From ritual to philosophy in India

Abstract

This article is not expository or evaluating; it is historical, being interested in the development, and the effect of the past on the classical culture. In this respect it may be most beneficial to those who least wish to read it. But while atman/brahma may be beyond context in itself, that is not true of its dis covery. The distinctive feature of Indian culture is its intellectual cast, which it received from the philosophy. The philosophy took its unique development in the 6th century B.C., and kept to that path. But we should not think of it as an abnormal development, for the signs are that the early Italic and Celtic Druidical mentalities were very similar. But while the Celtic was first exposed to Greek/Etruscan influences, and latterly obliterated by Roman conquest and Christianity, the Indian was an uninfluenced development. The urban life of Harappa had collapsed (from within or without) by the time of our RgVeda, and in their penetration south and east the Aryans met no culture higher than their own. What was absorbed from the lower may be expected to be found in the lower levels of society rather than dominating the upper strata. Just as religion may be sublimated from some very unedifying origins in the childish unconscious, philosophy too has its less admirable antecedents, in the Indo-European magic and sacrifice, developed through the Vedic period. As far as the gods are concerned, the sacrifice begins as a bribe and ends as a magic spell. I suspect that the personalized gods do not form the oldest parts of Indo-European religion (reflecting rather developing chiefdoms) and their novelty is being liquidated in the Brahmana period. The other element is the sacrifice of sympathetic magic, much older, in which the desired order of nature and society must be imitated. Life is a contradictory and complemen tary cycle, life and death, of which last there is as much need as of birth — hence probably the classical demonic nature of the asuras. In winning life from death, death must be transferred, since being, it cannot be destroyed. When the rite is celebrated nationally/tribally, by a number of cooperating social units, death and its pollution can easily be passed round to the (apparently physically kin, bhmtrvya) cooperating rival. But in interdependence the benefits are going to be shared, and this is only tolerable in a society of