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Advaita and Neoplatonism (1961)

Advaita and Neoplatonism

(1961)–Frits Staal–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

A Critical Study in Comparative Philosophy


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5. Sacrifice. Ontological reflections

In Vedic literature the religious act par excellence is the sacrifice (yaj÷a, homa).135 The view that sacrifice is an act by which certain advantages are gained, such as prosperity, long life, health, cattle and male offspring, is only partly true; the real significance lies deeper. According to Hubert and Mauss, sacrifice is a con-

secreation which transforms not only the victim, but also the sacrificing priest and sometimes an external object, which is connected with the ritual act. Thus it transforms profane into sacred and establishes with the victim as mediator a communication between profane and sacred. This communication is a transformation, ‘fulfilled not by the grace of the Gods, but as a natural result of the sacrifice’.136 Thus it becomes difficult to discriminate between a sacrifice and a magical act. Accordingly, the efficacy of the sacrifice is determined by the correctness of the ritual mechanism, which does not depend upon will or intention of the sacrificing priest. Therefore, and also because the Gods play no part in granting the fruit of an act137 which itself produces the effects, the sacrifice can be called an impersonal activity or process.

 

The doctrine of sacrifice is the central topic of the Brāhmaṇas, which are rightly called ‘the true source of Indian thought’.138 The God of sacrifice is also the creative principle of the world, Prajāpati. He creates for instance the sun by sacrificing.139 There is a close connection between the creative act in the Vedic sense and the act of sacrifice. Betty Heimann has dealt with this and summarizes her investigations as follows. She refers to myths of creation where the creator is also the material cause of the universe (e.g., the primordial puruṣa is sacrificed and his parts become the different realms of the world). In connection with sacrifice she refers to the ‘do ut des-principle’,140 which explains the significance of the sacrifice only partly.141 She says: 142 ‘Both the concept of creation and the concept of sacrifice contain possibilities of development which are unintelligible for the West. The Indian idea of creation starts from the unconscious and mechanical urge towards emanation, and develops only in the second place into the variant, in which the material cause is replaced by a conscious activity. The sacrifice is conceived in India as it were as a scientific process of transformation; (starting with the con-

scious “give and take”) it comes to denote (also) changes which are unconscious and more or less mechanical’.

 

Thus eating and digesting, but also speaking are acts interpreted as sacrifices.143 On the other hand, there are many examples which show that entities come into being not through creation, but through sacrifice. In the Chāndogyopaniṣad, for instance, it is said144 that each member of the sequence: rain, food, sperm, embryo, ‘is born from this offering.’145 Through the sacrifice transformation takes place, which presupposes the existence of a factor which transforms, a kind of substance which can be represented by food.146 The idea of sacrifice can also denote unconscious, organical transformation. The sacrificial background limits creation rigorously to that which follows the rule of continuity, - that nothing can come out of nothing. In this context we have to understand numerous passages such as the famous Chāndogya text:147 ‘How from the non-existent could the existent be produced?’148 which plays a very important role in the later philosophies. The Indian concept of creation need not imply the idea of creation out of nothing, as it generally does in the monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. This will be discussed below.149 Indian ideas of sacrifice and creation can be characterized as continuous, objective, scientific as it were, and entirely impersonal.

 

With regard to sacrifice the ways in which transformations take place and connections are established should be specified. In general magical connections are established between ritual acts and the cosmic order. These connections are the above mentioned nidānas. Through these connections ‘sacrifice has created the world, and its correct order determines and maintains the world process’.150

This last remark is important and may explain the real significance and meaning of the Vedic sacrifice. It is not easy to understand, personally and existentially, the world view and sentiment of those, for whom the sacrifice was so central. A fuller elucidation will require reference to contemporary philosophy.

 

Our easy way of approaching ancient or distant philosophies is to seek their answers to our questions. Instead of following the inner rhythm which a sensitive student may perceive in ancient texts, we order our questions in large frames, which seem universally applicable. Thus it has become customary to report about philosophies under three headings (either preceded or not by an epistemological introduction): God, world and the human soul. This procedure is at any rate preferable to the one which is unconsciously determined by this world view. Both are however misleading. Concerning the epistemological point of view, referred to above, we can be brief: though it has become increasingly important in later Advaita, it is strikingly out of place in connection with original Advaita. There is some truth in a remark of Guénon, an often exaggerating and emotional interpreter of Indian thought despite his profundity, that modern man has become so much interested in the theory of knowledge itself has receded into the background.

 

We fail accordingly if we try to apply the three headings mentioned above to Vedic views. For there is not only no God in any sense associated with that concept in our mind, but there is no world which surrounds us as an independent external entity or as an object; and there is no soul as foundation of our consciousness or receptacle of sense perceptions. That those concepts play no central part in Vedic literature means that we have to remove them from our mind. Such concepts should not be in the background as an established order, in which e.g. the sacrifice can be understood and interpreted. We should for example not assume that there is a human being and an outside world and that one of the possible relations between the two is the act of sacrifice. Both ‘human being’ and ‘world’ are ideas which arose in a modern context. Therefore we have to see how sacrifice existed in the beginning and how only later ‘human beings’ and ‘world’ came to exist. If a kind of meditative reflection can lead us away from the modern phenomena and lead us towards sacrifice as a unique phenomenon, we may be in a position to understand how only

sacrifice created a world which was the predecessor of what we now call world. We have to imagine sacrifice as the act, physical as well as spiritual, which organized and ordered an entirely unknown and unintelligible chaos into a world and made man himself man. Sacrifice is one of the possible steps by which man reached consciousness of a world as the basis of a world view and of himself as a being. Through the sacrificial act the world and man came into being as conscious and intelligible beings; i.e., sacrifice provided being with what was previously inaccessible. This does not mean that sacrifice created man and the world as entities in themselves, but that it made them exist for human consciousness (and created human consciousness), and made them accessible or gave them intelligibility. This is the philosophical significance of the belief that sacrifice created everything. Sacrifice determined previously unknown chaos as being for some being. The world and man did not exist for anybody until the sacrifice made them accessible and ‘discovered’ them.

 

That the Gods were unimportant when compared with sacrifice can be seen from the Mīmāṁsā view, a later and more formal development in the spirit of the Brāhmaṇas. According to the Prābhākara school, the sacrifice ‘cannot be regarded as laid down for the purpose of securing the favours of the Deity.... the Deity is there only as a hypothetical entity postulated as the recipient of the sacrificial offering’.151 In Mīmāṁsā the Gods were simply regarded as ‘grammatical datives’.

 

He who creates intelligibility makes being accessible, because that which is intelligible, must be. The reverse does not hold according to all philosophical doctrines, but in the West it is generally accepted, since its scholastic formulation in the thesis of the intelligibility of being. Among contemporary philosophers, being and intelligibility seem to coincide completely for Martin Heidegger.152 An attempt will be made to show that the Vedic sacrifice is the counterpart of the concept of being as conceived by

this important contemporary thinker, whose chief interest is ontology.

 

Heidegger on methodological grounds chooses as a starting point for his investigations human being (Dasein). His ultimate aim is to proceed to being itself (Sein) and thus towards a general ontology. We do not in the beginning know what being is, as there is at first only the opaque, chaotic and unintelligible structure of the various kinds of ‘existants’ (Seiendes), of which our own being is one. We have to presuppose that our Seiendes, Dasein, has as a mode of its being, ‘discovering-being’ (Entdeckendsein); because of this it is able to discover being. Being, on the other hand, (including Dasein itself) must be principally open, accessible, intelligible - nay, constitute the intelligibility itself which our being projects upon the ‘existants’. Neither the intelligibility of being nor being as intelligibility, nor the Entdeckendsein of our own being have to be understood in an intellectual sense only. To discover being means on the one hand to superimpose upon the existants intelligibility and order, on the other hand to realize some of the possibilities of our own being. The latter is a pro-ject and it cannot be otherwise, as it is evident according to Heidegger153 that our own being cannot transcend its own possibilities, but only realise them. Thus ‘the constitution of being of the existants is equivalent to the interpretation of these existants as a function of our own possibilities of existence’.154

 

Thus we find in Heidegger's work a philosophy - only part of its foundation could be sketched here - which reduces being and intelligibility to our own human being and which shows how our own being through being gives shape to the chaos of existants, which only then becomes accessible or becomes ‘being’. Such a philosophical view is the basis of e.g., the psychological view according to which consciousness originates from the unconscious and constitutes the outside world as outside world as well as the inside world as inside world. The metaphysical idea, however,

should not be understood as a psychologism; it is on the other hand the ontological foundation of any possible psychology.

 

The Vedic sacrifice can now be interpreted as one of the modes of human being which constitutes being. This ontological interpretation enables us to see how it was possible (ontically, as Heidegger would say) that such importance was attached to the ritual act. Any other approach would be bound to judge ritualistic ideas as exaggerations.

 

The transformation or consecration which is effectuated through sacrifice, is not as a transformation from one being into another but the constitution of being itself. Previously nothing existed but the undifferentiated and chaotic, unknown and unconscious, supposed unity of the existants. The sacrifice brought the light of consciousness, in accordance with the well known psychological interpretation of many light mythologies (C.G. Jung, E. Neumann, etc.), as well as the light of being in the sense alluded to above. Human being realised in the sacrificial act one of its possibilities and discovered therefore apart from other being also its own being. Because of this it must have become impressed with its own power and strength. Accordingly, a deeper interpretation has to be given to other phenomena connected with the sacrifice. It is not meaningful to hold the view that sacrifice connects previous known beings with each other; on the contrary, it gives being and makes accessible what previously was entirely hidden. This differentiation breaks through a chaotic unity, which is supposed to have previously existed only at the time of the differentiation itself. The frightening and abysmal character, which must have been connected with these first differentiating discoveries,155 caused man to desire to be connected or united with the newly discovered reality. The nidānas and identifications do not connect previously known beings with each other, but discover aspects of being and try at the same time to appease the conflict of differentiation by positing connections and identifications. This explains the unifying tendency found in all ancient and archaic civilisations. Later, human being was able to endure the tensions of the mind regarding unidentified and unconnected entities.

When in the beginning, for example, the cow is identified with breath, the ‘power’ - interpretation fails to give any explanation: we do not possess power over breath, and try to obtain power over a cow, or the reverse. Although this interpretation remains sometimes valid, another activity of human being is at work here: first being is discovered, i.e., the cow is understood as being a cow and breath as being breath; next, the awe and perhaps fear resulting from this discovery is somewhat tempered by the bold identification of cow and breath. This fear is not something ‘modern’, but it existed wherever being came into being or where consciousness arose, as for instance in the Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣad:156 ‘The Ātman existed alone, in the beginning, in the form of a puruṣa. Looking round himself, he saw nothing but himself. Then he said: ‘I am’!.... He feared thereupon; therefore he who is alone fears’. Only the fact that we have gone beyond identifications and have accepted discriminations more fully, i.e., recognised as being the meagre connections which exist between breath and cow, accounts for the fact that we style the previous mode of being of human being ‘magical’.

 

It is probable that man started soon reflecting about this discovery and creative activity, in which being came into being. To say that he tried to appease the discrimination by identification is the same as saying that he refused to accept his activity as really creative and held on to the doctrine that no being can originate if not from being. The power nevertheless connected with this activity must have been so impressive that human being ascribed it readily to the superhuman, rather than bear himself this first responsibility, which must have been experienced as a guilt157 in as far as it created the awe-inspiring but conflicting discriminations. Thus the Gods were created by the performance of a sacrificial act and nothing new was supposed to have come into being through them. The sacrificial act led necessarily to the existence of Gods - and this was recognised explicitly (with more readiness than in many modern minds): according to our texts, the Gods have come into being through sacrifice and they have

gained immortality through sacrifice. Rightly famous is the Ṛgvedic verse: ‘with sacrifice the Gods sacrificed the sacrifice. These were the first usages’.158

 

Here we have almost all the themes which will develop into Advaitic doctrines. The magical and creative activity by which being came into being and which caused awe and fear becomes adhyāsa, ‘superimposition’, which is the key-term of Śaṅkara's explanation (which is an ‘explaining away’, as a modern Advaitin said) of the world. The constitution of being or the sacrifice which also produces the Gods, results in the idea that even Īśvara is conditioned by māyā (as avidyā or adhyāsa). The view that nothing can come into being through discriminations and through human or divine creativity, becomes the doctrine that only Brahman exists, the rest being illusory, whereas Īśvara is not really creative. The appeasing of discriminations by resorting to identifications leads to the central idea of mokṣa, ‘release’, the highest identity, the fullness (pūrṇam) of being, the ultimate peace (śānti). And thus the aim of Advaita can provisionally be described as the re-constitution of this fullness of being which is mokṣa. That this can be realised by knowledge, and no longer by karma, is Śaṅkara's thesis, which is related to the general reaction against karma which took place in Indian thought.

 

The above interpretation of the sacrifice as being could be further corroborated by terminological investigations. There seems to be a close connection between sat and ṛta, which meant originally159 the wheel, described by the sun in its daily or annual revolution. Subsequently it denoted the wheel of existence (saṁsāra, transmigration) as the norm of existence (in ṛta and later in dharmacakra).160 If the sacrifice is sat, it is appropriate that the ritual exactness, with which it is performed is called satyam, as in the Brāhmaṇas.161

 

One last remark, referring to Heidegger's thought, may be made concerning the ‘world’. That sacrifice created man and his world in a certain sense means that man, constituted himself as a

being, and therefore as Dasein, a Seiendes of which the most central characteristic (existential) is ‘being-in-the-world’ (in-der-Welt-sein). The negative aspect of this creation is accordingly expressed as ‘being immersed in the world’ (Saṁsāra).162


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