Ardor (15 page)

The cosmic balance is kept by two tiny entities of huge power: the grain of barley in the heart, of which the Upani
ṣ
ads will speak, capable of spreading beyond all worlds, and the
pr
āś
itra
, the “first portion” to which the brahmin is entitled, that scrap of Praj
ā
pati’s flesh torn by the tip of Rudra’s arrow. It is also said that it has to be as big as a grain of barley or a
pippal
(
Ficus religiosa
) berry.

There is something excessive, corrosive, about that part of Rudra. And yet it was necessarily the
first offering
of the sacrifice. Without that beginning, the whole work would have been futile. But that first offering was what is intractable, uncontrollable. The gods were already in despair. They were already yielding to a pure force that was overwhelming them. At that moment the supreme astuteness of the brahmin was apparent. For some time B
ṛ
haspati had been performing rites for the gods. They hadn’t yet realized that this gave him wisdom greater than theirs. B
ṛ
haspati had the help of Savit
ṛ
, the Impeller, but then he was the first and only one to let his mouth touch that tiny scrap of flesh. He ate it, he said, “with Agni’s mouth”: fire with fire. But he dared not chew it. Then he rinsed his mouth with water, in silence. The gods understood at once why the brahmins are indispensable. They understood that the brahmin is “the best physician” for the sacrifice. Without him it wouldn’t have been possible to take a single step. For them, every possible task was a sacrifice, but the sacrifice could not be performed without the help of the being who dared to let his mouth touch the scrap of wounded flesh. In their purity, in the whiteness of their garments, the brahmins from then on carried with them the memory of the gesture by which the blood of the wound had for the first time disappeared into one of them, who had absorbed it without it destroying him. And from then on they would sometimes display a certain arrogance toward even the gods.

The brahmin is different from all others because his physical makeup is such that he can take poison that would kill anyone else.
Ś
iva managed to drink the poison of the world in the same way, which then turned his neck blue. Although
Ś
iva and the brahmins would show themselves to be fierce rivals in various circumstances, it was not enough to hide their basic complicity: that of being the only ones able to absorb the poison of the world. The brahmin does not act, except when he alone can act, as in the case of the
pr
āś
itra
, which can be eaten only by him. He does not speak, except when he alone can speak—and this occurs if errors are made in carrying out the sacrifice. The brahmin then has three possible invocations—
bh
ū
r
,
bhuvas
,
svar
—which operate as medicines applied to the loosened joints of the ceremony. Those words cannot be confused with the other words of the liturgy. The brahmin’s speech “is filled with the limitless unspoken,
anirukta
, of which silence is the emblem.” As bearer of the “limitless unspoken,” the brahmin is the direct representative of Praj
ā
pati. When Praj
ā
pati disappears from mythology, and his place is taken by Brahm
ā
, the brahmins will remain.

Otherwise, the brahmin silently watches what is happening. He is seated to the south, for that is the dangerous area, from which an attack may come at any time. From whom? When the gods were officiating, they were frightened of being ambushed by the anti-gods, the Asuras and the Rak
ṣ
as, the wicked demons. Men, on the other hand, must watch out for the “malevolent rival”: generally speaking, the enemy, the adversary, the ever-present shadow in every liturgical celebration.

The brahmin is the “guardian” of the sacrifice. In this respect he is like the Saptar
ṣ
is, who keep watch over the earth from the seven stars high up in the Great Bear. His silence likens him to Praj
ā
pati and keeps him away from the throng of the gods. All the brahmin’s tasks are reduced to one: to heal the wound that is the sacrifice. It is his main concern that the wound be inflicted in the right way, and he thus oversees the actions and words of the other priests. Finally he reassembles the tattered sacrifice by cloaking it in silence.

*   *   *

There are many paradoxes in the relationship between Praj
ā
pati and M
ṛ
tyu, Death (a male being). Praj
ā
pati was given a lifespan of a thousand years when he was born. And since a thousand indicates totality, it might be thought that this indicates a limitless period. But when Praj
ā
pati devoted himself to producing creatures, when he was pregnant with them, Death appeared in the background and seized them one by one. The result of the duel was obvious: “While Praj
ā
pati was producing living beings, M
ṛ
tyu, Death, that evil, overpowered him.” Praj
ā
pati was therefore defeated and thwarted during the very process of creation. For a thousand years he had to practice
tapas
to overcome the evil of Death. But which years are being referred to? Are they the same thousand years that marked his lifespan? Praj
ā
pati’s life in that case would have been one long, relentless struggle fighting the—already established—supremacy of Death. The life of the one to whom creatures owe their lives would therefore have been most of all an attempt to respond to Death and to avoid his power.

With what means did Praj
ā
pati create beings and worlds, in his repeated attempts? With “ardor,”
tapas
, and with the “vision” of ritual. Connected acts: ardor stirs vision, vision heightens ardor. There is no trace of a
will
, of a supreme and abstract decision imposed from outside. Or rather: all will is a “desire,”
k
ā
ma
, which is developed in ardor and emerges in vision. No will can be split away from its elaborate physiology.

*   *   *

Death is not an intrinsic part of divinity, but is an intrinsic part of creation (since successful creation is sexual: in the same way, in the natural world, death will appear together with sexual reproduction). There is no creation without death—and death dwells not only in creatures but also in their Progenitor. So the gods, children of Praj
ā
pati, accused him of creating Death. They were sometimes obsessed by the notion that Praj
ā
pati was himself Death. But, as always with children, they knew little of their father’s past. The fact that he was Year, therefore Time, exposed him to continual disintegration. He could not avoid coexisting with those two inveterate parasites, whom he himself had created but who lurked within him and similarly went to lurk in every other created being.

The connection between evil and M
ṛ
tyu, Death, as well as that between death and desire finally became clear when it was realized that “Death is hunger.” This revelation summed up the bond between desire and evil, through Death. Hunger is a desire, but a desire that involves killing, for it makes something disappear. The inevitability of that Evil which is Death was thus found in the first desire to prolong and perpetuate life, which is hunger.

*   *   *

Men complained, as the gods had already done, that their father, Praj
ā
pati, had also created M
ṛ
tyu, Death. They always remembered that: “Above creatures, [Praj
ā
pati] created Death as the one who devours them.” But Praj
ā
pati was also the first to feel a terror of Death, which dwelt within him, even though wrapped in something immortal. That part of him feared Death with the same intensity and violence that would later be experienced by humans. The first to escape into hiding—before Agni, Indra, or
Ś
iva—was Praj
ā
pati, who, to escape Death, became water and clay. The earth was first created as a refuge from the fear of Death. And yet Death was benevolent toward Praj
ā
pati. It reassured the gods that it would not hurt him. It knew, in fact, that Praj
ā
pati was protected by the immortal part of him. But Death went further: it invited the gods to seek out their lost father, it invited them to put him back together. The fire altar therefore not only saved Praj
ā
pati from agony, but it put his dismembered body back together
at the instigation of Death.
An ambiguity that would never be dispelled. After all, Death, of all of his children, had been the first to ask where their father had disappeared. Meanwhile the gods had perhaps already begun to feel the indifference they would later show toward their father. But they set to work and, layer by layer, arranged the bricks of the altar of fire one upon the other.

*   *   *

It was Praj
ā
pati who defeated M
ṛ
tyu, Death, in an interminable and inconclusive duel (“they continued for many years without succeeding for long in being triumphant”). In the end Death took refuge in the women’s hut. But elsewhere, in other stories (earlier? later? contemporaneous?), Praj
ā
pati
is
Death. As such, he terrified not just men but also the gods: “The gods were frightened of this Praj
ā
pati, the Year, Death, the Ender, fearing that he, through day and night, might bring an end to their lives.” Various rites were invented to erase—or at least alleviate—the fear: the
agnihotra
, the New Moon and the Full Moon sacrifice, the animal sacrifice, the
soma
sacrifice. But they ended in a succession of failures: “In offering these sacrifices they did not attain immortality.”

It was Praj
ā
pati himself who taught the gods and people how to go further. He had seen them busy building a brick altar, but they continually got the size and shape wrong. Like a patient father, Praj
ā
pati told them: “You do not arrange me in all my forms, you make me either too large or not large enough: and so you do not become immortal.” But what should the right form be? That which would succeed in completely filling the cavity of time, by stacking as many bricks as there are hours in the year: 10,800. That was the number of bricks
lokamp
ṛṇā
, “that fill the space.” And this time the gods succeeded in becoming immortal.

M
ṛ
tyu was worried. He thought that men who imitated the gods would one day have been able to become immortal themselves. So “Death said to the gods: ‘Surely in this way all men will become immortal and what then will be my part?’ They said: ‘From now on no one will be immortal in their body: only when you have taken the body as your part will they who are to become immortal, either through knowledge or through sacred works, become immortal after being separated from their body.’” Even when all the calculations are right, even when the 10,800
+
360
+
36 bricks match Praj
ā
pati’s instructions one by one, the final interlocutor is always Death. He had no intention of relinquishing his part, simply because the gods had become masters in creating forms. If men had now succeeded, through stacking bricks, in becoming immortal, Death would have lost his purpose, like an idle shepherd abandoned by his flock. The gods saw an opportunity here for establishing another obstacle for mankind. They had no intention of watching their own hard-earned privileges being eroded. So a pact was sealed, over the heads of men, between Death and the gods. Yes, men would become immortal, but without their bodies. The mortal remains were surrendered to Death forever. And this is the point that has always made every promise of immortality doubtful. Men in fact preferred their ephemeral bodies to the splendors of the spirit. They distrusted disembodied souls, vaguely tiresome and sinister entities. So the agreement between the gods and Death was seen as a trick.

The celestial immortality granted by the gods to mankind was a reduced immortality. Over the course of time, the celestial body was destined to dwindle and disintegrate. There would be a renewed attraction toward the earth, like a powerful downward suction. Life would begin again in other forms. But death would also be repeated. In this way people ended up seeing their many lives essentially as a sequence of deaths. And they thought that celestial immortality was not enough to escape from repeated death. They had to free themselves from life itself.

Already in the Br
ā
hma
ṇ
as—and not just in the Upani
ṣ
ads—the real enemy is not Death, M
ṛ
tyu, but “recurring death,”
punarm
ṛ
tyu.
The obsession with the chain of deaths—and therefore of births—is not Buddhist, but Vedic. The Buddha formulated a radically different way of escaping from the chain. But the doctrine that had prevailed before him was no less bold.

*   *   *

What happened to Death after the exhausting duel with Praj
ā
pati, after he had taken refuge in the women’s hut? No one ever saw him leave, even to this day. That doesn’t mean that Death disappeared. To see him, all we have to do is look up. The sunlight dazzles us in a diffused glow. But within it we can make out a black circle. It stays, persistently, in the eye. It is a figure, a man in the Sun: that is Death. And it will always be there, for “Death does not die,” protected all around it by the immortal. This is its challenging paradox: the endlessness of the shell also guarantees the endlessness of what it conceals—in this case, Death. When one celebrates the immortal, then at the same time—without knowing it—one celebrates Death, which is “within the immortal.”