[Pramāṇa](https://indike.org/pramana/) › [Studies](https://indike.org/pramana/ins) › [Polity, law and society](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity) › [The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985) › c11 # The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c11: 7 Ritual, Revelation, and the Axial Age The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c11 - **Language:** English ## Contents - [c11.s1 9](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.s1) — 2 parts ### 7 Ritual, Revelation, and the Axial Age ### [c11.1](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.1) It may seem at best idiosyncratic to connect ritualism with so dramatic a concept as Karl Jaspers's Axial Age. When ritualism, moreover, is hallowed by the antiquity and authority of the Veda, it would seem to be the very antithesis of anything revolutionary. Ritual is generally supposed to have gone on for ages past, and in the case of Vedic ritual, it goes on unchanged even in our time. Though subject to internal development, it has shown itself strangely impervious to the changes in its physical, social, intellectual, and religious surroundings, all of which would, moreover, seem to militate against its very survival. To make the case against Vedic ritual even worse, it is credited with the power to bring about all that one desires—health, progeny, wealth. It is, in other words, thoroughly magical and clearly at odds with all that the Axial Age stands for. ### [c11.2](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.2) Among the Vedic scriptures only the Upaniṣads are viewed as evidence of a decisive turning point, but only insofar as they, though rooted in ritual thought, are seen to go beyond and to supersede Vedic ritualism. Our attention is thus focused on the suggestive similarities as well as on the divergences of Upaniṣadic and early Buddhist thought.¹ ### [c11.3](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.3) Obviously, Buddhism is an imcomparably more presentable candidate for the axial breakthrough. It shares with the Upaniṣads the doctrinal concern with \*karman\*, transmigration, world renunciation, and final release; but its purely ethical karman doctrine untrammeled by ritual or magical reminiscences, the rational clarity of its stand on transmigration and salvation impress the observer as a decisive advance. Its rejection of the Veda, moreover, gives Buddhism the character of a radically new beginning. No less important in this respect is the impact it had on the mundane order through the intimate connection with the Maurya Empire, which arose with other new empires at the end of the Axial Age. Giving the empire a new ethical legitimation, Buddhism owes to empire the realization of its universalistic claim. Even though the Maurya Empire lasted only for a relatively short time, the pattern for a new type of universalistic imperial order, based on the intimate connection of the ruler and the monastic establishment, the \*sangha\*, was set.² ### [c11.4](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.4) The Veda, on the other hand, though ostensibly addressing itself to man and his mundane interests, kept out of such involvement with the world and its powers. True, its ritual does contain prestigious ceremonies that are explicitly meant for the consecration of kings and emperors, but when performing such ceremonies, the royal celebrant is just a sacrificer (\*yajamāna\*) like any commoner.³ Conversely, the legal authors do not even prescribe these ceremonies for sanctioning the ruler's power. Although they were often used to enhance the standing of the ruler by documenting his access to the Veda as a proper \*kṣatriya\*, the Vedic ceremonies by themselves did not turn a mere ruler into a king or emperor. ### [c11.5](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.5) Vedic ritualism, then—even when taking its Upaniṣadic extension into account—does not appear to present a prima facie case for the axial breakthrough. Its indecisive position vis-à-vis the world, as well as the restriction of its access, gives it a marginal place that seems to deny any such contention from the start. In postaxial Hinduism the Veda, and even more its ritual, is for all its high prestige controversial, that is, if it is not just treated as an idol that only rates a bow in passing, as Louis Renou has graphically put it.⁴ The classical proposition that the whole of the dharma rests on or is already contained in the Veda is a pious axiom that vanishes into thin air as soon as one tries to pin down their supposedly intimate connection.⁵ In one point at least, Veda and dharma are disturbingly at odds with each other. The very attempts to harmonize Vedic animal sacrifice with the dharma's ideal requirement of \*ahiṃsā\*, or at least to give sacrifice a secure place of its own, show that the relationship of Veda and dharma is a highly problematic one. ### [c11.6](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.6) But this contradictory valuation, running from transcendent elevation through indifference to outright rejection, should put us on our guard. On one hand, from the beginning, the Veda has not lacked in controversy. On the other hand, its extensive body of texts has been preserved in all its intricacy with unique faithfulness, which is all the more remarkable when one considers India's otherwise rather cavalier fashion of managing its textual heritage. Both the controversy surrounding it and the care spent on its preservation place the Veda in a class by itself. They may be considered as typical symptoms of the documents left by the Axial Age. ### [c11.7](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.7) The contention of the present paper, therefore, is that Vedic ritualism— ### [c11.8](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.8) no less than Buddhism or other "heterodox" sects—does indeed represent in its own and powerful manner the axial breakthrough. Notwithstanding the problems of textual chronology—the ritual texts in the version before us may be later than is commonly assumed—it may well reflect the primary breakthrough. ### [c11.9](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.9) At this point we should recall that the Veda is viewed as ultramundane, suprahuman (\*apauruṣeya\*) truth, in short as "revelation." The claim to being revealed truth is in no way an unusual one for Hindu scriptures, which are as a rule considered to have been taught or recited by the Godhead to the sage, who then handed down the revealed teaching through the teacher-pupil chain. In the case of the Veda, however, the matter is subtly different. The Veda is \*śruti\*, "hearing," and as such is sharply differentiated from \*smṛti\*, "remembrance," especially from the dharma texts. The term \*śruti\*, however, requires some comment. It implies oral transmission by the teacher to the pupil, who learns the text by rote. In this respect, the situation is not much different from that of the \*smṛti\*. However, this is not the way the texts tell us the \*śruti\* was originally received. They were not "heard" from the Godhead but "found" and, especially, "seen" by the ecstatic seers, the \*ṛṣis\*. In contradistinction to the \*smṛti\*, which is received and transmitted through the teacher-pupil chain, there is a sharp break between the vision of the revelation and its transmission by "hearing," \*śruti\*. That the Veda nevertheless goes under the name of \*śruti\* suggests that the age of the ecstatic seers is over and the revelation complete.⁶ The only thing that remained to be done was the painfully precise transmission of the revealed knowledge by hearing and learning it by rote. From then on, the Veda became a fixed and bounded body of texts, like the scriptures of Buddhists or Jains. ### [c11.10](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.10) The point to be retained is the break between the revelatory vision of the seers and the \*śruti\* that purports to be the content of their vision. Though one readily understands that the seers' vision is the source of the ritual formulas (\*mantra\*), it is hard to accept the notion that the ecstatic visions should be equally concerned with ritualistic minutiae, for the corpus of texts which form the \*śruti\* is concerned with the systematic elaboration of the utterly complicated ritual. Or, as an authoritative text has it, "Veda means \*mantra\* and \*brāhmaṇa\*",⁷ that is, ritual formula and exposition of the liturgical rules. There is, then, a decisive gap between the revelatory vision and its ritualistic substance. It is in this gap—and not in the preceding age of the seers—that the axial turning point is situated. This turning point does not lead to the exploitation of the revelation but is aimed at overcoming it. It replaces vision and revelation with something entirely different, namely, the rational order of ritualism that by itself constitutes ultimate truth and leaves no room for anything so unsettling as revelatory vision. ### [c11.11](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.11) At first sight, this may suggest a retreat from the transcendent breakthrough and its creativity and a movement toward ritualistic routinization.⁸ It could even be easily construed as a backsliding into a world of myth and magic. Such an appreciation would indeed be in line with the usual evaluation of Vedic ritual thought, which is at best qualified, in Hermann Oldenberg's words, as "vorwissenschaftliche Wissenschaft."⁹ While this qualification acknowledges a rationalistic impulse, Vedic ritualism is generally considered the hallmark of the magic-bound Hindu world.¹⁰ It cannot be denied that the Veda and its brahmin carriers gave much ground for such views. But even when we concede to these views their part of truth, the question is whether it can be the whole truth. For it leaves us with the obstinate problem of an ancient ritualism that has been kept alive and in exceptional esteem till the present day but that is and has always been at odds with the Hindu world and its values. We shall therefore have to look into the ritualistic content of the śruti. ### [c11.12](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.12) The central concept of the śruti is sacrifice (\*yajña\*). It is the primordial act of creation and establishes the order of the universe. In the enigmatically involute words of the \*Ṛgveda\*, which defy interpretation, it is said that "the gods sacrificed the sacrifice with the sacrifice, these were the primordial ordinances."¹¹ In this way, the text tells us, the gods found their place in heaven and thereby set the rules for men's activity. Starting from this mythic statement, one is tempted to view sacrifice as the organizing principle of the Hindu world order.¹² But it is exactly here that the problem stands out clearest. ### [c11.13](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.13) Essential to sacrifice is the immolatory act of violence and destruction. Even if the element of death is minimized, it remains a violent attempt at gaining access to the other world. At this point, as already mentioned, sacrifice collided with the Hindu value of \*ahiṃsā\*. The euphemisms for expressing the act of immolation—such as \*saṃjñapana\*, "making (the victim) consent"—highlight the utter gravity of the sacrificial enterprise. Rather than establishing and guaranteeing order, sacrifice overthrows order by the violent irruption of the sacred. The place of sacrifice is a battleground where one must risk life and goods in the uncertain hope of winning access to the other world. Thus the gods fought their rivals, the asuras, on the place of sacrifice, and so must man. Kurukṣetra, the epic battlefield of the \*Mahābhārata\*, is the gods' place of sacrifice. The ritual brāhmaṇa texts abound in references to their violently agonistic procedures. But, significantly, these brief, lemma-like statements are not considered to have a founding authority. Not being by themselves authoritative rules for the execution of the ritual, they are qualified as \*arthavāda\*, nonauthoritative explanation.¹³ They are the scattered and fossilized remnants of a lost and discredited world. ### [c11.14](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.14) This world was the world of the heroic age that the Indian epic, like Hesiod, places in the breach that divides our present world age from its predecessor—a mythic reminiscence, as it were, of an authentic axial crisis. Its warriors were constrained again and again to risk their all in the agonizing sacrificial contest. On one hand, the invitation to sacrifice is a challenge that the warrior cannot afford to refuse on pain of losing his honor.¹⁴ On the other hand, not being invited is a grave insult that may compel one to force his way in and challenge the host of the sacrificial festival.¹⁵ Better still than in the flat and dry allusions of the brāhmaṇa tests, the tragic predicament of the warrior ethos comes out in the epic, for example, when Yuddhiṣṭhira, who wants to renounce the insensate violence, is reminded that he is bound to stake again “the material sacrifice” (\*dravyamayo yajñaḥ\*) he has won in renewed sacrificial battle. For this, he is told, is the ever-lasting way of existence, the great “ten-chariot road” (\*dāśarathaḥ panthā\*).¹⁶ ### [c11.15](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.15) Therefore the gods too are said to drive about on their chariots while their opponents, the asuras, stay at home. And it is through their wheeled drive that they obtain the revelatory vision of the sacrificial “work” (\*karman\*).¹⁷ The statement is, as usual, short and undramatic. The “vision” in this context is, of course, nothing more exciting than ritual procedure. But however devoid of drama, it is nonetheless highly suggestive of a previous and totally different state of affairs. The interesting point is, however, not the hint at the violent warrior ethos, but the fact that this was the condition for the revelatory vision. ### [c11.16](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.16) If we look for what may have been the original context and content of such visions, there is another instance, where, again in the flattest possible manner, the story of a band of warriors is told.¹⁸ They are attacked and plundered on their place of sacrifice—which is also their camp—apparently by a similar warrior band. Their leader is among the slain, but while the survivors sit in mourning around his remains, one of them has the clear and sudden vision of the slain leader walking along the place of sacrifice to the offering fire at the eastern end and then upward, entering heaven. Here, it would seem, we see the full scenario in abridged and demythologized form: the sacrificial encampment and battleground, risk, defeat, death, and finally the redeeming vision of the hoped for but till the last uncertain access to heaven. At the same time, this explains how the heroic age where these visions were at home came to its end. As Hesiod explains, the heroic race was destroyed by “evil war, some of the heroes before the city of Thebes fighting over the animals of Oedipus and others brought across the sea to Troy because of fair-haired Helen”.¹⁹ ### [c11.17](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.17) If nothing else, the self-defeating violence to which the warrior was in honor bound time and again to expose his life and goods—even if we discount the hypertrophical elaboration in the epic—could not but call forth a radical reaction. The result was the decisive turning point where the warrior’s sacrifice was replaced with the brahmin’s ritualism, which rules out conflict and marginalizes violence. In fact, we are told as much by a brāhmaṇa passage, in which Prajāpati, the Lord of Life, after an age-long sacrificial struggle defeats and subjects his rival, Death, by the abstract means of the new ritualism. Since then, the text triumphantly declares, there is no sacrificial struggle any more.²⁰ ### [c11.18](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.18) The striking feature of Vedic ritualism is its unmythical, rational, and individualistic character. The mythical presence of gods and ancestors has evaporated to mere names. Their deeds no longer form the authoritative foundation of the ritual that now finds its authority in itself, in the comprehensive system of rules ordering the limited set of standardized liturgical elements—acts, formulas, recitations, and chants. ### [c11.19](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.19) The character of this ritualism comes out with particular clarity in the way it transformed the visionary truth of the \*brahman\*, the mysterious inner “connection” that holds together the universe.²¹ By its nature, the cosmic truth could only be expressed in the enigmatic formulations that did not explain the \*brahman\* but contained it in the silent hollow of the unresolved riddle. The contest in which the parties fought each other with visionary enigmatic formulas formed an essential part of the sacrificial scenario. It was a momentous and hazardous struggle where the contestants risked their lives, and the winning contestant showed himself to hold the visionary truth of the cosmic enigma. But, as we saw, Prajāpati’s victory over Death put an end to all this. The contest for the \*brahman\* only survives in a few \*brahmodyas\*, ritualized exchanges of fixed riddle formulas learnt by heart.²² “L’énigme essentielle du Veda”²³ has been replaced by the rationalized \*brahman\* that consists in cut-and-dried identifications of disparate elements of the divine and human worlds with those of the ritual. Indeed, identification, based on qualitative and numerical equivalence (\*sampad\*, \*saṃkhyānam\*), is said to have given Prajāpati his decisive victory. It is the premier intellectual tool for organizing the disjointed universe in the perfect order of the ritual. Even though the sheer weight of intricate detail requires the services of technical experts, the priestly \*ṛtvijaḥ\*, the system of liturgical elements and identifications is clear in itself. It has no place for mystery or enigma and, above all, it can be systematically taught and learned. ### [c11.20](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.20) But the important achievement of the ritual system and indeed its purpose was that it took away ultimate legitimation from the violent and destructive contest for the goods of life and access to heaven. When the ritual does require the immolation of an animal victim, it is no longer decapitated at the sacrificial stake but bloodlessly suffocated in a separate shed outside the ritual area. Violence and death have been replaced with the ritual mistake to be corrected by ritual means.²⁴ The sacrificial battleground has been turned into a serene and perfectly ordered ritual emplacement. There, freed from the ties and contingencies of the world, the yajamāna strikes out in his own universe through the artifice of the ritual. But this artificial universe, for all its systematic control of even the smallest detail, is brittle and ephemeral. The price it must pay for the perfection of its order is divorce from the world. It can only be realized outside society and for the limited duration of the ritual. At the end the ritual emplacement is abandoned,²⁵ and the yajamāna goes home again to his place in society, "as the one he was before." ### [c11.21](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.21) There is, then, a complete break between the social world and the world of the Vedic śruti. The bridge between this and yonder world that sacrifice was meant to be has been broken down. The ritual that took its place could only be transcendence itself—or nothing at all. Therefore it cannot be obligatory. It is left to the individual's choice whether he subjects himself to the ritual's transcendent law or not. If he does, it has no direct, visible bearing on his mundane life. Insofar as it has an impact, it is through the intermediary of an impersonal transcendent mechanism, namely the ritual's invisible or previously nonexistent faculty (\*adṛṣṭa\*, \*apūrva\*) that in an unknown way will bring about the intended result (say, wealth or progeny). This is not, however, a mystical or magical faculty but is simply inexplicable as the ritual itself, being transcendent, is inexplicable. ### [c11.22](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.22) The rise of Vedic ritualism broke the coherence of the world and produced an irreparable rift which closely resembles Max Weber's postulate of the \*Entzauberung\*, or disenchantment of the world.²⁶ The tragic world of the warrior's sacrifice was certainly no Arcadia, but at least god and man were at one in the internecine strife for the goods of life. Even though the pitch of violence was raised to the breaking point, it was still one world held together by the nexus of sacrifice. Life and death were not irreconcilable but complementary, success and defeat not decisive but reversible, good and evil not absolute but ambivalent. Nothing is definitive and everything is liable to recall at the next round of sacrifice. In the epic, Bali, the defeated king of the asuras, can still tell the victorious god Indra that at the next turn there will again be the renewal of the battle between gods and asuras, "when the sun will be standing still in the middle." Indra, however, retorts that such a day will never arrive since the sun's course has been permanently fixed, the world definitively ordered.²⁷ The ever-renewed sacrificial hour of truth has lost its power to give meaning and coherence to the world. Instead, the world has been definitively split between the transcendent order of ritual and the unreformed sphere of social life. ### [c11.23](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.23) However, this did not lead to the disenchantment of the world postulated by Weber. The social world was in no way divested of its mythical and magical meaning and values. It did not become a world where everything just "is" or "happens" but has no "meaning" anymore.²⁸ Such a world, denuded of meaning and therefore desperately looking to the transcendent sphere for a new and, this time, rational order and meaning, did not arise. What happened was that ultimate value and legitimation, as it was realized and activated in the warrior's sacrifice, was taken out of the mundane sphere. Henceforth, ultimate legitimation could only come from the transcendent ritual that took the place of sacrifice. For that reason, the whole of the dharma had to rest on or even had to be contained in the śruti—a necessary fiction, but a fiction all the same—for the śruti is patently devoid of use or meaning for the world's affairs and it is so as a matter of principle. Closed upon itself, it has no meaning other than the self-contained rationality of its system. Even if it may be supposed to offer an exhaustive pattern for life regulated by the law of ritual, it is for the life of the single yajamāna who chooses to spend his life in ritual and can afford to do so. ### [c11.24](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.24) True, we do find statements in the ritual texts that claim a total cosmic effect for the śruti, for instance, that the sun will not rise without the daily performance of the \*agnihotra\*, the milk offering in the fire.²⁹ This is, of course, in line with the ritualistic technique of identification, which equalizes the elements of the macro- and microcosmos with those of the ritual. The ritual can in this way be viewed as the central mechanism of an ideally ordered universe. Such statements are, however, obviously arthavāda and therefore lack ultimate authority, even though it would be wrong to ascribe them simply to priestly self-importance. They follow logically from the system of identification. The point, however, is that if the ritual is an essential condition for the maintenance of the universe, it is contradictory that its faithful performance is left to the decision of the single individual. But, as we already saw, the cosmic import is just arthavāda in praise of the agnihotra. That is, in the final analysis, Vedic ritualism rejects its rich potential for magical meaning. ### [c11.25](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.25) It was not the world that was "disenchanted" but the ritual, when it was stripped of the numinous meaning of sacrifice. Though the word "sacrifice" (\*yajña\*) suggests continuity, it is significant that the technical term for the central act of offering is \*tyāga\*, "abandoning" or "renouncing," which implies a free, nonobligatory and nonbinding gift without social tension or strife.³⁰ "This to the god N.N., not to me," as the oblation formula has it. Indeed, in the theory of the four world ages, sacrifice is too much for our fallen and spineless times. Its place has been taken by the gift, \*dāna\*.³¹ ### [c11.26](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.26) The result is two separate and fundamentally incompatible worlds: on the one hand, the break-away transcendence of rationally systematized but meaningless ritualism; on the other hand, an unreformed social world of conflict and ambivalence. Here, in the social world, all things are interconnected. It is a world that does not lack in numinous and magical meaning, but it knows itself to be cut off from ultimate value and legitimation and its arrangements to be contingent and reversible. ### [c11.27](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.27) These two worlds have to exist together and must work out their mutual accommodation, even though their essential incompatibility makes all accommodation precarious. There is, of course, the temptation to exploit the magic potential of Vedic ritualism for worldly uses. Its brahmin experts could easily turn into magicians and demonstrably often did so. But we have seen already that this possibility is in the last resort rejected and the brahmin is forbidden to put his Vedic expertise at the service of worldly interests. The ideal brahmin, like the Veda, stands apart from the world and cultivates the Veda by himself. The world, on the other hand, could not remain unaffected. The brahmin's standing apart illustrates how the world was impaired by the withdrawal of ultimate value and legitimation. The king and the web of power relations he represents especially stand in need of the brahmin's legitimizing services. But it is exactly the king who is singled out as the one whom the brahmin should utterly shun.³² The situation is the more contradictory for the fact that subsistence and survival may force the brahmin to turn to the king for support. ### [c11.28](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.28) ³² The situation is the more contradictory for the fact that subsistence and survival may force the brahmin to turn to the king for support. ### [c11.29](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.29) The point is that Vedic ritualism, by outlawing conflict and violence, not only makes kingship questionable but also aims at dissolving the ties of exchange and interdependence that constitute the social arena. To that end, it set the yajamana apart and isolated him on his ritual emplacement. Therefore too, it not only isolated the brahmin, but also required the whole of society to observe absolute dividing lines, namely, those between the \*vaṛṇas\*. The fact that the numberless castes (\*jāti\*) are viewed as the outcome of inter-\*varṇa\* marriages breaching the dividing lines vitally impaired the caste order. Caste society—like any other society—cannot do without exchange and interdependence, but at the same time, it is required to honor the principle of \*varṇa\*-like separation. In short, the strictly ultramundane divisiveness and individualism of the \*śruti\* threatens the world's vital relationships with disintegration. Hence the tension and controversy surrounding the Veda. They are the more dynamic for being irresolvable. ### [c11.30](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.30) The unresolved tension not only affected the social world. Vedic ritualism was also pried open to give way to other but never definitive solutions. It could either follow out the line of otherworldly individualism or it could turn back to the world in an attempt to encompass it. Indeed, both roads were followed. ### [c11.31](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.31) The first path led to the evaporated ritualism of the “offering in the internal fires of the breaths” (\*prāṇāgnihotra\*), that is, en clair: eating, ritualized by means of a few simple mantras and mouth rinsing.³³ However pale this may seem to be, it is more than just a bow in the direction of a hollow and outlived tradition. It is a ritual purified of the last vestiges of violence and death and solely geared to the maintenance of life. Above all, it marks the individualism of the eater. Alone and withdrawn into himself, he follows the injunction of “sacrifice” in sovereign independence from the world. And this brings us straightaway to the brahminic renouncer, who is no different from the ideal brahmin. Both stand apart and have no truck with the world. That the individualism implied in this type of ritualism is a palpable fiction makes the tension all the more poignant. ### [c11.32](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.32) Second, the attempt to encompass the world is well illustrated by the reinstitution in the prestigious agnicayana ritual of a wheeled vehicle for carrying the fire that eventually will be installed on the elaborately constructed fire altar. This rite of carrying the fire clearly harks back to the raiding and transhuming treks of warrior bands carrying their fire and belongings with them—the backdrop of heroic sacrifice, so frequently referred to in arthavāda passages but eliminated from the ritual and replaced with purely liturgical elements. In this case too, the setting out on the trek and the unyoking at the resting places were replaced by taking up the fire in its pot, making three steps, and putting it down again as well as by a particular recitation, the \*vātsapra\* hymn. There was, then, no need anymore even for mimicking the trek. Generally the texts are content to leave it at that. However, this is exactly what a comparatively late and highly systematized text, the \*Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa\*, objects to. After discussing the case, our text enjoins the performance of both the abstract ritual and the actual driving about of the fire on a cart. The reason given for this doubling of the procedure is significant. The abstract symbolization is said to be the divine form, the actual driving, the human form. By performing both, one makes the ritual “whole and entire” and encompasses both the transcendent and the human world.³⁴ The logic is compelling and deeply sincere, but, again, it is no more than arthavāda. The result is an amplification of the ritual as such. But the ritualistic injunction of an aimless “driving about” can only mimic an archaic reality, not give it new life and meaning. The intended encompassment cannot be validly achieved. ### [c11.33](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.33) So either way, we end in a stalemate. The chasm between transcendent ritualism and mundane reality remains unbridgeable. The world, once unified in the agonal violence of sacrifice, has been irreversibly broken. Society is left unhinged. Its arrangements are permanently undermined by the withdrawal of ultimate legitimation, which in the final analysis requires no less than the dissolution of society. By the same token, the source of ultimate legitimation itself cannot escape doubt and controversy. ### [c11.34](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.34) If the Vedic scriptures reflect the axial breakthrough, the question of the historical conditions which led to it imposes itself. The question is the more pressing for the unexplained parrellelism and simultaneity of the phenomenon in different areas of the ancient world. The answer must be disappointing at best. As Jaspers has already warned us, it is a historical mystery that the progress of research can only amplify but not solve.³⁵ If, however, we do not immediately expect to find valid causes but only try to fill in some of the historical backdrop, we can take advantage of frequent and telling indications scattered throughout the Vedic ritual texts. These indications seem to center on the transhuming and cattle-raiding warriors and the violence of their sacrificial encounters as they desperately strove for a way out of \*aṃhas\*, the narrows of want and insecurity. It seems safe to surmise—as indeed we have—that the self-defeating violence of giving and receiving death must have brought on a crisis. But we can only see this in the effect it had of eliminating conflict, violence, and destruction from the sacrificial ritual. The actual historical circumstances of an axial crisis escape us. ### [c11.35](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.35) The general picture of ancient Indo-Aryan society suggested by our texts is that of a world constantly on the move in a relentless push toward the east. This eastward move is a stereotype of the ritual texts, as in the legend of the ritual fire’s triumphant progress from the Sarasvatī River in the west to the River Sadānīra in the east finally to be settled even beyond that border.³⁶ It is symbolically expressed in the extension of the ritual emplacement to the east and the bringing over of the fire to its new hearth at the eastern end of the extended emplacement. This is even clearer in the processional rituals (\*yātsattra\*), in which the whole emplacement is each day moved further east. A more balanced and realistic view of the historical process, however, seems to be contained in a passage relating the activities of the ancient Kuru-Pañcālas over the year. In the cool season, they set out toward the east, settled there temporarily at different places, forcibly took hold of the winter crop, fed their men and animals, and finally, at the end of the hot season, returned to the west again where they stayed during the rainy season and worked their own fields.³⁷ ### [c11.36](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.36) The pattern, then, seems to have been a yearly circuit of transhumance and raiding, starting from permanent agricultural settlements and returning there again for the agricultural operations of the monsoon crop. It seems plausible that the eastward movements of the Vedic Aryans should be viewed in these terms, as a gradual extension of these centers and their circuits into the eastern "frontier areas." That this implied a growing density of agricultural settlements—as is also suggested by the Kuru-Pañcālas' seasonal movement to settled areas—seems equally plausible. This may be indicated also by the shift in meaning of the world \*grāma\* from "trekking warrior band" to settled "village" in the later ritual texts. In these texts, fairly densely settled tracts with contiguous villages are, if not the standard, at least the ideal of peaceful conditions.³⁸ But this is as far as the Vedic ritual texts will allow us to go. We may surmise that sedentarization and expansion of settled agriculture played a role in the rise of Vedic ritualism, but our texts have nothing to say about this, let alone about the urban world of trade, commerce, and courts found in early Buddhist texts. Instead, the ritual texts keep the imagery of the trekking warrior who is forever yoking his horses to set out again to lord it over the \*kṣemya\*, the stay-at-home sedentary people.³⁹ In this archaic world, the brahmin is not yet the priestly expert, but a warrior who is proclaimed a \*brāhmaṇa\* at his consecration (\*dīkṣā\*) and who sets out on a chariot, even though the ritual no longer has use for chariots or wide-ranging movements. ### [c11.37](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.37) Nevertheless, mention of the chariot is interesting. In the first place, it recalls the emergence of the mobile \*Streitwagenvölker\* and their breaking into the old world at the end of the second millennium B.C. Their climactic appearance is the only possible explanation—which Jaspers, following Alfred Weber, cites but finally rejects—for the otherwise inexplicable simultaneity of the Axial Age in areas as far apart as China and the Eastern Mediterranean. Indeed, our text show an enduring fascination with the war and racing chariot to the point where the whole of the ritual is identified with it.⁴⁰ But—and this is the second point—the chariot itself is clearly a thing of the past. Its use and technique are no longer clearly understood by the ritualists. The ritual, which is now stationary and confined to the narrow limits of its emplacement, has symbolized the chariot away. Having lost its reality, the chariot has gained a grandiose afterlife in ritualistic imagination. ### [c11.38](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.38) The ritual texts, then, are not concerned with the real world which surrounds them. The historical realities they refer to are those of a hallowed heroic past that the ritual meant to overcome and to replace with its own perfectly ordered world. Our texts therefore will not tell us about the historical conditions of the Axial Age. But they do tell us what, in their perspective, triggered the axial movement, namely the self-destructive violence of the warrior's sacrifice, whose emblem was the chariot. Though it lived on in the imagination of the epic, agonistic sacrifice was deprived of its value and legitimacy by the ritualists' achievement. This enables us to understand why the ritual texts faithfully preserved the fossilized but telling remnants of the heroic world they rejected, while neglecting their own actual surroundings. The conspicuous neglect of the latter therefore need not by itself prove an early date for our texts. The reason for their archaic nature is that the \*śrauta\* ritual was created out of the dismembered ruins of the warrior's sacrifice and therefore remained tied to its disembodied memory. ### [c11.39](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.39) There is an interesting parallel as well as a contrast with the axial break-through in ancient Iran. Working under the same or at least under comparable conditions and with essentially the same dismembered material, the outcome was an entirely different one. Both civilizations rejected the cyclical violence and destructiveness of the warrior's circuit between settlement and trekking camp. But while Vedic ritualism started from the menacing mobility of the trekking warrior and chariot fighter, which it transformed into the stasis of the single \*yajamāna\*'s ritual, the Zarathustrian reform took its stand at the other end of the circuit, in the settled community on which it built its ideal ethical order.⁴¹ ### [c11.40](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.40) Vedic ritualism exalts the gods who "drove about on wheels" while their rivals, the asuras, stayed at home in their lordly halls and lost out. With Zarathustrianism, however, it is the supreme asura who holds ultimate truth against the demoniacally destructive devas. Their cyclic conflict is not eliminated but elevated to the height of a battle betwen Good and Evil. Zarathustra's ethical dualism aimed at reforming the world; Vedic ritualism, in contrast, taking its cue from the ancient heroes, turned away from the world and in the last resort aimed at its dissolution. Both, however, irreversibly broke open the old world of violence and sacrifice. ### 9 ### [c11.s1.1](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.s1.1) In the sacrificial arena, man had again and again to risk all in the contest for the ultimate truth that held the world together—a truth that could only be expressed in the paradoxical language of the seer's \*brahman\*. With the removal of the sacrificial nexus of meaning, the paradoxical tension of the personal brahma vision collapsed into the flatly impersonal \*brāhmaṇa\*, or identification of disconnected elements. Connective myth gave way to divisive doctrine. The demise of the central nexus left a great rift but for the same reason invited ever new attempts at bridging the unbridgeable. ### [c11.s1.2](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11.s1.2) In Jaspers words: "Auch die Achsenzeit ist gescheitert. Es ging weiter"—relentlessly and indefinitely.⁴² ## Linked texts (3) - [Mahābhārata](https://indike.org/pramana/in.lit.mahabharata.vyasa) — Vyāsa, Sanskrit - [Ṛgvedasaṃhitā](https://indike.org/pramana/in.veda.samhita.rg) — Sanskrit - [Śatapathabrāhmaṇa](https://indike.org/pramana/in.veda.brahmana.satapatha) — Yājñavalkya & Śāṇḍilya (Vedic teacher), Sanskrit --- Source: [https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.heesterman-1985.c11) · Pramāṇa