The Vedic Origins of Karma: Cosmos As Man in Ancient Indian Myth and Ritual PDF
Preview The Vedic Origins of Karma: Cosmos As Man in Ancient Indian Myth and Ritual
The Vedic Origins of Karma Page ii SUNY Series in Hindu Studies Wendy Doniger, Editor Page iii The Vedic Origins of Karma Cosmos as Man in Ancient Indian Myth and Ritual Herman W. Tull State University of New York Press Page iv Disclaimer: This book contains characters with diacritics. When the characters can be represented using the ISO 88591 character set (http://www.w3.org/TR/images/latin1.gif), netLibrary will represent them as they appear in the original text, and most computers will be able to show the full characters correctly. In order to keep the text searchable and readable on most computers, characters with diacritics that are not part of the ISO 88591 list will be represented without their diacritical marks. Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 1989 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address State University of New York Press, State University Plaza, Albany, N.Y., 12246 Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Tull, Herman Wayne. The Vedic origins of karma : cosmos as man in ancient Indian myth and ritual / by Herman W. Tull. p. cm. Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0791400948. —ISBN 0791400956 (pbk.) 1. Karma. 2. Vedic literature—History and criticism. I. Title. BL2015.K3T85 1989 294.5´22—dc19 8837610 CIP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Page v For Chini and Jasha Page vii Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 The Vedic Origins of the Karma Doctrine 5 A Note on Texts, Method, Terms, and Translations 7 Chapter 1. The Problem of Karma and the Textual Sources 12 The Brahmanas and Upanisads in the View of Nineteenth Century Indology 14 The Upanisads and the Vedic Origins of the Karma Doctrine 21 The Earliest Notice of the Doctrine of Karma and Rebirth in the 28 Brhadaranyaka and Chandogya Upanisads Conclusion: The Karma Doctrine in the Context of Brahmanic Thought 41 Chapter 2. The Cosmos as Man: The Image of the Cosmos in Vedic Thought 44 The Cosmic Image and Its Vicissitudes in Vedic Thought 47 Purusa and the Creation of the Cosmos 50 The Reenactment of the Cosmogony 54 Prajapati and the Creation of the Cosmos 57 Conclusion: The Reenactment of the Cosmogony 69 Page viii Chapter 3. The Fire Altar (Agnicayana) as Man and Cosmos 72 The Problem of Sacrifice 72 The Problem of Sacrifice and the Agnicayana 77 The Construction of the Fire Altar 81 Conclusion: Man and Cosmos in the Fire Altar 95 Chapter 4. From Death to Rebirth 103 The Agnicayana and the Smasanacayana 108 Conclusion: The Karma Doctrine in the Context of Brahmanic Thought 119 Abbreviations of Vedic Texts 123 Notes 124 Bibliography 161 Index 175 Page ix Acknowledgments This book is a somewhat unexpected byproduct of my doctoral dissertation, submitted to the Department of History and Literature of Religions at Northwestern University in 1985. Simply because the completion of a dissertation is an arduous enough task, I did not originally see my work as something that might later be published in the form of a book. An odd coincidence has brought this book back into the hands of Wendy Doniger, who first encouraged me to seek a publisher— though as I now recall it, it was encouragement stated in the imperative mood. Certainly, without her support I would not have so willingly revised it "one more time," nor so readily submitted it to the scrutiny of a publisher. This latter process—due to the efforts of William Eastman of the State University of New York Press—has been a surprisingly agreeable one. Over the years many people taught me a great deal and along the way became close friends. I now find that many of my questions were their questions; for, those who taught me left an indelible mark—though each one of a different sort—on my way of thinking: what I thought about as well as how I thought about it. They are, at Hobart College, Professors Marvin Bram, Lowell Bloss, Chris Vescey (now at Colgate University), and my classmate John Blodgett; at Northwestern University, Professors George Bond, Edmund Perry, Isshi Yamada, and Robert Cohn (now at Lafayette College); and at the University of Chicago, Professors Edwin Gerow (now at Reed College) and Wendy Doniger, and my colleague David Lawrence. Most recently my colleagues at Rutgers University, Professors Henry Bowden, Alberto Green, James Jones, Chunfang Yu, and Mahlon Smith, and, at Princeton University, Professor John Kelly, have by their examples challenged me to explore further in my own field. I am especially indebted to Wendy Doniger, who gave unstintingly of her time to nurture this project, as she shared with me her ideas, her library, and the invaluable stray references that textualists tend to collect over the years. The remarkable enthusiasm with Page x which she read and commented on several drafts of this project bolstered me in what seemed to be a neverending process of writing and rewriting, thinking and rethinking. My parents, Gerald and Helene Tull, never questioned, but at all times enthusiastically supported the choices I made. My wife Lekha has shared this project with me from its inception to its completion. Through her persistence—sacrificing with the one concern of seeing my work in a completed form, first as a dissertation and now as a book—she has contributed to it perhaps more than I have. Page 1 Introduction J. C. Heesterman has recently observed that the Vedic sacrificial texts propose "a separate selfcontained world ruled exclusively by the comprehensive and exhaustive order of the ritual." 1 The closed world of the Vedic sacrifice recalls the larger closure of the Hindu universe, depicted from an early period as an egg "whose total contents can never increase but can only be redistributed."2 As Wendy O'Flaherty has noted within the world egg ''the Hindu cosmos is a series of receding frames, circles within circles."3 This image of circles within circles leads back to the world of the Vedic sacrifice, which itself consisted of a series of concentric circles;4 and so articulates again the close resemblance between the world of the ritual and the larger cosmos. The world of the sacrifice is intentionally made to resemble the larger cosmos. The Vedic ritualists sought, in their own sacrificial activity, to recreate the primordial events which shaped the cosmos. An oftenquoted passage that appears in the Satapatha Brahmana thus declares: "This [ritual act] done now is that which the gods did then [in the beginning]."5 What the gods did then was to create the world, an event that the late Vedic texts often depict as having occurred through the sacrifice of an anthropomorphic being, whose dismembered body was formed into the ordered cosmos. However, the death and destruction implicit in the primordial event created an untenable situation for the sacrificer; in particular, the reenactment of the cosmogony would seem to have required the sacrificer to give up his own life.6 The Vedic ritualists attempted to circumvent this actuality by employing various substitutes (ranging from grain and animals to a gold effigy) for the sacrificer's own person. Moreover, the closed world of the ritual, with its carefully delimited boundaries, seems to have been constructed to keep out the reality of death;7 for, just as the sacrificial arena itself represented a symbolic cosmos, so, too, the death that occurred in the ritual was only symbolically that of the sacrificer. There was one situation,
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