A few years ago, an Indian Brahmin couple living in an American state filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the hospital where their son had been born. They took this action because the boy was circumcised without the knowledge and permission of the parents. This sort of thing happens now and then in American hospitals, and the cases are usually settled between 50 and 100 thousand dollars per case. According to the distraught parents, the size of the award demanded was owing to religious reasons: “a circumcised male cannot be a good Hindu—the ancient tradition precludes bodily modifications and degrades those whose bodies are imperfect.” Furthermore, they argued, the boy would be subject to ridicule and would have an exceptionally difficult time acquiring a high-caste wife because of the “deformity.” The case was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount, which means that an American court did not have to rule on the matter of the integrity of the body in normative Hindu traditions.
An examination of the Dharmaśāstras and later commentaries and compendia provides no clear answer to the question raised: can a Brahmin be a “good Hindu” if he has been inadvertently circumcised (as opposed to, say, a Kṣatriya, who loses an arm in battle). The legal texts do not cover this topic, just as they do not cover many other topics. For example, can a modern college teacher use some Hindu justification to reject radio technology that would assist a deaf student hear her lectures. Simply put, the texts cannot cover what they do not imagine, and so, one might have to deftly turn to Mīmāṃsā meta-rules in order to produce viable conjectures (Lingat 1973: 158; Derrett 1968: 86; Kane III: 842–3).
However, the emotional issue underlying the parents’ distress, their shame is as old as culture itself and it may be stated in the following general terms: How is the body conceived within a normative cultural worldview, how is the body experienced, and are the two related? More specifically, what social and cultural representations does the body articulate (however implicitly) and how do power relations become manifest in the way that the socialized body imposes itself on the individual’s embodied experiences? Michel Foucault has been instrumental in framing the relationship between the world and the body by means of which “the most minute and local social practices are linked up with the large-scale organization of power” (1988: 17).
Perhaps the best methodological approach for closely examining the intersection of sociocultural values and embodied experience is phenomenology. This has certainly been the case in recent decades among contemporary anthropologists who have focused on cross-cultural embodied experiences (Desjarlais and Throop 2011). However, it may be possible to extend this approach to ancient material where firsthand informant data are unavailable (Glucklich 1994). It may still be possible to examine how concentrating on our experience “allows us to account for the many forms of mediations of experience and perception itself” (Ram and Houston 2015:4). Such mediations “encompass long histories of power relations that connect as well as divide people.” (Ram and Houston 2015: 4). Included among these mediations, or modes of shaping embodied experience, are traditions of representation that take the form of rules and regulations, institutions, social classes, aesthetic and hygienic norms, and many others. It is within this context that such a subtle and powerful concept as body image emerges and it is where the shame of a contemporary Hindu family assumes specific contours.
Hence, in the study of Dharmaśāstric conceptions of the body (and mythological Vedic precedents), and in the rules governing the conduct of the body in multiple contexts, we gain a potential glimpse into the spaces where social and political relations meet subjective experience—even in the absence of rich subjective material. In such spaces, the body is no longer “a mere metaphor for conceptual notions, it claims attention as a noetic force, a creator of truths” (Glucklich 1994: 5). We can study the texts and identify narratives on the Creator’s (Self-existent—Svayambhū ) body, the (male and female) Brahmanical body, the consecration and purification of the body in times of transition (dīkṣā, saṃskāra ), the ascetic body, the criminal’s body, the body of the sinner and the penitent, the body of the bride and her groom, the patient’s body or that of the chronically or congenitally ill and handicapped, the dead body, and others. No single text dominates such descriptions. The Manu Smṛti (Manu ) may perhaps be the most systematic elaboration of the socially mediated body, but the Caraka and Śu śruta-saṃhitas are more detailed with respect to the patient’s body; the Gṛhyasūtras are better for a description of the ritualized (saṃskāra ) body; the Upaniṣads, Yogasūtras , Tantras, and similar works pay greater attention to the ascetic body; the Vedas and Purāṇas spend more time with the divine body; the itihāsa literature (Rāmāya ṇ a and Mahābhārata ) contain more vivid narratives on the personal body in its social and biographical contexts. For example, it must be a text like the Rāmāya ṇ a that demonstrates that there is a correlation between virtue and beauty, that a perfect man has a perfect body, while a demon (or demoness) must be ugly (Pollock 1991: 258 fn. 5).
Perhaps no context better illustrates the way that the body mediates the cosmos-society-individual axis than a ritual that accounts for (illustrates and promotes) the way that the male seed becomes a human body (fetus) within the female body (womb). The Dharmaśāstras allude to such rituals (as Garbhādhāna ) in Manu 3.46–3.47 and Yājñavalkya 1.79 (where the rite is taken to be a saṃskāra for the son, not the mother). 1 However, for the signifying details one must turn to the Gṛhyasūtras. Kane (II: 201–7) has summarized a number of versions of the Garbhādhāna , which include the following key acts leading up to intercourse:
All of these actions are accompanied by explicit cosmological mantras that identify the joining of sperm and womb with various gods, fire and earth, Sāman and Rik, sky and earth, etc. Kane feels compelled to apologize for the “religious halo” surrounding such ancient rituals (II: 203), but contemporary ritual and cultural theories mine these rites for meaningful semiotic facts. 2 Current Foucauldian theories may identify the performance with the power trajectories with which both the garbha (fetus and future child) and the mother’s body are imbued with meaning, that is, are reinforced as cultural products. While it is highly doubtful that the American Hindu couple performed any such ritual at the time of coitus, there is no doubt that they viewed the integrity of their infant boy’s body with the same enculturated eye.
As one surveys the conception of the body in a single pivotal text such as Manu , one easily discovers a strong isomorphism between cosmological spaces and the human body and perhaps an attempt to turn this relationship into a rationale for authoritative practice: purity–pollution, social (var ṇ a ) relations, stages of life, law and order, and other domains are predicated on that foundational homology. The evidence for this broad assertion comes from a staggering wealth of references to the body, including the following (incomplete) list (in Olivelle’s translation): Arms, anus, beard, bladder, bone, breath, buttocks, ear, eye, fat, feet, finger, flesh, forehead, hair, hand, head, heart, heel, knee, lips, marrow, mouth, nails, navel, neck, palm, penis, pus, saliva, seed, semen, skin, spit, stomach, sweat, teeth, testicles, thigh, tongue, urine, waist, and womb.
Nonetheless, it must be clear that in discussing the body, we are addressing two distinct issues: the first is the body in the mind, that is, conceptions of the body as a locus of cosmological and social ideas. The second, in contrast, is the empirical body as the site of experience and knowledge. This distinction has emerged as an important agenda in the study of religion over the last quarter century. Lawrence Sullivan, who was then president of the American Academy of Religion, raised the issue in a History of Religions article in 1990: “How will we come to know, in a discursive, conceptual way the knowledge of the body?” (86) Doing so, he continued, would take us into the fields of neurophysiology, cognition and communication, perception, and so forth.
This chapter will cover both the metaphorical body—the socially constructed conception that tells us so much about the mind (and its social world)—and the experienced body that generates distinct (and perhaps resistant) knowledge. I shall show that the two domains closely overlap.
The Man has a thousand heads, a thousand eyes, and a thousand feet.
Having covered the earth on all sides he extended ten fingers’ breadth beyond. (Rig Veda 10.90; Jamison and Brereton 2014)
This exceedingly famous quote shows, yet again, that ideological and conceptual agendas are fulfilled by explicit or implied relationships. For example, the repeating numbers in the entire text (“Puruṣa Sūkta”) point to Agni or the sacrificial fire, with its many forms, and indeed, the text is explicitly about the sacrifice (Jamison and Brereton 2014: 1538). Puruṣa is the offering and the Puruṣa is the sacrifice itself, which, as an ordering event, produces both cosmological and social realities:
The Brahmin was his mouth. The ruler was made from his two arms. As to his thighs—that is what the freeman was. From his two feet the servant was born.
(RV 10.90)
This correlation is so familiar that it not only repeats in Manu , or in every modern textbook about Hinduism, it has become a conservative Brahmanical cliché to justify caste hierarchy (Stalin 2007). In that sense the Puruṣa Sūkta serves as an easy example for the body as a generative root metaphor—a cognitive tool used in a variety of domains in meaningful and influential ways (Pepper 1942; Turner 1974).
It is a relatively small leap from the late Rig Vedic text to Manu’s tip of the hat to the reigning idea: “For the protection of this whole creation, that One of dazzling brilliance assigned separate activities for those born from the mouth, arms, thighs and feet” (MDh 1.87; tr. Olivelle). The brilliance in the verse almost nostalgically alludes to Agni or the sacrificial fire yet again. But more obvious is the social and functional justification, and several verses later (MDh 1.92), the text clinches the main point of it all: “A man is said to be purer above the navel. Therefore, the Self-existent One has declared, the mouth is his purest part.” One comes to experience one’s own body as reprising influential social and cosmological ideas.
While the varṇa -oriented social function (and extension to experience) of this metaphor seems obvious, there is a great deal more to learn about the body acting on behalf of intellectual agendas. The symbolizing potential of the root metaphor is extremely flexible as it ranges far beyond the social domain and extends to notions of interrelatedness, global hierarchy, monistic philosophies, and the normative value of structure and structuring acts such as rituals and even language. As additional symbolized domains emerge from the root metaphor, the obvious use of the human body becomes more complicated. However, this increasing complexity helps us link the metaphor to actual bodies in a richer manner than Manu’s analogical exercise. For example, one may also (briefly) consider the use of the body in the Agnicayana ritual in the Brāhmaṇa texts, the ritual interpretation provided in the Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad 2.1 and the story of Indra, Virocana, and Prajāpati in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad (8.7).
The Agnicayana , laying of the brick altar for the Vedic sacrifice, was an immensely elaborate performance that Frits Staal (1989: 154) has analyzed as ritual rules without pragmatically validated meaning. At the heart of the early part of the ritual was a sequence of measurements in which the body of the yajamāna played a key role: his wife matching a brick to the size of his foot; the vedi measured with a rope that was twice his height; and others (ŚB 7.4.2). The symbolism of the Agnicayana involved the feeding of Prajāpati (time) or Puruṣa (that is, acquiring immortality)—but the correspondence with the sacrificer’s body reveals a magical-homological rationality in which numerical correspondence pointed at the goal of the sacrifice. (Kane II: 1246).
The Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad (2.1.2–2.1.3) takes us back to Puruṣa, and to the fire sacrifice as well, as it thoroughly reimagines the relationship between the person and reality:
That Person, indeed, is divine,
he has no visible form;
He is both within and without,
unborn, without breath or mind;
He is radiant, and farther than
the farthest imperishable.
From him issue breath and mind,
and all the organs…(Tr. Olivelle)
The narrative—myth really—of corporeality is here elevated to a dynamic monistic conception in which the person is all that exists and the body dissolves into ontological unintelligibility. This is consistent, if not identical, with that other Upanishadic narrative about the body and its relationship to ultimate truth: the story of Indra, Virocana, and Prajāpati (Chāndogya Upaniṣad 8.7). The Vedic Indra and the demon approach Prajāpati in order to learn the truth about the inner self (ātman ). Virocana is content with the first lesson: “This person that one sees here in the eye—that is the self (ātman ); that is the immortal…But then sir, who is the one that’s seen here in the water and here in the mirror? It is the same one who is seen in all these surfaces, replied Prajāpati.”
Indra, in contrast, obtains the final lesson, namely that “This body, Maghavan, is mortal; it is in the grip of death. So it is the abode of this immortal and non-bodily self…” (8.12.1; tr. Olivelle).
It is one of the chief characteristics of Manu’s synthesis that both corporeal and disembodied conceptions are integrated into the normative formulation of dharma . That is, the body is both a vehicle for socio-cosmological constructions that structure living bodies and, at the same time, the body serves as a symbol for its own transcendence. All of this can be seen in a variety of contexts in Manu:
The creator’s body (1.14 vss.)
The Brahmin’s body (1.92 vss.)
The consecrated body (2.26 vss.; 2.60)
The purified body (5.134 vss.)
The purified mind (5.107 vss.)
The ascetic body (6.30 vss.)
The punished (criminal) body (8.124 vss.; 8.270 vss.)
The penitent body (11.48 vss.; 11.74 vss.)
The logical place to begin in Manu is the body of the Creator (Chapter 1 ) and then to move to the Brahmin’s body (also in Chapter 1 ). These describe the ideal and establish normative implications such as social order, purity, and so forth. But, it may be more interesting to start elsewhere, unexpectedly, with the criminal and the sinner’s body. Here, ideal and norm emerge in their violation, where the lived body (in pain or pollution) attests to the actual applicability of the ideal.
Manu, the son of the Self-existent One, has proclaimed ten places upon which punishment may be inflicted…They are: genitals, stomach, tongue, and hands, feet are fifth; and then, eyes, nose, ears, wealth, and body. (MDh 8.124–8.125; Olivelle)
The text, which notes that Brahmins are exempt from this, does not immediately explain which crime is punished on which part of the body, but this becomes clear a bit later in the same chapter (MDh 8.270–8.271):
If a once-born man hurls grossly abusive words at twice-born men, his tongue shall be cut off, for he originated from the lowest part. If he invokes their names and castes with disdain, a red-hot iron nail ten fingers long should be driven into his mouth…
It bears noting that this text does not correspond to 8.125 precisely—the tongue is mentioned in both, but not the mouth. What is more significant to the overall theme (of the idealized body) is the clear reference to the Puruṣa Sūkta in accounting for the judicial hierarchy (“he originated from the lowest part.”). Next, that same text (ṚV 10.90) is alluded to in a more subtle manner when the hot nail is specified as ten-fingers long—the same length by which Puruṣa extends beyond the cosmos. The myth/legal homology may be a coincidence or the mere reliance on some standard unit of measurement. But, it could also be expressive of what we saw in the Agnicayana : a recognition that numerical similarities invoked across distinct domains express a relationship that transcends mere analogy and establishes, if not identity, at least some metonymic bond. This sort of relationship is easier to predict and ascertain in the penitential body: the sinner who performs penance (prāyaścitta ).
The correspondence between crime and punishment (daṇḍa ) in Manu implies, or perhaps prevents, an equally certain, if more metaphysical, connection between act and consequence.
A man who steals gold gets rotten nails; a man who drinks liquor, black teeth; the murderer of a Brahmin, consumption; a man who has sex with his elder’s wife, skin disease; a slanderer, a smelly nose; an informant, a smelly mouth…(MDh 11.49–11.50; tr. Olivelle)
Such considerations are usually reserved for discussions of sins (pāpa ), karmic consequences, and penances, but are also considered legally relevant for evaluating legal subjects (witnesses and so forth).
The most precise and literal correspondence between an offending organ and the location and severity of punishment can be seen in rules that apply to the Śūdra transgressor (MDh 8.270–8.272; 280–3). Manu (8.279) makes this clear: “When a lowest-born man uses a particular limb to injure a superior person, that very limb should be cut off—that is Manu’s decree.” Meanwhile, proportionality is still important in the case of twice-born offenders, but monetary calculation is applied as substitute in accordance with the pain or the damage to the body of the offender (MDh 8.285).
The legal status and ideological meaning of the offending body is implicitly given in Manu 8.374–8.385, which is a masterpiece of punitive proportionality. These rules deal with illicit sex with a woman (strīsaṁgraha ṇa ) who is either guarded (subject to male relative) or unguarded. The punishments are significant, including vast fines and even imprisonment for a Vaiśya. But, three things stand out: First, sex with a guarded Brahmin woman induces the highest punishment, but, otherwise, the fines are higher for a twice-born man who commits such acts with a low-caste woman. Second, the Śūdra can lose a limb (castration) and all his property, or his life as well, for sex with a twice-born woman. Finally, a Kṣatriya has his head shaved with urine for sex with an unguarded Kṣatriya woman, while a Vaiśya only pays 500 (Glucklich 1982).
The careful punitive grid in this and similar sections (for example, verbal abuse) shows numerical values as metrics of social rank and, at the same time, it demonstrates that often the Śūdra’s body acts as his legal currency, while the twice-born can replace the body with money or time served in prison. In either case, numbers in Manu (and other smṛtis ) act as a sort of validation of the cosmological foundation of social hierarchy, perhaps recapturing the metaphysical significance of numbers in Vedic rationality. And, as we shall see later on, the numerical consideration of length of impurity following birth and death function is a similar way.
The text explains all of this (and much more) as the product of deeds committed in this or a previous life and it prescribes—for those sins committed intentionally—a suitable penance (MDh 11.45, 11.48). The list occasionally appears to contain some sort of physio-moral balance (a man who steals a lamp is blind in one eye), but the relationship between the act and the body is not always clear. The blackening of nail or teeth look like the damage done to the offending limb (fingers, mouth)—but this is not always the case. Far more interesting than these karmic speculations are the actual manipulations of the body as one tries to prevent karmic consequences, or as one performs penances.
If a twice-born man in his folly drinks liquor, he should drink boiling hot-liquor; when his body is scalded by it, he will be released from that sin. (MDh 11.91)
The new element introduced by penance into what had been a theoretical homology between socio-cosmic disruption (sin) and the body is pain. The location of the punishment is significant, but it is the hot scolding sensation that releases one from sin. “The man who sleeps with his elder’s wife must proclaim his crime and lie down on a heated iron bed, or embrace a red-hot metal cylinder; he is purified by death” (MDh 11.104). The correspondences (the cosmos, the body, and justice), is reinforced by sheer enormity of the topic (prāyaścitta ) and by the exquisite detail with which the body is recruited to exact moral purification (Kane IV: 1–2).
It is not always the case that pain liberates from sin; there are other mechanisms, including magical and psychological elements (Glucklich 2003). Furthermore, it is far from obvious how bodily pain fits into the algorithm of sin-body-penance. It is easier to explain, for example, another dimension of the painful penance—public shaming: “Or, he may cut off his penis and testicles by himself, hold them in his cupped hands, and walk straight toward the south-west until he falls down dead” (MDh 11.105). Shaming exhibits the offending body part for all to see and ritually reinforces the desired normative lesson (Day 1982: 174, 181). It makes a private act (the sin) public and turns the sinner into the embodied exhibition of transgression. In fact, the integrity and health of the physical body play a significant role in the legal and, therefore, social status of the individual, and individuals who are congenitally ill or missing a limb are excluded from many legal transactions (MDh 8.64; 8.66; 8.71; 163; YDh 2.143–2.144).
Both characteristics—the body in pain and the body as the prism of legal and moral culpability—are visible in ordeals (divya ). Not all ordeals are painful (balance, for example), but the more significant ones—Sitā underwent a variation on this—do involve subjecting the body to potential pain (MDh 8.114–8.116). According to Yājñavalkya Sm ṛti 2.104, Viṣnu Dharmaśāstra 11.11–11.12, and other texts, the fire ordeal involves the heating of iron rods, which are placed on the open palms of the accused (śodhya), which are protected by leaves of the Aśvattha tree. The accused must show no hesitation during the elaborate ritual, and the hands must betray no physical sign of trauma. A variation involves heated gold coin (taptamaṣa ) and plowshare (phāla )—both heated and placed into contact with the accused (Kane III: 371). While stoicism in the face of pain is critical: in all ordeals, the body reveals hidden truths (guilt or innocence) as the field of action for divine information, and hence the term divya (Lariviere 1981a). 3
Vedic texts and rituals are famous for demonstrating magical relationships: between sound and meaning, ritual and result, ritual and performer, and so forth (Patton 2005). One might fit karmic reciprocity (act-consequence) in this scheme, as long as we set aside the moral consideration. However, the moral consideration is critical in the post-Vedic (e.g., Buddhist, late Upanishadic) way of thinking. We see this in Manu’s emphasis on intentionality (11.45). However, pain is another matter. Pain emerges as a factor within the moral-karmic domain in which the body figures as sinner and penitent. Inasmuch as intention defines the motive, pain acts as the countermeasure to immoral intention. The motive (kāmatah) is abstract, or rather hidden—a mere psychological force. But pain too is hidden. It is the subjective way in which the body registers the punishment. That punishment (hugging a hot cylinder) is concrete and often highly public—but the pain is private.
One may still ask why pain? Why not swift death? The reason, possibly, is that pain in religious contexts is regarded as a constructive-transformative force (Glucklich 2001). There is evidence for this in contexts that do not deal with punishment and penance, for example, in the way that the ascetic (saṃnyāsin ) manipulates his own body in pursuit of liberation.
Manu’s instructions for the fourth stage of life, translated by Olivelle as the ascetic , are detailed. They include highly symbolic gestures, but they also include acts that are extremely inconvenient, uncomfortable, and even painful:
He should roll on the ground or stand on tiptoes all day; spend the day standing and the night seated, bathing at dawn, midday, and dusk; surround himself with the five fires in the summer; live in the open air during the rainy season, and wear wet clothes in the winter—gradually intensifying his ascetic toil. Bathing at dawn, noon, and dusk, he should offer quenching libations to ancestors and gods, and engaging in even harsher ascetic toil, he should inflict punishment on his body.
(MDh 6.22–6.24)
The psychological mechanism that accounts for the perceived efficacy of the pain in gaining ultimate goals is yogic (MDh 6.61–6.86) and clearly dualistic. The ascetic meditates on embodied births in billions of wombs, linked with the pain of adharma . He must control his breath in order to burn away the faults of his organs (like the burning away of the impurities of metallic ore), he withdraws his organs from their attachments. And he meditates on the body:
Constructed with beams of bones, fastened with tendons, plastered with flesh and blood, covered with skin, foul-smelling, filled with urine and excrement, infested with old age and sorrow, the abode of sickness, full of pain, covered with dust, and impermanent—he must abandon this dwelling place of ghosts.
(MDh 6.76–6.77)
The voluntary pains of the ascetic are thus transformative, almost alchemical in effect. (Kaelber 1989: 5) The ascetic body—like those of the criminal and the sinner—is as useful in its ritual suppression as the Brahmin’s body is useful in its ideological expression.
Indeed, while the Brahmin’s body, as we shall see, is paradigmatic, the ascetic body represents a dynamic process: a transformation that includes penance, purification, and even internalization. Olivelle (2005a: 282) cites the rituals of saṃnyāsa , abandonment of the daily fires, as the ritual depositing of the fires within the body of the renouncer, where they become the five breaths. Elsewhere the dynamics of the ascetic body are described as a divinizing process (Davis 1991) or even as a sort of possession (Smith 2006).
There is a strong correlation in the Dharmaśāstra between the body of the Brahmin and the body of God. More specifically, the direct link between the mouth of God and the mouth of the Brahmin helps to define the authority on which social hierarchy—indeed order itself—is based. It is important to note that from a theological perspective, divine embodiment represents a problem of limitation, even for Manu and his archaic cosmology (Clooney 2005). 4 Later Shaivite and Vaishnavite theologians would disagree on the nature of this problem, but Manu’s focus was not on the nature of the divine itself, but on the relationship between cosmology and normative authority. Inasmuch as the divine body is limited to the mouth, authority is magnified and it extends to the empirical world. The correspondence between the divine mouth and that of the Brahmin builds on this theme: the birth (embodiment) of the Brahmin is the instantiation of dharma , which is the structure of God’s body made manifest in the social realm.
A man is said to be purer above the navel. Therefore, the Self-existent One has declared, the mouth is his purest part. Because he arose from the loftiest part of the body, because he is the eldest, and because he retains the Veda, the Brahmin is the Law the lord of this whole creation (MDh 1.92–1.93)
It is interesting to note that the mythical origin of the Brahmin was in ascetic heat (tapas ) rather than a birthing process. The product of the mouth (Veda, Brahmin) is both pure and authoritative, which is essential for the perpetuation of order and for the benefit of the divine as well:
What creature can surpass him through whose mouth the denizens of the triple heaven always eat their oblations, and the forefathers their offerings?(MDh 1.95)
If one were to argue that the authority that dharma texts claim for their social order comes from Vedic revelation and divine origins, it is the Brahmin’s body—pure but infinitely vulnerable to impurity—that turns authority into practice and perhaps even anxiety. Impurity is everywhere, and the battle against it unceasing—even around the Brahmin’s own body. There are, most immediately, the twelve products of the body (excrement, urine, semen, blood, etc.) to be rid of and to purify the orifices (MDh 5.134). There are the foods to avoid and even the remnants of allowed food that cling to the lips and must be cleansed (MDh 2.56). Even the palm of the hand with which the purifying sipping of water takes place is divided into the pure or acceptable (corresponding to Brahmā and Prajāpati) and unacceptable (corresponding to ancestors) (MDh 2.58–2.59). While in the state of impurity, the Brahmin must avoid touching pure objects such as the cow, a Brahmin, and fire—and if he does touch these, he purifies his limb with water (MDh 4.142). In fact, the entire day, consisting of proper ritual observance and proper moral conduct, is framed by a careful and extensive purification of the body and vigilance against coming into contact with anything that might defile the body. In a sense, the Brahmanical body acts as the living map of the social and natural order.
The Brahmin begins his day (after his toilet) with an elaborate series of purifications, which consist of carefully scripted physical manipulations, accompanied by the recitation of appropriate mantras. This includes:
It is important to note that while purity and impurity are closely related to the Brahmin’s body, this is a conceptual and ultimately homological body. In other words, this is the body as root metaphor and a sign for broader social relationships. Hence, when impurity extends to birth and death and applies to individuals who have had no direct physical contact with polluting matter (corpses, birth fluids), the body is in the background as a conceptual foundation. The impure relative who then comes in contact with others will pollute the first: the first will pollute the second, the third, and up to the fourth person (Michaels 2004: 179–80). This is a perfect illustration of the way that the paradigm of the body as the index of social relationships actually shapes social conduct.
Arrival into and departure from the world is an area of profound interest in the dharma literature, and Manu devotes a great deal of space to discussion of the periods of impurity that accompany these events. 5
Someone who has teethed, someone younger, or someone who has had his first cutting of hair—when any of these dies, all his relatives become impure; the same is prescribed after the birth of a child. A ten-day period of impurity following a death is prescribed for those who belong to the same ancestry; alternatively, that period may last until the collection of bones, or for three days, for a single day.
(MDh 5.58–5.59) 6
However, the Dharmaśāstra texts, including Manu, do not provide as much detail on the death rites as they do on the periods of impurity. For data on the dead body and its manipulation that early authors might have consulted, one must turn (again) to sources such as the Gṛhyasūtras. One example is Āśvalāyana Gṛhyasūtra 4.1–4.5. 7
The body of the deceased undergoes a gradual passage from living person to ancestor (via the ascetic body, etc.), and his physical body is instrumental in this process of perfection. The manipulations of the body in ĀśGṛ include the total shaving of the body and clipping of nails, placing the body on the hairy side of black antelope skin (in the manner of an ascetic), and placing various objects (of social and religious significance) in the hands or on the torso. For example, a sacrificial spoon goes in the right hand, and another type goes in the left; two wooden swords are placed on either side of the body (of a Kṣatriya); a ladle is placed on the chest; pressing stones on the teeth; and so forth. It appears that in order to achieve successful perfection of the released soul, the body is ritually connected to the paradigm of the sacrifice as an ordering mechanism that establishes caste identity and a dynamic relationship between society and broader cosmological themes.
In Manu, the careful ordering of periods of impurity may be understood not only in terms of the material aspects of death and corpses, but as links to the socio-cosmological values performed in the death rites as seen in the Gṛhyasūtras. The insistence on periods of impurity may be due to actual contact with the corpse or with the substances associated with delivery of a baby, but there are also conceptual considerations. 8 For instance, Manu distinguishes between those who handle the corpse—these are subject to ten days of impurity—from those who participate in the funeral by offering libations only. The latter are only subject to three days of impurity. This appears to suggest that the body itself is the polluter, even of death. However, another consideration, a social one, may be at work here. The following verse (MDh 5.66) states that a student who performs the funeral for his teacher is subject to ten days of pollution. This suggests, perhaps, that the previous rule was marking a distinction between close relatives who were expected to touch the corpse and the more distant relatives who were only expected to offer libation. In that case, the gradation in days of impurity reflects social proximity—not some property of the physical body.
Such an interpretation emerges from the reading of Manu 5.74–5.78, which discuss the death of a relative in a distant location. Indeed, Manu is both detailed and systematic in specifying the correlation between the social relationship (teacher, teacher’s son, teacher’s wife, Vedic scholar, officiating priest, etc.) and the term of impurity (5.80–5.84). While this material belongs in the discussion of impurity rather than the physical body, the occasion of death—the departure of physical substance of social individuals—marks this period a time of vulnerability for the social milieu vacated. The specific consideration of terms of impurity thus reflects the noetic—meaning giving—role of the body as a social nexus.
In conclusion, the numerous references to the human body in Dharmaśāstric texts like Manu display a deep and powerful rationale. The body—particularly the body of God and the body of the Brahmin—represent the deep relationship between cosmic and social order and the authority of dharma as the legitimate mechanism for upholding that order. But, the very same trope displays the tenuous nature of that order, its vulnerability to disruption by chaos, and, in a more subtle way, the anxiety induced by such threats. The power of these conceptions can be seen when this anxiety is perpetuated into the twenty-first century and as far away from the land of the black antelope as Ohio, USA.