Roberto Calasso - Ardor

The Vedic ritualists did not find themselves in this dilemma, but knew perfectly well that the act of eating animal flesh was a crux metaphysica that might not even have a solution. And it is precisely here that Yājñavalkya stepped in.

We are in the third kāṇḍa of the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa , in a part of the work that, according to tradition, was written by Yājñavalkya himself. But, exactly as would happen in the Mahābhārata , where Vyāsa was the author and occasionally appeared as a character, so too in that Brāhmaṇa, composed in the form of a treatise, Yājñavalkya manages several times to find his way into various scenes, always in crucial passages. Always with sharp, abrupt comments, like Marpa with his cane, ready to use it to wake up the pupil who would one day become Milarepa.

What happens after the passage where people had been flayed and their skins now clothe cattle? This is by decree of the gods. It follows that if people are not allowed even to show themselves naked in front of cows so as not to frighten them, they certainly won’t be allowed to kill them, let alone eat them. Here we find ourselves close to the origin of the prohibition on meat-eating in India. From here an uninterrupted line leads us to the cows wandering in the city traffic or lying pensively on temple steps. And yet didn’t the same Vedic ritualists spend their time meticulously describing animal sacrifices in which a part was then offered to the gods and a part was eaten by the officiants?

The point was very delicate — and had to be resolved by Yājñavalkya. First, according to the text, an officiant takes the consecrated person — who now wears a linen robe and so once again has a skin — into the hut built in the sacrificial area. And immediately after, it adds the requirement “that he [the consecrated person] shall not eat cow or ox; for the cow and the ox certainly support everything here on earth.” Once again, a decision from the gods had to be sought. They said: “Certainly the cow and the ox support everything here; come, let us bestow on the cow and the ox whatever strength belongs to the other species!” It wasn’t therefore just the human hide that had been transferred to cattle. But strength in general, dispersed throughout nature. So cows became a concentration of everything. To kill them would have meant killing everything. “If someone were to eat an ox or a cow, it would be as if, so to speak, he were to eat everything or, so to speak, as if he were to destroy everything.” Already the insistence — twice in two lines — on the particle iva , “so to speak,” warns us that we are in a highly fraught and dangerous area. The tone is serious — and immediately afterward there is a resounding threat, one of the earliest formulations of the doctrine of reincarnation: “One [who acts] thus could be reborn as a strange being, as one of evil repute, as one of whom it is said: ‘He has caused a woman to abort’ or ‘He has committed a sin.’ So he must not eat (the meat of) an ox or cow.”

The words are short, abrupt, they do not seem to allow for any reply. But they are turned on their head in the next sentence: “Nonetheless Yājñavalkya said: ‘I, for my part, eat it, provided it is tender.’” The text then moves on, without any comment. Yājñavalkya’s metaphysical probe had touched a point that is usually avoided: there is a pleasure in eating the flesh of dead animals that is deeply physiological, just like sexual pleasure. In that case too, pleasure and guilt come together — and remain inseparable. When we go back beyond a certain threshold in phylogenesis, there is no escaping these simultaneous conflicting drives, which are not yet feelings but dark and highly powerful imperatives: allusions to our most distant memories, from which, however, we are separated by an insuperable barrier, like dreams that have been blotted out.

What conclusions can be drawn from all this? The doubt cannot be solved. The teaching set out in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa seems to require abstinence from meat, with various arguments and a severe tone. Yet the supposed author of the text breaks in impetuously and insolently to say the opposite. What would be the right doctrine?

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Guilt connected to sacrifice — guilt about killing and destruction in general: more fundamentally, guilt about what disappears —extends not just to animals, but to the plant world, so as plants and trees can be saved by sacrifice. Everything is killed, starting from the sacrificer, who has just — temporarily — avoided it, when “Agni and Soma have taken he who sacrifices between their jaws,” and starting from Soma himself, who will be killed by the pestle in the mortar. Others will eventually be tied to the “post” before being killed. And for each victim the event is described through euphemism: the sacrificial killing is called “appeasement.” During the sacrifice, the officiant speaks to the sacrificial horse using words of high, visionary, tender lyricism, promising that no harm will come to it and that it will follow the path of the gods, in the same way as Siberian hunters speak with gentleness and devotion to the bear they are about to kill. Something similar happens with the tree. The officiant is even required to reassure it: “This sharp-edged axe has led you toward great bliss.” The reference to “bliss” is meant to mitigate the impact of a “thunderbolt”: “for the axe is a thunderbolt.” Thunderbolt is everything that has an absolute power. But the ritualists were too subtle to define only certain potentially lethal arms in this way: “the razor is a thunderbolt,” but it is also true that “water is a thunderbolt,” and “ghee is a thunderbolt,” in the same way that “the tree they cut down to make the sacrificial post is a thunderbolt” and “the year is a thunderbolt.” And one day it happened that “the gods perceived that thunderbolt: the horse.” In the case of the tree, of that “lord of the forest” which is chosen for the sacrifice of soma , the mitigation of guilt will be achieved above all by placing a blade of darbha grass on the trunk. It would be foolish to mock the meagerness of such means. A tuft of darbha grass alone can purify the face of a “consecrated one,” a dīkṣita , one who can therefore perform a sacrifice: “For impure, indeed, is man; he is foul within, in that he speaks untruth; and darbha grass is pure.”

Choosing the tree to cut down, from which to make the yūpa , the sacrificial “post,” which in itself epitomizes the totality of the sacrifice, is like choosing any other victim: it is the act in which the mystery of election is revealed. The ritualist therefore considers it with great care, so that the sacrificer must bring all his keenness into play. What tree will he choose? Not the closest one in the forest. That would be too crude and too simple. It would be as if all you had to do was take one step forward to be chosen — and one step back not to be. But nor will the sacrificer choose the tree farthest away. The last would then be the most likely — and all, if they wanted to avoid being chosen, would rush to the most conspicuous positions. Here again the choice would lose its mystery. No, the sacrificer will choose “on the nearer side of the farther” and “on the farther side of the nearer.” And where in the forest does the farther begin? Where does the nearer reach its limit? No one can know this. Not even the sacrificer, until that inscrutable moment when he will say to the tree, in that grim, unctuous tone that all victims recognize: “We favor you, O divine lord of the forest.”

This way of dealing with the mystery of election brings us face-to-face with an implacable difference and peculiarity, from the brahminic point of view. An average Westerner today (but most probably, also, an ancient), in front of a whole forest where he has to choose one tree among many, all equally suitable, would say: the first, or the last, or one at random. All three criteria are rejected by the Vedic ritualist. We might, with some surprise but no difficulty, accept the reasoning that leads to rejecting the choice of the first and the last. But the more delicate and difficult point is the exclusion of the third (and more obvious) possibility: the random choice. Here we are dealing with choice — and not only that, but the choice of something that makes the sacrifice possible. And eliminating, or at least circumventing, arbitrary discretion in this choice means abrogating the sovereignty of chance where it hurts most. But will the sacrificer succeed in his intent? Not exactly. Chance will be circumscribed, but not removed altogether. Above all, it will be covered. The choice is presented as motivated — but the motivation has to coexist with discretion. Searching for the chosen object “on the nearer side of the farther” and “on the farther side of the nearer” may sound like gibberish, but indicates an act that is not casual and yet can only remain impenetrable, even if carried out by an ordinary officiant and not by an inaccessible divinity. This guarantees that what happens — and above all what happens at the crucial moment, that of the choice — is not totally arbitrary, but nor can it be reconstructed through a finite series of steps. This is what will one day, with Gödel, be called “undecidable.” It is as if radical indeterminacy had taken over thought here, detaching itself from chance as well as from any ratio. While not being casual, the choice remains impenetrable, above all for he who has performed it.