The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  The people who reach the moon in the Brihadaranyaka are eaten by the gods (as they were eaten by animals in the Other World in the Brahmanas), but the gods in the Chandogya merely eat the moon, a more direct way to account for its waning. The Chandogya also has a slightly different ending for the second group, the sacrificers who pass through the smoke:

  THE THIRD OPTION

  They return by the same path by which they came—first to space and to the wind, which turns into smoke and then into a cloud, which then rains down. On earth they grow as rice and barley, plants and trees, sesame and beans, from which it is very difficult to escape. When someone eats that food and sheds his semen, one is born again from him.

  Now, people here whose behavior is charming can expect to enter a nice womb, like that of a woman of the Brahmin, Kshatriya, or Vaishya class. But people whose behavior is stinking can expect to enter a nasty womb, like that of a dog, a pig, or a Pariah woman.

  And there is a third state, for people who take neither of these paths: They become tiny creatures who go around and around ceaselessly. “Be born! Die!” A person should take measures to avoid that (5.10.1-8).

  It is clear from the Chandogya, and implicit in the Brihadaranyaka, that one does not want to end up in the company of the worms and other tiny creatures in the third state, the place from which no traveler returns. It’s better to be a dog.

  But it is not so clear from these texts that the path of Vedic gift giving is undesirable, that everyone wants to get off the wheel and onto the path of flame. For renouncers, the very idea of good karma is an oxymoron:da Any karma is bad because it binds you to the wheel of rebirth. But the Chandogya spells out the belief that for sacrificers, some rebirths are quite pleasant, the reward for good behavior. Their fate corresponds to Yajnavalkya’s statement “A man becomes something good by good karma and something bad by bad karma.” The Brihadaranyaka says much the same thing: “What a man turns out to be depends on how he acts. If his actions [karma] are good, he will turn into something good. If his actions are bad, he will turn into something bad.” But then it adds that this applies only to the man who has desires; the man who is freed from desires, whose desires are fulfilled, does not die at all; he goes to brahman (BU 4.4.5-6).db So too the funeral ceremonies include instructions that ensure that the dead man will not remain in limbo but will move forward, either to a new life or to final Release (moksha) from the cycle of transmigration,18 further evidence of a deeply embedded tension between the desire to assure a good rebirth and the desire to prevent rebirth altogether. The fear of redeath led to the desire for Release (including Release from the values of Vedic Hinduism), but then the ideal of Release was reabsorbed into Vedic Hinduism and reshaped into the desire to be reborn better, in worldly terms: richer, with more sons, and so forth. These two tracks—one for people who want to get off the wheel of redeath and one for those who don’t want to get off the wheel of rebirth—continue as options for South Asians to this day.

  The Kaushitaki Upanishad describes the fork in the road a bit differently:

  THE FINAL EXAM

  When people depart from this world, they go to the moon. Those who do not answer the moon’s questions become rain, and rain down here on earth, where they are reborn according to their actions [karma] and knowledge—as a worm, an insect, a fish, a bird, a lion, a boar, a rhinoceros, a tiger, a human, or some other creature. Those who answer the moon’s questions correctly pass to the heavenly world: They go on the path to the gods, to fire, and finally to brahman. On the way, he shakes off his good and bad deeds [karma], which fall upon his relatives: the good deeds on the ones he likes and the bad deeds on the ones he dislikes. Freed from his good and bad deeds, this person, who has the knowledge of brahman, goes on to brahman (1.1-4a).

  The deciding factor here apparently has nothing to do with the sort of worship the dead person engaged in while alive, or whether he lived in the village or the wilderness; there is just one final postmortem exam (proctored by the rabbit in the moon?) that determines everything.dc The good and bad deeds weigh in only later and then only for the man who gets a first on the exam and proceeds on the path to brahman (not, as in the Chandogya, for the man on the path of rebirth). Nor does this text spell out what deeds are good, and what bad; that will come in later texts. The important doctrine of the transfer of karma from one person to another is harnessed to the trivial human frailty of liking some relatives and disliking others and caring about the disposal of one’s worldly goods (in this case, one’s karma). And the worms and insects no longer form a third place of No Exit, but are simply part of the lesser of the only two paths.

  THE PATH OF SMOKE: THE PLEASURES OF SAMSARA

  The path of smoke, of Vedic generosity, of procreation and samsara survives intact the journey from the Vedas to the Upanishads, though the Upanishads provide very little detail about it, perhaps assuming that everyone knew it because it had been around for centuries. The case in favor of samsara, in its positive aspect of passion, family, love, loss (what Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek called “the whole catastrophe”), is strong. The Upanishads reopen some of the options of the Vedas that the Brahmanas closed down and open up other options. Individual texts, as always, often go against the grain of the general zeitgeist.

  There’s some pretty hot stuff in the Upanishads. The paragraph that introduces the description of the two paths refers to the act of progeneration as an offering in the fire of man and a birth in the fire of woman and analogizes a woman’s genitals to the sacrificial fire: Her vulva is the firewood, her pubic hair the smoke, her vagina the flame; the acts of penetration and climax are the embers and the sparks (BU 6.2.13; 6.4.1-3; CU 5.8.1). One text takes the bliss of sexual climax as the closest available approximation to the ineffable experience of deep, dreamless sleep (BU 2.1.19). A woman in her fertile period is described as splendid and auspicious, and her fertility is so important that if she refuses to have sex with her husband at that time, he is advised to bribe her or beat her with a stick or with his fists (BU 6.4.6-7). A more tender attitude is advocated in the mantra that a man should use to make his wife love him, and a more practical one in the mantra for contraception if he does not want her to be pregnant (BU 6.4.9-10), an intention that flies in the face of the dharma texts that insist that the only purpose of sex is procreation.

  A remarkably open-minded attitude to women’s infidelity is evident in the mantra recommended to make a sexual rival impotent:

  MANTRA AGAINST YOUR WIFE’S LOVER

  If a man’s wife has a lover whom he hates, he should place some fire in an unbaked pot, arrange a bed of reeds in reverse order from the usual way, apply ghee to the tips of the reeds, also in reverse order, and offer them in the fire as he recites this mantra: “You (he names the man) have made an offering in my fire! I take away your out-breath and your in-breath, your sons and livestock, your sacrifices and good works [or good karma], your hopes and plans.” If a Brahmin who knows this curses a man, that man will surely leave this world stripped of his virility and his good karma. One should therefore never fool around with the wife of a learned Brahmin who knows this (BU 6.4.12).

  In contrast with almost all of later Hinduism, which punished a woman extremely severely for adultery, this text punishes only her partner. Moreover, this punishment is intended (only) for a lover of his wife that the husband hates and therefore not necessarily for a lover that he does not hate, a most permissive qualification, suggestive of a Noel Coward drawing room comedy or a French ménage à trois. The men for whom these mantras are intended would have little use for the path of Release. Their primary concerns were Vedic: family, women, offspring, sons, the lineage of the flesh. For them the sacrifice of semen into a womb was a Vedic sacrifice of butter into the fire; the hated lover is cursed for making such an offering in another man’s spousal fire.

  THE PATH OF FLAME: MOKSHA AND RENUNCIATION

  On the other hand, one of the later Upanishads mocks the sacrificial path (MU 1.2.10-1
1), and other passages in the Upanishads assume, like the Brahmanas, that repeated death is a Bad Thing, that the whips and scorns of time make life a nightmare from which one longs for final Release or freedom (moksha ), a blessed awakening or, perhaps, a subsidence into a dreamless sleep. The cycle of rebirth was another way of being fenced in (amhas), a painfully restricting prison, from which one wanted to break out, to be sprung, which is what moksha means; the word is used for the release of an arrow from a bow or of a prisoner from a jail. It is sometimes translated as “Freedom.”

  Brahman, ineffable, can be described only in the negative: “Not like this, not like that” (neti, neti) (BU 4.5.15). Given that the positive goal, what one is going to, moksha, is never described, one might at least hope to be told what one was going away from. Precisely what was one freed from? At first, moksha meant only freedom from death, a concept firmly grounded within the Vedic sacrificial system that promised the worshiper a kind of immortality. The word appears in the Upanishads in various forms, often as a verb, “to set free.” Through the sacrifice, the patron of the sacrifice frees himself from the grip of death, the grip of days and nights, the grip of the waxing moon and climbs up to heaven: “It is freedom, complete freedom (BU 3.1.3-6,34-35). Or: “Shaking off evil, like a horse its hair, and freeing myself, like the moon from the jaws of the demon of eclipse, I, the perfected self [atman], cast off the imperfect body and attain the world of brahman (CU 8.13.1).” Moksha sometimes comes to designate Release not merely from death or evil in general but, more specifically, from samsara, from the cycle of rebirth (SU 6.16,18). And then, in later Upanishads, moksha is associated with renunciation (samnyasa): “The ascetics who have full knowledge of the Vedanta are purified by the discipline of renunciation. In the worlds of brahman, at the time of the final end, they become fully immortal and fully freed (MU 3.2.6).” And whoever knows this (yo evam veda) will realize that unity with brahman upon his death and be freed from redeath.

  The Brihadaranyaka promises freedom from the very things that the Vedic path valued—namely, children and family, the whole catastrophe: “It is when they come to know this self that Brahmins give up the desire for sons, the desire for wealth, and the desire for worlds, and undertake the renunciant life. . . . It was when they knew this that men of old did not desire offspring (BU 3.5.1, 4.4.22).” Such a man no longer amasses karma. He does not think, “I did something good” or “I did something bad,” nor is he stained by bad karma/deeds. He is beyond good and evil.dd We recognize the confident assurance of the Brahmanas: Even redeath can be fixed, if you know how, but now you do not even have to be a Brahmin to fix it, as long as you have the proper knowledge. This is yet another major innovation.

  CONTINUITIES AND DISCONTINUITIES FROM THE VEDAS

  The belief that souls are reborn for richer or for poorer, sickness or health, according to their conduct in their previous life, has roots in Vedic ideas of heaven and hell, reward and punishment.19 So too the idea of the identity of the individual soul (atman) with the world soul (brahman) is a natural expansion of the Vedic idea that the individual body is overlaid upon the cosmic body, the eye on the sun, the breath on the wind (although now new questions arise about the definition of the self).20 The initiated Vedic ritual patron practiced a kind of renunciation,21 and the sacrificer would say a mantra renouncing the fruits of his offerings. Even the idea of the transfer of karma, so central to Buddhism (where it is usually called the transfer of merit), has its roots, as we have seen, in the Vedic poems to the god Varuna (whom the poet asks to forgive him for the sins of his fathers) and in the transfer of evil from gods to humans, in the Brahmanas, 22 though it got an added boost from the growth of a moneyed economy.

  The Upanishadic sages take the Vedic themes and run with them in new directions and far. Indeed, they openly challenge the Vedas; one sage quotes the Vedic line about existence coming from nonexistence (10.72.1-5) but then remarks: “How can that possibly be?” and argues instead: “In the beginning, this world was simply what is existent [CU 6.2.2].” The Rig Veda passage cited in the Brihadaranyaka mentions a slightly different version of the two paths: the path of the fathers and the path of the immortal gods. But in the Rig Veda, living creatures on these paths go not through the smoke to the moon or through the flame to the sun, but between the mother (both the female parent and the earth) and the father (both the male parent and the sky) (RV 10.88.15; BU 6.2.2).

  Much of Upanishadic thought represents a radical break with the Vedas. Though the realization that each soul was one with the infinite soul was hardly breaking news in the Upanishads, the earlier Vedic sources hardly mention this idea and certainly do not develop it systematically. What was particularly new was the suggestion, only in the later Upanishads, that understanding the equation of atman and brahman was a call to action: You must change your life.de Most people did not change their lives. But eventually, as the lower classes gained more money, time, and education, some of them had the resources to act on ideas that they might have nourished for a long time and break away from the Vedic world entirely.23 Aspects of the Upanishads certainly appealed to people who no longer wished, or were never allowed, to play ball with the Brahmins. Although the early Upanishads, as we have seen, regard renunciation as a live option only for some people, the later texts, the Renunciation Upanishads (Samnyasa Upanishads), encouraged a person heading for the path of Release (or Freedom) to seek moksha as soon as possible,24 to make a vertical takeoff from any point in his life. For such a person, moksha is just another word for nothing left to lose.df

  We have some knowledge of the people who might have contributed these new ideas. The Upanishads refer to already existing renunciants who operated within the Vedic tradition, and Buddhist texts tell us that such people were also there before the time of the Buddha, who, in the story of his enlightenment, meets a sick man, an old man, a dead man, and then a renunciant,25 perhaps a Vedic renunciant. The fringe mystics that the Rig Veda mentions, the Vratyas and the long-haired ascetic, may also have belonged to some of these motley and marginalized Vedic groups. The Upanishads attest to the existence of ascetic traditions that, by the sixth or fifth century BCE, had developed within the bounds of Vedic tradition, though not necessarily within the Brahmin class.26 Speculation about the nature and purpose of Vedic ritual began eventually, for some thinkers, to subordinate ritual action to spiritual knowledge, which could be attained by asceticism, world renunciation, or the disciplines that came to be known as yoga, designed to transform behavior through their emphasis on refining, controlling, and transforming the mind and the body.27

  Some people rejected the world of heaven that the Vedas promised them but remained within the Hindu fold, on the path to Release; others suspected that the Brahmins could not keep their promises of either path and left the Vedic world entirely, to become Buddhists or Jainas. Some non-Brahmins who were still not ready to leave the Vedic fold entirely may have been reacting against the excesses of the priests, seeking, through asceticism or meditation, freedom from an increasingly regulated society or from a religious life dominated by elaborate and expensive rituals that the Brahmins monopolized.28 Other non-Brahmins may have been keen to introduce into the Vedic mix ideas, perhaps even ideas about karma and death, that have left no trace elsewhere, while at the same time they hoped in that way to crash the Brahmin party at last. Within Hinduism, the transition was from meditating on the Vedic sacrifice while doing it (in the Brahmanas and early Upanishads) to meditating upon the sacrifice instead of doing it (from the time of the Renunciation Upanishads), a move implicit in the renunciation of the householder life.

  NON-BRAHMIN SECRETS

  The Upanishads attribute some of their new doctrines to an important group of non-Brahmins within the Vedic world, Kshatriyas. It is a king, Jaivali Pravahana of Panchala, who teaches the doctrine of the two paths to the young Brahmin Shvetaketu. In the Brihadaranyaka, Shvetaketu approaches the king “while people are waiting upon him,” and he later refers to the king
(out of his earshot) as a “second-rate prince” (rajanya-bandhu). The king insists that both Shvetaketu and his father must beg him to be their teacher, as they do, and before he teaches them, he says, “This knowledge has never before been in the possession of a Brahmin. But I will reveal it to you, to keep you or an ancestor of yours from doing harm to me (BU 6.3.8).” (Note that he still acknowledges the Brahmins’ power to curse.) In the Chandogya, the king adds, “As a result, throughout the world government has belonged exclusively to royalty (CU 5.3.6).” In the Kaushitaki, Shvetaketu’s father explicitly regards his royal teacher (another king) as an “outsider,” and the king praises the father for swallowing his pride (KauU 1.1-7). The eclectic Upanishadic kings as gurus, such as Janaka of Videha (BU 3.1.1.1, 2.1.1), may have been drawing upon that legacy when they summoned the leading philosophers of their day, holy men of various schools and persuasions (surely including some Brahmins), to compete in their salons and to debate religious questions at royal gatherings.