CHAPTER 7

RENUNCIATION IN THE UPANISHADS
600 to 200 BCE

CHRONOLOGY (ALL DATES BCE)

c. 600-500 Aranyakas are composed

c. 500 Shrauta Sutras are composed

c. 500-400 Early Upanishads (Brihadaranyaka [BU], Chandogya [CU], Kaushitaki [KauU]) are composed

c. 500 Pataliputra is founded; Vedic peoples gradually move southward

c. 483 or 410 Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, dies

c. 468 Vardhamana Mahavira, the Jina, founder of Jainism, dies

c. 400-1200 Later Upanishads (Katha [KU], Kaushitaki [KauU], Shvetashvatara [SU], and Mundaka [MU]) are composed

c. 300 Grihya Sutras are composed

SATYAKAMA’S MOTHER

Once upon a time, Satyakama Jabala said to his mother, Jabala,
“Ma’am, I want to live the life of a Vedic student. What is the line
of my male ancestors [gotra]?” She said to him, “My dear, I don’t
know the line of your male ancestors. When I was young, I got
around a lot, as I was working, and I got you. But my name is Jabala,
and your name is Satyakama [‘Lover of Truth’]. So why don’t you
say that you are Satyakama Jabala?” Satyakama went to Gautama,
the son of Haridrumata, and asked to study with him; when asked
about his line of male ancestors he repeated what his mother had
said. Gautama replied, “No one who was not a Brahmin would be
able to say that. You have not deviated from the truth, my dear. I
will initiate you.”

Chandogya Upanishad (c. 600 BCE)¹

A woman who is not ashamed to tell her son that she had multiple partners when she conceived him is one of a number of astonishingly nonconformist characters, often discussing new ideas about karma and renunciation, whom we meet in the Upanishads, philosophical texts composed from around the sixth century BCE.

THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL WORLD OF THE UPANISHADS

The eastern Ganges at this time, the seventh through the fifth century BCE, was a place of kingdoms dominated by Magadha, whose capital was Rajagriha, and Koshala-Videha, whose capital was Kashi (Varanasi, Benares). Trade—especially of metals, fine textiles, salt, pottery, and, always, horses—flourished,² and the towns were connected by trade routes; all roads led to Kashi. The development of the idea of merit or karma as something “to be earned, accumulated, occasionally transferred and eventually realized”³owes much to the post-Vedic moneyed economy. More generally, where there’s trade, people leave home; new commercial classes emerge; and above all, new ideas spread quickly and circulate freely. They certainly did so at this time in India, and there was little to stop them: The Vedas did not constitute a closed canon, and there was no central temporal or religious authority to enforce a canon had there been one.

Commerce was facilitated by the rise of prosperous kingdoms and social mobility by the rise of great protostates, or oligarchies (maha-janapadas or ganasanghas ),⁴ governed by Kshatriya clans. One Brahmin source describes these clans as degenerate Kshatriyas and even Shudras, accusing them of having ceased to honor the Brahmins or to observe Vedic ritual, worshiping at sacred groves instead,⁵ and of paying short shrift to sacrifices, using their funds for trade (behavior that goes a long way to explain why the Brahmins called them Shudras). The clans were said to have just two classes, the ruling families and the slaves and laborers, an arrangement that would have posed a serious threat to Brahmin supremacy. Significantly, both Vardhamana Mahavira (also called the Jina), the founder of Jainism, and Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, were born into distinguished clans in one of these alternative, nonmonarchical state systems. Such systems fostered greater personal freedom and mobility, nurturing individuals as well as social groups—the trader, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the government official.

This rise in individual freedom was, however, offset by the growing bureaucracy and state institutions in both the kingdoms and the oligarchies, which eroded the traditional rural social order and replaced it with new kinds of social control.⁶ So too, perhaps in response to the growing social laxity, class lines laid down in texts such as the Brahmanas now began to harden. The first three classes (Brahmin, Kshatriya, and Vaishya) became more sharply delineated not only from the Shudras (the fourth class, below them) but, now, from a fifth category, Pariahs.

A vast transformation of society was taking place in response to the social, economic, and political reorganization of northern South Asia, as small-scale, pastoral chiefdoms gave way to hierarchically ordered settlements organized into states. Students and thinkers moved over a wide geographical area in search of philosophical and theological debate, encountering not merely royal assemblies of Indian thinkers but new peoples and ideas from outside South Asia. Much of the new literature on religious and social law (the Shrauta Sutras and Grihya Sutras) may have been designed to incorporate newcomers or social groups into a ranking system or to accommodate local power relations.⁷ The emergent system recognized the authority of village, guild, family, and provincial custom, so long as they did not conflict with some higher authority. Political and intellectual diversity thrived. This may go a long way to explain not where the new ideas in the Upanishads came from but why the Brahmins were willing—perhaps under pressure from other people who had gained access to power—to incorporate these ideas into new texts that were regarded as part of the Vedas, despite the ways in which they contravened the Brahmin imaginary.⁸

THE TEXTUAL WORLD OF THE UPANISHADS

The Upanishads are often referred to as “the end of the Veda” (Vedanta^cs), for they are the final texts in the body of literature called shruti (“what is heard”), unalterable divine revelation, in contrast with the rest of Hindu literature, called smriti (“what is remembered”), the tradition attributed to human authors, thereforefallible and corrigible. Just as the Brahmanas are, among other things, footnotes to the Vedas, so the Upanishads began as Cliffs Notes to the Brahmanas, meditations on the meaning of the Vedic rituals and myths. The different Upanishads belong to different branches of the Vedic traditions, different family lineages, but they share so many stories and ideas that they are clearly in conversation with one another.

Bridging these two sets of texts, the Brahmanas and the Upanishads, and actually overlapping with both of them are the Aranyakas (“Jungle Books”), so called presumably because they were composed in the wilderness, or jungle, outside the village; they dealt more with ritual and less with cosmology and metaphysics than the Upanishads did. The early Upanishads (meaning “sitting beside,” a name that may refer to the method of placing one thing next to another, making connections, or to pupils sitting beside their teacher) probably⁹ were composed in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE.^ct Again we find a major shift in language, between the Sanskrit of the Brahmanas and that of the Upanishads, not merely in the grammar and vocabulary but also in the style, which is far more accessible, conversational, reader friendly; if we liken the Brahmanas to Chaucer (in their distance from modern English), the Upanishads are like Shakespeare. The grammarian Panini wrote about spoken Sanskrit (bhasha), in contrast with Vedic, ritualistic Sanskrit. In North Indian towns and villages, people spoke Prakrits, the “natural” or “unrefined” languages, often regarded as dialects, in contrast with Sanskrit, the “perfected” or “artificial” language. The Buddha, preaching at roughly the time of the Upanishads, was beginning to preach in Magadhi, the local dialect of Magadha, in order to reach a wider audience; the decision to preserve the Buddhist canon in such a dialect, Pali, had an effect much like that of the elimination of Latin from the Catholic mass after Vatican II: It made the liturgy comprehensible to all the Pali-valent Buddhists. The Upanishadic authors too were probably reaching out in that more vernacular direction, stretching the Sanskrit envelope.

Like other great religious reform movements, such as those inspired by Jesus, Muhammad, and Luther, the Upanishads did not replace but merely supplemented the earlier religion, so that just as Catholicism continued to exist alongside Protestantism within Christianity, so Vedic Hinduism (sacrificial, worldly) continued to exist alongside Vedantic Hinduism (philosophical, renunciant). The tension between householders and renouncers begins here and exerts an enormous influence over the subsequent history of the Hindus. But in Hinduism, unlike Christianity, there never was an official schism. Certain words from earlier periods—karma, tapas—took on new meanings at this point, though their original meanings never disappeared, resulting in a layering that served as one of the major sources of multiplicity within Hinduism.

KARMA AND DEATH

Where did the potentially revolutionary ideas of karma and renunciation come from? We can identify both Vedic and non-Vedic sources. Let’s begin with the Vedic.

In the Upanishads, as in the Rig Veda, the body of the dead man returns to the elements—his eye to the sun, the hair of his body to plants, the hair of his head into trees, his blood and semen into water, and so forth—but the Upanishadic sages regard this as the beginning, not the end, of the explanation of death. The sage Yajnavalkya listed the correspondences between the parts of the body and the cosmos, whereupon his pupil asked, “What happens to the person then?” The person is the individual soul, the atman, or self, which is identical with the brahman, the world soul (sometimes also called atman, often transcribed as Atman to distinguish it from the individual soul), as salt becomes identical with water into which it is dissolved (BU 2.4.12). This is the central teaching of the Upanishads, a doctrine of pantheism (or panentheism, the world made of god), most famously expressed in the phrase generally translated “You are that” (tat tvam asi) (CU 6.8.7)¹⁰ In answer to his pupil’s question, the Upanishad continues, Yajnavalkya drew him aside in private: “And what did they talk about? Nothing but karma. They praised nothing but karma. Yajnavalkya told him: ‘A man becomes something good by good karma and something bad by bad karma’ (BU 3.2.13).”

The first and most basic meaning of “karma” is action. The noun “karma” comes from the verb kri, cognate with the Latin creo, “to make or do,^cu to make a baby or a table or to perform a ritual.” It is often contrasted with mind and speech: One can think, say, or do (kri) something, with steadily escalating consequences. The second meaning of “karma” is “ritual action,” particularly Vedic ritual action; this is its primary connotation in the Rig Veda. Its third meaning, which begins to be operative in the Upanishads, is “morally charged action, good or bad,” a meter that is always running, that is constantly charging something to one’s account. And its fourth meaning, which follows closely on the heels of the third, is “morally charged action that has consequences for the soul in the future, that is retributive both within one’s life and across the barrier of redeath”: You become a sheep that people eat if you have eaten a sheep. (We saw the germ of this theory in the Brahmana descriptions of people soundlessly screaming in the other world and in statements that sacrifice generates merit that guarantees an afterlife in the other world.) In this sense, karma is action whose retributive moral charge determines the nature of your future rebirths. Consequences have consequences, and first thing you know, you’re born as a sheep.

Turned on its head, this link led to a fifth meaning of karma, not as the cause of future lives but as the result of past lives and the agenda for this life, the inescapable role in life that one was born to play, one’s work, or innate activity. Euro-Americans believe too that we often cannot remember the past causes of present circumstances and that the present will influence the future, but the Hindu view differs from this in extending the past and future beyond the boundaries of this life span. F. Scott Fitzgerald, of all people, captured the spirit of karma in the final sentence of The Great Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” In Hinduism we are also borne back ceaselessly into the future.

The last (sixth) meaning of karma is the implication that good and bad karma may also be transferred from one person to another under certain circumstances, not merely between parents and children (as we saw in the Vedic poem to Varuna) and between sacrificial priest and patron, but between any people who meet. This transfer may take place either intentionally or unintentionally: The dharma texts say that if someone lets a guest depart unfed, the guest will take away the host’s good karma and leave behind his own bad karma.¹¹ In the Brahmana story of Nachiketas, Nachiketas remains in the house of Death for three nights without eating and then tells Death that in effect, on the three nights of fasting he ate “your offspring, your sacrificial beasts (pashus), and your good deeds (sadhu-krityam).” This last is an example of the transfer of good karma; unfed, Nachiketas “eats” (which is to say, consumes) Death’s good deeds (which is to say, he siphons off Death’s good karma) as well as his children and cattle. This blackmail is what forces Death to tell Nachiketas his secrets.

It is not always clear which of these meanings of karma is intended in any particular passage in the Upanishads (or in other texts). Moreover, the idea of karma was certainly not accepted by everyone as the final solution to the problem of death (or the problem of evil); many other, conflicting ideas were proposed and widely accepted, alongside the karma theory.¹²

The Upanishads continue to speak of “recurrent death” (BU 3.2.10, 3.3.2) and now describe the process in cruel detail (BU 4.3.36, 4.4.2). For heaven is no longer the end of the line, as it was in some of the Brahmanas; it is simply another place that eventually everyone leaves. The Upanishads spell out the assumption, sketched in the Brahmanas, that we all are on the wheel of redeath, transmigration (samsara, “flowing around”). From the very start, the idea that transmigration occurred was qualified by two other ideas: that some people wanted to get out of it and that there was a way to do this, a restoration not merely for one of life’s mistakes but for life itself, a way to put the fix in on death. When the Upanishads retell the story of Nachiketas, Death explains to the boy the process of dying and going to heaven in much greater detail, and at the end, Nachiketas “became free of old age and death, and so will anyone who knows this teaching (KU 1-2, 6.18).” Significantly, where the Brahmanas promise the conquest of redeath to anyone who knows the ritual, the Upanishad promises it to anyone who knows the teaching, a shift from a way of acting to a way of knowing.

OVERCROWDING AND RECYCLING

The theory of reincarnation, a recycling not of tin cans but of souls, may reflect an anxiety of overcrowding, the claustrophobia of a culture fenced in, a kind of urban Angst (amhas). The Upanishadic discussion of the doctrine of transmigration begins when a teacher asks his pupil, “Do you know why the world beyond is not filled up, even when more and more people continuously go there?” and it ends with the statement “As a result, that world up there is not filled up (CU 5.10.8; BU 5.1.1 and 6.2.2)”^cv The idea of an overcrowded earth is a part of the myth of the four Ages (people live too long in the first Age and become too numerous) and recurs in the Mahabharata as a justification for the genocidal war (when the overburdened earth begins to sink beneath the cosmic waters).¹³ Is this fear of crowds related to the shock of the new experience of city life in the Ganges Valley? Were there already slums in Kashi (as there may already have been in Harappa)? If a fear of this sort is what inspired the theory of reincarnation, who precisely was it who was afraid?

The “second urbanization,” the spread of paddy rice cultivation into the Ganges Valley, producing a surplus that could support cities, the emergence of societies along the Ganges, created an unprecedented proximity of people. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, said that the Indians were the most populous country on earth (5.3). Population densities had significantly increased, the result of a combination of the incorporation of indigenous peoples, a soaring birthrate, and the creation of agricultural surpluses. ¹⁴ This led to a burgeoning of all the things that people who like to sleep on their saddlebags at night don’t like about sleeping indoors, things that are for them a cultural nightmare. The movements to renounce the fleshpots of the Ganges Valley may have been inspired in part by a longing to return to the good old days preserved in the texts, when life was both simpler and freer, more heroic.¹⁵ Such a longing is reflected in the name of the Aranyakas (“Jungle Books”), in the village settings of so much of the Upanishads, and in the forest imagery that abounds in the writings of the early sects, both inside and outside Hinduism. Within the cities the Buddha sat in an isolated spot under a tree to obtain enlightenment, and he first preached in a deer park. The Upanishads seem to have been composed by people who left the settled towns for rustic settings where master and student could sit under some tree somewhere, the ancient Indian equivalent of the bucolic liberal arts college; the renunciants are said to live in the wilderness, in contrast with the conventional Vedic sacrificers who live in villages. No individuals in the Ganges Valley could have remembered the old days up in the Punjab, but there was certainly a group memory, or at least a literary memory, of an idealized time when people lived under the trees and slept under the stars, a cultural memory of wide-open spaces. Many of the old rituals and texts too, such as the tales of cattle raids, no longer made sense but still exerted a nostalgic appeal.

A striking insight into the psychology of the forest dweller stage comes from an unexpected source, Philip Roth’s 1998 novel I Married a Communist, in a passage describing a shack that the hero, Ira, retreats to in times of trouble:

The palliative of the primitive hut. The place where you are stripped back to essentials, to which you return—even if it happens not to be where you came from—to decontaminate and absolve yourself of the striving. The place where you disrobe, molt it all, the uniforms you’ve worn and the costumes you’ve gotten into, where you shed your batteredness and your resentment, your appeasement of the world and your defiance of the world, your manipulation of the world and its manhandling of you. The aging man leaves and goes into the woods . . . receding from the agitation of the autobiographical. He has entered vigorously into competition with life; now, becalmed, he enters into competition with death, drawn down into austerity, the final business.”¹⁶

Beneath the specifically American concerns lies an understanding of ways in which, in ancient India too, the forest offers individual purification from the corruption of collective urban life.

The whole tradition was becoming individualistic, not just renunciant; we begin to see a transition from group to individual, a perceived need for personal rituals of transformation, forming a certain sort of person, not just a member of the tribe. At the same time, collective rather than individual choices needed to be made in order to start and maintain alternative societies, such as Buddhism, and monastic communities, as well as to engage in the highly collective enterprise of growing rice.

Reincarnation addressed this social problem and formulated it in terms of individual salvation. It seldom, if ever, occurred to anyone, then or at any time before the nineteenth century in India,^cw to attempt to change the world; but many people made judgments against it and opted out or tried to solve the problem of suffering within the individual. The new religious movements located the problem of the human condition, of human suffering, within the individual heart and mind (where Freud too located it), rather than in a hierarchical society (where Marx located it). The Upanishads emphasize a more personal religious experience than the one addressed by the Brahmanas.¹⁷ In this way, at least, these movements were individualistic—“Look to your own house” (or, in the Buddha’s metaphor, “Get out of your burning house”^cx)—rather than socially oriented, as nonrenunciant Hinduism was—“Your identity is meaningful only as one member of a diverse social body.” This in itself was a tremendous innovation.

THE PATHS OF REBIRTH AND RELEASE

The Upanishads assume, like the Vedas and Brahmanas, that people pass into heaven or hell when they die, but they are far more concerned with the fate of the dead beyond heaven or hell. Here is how the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad describes the possible trajectories of people who have died and are being cremated:

THE PATHS OF SMOKE AND FLAME

The people who know this [the Upanishadic doctrine of the identity of the soul and the brahman], and the people there in the wilderness who venerate truth as faith—they pass into the flame (of the cremation fire), and thence into the day . . . into the world of the gods, into the sun, and into the region of lightning. A person made of mind comes to the regions of lightning and leads them to the worlds of brahman. These exalted people live in those worlds of brahman for the longest time. They do not return.

The people who win heavenly worlds, on the other hand, by offering sacrifices, by giving gifts, and by generating inner heat [tapas]—they pass into the smoke, and then into the night . . . into the world of the fathers, into the moon. There they become food. There the gods feed on them, as the moon increases and decreases. When that ends, they pass into the sky, then into the wind, then the rain, and then the earth, where they become food. They are offered in the fire of man and are born in the fire of woman. Rising up again to the heavenly worlds, they circle around in the same way.

Those who do not know these two paths, however, become worms, insects, or snakes (BU 6.2.13-16).

This text tells us that people within the Vedic fold at this time had a choice of two ways of being religious.

The people of the wilderness end up in the world of brahman, the divine substance of which the universe is composed. Brahman, which in the Rig Veda designates sacred speech, is the root of a number of words in later Sanskrit distinguished by just one or two sounds (or letters, in English):brahman (the divine substance of the universe); Brahma (the creator god); Brahmin or Brahman (a member of the first or priestly class^cy); Brahmana (one of a class of texts that follow the Vedas and precede the Upanishads); and Brahma-charin (“moving in brahman,” designating a chaste student). The world of brahman is a world of monism (which assumes that all living things are elements of a single, universal being),^cz sometimes equated with monotheism, in contrast with the world of rebirth, the polytheistic world of sacrifice to multiple gods. The doctrine of the Upanishads is also sometimes characterized as pantheism (in which god is everything and everything is god) or, at times, panentheism (in which god encompasses and interpenetrates the universe but at the same time is greater than and independent of it). It views the very substance of the universe as divine and views that substance and that divinity as unitary. The pluralistic world has a secondary, illusory status in comparison with the enduring, real status of the underlying monistic being.

The people who reach brahman have lived in the wilderness, the jungle, either permanently as some sort of forest ascetics or merely on the occasions when they held their religious rituals there. By contrast, the sacrificers, who follow the Vedic path of generosity (to gods and priests or to people more generally) or engage in the ritual practices that generate internal heat (tapas), go to heaven but do not stay there; they die again and are reborn. This text does not tell us where these people have lived but a parallel passage in theChandogya Upanishad (5.10.1-8) tells us that the people who devote themselves to giving gifts to gods and to priests (this text specifies the recipients, where the other did not) live in villages. This group no longer generates internal heat as the sacrificers did in theBrihadaranyaka, an activity that the Chandogya assigns to the people in the wilderness, who venerate (in place of truth, in the Brihadaranyaka) internal heat as faith. Tapas therefore can belong to either group, for it is a transitional power: For sacrificers, it is the heat that the priest generates in the sacrifice, while for people of the wilderness, it becomes detached from the sacrifice and internalized, just as the sacrifice itself is internalized; now tapas is the heat that an individual ascetic generates within himself. The only criterion that marks the sacrificers in both texts is their generosity, and the only criterion that marks the people of the wilderness is their life in the wilderness.

The people who reach the moon in the Brihadaranyaka are eaten by the gods (as they were eaten by animals in the Other World in the Brahmanas), but the gods in the Chandogya merely eat the moon, a more direct way to account for its waning. The Chandogyaalso has a slightly different ending for the second group, the sacrificers who pass through the smoke:

THE THIRD OPTION

They return by the same path by which they came—first to space and to the wind, which turns into smoke and then into a cloud, which then rains down. On earth they grow as rice and barley, plants and trees, sesame and beans, from which it is very difficult to escape. When someone eats that food and sheds his semen, one is born again from him.

Now, people here whose behavior is charming can expect to enter a nice womb, like that of a woman of the Brahmin, Kshatriya, or Vaishya class. But people whose behavior is stinking can expect to enter a nasty womb, like that of a dog, a pig, or a Pariah woman.

And there is a third state, for people who take neither of these paths: They become tiny creatures who go around and around ceaselessly. “Be born! Die!” A person should take measures to avoid that (5.10.1-8).

It is clear from the Chandogya, and implicit in the Brihadaranyaka, that one does not want to end up in the company of the worms and other tiny creatures in the third state, the place from which no traveler returns. It’s better to be a dog.

But it is not so clear from these texts that the path of Vedic gift giving is undesirable, that everyone wants to get off the wheel and onto the path of flame. For renouncers, the very idea of good karma is an oxymoron:^da Any karma is bad because it binds you to the wheel of rebirth. But theChandogya spells out the belief that for sacrificers, some rebirths are quite pleasant, the reward for good behavior. Their fate corresponds to Yajnavalkya’s statement “A man becomes something good by good karma and something bad by bad karma.” The Brihadaranyaka says much the same thing: “What a man turns out to be depends on how he acts. If his actions [karma] are good, he will turn into something good. If his actions are bad, he will turn into something bad.” But then it adds that this applies only to the man who has desires; the man who is freed from desires, whose desires are fulfilled, does not die at all; he goes to brahman (BU 4.4.5-6).^db So too the funeral ceremonies include instructions that ensure that the dead man will not remain in limbo but will move forward, either to a new life or to final Release (moksha) from the cycle of transmigration,¹⁸further evidence of a deeply embedded tension between the desire to assure a good rebirth and the desire to prevent rebirth altogether. The fear of redeath led to the desire for Release (including Release from the values of Vedic Hinduism), but then the ideal of Release was reabsorbed into Vedic Hinduism and reshaped into the desire to be reborn better, in worldly terms: richer, with more sons, and so forth. These two tracks—one for people who want to get off the wheel of redeath and one for those who don’t want to get off the wheel of rebirth—continue as options for South Asians to this day.

The Kaushitaki Upanishad describes the fork in the road a bit differently:

THE FINAL EXAM

When people depart from this world, they go to the moon. Those who do not answer the moon’s questions become rain, and rain down here on earth, where they are reborn according to their actions [karma] and knowledge—as a worm, an insect, a fish, a bird, a lion, a boar, a rhinoceros, a tiger, a human, or some other creature. Those who answer the moon’s questions correctly pass to the heavenly world: They go on the path to the gods, to fire, and finally to brahman. On the way, he shakes off his good and bad deeds [karma], which fall upon his relatives: the good deeds on the ones he likes and the bad deeds on the ones he dislikes. Freed from his good and bad deeds, this person, who has the knowledge of brahman, goes on to brahman (1.1-4a).

The deciding factor here apparently has nothing to do with the sort of worship the dead person engaged in while alive, or whether he lived in the village or the wilderness; there is just one final postmortem exam (proctored by the rabbit in the moon?) that determines everything.^dc The good and bad deeds weigh in only later and then only for the man who gets a first on the exam and proceeds on the path to brahman (not, as in the Chandogya, for the man on the path of rebirth). Nor does this text spell out what deeds are good, and what bad; that will come in later texts. The important doctrine of the transfer of karma from one person to another is harnessed to the trivial human frailty of liking some relatives and disliking others and caring about the disposal of one’s worldly goods (in this case, one’s karma). And the worms and insects no longer form a third place of No Exit, but are simply part of the lesser of the only two paths.

THE PATH OF SMOKE: THE PLEASURES OF SAMSARA

The path of smoke, of Vedic generosity, of procreation and samsara survives intact the journey from the Vedas to the Upanishads, though the Upanishads provide very little detail about it, perhaps assuming that everyone knew it because it had been around for centuries. The case in favor of samsara, in its positive aspect of passion, family, love, loss (what Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek called “the whole catastrophe”), is strong. The Upanishads reopen some of the options of the Vedas that the Brahmanas closed down and open up other options. Individual texts, as always, often go against the grain of the general zeitgeist.

There’s some pretty hot stuff in the Upanishads. The paragraph that introduces the description of the two paths refers to the act of progeneration as an offering in the fire of man and a birth in the fire of woman and analogizes a woman’s genitals to the sacrificial fire: Her vulva is the firewood, her pubic hair the smoke, her vagina the flame; the acts of penetration and climax are the embers and the sparks (BU 6.2.13; 6.4.1-3; CU 5.8.1). One text takes the bliss of sexual climax as the closest available approximation to the ineffable experience of deep, dreamless sleep (BU 2.1.19). A woman in her fertile period is described as splendid and auspicious, and her fertility is so important that if she refuses to have sex with her husband at that time, he is advised to bribe her or beat her with a stick or with his fists (BU 6.4.6-7). A more tender attitude is advocated in the mantra that a man should use to make his wife love him, and a more practical one in the mantra for contraception if he does not want her to be pregnant (BU 6.4.9-10), an intention that flies in the face of the dharma texts that insist that the only purpose of sex is procreation.

A remarkably open-minded attitude to women’s infidelity is evident in the mantra recommended to make a sexual rival impotent:

MANTRA AGAINST YOUR WIFE’S LOVER

If a man’s wife has a lover whom he hates, he should place some fire in an unbaked pot, arrange a bed of reeds in reverse order from the usual way, apply ghee to the tips of the reeds, also in reverse order, and offer them in the fire as he recites this mantra: “You (he names the man) have made an offering in my fire! I take away your out-breath and your in-breath, your sons and livestock, your sacrifices and good works [or good karma], your hopes and plans.” If a Brahmin who knows this curses a man, that man will surely leave this world stripped of his virility and his good karma.One should therefore never fool around with the wife of a learned Brahmin who knows this (BU 6.4.12).

In contrast with almost all of later Hinduism, which punished a woman extremely severely for adultery, this text punishes only her partner. Moreover, this punishment is intended (only) for a lover of his wife that the husband hates and therefore not necessarily for a lover that he does not hate, a most permissive qualification, suggestive of a Noel Coward drawing room comedy or a French ménage à trois. The men for whom these mantras are intended would have little use for the path of Release. Their primary concerns were Vedic: family, women, offspring, sons, the lineage of the flesh. For them the sacrifice of semen into a womb was a Vedic sacrifice of butter into the fire; the hated lover is cursed for making such an offering in another man’s spousal fire.

THE PATH OF FLAME: MOKSHA AND RENUNCIATION

On the other hand, one of the later Upanishads mocks the sacrificial path (MU 1.2.10-11), and other passages in the Upanishads assume, like the Brahmanas, that repeated death is a Bad Thing, that the whips and scorns of time make life a nightmare from which one longs for final Release or freedom (moksha ), a blessed awakening or, perhaps, a subsidence into a dreamless sleep. The cycle of rebirth was another way of being fenced in (amhas), a painfully restricting prison, from which one wanted to break out, to be sprung, which is what moksha means; the word is used for the release of an arrow from a bow or of a prisoner from a jail. It is sometimes translated as “Freedom.”

Brahman, ineffable, can be described only in the negative: “Not like this, not like that” (neti, neti) (BU 4.5.15). Given that the positive goal, what one is going to, moksha, is never described, one might at least hope to be told what one was going away from. Precisely what was one freed from? At first, moksha meant only freedom from death, a concept firmly grounded within the Vedic sacrificial system that promised the worshiper a kind of immortality. The word appears in the Upanishads in various forms, often as a verb, “to set free.” Through the sacrifice, the patron of the sacrifice frees himself from the grip of death, the grip of days and nights, the grip of the waxing moon and climbs up to heaven: “It is freedom, complete freedom (BU 3.1.3-6,34-35). Or: “Shaking off evil, like a horse its hair, and freeing myself, like the moon from the jaws of the demon of eclipse, I, the perfected self [atman], cast off the imperfect body and attain the world of brahman (CU 8.13.1).” Moksha sometimes comes to designate Release not merely from death or evil in general but, more specifically, from samsara, from the cycle of rebirth (SU 6.16,18). And then, in later Upanishads, moksha is associated with renunciation (samnyasa): “The ascetics who have full knowledge of the Vedanta are purified by the discipline of renunciation. In the worlds of brahman, at the time of the final end, they become fully immortal and fully freed (MU 3.2.6).” And whoever knows this (yo evam veda) will realize that unity with brahman upon his death and be freed from redeath.

The Brihadaranyaka promises freedom from the very things that the Vedic path valued—namely, children and family, the whole catastrophe: “It is when they come to know this self that Brahmins give up the desire for sons, the desire for wealth, and the desire for worlds, and undertake the renunciant life. . . . It was when they knew this that men of old did not desire offspring (BU 3.5.1, 4.4.22).” Such a man no longer amasses karma. He does not think, “I did something good” or “I did something bad,” nor is he stained by bad karma/deeds. He is beyond good and evil.^dd We recognize the confident assurance of the Brahmanas: Even redeath can be fixed, if you know how, but now you do not even have to be a Brahmin to fix it, as long as you have the proper knowledge. This is yet another major innovation.

CONTINUITIES AND DISCONTINUITIES FROM THE VEDAS

The belief that souls are reborn for richer or for poorer, sickness or health, according to their conduct in their previous life, has roots in Vedic ideas of heaven and hell, reward and punishment.¹⁹ So too the idea of the identity of the individual soul (atman) with the world soul (brahman) is a natural expansion of the Vedic idea that the individual body is overlaid upon the cosmic body, the eye on the sun, the breath on the wind (although now new questions arise about the definition of the self).²⁰ The initiated Vedic ritual patron practiced a kind of renunciation,²¹ and the sacrificer would say a mantra renouncing the fruits of his offerings. Even the idea of the transfer of karma, so central to Buddhism (where it is usually called the transfer of merit), has its roots, as we have seen, in the Vedic poems to the god Varuna (whom the poet asks to forgive him for the sins of his fathers) and in the transfer of evil from gods to humans, in the Brahmanas, ²² though it got an added boost from the growth of a moneyed economy.

The Upanishadic sages take the Vedic themes and run with them in new directions and far. Indeed, they openly challenge the Vedas; one sage quotes the Vedic line about existence coming from nonexistence (10.72.1-5) but then remarks: “How can that possibly be?” and argues instead: “In the beginning, this world was simply what is existent [CU 6.2.2].” The Rig Veda passage cited in the Brihadaranyaka mentions a slightly different version of the two paths: the path of the fathers and the path of the immortal gods. But in the Rig Veda, living creatures on these paths go not through the smoke to the moon or through the flame to the sun, but between the mother (both the female parent and the earth) and the father (both the male parent and the sky) (RV 10.88.15; BU 6.2.2).

Much of Upanishadic thought represents a radical break with the Vedas. Though the realization that each soul was one with the infinite soul was hardly breaking news in the Upanishads, the earlier Vedic sources hardly mention this idea and certainly do not develop it systematically. What was particularly new was the suggestion, only in the later Upanishads, that understanding the equation of atman and brahman was a call to action: You must change your life.^de Most people did not change their lives. But eventually, as the lower classes gained more money, time, and education, some of them had the resources to act on ideas that they might have nourished for a long time and break away from the Vedic world entirely.²³ Aspects of the Upanishads certainly appealed to people who no longer wished, or were never allowed, to play ball with the Brahmins. Although the early Upanishads, as we have seen, regard renunciation as a live option only for some people, the later texts, the Renunciation Upanishads (Samnyasa Upanishads), encouraged a person heading for the path of Release (or Freedom) to seek moksha as soon as possible,²⁴ to make a vertical takeoff from any point in his life. For such a person, moksha is just another word for nothing left to lose.^df

We have some knowledge of the people who might have contributed these new ideas. The Upanishads refer to already existing renunciants who operated within the Vedic tradition, and Buddhist texts tell us that such people were also there before the time of the Buddha, who, in the story of his enlightenment, meets a sick man, an old man, a dead man, and then a renunciant,²⁵ perhaps a Vedic renunciant. The fringe mystics that the Rig Veda mentions, the Vratyas and the long-haired ascetic, may also have belonged to some of these motley and marginalized Vedic groups. The Upanishads attest to the existence of ascetic traditions that, by the sixth or fifth century BCE, had developed within the bounds of Vedic tradition, though not necessarily within the Brahmin class.²⁶ Speculation about the nature and purpose of Vedic ritual began eventually, for some thinkers, to subordinate ritual action to spiritual knowledge, which could be attained by asceticism, world renunciation, or the disciplines that came to be known as yoga, designed to transform behavior through their emphasis on refining, controlling, and transforming the mind and the body.²⁷

Some people rejected the world of heaven that the Vedas promised them but remained within the Hindu fold, on the path to Release; others suspected that the Brahmins could not keep their promises of either path and left the Vedic world entirely, to become Buddhists or Jainas. Some non-Brahmins who were still not ready to leave the Vedic fold entirely may have been reacting against the excesses of the priests, seeking, through asceticism or meditation, freedom from an increasingly regulated society or from a religious life dominated by elaborate and expensive rituals that the Brahmins monopolized.²⁸ Other non-Brahmins may have been keen to introduce into the Vedic mix ideas, perhaps even ideas about karma and death, that have left no trace elsewhere, while at the same time they hoped in that way to crash the Brahmin party at last. Within Hinduism, the transition was from meditating on the Vedic sacrifice while doing it (in the Brahmanas and early Upanishads) to meditating upon the sacrifice instead of doing it (from the time of the Renunciation Upanishads), a move implicit in the renunciation of the householder life.

NON-BRAHMIN SECRETS

The Upanishads attribute some of their new doctrines to an important group of non-Brahmins within the Vedic world, Kshatriyas. It is a king, Jaivali Pravahana of Panchala, who teaches the doctrine of the two paths to the young Brahmin Shvetaketu. In theBrihadaranyaka, Shvetaketu approaches the king “while people are waiting upon him,” and he later refers to the king (out of his earshot) as a “second-rate prince” (rajanya-bandhu). The king insists that both Shvetaketu and his father must beg him to be their teacher, as they do, and before he teaches them, he says, “This knowledge has never before been in the possession of a Brahmin. But I will reveal it to you, to keep you or an ancestor of yours from doing harm to me (BU 6.3.8).” (Note that he still acknowledges the Brahmins’ power to curse.) In the Chandogya, the king adds, “As a result, throughout the world government has belonged exclusively to royalty (CU 5.3.6).” In the Kaushitaki, Shvetaketu’s father explicitly regards his royal teacher (another king) as an “outsider,” and the king praises the father for swallowing his pride (KauU 1.1-7). The eclectic Upanishadic kings as gurus, such as Janaka of Videha (BU 3.1.1.1, 2.1.1), may have been drawing upon that legacy when they summoned the leading philosophers of their day, holy men of various schools and persuasions (surely including some Brahmins), to compete in their salons and to debate religious questions at royal gatherings.

Of course the kings in these texts may never have existed; they may simply have been dreamed up by Brahmin authors, purely a literary convention, a fantasy. ^dg Texts record sentiments, not events. But it is surely significant that such a positive fantasy, if it is just a fantasy, about royal sages found its way into the texts of the Brahmin imaginary; certainly it is telling that the Upanishads attributed to the Kshatriyas ideas questioning the centrality of the ritual and thus challenging the power of the Brahmins. When the Brahmin Gargya asks King Ajatashatru of Kashi to be his teacher, the king says, “Isn’t it a reversal of the norm for a Brahmin to become the pupil of a Kshatriya?” But he does it anyway (BU 2.1.15). These passages may represent a Kshatriya reaction to the Brahmin takeover during the preceding centuries, the period of the Brahmanas.

Nor were Kshatriyas the only non-Brahmins who contributed new ideas to the Upanishads:

RAIKVA, THE MAN UNDER THE CART

King Janashruti was devoted to giving a great deal of everything, especially food, thinking, “People will eat food from me everywhere.” One night some wild geese were flying overhead, and one said, “Look, the light of Janashruti fills the sky!” The other replied, “Why speak of Janashruti? For just as the person with the highest throw of the dice wins all the lower throws, Raikva, the gatherer, takes the credit for all the good things that people do. So does anyone who knows what Raikva knows.” Janashruti overheard them. He summoned his steward and repeated to him what the geese had said.

The steward searched in vain and said to the king, “Can’t find him.” The king said, “Look for Raikva in a place where one would search for a non-Brahmin.” The steward saw a man under a cart scratching his sores. He approached him respectfully and asked, “Sir, are you Raikva, the gatherer?” The man replied, “Yes, I am.” The steward returned to the king and said, “Got him!” Janashruti offered Raikva hundreds of cows and gold if he would teach him the deity that he worshiped, but Raikva refused, saying, “Take them back, Shudra!” When, however, Janashruti offered him all this and his daughter, Raikva lifted up her face and said, “With just this face you could have bought me cheap (CU 4.1-2).”

Janashruti is a rich man and a king. Raikva is, by contrast, evidently a homeless person or a street person. He is also a man who despises cows and gold (two things that Brahmins always like best) and who likes women. It is extremely cheeky of him to call Janashruti a Shudra. Raikva is said to be a gatherer, which may refer to his knack of gathering up everyone else’s good karma,^dh as a successful gambler gathers up the dice of the losers, another early example of the transfer of karma from one person to another. But “gathering” may also refer to Raikva’s poverty, for he may have been a gleaner (like Ruth in the Hebrew Bible), gathering up the dregs of the harvest after everyone else has taken the real crop, or even, like so many homeless people, gathering up other people’s garbage for his own use. The two meanings work well together: The man who lives on richer people’s garbage also lives off their good deeds. (Much later, in the Mahabharata [14.90], several people, including a mongoose, tell King Yudhishthira about the great virtue of “the way of gleaning.”) At first the steward presumably searches for a Brahmin, for he has to be specifically instructed to search elsewhere. That Janashruti can understand the talking animals (wild geese, which often carry messages in Hindu mythology) is evidence of his high spiritual achievement, but the non-Brahmin Raikva is higher still; his secret knowledge (about the wind and breath as gatherers) trumps Janashruti’s ace of Vedic generosity.

An innovator of unknown paternal lineage and hence questionable class appears in the story that immediately follows the tale of Raikva, the story of Satyakama Jabala, the hero of the vignette at the head of this chapter. For Satyakama’s mother had slept with many men. (“I got around a lot” [bahu aham caranti] has the same double meaning in Sanskrit as it has in English—to move from one place to another and from one sexual partner to another—as well as a third, purely Indian meaning that is also relevant here: to wander as a mendicant.) An ancient Indian text that makes the son of such a woman a spiritual leader is a feminist tract. Such a text also takes truth rather than birth as the criterion of Brahminhood, though it still maintains that only a Brahmin, however defined, may learn the Veda. (Here we may recall the Brahmana statement “Why do you inquire about the father or the mother of a Brahmin? When you find knowledge in someone, that is his father and his grandfather.”)²⁹ Satyakama needs to know his male lineage in order to prove that he was born in a family that has a right to learn the Veda; by conventional rules, he cannot matriculate in Varanasi U and sign up for Upanishads 108 unless he knows who his father is. But this text says it is enough for him to know who he himself is. Eventually Satyakama’s teacher sends him out to herd a hundred lean, weak cows. They thrive and increase to a thousand, and after some years the bull speaks to him, and so do the fire, and a goose, and a cormorant, each telling him one foot of the brahman, here imagined as a quadruped (CU 4.4-8). His ability to make weak cows into strong cows is a Vaishya trait, but his ability to converse with these animals is a sign of his extraordinary religious talent, rare in any class.

SHRAMANAS AND BRAHMANAS

Though the idea of karma seems to have strong Vedic roots, strong enough that it seems almost inevitable that someone would have come up with it sooner or later (it was, one might say, the karma of the Upanishads to have that idea), ideas such as the identity of the atman with brahman, transmigration, and the Release from transmigration through renunciation and asceticism don’t have such strong Vedic ties and send us out, like Janashruti’s steward, to look for non-Vedic sources.

There were already in existence at this time a number of ascetic movements that were non-Vedic either in coming from some other, indigenous pool of ideas or in rejecting the Vedas, and these movements too may have come into, or influenced, the Upanishads.³⁰The karma theory may have developed many of its crucial details within Jainism and moved from there to Buddhism and Hinduism; ³¹ the Jainas have always taken vegetarianism to the greatest extremes, taking pains to avoid injuring even tiny insects, and this too heavily influenced Hindus. The breakaway groups not only abhorred sacrifice but also rejected the Veda as revelation and disregarded Brahminical teachings and Brahminical claims to divine authority,³² three more crucial points that distinguished them from Hindus, even from those Hindus who were beginning to take up some of the new doctrines and practices. The Buddhists also denied the existence of an individual soul, scorned the gods (particularly Indra^di) as insignificant and/or ridiculous and, like the authors of some of the Upanishads, argued that conduct rather than birth determined the true Brahmin, all significant departures from Hindu doctrines. Moreover, Buddhist monks lived together in monasteries, at first only during the rainy season and later at other times as well, while the Hindu renouncers during this period renounced human companionship too and wandered alone.

A number of groups engaged in friendly intellectual combat at this time. There were probably early adherents of what were to become the six major philosophical schools of Hinduism: Critical Inquiry (Mimamsa ), Logic (Nyaya), Particularism (Vaisheshika), Numbers (Sankhya), Yoga, and Vedanta. Ajivikas (contemporaries of the Jainas and Buddhists) rejected free will, an essential component of the doctrine of karma. Lokayatas (“This Worldly” people, also called Materialists and Charvakas, followers of a founder named Charvaka) not only rejected the doctrine of reincarnation (arguing that when the body was destroyed, the spirit that had been created specifically for it dissolved back into nothingness) but believed that physical sense data were the only source of knowledge and that the Vedas were “the prattling of knaves, characterized by the three faults of untruthfulness, internal contradiction, and useless repetition.” ³³ But most of what we know of the Materialists comes from their opponents and almost surely does not do them justice. Even the permissive Kama-sutra (c. second century CE) gives a simplistic version of the Materialist position: “Materialists say: ‘People should not perform religious acts, for their results are in the world to come and that is doubtful. Who but a fool would take what is in his own hand and put it in someone else’s hand? Better a pigeon today than a peacock tomorrow, and better a copper coin that is certain than a gold coin that is doubtful (1.2.21-23).’ ” The Materialists, as well as the Nastikas, common or garden-variety atheists (people who say “There is no (na-asti) [heaven or gods]”), were among a number of rebellious intellectual movements that gained momentum in the vigorous public debates of the fifth century BCE.

Renunciants are sometimes called Shramanas (“toilers,” designating wanderers, ascetics), in contrast with Brahmanas (the Sanskrit word for Brahmins; the name of Shramanas stuck in part because of the felicitous assonance).^dj “Shramana” at first often referred to ascetics both within and without the Hindu fold,³⁴ including Ajivikas, Nastikas, Lokayatas, and Charvakas.³⁵ But the Brihadaranyaka groups Shramanas with thieves, abortionists, Chandalas and Pulkasas (two Pariah groups), and ascetics (BU 4.3.22), and eventually the word “Shramana” came to mean anyone low or vile or, finally, naked.

Shramanas and Brahmins were said to fight like snakes and mongooses³⁶ or as we would say, like cats and dogs. Many Brahmins loathed the non-Vedic Shramanas (Buddhists and Jainas), who had entirely rejected, in favor of forest meditation, the sacrificial system that was the Brahmin livelihood. But the Shramanas within the Hindu fold, who still paid lip service, at least, to the Vedas and sacrifice but rejected the householder life (also a factor in Brahmin livelihood), were even more loathsome, a fifth column within the ranks. Both Shramanas and Brahmins must have been the source, and the audience, for the Upanishads, some of which they would have interpreted in different ways. Thus Brahmins, or the upper classes more generally, would take “renounce karma” to mean renouncing Vedic ritual, while to the Magadhi crowd that the Buddha preached to, it would have meant renouncing the fruits of actions of all kinds. Largely in response to the Shramana challenge, the Brahmins themselves absorbed a great deal of the renunciant ideal³⁷ and came to epitomize one sort of renouncer—a paradigm of purity, self-denial, and self-control—even while they excoriated the other sort of renouncer, the low-caste drifter.

But in addition to the Brahminic and Shramanic strains enriching the Upanishads, there was, as always, the great Indian catchall of “local beliefs and customs,”³⁸ or that ever-ready source of the unknown, the Adivasis or aboriginals, to whom more than one scholar attributes “some more or less universal Hindu beliefs like rebirth and transmigration of the jiva [soul] from animal to human existence.”³⁹ There is also always the possibility of infusion of ideas from the descendants of the Indus Valley Civilization, an unknowable pool of what might be radically different ideas, a tantalizing source that some would, and others would not, distinguish from the Adivasis and Dravidians. But another, better answer for the source of these ideas about individual salvation, better perhaps than a pool whose existence can’t be proved, might be simply to admit that some individual, some brilliant, original theologian whose name is lost to us, composed some of the Upanishads. Lining up the usual suspects like this—a natural development from Vedic ideas (no genius required); Kshatriyas; some brilliant person in the Vedic camp; the IVC and its descendants; Adivasis—is often nothing more than confessing, “I can’t find it in the Veda.”

WOMEN AND OTHER LOWLIFE

The criterion of individual intellectual talent colors an Upanishadic story of a Brahmin with two wives, who are distinguished not by their class (as multiple wives often are) but by their minds:

THE THEOLOGICAL WIFE AND THE WORLDLY WIFE

Yajnavalkya had two wives, Maitreyi and Katyayani. Of the two, Maitreyi was a woman who took part in theological discussions, while Katyayani’s understanding was limited to women’s affairs. One day, as he was preparing to set out to wander as an ascetic, Yajnavalkya said, “Maitreyi, I am about to go away from this place. So come, let me make a settlement between you and Katyayani.” Maitreyi replied, “What is the point in getting something that will not make me immortal? Tell me instead all that you know.” Yajnavalkya replied, “I have always been very fond of you, and now you have made me even more so. Come, my dear, and I will explain it to you. But do try to concentrate (BU 4.5; cf. BU 2.4).”

And he explains the doctrine of the self to her and goes away. Katyayani never even appears.^dk Presumably she (like Martha in the gospel story) takes care of the house (which, also presumably, she will inherit when their husband abandons both wives to take the ascetic path) while the other woman talks theology.

Some women therefore took part in the new theological debates, though none is depicted as an author. Gargi, the feistiest woman in the Upanishads,^dl is a staunch defender of Yajnavalkya. On one occasion she questions him about a series of increasingly important worlds, culminating in the worlds of brahman. Then Yajnavalkya says, “Don’t ask too many questions, Gargi, or your head will shatter apart!” And she shuts up (BU 3.6) (as do, on other occasions, several men who are threatened with having their heads shatter⁴⁰). Another time, she asks Yajnavalkya two questions in front of a group of distinguished Brahmins; she likens herself to “a fierce warrior, stringing his unstrung bow and taking two deadly arrows in his hand, rising to challenge an enemy,” an extraordinarily masculine, and violent, simile for a woman. When he answers her, at some length, she cries out, “Distinguished Brahmins! You should count yourselves lucky if you escape from this man without paying him anything more than your respects. None of you will ever defeat him in a theological debate (BU 3.8).” This is one tough lady, cast from the same mold as Urvashi and, later, Draupadi. (A later text even suggests that in addition to his other two wives, Yajnavalkya was also married to Gargi.⁴¹)

Women also had other options. Buddhism offered women security within a socially approved institution as well as a double liberation, on both the worldly and the spiritual planes, glorying in the release not just from rebirth but from the kitchen and the husband.⁴² Yet the Buddhists did not value nuns as highly as monks; there is even a tradition that the Buddha himself cautioned against admitting women, which, he warned, would spell the downfall of the order in India within five hundred years,⁴³ a prophecy that did, more or less, come true.

This period also saw the beginning of the composition of a large literature of supplementary Sanskrit texts, the Shrauta Sutras (c. 500 BCE), which describe the solemn, public rites of the Vedas (the shruti), always performed by Brahmins, and the Grihya Sutras (c. 300 BCE), the texts of the household (griha), describing the domestic and life cycle rites, often performed by householders who were not necessarily Brahmins. The Grihya Sutras regulated and normalized domestic life, bringing about the penetration of ritual regulation into the daily life of the household, on a scale not seen before. We may look at this development in two different ways, both as a greater power among householders who now had many rituals that they could perform without the help of a Brahmin and as the extension of Brahmin power, through the codification of texts about householders’ rituals that had not previously been under Brahmin regulation. ⁴⁴ While the earlier Shrauta Sutras had made mandatory large-scale ritual performances, in some of which (such as the horse sacrifice) the sacrificer’s wife had to be present and even to speak, though not to speak Vedic mantras, the Grihya Sutras that regulated daily practices to be performed in the home required the more active participation of the sacrificer’s wife and other members of the household. This too may explain the proactive behavior of some of the women in the Upanishads.

ANIMALS

Low or excluded people are often associated with animals, like Raikva and Satyakama with geese and bulls, and the fact that certain animals actually proclaim new Upanishadic doctrines tells us something important about the porosity of the class structure in religious circles at this time.

Dogs are satirically transformed from the lowest to the highest caste in an Upanishadic passage that may have been inspired by the Vedic poem likening priests (who begin their prayers with the sacred syllable “Om!”) to frogs singing in the rainy season:

THE SONG OF THE DOGS

A group of dogs asked a Vedic priest, “Please, sir, we’d like to find some food by singing for our supper. We are really hungry.” He asked them to return the next morning, and so the dogs filed in, sliding in slyly as priests slide in slyly in a file, each holding on to the back of the one in front of him. They sat down together and began to hum. Then they sang, “Om! Let’s eat! Om! Let’s drink. Om! May the gods bring food! Lord of food, bring food! Bring it! Bring it! Om! (CU 1.12-13).”

Apparently they are rewarded, for the passage concludes with a statement that anyone who understands the secret meaning of the word “hum” (a meaning that the text supplies) “will come to own and to eat his own food.” To have dogs, the most impure of animals, impersonate Brahmins makes this remarkable satire, so reminiscent of Orwell’s Animal Farm, truly bolshie. For dogs are already stigmatized as eaters of carrion; when someone annoys Yajnavalkya by asking where the heart is lodged, he replies, impatiently, “In the body, you idiot! If it were anywhere other than in ourselves, dogs would eat it, or birds would tear it up (BU 3.9.25).” The author of this text may be poking fun at Brahmins or pleading for more sympathy for dogs (and therefore for the lower castes), or both or none of the above.

At the other end of the animal spectrum, the horse’s continuing importance in the Upanishads is a constant reminder of the Kshatriya presence in these texts. A horse auspiciously opens the very first line of the very first Upanishad: “The head of the sacrificial horse is the dawn; his eye is the sun; his breath the wind; and his gaping mouth the fire common to all men. . . . When he yawns, lightning flashes; when he shakes himself, it thunders; and when he urinates, it rains. His whinny is speech itself (BU 1.1.1).” The Vedic Dawn Horse (Eohippus ) has cosmic counterparts; his eye is the sun just as, in the funeral hymn in the Rig Veda, the eye of the dead man is dispersed (back) to the sun, and the sun is born from the eye of the Primeval Man. The stallion’s gaping mouth of flame is later echoed in the submarine mare with fire in her mouth.

Another equine image, the chariot as a metaphor for the control of the senses, familiar from the Brahmana story of Vrisha, reappears now: “A wise man should keep his mind vigilantly under control, just as he would control a wagon yoked to unruly horses (SU 2.9).” A more extended passage explains this metaphor:

Think of the self as a rider in a chariot that is the body; the intellect is the charioteer, and the mind the reins. The senses are the horses and the paths around them are the objects of the senses. The senses do not obey a man who cannot control his mind, as bad horses disdain the charioteer; such a man continues to be subject to reincarnation. But the senses obey a man whose mind is always under control, as good horses heed the charioteer; such a man reaches the end of the journey (KU 3.3-6).

The senses must be harnessed, yoked, yogaed.^dm (Sometimes anger rather than desire is the sense that must be controlled, and desire is positioned as the charioteer; desire reins in anger like a charioteer with horses.)⁴⁵ For horses, like the senses, straddle the line between wild and tame, always under hair-trigger control like that mare who holds the doomsday flame in her mouth. Indeed the image of the driver of the chariot gives way in later texts to the image of the tiny elephant driver (the mahout) who is barely able to control the enormous rutting elephant on which he rides. Eternal vigilance is the price of moksha.

REBIRTH, NONVIOLENCE, AND VEGETARIANISM

Animals also appear in the lists of unwanted rebirths, in comparison with the two preferable options of rebirth as upper-class humans and Release from rebirth entirely. Dogs in particular represent the horrors of low birth; people who behave badly can expect to enter a nasty womb, like that of a dog. Significantly, the Good Animals, horses and cows, do not appear in the rebirth lists as likely options. One might assume that the belief that we might become reincarnate as animals contributes to the rise of vegetarianism in India, but no sympathy is extended to the animals in the rebirth lists, nor do the early Upanishads betray as many misgivings about eating animals (even reincarnated and/or talking animals) as the Brahmanas did toward the animals in the Other World. Yet the belief that humans and animals were part of a single system of the recycling of souls implies the fungibility of animals and humans and could easily sound a warning: Do not kill/eat an animal, for it might be your grandmother, or your grandchild, or (in the other world) you. For you are who you ate, and you may become whom you eat.

Nonviolence toward animals is mentioned only glancingly, twice, in the early Upanishads and then not as a word (such as ahimsa) but as a concept. The Brihadaranyaka stipulates that on a particular night, “a man should not take the life of any being that sustains life, not even that of a lizard (BU 1.5.14).” But presumably this is permissible on other nights. And the very last passage of the Chandogya states that the man who studies the Veda, becomes a householder, rears virtuous children, reins in his senses, “and refrains from killing any creature except on special occasions”^dnreaches the world of brahman and does not return again (CU 8.15.1). Here nonviolence against animals is specifically connected with the householder life, the path of rebirth, and is qualified in the usual way: There are occasions when it is good to eat animals, such as hospitality to honored guests.⁴⁶

Yet most Indian traditions of reincarnation advise the renouncer to avoid eating meat,⁴⁷ and renouncers were likely to be vegetarians; to renounce the flesh is to renounce flesh. Morever, since the renouncer renounces the sacrificial ritual (karma), he thereby loses one of the main occasions when it is legal to kill animals.⁴⁸ The Brahmanas and Upanishads sow the seeds for the eventual transition away from animal sacrifice. Where Indra in the Vedas ate bulls and buffalo, now the gods neither eat nor drink but become sated by just looking at the soma nectar (CU 3.6.1), just as the king merely smells the odor of the burning marrow in the horse sacrifice. Even in the Vedic ritual, vegetable oblations (rice and barley) were the minimally acceptable lowest form of the sacrificial victim, thepashu, but the original animal victim lingers on in the way that the Vedic texts treat even the rice cake like an animal: “When the rice cake [is offered], it is indeed a pashu that is offered up. Its stringy chaff, that is the hairs; its husk is the skin; the flour is the blood; the small grains are the flesh; whatever is the best part [of the grain] is the bone.”⁴⁹

Gradually many branches of Hinduism banished all animal sacrifices. Though this latter transition is almost always couched in terms of morality (ahimsa), there may also have been an element of necessity in it, the need to answer the challenge posed by the antisacrificial polemic of Buddhism and Jainism, which had converted many powerful political leaders. The Buddhists and Jainas too may have had moral reasons to abolish the sacrifice (as they said they did), but they may also have wanted to make a clean break with Hinduism by eliminating the one element by which most Hindus defined themselves, Vedic sacrifice. It was politic too for the Buddhists to promote a religion that did not need Brahmins to intercede for individual humans with gods, indeed that denied the efficacy of gods altogether, and this was the final move that distinguished Buddhists and Jainas from Hindu renunciants, who may not have employed Brahmins themselves but did not deny their authority for others. It was factors such as these, more than compassion for furry creatures, that made Buddhists and Jainas abjure animal sacrifice.^do (The stricter ahimsa of the Jainas, which forbade them to take any animal life, prevented them from farming, which killed the tiny creatures caught under the plow; they were therefore forced to become bankers and get rich.)

But when we fold this mix back into the broader issues, we must distinguish among killing animals, tormenting animals, sacrificing them, eating them, and, finally, worshiping them. Nonviolence, pacifism, compassion for animals, and vegetarianism are not the same thing at all. Indeed Manu equates, in terms of merit, performing a horse sacrifice and abjuring the eating of meat (5.53). It is usual for an individual to eat meat without killing animals (most nonvegetarians, few of whom hunt or butcher, do it every day) and equally normal for an individual to kill people without eating them (what percentage of hit men or soldiers devour their fallen enemies?). We have noted that the horse in the Vedic sacrifice was killed but not eaten. Similarly, vegetarianism and killing may have been originally mutually exclusive; in the earliest period of Indian civilization, in places where there was no standing army, meat-eating householders would, in time of war, like volunteer firemen, become soldiers and consecrate themselves as warriors by giving up the eating of meat.⁵⁰ They either ate meat or killed.^dp

In later Hinduism, the strictures against eating and killing continued to work at odds, so that it would have been regarded as better (for most people, in general; the rules would vary according to the caste status of the person in each case) to kill a Pariah than to kill a Brahmin, but better to eat a Brahmin (if one came across a dead one) than to eat a Pariah (under the same circumstances). The degree of purity/pollution in the food that is eaten seems to be an issue distinct from the issue of the amount of violence involved in procuring it. It makes a difference if you find the meat already killed or have to kill it, and this would apply not only to Brahmins versus Pariahs (admittedly an extreme case) but to cows versus dogs as roadkill.

Nevertheless, the logical assumption that any animal that one ate had to have been killed by someone led to a natural association between the ideal of vegetarianism and the ideal of nonviolence toward living creatures. And this ideal came to prevail in India, reinforced by the idea of reincarnation. Thus, in the course of a few centuries, the Upanishads took the Vedic depiction of the natural and social orders as determined by power and violence (himsa) and reversed it in a 180-degree turn toward nonviolence. The logical link is the realization, so basic to Hinduism in all periods, that every human and every animal dies, that every human and every animal must eat, and that eating requires that someone or something (since vegetables are part of the continuum of life too) must die. The question is simply how one is going to live, and kill to live, until death.

FAST-FORWARD

ADDICTION AND RENUNCIATION

One reason why the renunciant movements were accepted alongside the more conventional householder religion was that such movements addressed a problem that was of great concern to the wider tradition, the problem of addiction. A profound psychological understanding of addiction (sakti,^dq particularly excessive attachment, ati-sakti^dr) to material objects and of the true hallmark of addiction, the recurrent failure to give them up even when one wants to give them up—the “just one more and I will stop” scenario—is evident throughout the history of Hinduism. Manu puts it well: “A man should not, out of desire, become addicted to any of the sensory objects; let him rather consider in his mind what is entailed in becoming excessively addicted to them (4.16).” One reaction to this perceived danger was the movement to control addiction through renunciation and/or asceticism, building dikes to hold back the oceanic tides of sensuality. Fasting and vows of chastity were widely accepted, in moderated forms, even among householders.

The Hindu appreciation of the value of exquisite pleasure (kama) was balanced by an awareness of the dangers that it posed, when cultivated to the point at which it became a vice (a danger appreciated even by the Kama-sutra), and by a number of religious disciplines designed to control the sensual addictions to material objects. Most sorts of renunciation were peaceful, both for the individual renouncer and for the society from which the renouncer withdrew, offsides, hors de combat, while remaining perceived as broadly beneficial to the community at large. But other kinds of renunciation were violent both to the physical body and to the social body, to the world of families. Hinduism was violent not only in its sensuality but in its reaction against that sensuality—violent, that is, both in its addictions and in the measures that it took to curb those addictions (acknowledging, like Dr. Samuel Johnson, that it is easier to abstain than to be moderate).

The senses, as we have seen, were analogized not to unglamorous tame animals like pigs or dogs or to more violent wild animals like lions or crocodiles, but to noble, beautiful, expensive horses. Both the senses and horses were a Good Thing for high-spirited warrior kings (though dangerous even for them; remember King Triyaruna and his chariot) but not such a Good Thing for more bovine priests and householders whose goal was control. And as Brahmins were perceived (at least by Brahmins) as needed to control kings, so asceticism was thought necessary to rein in the treacherous senses.

Some renouncers chose to marginalize themselves socially in order not to fall prey to the violence and tyranny of the senses—that is, to addiction. At the opposite end from renunciation on the spectrum of sensuality, addiction, like renunciation, served to marginalize upper-caste males and consign them to the ranks of the other marginalized people who are a central concern of our narrative, women and lower castes. Addiction to the vices marginalized some Brahmins and rajas by stripping them of their power and status; kings, at least in stories, lost their kingdoms by gambling or were carried away by hunting and landed in dangerous or polluting circumstances. Hunting was classified as a vice only when it was pursued when there was no need for food, just as gambling became a vice when undertaken independent of a need for money, and sex when there was no need for offspring. Hunting therefore is not a vice for poor people, who hunt for squirrels or whatever they can find to eat, though tribal hunters were regarded as unclean because of their habit of hunting. To some extent, these vices leveled the playing field.

ASCETICISM AND EROTICISM

But sensuality continued to keep its foot in the door of the house of religion; the erotic was a central path throughout the history of India. Though asceticism remained alive and well and living in India, in other parts of the forest, householders continued to obey the command to be fruitful and multiply. Material evidence, such as epigraphy, has recently indicated that Hinduism (like Buddhism) on the ground was less concerned with soteriology and more with worldly values than textual scholars have previously assumed. But the religious texts too show this ambivalence. The tension between the two paths, the violent (sacrificial), worldly, materialistic, sensual, and potentially addictive path of smoke and rebirth, on the one hand, and the nonviolent (vegetarian), renunciant, ascetic, spiritual, and controlled path of flame and Release, on the other, was sometimes expressed as the balance between worldly involvement and withdrawal from life, between the outwardly directed drive toward activity (pravritti) and the inwardly directed drive toward withdrawal (nivritti), between bourgeois householders and homeless seekers, or between traditions that regarded karma as a good or a bad thing, respectively.

From time to time one person or one group raised its voice to accuse the other of missing the point. Hostility was rare but not unknown. One Brahmana depicts the renunciant life in unflattering terms: “Fathers have always crossed over the deep darkness by means of a son, for a son gives a father comfort and carries him across; the self is born from the self. What use is dirt or the black antelope skin [of the ascetic]? What use are beards and asceticism? Brahmins, get a son; that is what people keep saying.”⁵¹ The householder’s tendency to regard ascetics with a mixture of reverence, envy (perhaps tinged with guilt), pity, and distrust⁵² sometimes fueled the widespread image of false ascetics, fake fakirs, and mendacious mendicants, an image just about as old as the tradition of genuine ascetics.⁵³ The 1891 census listed yogis under “miscellaneous and disreputable vagrants”⁵⁴ (think of Raikva), and to this day villagers express “considerable skepticism about yogis in general in Hindu society.” Throughout India, people tell stories about yogis who are “mere men” and succumb to temptation by women.⁵⁵ The householder could express his ambivalence by honoring “real” ascetics and dishonoring the fakes. Hindus have always been as skeptic as they are omphaloskeptic.

A related tension runs between the vitality of the Hindu sensual and artistic traditions, on the one hand, and the puritanism of many Hindu sects, on the other. It also led to an ongoing ambivalence toward women. Renouncers tended to encourage a virulent loathing and fear of women, while worldly Hindus celebrated women in their sculptures, their poetry, and, sometimes, real life. In addition to various options that were later developed to accommodate moksha, one solution was to remove from men entirely the responsibility for the conflict between sexuality and chastity and to project it onto women.⁵⁶ For men who took the option of fertility, therefore, women were revered as wives and mothers, while for those who were tempted by chastity, women were feared as insatiable seductresses. This schizoid pattern emerges again and again in attitudes to women throughout the history of Hinduism.

These differences fueled debates on a number of key philosophical and practical issues in Hinduism. For Hindus continue to drive, like King Vrisha in the Brahmana story, with one foot on the accelerator of eroticism and one foot on the brake of renunciation. The tension appears, for instance, in the interaction of two forms of worship: on the one hand, a form that visualizes the god with qualities (sa-guna), as an animal, or a man or a woman, with arms and legs and a face, a god that you can tell stories about, a god you can love, a god that becomes incarnate from time to time, assuming an illusory form out of compassion for human beings who need to be able to imagine and love and worship the deity, and, on the other hand, a worship that sees god ultimately without qualities (nir-guna), beyond form, ineffable and unimaginable, an aspect of brahman. This second viewpoint is often a force for tolerance, rather than difference: If you believe that the deity is ultimately without form, you are less likely to insist on the particular form that you happen to worship or to stigmatize the different form that your neighbor worships. Yet the creative tension between renouncers and Hindus who chose to remain in the thick of human things at times threatened the tolerance and diversity of Hinduism.

We must, in any case, beware of essentializing these oppositions, as the early Orientalists did, as even Karl Marx did, when he characterized Hinduism, in an article in the New York Tribune, in June 10, 1853, as “at once a religion of sensualist exuberance, and a religion of self-torturing asceticism; a religion of the Lingam and of the juggernaut; the religion of the Monk, and of the Bayadere [dancing girl].” Rather, we should regard these dichotomies as nothing more than general guidelines or intellectual constructs that help us find our way through the labyrinth of ancient Indian religious groups. Just because the Hindus themselves often formulated their ideas in terms of polar opposites—and they did—there is no reason to believe that these categories corresponded to any sort of lived experience. For though the ideal of renunciation seemed in ways to challenge or even to threaten the traditional Vedic system, it was entirely assimilated by Hinduism, the world’s great “have your rice cake and eat it” tradition. To practicing Hindus, it was all part of the same religion, one house with many mansions; their enduring pluralism allowed Hindus to recognize the fissures but to accept them as part of a unified world. In a way somewhat analogous to the attitude of lay Buddhists or Catholics to nuns and monks, many Hindu householders were happy to support renouncers in order to gain secondhand merit from a regimen that they themselves were not willing to undergo, and renouncers were happy to be supported by householders in exchange for their blessings and, sometimes, their teachings. Despite the recurrent conflicts and occasional antagonisms between the two paths, by and large the creative tension between them was peaceful; the two options generally respected each other and lived together happily for centuries, carrying on in tandem. The idea of nonviolence supplemented rather than replaced the Vedic demand for blood sacrifice. Renunciation remained a separate live option alongside the earlier options. Whole groups—the lower castes, for instance—never saw any conflict between the two ideals or simply ignored both. Where a less vigorous, or less tolerant, tradition might have burned the Upanishadic sages at the stake, where most other religions would have either kicked out or swallowed up the antinomian ascetics, Vedic Hinduism moved over to make a place of honor for them.

In general, the followers of the path of Release attached no opprobrium to the path of rebirth. Time and again the road forks, but the two paths continue side by side, sometimes joining, then diverging again, and people can easily leap from one to the other at any moment. Vedic tapas, outward-directed heat, seems at first to conflict with Upanishadic tapas, inward-directed heat. But ultimately both forms of spiritual heat, as well as erotic heat (kama ),⁵⁷ are aspects of the same human force, simply channeled along different paths. Asceticism ricochets against addiction and back again. Indian logic used as a standard example of inference one that we use too: Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, smoke being the sign (linga, the same word as the “sign” for male gender) of fire. Which is to say, wherever there is the option of transmigration, the path of smoke (samsara), there is also the option of Release from transmigration, the path of fire (moksha). Less obvious but equally true: Wherever there is the option of Release from transmigration, fire, there is the option of transmigration, smoke.