Dharma

Chapter 5: Classical Brahmanical Dharma

CHApTEr 5 Classical Brahmanical Dharma We now turn to the post-Vedic texts in which Brahmanical dharma blossomed: the dharmasūtras, Manu, and the two Sanskrit epics. These texts open up the concept of dharma for what will come to be called Hinduism.If Indians recall the epics for their manner of relating dharma to what is familiar in everyday lives, they tend to cite Manu, often enough polemically, for its proverbial authority on particulars of traditional law. This chapter will foreground the legal meaning of dharma by often translating it as “law.” Since the dharmasūtras and Manu are named after authorities on law,we can refer to their titles in italics as a shorthand (e.g.,Manu),and to their reputed spokesmen by citing their names without italics (e.g., Manu, Āpastamba). To probe Manu’s relation to the dharmasūtras, one must differentiate Sūtras from Śāstras. Sūtra means “thread,” and Sūtras are short pithy aphorisms, typically in prose, which, in their sequence, call for a guru’s explanation of the thread that connects them. Two of the oldest dharmasūtras, Āpastamba and Baudhāyana, come at the end of longer texts, where they follow earlier discussions of Vedic solemn and domestic ritual. This makes them continuations of aphorisms on Vedic ritual and implies that the spiritual thread of what they have to say about dharma is transmitted within a Vedic school.The two other surviving dharmasūtras, Gautama and Vasiṣṭha, are more independent works named after ancient Vedic sages and have only tenuous associations withVedic schools.Śāstras, from a root meaning “to instruct,” are more straightforward “manuals” or “treatises ,” and are typically composed in verse. Manu, as an independent “treatise” of this kind, is entirely in verse, and goes one better than the dharmasūtras in claiming the first man, Manu, as its authority on law. Manu does not name other textual or sagely authorities on dharma. But it clearly builds on what the earlier dharmasūtras, particularly Classical Brahmanical Dharma 61 Gautama, have said about it, and uses the term dharmaśāstra in a way that covers both dharmasūtra and dharmaśāstra. While introducing dharmaśāstra, this chapter will also begin to introduce the epics around the figures of their great kings and queens—Rāma and Sītā of the Rāmāyaṇa; Yudhiṣṭhira and Draupadī of the Mahābhārata—whose stands for dharma we shall study more closely in chapters 6 and 7. But herein we will center discussion on Manu’s relation to the dharmasūtras, since with this “legal tradition” we get down to the social and customary thicket of it. We may think of chapter 5 as a sociological interlude.And since we must,to a certain extent, relish this thicket, it may be useful to remember how Brer Rabbit got Brers Fox and Bear to throw him into a briar patch so that he could devise his escape from them. Dharmaśāstra is the sociological thicket of Brahmanical dharma, and the spirituality of Hindu dharma must be traced through its “thorns,” which is what Manu itself, from its elitist and totalitarian perspective, calls reprobates it wants its king to summarily eradicate. The “Five Great Sacrifices” Let us start with a group of piety practices that sets the tone and spirit of Brahmanical hospitality: the prescription of a novel cluster of routines for householders of the three upper classes, called “twice-born” because their access toVedic ritual gave them a spiritual second birth. This set of rites, developed in the early dharmasūtras, after first being mentioned in discussions of domestic ritual, called for the daily practice of “five great sacrifices”: (1) a food offering on the ground or in the air to beings (e.g., crows), (2) food hospitality to guests, (3) some wood as a fire offering to the gods, (4) a water offering to ancestors, and (5) personal Vedic recitation or “recitation to oneself” as the offering to Brahman, the world-source or absolute as embodied in holy Vedic utterance. We may recall that personal recitation, which we met in chapter 3, was a Brahmin’s main means of “cooking the world” and think of it now as the spiritual unifier of all five offerings , since Brahman is the spiritual All, and the other four are also done with Vedic utterances or overtones. Using a term that described “great” and complexVedic ceremonies for these five simple rites,it was claimed...