AUTHORITY, ANXIETY, AND CANON Essays in Vedic Interpretation Edited by Laurie L. Patton State University of New York Press NERO NEAONLRO NENT C‘The cover illustration is from a manuscript of the Razm-nama, ascribed to kanha (late sixteenth century). it is reproduced in Indian Miniatures: The Ebrenfeld Collection, by Daniel J. Ehnbom; with essays by Robest Skelton and Pramod Chandra (New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with the American Federa- tion of Arts: Distributed by Viking Penguin, 1985), Folio #13, “A brahmana and ‘his son Medhavin discourse on the path to salvation.” Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 1994 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address State University of New York Press, State University Plaza, Albany, N.Y., 12246 Production by Cathleen Collins Marketing by Dana Yanulavich Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Authority, anxiety, and canon : essays in Vedic interpretation / edited by Laurie L. Patton. P. cm, — (SUNY series in Hindu studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7914-1937-1 (hc). — ISBN 0-79 14-1938-X (pb) 1. Vedas—Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Patton, Laurie L. UL. Series. BL1112.26.A98 1993 294.5°921—de20 93-25748 ford 10987654321Contents Preface WENDY DONIGER Introduction LAURIE L. PATTON, PART ONE THE VEDAS REFLECT ON THEMSELVES ‘THE MASTERY OF SPEECH Canonicity and Control in the Vedas DAVID CARPENTER VEDA IN THE BRAHMANAS Cosmogonic Paradigms and the Delimitation of Canon BARBARA A, HOLDREGE ‘THE VEDA AND THE AUTHORITY OF CLASS Reduplicating Structures of Veda and Varna in Ancient Indian Texts BRIAN K. SMITH PART TWO THE VEDAS IN CLassicat DiscouRsE PURANAVEDA FREDERICK M. SMITH FROM ANXIETY TO BLISS Argument, Care, and Responsibility in the Vedanta Reading of Taittiriya 2.1~-6a FRANCIS X. CLOONEY, SJ. vii 19 35 67vi 6 10 Contents “WHITHER THE THICK SWEETNESS OF THEIR PAssION?”” The Search for Vedic Origins of Sanskrit Drama DAVID L. GITOMER PART THREE THE VEDAS IN MODERNITY AND BEYOND THE AUTHORITY OF AN ABSENT TEXT ‘The Veda, Upangas, Upavedas, and Upnekhata in European Thought DOROTHY M. FIGUEIRA FROM INTERPRETATION TO REFORM Dayanand’s Reading of the Vedas JOHN E, LLEWELLYN REDEFINING THE AUTHORITY The Rejection of Vedic Infallib’ ANANTANAND RAMBACHAN Ports AND FISHES Modern Indian Interpretations of the Vedic Rishi LAURIE .. PATON Afterword LAURIE L. PATTON Contributors Index 171 201 235 253 281 309 317Preface A FIGHT HAS BEEN RAGING over the ownership of the sacred relic of the body of the Rg-Veda (and over the question of whether it is, in fact, a corpse) for over a century, from the days of Colebrooke and Wilson, perhaps cresting in 1890, when F. Max Miiller published his edition of the Sanskrit text and brought it to the consciousness of Europe. There have been two main warring camps, each consisting ofa small, elite group: on this side, German (and British) philologists, in their obsessively neat ranks of scholarship, and on that side, Brahmins, in their equally (but separately) obsessive ranks of ritual. Each has claimed the Veda, for very different purposes and on very different grounds. The anti-Orientalists, following Edward Said, have argued that European scholars have somehow simultaneously inflicted the Veda upon the Hindus and kept it from them; and the subaltern/Marxist coalition, in a parallel rut, have argued that the Brahmins have done the same double damage. But now a third party has entered the ranks, academicus ex machina, to rescue the Veda from the depth of the Ocean of Obfuscation to which those twin demons, European and Brahminical, had abducted it? Now itappears that (if we accept the wise dictum of Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s Petit Prince, that you can only truly own something that you take care of) the Veda belongs neither to the anal-retentive nor to the sanctimonious, but to the methodological. More precisely, the Veda has attracted the attention of a group of historians of religions in North America, which turns out to be intellectually, if not geographically, midway between Benares and Berlin This shift in the center of gravity, this tilting of the axis mundi, may be attributed in part to the excitement stirred up in the 1980s by two works by American scholars. First (in 1982) came Jonathan Z. Smith's article on canon, an article that has now itself become canonical in our field: “Sacred Persistence: Toward a Redescription of Canon’ (to which several of the chapters in this volume refer, beginning with Laurie Patton in the introduction). In many ways, the ghost in the (methodological) machine vilvill PREFACE of the present volume is not F Max Miller but Jonathan Z. Smith. Then (in 1989) Brian K. Smith published Reflections on Resemblance, Ritual and Religion, a book that took a bold look at the Veda’s canonical status within Hinduism and issued in a New Age in the study not merely of the Veda but of the whole religious complex that we call Hinduism. Laurie Patton, who had already been plowing her own furrow in the rich field of the Vedas, joined with Brian K, Smith and others laboring in other parts of the forest, and they converged on an American Academy of Religion panel in 1990. That panel, in its turn, served as a magnet for yet other scholars with yet other interests in the Veda. The result is this volume, ; When I first discussed the possibilities of this series with Bill Eastman (who surely deserves a medal for courageous publishing—perhaps he should be made Knight of the Multiauthored Volume), I said I hoped the series would include both classical studies and the cutting edge of new studies. I did not then imagine that a single volume would do both at once, but this is that volume, For, after all, the Veda is as Ur as it gets, while the young scholars who have written this volume represent the nowvelle vague in approaches to religious texts. They carry their theoretical assumptions not as shields to protect themselves from unexpected and recalcitrant dirty data (what Mary Douglas called ‘matter out of place”), but as awkward backpacks that get heavier with every step, burdens that can neither jettison nor ignore. It is their honest attempt to grapple with the theoretical monkeys on their backs, while still paying careful attention to the Indological tradition before them, that makes these chapters both, 80 solid and so stimulating. Whatever the Veda may or may not be anywhere else (and it is precisely this question that is so hotly debated throughout this volume), it is certainly very much alive and well in these pages. Wendy Doniger NOTES J. An earlier rescue attempt, made, in 1981, not by the traditional Fish avatar, nor even by one of Laurie Patton's fishy rishies, but by 2 translated Penguin, had met with only moderate success.Introduction ‘THe POET KABIR’S WARNING that the one who studies the Vedas “gets entangled and dies therein’ is one to be taken quite seriously. Until recently, the study of the Veda has been philologically sigorous yet theoretically moribund. Also until recently, the influence of the Vedic canon on the rest of Indian seligious history has been inadequately addressed. One of the few scholars to address the issue, Louis Renou, ends up closing off rather than opening up possibilities for further research in this area. In his small but influential essay, ‘The Destiny of the Veda in India;"? Renow asserts that over time the Vedic canon became a kind of empty icon, signifying various kinds of prestige and power, but little else. According to Renou, in the classical and modern religious traditions of India, only the ‘‘outside’’ of the Veda has survived. Renou concludes rather sadly, “The Vedic world, whose essence has passed... .was no more than a distant object, exposed to the hazards of an adoration stripped of its textual substance.” The present volume joins other recent Indological scholarship in demuring from such conclusions.* The book began as a panel at the American Academy of Religion, held in New Orleans, Louisiana, in late 1990, and continued as a series of informal discussions and conversations well into 1991. The panelists argued that the substance of the Veda is indeed integrated into later traditions. What is more, they demonstrated that Renou has missed the most interesting point of departure: even if it were true that only the outside of the Veda survives in later periods, that “outside” itself is not uniformly received. Such a point is simply illustrated by the commonplace fact that the Vedas can refer either to the four eatliest collections of verses (the Rg-, the Sama, the Yajur-, and the Atharva-Vedas), or to an aggregate of early Indian works, including the four Vedas, the Bralmanas, and the Upanisads. (The chapters in the present volume use both definitions, depending on which historical period is being discussed.) While Renou perceived that the Veda takes on various patterns of influence in different systems of Indian thought, he failed to see 1