Bringing the Gods to Mind: Mantra and Ritual in Early Indian Sacrifice

Introduction

Introduction 1 The Issues It is early morning in a small village in western Maharashtra, India. The pravargya rite is being performed—an introductory Vedic ritual with an obscure and intriguing history. During the ceremony the doors of the sacrificial arena are closed. Everyone knows that the sacrificer’s wife is present, but she is hidden from view. The chanting of Rg Vedic hymns makes this rite all the more mysterious. But it is not the sound alone that makes the atmosphere so intriguing. The hymn being chanted is Rg Veda 10.177—the mayabheda hymn—which helps to discern illusion. Does the placement of this hymn about discerning illusion in this secretive rite matter? I argue in these pages that the placement of the hymn indeed matters. In the Vedic period, ritual was the location in which both imaginative and social realities were brought to mind and played out in the public arena. Through the medium of esoteric poetic utterance, chanted by hereditary classes of performers, Vedic society assembled its collective life. Much of Indological scholarship, grounded as it has been in the distinction between imagination and empirical experience, has tended to view aspects of Vedic culture as “solemn prayer” and other, usually later, aspects as “magical spell.” This book will attempt to rethink this aspect of Vedic reality by questioning the distinction between magic and religion , focusing instead on the use of Rg Vedic mantras in particular ritual schools. The use of Rg Vedic mantras in ritual has a name and a method behind it: viniyoga. This is the application of mantras in particular ritual situations, and it is undertaken according to particular hermeneutic principles based on metonymy, or associative thought. This book is about the recovery of that hermeneutic principle of viniyoga. In order to understand the full trajectory of Vedic realities, one must understand the trajectory of Vedic influence, conservation, and extension through a lineage of textual traditions and communities who practice them. This lineage begins with the Rg Vedic hymns, the mantras themselves , and continues in their application in the public ritual activity of the Šrauta rites, the domestic sphere of the Grhya rites, and the more broadly practical sphere of the Vidhana texts. Through this lineage of texts, each in its own way serving as a commentary on what went before, one can trace the formation and extension of the early Indian religious imagination as a complex ritual and poetic process that extends across the generations. In the spirit of such a hypothesis, this book is a history of one strand of interpretative imagination in ancient India, a study in mental creativity and hermeneutic sophistication. While acknowledging the value of certain trends that interpret Vedic tradition more predominantly in terms of its formal structures, I want to make the claim that, even in the act of participating in a Vedic ritual, the imagination of the participants is highly engaged. In this I take the Ašvalayana Šrauta Sutra, the Nirukta, the Brhaddevata, the Rg Vidhana, and other texts at face value when they call for “bringing the deity to mind.” Such a focus is also borne out by fieldwork on contemporary Vedic sacrifice. I recently made a trip to Barsi, Maharashtra, to study a Soma sattra, or year-long sacrifice involving pressing and consuming Soma, the sacred drink that gives eloquence. As I spoke with the sacrificer, Nana Maharaj Kale, I learned that he had begun a small gurukula, or school, for those interested in training to sacrifice and had tried as much as possible to base it on the ancient system of education, with some important innovations. Unlike other sacrificers I have met, this man adhered to the Šaunakiya school of interpretation of Vedic mantra (about which I have also written), and he cited its texts often.1 This school tends to emphasize the mental imagery of the mantras and the use of them as powerful aids to the efficacy of the sacrifice. The innovations in his gurukula reflected this commitment to using mental imagery, including helping students to memorize Rg Vedic hymns and to 2 Introduction imagine the deities within them, through the use of photographs. It was a startling experience to watch the students chant Vedic hymns while meditating on photographs of Surya or Sarasvati. It was clear, however, that the idea of imagining the deities was crucial to the sacrificer’s view of contemporary sacrifice, and he had...