Divinizing the Veda : the Problem of Traditionalism
Dr. Koenraad ELST
in Prof. Bhaskarnath Bhattacharya, ed.: Vedavidyāśrīḥ / Gems of Vedic Wisdom. Prof. Shashi Tiwari Felicitation Volume (Pratibha Prakashan, Delhi 2021), p.170-186:
Abstract
The present discussion is not new but still necessary. Till today,
traditionalism insists that the Vedas are a revealed scripture. This is what Muslims
also say about the Qur’ān, but in Hinduism it precedes Islamic or any
other influence. Rather, it stems from a pan-human tendency to idealize and
absolutize anything deemed spiritual, and is well-attested in foreign cultures
throughout history. But it is demonstrably in conflict with various types of
testimony in the Vedas themselves.
1. Traditionalism
Definition: traditionalism claims that what was valid in the past, is
still valid today and must be continued tomorrow. This is because what has been
handed down is intrinsically superior, just as a child trusts its father’s
grasp of reality to be superior to its own. In ethics and law, for instance,
rules are handed down from earlier generations to us (the mos maiorum, “customs
of the ancestors”) because we deem them to have proven their worth by long
practice. To an extent, this may be justified; it is pragmatic. But this
evaluation often gets absolutized and is vulnerable to a few distortions.
Firstly, what was once experienced in practice to be valid, may be done
by future generations purely out of deference to the mos maiorum without
any remaining reference to its empirical reason. This attitude may then
wilfully ignore new circumstances or increasing knowledge: a blind attachment
to a past generation’s experience blind to new but equally real experience. A
very simple example, over an even shorter time-span than generations: we once
knew a girl regularly hanging up the laundry outside so sun and wind could
speed up its drying. She used clothespins because she found (and in fact, at
first her mother had told her) that otherwise the wind would blow the clothes
away. But one day it rained and she hung the wet clothes to dry (p.171) inside
the garage, where there was no wind; yet out of attachment to a long established
habit, without thinking further, she still used clothespins.
If this example is innocent, we can also give more controversial
instances. Thus, for ages, women were expected to confine sexual activity to
inside marriage, and not before, as they could get pregnant; but that has
changed with the discovery of reliable birth control. Men were advised to
jealously guard their wives’ fidelity, since otherwise the children they bore
could be another man’s, even without his knowing; but that has changed somewhat
with the development of genetic testing. Does this mean that the chastity rules
from the past can now go out the window? Not necessarily, there may be other
reasons for maintaining them, but these elementary biological considerations
have lost their compelling force. So now, debate and reconsideration are
needed.
We need a subtler understanding of the human condition to make the right
choice. Old truths are not so obvious anymore, the course to take not so
automatic anymore, so that we have “choice stress”. This is at once the main
reason why traditionalism is so popular: it saves us the trouble of making
choices, a possibly demanding process of gathering information, analysing it
and estimating potential consequences. It is easy. In a world where we have so
many things to do, we cannot always go back to square one, we often have to
rely on conclusions or decisions that some older and wiser generation has made
for us. Indeed, as children we do it all the time, so it is an ingrained habit.
As adults we sometimes get to make the laborious choice whether to follow in
our ancestors’ footstep or chart a new and different course, and we tend to
limit these occasions.
Thus far, no real problem, at least not for the topic of the status of
the Vedas that concerns us here. But a second problem with traditionalism
arises when traditionalists also do the reverse: they do not just make the past
condition the present, but also project the present norms onto the past, or
norms valid in a recent past onto a more ancient past. They homogenize the past
into a single screen, denying any specific time-depth to different phases. They
do in time what we all do in space when looking at the stars: we see no
space-depth, they all look homogeneously far, whether 4 or 4,000 light years
away. In doing so, they tend to deny changes that have taken place at some
historical point in the past. This usually takes the form of grafting onto the
ancient past an invented tradition that came about later. Grafting, or
imagining a false ancestry for current views and customs, is widespread in
traditionalism, though not synonymous with it. It need not be intrinsic to
traditionalism, but is a disease to which it is very vulnerable.
Thirdly, the ancients in many cultures had a tendency to absolutize the
value of what the earlier generations had transmitted, and extol it to
superhuman status, even (p.172) God-given. What is eternal was there before
you, what your grandparents have been into was also there before you, so the
two are easy to confuse.
2. Foreign Examples
Our first examples are from outside India. The Book
of Changes or Yijing was
written in the 11th century BCE, and incorporated in
the Confucian corpus
collected in the 5th-3rd century BCE. It was
originally an oracle book:
predictions of the future in a straightforward
language that, with the loss
of the contemporaneous reference framework and the
changes in script and
language, has become cloudy. The Confucians read all
manner of new,
moralizing meanings into the key phrases of the Yijing,
thus making it into
a proto-Confucian classic. For instance, the standard
phrase li zhen, “fortunate
oracle”, came to mean: “constancy is beneficial”. The
Confucian reading of
the Yijing has been enormously influential in
Chinese civilization, yet
constituted an invented tradition seriously
different from the original.
Neo-Platonism was a dominant philosophy in the later
Roman Empire.
It was emanationist, i.e. it taught that from the
original One, successive
emanations formed layers of solidifying essence,
culminating in the material
world, somewhat like the five successive sheaths in
the Taittirīya Upaniṣad.
This means that even the most material objects partook
of the essence of
the One. Many scholars agree that it was a Hellenistic
evolute of a basic
insight from Vedānta.
This emanationism was the opposite of creationism:
unlike in Biblical
(and later most explicitly the Quranic) theology, it
did not posit a creation
ex nihilo, where the created world contrasts as temporary with the eternal
Creator. In the Vedantic-cum-Neo-Platonist view, every
being carries the
essence of the One inside itself, whereas in the
creationist view, the Supreme
Being and his creation are radically different, and it
is blasphemous to liken
the one to the other. There, God is the totally Other.
Yet, Neo-Platonism was absorbed by some Jews, who
started
reinterpreting the Bible in its light. This became
mystical Judaism or the
Qabbala, “what has been received”, “tradition”. Its
concept of the Tree of
Life is intellectually quite elegant and original,
bridging these ultimately
opposing ideas of creation and emanation. But the
point at present is: it
projects meanings onto Biblical terminology that weren’t
there and had not
been meant by the authors. Like seeing the Tree of
Life wherever the
Biblical narrative mentions wood.
This back-projection of meanings onto scriptural terminology is also in evidence
in Sufism, the mystical current within Islam. Thus, ḏikr, “remembering”,
is a translation of the Sanskrit Vedāntic concept smaraṇa 173 (Panjabi simraṇ)
or smṛti, Pali Buddhist sati, and means in effect dhāraṇā,
“concentration”, “continuous focus”. This yogic concept was not present in the Qur’ān,
yet the Sufis had to justify as Quranic their borrowed spiritual practices (to
avoid being denounced as Infidels), so they read this technical meaning into
the perfectly ordinary word ḏikr. This way, they grafted a new, borrowed
spiritual tradition onto the Quranic stem. (Through French convert René Guénon,
Sufism actually spawned a self-styled “Traditionalist” current in 20 th
-century Europe.)
Within Christianity, Roman Catholicism is, according to the Protestants,
full of “invented traditions”, often borrowed from Pagan sources but at any
rate not Evangelical. Thus, modern Catholics may assume that their celibate
priesthood is an ancient and quintessentially Christian institution, but Jesus
never created a priesthood. This institution was at some point imitated from
the surrounding religions; and it was only at yet another remove that this
priesthood was ordered to remain celibate.
The Catholic Church bases itself only very partially on the Bible and
more on what it calls “Church tradition”, justified as the continuous working
of the Holy Ghost, e.g. the institution of priestly celibacy is attributed to a
whisper from the Holy Ghost. Or for another example, when the Cardinals vote to
elect a new Pope, it is the presence and unseen working of the Holy Ghost that
someone engineers the “right” majority vote. Through the Holy Ghost stratagem,
the Church manages to do de jure what other traditions only do de
facto, viz. to integrate change or deviation from the original message.
Traditionalism is a worldwide phenomenon, simplifying and homogenizing
the working of time as far as a sect’s own doctrine and practices are
concerned. Scholars of other cultures will immediately recognize it in the
Hindu tendencies sketched below. But this attribution of a tendency
well-attested elsewhere to Hindu civilization is, so experience teaches,
strongly resented in Hindu circles. To them it is like trying to pull the large
psychological categories of Yoga thought into the small categories of modern
materialistic Western psychology.
3. Indian Non-Vedic Examples
Now coming to India, let us see how Hindu traditionalists celebrate
invented traditions, historically determined, as if they were hoary or even
eternal, and as if they are quintessentially and constitutively Hindu. The “traditional”
chronology offers a fine example, viz. the claim that Kṛṣṇa’s death
completing the Mahābhārata narrative took place in 3102 BCE, and the war
37 years before, in 3139 BCE. We see this “invented tradition” take shape only
in the mid-1st millennium CE. The specification of the year (p.174) 3102 BCE as
the start of Kali Yuga only appears in the work of Āryabhata in 499 CE,
and there, Kṛṣṇa’s passing is not brought into the equation. The full
equation: Kṛṣṇa’s death = 3102 BCE = Kali Yuga is first found in
the Aihole inscription of 634 CE. (Yet, the term yugānta, “end of an
epoch”, often applied to this war [as in Irawati Karve’s title of her 1974 book
on the epic], may well date back to the battle itself, but in another, more
manageable meaning. A yuga, “era, epoch”, literally is a conjunction of
two celestial bodies, marking the beginning or end of their interaction cycle,
such as the moonless night for the sun/moon cycle also known as the month. The
epic itself gives many stellar positions as marking the time of the war,
arguably including the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction [this point is debated: disputant
doctores], which was the end of the largest cycle known before the
discovery of the precession cycle. One Jupiter-Saturn cycle takes 20 years; but
after three cycles, the two planets don’t just reconnect, they also do so at
the same place in the Zodiac, thus giving rise to a 60-year cycle, recognized
as a kind of century or “epoch” in both Indian and Chinese astronomy. Just a
tempting possibility.)
The epic itself merely says about the Kali Yuga (an already
long-existing concept) that it will not touch the world as long as Kṛṣṇa’s
feet walk on it. Historically, this concept of four world ages of descending
quality exists in many cultures, indicating a very early common origin,
certainly pre-Vedic. The Hindu notion of Kṛtā, Tretā, Dvāpara
and Kali Yuga is matched by the Greek notion of a Golden, Silver, Bronze
and Iron Age and the Germanic notion of a Spear, Sword, Wind and Wolf Age.
Neither in the epic nor abroad are any specific dates or time-spans assigned to
them. The phrase about Kṛṣṇa’s presence excluding and preceding the
darkest age is only a literary manner of speaking and should not be taken
literally.
On present evidence, the long duration of these ages originated as
fractions of the precession cycle, the movement of the vernal equinox around
the ecliptic of ca. 25,772 years, rounded off to 24,000 years. This motion was
discovered by Hipparchus of Alexandria in 127 BC, whereupon this knowledge was
transmitted via the Indo-Greeks to India. (Proof that earlier Hindus had not
yet understood precessional movements is Maitrī Upaniṣad 1.4, where the
precessional falling away of the Pole Star from the North Pole is wrongly
interpreted as a sign of a world in chaos rather than as a regular application
of an astronomical law, see Radhakrishnan 1992:797. This growth in knowledge
incidentally contradicts the traditionalist idea that truth has anciently been
given and must only be preserved, in favour of the evolutionist paradigm that
ignorance and fanciful explanations gradually make way for better insights.
Admittedly it is only peripheral information within the text and does not
concern the metaphysical subject- (p.175) matter of the Upaniṣads.)
In a next move, the numbers were multiplied by 360 out of awe, in
zealous application of the intuition that “a year for man is only a day for the
Gods”. This innovation then, more recently than 127 BC, yields the equation: Kali
Yuga = 432.000 years, beginning in -3012. It implies that the preceding Dvāpara
Yuga was twice as long, so that the even earlier Tretā Yuga in which
Rāma is situated, must have taken place a million years ago, even though
Rāma’s epic contains Bronze Age technology from less than 10.000 years
ago. Stories are fine, but adults shouldn’t take them literally, so the Yuga
ages as conceived by Hindu traditionalists had better be put between brackets
as just fanciful. Among outside observers, the sight of Hindus taking it
literally costs the Hindu cause a lot of credibility.
In the same vein, Hindu traditionalists speak of “Vedic astrology” when
they mean the horoscopy presently practised by Hindu astrologers. As Harvard
Indologist Michael Witzel has said: “In India, ‘Vedic’ simply means ‘old’.” But
there was no horoscopy yet in the Vedic age. There did exist a certain
astrology, not based on the 12 Zodiac signs (rāśi) but on the 27 or 28
moon houses (nakṣatra), with beneficial and harmful configurations
determining auspicious and inauspicious times for conducting a ritual or
starting an enterprise. It would nowadays be called mundane and electional
astrology; an important relic still observed today are the auspicious times for
weddings. But that is something else than the individual birth horoscopes with
which Hindu astrologers make a living. The first known horoscope, still quite
simple, is from Babylon in 412 BC. After Alexander conquered the city, this
horoscopy got combined with Greek geometry, and within decades, it developed
essentially all the techniques still used by astrologers in the West as well as
in India. The Indo-Greeks then brought it into India, where the oldest
horoscopy writings have Greek technical loanwords, transcribe rather than
translate the Greek names of the Zodiac signs, introduce the planetary names of
the weekdays, and explicitly acknowledge their Greek lineage, as in the title
of the oldest treatise, Yāvana Jātaka, “Greek Birth Horoscopy”. It is
clear as day that horoscopy was imported, yet traditionalists graft it onto the
Vedic stem.
A very consequential invented tradition concerns caste. Some elements of
Hinduism have been taken to be quintessentially Hindu, so that no Hinduism is
deemed possible without them; yet they turn out to have a genesis in history,
as well as an ending. Traditionalists treat them as God-given and beyond
history, and thus they see caste as part of unchanging Sanātana Dharma.
They see caste as part of revealed scripture (Śruti) through the
appearance of the four social functions (Varṇas) in the late-Vedic Puruṣa
Sūkta (a beautiful summary of the doctrine of Corporatism, i.e. likeness of
(p.176) the cosmos and of society to a human body, of which traditionalists won’t
like to hear that it is quite banal, present in many mythologies), which
actually fails to mention the two defining traits of caste: hereditary
profession and endogamy. In this case, the traditionalists are enthusiastically
seconded by anti-Hindus, who hurry to flaunt the hymn as “proof” that Hinduism
is intrinsically and irrevocably “caste, wholly caste and nothing but caste”.
Their valuation of caste is opposite, and what the traditionalists use as proof
of its God-given character is used by the Missionaries and Ambedkarites all the
better to incriminate Hinduism.
By contrast, the Veda fundamentalists of the Ārya Samāj emphasize
the contrast between the situation in classical Hinduism, where a hard caste
system reigned supreme for some two millennia, and the Vedic age which began
totally free of caste and ended with a hymn that in spite of superficial
appearances is really still free of caste. In this they are surprisingly
seconded by Marxist historians, who tie social systems to economic conditions
and deem the Vedic-age economy unfit for generating a division in castes. (Thus
Shereen Ratnagar in Thapar 2006:166) In the later Vedic period, the caste
system did emerge in stages, first without endogamy as caste identity was
passed on in the male line, with the father free to marry a woman of another
caste; and then with full endogamy, which geneticists estimate as having existed
since ca. two millennnia. When caste came into its own, early votaries of this “invented
tradition” started back-projecting it onto ancient scriptures. The Vedas had by
then become too venerated to add a word to it, but the Rāmāyaṇa received
the addition of a final chapter: the Uttarakaṇḍa. Contrary to Rāma’s
carefree interaction with foreign and tribal people, contrary to Rāvaṇa’s
inter-caste love for Sītā, this interpolated final chapter has Rāma
rewarded by the gods for mercilessly killing the Śūdra Śambuka
for trespassing against caste rules. Other writings retold and reinterpreted
the implied Vedic episode of rivalry between the sages Viśvāmitra and Vasiṣṭha,
which has nothing to do with caste there, as a struggle between Kṣatriya
and Brāhmaṇa caste. This way, the traditionalists managed to insert
their innovations into early parts of Hindu scripture and near-equate Hinduism
with caste.
4. The Traditionalist Veda
The traditionalist account of the Vedas is that they are the source of
Hinduism, and that everything of value proceeds from them. This to them is
logical, as the Veda is of divine origin: a revealed scripture, apauruṣeya,
“non-human”. Unlike scriptures of various other religions, that were not
written by human beings, no individual wrote the Vedas. So, those others
falsely claim a revealed scripture, but Hindus have the truth on their side
when they claim the same. Or in a Gandhian variety, they don’t want to (p.177)
deny truth and a revealed origin to other religions, but at least they insist
on a divine origin for the Vedas.
In this respect, the egalitarian anti-caste Ārya Samāj was also
traditionalist. Generally it is not known as traditionalist but as
fundamentalist: its “back to the Vedas” as an instance of the common viewpoint
of all fundamentalists: “back to the sources”. Unlike the traditionalists, it
rejected the post-Vedic practices, such as idol-worship and untouchability, and
scriptures such as the Purāṇas. But it didn’t think through the
fundamental assumptions of Hinduism, which then were mostly traditionalist. So,
it equally continued to assume the revealed origin of the Vedas.
This contrasts with the view of the Indologists and of everyone who
would stumble upon a book full of hymns: these hymns are poetry written by
human poets. In the disastrous attempts by California Hindus to introduce more
Hindu-friendly amendments in the state’s social science textbooks in 2005-6
(see Elst 2012:137-155), one (unsuccessful) demand was to replace the term “poetry”
for the Vedas with “scripture”, on a par with the Bible and the Qur’ān. “Scripture”
is a status that the believers attribute to a book, whereas “poetry” as a
characterization of the Vedic hymns is just factual. Even if revealed, it
remains poetry. But alright, it then also has the status of scripture. Yet, if
Hindus claim their religion to be “scientific”, as they often do, they ought to
do better than such primitive a-dime-a-dozen claims for a supernatural origin.
The term apauruṣeya is usually translated as “non-human”, “impersonal”.
It does not come from the Vedas themselves, but from the Pūrva Mīmāṁsā
school of philosophy, centuries younger than the youngest book that could
reasonably be called Vedic: “The Mīmāṁsakas hold that the Veda is self-subsistent,
eternal and ‘Śruti’ or divine revelation.” (Anirvan 2018:11-12) In the
intervening centuries, the Vedas had been extolled, with a class of people set
apart just to memorize them and pass them on unchanged to the letter; and with
the best of sciences (grammar, mathematics, astronomy) growing up around them.
If anything in the surroundings of an ancient Hindu approached the divine, this
was it. So the idea of divinizing them or at least their source caught on among
intellectually unsophisticated minds.
This attribution to the Vedas of a supernatural origin through
revelation is exactly what Muslims say about the Qur’ān. But it is not
what the Ṛṣis say about the Vedas. They all write their hymns in the
form of man addressing God, just the opposite of the Qur’ān. Thus, in
the Gāyatrī Mantra, “may You, the rising Sun, awaken our minds”; or the Mṛtyunjaya
Mantra: “we worship the tryambaka deity”. The hymn chosen by Veda
editor Veda-Vyāsa (at, by definition, the very completion of the Vedic
period) to be the very first, 1.1.1, says that “I (the poet or Ṛṣi)
worship the Fire”, and it incidentally (p.178) also refers to “earlier Ṛṣis”,
i.e. pre-Vedic Ṛṣis. For another example among numerous ones: “A thought
have I imagined, like a workman.” (RV 3.38.1) This refers to the craftsmanship
needed, and the hard work of fashioning verses: as any poet knows, composing
poetry is one part inspiration and nine parts perspiration. Likewise: “I
worship Heaven and Earth, parents of the Gods.” (RV 7:53:1 and again 7:43:1) Ṛṣi
Vasiṣṭha even praises himself for having, through his perfect hymns, swayed
the god Indra into supporting his employer, king Sudās, into
winning the Battle of the Ten Kings. (RV 7:33:1-3) The Ṛg-Vedic family books
are very explicitly creations by human poets. The Ṛṣis were originally
deemed Mantra-kartā, “makers of Vedic verses”, only later Mantra-draṣṭā,
“seers of Vedic verses”, their now-common epithet. The devotional masses lapped
this post-Vedic “invented tradition” up. This is a tamasic attitude, but
unworthy of creative men of genius like the Vedic Ṛṣis.
5. The Vedas as a source of history
The Ṛg-Veda (RV) is a collection (saṁhitā) of hymns (sūkta)
to the gods
(devatā). Its subject-matter is not historical narratives, but
praise of the gods.
Yet, inevitably, and like any human creation, it contains a lot of
historical
information. Any and every text, regardless of its topic, gives
information
about its time and place. The Vedic hymns allow us to deduce that they
were written in Bronze Age North India. To judge from the texts
themselves,
their composers were neither cavemen nor automobile drivers, and they
mention neither African giraffes nor Arctic polar bears. The Ṛg-Veda
is
neither global nor timeless. Like all human creations, it is determined
in
space and time. Any historian will note that the Vedas are composed in a
specific human language, pre-classical Sanskrit, datable and enjoying a
placement on the genealogical tree of the Indo-European language family.
Like the Bible and the Qur’ān, the Vedas only contain statements
that could
perfectly have been made by human beings of that place and time; nothing
supernatural.
The Ṛg-Veda is explicit about the existence of a pre-Vedic
period. This
includes the oft-mentioned ancient patriarch and law-giver Manu,
the Vedic
tribe’s foremother Ilā, the patriarchs Nahuṣa and Yayāti,
who were ancestors
of the Vedic founder Bharata. It also hints at the pre-Vedic
expulsion
northwestwards of the Druhyu tribe. It implies that the Vedas had
a
beginning within history. This is confirmed by another text corpus,
hazier
but covering a more extended area and period, the Purāṇas.
Likewise the Vedic hymn collection had an ending within history, just
like all mortal entities, encapsulated in their final editing attributed
to Veda (p.179) Vyāsa, the “editor of the Vedas”. We find
confirmation for the traditional belief that the Vedic hymn collections were
completed just before the
Bhārata war, viz. by the non-mention
in the Vedas of any king who,
according to the Puranic genealogical lists, is younger than Veda-Vyāsa’s
biological son Dhṛtarāṣṭra, father of the Kaurava party in
the war.
As Shrikant Talageri (2000) showed, the Vedas are expressive of the
culture of the Paurava tribe of Northwest India, particularly of
the Haryāṇā
area around the Sarasvatī basin. This was a variation on the
culture of the
surrounding areas (like the Aikṣkvāku tribe to their east,
featuring Rāma and
the Buddha, and the Yādavas to their south, featuring Kṛṣṇa),
which likewise
were tributaries of what came to be known as Hindu civilization. Helped
no doubt by a period of expanding political power for the Pauravas,
the
Vedas, as an ordered corpus of well-crafted poetry memorized by a class
set
apart for this purpose, and as the centre around which several
prestigious
sciences developed, gained a leading role in an ever-larger area,
ultimately
all over the Subcontinent. On the other hand, Talageri’s
contextualization
of the Vedas conflicts with common Hindu beliefs: that everything Hindu
stems from the Vedas, and that they can even be treated as the defining
source of Hinduism.
6.
When a Battle is just a Battle
In spite of not being a historical chronicle, the Vedic corpus does
contain
a few accounts of historical events which were occasions to thank the
gods.
These are principally several migrations and battles, best known among
them
the Battle of the Ten Kings (chiefly described in RV 7:18, 7:33
and 7:83).
This was a confrontation between the Paurava tribe’s Bhārata
clan and
mainly the Ānava tribe, with numerous names of participating
tribes and
battles. Numerous Hindus, including the Ārya Samāj, Mahātma Gāndhi
and
Sri Aurobindo, consider this a symbolic battle against materialism or
against
the evil in oneself, or against the evil-doers. Terms like Asura and
Dāsa, later
in classical Sanskrit used for demons c.q. serfs, get their later
meaning back-projected onto their usage in the battle’s account, where in fact
they are
only the names of all or some of the Ānavas. This follows a
universal pattern,
where names for “foreigner” end up as terms for “barbarians”, “evil-doers”
or “demons”. Other Sanskrit examples of a similar process are Rākṣasas,
Pisācas (two mountain tribes,
later reduced to something like “cannibals”)
and Mlecchas (the natives of the non-Vedic territory more or less
coinciding
with the region of Sindh).
But no, unlike what all too pious interpreters claim, thereby considering
themselves very profound and spiritual, this does not concern a battle of the
good guys against the bad guys; it is only and robustly a (p.180) real-life
battle of “us” against “them”. There is no indication that the Ānavas
embodied evil; their only negative trait from a Paurava/Vedic viewpoint
is that they were the enemy in a war for territory. And while they are
described as aggressors from the Asiknī/Chenab basin eastwards to the
Vedic-held Paruṣnī/Ravi basin, they may only have staged a counterattack
against an intrusive king Sudās originally based more to the east in the
Sarasvatī basin.
It is like that other battle, the core event of the Mahābhārata,
which has endlessly been treated as a metaphor for some moral or spiritual struggle,
where one side represent dharma, the other adharma. Even there, the
moral contrast between the two warring parties is not black and white. At most,
a moralizing narrative pitting dharma against adharma has been laid
over a historical event, where the two sides both had their share of good and
of evil, which still shines through in the final version of the evolving story.
Indeed, that is what we find so great about the epic: that the good guys have
somehow deserved the injustice they encounter, and that the bad guys also have
a justification for whatever they do. It is not some simplistic fairy-tale.
Some Vedic events are verifiable, chiefly through correspondence with
the archaeological data collected in the Sarasvatī basin. Very
rarely, the
textual information is even matched by information given in another
text:
the Vārṣāgira Battle, a sequel to the Ten Kings’ Battle but
farther west, is
also reported in a source by the then enemy, viz. the Avesta of
the Iranian
section of the Ānava tribe. The military commanders on both sides
are the
same, only the outcome of the battle is slightly different: clearly not
as
resoundingly victorious on the Vedic side as the Ṛṣis claim.
(Especially in
the longer term, it becomes clear that the initially expanding Pauravas
have
to settle for the already-established border, viz. the Hindu Kush
mountain
range between a Vedic India and an Iranian Afghanistan.) But two
slightly
different versions is exactly what you would expect in two people’s
testimonies of a single event. So, this is what can happen in a
historical
narrative; no
need to take refuge in a symbolic or didactic reading.
7. Pro Traditionalism
All the arguments we have ever heard against the historicity of the
Vedas (and that cannot annul the Ṛṣis’ own primary testimony anyway) are
based on (1) later-Vedic or post-Vedic sayings; and (2) shifting the meaning of
one of the terms employed. Thus, an Ārya Samāj spokesman sent us this
quotation: “The Vedas are the true knowledge of God. In the beginning after
human beings had been created, the Supreme Spirit made the Vedas known to
Brahma through Agni, etc., i.e., Brahma learnt the four Vedas (p.181) from
Agni, Vayu, Āditya and Aṅgira. (Manu Smriti 1-23).” A better approximation of
the verse’s meaning would be: “He (= Brahmā), for the perfection of
sacrifice, from fire, wind and the sun, milked (out) the eternal threefold Veda
(Brāhma), which consists of the Ṛg-, Yajur- and Sāma-
(Vedas).” The detail that the verse only mentions a set of 3 Vedas, which is
the original version (Vedatrayī), whereas the classical count implied
here is 4 Vedas, including the Atharva-Veda, already amounts to a modest
motion of no-confidence against the Traditionalist paradigm, for it exemplifies
an element of change in the purportedly eternal Vedic tradition.
But in a general sense, it is of course true that the Manu Smṛti,
the Bhagavad Gītā and other post-Vedic literature took this new
narrative of uncreated revealed eternal Vedas and ran with it, making it into
an unquestioned tradition. Yet, with all due respect for those authority-laden
books, their claim is and remains in conflict with the evidence of the Vedas
themselves, and wrong. Among the reasons not yet discussed, we might mention
that it does injustice to the divine character of the gods: if these have to
dictate the hymns of praise to themselves, they are narcissistic. If a girl is
given a serenade by a suitor below her balcony, she is not going to dictate to
him what praises to sing; on the contrary, she wants to be surprised by what
new phrases he comes up with. At any rate, the claim is and remains post-Vedic,
unknown to the Ṛṣis. It is the psychological result of centuries when
the Vedas had been given a higher place in Hindu society than anything
elsewhere. People looked ever more steeply
upwards to them.
8. Narahari Achar’s case
In reply to Shrikant Talageri’s historicization of the Vedas (Talageri
2020a), Prof. Narahari Achar argues from scripture that neither the Vedas nor
other ancient sources give a historical analysis. Mostly they don’t, but that
is what you would expect from a poetry book. What historians find in there are
meta-data, information not intended by the writer but nonetheless present
because all men unwittingly let on much about their circumstances. Even in an
explicitly historiographical book from ancient Northwest India you wouldn’t
find most of the modern philological and historical methods. But out of the
ordinary, Achar himself uses meta-information, viz. that yajña is the
essence of the Vedas, and that: “Since yajña is traced to Manu
and essentially to creation, there was no time when yajña was not there
and hence the concept ‘pre-Vedic’ does not arise.” (Achar 2020) Yajña was in
principle possible ever since mankind mastered the “red flower” (as Rudyard
Kipling’s Jungle Books character Mowgli calls fire), hundreds of
thousands of years ago. Indeed, as the first fire was probably taken from trees
struck by lightning, i.e. “by the thunder-god”, it was taken (p.182) to be a
gift from Above. Fire was an intrinsically divine element and thus a logical
bridge from the human to the heavenly sphere, symbolized by the smoke circling
up from the flames to heaven, and this since many millennia before the
composition of the Vedas.
However, as per one of Shrikant Talageri’s less controversial
observations, the introduction of the yajña was not made the centre of
the Vedas as an age-old inheritance, but was known in the Ṛg-Veda itself
to be more or less coterminous with the time of the Vedic hymns: it was
introduced by early sage Bhṛgu, who stemmed from the Ānava tribe,
northwestern cousins of the Vedic Paurava tribe and generators of the
Avestan tradition. It was not a widespread practice, the usual form of
sacrifice worldwide being either pouring a liquid on a representation of the
deity, as in the pan-Indian pūjā, or sacrificing a victim on an altar.
But among the Ānavas, it was standard practice, and while being passed
on to the Pauravas, it continued to evolve, extolling the sacred fire
thus far that they abandoned throwing their sacrifices into it.
Fire-sacrifice was typical for the northwestern tribes, the Druhyus and
the Ānavas (chiefly the Proto-Iranian branch during the early Vedic period),
who made up the near-total of the Indo-Europeans emigrating from India. The
Abbasid caliphate’s ambassador Ibn Faḏlan, who in the 9th century sailed
up the Volga river and lived with the Vikings there, describes his hosts as “fire-worshippers”
(like the Zoroastrians), because while idol-worshipping was only marginally in
evidence, probably borrowed through the Romans ultimately from the ancient
Middle East, fire was central in their religion. The Irish Celts had a
prominent fire-temple dedicated to the goddess Brigit (same root as Bhṛgu),
the Romans had Vestal virgins tending the eternal fire. So, what was a marginal
phenomenon in India, confined to the northwest, was exported to the whole
Indo-European expanse. In India, it gained a pre-eminent position when the
Vedic tradition was spread all over the Subcontinent because kings invited
Brahmin families to emigrate from the Sarasvatī basin, settle in their
own kingdoms and confer the sanctity and prestige of the Vedas on their
dynasties.
Alright, so fire sacrifice is not intrinsically coterminous with the
Vedas, but as it happens, the two do more or less coincide. Still, they are not
the same, and nothing is proven about the Vedas by making a point about yajña.
So when it comes to the Vedic hymns themselves, Prof. Achar should have shown
something in the text that could not possibly have been thought up by a
Bronze-Age NW-Indian human being, or perhaps brandished a dinosaur skeleton
sporting a tattoo of the Gāyatrī Mantra or at least the Auṁ sign
to prove the Vedas’ eternality.
In a reply to Achar’s paper, Talageri (2020b) notes that most (p.183)
Traditionalists reject not only the notion of “pre-Vedic” but also the
discerning of successive historical layers within the Vedas, the key to lots of
data about the geographical gradient crucial to the “Aryan” debate. These have
been elaborately distinguished by Western Orientalists and in even more
consequential detail by Talageri himself: “All this massive evidence certainly
cannot be discarded on the basis of the myth (yes, myth) that an individual
person named Vyāsa compiled all the Vedas in one go. It is perfectly
possible that Vyāsa gave the final canonical form to the collection, but
to say that the books were all composed and compiled together at one point of
time (I will ignore here the date of this point of time: Achar says 3100 BCE, I
say 1500-1400 BCE) against all the evidence, and then further use this to deny
any internal chronology to the Rigveda, is a joke.”
9.
Daya Krishna’s case
Philosophy Professor Daya Krishna musters even more arguments why the
Vedas are just human literature. They behave just like any human
literature.
Thus, the existence of different versions of the Yajur-Veda was
consciously
countenanced by the Yajur-Vedic Ṛṣis: “Obviously, they would not
have
regarded it as apauruṣeya or revealed”. (Krishna 1996:84)
Repetition of Vedic
verses is another key to the natural process of intertextuality: “It is
not only
that a very large number of Mantras from the Ṛgveda are repeated in the
other Vedas, but that there are substantial repetitions in the Ṛgveda
itself.”
(Krishna 1996:86) The Ṛṣis freely borrowed from each other, they
could
see far because they stood on the shoulders of giants: “But if this was
the
relation of one Vedic Ṛṣi to another, how can that relation be
understood
either in terms of apauruṣeyatva or revelation, or even in terms
of Vedic
authority?” (p.86)
Today’s devout God-fearing Hindus, temple-goers and practitioners of
a daily pūjā, would not feel at home with the old-school Hindu
philosophers,
many of whom were functionally or even explicitly atheist. Daya Krishna
cites Karl Potter with approval: “If, for example, one chooses the
second
century AD, one would discover that ‘the major systems extant at that
time --
Sāṁkhya, Mīmāṁsā, Nyāya
and Vaiśeṣika, Jainism, the several schools of
Buddhism, and Cārvāka -- are none of them theistic’. But ‘if one
slices
instead at, say, the fourteenth century AD, one finds that Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika
has become pronouncedly theistic, that Buddhism and Cārvāka had
disappeared, and that several varieties of theistic Vedānta have
come into
prominence.” (Krishna 1996:40) This shows in passing that medieval and
modern Hindus are very different from their ancient ancestors, including
the Ṛṣis they swear by.
Coming to the Upaniṣads, according to Krishna: “Most are not (p.184)
independent works, but selections made out of a pre-existing text”.
(Krishna
1991:104) This raises normal philological questions, such as: who made
the
selection, and why? Thus, the Aitareya Upaniṣad forms the middle
part of
the Aitareya Āraṇyaka, the Kena Upaniṣad forms the 10th chapter
of the
Jaiminīya Upaniṣad-Brāhmaṇa, the Taittirīya
Upaniṣad is the 7th to 9th
chapter of Taittirīya Āraṇyaka, while the Kaṭha Upaniṣad
is part of the
Taittirīya Brāhmaṇa. Again, the
fact that many later books named Upaniṣad
clearly postdate the Vedic period, even in the capacious definition of “Vedic”
current in India, casts doubt on their status of apauruṣeyatva.
Like in the
hymn collections, here too, we get to know from the texts the very human
life-stories of Ṛṣis, such as Yājñavalkya, Satyakāma Jābala,
Uddālaka Aruṇi and others, as of any human writers.
If this is God speaking, we find him, as gods go, comparatively undecided,
wrapped up in trifles, changing his mind even at the solemn moment of giving a
message for eternity. Yes, the doctrine of the Self is enormously important,
but if God Himself had to communicate it, would he have buried it in
all-too-human anecdotes? By contrast, in human beings, this is only what you
can expect: even discoveries or innovations of genius get born in an
all-too-human context, with circumstances that disappoint if you expect
splendour befitting their world-historical importance. Yet, Traditionalists
consider these texts as Śruti, “what is heard”, interpreted as “what has
been revealed”.
10.
Strategic Implications of
Anti-history Positions
Today, in an ongoing and very consequential debate, the Traditionalist
position happens to be contrary to Hindu self-interest. The search for
historical information in the Vedas (so far both by the Western
Orientalists
and by Talageri), has yielded lots of material, first establishing but
on closer
look refuting the Aryan Invasion Theory decried by most aware Hindus.
The
ancient but post-Vedic writers conditioned by human psychology and
cultural tendencies, extolling the for them already ancient Vedas, were
in
no position yet to draw all the historical implications from these
texts.
As Talageri (2020) notes: “All these ancient writers were totally
unacquainted with the Indo-European question or the AIT, and with the
principles of modern linguistics and historical studies, and could never
have
possibly intended that their religious views be misused as weapons
by present-day “traditionalist” Hindus to sabotage research on ancient
history and to
disarm other Hindu researchers from dealing with the (for example, AIT-promoting)
opponents.”
For the Traditionalists, however, it is still preferable to lose this
debate
(which is mostly with foreigners, whose opinion they contemptuously
ignore
(p.185) anyway), rather than to give up on their fundamental belief that
the Vedas were uncreated and oblivious to mere history.
In another debate too, the historical approach proves quite fruitful. About
caste, the diehard Traditionalists simply maintain that the Vedas are eternal
and the necessity of caste with it. But at the same time, numerous Hindus are
aware that caste is Hinduism’s Achilles heel. So modern activist Hindus try to
disown caste and evacuate it from Hinduism. Ludicrously, they deny the emphasis
on caste in their scriptures, or reinterpret caste as a matter of personal
choice. Thus, they deny (or if possible, keep out of view) that in the Bhagavad
Gītā, both Kṛṣṇa’s and Arjuṇa’s references to “immorality of
women” as cause of “caste-mixing” obviously imply an unabashedly birth-based
endogamous understanding of caste. They even claim that caste is nothing but a
British concoction, the Hindu counterpart of the anti-Hindus’ claim that the
Ayodhya temple was nothing but a British concoction, and for the same purpose:
to “divide and rule”.
A historical view of caste, by contrast, concedes candidly that caste
was
intertwined with Hinduism for long, but equally shows that caste was
initially
absent and only intruded in stages. Hinduism can flourish all while
letting
caste wither away. That may satisfy at least the more fair-minded among
Hinduism’s critics.
But then, real Traditionalists are not interested in such temporary advantages,
trifles compared to timeless Tradition. And now you mention it, it may be
commendable to forego a strategic advantage just to remain faithful to your
most cherished beliefs. Moreover, the Aryan Invasion debate can be dismissed as
but a temporary distraction. It didn’t exist for most of history, and after
being resolved, it will disappear again soon, so it is not worth sacrificing an
old doctrine for. Similarly, caste can be cherished as too precious (and alas,
misunderstood) to justify any interference by incomprehending moderns. Right?
Well, in that case, after discarding considerations of argumentative
expediency, the consideration of truth remains. There is not a shred of
evidence for the Vedas’ supernatural origin, and plenty for a human, historical
origin.
Conclusion
Those who disagree with us and stick to the belief in an eternal and
uncreated Veda, shouldn’t convince us, they should go and
convince the
Ṛṣis. It is they, not the cabal of Western India-watchers
or Orientalists, who
have described a pre-Vedic stretch of history, and who gave us a
collection
of hymns expressing the human viewpoint and addressing the gods. They
included all manner of historical details, from contingent and
convoluted
family sagas through the names of rivers to descriptions of battles, all
in
between their main purpose of singing praise to the gods.
(p.186)
Oddly, for people who hold the Vedas in such quasi-divinizing awe, the
Traditionalists turn out to go against the Vedic testimony itself. When
the
choice is between the Traditionalists’ version and the Ṛṣisí
version, we stand
with the Ṛṣis.
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Elst, Koenraad, 2012: The Argumentative Hindu, Voice of India,
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Jamison, Stephanie W, and Brereton, Joel, 2014: The Rigveda, OUP,
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--, 2020a: “Rigveda and the Aryan Theory: a Rational Approach”,
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--, 2020b: “A Reply To Prof. Narahari Achar’s Critique of my article The
Rigveda and the Aryan Theory: A Rational Perspective. The Full
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