Amrta(Immortality) and Women in Indian Philosophical context
I. MEANINGS OF AMRTA
The Sanskrit term for “immortal” and “immortality” isvamrta. It consists of mrta, which is the past participle of the verbal root mr to die, with the negative prefixa. This is a somewhat curious formation,
because theoretically it should mean “not dead” rather than “nondieable” or “immortal”, which in Sanskrit should be amartya. Negated past participles, however, tend to have an “un-Xable” rather than an
“un-Xed” meaning, and the former is the primary meaning of amrta.
The term amrta as “immortal”, however, is not a Sanskrit invention; it has solid Indo-European roots, with the Greek cognate ambrotos(from which is derived ambrosia) and the Avestan ame sa. Paul Thieme (1968)
has studied these terms and their meanings in detail; I summarize here his findings.
Thieme has shown that in Indo-European the term had two distinct meanings: the first he calls “Lebenskraft spendend”, “giving vitality”;and the second, “unsterblich”, “immortal”. The spectrum of objects to
which the term amrta is applied in the Vedic texts, objects from clarified butter(ghee), gold, and the Soma drink to food, water, semen, son, and gods,supports Thieme’s conclusion.The term amrta does not always mean immortal in the sense we usually attach to it; it often means vitality or vital energy (Thieme’s Lebenskaft) – it is a full and prosperous life and all things that sustain and promote such a life, including food, drink,cattle, and medicine.
Amrta can thus indicate both life/immortality,as well as instruments that sustain life and ward off death. The two terms amrta and ayus(long and full life) are often juxtaposed and form a single complex of meanings. Indeed, the Satapatha Br ahmana(10.2.6.7–9) sees long life as a visible sign that a man is destined to
become immortal: “The life of a hundred years makes for heaven.:::He alone who lives a hundred years or more attains to that immortal life.”
I disagree with Thieme, however, in taking these two meanings as somehow distinct and separate. Both because of the identity of the term and because life in all its forms confronts death as its opposite, I
think what we have, at least in ancient India, is a spectrum of meanings that are never totally separate, each merging into and influencing the conception of the others. It is also this broad semantic range of the
term that permitted its use simultaneously with regard to a wide variety of objects without contradiction. The term underwent further widening as the conception of death and the after-death state underwent drastic
change within the ideology of rebirth (sams ara), coming to signify not just survival after death but the liberation from the cycle of rebirth(moksa).
II. CONCEPTIONS OF THE SELF
The changing conceptions of immortality in ancient India were closely connected with the changing conception of “self ”, of what it means to be a human individual. Michael Carrithers (1985), responding to
Marcel Mauss’s attempt to trace the history of the ‘self ’makes a useful distinction between personne and moi, a distinction that provides a helpful heuristic tool to understand the connection between three
things: conception of self, conception of immortality, and the position of women.
Carrithers (1985: 235–36) defines personneas “a conception of the individual human being as a member of a (1) significant and (2) ordered collectivity”, and moi as “a conception of (1) the physical and mental
individuality of human beings within (2) a natural or spiritual cosmos, and (3) interacting with each other as moral agents”.
I want to extend Carrithers’ somewhat narrow definition of personne to include the selfhood of an individual, especially of a married male, within the society of ancient India hierarchically ordered according
to class and gender. A personneis defined in terms of interlocking social relationships – to living and deceased members of one’s family, to members of one’s caste, to residents of one’s village, and so forth.
When self is defined in terms of personne, the collectivity of which an individual is a member plays a determining role in the definition of a person’s self and vitally affects an individual’s choices and goals.
Self as moi, on the other hand, sees the individual as a unique and self-contained entity transcending temporary social relationships. This conception of the self emerged in India within the context of the rebirth
ideology which sees social relationships as fleeting and ephemeral, not affecting the inner core of one’s self.
In distinguishing the two conceptions of self I am not suggesting that personne and moi are watertight and self-contained categories.
These two conceptions of the self do exercise influence on each other especially in complex societies where an individual often belongs to several “collectivities”.
In ancient India, such collectivities may have included family/lineage, caste, language group, city/village, kingdom, and sectarian religious affiliation. I like to see the two conceptions of self at two ideal-typical poles of a continuous line [see chart], in which the features of the one penetrate the other.
Different social experiences, furthermore, must underlie these conceptions of self. I have argued elsewhere that the development of large bureaucratic states with complex economies and the rise of urbanization
along the Gangetic plain in the middle of the first millennium BCE were, at least in part, responsible for the rise of world-renouncing ideologies and of conceptions of selfhood divorced from social relationships.
The differing conceptions of the self, in turn, influenced differing conceptions of what it means to die, to survive death, and to become immortal. From among these conceptions I have selected four for
comment : son (together with the world of the fathers), a full life span, heaven, and liberation from the cycle of rebirth. The reason for selecting these is because they are the ones that are prominent in
the technologies of immortality found in the extant literature of the period. It would be a mistake, however, to think that these were the only views regarding immortality in ancient India or that they represent
a chronological history of the conceptions of immortality. The literature that has survived was produced for the most part by a male elite of the Brahmin class; their concerns dominate the discourse. We have no
idea of what other classes and other peoples of ancient India may have thought about these matters. Even more significantly, we do not know the aspirations of ancient Indian women themselves or their thoughts
about their own selves and their mortality/immortality. The women we encounter in the Vedic literature are literary creations of men and women’s voices from ancient India are really the ventriloquial speech
of men. Given the social prestige of Br ahmanical writings, especially of the Vedic texts, however, the “minority view” on self and immortality found in them did have a disproportionate influence on Indian society,an influence that Collins (1982: 32), borrowing an expression from Gramsci, has called the “culturally hegemonous role” of Br ahmanism vis- a-vis other groups and ideologies of India.
I will also argue, somewhat in the manner of Mary Douglas’s (1982) paradigm of grid and group, that A) social experiences and constraints are strong [represented by+in the chart] at the personne pole and
become weaker as we move toward the moi pole; and B) the perception of women as instruments is strong [+]at the personne pole, while the perception of women as agents and individuals with desires and roles independent of their connection to males is strong at the moi pole.
III. SONS AND IMMORTALITY
The instrumentality of the wife is most evident and the self as personne most central in the conception of the son as the physical and ritual continuation of the father, as the father’s immortality. This idea is
very old. Already in theRgveda(4.4.10) we find the prayer:praj abhir agne ’mrtatvam a sy am, “Through offspring, O Angi, may we attain immortality”, The Taittir ıya Br ahmana(1.5.5.6) exhorts: praj am anu
praj ayase tad u te marty amrotam, “In your offspring you are born again; that, O mortal, is your immortality”. The wife is often said to be the completion of the husband; he becomes a complete “self ”only when he is married:"ardho ha v a esa atmano yaj j ay a tasm ad y avaj j ay am .na vindate naiva t avat praj ayate ’sarvo hi tavad bhavatyatha yadaiva j ay am .vindate ’ha praj ayate tarhi hi sarvo bhavati,“A
full half, surely, of one’s self is one’s wife. As long as one does not obtain a wife, therefore, one can never be reborn, for he then remains incomplete. As soon as he obtains a wife, however, he is reborn, for
then he becomes complete” (SB 5.2.1.10). Now, it is not altogether clear whether amrtatva and amrota in passages such as these mean immortality or merely life/vital energy. Children, just like wives and
cattle, can be seen as the expansion of the father’s life, a life that he defined here not just as biological existence but “living a full life”, the life of a rich, prosperous householder.
But I think there is more to it than that; the child is seen here as the continuation of the father both when the father is alive and especially after his death.
It is, however, not just any child that constitutes the continuation of the father; it is the son: ya u vai putrah
.sa pit a yah. pit a sa putrah
.
, “The father is the same as the son, and the son is the same as the father” (SB 12.4.3.1). At the birth of a son the father ritually takes him, saying :ang ad a ng at sam .bhavasi hrday ad adhij ayase, atm avai
putran am asi sa j ıva saradah satam, “From my every limb you spring; out of my heart you are born. You are my self ( atman) called ‘son’;ive a hundred autumns!” (P araskara Grhyas utra2.3.2; cf. BU 6.4.9).
The family line continues uninterrupted in the son despite the death of the father; the son inherits the paternal estate and replaces the father as the ritual and economic head of the family – the father’s personne
continues in the son.
As the son survives his father’s death, so the father in his son survives his own death. In a very moving song the Aitareya Br ahmana(7.13) eulogizes the son as the new birth of the father:
A debt he pays in him, and immortality he gains, the father who sees the face of his son born and alive. The husband enters the wife; becoming an embryo he enters the mother. Becoming in her a new man again, he is born in the tenth month. A wife is called ‘wife’ (j ay a), because in her he is born again (j ayate). The gods said
to men: ‘She is your mother again’. A sonless man has no world. All the beasts know this. Therefore a son mounts even his mother and sister.
In this song that would have, had he but known it, brought joy to Freud’s heart, the instrumentality of the wife in accomplishing the immortality of her husband is brought out in starkest clarity. The same vision of wife and son is the focus of Sakuntal a’s heart-wrenching outburst to Duhsanta when he feigned not to remember his affair with her: “Because a husband enters his wife and is born (j ayate)again from her, the poets of old knew that this is the ‘wifehood’ (j ay atva) of a wife(j ay a).:::A son, the wise say, is the man himself born from
himself; therefore a man will look upon his wife, the mother of his son, as his own mother. The son born from his wife is like a man’s face in a mirror”.
Mother and wife exchange roles and become fused together in their role of begetting male children to continue the male line unbroken, thus assuring male immortality.
Ancient speculation regarding the nature of semen also contributed to the equation of father and son. A man’s sperm is viewed as his rasa or essence. In other words, a man replicates himself, creates a second self
for himself, in his sperm. The Aitareya Upanisad, for example, calls semen a man in embryonic form that he carries within himself; when he deposits it in a woman it becomes his first birth:
“At the outset, this embryo comes into being within a man as semen. This radiance gathered from all the bodily parts he bears in himself ( atman) as himself ( atman). And when he deposits it in a woman, he
gives birth to it. That is his first birth.” The Taittir iya Upanisad(3.10.3) locates procreation, immortality, and orgasmic bliss in the sexual organ (praj atir amrotam ananda ity upasthe), underscoring the connection between these three concepts.
In this view of a man’s replication of himself through the ejaculation of semen and the accompanying bliss,
the wife plays a passive and clearly instrumental role;she is the fertile field, the soil, in which the seed is planted. The continuation of the father in the son is ritually and dramatically expressed in the ancient rite of transmission (BU 1.5.17–20; KsU 2.15).
When the father is about to die, the son comes and lies on top of the father, each of his organs touching the respective organs of the father.
The father consigns all his faculties to the son; entering the son he stands firm in the world even after death. In the son the father continues his personne, his role as paterfamilias. The reversal of roles is dramatic as it is permanent; if the father happens to recover he is expected either to leave home and live as an ascetic or to live at home under the authority of his son.
The theological articulation of the identity between father and son and of this generational continuity as a form of male immortality leaves mothers, wives, and daughters out of the discourse except insofar as
wife and mother.
Sakuntal a’s speech to her husband underscores the male expectation (articulated by the male author of the tale) that wives and mothers would unhesitatingly internalize this theology.
Another conception of after-death connected with the centrality of a son is the “world of fathers”. The happiness of one’s ancestors depends on food and water offerings made by their male descendants, and this
belief is often presented as a cornerstone of the imperative to marry and to father sons and as an argument against celibate modes of life.
The world of fathers, however, appears as an archaic concept already in the Br ahmanas, and it is often presented as a counterpoint to immortality associated with the “world of gods”. Fathers are said to be mortal, while gods are immortal. But like many things in Indian religious history, the belief that the destiny of the deceased ancestors is tied to their continuing relationship to their descendants endured and still endures,
ritually enshrined in the sr addha offerings. Even in death the self is very much a personne tied to enduring kinship relations.
In the middle and late Vedic literature we come across the interesting concept of punarmrtyu, re-death; people who die may be subject to death once again. Bodewitz (1996) in his recent article has argued, correctly I believe, that “re-death” is more an argument than a belief; an argument by anti-ritualists that the worlds won by rites, for example, the world of fathers, are still subject to death. One reason why re-death appears to be a debating point is that it appears only in ritualist discourses (we must
assume that they are responding to anti-ritualist arguments) and always with a corrective: those who do X will not die again, a conclusion that appears to be a preemptive answer to possible anti-ritualist claims.
Nevertheless, the world of fathers becomes identified with death (and re-death) and appears again in later discussions about rebirth: the path of fathers entailing rebirth and the path of gods assuring immortality
and liberation from rebirth.
The “world of fathers” is also interesting in what it leaves out –the mothers, the women. As its name suggests, the world of fathers is clearly a male conception closely connected with social memory and
the inheritance of property.
Thus, only the three previous generations of ancestors – father, grandfather, and great-grandfather – are addressed by name in the ritual food offerings of sr addha. These are called the a srumukha or tearful fathers, because they are still in the collective memory of the family. Prior generations are called n and ımukha or
joyful fathers, and they are anonymous. When one’s father dies, his grandfather departs from social memory and joins the anonymous group of fathers. In ancestral food offerings female ancestors enter into the
picture only as wives of the fathers.
Here, as we will see also in our discussion of heaven, women enter into the discourse and ritual only as
appendages of their husbands. The very fact that “ancestors” are called pitarah.(“fathers”) indicates the male bias in the social/ritual memory of the dead.
IV. LONG LIFE AND IMMORTALITY
The meaning of amrta that comes closest to Thieme’s (1968) first meaning is ayus, a long and full life. Long life may seem unproblematic to us with our public health programs and medical technology; but in ancient times the probability of a new-born child living its full life span, viewed ideally in ancient India as 100 years, must have been extremely low. A recurring refrain at the conclusion of Vedic descriptions of most rites is that the person “will live his full life span”sarvam ayur eti.
So, the Satapatha Br ahmana(2.1.4.4) says that a man who sets up his fires during the period when the sun moves north lives his full life span, because that period belongs to the gods, who are immortal; while
the period when the sun moves south belongs to the fathers, who are mortal.
As Thieme (1968) has pointed out,amrta is not simply “not dying” or “un-dieble” but also that which stands apart from death, that is, life, vitality, health, and all that promotes life. The connection between ayus
and amrta in the Vedic mind can be seen in the many substances that are called both ayus and amrta.
The two terms are also used together,as in amrotam ayur hiranyam.
There were at least some who proposed that a long life was the only“immortality” that humans can aspire to. The Satapatha Br ahmana (9.5.1.10) says:eta vai manusyasy amrotatvam yat sarvam ayur eti, “For
a man immortality is simply this – that he lives his full life span”.
Likewise:tad dhaitad y avac chatam .samvatsar as t avad amrotam anantam aparyantam .
sa yo haitad evam vedaivam haiv asyaitad amrotam anantam aparyantam bhavati, “A hundred years is as much as immortality –unending and everlasting; and a man who knows it in this way will have
immortality – unending and everlasting” (SB 10.1.5.4). The Satapatha (SB 2.2.2.14) also says that gods became immortal by establishing the fire in their inmost self; a man who does the same will get to live
his full life span, because “there is for him no hope of immortality”(n amrtatvasy a s asti). Gods themselves were not naturally immortal; they achieved immortality through a variety of means consisting mostly of
different ritual technologies. Likewise, humans cannot achieve their full life span naturally; it is the outcome of ritual activity and ritual knowledge.
Living a long life may appear as a somewhat individualistic enterprise, closer to the moi conception of self than the personne. Yet, within the ancient Indian context of the ritual persona, living a long life is rooted
within a ritual/familial context and is bound up with fame, riches, children, and social position. It would have seemed absurd to associate ayus or amrta with a poor, low-class, and ignorant man.
Ayus is not simply living but living well and living long. We have this refrain repeated ten times in the Ch andogya Upanisad(2.11–20):sa ya evam etad:::veda:::sarvam ayur eti jyog j ıvati mah an prajay a pa subhir
bhavati man an k ırty a, “When in this manner a man knows this :::,he lives his full life span; he lives a long life; he becomes a big man on account of offspring and livestock; and he becomes a big man on
account of his fame.” As we will see in our discussion of heaven, it is not just any human being who is the subject of this discussion about ayus; it is a married male possessing the ritual fires as the head
of a household. A wife is an absolute necessity for performing ritual functions; she is as much a sacrificial instrument as the priests, spoons, knives, and fires, an instrument in assuring her husband’s ayus.
V. HEAVEN AND IMMORTALITY
Human desire knows no bound, and the advice of some who asked humans to be content with a long life and children mostly fell on deaf ears. TheAitareya Aranyaka(2.3.2–3) astutely observes:martyen amrotam ıpsati :::sa esa purusah. samudrah.sarvam.lokam ati / yad dha kimc a snute ’ty enam manyate yady antariksalokam asnute ’ty enam manyate yady amum. lokam a snuv ıt aty evainam .manyeta, “By means of
the mortal he desires to obtain the immortal :::This man is an ocean, beyond the entire universe. Whatever he obtains, he thinks beyond it.If he obtains the intermediate world, he thinks beyond it. If he were to obtain the world up there, he would surely think beyond it.”
Men, in other words, want to be like the gods. They want to be immortal not merely in their sons, but in their own self-identity and self-consciousness. “To have the same world as the gods”,dev an am .
sa lokat a, is the refrain one hears with reference to people who perform sacrifices. We are moving here closer to a moi definition of self, a self that can survive and transcend death, a self that is the architect of its
future, a self that does not require an unbroken ritual connection to its former kin for its existence and happiness.
By the middle Vedic period it was a common belief that gods themselves were not originally immortal. A universal principle applicable to all beings, gods and humans alike, appears to have been established:
immortality is not a natural attribute of any being; it is something to be achieved. At first gods were on earth and they were mortal. It was through their full knowledge and correct performance of the sacrifice
that they became immortal and reached heaven.yaj~ nena vai dev adivam
upodakr aman, “It is by means of the sacrifice that the gods ascended to heaven” (SB 1.7.3.1).
The seers discovered this divine secret, the ritual technology of immortality, which the gods tried their level best to hide from men, and revealed it in the Vedas.Now men also possess the ritual technology to become immortal, to ascend to the world of the gods, to become like the gods.
But this ritual technology for reaching heaven is a male prerogative. Only men are taught the Vedic secrets; only men can sacrifice. But single men are not entitled to sacrifice, just as they are not entitled to
father children. Only married men accompanied by their wives have the capacity to sacrifice and thus aspire to heavenly immortality. The woman is viewed as the completion of the male sacrificial persona. The
Satapatha Br ahmana(5.2.1.10), we have seen, proclaims the wife to be one half of the husband; it is only when they are together that they constitute a full ritual person. At one level this requirement elevates
he position of a woman. Stephanie Jamison (1996) has demonstrated both the centrality and the complex nature of a wife’s participation in the Vedic ritual, bringing a much needed corrective to the oft-repeated
platitudes about the status of women in “Hindu” society.
Note, however, that the entire discourse regarding the female participation in the ritual is carried out from a male perspective; one needs a wife to perform a sacrifice, just as one needs firewood and ghee.
They are all instruments. Women, nevertheless, are different from other instruments; they are also ritual actors. Women, indeed, can aspire to heaven, but only as wives of their heaven-bound husbands. In a significant rite during the Soma sacrifice the sacrificer and his wife pretend to climb the sacrificial pole that connects heaven to earth. In the Taittir ıya Samhit a(1.7.9.1–2) the sacrificer tells his wife:
,“Come here, wife, let us climb to heaven, let us, indeed, climb to heaven.I will climb to heaven for both of us.:::To heaven, to the gods we have come! We have become immortal! We have become Praj apati’s
children! May I be joined with children; may children be joined with me! May I be joined with increase of wealth; may increase of wealth be joined with me!”
Besides the union of husband and wife in heaven, this passage also highlights the connections among several things wehave examined: sacrifice, heaven, children, wealth.
Women, in this ritual theology, are not independent ritual actors.They can only hope to get to heaven as wives, hanging on to their husbands’ ritual coat-tails, but at least they can get there. We have come some way from immortality defined as the son where the wife and women are instruments but not participants.
VI. MOKSA AND IMMORTALITY
All the technologies of immortality we have looked at thus far are located within the social context of family, rituals, and wealth. Indeed, the possession of wealth was regarded as a prerequisite for performing
any rite, many of which were quite expensive to conduct, requiring the services of numerous ritual experts.To put it crassly, you have to be rich to become immortal.
The middle of the first millennium B.C.E. was a watershed in the cultural and religious history of India. Drastic social, political, and economic changes took place during this period principally in the Gangetic plain. A surplus and complex economy, the creation of larger political units coming close to state formation (Thapar, 1984), facility of travel, trade, and urbanization – all contributed to the emergence of new religions such as Buddhism and Jainism based on ideologies and religious practices very different from the Vedic,ideologies that underlie at least some of the literature of the late vedic period,including the Upanisads. Let me highlight two elements of the new religious culture which underscore the emerging centrality of self as moi.They are the belief in rebirth and the institution of world renunciation.Rebirth asserts the continuity of individual identity across life times both in the past and into the future. The same individual is born,
dies, and is reborn, repeating this cycle indefinitely. The relationships and roles a person establishes within a given lifetime – wife/husband,children, and parents, as well as kinship, caste, professional, and political
ties –, relationships that constitute a personne, are all fleeting and do not constitute one’s self, one’s moi. Indeed, over several lifetimes an individual will enter into and sever many such relationships, as presented
graphically in a passage from the R am ayana(2.98.25–26): “As two pieces of wood might meet upon the open sea and, having met, drift apart after a few brief moments, so too do your wives and children,
your relatives and riches meet with you and hasten away” (tr. Pollock).
The doctrine of karma, furthermore, proclaims that an individual is the architect of his or her own future.
A renouncer does here and now what death does at the end of life; he severs the social relationships that constitute his personne. An ascetic leaves home and family, severs all kinship and economic ties, and lives
as a homeless, wandering mendicant. He loses all title to property, his marriage is dissolved ipso facto, and he is often regarded as ritually dead.
The new ideology puts into question many of the central elements of previous conceptions of immortality. Let us take son and semen, for xample. In the rebirth ideology the son is a separate individual with a
long series of prior births and deaths; he is not the continuation of the father and his relation to his present father is contingent at best. The new ideology also questions older ideas about the meaning of semen.
In one of the earliest attempts to describe the process of rebirth (BU 6.29–16; CU 5.3–10; cf. JB 1.45–46), the self of the deceased person is said to go up as smoke to the sky. It finally reaches the moon and
comes down as rain. The individual, now transformed into water, is absorbed into plants and finally becomes food. A man eats that food and transforms it into semen, which he deposits in a woman, giving rise
to a new birth of the dead man. As opposed to the doctrine which sees the semen as the condensed self of the father, the new doctrine sees the semen as totally another person transformed into a new dimension.
The father is a mere conduit, a reprocessing machine, for another being who is reborn by means of his semen.
The relationship of the current generation to its forefathers and the imperative of begetting sons are also put into question. The Brhad aranyaka Upanisad(4.4.22) has this to say about people who have discovered their true self, their moi:, “It was when they knew that that men of old did not desire offspring, reasoning: ‘Ours is
this self, it is our world. What then is the use of offspring for us?’ So they gave up the desire for sons, the desire for wealth, and the desire for worlds, and undertook the mendicant life.” Note again how sons,
wealth, and worlds are brought together here as the objects of desire; the desire for worlds demand the desire for the means of attaining them, namely, sons and wealth (= rites). Another passage responds to
the older idea that a wife completes the self of the husband:
:::, “So even today when one is single, one has the desire: ‘I wish I had a wife so I could father offspring. I wish I had wealth so I could perform rites.’ As long as someone has not obtained either of these, he considers himself to be utterly incomplete. Now, this is his completeness – his mind is his self; his speech is his wife; his breath is his offspring; his sight is his human wealth:::; and his hearing is his divine wealth :::” (BU 1.4.17).
This is as clear a statement of self as moi as we can expect: one’s self is self-contained, it does not need external things or relationships to make it complete.
In the new ideology, immortality is not seen as a form of survival after death; within the rebirth ideology survival is guaranteed to all.
Neither is it some desirable location (e.g., heaven) after death, for now all those locations are regarded as way-stations in the unending cycle of births and deaths. Immortality is the liberation from that cycle, from
being subject to repeated births and deaths, by means of some type of secret and powerful knowledge.
How do women fare in this new ideological climate? An answer to this question emerges in the story about Y ajnavalkya and his two wives related twice in the Brhad aranyaka Upanisad(2.4; 4.5): “Now,
Y ajnavalkya had two wives, Maitrey ı and K aty ayan ı. Of the two, Maitrey ı was a woman who took part in theological discussions, while K aty ayan ı’s understanding was limited to womanly matters. One day,
as he was preparing to undertake a different mode of life, Y ajnavalkya said: ‘Maitrey ı, I am about to go away from this place. So come, let me make a settlement between you and K aty ayan ı.’ Maitrey ı asked in
reply: ‘If I were to possess the entire world filled with wealth, sir, would
it, or would it not, make me immortal (amrt a).’ ‘No,’ said Y ajnavalkya, ‘it will only permit you to live the life of a wealthy person. Through wealth one cannot expect immortality.’ ‘What is the point in getting something that will not make me immortal?’ retorted Maitrey ı. ‘Tell me instead, sir, all that you know’ ”.A couple of points about this story: first, this is possibly the first time in the whole of the Vedic literature that the feminine adjective amrt a(“immortal”) is used with reference to an actual flesh-and-blood woman, the adjective I have used as the title of this paper.
Maitrey ı dares to ask – or, to be more precise, the author dares to put this question in Maitrey ı’s mouth – how she can become immortal, and she does that as an individual in her own right and not just as the
wife of Y aj navalkya. Indeed, if the wife accompanied the husband into immortality, as we saw within the context of the sacrifice, then Maitrey ı needn’t have worried; she would have become immortal automatically
as part of her husband’s self. But now the secret to immortality is not the sacrifice which demands wealth but knowledge which cannot be obtained vicariously. To become immortal Maitrey ı did not need wealth;
she had to know what Y aj navalkya knew.
In an interesting reversal, the acknowledgment of female agency with respect to immortality is accompanied by the denial to women of an instrumental role in the acquisition of male immortality.
The passage I cited above BU (1.4.17) tells a man not to consider himself incomplete if he lacks a wife or son; his completeness lies within himself, and his wife is his speech. In a curious but significant way male independence from women created independence for women as well, and vice versa.
Women’s liberation obviously did not come to India with the rebirth/liberation ideology, but at least now women become part of the discourse on human aspiration for immortality. This is nicely demonstrated by the third and fourth books of the Brhad aranyaka Upanisad, a section that originally formed the conclusion of the great Satapatha Br ahmana and constitutes what I would call “The Triumph of Y ajnavalkya”, the individual responsible for the composition of the White Yajurveda. This triumphant conclusion of that Veda contains
four episodes that establishes Y aj navalkya as the foremost theologian of the time. King Janaka appears as a main figure in the first three; the fourth is the conversation between Y ajnavalkya and his wife Maitrey ı.
Renowned for his knowledge,the presence of Janaka is a deliberate literary strategy of the author to highlight Y ajnavalkya’s supremacy in knowledge. If he can teach Janaka, a listener will think, he must be
the greatest!
In the first of these episodes a group of distinguished theologians have assembled at the king’s court, and Janaka wants to find out who among them is the most learned. In this group of theologians is one
woman, G arg ıV acaknav ı. Her mere presence would have raised many a Br ahmanical eyebrow, and I think that this was a deliberate literary strategy of the author. Within the literary structure of this story, she plays
a crucial role precisely because she is a woman. First, G arg ı is the only member of the group who questions Y ajnavalkya twice. On the second occasion she makes this boast to her male colleagues [BU 3.8.1–2]:
br ahmana bhagavanto hant aham imam .dvau pra snau prakay ami/ tau cen me vaksyati na vai j atu yusm akam imam ka scid brahodyam jeteti,
“Distinguished Brahmins! I am going to ask this man two questions. If he can give the answers to them, none of you will be able to defeat him in a theological debate.” Then she challenges Y ajnavalkya:“I rise to challenge you, Y ajnavalkya, with two questions, much as a fierce warrior of K a si or Videha, stringing his unstrung bow and taking two deadly arrows in his hand, would rise to challenge an enemy. Give me the answers to them!” The military image is interesting; as Mrs. Thatcher is said to have been in her cabinet, Garg ı is presented here as the only man in that male assembly. The image is also interesting because both of G arg ı’s questions contain the metaphor of weaving, in all likelihood an occupation closely associated with women (see Rau, 1970). The author of the tale mixes his metaphors, so to speak, to create the wonderful character of G arg ı – woman, theologian, and warrior. After Y ajnavalkya answers her questions, she turns to her male colleagues: “Distinguished Brahmins! You should consider yourself lucky if you escape from this man by merely paying him your respects. None of you will ever defeat him in a theological debate”
[BU 3.8.12]. She, in other words, tells her male colleagues: “If I can’t beat him, none of you can!” The leader of the group, S akalya, did not heed her warning, and lost his head after he was defeated by
Y ajnavalkya.
The triumph of Y ajnavalkya concludes with his instruction of another woman, his wife Maitrey ı. The prominence of women in this section, I think, is a literary strategy intended to show the triumph of the new
ideology connected with Y ajnavalkya: even women can understand the truth better than those old fogies!
Going beyond the Br ahmanical tradition, we see in Buddhism and Jainism the world’s first voluntary organizations for women – the Buddhist and Jain orders of nuns. Here are women who leave their
families, break their kinship ties, and voluntarily and possibly against the wishes of their families enter a community of celibate women. This is quite a departure from Manu’s dictum: “A girl, a young woman, or
even an old woman should not do anything independently, even in her own house. In childhood a woman should be under her father’s control, in youth under her husband’s, and when her husband is dead, under her
son’s. She should never be independent” (MDh 5.147–48). Here are Buddhist and Jain nuns exercising a daring freedom of choice, living lives in female communities outside direct male control, and taking
control of their own sexuality. What better example of the ultimate triumph of the self as moi.
VII. THE MORE THINGS CHANGE:::
way I have structured my comments may leave the impression that the path from personneto moi and the
concomitant changes in the position of women vis- a-vis immortality chart a clear chronological line, each ideological change leaving its predecessors in the dust. This, of course, is far from the truth. Although
there is some detectable chronology to these changes, given the problems nherent in dating Indian texts with any degree of accuracy and certainty, building a chronology of these changes is very much like building a
house of cards. More importantly, however, in India older ideologies did not change, yielding place to new; as Louis Dumont (1960) has accurately observed, Indian religious history by and large has moved by
way of aggregation, putting new stones on old, rather than substitution.
So, for example, rites and ideologies involving sons and the world of the fathers coexisted and continued to coexist in India side by side with the ideologies of rebirth and liberation.
Attempts, however, were made to synthesize the differing conceptions of death and immortality. TheAitareya Upanisad(2.1–4), for example, attempts a synthesis in terms of the three births of a man:
At the outset, this embryo comes into being within a man as semen. This radiance
gathered from all the bodily parts he bears in himself ( atman) as himself ( atman).
And when a man deposits [lit. pour] it in a woman, he gives birth to it. That is his
first birth.
It becomes one with the woman’s body ( atman), as if it were a part of her own body. As a result, it does not harm her. And she nourishes this self ( atman)ofhis that has entered her. As she nourishes him, so he should nourish her. The woman carries him as the embryo. At the beginning, he nourishes the child even before
its birth. When he nourishes the child even before its birth, he thereby nourishes himself ( atman) for the continuance of these worlds, for it is in this way that these worlds continue. That is his second birth.
And he – this self ( atman) of his – is appointed to carry out holy rites, while his other self, after it has done all it has to do, becomes old and dies. As soon as he departs from this world, he is born again. That is his third birth.
Here we have a curious combination of “selfhoods” in terms of new births, that is, taking on new selves. The first self/birth is when one ejaculates oneself as one’s semen into a woman. Here the coming out
of the semen from one’s body is viewed as a birth, just as the coming out of the baby from the mother’s body. Both these hark back to the conception of self as son. The self of his that is the son continues his
ritual tasks after his death, while his “other self ” takes birth anew. This third birth is, of course, based on the rebirth ideology.
Another attempt at synthesis is found in theBrhad aranyaka Upanisad (1.5.16) in terms of the different worlds that a man aspires to win: “Now, there are only three worlds: the world of men, the world of ancestors, and the world of gods. One can win this world of men only through a son, and by no other rite,whereas one wins the world of ancestors through rites, and the world of gods through
knowledge. The best of these, clearly, is the world of gods, and for this reason they praise knowledge.”
The coexistence of different notions of self and after-death states makes for a messy situation. Clarity is often achieved in such situations only at the expense of accuracy. The Hindu funeral rite is a good example
of this “mess theory” of Indian religious history. Theoretically, this is the one rite that should bring to the foreground a culture’s ideas about death and afterlife. Given that the dominant ideology in Indian culture
with respect to afterlife is rebirth, we should expect to find this belief clearly articulated in the funeral rite. The opposite is, in fact, the case.
An observer looking solely at the Hindu funeral rite will have no idea that Indians believed in rebirth; this belief is completely ignored in favor of the ideology of the world of the fathers. The same is true of
all rites connected with ancestral offerings.
In the religions rooted in the ideologies of rebirth and liberation and wedded to the concept of self asmoi, such as Buddhism and Jainism, furthermore, we should expect to find the claim of women to liberation
and immortality articulated loud and clear. But that is not the case. There is great ambivalence and ambiguity in both traditions regarding the spiritual capabilities of women. The Buddha is supposed to have opened
his monastic order to women with great reluctance and at the urging of his favorite discipline Ananda; after giving his reluctant assent, he is said to have predicted that had women not been admitted the Buddhist
way of life would have lasted 1000 years, but because women had been admitted it will last only 500 years (Lamotte, 1958, 211). We do not know, of course, what the Buddha himself thought; but the story is
direct evidence of the great ambivalence the Buddhist male monastic community (we have no idea as to what the nuns themselves thought about this) must have felt about the order of nuns and the spiritual
capabilities of women. Diana Paul (1985) details the debates that raged within Mah ay ana Buddhism regarding the possibility of women becoming a Buddha. And more recently Padmanabh Jaini (1991) has
chronicled the debates between the Digambara and Svet ambara Jains about the possibility of women attaining liberation as women, that is, without being reborn as men.
The same ideologies that brought a modicum of agency to women also created ascetic traditions that considered women as temptresses and created a truly misogynic literature (Olivelle, 1995). Within the
Br ahmanical/Hindu traditions there has been an ongoing controversy whether it was legitimate for women to become ascetics (Olivelle, 1993,183–90). And as we have seen, the legal codes, composed many centuries
after the emergence of the rebirth ideology, repeatedly insist that women are never to be independent agents either in the legal/economic or in the ritual/religious field (MDh 5.147–56; see note 28).
Nevertheless, within the rebirth ideology women have at least had the opportunity to choose not to marry, to control their sexuality, to live independently of male authority, to pursue individual aspirations, and
even to become religious elite. They do not have to be mere instruments of their husbands’ aspirations and have the opportunity to become agents of their own destiny.
The Sanskrit term for “immortal” and “immortality” isvamrta. It consists of mrta, which is the past participle of the verbal root mr to die, with the negative prefixa. This is a somewhat curious formation,
because theoretically it should mean “not dead” rather than “nondieable” or “immortal”, which in Sanskrit should be amartya. Negated past participles, however, tend to have an “un-Xable” rather than an
“un-Xed” meaning, and the former is the primary meaning of amrta.
The term amrta as “immortal”, however, is not a Sanskrit invention; it has solid Indo-European roots, with the Greek cognate ambrotos(from which is derived ambrosia) and the Avestan ame sa. Paul Thieme (1968)
has studied these terms and their meanings in detail; I summarize here his findings.
Thieme has shown that in Indo-European the term had two distinct meanings: the first he calls “Lebenskraft spendend”, “giving vitality”;and the second, “unsterblich”, “immortal”. The spectrum of objects to
which the term amrta is applied in the Vedic texts, objects from clarified butter(ghee), gold, and the Soma drink to food, water, semen, son, and gods,supports Thieme’s conclusion.The term amrta does not always mean immortal in the sense we usually attach to it; it often means vitality or vital energy (Thieme’s Lebenskaft) – it is a full and prosperous life and all things that sustain and promote such a life, including food, drink,cattle, and medicine.
Amrta can thus indicate both life/immortality,as well as instruments that sustain life and ward off death. The two terms amrta and ayus(long and full life) are often juxtaposed and form a single complex of meanings. Indeed, the Satapatha Br ahmana(10.2.6.7–9) sees long life as a visible sign that a man is destined to
become immortal: “The life of a hundred years makes for heaven.:::He alone who lives a hundred years or more attains to that immortal life.”
I disagree with Thieme, however, in taking these two meanings as somehow distinct and separate. Both because of the identity of the term and because life in all its forms confronts death as its opposite, I
think what we have, at least in ancient India, is a spectrum of meanings that are never totally separate, each merging into and influencing the conception of the others. It is also this broad semantic range of the
term that permitted its use simultaneously with regard to a wide variety of objects without contradiction. The term underwent further widening as the conception of death and the after-death state underwent drastic
change within the ideology of rebirth (sams ara), coming to signify not just survival after death but the liberation from the cycle of rebirth(moksa).
II. CONCEPTIONS OF THE SELF
The changing conceptions of immortality in ancient India were closely connected with the changing conception of “self ”, of what it means to be a human individual. Michael Carrithers (1985), responding to
Marcel Mauss’s attempt to trace the history of the ‘self ’makes a useful distinction between personne and moi, a distinction that provides a helpful heuristic tool to understand the connection between three
things: conception of self, conception of immortality, and the position of women.
Carrithers (1985: 235–36) defines personneas “a conception of the individual human being as a member of a (1) significant and (2) ordered collectivity”, and moi as “a conception of (1) the physical and mental
individuality of human beings within (2) a natural or spiritual cosmos, and (3) interacting with each other as moral agents”.
I want to extend Carrithers’ somewhat narrow definition of personne to include the selfhood of an individual, especially of a married male, within the society of ancient India hierarchically ordered according
to class and gender. A personneis defined in terms of interlocking social relationships – to living and deceased members of one’s family, to members of one’s caste, to residents of one’s village, and so forth.
When self is defined in terms of personne, the collectivity of which an individual is a member plays a determining role in the definition of a person’s self and vitally affects an individual’s choices and goals.
Self as moi, on the other hand, sees the individual as a unique and self-contained entity transcending temporary social relationships. This conception of the self emerged in India within the context of the rebirth
ideology which sees social relationships as fleeting and ephemeral, not affecting the inner core of one’s self.
In distinguishing the two conceptions of self I am not suggesting that personne and moi are watertight and self-contained categories.
These two conceptions of the self do exercise influence on each other especially in complex societies where an individual often belongs to several “collectivities”.
In ancient India, such collectivities may have included family/lineage, caste, language group, city/village, kingdom, and sectarian religious affiliation. I like to see the two conceptions of self at two ideal-typical poles of a continuous line [see chart], in which the features of the one penetrate the other.
Different social experiences, furthermore, must underlie these conceptions of self. I have argued elsewhere that the development of large bureaucratic states with complex economies and the rise of urbanization
along the Gangetic plain in the middle of the first millennium BCE were, at least in part, responsible for the rise of world-renouncing ideologies and of conceptions of selfhood divorced from social relationships.
The differing conceptions of the self, in turn, influenced differing conceptions of what it means to die, to survive death, and to become immortal. From among these conceptions I have selected four for
comment : son (together with the world of the fathers), a full life span, heaven, and liberation from the cycle of rebirth. The reason for selecting these is because they are the ones that are prominent in
the technologies of immortality found in the extant literature of the period. It would be a mistake, however, to think that these were the only views regarding immortality in ancient India or that they represent
a chronological history of the conceptions of immortality. The literature that has survived was produced for the most part by a male elite of the Brahmin class; their concerns dominate the discourse. We have no
idea of what other classes and other peoples of ancient India may have thought about these matters. Even more significantly, we do not know the aspirations of ancient Indian women themselves or their thoughts
about their own selves and their mortality/immortality. The women we encounter in the Vedic literature are literary creations of men and women’s voices from ancient India are really the ventriloquial speech
of men. Given the social prestige of Br ahmanical writings, especially of the Vedic texts, however, the “minority view” on self and immortality found in them did have a disproportionate influence on Indian society,an influence that Collins (1982: 32), borrowing an expression from Gramsci, has called the “culturally hegemonous role” of Br ahmanism vis- a-vis other groups and ideologies of India.
I will also argue, somewhat in the manner of Mary Douglas’s (1982) paradigm of grid and group, that A) social experiences and constraints are strong [represented by+in the chart] at the personne pole and
become weaker as we move toward the moi pole; and B) the perception of women as instruments is strong [+]at the personne pole, while the perception of women as agents and individuals with desires and roles independent of their connection to males is strong at the moi pole.
III. SONS AND IMMORTALITY
The instrumentality of the wife is most evident and the self as personne most central in the conception of the son as the physical and ritual continuation of the father, as the father’s immortality. This idea is
very old. Already in theRgveda(4.4.10) we find the prayer:praj abhir agne ’mrtatvam a sy am, “Through offspring, O Angi, may we attain immortality”, The Taittir ıya Br ahmana(1.5.5.6) exhorts: praj am anu
praj ayase tad u te marty amrotam, “In your offspring you are born again; that, O mortal, is your immortality”. The wife is often said to be the completion of the husband; he becomes a complete “self ”only when he is married:"ardho ha v a esa atmano yaj j ay a tasm ad y avaj j ay am .na vindate naiva t avat praj ayate ’sarvo hi tavad bhavatyatha yadaiva j ay am .vindate ’ha praj ayate tarhi hi sarvo bhavati,“A
full half, surely, of one’s self is one’s wife. As long as one does not obtain a wife, therefore, one can never be reborn, for he then remains incomplete. As soon as he obtains a wife, however, he is reborn, for
then he becomes complete” (SB 5.2.1.10). Now, it is not altogether clear whether amrtatva and amrota in passages such as these mean immortality or merely life/vital energy. Children, just like wives and
cattle, can be seen as the expansion of the father’s life, a life that he defined here not just as biological existence but “living a full life”, the life of a rich, prosperous householder.
But I think there is more to it than that; the child is seen here as the continuation of the father both when the father is alive and especially after his death.
It is, however, not just any child that constitutes the continuation of the father; it is the son: ya u vai putrah
.sa pit a yah. pit a sa putrah
.
, “The father is the same as the son, and the son is the same as the father” (SB 12.4.3.1). At the birth of a son the father ritually takes him, saying :ang ad a ng at sam .bhavasi hrday ad adhij ayase, atm avai
putran am asi sa j ıva saradah satam, “From my every limb you spring; out of my heart you are born. You are my self ( atman) called ‘son’;ive a hundred autumns!” (P araskara Grhyas utra2.3.2; cf. BU 6.4.9).
The family line continues uninterrupted in the son despite the death of the father; the son inherits the paternal estate and replaces the father as the ritual and economic head of the family – the father’s personne
continues in the son.
As the son survives his father’s death, so the father in his son survives his own death. In a very moving song the Aitareya Br ahmana(7.13) eulogizes the son as the new birth of the father:
A debt he pays in him, and immortality he gains, the father who sees the face of his son born and alive. The husband enters the wife; becoming an embryo he enters the mother. Becoming in her a new man again, he is born in the tenth month. A wife is called ‘wife’ (j ay a), because in her he is born again (j ayate). The gods said
to men: ‘She is your mother again’. A sonless man has no world. All the beasts know this. Therefore a son mounts even his mother and sister.
In this song that would have, had he but known it, brought joy to Freud’s heart, the instrumentality of the wife in accomplishing the immortality of her husband is brought out in starkest clarity. The same vision of wife and son is the focus of Sakuntal a’s heart-wrenching outburst to Duhsanta when he feigned not to remember his affair with her: “Because a husband enters his wife and is born (j ayate)again from her, the poets of old knew that this is the ‘wifehood’ (j ay atva) of a wife(j ay a).:::A son, the wise say, is the man himself born from
himself; therefore a man will look upon his wife, the mother of his son, as his own mother. The son born from his wife is like a man’s face in a mirror”.
Mother and wife exchange roles and become fused together in their role of begetting male children to continue the male line unbroken, thus assuring male immortality.
Ancient speculation regarding the nature of semen also contributed to the equation of father and son. A man’s sperm is viewed as his rasa or essence. In other words, a man replicates himself, creates a second self
for himself, in his sperm. The Aitareya Upanisad, for example, calls semen a man in embryonic form that he carries within himself; when he deposits it in a woman it becomes his first birth:
“At the outset, this embryo comes into being within a man as semen. This radiance gathered from all the bodily parts he bears in himself ( atman) as himself ( atman). And when he deposits it in a woman, he
gives birth to it. That is his first birth.” The Taittir iya Upanisad(3.10.3) locates procreation, immortality, and orgasmic bliss in the sexual organ (praj atir amrotam ananda ity upasthe), underscoring the connection between these three concepts.
In this view of a man’s replication of himself through the ejaculation of semen and the accompanying bliss,
the wife plays a passive and clearly instrumental role;she is the fertile field, the soil, in which the seed is planted. The continuation of the father in the son is ritually and dramatically expressed in the ancient rite of transmission (BU 1.5.17–20; KsU 2.15).
When the father is about to die, the son comes and lies on top of the father, each of his organs touching the respective organs of the father.
The father consigns all his faculties to the son; entering the son he stands firm in the world even after death. In the son the father continues his personne, his role as paterfamilias. The reversal of roles is dramatic as it is permanent; if the father happens to recover he is expected either to leave home and live as an ascetic or to live at home under the authority of his son.
The theological articulation of the identity between father and son and of this generational continuity as a form of male immortality leaves mothers, wives, and daughters out of the discourse except insofar as
wife and mother.
Sakuntal a’s speech to her husband underscores the male expectation (articulated by the male author of the tale) that wives and mothers would unhesitatingly internalize this theology.
Another conception of after-death connected with the centrality of a son is the “world of fathers”. The happiness of one’s ancestors depends on food and water offerings made by their male descendants, and this
belief is often presented as a cornerstone of the imperative to marry and to father sons and as an argument against celibate modes of life.
The world of fathers, however, appears as an archaic concept already in the Br ahmanas, and it is often presented as a counterpoint to immortality associated with the “world of gods”. Fathers are said to be mortal, while gods are immortal. But like many things in Indian religious history, the belief that the destiny of the deceased ancestors is tied to their continuing relationship to their descendants endured and still endures,
ritually enshrined in the sr addha offerings. Even in death the self is very much a personne tied to enduring kinship relations.
In the middle and late Vedic literature we come across the interesting concept of punarmrtyu, re-death; people who die may be subject to death once again. Bodewitz (1996) in his recent article has argued, correctly I believe, that “re-death” is more an argument than a belief; an argument by anti-ritualists that the worlds won by rites, for example, the world of fathers, are still subject to death. One reason why re-death appears to be a debating point is that it appears only in ritualist discourses (we must
assume that they are responding to anti-ritualist arguments) and always with a corrective: those who do X will not die again, a conclusion that appears to be a preemptive answer to possible anti-ritualist claims.
Nevertheless, the world of fathers becomes identified with death (and re-death) and appears again in later discussions about rebirth: the path of fathers entailing rebirth and the path of gods assuring immortality
and liberation from rebirth.
The “world of fathers” is also interesting in what it leaves out –the mothers, the women. As its name suggests, the world of fathers is clearly a male conception closely connected with social memory and
the inheritance of property.
Thus, only the three previous generations of ancestors – father, grandfather, and great-grandfather – are addressed by name in the ritual food offerings of sr addha. These are called the a srumukha or tearful fathers, because they are still in the collective memory of the family. Prior generations are called n and ımukha or
joyful fathers, and they are anonymous. When one’s father dies, his grandfather departs from social memory and joins the anonymous group of fathers. In ancestral food offerings female ancestors enter into the
picture only as wives of the fathers.
Here, as we will see also in our discussion of heaven, women enter into the discourse and ritual only as
appendages of their husbands. The very fact that “ancestors” are called pitarah.(“fathers”) indicates the male bias in the social/ritual memory of the dead.
IV. LONG LIFE AND IMMORTALITY
The meaning of amrta that comes closest to Thieme’s (1968) first meaning is ayus, a long and full life. Long life may seem unproblematic to us with our public health programs and medical technology; but in ancient times the probability of a new-born child living its full life span, viewed ideally in ancient India as 100 years, must have been extremely low. A recurring refrain at the conclusion of Vedic descriptions of most rites is that the person “will live his full life span”sarvam ayur eti.
So, the Satapatha Br ahmana(2.1.4.4) says that a man who sets up his fires during the period when the sun moves north lives his full life span, because that period belongs to the gods, who are immortal; while
the period when the sun moves south belongs to the fathers, who are mortal.
As Thieme (1968) has pointed out,amrta is not simply “not dying” or “un-dieble” but also that which stands apart from death, that is, life, vitality, health, and all that promotes life. The connection between ayus
and amrta in the Vedic mind can be seen in the many substances that are called both ayus and amrta.
The two terms are also used together,as in amrotam ayur hiranyam.
There were at least some who proposed that a long life was the only“immortality” that humans can aspire to. The Satapatha Br ahmana (9.5.1.10) says:eta vai manusyasy amrotatvam yat sarvam ayur eti, “For
a man immortality is simply this – that he lives his full life span”.
Likewise:tad dhaitad y avac chatam .samvatsar as t avad amrotam anantam aparyantam .
sa yo haitad evam vedaivam haiv asyaitad amrotam anantam aparyantam bhavati, “A hundred years is as much as immortality –unending and everlasting; and a man who knows it in this way will have
immortality – unending and everlasting” (SB 10.1.5.4). The Satapatha (SB 2.2.2.14) also says that gods became immortal by establishing the fire in their inmost self; a man who does the same will get to live
his full life span, because “there is for him no hope of immortality”(n amrtatvasy a s asti). Gods themselves were not naturally immortal; they achieved immortality through a variety of means consisting mostly of
different ritual technologies. Likewise, humans cannot achieve their full life span naturally; it is the outcome of ritual activity and ritual knowledge.
Living a long life may appear as a somewhat individualistic enterprise, closer to the moi conception of self than the personne. Yet, within the ancient Indian context of the ritual persona, living a long life is rooted
within a ritual/familial context and is bound up with fame, riches, children, and social position. It would have seemed absurd to associate ayus or amrta with a poor, low-class, and ignorant man.
Ayus is not simply living but living well and living long. We have this refrain repeated ten times in the Ch andogya Upanisad(2.11–20):sa ya evam etad:::veda:::sarvam ayur eti jyog j ıvati mah an prajay a pa subhir
bhavati man an k ırty a, “When in this manner a man knows this :::,he lives his full life span; he lives a long life; he becomes a big man on account of offspring and livestock; and he becomes a big man on
account of his fame.” As we will see in our discussion of heaven, it is not just any human being who is the subject of this discussion about ayus; it is a married male possessing the ritual fires as the head
of a household. A wife is an absolute necessity for performing ritual functions; she is as much a sacrificial instrument as the priests, spoons, knives, and fires, an instrument in assuring her husband’s ayus.
V. HEAVEN AND IMMORTALITY
Human desire knows no bound, and the advice of some who asked humans to be content with a long life and children mostly fell on deaf ears. TheAitareya Aranyaka(2.3.2–3) astutely observes:martyen amrotam ıpsati :::sa esa purusah. samudrah.sarvam.lokam ati / yad dha kimc a snute ’ty enam manyate yady antariksalokam asnute ’ty enam manyate yady amum. lokam a snuv ıt aty evainam .manyeta, “By means of
the mortal he desires to obtain the immortal :::This man is an ocean, beyond the entire universe. Whatever he obtains, he thinks beyond it.If he obtains the intermediate world, he thinks beyond it. If he were to obtain the world up there, he would surely think beyond it.”
Men, in other words, want to be like the gods. They want to be immortal not merely in their sons, but in their own self-identity and self-consciousness. “To have the same world as the gods”,dev an am .
sa lokat a, is the refrain one hears with reference to people who perform sacrifices. We are moving here closer to a moi definition of self, a self that can survive and transcend death, a self that is the architect of its
future, a self that does not require an unbroken ritual connection to its former kin for its existence and happiness.
By the middle Vedic period it was a common belief that gods themselves were not originally immortal. A universal principle applicable to all beings, gods and humans alike, appears to have been established:
immortality is not a natural attribute of any being; it is something to be achieved. At first gods were on earth and they were mortal. It was through their full knowledge and correct performance of the sacrifice
that they became immortal and reached heaven.yaj~ nena vai dev adivam
upodakr aman, “It is by means of the sacrifice that the gods ascended to heaven” (SB 1.7.3.1).
The seers discovered this divine secret, the ritual technology of immortality, which the gods tried their level best to hide from men, and revealed it in the Vedas.Now men also possess the ritual technology to become immortal, to ascend to the world of the gods, to become like the gods.
But this ritual technology for reaching heaven is a male prerogative. Only men are taught the Vedic secrets; only men can sacrifice. But single men are not entitled to sacrifice, just as they are not entitled to
father children. Only married men accompanied by their wives have the capacity to sacrifice and thus aspire to heavenly immortality. The woman is viewed as the completion of the male sacrificial persona. The
Satapatha Br ahmana(5.2.1.10), we have seen, proclaims the wife to be one half of the husband; it is only when they are together that they constitute a full ritual person. At one level this requirement elevates
he position of a woman. Stephanie Jamison (1996) has demonstrated both the centrality and the complex nature of a wife’s participation in the Vedic ritual, bringing a much needed corrective to the oft-repeated
platitudes about the status of women in “Hindu” society.
Note, however, that the entire discourse regarding the female participation in the ritual is carried out from a male perspective; one needs a wife to perform a sacrifice, just as one needs firewood and ghee.
They are all instruments. Women, nevertheless, are different from other instruments; they are also ritual actors. Women, indeed, can aspire to heaven, but only as wives of their heaven-bound husbands. In a significant rite during the Soma sacrifice the sacrificer and his wife pretend to climb the sacrificial pole that connects heaven to earth. In the Taittir ıya Samhit a(1.7.9.1–2) the sacrificer tells his wife:
,“Come here, wife, let us climb to heaven, let us, indeed, climb to heaven.I will climb to heaven for both of us.:::To heaven, to the gods we have come! We have become immortal! We have become Praj apati’s
children! May I be joined with children; may children be joined with me! May I be joined with increase of wealth; may increase of wealth be joined with me!”
Besides the union of husband and wife in heaven, this passage also highlights the connections among several things wehave examined: sacrifice, heaven, children, wealth.
Women, in this ritual theology, are not independent ritual actors.They can only hope to get to heaven as wives, hanging on to their husbands’ ritual coat-tails, but at least they can get there. We have come some way from immortality defined as the son where the wife and women are instruments but not participants.
VI. MOKSA AND IMMORTALITY
All the technologies of immortality we have looked at thus far are located within the social context of family, rituals, and wealth. Indeed, the possession of wealth was regarded as a prerequisite for performing
any rite, many of which were quite expensive to conduct, requiring the services of numerous ritual experts.To put it crassly, you have to be rich to become immortal.
The middle of the first millennium B.C.E. was a watershed in the cultural and religious history of India. Drastic social, political, and economic changes took place during this period principally in the Gangetic plain. A surplus and complex economy, the creation of larger political units coming close to state formation (Thapar, 1984), facility of travel, trade, and urbanization – all contributed to the emergence of new religions such as Buddhism and Jainism based on ideologies and religious practices very different from the Vedic,ideologies that underlie at least some of the literature of the late vedic period,including the Upanisads. Let me highlight two elements of the new religious culture which underscore the emerging centrality of self as moi.They are the belief in rebirth and the institution of world renunciation.Rebirth asserts the continuity of individual identity across life times both in the past and into the future. The same individual is born,
dies, and is reborn, repeating this cycle indefinitely. The relationships and roles a person establishes within a given lifetime – wife/husband,children, and parents, as well as kinship, caste, professional, and political
ties –, relationships that constitute a personne, are all fleeting and do not constitute one’s self, one’s moi. Indeed, over several lifetimes an individual will enter into and sever many such relationships, as presented
graphically in a passage from the R am ayana(2.98.25–26): “As two pieces of wood might meet upon the open sea and, having met, drift apart after a few brief moments, so too do your wives and children,
your relatives and riches meet with you and hasten away” (tr. Pollock).
The doctrine of karma, furthermore, proclaims that an individual is the architect of his or her own future.
A renouncer does here and now what death does at the end of life; he severs the social relationships that constitute his personne. An ascetic leaves home and family, severs all kinship and economic ties, and lives
as a homeless, wandering mendicant. He loses all title to property, his marriage is dissolved ipso facto, and he is often regarded as ritually dead.
The new ideology puts into question many of the central elements of previous conceptions of immortality. Let us take son and semen, for xample. In the rebirth ideology the son is a separate individual with a
long series of prior births and deaths; he is not the continuation of the father and his relation to his present father is contingent at best. The new ideology also questions older ideas about the meaning of semen.
In one of the earliest attempts to describe the process of rebirth (BU 6.29–16; CU 5.3–10; cf. JB 1.45–46), the self of the deceased person is said to go up as smoke to the sky. It finally reaches the moon and
comes down as rain. The individual, now transformed into water, is absorbed into plants and finally becomes food. A man eats that food and transforms it into semen, which he deposits in a woman, giving rise
to a new birth of the dead man. As opposed to the doctrine which sees the semen as the condensed self of the father, the new doctrine sees the semen as totally another person transformed into a new dimension.
The father is a mere conduit, a reprocessing machine, for another being who is reborn by means of his semen.
The relationship of the current generation to its forefathers and the imperative of begetting sons are also put into question. The Brhad aranyaka Upanisad(4.4.22) has this to say about people who have discovered their true self, their moi:, “It was when they knew that that men of old did not desire offspring, reasoning: ‘Ours is
this self, it is our world. What then is the use of offspring for us?’ So they gave up the desire for sons, the desire for wealth, and the desire for worlds, and undertook the mendicant life.” Note again how sons,
wealth, and worlds are brought together here as the objects of desire; the desire for worlds demand the desire for the means of attaining them, namely, sons and wealth (= rites). Another passage responds to
the older idea that a wife completes the self of the husband:
:::, “So even today when one is single, one has the desire: ‘I wish I had a wife so I could father offspring. I wish I had wealth so I could perform rites.’ As long as someone has not obtained either of these, he considers himself to be utterly incomplete. Now, this is his completeness – his mind is his self; his speech is his wife; his breath is his offspring; his sight is his human wealth:::; and his hearing is his divine wealth :::” (BU 1.4.17).
This is as clear a statement of self as moi as we can expect: one’s self is self-contained, it does not need external things or relationships to make it complete.
In the new ideology, immortality is not seen as a form of survival after death; within the rebirth ideology survival is guaranteed to all.
Neither is it some desirable location (e.g., heaven) after death, for now all those locations are regarded as way-stations in the unending cycle of births and deaths. Immortality is the liberation from that cycle, from
being subject to repeated births and deaths, by means of some type of secret and powerful knowledge.
How do women fare in this new ideological climate? An answer to this question emerges in the story about Y ajnavalkya and his two wives related twice in the Brhad aranyaka Upanisad(2.4; 4.5): “Now,
Y ajnavalkya had two wives, Maitrey ı and K aty ayan ı. Of the two, Maitrey ı was a woman who took part in theological discussions, while K aty ayan ı’s understanding was limited to womanly matters. One day,
as he was preparing to undertake a different mode of life, Y ajnavalkya said: ‘Maitrey ı, I am about to go away from this place. So come, let me make a settlement between you and K aty ayan ı.’ Maitrey ı asked in
reply: ‘If I were to possess the entire world filled with wealth, sir, would
it, or would it not, make me immortal (amrt a).’ ‘No,’ said Y ajnavalkya, ‘it will only permit you to live the life of a wealthy person. Through wealth one cannot expect immortality.’ ‘What is the point in getting something that will not make me immortal?’ retorted Maitrey ı. ‘Tell me instead, sir, all that you know’ ”.A couple of points about this story: first, this is possibly the first time in the whole of the Vedic literature that the feminine adjective amrt a(“immortal”) is used with reference to an actual flesh-and-blood woman, the adjective I have used as the title of this paper.
Maitrey ı dares to ask – or, to be more precise, the author dares to put this question in Maitrey ı’s mouth – how she can become immortal, and she does that as an individual in her own right and not just as the
wife of Y aj navalkya. Indeed, if the wife accompanied the husband into immortality, as we saw within the context of the sacrifice, then Maitrey ı needn’t have worried; she would have become immortal automatically
as part of her husband’s self. But now the secret to immortality is not the sacrifice which demands wealth but knowledge which cannot be obtained vicariously. To become immortal Maitrey ı did not need wealth;
she had to know what Y aj navalkya knew.
In an interesting reversal, the acknowledgment of female agency with respect to immortality is accompanied by the denial to women of an instrumental role in the acquisition of male immortality.
The passage I cited above BU (1.4.17) tells a man not to consider himself incomplete if he lacks a wife or son; his completeness lies within himself, and his wife is his speech. In a curious but significant way male independence from women created independence for women as well, and vice versa.
Women’s liberation obviously did not come to India with the rebirth/liberation ideology, but at least now women become part of the discourse on human aspiration for immortality. This is nicely demonstrated by the third and fourth books of the Brhad aranyaka Upanisad, a section that originally formed the conclusion of the great Satapatha Br ahmana and constitutes what I would call “The Triumph of Y ajnavalkya”, the individual responsible for the composition of the White Yajurveda. This triumphant conclusion of that Veda contains
four episodes that establishes Y aj navalkya as the foremost theologian of the time. King Janaka appears as a main figure in the first three; the fourth is the conversation between Y ajnavalkya and his wife Maitrey ı.
Renowned for his knowledge,the presence of Janaka is a deliberate literary strategy of the author to highlight Y ajnavalkya’s supremacy in knowledge. If he can teach Janaka, a listener will think, he must be
the greatest!
In the first of these episodes a group of distinguished theologians have assembled at the king’s court, and Janaka wants to find out who among them is the most learned. In this group of theologians is one
woman, G arg ıV acaknav ı. Her mere presence would have raised many a Br ahmanical eyebrow, and I think that this was a deliberate literary strategy of the author. Within the literary structure of this story, she plays
a crucial role precisely because she is a woman. First, G arg ı is the only member of the group who questions Y ajnavalkya twice. On the second occasion she makes this boast to her male colleagues [BU 3.8.1–2]:
br ahmana bhagavanto hant aham imam .dvau pra snau prakay ami/ tau cen me vaksyati na vai j atu yusm akam imam ka scid brahodyam jeteti,
“Distinguished Brahmins! I am going to ask this man two questions. If he can give the answers to them, none of you will be able to defeat him in a theological debate.” Then she challenges Y ajnavalkya:“I rise to challenge you, Y ajnavalkya, with two questions, much as a fierce warrior of K a si or Videha, stringing his unstrung bow and taking two deadly arrows in his hand, would rise to challenge an enemy. Give me the answers to them!” The military image is interesting; as Mrs. Thatcher is said to have been in her cabinet, Garg ı is presented here as the only man in that male assembly. The image is also interesting because both of G arg ı’s questions contain the metaphor of weaving, in all likelihood an occupation closely associated with women (see Rau, 1970). The author of the tale mixes his metaphors, so to speak, to create the wonderful character of G arg ı – woman, theologian, and warrior. After Y ajnavalkya answers her questions, she turns to her male colleagues: “Distinguished Brahmins! You should consider yourself lucky if you escape from this man by merely paying him your respects. None of you will ever defeat him in a theological debate”
[BU 3.8.12]. She, in other words, tells her male colleagues: “If I can’t beat him, none of you can!” The leader of the group, S akalya, did not heed her warning, and lost his head after he was defeated by
Y ajnavalkya.
The triumph of Y ajnavalkya concludes with his instruction of another woman, his wife Maitrey ı. The prominence of women in this section, I think, is a literary strategy intended to show the triumph of the new
ideology connected with Y ajnavalkya: even women can understand the truth better than those old fogies!
Going beyond the Br ahmanical tradition, we see in Buddhism and Jainism the world’s first voluntary organizations for women – the Buddhist and Jain orders of nuns. Here are women who leave their
families, break their kinship ties, and voluntarily and possibly against the wishes of their families enter a community of celibate women. This is quite a departure from Manu’s dictum: “A girl, a young woman, or
even an old woman should not do anything independently, even in her own house. In childhood a woman should be under her father’s control, in youth under her husband’s, and when her husband is dead, under her
son’s. She should never be independent” (MDh 5.147–48). Here are Buddhist and Jain nuns exercising a daring freedom of choice, living lives in female communities outside direct male control, and taking
control of their own sexuality. What better example of the ultimate triumph of the self as moi.
VII. THE MORE THINGS CHANGE:::
way I have structured my comments may leave the impression that the path from personneto moi and the
concomitant changes in the position of women vis- a-vis immortality chart a clear chronological line, each ideological change leaving its predecessors in the dust. This, of course, is far from the truth. Although
there is some detectable chronology to these changes, given the problems nherent in dating Indian texts with any degree of accuracy and certainty, building a chronology of these changes is very much like building a
house of cards. More importantly, however, in India older ideologies did not change, yielding place to new; as Louis Dumont (1960) has accurately observed, Indian religious history by and large has moved by
way of aggregation, putting new stones on old, rather than substitution.
So, for example, rites and ideologies involving sons and the world of the fathers coexisted and continued to coexist in India side by side with the ideologies of rebirth and liberation.
Attempts, however, were made to synthesize the differing conceptions of death and immortality. TheAitareya Upanisad(2.1–4), for example, attempts a synthesis in terms of the three births of a man:
At the outset, this embryo comes into being within a man as semen. This radiance
gathered from all the bodily parts he bears in himself ( atman) as himself ( atman).
And when a man deposits [lit. pour] it in a woman, he gives birth to it. That is his
first birth.
It becomes one with the woman’s body ( atman), as if it were a part of her own body. As a result, it does not harm her. And she nourishes this self ( atman)ofhis that has entered her. As she nourishes him, so he should nourish her. The woman carries him as the embryo. At the beginning, he nourishes the child even before
its birth. When he nourishes the child even before its birth, he thereby nourishes himself ( atman) for the continuance of these worlds, for it is in this way that these worlds continue. That is his second birth.
And he – this self ( atman) of his – is appointed to carry out holy rites, while his other self, after it has done all it has to do, becomes old and dies. As soon as he departs from this world, he is born again. That is his third birth.
Here we have a curious combination of “selfhoods” in terms of new births, that is, taking on new selves. The first self/birth is when one ejaculates oneself as one’s semen into a woman. Here the coming out
of the semen from one’s body is viewed as a birth, just as the coming out of the baby from the mother’s body. Both these hark back to the conception of self as son. The self of his that is the son continues his
ritual tasks after his death, while his “other self ” takes birth anew. This third birth is, of course, based on the rebirth ideology.
Another attempt at synthesis is found in theBrhad aranyaka Upanisad (1.5.16) in terms of the different worlds that a man aspires to win: “Now, there are only three worlds: the world of men, the world of ancestors, and the world of gods. One can win this world of men only through a son, and by no other rite,whereas one wins the world of ancestors through rites, and the world of gods through
knowledge. The best of these, clearly, is the world of gods, and for this reason they praise knowledge.”
The coexistence of different notions of self and after-death states makes for a messy situation. Clarity is often achieved in such situations only at the expense of accuracy. The Hindu funeral rite is a good example
of this “mess theory” of Indian religious history. Theoretically, this is the one rite that should bring to the foreground a culture’s ideas about death and afterlife. Given that the dominant ideology in Indian culture
with respect to afterlife is rebirth, we should expect to find this belief clearly articulated in the funeral rite. The opposite is, in fact, the case.
An observer looking solely at the Hindu funeral rite will have no idea that Indians believed in rebirth; this belief is completely ignored in favor of the ideology of the world of the fathers. The same is true of
all rites connected with ancestral offerings.
In the religions rooted in the ideologies of rebirth and liberation and wedded to the concept of self asmoi, such as Buddhism and Jainism, furthermore, we should expect to find the claim of women to liberation
and immortality articulated loud and clear. But that is not the case. There is great ambivalence and ambiguity in both traditions regarding the spiritual capabilities of women. The Buddha is supposed to have opened
his monastic order to women with great reluctance and at the urging of his favorite discipline Ananda; after giving his reluctant assent, he is said to have predicted that had women not been admitted the Buddhist
way of life would have lasted 1000 years, but because women had been admitted it will last only 500 years (Lamotte, 1958, 211). We do not know, of course, what the Buddha himself thought; but the story is
direct evidence of the great ambivalence the Buddhist male monastic community (we have no idea as to what the nuns themselves thought about this) must have felt about the order of nuns and the spiritual
capabilities of women. Diana Paul (1985) details the debates that raged within Mah ay ana Buddhism regarding the possibility of women becoming a Buddha. And more recently Padmanabh Jaini (1991) has
chronicled the debates between the Digambara and Svet ambara Jains about the possibility of women attaining liberation as women, that is, without being reborn as men.
The same ideologies that brought a modicum of agency to women also created ascetic traditions that considered women as temptresses and created a truly misogynic literature (Olivelle, 1995). Within the
Br ahmanical/Hindu traditions there has been an ongoing controversy whether it was legitimate for women to become ascetics (Olivelle, 1993,183–90). And as we have seen, the legal codes, composed many centuries
after the emergence of the rebirth ideology, repeatedly insist that women are never to be independent agents either in the legal/economic or in the ritual/religious field (MDh 5.147–56; see note 28).
Nevertheless, within the rebirth ideology women have at least had the opportunity to choose not to marry, to control their sexuality, to live independently of male authority, to pursue individual aspirations, and
even to become religious elite. They do not have to be mere instruments of their husbands’ aspirations and have the opportunity to become agents of their own destiny.
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