Ardor (27 page)

*   *   *

The Br
ā
hma
ṇ
as do not offer
one
cosmogony, like the Bible or Hesiod or many tribal epic poems, but clusters of cosmogonies, juxtaposed, superimposed, and contrasted. This produces a feeling of bewilderment—and in the end of indifference. If the versions are so many and conflicting, might they not be regarded as lucubrations of the ritualists? The multiplicity of alternatives tends to lessen their meaning. Even Malamoud, who is used to treating texts with supreme care and discretion, in the end shows signs of impatience when referring to these “cosmogonies replicated, repeated, piling up, from one text to another, or within one and the same hymn, pushing back, overwhelming, penetrating, breaking up, like crashing waves”—a vivid and accurate description of these stories of “false beginnings or relative beginnings” that seem to give no hope of a fundamental solidity when describing origins, which are always veiled. And Malamoud quotes here a verse from the
Ṛ
gveda
: “You will not know he who created these worlds: something shields you.”

Yet cosmogonies follow and overlap one another. But there is always the suspicion that they are “secondary creations.” The gods are not there at the beginning, but almost at the end. Before them appeared the “mind-born children,”
m
ā
nas
āḥ
putr
āḥ
, of Praj
ā
pati—successful attempts after many failures. And before them was Praj
ā
pati himself, the Progenitor, though he—once again—was not a beginning. For Praj
ā
pati to be created, the Saptar
ṣ
is had to meet and join forces, because they in turn felt unable to exist
alone.
A tangle of dark and tortuous stories, behind which always looms the outline of something else, perhaps only the “indistinct wave” to which the
Ṛ
gveda
refers.

*   *   *

On reaching the end of the tenth
k
āṇḍ
a
of the
Ś
atapatha Br
ā
hma
ṇ
a
, after five
k
āṇḍ
as
devoted to describing how the fire altar is to be built, covering an equivalent of 678 pages in Eggeling’s translation, and after having negotiated a frenzy of additions and multiplications concerning the number of bricks to be used for building it and the way in which they are to be arranged, as well as various errors of calculation that have to be avoided during these operations, we come across three passages that are surprising for different reasons. After a final, breathtaking
excursus
on
arka
, a word in which a secret teaching is each time encapsulated, we immediately pass to a page that opens like a sudden clearing within the forest of numbers. It begins with these words: “Let him meditate on true
brahman
,” which is linked, a little later, to a passage beginning: “Let him meditate on
ā
tman.
” And it is followed by a few lines that already have the self-absorbed, final tone of the first Upani
ṣ
ads and end with the words: “Thus spoke
Śāṇḍ
ilya and so it is.”
Śāṇḍ
ilya, according to tradition, is the author of
k
āṇḍ
as
6–10 of the
Ś
atapatha Br
ā
hma
ṇ
a
and these words of his are called the
Śāṇḍ
ilyavidy
ā
, “the doctrine of
Śāṇḍ
ilya,” as if the essence of his thought is revealed there. And it is here, in fact, that we find the precise meeting point, if ever this were needed, between the Br
ā
hma
ṇ
as and the subsequent and consequent Upani
ṣ
ads. This is the point where
ā
tman
is described as being like a “grain of millet” and like “this golden Puru
ṣ
a in the heart,” after the five previous
k
āṇḍ
as
had culminated in the description of how a minuscule human figure, the golden Puru
ṣ
a, was to be placed into the fire altar, whereas that same Puru
ṣ
a, that Person, is now to be found inside the heart and is revealed as being “greater than the sky, greater than space, greater than the earth, greater than all beings.” This is the Vedic catapult that suddenly takes us from the smallest to the immeasurable and reveals where to find something that anyone, every meditator, can call “my Self.” Here is a doctrine of enormous force, set out in a few clear, calm words, which will then extend throughout the Upani
ṣ
ads, for which it is the supreme teaching. “Thus spoke
Śāṇḍ
ilya and so it is.” For Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the final clause—“and so it is”—would be missing. Nor could it have been otherwise.

*   *   *

An old problem for Indologists is the relationship between the Br
ā
hma
ṇ
as and the Upani
ṣ
ads. Agreement? Disagreement? Conflict? For guidance, there is a simple test: if we read the
Ś
atapatha Br
ā
hma
ṇ
a
as it is set out—and therefore followed immediately by the
B
ṛ
had
ā
ra
ṇ
yaka Upani
ṣ
ad
—we cannot avoid the impression of a perfect continuity of ideas. What changes is the stylistic register. After the incessant, detailed, stubborn exposition of the Br
ā
hma
ṇ
a, similar to the obsessive whirring voice of the
adhvaryu
, we now plunge into a dazzling
incipit
, which acts like a megavoltage discharge built up from the accumulation of nimbus clouds over the previous two thousand or so pages. It is as though, after a protracted compression and concentration of energies, we witness their release into bright fragments that instantaneously connect, without even a pause for verbs, as the Sanskrit language allows: “Dawn the head of the sacrificial horse, Sun its eye, Wind its breath, the open mouth Fire-of-all-men, the Year the Self,” (where Dawn, Sun, Wind, and Fire are U
ṣ
as, S
ū
rya, V
ā
yu, and Agni, all gods of the Vedic pantheon).

The unstoppable effusions of the Br
ā
hma
ṇ
a are followed and contrasted by the highly condensed Upani
ṣ
ad. What remains is the flash of equivalences: as dawn rises the young girl U
ṣ
as is superimposed on the head of the sacrificial horse; the eye—anticipating Goethe—is the sun; fire and wind go deep into the body of every man. For all this we have been prepared by the “hundred paths”—intersecting, tortuous, rough and arduous—of the Br
ā
hma
ṇ
a. Only after traveling them does the view unfold in its full splendor.

There is no doubt, though, that in the Upani
ṣ
ads we see a tendency to give little value to knowledge gained through works and a parallel praise of knowledge detached from all action. It is the earliest gnosis, a model for all others. But it would be naïve and misleading to imagine that such a distinction was not already clear to the authors of the Br
ā
hma
ṇ
as, almost as if they were superstitious liturgical craftsmen, ignorant of metaphysics. The opposite was true—and from time to time they would refer with dry irony to what would, over the centuries, turn out to be the central point: “When they said ‘either through knowledge or through work’: it is the fire that is knowledge; it is the fire that is holy work.” An apparently superfluous comment, which touches, however, on a key question. Two types of knowledge are thus established: the first is knowledge that need not be combined with visible acts; the other is knowledge as liturgical acts. At this stage, the shocking innovation lay in the first type of knowledge, which would then develop into the figure of the renouncer—and from there into every theoretical inquiry considered as the natural and appropriate condition of thought. In fact, what one day would become philosophizing, detached from any kind of ritual gesture, was the final outcome of a long process, a process in the course of which the crucial step was the internalization of the
agnihotra
, the first and most simple of sacrifices. And what could be done with the
agnihotra
could also be done with the most complicated rite, the
agnicayana
, the building of the fire altar.

But this step is important not only in distinguishing between the two regimes of knowledge. It is just as important in showing that the object of knowledge is still the same: the fire altar. When even knowledge is detached from every liturgical act, becoming pure construction and contemplation of relationships, such relationships would still remain the same ones expressed through that splayed wall of bricks built and then abandoned in a forest clearing. This is what the Vedic ritualists wanted to keep in mind; this would be the point on which they would clash with the Buddha, who wanted only to
extinguish
the fire.

The authors of the Br
ā
hma
ṇ
as paid meticulous attention to the world of desires (and of sacrifice insofar as it is based on desire), but they already saw perfectly well that the ultimate dividing line was between that world and what happens when desire no longer exists: “Regarding this there is the verse ‘Through knowledge they ascend to that state where desires have vanished’: one cannot get there with ritual fees and those practicing
tapas
do not get there without knowledge.” With these words the paths of knowledge and sacrifice separate for the first time. Sacrifice, which arises out of desire (“Praj
ā
pati desired” is said countless times—and every sacrificer, like him, says the same), cannot reach the point where “desires have vanished.” Knowledge, which until then was equivalent to sacrifice, now appears as the path that allows access to a point that will never be reached by the sacrificial act. We are now in the realm of the Upani
ṣ
ads—if by this we mean that the question of knowledge is now to be posed in terms that will be followed by the Buddha (or Spinoza).

*   *   *

How do we heal an error that is always lurking in an imprecise gesture, in an inappropriate word? The gods were the first to ask the question, to Praj
ā
pati. He replied with a concise and definitive lesson on methodology: “One heals the
Ṛ
gveda
with the
Ṛ
gveda
, the
Yajurveda
with the
Yajurveda
, the
S
ā
maveda
with the
S
ā
maveda.
As one would put together joint with joint, so he puts them [the parts of the sacrifice] together whoever heals by means of these words [the three ‘luminous essences,’ which are
bh
ū
r
,
bhuvas
,
svar
, corresponding respectively to the three Vedas]. But, if he heals them in any other way than this, it would be like someone trying to put together something broken with something else that is broken, or as if a poison were applied as a balm for a fractured limb.” This rule is also valid for the study and interpretation of the Veda. Bergaigne obeyed it in his
Religion védique
, illuminating the
Ṛ
gveda
with the
Ṛ
gveda
and nothing else. The
Ś
atapatha Br
ā
hma
ṇ
a
is waiting in the same way for a future scholar to fathom it in its entirety, as an immense opus dedicated to the opus of sacrifice. But the Br
ā
hma
ṇ
as have the peculiar characteristic of causing Indologists to lose their tempers. It’s an age-old tradition. As old as the work of those intrepid scholars (such as Eggeling or Keith) who devoted several decades to translating and annotating them. We might imagine that the impressive quantity of studies amassed, beginning with Sylvain Lévi’s illuminating
Doctrine du sacri
fi
ce dans les Brâhmanas
(1898), would have radically changed this attitude. But it hasn’t. After more than a hundred years, it reemerges unchanged—paradoxically in an otherwise fascinating book by Frits Staal, one of the greatest experts on the Br
ā
hma
ṇ
as.