Routledge Handbook of South Asian Religions

Knut A. Jacobsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367150778
• eBook ISBN: 9780429619915
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Hinduism

The Routledge Handbook of South Asian Religions presents critical research, overviews, and case studies on religion in historical South Asia, in the seven nation states of contemporary South Asia: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives, and in the South Asian diaspora.

Chapters by an international set of experts analyse formative developments, roots, changes and transformations, religious practices and ideas, identities, relations, territorialisation, and globalisation in historical and contemporary South Asia. The Handbook is divided into two parts which first analyse historical South Asian religions and their developments and second contemporary South Asia religions that are influenced by both religious pluralism and their close connection to nation states and their ideological power. Contributors argue that religion has been used as a tool for creating nations as well as majorities within those nations in South Asia, despite their enormous diversity, in particular religious diversity. The Handbook explores these diversities and tensions, historical developments, and the present situation across religious traditions by utilising an array of approaches and from the point of view of various academic disciplines.

Drawing together a remarkable collection of leading and emerging scholars, this handbook is an invaluable research tool and will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of Asian religion, religion in context, and South Asian religions.

PART I

Historical South Asian religions

Formative developments

1
THE VEDA

Carlos Lopez

The Veda is the earliest accessible body of literature from the region historically known as Bharata, encompassing several of the nation-states of contemporary South Asia. Although there is evidence for writing from the Indus Valley Civilization (ca. 3300–1300 BCE) that predates the Veda, its language remains untranslatable. The Veda consists of mantras (poetic formulas) and prose that were orally composed and transmitted in Vedic Sanskrit, the earliest attested language of the Indic branch of Indo-Iranian, a major subfamily of Indo-European, in the context of sacrificial performances. The Ṛgveda, the earliest Vedic text, understands veda (from √vid ‘to know’) as trayī vidyā (threefold knowledge)—ṛc (verses), sāma (melodies), and yajus (ritual injunctions)—that were later collected and redacted in the saṃhitā collections of the Ṛgveda (RV), Sāmaveda (SV), and Yajurveda (YV), respectively. The mantras attributed to the atharvāṅgirasa were assembled in the Atharvaveda (AV). By the time of the grammarian Patañjali (ca. mid 2nd c. BCE), veda referred to the four saṃhitās with opening lines śáṃ no devī́r ábhiṣaye (AV=PS), iṣé tvorjé tvā (YV), agním īḷe puróhitaṃ (RV), and ágna ā́ yāhi vītáya iti (SV) (Lopez 2010).

The Veda is an oral text in a different sense than improvisational oral-formulaic epic poetry (Lord 1964). Its language is more “condensed, elliptical, grammatically scrambled … formulaic in the broad sense, but it makes surprisingly little use of metrically fixed and verbally frozen formulae in the strict sense” (Jamison 1991: 8). The form of the core hymns of the RV was fixed relatively early and preserved with little variation already during the Early Vedic Period, even as new hymns continued to be composed.

In what follows, Veda and Vedas refer to the orally composed and transmitted texts whose principal subject is yajña or sacrifice, which are delimited by linguistic and stylistic features of Vedic Sanskrit.

The texts: date, localization, and transmission

The problem of establishing firm historical dates for ancient South Asia generally before the earliest incursion into northwest India by the Islamic Ghaznavid Empire (ca. 977–1186) is well known (Mylius 1970). Beyond the archaeological dates for the Late Harappan/Third Phase Indus Civilization (Cemetery H/Ochre Coloured Pottery; ca. 1900–1300 BCE) (Possehl 2002), the Mitanni Agreement (Mallory 1989; Thieme 1960), evidence for iron in the Atharvaveda (Gullapalli 2009; Possehl and Gullapalli 1999), and some archeologically attestable textual references to realia, there is scant evidence to undisputedly establish the date for the Veda. The current scholarly consensus is that the earliest portions of Vedas were composed as early ca. 1500 BCE, with a terminus ad quem date ca. 500 BCE for late Vedic texts, including upaniṣads, gṛhyasūtras, and Kātyāyanaśrautasūtra (Parpola 2019).

The texts describe a semi-nomadic, pastoral society engaged in treks (yoga) and establishing temporary peaceful (kṣema) settlements (pur; grāma). There is no evidence for permanent structures, such as temples or forts (Rau 1973; Stuhrmann 2008). Only ruins (armaka, mahāvailastha) are mentioned in the RV. It is in the early upaniṣads that one finds references to permanent settlements and cities, which suggests the Second Urbanization period of South Asia (Allchin and Erdosy 1995; Allchin and Allchin 1997).

Vedic śākhās

The Vedic texts were orally composed and transmitted for at least 1200 years through various śākhās or ritual schools, each representing a community of Brahmans throughout the territory. Śākhās were not theological schools with monolithic orthodox understandings of sacrifice and cultural concepts (Renou 1947). Rather, they shared a general outlook about sacrifice and the hermeneutical approaches to the meaning of words and acts in sacrifice. Each śākhā was characterized by the peculiarities and particularities of their dialect of Vedic Sanskrit, recitational styles, ritual techniques, and sacrificial performances. Numerous quotations from other śākhās show their mutual contacts and interactions, as well as their knowledge of other schools’ traditions (Witzel 1997; Houben 2016).

The accuracy of the oral transmission of each Veda was not universally consistent. The RV has been the most accurately preserved and transmitted text. The collection of ṛcas has been transmitted word for word, unchanged, for the last 3000 years or more. The accuracy of the transmission is detected at the level of verse and hymn but also in the precision of the accentuation. Each word and, more importantly, each accent have been carefully preserved unchanged. Today, in different regions of India where the RV recitation continues to be taught, one can hear a virtual “tape recording,” down to the accent, of the text that was recited ca. 1200 BCE.

However, the received texts of other Vedas, especially those with a small base of reciters, had increasingly more errors creep into the oral and manuscript traditions. When an oral tradition was weakened, no mechanisms existed to correct errors that became established in the manuscript traditions. In some cases, these errors were transmitted and preserved by reciters who re-learned the recitation secondarily from manuscripts or printed editions. The worst transmission case was the AV, in which the true oral tradition of the two surviving śākhās has been lost completely (Witzel 1985).

It is difficult to establish when the Veda began to be preserved and transmitted in writing. Evidence for writing in South Asia is relatively recent when compared to the evidence for writing in other civilizations (Falk 1999). The earliest epigraphic evidence for writing in South Asia only dates to the Maurya Period (ca. 320–185 BCE) (Salomon 1998). The earliest surviving Vedic manuscripts have been found in Nepal and Kashmir, where the climate is more conducive to the preservation of early writing materials, such as palm leaves and birchbark. The earliest Vedic manuscript, a palm-leaf manuscript of Vājasaneyisaṃhitā (VS), dated to 1150 CE, originates from Nepal (Witzel and Wu 2018).

The geographical distribution of dialectical particularities of Vedic śākhās has been established by Witzel (1989) based on textual references to names of localities, rivers, and mountains well known in Indian antiquity and details of climate, flora, and fauna, as well as references to named tribes or communities. Maps 1.1 and 1.2 show the distribution of the RV, SV, YV, and AV schools in the Middle to Late Vedic Period.

Map 1.1 Schools (śākhā) of the Middle and Late Vedic Period: Ṛgveda, Sāmaveda, and Atharvaveda

Map 1.2 Schools (śākhā) of the Middle and Late Vedic Period: Yajurveda

Typology and linguistic chronology of Vedic texts

The post-Vedic typology of the Vedic texts reflects the traditional Hindu analysis of their subject, content, and internal referentiality. It offers insight into the content and the hermeneutic activity of each textual layer but provides little elucidation of the historical context of each layer. The texts are classified into four layers—saṃhitā, brāhmaṇa, āraṇyaka, and upaniṣad—with each subsequent layer being engaged in the exegesis of the preceding ones.

The saṃhitā is the earliest layer and reflects the recitational style and function of the text in sacrifice. The saṃhitā text is recited continuously, with phonological alterations (sandhi) between words. Other types of recitation were known from an early period and preserved in post-Vedic recitational handbooks, including padapāṭhas and kramapāṭhas. The saṃhitā is the foundational text upon which subsequent texts engage in analysis and commentary.

Brāhmaṇas present the exegesis in prose of the saṃhitā and presuppose in-depth knowledge of the text and its role in sacrifice. However, they are not a systematic exposition of sacrifice, unlike the later śrautasūtras, ritual manuals that minutely detailed the preparation and enactment of every aspect of the ‘classical’ Vedic sacrifice. Through the analysis of words, acts, and physical elements, their goal is to discover the bandhu (secret link) between the sacrifice/mesocosmic realm (adhiyajña) and heavenly/macrocosmic realm (adhidevatā) (Gonda 1965b). The efficacy of the sacrifice was contingent on the ritualist’s knowledge of bandhus (Smith 1989; Witzel 1979). Indeed, the false claim to knowledge could have devastating consequences, as the story of Śākalya vividly illustrates (BĀU 3.9). Upon being challenged for the role of officiating priest by Yājñavalkya and failing to correctly articulate the last in a series of queries of bandhus, Śākalya’s head shatters (Brereton 1996; Insler 1989–90; Lindquist 2011; Witzel 1987b). The efficacy of sacrifice and knowledge were explicitly linked.

Āraṇyakas are also engaged in ritual exegesis and the search for bandhus but focused on secret and dangerous rituals, such as the Mahāvrata (Rolland 1973) and Pravargya (van Buitenen 1968; Houben 1991), to be performed outside of the village in the araṇya, “where one can no longer see the top of the houses” (TĀ 2.9012), a location that is safely away from the people in the village (Gonda 1975). Not only the rituals but even the study and recitation of these texts was to be done outside of the village. The dangerous character of the Pravargya was on display during the Atirātra/Agnicayana (Pañjal 2011; Kodakara 2012) and Somayāga (Pattambi 2016) in Kerala.¹ Upon the public announcement that the Pravargya was about to begin, all women in the public viewing stands left the vicinity of the ritual enclosure and returned only after the ritual was finished. As TĀ 5.6.12 states: a woman who looks upon the Pravargya-fire becomes barren.

Considered vedānta ‘the end of the Veda,’ the upaniṣads continued to further develop the exegesis of sacrifice by taking the analysis one step further to discern the interconnection between macrocosmic, mesocosmic, and individual/microcosmic (adhyātma) domains. They re-evaluated older concepts connected to sacrifice—amṛta (immortality), karma (action), anna (food), and ātman/brahman-, and introduced new ideas, including the contrast of devayāna (the path of the gods) and pitṛyāna (the path of the ancestors), rebirth, and transmigration (Cohen 2017; Olivelle 1998).

A more secure guide to understanding the historical levels of Vedic texts has been constructed based on grammatical and linguistic features of the texts (Witzel 1989).

Level 1—The Ṛgveda represents the last stage of an Indo-Iranian poetic tradition, sharing many linguistic features with Old Iranian texts that disappear in post-Ṛgvedic texts. Significant linguistic markers include the frequent use of the injunctive mood (Hoffmann 1967), the rare use of -toḥ infinitive, and the appearance of kuru/karoti (√kṛ ‘to do’) alongside the common Ṛgvedic kṛṇu/kṛṇoti.²

Level 2—The Mantra-level is exemplified by the early mantras of the saṃhitās of the YV, SV, and AV, which is characterized by developments that distinguish it from Level 1, including the gradual loss of the injunctive mood, the increased usage of kuru/karoti in non-Ṛgvedic contexts, and the replacement of viś...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of maps
• Abbreviations of texts
• General abbreviations
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Historical and contemporary South Asian religions
• Part I Historical South Asian religions: Formative developments
• Part II Contemporary South Asian religions: Religious pluralism
• Index