SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS Number 241 October, 2013 On the Nature of the Vedic Gods by Catalin Anghelina Victor H. Mair, Editor Sino-Platonic Papers Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305 USA [email protected] www.sino-platonic.org SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS FOUNDED 1986 Editor-in-Chief VICTOR H. MAIR Associate Editors PAULA ROBERTS MARK SWOFFORD ISSN 2157-9679 (print) 2157-9687 (online) SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS is an occasional series dedicated to making available to specialists and the interested public the results of research that, because of its unconventional or controversial nature, might otherwise go unpublished. The editor-in-chief actively encourages younger, not yet well established, scholars and independent authors to submit manuscripts for consideration. Contributions in any of the major scholarly languages of the world, including romanized modern standard Mandarin (MSM) and Japanese, are acceptable. 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To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. ON THE NATURE OF THE VEDIC GODS Catalin Anghelina, “On the Nature of the Vedic Gods” Sino-Platonic Papers, 241 (October 2013) On the Nature of the Vedic Gods Catalin Anghelina Columbus State Community College ii Catalin Anghelina, “On the Nature of the Vedic Gods” Sino-Platonic Papers, 241 (October 2013) “Zwei Dinge erfüllen das Gemüt mit immer neuer und zunehmender Bewunderung und Ehrfurcht, je öfter und anhaltender sich das Nachdenken damit beschäftigt: der bestirnte Himmel über mir und das moralische Gesetz in mir.” —Immanuel Kant iii Catalin Anghelina, “On the Nature of the Vedic Gods” Sino-Platonic Papers, 241 (October 2013) FOREWORD The goal of the present study is to find a new solution to the difficult issue of the nature and significance of the Rig Vedic main gods. Obviously, since such an objective is not only ambitious, but also utterly bold, it is necessary to explain the reasons that led me to take up this enterprise. In the preface of his recent monumental study on the Rig Veda, T. Oberlies (1998) expresses his admiration for the “fascinating” world (“die faszinierende Welt”) of the Rig Veda. To the present author, given the level of current understanding of the Rig Veda, statements of this kind seem puzzling. How can an obscure and unintelligible text be “fascinating”? That such a natural question is neither illegitimate nor exaggerated is shown by the fact that, indeed, the obscurity of the Vedic text was seen many times by scholars as something intentionally created. To give some examples, one can start with A. Bergaigne who judged the Rig Veda as a “verbally and poetically sophisticated, indeed deliberately obscure text.”1 In more recent years, W. Doniger (1981: 15–6) mentions the Vedic “paradox” and “enigma” and argues that the obscurity of the Rig Vedic text leads to a divorce between words and meaning: “What does it mean? It means what it says.” Her conclusion is that the Rig Veda is “a book of questions, not a book of answers,” a book meant “to puzzle, to surprise, to trouble the mind.” These few examples undoubtedly show that, essentially, the Rig Veda is for many scholars an irrational text, or at least a text which contains many deliberately unintelligible passages. It appears then that the question above is more than a rhetorical one. Statements such as those above, which concern the meaning of the Rig Veda, could lead to the conclusion that the obscurity of this book derives from the obscurity of many of its words, passages, and/or even myths. To give some very well-known examples: the Aśvins stop their chariot on the bull’s head; the whale looks at the Aśvins’ chariot; Agni, the god of fire, is born twice in the waters, and the waters feed him; Varuṇa plays with the sun as with a swing, Indra, the bull, drinks the juice Soma, and kills a dragon. The Rig Veda is full of such examples, which completely lack a plausible interpretation. Moreover, the hermeneutical attempts to solve riddles of this type often led to the 1 Cf. Jamison & Witzel (1992: 52), who adhere to this idea. iv Catalin Anghelina, “On the Nature of the Vedic Gods” Sino-Platonic Papers, 241 (October 2013) replacement of obscurum by obscurius. A good example of this is the opinion that certain Vedic gods can be both different and identical to one another.2 To reduce the decipherability of the Vedic text only to the understanding of such passages is very deceptive. The Rig Veda is not just any text, but one that represents the most important religious text of a people at a certain moment in time. Given this, the quest for the meaning of the Rig Veda is and should be a quest for the meaning of the Vedic religion as well. The meaning of the Rig Veda can be reduced neither to the morphological, syntactical or semantic aspects of the Vedic lexicon and grammar nor to the interpretation of some passages; it is far more profound than that. This meaning hinges upon these questions: who are the Vedic gods that are worshipped in this religion, and what do they represent? Certainly, the first part of the question above has an immediate and obvious answer, since the Rig Vedic hymns are transparently dedicated to the deities the Vedic people worshipped. There is, however, nothing more difficult to answer with certainty than the second part of this question. Let me amplify this by considering the three main gods of the Vedic pantheon: Indra, Agni, and Soma. The scholarly consensus is that Indra, the most powerful Vedic deity, represents the warrior god of the Vedic people; Agni would represent the deified ritual fire, whereas Soma would be a hallucinatory juice/drink, that is, a kind of drug that the Vedic people happened to worship as well. In conclusion: a warrior, a drug, and fire are the greatest gods of one of the most elaborated religions ever created by mankind! If we add here the Ādityas, the other great Vedic gods, which are generally regarded nowadays as gods of social contracts, the picture that emerges appears to be that of an incomprehensible hodgepodge.3 Since the obscurity of the Rig Veda concerns not only certain linguistic aspects of the text, but the very core of the religion this text refers to, the interpretation of one obscure passage or the other in the Rig Veda cannot be regarded as an individual matter pertaining to that particular passage or to 2 E.g., Bergaigne’s (1878–1883: I 13) analysis of the passages in which Agni is compared to the sun: “pour les poëtes védiques la comparaison n’est pas éloignée de l’assimilation ... les deux termes d’une comparaison [i.e., in this case, Agni and the sun — my note] peuvent être identiques.” 3 For a brief summary of the Vedic gods, see Jamison & Witzel (1992:52–55), who believe that “what is striking about the Vedic Pantheon is its lack of overarching organization.” v Catalin Anghelina, “On the Nature of the Vedic Gods” Sino-Platonic Papers, 241 (October 2013) the association of that passage with other similar ones, but should ultimately lead to the core of the Vedic religion, which contains the answer to the nature and significance of the Vedic gods. The present study starts from the author’s belief that the Rig Veda is not and cannot be an irrational text. In other words, to rephrase one of the scholarly comments above, my belief is that the Rig Veda is a book of answers, not a book of questions. The “spark” that generated this work is a study of mine published recently in JIES, in which I made the hypothesis that Viṣṇu, a Vedic god inferior to Indra, Soma, or Agni, is located at the North Pole of the celestial vault.