two nations over the next 25 years; the political murders of Mahatma Gandhi (by a Hindu), Indira Gandhi (by her Sikh bodyguards), and Rajiv Gandhi (by a Tamil separatist); the deadliest manmade ecological disaster in history at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal in 1985; the periodic outbreaks of communal violence against Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians; and the nuclear armament of India and Pakistan. Religion, in addition to India's gift to the world, is also oft en the scapegoat for India's violence.
Hindu mythology reflects this mixture of otherworldly spiritualism and worldly violence. Like most mythologies, it is full of images of cosmic wars, apocalyptic destruction, and tragic heroes. But it is also the repository of as many stories about courtly love, self-sacrifice, ethical quandaries, and sophisticated philosophical edifices to rival (or even surpass) Augustine and Aquinas. And unlike Greek or Scandinavian mythology, Hindu mythology is also connected to a living religious tradition and helps to define the religious identity of hundreds of millions of Hindus. As scholars of Hinduism have learned, one is far more likely to draw protests when writing about Ganesa or Siva than when writing about Loki or Aphrodite. Indeed, as we shall see, scholars of Hindu mythology have recently found themselves enmeshed or implicated in India's religious conflicts.
Many books have been written about the violence of religion, the religions of India, and the violence of the religions of India. But René Girard, who has spent the last four decades thinking and writing about religion and violence, has had virtually nothing to say about it until his lectures on the Sanskrit Brahmanas at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in October of 2002. This book will make a study of those lectures, published in English in 2011 as Sacrifice, in light of the rest of Girard's work, current Indological scholarship, and primary texts from the Hindu tradition. Along the way, we will also visit the work of Girard's predecessors, heirs, rivals, and critics, examine some well-known and some frequently overlooked Hindu myths and rituals, and take some sidelong glances into Christian theology, contemporary philosophy, and Greek, Iranian, and Scandinavian literature. In the end, we will come to some conclusions about what it means for him and for us that Girard has finally turned to India so late in his long and distinguished career and how a Girardian reading of Hindu myth might contribute to a new universal history built on humanity's shared future rather than its diffused pasts.
From Mimetic Theory to Hinduism ...
This book has two separate but related aims. First, I want to see to what extent René Girard's "mimetic theory" of the sacrificial origin of religion and culture can enrich our understanding of Hinduism. More specifically, I am interested in using Girard's theory and the hypotheses it engenders to understand what is happening in Indian myth and ritual between 500 B.C.E. and 500 C.E., a time frame roughly covering the periods of religious development that Axel Michaels calls the epochs of "Vedic Religions," "Ascetic Reformism," and "Classical Hinduism."
This is a rather large stretch of history that covers some significant changes, including the development of the Indian state, the successive rise and fall of Hindu and Buddhist empires, and cultural impact from Central Asian newcomers. But this book is about Hindu myth, not Indian history. While I will be referring to historical events occasionally to provide context, my primary mode of analysis will be textual, not historical, proceeding from Brian K. Smith's argument that "Hinduism is the religion of those humans who create, perpetuate, and transform traditions with legitimizing reference to the authority of the Veda." Accordingly the Veda will always be in the background of my analysis, and more so the commentarial tradition of the Brahmanas. I will also be spending a significant amount of time on the later heroic epic the Mahabharata, sometimes granted the honorary title of "Fifth Veda."
For the benefit of the nonspecialist, it may be useful at this point to explain exactly what a Veda and a Brahmana are. Both of these words have multiple overlapping meanings that can confuse those encountering Indian religions for the first time. "Veda" is a Sanskrit word that means "knowledge" and is cognate with the English wit and the German wissen. It refers to a class of revealed canonical literature that has the status of ultimate authority in the later Hindu tradition, which is why calling the Mahabharata the "Fifth Veda" is so significant. But the Veda also refers more specifically to the top "layer" of the Vedic literary tradition, the four original Vedic Samhitas. In this book, when the term appears in italics and is preceded by Rg, Yajur, Sama, or Atharva, I am speaking of one of the four Samhitas, or "collections," that comprise the top layer of the Veda and when I use the term without italics, I am referring to the class of Vedic literature as a whole. The Brahmanas are commentarial texts belonging to the second layer of this Vedic corpus. Unfortunately, the word "Brahmana" also refers to the class of priests responsible for passing on the Vedic tradition and performing its rites. To avoid confusion on this point, I will abandon transliteration when using the latter sense of the word and use "Brahmanas" to refer to the texts and "Brahmins" to refer to the people.
To make matters worse, there is another word that is synonymous with Veda in the collective sense: sruti. Sruti or "heard" texts, unlike those of the smrti or "remembered" variety, are apauruseya, that is, "without human [authorship]," and thus the ultimate and unquestionable authority over men and even gods, at least according to some schools of thought. Though the texts have no authors per se, they were revealed, through ecstatic states brought on by the ingestion of the sacred soma juice, to Vedic priest-poets who then memorized them and passed them along orally. An array of ingenious mnemonic devices aided the oral transmission of knowledge in ancient India and kept the integrity of the texts remarkably intact. As proof, Indologists have discovered separate oral traditions hundreds of miles apart that have maintained the same text word for word over a period of centuries without losing or changing a syllable. The Vedic scholar Michael Witzel has called the Vedic oral tradition, "something like a tape-recording of ca. 1500–500 B.C.E."
The Veda is a sprawling multiplicity of oral traditions comprising primary texts and commentaries of many different Vedic lineages, some still extant, some lost to time. This vast body of texts is divided into four classes or layers. The first, as we have seen, consists of the Samhitas or the Vedas proper, which are themselves divided into four: the aforementioned Rg, Sama, Yajur (which is further divided into Black and White branches), and Atharva. The Rg Veda is the largest, comprising 1028 poetic hymns celebrating the exploits of the Vedic gods, which were recited at the community's rituals. The Yajur is made up of prose mantras to be chanted at specific points in the rituals and the Sama is a collection of Vedic hymns presented in complex metrical forms, all but seventy-five of which are also found in the eighth and ninth books of the Rg. The Atharva is the youngest Veda and is characterized by its collection of magic spells and charms.
The earliest stratum of the Vedas (generally agreed to be books two through seven of the ten books of the Rg Veda) dates to sometime between 1500 and 1100 B.C.E., around the time the nomadic and pastoral Vedic people that produced them entered what we now call India, bringing their mobile sacrificial tradition with them. The language and culture of the Vedic people belong to a larger linguistic and cultural family called the Indo-European, which also includes the ancient cultures of Greece, Rome, Scandinavia, and Central Europe. The Vedic language and culture are most closely related to those of ancient Iran, leading some scholars to speak of an "Indo-Iranian" subgroup. By around 800 B.C.E., the Vedic people had left the Indo-Iranian world behind and were settling in the Ganges River Valley, where what had been a collection of tribes and clans began to develop into a stratified and hierarchical society consisting of four classes or varnas (literally, "colors"). Brahmin priests were at the top. Below them was the martial and royal Ksatriya class. The agricultural and mercantile Vaisya class was below the Ksatriya, and at the bottom were the Sudras, or slaves. This well-ordered picture, of course, comes to us from the very Brahmin-centered world of the textual tradition and should be taken with a grain (if not a five-pound bag) of salt. Recent evidence from the study of population genetics indicates that people in India were mixing across every conceivable ethnic and class barrier until around the second century C.E.
Indologists refer to the period of social upheaval that gave rise to this class ideology as the Second Urbanization, the First Urbanization being the pre-Vedic Harappan civilization that thrived between 2200 and 1500 B.C.E. in what is now Pakistan. By the time of the Second Urbanization, at least according to the idealized vision of the Vedic world portrayed in the text, the institution of yajña, or sacrifice, had become the central feature of the society. Wealthy patrons sponsored elaborate rituals performed by dozens of Brahmins, sometimes working for days on end. And as they became more established as the class with the exclusive right to perform the sacrifice, Brahmin lineages began to develop their own commentarial traditions to make sure that the rites were performed properly and to elucidate the oft enobscure Vedic hymns with mythical and proto-philosophical explanations. These commentarial texts were the Brahmanas, the second class of Vedic literature, and each one developed into a "branch" connected to one of the four Vedas and with its own commentarial tradition in the form of the more esoterically inclined Aranyakas and Upanisads, which comprise the third and fourth classes of Veda, or are sometimes combined into a single third class. As the final layer, the Upanisads (or the Aranyakas and Upanisads together) are frequently referred to collectively as the repository for the philosophical body of knowledge called the Vedanta or "The End of the Veda."
To the four Samhitas (Rg, Sama, Yajur, and Atharva) and other three classes of Vedic literature (Brahmanas, Aranyakas, and Upanisads), we should also add the Sutras, technical explanations of the Vedic rituals contained in the Yajur Veda, which are not granted the status of Veda themselves but are considered smrti, or "remembered." The category of smrti literature also includes a wide variety of ritual texts, theological and philosophical treatises, myths, and histories that do not possess the Brahmin-sanctioned authority of the Vedas but have had considerable influence over religious development in India. The ones that we will be concerned with are the Sutras, the Ramayana and Mahabharata epics, and the Puranas (encyclopedic compendia that are the sources of classical Indian mythology).
Having had a cursory glance over the massive body of Hindu scripture, we now come to the regrettably unavoidable question of whether or not the term "Hindu" has any coherent meaning that would justify looking at such a wide array of material as expressions of a whole. As many scholars have pointed out, "Hinduism" is an English word with no real counterpart in any Indian language. More than that, it doesn't appear anywhere in print before the nineteenth century. With this in mind, there are at least two reasons (both of which have merit) why some scholars, many of them influenced by the Islamicist Wilfred Cantwell Smith (notorious critic of the category of "Religion"), argue that Hinduism is a colonial or scholarly construction that does not correspond to any coherent religious tradition. First there is the postcolonial critique with its imperative to unmask any and all ideas presented as self-evident and examine the power structures and inequalities that produced them. This critique has revealed the political uses of the term "Hinduism" to legitimize certain forms of political order in the colonial period. Second is the sometimes-bewildering multiplicity of distinct practices and sects that are all lumped together in the category of Hinduism, which begs the question of whether we ought not consider them as separate traditions. But, even in the face of these challenges, there are good reasons to accept the notion of Hinduism, if only provisionally. In his 2006 essay, "Who Invented Hinduism?," David Lorenzen challenges the claim that "Hinduism was invented or constructed by European colonizers, mostly British, sometime after 1800" and notes that the first documented appearance of "Hinduism," though it does come at the recent date of 1816, is in a text by Rammohan Roy, the Hindu reformer and founder of the Brahmo Samaj, a society dedicated to making Hinduism a world religion. Despite Roy's Indian nationality, this fact taken alone may be more evidence in favor of the xenonymic nature of the word, since Roy was consciously remodeling Hinduism in light of his engagement with Unitarianism. But before the term enters English, we can find many more instances, in various forms, of a word that denotes the traditions of the Brahmins and the sects devoted to Vishnu, Siva, and the Goddess (Vaisnavas, Saivas, and Saktas, respectively) in Spanish, Italian, and Persian sources as well as native accounts dating to the fifteenth century. From this and other evidence, Lorenzen concludes that something recognizable as Hinduism, displaying "many continuities with the earlier Vedic religion" is discernible from the period of the composition of the earliest Puranas, which served as focal texts for the temple-based Hindu sects between the fourth and the seventh centuries C.E.
Although Lorenzen and Brian K. Smith both define Hinduism by its relation to the earlier Vedic religion, it is surely the case that some strains of Hinduism are as diff erent from Vedic religion as the Church of England is from Second Temple Judaism. And, more to the point, applying an idea as alien as mimetic theory—derived from Girard's reading of Shakespeare, the Bible, and Greek drama—to such an array of disparate sects and traditions would seem to exacerbate the distortion that comes from lumping together the traditions of twentieth century Saktism in Sri Lanka and tenth century B.C.E. Horse Sacrifices in the Panjab. Keeping that in mind, in this book I will focus on the aspects of Hinduism that are directly and demonstrably related to the Vedic tradition. Along with the Vedas themselves, especially the Rg Veda and the Yajur Veda, I will also look at the commentarial tradition contained in the Brahmanas, the ritual speculations of the Mimamsa philosophers, and the Sanskrit epics. And in order to illuminate the multiple connections between Hinduism and the archaic religions on which Girard's work has been mainly focused, I will also look at materials from other Indo-European cultures, including Greece and Scandinavia.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Head Beneath the Altar by Brian Collins. Copyright © 2014 Brian Collins. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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