History of Indian Philosophy

Purushottama Bilimoria

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317356172
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The History of Indian Philosophy is a comprehensive and authoritative examination of the movements and thinkers that have shaped Indian philosophy over the last three thousand years. An outstanding team of international contributors provide fifty-eight accessible chapters, organised into three clear parts:

• knowledge, context, concepts

• philosophical traditions

• engaging and encounters: modern and postmodern.

This outstanding collection is essential reading for students of Indian philosophy. It will also be of interest to those seeking to explore the lasting significance of this rich and complex philosophical tradition, and to philosophers who wish to learn about Indian philosophy through a comparative lens.

IIa

Philosophical traditions

Chapter 11

Philosophy of the Brāhmaṇas

Herman Tull

The Brāhmaṇas

The Brāhmaṇas are a class of Vedic texts generally considered to have been composed in north India sometime between 1000 and 500 BCE. The precise derivation of the term “Brāhmaṇa” is unclear; it may refer to the ritualist-authors of the texts (from brahman, “priest”), or it may refer to the texts as a collection of sacred knowledge (from brahman, “sacred utterance”) (Winternitz 1981 [1909], 174). There are ten extant Brāhmaṇas; in modern, printed Sanskrit editions, they range in size from a few hundred to a few thousand pages. Each Brāhmaṇa is attached to one of the four Vedic Saṃhitās or “collections”: the Ṛgveda, the Sāmaveda, the Yajurveda, and the Atharvaveda.¹ However, between the Saṃhitās and the Brāhmaṇas there are marked differences in language and in style; the language of the Saṃhitās, which is in verse, is more archaic than that of the prose Brāhmaṇas, suggesting a significant gap in years between these texts (Keith 1925, 19). The historic relationship between the Saṃhitās and the Brāhmaṇas is further complicated by the apparent existence of earlier, non-extant Brāhmaṇa-type texts that were closely aligned with the Saṃhitās (Witzel 1997a, 298). This layer of “lost” texts may well account for the mass of shared material in the extant Brāhmaṇas, seen in the repetition of certain stock phrases; in the emphasis on a few key mythological episodes; and, in the common epistemological and ontological foundation that underlies much of the Brāhmaṇic discourse (see, further, Witzel 1997a, 288; 297–299).²

The raison d’être of the Brāhmaṇas—and, so, too, the point around which their authors’ discussions begin and end—are the great Vedic rites of sacrifice. These sacrificial rituals hark back to the oldest layers of Vedic culture and are glimpsed—though not fully described—throughout the Saṃhitās. A chief characteristic of the Brāhmaṇas is their two-leveled discussion of the rites: as performance (vidhi, literally “injunction”) and as explication (arthavāda) (Winternitz 1981, 187; Gonda 1975, 340–341). Whereas the vidhi or “how-to” portion of the text tends to be somewhat muted (the authors apparently presumed that their audience knew how to perform the rites), the explanations can be expansive, as the authors delve into the “higher” and “mysterious” meanings of the Vedic rites (cf. Malamoud 1998, 29–30). Thus, a rather simple direction (vidhi), such as, “Entering the vow, he stands between the āhavanīya and the gārhapatya fires, turning eastward, he touches water” (ŚB 1.1.1.1), leads to a discussion of the mystic import that connects the vow to the god Agni, and then to the (arthavāda) declaration of the “higher” meaning of the ritual object, namely, the water used in the rite, which connects it to “all this”: “He brings forward water because all this (the cosmos) is filled up by water; so by this first act, he acquires all this” (ŚB 1.1.1.14).

Although the history of the Brāhmaṇas’ composition cannot be recovered, a number of significant developmental elements can be discerned beneath the surface of these texts. Thus, occasional references to one ritualist contradicting another, or to certain obsolete or “incorrect” practices or interpretations (often said to be regionally based), almost certainly reflect the expansion of Vedic culture during the first millennium BCE (Witzel 1997a, 301ff.). With expansion, new schools were founded (evidenced in the compilation of new Brāhmaṇas), providing an opportunity for fresh interpretations of the ritual forms. Coordinate with this expansion was the rise of a large class of ritualists whose charge was to ensure that the rites were performed with the utmost accuracy but who also served to explicate the ceremonies. These ritualists were subdivided into groups of specialized functionaries, each charged with undertaking a specific element of the rite (see Müller 1859, 450; 469ff.). Among these functionaries was the brahman who performed the rite mentally as a means of averting possible errors in performance (Müller 1859, 450). This ritualist was said to be “all-knowing”; that is, to encompass within his own mind the rite in its entirety (Gonda 1975, 271). Although there is no certain evidence connecting the mental performance of the rite to the emergence of Brāhmaṇic speculation, this element of the ritual resonates deeply with what has been broadly identified as the “internalization” of the sacrifice, “in which physiological functions take the place of libations and ritual objects,” a notion which stands as a foundational element in ancient Indian philosophy (Eliade 1969, 111–114).

European Indologists and the Brāhmaṇas

Throughout the nineteenth century, European (in particular, German) Indologists evinced an intense interest in the Vedic literature, producing critical Sanskrit editions and translations into European languages of these texts, a project that included several major Brāhmaṇas. However, as modern Indology changed direction from what was in fact a misguided focus on the Veda, the study of the Brāhmaṇas became peripheral. As a result, several Brāhmaṇas remain untranslated, and thus are inaccessible to Western scholars. Along with this early textual work, Western scholars produced a handful of important studies of the sacrificial ritual in the Brāhmaṇas (see, e.g., Lévi 1898; Oldenberg 1919; Bodewitz 1973; Heesterman 1985; 1993; and Smith 1989), and a few other studies that focus on Brāhmaṇic mythologies (see, e.g., Weber 1850, 1885; Hopkins 1909; and Doniger 1985). A. B. Keith, who translated several Brāhmaṇas, devoted considerable portions of his monumental work, The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads (1925), to discussing (albeit often dismissively) the nature of Brāhmaṇic thought. Recently, Michael Witzel has produced a number of studies that draw deeply on the Brāhmaṇas, examining aspects of their thought (1979, 1996; cf. Oldenberg 1919) as well as exploring them for what they reveal of their socio-political milieu (1997a; 1997b; 1987; cf. Rau 1957).

The first generation of European Indologists to study the Brāhmaṇas almost universally disparaged them (the one notable exception being Lévi 1898). In what may be the most oft-repeated description of these texts, F. Max Müller notoriously declared that the Brāhmaṇas were “twaddle, and what is worse theological twaddle” (1867, 1, 113), likening their thought to the “raving of madmen” (1859, 389). These same sentiments occur in nearly every nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholarly work that examines the Brāhmaṇas (for a conspectus, see Doniger 1985, 5; Tull 1989, 19, 16ff.; Tull 1991, 39; Smith 1989, 32–33). In addition to being deeply troubled by the nature of Brāhmaṇic reasoning (see Oldenberg 1919; cf. 1991, 12; Keith 1925, 440; Eggeling 1882, ix), these scholars took a dim view of the ritualistic atmosphere of the Brāhmanas. With their post-enlightenment protestant view of “priestcraft,” these scholars were repulsed by the Vedic ritualists’ description of themselves as “gods among men” (ŚB 2.2.2.6) and found abhorrent the priests’ demands for a heavy recompense for their ritual work (see, e.g., ŚB 2.2.2.2-5) (Tull 1989, 17, 129 n.24).

The Brāhmaṇas as philosophy

As indicated in the foregoing, the Brāhmaṇas were composed with a singular focus on the Vedic sacrificial rites. Accordingly, areas that in modern usage broadly fall under the scope of philosophy, but that are related to everyday social existence—such as ethics, the nature of justice, political power, and so forth—have virtually no place in Brāhmaṇic discourse. On the other hand, however, the Brāhmaṇic thinkers were deeply engaged by metaphysical inquiry. Here, conditioned by the performance of the Vedic rituals, which entail a carefully orchestrated series of acts that are themselves divorced from ordinary reality, the Brāhmaṇic thinkers developed a systematic method of inquiry that provided them access to meaning where no obvious everyday meaning existed (see Keith 1925, 482). As noted above, this system of thought is built on the notion that any number of identities can be found between entities, a system that is, as Sylvain Lévi (1898, 9) noted long ago, “net, logique, harmonieux” (“neat, logical, and harmonious”).³ Of course, that the system is neat and logical does not preclude the possibility that nothing of substance arises from it. The critical question in approaching the Brāhmaṇa texts as “philosophy” then becomes whether this system of identification is merely a form of hollow symbolism, as nineteenth-century Indologists tended to see it, or if it holds within it substantial insights into the nature of being (ontology) and the nature of knowledge (epistemology).

A fundamental question of philosophy is, “How is a thing known?” The Brāhmaṇas contain innumerable declarative statements identifying one entity with another, in effect, creating a series of equations that define things by what they are akin to. Often the entities being identified with one another are linked through quasi-syllogistic reasoning; that is, if A = B, and B = C, then A = C. Here, in seeking out the underlying meaning of the rites, even the thinnest connections might be exploited. Thus, a typical example drawn from the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa shows the author citing a numerical resemblance to connect the twelve verses in a particular prayer to the meter of the hymn (which has twelve syllables), then to the earth (since the name of the meter [jagati] approximates a word used for the earth [jagat]), to the god Agni (since the earth is the locus of the fire altar, also referred to as agni), and ultimately to the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• I Knowledge, context, concepts
• IIa Philosophical traditions
• IIb Philosophical traditions
• IIc Philosophical traditions
• III Engaging and encounters: modern and postmodern
• Glossary of sanskrit terms
• Index