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Human Sacrifice, Karma and Asceticism in Jantu’S Tale of the Mahābhārata.”

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Human Sacrifice, Karma and Asceticism in Jantu’S Tale of the Mahābhārata.” A Final Response to Philipp A. Maas, “Negotiating Efficiencies: Human Sacrifice, Karma and Asceticism in Jantu’s Tale of the Mahābhārata.” Vishwa Adluri, Hunter College, New York Interpretation of the narrative and using intertextual connections as evidence I disagree that “the occurrence of the word ‘jantu’ in the KU and in Shankara[’]s commentary” does not “help to understand the MBh passage under discussion.” On the contrary, it is highly relevant. The term jantu’s resonances in the Kaṭha Upaniṣad permit us to understand the philosophical dimension of the narrative. It suggests that an important philosophical argument is being worked out in the narrative rather than the kind of jostling for political authority between Brahmanism and śramaṇa traditions you see in the text. Even if you are not interested in philosophical questions, it is disingenuous to suggest that “Shankara interpreted the Upanishads from the perspective of Advaita Vedanta many hundred years after these works were composed. His approach is not historical but philosophical, which is fully justified, but his testimony does not help to determine what the works he comments upon meant at the time and in the contexts of their composition.” Is it really credible that Śaṁkara, interpreting the Mahābhārata some centuries after it was composed, did not correctly understand the Mahābhārata, while you, writing two millennia later, do? Can you seriously claim that Śaṁkara is not aware of the history of the text (although you are), while being ignorant of the intertextual connections between this narrative and the Kaṭha Upaniṣad? Isn’t the real reason that you claim a long period of development that it is only on this premise that you can claim that Śaṁkara’s interpretation is not relevant, and that yours, on the contrary, has greater objectivity? The notion that only the contemporary scholar, applying the historical-critical method, has access to the true or the most original meaning of the text is deeply rooted in 1 modernity. It is at the root of both Rudolf von Roth’s disparagement of the tradition1 and Heinrich von Stietencron’s claim to having exclusively attained pure objectivity.2 But it is erroneous all the same. Without looking at the narrative’s resonances in other sources, without considering the history of reception or interpretation of the text in question, and without being aware of the narrative’s function in an economy of meaning underwritten by the literary unity of the Mahābhārata, you will be unable to understand the Jantūpākhyāna. The narrative, as I have shown, is connected with the decision in the Sabhāparvan to perform the Rājasūya sacrifice. The Rājasūya is a pravṛtti rite, and the Mahābhārata is deeply skeptical of pravṛtti. This applies in a special way to the maximization of pravṛtti that is svarga. I also pointed out that the upākhyānas are connected with the main narrative as “mirror stories” or vantage points for reflecting on the fates of the protagonists of the Kuru narrative. The sacrifice of the one son to obtain a hundred sons obviously recalls the partitioning of a lump of flesh to produce the hundred Kauravas. At a minimum you would have to evaluate the debates over sacrifice versus action that continue on into the Udyogaparvan (e.g., at Mahābhārata 5.43). 1 “Thus, the holy books of the ancient peoples were clarified by later centuries according to the dominant systems of theology of the time and according to the higher or lower condition of science in general. Indeed, they were clarified in such a way that this interpretation pretended to be the tradition [itself], that is, it claimed an antiquity and a prestige for itself that it, in truth, did not always possess. Nor has it occurred to anyone, for example, to make our understanding of the Hebrew books of the Old Testament dependent upon the Talmud and the rabbis. In contrast, there is no lack of people who consider it the duty of a conscientious Veda interpreter to translate according to Sâjaṇa, Mahîdhara, and others. Thus, we do not hold as H. H. Wilson does, that Sâjaṇa understood the expressions of the Veda better than every European interpreter, [and] that we hence have nothing more to do than to repeat after him. Rather, we hold that a conscientious European interpreter can understand the Veda more accurately and much better than Sâjaṇa. We do not consider it our immediate task to attain that understanding of the Veda that was prevalent in India a few centuries ago; rather, we seek the meaning that the poets themselves placed in their hymns and sayings.” Rudolf von Roth, “Vorwort,” in Otto Böhtlingk and Rudolf von Roth, Sanskrit-Wörterbuch, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg: Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1855), v, cited and translated in Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee, The Nay Science: A History of German Indology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 394. 2 “The analytical thinking of Western scholars trained in historical and philological methodology stood in contrast to the traditional Indian commentators. The latter not only generously harmonized all the disjunctions in the text but, above all, attempted to recognise in particular passages of the text their own philosophical and theological concepts. This was done in order to secure for themselves the divine authority of Kṛṣṇa. In this manner, several philosophical schools developed Gītā interpretations of their own—a spectrum that has been further expanded through politically motivated, modern interpretations since the beginning of the Indian independence struggle.” Heinrich von Stietencron, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Angelika Malinar, Rājavidyā: Das königliche Wissen um Herrschaft und Verzicht (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1996), 6–7. See also Adluri and Bagchee, The Nay Science, 296–97 and 436. 2 Interpretation of the critical edition and using unproven assumptions as evidence I am puzzled by this remark: “In my view, the final redaction(s) of the MBh, which would be the archetype(s) of all manuscripts, is/are the result of a single authorial/redactorial intention. It is, however, improbable, in my view, that the comprehensive literary material was created anew for this occasion. I would rather assume that a lot of material (written and/ or oral) was reused, rearranged, and adapted to the intentions that guided the composition of the MBh.” What is the evidence for a “final redaction(s) of the MBh”? And what is your proof for identifying this supposed redaction with “the archetype(s) of all manuscripts”? The archetype is by definition the latest common ancestor of all the manuscripts collated for that edition. It has nothing to do with a “redaction,” final or otherwise. Merely because it occupies a prominent place on our stemma, as a singular exemplar that happens to have been the ancestor of all surviving copies, we cannot concede that it was particularly authoritative or that it was unique (i.e., that there were no other copies in circulation) or that the tradition was plural above the archetype (as it is below it). You assume all three to be the case, even declaring that “a lot of material (written and/ or oral) was reused, rearranged, and adapted to the intentions that guided the composition of the MBh?” But what is your evidence that there was all of this material and what is your evidence that all of this material emptied itself into one exemplar? What is your evidence that there was only one? Merely because the stemmatic method reconstructs a codex unicus? And if “reused” was this material also transformed? And if significantly transformed into a literary unity, what exactly is this “history” you are positing? A sort of bibliography of sources? It would take too long to explain the numerous errors in your argument here. I have instead uploaded a document (a draft of the introduction to our new book, Philology and Criticism) here: http://tinyurl.com/PhilCrit. You will understand your error once you read it. It is a common enough mistake: it can also be found in the work of Georg von Simson, Johannes Bronkhorst, James L. Fitzgerald, and Andreas Bigger. But it is no less grave for that reason. You may wish to be more careful in future about making such claims of the critical edition. 3 Factual errors and reliance on non-existent authority I will not repeat the many other problems with your paper that I pointed out in the earlier responses. I do, however, want to note the reciprocal dependence of your thesis upon positing a long period of composition and of the hypothesis of a long period of composition upon reading the epic fragmentarily and without attention to either literary context or to intertextual references. By not paying attention to the meaningful connections between upaniṣadic and smṛti or purāṇic literature and by not paying attention to the meaningful connections between the different books and episodes of the Mahābhārata you are able to facilitate the impression of a lack of coherence and this, in turn, is used as evidence of the heterogeneous nature of “Brahmanism” and of the long period of composition or uncontrolled expansion of Indian texts. I have still not seen a single argument to justify the assumption of a long period of composition. I have also not seen any independent verification of Hopkins’s 400 BC to 400 AD dates. Please do look into the different secondary sources I highlighted in my responses. Biardeau as well as Heesterman have shown how crucial the question of the relationship between the sacrificial and renunciate paths is to Brahmanism—with or without Buddhism. The repeated occurrence of this question in the Mahābhārata reflects a tension interior to varṇāśramadharma. It is not completely solved until the formulation of the bhakti ideal, which requires a lot of philosophical work before it can emerge in the text.
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