XIII

RESIDUE AND SURPLUS

In that place therefore the blessed god, all-present, sleeping on the ocean, cloaked his night with thick darkness. But a surplus of luminous quality awakened him and he saw the empty world.

—Mahābhārata, 3.272.40–41ab

 

 

The whole of Indian tradition, in its various branches, is influenced by a doctrine of residue, which can be embodied in three words, corresponding to three successive stages: vāstu, ucchiṣṭa, and śeṣa. It has a key role as a doctrine, similar to that of ousía in classical Greece, in that it suggests the inadequacy of sacrifice (but instead of sacrifice we can also say: of any system) in supporting the whole of existence. Something always remains outside—indeed, has to remain outside, because, if it were included in the system, it would disrupt it from within. On the other hand, the sacrifice or any system makes sense only if it extends to everything. A compromise therefore had to be established with what was left outside, what was left behind. So Rudra became Vāstavya, the ruler of the place and of the residue. This was the place the gods had left behind to get to the sky. But this place was the whole earth. So the whole earth was the residue.

The passage from one epoch to the other was described as being like an enormous fire, a funeral sacrifice in which the fire consumed the whole earth. In the end, all that remained was ash, floating on the waters. Once again, the residue. This ash took the form of a snake, called Śeṣa, Residue, and also Ananta, Infinite. What at the beginning had been thrown away turned out to be limitless, invincible. The snake arranged its coils into a soft bed so Viṣṇu could lie on it. The god slept—or meditated or dreamed. One day a surplus of sattva, that luminous thread woven within all that exists, shook him and woke him. And another world sprang forth while a long lotus stalk sprouted from his navel. At the top, a magnificent pink bud came into blossom. And resting on it was another god, Brahmā, who looked about him with his four faces and was puzzled, since “sitting at the center of that plant, he didn’t see the world.” Looking about in all directions he saw the vast lotus petals and then waters and sky, far away. The petals prevented Brahmā from seeing the other god, Viṣṇu, from whose navel the stalk had sprouted. Brahmā would one day drop down into that porous fiber to make a new world start.

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The question of residue arises when at last “by means of the sacrifice the gods rose up to the sky.” It could have been the happy ending to their troubled time on earth. But it was not to be so, for that moment marked the beginning of a convulsive, coruscating sequence that the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa recounts in its masterly style: “The god who rules the cattle was left behind here: so they call him Vāstavya, because he was left behind on the sacrificial site (vāstu). The gods continued to practice tapas in the same sacrifice through which they had ascended to the sky. Now the god who rules the cattle and had been left behind here saw [all this and said]: ‘I have been left behind. They are leaving me out of the sacrifice!’ He pursued them and with his [weapon] held high he rose up to the north, and the moment when this happened was that of the Sviṣṭakṛt [He-who-offers-well-the-sacrifice]. The gods said: ‘Don’t shoot!’ He said: ‘Don’t leave me out of the sacrifice! Leave an oblation aside for me!’ They replied: ‘Let it be so!’ He withdrew and didn’t shoot his weapon; and injured no one. The gods said to themselves: ‘All portions of the sacrificial food we have prepared have been offered. Let us try to find a way of putting aside an oblation for him!’ They said to the officiant: ‘Lay out the sacrificial plates in the proper succession; and fill them, making an extra portion, and make them once again fitting to be used; and then cut a portion for each.’ So the officiant lay out the sacrificial plates in the proper succession and filled them up, making an extra portion, and he made them once again fitting to be used and cut a portion for each. This is the reason he is called Vāstavya, because a residue (vāstu) is that part of the sacrifice that remains when the oblations have been made.”

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Sacrifice is a journey above all for the gods—the only way of reaching heaven. But who did the gods sacrifice to, when they rose up to heaven? The elements for the sacrifice had been obtained—desire, to remain in heaven; tapas, which the gods practiced; and the material for the oblation (ghee). But there was no one to sacrifice to. Heaven was apparently empty. On this point the texts, so complete in every other detail, are silent. One might suspect, then, that the sacrificial act was effective regardless of whom it was for. Indeed, one could arrive at the ultimate conclusion: that it was all the more effective because the recipient of the sacrifice was not there. One day, Kṛṣṇa taught a doctrine no less paradoxical, in the Bhagavad Gītā: of sacrifice where desire is eliminated. This is suggested as a path for mankind, a path that never reaches its destination and one therefore to be continually pursued. But the gods had set their minds on a journey that was to be taken only once. And so they had no wish to renounce desire. If anything, they were more concerned about something else: wiping out their tracks so that people couldn’t follow them: “They sucked the sap of the sacrifice, as bees suck honey; and after having drained and wiped out its traces with the sacrificial post, they hid themselves.” Spiteful gods. But they were equally spiteful toward one of their own. They had abandoned him on earth, at the very place of the sacrifice. He was a god they preferred not to name—and who is not indeed named anywhere in the whole passage except at the end, with a clever device in which his name appears as one of his epithets: Rudra, the Wild One. We can, thus, already see the strange impatience, tinged with fear and hostility, that the gods felt for two divine figures: firstly Prajāpati, the father, who in having intercourse with Uṣas had performed an act that was “an evil in the eyes of the gods,” and then Rudra, this strange god, whom the other gods want to be rid of, for mysterious reasons that are never explained, at the point when they become fully fledged gods, inhabitants of the sky. Even if the texts are more reticent over Rudra than over any other god, the essential points seem clear: the Devas want to get away from Rudra, they want to leave him behind at the place (vāstu) of the sacrifice, which is also the residue (vāstu) of the sacrifice. But once the gods have risen to the sky, the whole earth can be seen as a residue of the sacrifice. And this residue is powerful and can attack the gods. And so its lord, who is Rudra, retains the capacity to injure the gods, as he threatens to do by shooting his unnamed weapon, presumably an arrow. For the gods, therefore, it is not enough to perform an effective sacrifice. They have to reach a pact with Rudra, who will otherwise strike them. And a pact, for the gods, is always a new division of portions. This time a division has to be made that includes Rudra’s portion: la part du feu. And that portion, by definition, will be the excess, that surplus which the gods can forgo, so as to ward off Rudra’s attack.

The question remains: how could the gods possibly think of leaving Rudra out of the sacrifice? And why did they want to leave him out? “They did not truly know him,” says the Mahābhārata, thus revealing what older texts had been silent about. Perhaps they did not know him because in Rudra there was an element resistant to knowledge, of pure intensity, prior to meaning. The gods, though, had based their work—the sacrifice—on the pervasiveness of knowledge itself, on its transparency. They left Rudra out because they rightly suspected that he would have undermined their enterprise from within. But certainly not because Rudra was extraneous or hostile to the sacrifice. When Rudra appeared in the north of the sky, striking terror, bow in hand, his hair tied at the back of his neck in a black shell, the other gods saw straightaway that his lethal weapon was made of the same substance as the first and the fourth type of sacrifice. They also saw that the string of his bow was made of the invocation vaṣaṭ, which is heard every day in the sacrifices.

This much we can gather, but none of the texts give the reason for Rudra’s initial exclusion. A reason, though, that will become much clearer when Rudra becomes Śiva in another eon and another story cycle, and the tale of his exclusion becomes the tale of Śiva’s exclusion by Dakṣa from the sacrifice: another event that the gods would seek to hide, since it describes their own defeat. And here a suspicion arises: that the sacrifice claims to be everything, but fails to be so. Every sacrifice leaves out or leaves behind something that may turn against it: its site, its residue.

Śiva is excluded by Dakṣa because he has offended the brahminic laws, twice showing disrespect: in taking away Dakṣa’s daughter Satī and, in a certain moment, not standing up in front of him. But at the same time Śiva cannot be regarded as being against the sacrifice. Nor can Rudra, who is called “king of the sacrifice” and “he who brings the sacrifice to its completion.” It would therefore seem that the sacrifice performed by the Devas conflicts with a further sacrifice, that of Rudra and of Śiva, which threatens to harm and cancel out the first—and it may perhaps be the sacrifice that happens in any case, that forms part of the cycle of life, of its breath, and can sweep away everything, even the gods. Invasive and ever-present, this sacrifice doesn’t follow an explicit doctrine, but is nevertheless performed. This happens all the time, whether we like it or not, just like the breath within us, which is a continual drawing in from the outside world and a continual expulsion into the outside world, even when it is not subject to yogic discipline. It can therefore be thought of as a continuous sacrifice, which coincides with life itself. When this form of sacrifice appears, there is no choice but to come to an agreement with it, to allow it its irreducible role. Only such a recognition enables the ordinary sacrifice of the gods to be done well, as is suggested by the term Sviṣṭakṛt, which is applied to this moment. In a certain way, then, the figure of Rudra and subsequently of Śiva, into whom he is transformed, is the most radical criticism of sacrifice to be found in the world of the gods. But it is a criticism that doesn’t destroy. Indeed, in the end it provides confirmation, further extending the field of sacrifice to cover everything, encapsulating within it all residue.

*   *   *

Rudra’s name is to be avoided. Anyone forced to name him must immediately touch sacred water, for protection. Better to call him Vāstavya, ruler of place and of residue. Vāstu means both: place and residue. “A disconcerting semanticism,” noted Minard, eminent philologist. And yet there is just as much reason to be disconcerted over the Latin situs, which means site, place, but also powder, detritus, rust, mold, the bad smell built up over time. Situs implies that existence exudes a residue from the mere fact of being sited. There is something stale in existence, in that it has always been there. And this may produce a doubt that existence itself, that its site, are a residue, the detritus of a désastre obscur.

When oblations have been offered, something always remains. And, if nothing remains, the site itself of the oblations will remain, swept clean by the wind. Between order and the thing ordered, there is always a margin, a difference that is a residue: Rudra is there.

*   *   *

Any kind of order involves eliminating a part of the original material. That part is the residue. What is to be done with it? It can be treated as the principal enemy of order, as the constant threat of a relapse to the status that existed before order. Or as something that, going beyond order, ensures the permanence of a contact with the continuum that preceded order itself. The soma that issues from the body of Vṛtra is the most precious thing that order can offer. And it is a memory of something that already existed before order, before Indra’s liberating attack.

What criteria can we use to compare two kinds of order? Two kinds of order can be considered as two formal systems. Alternatively we can look at them in relation to what surplus and residue they produce. To what degree do the two comparisons diverge? In the first case: we can evaluate the different extent, functionality, effectiveness of each kind of order, its capacity to remain consistent. Not much more can be said. To attribute a meaning to a formal system would be arbitrary. In the second case: we have to give a meaning to each kind of order, we have to evaluate it. But in relation to what? There ought then to be an order of reference that makes it possible to attribute meaning and quality to all other kinds of order. But this kind of order does not exist. Or at least: this is the condition in which the moderns found themselves, this is the situation in which they were obliged to think. But for Vedic men, surplus and residue were the prerequisites that made it possible to judge the kind of order that excluded them from it. And it could be world order itself, ṛta—or it could be any other kind of order undermined and disrupted by people unaware of what they are doing when dealing with surplus and residue.

*   *   *

“The officiant recites the verses continually, without interruption: and so he makes the days and nights of the year continuous, and so the days and nights of the year alternate continually and without interruption. And in this way he leaves open no way of access to the spiteful rival; but he would indeed leave open a way of access if he recited the verses in a discontinuous way: he therefore recites them continuously, without interruption.” Here we see, with full immediacy, the Vedic officiant’s main anxiety: the fear of time being split, of the course of the day being suddenly interrupted, of the whole world irretrievably disintegrating. This fear is far deeper than the fear of death. Indeed, the fear of death is only a secondary—one might say modern—concern. Something else comes before it: a sense of impermanence that is so great, so acute, so tormenting as to make the continuity of time seem an improbable gift, and one that is always about to be taken away. And so it is vital to intervene immediately with the sacrifice, which can be defined as that which the officiant tends, extends. This tissue of indefinite matter (the sacrifice) has to be “tended,” tan-, so that something continuous is formed, with no breaks, no interruptions, no gaps into which the “spiteful rival” who is lying in wait might wheedle his way. It is something that, by reason of its elaborate construction, stands in opposition to the world—a place whose origin appears like a series of breaks, interruptions, fragments in which we may recognize the strips of Prajāpati’s dismembered body. To overwhelm the discontinuous: this is the purpose of the officiant. Overcoming death is only one of the many consequences. And so the first requirement is that the voice of the hotṛ is as taut as possible, with a continuous emission of sound. How does he take in breath? “If he were to take in breath in the middle of the verse, it would be harmful to the sacrifice.” It would be a defeat through discontinuity, like driving a wedge into the middle of the verse. To avoid it, the verses of the gāyatrī, the fundamental meter, have to be recited, one by one, without an intake of breath. This creates a tiny, impregnable cell of continuity in the boundless expanse of discontinuity. And so the gāyatrī meter one day became the bird Gāyatrī and had the strength to fly high into the sky to conquer Soma, that intoxicating and all-enveloping fluid in which the officiant recognized the supreme expansion of the continuum.

Such was the terror of discontinuity—and of the injury implicit in every interruption—that they resorted, in the end, to the ultimate weapon of etymology to make it clear: they derived the word adhvara (“worship,” that which the adhvaryu practices) from the verb dhūrv-, “to injure.” Meaning by this that “the Asuras, though desiring to injure them, were unable to injure them and were foiled: for this reason the sacrifice is called adhvara, not damaged, uninterrupted.” And so the adhvaryu can only murmur, accompanying his constant acts with a buzz in which the individual words are unrecognizable. If he were to articulate them more clearly, he would risk losing his breath, which is life, since the formulas are breath—and the breath “resides in a silent abode.” The power of the adhvaryu is concentrated in the indistinct: “All that he carries out in a very low voice, when it is finished and complete, becomes manifest.” For something to assume its purest and clearest form, it has to be born out of something impenetrable, opaque, boundless.

*   *   *

Residue is the memory, the enduring presence of the insuppressible continuum. Whatever kind of order is established, in whatever context and of whatever kind, that order will leave something outside itself—and will have to leave that thing outside if it purports to be an order. That something outside order is residue, but also surplus. Residue is what is left out, surplus is the part left out which is offered up. The meaning of order lies, first and foremost, not in the way the order itself is arranged but in what that order determines to do with the part that does not belong to it. Offer it up? Consume it? Throw it away? That is the part which is cursed and blessed. And depending on what is decided to be done with it, the newly established order acquires meaning. Taken by themselves, as a simple formal configuration, all orders are equivalents, insofar as all coexist at the same level, like crystals cut in various ways. Considered in terms of what is outside them—residue, surplus, but also nature, world—all forms of order are divergent and irreducible, no less than the timbre of one voice in relation to another.

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Among the most memorable metaphysical disputations was the one in which the problem was whether the sacrifice is a curled-up dog. How did that happen? For some time the ritualists had been troubled by certain questions: “What is the beginning, what is the end of the sacrifice, what is its narrowest part, what is its broadest part?” There was no agreement about the answers.

One day a group of theologians belonging to the Kuru and Pañcāla clans, from the Land of the Seven Rivers, were arguing these matters. “Then they came across a curled-up dog. They said: ‘May there be in this dog what will decide who wins.’ The Pañcālas asked the Kurus: ‘To what extent does this dog resemble the sacrifice?’ They didn’t know how to answer. Then Vasiṣṭha Caikitāneya spoke: ‘In the same way as [the sacrificer] lies there joining the twenty-first verse of the yajñāyajñīya to the nine verses of the bahiṣpavamāna, so the dog lies there curled up, joining its two extremes. In this position the dog is the same as the sacrifice.’ With these words the Pañcālas defeated the Kurus.”

This is how the most difficult questions are tackled: they come across a curled-up dog or any ordinary thing—and they decide that the answer must be there. If the answer isn’t in any ordinary thing then it won’t be anywhere else. But the Pañcāla theologian was a learned man and his answer referred back to a very old story. In the beginning, when only the waters existed, Agni sang the verses of the agniṣṭoma so that the waters would recede and he could find food for himself. And it was then that the sampad, the “equivalence” or “correspondence,” flashed before him, enabling him to carry on singing without interruption, thereby preventing the other gods from stealing his food. He saw then that the dreaded gap which appeared between a particular song (the yajñāyajñīya) and another (the bahiṣpavamāna) could be eliminated: if the last verse of the one also became the first verse of the other. With this, the bahiṣpavamāna came to consist of ten syllables, transforming itself into a virāj meter. And virāj is food. QED. And so Agni would never be short of food, and there would never be a break in the sacrifice. This is what Vasiṣṭha Caikitāneya was referring to. He thought that the dog curled up before their eyes was the sacrifice as it had become after Agni had seen his vision. This, then, was the precedent to which the theologian referred.

But something else was implied in the answer to the riddle. Above all, that the sacrifice has to be continuous. Any break whatsoever would make it worthless, allowing the gods to snatch Agni’s food from him. But here they failed, since now the sacrifice “had become endless” in the words of the Jaiminīya Brāhmaṇa, which adds: “it was like a lighted ember in a pot.” But if the sacrifice is continuous, with no end and no beginning, it also means it is not a human institution. There is no zero point at which a man begins a sacrifice. Sacrifice is something that is always happening. If this is so, the whole world must be seen as the field in which sacrifice is celebrated. The difference between gods and men is primarily this. Certain gods—such as Prajāpati, such as Agni, who are the sacrifice—ensured that the world came to function like an uninterrupted sacrifice. Humans are the last arrivals who become part of the ceremony and perpetuate it, as long as their strength allows them to do so. This, according to Vasiṣṭha Caikitāneya, was a first series of ideas that could be elaborated that day, observing the curled-up dog that a group of theologians from the Kuru and Pañcāla clans had come across as they walked along the road in discussion.

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We can certainly know the world—and live there—observing only the dealings that occur between mankind and the thirty-three gods. But, if we also take into consideration all that is left out of these dealings, because it forms their background, the residue that does not belong to anyone, then everything changes, in the same way that it would change if, rather than looking at individuals, we look at the background against which they are gradually drawn. But we can better understand the implications of residue with the question of the Sāhasrī (which means “she who sees to it that the ritual fee is a thousand [cows]”). The Sāhasrī is a dappled cow, of three colors. Or alternatively red. Never approached by a bull. That cow is Vāc, Speech, and she appears along with nine hundred and ninety-nine other cows. In all, there has to be a thousand—and no more—because “with a thousand he [the sacrificer] gets all the objects of his desire.” Three hundred and thirty-three every day. The Sāhasrī guides them, moving forward at the head of the herd, for three days. Or alternatively she follows them from behind. These cows are also the hymns of the Ṛgveda (though in fact there are a few more: one thousand and twenty-eight). The Sāhasrī, the supreme power of speech, is the thousandth cow: once again the remainder, the residue.

Then the unprecedented gesture occurs. They do not sacrifice it, they do not deliver it up to the priests as a ritual fee, but “they release it.” In that instant the whole sacrificial edifice is in danger of collapsing. How can a domestic animal, destined for sacrifice or to be offered as a ritual fee to the priests, be released—to wander about once again like a forest animal? If this happens, it becomes an ordeal. Without human interference, the direction chosen by the released cow determines the fate of the sacrificer: “If, not being goaded by anyone, it goes eastward, let him know that this sacrificer has been successful, that he has conquered the world of happiness. If it goes northward, let him know that the sacrificer will become more glorious in this world. If it goes westward, let him know that he will be rich in servants and crops. If it goes southward, let him know that the sacrificer will soon depart from this world. These are the ways of finding out.” The same happened to St. Ignatius of Loyola and his mule, whom Ignatius, still a layman and a warrior, allowed to choose between two roads: one of which would certainly lead to murder; the other of which would ultimately mean sainthood. If the Sāhasrī wanders southward, the sacrificer knows his death is imminent. The immense effort of the sacrifice has been worth nothing. And so too have been the nine hundred and ninety-nine cows given as a ritual fee to the priests. And all because that one, single cow went southward. “These are the ways of finding out.”

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However he was considered, Prajāpati always appeared unique. Even when the gods were counted: “There are eight Vasus, eleven Rudras, twelve Ādityas; and these two, Sky and Earth, are the thirty-second and thirty-third. And there are thirty-three gods and Prajāpati is the thirty-fourth.” Prajāpati’s supernumerary nature was his unfailing characteristic. Prajāpati was always extra—and it is precisely to this that the ritualists connected the link between surplus and residue. They saw that they were the same question. And the question was Prajāpati himself. Prajāpati is that which remains. Prajāpati is the superfluous part from which all that is necessary is born.

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Surplus and residue are ever-present. Especially in time. The day that marks the climax of the year is the viṣuvat—and that is a surplus day. Without that day, the year would be divided into two equal parts, in which each rite could have its identical counterpart. But the viṣuvat places this perfect symmetry at risk. The question is: “‘Does the viṣuvat belong to the months that go before or those that follow?’ He must reply: ‘Both to those that go before and those that follow.’” Why? “Because the viṣuvat is the torso of the year and the months are its limbs.” And a body cannot do without its torso. And then again: the year is a great eagle. The first six months are one wing and the other six the other wing. And the viṣuvat is the body of the bird. That surplus day, the viṣuvat, is therefore indispensable: only this interval can keep time together, can enable it to spread out two perfectly symmetrical wings, that extra day alone gives completeness to the year, where the rites each occur in correspondence with their counterpart, in the first and in the second half. Only in that way, with the last ceremony (the stairway that is climbed emerging from the ocean of the rite) do we reach the “world of heaven, the place of quietness, of plenty.”

Having reached the end of this crucial demonstration, since the proper conduct of the whole liturgy depends upon it, the ritualist allows himself a meditative aside, serious in tone, almost a confession by someone who has spent his whole life carefully, steadfastly, examining this subject: “These are indeed the forests and the ravines of the sacrifice, and hundreds and hundreds of days are needed to travel them by chariot; and if anyone ventures into them without knowledge, then hunger or thirst, marauders and wicked demons will assail them, in the same way that wicked demons would attack fools who wander in a wild forest; but if they who know do so, they pass from one task to the other, as from one river to the other and from one safe place to the other, and they reach bliss, the world of heaven.” Then suddenly, as if he had become carried away for a moment in contemplating his life and all his past experience—and this was against the rule—the ritualist patiently returns to a technical detail of the liturgy, to preparing answers to those who are always asking pointless and captious questions about this and that.

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“That is full, this is full. / Full gushes forth from fullness. / Even after the full has been fully drawn upon, / this full remains full.”

We encounter the “stanza of plenitude” at the beginning of the penultimate adhyāya of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad. Paul Mus wrote a masterly commentary on it. But, as the words of the stanza say, what it describes is boundless. And it might be placed at the very center of Vedic thought—even if the word thought may, in this case, seem reductive. The closest proximity to full, pūrṇa, mentioned in the text is a passage in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, which reads: “The gods certainly have a joyous Self; and this, true knowledge, belongs to the gods alone—and indeed whosoever knows this is not a man but one of the gods.” The real difference between gods and humans does not lie exclusively in the immortality that the gods have laboriously achieved—and which they want to keep only for themselves. It lies in a particular kind of knowledge, which corresponds to the joy gushing forth from the depths of Self. Ultimate knowledge is neither impassive nor immovable, but resembles the perpetual flow of plenitude in the world. The Vedic cult of knowledge is directed toward this image.

“When the yonder world overflows, all gods and all beings subsist on it, and truly the yonder world overflows for he who knows this.” All is possible—even the existence of the gods—only because “the yonder world” is superabundant. Its bursting forth into the other world, which is ours, offers that surplus without which there would be no life.