The emphasis on the study of human practices in the social sciences, particularly in the field of religion, has been intended as a counterbalance or antidote to viewing religion as belief and faith in a transcendent or putative theistic reality. It is not so much faith that characterizes religion but kinds of practice. This move from the study of thinking to the study of doing was not so much a harking back to behaviourism in Psychology but rather reflected a shift from Theology, which was traditionally understood as faith seeking understanding, to studying religion through Anthropology and paying attention to what human beings do. It is not so much belief that defines human reality but action and the institutions consequent upon it, which in turn influence action: collective actions produce institutions that affect individual human action (voting produces parliaments that in turn affect voting; inventions produce patents and businesses that affect production, and so on). While too sharp a distinction between idea or belief and act is not helpful because such a distinction undermines people’s reasons for their acts, the emphasis on practice is to be welcomed because practice embodies more than what is consciously present to the actor. I shall say a little more about this in a moment.
The scope of the present project is therefore within the bounds of recent interest in human practice, particularly ritual practices, but also the institutions within which we live that are also forms of practice. When studying the history of Indic religions, we are immediately faced with the problem of how we study practices that have long gone into the past. In inquiring into the history of human practices we are necessarily restricted to representations of practice in texts that may or may not accurately reflect what people actually did. These sources are written, although material culture exposed through Archaeology can also contribute to our understanding. The sources that this volume draws on are predominantly textual and this Introduction will use mostly pre-philosophical religious literature. By pre-philosophical, I mean texts that are not systematically presented as a discourse or argument about the nature of existence or knowledge, but are varied genres of literature such as religious revelation, ritual texts, and meditation manuals, and I will be particularly drawing on the tantric revelation of the Middle Ages composed in Sanskrit. We also have inscriptions that record practices of donation and support of religious institutions, especially monastic institutions through royal patronage. This is a potentially vast history and the current volume offers portrayals of this history that reflect the major developments of religious practice in India. Some might object: how can we distinguish religious practice from other cultural practices? What is distinctively religious about any human practice? Getting married is clearly a human practice but is it religious, cultural, secular, or something else? Can we anyway speak in general terms or must we speak of Hindu marriage, Chinese marriage, or secular marriage? It is here that I think we need some integration of ideas about practice with practice. People generally have reasons for doing what they do, and part of these reasons can be what we might call eschatological hope; a kind of cultural prolepsis or anticipation of a more fulfilled or complete future. Reasons for performing certain actions or participating in a collective activity might also be affective elevation, Durkheim’s collective effervescence, or a kind of elation that lifts people out of everyday survival activities. There are many different kinds of activity that do this, and ritual behaviour is important not simply for any elevator effect but also for social function. But the adjective ‘religious’ narrows our inquiry. By it I mean to indicate practices orientated towards a cultural prolepsis that anticipates completion or fulfilment of the human person. I am in sympathy here with Martin Riesebrodt’s thesis that what characterizes religions are practices, but practices performed within ‘the promise of salvation’ (Riesebrodt 2010). I have called this eschatological hope,1 characterized by a sense of transcendence, verticality, or vertical attraction that is common among religious practitioners and that we find repeated instances of in the history of Hindu practice. Eschatological hope is future orientated even though part of its rhetoric is often that complete fullness or total flourishing is not in the future but in the here and now.
As we age within a human life span, different phases of life are characterized by different kinds of behaviour and specific points of time marked by specific kinds of action. Van Gennep called these points of time rites of passage, rituals that highlight birth, entry into adulthood, marriage, and death (Van Gennep 1960). These rites of passage would seem to be fairly universal in human communities and involve separation from the group and reintegration with a new status, as Victor and Edith Turner have described and analysed (Turner 1967; Turner 1992). In a Hindu context rites of passage or formations of the human person (saṃskāra) are generally birth, first feeding, naming, initiation into the community, marriage, and rites of ageing and death along with post-mortem, śrāddha rites.2 There are also other kinds of practice such as prayer, meditation, and going to the temple that might accompany a person throughout their life, along with occasional pilgrimage or observance of a vow to a deity (vrata). From an early period, the tradition identified occasional rituals (naimittika-karman) (Āpasthamba Gṛhya Sūtra, 1.1.11. in Oldenberg 1964) and later these were contrasted with everyday rituals (nitya-karman) and rites to obtain a desired result (kāmya-karman). These practices are religious insofar as they embody eschatological hope and also magical insofar as they embody a technology thought to achieve specific results. While I do not wish to evoke the old religion/magic distinction because of this integration of the two realms, these indigenous categories indicate an orientation towards a human purpose or goal considered to transcend the particularity of everyday life alongside goals that we might consider to be more mundane, such as a successful love life. This eschatological hope or cultural prolepsis might be quite explicit—the desire for salvation, of liberation in this lifetime or at death (mumukṣu)—or it might be implicit insofar as a rite of passage such as marriage might be thought of as being within a transcendent order, within a cosmos. So, while I can see what the critics of the category religion mean in emphasizing its European cultural, historical, and even imperialistic origins,3 the kinds of thing it refers to—hope for future peace, hope for a good life for one’s children—are human universals. A marriage might be many things—a purely political or financial arrangement between two parties—but it might also be participation in a cosmic order. It might reflect an eschatological hope for a verticality or vertical attraction that takes us out of the mundane life of everyday transaction. Some practices are specifically eschatological in this sense, such as praying, meditating, going to the temple, and pilgrimage.
So, as to the question whether we can distinguish religious from other cultural practices, the answer is yes and no. Yes, in the sense that some practices are explicitly directed towards eschatological hope, such as meditating in the early morning for two and a half hours, while other practices such as lighting incense to an image of Gaṇeśa before work are less focused in that way. Yet both are practices within a framework or discipline orientated towards constructing or changing the self over the period of a lifetime to a particular kind of human flourishing. The repeated patterns of a Hindu ritual life are thought to have a transformational effect on the people who practise them: the ‘identificatory habitus’ of Axel Michaels that ‘ritually regulates most parts of life’ (Michaels 2016: 3–6).
This book, then, is about the history of religious practices within the Hindu cultural horizon, within a particular conception of human flourishing. But again we are faced with a problematic adjective. Throughout these volumes ‘Hindu’ is simply a term to limit the scope of discussion to traditions that have historically developed within a Brahmanical frame of reference, constrained especially by the Veda and traditions that stem from it, but not restricted to it and also dealing with later tantric traditions that reject it. Although this discussion is beyond the scope of this Introduction, briefly on the one hand we have the view that Hinduism was created in the nineteenth century under the constraint of colonialism, particularly by thinkers such as Vivekananda, while others wish to push back the coherence of the category to the Sant tradition of early modernity, or even further back.4 But before we launch into our account, I need to say something more about the belief–practice distinction and the nature of human practices.
One of the features of Hinduism noted by a number of scholars is that it does not entail a specific set of doctrines and beliefs. Frits Staal observed that being a Hindu does not involve believing anything in particular but rather having been born into a certain segment of Indian society and participating in its ritual activity (Staal 1989: 389), although this excludes modern ‘conversions’ to Hinduism. Axel Michaels cites Ashish Nandy who makes a similar claim that South Asian religions do not depend on belief but rather practice, and Michaels himself writes:
I propose that Hindu India is special in that ritual surpasses belief and that surviving in such a socio-religious environment is only possible through participation in a great number of rituals. In other words, what you believe is less important than what you do—in and through rituals. (Michaels 2016: 2)
I think this is generally true. Action or patterns of action predominate over assertions about the nature of the world and different philosophical views were held while sharing participation in a common ritual structure, as we will see. But this issue of the relationship between belief and ritual act is complex and needs further reflection.
The history of human practices includes a whole range of things that people do from waging war, to getting married, to having children and baptizing them, to establishing political power, to doing philosophy, to telling a story, and to going for a run. These practices might entail rules (marriage entails kinship structures and rules governing who one can and cannot marry), or strategies (waging war), or entail not only practice but also a discourse about practice (doing philosophy). Practice entails a number of things such as occurrence in time, repetition, the development of habit, and goal-orientated behaviour. But, as the theorist of practice Pierre Bourdieu observed, practice is not mechanistic, it is not a mechanical reaction to what went before, but neither can it be reduced to the conscious intention of actors (Bourdieu 1977: 73). What we do is constrained by the structures we are born into and what we do in turn influences those structures. Bourdieu develops the useful idea of the habitus, ‘systems of durable, transposable dispositions’ (Bourdieu 1990: 53) that identify human practices. Dispositions to behave in certain ways are just that; tendencies that require human agency yet an agency that always operates within a system that anticipates particular outcomes of action. Indeed, a society can only function within such reliability, within the anticipation of outcomes that are judged on the transposable dispositions that comprise practices. This entails time and the structuring of time in orientation to goals and purposes of action. The patterning of action into sequences, often repeated, pervades the whole gamut of human practice that we call ritual. Ritual is a category that can be applied to all Homo sapiens and is also something that we share with other animals. Our furry and feathered friends perform ritual for pair bonding and ritual displays for protection of space, resources, and family. And there is some evidence for less functional ritual behaviour among higher primates such as chimps gathering stones into piles in the hollows of trees (Kühl 2016). But generally ritual tends to have a function and has probably evolved as part of human niche construction in the service of species propagation and protection; there is a feedback mechanism that ensures propagation through the generations (Odling-Smee 2003: 376–7). The question about whether ritual has meaning must be linked to questions about function and purpose independent of the participants’ awareness or intention. The chimps’ stone-throwing behaviour presumably has a cause but might not have a meaning if we restrict meaning to linguistic expression. Frits Staal has developed an interesting thesis from evidence from ancient Hindu ritual. He argues that the Śrauta ritual—the solemn, public sacrifice and accompanying rites—can be characterized as having a structure, a syntax, but in itself is devoid of meaning; it has no semantics. The Śrauta ritual is action for its own sake and not for the sake of something else. This is a strong argument demonstrated in great detail by Staal’s analyses of the rites, both as practised and textually represented. What counts in ritual is correct performance, not meaning; all meaning is secondary elaboration that changes, projected in an ad hoc manner onto the ritual structure. On the analogy with language, the Śrauta rites involve basic and secondary elements along with processes or rules of transformation whereby different ritual elements are embedded within others and are recursive. For example, sequences of recitation such as ‘this is for Agni not for me’ are embedded within other sequences of recitation and a recursive pattern of these recitations can be identified. Like music, these recursive patterns ‘do not mean anything apart from and beyond the structural complexity they display’.5
This is quite distinct from the view of Anthropologists such as the Turners, for whom ritual is deeply meaningful because it is linked to experience and facilitates certain kinds of transformative experience for human communities, as we see with the ihamba tooth ritual of the Ndembu, in which a person is cured from possession by the spirit of a hunter through a ritual process (Turner 1992). Of course, it may be that the Śrauta rituals are meaningless in contrast to the Ndembu rite that is not, but I suspect that there are patterns of deeper significance that we need to understand.
There are many theories of ritual (see Michaels 2016: 10–21), including functional accounts that stress the social function of ritual as a group-bonding process (particularly Durkheim and the Durkheimian tradition) and psychological accounts that emphasize the release from stress or fear that ritual brings (Malinowski) or the cathartic release of tension caused through repression (Freud) or mimetic rivalry (Girard). There are also sociobiological and neurological or cognitivist accounts (Lawson and McCauley 1990). There has been some application of these to Hinduism.6 It is not possible to discuss them here, but I need to say something about the common features of human behaviour that all of these theories deal with. That is, we need to postulate three categories for understanding human practices generally and ritual processes in particular, namely function, meaning or purpose, and experience.
Firstly, function. At least some if not most ritual has a social function. As I have said, ritual marks off stages in the process of life, it marks off different social groups and the power relationships between them, and it functions to make groups cohere. Ritual is social glue, among other things, that facilitates social cognition and group bonding.7 Staal’s counter-argument to this is that social bonding and social differentiation may be by-products of ritual, an epiphenomenon, but they are not inherent to ritual itself. Ritual itself is without semantic content and is action for its own sake rather than action for the sake of something else (such as social cohesion). Yet it could be argued that even if this is the case, the function of ritual must be the primary way in which we understand it if we are to take human social formation as important.
The function of ritual might therefore be distinguished from the meaning of ritual. The meaning of ritual involves linguistic accounts that are internal to participants and that are commentaries upon the action involved. There are also more developed reasons for ritual, which can overlap with function, such as performing tonsure on children as part of the initiation that will incorporate them into the world of adults. In specifically religious ritual—such as performing sacrifice in the anticipation of life in the next world—meaning is more explicit, and the meaning is reflected upon within the textual tradition that accompanies the ritual act. Vedic sacrifice is performed primarily because of injunction, but secondarily to ensure a place in heaven for the patron. These are accounts that are within meaning and arguably central to the act rather than ad hoc or arbitrary post-event projections. In this case meaning—heaven for the patron—might be distinguished from function that is about social differentiation and marking out status for the patron, as well as for the Brahman ritualists that the participants themselves may not be aware of.
Meaning is also associated with experience. While ritual mostly has a social function and while it may have an overt meaning or reason for being performed, it can also have emotional or experiential consequences on the participants. Having undergone elaborate purifications and persisted with the ritual procedure, the patron of the Vedic sacrifice has experienced the rite and returns to his house in a state of ritual purity and feeling good about himself. In this case experience for the patron is important even though it may well be irrelevant to function and even irrelevant to meaning. Thus, for example, in the dance possession rites of Kerala documented in meticulous detail and theorized by Freeman, the inner experience of the dancer, whether they feel possessed by the deity or whether they do not, is irrelevant to the social function of its performance (Freeman 2003). But for some kinds of ritual experience is important. If yoga or meditation is a kind of ritual, then experience might be a reason for its performance. Experience has often been a theme in the history of Indic religions, although perhaps gaining particular favour in the twentieth century through the West, with the privileging of experience over cognition, of affect over doctrine. The vertical elevation of the practitioner through different stages of practice and levels is an intensification of inner experience. Here function, meaning, and experience coincide.
One of the functions of ritual is group bonding: a structure of action that facilitates and enables individuals to mirror other members and to identify with the group’s values. All human communities must have this function to some degree, but some communities have developed extraordinarily complex patterns of action that support the bonding as well as the social differentiation function. The history of Indic society is an example of a structured and differentiated society characterized by a very high degree of ritual behaviour. As Dumont observed, the highly segmented society of South Asia is characterized by caste or groups of agnatic descent in which members of the group must generally marry and eat only within the descent group. That is, rules of endogamy and commensality ensure group cohesion and identity of members. In such a society, there is a high degree of ritual that functions to reinforce group boundaries, including the elaborate series of twelve classical Hindu saṃskāras that mark the junctures of life and ‘construct’ the social person. Whenever we are dealing with human practices focused on the body, focused on gender, and focused on age, it seems to me that we are inevitably within the realm of human meaning. There is clearly intention involved in the ritual process as well as experience. Although not so much in Hinduism, other societies that practise initiation often inflict varying degrees of pain on the young participants, underlining experience as being intertwined with function and meaning.
Arguably experience is fundamentally important in forms of ritual explicitly concerned with eschatological hope. Some ritual is only meaningful in terms of this cultural prolepsis and the anticipation of spiritual liberation or enlightenment. In Hinduism, one can formally become a world renouncer, give up being a householder, and dedicate the remainder of one’s life to pursuing the goal of liberation through ascetic practices and meditation. In such cases, the social function of renunciation for the wider society is probably minimal (not withstanding Dumont’s claim that all innovation comes from the renouncer) but the intensification of meaning for the individual practitioner is great. The daily, dedicated practice of yoga along with ascetic practices of restricted eating and sleeping, intended to control desire and focus the mind on transcendence, is both deeply meaningful and experiential. Such practices cannot be explained by social function alone but need to be accounted for with reference to bringing about the eschatological hope of the practitioner. The meaning of the practice is linked to the anticipated experience. For example, in Jainism some ascetics have practised fasting to death, sallekhana, labelled as ‘ritual suicide’. This sallekhana is a withering or scraping (lekhana), attenuating the body for the sake of truth (sat). One of the meanings of the term lekhana is ‘scratching’ or ‘writing’, and so indicates the body being inscribed by the tradition through the act of fasting. The meaning here is explicit: the Jain ascetic wishes to withdraw his attention from the world, stop action that causes further impurity leading to rebirth, and experience the joy of liberation in the isolation (kaivalya) of the soul from physical matter at the top of the universe. Such an act is functionally minimal (although such saints do have some effect upon their communities), but experientially intense and completely motivated by eschatological hope. It is this kind of meditative, ascetic ritual that is most closely linked to the anticipation of liberation and has least in common with the social ritual of rites of passage. Furthermore, such practice enacts the values of Jainism and exemplifies extreme non-violence on the part of the ascetic and a deep longing for isolation from the material world.8
But while the Jain ascetic is individual, his practice does not entail the values of individualism that have only developed in modernity. Indeed, Michael’s Homo ritualis entails non-individualist values in that highly ritualized societies, such as India, espouse a collectivism that places emphasis on the group rather than the individual. In his famous essay on world renunciation, Dumont claimed that the renouncer is an individual whereas the ‘man-in-the-world’ is not, being defined rather by social role (Dumont 1979). It is the renouncer who seeks individual salvation through rejecting the collectivism of the social person. While I can see what Dumont means, this is problematic in that the renouncer is not an individual in the sense of espousing the value of individualism because he, and sometimes she, is losing social identity through the rite of renunciation but gaining a different social identity instead. The renouncer becomes part of an order of renouncers and indeed all markers of individuality are stripped away—he or she wears an orange robe or walks naked, takes a name dependent on the sect, and seeks to erase individuality through a rigorous regime (Flood 2006: 88–9). Such practices of renunciation are highly motivated by eschatological hope, even though there may be other, more worldly factors involved, such as becoming a renouncer to escape from a family problem or because he cannot find another social role (Hausner 2007). While Dumont may have exaggerated the individuality of the renouncer, I think he makes an important point in that the history of Hinduism can be characterized as comprising these two institutions of the Brahmanical householder and the world renouncer, a distinction that maps onto two realms of value or purposes of life: dharma focused on living a good and full life in the world, pursuing the legitimate goals of duty, pleasure, and prosperity, and mokṣa focused on a verticality that ultimately takes the person out of the social world. These trajectories, the householder and the renunciate, interact with the Brahmanical tradition absorbing practices and ideas from the realm of renunciation (on the history of renunciation see the essays by Olivelle and Hausner in this volume).
In the history of Hindu practices, we might therefore distinguish between those orientated towards the clarification of social role and marking temporal transitions through life, such as birth rites, marriage, and death rites—that is, the social construction of the self—and practices orientated towards eschatological hope. The history of Brahmanism initially distinguished between these two in the sense that sacrificial rites were the concern of a particular group of texts called the Śrauta, those that followed from revelation or Śruti, and those that were concerned with the home, with life-cycle rituals, were the focus of Gṛhya texts (see Galewicz in this volume). The Śrauta texts were concerned with eschatological hope in the sense that the ritual patron was deemed to acquire not simply status but supernatural benefit from the ritual process, namely heaven at death. The domestic rites, on the other hand, were concerned with the horizontal transformation of a person through life, becoming a particular kind of person with a particular status.
With the Upaniṣads and the influence of Śramaṇa spiritualty on mainstream Vedic Brahmanism we have the internalization of the sacrifice and its reinterpretation as a process within the self; the sacrifice of the self to a transcendent reality (see the chapters by Galewicz and Bronkhorst in this volume). This shift is part of what some scholars, following Karl Jaspers, have called the Axial transition (Bellah and Joas 2012) in which rather than affirmation of the human good simply as prosperity in the world facilitated through the magical means of sacrifice, there is a claim to a higher, transcendent good; that human fulfilment is beyond the world of daily transaction. They are part of this shift in values from a this-worldly orientation of the Vedic sacrifice to an other-worldly orientation of the Upaniṣads. The term dharma, which among its meanings refers to ritual system, comes to be reinterpreted as ethics. There is a shift from ritualism to values that place emphasis on transcendence. This verticality, the awareness of height in human reality, comes to control the values of the tradition. Thus liberation (mokṣa) comes to be added to the three purposes of human life (puruṣārtha), namely duty (dharma), pleasure (kāma), and prosperity (artha), and comes to be regarded as the highest.
Practices might therefore be classified along the lines of these two orientations, the one towards transcendence and final liberation that I have called eschatological hope, the other towards worldly prosperity and the leading of a full and complete life on earth as a social person embedded in time: the social ‘construction’ (saṃskāra) of the self. The value of transcendence or verticality came to be associated with practices of asceticism and yoga to achieve an existential realization of that truth within the practitioner. The householder was also able to adopt these practices and values of transcendence came to be the values of worldly or horizontal fulfilment. We can therefore distinguish between inner practices focused on the realization of transcendence and external practices concerned with the worship and appeasement of deities, with pūjā, and the fulfilment of worldly obligations. The inner practice of meditation and asceticism by those who practise them are considered to be of higher worth than the merely external: for Śaṅkara knowledge is better than devotion, for Rāmānuja devotion is better than action, and for Abhinavagupta the spontaneous realization of truth is higher than any of them.
So, to return to the larger point: Hinduism is a religion of ritual par excellence but within it we can identify two kinds of practice, one orientated towards social value, obligation, and duty, the other orientated towards liberation and spiritual ascent. Both can overlap to an extent in that spiritual ascent can also be a value of the householder committed to practices of social obligation and value. We see this in the married householder, male or female, who devotes some hours every morning to meditation while fulfilling worldly responsibilities in the rest of the day (Juergensmeyer 1991: 127–46). Ritual therefore is a term that can cover both practices of social transformation and practices of inner transformation. Axel Michaels in an important book, Homo Ritualis, has discussed the history of the term ‘ritual’ in a fine survey of theories about it and points out that it covers a wide range of indigenous Indic terms, mostly in Sanskrit. Michaels lists karma and kriyā from the verbal root kṛ, to do or make; maṅgala to denote a rite or auspicious event; saṃskāra, to put something together perfectly; kalpa, a ritual rule; pūjā, worshipping, honouring, adoring; yajña/yāga, sacrifice; and utsava, melā, or līlā to denote a festival (Michaels 2016: 8–10).
Lastly, we have not yet talked about practice more broadly as behaviour or comportment towards the world: dharma, the social and moral obligations of Hindus, is actually a kind of practice. The Dharmaśāstras, the so-called law books, are treatises that include ritual procedures but are particularly concerned with comportment and behaviour and the great epic literature, the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa, are fundamentally concerned with questions of correct action and moral conduct (see Brockington in this volume). The Brahman should behave in particular ways to maintain purity and also dignity. This kind of thing extends to ways of eating, bodily cleanliness, ways of interacting such as how one greets another, and moral obligations to one’s family and wider society. One of the key questions of the Bhagavad-gītā is about how to act and behave, particularly regarding Arjuna’s dilemma about whether he should fight in the great battle or not. To act honourably is to fight, as he is a warrior whose commitment should be to the king and state, even above his responsibility to family (Malinar 2007: 44–5). These issues have been and continue to be articulated through story-telling traditions and especially acted out in theatre (see Bansat-Boudon in this volume). Bansat-Boudon shows how theatre is a central motif in Indian thought that cannot be limited to the realm of dharma alone. Moreover there is an affinity between theatrical and spiritual experience, as we see in the aesthetic theory within ‘Kashmir’ Śaivism.
So, I take human practice to entail body, movement, and repetition. Indeed, the noun ‘practice’ implies the verb ‘to practise’ and entails something yet to be completed. Practice involves a temporality and fore-conception of what is to be achieved. It also entails establishing a pattern of repetition, a habit, some of which will be purposive in the sense that the practice is directed towards a future goal, such as the practice of studying for an exam, while others are purposive in a different or more limited sense of maintaining a certain state of affairs (such as the habit of cleaning one’s teeth). Religious practice is orientated towards verticality (there has to be eschatological hope or cultural prolepsis), which is the elevation of self or community that can sometimes disrupt conventional or even biological patterns of practice; the Jain monk radically disrupts the conventional practice of eating.
The cultivation of religious habits, such as regular prayer and meditation, entails discipline and application and often go against what I have called ‘the flow of the body’ (Flood 2006: 4–5). A key feature of ascetic practice is the reversal of the body’s biological orientation through the renunciation of food and sexual practice, along with the intention to eradicate sexual desire. The cultivation of a religious or ascetic habitus is central to what religions are and the goals they seek; such a habitus disposes people to act in particular ways and to respond to cultural rhythms that inscribe the body with cultural power, as Bourdieu reminds us (Bourdieu 1977: 163). The cultivation of the practice of asceticism inscribes the ascetic’s body with the values of tradition and often goes against the prevailing social habitus of conformity to social rules and norms. It is not simply that the ascetic, in the extreme Jain case, embraces the world of death at the expense of the world of life, but rather that they seek what they regard as the fulfilment of life through the habitus of asceticism. Tradition is vitally important here as traditions handed down from the past determine the shape and form of religious practice; the ascetic enacts ‘the memory of tradition’ (Flood 2006: 8–13). Of course, the religious habitus changes through time and each performance of a ritual, for example, is the same and yet different and unique. Religious practice is non-identical repetition; it enacts what is prescribed, yet each instantiation is inevitably unique to itself. Practices then are kinds of repeated action and action is intentional movement in space/time. Repeated intentional movement creates events that feed back to the actor and reinforce those patterns of behaviour.9
To explore this history of repeated action that forms habits of behaviour more systematically, I shall begin with Vedic sacrifice, as this is the foundation of all that follows. I shall then view practice through the traditional classification of daily rites, occasional rites, and rites for obtaining a desired purpose, as this is an informative indigenous classification that demarcates well the different areas of Hindu practices linked to different kinds of purpose (such as social cohesion or integration, salvation, and the fulfilment of worldly desire). But we must begin with Vedic sacrifice.
As Alexander Piatigorsky once observed, when we are studying the history of Indian religions, we are studying something that has already studied itself (Piatigorsky 1985). There are categories of self-understanding that developed within Hinduism that need to be taken into account. Vedic ritual is arguably the foundation of Brahmanical practices and even once the majority had left sacrifice far behind, it still retained a hold on the religious imagination and structured patterns of ritual focused on the fire. Moreover, the tradition developed a discourse that was pure reflection on the meaning and purpose of ritual, namely the Mīmāṃsā. I first need to say something about both Vedic ritual itself and then Vedic reflection upon ritual.
The central practice of Vedic religion is sacrifice. This involved elaborate ritual procedures that might last for many days and involved the construction of a temporary pavilion for the rites, an altar made of bricks in the shape of a bird, and three places for the sanctified fire. The purpose was the purification of the patron of the sacrifice who, accompanied by his wife, would undergo asceticism before participating in the rite indirectly through the actions of the ritualists, the Brahman experts who would recite or sing verses from the Vedas. Three priests would recite from the three Vedas with a fourth priest, called the Brahman reciting from the fourth Veda, the Atharva, and overseeing the process. The animal that was to be the victim would be tied to a post (yupa) outside the main enclosure and its death would be by suffocation although in the original rite it would probably have been decapitated. In origin, the killing of the animal—horse, cow, or goat—would be followed by a shared meal. Heesterman has noted that sacrifice entails the three acts of killing, destruction, and food distribution. The animal is killed, destroyed in the fire, and distributed as food, thereby facilitating ‘the formation and maintenance of human society’ (Heesterman 1993: 10). Heesterman also highlights a fourth component of the original Vedic sacrifice, namely contest. Indeed, contest pervaded the rite in the original competition about who would be the sacrificer, chariot races, dicing games for different parts of the sacrificed animal, and disputation in which participants would challenge each other with riddles (Heesterman 1993: 42). Heesterman sees the function of Vedic sacrifice as the attempt to restore the primal unity of the cosmos indicated in the hymn to the cosmic person whose sacrificed body forms the universe and society (Ṛg-veda 10.90 in Jamieson and Brereton 2015). This is sacrifice’s ‘broken world’ because the desire (kāma) for the primordial unity and for a healed community in which death has been banished is, of course, unobtainable. The complex issue of the purpose of sacrifice is beyond the scope of our discussion, but Heesterman’s contention about reaching back to a primordial unity and the banishing of death has support in the texts. The fourth priest, the Brahman, is said to ‘heal the sacrifice’ by offering a portion of the sacrificed animal, called the iḍā, to the Brahman or power of the rite. This act symbolizes the wound created by the feral deity Rudra who, when excluded from the sacrifice by the gods, shot an arrow, piercing the sacrifice that needs to be symbolically healed. This myth of Rudra foreshadows the later myth of Śiva in the Purāṇas who is excluded from Dakṣa’s sacrifice and then destroys it. Iḍā was the Goddess in the form of a cow who represents the sacrificial meal, and the iḍā portion of the sacrificial meal is ‘torn apart’ but healed by the Brahman priest through offering it into the fire. There is an identification of the sacrificial cow with the power of the sacrifice, brahman. Heesterman observes that the meaning of this rite seems to be that for the sustenance of life, food (the cow) has to pass through death. In a similar way, the royal patron of the sacrifice has to symbolically pass through death to live. Thus the ‘link between life and death, is the riddle of brahman’ (Heesterman 1993: 155–6). Heesterman is surely right that sacrifice is about the affirmation of life and the overcoming of death. Through the death of the sacrificial victim, the patron is given life.
This is affected through ritual substitution. Indeed, the idea of the hidden connections or ‘binding’ (bandha) between sacrifice and cosmos, patron and sacrifice was developed in the post-Saṃhitā literature of the Brahmaṇas. The patron, the one who has been initiated (dīkṣita), is a sign for the whole community who has a connection with the victim. The sins of the patron are transferred to the sacrifice and so he is purified, and thus symbolically is the community. The repeated statement that ‘man is the sacrifice’ (puriṣo vai yajña) echoes the hymn to the cosmic man, the puruṣa who is immolated to create the universe, and perhaps reflects events of actual human sacrifice, as indicated by the very category puruṣamedha. We see this in the myth of Śunaḥśepa told in the Śathapatha-brahmaṇa. The Brahman’s son Śunaḥśepa is substituted as a sacrifice for King Hariścandra’s son who had been granted to the king as a boon by the god Varuṇa on the condition that the son be sacrificed back to him. Varuṇa agrees that the Brahman’s son can substitute for the King’s son but Śunaḥśepa skilfully wrangles his way out of his fate by praising the gods and wins his freedom (Heesterman 1993: 173–4). Sacrifice is substitution and through substitution claims that death is not inevitable and affirms life through the immolation of the victim: an act that necessitates repetition because of its inevitable failure. This hope of transforming death into life through sacrifice is even reflected at human death in the funeral pyre that is called the ‘last sacrifice’ (antyeṣṭi): the final sacrifice that transforms death into sacrifice and so death into eschatological hope.
Vedic sacrifice was and continues to be a long and complex ritual process that has continued in a line of transmission for several thousand years.10 The Śrauta sūtras describe the correct procedures. The Baudhāyana-śrautasūtra describes how the patron is anointed and offers soma juice pressed from plants that may in origin have been a stimulant of even hallucinogenic substance to Indra. The text presents precise details of what is to be done. For example, during the morning pressing of Soma the victim’s heart is put on a twig of a fig tree (Plakṣa)11 and a portion cut out and offered into the fire, then the fatty fold that is the omentum is offered into one of the three fires (into the Āhvanīya fire) as an offering to the fire god Agni. After this a rice cake is prepared while the victim is butchered and cooked, and finally all parts of the animal, parts of the tongue, the sternum, liver, right front leg, buttocks, testes, and penis are offered with its liquefied fat (Baudhāyana-śrautasūtra 4.8–9; 20.29–30; 24.36–7, in Kashikar 2003). At the end of the sacrificial process the relationship between the patron and the priests is formally dissolved and the ritual enclosure burned down. The patron returns to his home, accompanied by his wife, where he will make offerings into the three household fires for the remainder of his days.12 His asceticism, celibacy, and ritual performance have finally achieved a limited success in their completion, even though the ultimate desire to defeat death cannot be fulfilled.
Sacrifice is not only the central rite of Vedic Brahmanism but also the central metaphor that extends well beyond the temporal boundary of Vedism. The ‘cycle of sacrifice’ (yajñacakra) refers to the process of consumption within the entire universe where food from the sacrifice moves through the cosmic regions, beings consuming beings to live, the exchange of goods between gods and humans being facilitated through Agni (Wilden 2000: 65–6). Consumption of food, the sacrifice of one being to another for survival, is the central theme of the Taittīrya-upaniṣad and even the Bhagavad-gītā describes the universe in terms of sacrifice: that creatures come from food, food from rain, rain from sacrifice, sacrifice from action enjoined by the Veda, this from the absolute power Brahman, and Brahman from the cosmic sound oṃ, thus Brahman is founded on sacrifice (Bhagavad-gītā 3.9–15. See Malinar 2007: 84–90). The whole Vedic worldview is sacrificial with sacrifice at the ritual heart of the society and central to the founding myth of the immolation of the cosmic man from which society and universe emerge (Jamieson and Brereton 2015). Although the Śramaṇa traditions rejected sacrifice, as did the renouncers who have given up fire going beyond the householder’s life to the fourth stage, Vedic sacrifice continued to be practised through the generations, being particularly auspicious for kings in the medieval period, and continues in an ameliorated form into modernity.
Given the importance of Vedic sacrifice, it is not surprising that the tradition developed refection upon it and the exegesis of the scriptures that prescribed it. The Mīmāṃsā tradition of hermeneutics was keen to uphold the authority of the Veda and to explicate the meaning of those scriptures through an apparatus for reading scripture, the six signs or characteristics (ṣadliṅga) (Rambachan 1992), that enabled the reader to understand the importance of performing the sacrifice correctly. The Mīmāṃsā developed a theory of language showing how the sentences in Vedic scriptures are primarily concerned with injunction (vidhi) and other sentences are ‘subsequent reference’ (anuvāda) which simply offer additional information to the injunction (Benson 2010: 47). Indeed, the Mīmāṃsā is in many ways an ally for Staal’s thesis in that Vedic ritual is to be performed simply because it is an injunction (vidhi) prescribed by the Veda and the Veda is self-validating revelation. The Mīmāṃsakas even maintained the view that the gods have no reality other than as their appearance in language. The gods are real only as their names uttered in the ritual and encoded in the texts and so as simply verbal signs; no god is superior to any other. Ritual recitations or mantras are meaningless (anarthakā mantrāḥ), it says in the Mīmāṃsā-sūtra (Mīmāṃsā-sūtra 1.2.31–9 in Staal 1989: 234). Mantras, particularly the meaningless sounds recited during Vedic ritual stated in the Śrauta texts (the stobhas) as well as the seed syllables (the bījas) of Tantric ritual, could be a remnant of a past before semantics and referential language emerged. Staal argues this: that such sounds are ‘but a remnant or resurgence of a pre-linguistic stage of development, during which man or his ancestors used sound in a purely syntactic or ritual manner’.13 But even if many sounds and uses of language in Vedic ritual are meaningless, this is not the case in the majority of instances. Lubin makes the point that ‘it is indisputable that the ritual words and actions are in the vast majority of cases not perfectly arbitrary but are assigned their place on the basis of lexical meaning (if not of the whole of the mantra, at least of some word in it) and the mimetic or dramatic value of ritual acts’ (Lubin 2016: 147). Indeed, Jaimini’s Mīmāṃsā-sūtra is generally of the view that ritual action is meaningful, notwithstanding the Kautsa claim about the meaninglessness of mantras. In ordinary life, Jaimini says, action depends upon need (loke karma arthalakṣaṇam) so all action, both everyday action and ritual action, is performed for a purpose (artha) and action without purpose should not be done (Mīmāṃsā-sūtra 11.1.26. See Clooney 1990: 135–6).
The issue of meaning in Vedic ritual is important because it relates to the continuity of ritual through the generations. The contemporary Nambudri Brahmans of Kerala who preserve the Veda through ritual recitation and who perform Vedic sacrifice from time to time will rarely understand the meaning of their recitations, underlining the fact that ritual transmission is more important. What counts is the correct transmission and correct performance. But while meaning might be in abeyance, the function of bonding the community is clearly in evidence along with the purificatory experience of the participants.
How do we move from formalized Vedic sacrifice to the archetypal Hindu ritual of offering vegetarian food to deities embodied in icons in temples and shrines? The answer is probably in the domestic rites of the Brahman householder. While the Śrauta texts emphasized public practice, a different group of texts, the Gṛhya-sūtras, describe the Brahman householder and the domestic rites he should perform. The Gṛhya rites involved the maintenance of and making offerings into the three domestic fires. In an incremental process, these probably developed into the standard form of worship that is all-pervasive in Hinduism today, pūjā. While the Śrauta Brahmans were concerned with the large sacrifices that attracted royal support throughout the first millennium bc and into the first millennium of the common era, the Smārta Brahmans developed from the Gṛhya tradition of domestic worship focused on particular deities. During the first millennium ad these became standardized as worship of five gods, Viṣṇu, Śiva, Devī, Gaṇeśa, and Sūrya (the pañcāyatana worship), but became more sectarian as time went on, in particular with the Purāṇas and their focus on specific deities (Bühnemann 1988). The Smārta worship of Viṣṇu in the Vaikhānasa sect is a good example or the Pāñcarātra worship of Viṣṇu that, while being tantric, is still close to the Vaikhānasas (Colas 1996).
The standard term for Hindu ritual that involved offering to the gods is pūjā (see Lidova in this volume). This would seem to have been in place by the time of the Bhagavad-gītā,14 when the portable religion of Vedic sacrifice is replaced by more stable places of worship and enshrined images. Although the earliest stone temple at Mahābalipuram only dates from around the fifth century ad, the tradition of plastic icons may go back much further and there may have been wooden temples long before there were stone ones. The origins of pūjā are unclear, especially as it seems so markedly different to Vedic sacrifice, but Timothy Lubin has put forward an argument that it does indeed develop from Vedic ritual, but not the Śrauta rites of the Śrauta ritualists but rather the domestic rites or the Smārta ritualists. That is, while the Śrauta-sūtras document the dominance and importance of sacrifice, another tradition developed, once the patron arrived home, of making offerings into the domestic fire, which in time became offerings of food to a deity in a domestic setting.
Lubin has documented how the domestic or Gṛhya, later Smārta, rites developed as modelled on the Śrauta. One important shift was the development of ritual acts without the need of fire such as the rites of passage or life-cycle rituals (saṃskāra), and over the period of a few hundred years, the growth of the worship of Rudra, Viṣṇu, and Gaṇeśa. The Varāhagṛhya-sūtra discussed by Lubin describes rites of attendance on a deity such as Rudra who is residing in a tree, at a crossroads, at a cremation ground, or in a pot, and how there is Vedic precedent for offerings without fire (Lubin 2016: 151). Rudra who is outside of rites dealt with in the Śrauta texts is offered the sacrifice of a cow modelled on the Śrauta ritual. Texts such as the Baudhāyana-Gṛhya-śeṣasūtra, which deals with what was left out of the main text, introduce image worship and rites for Rudra, Viṣṇu, and Durgā, the main deities of later Hinduism, while the parallel Vaikhānasa-Gṛhyasūtra focuses on Viṣṇu and becomes a key text of the Vaiṣṇava Vaikānasa tradition (Lubin 2016: 152–3). Mainstream Hindu worship would therefore seem to be a development of the non-Śrauta, Gṛhya tradition in which offerings could be made which were vegetarian, using milk-rice, or flowers with water, and mantras accompanied by the word ‘homage’ (namaḥ). We see in the Baudhāyana tradition the bringing into the Vedic fold of non-Vedic worship of deities, particularly Rudra who was given no warrant in the Śrauta textual corpus and practice. Pūjā is here brought into harmony with homa and the Smārta Brahmans practice harmonized with that of the Śrauta Brahmans. In time, pūjā becomes the dominant mode of worship and it is rather the Vedic fire ritual that finds its way as an option into pūjā as the offering of generally vegetarian foodstuffs to the deities of the Hindu pantheon (see Lidova in this volume).15
Pūjā is related to an attitude of devotion or bhakti to the deity. The epics bear witness to the rise of theism, especially the Bhagavad-gītā, but a large corpus of interrelated textual material called ‘the ancient texts’ or Purāṇas bears witness to the worship and the expression of what we can easily identify as typical Hindu devotion in temples and shrines throughout the sub-continent. The Purāṇas are narratives that were told by professional storytellers, the Sūtas, and came to distillation, as it were, over many generations. These texts include creation myths, genealogies of kings, stories of the gods, and moral tales about the violation and fulfilment of dharma.16 That these stories are so widespread and popular—there are many manuscripts of the Bhāgavata-purāṇa, for example—bears witness to the deep cultural roots of popular devotionalism that remains unabated. Much of this devotionalism has its roots in Tamil culture. So, by the beginning of the second millennium all the elements are in place that we can recognize in modern Hinduism: mythic narratives, devotional worship of deities embodied in images, temple worship, and caste- and region-specific kinds of devotional practices such as pilgrimage. By this time (the first millennium ad) the Śrauta tradition is still strong, the Smārta tradition is developing more sectarian worship of deities as articulated in the Purāṇas, with a great focus on devotion (bhakti) and offerings (pūjā), and alongside this we have a new form of worship based on a new revelation, that of the Tantras.
The earliest sections of the Niśvāsatattva-saṃhitā focused on Śiva can be dated to the fifth century ad. This is the earliest Tantra that has so far come to light. Between its composition and the eleventh century there is a great proliferation of texts in this genre, and these further revelations continue to be produced even up to the eighteenth century. Sanderson has called the heyday of this revelation and the traditions associated with it the ‘Śaiva Age’ (Sanderson 2009), and I refer the reader to his publications for a mapping of these traditions (Sanderson 2012–13). In terms of practice, some specific forms developed that claimed to have liberation and/or power as their goal. Śaivism became very influential in courtly circles during the medieval period and penetrated all levels of society, from low-caste possession cults, to yogic practices, to Brahmanical appropriation of fringe ascetic practices. Through focusing on these traditions, we have an insight into the structures of practice in the history of Hinduism that are still with us today. By the medieval or post-Gupta period, we can identify broad currents of tradition, each with its own specific practice. These are:
Within the tantric traditions some adopted antinomian practices opposed to orthodox Brahmanism, although the mainstream tantric tradition of the Śaiva Siddhānta did not (see Flood in this volume). By the eleventh century, this tradition, following orthodox Brahmanical classification found in the Mīmāṃsā (Benson 2010: 34), divided ritual into daily rites (nitya-karman), occasional rites (naimittika-karman), and rites for a desired purpose (kāmya karman). This ritual pattern is shared by tantric traditions and while the Śaiva Siddhānta ritual manual, the Somaśambhupaddhati, has a good account, perhaps the best tantric text for the identification of the body with the cosmos is the Pāñcarātra scripture called the Jayākhya-saṃhitā, one of the ‘three gems’ of the tradition,18 composed before Utpaladeva (c. 925–75 ad) who quotes it.19 The Pāñcarātra is the tantric version of the religion of Viṣṇu.
After a chapter describing the ritual bath, the text describes the purification of the elements within the body (bhūtaśuddhi) as a preliminary to ritual identification with the deity. The body needs to be purified and transformed from a biological body that in its non-ritual state is impure (malina), without autonomy (asvatantra), subject to decay and death, and made from blood and semen (retoraktobhava) (Jayākhya-saṃhitā 10.16) into a pure, ritual body; a divine body (divya deha). As the cosmos is dissolved at the end of an age in the Pralaya, so the body is to be dissolved, the ritual time of the practice reflecting the cosmic time of the universe. The hierarchical universe divided into pure, mixed, and impure regions is mapped onto the hierarchy of the body. Of particular interest is the elaborate detail that the text goes into regarding the specific visualizations that accompany each stage of the rite. The five elements earth, air, fire, water, and ether or space are mapped onto the body: earth pervading from knees to feet, water from the top of the thighs to the knees, fire from navel to anus, wind from throat to navel, and space from ears to the crown of the head. The procedure is to dissolve each element systematically from the feet upwards. The element is dissolved into its mantra and the mantra dissolved into the subtle element that is regarded as its cause, also regarded as energy or power (śakti/vibhava). In practice, this means that the practitioner imagines the element in front of him, such as the earth in the form of a yellow square, breathes it in so that it goes down his body to pervade from knees to the soles of the feet while repeating the mantra OṂ ŚLĀṂ PṚTHIVYAI HUṂ PHAṬ, thereby dissolving it into the mantra, then breathes out the mantra which dissolves into the subtle element (sound) (Jayākhya-saṃhitā 10.26–30ab, Flood 2000: 514–17). The process continues with each element in sequence replacing the earth seed syllable (here ŚLĀṂ) with its own seed. In this way, the body is ‘destroyed’, reduced to a pile of ashes in the imagination and swept away, to allow for the construction of a divine body. I have described this process as the entextualization of the body (Flood 2006: 74–6) in which the biological body is overlaid with a cultural body specified in the textual revelation. Through the taking on or appropriation of this new body, the practitioner transcends biological destiny and is then prepared for the formation of a divine body, a body made of mantras exactly as the body of the deity is made of mantras. The creation of the divine body through the imposition of mantras upon it is the expression of a vertical attraction to a transcended realm. Or rather, the pure transcendence is brought down into the world in the imagination. With the transformation of the body in this way, God as Nārāyaṇa is visualized above the crown of the head and made to descend through the top of the head and installed on a throne visualized in the heart where offerings are presented purely in imagination. This is followed by external worship to an icon (Jayākhya-saṃhitā 12.1–15; Flood 2006: 116–18; Rastelli 1999: 246–71, 2002: 9–59). Although the Jayākhya is a Pāñcarātra text, the procedure is virtually identical to that found in the Śaiva Siddhānta, which influenced it (Jayākhyasaṃhitā 1931). But generally absent from these mainstream tantric traditions are the antinomian practices often associated with Tantrism, of taboo breaking through the consumption of polluting substances (alcohol, meat, sexual fluids, and even human flesh) regarded as being conducive to attaining enlightenment and power (see Flood in this volume).
More mainstream practices for the attainment of power and liberation were yoga and ascetic disciplines. Yoga or meditation came to be important and emerged as central concerns of Brahmanical Hinduism, becoming emphasized and popularized in the nineteenth century with Vivekananda and now being a global phenomenon. From an ancient ascetic context, the Brahmanical householder absorbed yoga. The origins of yoga may be ancient and at least go back to the time of the Buddha. Indeed, the origins of haṭhayoga are arguably from within Vajrayāna Buddhism (see Mallinson in this volume), although later texts such as the Śvetāśvatara-upaniṣad present a description of holding the back straight and practising meditation (Śvetāśvatara-upaniṣad 2.8–15 in Olivelle 1998). The Yoga-sūtra of Patañjali, composed probably during the latter years of the first millennium bc, is a text that probably reflects an ancient tradition and codifies practices for meditation and controlling the mind. It famously defines yoga as ‘the cessation of mental fluctuations’ (Yoga-sūtra 1.2: yogaś cittavṛttinirodhaḥ in Āraṇya 1983), the idea being that if the mind is stilled then liberation will be attained. Eliade long ago in his masterful book described how there is a link between consciousness, breath, and body in yoga, so that in Patañjali’s eightfold system, the yogi practises restraint (niyama) and discipline (yama), stills the body through posture (āsana), stills the breath through breath control (prāṇayama), withdraws the senses (pratyahāra), and stills the mind through concentration (dhāraṇa, dhyāna, samādhi) (Eliade 1958: 47–95). Patañjali seems to adopt a Sāṃkhya metaphysics in which the purpose of practice was the isolation of the self from matter, although his text has a commentary attributed to Śaṅkara who reads it through the lens of the non-dualist ontology of the Vedānta. There is also a section of the text on the attaining of magical powers (siddhi) through yoga, which David White has claimed is more important than the quietist aspect that sees liberation as dominant (White 2009 but see Mallinson 2014a). But it was particularly during the medieval period that yoga develops and haṭha yoga in particular that has become so popular worldwide; yoga shifts from being restricted to renouncers to become a practice for householders as well. The eight ancillaries or limbs of yoga are also adopted and modified by Śaivism into a ‘six-limbed’ (ṣaḍaṅga) system.
Haṭha yoga, the ‘yoga of force’ (Birch 2011), is posture-based yoga concerned with the cultivation of a regime of physical exercise accompanied by meditation that stills the mind. Expressed in the key fifteenth-century Haṭhapradīpika by Svātmarāma (Akers 2002), there is great emphasis on posture and minimal philosophy. While this text is a Śaiva appropriation of an extra-Vedic soteriology, as Mallinson shows, it does not particularly adopt a Śaiva metaphysics (Mallinson 2014b). Hence when Śaivism has faded away as a dominant cultural and political force, yoga continues and adapts. The origins of haṭha yoga seem to have been in Buddhism (see Mallinson in this volume) and adopted by groups of ascetics; it may also have roots in the Vedānta and Vaiṣṇava sources (Mallinson 2014b). There would also seem to be a later connection with Śākta yogini cults and Kiss has shown how the Matsendrasaṃhitā is a thirteenth-century text from South India that incorporates both Śaiva and Śākta, Kaula Yoginī teachings within it from the Śāmbhava Śaiva sect (Kiss 2011).
The minimizing of metaphysics in practices that abjure effort can also be found in the texts of ‘mindless yoga’ (amanaska yoga) that teach an immediate realization of truth (see Birch in this volume). This tradition of meditation forgoes a structured understanding of a path to a goal in favour of an expansion of awareness in the present moment that is beyond intellectual understanding. These yoga texts from the mid- to late medieval period are minimally philosophical in the sense that they do not develop a systematic metaphysics, nor do they align themselves with a particular religious tradition. Regarding the Haṭhapradīpikā, Mallinson has noted that this non-alignment with philosophical positions and systems is one of the features of yoga that has made it easy to adopt by different philosophical and religious systems: it is first and foremost a practice, and furthermore a practice that can be adapted to suit different intellectual and cultural climates, as has happened throughout the course of its history.
Although the tantric tradition continues, especially with the development of a tradition called the Śrīvidyā where it becomes respectable Hinduism in the South, Śaivism as a political force died out in India by about the thirteenth century. With Mughal polity dominating the North and fractious kingdoms in the South, Hindu practices developed through temple devotion and pūjā with the large, regional temples such as Tirupathi, Cidamabaram, and Jagannatha at Puri remaining important centres of power and pilgrimage. Within Vaiṣṇava practice, in Bengal, devotion to Kṛṣṇa became especially important with Caitanya (1486–1533) inspiring a great swathe of devotion and devotional literature composed by his disciples, especially the Gosvāmins (see Lutjeharms in this volume). Caitanya was a reformer who developed a new kind of devotional religion in Bengal and later at Puri in Orissa, which emphasized surrender to the Lord in ecstatic devotion, particularly through dancing and singing the names of God. The literature of this tradition of Bengal or Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism is large, with an important hagiography of Caitanya (Steward 2010) and independent works by the Gosvāmins on the theology of the sect. Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism became extremely popular and had courtly influence. In the context of the decay of Mughal power and increasing hostility to Hinduism, the Rajput king Jaisiṅgh II (1688–1743) supported Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism but was concerned with the ethics of Vaiṣṇava theology because in the poetic tradition the love between Kṛṣṇa and his consort Rādhā is adulterous, and love in separation is theologically superior to love in union because it is based on longing (viraha), the fundamental attitude of the soul towards God. The theologians seem to have resolved the issue and Jaisiṅgh asserted his authority as a dharmic ruler (Okita 2014: 30–40; Patel 2018; Wong 2015: 318; Horstmann 2009: 90–8).
Apart from the practice of ecstatic devotion, in the early modern period we have the development of devotional movements articulated through poetry in vernacular languages. Kabīr (1398–1448) is especially important who advocates the practice of devotion to a God who is wholly transcendent and without qualities. In the Panjab we have Nānak whose devotional poetry comes to form the backbone of Sikh holy scripture, the Ādi Granth, and in Maharashtra we have the poetry of Tukārām (c. 1568–1650). These are but three names among many Sants who included women (we might mention Mīrābāī in Kashmir) who composed devotional verses, important for the practice of Hinduism because their poetry comes to be collected and sung in collective gatherings called satsang. The expression of devotion through music is an important practice in the history of Hinduism and Richard David Williams gives us examples in this volume. From the time of their composition, these saints gathered groups of disciples around them who formed the origin of specific traditions of practice and transmission. Each saint generated a lineage of masters and community of service and worship. One example of this is the Radhasoami tradition founded in the nineteenth century in Agra by Shiv Dayal (see Daniel Gold in this volume). He generated two lineages, one remaining in Agra and the other developing at Beas near Amritsar in the Punjab. The central practice of the tradition is meditation on a transcendent God through repeating the names of God given by the master and focusing attention on the inner sound (shabd) of God so that the soul will rise up, leaving the body, through the levels of the cosmos to its true home (sacch khand, sat lok) (Juergensmeyer 1991). These are fundamentally gnostic practices that reach far back into Hindu tradition. While performing one’s duty in the world, one’s dharma, the deeper orientation of the devotee is towards God. Through devotion to the guru, daily meditation of repeating the names, and a well-ordered life, the practitioner hopes to attain liberation at death when the soul will be taken to the divine abode.
This is an example of a religion perfectly at home in the modern world and yet whose roots are deeper than the nineteenth century. The Bhagavad-gītā itself advocated the performance of duty in the world while being detached at the same time. Eschatological hope lies in transcending the world and yet there is the imperative to fulfil one’s duty in it. Perhaps this goes to the heart of the history of Hindu practice. The pull of verticality is strong in the tradition that seeks transcendence and the realization of the person’s innate divinity, and hence the realm of true value lies outside the world, and yet the imperative to do one’s duty and perform social obligation is equally strong, and hence the realm of value lies within the world. This is perhaps the paradox of Hindu practice: the affirmation of dharma in the world through the practice of everyday responsibility alongside the affirmation of transcendence and verticality through the practice of detachment and inner ascent.
Like many Indic traditions, the Radhasoami has found a following outside of India and the West has adopted many Hindu practices. There are now many traditions of gurus and disciples whose roots are in Hinduism but are wholly Western (although now dated; see Rawlinson 1998). Tantric Śaivism has taken root in the USA with gurus such as Cetanananda, an American whose own guru was a New York art dealer, Rudi. His guru was from Kerala, Nityananda, also an influence on Muktananda who founded Siddha Yoga, again a largely Western concern. We should also mention here the Hare Krishna movement whose founding father Swami Prabhu Bhaktivedanta founded the tradition when quite elderly and that has now been reintroduced to India. These traditions show the centrality of the guru in Hindu practice (see Gold in this volume). Many recent gurus have been one-offs, as it were, without a significant tradition following from them. The magician Sai Baba was the centre of a vast enterprise but with his demise it has declined. Similarly, Da Avabhasa Kalki in Hawaii was a spontaneously realized guru, but without his charismatic personality, the tradition goes into abeyance. The history of gurus (as Gold shows in this volume) has been important in Hinduism and gurus continue to attract large followings. Outside of particular gurus, the practice of yoga has become a global phenomenon and adapted for health and recreation (see De Michelis in this volume), demonstrating its plasticity and ability to meet the demands of different cultural needs in different times and places.
By way of summary, our survey of religious literature on practice has given us a picture of religious practices that persist through time, virtually unchanged such as Vedic sacrifice, and we might include here the chanting of Vedic texts. With the Upaniṣads and what scholars have called the Axial shift, we have seen the re-thinking of dharma as ritual act to ethics and the development of the idea of a transcendent reality. We have seen a shift from Brahmanical sacrifice in the Śrauta tradition to worship of a putative theistic reality in the Smārta tradition along with the development of an emotional attachment to God (bhakti). With the medieval period a new development occurs with the tantric revelation and forms of practice characterized by the ritual identification of the practitioner with the deity. We also witness here practices on the edges of society or from lower social ranks, such as possession and exorcism, penetrating into mainstream Brahmanism and being absorbed by it. The tantric traditions along with ascetic traditions are arguably a way in which the culture manages sexuality: controlling it within caste boundaries yet developing exceptions and transgressions. Yoga is an important development during the medieval period whose roots are much older, and this tradition develops up to today’s multimillion-dollar industry along with India’s reinvigoration of yoga in public discourse and political formation (see Kale and Novetzke in this volume). The older forms of practice are still with us today but many of these have been updated through communicative technologies—there is online darśana, the viewing of the deity, and millions of Hindus still continue to do pūjā as well as practise life-cycle rites, much as prescribed in the ancient Smṛti texts. Many Hindu practices have been exported beyond India, notably yoga, bhakti, and gurus, all of which have become English nouns. Practices, even those characterized by eschatological hope, or perhaps particularly those, are today deeply imbricated in politics, and the ‘Hindu’ voice, as we have seen with ‘saffron power’, is effective in contemporary Indian politics. Hindu practices had become absorbed in the service of developing the nation of India, particularly exemplified by the figure of Gandhi (as Devji discusses in this volume).
The vision of the nation is linked to its past and the construction of that past as Hindu is part of the political landscape. Traditionally a political theology that articulated eschatological hope in terms of a transformed social and political world never developed within Hinduism. Although there are political texts such as Kautilya’s Arthaśāstra, there is no religio-political text in the ancient past that presents a vision of a future world transformed. This is partly due, I think, to the distinction between the two institutions of the householder life and renunciation that Dumont highlighted. The practices of Hinduism geared towards eschatological hope remain, in a sense, individualistic. Hinduism bears witness to the deep-rooted persistence of cultural practices through the generations and their transformative potential for those who live in eschatological hope. To counterbalance the hijacking of religious practice by those with a very narrow view of Hinduism, perhaps we need the development a Hindu political theology that reflects the wider history of its practice, along the lines of a cultural prolepsis brought into a socio-political vision. This is now a desideratum for Hindu theologians.
Gavin Flood, Introduction: A History of Hindu Practice In: Hindu Practice. Edited by: Gavin Flood, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198733508.003.0001