The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c12.s5.3

c12.s5.3

The wilderness was not only the extrasocial sphere of the warrior and his violent way of life. It was equally the sphere of esoteric knowledge, which is the substance of ultimate authority. To this knowledge the term *brahman* refers. The two—violent contest and esoteric knowledge—are intimately connected. The brahman seems, in fact, to have been originally the winning enigmatic “truth formulation” in a verbal contest, the *brahmodya*.¹⁰⁰ Though seemingly a peaceful pastime, the violence involved in it should not be underrated, for, as the oldest Upaniṣads tell us, the unsuccessful contestant might have to pay for his imprudence with his life. After all, what was at stake was no less than the mastery of the cosmic enigma. To qualify for such contests, one had to go out into the wilderness and commend oneself as a pupil to a teacher in order to obtain the esoteric knowledge from him. Thus we are told of one Hṛtsvāśaya Āllakeya, known equally as a king, who went out as a dīkṣita and while wandering abroad found a teacher who was willing to impart to him the “knowledge of the year.” This knowledge, it is said, made it possible for Hṛtsvāśaya to reach “the end of the year” safely or, in other words, to pass unharmed through the full cycle—no small prize indeed, when we consider the danger involved.¹⁰¹ This procedure—going abroad, commending oneself as a pupil, and obtaining the esoteric knowledge—is explicitly given as a general one for a *rājanyabandhu*, that is, a nobelman.