SAST 203 - Sept 20 Notes

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Oct 30, 2023

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Out the performance of the sacrifices in more detail and that is this idea that the earth is the cosmos is structured in three tiers so we always want to that in the back of our mind when we think of yoshia or Vedic sacrifice the earth where we live the sky or the heavens are where the gods live in this app the intermediary state which is usually translated as atmosphere some some text call it the intermediary in between which I think is just more confusing so we're thinking about the Vedic worldview as a very world affirming view of the world the physical world in which we live is very positive and it's something that we want to preserve we preserve that by performing ritual sacrifice making sacrifices to the gods and the sacrificial offering is carried through the atmosphere up to the song up to the sky excuse me through two things one is sound the sound of the monitors travels through the atmosphere to the sky and the other is smoke the smoke created by offering substances into the fire drifts through the atmosphere and arrives in the sky and that is how the gods received sacrifice we ended on Monday talking about the Vedic sacrificial altar here we have an image of one particular kind of Vedic ritual altar from the opening China or fire ritual this altar is made in the shape of a bird different rituals would have different shapes of alters depending on what the text for scribes so the primary thing I wanted you to have from or take from the slide is the idea of that or the fact that basic ritual altars were temporary right where several thousand years before the create stone temples of Buddhism and Jane ISM and Hinduism will start to be built maybe 1000 years for Buddhism Jane ISM but a little longer than that for Hinduism the earliest forms of Hinduism are really about celebrating worship in the natural world so the Vedic alter is created for a fixed period of time it is connected to the specific yajamana the specific sponsor of the ritual and it will be burned at the end it will be destroyed to go back into the earth and then the next ritual requires the creation of a new altar now here's an image from the ultra fire documentary of the wife of the jumana remember that the yamana is the sponsor of the sacrifice traditionally for large scale shrout or public Vedic rituals this would be the king so it is someone who has an intention for the sacrifice for both natural order usually for a successful crop but also for political order to sanctify the role of the king and to ensure that the king has sons to carry on the dynasty and create political stability so the only non priests present in the sacrificial altar would be the yajamana the sponsor and the wife of jamama the wife of the jumana is also the only woman allowed inside the sacrificial altar or space in a traditional dating sacrifice she is there again because one of the purposes of large scale public ritual is to ensure that the king has sons to carry on the political dynasty and so she has to be there essentially to absorb the good effects of the ritual again I want to remind everyone to think of this in two ways that might seem counterintuitive with those of us living in the 21st century one is that the Sanskrit language the sacred mantras have most of physical presence in the world right the religious belief within Vedic religion is that they are both heard and seen and that the sound of those Montrose has real effect on the world around us and also the belief that ritual has real effect right there there's clearly a faith-based belief within this tradition so I think many people are still religious practitioners so perhaps it isn't such a foreign idea but I think in the 21st century many people find the idea of ritual religious ritual having real impact or real effect on the world around us can be hard to ever had around think about as old fashioned book this is the 15th century BC so it is a bit old fashioned so the jamana in the life of the edgmont are the only non priests of present in the sacrificial sphere there's then a whole team of the priests for this large scale ritual ahead is called the holder that is the specialist in performing the ritual and then there

would be a team of other priests there's a chanter there's someone who built the fire each in terms of the actual performance of the ritual each Vedic priest has a specialized task that they're trained in this will go on in a ritual like China with our bird shaped altar here would be anywhere from 7 to 9 days so this is this takes more than one day it's not that the altars built and then burn down in one day these large scale show to rituals are meant to take some time I'm interview public events so that's another thing to note these are the individuals who are allowed inside the virtual sphere the same defined place of the beta culture observers are welcome on the outside so if you do a Google search for images of the ugly China on this website there were other actually you can even see a few observers outside the altar in the background there their photographs from this particular ritual performance where you can see the public comes and goes and gets to watch from the outside they just can't come into the sanctified centre of the all turn are there any questions about the performance of Vedic ritual before I move on to the actual hymns from the red data so we will talk about these things also during our discussion section on Friday I want to focus on a few of the hymns that I really that you really should know for the example that were no from this class will start with the most famous oh OK the one last question which animals are sacrificed the most common animals in the sacrificial listing are goats so basically small domestic animals Buffalo sometimes as well we will talk today and I the Friday about the first sacrifice the horse sacrifice is among the most famous of Datuk sacrifices but probably was not performed very frequently simply because of the expense involved it's a sacrifice performed by a king and a horse is a valuable inexpensive animal and so it becomes an important symbol in later Hindu literature but may not have been performed very frequently think of it in this way that animals like goats and sheep who are going to be eaten afterwards so animals that are commonly consumed are the animals that would be included in the sacrifice good question but thank you for asking that any other questions about the sacrifice before we move on OK so we're going to start with talking about the most famous person the rigveda remove the most commonly or frequently studied verse of the big data which is recreated 1090 briefly to 1090 is one of many creation hills inside the within the betas even just in book ten of the rig veda there are dozens of creation stories so I want you to think about what that tells us what the text is telling us about creation simply through that structure first the fact that many different stories of creation are told tells us that a text views these as metaphor there's not one creation story that's meant to be viewed literally rather it's giving metaphoric interpretations of the creation of the universe which ultimately the rig veda says is beyond human knowledge we can only think of it through metaphor and imagine what it might have been the second thing that the text is telling us when it tells multiple different creation stories one of which I've already told you about the vibration of the syllable om is that each of these creation stories highlight something that is highly valuable valuable or sacred even the Vedic religion the syllable om reverberating in creating the cosmos points to the importance of the sacred Sanskrit language in the Vedic religion rigveda 1090 points to the importance of practicing ritual sacrifice in the Vedic religion and that it conceives of the creation of the world we live in by the sacrifice of crusha Persia here is the primordial man the first man and in the verse from renovate attend I believe the God sacrificed prover shot and from his body they create both the physical world and the Vedic mantras and the human social order now the first thing I want to say here is that you will find the point at which to remind ourselves of the influence of orientalism in the study of South Asia you will find many

European orientalist scholars from the 19th and 21st century and unfortunately a handful still around today who will argue that based on this him Vedic civilization practiced human sacrifice I want to really emphasize that I think the text is very clear that this is a metaphoric sacrifices we have absolutely no physical evidence or really even evidence outside of this course or outside of this text in this verse that humans were ever sacrificed in Vedic religion this is where we think about both how to read religious literature as idealized of metaphorical rather than a positivist or direct historical description and also where we remember the historical biases of past generations of European orientalist scholars versus what we now know in reality in terms of the historical record so this is a metaphorical description of the sacrifice of the primordial game and from that God the world is created right his eyes become the sun his voice become the Vedic mantra his breath becomes a wind but then most famously his body is divided into up into the four social groups in Sanskrit this term is varna it is probably better known in English or it's definitely better known in English as cast cast as a Portuguese word it's the word for social class at the first Portuguese colonized of them all of our coast used to describe the caste system of India and that's the term that continues to be used to the state in Sanskrit this term is known as varna and which also means colour so this is also some some of the reason why there is initially the indo Aryan invasion theory that aryans invaded India wiped out the the Indus valley civilization and pushed the judean people the original indigenous people of the subcontinent down into southern India the belief based on the fact that varna means both class and colour was that this was originally a racial distinction as we talked about at length that theory has been largely has been really completely debunked by historians in favor of the less violent and more gradual indo Aryan migration theory rather than the invasion theory So what are the four Barnes when purusha the primordial man is sacrificed by the gods his head becomes the problems brahmins are the priests his arms become the kshatriya's kshatriya zar warriors or the kings his torso becomes the vaisyas vices are often translated as artisans as tradespeople or as land owners and his legs become the shooter's that that is the servant classes one thing I want to point out here is in the next couple of weeks in particular we will see several versions of this top word problem that can be confusing for people who don't have prior knowledge of some Sanskrit vocabulary when we're talking about the cast which is problem we will it will generally in 21st century English be written with a lowercase B and it ends with IM IN in the Sanskrit language functions like ER in English it means a person who does something so like a groomer who grooms my dogs brahmin is that I am functions like the ER at the end of crumar bisha are skilled tradespeople so sometimes it's translated into English as land owners but it really covers a wider variety of trades including artisans and those who pretty much things absolutely I will review this brahman is the head so the priests become the head that is the sort of intellectual pursuits kshatriya's are the arms those are the kings the warriors constructors literally our worries were also kings so think of it in this way priests are the purveyors of knowledge right we talked about the specialized knowledge to perform the big sacrifice they're associated with the head and actually the mouth specifically because they chant Vedic mantra kings are warriors they fight battles they protect people they are the arms because they have to hold this sword so those are the two numonics for the top then the torso becomes those that were that made things the those that own land and that were tradespeople are the translation you have literally from yarn text is the common people so everyone who is common person maybe 21st century for this would be like the middle class people who land from land in our tradespeople a feet or

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the lower port sentence is translated his legs because that's really below the knees are the servants so those this is a very old fashioned translation and embry surfs like in the feudal sense of service but serving classes so a couple of things that we want to take from this one is that we see the first acknowledgment of a caste system of a social order in the very earliest Vedic literature we will talk about this throughout the class but while Hinduism is associated with the caste system and this is expressly written out in the rig veda in contemporary South Asia caste is a category that transcends religious boundaries it's a social class system that really refers to all people secondly is that in its ideal sense brigada 1090 is presenting the caste system as a social order it's essentially a division of labour remember that religious literature always expresses an ideal vision of the world does not necessarily describe the reality of the world but the original visioning of riveta 90 is that human society is broken up into a division of labour and yes that division is hierarchical the final will talk about cast more going on but the final thing I want you to think about in terms of just within Vedic civilization again if we think of these creation stories from the book from book ten of the rig data as giving clear indications of what was important or sacred to Vedic civilization and Vedic society the performance of ritual sacrifice was a primary pillar of their foundation of their religion but also that it points to the idea of order an organization that rhythm maintaining order in an abstract sense the balance between Subs and us at being a non being but also natural order making sure the rains come on time in the crop succeed and finally and most importantly in this verse social order the idea that society is imbalanced when there is a division of labour and there is political consistency in the king keeps having sons so this ties into this idea of order in a broader sense are there any more questions about big data 1090 before we move on the next verse that I really want to talk about in detail is riveta 10129 this doesn't roll off the tongue quite as easily and is less studied than rivada 1090 is really what I wanted to draw your attention to is the structure of this because this is essentially a reading guide for how we should read all other creation hymns innovators it starts out with questions essentially what happened before in the beginning what was there where in whose protection in that before time what made this happen essentially the questions are what was there before the world was created and how is it created and here's the answer at the end who knows truly who can hear declare it once it was born when it is it this emanation by the emanation of the gods only later came to be who then knows whence it was arisen now again this is sort of an old-fashioned King James English Bible English translation so let's put that into more modern English after a long list of what existed before this world and who created the world as it is the answer is who can possibly know even the gods yet had not yet been created so creation of the cosmos create exists before the gods according to the Vedas and the answer is no one really knows so the view of the Vedas is that these big lofty spiritual questions like what existed before what was creation and how did the world come to be as it is that those are essentially beyond human understanding which a is a reading guide to hymns like related to 90 was their literal human sacrifice is their belief that the earth was literally created through sacrifice no because just a few verses later the rebate is saying we can't possibly know so it's telling us to read that first as a metaphor secondly it really speaks to the overall values of the Vedic religion which again are very materialistic in that they are focused on maintaining the material physical world that we live in they see this world is basically positive they want to maintain order in the world and big lofty spiritual questions not only about the creation of the world but about the human spirit and what happens to us after death those are largely off limits

their sort of taboo because the text is saying all of that is ultimately beyond humans ability for understanding are there any questions about this first before I move on alright I finished faster than I expected to which is probably good because as I mentioned I'm not at my peak here on for that should say for Friday really what I want you to do is to finish your troutman embry readings if you haven't already gotten up to speed on that I linked to a set of reading guide questions there covering both this week then next week reading So what I want you to focus on for this Friday are the three hymns we've already gone over two of them in class but there's a third that will talk about um the three hymns that I've asked you to think about in detail from the rebated that's in question one and then for the last question is about the horse sacrifice which we're going to compare how they were sacrifices described in the rigveda versus the opponents were not getting to the ponds for next week so just focus on the horse sacrifice reading are the from the Vedic part of your reading and we'll talk about that on Friday HRD pedal question so our deep let me see if I understand your question would it be safe to say that 10129 is about how to read the rest of the data and that 1090 is about how the world is created I would say yes to both of those things with this kind of clarification I think we've we've added 10129 is about how to read the entire text including rigveda 1090 which is one of many creation stories and So what it's saying is that each we are ending class so if you need to go feel free to go by I'm just staying on to answer a few questions of students still have questions thanks for asking to clarify that thank you so much so I think that 1090 is about how the world is created but it's one of many hymns that are about how the world was created and to convey explain why there are so many different metaphors for how the world is created 10129 is a a good clue as to how to read these other hymns that the Vedic religion in general especially the rig veda believes that really knowing these bigger issues is beyond the capacity for human understanding and so all we can do is