The Laws of Manu

by The Laws of Manu (retail) (epub)

  Consumption was, in sum, the ultimate victory of the consumer over the consumed, of the victor over the vanquished, and of the self over the rival.

  The nature of social life is described more specifically in terms of the interrelations between the four social classes or varṇas: priests (Brahmins), rulers and warriors (kṣatriyas), commoners (vaiśyas), and servants (śūdras). Society’s classes, like nature’s, are divided into eaters and food, and supposedly immutable hierarchical distinctions are drawn between the classes on this basis. The Lord of Creatures (Prajāpati) is portrayed as manifest on earth in the form of a series of mouths: ‘The priest is one of your mouths. With that mouth you eat rulers. With that mouth make me an eater of food. The king is one of your mouths. With that mouth you eat the commoners. With that mouth make me an eater of food.’30 The hierarchical encompassment of the lower by the higher is here articulated in alimentary (and elementary) terms: you are more than the one you eat, and less than the one by whom you are eaten.

  The rather basic and literal description of the world endlessly divided into food and eaters of food was thus applied in perhaps a more figurative way to the interrelations between the classes in the social world: the higher orders ‘live on’ the lower. But it may be just a prejudice to regard as symbolic the image of the lower classes as ‘food’ for their superiors. Perhaps it is indeed an accurate, if unadorned, account of actual interpersonal, social, political, and economic relations within any society.

  The Veda depicts a life where I gain only at your loss, my prosperity entails your ruin, my continued existence depends on your death, my eating requires that you become food. It is an order of things seemingly most advantageous to the one with the greatest physical strength and military might – the biggest fish, the top dog. The rank order of eaters and food in the natural world is straightforward: the physically more powerful eat the physically less powerful. And the principle supposedly holds when it comes to the social world.

  But what then are we to make of the priest’s claim to pre-eminence? It is from within a society governed by values that would seem to favour the rulers that the priests composed the Veda. And in those texts, the priests repeatedly declared themselves the highest class, the ultimate ‘eaters’. On what ground could priests and intellectuals stand to justify their supremacy in a pecking order regulated by raw power?

  On the basis of priestly control over the sacrifice. The importance attributed in the Veda to the fire ritual can hardly be overestimated. It was from a cosmic and primordial sacrifice that the universe was created, and it was because of the repeated sacrifices offered by humans that the universe continues. The ritual, done correctly and at the proper time, was the workshop for manipulating the cosmic order (ṛta) itself. The sacrifice was also the site in which the priests laboured on behalf of their patrons, the sacrificers (yajamānas) who sponsored and benefited from the ritual. Personal ends, as well as cosmic ones, were the fruit of sacrificial practices. The priests held out to their patrons the promise of a place in heaven, but also of a long and contented life, material success of all sorts, and wordly status. The relative nature of each of these rewards, however, was gauged to the relative nature of the sacrifices offered. Put crudely, the more and bigger the sacrifice (which included gifts to the officiating priests), the more and bigger the reward of offering it.

  The ritualists also claimed to be able to elevate the sacrificer over his rivals and enemies – goals most appealing to the warriors and rulers who patronized the sacrifice. Rationalizing their assertion of superiority by reference to their monopoly of sacrificial skills, the priests concomitantly constituted the ritual as an unfailing source of social and political power. The control of a ritual sphere that had as its climax the violent death of an animal victim (or of a vegetable substitute) was marketed as the control of the very process of cosmic life and death. The scene of orchestrated sacrificial violence could thus be favourably compared to the much more uncertain and risky, but equally deadly, power struggle in the extra-ritual world ruled by rulers.

  While the rulers may have the weapons of war and physical power, it is only the priests who are to possess the ‘weapons’ that tame the powerful sacrifice. But the class monopolization of powers of such very different sorts would have rather different practical results in the real world, or so one would assume. A well-aimed arrow from the bow of a warrior careering about on his chariot would instantly render ineffectual a priest engaged in his ritual. Otherwise stated, it would seem fairly obvious that actualized physical and military force could easily and whenever it wished overpower ritual technicians. And perhaps it did, in the reality that was historical India.

  Even as that world was portrayed by the priests, there are indications that the rulers had certain undeniable advantages over even the priests themselves, not to mention the other classes. In one rite, if the sacrificer is a ruler certain verses are to be repeated three times, for ‘there are three other sorts of men besides the ruler – the priest, the commoner, and the servant. He thus makes them subordinate to him.’31 A remarkable Vedic text posits that a sacrificer of the ruling class who mistakenly consumes Soma, a symbol (and ‘the king’) of the priestly class, is doomed to have priest-like progeny: ‘Among your offspring will be born one who is equal to a priest – a recipient of charity, a drinker (of Soma), a job-seeker, one who may be dismissed at will. When evil befalls a ruler, one who is equal to a priest is born among his offspring.’32

  The all-too-real advantages of the rulers and the fears provoked by them are sometimes confronted head on by the priests. In one myth, the gods (who are supposedly close kin to the priests) ‘were afraid of the ruler when he was born’. But gods, and those who speak for them, have their ways of assuring that the human warriors and rulers will ultimately subject themselves to the authority of the priests. Mythologically, at least, the ruler’s power is allowed expression only through the medium of priestly interests:

  When the ruler was born, the gods became fearful. Being still within (the womb) they fettered him with a rope. The ruler therefore is born fettered. If the ruler were to be born unfettered, he would continually kill his enemies. If one (viz., an officiating priest) desires regarding a ruler, ‘May he be born unfettered; may he continually kill his enemies,’ then one should offer for him the boiled offering dedicated to Indra and Bṛhaspati. For the ruler has the nature of Indra, and Bṛhaspati is the brahman power. By means of the brahman power he thus liberates him from the rope that fetters him.33

  While it thus may very well have been that the rulers in actuality determined the conditions under which life was really led (as warriors and rulers so often do), the priestly authors of the Veda generally project a rather different image – possibly a mere hope – about the relative power of their own class vis-à-vis the rulers. The texts often reveal the priests at work manipulating their rites so as to establish their own dominance over the rulers.34

  The priests’ claims to supremacy, based on their control of a violent sacrifice directed towards the domination of others, were not those of a ‘spiritual’ over and against a ‘temporal’ power.35 Both priests and rulers manoeuvred in the same agonistic world. But the priestly authors of the Veda represented their own speciality, the sacrificial ritual, as the ultimate weapon in society’s version of the survival of the fittest.

  Regardless of such machinations, the Veda nevertheless assumes criteria of ranking that may not have been optimally suited to the interests of those who composed it – poets and priests dependent on the patronage and protection of powerbrokers of the ruling class. One wonders about the extent to which the assertion of ritually based social superiority was realized in a society that by all accounts attempted to reduplicate in the social order a natural order envisaged in starkly Hobbesian terms. Such a sacrificial power might have easily been disputed by rulers and warriors whose coercive potential was, shall we say, more readily apparent.

  4. The Revaluation of All Values: Violence and Vegeta
rianism

  The Vedic depiction of the natural and social orders as determined by power and violence (hiṃsā, literally ‘the desire to inflict injury’) was preserved in later Indian thought. One might argue that it had to be if the real world was not to be ignored. The Hindu metaphor of the ‘law of the fishes’, whereby bigger fish eat smaller ones in an uncontrolled universe, is a direct continuation of Vedic assumptions. Especially in texts that deal with Realpolitik rather than religious ideals, the ancient belief in a congruence between the natural world of brutality and human life as it actually is lived is perpetuated.36 Witness, for example, the paean in the Mahābhārata to daṇḍa or the king’s duty to instil the fear of punishment in his subjects:

  All the limits established in the world, O King, are marked by daṇḍa … No man will sacrifice if he is not afraid, nor will he give gifts or hold to his promise … I see no being which lives in the world without violence. Creatures exist at one another’s expense; the stronger consume the weaker. The mongoose eats mice, just as the cat eats the mongoose; the dog devours the cat, O king, and wild beasts eat the dog. Man eats them all – see dharma for what it is! Everything that moves and is still is food for life.37

  Vedic presuppositions (‘I see no being which lives in the world without violence’), still articulated in the language of food and eaters (‘Everything that moves and is still is food for life’), are here simply reiterated. Human life, ruled by repressive power (daṇḍa) and dharma (in this case, the law ‘as it is’ rather than ‘how it should be’), reduplicates life in nature dictated by the ‘law of the fishes’.

  Such continuities, however, should not obscure the revolutionary quality of other later and very non-Vedic ideas and practices that overturned earlier assumptions. Some of these had direct bearing on the overlapping arenas discussed above: human diet and the principles, if not the rank order, of the social hierarchy. As Zimmermann points out, the Indic discourses in which vegetarianism and non-violence (ahiṃsā) 38 occupied a privileged place must be seen as wildly innovative:39

  In the animal kingdom and then the human one, the dialectic of the eaten eater introduces further divisions between the strong and the weak, the predator and his prey, the carnivore and the vegetarian. Vegetarianism – a brahminic ideal and a social fact in India – precisely calls into question that fateful dialectic in which every class of being feeds on another. The prohibition of flesh, which became increasingly strict in brahminic society, was one way to break the chain of all this alimentary violence and affirm that it is not really necessary to kill in order to eat. To that end, a new type of opposition between men was introduced. It was no longer a matter of courage and fear, domination and servitude; it was instead an opposition between the pure and the impure and a hierarchy of castes. Abstention from eating meat became a criterion of purity.40

  In later Indic traditions, no less than in the Vedic texts, social ideology was fixated on food. Vegetarianism was far more than an interesting new dietary custom. It was a focal point for what might be called a revaluation of all values in ancient India. When one further considers the intrusion into mainstream Hindu thought, as witnessed in texts like the Bhagavad Gītā, of bhakti or devotionalism – with its emphasis on ‘service’, ‘grace’, ‘humility’, and ‘love’ – at about the same time as the composition of Manu, the full extent of the reversal of Vedic ideals is striking.41 The reformation in ancient India is in many ways comparable to the early Christian inversion of ‘pagan’ values: what was once called ‘bad’ was now considered ‘good’, and vice versa.42

  In the Veda there was no question about it: ‘Meat is indeed the best kind of food. ‘43 Here is the credo of a personal alimentary regimen conducted in conformity with nature, as those more powerful and higher on the food chain (humans) consume those weaker and below (animals). Correlatively, in society the stronger ‘naturally’ dominate and encompass (‘consume’) the timid or pacifistic and are therefore ‘higher’ on the social chain of being. Vegetarianism and non-violence, interjected into such a world-view, were the conceptual shock troops of a provocative attack on the older vision of the natural order of things – and were crucial for a reorganization of the rules for social ranking.

  The original source of vegetarianism and non-violence remains shrouded. It does seem likely, however, that such concepts were embedded in the larger revolutionary programme of the world renouncers or śramanas who were so influential beginning in around the sixth century B.C.E. In each of their brands – the ‘orthodox’ composers of the Upaniṣads as well as the ‘heterodox’ groups, some of which soon coalesced into the religions later known as Buddhism and Jainism – the world-renouncers challenged the fundamental assumptions of Vedism.

  World-renunciation in and of itself was a radical departure from the life-affirming values of the Veda. The natural world, and the social world which supposedly reflected it, were reconstituted as realms of perpetual suffering, as the recurrent nightmare of saṃsāra or the endless cycle of rebirth. The Vedic telos of an earthly existence where the subject enjoyed the goods of life for as long as possible, followed by eternal life in heaven that was simply an interminable extension of this, was replaced by a goal (mokṣa, nirvāṇa, kevala) that collapsed the distinction between subject and object, enjoyer and enjoyed. For the Vedic concern with perpetuating time – this was one primary purpose of sacrifices correlated with the rising and setting of the sun, the new and full moons, etc. – was substituted an exactly opposite concern to re-run life’s movie and recapture a timeless, ‘karmaless’ purity of origins.44

  These new tenets, turning Vedic doctrines on their head, were soon appropriated and brought back into the world of social hierarchy by the very ‘orthodox’ class of priests originally responsible for the Veda.45 The dharma sūtras, the earliest of which date to circa the fourth century B.C.E. and were produced by the ritualists, assume that world-renunciatory values should guide a moral life in the world. Such a trick was not easily carried out, but it was to have enormous ramifications for the history of religion in India.

  Manu in particular marks a critical moment in the orthodox priestly tradition. It is an attempt at a reconsolidation of an already ancient heritage as well as a reorientation of that heritage around new ‘principles of life’ (dharmas). The times called for both. Challenged on the one hand by ‘orthodox’ renouncers, and on the other hand by Buddhists and Jains who were increasingly garnering political patronage,46 the text is pivotal in the priestly response to the crisis of traditional Aryan culture.

  For one thing, Manu is one of the first ‘orthodox’ works to extricate itself from the system of competing ritual schools and affiliations – a situation that continued well into the Common Era with the production of sūtras, śāstras, and ‘handbooks’ or prayogas, all attached to one or another of the Vedic schools. Manu is an attempt at consolidation and unity. The work is thus an invaluable historical witness to the forging of ‘a synthetic common culture among persons professing the laws in the various schools’.47 In this respect, the text serves as a complement to the Bhagavad Gītā and, indeed, to the great epics as a whole (the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa), whose objectives were similar.

  As a text that could just as well claim, as the Mahābhārata actually does, that ‘what is not here does not exist’, Manu poses as a universalistic treatise. The product differentiation obsessively focussed on sacrificial minutiae, that characterized the ritual schools, is here reincarnate in an equally obsessive attempt at universality and the ritualization of life as a whole. The controlled world of the sacrifice is expanded to encompass life as it is lived and as a whole; ritual rules (vidhis) are blown up and out into dharma. The text attempts to extend its reach to all people as well as all situations – the king as well as the ritual priest; the Untouchable as well as the priest; the householder as well as the world-renouncer; women as well as men.

  The form this intellectual hegemonic effort often takes in Manu is lists. These lists might very we
ll be one reflex of an earlier, and continuing, mode of thought in ancient India: a homological world-view ruled by the concept of the mutual resemblance of all entities. Beginning in the Veda, persisting through the technical literature of India (including Manu’s text), and still characteristic of much of modern Indian scholarship, is the attempt to reach universality through the inclusion, listing, and ordering of all relevant particulars.48

  Into this new ‘orthodox’ configuration, renunciatory values were integrated with – or rather uneasily juxtaposed to – worldly concerns. Most jarringly, the teachings of those who despised the social world became templates for reorganizing the principles governing social rank. Louis Dumont has contended that ‘purity’ – largely articulated in terms set by the world-renouncers – replaced sacrificial skills as the mainstay in the priest’s ideological arsenal.49 Vegetarianism and non-violence became the principal signifiers of this ‘purity’ that jostled power, the new yardsticks for social ranking in the priestly and ‘orthodox’ reformation of Vedism documented in the dharma texts. Indeed, whereas in the Veda ritual technique (insofar as it deals with the ‘symbolic’) was in some respects the exception to the rule of actualized physical and military power, in post-Vedic Hinduism power becomes the exception to the rule of ‘purity’.

  But why? What possible impetus might account for such a revolutionary shift among those arbiters of life in the world, complementing and imitating the shift occurring in the jungles, forests, and wastelands where the world-renouncers retreated from saṃsāra? While surely the phenomenon is over-determined, we have already hinted at one possible factor.

  ‘One can never get meat without violence to creatures with the breath of life,’ so admits Manu (5.48). Eschewing animal flesh was an attempt to break free from the shackles of the food chain and to claim, as Zimmermann says, that it is not really necessary to kill in order to eat.50 Vegetarianism was put forward as the only way to liberate oneself from the bonds of natural violence that adversely affected one’s karma. A concomitant of this new dietary practice was a social hierarchy governed to a large extent by the relative realization of the ideal of non-violence. The rank order of the social classes did not change. But the rationale for the ranking did.