The Hindus (148 page)

This is one of several creation scenarios in the
Rig Veda;
we will see two more below.

Indo-European linguists usually derive “Vaishya” from a different word that means “settlement” or “people who live on the land,” but some Sanskrit texts cite the derivation from “all.”

Since the fourth class is also already present in the Veda’s Iranian cousin, the Avesta, such a fourth class, consisting primarily of artisans, may in fact have been Indo-European (or at least Indo-Iranian). Yet this Vedic hymn already regards Shudras as outsiders.

The numerous pairings of contrasting terms, such as “mortals and immortals” or “sky and earth” or “creatures two-footed and four-footed,” suggest that division into two rather than three is the fundamental structuring principle of Indo-European thought—perhaps of human thought in general. But that is another story.

A possibility supported by analogy with the Greek playwright Aristophanes’ comedy
The Frogs
, in which the Dionysian chorus consists entirely of frogs who say, “Brekekekek koax koax,” the Greek for “Akh-khala” (which is what frogs say in Sanskrit).

In variants from the Indo-European corpus, fire is held within a reed in the Greek myth of Prometheus and brought down from heaven by a firebird in Russian mythology.

The appeal was rejected because though the claim was that the soma plant was
not
the mushroom
Amanita muscaria
, it never specified what the plant in fact
was
.

Ephedra does not seem to have a sufficiently strong mental effect to have produced the conditions described in the poems. The soma was pressed in the morning and drunk on the same day, thereby eliminating wine and beer (which take longer than that to ferment, even in a hot climate). Palm toddy must be drunk within hours of making it, but toddy is not “pressed,” as soma is, nor do coconut palm trees grow in the Punjab. They didn’t know about distillation at that time (so much for
daru
or brandy), and they used hemp only to make rope, not marijuana (
bhang
). It wasn’t opium; poppies were not grown then in the Punjab.

The
Varuna-praghasa
at the beginning of the rainy season, in which the priest interrogates the queen with a question on the order of “When did you stop beating your wife?”

It was a man’s duty to impregnate his brother’s wife, but only if the brother was dead or unable to produce his own heirs.

The porcupine is attested to in India from the time of the
Atharva Veda
through Kipling’s Stickly-Prickly (in
Just So Stories
).

In classical Sanskrit it also means “having a good vagina,” which may be a distant but relevant overtone.

Impotence is also at issue in other
Rig Vedic
poems (such as 10.86 and 10.102).

Visual depictions of this figure are first attested from the second to the fourth century CE.

This is an enduring concept in Hinduism; the Marathi saint Tukaram sees the relationship between himself and god in these terms: “There is a whole tree within a seed/ And a seed at the end of each tree/That is how it is between you and me/ One contains the Other.”

The
Rig Veda
(10.83.4) applied this name not to a creator but to Manyu, “Anger.” By the time of the
Mahabharata
, however, it is an epithet of Manu and then of Brahma.

Indeed, like the cattle raid myth, it is not merely a Vedic but a wider Indo-European myth.

The Buddhists, in subsequent centuries, often attacked Indra and questioned his existence, and in the
Bhagavata Purana
(10.24.23), when Krishna is fighting against Indra, he dissuades people from praying to Indra for rain, saying, “Clouds driven by mist rain everywhere. What can Indra do?”

Some renunciant forms of Hinduism stood this value system on its head and viewed life as a terrifying chaos and death as the liberating peace of perfect order.

The great French Indologist Louis Renou capriciously translated the idea of being cooked perfectly as
au point
, just as one would say of a good steak.

The Vedic mantra that he sees likens Soma to a nimble chariot horse.

In
Homo Necans
(1972) Walter Burkert argued that the act of killing the animal in a sacrifice was the survival of a Neolithic hunting ritual expressing grief over the animal’s demise. For Burkert, animal sacrifice was a tragic deception, in which the sacrificer assumed that the sacrificial animal consented to being sacrificed. Whether or not Burkert’s insights are valid for the Greek evidence, they do seem to be highly relevant to the ancient Indian texts.

To this day it is often argued in India that the meat of animals killed for the table is poison because such animals die in fear and anger, while animals killed for sacrifice are happy to die, and so their meat is sweet.

Since only cows and bulls are prohibited, the text may allow for the eating of castrated bulls, steers, or bullocks.

The image of the woman who flees, in vain, from rape by becoming a cow and a mare may also have been inspired by the Vedic myth of Saranyu, who takes the form of a mare to flee from sexual violence but is then raped by the sun when he takes the form of a stallion.

Compare the ram that miraculously appears to save Isaac when Abraham is about to sacrifice him.

Stephanie Jamison says that the queen did not merely mime copulation, and Jamison is usually right. But in favor of the argument that the queen did
not
actually copulate with the stallion are the considerations that most of the texts instruct the priests to kill the horse first and that the ceremony would be hard to do with a live stallion.

Such as Saranyu and Sita.

Though not for long: In the
Mahabharata
(1.92), the goddess of the Ganges, another immortal woman with a mortal husband, not only abandons her husband and children when he violates the contract but kills several of the children.

Jara
is cognate with the Greek
geron
,
geras
, from which we derive the English “gerontology,” and
mrityu
with our “mortal, mortality.”

In
The Cocktail Party.

“The Three Brothers”
(Jaiminiya Brahmana
1.184) is Tale Type 654, and the tale of Kutsa and his father follows a pattern best known from Sophocles’ Oedipus (Tale Type 921; also T 92.9, T 412).

For the Brahmanas have long been regarded as the private stock of the most elitist textualists who ever lived. Müller thought the Brahmanas were “simply twaddle, and what is worse, theological twaddle,” while Julius Eggeling, who devoted most of his life to translating the
Shatapatha Brahmana
, bemoaned its “wearisome prolixity of exposition, characterised by dogmatic assertion and a flimsy symbolism rather than by serious reasoning.” Other scholars called the Brahmanas “an arid desert of puerile speculation,” “of sickening prolixity,” “filthy,” “repulsive,” and “of interest only to students of abnormal psychology.”

If it was the
Amanita muscaria,
it grew only where there were birch trees.

According to one uncharacteristic story, when the antigods were fighting the gods, the antigods, rather than the gods, put evil into the senses and into the mind; that is why we can see good or evil, speak good or evil, imagine good or evil.

“Vedanta” also has a second meaning, denoting a particular philosophy, based on commentaries on the Upanishads, that was developed many centuries later by a group of philosophers, of whom Shankara is the most famous.

If the Buddha died in around 400 BCE, as has been recently argued rather persuasively, and if, as seems evident, the Buddha knew at least parts of the early Upanishads (the
Brihadaranyaka
, the
Taittiriya
, and the
Chandogya
), those texts must have been known by about 450 BCE.

In Sanskrit grammar,
karma
is the accusative case.

No one there seems to have thought of asking about the opposite problem, why the world doesn’t run out of souls, which constantly leak out of the cycle in both directions, some up to the world of
brahman
and some down to the world of insects. Centuries later Jaina cosmogonies did address this problem.

This was true of premodern Europe as well as India.

He said this (in the
Lotus Sutra
) in response to people who kept asking for precise details about nirvana (the escape from samsara), as people in a burning house might ask, before agreeing to leave, what sort of house they might get in exchange. The Buddha taught that misery (
duhkha
) is not so much suffering as it is the inevitable loss of happiness, since everything is impermanent (
anicca/anitya
), a problem for which nirvana offered the solution.

The Sanskrit word for the class I am calling Brahmins is actually
brahmana
, the same word as the name of the texts between the Vedas and Upanishads. To confuse matters further, of the four priests needed to perform certain Vedic sacrifices, one, who just stands around and does nothing but run a full script of the sacrifice in his head, to make sure there are no mistakes, is called the
brahmin
(in Sanskrit), in contrast with the other priests designated by different names.

The Vedantic philosophers belong, by and large, to the monist tradition.

It is also a palindrome: Do Good’s deeds live on? No, Evil’s deeds do, O God.

Fast-forward alert: This anticipates the notion developed at length in the
Bhagavad Gita
, that acts performed without desire have no karmic effects.

Rather like the Oxbridge schools exams.

An idea that turned out quite differently when Nietzsche got hold of it.

As Rilke imagined the archaic torso of Apollo saying to him:
Du muss dein Leben ändern.

To paraphrase Janis Joplin.

It is, however, a fantasy supported by Georges Dumézil’s arguments for an Indo-European king who was also a priest.

The phrase used here is
sadhu-kurvanti
, from the same roots as the
sadhu-krityam
of the Nachiketas story.

This may well have contributed to Indra’s fall from popularity within Hinduism too.

The Greek historian Megasthenes called them Brahmanes and Sarmanes, and the third-century BCE emperor Ashoka called them Shramanas and Brahmanas or else, significantly, Shramanas and householders.

Katyayani does appear, however, in a much later text (
Skanda Purana
6.129), in which her jealousy of Maitreyi, Yajnavalkya’s favorite, torments her until she performs a particular ritual (
puja
) to Parvati, which makes her equal to Maitreyi in Yajnavalkya’s eyes.

Fast-forward: Gargi is now the name of a woman’s college in India and a symbol for women intellectuals.

In a parallel image that Plato came up with at roughly the same time (
Phaedrus
, 253D), the horse of the pair that represents the senses is “a crooked, great jumble of limbs . . . companion to wild boasts and indecency. He is shaggy around the ears, deaf as a post, and just barely yields to horse-whip and goad combined.”

Or “except to feed a worthy person” or “except in places specially ordained” or “except at sacrifices.” The Sanskrit
anyatra tirtheshu
has all these meanings.

Early Buddhist monks and nuns ate meat but did not kill (or sacrifice) the animals themselves. Non-killing was a virtue for them, but the Buddha explicitly refused to require monks and nuns to refrain from eating meat.

There was also an idea of
tapas
, of controlling the energy in the body through self-denial on the eve of war, that worked by a logic similar to that of the old American tradition of football players’ not being allowed to party on the night before the big game.

Not to be confused with
shakti
, a feminine form of power.

The title of Gandhi’s essay on the
Gita
says it is about
asakti-yoga
, usually translated as “selfless action” but more precisely the yoga of nonaddiction.

The sutras, or texts consisting of lines “sewn together”—“sutra” being cognate with our “suture”—are the predecessors of the
shastras.

Women in the
Kama-sutra
have sex with statues, and in the
Narmamala
, as we’ve seen on page 22, a woman has sex with a linga of leather or skin.

The
Mahabharata
(13.63) also contains passages of satire on the
Artha-shastra
.