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Ritual, Knowledge and Liberation in Vedānta
In Indian tradition "rite" or "ritual," equivalent to the Sanskrit word yajña or karman, dates back to the period of the Veda, when semi-nomadic Aryan brought their own rituals with them and established their superiority over the indigenous peoples who were not qualified to perform these rituals. Vedic religious texts consist mainly of liturgy. The purpose of this liturgy was "the gratification of the gods in order to obtain from them benefits such as offspring, increase of cattle, a long lifetime, wealth, superiority, success in war." 2 In the words of Renou, 3 Vedic "liturgy" has "only secondarily" developed into a "speculative system" through the interpretation by the Br hma as. The full understanding of "how a rite originated, why a ritual act is to be performed in a definite way, what is its effect, why a definite utensil should be used, what is the significance and result of definite practices and so on" 4 and its correct performance, lead to happiness in this world and to heaven after death. Br hma as, which are defined as "explanation of a ritual act and of the formula (mantra) belonging to it" 5 by a later commentator, support the idea that human and divine beings as well as natural powers are related to Vedic ritual. At the same time, those well versed in rituals and entitled to perform them gained power in society. Belief in the efficacy of Vedic rituals was strengthened and the priestly class ranked supreme. Followers of the Karma-M m s (ritual-enquiry, also called P rva-M m s , hereafter PM) 1 I sincerely appreciate the grants awarded by the Mishima Kaiun Memorial Foundation (Mishima Kaiun Kinen Zaidan, T ky ) and the Matsushita International Foundation (Matsushita Kokusai Zaidan, saka) and the Doitsu tani Scholarship provided by Ek -Haus der Japanischen Kultur e.V. that enabled me to carry out this research. My special thanks are also due to Prof. Dr. Walter Slaje for kindly reading this paper and making a number of critical and valuable comments.
Vedic Investigations (Papers of the 12th World Sanskrit Conference, Vol. 1).
Just as strings of by themselves meaningless phonemes may have a capacity for linguistic meaning, like that ritual may be meaningless from one perspective and meaningful from another. In language we have a good idea of types of meaning which are to be expected at different organizational levels. Words are generally regarded as meaningful units, and so are sentences and syntagmas, but also many morphemes. Phonemes are distinctive but not independently meaningful, unless they happen to coincide with a morpheme or word. The meaningfulness of sentences is generally thought of as being derived from the meaning of the constituent words, but some theories want to have it the other way round and state that the meaning of the word is derived from the meaning of the sentence or utterance. In Vedic ritual, however, we still have hardly any idea what kind of organizational levels and functional units there are in between the most basic acts and utterances, and the complex performance as a whole of for instance the Agniṣṭoma. A large ritual will hence appear as an amorphous mass of acts. In his arguments for seeing ritual as meaningless, Frits Staal (1989: 186f) used the example of the Nihnavana rite, which is a small element in the Agniṣṭoma and in other, more complex Soma-sacrifices. According to Staal the Nihnavana is an entirely meaningless act. It can be demonstrated that its meaninglessness results from strictly isolating it from its context. A different presentation of this rite – making use of recent videoregistrations of a Soma-sacrifice – and some basic background information on Vedic ritual which every performer may be expected to be familiar with (also known to Staal, 1989: 116) show that performers must have generally experienced it as clearly significant. On the basis of this demonstration it is argued that different organizational levels are to be distinguished in Vedic ritual, and that meaningfulness or meaninglessness of an element in the ritual is not an ontological problem but a matter of seeing that element at an appropriate level in relation with other elements of the same level. This finding suits a general theory of ritual structure and ritual meaning as propounded recently by Rappaport (1999).
Ritual, Self and Yoga: On the Ways and Goals of Salvation in the Kaṭha Upaniṣad
Journal of Indian Philosophy, 2019
Throughout its history, the renowned Kaṭha Upaniṣad has often been described as being both incoherent and contradictory. The aim of this paper is to show to what purpose the text was created. To this end, it discusses the connection of the three paths to salvation depicted in the text, viz. the Agnicayana (a powerful Vedic fire-ritual), the Upaniṣadic method of self-knowledge, and yoga. The first part retraces how in the Upaniṣads, the Agnicayana was transformed into a non-material or mental ritual and linked with self-knowledge. The second part analyses how the various salvation goals (heaven, the World of Brahman, liberation from rebirth) could be related to each other. First, the authors redefined the Agnicayana's salvation goal, heaven, to make it identical with liberation. Secondly, they introduced self-knowledge and yoga as alternative and equally powerful means to the same end. In practice, however, the new and world-negating methods were implied to be superior to the costly ritual from which they had drawn their authority. Thus, the authors of the Upaniṣad were more concerned with showing continuity between different religious approaches than upholding consistency of content.
AIOO (Annali dell'Università di Napoli), Sezione Orientale, 2016
Sacrifice is a keyword in religious studies. Yajña is a governing concept of Vedic literature. On the basis of the major theories of rituals that flourished between the 18th and the 19th centuries, yajña has been referred to as a perfect example of sacrificial pattern in Vedic tradition. However, while ‘sacrifice’ as a category has been widely discussed among scholars from different fields, the equivalence between ‘sacrifice’ and yajña has been tacitly assumed in the notion of ‘Vedic sacrifice’.Focusing on the rise of Indology as a discipline, this article explores the success of ‘sacrifice’ as a category in the history of scholarship in 18th- and 19th-century Europe. The main argument is that the equivalence between ‘sacrifice’ and yajña has developed at the crossroads between Indology and the socio-anthropological studies, while the Vedic notion of yajña is, indeed, strictly related to the semantic field that has developed around the root yaj-, of which it is proposed to maintain the etymological meaning “to honour, offer, dedicate”. As a result, it is suggested that the translation of yajña as ‘sacrifice’ may be rejected by three types of arguments: linguistic, theoretical, and historical.
Indo-Iranian Journal, 2014
With this little book published by Logos Verlag in Berlin, Hideki TESHIMA offers us a deep and insightful investigation into the preparatory rituals of the Aśvamedha. As the author notes in the introduction to his study (pp. 1-2), although the Indian horse sacrifice has attracted much attention, its preparatory phase has only been casually studied, even in DUMONT'S fundamental research on the subject. 1 TESHIMA proposes to fill up this lacuna by inquiring into the matter using all currently available textual sources. To do so, he offers as an annex to his investigation a critical edition and annotated German translation of the beginning of the Aśvamedha section of the Vādhūlaśrautasūtra 2 which deals with these preparatory rituals. The critical edition has been prepared by both the author and Prof. Yasuke IKARI of Kyōto University. The latter has provided TESHIMA with some previously unavailable manuscripts of the VŚS he discovered in Kerala in the mid 1990s. This edition is thus part of the ongoing effort started by Prof. Ikari and aiming at providing the scholarly public with a truly critical and accurate edition of the VŚS. The edition found as "Anhang 2.1," pp. 102-122, of TESHIMA's book is followed in "Anhang 2.2," pp. 123-150, by a careful translation of the text, done with excellent philological acumen and which could be improved in only a very few places. Considering the importance of the text of the VŚS-which is now well known to be a key missing link for our understanding of the history of Vedic ritual-and the quality of its translation, it would have been advisable to present them at the very beginning of the book. The reader would then have had a token of, as well as an excellent introduction into, the difficulties posed by the subject treated in the rest of the work. TESHIMA probably proceded otherwise because he felt that the text of the VŚS would not have been easily understood if one did not have first a synoptic view of the problems raised by the complex and long lasting preparatory rituals of the horse sacrifice. This synoptic view he procedes to give in the first part of his book from p. 5 to p. 95. It is divided into the four sections, following the make-up of the preliminary rites of the Aśvamedha, that is: 1) the pāriplava recitation of the Hot and/or the eulogy of the king sang by a number of Vīṇā-playing bards, 2) the iṣṭis for Savitar, 3) the Dīkṣā, and 4) the Cāturmāsyāni cycle of offerings. As is usual with matters pertaining to Vedic rituals, the proceedings of these rites show a great deal of variation among the different Vedic caraṇas. The author's feat has been to explain in details these variations and to uncover their origin. I will therefore only summarize hereafter his conclusions and dwell on the few points which, in my view, deserve clarification or further explanations.
Journal of the American Oriental Society, 2017
that humans may have sometimes served as actual victims (p. 238). (The anthropomorphic head pictured on the cover of the book is a clay specimen used by Nambudiri Brahmins of Kerala in their modern performances of Vedic ritual, where no victims of any kind are immolated.) At least in a symbolic sense, however, Collins agrees with Heesterman that the head beneath the altar "attests to the violent relations that lie hidden beneath the surface of the bloodless. .. classical ritual" (p. 198). The bottom line, for Collins and Heesterman alike, is that the displacement of conflict from Vedic sacrifice creates a void in which a wide range of meanings-language, myth, philosophy, and theology-may arise. While situating his project as a study of myth and ritual in India over a thousand-year period from 500 B.c.e. to 500 c.e., Collins offers the caveat that his "primary mode of analysis will be textual, not historical" (p. 3). Indeed, the book's stance throughout is pointedly ahistorical: like Girard and Heesterman, Collins makes an argument predicated on a loosely defined "prehistory," whose legacy reverberates in the historical cultures that follow. And while his reading strategy may be textual in that it takes the Vedas and the Sanskrit epics as the main frame of reference, its primary concern is not to systematically analyze the stratified testimony of these texts, nor to philologically engage text and language. Instead, Collins' approach is thematic and comparative: for instance, he invokes the work of medievalist Henry Charles Lea to frame the dynamics of rivalry in Vedic ritual (p. 96), Jacques Derrida on Greek ritual to decode the Brāhmaṇa story of Cyavana (p. 223), the "speculative realism" of philosopher Quentin Meillassoux to analyze the Pūrva-Mīmāṃsā doctrines of Jaiminī (p. 231), postcolonial theory on climate change to talk about Karṇa's role in the Mahābhārata (p. 243), and so on. While sometimes disorienting, this approach makes for a fascinating read. The Head beneath the Altar concludes with a short chapter ("Yajñānta: The End of Sacrifice") that aims to elaborate on the differences between Girard's critique of sacrifice and those Collins has assembled from Hindu mythology. Here, Collins acknowledges that his culminating ambition in interpreting Hindu critiques of sacrifice from the perspective of mimetic theory is to "articulate an ethical position" (p. 241) that will minimize the scapegoating, rivalry, and violence of mimesis in human culture. To this end, he returns to the epic hero Karṇa-who, he argues, transcends the mimetic structures of violence and sacrifice in the Mahābhārata war-to highlight his potential as a model for "universal singularity" (p. 241) in the modern context of global environmental catastrophe. In this way, a book that began as an analysis of how the old world has shaped religion concludes as an idealistic pitch for how religion might shape the new world. On the final pages Collins makes the case for locating "the end of sacrifice" in Hindu traditions of sacrifice, and more precisely in the Vedas as deployed by Girard in his Sacrifice lectures: because Vedic thinkers discerned the violence inherent in sacrifice in the Brāhmaṇas, they were able to transcend "archaic religion" (p. 243) and produce the philosophical innovations of the Upaniṣads. In the context of Indology, this assessment neglects recent work by Signe Cohen, Brian Black, and Patrick Olivelle, among others, which interrogates the conventional wisdom that the Upaniṣads represent a monumental turning point in Indian cultural history; more broadly, however, the conclusion leaves the impression that, avowed differences aside, Collins' work cannot escape its Girardian inspiration. In true mimetic fashion, one might say, Collins has fashioned a reading of Hindu myth to rival Girard's reading of Western myth. The Head Beneath the Altar contains several tables, endnotes, a bibliography, and an index.