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The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c24: Chapter 16. The Gods and their Worshippers

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c24

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Chapter 16. The Gods and their Worshippers

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As men fashion their concepts of their gods in accordance with their own attitude towards life, it is natural to find in the Rigveda the expression of the real religious spirit of the day. It must, however, be borne in mind in any estimate of that spirit that the sources are all priestly, and that, therefore, they express the views not so much of the ordinary man even of the higher ranks, and social distinctions certainly existed then, but of the priest himself, and of a priesthood which had already advanced a long way in the direction of the elaboration and definition of religion. This fact, however, while it explains much that is to be found in the thought of the Rigveda, and warns us against imputing that thought to a simple people living in immediate contact with nature and the birth of the gods, does not alter the impression which is unquestionably made by the Rigveda as a whole, and which is of a definite and intelligible character.

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The Indians of the Rigveda, from even the comparatively scanty traces of their ordinary activities to be gathered from that collection, were essentially an active, energetic, warrior people, engaged indeed in struggles with the aborigines, and even among themselves, but in the main prosperous, and contented with their life. The tone of the great gods reflects, therefore, the character of the people, and in no case better than in that of Indra. Indra is the victorious warrior: he is also the jovial and human god: he is a great drinker, a mighty eater, and the poets do not scorn to tell how he drank over much and required skilled tendance as the result. He is hot-tempered, as befits a god who wars ever with demons: there are signs of a quarrel with the gods, of interference with Sūrya, of an onslaught even on Uṣas, and, worst of all, of killing his father for the sake of the Soma. But the presence of such traits is only incidental and occasional: they cannot have formed any serious element in his character, save in so far as they gave rise to the feeling which is frankly expressed in one hymn,¹ that Indra is changeable, that he is inconstant in his friendships, that he makes the first last at pleasure, and that he is angry with the man who has wealth. We must be careful not to overestimate the force of such remarks: the wealthy against whom the god is wroth are the Paṇis, who withhold treasures from men and gods alike: we have nothing of Herodotos's doctrine of the jealousy of heaven. But it must be owned that Indra by these traits seems to have created misbelief, for we find here and there firm assertions in his divinity, which is proved when he manifests his great deeds and which refutes the sayings of men who deny Indra's existence. Of no other god have we any such doubt expressed in the Rigveda.¹ In the main, however, Indra is a kind and generous friend to his votaries, and the Rigveda does not seem to know the legend which makes him seduce Ahalyā by assuming as a disguise the form of her husband, a performance more in accord with the ways of demons than of a great god.

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¹ RV. vi. 47. 15–17.

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¹ RV. ii. 12. 5.; viii. 103; Deussen, *Gesch. der Phil.* I. i. 96 ff.

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The position of the other gods is essentially similar to that of Indra; on the one hand, most of them are not so near to men in feeling and have less human life in their natures, but at the same time they are free from the less creditable aspects which belong to Indra. Agni is in special closeness to the worshipper, as he is the guest who dwells in the house, and, therefore, a very present friend, but his close relation to the element renders his personality less clear than that of Indra, and so places a difficulty in the way of the generation of deeper human relations. His parentage of men is hardly marked: he is rather the prototype, as Aṅgiras, of the priest, and the great god of the priests. The only exception to the general rule is Rudra, and in a minor degree the Maruts, his companions.² Rudra is emphatically a terrible god: the ritual exhibits this characteristic in the constant assimilation of his character to that of the dead and the demons, and in the prayers this fact is clearly shown by the efforts ever made to induce him to spare the worshipper, his wife, his children, his horses, his cattle, to keep his weapons afar from him, and to be merciful. The wrath of the god is evidently easily awakened whether by prayer wrongly offered or obtruded upon him when busy otherwise,³ or merely spontaneously and without good cause: the complaint of Indra's inconstancy is quite different from the uneasy feeling of terror inspired in his votaries by Rudra: they had no doubt at all of his reality or his deadly powers. Of the other gods a hint or two of hostility is mentioned, but merely in the vaguest way, the gods themselves are once or twice—perhaps by assimilation to the Asuras—deemed hostile,⁴ but in an overwhelming number of cases we hear of the gods as good and true and generous to their worshippers.

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² Bergaigne, *Rel. Véd.* iii. 154.

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³ RV. ii. 33. 4.

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⁴ The Avestan Daēvas are of course demons. Cf. AV. iii. 15. 5; TS. iii. 5. 4. 1.

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That the gods are kind to their worshippers is supplemented by the assertion that they do not deceive and are true, doubtless in the main an assertion that the gods send the blessings which they are asked to give, and for which offerings are bestowed on them. But it is an essential distinction between the religion of the Veda and many other religions, not merely Semitic, that there is no great stress laid on the moral quality of the gods, and that the sense of sin is only very feebly represented in the hymns: the moral aspect of the Rigveda is practically confined to the case of the gods Varuṇa, the Ādityas, and Aditi herself, and it is doubtless from these gods that here and there other gods assume the aspect of punishers and remitters of sin. Moreover, despite the stress which is laid on the position of these gods, the Rigveda itself, and in far greater degree the Atharvaveda, present us with a much simpler conception of sin, which assimilates it to a disease. Sin is something which sticks to a man, which confers a taint upon him as a disease does, and it is to be fought against in the same way as a disease: it may be banished by spells, water may wash it out, fire may purify it; it has precisely the same remedies as a disease, and is as external as a disease itself. The sinner has no consciousness of any more sin than would be produced by a disease. The hieratic poetry of the Rigveda cannot be said to take normally this view of the case, but it is obviously in itself the more popular view, and the Atharvaveda here certainly reflects the feelings of those classes to whom the high gods, the doctrine of consciousness of sin, and the forgiveness of sin were far away.

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The physical nature of sin accounts for the fact that it can be conferred by others without any act of human volition on the part of him whom it attacks; the bird of Nirṛti bearing the infection can pass it upon men:¹ when the sin of the slaying of a Brahman falls on Indra he successively manages to pass it off on a series of other kinds of beings. The gods wipe sin off on Trita and he on men.² The victim at the sacrifice by its lowing or tearing the ground with its feet creates a sin which passes on to those around.³ The wailing of the women at the house of the dead produces by itself a sin.⁴ Sin is brought upon men by others, and even by the gods:⁵ it is inherited from the father or other relative and made by one self.⁶ But this process of transfer has an obvious advantage; even as man may be affected by sin without action of his own, so he can transfer sin or even a good deed⁷ to others, and so get rid not merely of sins which have been passed on to him, but also of sins which he himself has committed. The absence of the element of consciousness explains also why it is possible for sins to be committed even in sleep.⁸ There is no essential distinction when the sin is spoken of as a fetter: the fetters of death, the fetters of sickness, or the fetters of Nirṛti seem to convey no more meaning than the natural comparison of the constraint, which is put on man by sin in its physical aspect, with the fetters imposed by man for a civil crime, although the use of such metaphors must have aided the growth of the idea that the fetters are imposed by a god, as when the gods are besought not to catch men as in a net.⁹

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¹ AV. vii. 64.

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² TS. ii. 5. 1. 2.

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³ TS. iii. 1. 4. 3.

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⁴ AV. xiv. 2. 59, 60.

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⁵ RV. ii. 28. 9; vi. 51. 7; vii. 52. 2; VS. iii. 48; viii. 13; ÇB. iv. 4. 5. 22; PB. i. 6. 10.

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⁶ RV. vii. 86. 5; AV. v. 30. 4; vi. 116. 3; x. 3. 8.

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⁷ RV. vii. 35. 4.

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⁸ RV. x. 164. 3; VS. viii. 13; xx. 16.

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⁹ RV. ii. 29. 5; cf. ii. 27. 16; AV. iv. 16. 6; viii. 8. 16.

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There is clear proof that the feeling of sin in many cases did not exist: the poets freely confess to lies, to failure to keep promises, to treachery, to other forms of sin, and by magic means or by prayers to the gods, mingled with magic, seek to divest themselves of the sin, just as they seek in the same way to rid themselves of a disease:¹⁰ the sense of guilt is still external, and suggests that we must connect it in thought with such things as the blood of the clansman in murder: it is in such instances that we may see the growth of the conception of the substance which as sin clings to a man, an idea which must have been aided by the conception that a disease is some such substance. The intervention of a god like Agni in such a case is merely to be compared with his intervention in the case of a disease: a deadly substance affects the man, and must be removed from him: it is not a case of searching of heart and forgiveness accorded to the contrite soul by heaven.

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¹⁰ RV. i. 23. 22; x. 164. 3; AV. vi. 119; Oldenberg, *Rel. des Veda*², pp. 297 f.

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It is by no means certain exactly in what way the conception of the connexion of Varuṇa with sin sprang into such prominence, if we assume, as we must in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that the conception of sin as punished by Varuṇa is an Aryan one, and not a conception borrowed from a Semitic race. It is possible that the point of contact lay in the fact that the disease of dropsy by its accumulation of fluid suggested the action of the god who is always connected with the waters: there seems every reason to suppose that the connexion of the god and that disease is as early as anything else in this regard. If, therefore, the disease became associated with the action of the god, it may have been an easy step to evolve the view that the disease was a punishment for sin, for the idea of Varuṇa as the overseer of moral order may have been produced at a comparatively early date from the kindred conception that the order of the universe is particularly his care. This moral character of Varuṇa is expressed repeatedly in the most emphatic manner.¹ Mitra and he are barriers furnished with many fetters against falsehood, his fetters are cast threefold and sevenfold, snaring the man who tells lies, he is a dispeller, hater, and punisher of falsehood, and afflicts with disease those who are sinful. But, on the other hand, stress is laid also on the mercy of the god: he releases from sins committed by men and by their fathers also: the prayer of men who day by day trangress his ordinances, through thoughtlessness and through the sinful nature of man, is efficacious to secure forgiveness. The poet in one hymn² represents in an effective and interesting way the feeling of the sinner, who approaches the god in full consciousness that he or his fathers has sinned against him, but who urges as excuse lack of thought, passion, and other causes, wine, dice, anger, slumber, and begs for forgiveness and to be set free from the fetters in which he is bound. It is, of course, possible to exaggerate the moral character of this confession of sin: the poet is not a prophet, and he takes his position with a calm which is not expressive of any deep movement of repentance or consciousness of sin,³ but the attitude is clearly moral; the punishment is admitted to be just, repentance is expressed, and the god is asked to forgive. In another hymn,⁴ perhaps of the same authorship, we have a striking expression; the poet reflects on his former companionship with the god, when Varuṇa and he sailed on a ship together in Varuṇa's heaven, and the god made him to be a seer; if he has sinned against the god, still as his true friend he begs for forgiveness. In yet another¹ the sinner presents himself as tottering along, blown out like an inflated skin, athirst in the midst of the waters, and begs pardon for the sins he has committed whether from lack of thought or feebleness of will. Elsewhere the sinner admits violating day by day the laws of Varuṇa or of the gods.² Passages such as these, with admission of sin committed, must be put beside the emphatic assertion of the omniscience of Varuṇa which is found in a hymn of the Atharvaveda,³ and which asserts that he is present everywhere; when two men are together Varuṇa is present as third: he numbers the winkings of the eyes of men: if a man should flee far beyond the heavens, yet he would not be free from Varuṇa who has a thousand spies, and who knows all things. There should also be added the emphasis which is laid on the conception of Ṛta as moral and not merely a physical or a sacrificial law of order: when Yamī urges Yama⁴ to marry her despite the guilt of incest which thus would arise, he replies that the action is contrary to Ṛta, which is thus conceived as a firm and abiding principle binding on man.

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¹ Varuṇa is essentially connected with Ṛta, whereas Indra with Satya; his great might is true, while his fierce nature is less in accord with Ṛta; Bergaigne, *Rel. Véd.* iii. 249; Oldenberg, GN. 1915, p. 175.

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² RV. vii. 86. To assert that the sin here confessed is a ritual error is wholly without justification.

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³ The fact that the sin may be of one's ancestors or committed in sleep is significant.

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⁴ RV. vii. 88.

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¹ RV. vii. 89.

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² RV. i. 25. 1; x. 2. 4.

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³ AV. iv. 16.

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⁴ RV. x. 10. 4. Cf. vii. 104. 14, *anṛtadeva*, perhaps a false dicer; TB. i. 7. 2. 6, *anṛta* is stealing from a sister, oppressing Brahmans, falsehood.

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In the light of this exalted conception of Varuṇa which seems clearly normal in the Rigveda, and which of course corresponds with the majestic figure of Ahura in the Avesta, though far inferior to the conception, it is easy to understand the references which are occasionally made to the spirits of deceit⁵ which serve him and execute his ordinances, and his deceit⁶ from which Agni is asked to save the worshipper. In this connexion also is the Māyā, magic power, of Varuṇa spoken of. The view of Geldner⁷ that Asura is thus reduced to something no better than the normal demon is erroneous: it rests on the mistaken view that the Māyā is something in itself bad, and that deceit is never justifiable. But the term Māyā has in itself no bad sense, and, though Varuṇa is an elevated figure, it must be recognized that the Vedic Indian saw nothing wrong in the use of deceit against the wicked: how else indeed would the deceitful be destroyed save by superior cunning? It is just to recognize this limitation on Indian ethics, but not to exaggerate its nature or significance.

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⁵ RV. i. 25. 2; ii. 28. 7; ix. 73. 8; vii. 61. 5, give his various punishments of men.

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⁶ RV. ii. 27. 16; i. 128. 7.

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⁷ *Ved. Stud.* i. 142.

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It must be admitted that the figure of Varuṇa does not increase in moral value in the course of the development of Vedic religion: in the fact of the failure of morality to develop itself as an important factor in the nature of the gods lies a deep distinction between Indian and other religions. Varuṇa is remembered as the god who has fetters and becomes in the Brāhmaṇas a dread god, whose ritual in some measure is assimilated to that of the demons and the dead. After the performance of the bath, which ends the Agniṣṭoma sacrifice, the performer turns away and does not look back to escape from Varuṇa's notice,¹ and in the ceremony of that bath, when performed after the horse sacrifice, a man of a peculiar appearance is driven into the water and an offering made on his head, as being a representative of Varuṇa :² this form of the expulsion of evils, which is a common idea throughout the world, shows Varuṇa reduced to a somewhat humble level, and degraded from his Rigvedic eminence. In the Varuṇapraghāsas, the second of the four-month feasts, which is one concerning him in the main, the wife of the sacrificer is made to declare her lovers if any, and if she does so she is made formally free from guilt in respect of them, but here there is no trace of an exalted moral conception.³

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¹ TS. vi. 6. 3. 5; MS. iv. 8. 5.

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² ApÇS. xiii. 19. 1 ff.

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³ Hillebrandt, *Ved. Myth.* iii. 27. A somewhat cynical morality is indicated by the rites to encourage a wife's lovers in BhGS. ii. 28; ApGS. xxiii. 4, which is unsuccessfully referred to the levirate by the comm. on BhGS.

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Of the other gods Aditi and the Ādityas share with Mitra in the attributes of Varuṇa as a matter of course. The position is different with the rest : here and there an odd reference to forgiving sin and even to punishing sinners is of little or no consequence. In the case of Agni, however, these characteristics are more marked, as is natural in the god who is essentially the god of the house, and therefore a friend of men. Moreover, his position as the messenger between earth and heaven fits him for the role of acting as a go-between in propitiating the wrath of Varuṇa : as we have seen, he is even implored to avert the deceit of Varuṇa. With Indra the position is different :⁴ it is true that he is asked to forgive sins and that he punishes the evil man, the liar, and the haughty, but these are merely characteristics which the most popular of gods must borrow from Varuṇa in a religion so fond of syncretism as that of the Rigveda, and the dependent position of Indra in this regard is sufficiently seen by the fact that he vindicates the ordinances of Mitra and Varuṇa,⁵ not his own, and, when invoked with these gods, is asked for the material, not for the spiritual, blessings which they grant.

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⁴ Bergaigne, *Rel. Véd.* iii. 200 ff.

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⁵ RV. x. 89. 9.

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The ethical terminology of the Rigveda presents points of interest.⁶ The term for cosmic order,⁷ Ṛta, and its opposite, Anṛta, express also moral order as in the dialogue of Yama and Yamī; Ṛta forbids and doubtless also commands positive action.⁸ Ṛta is more than truth, Satya, nor can we say with Wundt⁹ that Vedic India makes the good and the true identical, though truth is given an extraordinary high place, in its various senses of accuracy of statement, faithful performance of promises, and the assurance that what should happen will happen, and that the order of things is as it ought to be. Law is denoted by Dharman,¹ which denotes that which supports and that which is supported; it applies like Ṛta to all aspects of the world, to the sequence of events in nature, to the sacrifice and to man’s life; ‘The gods by the sacrifice offered the sacrifice; these were the first ordinances’, says the Puruṣa hymn; it is according to Dharman that the sacrificial flame is enkindled, that the pious man duly propagates himself with offspring. Law is also expressed by Vrata,² a term which has been compared with *verbum* in Latin and word in English, and which in any case denotes often the command or law of a deity; thus on Varuṇa the laws rest firmly as on a rock, and the gods make the abiding laws; under the law of Indra are Varuṇa and the sun, the streams obey his laws; before Parjanya’s law the earth bows; the pious man lives righteously according to the law. The term can be applied more widely;³ under the law of the king the rich man prospers; the bridegroom brings the heart of the bride under his command. A development gives the term the sense of the rule of life or of ritual conduct which men observe, originally as commanded; thus we hear of the Vrata of the carpenter, doctor, priest, or smith, or of the Brahmans who keep their year-long Vrata.⁴ Sin, Āgas or Enas, as we have seen, is the lot of him who violates the Vratas of the gods.

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⁶ Bergaigne, *Rel. Véd.* iii. 210 ff.; Oldenberg, *Weltanschauung der Brāhmaṇa-texte*, pp. 186 ff.

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⁷ Oldenberg, GN. 1915, pp. 167 ff.; *contra*, Lüders, SBA. 1910, p. 931; Andreas and Wackernagel, GN. 1911, p. 28.

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⁸ RV. x. 10. 4; iv. 23. 8.

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⁹ *Ethik*⁴, i. 24.

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¹ RV. i. 164. 50; x. 90. 16; iii. 17. 1; vi. 70. 3.

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² RV. ii. 28. 8; i. 36. 5; x. 65. 11; i. 101. 3; v. 83. 5; i. 136. 5.

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³ RV. x. 60. 4; PGS. i. 8. 8.

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⁴ ix. 112; vii. 103.

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The term for individual goods is, as in the Avesta, Vasu, which is used repeatedly of every conceivable sort of desired object. Çrī again denotes primarily what is beautiful, to the primitive taste, that is something possessing show and brilliance, but even in the Rigveda it tends to designate the pomp of the man of high position.⁵ Pāpa⁶ is the term for evil, for it is used of the man who commits incest, but it also applies to mere poverty; the god is besought to be generous and not to abandon his worshipper to evil days, Pāpatva; it is opposed to Bhadra in one of those contrasts which are regular in the Rigveda and later.

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⁵ Oldenberg, GN. 1918, pp. 35 ff.

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⁶ RV. x. 10. 12; iv. 5. 5; vii. 32. 18.

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Despite the importance which legitimately attaches to it, the moral element in the Rigveda and the subsequent literature is of comparatively small extent, and the vast majority of the Vedic hymns are not concerned in the remotest degree with questions of morals. The chief requirement for man, in the opinion of the poets, is not that he should be good or be conscious of sin and attain forgiveness, but that he should have faith in the gods and pay them their honours due, nor should he fail in so doing to remember his obligation towards the priest, who alone can rightly perform the sacrifice for him and create the hymn of praise. The personification of Faith is a very essential thing in the eyes of the priest:⁷ it is Faith which makes a man believe in the existence of such a god as Indra, and which makes him appreciate the need of sacrifice to Indra and of generosity to the priests. Faith becomes a very real goddess in the Rigveda: she receives formal obligations and is exhalted by a priesthood, who had her to thank for their daily food. The priests soon realized that the patron must be induced to realize that he gained something from his offerings which must have gravely reduced his possessions: they promise the offerer long life for his gifts;¹ they assure him that what the god—and his priest—takes does not in any wise diminish his goods, an idea found in the latest as well as the earliest² literature, they promise immortality to the giver of gold, the sun to givers of horses.³ No exaltation is too high for Faith: it is through her that Naciketas in the Kaṭha Upaniṣad insists on his father giving him to death, when his father offered a sacrifice of all he had, but yet did not propose to include his son in it. On the other hand a poet⁴ makes clear the causal nexus of life in the sequence, Faith, Consecration for Sacrifice, the Sacrifice, the Sacrificial Fee: all that is lacking is the eternal life in the world to come, which is the share of the sacrificer. A technical term, Iṣṭāpūrta, denotes the merit won by offering and gifts to the priest a distant precursor of the later Karman: in the funeral hymn⁵ the dead man is bidden to unite himself with the Fathers, with the fruit of his offerings and gifts; the gods are bidden to unite him with his Iṣṭāpūrta, when he has attained their abode,⁶ and it is declared that the liberal giver⁷ is he who gazes on the third step of Viṣṇu set in the sky: no more clear way of attaining heaven has often been offered to man. But it must be remembered that the man must be rich: the true sacrificer is he who gives all his wealth to the priest as the fee, or who at least gives, like Kaurama among the Ruçamas,⁸ a hundred jewels, ten chaplets, three hundred horses, and ten thousand cattle. In return for this generosity the sacrificer, however, gets something, which in the eyes of the priest doubtless seemed worth more than even immortality, the glory of mention of his generosity in a Vedic hymn.

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⁷ RV. ii. 12. 5; i. 55. 1; vii. 32. 14; x. 151. 1; AV. vi. 133; VS. xix. 77; TB. ii. 8. 8; iii. 12. 3.

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¹ AV. vii. 103. 1.

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² RV. vi. 28. 2.

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³ AV. x. 107. 2.

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⁴ AV. xv. 16.

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⁵ RV. x. 14. 8.

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⁶ TS. v. 7. 7. 1.

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⁷ RV. i. 22. 20.

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⁸ AV. xx. 127. But giving all is censured, PB. xvi. 5. 6; 6. 1; 9. 2; Hopkins, *Trans. Conn. Acad.* xv. 31.

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The later Vedic age⁹ appreciated these praises of liberality, Dānastutis, and celebrations of the fame of men, Gāthā Nārāçaṅsī, at their true worth when they treated them as lies and placed the makers in the same rank as drunkards, but to the Vedic poet they doubtless shared the glory of his poetry. The poets of the Rigveda took themselves in all seriousness: they called themselves inspired, and believed in their high powers of workmanship: they repeatedly extol the value of their new and beautiful songs, which surpass those of others. To Indra they can say unashamed¹⁰ 'We have wishes; you have gifts; here are we with our songs', and expect that the god will see that the exchange is fair. The same spirit is shown in the elaboration of the poems themselves, in the efforts by bold imagery and even by elaborate metre to produce perfect works of art. The poem is compared to a well-wrought chariot, it is likened to winnowed grain, to ghee well purified. It became in itself a divinity as Dhī, ‘holy devotion’, Suṣṭuti, ‘lovely praise’, and Manīṣā, ‘holy thought’. In its expression of admiration of the gods, it is the highest product of the worship of the priests, the most attractive outcome of their religious consciousness, relieving and giving value to a cult which is of overwhelming tedium and complication.

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⁹ Bloomfield, *Atharvaveda*, p. 100; *Rel. of Veda*, pp. 196 ff.

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¹⁰ RV. viii. 21. 6.

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It must, however, be admitted that this pride of creation was unhappily united with the feeling of rivalry: the gods are not conceived as able to be present at every offering at one and the same moment: they are too like to man to have true omniscience and therefore the sacrificers may compete. It is natural enough to find this idea in the late texts, where we hear often of competing of sacrifices, and devices to undo the ill results of the mingling of sacrificial fires with one another, or the interference of one invocation with another. But it is somewhat of a shock to find that these views are expressed in the earliest hymns preserved to us, that the Vasiṣṭhas complacently plume themselves on having induced Indra to prefer their oblations of the Soma to those of Pāçadyumna Vāyata, though the latter had gone to the trouble of recalling the god from far away.¹ It is a lower and more vulgar thought which pictures Kutsa tying Indra² up to keep him beside him, and the god being induced by Luça to extricate himself from his shameful bondage, but the conception is the same, and it is an essential part of the Vedic conception of the deity.

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¹ Bloomfield, *Rel. of Veda*, p. 186; RV. vii. 33. 2.

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² PB. ix. 2. 22; for the alleged reference to this in RV. x. 38. 5, see below Part III, Chap. 18, § 2.

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