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Chapter 3 Viniyoga The Recovery of a Hermeneutic Principle The application is more important. Brhaddevata 5.94 59 A discussion of Vedic ritual metonymy leads to a special form of associative thought—a particular form of mantric interpretation called viniyoga . Viniyoga is a kind of application of Vedic mantra through the creations of new sets of associations in new ritual situations and is a special form of a hermeneutic principle that involves metonymy. It also involves two assumptions: (1) that mantras have some semantic content, even if it is only in terms of a single word association; and (2) that some imaginative world is built in juxtaposing, or metonymically linking, ritual poetic word and ritual action. To put it in terms of our earlier examples, the Hail Marys, no matter how rote, typically seem to involve some image of Mary, no matter how faint. The Gita bhajan, no matter how exhausted, would involve some trace of Krsna, no matter how rote. And the brahmin in the film Agnicayana is clearly using the mental images of rebirth suggested by the mantra to describe the link between word and action. The brahmin is, in effect, describing the principle behind the viniyoga or application of that particular mantra in that ritual situation. VINIYOGA and the Semantic Content of Mantra But how do we know mantras mean anything at all when it comes to dispelling fear, for example? Aren’t they just sounds, despite some residual meaning in the words, as many Indologists have implied? A further, if brief, review of mantra’s usage in early India might be useful here. The Rg Vedic mantra is usually a single verse dedicated to a particular deity, with a particular purpose in mind—agricultural prosperity, long life, material wealth, sons, and the like. During the early and middle Vedic periods (ca. 1500–900 BCE and ca. 900–400 BCE, respectively), mantras were used both in the context of public, sacrificial (Šrauta) rituals and in domestic, household (Grhya) rituals. Many scholars have engaged the issue of mantra as speech act: generally defined as an utterance that is not simply a statement of fact, but a doing of something, a purposeful act. As is by now well known, mantras are helpfully described through the linguistic categories of John Searle, who, in a sophisticated expansion of Austin’s linguistic taxonomy, distinguishes between several types: (1) assertives, whose function is to commit the speaker to the truth of an expressed proposition; (2) directives, which aim at getting the hearer to do something; (3) commissives, whose point is to commit the speaker to some future course of action; (4) expressives, which express some psychological attitude toward the proposition; and (5) declarations, whose function is to bring about the state of affairs indicated in the proposition by the mere fact of their being said. The utterances in this fifth category—declarations—create a reality as they are being spoken.1 (Such a reality, of course, also depends on the situation of the hearers as well as the speakers.) While it is unnecessary for the purposes of this chapter to delve too deeply into the muchdiscussed details of speech-act theory, my larger point is that, in the description of the mechanics of mantra, these ideas have been extraordinarily influential.2 In sum, Rg Vedic mantras are oral utterances restricted to the brahmin class, which learns them in an elaborately ritualized period of study. In part because of their restricted nature, Rg Vedic mantras are also fixed, and their power as speech acts derives from this fixity. The power of these oral texts is harnessed in different ways in various forms of Vedic ritual. In the Brahmanas, mantras are invoked to explain philosophically the nature of the Vedic sacrifice. In the Šrauta, or public rites, mantras tend to be used in order to augment or describe a sacrificial action. In the grhya, or domestic, rites, mantras tend to augment or describe the state of the householder who is performing a domestic sacrifice, and they become in their own right verbal substitutes for the materials of the sacrifice, such as milk, butter, and so forth. Both Grhya and Šrauta Sutras tell the sacrificer which Vedic mantra to use in the performance of these rites. In both cases there is an elaborate system of correspondences at work, whereby a primarily oral text, the Rg Vedic mantra, is linked to other primarily oral 60 Viniyoga [3.145.186.173] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 09:53...

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