Endlessly chanting hymns or reflecting on what they mean. how does one understand the ancient texts?
Endlessly chanting hymns or reflecting on what they mean. how does one understand the ancient texts?I have just returned from the Jaipur Literature Festival and it was a great joy to meet the author Roberto Calasso whose books Ka (on Indian mythology) and Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (on Greek mythology), I read with great relish over a decade ago.
But the man I met was different from the man who wrote the books. These books focused a lot on plot and narrative. The man I met was more interested in reflectionu00a0 on the machinations of the mind rather than the antics of the gods. Not surprisingly, his next book is with those obscure Vedic texts known as the Brahmanas.
And he specifically spoke of one man, Yagnavalkya, whose name recurs time and again in Vedic literature.
The Vedas are essentially Samhitas or a collection of hymns.
These collections were applied to ritual for apparently magical purposes like bringing rain, making men virile and women fertile. The Brahmanas were scriptures that explain how the hymns have to be applied to rituals. Two of the most popular Brahmanas were the Shatapatha Brahmana and the Gopatha Brahmana. These are huge scriptures, full of details of how to conduct simple rituals like Agnihotra and complex rituals like Ashwamedha. And for many scholars, these seem to be crazy magical ramblings of priest-sorcerers.
But there were sages who realised that the point was not to simply mindlessly chant the hymn or conduct the ritual. It was to reflect on them. Reflection directed one towards realisation. These reflections and realisations became part of scriptures that were known as Aranyakas.
These were the forest texts, very different from Brahmanas, which were texts of the sacrificial halls. Aranyakas were philosophical speculations, Brahmanas were ritual manuals. Yagnavalkya meandered between the Aranyakas and the Brahmanas as he wondered where lay the truth, in the contemplations of forest-ascetics or the rigours of orthodox priests. Where lay the mystery of divinity?
Yagnavalkya perhaps represents one of those sages who broke free from the narrow confines of ritual. He was perhaps one of the earliest students to rebel against his teacher. His teacher's name was Vaisampayana, who was a student of the great Veda Vyasa. There were disagreements between student and teacher. The reason is not clear.
One story goes that Vaisampayana felt Yagnavalkya was too arrogant of his rather superior intellect or that he felt threatened and insecure by his student's intellectual prowess. Another story says that that Vaisampayana accidentally killed his nephew and wanted his students to conduct a ritual to purify him of the crime.
Yagnavalkya refused stating that it was not the external ritual that does the cleansing but the inner ritual that removes guilt and shame. Vaisampayana ordered Yagnavalkya to return all that he had learnt and leave his hermitage. Yagnavalkya then did the unthinkable he vomited out all that he had been taught.
One wonders if 'vomiting out knowledge' is a metaphor for information passed on from teacher to student by rote. The food was undigested Yagnavalkya had not assimilated what Vaisampayana had taught him. He refused to, perhaps, memorise teaching he believed teaching is not about memory, it is about understanding, assimilation and internalisation (Did this Vedic incident inspire the writers of 3 Idiots, I wonder?)
The remaining students turned into partridges (Tittiri) and ate what was vomited out. This body of knowledge came to be known as the 'dark' Yajur Veda. It also came to be known as Yajur Veda of the partridges, Taittiriya Samhita.
Yagnavalkya refused to turn to humans to understand the secret Veda. He knew there was more to the hymns than ritual and magic. He turned to the sun-god himself who took the form of a horse and became his teacher.
This teaching was unique, in that it had more prose than poetry, in other words more reflection than merely song and instruction. It came to be known as 'bright' Yajur Veda, bright because it was lit up by the sun. It is also known as Vajasaneya Samhita, or the Yajur Veda of the horse.
Yagnavalkya was invited by Janaka, a great king, to discuss the nature of reality. These conversations, along with others, became what we now know as the Upanishads. While the Buddha, who lived a few centuries later, completely rejected the ritual and focussed on contemplation, Yagnavalkya connected ritual with reflection and ultimately, realisation.
This is what Roberto Calasso spoke about at the festival: how the simple act of pouring milk in fire can open an intellectual and speculative passage towards the divine and how in the pupil of a dying man one can see Purusha, consciousness, breaking free from the intimate clutches of Prakriti, matter.
As one ponders over the words spoken by the sage and the king, one realises that the line between student and teacher blurs as both actively seek the wisdom of the Veda, and in an attempt to communicate the incommunicable, turn to poetry and metaphor.
At first everything sounds like gobbledygook, the ravings of a madman, but when one breaks the code and understands the patterns of the narrator, one realises what Yagnavalkya was trying to do along with Janaka, through ritual and reflection, 3000 years ago. It is what the most learned scientists and quantum physicians are tying to do today: define that un-definable mysterious entity called consciousness.
