S1E2 Shunned
This episode focuses on a body of sacred literature from the late Vedic period known as the Brahmanas. This literature has been largely ignored by modern scholarship due to certain biases at work in what are now known as the “first wave Orientalists”. These biases have affected the way modern yoga is understood via interpretation of ideas like the self, and the soul, and through the selection of certain texts over others. We trace the evolution of the Vedic sacrificial triad in the Brahmanas, and interpret a story about Prajapati, the primal creator god, as an early foreshadowing of modern practice.
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Edited Transcript
The Brahmanas are said to have been composed between 806 and 100 BCE (Doniger). What exactly are the Brahmanas? In short, they are mythical, philosophical, and ritual glosses on the Vedas. Dr. Wendy Doniger says something that helps focus us here: “Whereas the Rig Veda expressed uncertainty and begged the gods for help, the Brahmanas express confidence that their infallible Vedic mantras can deal with all dangers.” (The Hindus) So the Brahmanas comment on the Vedic revelation and bring out the details of many things that are subtly mysterious in it. The sacrifices become more ritualized in the form of powerful mantras, and certain elements get personified in mythological forms.
The Brahmanas are a body of literature that has been largely ignored by most modern scholarship. Many scholars found both their form and content to be distasteful. Notably, because the Vedic sacrifice had become formalized to such a high degree, the Brahmanas begin to outline the specifics of killing things: who is to do it; what is to be said during the act; which things are to be sacrificed, etc.
For instance, there's a particular ritual described in the Brahmanas called Purusha Meda, which can be translated as “human sacrifice” or “person sacrifice”, and there's a debate that is still going on amongst sociologists, anthropologists, religious scholars and traditional Hindu practitioners about whether or not this is a metaphorical reference, or an actual practice. I don't know enough about the relevant archaeology to be able to comment on that. It is simply mentioned here to give an idea about the nature of the content in the Brahmanas, and to illustrate how that content might have turned off certain Western translators (German and French), given the more modern assumptions that they brought to the table.
In terms of literary form, the Brahmanas can be very mathematical, to the point of being perceived as devolving into “tedious minutia”. The scholars who perceived the Brahmanas in this way have been called the “first wave orientalists” by some, and this term “orientalist” has become somewhat disparaging in discussions concerning history and the translation of traditional texts by non-native peoples. Specifically, we're talking about men like Max Mueller, Arthur A. McDonald, and Julius Eggling. These are examples of three heavyweights who translated the earliest Sanskrit texts for the West.
Specifically, Max Mueller said the Brahmanas were “twaddle”, and what is worse, “theological twaddle”. So Mueller felt that whatever is religious about them is not worth seeing at all. Likewise, Arthur A. Macdonald dismissed them as “an aggregate of shallow and pedantic discussions, full of sacerdotal conceits and fanciful or even absurd identifications.” The word fanciful stands out here: Macdonald felt that what was advised and recorded in the Brahmanas could not be truly real. Finally, Julius Eggeling said, “for wearisome prolixity of exposition, characterized by dogmatic assertion and a flimsy symbolism rather than by serious reasoning, these works are perhaps not equaled anywhere; unless, indeed, it be by the speculative vapourings of the gnostics, than which, in the learned translators of Irenaeus, nothing more absurd has probably ever been imagined by rational beings.” (Quoted in Collins, 45).
Mueller, in particular, is very important for our discussion of the development of modern yoga because he was involved with Swami Vivekananda. Vivekananda is a huge influence on how the West came to understand certain ideas in the yoga tradition. He was one of the early Hindu reformers, someone interested in bringing India into the modern, scientific age in a way that preserved the essence of his native culture. He was deeply affected by Western ideas like Darwinian evolution, democracy, universal salvation, and Western-style monotheism: he famously shunned idol worship as a degraded form of spiritual practice. Vivekananda and Mueller were in correspondence, and Vivekananda had a very high opinion of Mueller. The modern values they both shared deeply influenced the way that yoga was presented to the World via translations of sacred texts, and one can assume that Vivekananda looked askance at the Brahmanas in the same way that Mueller and his compatriots did.
We get the idea . . . So why is this important for us? The first wave of Orientalists translated the Rig Veda and many of the Upanishads, which were among the first sacred texts from the East to make it to America. Those who first learned about sacred literature from the East often learned through the American transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson and Thoreau would have gotten translations from these early scholars, and insofar as Emerson and Thoreau have been influential, the ideas emerging from the early translations and the biases they contain have become the foundation for much modern understanding.
If I were to give an example of how influence like this pans out, one of the most obvious things is that when people speak about “yoga”, they speak as if it is a monolithic enterprise, the authentic origin of which can be found and laid bare for all to see. In reality, it's much more complicated than that, especially the more we learn. Now, I don't want to simply dissolve all the cherished ideas that modern people have about the yoga they're doing. I'm even going to use the word throughout the coming seasons in a way that sounds like there's something singular that can indeed be called yoga. We just have to be careful with the way that we read, think, and especially with what we say.
Exercising Care
If you want to exercise a certain care when you read, you need a basic sense of what the text is about, and the differences and commonalities between our culture and ancient Indian culture. In this regard, there are key concepts that permeate the texts that Westerners also share, but which have subtly different meanings.
For instance, take the idea of a soul: what it is, and/or whether or not it has a reality. Soul and discussion about it are not exclusive to Hindus. But their culture has given a unique flavor and nuance to the idea, and the flavor that's brought from our side is subtly different; not totally different, but subtly and importantly so.
When reading the Upanishad we come across the notion of atman - a word that's been translated as “soul” - In order to avoid confusion, we have to look very closely at how atman is being used, because depending on where you’re from and how you’ve been educated (if at all), you're going to immediately assume certain things when you hear words like “soul”.
One important difference between how ancient India and the West have traditionally understood the soul is that in the ancient Indian context, souls are not created; they exist eternally and so are not subject to birth and death, whereas in the Judeo-Christian context, souls are created by God. Also, in the Judeo-Christian West, souls are not totally independent of the body: they need bodies in order to exist. This is important because it explains why bodily resurrection is promised in the Christian traditions and why, in Classical Hindu texts like the Bhagavad Gita, the body is not important in the end. Yet in both cases, the idea of the soul is that of the most essential “part” of the person, the organizing principle of her manifestation and coherent functioning as an individuated organism.
The same can be said of the idea of a person, and importantly, about the idea mind. What is it that we are talking about when we say these things? We can't assume, for instance, when the Samkhya philosophy gives us the three parts of mind - manas, budhi, and ahamkara - that these are equivalent to the inner, subjective, experience of the Freudian id, ego, and super-ego, or that they fit well with the common assumptions about the conscious and the unconscious mind (Freud again).
We also have to be very mindful of cultural lenses through which we frame interpretation, in this case, valuations of concepts like individual and collective. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt would call India socio-centered, or community and family-oriented. The modern West tends to be more Ego/individually centered. So the East has tended to accent the value of the community over the autonomy of the individual, and the West has accented individual independence a bit more. When reading, it's easy to interpret important ideas like liberation through a Western lens, which conceives of freedom as the psychologically mature individual unconstrained by external forces, whereas in a sociocentric culture, freedom is generally not conceived in terms of isolated individuality. Now, I am not saying that the individual is valuable only in Western culture, nor that families are only important in the East, nor that psychological maturity is meaningless in liberation-oriented practices. Just that there is much nuance to unpack in our investigations.
Finally, I don't want to disparage the intelligence of the first wave Orientalists. These are massive intellects who devoted their lives to learning Sanskrit and bringing it to the world, and I recognize that they obviously gave deep attention and care to this project. But they were equally capable of being dismissive and making selections of things that simply fit ideas of value that were from their own cultures.
Going to the Fives
It is said in India that “five is good to think with”. The Brahmanas are also really important for giving us an organizational pattern of the universe that is generally seen across a large swath of Indian cosmological history. This pattern shows a tendency to group the levels of manifest reality - from the most mundane to the most subtle - into groups of five. There are also important groups of three, and important binaries, but five is something that you learn to spot when you dig down into these texts and their ideas. Let's look at some examples.
The Brahmanas depict the sacrificial altar, the “Agni chayan,” as composed of five layers of bricks. In the Satapatha Brahmana, these layers represent the five bodily constituents of the god Prajapati, as well as the five seasons, and the five directions. Because the altar represents Prajapati, who is also known as the “Progenitor”, it is symbolic of the original source of creation, so the world and the culture emerge from it; the world and the culture are created from his primordial body, and all of it is organized in groups of five.
If we look closely we keep finding these groupings, even as we go forward in history: most systems accept that the five elements (pachabhutani) earth, air, fire, water, space are the basic building blocks of reality; and the five senses that make up our cognitive apparatus (jnanendriya) - seeing, tasting, smelling, hearing and touching. Then there are the five sensory organs of action (karmendriya): speaking, grasping, moving, procreating, and eliminating. Each of the doshas in Ayurveda (Vata, Pitta, Kapha) is divided into subsets of five. Finally, because we could go on - in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, there are five key ethical observances known as Yama, and five internal constraints known as Niyama. This organizational tendency continues into Hatha Yoga and into Tantra as well.
David Gordon White sums it up when he says that “fiveness permeates the everyday sphere of discourse in India” at a really deep level, beneath and prior to philosophical and historical examples.
Sacrificial Triad
In the first episode, we focused on the Vedic sacrificial triad. We also find that the triad is expressed in the Brahmanas, and in this later context, it is subtly reworked. In its original form, it is composed of vayu, agni, and soma: the wind (vayu) from heaven, which the fire breathes, the fire itself (agni), and the earth (soma), or the manifest, structural element on which the fire feeds. In the Brahmanas, we find the heavenly element imaged as the god Purusha/Prajapati, which means Lord of creatures. Then again, we see Agni, the sacrificial fire, and Soma, the fluid god, embodying the sacrificial oblation.
It's important to see that the elements of the triad are personified as deities in the Brahmanas. As mentioned earlier, this is one of the mythological accretions that arose as the original Vedic material got imagined in new ways. David Gordon White says this Brahmanic triad of sacrificial gods is itself a reworking of the triune Vedic universe, with two static elements - gods and humans, or oblation and fire - being mediated by a third, the enacted sacrifice. And so here we have the same basic material, but in a newly personified form.
Modern Connections
How do these ideas point ahead to what we understand as yoga today? Let’s start with perhaps the most important element of the sacrificial triad: soma. Robert Colosso says that even in the early Veda Soma is often spoken of as something really difficult to find; so even in the primordial revelation there is an air of rareness to it. By the time we get to the Brahmanas we see elaborate strategies to try and find a substitute for the soma, so that the sacrifice can continue. Sacrificial substitution is a perilous and difficult thing because the qualities of the original material (soma) are necessary for a successful sacrifice. If something else is to take soma’s place, the new material has to have similar qualities. So, remember that soma is a psychoactive substance which engenders rapture, visionary experience, and the revelation of truth. So the substitution had to produce something of like quality.
This activity of searching for something that engenders rapture and the realization of truth is indicative of an attitude that connects directly to our understanding of yoga today. Dr. Wendy Doniger says, “the need for a substitute for the consciousness-altering Soma may also have led to the development of other ways of creating unusual psychic states, such as yoga, breath control, fasting, and meditation.” (The Hindus) This is compelling because many techniques in the Hatha yoga tradition, in particular breathing techniques, are consciousness-altering in real ways. Likewise, fasting and meditation generate very rarefied states if managed well. And so the search for a substitution that generates visionary experience probably shows up in some of the techniques we employ today.
Moreover, as one goes forward in history, one finds similar concerns in Patanjali’s yoga sutra, with its insistence on the place of samadhi - that deeply subtle experience of being fully absorbed in a profound state of concentration - in yoga practice. Perhaps the greatest commentator on Patanjali’s sutras is Vyasa, and Vyasa actually identifies yoga as Samadhi in his commentary. These are just a few examples that can be traced all the way back to the purpose of the soma in the Vedic sacrifice.
The Primordial Yogin and Sacrifice
There is a story about the progenitor, Prajapati, which depicts the importance of sacrifice and its relationship to modern yoga practice. It is from the Brahmanas and is recounted by David Gordon White in his book The Alchemical Body: “verily, Prajapati alone was here in the beginning. He desired, may I exist, may I reproduce myself. He toiled, heated himself with inner heat. From his exhausted and overheated body, waters flowed forth. From those heated waters, foam arose; from the heated foam there arose clay, and sand. From the heated sand, grit. From the grit, rock. From the heated rock, metallic ore. And from the smelted ore, gold arose.” What about these images?
Notice that Prajapati “toiled” in a process of creation which results in his coming into existence, or in his standing forth as a specific entity in its own right. David Gordon White highlights this as an example of religious austerity, or ardor: a sublime kind of fervor which defines truly transformative work, generating a unique heat called tapas, which is the potent energy that eventually causes the alchemical transformation of Prajapati’s body into gold. So creation is the result of sacrifice. In relation to modern yoga practice, this can be seen as an image of the creative process of working to become who or what one most essentially is. As in Prajapati’s case, the process involves focused desire, effort, and heat, and it unfolds in a progression through various stages that represent gradual change from gross/indistinct to subtle/refined and specific.
First, from Prajapati’s “over-heated body, waters flowed forth”, which then turned to “foam”. These waters are homologs of the Soma, or the fluid element in the sacrificial triad. At the individual level, they are the sweat of the practitioner, which is traditionally rubbed back into the skin in an act resembling a kind of distillation, or a refinement into more subtle essence. Here, the practitioner’s body is the alchemical vessel in a transformative fire which he himself tends, cooking himself slowly in order to transform his body and its experiential contents into a finer and finer, distinct and more valuable essence.
In the story, this process of refinement/reduction continues as the liquid elements are progressively dried and begin to solidify: first clay, then sand, grit, rock, metallic ore, and finally gold. At the level of the practitioner, the drying process can be seen as the refinement of the practitioner’s physical and mental states, which are initially homogenous, unstable, and wet - that is, weak, and emotionally reactive/ignorant (water/foam) - then progressing through successively more distinct, strong and stable qualities/states. This can be seen as a movement from ignorance to weakness through feeling (clay, more stable malleability), knowledge (sand/grit, distinctness endurance), intuition (stone, a solid foundation, strength), wisdom (metallic ore, a combination of the preceding refinements with a new level of value and malleability, i.e. new creative potential), and eventually liberation (gold, radiance, and an unprecedented combination of value, strength, and malleability), with gold symbolizing the telos here - or the ultimate value, or goal of the creative process.
Internalization
This notion of a transformative inner heat that results from spiritual effort signals something that will become very important as we proceed through the episodes, which we’ll call the “internalization of the sacrifice”: notably, tapas is the word that is used later in the Upanishads to designate the fire in the sacrificial triad. In this new context, the formal, external elements of the Vedic ritual are sublimated into the human being. So the human body becomes the space of the sacrifice and the transformation it facilitates. In this sense, the yogin’s body-mind becomes the space of the sacrifice and contains all of the elements necessary for its performance. The body-mind and the material it contains can eventually be transformed into something precious and rare via religious austerities.
In particular, the later Hatha yogis take this idea of transmuting indistinct internal material into something precious and really run with it. Their idea is that Hatha Yoga is a process of cooking, or what they call the yoga of the pot. This pot, or the vessel, is filled with rough and unrefined material, and it's sitting in a slow fire. In the Hatha tradition, the body is both the furnace, like the oven containing the cooking vessel, and it's also the vessel, and the material being cooked, and the fire itself, which is controlled via breath, physical effort, and concentration.
Summary
If we can sum up, the brahmanas appear in the late Vedic Period, just before the emergence of the
Upanishads. So we're getting closer to the turn of the millennium. This time is, according to Wendy Doniger, a time of great geographical change: in the direction of rivers, and also the migration of people settling in new places, in large groups for the first time, which involved an intense mixing of cultures. All of this is represented in the progression from the early Veda to the Brahmanas, and the later the Upanishads.
We saw that these texts tended to be dismissed as an inferior chapter in India's spiritual history, and this affected the future attitudes of all the folks who didn't get to read them and see what they were about, and who read particular selections and translations reflecting certain biases. All this has affected how we understand yoga today.
We noted the presence of the Vedic triad in the brahmanas, albeit in a slightly modified form, particularly in prototypical images of the sacrifice being reinterpreted as an internal act, and we looked at the story of Prajapati as the prototypical yogin or initiate. All the elements of the vedic triad are represented: his sweat is the soma; the fire is generated by his heat, and he himself, as the god, is the heavenly element, or the subtle wind that moves everything.
We noted that in this story, the Brahmanas give us a beautiful dose of alchemical imagery, which we're going to be talking about more and more as the seasons progress. As the archetypal yogin Prajapati is the alchemist at work, accelerating the ripening of the elements of creation into precious metals. These precious metals themselves are treated by traditions like Ayurveda, Hatha, and Tantra as a kind of reproductive tissue latent in the earth, which are homologs of human reproductive essence on our bodies, or that which harbors the power to generate new life.
So I hope this all has been interesting. We sure appreciate your listening. God bless you, and I hope to see you next time.
