S1E2 Shunned

This episode focuses on a body of sacred literature from the late Vedic period known as the Brahmanas. This literature has been largely ignored by modern scholarship due to certain biases at work in what are now known as the “first wave Orientalists”. These biases have affected the way modern yoga is understood via interpretation of ideas like the self, and the soul, and through the selection of certain texts over others. We trace the evolution of the Vedic sacrificial triad in the Brahmanas, and interpret a story about Prajapati, the primal creator god, as an early foreshadowing of modern practice.

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Episode Transcript

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So let's do a little recap. Just in case anyone is new, we'll catch them up from the last section that we did on the Vedas in episode one, we talked about the soma, the elixir of immortality, the food that the fire eats. In the sacrifice, we talked about how it was to be approached with awe and the myth of Indra that showed the consequences of imbibing the soma in a way that is outside of the sacrificial context. The knowledge that is Vedic knowledge is knowledge of rapture and truth. And we saw that the soma not only produced rapture, but we're told that it was the protector of truth, and this combination of rapture and truth together is what distinguishes what you would generally call Vedic knowledge. Then we discussed the structure of the sacrifice and talked about the Vedic sacrifice as a mediating mechanism between the divine world and the mundane world. We had a three part structure there divine mundane, and then in the middle, sacrifice, and that sacrifice facilitates an exchange between the two levels. And last, we read the story of the young son of Varuna, the young arrogant son, arrogant with knowledge buddhagu, and how he learned about the sacrificial nature of the universe by experiencing this phenomenon of eating going on everywhere. And so all things that continue will eat. And they will eat because there will be a fire inside them, and it drives them toward this, and they will need to breathe in order to feed that fire also. And so in a worldview where the microcosm and the macrocosm reflect one another, we can see that in some ways, all three levels are engaged in sacrifice when the mediating term is there. And we're moving forward a little bit in time to what's called the late Vedic Period and a body of texts called the brahmanas. And these ideas that we talked about in the last episode are going to come with us. So the brahmanas are said to be composed. This is probably Wendy Doniger that I got these dates from between 806 100 BCE. Now, if you were to say, what are they, they are mythical, philosophical and ritual glosses on the Vedas. So in a way, they kind of comment on the Vedas, and they kind of bring out the details of all the stuff that in the Veda is still subtly mysterious. It becomes less mysterious. It becomes more ritualized. It becomes personified in mythological forms, but the original content of the Vedic revelation is obviously still what this is about. Now Wendy Doniger says something that helps focus us here. Where is the rig? Veda expressed uncertainty and begged the gods for help. The brahmanas express confidence that their infallible Vedic mantras can deal with all dangers. So the original revelation now has been thoroughly, sort of embodied in what you might loosely call a dogma, and that represents the progression, in a sense, through history. The brahmanas are a body of literature that went largely ignored for most modern scholarship, because of the nature of their content and because of the nature of their form, we have those data points like disagreements with or dislike of the form of the branamous the brahmanas, excuse me and. And the dislike of their content as reasons given by the scholars that we're going to talk about very quickly, the content had to do with sacrifice. Well, because the sacrificial complex had been ritualized to a certain degree, you really start See, you really start seeing a lot of things about the specifics of killing, and that seemed to turn off many of the scholars that we're going to talk about. There's a concept from the brahmanas called Purusha Meda, and in a way, you could translate that as human sacrifice or person sacrifice. And there's a long standing debate that is still going on amongst sociologists and anthropologists and and Hindus who do those same things, and also traditional Hindu practitioners, about whether or not these are metaphorical references, or whether they're they're actual. I don't know enough about the archeology and those things to be able to comment on that, but I think that gives us an idea about what the content involved in the brahmanas, how that content might have turned off certain scholars, given the assumptions that they bring. And these are Western scholars, Germans and Frenchmen that I know of, as far as the form goes. The brahmanas can be very mathematical, and evidently they can be really tedious in their form. I have a quotation here on my notes to remind me to say the word tedious minutia. That's what that's the idea that you're going to get from the quotations I'm going to read you from these people who translated these things and spent their lives doing that. The the people I'm going to talk about have been called the first wave orientalists by some, and I think the term Orientalist has become somewhat disparaging in discussion around history and things like that. I'm going to give you an idea about why that might be the case. We're talking about a man named Max Mueller, Arthur, a McDonald, Julius eggling or edgeling. I'm not sure how to say it, but these are examples of of three heavy weights in the study of the of the Hindu world and the study of the Veda and the trans the earliest translations of Sanskrit and people like Mueller in particular are very important because they Max Mueller was involved with someone named Swami Vivekananda, and Vivekananda is an a huge influence on how the West saw certain ideas in the tradition and how ideas like universalism and and idolatry worship being not good, or the worshiping of idols, and therefore, quote, unquote, paganism not being good. Vivekananda was involved with this and Mueller. He and Mueller were, were in correspondence and knew one another in a way. Vivekananda had a very high opinion of Mueller. So here's something that Max Mueller said about the brahmanas. He stated that they were, quote, twaddle, and what is worse, theological twaddle. So notice that particular reference, the whatever it is that's religious about them, is not worth seeing at all. This could be totally ignored. Arthur A Macdonald dismissed them as quote an aggregate of shallow and pedantic discussions full of sacerdotal conceits and fanciful or even absurd identifications. So the word fanciful stands out there in the sense of this particular important scholar feeling that what is imaged in the Brahmanism and what is advised and recorded is not real. Julius edgeling said quote for weary, some prolixity of exposition, characterized by dogmatic assertion and a flimsy symbolism, rather than by serious reasoning. These works are perhaps not equaled anywhere, unless, indeed it be by the speculative vapor rings of the Gnostics, than which, in the learned translators of Irenaeus quote, nothing more absurd has probably ever been. Imagined by rational beings. So you get the idea of how this stuff was seen by the early translators. I could note here, in fairness. Rene Girard is an example of a scholar who is in disagreement with this. Gerards particular area of study is is sacrifice in a certain way, and he sees quite a bit of value and quite a deep detailed window into the psyche of Hindus and how the Vedic revelation emerged out of or how the Vedic revelation changed in the brahmanas as being Very important. So why is this important for us. The first wave Orientalist translated the Upanishad, the Rig Veda, right, the things that made their way to America, I learned first through the American transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. And so insofar as Emerson and Thoreau have been influential, then we can see already that stuff has made its way here. Remember that Emerson and Thoreau would have gotten translations from these early scholars. We should also note that there the influence of these scholars isn't only in how they translated, but it's also in what they selected to be translated. Because, I mean, in fairness, this, the amount of stuff or texts is is just said to be astronomical in certain sense, and that that is that problem is compounded by the problem that very few people can read all these different inflections of dialect that may be present in Those so we we learned what, quote, unquote, the Upanishad said We, therefore, we learned about certain ideas through these early translations. And I mentioned Vivekananda. We'll get to him at the end of the of the last season. This all shaped how we understand what yoga is. And therefore what its aim is, therefore what techniques should be engaged and how they should be engaged, and so on and so forth. So it's super important to understand that we were influenced in certain ways, people like I have to mention a more stringent reason for those of us who care about the horrors of history, a scholar named Edward said in the 70s, wrote a book called Orientalism, and it is a strong argument that the interpretations from, for instance, people like the first wave orientalists, and any continued influence that those interpretations have on us, is still a form of colonialism, still a form of Western domination of the discourse in History and Sociology and so on and so forth. So some people disagree with that. Some people think that's too strong and but I think it's important to to think about those things when we receive texts and we receive the things that have been brought here. So we're very influenced by these ideas. If I were to give an example of how that might be the case, I think the most prominent thing that I see is that when people speak about, quote, unquote yoga, they speak about as if there is this sort of monolithic thing called Yoga, where you could go to the origin of it and find the real thing, the real dope. And I think it's much more complicated than that, especially the more we learn. Now, I don't want to just dissolve all the connections that people have with what they're doing, and this idea, right, called Yoga and so on. I'm even going to use the word and throughout the seasons in a way that sounds like there's something singular, right, that might be yoga. We just have to be careful with the way that we think. And and what we do in regard to to ideas like that, it most of the of the scholars that you're going to hear me talking about have have been in this camp of saying, look at how much diversity there is. Look at where these original ideas come from. Look at how it was practiced by those in South India, and how something else was being done here. And while we don't really know what's happening, David Gordon White did that, particularly with the yoga sutra, and my views on the yoga sutra and the stories I had been told about it and so on, I think that's a good thing to continually make more space inside oneself for knowledge of those things. If you want to do that when you read, you know, you have to know. Have to have some sense of what the text is about, some general understanding. But there are concepts that permeate, you know, the the texts that are general enough to focus on that Westerners also share. So, for instance, soul, the idea of soul and the idea of no soul that's not a unique, you know, expression only to Hindus, but the flavor and nuance that's brought to that idea, you know, in a sense, and the flavor that's brought from our side to that idea, you can make sure that when you're reading a text, say, like the Upanishad That's talking about atma on a word that's been translated as soul. Sometimes the word Purusha is translated as soul. You How is it that it's being you know, look closely at how these things are being used, because you're going to immediately assume certain things when you hear that word. You could also say that person, the idea of a person, and where that comes from, and those valences that come from our cultures and to us about that the idea like mind. What is what exactly are we talking about? We're talking about mind. We can't assume, for instance, that when the when the Samkhya philosophy gives us the three parts of mind, Manas, booty, ahamkara, that this is kind of the same thing as like the inner, subjective Western experience, or something like the Freudian ego. Can't just assume there may be relations there, right? But we have to be very careful also, I think ideas like individual and collective, the the value of the individual and the collective. When reading these things, we it's easy to to project a western idea of individuality and the importance of that, and not saying that that idea that the individual is valuable is only Western. I'm just saying that we got a particular way of valuing that that would influence the way we read things that generally come from a culture that is family oriented. The scholar Jonathan Haidt would call India community oriented, call ego centered. The West would be Ego centered. And the and generally, India has been socio centric, and so those things are very important right for us to understand. And I think this short little history of the brahmanas right gives an example of folks who didn't necessarily do that in the beginning. I don't want to, I don't want to disparage the intelligence of the first wave orientalists. These are massive intellects that devoted their lives to learning Sanskrit, you know, and and bringing that to the world, and gave deep, deep care to it, in some sense. But they were equally capable of being dismissive and and making selections of things that just fit ideas that that were their own. We talked about the Vedic triad, and in the first episode, we do find that Vedic triad also in the brahmanas. So the the triad is reworked a little bit into, let's say two words here that have a slash between them, because they're sort of synonyms Purusha Prajapati, and that means, quote, man, Lord of creatures. Then there's ogni the sacrificial fire, and there's still Soma, the fluid, god of the sacrificial oblation. It's important to see that this Soma is is glossed in the brahmanas a lot as a god. This would be one of the mythological accretions that came as the original Vedic material got imagined right in various ways. David Gordon White says this Brahmanic triad of sacrificial gods. Is itself a reworking of the triune Vedic universe with two static elements, gods and humans, oblation and fire being mediated by a third element, the enacted sacrifice. And so here we have the same basic material, but it looks like a ritualization, and in a sense, it looks like a personification. Notice that these three parts, purusha, Prajapati, Agni and soma, that white refers to them as gods, the brahmanas, are also really important for giving us a sort of organizational pattern of the universe that generally can be seen across a large swath of history, throughout the Indian discourse. And it's what we call fiveness, pancha five the tendency to divide the levels of reality manifest reality from the most mundane to the highest into kind of groups of fives. There's also groups of threes and there's twos that are important. But five is something that you really learn to spot when you begin to try to try to dig down and find some of the most basic things about the history of the place where our ideas of yoga came from. It said in India, there's a saying that five is good to think with. So David Gordon White says it's the brahmanas that even as they continue the Vedic discourse of the triune universe. First elaborate the concept of the universe is five fold. That tendency is strong. Let's look at some examples. So, starting in the brahmanas, directly connected to the Veda, the Vedic sacrificial altar, or the sacrificial altar, the Agni chayan is composed of five layers of bricks. The five layers are told to be by the satophita brahmana, the five bodily constituents of the god Prajapati, as well as the five seasons and as well as the five directions. So the altar laid out in five layers. The layers themselves are symbols of the five bodily constituents of the god Prajapati. And also they represent the seasons. And also they represent the directions. So the original source of creation, which the altar represents, because it's the those five layers are about preopity, and he's called the progenator. He's it was out of his primordial body that the world and the culture was made. So he's composed of five. And I think anyone who has studied a little bit will will keep noticing the groups of five. How about the five elements, earth, air, fire, water, space? What about the five senses? The five senses that would be of cognition, seeing, tasting, smelling, hearing and touch, the sense of touch. And then there are the five organs of action, the karmandrias. There are five sub doshas of vada. There are five sub doshas of pitta, there are five sub doshas of kapha, there are five Yamas, there are five niyamas. So we really see this tendency, and this goes forward into Hatha Yoga two and the tantra that we'll talk about later. So David Gordon white, kind of sums it up. He says fiveness permeates the everyday sphere of discourse in India, it permeates at a really deep level beyond all these philosophical things or historical things, you know that I'm talking about. There's a phrase evidently in in the broad vernacular, panchat vom gamana. Panchat vom gamana, anybody who speaks Sanskrit? I apologize for these pronunciations. I'm giving it my best shot. That means going to the five elements, and that's another way to talk about death or the dissolution of bodily integrity. So you see here, the idea that the body is a is an impermanent quote, unquote integrity, and in hearing together of earth, air, fire, water, space and so on, and that when we die, those things come apart, we have to continue to talk about sacrifice and the evolution of these original. Vedic ideas now in the context of the brahmanas, but I wanted to try to connect some of this stuff that we've been talking about to to future yoga. How does this stuff point ahead, in a way, to to what we understand today as to be yoga, what we're doing, if we go back to Soma, it's interesting that Robert colosso says that even in the Veda, the earlier Vedas Soma, is often spoken of as something that they were having real difficulty finding and remembering. And so it it has a rareness to it, in addition to the value that we spoke of, the brahmanas are starting to elaborate strategies to try to find something to substitute for the soma so that the sacrifice can continue. And the substitution in sacrifice is a very important thing, because the original material is is the material that makes the sacrifice work. And so if we're going to put something else in there, it has to have similar qualities. It has to be valuable in the same way. This is a very interesting thing when it comes to someone because, remember, it's a psychoactive substance, assuming it's a literal substance, I think it has other dimensions, rather than just the literal thing. But if we talk about a plant that engendered rapture and visionary experience and Revelation, the substitution had to produce something of like quality. And anyone who knows anything about Ayurveda and ancient Indian medicinal systems knows that there's a massive Pharmacopeia, right, a plant knowledge and and mineral knowledge and so on. So we're looking for something that's like the soma. Well, this activity of searching out things is indicative of an attitude that connects directly to our understanding of yoga today. Wendy Donner says the need for a substitute for the consciousness altering Soma may also have led to the development of other ways of creating unusual psychic states, such as yoga, breath control, fasting and meditation. Now I find that to also be very compelling, because it is true that some of the breathing techniques that I have come across would be considered consciousness altering in a certain way, fasting and meditation definitely put you in a very rarefied state. And so visionary experience, the need for visionary experience shows probably in some of the technical things we do today, like she's saying pranayama here and fasting and meditation. But I think as you go forward and you see examples of things like the yoga sutra and its insistence on samadhi or absorption as part of what constitutes yoga. Vyasa actually says yoga is Samadhi. In his commentary on the yoga sutra, I think you see this value stretching all the way back right to the soma, and then possibly coming forward in a search for a substitution, generating some of the stuff that we understand to be modern yoga. So, you know, we love to tell stories and leave you with images, and I wanted to pick one that, in a sense, connects to a lot of the stuff that we're going to be doing later in later seasons of the podcast. But also as you know which the point of which is to point forward into modern yoga as best we can. This is a story about the progenator Prajapati, and it's a story about creation. I believe it's from the setapatha brahmana. I have the reference, and I say that it's quoted in David Gordon white here on page 13 of his book the alchemical body, which is a real magnum opus. But I don't have whether it's from the set top of the brahmana or another brahmana. Sorry about that, but you can find it in David Gordon white quote verily Prajapati alone was here in the beginning. He desired, may I exist, May I May I reproduce myself. He toiled, heated himself with inner heat from his exhausted and overheated body, waters flowed forth from those heated waters, foam arose. Rose from the heated foam. There arose clay, sand from the heated sand, grit from the grit, rock from the heated rock, metallic ore and from the smelted or gold arose. What about these images? There's a lot in here that that shows up in various ways and glosses later. First of all, notice that pro Joppa T toiled. David Gordon white points this out as an example of what you would call a religious austerity, and this toiling of his, this work of His created heat, this thermal energy that caused the transformation right of his body into eventual gold, is an inner heat that is the result of effort that signals something very important that we're going to call the internalization of the sacrifice. So this idea that I am the sacrifice gets expressed further, and I begin to understand myself as something that can make effort. And eventually, if we go with the metaphor here, produce gold. So my work is valuable. This work on myself. I also contain material that can eventually be transformed right into something else by, quote, religious austerities. It's an important image here. It starts to look a little bit like pro Japanese practicing yoga, just a little bit. I want to be loose with that. So Agni has now gone inside the Agni of the Vedic sacrifice, and it has become tapas or ardor or religious austerity. No more external heat. Internal heat, okay, these images of water being churned and producing foam, and foam then coagulating and producing sand. I mean, I get them in the right order, and then or clay, I think, and then clay coagulating further and producing sand, and sand producing stone. And then we finally make it to metal. This smacks wildly of alchemy, and in several ways, number one, that nature is undergoing a slow process in which the material contained in nature is being cooked, and that eventually is moving its way toward gold, or something very, extremely valuable. The Alchemist believed that there was a natural process going on, but they believed that they could intervene in a certain way and bring fire, more fire, to the situation, and possibly speed along that trans translation, or transmutation, from what here foam all the way through clay and sand and rock to to minerals and then to metals, precious metals. They also believed that that process was was mimicked in the human body and and Hatha Yoga starts looking like something that we can see even as far back as the brahmanas. Because the Hatha yogis take that idea of transmuting some internal material into something so precious and so on, and they really run with it. The idea that that Hatha Yoga is a process of cooking is imaged in the saying that that Hatha is the yoga of the pot. So the the pot itself contains material has to be filled up. And there's also a fire that's that's lit under this pot. That means, in Hatha, the body becomes the both the furnace the the thing that's the fire, like the oven that the vessel gets put in, or the material gets put in, but it's also the vessel itself that contains the material. And so there's a lot going on here that's being imaged for us in these beautiful passages. Prajapati sort of looks like the primordial Yogi here being initiated and producing something very beautiful and amazing. So if we can sum up, the brahmanas are the late Vedic Period, just before the emergence of the Upanishads. So we're getting closer to the turn of the millennium at this time, and this time, evidently, according to Wendy Doner, was a time of great geographical change, changes in the direction of rivers, I believe, is something. Talks about, and also migratory patterns, people settling in various places and large groups, their cultures, mixing a very important time. And so the that's represented right in this, in this progression from the early VEDA that ends up being the brahmanas and later the Upanishads, their mythological, philosophical and ritual glosses on the Vedas, things get ritualized. Things get personified because of their content and form. I'm using that those criteria from the first wave or endless these texts tended to be dismissed as an inferior chapter in India's spiritual history, and this affected future attitudes of all folks who, you know, by neglect, didn't get to read them to see what they were about, because they were pushed aside. And also, our attention was focused in certain areas. In the Veda and the Upanishad, for instance, that affects how we understand yoga. We still see also the Vedic triad present in the brahmanas in a slightly modified form. We see prototypical images of the sacrifice being reinterpreted as an internal act. And here, just a minute ago, we mentioned Prajapati as the prototypical yogin or initiate. So finally, the brahmanas give us a little bit of alchemical imagery, which we're going to be talking about more and more. As the seasons progress, we see Prajapati, in a way, as an alchemist, his work and his toil speeding this ripening process of the metals, the precious metals, which are in the earth. The precious metals themselves are treated by later alchemical traditions and by Ayurveda, for instance, and also by the Hatha yogis and the Tantrics as as like reproductive tissue in the earth, something that is the same as as us, it has reproductive tissue. And so those metals are actually interpreted later to be expressions of Soma, ways that we could see the con. There ways that we can see this concept of Soma moving forward in history and becoming something else. So I hope it's been interesting. We sure appreciate your listening. God bless you, and I hope to see you next time.