Beginnings - The Vedas

Book II: Indian Thought

1. THE ARYANS

When they divided the Man, into how many parts did they apportion him? What do they call his mouth, his two arms and thighs and feet?

His mouth became the Brahmin; his arms were made into the Kshatriya; his thighs the Vaishyas; and from his feet the Shudras were born.

Verses on the creation of the world

from the Primal Man, Rig Veda 10.90: 11-12

Karma [i.e. action] which springs from the mind, from speech, and from the body, produces either evil or good results; by karma are caused the conditions of men, the highest, the middling, and the lowest.

The Laws of Manu 12.3.

In the popular imagination of the West, India is a timeless land, its society dominated for ages beyond memory by the Caste system, and its thought formed from the beginning by the belief in karma and reincarnation. But though these institutions are indeed old, we know something about their origins. There was no Caste before the Aryan migration into northwest India, in the middle of the second millennium bce. The Aryans were an Indo-European people speaking Sanskrit, a language closely related to Greek and Latin. The invaders of Greece and Italy about this same time originated among the same Indo-Europeans, whose homeland was somewhere in the Eurasian steppes.

The invaders did not bring with them the Caste system, or the beliefs in reincarnation and karma, that we associate with Indian culture. These developed in response to the situation they faced in their newly conquered lands. Castes arose after the invasion, rooted in class-divisions among the Aryans themselves as well as the division between the Aryans and the people they conquered. The indigenous peoples were physically very different from the Aryans, and the usual class divisions resulting from conquest were no doubt exacerbated by racial prejudice and fear of miscegenation. But it was surely equally as important that the invaders had different religious beliefs than did the indigenous peoples, a religious system which promised a far more favorable afterlife. Four Castes came to be distinguished. The three Aryan Castes were the Brahmins, priests and religious teachers, the Kshatriyas, aristocrats and warriors, and the Vaishyas, farmers, traders and merchants, craftsmen, owners of property. These were said to “twice-born” because of the initiation their young men underwent when they began their studies of the Vedas, the Aryan sacred scriptures, under a Brahmin master. From the Vedas they learned their duties (dharma) in life, both the general moral duties that all men have and those specific to their caste. Women did not become students or participate in the religious life, and their initiation occurred at marriage. Through the initiation and observation of their duties, they could expect to go in the afterlife to the Heaven of the Fathers, where they would feast with the gods forever. The non-Aryans, the ‘Shudras’, were not initiated, of course, and were not permitted to study the Vedas. According to their own traditional beliefs, they could expect nothing better in the afterlife than a half-conscious existence in the underworld, like that traditionally expected in Mesopotamia. They would originally have been day laborers without property, serfs and the like. In theory, at least, they were subservient to the twice-born. (Probably the upper classes of the non-Aryan groups were absorbed into the Kshatriyas, and a pre-existing layered social system prepared people to accept the Caste arrangements later imposed.) By the 6^th century bce there were also Untouchables, who seem to have been, originally, an aboriginal hunting-gathering group with its own language, shunned by Aryans and non-Aryans alike. Criminals and other Outcastes also became Untouchable, and the group eventually constituted nearly a quarter of the population. In theory one could not leave one’s Caste, and a male could not marry into a higher Caste. If there was no other option one was allowed to do the work of a lower Caste, and the Shudras came to be allowed to practice handicrafts. This is the way it is supposed to be, of course, and there has always been illegitimate social and occupational mobility. The five major divisions are supplemented by detailed classifications covering all the important occupations, religious systems, races, languages, and whatever else might mark one as a member of a group, particularly if its members conceive themselves to have peculiar obligations not binding on other groups, or has any tendency to endogamy. Wherever social mobility threatened to destroy the boundaries between the conquered and the conqueror, barriers were erected.

Old customs and religious practices that distinguished Aryans from non-Aryans assumed enormous importance to the conquerors, due to the profound fear of loss of racial and cultural identity through mixture with the more numerous indigenous Indians, an identity associated with the prospect of a favorable after-life unknown to the non-Aryans. The priestly Shamans who took advantage of the situation developed an unusually powerful religious establishment, organizing the initiations they conducted into a mandatory educational institution. The conservative hysteria apparent in such works as the Laws of Manu emphasized the authority of the teachers and preservers of the sacred literature, and the precise observance of traditional laws and customs. A similar phenomenon can be observed in the development of Jewish culture after the Dispersion, for the Jews also had a salvation in prospect not available to the gentiles, but the Jews, of course, were not conquerors, but conquered, and so evolved, not into a Caste society, but into a single Caste isolated within a wider alien culture.

The Caste system is not apparent in the earliest written records of Indian culture in the Rig Veda (perhaps as early as 1200 bce), and neither is the doctrine of karma and reincarnation. According to this view every human being leads a series of lives, experiencing rebirth in a new body after each death. One’s fortunes in life, and in rebirth, are determined by good and bad karma, and good or bad karma is acquired by adherence to or neglect of one’s dharma, or duties, whether they be duties all men must fulfill, or duties specific to one’s Caste. The doctrine rules out a beginning to one’s past lives, for those without previous lives would have no accumulated karma, so that nothing could happen to them. Believers in the doctrine will, if they are reasonable, accept what happens in life as their due rather than the fault of God or their neighbor, and attend to the future rather than dwelling on the past. For although people must work through the bad karma they have already accumulated, they need not acquire any more, and may get good karma to counterbalance the bad. Improved behavior will inevitably improve one’s lot, and improvement is always possible, for although the karmic consequences of an act are inevitable, one’s response to these consequences, though not uninfluenced by habit and character, remain ultimately within the individual’s power.

But whatever beneficial influence these doctrines might have on one’s striving for a better life, it is clear that they also support the Caste system and work against social change. They justify one’s place in the system as the fitting outcome of past lives, and produce acquiescence in inequalities as they direct one’s efforts to the fulfillment of duties defined within the existing social order. It might reasonably be objected that it is the ideal social order, not the actual one, that defines one’s duties, so that considerable room is left for criticism of actual practice in terms of the ideal, but still, since it forbids any attempt to leave one’s caste or evade its assigned duties, or to gain power or privilege not traditional for one’s caste, no room is left for the revision of the ideal conception of the social order. Though, as we shall see, the doctrine of karma and reincarnation seem to have originated outside the Brahmanic priesthood, they were made to serve the Caste system very early, and as taught in the classical Hindu texts they are inseparable from it.

2. THE RELIGION OF THE RIG VEDA

I will extol the most heroic Indra who with his might forced earth and sky asunder;

Who hath filled all with width as man’s upholder, surpassing floods and rivers in his greatness.

Surya [the Sun] is he: throughout the wide expanses shall Indra turn him, swift as car-wheels, hither,

Like a stream resting not but ever active: he has destroyed with light the black-hued darkness.

Rig Veda 10.89 vv. 1-2

For our purposes the most important of the sacred books recognized by the orthodox among the Indians are the Samhitas and the Upanishads, the first and fourth parts of the Vedas, and the Bhagavad-Gita, contained in the national epic poem, the Mahabharata.

The date of the existing rendition of the Vedic hymns collected in the Samhitas, the first part of each Veda, is conjectural, though all the poetry can be placed before 600 bce . There are a number of different strata—perhaps the earliest material in the Rig Veda goes back as far as 1200 bce. There are four Vedas, the Rig, Yajur, Sama and Atharva. The Samhitas in the first three Vedas agree in language and much of their content. The Rig Veda contains 1,028 hymns praising various gods, divided into ten books. The tenth book, which, judging from its doctrine and language, was composed some centuries later than the rest, is generally regarded as the first document of Indian philosophy.

The oldest collections of Vedic hymns were originally the property of one or another of the ancient families of priests attached to the great Aryan clans. They had supposedly been revealed to members of these clans, and their ritual power was jealously guarded. In particular, the Shudras, the lowest, non-Aryan caste, were forbidden to study the Vedas, and the early Dharmashastras command that a Shudra who has overheard the recitation of a Vedic hymn should have his ears filled with molten lead. Such protection was demanded by the supposed power of the hymns within Vedic ritual, which could accomplish all the aims of life, and by the wealth to be gained by chanting them for a fee.

The religion of the Rig Veda is polytheistic, and its world-view is strongly reminiscent of that of the eastern Mediterranean in the second millenium bce. The gods are nature-gods, gods of the wind (Vayu), of fire (Agni, whose chief function is to carry the sacrifice to the gods), of the earth, sun (Surya), moon, stars and planets. The universe was divided into heaven, where the gods dwelt with the souls of the righteous dead, the earth, and the region below the earth, including a hell for the spirits of the unrighteous. There is no sign as yet of any belief in transmigration or multiple lives. Despite the indefinite multiplicity of the gods, the particular god whose praises are sung in any particular hymn is often magnified to the source of all things. The key to understanding this is the fact that each god represents some aspect of the powers of the One breath-spirit of the Universe. The Aryans identified the soul with the breath, and so with air or fire. Vata, the wind-god, is “the atman” (breath or self) “of the gods, the germ of this world.”

The identification of Indra, a young storm-god and god of battles, as the founder of the present world order establishes a connection to later Mesopotamia and early Greece. Just as, in the Mesopotamian tale, the young storm-god Marduk is commissioned by the younger gods to slay the dragon Tiamat, the leader of the elder gods who would keep all things in stillness and darkness, and then constructs the world from her body—so in the Indian tale Indra is commissioned by Varuna and the other gods to slay their elder, Vritra, also a dragon, and, slicing open her belly and making heaven and earth of her upper and lower half, looses the seven streams of life-bearing waters that give birth to all the things of this world. Indra (and later Vishnu, who takes his place), like the Babylonian Marduk, is asked to do the work by the father of the younger gods, an omniscient, but forgiving high god of justice, Varuna, who is identified as a god of the sea. This figure was once the ruler of the gods, but becomes relatively unimportant once Indra appears on the scene. The view is the same one we find in the Middle east—the storm-god forces the waters above and below earth apart, creating a bubble of air in the primordial depths of the fertile and life-giving waters, and thus, with the growth of land at the lower surface of the bubble, the cosmos is established.

Indra is the universal breath as storm-wind. Elsewhere breath in another form, Vak, the god of speech, is said to hold together all existence, while breathing a strong breath like the wind. It is not entirely clear how speech accomplishes what it does here, but it is probably because of its power of command and persuasion. In any case the equation of speech with the wind, the breath of the universe, suggests that breath was thought of as mind in part because of the association of breath with speech, and so with cognition, judgment, and persuasive power. There may also be a connection here to Iranian tendencies of thought that make the outer fire of the heavens the soul-stuff, and look forward to a reunion of the individual soul with the great mass of fire that forms the soul of the world. So in one place it is hinted that souls soar up to the sun, Surya, on their death.

The most prominent representation of the universal breath in the later Vedas is Prajapati, who was the first of things, “he who gives breath, who gives strength, whose command all the gods wait upon.” Prajapati is life-breath, which provides strength and speech, the power of command. His name means the “Father God.” He is born of rita, the law of the cosmos, and it is he who reduces the primal chaos into order by entering into things with form and name. For a while, in the later Vedic hymns and the Brahmanas, he seems to have been considered the highest God, but is replaced by Brahman in the Upanishads.

In the Brahmanas, Prajapati is sometimes said to be self-created:

Verily, in the beginning, Prajapati alone was here. He desired, “May I exist, may I be generated.” He wearied himself and performed fervid devotions: from him thus wearied and heated, the three worlds were created—the earth, the air and the sky.

In another place a sacrificial oblation is identified with exhalation of Yajña (the god of sacrifice), and is likewise said to be self-made, and “self-creating” occurs as an epithet for the creator God in many other places in the Brahmanas. One of the four false theories about causation listed in early Buddhist works is the view that something can be the cause of itself. It might seem that the power of creation, since it involves creating the very laws of the universe, makes its bearer exempt from the ordinary restraints of natural causal laws. So perhaps he could cause himself, and one can take advantage of that to avoid leaving the existence of the creator unexplained.

Brahman, though he plays a large role in later speculations, does not occur in the Vedic Hymns, unless one counts the use of the word brahman for the sacrificial food offering, sacrificial chants and magical formulas. Only in the Satapatha Brahmana does Brahman appear. It

created the Gods, and having created them, made them ascend these worlds, Agni this world, Vayu the air, and Surya the sky... Then the Brahman went up to the sphere beyond. Having gone up to the sphere beyond, it considered, “How can I descend again into these worlds?” It then descended again by means of these two, form and name.

Brahman in the Brahmanas is the spirit of the magical and the sacrificial act that created the world, and to make Brahman the source of things is to say that ritual, sacrificial and magical, lies behind all things. Like Prajapati, Brahman is found in all things and is the source of their form and name.

These hymns assume a dualism of gods (daevas), who uphold the cosmic order, and demons (asuras), who attempt to undermine it. This dualism is placed at the center of religious speculation in Iranian thought, and although it plays a peripheral role in India, it is an important part of Hindu mythology and popular beliefs. One cosmogonic tale in the Mahabharata speaks of these two groups cooperating in the creation of the world. To bring the cosmos into being a great world-mountain is sunk into the sea, which is filled with milk, and the world-serpent wraps itself around the mountain many times. The Daevas (the bright, younger gods) and the Asuras (the dark, elder gods) then take hold of the head and tail, respectively, and, pulling it back and forth, spin the mountain like an agitator in a churn, stirring the sea into a froth from which the moon, cattle, and everything else in the world is generated, including, no doubt, lands at the edge, accumulating like curds. Finally the milk of the sea, stirred too much, generates a poison and turns to salt water (rather like whey, perhaps), and Shiva, to save creation, takes the poison into his throat and holds it there, neither swallowing it so as to suffer its full effects, nor releasing it to destroy the new world order. As a result he turns blue. Note how this captivating myth resembles Ionian speculations among the Greeks. The vortex which separates the things out in this cosmos, rooted in the story of the storm god Indra-Marduk-Zeus, is present, though it works by a different mechanism to produce land from the primal sea. The opposites, in their eternal tug of war, driving the natural order, are represented by the Devas and Asuras. But, as we shall see, the vision of the eternal struggle of opposites, though present in Indian thought, was not developed in the same way as it was in Greek speculation. Moreover, a moment of reflection shows that the writer of the tale, though possibly influenced by some naturalistic account, is still very far from the transformation of the gods into mere cosmic masses and forces that began Greek scientific speculation. The vortex of Anaximander is a serious scientific proposal—the cosmic churn, on the other hand, is more interested in being picturesque. Most of it is irrelevant to explanation of observable phenomena. The author wants to entertain, to pass on wisdom, but he is only marginally interested in scientific explanation. Indian mythology is lush, dramatic and humorous, a product of the artistically creative mind. It is not the spare, literal stuff of people obsessed with getting the truth down. The usual skeptical views associated with mythical world views held sway, and in the Rig Veda this skepticism became explicit when people insisted on taking the myths literally.

3. SKEPTICISM AND THE HYMN OF CREATION

One and another say: “There is no Indra. Who hath beheld him?”

Rig Veda 8.89 v.3.

Who for ten milch-kine will purchase from me this Indra who is mine?

When he has slain Vritra let the buyer give him back to me.

Rig Veda 4.24 v. 10

The so-called “Hymn of Creation,” a much discussed proto–philosophical document, is best understood in terms of this mythological background. An emergent skepticism concerning Indra and the role of the gods in creation is reflected in the hymn, and some attempt is made at a new style of literal cosmology presenting the truth contained in the old myths plain and unadorned.

The hymn, composed about 900 bce, begins:

Then even nothingness was not, nor existence,

There was no air then, nor the heavens beyond it.

Who covered it? Where was it? In whose keeping?

Was there then cosmic water, in depths unfathomable?

The poet’s opening lines seem to mean that the things that exist now in the present world order could not have been said to be then, nor even not to be, for even though they were not, it was not as if they could be but somehow had died or failed to grow into being. The third line raises the question whether their existence was to be found hidden away in their causes as potential existence. The natural order which supports the possibility of their being, involving the bubble of air and light in the midst of the waters, was not yet. The being of the things that now exist was perhaps hidden away as potential existence in the vast generative waters.

Then there was neither death nor immortality;

Nor was there then the touch of night or day.

The One breathed windlessly and self-sustaining.

There was that one then, and there was no other.

There was neither death nor life, that is, none of the things that exist now could be said to live, or to have died. What has never been is not dead, after all, and nothing had yet been. If non-being is conceived in the same way as death, then one can see why the poet denied in the first line that there was any non-being before this world order for the things of this world order. The possibility of non-being, like the possibility of death, would have to be allowed to depend on the thing’s having been at some time, or at least on there being a process afoot that is naturally suited to give rise to it, so that it is not yet.

So what was going on in the very beginning? It seems something must have been going on, so that we can account for the present state of things, but it needs to be as little as possible, so that as little as possible is left unexplained by any earlier state of things. The poet’s suggestions embody the notion prevalent in the Near East, and in the earliest known Greek speculation. The original state of things consisted of an immense expanse of water, with nothing to differentiate one part of it from another. The world arose when light (and so day and night) and wind (and so air and the sky beyond it) arose, making a space in the water for a world to form. A vast expanse of water with no worlds, no bubbles of air, in it, breathes windlessly. Perhaps it swells and contracts without any air arising in it, but however that may be the point seems to be that it was, but not in the way that things are now, with breath-souls shaping them. Nothing is happening yet. It must breathe to live and be, but it breathes without change or structure.

At first there was only darkness wrapped in darkness,

All this was only unilluminated water.

That One which came to be, enclosed in nothing,

Arose at last, born of the power of heat.

That which was becoming is surely the seed of the present-day world order. The nothing, or void, that encloses it might be the gap introduced in the expanse of waters, and the first things arise in the gap due to heat.

In the beginning desire descended upon it—

That was the primal seed born of the mind.

Here we can compare some other passages from the tenth book of the Rig Veda:

What time the mighty waters came, containing the

universal germ, producing Agni (fire).

Thence sprang the Gods’ one spirit into being.

and

The waters, they received the germ primeval wherein

the gods were gathered all together.

It rested upon the Unborn’s navel, that One

wherein abide all things existing.

Ye will not find him who produced these creatures:

another thing hath risen up among you.

The poet is still speaking about the world forming in the bubble of air, and desire and thought are the natural function of the heated air, which is the One, the world-order, at this phase. Desire is the product of mind or thought (if that is what is intended) because one can desire only what one has conceived, and it was commonplace in later thought that the conception of a thing naturally gives rise to desire or aversion directed toward it. It is not clear what the physical correlate of thought is, but it may well be light, in which case this light gave rise to the heated air which is desire, and is also the One, the natural world. (The presence of desire and thought represent the victory of the later gods, with their noisy activity, over the elder generation, resting in mere potentiality and darkness.) This may be given an Idealist reading, of course, but to understand this poem in its own terms, the persistent physicalism of pre-literate thought, which assigns some physical correlate to every mental event, must be born in mind. These events work on the physical and the mental plane at the same time. To return to our poem:

The sages who have searched their hearts with wisdom,

Know that which is is kin to that which is not.

This sums it up. The sages have discovered that which is kin to being (the parent of being, actually) within the not-being (see the comments on the first two stanzas) of the dark, undifferentiated, primeval waters.

And they have stretched their cord across the void,

And know what was above and what below.

Seminal powers made fertile mighty forces.

Below was strength, and over it was impulse.

The power to bring about creation, and the impulse to do so—the power must have been resident in that which is not, which is kin to what is, and so has the ability to give rise to what is, and the impulse would have arisen from the thought and desire engendered by the primal heat. The power would be in the primal waters, then, and the primal waters relevant to the operation of the world of men are found below the earth, while the impulse is found above in the air, the soul of this world.

But after all, who knows, and who can say

Whence it all came, and how creation happened?

The Gods themselves are later than creation,

So who knows truly whence it has arisen?

Notice the assumption that knowledge of the beginning of the world could only be gained by experience of the event, so that we must rely here on testimony from the gods. The poet goes so far as to suggest that even the highest god, Prajapati, may not know how the world arose:

Whence all creation had its origin,

He, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not,

He who surveys it all from the highest heaven,

He knows—or maybe even he does not.

The God in the highest heaven controls things at present, and he may have created them, but whether he did or not, the suggestion is that he might still be ignorant of the origins of this world-order. If he did create the world, perhaps he has forgotten, or it may be his act of creation was unconscious. If he did not, then he may not have been a witness to it, particularly since he may have arisen in the act of creation. The poet does not deny that there must be an explanation of the world-order here, but he embraces skepticism on the question exactly what the explanation is, because only an eye-witness could settle it.

In connection with the possible ignorance of the One, it is worth noting that the gods often do not receive the unqualified respect in the Indian tradition that they typically receive in the West. The Indian attitude is something like that of the Neo-Platonists toward lower Daimones. The gods are not the creators of the world, and they may be thought ignorant of some matters. There is even something of a tradition of ridicule of the gods, rooted in two opposed tendencies, the skeptical tendency represented here, reinforced by the problem of evil and a suspicion that the Brahmanic teachings are too self-serving to be fully credible, and a tendency, even on the part of the Brahmins themselves to regard the ascetic as superior to the Gods. The tendency carries over into Buddhism, which treats the gods very much like rich, long-lived neighbors who think rather too much of themselves, and suggests that Brahman, though he was born and will die, like all things, supposes that he is eternal and made this world simply because he was the first thing to arise in the present world order. All of this disrespect is rooted in the expectation that the ascetic could escape this world and the rule of the gods by merging with the One which underlies them. The gods themselves, who hope to achieve happiness by staying always on top, are deluded about the sufficiency of their powers and the eternity of their bliss, and so inferior to the sage in his ascetic wisdom.

What has happened to the myth of Indra and Vritra here? The mythology has been restated in literalist terms, and the suggestion has been broached that an explanation of the world can be evolved in terms of natural processes rather than the actions of the gods. The beginning of natural science takes the same shape here that it did in Thales, and the poem provides our earliest evidence of a naturalistic trend emerging in the 10^th century bce and after in India.

4. LAW (RITA) AND DHARMA

Law has varied food that strengthens; thought of law

removes transgressions.

The praise-hymn of law, arousing, glowing, has opened

the deaf ears of the living.

Firm-seated are law’s foundations; in its fair form

are many splendid beauties.

By holy law long lasting food they bring us; by holy

law have cows come to our worship.

Fixing law he <Indra> too upholds it: swift moves the

might of law and wins the booty.

To law belong the vast deep earth and the heavens:

milch kine supreme, to law their milk they render.

Rig Veda IV.23.8-10

Another set of hymns approaches the problem how the world arises in a somewhat different way, which brings us back to social issues. For example:

From fervor kindled to its height law (rita) and

Truth were born,

Thence was night produced, and thence the billowy

flood, the sea arose.

From that same billowy flood of sea the year was

afterwards produced,

Ordainer of the days <and> nights, Lord of all who

close the eye.

Dhatar, the great creator, then formed in due order

the sun and moon,

He formed in order heaven and earth, the regions

of the air, and light.

Rita, the Law that governs the world, and Truth (conceived as conformity with the Law), were originally upheld by Varuna, the father of the gods, very much as Ma’at, Law or Truth, was guarded by Osiris in Egypt. Rita was conceived to specify the obligations of men and the structure of the social order, including the place of gods and men in the world, and, by prescribing and limiting the actions of the gods who represented the great natural forces, it also served in the place of natural law. In later thought this Law was called dharma.

How does the poet think the law arose? It may be that when he says the Law arose from heat or fervor, he means that it arose through the power gained from ascetic practice, but that is probably an anachronistic reading of the passage. The intention is more likely that the heat that gave rise to the power to generate, to the possibility of the natural order and the things in it, also gave rise simultaneously to the Law that would govern the things arising out of the primal generative waters. After all, the very possibility of things in a natural order, figured in the generative water and explicitly present in the seed that arose within it, presupposes the presence of some plan and order, of Law.

The Law here strengthens and instructs the one who contemplates it, just as contemplation of the Law of Yahweh strengthened the Hebrew. More to the point, its social and ethical content upheld the social order and guaranteed the Brahmin his offerings by enforcing participation in his ceremonies, many of which, involving marriage, childbirth, and the like, were unavoidable if one was to be a member of society at all. Indeed, the social order on earth was continuous with the larger order of the universe, and the performance of the great Brahmanic sacrifices were as necessary to keep the world going as the lesser ceremonies were to maintaining the social order.

The inherent conservatism of the Brahmanic conception of natural law is apparent when we compare it to early Greek views. For the Greeks the cosmic law did not specify any particular social order or particular actions, but only that the social order and one’s actions grant appropriate privileges and power to everyone with the power to benefit the community (and so also to make trouble for it). Thus it left room for social protest, and the alteration of institutions. There is none of this in the Indian account. The law of the