Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

  93. Ibid., 46.

  94. Ibid., 50.

  95. Ibid., 50-51. Smith’s description of the natural state is reminiscent of the second law of thermodynamics. However, what Hermann Oldenberg meant by his term “pre-scientific science” was not exactly this, but rather the immense effort to correlate and classify, which does indeed lie behind what we would call real science. See Hermann Oldenberg, Vorwissenschaftliche Wissenschaft: Die Weltanschauung der Brahman-Texte (Gottingen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, 1919).

  96. Jamison and Witzel, “Vedic Hinduism,” 38.

  97. Frits Staal, Rules without Meaning: Ritual, Mantras, and the Human Sciences (New York: P. Lang, 1989), 101.

  98. Staal, Agni, 1:590ff.

  99. Smith, Reflections, 48.

  100. Ibid., 199.

  101. Actually Staal says that because ritual is older than language, probably by hundreds of thousands of years (see chapter 3 of Rules without Meaning), “mantras occupy a domain that is situated between ritual and language.” He notes that there are “mantra like sound structures among animals.” Staal, Rules without Meaning, 261.

  102. “From the perspective of later Hindu thought, the entire Veda is sometimes associated with the idea of a protosemantic presence of `words’ and `sounds.’ In this view, the Veda is `primarily word’ (abdapradbana) and thus distinguished from the Puranas, which are said to be artbapradbana, that is texts in which `meaning’ and `information’ predominate.” Wilhelm Halbfass, Tradition and Reflection: Explorations in Indian Thought (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991), 6.

  103. Maurer, Pinnacles ofIndia s Past, 280-281.

  104. Jamison and Witzel, “Vedic Hinduism,” 67.

  105. Ibid., 66.

  106. Jan Gonda, Notes on Brahman (Utrecht: J. L. Beyers, 1950), 62-63.

  107. Both Levi (in La doctrine du sacrifice, see esp. 10-11) and Mus (in Barabudur) point out the structural parallel between the sacrificer who, through the ritual, becomes identified with the divine, and the renouncer who, through austerities and meditation, finds that his Self (atman) is identical with the Absolute (brahman). Yet I think they both see that what I call theory was present in the case of the renouncer but not in the case of the Vedic sacrificer. Mus, if I understand him correctly, finds Upanishadic thought so theoretical that it cannot offer salvation and must be replaced later in Hinduism by bhakti (devotional) religion, whereas Buddhism managed to combine the Upanishadic breakthrough with the Brahmanic emphasis on practice.

  108. See Erdosy, “City States”; and Erdosy, Urbanisation in Early Historic India (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, International Series, 1988).

  109. Olivelle, Upanisads, xxix.

  110. Witzel, “Tracing the Vedic Dialects,” 245.

  111. Olivelle, Upanisads, xxix.

  112. Jamison and Witzel, “Vedic Hinduism,” 75.

  113. Ibid., 75-76.

  114. Jan Gonda, Brahman, 58-61.

  115. Wayne Whillier, “Truth, Teaching, and Tradition,” in Hindu Spirituality: Vedas through Vedanta, ed. Krishna Sivaraman (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 48.

  116. O’Flaherty, Rig Veda, 25-26. Note that this hymn, like RV 10.90, is quite late, anywhere between 1000 and 600 BCE.

  117. Joel Brereton, “The Upanishads,” in Eastern Canons: Approaches to the Asian Classics, ed. William Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 115-135. I am also indebted to Hermann Oldenberg, The Doctrine of the Upanisads and Early Buddhism, trans. Shridor B. Shrotri (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1991 [1923]), chap. 1, “The Older Upanisads,” for many helpful suggestions.

  118. Brereton, “Upanishads,” 121.

  119. Halbfass, Tradition and Reflection, 40.

  120. Brbadaranyaka Upanisad 1.4.10, in Olivelle, Upanisads, 15.

  121. Panini’s Sanskrit grammar (ca. 400 BCE) is generally accepted as the beginning of scientific linguistics and the stimulus for modern Western developments in that field. Staal argues that Panini’s linguistics developed out of a “science of ritual” and was related to the need to understand what was by then archaic Vedic language (Rules without Meaning, 33-60).

  122. I will be using the translations of Olivelle, Upanisads, 148, and Brereton, “The Upanisads,” 122. The Chandogya Upanisad is the most important early Upanisad besides the Brbadaranyaka Upanisad.

  123. Olivelle, Upanisads, 148.

  124. Ibid., 154, except for the last paragraph, which is from Brereton, “The Upanisads,” 124. Olivelle, for reasons that he explains in his notes, translates the famous last sentence, tat tvam asi, as “And that’s how you are, ~vetaketu,” whereas Brereton is closer to traditional translations. Edgerton, for example, translates the phrase “That art thou, Svetaketu.” Franklin Edgerton, The Beginnings ofIndian Philosophy (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1965), 176.

  125. Gananath Obeyesekere, Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 111. Obeyesekere is one of the few scholars of early India who have explicitly discussed the axial-age question, citing Jaspers and Eisenstadt.

  126. Olivelle, Upanisads, 17.

  127. Brereton, “The Upanisads,” 124.

  128. For the modern thinkers, see Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988).

  129. Olivelle, Upanisads, Ivi.

  130. Ibid., 140.

  131. Ibid., 142. A somewhat different version of this dialogue appears in the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad 6.2, Olivelle, Upanisads, 81-84. “Pleasant” and “foul” appear to describe behavior appropriate to caste status rather than conforming to universal ethical norms.

  132. Kenneth H. Post, “Spiritual Foundations of Caste,” in Sivaraman, Hindu Spirituality, 101.

  133. Olivelle, Upanisads, 38.

  134. Witzel has an interesting discussion of Yajnavalkya as “one of the few lively people in the oldest strata of Indian literature” [italics in original], the others being Vasistha and the Buddha. Vasistha appears briefly but vividly in the Rgveda, bk. 7, but is the only such figure to stand out until late Vedic times when Yajnavalkya appears. Because Yajnavalkya is the very embodiment of the Upanishadic axial transition, and axial transitions often produce striking individuals, whereas archaic societies produce vivid gods but individuals largely defined by status, not personality, his very existence confirms the axial turn, as does, of course, the Buddha. See Michael Witzel, “Yajnavalkya as Ritualist and Philosopher, and His Personal Language,” in Patimana: Essays in Iranian, Indo-European, and Indian Studies in Honor of HannsPeter Schmidt, ed. SiamakAdhami (Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda, 2003), 104-105.

  135. Olivelle, Upanisads, 39-40.

  136. Ibid., 71.

  137. Ibid., 16.

  138. Ibid.

  139. Halbfass, India and Europe, chap. 17, “Dharma in the Self-Understanding of Traditional Hinduism,” 310-333.

  140. Witzel, “How to Enter the Vedic Mind?” 12.

  141. Olivelle, Upanisads, 334.

  142. Halbfass, `Dbarma,“314, 317.

  143. Ibid., 317-318.

  144. Ibid., 318.

  145. Ibid., 320-321.

  146. Ibid., 320.

  147. Ibid., 316-317.

  148. Bhagavadgita 24[2]ff., in J. A. B. van Buitenen, The Bhagavadgita in the Mahabharata (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 73ff.

  149. Halbfass, `Dbarma,“326, 329.

  150. Ibid., 333.

  151. See, for example, A. L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India (New York: Grove, 1959), 148.

  152. Halbfass, Tradition and Reflection, chap. 10, “Homo Hierarchicus: The Conceptualization of the Varna System in Indian Thought,” 352. Halbfass says that he is not defending Dumont’s famous book in this chapter, but that he does agree with what Dumont called “the main idea” of his book, that is, “the idea of hierarchy separated from power” (350).

  153. Brian K. Smith, Classifying the Universe: The Ancient Indian Varna System and the Origins of Caste (N
ew York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 82.

  154. It might be thought that the great philosophers of later centuries would have rejected these exclusions of Sudras, but such is not the case. Both Sankara and Ramanuja agreed with the exclusion of Sudras from the study of the Vedas. Sankara even approved the rule that Sudras who listened to Vedic texts should have their ears filled with molten metal. Halbfass, Tradition and Reflection, 380-381.

  155. S. N. Eisenstadt, Japanese Civilization: A Comparative View (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996); and Robert N. Bellah, Imagining japan: The Japanese Tradition and Its Modern Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

  156. Eric Voegelin, Israel and Revelation, vol. 1 of Order and History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956), 164.

  157. Alexander von Rospatt reminds me that classic Indian Buddhism did survive to the present in one traditionally Indian area: Nepal, particularly the Kathmandu Valley. It is only there that Sanskrit Buddhism can be found today, I am grateful for this and other suggestions that he gave me.

  158. Ronald B. Inden, Imagining India (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990), 73-74.

  159. Ibid., 217ff.

  160. Ibid., 212-262.

  161. Thapar, From Lineage to State, 171-172. S. N. Eisenstadt and Harriet Hartman, “Cultural Traditions, Conceptions of Sovereignty and State Formation in India and Europe,” in van den Hoek, Kolf and Oort, Ritual, State and History, 493-506, discuss Indian society in a way that supports and extends Thapar’s analysis. They write, “Indian politics developed predominantly patrimonial characteristics, the rulers relying mostly on personal loyalty” (499). Society they see as composed of rather complex networks of ascriptive and particularistic groups that were by no means similar to geographically limited “tribal” solidarities, but could be extended to wide areas. Caste solidarities were particularistic yet could provide some functional equivalents to more universalistic solidarities because of their capacity to transcend local geography.

  162. Charles Malamoud, “Semantics and Rhetoric in the Hindu Hierarchy of the `Aims of Man,”’ in his Cooking the World: Ritual and Thought in Ancient India, trans. David White (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996 [1989]), 125, 128. Malamoud translates the ends as “Order (dharma), Interest (artha), and Desire (kama)” (113).

  163. Whillier, “Truth, Teaching, and Tradition,” 53.

  164. Olivelle, in TheAsrama System, cites a number of places in the epics where “the term sramana is used for a variety of Bramanical ascetics” (15 n. 34).

  165. Patrick Olivelle, “The Renouncer Tradition,” in The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, ed. Gavin Flood (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 277. For a fuller description, see Olivelle, TbeAsrama System; and Olivelle, Dbarmasutras.

  166. Olivelle, TheAsrama System, 36.

  167. Olivelle quotes from dharma texts to show how strongly the householder order was upheld: “All orders (dsramas) subsist by receiving support from the householder,” and “As all rivers, both great and small, find a resting-place in the ocean, even so men of all orders find protection with householders,” from Manu; “there is one dsrama only, because the others do not beget offspring,” from the Baudriliya Dharmasutra. See also Patrick Olivelle, The Origin and Early Development of Buddhist Monachism (Colombo: Gunasena, 1974), 5.

  168. Olivelle, TheAsrama System, 242.

  169. Ibid., 227.

  170. Romila Thapar, “Renunciation: The Making of a Counter-Culture?” in Ancient Indian Social History: Some Interpretations (Bashir Bagh: Orient Longman, 1978 [1976]), 63. This is one of four papers that are particularly helpful in understanding the role of renouncers in Indian history. The others are Louis Dumont, “World Renunciation in Indian Religions,” in Religion/Politics and History in India: Collected Papers in Indian Sociology (The Hague: Mouton, 1970 [1960]); Jan Heesterman, “Brahmin, Ritual, and Renouncer,” in The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985 [1964]), 26-44; and Charles Malamoud, “Village and Forest in the Ideology of Brahmanic India,” in Cooking the World, 74-91. Heesterman and Malamoud deal largely with the early period; Thapar and Dumont deal with Indian history as a whole.

  171. Thapar, “Renunciation,” 63.

  172. Richard Gombrich, How Buddhism Began: The Conditioned Genesis of the Early Teachings (London: Athlone, 1996), 51.

  173. Gombrich, How Buddhism Began, 33.

  174. See Steven Collins, Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravada Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 125; Collins in this book presents the fullest account of anatta available in English.

  175. Ibid., 136-137, referring to Majjbima Nikaya 63.5.

  176. My description of these three fundamental categories is a condensation of Collins’s exposition of them in his Selfless Persons, 29. A recent book by Johannes Bronkhorst, Greater Magadha: Studies in the Culture of Early India (Leiden: Brill, 2007), offers a radical alternative view of the origin of these three ideas, suggesting that their origin is not in the Vedic tradition but in the rather different culture of “Greater Magadha” that developed outside the Vedic orbit and was only gradually assimilated to the Vedic tradition. I am in no position to evaluate this argument, which runs counter to other sources I have used. The specialists will have to decide these issues, but, as I have learned from scholarship on the Hebrew scriptures, arguments about chronology can go on interminably when there is little or no basis outside the texts for dating them before or after other texts.

  177. I am very indebted to Collins, Selfless Persons, esp. 191-193, for his illuminating discussion of dukkba.

  178. Charles Taylor, A SecularAge (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 6-7.

  179. Maurice Walshe, in the introduction to his translation of the Digba Nikaya, says that in the treatment of the Brahmins in the Buddhist texts “one is insistently reminded of the New Testament picture of the Pharisees, though in both cases the picture as presented is, to say the least, one-sided.” Maurice Walshe, trans., The Long Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Digba Nikaya (Boston: Wisdom), 22.

  180. Collins, Selfless Persons, 32-33.

  181. This teaching was shared with and even conceivably borrowed from the Jains, who took it to lengths to which Buddhism usually did not go.

  182. Gombrich, How Buddhism Began, 68-69. Gombrich notes that the Mahayana tradition gave expression to this basic idea “in one of the most famous passages in the whole of Mahayana literature, the allegory of the [world as a] burning house in the Lotus Sutra (chapter 3)” (69).

  183. Sonadanda Sutta, Digha Nikaya 4, in Walshe, The Long Discourses, 125-132.

  184. Ibid., 128.

  185. Ibid., 129-131.

  186. Ibid., 132.

  187. Ibid., 550 n. 169.

  188. Obeyesekere, Imagining Karma, 114.

  189. Although Brahman in the singular, either as the highest god or as the absolute, is not to be found in the Suttas, Brahmas, in the plural, are among the many gods that continued to be recognized by Buddhists. Having a Brahma request that the Buddha take on the lifelong arduous task of teacher to the world is one of the ironies that the Suttas delight in. Not least of the ironies is that Vedic orthodoxy limited the teaching of liberating truth to a few, whereas here Brahma urges the Buddha to make it available to all.

  190. Ariyapariyesand Sutta 19-21, in Bikkhu Bodhi, trans., The Middle Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Majjbima Nikaya (Boston: Wisdom, 1995), 260-262.

  191. Obeyesekere, Imagining Karma, 114-115. The passage is from the Mahaparinibbana Sutta (The Buddha’s Last Days) 3.7-8. For another translation, see Walshe, Long Discourses, 246-247.

  192. For an excellent discussion of the relation of Buddhist monasticism to the laity, see Ilana Friedrich Silber, Virtuosity, Charisma, and Social Order: A Comparative Sociological Study of Monasticism in Theravada Buddhism and Medieval Catholicism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). It is in t
his book that Silber argues for Buddhism and Christianity as the only religions where true monasticism developed.

  193. Ibid., 67.

  194. Richard F. Gombrich, Theravada Buddhism: A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2007), 66.

  195. Ibid., 78.

  196. Here I am drawing from Steven Collins’s discussion in his Nirvana and Other Buddhist Felicities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 282-285.

  197. Bikkhu Bodhi, The Connected Discourses oftbe Buddha: A Translation of the Samyutta Nikaya (Boston: Wisdom, 2000), 1846. The Deer Park Sermon is to be found in the Samyutta Nikaya 56.11.

  198. Collins, Nirvana, 284. For Collins’s idea of nirvana as, in the linguistic sense, syntactic as well as semantic and pragmatic, see below. Kenneth Burke has written an essay that moves in the opposite direction from Collins but makes the same point: the interchangeability of systematic and narrative thought, with the remaining significant difference that one is atemporal and the other necessarily temporal. For Burke, the first three chapters of Genesis, the Garden of Eden story, though narrative in form, can be reformulated in “philosophical,” that is, timeless propositional form, as the logical consequences that necessarily follow the postulation of the idea of order. See Burke, “The First Three Chapters of Genesis” in The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 172-272.

  199. Collins, Nirvana, 243.

  200. Ibid., 243-244. My whole discussion of the “knowledge” the gaining of which is so central to the Buddhist Path as not only cognitive but also affective and behavioral draws largely from Collins’s book. For a summary discussion of Buddhist knowledge as the gaining of skill rather than fact alone, see Collins’s summary, Nirvana, 153.

  201. Ibid., 245.

  202. On this Weberian characterization of the Sangha, see Collins, Nirvana, 558.

  203. Patrick Olivelle, The Origin, pt. 2, “The Growth of Buddhist Cenobitical Life,” 35-77.