Figure of Brahman and brahminical Ritual Thinking

Abstract

The article’s author suggests, that philosophy in Indian culture didn’t arised as a ritual’s overcoming, but arised as a ritual thinking’s development, the most important of that is the unity of word, thought and action, founded on the participants’ ritual’s and everything’s, that happens in it, symbolic identification’s with absolute, eternal divine life’ developments (first of all — world’s creation). The acts of philosophical thought, described in the "older" Upanishads, — this isn’t abstract thinking about world’s principles, which replaced the vedic sacrifice, and a new, more perfect form of sacrificial ritual’s performing, and a special, sacred Knowledge, which has not an epistemological, but a soteriological meaning. The purpose of such philosophy is not to know the world but is an achieving immortality through the sacralization of all things. For this purpose, the most important is the ontologization of the priest-brahman’s figure, transformed into the image of Brahman as the absolute life’s found and the inner essence of the ″self″ (this transformation is described in brahman texts — symbolic comments on the vedic ritual), and the meaning of the ritual formula ya evam veda ("who knows so"), the form of development of which is the philosophical formulas of the Upanishads. Just as the Brahman priest creates the sacral space of the ritual identifying himself and everything, that happens inside the ritual, with the Prajapati’s sacrifice, who creates the world, so Upanishad thinkers sacralize everything that exists and themselves through the understanding the identity of atman and brahman. This understanding is an act of ritual identity, not a theoretical interpretation. The author of the article was helped by the concept of "ritual symbolism" by V.S. Sementsov, who understands Vedic sacrifice as a special type of thinking.