V

THEY WHO SAW THE HYMNS

 

 

The hymns of the Ṛgveda were said to have been seen by the ṛṣis. The ṛṣis may therefore be described as “seers.” They saw the hymns in the same way as we see a tree or a river. They were the most disconcerting, least easily explainable beings in the Vedic cosmos. Chief among them were the Saptarṣis, the Seven who lived in the stars of the Great Bear, who have some affinity with the Seven Greek Sages, with the Islamic abdāls, and with the Seven Akkadian Apkallus of the Apsu. But something in the very nature of the ṛṣis was an epistemological scandal: they alone were allowed to belong to the unmanifest and at the same time take part in the events of everyday life, which they secretly ruled.

And this itself was alarming: that a metaphysical category, the asat, the “unmanifest,” was a category of beings that had a name. Hermann Oldenberg felt an immediate need to clear away any inappropriate comparisons: “This non-being was of quite a different kind to Parmenides’ non-being—and there is very little here of his rigor in discussing with passionate seriousness the non-being of the non-existent.” Oldenberg’s embarrassment was justified and we can still detect the pride of someone who had been educated following the nineteenth-century idea of classicism. With the ṛṣis, in fact, one has to go in quite another direction. Only the starting point is the same: the asat which Oldenberg translates as “non-being.” Now, if asat refers to the ṛṣis, the nonbeing would refer to a category of beings. These, in turn, would correspond with the “vital breaths,” prāṇas—and here we plunge into the realm of physiology. Moreover, nonbeing acts through the practice of tapas, the “ardor” that overheats consciousness. Too many palpable elements are attributed to this nonbeing. And above all: too many elements that then continue to appear and operate in the existent, in whatever exists. A network of cracks thus forms in it, as if to suggest that not everything that appears in the existent belongs to the existent. These metaphysical passages were not congenial to the West. Oldenberg could barely restrain his indignation: “The non-being starts to think, to act so readily, in spite of any Cogito ergo sum, like an ascetic preparing to perform some magic trick.” Oldenberg thought he was expressing a paradox, or even an absurdity. But his words could have been interpreted as a plain, accurate description. The ṛṣis watched him from high up in their stars, with that exasperating seriousness of theirs, more derisive even than sarcasm.

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The Vedic seers saw the hymns of the Ṛgveda in much the same way that others among them found the rites that were later to be celebrated and studied. Knowledge was an encounter with something preexisting, sight of which the gods now and then allowed. They were not interested in educating and guiding the human race, which they looked upon with mixed feelings, sometimes benevolent sometimes hostile, so that “from time to time, following the whim of the moment, the celestial power communicates to mankind first one, then another fragment of inestimable knowledge” (Oldenberg again).

How, though, was this knowledge deposited and arranged? The metrics are too perfect, the vocabulary too varied, the overall composition too complex, so it must be presumed that the Ṛgveda—the concrete product of that knowledge—was developed over a long period that began before even the descent into India, in other regions toward the northwest, and in other climates. Traces of these events, enigmatic as always, can be spotted in certain hymns. The most dazzling ancient poetry is already imitating an archaic style, as if the earliest Greek statuary were that of the Master of Olympia. When it first came to us, passed down through thousands of memories, unaltered, the word of the ṛṣis seemed already to be a “tributary of a long, learned tradition.” And the Ṛgveda was already a saṃhitā, a “collection,” an anthology that “mixes together an older, less differentiated, mass that heads of clans or schools would have drawn from at different moments.”

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When something (or someone) is created, produced, emanated, composed—especially at the beginning of the world—the Vedic texts repeat countless times that this happened through tapas, “ardor.” But what is tapas? Many Indologists have avoided the question, having been led astray by the Christianizing translations (“asceticism,” “penance,” “mortification”) that began with the first nineteenth-century editions (and can still be found today). After all, it is well-known that ascetics, penitents, and disciples practicing self-mortification are to be found in India more than anywhere else. They, it is said, are the latest practitioners of tapas. And the question would seem to be resolved with a general reference to spirituality.

Now tapas is certainly a form of asceticism in the original sense of “exercise,” but it is a very particular exercise that implies the developing of heat. Tapas is akin to the Latin word tepor—and indicates fervor, ardor. Those who practice tapas could be described as “ardent.” They generate a heat that can become a devastating blaze. This is what happened with various ṛṣis who every so often shook the world.

The ṛṣis are not gods, they are not demons, they are not men. But they often appear earlier than the gods, indeed earlier than the being from which the gods had emanated; they often display demonic powers; they often move about like people among people. The Vedic texts feign indifference toward these incompatibilities, as if they didn’t recognize them, perhaps because the hymns of the Ṛgveda appear to be composed by the ṛṣis themselves. Elsewhere, in other places and periods, we search in vain for figures that combine their characteristics, all converging into one: incandescence of mind. With this the ṛṣis were capable of attacking all other beings, whether gods, men, or animals.

The ṛṣis reached an unattainable level of knowledge not just because they thought certain thoughts but because they burned. Ardor comes before thought. Thoughts are given off like steam from a boiling liquid. While the ṛṣis were sitting, motionless, and contemplating what was happening in the world, whirling inside them was a scorching spiral that would one day break off to become the hymns of the Ṛgveda or the “great sayings,” mahāvākya, of the Upaniṣads.

There is nothing more misleading than to imagine the ṛṣis, and above all the Seven Seers, as calm and affable beings, detached from the world’s vicissitudes. On the contrary, if the world continues on its course, it is primarily due to the immense reserves of tapas that the Seven Seers channel, moment by moment, into the veins of the universe. But this tapas can occasionally be directed against the world itself—and wreak havoc. Nor can it be said that the incandescent mass of ardor lets itself be steered by the ṛṣis. When Vasiṣṭha, one of the Seven Seers, wishes to kill himself in despair over the death of his children, his tapas prevents him from doing so. He threw himself off a very high cliff, only to land on a vast lotus, as if on a soft bed. His tapas was too powerful to allow its bearer to kill himself.

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The story of the relationship between the Seven Seers and their consorts, the Pleiades, dates back to the earliest times, and is never properly explained. The Saptarṣis, in their celestial residences, signaled the north with the Pole Star. If they had once also been called “bears,” ṛkṣa, there was presumably something in their appearance that resembled those animals, in the same way that we see the Seven Apkallus of Sumer, the “Holy Carps,” covered in fish scales. The Saptarṣis were three pairs of twins, plus a “seventh single-born.” They were loved and respected by their consorts but separated from them by a vast expanse of sky, since the Pleiades lie to the east. So Agni, their first lover, crept in. He was the first to seduce the lonely women neglected by their husbands. With his flames he began licking the toes of the wives of the ṛṣis, while they were gathered around the fire. In the end he became the lover of each of them. Only the stern Arundhatī refused him. Thus one day, when the Pleiades went down to the waters of a reed bed to meet the runaway Agni, it was an old lover in difficulty they found.

When it came to deciding on setting up the fires, the ritualists pondered: should the protection of the Pleiades be refused, since they were adulterers, or sought for the same reason, since they betrayed the ṛṣis with Agni? The alternative was this: either to place the fires under the Pleiades, seeking in some way to attract their complicit gaze, or keep away from them, as they were an example of adultery—or at least, of the couple’s distance (and at this point the worried ritualist noted “it is a misfortune not to have intercourse [with one’s wife]”). The dilemma raised once again a delicate, recurring question. The ṛṣis are sages with immense power, formidable anger, often contemptuous and stern even toward the gods. But they are unable to ensure the fidelity of their wives. The Pleiades, who were ravishing and also severe, couldn’t resist the enticements of a god. This was what happened with Agni, their long-term lover. But the most scandalous event was Śiva’s visit to the Cedar Forest, when they followed him dancing, in rapture. The story itself took place against a background of cruel revenge. The ṛṣis were above all the husbands chosen by Dakṣa for his daughters. And Śiva was he who had taken Satī, Dakṣa’s favorite daughter, against his will. This was the beginning of the conflict that ended with the burning of Satī’s body. And Śiva, through the ṛṣis, now mocked those in the world who would continue to represent Dakṣa’s authority, his priestly power.

Tracing these stories back to their origins within the divine, they were a new expression, in erotic terms, of the conflict between Brahmā and Śiva, as a result of which Śiva had cut off Brahmā’s fifth head and had then spent a long time wandering about dressed as a beggar, with the god’s skull fastened to his hand as a bowl. But what had caused the conflict between Brahmā and Śiva? That is highly unclear, little can be gleaned about it. While Brahmā is the source of order and priestly authority, Śiva is the perpetual certainty that this order will eventually break down, that it will not withstand the impact of a force that exists beyond ritual. Order thus falls apart over the course of history. And this is why the Saptarṣis’s wives were powerless to resist Agni’s persistent, passionate courtship.

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The Vedic seers regarded the passage of the mind from one thought to the next, and its ever deeper immersion into the same thought, as the model for every journey. To speak about oceans, mountains, and skies they had no need for daring explorations. They could remain motionless beside their belongings, during a pause in their migrations. The result would be the same. Traveling, they thought, was an essentially invisible activity. And, if anything, it takes its form in a series of liturgical actions. So in the kindling rituals they were above all concerned with kindling the mind, the only steed capable of carrying them to the gods. And they murmured: “Yes, that which carries to the gods is the mind.”

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The activity that the whole of creation depends on takes place in mind alone. But it is of a kind that immediately demonstrates the effectiveness of the mind over what lies outside it. And, for the mind, the effects of what lies outside it are within the body itself. An invisible combustion is thus produced, a gradual heat, up to the ardor achieved through the operation of the mind. It is tapas, well known to Siberian shamans, ignored or banished in Western thought. Ubiquitous and supreme, rarely are its powers defined, because they are too obvious. But the ritualist sometimes consents to explain them: “In truth, with tapas they conquer the world.” What affects the world, what assails it is tapas, the inner ardor of the mind. Without it, all gestures, all words are useless. Tapas is the flame that passes covertly or overtly through everything. Sacrifice is the occasion for which those two conditions of ardor—visible in fire, invisible in the officiant—meet and combine.

This is the greatest approximation allowed, if we want to describe the most elusive yet inevitable of facts: the feeling of being alive. Reduced to its proprioceptive as well as its thermodynamic essence, it is a sensation of something alight, something that burns on a slow and continual flame. All other characteristics are added and superimposed on this, which is their assumption and support. The word extinction, nirvāṇa, taught by the Buddha, had to appear as the negation par excellence of what was presented as life itself. Sacrifice, as an act of burning something, therefore had to appear as the most exact visible equivalent of the state which is the basis of life itself.

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The ṛṣis had the task of keeping and controlling world order. But they also had another function, which threatened to disrupt world order at any moment. Stories were based around the ṛṣis. In the interminable tangle of dealings between men and gods, at every turn there was a ṛṣi’s curse, or his “boon,” vara. Great epic stories such as the Mahābhārata or the Rāmāyaṇa, which resemble immense luxuriant trees, would one day be presented as the work of a ṛṣi, Vyāsa or Vālmīki. But, much earlier, the framework of the stories they retold had been based on the acts of other ṛṣis, among whom there may have been the person who would one day become author of the poem that told these stories. This is what happened with Vyāsa and the Mahābhārata—as if Homer had been one of the Greek heroes who fought under the walls of Troy.

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There are no archaeological remains of Vedic kingdoms, but the Ṛgveda describes various conflicts and battles. They culminated in the “Battle of the Ten Kings,” where the Bharatas, under their chieftain Sudās and armed with axes, managed to defeat a coalition of ten warlords—Āryas and non-Āryas—who were surrounding them. So the Bharatas won, and it is the name by which India is still known today. Or this, at least, is what we may infer, since the hymns never recount a sequence of events, but allude to them, addressing gods and men who already knew what had happened. What were the salient features of the war? In describing the enemies of the Bharatas, the text declares only that they were “without sacrifices (áyajyavaḥ).” That was quite enough. It was taken for granted that every war is a war of religion. As for the Bharatas themselves, they were supported by both Indra and Varuṇa, not always friendly divinities. How had this miracle been possible? Thanks to the work of a seer, the ṛṣi Vasiṣṭha, who had arranged that alliance and had taken over as chaplain to the Bharatas, ousting another seer, Viśvāmitra, who had immediately crossed over to the enemy line. After that, they had been in perpetual conflict. They argued sitting on opposite banks of the Sarasvatī—and their voices traveled across the roaring flow of the waters. Even when Vasiṣṭha transformed Viśvāmitra into a heron—and Viśvāmitra in turn transformed Vasiṣṭha into a crane—they continued fighting in the air, pecking furiously with their beaks. They detested each other for deep religious reasons, “totally committed to attachment or aversion, always full of desire and hatred.”

Viśvāmitra had once threatened to destroy the three worlds, but Vasiṣṭha relied on his secret: he was the only ṛṣi to have seen Indra “face to face.” And when the hymns mention the battles, they do not pause to describe the kings, the warriors, and their exploits, but rather the gods and ṛṣis, as if the decisive conflicts could take place only between them. If Sudās turned out to be a great ruler in the end, it was not so much because he had defeated the Ten Kings, but because Vasiṣṭha had once taught him how to perform a particular type of soma sacrifice. Sudās was grateful. He gave Vasiṣṭha two hundred cows and two chariots, as well as women, jewels, and four horses.