Ardor (28 page)

According to Staal, the Br
ā
hma
ṇ
as are an undigested hotchpotch, inside which the sober eye of the scholar has to “ferret out” (the verb is repeated within a few pages) some rare insight. The “most suspect” of all is the
Ś
atapatha Br
ā
hma
ṇ
a.
One has the feeling that Staal would like to go further in deploring these texts that contain “a great deal of what we may call magic but is better, more truthfully and less condescendingly or insultingly described as simple superstition.” At this point he stops and asks, with haughty benevolence: “But should we not be charitable?” The answer follows immediately—and is less benevolent: “We should be, but there is a limit even to charity.” We can infer from this that the Br
ā
hma
ṇ
as, after almost three thousand years, still have no right to the Western scholar’s “charity.” And yet, from what texts other than the Br
ā
hma
ṇ
as has most of the knowledge been taken that infuses the work of some of the greatest scholars on ancient India—Caland or Renou or Minard or Mus or Oldenberg or Malamoud? Or Staal himself?

We might ask why the Br
ā
hma
ṇ
as above all, among the whole of the Veda, arouse such irritation. Perhaps the answer is to be found in the word that Staal, with his vehement prose, would like to expunge not only from Vedic ritual, but from ritual in general:
meaning
(the intention is declared in exemplary fashion in the title of an important book of his:
Rules Without Meaning
). The assumption—unspoken, but increasingly apparent over the years—is that,
wherever
meaning appears (and not just in Vedic ritual, but everywhere and always), everything tends to become obscure and arbitrary, destroying the noble transparency of science. In Staal there is a violent and preposterous contrast between his devotion and expertise in studying Vedic ritual and his contemptuous and ill-concealed intolerance toward the oldest texts in which those rites are described and explained. This intolerance grows from the
hypertrophy of meaning
that marks the Br
ā
hma
ṇ
as, and induces him to take refuge in the opposite extreme, in the realms of algebra and formalization, areas uncontaminated by that unwelcome guest: semantics. Staal’s theory, reduced to its bluntest and most provocative form, states that the rite is carried out
for the rite itself
, as if “art for art’s sake” could be applied several thousand years retrospectively and could indeed serve as a prelinguistic basis for human activity. A bold approach that doesn’t stand up to investigation. But Staal has used it because he has been struck by the very high degree of formalization (and a tendency toward algebrization) found in Vedic ritual. His studies of certain ritual sequences, above all those where recursive methods are applied, are in fact illuminating.

In that body of Vedic ritual, which is anomalous from every point of view, it is clear that two factors come together that elsewhere tend to remain separate: on the one hand a semantic excess, which leads to a proliferation of possible interpretations and can easily be passed off as an archaic remnant (as if it were a childish world where
anything can be said about anything
). On the other, a rigorous formalization that we are used to associating only with far more recent ideas (the very notion of a “formal system” is a twentieth-century acquisition).

If meaning is expunged from the Vedas, as Staal suggests, then at least two other words have to be expunged:
religious
and
sacrifice.
Staal, undeterred, does not shrink from the task. And his casualness applies not only to the ancient texts. Even when dealing with modern Indologists, in those rare cases where they are cited with approval, Staal has no qualms about carrying out corrective adjustments that guide the text toward the right theory: quoting an important passage by Renou on the “priority of the
mantras
and the liturgical forms which they presuppose,” Staal frankly warns us that he is replacing the word
religious
with the word
Vedic.
Now, the word
Vedic
can mean either a vague chronological indication or the connection of something to “knowledge,”
veda.
But Staal evidently wants to blot out anything religious from this “knowledge,” as if it were a disturbing alien element. More than anywhere else, this is untenable when talking about ancient India, where it is pointless searching for even the tiniest detail that is not intertwined with religion. As Staal himself has noted elsewhere: “There do not exist, for example, any Indian category and words that correspond to the Western notion of religion.” But they do not exist insofar as
everything
, in a Vedic context, is religious. Even so far as vocabulary is concerned, Staal seeks to intervene, presenting his own suggestions as an appropriate technical adjustment: “I prefer to use the word
ritual
rather than the word
sacrifice
, since I reserve this latter for describing the rituals that lead to the killing of an animal.” A neutral tone, as if the matter ought to cause no problems. But that adjustment is enough to cancel out countless passages in the Br
ā
hma
ṇ
as that speak of the rite of the
soma
as a killing. A killing of a plant and of King Soma, who is a god, welcome on earth. The Br
ā
hma
ṇ
as are tireless in reaffirming that all offerings, including the libation of milk in the fire, the
agnihotra
, are sacrifices. And here comes the Indologist Frits Staal, three thousand years later, who decides this isn’t so. And above all: that it mustn’t be so. His zeal takes him to the point of correcting Hubert and Mauss’s famous title: quoted by Staal, their
Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacri
fi
ce
becomes
Essay on the Nature and Function of Ritual.
It is Western science, in its naïveté and its arrogance, that has decided this (and Staal has indeed entitled one of his books
The Science of Ritual)
.

*   *   *

Even back in the times of Keith (1925) it could be suggested with a certain candor that
all is possible
(and that therefore
all is arbitrary
) in the Vedic texts: “If the waters can practice asceticism, it is not surprising that speech can speak standing in the seasons, or that the sacrificial consecration can be pursued by the gods with the aid of the seasons, or that the ascent of the meters to the sky should be visible.” In short, in the Veda
anything goes
, declared Keith, at almost the same time as the première of the great musical of the same name. What offended a sane Westerner was above all “the notorious ‘identifications’ of the Br
ā
hma
ṇ
as which, since long, had been the laughing stock of occidental scholarship.” This was an “identification technique that establishes links, equivalents, nexuses (or correlations) between, or identity of two entities, things, beings, thoughts, states of mind, etc. Both entities are unrelated, according to our way of thinking.” Examples? “When the text says ‘the
muñja
grass is strength’ and ‘the
udumbara
tree is strength,’ or ‘Praj
ā
pati is thought’ and ‘Praj
ā
pati is the sacrifice,’ it will not be clear why some kind of grass (a living being, or dead material) could be the
same
as ‘strength’ (an abstract idea, or a force experienced); or, in the second case, why and how the god Praj
ā
pati, ‘the lord of creation,’ could be the same as ‘thought/thinking,’ and, at the same time, the idea or act or ritual (‘sacrifice,’
yajña
).” This passage is found in Witzel’s introduction to his edition of the
Ka
ṭ
ha
Ā
ra
ṇ
yaka
(an extremely rare instance of a Vedic text that can properly be described as published in a critical edition). And his intention is clear: to illustrate in a neutral and fair-minded tone why Vedic thought continues to be so disconcerting, but without adopting the usual voice of disapproval, in the manner of Keith or Eggeling or Max Müller. Yet, even in this very recent formulation, there is much that jars. What, indeed, is “our way of thinking” (almost as if the West were a seamless mass of unalloyed good sense)? And are the strange examples of identification that Witzel offers us indeed so inconceivable? Does saying that a certain grass “is strength” really sound any more incomprehensible than Jesus’s words at the Last Supper when he says that a piece of bread is his body and some wine his blood? Is saying “Praj
ā
pati is thought” any stranger than talking about the word made flesh? Is it possible to hold that “our way of thinking” is so barren and desolate that it doesn’t embrace, at least to some extent,
thinking in images
?

We still, though, have to understand why the Vedic texts—and above all the Br
ā
hma
ṇ
as—continue to evoke such a feeling of vertigo and obscurity. Not because they involve thinking in images (without which all thought would be inert). But because they use it all the time, with extreme devotion, unperturbed about any implication, indeed putting every implication into action (through gesture). This is the intractable Vedic offense, that triggers so many reactions of rejection and fear. The Western attitude toward imagery wavers between minimization (
x
is
only
a metaphor, and therefore not binding) and the temptation to interpret metaphors literally (a practice leading to various basic psychic pathologies, above all paranoia and schizophrenia).

But in Vedic thought, identifications are
not
metaphors. As Witzel has rightly said, “the majority of sentences establishing identifications are simple nominal clauses of the type ‘x [is] z’ or ‘x
vai
z’; they are frequently summed up by a statement ‘x
eva
z’” (where
eva
and
vai
are words roughly corresponding to “indeed,” “in fact”). The cautious and uncompromising way of metaphors is therefore ruled out from the very beginning. The identification (or equivalence) superimposes two entities without any exercise of caution. And here we sense the slight sneer of Western superiority, recalling Musil’s description of the scientists in Diotima’s salon. Once the metaphor is gone, an irresolvable confusion would be created between the two entities whose equivalence is asserted. But it is obvious from a thousand indications that the Vedic ritualists were in no danger of confusing the multiple levels of that which is. Instead, they saw them at every moment and allowed thought to waver continually from one to the other. To cover themselves—and give an ironic nod to the effect that they were well aware of the rules and limitations of the game—they often resorted to the particle
iva
, “so to speak,” “in a certain way.” Far more subtle than the clumsy “like,” which elsewhere (in the West) announces entry into the realm of the metaphor.
Iva
is more vague—and lets the unknown and the uncertain become involved at the very moment when a nexus, a
bandhu
, is established.

Iva
,
svid
, two expressions that could even be left untranslated (as often happens), indicate that we are crossing the threshold of hidden thoughts. According to Renou and Silburn, “the word
iva
accentuates indetermination, evokes latent values.” In the same way that
svid
above all accompanies questions in which enigmas are voiced. There were two ways of introducing into discussion that aspect of the
anirukta
, of the “unexplicit” that is destined to remain so, ever shifting but always encircling the spoken word like a halo. Since thought proceeded by way of identifications, comparisons, equivalences,
iva
was a reminder that everything said was to be understood “in a certain way,” without becoming fixed in its identity. Which of itself does not exist—or at least only “so to speak,”
iva.

*   *   *

In the troubled history of the Br
ā
hma
ṇ
as, after much insult and abuse, the day of reckoning at last came. It happened in July 1959, at the Indological conference held at Essen-Bredeney. An eminent Indologist, Karl Hoffmann, stood up to deliver a few words that sounded like a long-awaited Supreme Court ruling: “The monuments of Vedic prose (the
sa
ṃ
hit
ā
s
of the Black Yajur Veda and the Br
ā
hma
ṇ
as) are, as the immensity of the twelve principal works that they contain is already proof by itself, the literary precipitate of a significant period in the history of the spirit and religion, stretching from the
Ṛ
gveda
, India’s most ancient literary monument, to the Upani
ṣ
ads. The contents of these monuments in prose are made up of theological discussions on the rituals of Vedic sacrifice. The arguments they present often seem devoid of meaning, which is why Max Müller could describe them as ‘the twaddle of idiots and the raving of madmen.’ This may be explained, however, through the magical vision of the world that dominates here (Stanis
ł
aw Schayer). And they constitute furthermore, as a sort of ‘prescienti
fi
c science’ (Hermann Oldenberg), the germ cell of the speculative thought of the Indians.”