The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c9.4

c9.4

Anyone interested in the actual content of ancient India's materialist doctrines should at this point stop reading. The purpose of the present paper is a short excursion in the meaning and history of the art of controversy, which through the vāda rules ultimately led to the development of Nyāya.¹ I shall therefore unrepentingly regress from the clarity of philosophy to the murky realm of mythology and ritual, from the specificity of doctrine to the diffuseness of agonistic dualism—for, if I am not mistaken, we may hope to find there some indications, not only regarding the nāstika's ancestry, but perhaps also regarding the place of the doctrinal nāstika in Indian tradition, as distinct from the simple controversialist. The way will lead us back to the Vedic ritual, beyond its classical form to the stage where the contest, verbal or otherwise, was still in the full sense a matter of life and death, not a means to assert and prove a specific doctrine, but the way to win the goods of life from the fangs of death.²