THE TEXTUAL WORLD OF THE UPANISHADS
The Upanishads are often referred to as “the end of the Veda” (Vedantacs), for they are the final texts in the body of literature called shruti (“what is heard”), unalterable divine revelation, in contrast with the rest of Hindu literature, called smriti (“what is remembered”), the tradition attributed to human authors, thereforefallible and corrigible. Just as the Brahmanas are, among other things, footnotes to the Vedas, so the Upanishads began as Cliffs Notes to the Brahmanas, meditations on the meaning of the Vedic rituals and myths. The different Upanishads belong to different branches of the Vedic traditions, different family lineages, but they share so many stories and ideas that they are clearly in conversation with one another.
Bridging these two sets of texts, the Brahmanas and the Upanishads, and actually overlapping with both of them are the Aranyakas (“Jungle Books”), so called presumably because they were composed in the wilderness, or jungle, outside the village; they dealt more with ritual and less with cosmology and metaphysics than the Upanishads did. The early Upanishads (meaning “sitting beside,” a name that may refer to the method of placing one thing next to another, making connections, or to pupils sitting beside their teacher) probably9 were composed in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE.ct Again we find a major shift in language, between the Sanskrit of the Brahmanas and that of the Upanishads, not merely in the grammar and vocabulary but also in the style, which is far more accessible, conversational, reader friendly; if we liken the Brahmanas to Chaucer (in their distance from modern English), the Upanishads are like Shakespeare. The grammarian Panini wrote about spoken Sanskrit (bhasha), in contrast with Vedic, ritualistic Sanskrit. In North Indian towns and villages, people spoke Prakrits, the “natural” or “unrefined” languages, often regarded as dialects, in contrast with Sanskrit, the “perfected” or “artificial” language. The Buddha, preaching at roughly the time of the Upanishads, was beginning to preach in Magadhi, the local dialect of Magadha, in order to reach a wider audience; the decision to preserve the Buddhist canon in such a dialect, Pali, had an effect much like that of the elimination of Latin from the Catholic mass after Vatican II: It made the liturgy comprehensible to all the Pali-valent Buddhists. The Upanishadic authors too were probably reaching out in that more vernacular direction, stretching the Sanskrit envelope.
Like other great religious reform movements, such as those inspired by Jesus, Muhammad, and Luther, the Upanishads did not replace but merely supplemented the earlier religion, so that just as Catholicism continued to exist alongside Protestantism within Christianity, so Vedic Hinduism (sacrificial, worldly) continued to exist alongside Vedantic Hinduism (philosophical, renunciant). The tension between householders and renouncers begins here and exerts an enormous influence over the subsequent history of the Hindus. But in Hinduism, unlike Christianity, there never was an official schism. Certain words from earlier periods—karma, tapas—took on new meanings at this point, though their original meanings never disappeared, resulting in a layering that served as one of the major sources of multiplicity within Hinduism.
KARMA AND DEATH
Where did the potentially revolutionary ideas of karma and renunciation come from? We can identify both Vedic and non-Vedic sources. Let’s begin with the Vedic.
In the Upanishads, as in the Rig Veda, the body of the dead man returns to the elements—his eye to the sun, the hair of his body to plants, the hair of his head into trees, his blood and semen into water, and so forth—but the Upanishadic sages regard this as the beginning, not the end, of the explanation of death. The sage Yajnavalkya listed the correspondences between the parts of the body and the cosmos, whereupon his pupil asked, “What happens to the person then?” The person is the individual soul, the atman, or self, which is identical with the brahman, the world soul (sometimes also called atman, often transcribed as Atman to distinguish it from the individual soul), as salt becomes identical with water into which it is dissolved (BU 2.4.12). This is the central teaching of the Upanishads, a doctrine of pantheism (or panentheism, the world made of god), most famously expressed in the phrase generally translated “You are that” (tat tvam asi) (CU 6.8.7)10 In answer to his pupil’s question, the Upanishad continues, Yajnavalkya drew him aside in private: “And what did they talk about? Nothing but karma. They praised nothing but karma. Yajnavalkya told him: ‘A man becomes something good by good karma and something bad by bad karma’ (BU 3.2.13).”
The first and most basic meaning of “karma” is action. The noun “karma” comes from the verb kri, cognate with the Latin creo, “to make or do,cu to make a baby or a table or to perform a ritual.” It is often contrasted with mind and speech: One can think, say, or do (kri) something, with steadily escalating consequences. The second meaning of “karma” is “ritual action,” particularly Vedic ritual action; this is its primary connotation in the Rig Veda. Its third meaning, which begins to be operative in the Upanishads, is “morally charged action, good or bad,” a meter that is always running, that is constantly charging something to one’s account. And its fourth meaning, which follows closely on the heels of the third, is “morally charged action that has consequences for the soul in the future, that is retributive both within one’s life and across the barrier of redeath”: You become a sheep that people eat if you have eaten a sheep. (We saw the germ of this theory in the Brahmana descriptions of people soundlessly screaming in the other world and in statements that sacrifice generates merit that guarantees an afterlife in the other world.) In this sense, karma is action whose retributive moral charge determines the nature of your future rebirths. Consequences have consequences, and first thing you know, you’re born as a sheep.
Turned on its head, this link led to a fifth meaning of karma, not as the cause of future lives but as the result of past lives and the agenda for this life, the inescapable role in life that one was born to play, one’s work, or innate activity. Euro-Americans believe too that we often cannot remember the past causes of present circumstances and that the present will influence the future, but the Hindu view differs from this in extending the past and future beyond the boundaries of this life span. F. Scott Fitzgerald, of all people, captured the spirit of karma in the final sentence of The Great Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” In Hinduism we are also borne back ceaselessly into the future.
The last (sixth) meaning of karma is the implication that good and bad karma may also be transferred from one person to another under certain circumstances, not merely between parents and children (as we saw in the Vedic poem to Varuna) and between sacrificial priest and patron, but between any people who meet. This transfer may take place either intentionally or unintentionally: The dharma texts say that if someone lets a guest depart unfed, the guest will take away the host’s good karma and leave behind his own bad karma.11 In the Brahmana story of Nachiketas, Nachiketas remains in the house of Death for three nights without eating and then tells Death that in effect, on the three nights of fasting he ate “your offspring, your sacrificial beasts (pashus), and your good deeds (sadhu-krityam).” This last is an example of the transfer of good karma; unfed, Nachiketas “eats” (which is to say, consumes) Death’s good deeds (which is to say, he siphons off Death’s good karma) as well as his children and cattle. This blackmail is what forces Death to tell Nachiketas his secrets.
It is not always clear which of these meanings of karma is intended in any particular passage in the Upanishads (or in other texts). Moreover, the idea of karma was certainly not accepted by everyone as the final solution to the problem of death (or the problem of evil); many other, conflicting ideas were proposed and widely accepted, alongside the karma theory.12
The Upanishads continue to speak of “recurrent death” (BU 3.2.10, 3.3.2) and now describe the process in cruel detail (BU 4.3.36, 4.4.2). For heaven is no longer the end of the line, as it was in some of the Brahmanas; it is simply another place that eventually everyone leav
es. The Upanishads spell out the assumption, sketched in the Brahmanas, that we all are on the wheel of redeath, transmigration (samsara, “flowing around”). From the very start, the idea that transmigration occurred was qualified by two other ideas: that some people wanted to get out of it and that there was a way to do this, a restoration not merely for one of life’s mistakes but for life itself, a way to put the fix in on death. When the Upanishads retell the story of Nachiketas, Death explains to the boy the process of dying and going to heaven in much greater detail, and at the end, Nachiketas “became free of old age and death, and so will anyone who knows this teaching (KU 1-2, 6.18).” Significantly, where the Brahmanas promise the conquest of redeath to anyone who knows the ritual, the Upanishad promises it to anyone who knows the teaching, a shift from a way of acting to a way of knowing.
OVERCROWDING AND RECYCLING
The theory of reincarnation, a recycling not of tin cans but of souls, may reflect an anxiety of overcrowding, the claustrophobia of a culture fenced in, a kind of urban Angst (amhas). The Upanishadic discussion of the doctrine of transmigration begins when a teacher asks his pupil, “Do you know why the world beyond is not filled up, even when more and more people continuously go there?” and it ends with the statement “As a result, that world up there is not filled up (CU 5.10.8; BU 5.1.1 and 6.2.2)”cv The idea of an overcrowded earth is a part of the myth of the four Ages (people live too long in the first Age and become too numerous) and recurs in the Mahabharata as a justification for the genocidal war (when the overburdened earth begins to sink beneath the cosmic waters).13 Is this fear of crowds related to the shock of the new experience of city life in the Ganges Valley? Were there already slums in Kashi (as there may already have been in Harappa)? If a fear of this sort is what inspired the theory of reincarnation, who precisely was it who was afraid?
The “second urbanization,” the spread of paddy rice cultivation into the Ganges Valley, producing a surplus that could support cities, the emergence of societies along the Ganges, created an unprecedented proximity of people. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, said that the Indians were the most populous country on earth (5.3). Population densities had significantly increased, the result of a combination of the incorporation of indigenous peoples, a soaring birthrate, and the creation of agricultural surpluses. 14 This led to a burgeoning of all the things that people who like to sleep on their saddlebags at night don’t like about sleeping indoors, things that are for them a cultural nightmare. The movements to renounce the fleshpots of the Ganges Valley may have been inspired in part by a longing to return to the good old days preserved in the texts, when life was both simpler and freer, more heroic.15 Such a longing is reflected in the name of the Aranyakas (“Jungle Books”), in the village settings of so much of the Upanishads, and in the forest imagery that abounds in the writings of the early sects, both inside and outside Hinduism. Within the cities the Buddha sat in an isolated spot under a tree to obtain enlightenment, and he first preached in a deer park. The Upanishads seem to have been composed by people who left the settled towns for rustic settings where master and student could sit under some tree somewhere, the ancient Indian equivalent of the bucolic liberal arts college; the renunciants are said to live in the wilderness, in contrast with the conventional Vedic sacrificers who live in villages. No individuals in the Ganges Valley could have remembered the old days up in the Punjab, but there was certainly a group memory, or at least a literary memory, of an idealized time when people lived under the trees and slept under the stars, a cultural memory of wide-open spaces. Many of the old rituals and texts too, such as the tales of cattle raids, no longer made sense but still exerted a nostalgic appeal.
A striking insight into the psychology of the forest dweller stage comes from an unexpected source, Philip Roth’s 1998 novel I Married a Communist, in a passage describing a shack that the hero, Ira, retreats to in times of trouble:
The palliative of the primitive hut. The place where you are stripped back to essentials, to which you return—even if it happens not to be where you came from—to decontaminate and absolve yourself of the striving. The place where you disrobe, molt it all, the uniforms you’ve worn and the costumes you’ve gotten into, where you shed your batteredness and your resentment, your appeasement of the world and your defiance of the world, your manipulation of the world and its manhandling of you. The aging man leaves and goes into the woods . . . receding from the agitation of the autobiographical. He has entered vigorously into competition with life; now, becalmed, he enters into competition with death, drawn down into austerity, the final business.”16
Beneath the specifically American concerns lies an understanding of ways in which, in ancient India too, the forest offers individual purification from the corruption of collective urban life.
The whole tradition was becoming individualistic, not just renunciant; we begin to see a transition from group to individual, a perceived need for personal rituals of transformation, forming a certain sort of person, not just a member of the tribe. At the same time, collective rather than individual choices needed to be made in order to start and maintain alternative societies, such as Buddhism, and monastic communities, as well as to engage in the highly collective enterprise of growing rice.
Reincarnation addressed this social problem and formulated it in terms of individual salvation. It seldom, if ever, occurred to anyone, then or at any time before the nineteenth century in India,cw to attempt to change the world; but many people made judgments against it and opted out or tried to solve the problem of suffering within the individual. The new religious movements located the problem of the human condition, of human suffering, within the individual heart and mind (where Freud too located it), rather than in a hierarchical society (where Marx located it). The Upanishads emphasize a more personal religious experience than the one addressed by the Brahmanas.17 In this way, at least, these movements were individualistic—“Look to your own house” (or, in the Buddha’s metaphor, “Get out of your burning house”cx)—rather than socially oriented, as nonrenunciant Hinduism was—“Your identity is meaningful only as one member of a diverse social body.” This in itself was a tremendous innovation.
THE PATHS OF REBIRTH AND RELEASE
The Upanishads assume, like the Vedas and Brahmanas, that people pass into heaven or hell when they die, but they are far more concerned with the fate of the dead beyond heaven or hell. Here is how the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad describes the possible trajectories of people who have died and are being cremated:
THE PATHS OF SMOKE AND FLAME
The people who know this [the Upanishadic doctrine of the identity of the soul and the brahman], and the people there in the wilderness who venerate truth as faith—they pass into the flame (of the cremation fire), and thence into the day . . . into the world of the gods, into the sun, and into the region of lightning. A person made of mind comes to the regions of lightning and leads them to the worlds of brahman. These exalted people live in those worlds of brahman for the longest time. They do not return.
The people who win heavenly worlds, on the other hand, by offering sacrifices, by giving gifts, and by generating inner heat [tapas]—they pass into the smoke, and then into the night . . . into the world of the fathers, into the moon. There they become food. There the gods feed on them, as the moon increases and decreases. When that ends, they pass into the sky, then into the wind, then the rain, and then the earth, where they become food. They are offered in the fire of man and are born in the fire of woman. Rising up again to the heavenly worlds, they circle around in the same way.
Those who do not know these two paths, however, become worms, insects, or snakes (BU 6.2.13-16).
This text tells us that people within the Vedic fold at this time had a choice of two ways of being religious.
The people of the wilderness end up in the world of brahman, the divine substance of which the universe is composed. Brahman, which in the Rig Veda designates sacred
speech, is the root of a number of words in later Sanskrit distinguished by just one or two sounds (or letters, in English): brahman (the divine substance of the universe); Brahma (the creator god); Brahmin or Brahman (a member of the first or priestly classcy); Brahmana (one of a class of texts that follow the Vedas and precede the Upanishads); and Brahma-charin (“moving in brahman,” designating a chaste student). The world of brahman is a world of monism (which assumes that all living things are elements of a single, universal being),cz sometimes equated with monotheism, in contrast with the world of rebirth, the polytheistic world of sacrifice to multiple gods. The doctrine of the Upanishads is also sometimes characterized as pantheism (in which god is everything and everything is god) or, at times, panentheism (in which god encompasses and interpenetrates the universe but at the same time is greater than and independent of it). It views the very substance of the universe as divine and views that substance and that divinity as unitary. The pluralistic world has a secondary, illusory status in comparison with the enduring, real status of the underlying monistic being.
The people who reach brahman have lived in the wilderness, the jungle, either permanently as some sort of forest ascetics or merely on the occasions when they held their religious rituals there. By contrast, the sacrificers, who follow the Vedic path of generosity (to gods and priests or to people more generally) or engage in the ritual practices that generate internal heat (tapas), go to heaven but do not stay there; they die again and are reborn. This text does not tell us where these people have lived but a parallel passage in the Chandogya Upanishad (5.10.1-8) tells us that the people who devote themselves to giving gifts to gods and to priests (this text specifies the recipients, where the other did not) live in villages. This group no longer generates internal heat as the sacrificers did in the Brihadaranyaka, an activity that the Chandogya assigns to the people in the wilderness, who venerate (in place of truth, in the Brihadaranyaka) internal heat as faith. Tapas therefore can belong to either group, for it is a transitional power: For sacrificers, it is the heat that the priest generates in the sacrifice, while for people of the wilderness, it becomes detached from the sacrifice and internalized, just as the sacrifice itself is internalized; now tapas is the heat that an individual ascetic generates within himself. The only criterion that marks the sacrificers in both texts is their generosity, and the only criterion that marks the people of the wilderness is their life in the wilderness.
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