We catch a glimpse into orthodox thinking about the authority of the Vedas in the first half of the nineteenth century through a controversy at the time conducted in Sanskrit over a polemical treatise called the Mataparīkṣā (‘Test of Doctrines’). The Mataparīkṣā, which eventually saw three editions, the first in 1839, was written by a Scottish Episcopalian, John Muir (1810–82). At the time, Muir was a civil servant in the East India Company. Muir proposed to test for the true religion on the basis of certain criteria, rationally applied. Not surprisingly, it was the religion of the Christians that was found to pass the test, while that of the Hindus, in particular, was adjudged to fail. It is not our purpose here to inquire into the details of the controversy or into the methodological soundness of Muir's project.15 What interests us is how some orthodox thinkers responded, especially by their use of the Veda.
Allowing for some individual variations, the pandits in general show remarkable unanimity in their attitude to theVedas. Most if not all of the basic ingredients of a traditional approach are present: that the Vedas derive from God /Brahman, but that they are eternal and unauthored; that at each production of the world they are promulgated by the demiurge Brahmā through the agency of the ṛṣis/seers;that Sanskrit is their original, sacrosanct language;that the Vedas are above reason, but that they may be defended and elucidated with the help of reason; and that in this light the Bible, or any other scripture for that matter, is no match for the authority and truth of what they say. One pandit affirmed, ‘If you must believe in a text, then rely on the Veda, for it has been current on earth since the beginning of creation and time’.16 All other scriptures, it is implied, are newcomers and hence lacking in authority by comparison. Elsewhere, the same pandit says,‘It is on the basis of the cognitive authority of the Veda (vedapramāṇatvat), that other [Hindu] sacred texts have their authority’ (Young 1981:131, footnote 146 for the Sanskrit). And another pandit declared/‘Having first accepted the things scripture says as true, one should then establish them by reasoning ... Reasoning conforms to scripture, not scripture to reasoning. Scripture is self-validating (svataiṣpramāṇaka) whereas reasoning exists to understand scripture’ (ibid.:107–8, footnote 103 for the Sanskrit). So the old approach had its champions, while the new was gaining ground. Even today the old approach is far from moribund; in fact, under the catch-all phrase of Hindu fundamentalism, it is enjoying a revival in some quarters. Scriptural literalism or regarding scripture as the template of all truth, are trends with many followers in all religious traditions. Hinduism and the Vedas are no exception.
(iii) Finally, we must mention one of Hinduism's best-known modern thinkers in this brief discussion about the influence of the Vedas in contemporary times. This is Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975), who was not only a philosopher and interpreter of Hinduism, but also President of India from 1962–67. Radhakrishnan was something of an eclectic, ranging widely among the philosophies and religions of the world in articulating his views. Like Ram Mohan, he believed that rationalist criteria must be brought to bear in determining the meaning of religious scriptures. So he could write, in perhaps his most enduring original work, An Idealist View of Life:
The scriptures which affirm the absolutism of religions and announce themselves as infallible, such as the Vedas and the Tipṭaka [of Buddhism], the Bible and the Qu'ran, are treated today in the same critical and historical spirit as the Dialogues of Plato or the Inscriptions of Aśoka. They are all human documents written by human hands and liable to error ... The scriptures are products of history and some of their parts are forgeries, or at least not so old as they were supposed to be. The case for verbal inspiration is not seriously put forward. We cannot bring ourselves to believe that any of these scriptures is the word of god ... The Vedas are a literature rather than a single book, containing writings of varied style, date and value. Their value is not determined by their hoary antiquity or alleged divine dictation, but only by the nature of their contents ... Every revealed scripture seems to contain in it a large mass of elements which scientific criticism and historical knowledge require us to discard and there is no reason why we should accept it at all. Truth is greater than any revelation.
(1961:28–30)17
At first sight, this statement appears to be in sharp contrast to the simple faith in the Vedas of the pandits discussed earlier. And in some respects it is. But Radhakrishnan's whole thought was structured on an Advaitic interpretation of the upaniṣads, which also encapsulates an attitude of faith. Hence the apparent rationalism in the passage above is to some extent intellectually misleading. Again and again, in his numerous writings, Radhakrishnan quotes from the upaniṣads to substantiate a point. He goes so far as to say that the ‘germinal conceptions’ of Hinduism'are contained in the Vedānta standard ... The Vedānta is not a religion, but religion itself in its most universal and deepest significance’ (1927/1980:18). It was the Vedānta as interpreted from his own Advaitic or monistic standpoint that he had in mind here. On this basis he endorses an ascending scale of truth for the religions of the world. The closer a religious ideal is to monism, the higher up the scale it is:
[Hinduism] accepts the obvious fact that mankind seeks its goal of God at various levels and in various directions, and feels sympathy with every stage of the search ... Hinduism accepts all religious notions as facts and arranges them in the order of their more or less intrinsic significance ... Hinduism insists on our working steadily upwards and improving our knowledge of God.
(1927/1980:24)
Here Radhakrishnan clearly states that in his own view religious insight is a matter of progression ‘upwards’ as affirmed in ‘Hinduism’ which has the wisdom (through thinkers like him) to rank religious ideals in the order of their more or less ‘intrinsic’ and therefore unquestionable significance. He then proceeds to do this within (unattributed) quotation marks, presumably on behalf of ‘Hinduism’:
The worshippers of the [monistic] Absolute are the highest in rank;second to them are the worshippers of the personal God;then come the worshippers of the incarnations like Rāma, Kṛṣṇna, Buddha [and presumably, Christ];below them are those who worship ancestors, deities and sages, and lowest of all are the worshippers of the petty forces and spirits.
(ibid.:24)
This is hardly an assessment derived from predominantly rational criteria, for it is based on a number of extra-rational assumptions (e.g. that monism represents the highest level of religious truth). Whatever one may think of Radhakrishnan as a philosopher of religion (in wider context he made a considerable impression on the world stage;see Lipner 1989a:123–37), there is no doubt that his writings helped reinforce the intellectual and cultural prestige of the Vedas among educated Hindus and implicitly won for these texts serious consideration by thinkers outside Hinduism, not least in the West.
The Vedas, therefore, are far from having to be written off on the modern Indian scene. On the contrary, Vedic religion, in one form or another, has helped bring that multi-faceted phenomenon we know as modern India, not to speak of modern Hinduism, to birth. Gone are the days of the widespread performance of the Vedic yajña, it is true, or of the mentality, certainly among the educated and rapidly increasing middle classes of Hindu society, that the study of the Vedas is the preserve of Brahmins. Ram Mohan Roy and other moderns saw to that. But, as we have seen, Vedic religion, or at least religious attitudes based on the Veda, has staged a powerful comeback (if ever these were really in abeyance). And the mentality of the Saṃhitās that religious ritual is a source of power is still very much in force among Hindus at large, though this is now mainly religious ritual in the form of rites of passage, domestic worship and temple practice. The Ancient Banyan continues to regenerate and adapt itself.
Thus, traditional uses of the Vedas have by no means been abandoned. We have noted how schools of Vedic chant still operate. Upper-caste Hindus still recite from the Veda as part of their daily religious observances, or commission religious ceremon
ies to be performed at home or in temples that require Vedic utterances. Further, as part of the process of Sanskritization, recourse to the authority of the Vedas in some form continues to service attempts made by low-caste people to raise their status in the caste hierarchy. It has been shown, for instance, that contrary to age-old injunctions, Brahmin priests are quite prepared to recite mantras from the Veda for Śūdra clients, e.g. in connection with certain rites of passage such as death and the disposal of remains of the dead. Other studies, some begun over half a century ago, have made it clear that castes traditionally described as ‘Untouchable’ have been seeking a higher standing in the social hierarchy by abandoning ancestral so-called unorthodox socio-religious practices and adopting forms of religion and ritual that derive from Sanskritic Hinduism. The norms of Vedic religion would loom large in this process.18 There is every reason to believe that what has been happening in this respect today has been an (unrecorded) feature of historical Hinduism, though it must be pointed out that the situation today has become much more complicated, as we shall see in due course. Still, as this chapter has attempted to demonstrate, the voice of Vedic authority remains powerful in Hinduism today. This is the case not only in India, but also in the Hindu diaspora. Thus it is hardly an accident that at the time of first writing this book, one could find displayed in a glass-topped cabinet in a room in the Maheshwaranath temple-compound in the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, a large, open volume in Sanskrit with excerpts from the four Vedas. It is clear that this impressive tome is intended to function as a potent, overarching symbol of Hinduism's ancient roots – a symbol which through the wondrous twists and turns of history is seen to authorize, over 4000 years after the first recording of the Veda, the dispensation of salvation through a popular temple cult.
But the voice of Vedic authority, fundamental though it continues to remain in Hinduism, has always been appealed to so variously and for such diverse ends, that it cannot function alone. How to interpret it? What exactly is it saying in this or that circumstance of its use? How should one respond to its call? How have luminaries, and ordinary women and men of the past, responded to it? The voice of the Veda has had to be clarified and made accessible by attentiveness to other guiding voices. We shall begin considering these matters in Chapter 5.
5
The voice of tradition: smṛti and its divisions (I)
The call of śruti or primary scripture cannot guide adequately without due attention being paid to the voices of tradition and experience. ‘Tradition’ is a large word and seems to include ‘experience’ of all kinds. By ‘tradition’ here we mean something more specific. The Sanskrit term we have in mind is smṛti (pronounced for practical purposes as ‘smriti’). Whereas for the Vedic orthodox, śruti refers to the ‘hearing’ of the sacred Word as we have seen – the hearing of Vedic utterance by the primeval sages, the transmission of the Veda as heard from one generation to the next, its creative resonance within the fabric of being – smṛti refers literally to the ‘remembering’ of the memorable, to the ‘recollection’ of the wisdom of the past. So, by ‘experience and tradition’ in the phrase the voices of experience and tradition’, we mean individual experience’ and ‘collective experience’ respectively. In other words, ‘tradition’ stands for the collective experience that has been recorded, codified and ratified for posterity by those who know, by the wise of the community. It will occur to one that, in contrast to śruti, smṛti seems to lack fixed reference. Remembering exactly what, you may ask;and precisely by whom;and for how long? And by what criteria were some things deemed worth preserving and others not worth remembering? And who were authorized to enforce this distinction? And finally, why ‘remembering’? Let us try and answer the last question first; it will help us deal with the others. Our main source-texts in this and subsequent chapters will be the Sanskritic tradition, for this was the original frame of reference from which smṛti branched out into the regions and vernaculars;on occasion we shall take note of this proliferative process and its more localized contexts. There is another consideration that privileges the (Vedic) Sanskritic tradition here: it was the pervasive popularity of certain landmarks of smṛti in this tradition, e.g. the great epics, which over time acquired a pan-Indian coverage (not least in regional and linguistic variations), that played a crucial role in vitalizing the sap of the Great Banyan and accommodating systems of thought and practice that might otherwise have remained quite alien (e.g. various Śākta and Tantric traditions in the Bengal area).
In the strict sense, smṛti is the counterpart of śruti; thus this distinction has direct relevance for the circles of Vedic orthodoxy, and not for those branches of Hinduism which defer to such texts as ‘Ágamas’ and ‘Tantras’, which arose outside the pale of Vedic orthodoxy (even though these may have been Hinduized in the way discussed earlier). But smṛti can also be used in a broad sense to refer to texts – not only the written text, but also oral texts, and such media as pictures, images and music – that purport to support primary scripture in some way. It is this larger sense of smṛti that the reader must keep in mind, where applicable, no less than the more specific one in the course of the following discussion.
Smṛti or ‘remembering’ is an eminently personal experience. One remembers what one has done or what has happened to one. Through memory one can appropriate and relive one's past, and learn from experience. These marks – appropriation, reliving, learning, and guidance – are all included in the sense of smṛti. Smṛti refers to that store of group experience by which the community appropriates and relives its past, learns from it and is guided by it, and in the process shapes its identity. In so far as smṛti has to do with personal experience, it is humanly authored (paurṣeya), in contrast to śruti proper, which is a-pauruṣeya or ‘not humanly produced’. This is a crucial distinction for the ongoing life of a community. The non-personal Veda, received by the seers, which is religiously sacrosanct, linguistically immutable, culturally perfect (‘saṃskṛta’ – from which the English word ‘Sanskrit’ is derived), needs to be made accessible and humanized. Smṛti probes, interrogates, debates, offers answers, mediates. It makes the impersonal personal. It allows the śruti to shape the world in which we live, and so to shape lives. As such, unlike the śruti, it is fallible and open to criticism;more importantly, it is a selective term. For what may be smṛti to you or your community, may not function as smṛti for me or my community. Or it may be the case that though both of us recognize the authority of a particular slice of smṛti, we may weight this authority differently according to the particular traditions that nurture us, or the demands of our situations. Smṛti is the medium through which we hear the voice of śruti; it is interpretive, selective, collaborative, pliable. śruti and Smṛti – or their equivalents, namely primary scripture and tradition – are the co-ordinates by which the religious authority of Hinduism has been transmitted.
For Hindus, smṛti recalls exemplary figures and events that have shaped their past, the universe they inhabit. These figures may be human or non-human, benevolent or hostile, virtuous or malign. Smṛti pronounces on the origination and transmission of almost every branch of human expertise. Its concerns include how to use words, how to read the heavens, how to care for elephants, how to make love, how to make war, how to make temples, how to worship, how to go on pilgrimage (and where and why), how to dance, how to sing; how to classify men, women, horses, gems, snakes, herbs, dreams, drama, diseases, poetic metre, temple images, castes, kings, spies, ascetics, sex organs, dance movements, rituals, time, offences, penances, heavens, hells;how to curse and how to heal. Smṛti deals with the founding of ancient dynasties and their ending; with the origination and destruction of the world;with rites of passage, the goals and stages of life, and cremation rites.
Smṛti prescribes and cautions in all matters of dharma or right living: in the dharma of husbands, in the dharma of wives (and co-wives), in the dharma of ascetics and in the dharma of courtesans, in the dharm
a of things moving and things unmoving, in the complex, multi-faceted dharma of caste, in the dharma of peace, in the dharma of war; in the dharma of eating, drinking, having sex, seeing, handling, washing, worshipping, purifying: in a word, in the dharma of living and in the dharma of dying. Smṛti is a great story-teller, myth-maker, codifier, teacher, punisher, rewarder, guide.
Smṛti can support primary scripture directly or indirectly through stories about gods, saints and sacred events, cautionary tales, graphic descriptions of heavenly and hellish realms, didactic discourses, the elaboration of codes of dharma, the sanctioning of reward or punishment for observing or violating these codes, and by recording the development of human expertise in prosody, phonetics, astronomy, love-making, war-waging, temple-building, icon-shaping, philosophy and theology, and so on. The amount of accumulated material that counts for Smṛti over the past 4000 years is immense, and in the more articulate world in which we live this material is increasing rapidly all the time. In the light of the enormous variety and volume of Smṛti, then, what we can hope to achieve in this chapter is no more than to seek to understand the rationale undergirding this genre of Hindu tradition and some of its more instructive landmarks.
No doubt, implementing Smṛti is a subjective exercise. What may be suitably corroborative material for my grasp of primary scripture may not be so for you;or you may use the same material in a different way. For smṛti to function as smṛti, what matters is the intention seen to underlie the material in question. An item of Smṛti may not seem to focus on primary scripture at all, e.g. a treatise on erotics, or grammar, or astronomy, but it is regarded as smṛti because it is seen as intended to further – or is made by those in appropriate authority to bear upon – the aims of śruti or primary scripture. For instance, it may do this by enabling an appropriate lifestyle to be followed, for it is only on this basis that scripture would be efficacious.1
Hindus: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (The Library of Religious Beliefs and Practices) Page 16