As the role of sacrifice grew, so did the status of the new group of religious specialists who called themselves ‘Brahmins’. The poets of the earlier Rig Veda had used the term ‘Brahmin’ to refer to the Vedic hymns—now popularly known as mantras. By extension, the Rig Veda poets also used the term to refer to those who fashioned and recited the hymns. The Brahmin reciters of the Rig Veda did not constitute a hereditary or endogamous social group. But gradually, towards the end of the Vedic era, the term ‘Brahmin’ came to be defined by the Brahmins themselves as a hereditary occupational social group, specializing in rituals and the teaching of the Vedas.
Not everyone agreed. Siddhartha Gautama, a Kshatriya born in the foothills of the Himalayas in about 566 BC, and the founder of the Buddhist religion, denounced the public sacrifices advocated by Brahmin specialists as overly costly, violent and unreliable. He ridiculed the Brahmins’ claims to authority. He pointed out that anyone could see that Brahmins emerged not from the mouth of the Purusha, but from the same female bodily organ as everybody else. He also defied Brahminic claims to a special inborn authority, questioning other claims that the Vedas were ‘revealed’ texts. The Buddha, instead, emphasized that the Vedas were poems, not divine interventions, and human in origin.10
The Buddhists, Jains, later religious teachers such as Kabir and also the Bengali bauls—each originating and developing their specific philosophies in the Indian subcontinent—continued to question the authoritative claims of the Brahmins.
Besides ideological difference, another plausible explanation of the rejection of the Brahminical order by Buddhists and Jains could be their stiff competition for the same pool of economic resources. Mendicants depend on alms, and the surplus production that could be offered to support various claimants—Hindus, Jains, Buddhists—was finite. So in this competitive situation, perhaps, the Buddhists and Jains developed a penetrating critique of Vedic practices.11
However, notwithstanding these criticisms, the Vedas became a gauge for Hindu orthodoxy in later times. As a consequence, many new Hindu groups, honouring new deities or new forms of worship, claimed allegiance to the Vedas. The epic Mahabharata posed as the ‘fifth Veda’, Vaishnava devotional poetry is said to be the ‘Tamil Veda’, and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Brahmo Samaj and Arya Samaj movements sought to return Hinduism to what they claimed were its ‘purer Vedic roots’. Gradually, it was established that those like the Brahmins, who adhered most closely to the Vedic tradition, had a status superior to ‘others’, such as the other Hindu castes or those following other religions, which were placed outside the Vedic fold.
Let us take another example: the origins of the Hindu concept of rebirth. Around the seventh century BC, at the conclusion of a royal sacrifice, a sage named Yajnavalkya declared to the king that he was the most knowledgeable in Vedic matters out of all those present. As a reward for his achievement, he demanded a thousand heads of cattle. A large number of people questioned him to test his claims, and Yajnavalkya proved himself each time. However, while doing so, he introduced several important concepts that were hitherto unknown in the earlier Vedic tradition. This included the notion that upon death a person is neither annihilated nor transported to some other world for perpetuity, but returns to worldly life to live again in a new mortal form. This concept of the succession of life, death and rebirth grew out of an earlier Vedic concern with the natural cycles of day, night and seasons, and was termed in the Upanishads as samsara or wandering.
But Yajnavalkya’s notion of rebirth raised two new perplexing issues: What determines a person’s subsequent form in rebirth? And is there an end to this cycle of rebirth?
To answer the first question, the all-knowing Yajnavalkya redefined the Vedic notion of karman, which simply meant ‘action’ in a very broad sense. In the Vedas, karman referred particularly to the sacrificial act. In Vedic sacrifice, all ritual actions have phala or fruits—consequences often not apparent at the time, but which will inevitably ripen. Yajnavalkya extended this notion of causality and gave it a moral dimension—that the moral character of one’s actions in this life determines the status of one’s rebirth in the next, a notion thereafter established as karma in Hinduism.
To answer the second question, Yajnavalkya suggested that a person may attain liberation by abstaining from desire, since desire is what engenders samsara in the first place, hence establishing for the first time the popular Hindu notion of moksha or salvation.12
After I returned to live in India three years ago, I decided to travel, explore and seek answers about the tremendous power of faith which fills us with hope for miracles, and makes us so blind to fact and reason.
I travelled widely and spoke to pilgrims and priests at various religious sites, delving into conversations—if they were comfortable discussing these—about their personal faith and religious motivation. I felt that I needed to understand the subject from the perspective of those who perceived and experienced religion differently from me.
A year ago, I visited the Lord Venkateshwara temple, one of the holiest of all Hindu pilgrimage sites,13 and by no coincidence considered among the wealthiest holy sites in the world as of 2016.14 The temple is lavish, spread over 25 square kilometres atop the Tirumala hill, located in the south of India. It had a massive footfall of 27.3 million people who trekked up to visit the temple in 2016.15
My driver Irfan was a stubbled twenty-five-year-old dressed in denims and a loose chequered shirt, with a bunch of colourful lockets on golden chains around his neck. He was an employee of the temple guesthouse, where I was to stay. He was a chatty and helpful fellow who had picked me up from the airport of the nearby township of Tirupati. On our way up the 3000-foot winding road, he told me cheerfully that Lord Balaji—as Venkateshwara is fondly referred to by the
