The Hindus (29 page)

Evil originates in the gods themselves and spreads to both antigods and humans. More precisely, it originates in Prajapati, who, as he attempts to create, falls into the grasp of evil. In one myth, a Brahmin rids him of the evil by transforming it into prosperity (Shri) and placing it in cows, in sleep, and in shade.
¹⁰¹
It is rare, however, for evil to be so simply transformed into something good; usually it remains evil and is distributed in that form, to the detriment of those who receive it. Thus, in a kind of reverse savior mythology, the gods create forms of evil—delusion (
moha
), a stain (
kalmasha
), evil
tout court
(
papa
)—that they transfer to humans, who suffer from it forever after. Humans are thus the scapegoats of the gods. In a much-retold myth, Indra becomes infected with Brahminicide—the gold standard of sins—after he kills Vritra (whom the Brahmanas, and all subsequent texts, regard as a Brahmin—a Dasyu Brahmin but a Brahmin). Sometimes Indra gets drunk on soma—his notorious addiction—and on one occasion the Brahminicide flows out of him with the excess soma; from what flows from his nose, a lion arises; from his ears a jackal, from the lower opening of his body, tigers and other wild beasts.
¹⁰²
Thus the divine hangover leaves us to deal with man-eating beasts.

When Indra kills another enemy, also a Brahmin, he distributes the Brahminicide, with compensations:

The boons explain why the distribution is willingly accepted: As long as Indra is polluted, fertility on earth is stymied; it is in the best interests of earth, trees, and women to help Indra out, so that they themselves can remain fertile. (One version of the story inverts the principle and ultimately transfers the sin to abortionists, the enemies of fertility.
¹⁰⁴
) But evil cannot be destroyed; the best that one can hope for is to move it to a place where it will do less harm. Therefore the gods in these stories draw evil’s fangs by breaking it up, sometimes into three pieces and sometimes into four. Blatant self-interest operates in a variant in which Indra’s Brahminicide is “wiped off,” as the text puts it, onto people who make offerings without paying the priests;
¹⁰⁵
such deadbeats, the bêtes noires of the Brahmin compilers of these texts, are the perfect scapegoats.

Evil on earth in general results from fallout from heaven, from the cosmic struggles of gods and antigods:

The gods here do not merely accidentally burden humans with evil that they themselves, the gods, cannot manage; they do it purposely, to prevent humans from going to heaven.
^cr
107
And this evil includes two of the four major addictive vices, love of dice and desire for women. The implications of this major shift in the human-divine contract will continue to spread in generations to follow.

Why does this change take place at this moment? The hardening of the lines between states, the beginning of competition for wealth and power, the scramble for the supremacy of the rich Ganges bottomland may have introduced into the myths a more cynical approach to the problem of dealing with evil. And the growth of both power and the abuse of power among the two upper classes may explain why the gods at this time came to be visualized less like morally neutral (if capricious and often destructive) forces of nature—the fire, soma, rain, and rivers of the Veda—or brutal and sensually addicted but fair-minded human chieftains and more like wealthy and powerful kings and Brahmins, selfish, jealous, and vicious.

CHAPTER 7

A woman who is not ashamed to tell her son that she had multiple partners when she conceived him is one of a number of astonishingly nonconformist characters, often discussing new ideas about karma and renunciation, whom we meet in the Upanishads, philosophical texts composed from around the sixth century BCE.

The eastern Ganges at this time, the seventh through the fifth century BCE, was a place of kingdoms dominated by Magadha, whose capital was Rajagriha, and Koshala-Videha, whose capital was Kashi (Varanasi, Benares). Trade—especially of metals, fine textiles, salt, pottery, and, always, horses—flourished,
²
and the towns were connected by trade routes; all roads led to Kashi. The development of the idea of merit or karma as something “to be earned, accumulated, occasionally transferred and eventually realized”
³
owes much to the post-Vedic moneyed economy. More generally, where there’s trade, people leave home; new commercial classes emerge; and above all, new ideas spread quickly and circulate freely. They certainly did so at this time in India, and there was little to stop them: The Vedas did not constitute a closed canon, and there was no central temporal or religious authority to enforce a canon had there been one.

Commerce was facilitated by the rise of prosperous kingdoms and social mobility by the rise of great protostates, or oligarchies (
maha-janapadas
or
ganasanghas
),
⁴
governed by Kshatriya clans. One Brahmin source describes these clans as degenerate Kshatriyas and even Shudras, accusing them of having ceased to honor the Brahmins or to observe Vedic ritual, worshiping at sacred groves instead,
⁵
and of paying short shrift to sacrifices, using their funds for trade (behavior that goes a long way to explain why the Brahmins called them Shudras). The clans were said to have just two classes, the ruling families and the slaves and laborers, an arrangement that would have posed a serious threat to Brahmin supremacy. Significantly, both Vardhamana Mahavira (also called the Jina), the founder of Jainism, and Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, were born into distinguished clans in one of these alternative, nonmonarchical state systems. Such systems fostered greater personal freedom and mobility, nurturing individuals as well as social groups—the trader, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the government official.

This rise in individual freedom was, however, offset by the growing bureaucracy and state institutions in both the kingdoms and the oligarchies, which eroded the traditional rural social order and replaced it with new kinds of social control.
⁶
So too, perhaps in response to the growing social laxity, class lines laid down in texts such as the Brahmanas now began to harden. The first three classes (Brahmin, Kshatriya, and Vaishya) became more sharply delineated not only from the Shudras (the fourth class, below them) but, now, from a fifth category, Pariahs.

A vast transformation of society was taking place in response to the social, economic, and political reorganization of northern South Asia, as small-scale, pastoral chiefdoms gave way to hierarchically ordered settlements organized into states. Students and thinkers moved over a wide geographical area in search of philosophical and theological debate, encountering not merely royal assemblies of Indian thinkers but new peoples and ideas from outside South Asia. Much of the new literature on religious and social law (the Shrauta Sutras and Grihya Sutras) may have been designed to incorporate newcomers or social groups into a ranking system or to accommodate local power relations.
⁷
The emergent system recognized the authority of village, guild, family, and provincial custom, so long as they did not conflict with some higher authority. Political and intellectual diversity thrived. This may go a long way to explain not where the new ideas in the Upanishads came from but why the Brahmins were willing—perhaps under pressure from other people who had gained access to power—to incorporate these ideas into new texts that were regarded as part of the Vedas, despite the ways in which they contravened the Brahmin imaginary.
⁸

The Upanishads are often referred to as “the end of the Veda” (Vedanta
^cs
), 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) probably
⁹
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.