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The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c14.s2: 8

The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c14.s2

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English

8

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It may be objected that the Vedic śrauta ritual provides sacrificial ceremonies that are ostensibly an effective link between the king's order and the order of the brahmin. In the first place, there is the rājasūya, consisting of a series of sacrificial rituals during which the king is anointed or, rather, profusely showered with the consecratory waters (*abhiṣeka*). There are, moreover, other royal rituals as well, including the prestigious horse sacrifice, the aśvamedha. However, these royal rituals are just modifications of the extrasocial, individualized Soma sacrifice and equally require that their single sacrificer, even though a king, stand outside the social world. The Soma ritual has no place for the community. The ratnins have no part in it, but are accommodated in a separate series of non-Soma offerings, each of which has again the form of an individualized, single-sacrificer ritual. There is no common ground between the ritual universe and the social world.

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Still one might be tempted to view the episode where the royal sacrificer is acclaimed *brahmán* as the decisive junction of the temporal and the transcendent. But in the first place, not only the king but also the commoner is proclaimed a *brāhmaṇa*, a representative of the *bráhman*, at his consecration for the Soma sacrifice (*dīkṣā*). The king's brahman proclamation fails to distinguish him from his subject, and this brings us back again to the diffusion of power and authority. More serious, indeed decisive, is another point. Though the proclamation originally conferred connective sacrality in this and the other world on the king, it can now, in the reformed, “postaxial” ritual, only have meaning within the strictly limited time and place of the ritual. After its conclusion, about to leave the ritual enclosure, the sacrificer, whether king or commoner, returns to his normal, unchanged self in society: “Here I am just the one I am,” as he has to declare in his concluding mantra.⁴² Nothing has changed.

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Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that the dharma authors do not seem to attach practical value to the rājasūya. Though they require a brahmanic sacrament (*brāhmaḥ saṃskāraḥ*), there is no agreement as to what this ceremony should be.⁴³ It may even be no more than the *upanayana*, which opens the period of pupilage with the teacher and so gives the king access to the Veda but which is also required for all “twice-born” commoners. Again it does not distinguish the king from, say, the vaiśya. In fact, the ritual texts themselves appear to concede the point that the rājasūya does not make the king. “A king who desires to win heaven should perform the rājasūya”,⁴⁴ that is, he is already a king. His desire for heaven is a strictly individual matter that has no bearing on his royal function.

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Whatever the śrauta ritual may achieve for the strictly personal gratification of the king, it can not confer its authority on him. Nor can there be a priesthood to bridge the gap. The king, like any other sacrificer, can of course engage brahmin experts to officiate in his sacrifices, but the king's link with this priesthood does not extend beyond the sphere of the ritual's strictly limited time and place. More important, however, is the individualization of sacrifice, which makes the brahmin's participation in a patron's, and especially in the king's, sacrifice intensely questionable. Even if the close relationship between patron and officiant lasts only for the duration of the ritual—but the rājasūya, for one, spans a couple of years—the brahmin has to accept the food and gifts of his patron during that period. The sharp dividing line between the ritual universe and the social world tends to be blurred, if not obliterated, and the brahmin’s authority to be fatally impaired by involvement in worldly relationships. In this respect, we can readily understand that the sacrificial gifts to the officiants are viewed as a “salary” (*vetana*) for a well-defined, specific service. Once the salary is paid, the relationship is ended and, in theory at least, there are no further personal bonds of obligation and reciprocity.⁴⁵ Nonetheless, the distinction may easily turn out to be too sophisticated, and the texts have harsh things to say about the brahmin who serves the king.⁴⁶ Such service cannot, of course, be ruled out, be it only for the fact that the brahmin cannot live on his spiritual authority alone. But insofar as he is allowed to serve the kṣatriya, he loses his brahmanic value and becomes the kṣatriya’s equal (*kṣatrasama*), even if he serves in the specifically brahmin capacity of an *ṛtvij*, an officiant, in the śrauta ritual. The position of the king’s purohita, in what is an enduring and close relationship, can therefore only be an utterly ambiguous one. He precedes the king but is at the same time held in contempt. No wonder the king’s confidant and jester in the Sanskrit theater, the *vidūṣaka*, is typically a brahmin.

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Ironically, the king who has successfully enticed the brahmin to serve him only obtains an empty husk, for the brahmin then loses his special quality that was the reason to engage him and becomes equal to a kṣatriya. The truth is that the ideal brahmin should cultivate the Veda and its ritual by himself, in himself, and for himself. The ideal brahmin, like the ideal sacrificer, is a renouncer. Only in this way can the hard-won view of the transcendent that was gained out of the violence of the ancient sacrificial battle be saved from corruption by the world’s powers and conflicts. The sacrificial battle for the transcendent is over, leaving worldly power without authority, transcendent authority without power, and ruling out priesthood as a mediator.

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It was not the brahmin who by some obscure stratagem wrested sacrality and priesthood from the king. It was the other way round. Not the king, but the brahmin was emptied of magic and sacrality. The brahmin was “desacralized,” and the burden of connective sacrality came to rest all the more heavily on the king. This sacrality weighs him down and enmeshes him in the constricting web of conflictive relationships. It cannot raise him to a level of authority transcending society. Even when the Hindu king is viewed as a god, it should be remembered that the gods do not transcend the world of *saṃsāra*. They are like humans, only more so. The king’s sacrality does confer on him a measure of authority to the extent that he fulfills the connective function amid the relationships that constitute society. But for the same reason, his authority lacks ultimate validity. It is not derived from a transcendent source but is rooted in worldly relationships. The king's sacrality is the exact opposite of transcendence. Access to the transcendent and the ultimate authority it bestows are the exclusive prerogative of the brahmin, but only so long as he keeps free from worldly involvement.

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The king's connective sacrality is incompatible with the brahmin's separative authority. For the king and the brahmin to meet each other, it would be necessary that the brahmin, instead of stepping down from his ultramundane stand, steps up to a level from which he can enter the king's world of pervasive conflict without being affected by it. That is, the brahmin must be absolutely disinterested. This is indeed the image of the ideal brahmin. But it is hard to see how such a paradoxical stance could be realized and maintained in actual practice. It would, in fact, require a similarly detached king, who would rise above the restrictive bonds of personal relationships. This quality is recommended by the *Arthaśāstra* where it stresses the need for "victory over the senses" (*indriyajaya*)—a victory won, not by means of magic, but through science and discipline (*vidyā*, *vinaya*).⁴⁷ Kauṭilya's ideal is a rationalistic, impersonal, and detached kingship. But kingship based on the renunciatory virtue of indriyajaya would not need the brahmin's authority anymore. Although Kauṭilya reiterates the time-honored idea of the kṣatra fostered by the brahman,⁴⁸ he does not seem to have much use for the brahmin and his authority. For him the purohita is a learned magician, averting calamities and bringing about happy turns of events, but he is not a bearer of authority. More serious, however, is the fact that the king, by virtue of his renunciatory stance, would cut himself off from his field of activity in the middle of personal relationships and conflicting interests. It is significant that the discussion of the king's lofty detachment is concluded by stating the king's dependence on his associates (*sahāya*). "One wheel alone does not turn."⁴⁹ Here we are back again where we started. Both the power and authority of the king remain entangled in the web of relationships with his associates, the cosharers in the realm.

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Only under the absolute, universal rule of the dharma can temporal power and spiritual authority be fused. The dharma would then realize the revealed order of the Vedic śruti. In other words, the world would have to be transformed into an atomized universe made up of individual sacrificers, each singly submitting to the exhaustive and inflexible order of the śrauta ritual. But as we saw, such a seamlessly ordered universe can only be realized temporarily within the confines of the ritual enclosure. The universal rule of ritual over the world would mean the dissolution of society.

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It is, however, possible to think of an approximate analogue. One example would be the Buddhist *sangha*, the community of monks individually following the strict ritualistic rule of monastic discipline. It only knows the impersonal authority of the Buddhist dharma. But for that reason, it can only endure in juxtaposition to the temporal power of the king, who must resolve the internal conflicts that the sangha itself has no power to decide, even though outside intervention compromises its integrity.⁵⁰

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The universal rule of dharma, whether Hindu or Buddhist, would withdraw from society, not only all authority, but all power as well, so as to vest them in each individual. This was the situation of mankind’s mythic golden age, the *kṛtayuga*. But as the *Mahābhārata* tells us, it was exactly this situation which gave rise to confusion and conflict, for men only had the unmediated dharma, vested in each single individual, to maintain order and to protect each other.⁵¹ Universal order succumbs to its inner contradiction. Depending entirely on the individual, it has no room for conflict, for there is no power and authority left for a mediating agency. Monolithic universality breaks down on its unacknowledged explosiveness.

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The problem may not be much different from that of the modern polity of the nation-state. In order to save society from dissolving, the nation-state pretends to fuse the individual citizens, each singly subject to the rule of law, into a single monolithic unity. It represents a maximal concentration of both power and authority. Hence its inviolability. But it must then direct its inner conflict outward to other nation-states. The more strongly fusion and unity are stressed, the more explosive is the conflict. We know the catastrophic consequences.

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The seemingly coherent and harmonious triad of power, priesthood, and authority owed its effectiveness to the sacrificial nexus of the contest. In other words, it required and gave sacral sanction to the unsettling violence of conflict. The “axial breakthrough,” on the other hand, dissolved the agonistic nexus. It devalorized sacrality and denied conflict its ultimate legitimacy. Instead it posited the ideal of an absolute transcendent order that is, as a matter of principle, incapable of worldly realization. The triad collapsed under the pressure of the ideal into an irreversible dichotomy of worldly power and transcendent authority that cancelled the mediating capacity of priest or magician. The ensuing problem of power and authority is as insoluble as it is universal. Indian tradition, instead of trying to solve the problem, acknowledges its insolubility. Notwithstanding the deficiencies of the compromises it requires in day-to-day practice, recognition of the dichotomy may still be the most efficacious way to deal with the problem. At the very least, it leaves the future open.

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