JM Frazier 5 Ritual and Practice J Hindu Studies 2012

The Journal of Hindu Studies 2012;5:1–9 doi:10.1093/jhs/his017 Ritual and Practice in Hindu Studies Jessica Frazier* Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and University of Kent *Corresponding author: jfrazier@ochs.org.uk ß The Author 2012. Oxford University Press and The Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email journals.permissions@oup.com Downloaded from http://jhs.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on April 27, 2012 Frits Staal once provocatively claimed that what makes someone a Hindu is not what he believes, but ‘the ritual practices he performs and the rules to which he adheres, in short, what he does’ (Staal 1989, p. 389). On this account the verbal text of Hinduism found in poetry, discussion, prescription, and narrative co-exists with a particularly rich ‘enacted’ text of rituals, customs, practices and techniques: indeed, it is these activities that constitute the majority of religious life for many Hindus. This can be seen as the means by which Hinduism as a cultural form reproduces itself through the ages, internalised in what Pierre Bourdieu calls an embodied doxa, an ‘active presence in the world through which the world imposes its presence, with its urgencies, its things to be done or said’—its values, taste, and bodily logic (Bourdieu 1977, p. 96). But the prominence of morphology, variation, and synthesis in the practice traditions explored in the present volume suggests that there is also a disarmingly innovative dimension to Hindu practice. June McDaniel defines ritual as ‘the creation of habit’, reminding us that practices help establish us as the people we would like to become, shaping the lives we would like to lead. In the Hindu ritual habitus, then, we see a creative and constructive response to the conditions in which Hindus have found themselves for millennia. Hindu culture is full of explicit theorisation of ‘karma’—action; it asks cosmological questions about the nature of the first actions, ethical questions about right and wrong actions, and metaphysical questions about the causal implications of action. Yet the ascription of value to acts is not reduced into a bi-polar system of right and wrong, but is instead mapped onto multiple grids: these include merit and misdemeanour in the m@h@tmyas, prudent and foolish conduct in natiś@stra, outer (pravPtti) and inner (nivPtti) action, or attached or detached action in yogainfluenced texts such as the Bhagavad Gat@, worldly and otherworldly actions in aesthetic theory. But however fraught our range of options may turn out to be, key texts remind us that there is no escaping the world of action: it is a metaphysical necessity, for even to restrain action is to act, as the Bhagavad Gat@ points out. Thus what is to be sought is an understanding of the subtle vPddhis or modalities of action.1 Much of Hindu culture takes place in the medium not of words, but of looks, movements, murmurs, journeys, eating, breathing, and other forms of 2 Ritual and Practice in Hindu Studies Interpreting ritual and practice While traditional approaches to religious traditions have tended to see texts and artifacts as our enduring historical link to the past, in many respects, the lived text of religious practice is a more robust manifestation of Hinduism. Rituals travel more slowly through time, cutting across both cultural and theological shifts to act as a ‘comparatively stable and invariant event in contradistinction to a changing, and often politically unstable, political and economic history. In some sense ritual defies history’ (Flood 1996, p. 199). Thus, although Hindu practice is ‘often innate and unconscious’, Staal points out that rituals ‘lead a life of their own, independent of religion, society and language’ (Staal 1996, p. xiii). But this pervasive ‘lived’ fabric of religious life poses intense difficulties to scholars who try to pin down the mercurial ‘meaning’ of practice. The problem is that practice tends to shift in form and meaning across the slightest change of region, varies from its textual accounts—if there are any, and is often non-verbal or non-semantic in character. Staal claims that ‘neither rituals nor mantras are languages’ (Staal 1996, p. 4) and that linguistic explanation misses the point of the ritual: ‘for the ritualists, actions comes first, and action, which includes recitation and chant, is all that counts’ (Staal 1983, p. xii). Thus practice qua practice has the nature of a mystery, challenging us to discover hidden grammars, motivations, consequences, and symbolism behind the action. Some scholars have tried to introduce new hermeneutic principles for understanding practice. One example is the attempt to shift our focus from the verbal contexts of Hindu text, to the visual and enacted contexts of Hindu worship: in a culture where ‘beholding . . . is an act of worship’ (Eck 1998, p. 4), the visual arts ‘have an essential relationship with ritual practice’ (Elgood 1999, p. 3). Valpey Downloaded from http://jhs.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on April 27, 2012 action. The Hindu world recognises that such actions are more than fleeting forms of life—they are important entities with a lasting impact on the cosmos. As the articles in the present volume by Axel Michaels, June McDaniel, and John Brockington show, the tacit mutability of practice—its ability to maintain its form while subtly shifting its meaning—is what frees practitioners to change and create their religion from within the boundaries of tradition. These authors show how Hindus can become creative theologians by using ritual syntax to develop new regional forms, by adapting yogic techniques to different devotional uses, and by giving fresh interpretations to inherited practices such as j@pa recitation. This reflects an individual creativity that is seen in the gradual accretion of a home shrine, the drawing of Kolam patterns on the threshold of a home at dawn, the improvised performance of mediums responding to the experience of possession, the musical expression of singers and musicians at a kartan, or a brahmins’ adornment of a temple image in new outfits. Each expresses the creativity that is facilitated by religious practice, in contrast to the predominantly passive reception of textual traditions. Jessica Frazier 3 Structuring Practices Hinduism has a particularly strong sense of the value of an ordered world. Consequently the maintenance of structures—both natural and social—is a key theme in Hindu ritual. The Vedic sacrificer is like ViX>u, who brings order to the firmament with his three wide strides, or PuruXa, from whom the symbiotic social order of the var>as is constructed; he is one who stands on the side of order against an incipient chaos of life, nature, and society. In contrast to the desire for rewards, the order of Pta or dharma can be an end-goal in itself. And just as one sees the pleasing geometry of the Kolam design drawn in chalk and rice flour by a Tamil wife on a threshold as the sign of a house that is freshly cleaned ready for a new day, so too visible regularity in nature and society is taken as the sign of a world in which it is good to live. However the cosmic order is seen not as a self-sustaining structure, but a reality that constantly requires active participation. In the Hindu worldview, orders of nature, thought and society are often implicitly ethical concepts which, in representing structures, invite co-operation in creating them. Thus Witzel translates Pta as ‘active realisation of the truth’, and Mahoney invites us to think of it as a work of Downloaded from http://jhs.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on April 27, 2012 (2011) has emphasised the sensory character of p+j@ practice, and others have argued that tantric practices, pervading Hinduism in regard to activities such as the reconstruction of the body by initiates, experiences of sacred architecture by worshipers, and devotional participation in the divine ‘play’, introduce a profoundly sensory, embodied character to Hindu worship. Thus the phenomenologist of religious practice often has to explain meanings that have more to do with affective, mental, sensory, physical, and social states, than with conceptual propositions. Anthropological scholars have had to learn to explore subjective experiences such as the ecstasies of devotional saints in Bengal (McDaniel 1989), the fluid identities of Teyyam mediums in Kerala (Freeman 1998), or the inter-subjective mental acts of which some tantric gurus have claimed to be capable (White 2009). The mantric utterances that form the main verbal aspects of so many Hindu ritual practices, have been explained in terms of the ‘esoteric poetic’ manner in which they are experienced by those who utter and hear them: framed by an evocative ritual setting in the community or landscape, accompanied by expressive gestures, and appreciated allusively, aphoristically, metonymically, with reference to all the space that they leave for the imagination (Patton 2005). The search for the meaning of practice turns observers of outwards action into speculators on the inner state; thus it takes us to the heart of questions about what it means to ‘experience’ a religious tradition. In order to answer the question of what a practice means, it is often helpful to ask what a practice is meant to do for or to the practitioner. In light of this, one can observe distinctive purposive themes in the inventory of Hindu religious technologies. 4 Ritual and Practice in Hindu Studies Self-controlling practices Many Indian religious traditions recommend self-control through ‘techniques of mental and physical cultivation’ that provide a sophisticated technology for navigating, controlling, and creatively manipulating the inner world (Samuels 2008, p. 11). The Bhagavad Gat@, for instance, reminds us to counter the impulsive character of most actions, by undertaking ‘the discipline of action with the faculties of action’3 yoking human nature to our will through ‘training in the sustained control over the activities of the mind and the desires of the body’. Such practices aim at the possibility of ‘successfully navigating the course of a human body, or maximising its potential in the world while refusing to be drawn into its lair’ (Hausner 2011, p. 102). In this sense, almost all religious practitioners are yogis, seeking to yoke the body and mind and guide them in a desirable direction, rather than to ride them blindly. The most famous of the ‘controlling practices’ of Indian religion is yoga, a complex of related techniques applied to different goals in different traditions. Uses of the term yoga incorporate speculative physiology, the determined rejection of desire and attachment, the pursuit of single-pointed consciousness, the acquisition of supernatural/heightened-natural powers, Tantric alchemies of the spirit-body, and other technologies of the self. Certain devotional texts portray connoisseurs of emotion (such as R@dh@, P@rvata, and Hanum@n) as yogis, skilled in accessing their passions and ‘yoking’ them to higher goals. Thus in the bhakti Downloaded from http://jhs.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on April 27, 2012 art co-created by all ritual-enacters.2 The medha contained by the sacrificial objects is a conveyor of causal efficacy that gives us power over the universe, and the causal law of karma also empowers us to impact upon the future conditions of our own experience. But we must order the world according to its own intrinsic structures, rather than attempting to impose an artificial regime that reflects merely the human viewpoint. The good ritual produces a ‘good cut’ of the world, and thus the ritualist must be sensitive to the hidden structures waiting to be manifested. The astrologer’s power over the way that many Hindus arrange the major events in their lives reflects a shared belief in a subtle order of auspiciousness events that can be discovered and made concrete by the proper human attention. One of the goals of structuring rituals is to cause one’s own small part of history to follow a more perfect path. A key feature of any structuring of practice is that it must be able to make sense of new experiences, placing them within a comprehensible framework. In this sense ritual draws what Peter Berger calls a ‘sacred canopy’ across our experiences, giving them shape and direction much as the Nambudri Brahmin draws the ‘altar of fire’ on the bare earth. Mere ideas pass across our awareness, touching it only lightly. But rituals actively mould experience into a meaningful shape that establishes patterns for the future. Jessica Frazier 5 Interpersonal practices Personal relationships are bound to feature prominently in a culture that combines the animism of South-East Asian beliefs with the polytheism of IndoEuropean and indigenous sub-continental cultures, and the monotheism of devotional traditions. Indian cosmologies are filled with a vast range of natural and supernatural beings; it is natural, then, that interpersonal practices have become a key element of Hindu activity. Some of the most popular practices, from the daily p+j@ in the morning to m+rti-bhoga at mealtime, allow humans to live alongside the divine, filling the quotidian temporal space of the day with experience of the sacred—as Durkheim might put it, the effervescence not of communion with other humans, but with divine beings. Hinduism has come to encompass a wide range of forms of communication, including the use of the Vedic altar as a place of gift-giving and hymnal communications, the meeting of the deity’s eyes in darśana, the performing of service in seva, the physical contact of anointing the deity in the abhiXeka, and the fully embodied interaction of speech and touch that are made possible by possession traditions. Many practices seek the intimacy implied in stories of practitioners who receive embraces from the body into which ViX>u descends, blessing from hands that have been briefly possessed by a goddess, or physical initiation from a corpse that Śiva animates. In all of these practices an intense realist attitude to spiritual beings is in evidence—deities and spirits are autonomous presences with whom we must develop relationships as we would with the neighbours, family members, lovers, teachers, or overlords in our community. This realism is almost never brought into explicit discourse in the Hindu world—there are few theological or philosophical texts discussing the nature of the divine presence in the natural world and defending it against sceptics. Rather spiritual presences are an Downloaded from http://jhs.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on April 27, 2012 traditions we see ‘a religious strategy entirely different from that of ascetic denial’—a yoga of emotional focus and intensification, ‘cultivated as an effective means of establishing a relationship with ultimate reality’ (Haberman 2003, p. xxix). As McDaniel puts it in the present volume, bhakti practices not only evoke a powerful affective response to their religious object, they also shape that response though techniques designed to ‘modulate’ and ‘refine religious experiences, and bring dharmic order into states of passions and inspiration’. The Indian aesthetic tradition contributes to this science of manipulating emotional experience, and the religious arts constitute an extremely effective application of this theory-base. The controlled flow of classical r@gas or popular kartan, the narrative pace of a bard or the cadence of a poet all allow for a manipulation of the audience’s emotion that is as concise as the methods of yogic meditation. The arts of India are thus as important a tool for shaping subjectivity as ritual, meditation, and prayer. 6 Ritual and Practice in Hindu Studies enacted religious reality, all the more evident in the immediacy of human relationship. Transforming practices Five perspectives on ritual and practice Such classifications, however, can never capture the fluid way in which actual practitioners combine different techniques within an intuitive embodied expression of religious life, and we see a range of practices in the articles that follow. Axel Michaels’ study of the syntax of Newar life cycle practices re-engages the longstanding attempt to ‘analyse the rules of rituals in linguistic terms’. In the process, he discovers ‘material’, ‘linguistic’, ‘acoustic’, and ‘kinetic’ ‘action units’ which instantiate an underlying generative grammar of repetition, differentiation, expansion, and condensation that governs the use and variation of such rituals. His article demonstrates the value of computational methods for discovering orders that might otherwise remain hidden in the sequence of actions. Yet contrary to appearances, such attempts at a pure grammar of ritual do not militate away from the ‘lived’ context of the Newar culture’s ritual usage in society. Instead Michaels’ Newar grammar shows us the way in which the ‘combination of context and text, Downloaded from http://jhs.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on April 27, 2012 Certain styles of rituals aim to transform the very substance of reality. Rituals of initiation involve actions that change the ontological status of an object, and human bodies, for instance, with all their mechanical, chemical, energic, psychological, and other systems, have been imagined by different schools of Indian thought as being constituted of food, breath, mind, joy, energies, spirits, experience, karma, or the cosmos itself.4 Nor is the body necessarily a single entity, a ‘monad that is determined by its physical limits’ for it can also be seen as a ‘porous structure’ that is ‘the seat of cosmic planes’ (Michaels and Wulff 2009). A person may shift from human to deity and back, living person to bh+ta, person to new person, and so on, and ritual performances help to concretise transformations in identity, confirming them through self-display to an audience that may include ‘our neighbours, and the faraway city dwellers . . . the netherworld, the world, the heavens’ (Sax 2002, p. 20). Similarly physical reality is also capable of different modes of existence. DakX@ rituals are crucial in this connection, drawing on tantric ‘sacramental’ techniques for the transformation of substances. Yoga, seen in the Yoga S+tras as a form of mental restraint, can also be a medium for transformation—through which subjectivities are ‘smashed’, ‘melted’, and ‘liquified’ (White 2009, p. 72). A festival can bring a ‘moveable feast’ of the sacred to a place and a time, delivering the mundane streets of the modern city into the spatial range of sanctity.5 Hindu cultures are filled with figures—brahmins, gurus, and mediums—who are able to create new realities through transformative practice. Jessica Frazier 7 Downloaded from http://jhs.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on April 27, 2012 of great, folk and local traditions, the merging of Hindu and Buddhist religions’ is achieved through the rigorous and structured ritual mechanisms of cultural change. In Sthaneshwar Timalsina’s study of shamanic elements in the Netratantra, it is the transformative practices of tantric religious culture that fall under the lens. Timalsina places tantric possession firmly within a framework of interweaving cosmologies that cross-references ‘various forms of spirits roaming in different realms’ accessible through rituals of a shamanic character, with alchemical sciences of gu>as and doXas, yoga’s ‘hydraulic’ model of a body full of energies flowing through channels, and with the pratyabhijñ@’s metaphysics of self-awareness. Ontological boundaries are effortlessly elided in the Netratantra’s approach. Mantras become ‘living and breathing’ beings, imbalances and impurities are demons, hearing and seeing are forms of touching, and the body is a mental construct. Yet the fruitful juxtaposition of these systems and sciences allows tantric practitioners to manipulate the body for ameliorative purposes both of healing and liberation. In a final transformation of categories, we find that even pain is really a bridge to self-realisation. Like Michaels’ article, June McDaniels’ survey of the uses of yoga in bhakti traditions of Bengal also explores the morphology of a widespread practice. Here variation occurs less through shifts in ritual form, than through varied application of shared techniques designed to ‘modulate and fine-tune’ devotional experience. This reveals a rich plurality of ‘yogas’ in the complex, multi-religious culture of Bengal. One of the themes that links them is the need for committed religious practitioners to turn their moments of spontaneous inspiration into a way of life, or to put it another way, the ecstatic experience of bh@va must become a permanent foundation for s@dhana. What is at stake for the practitioner is the possibility of spiritual progress, while what is at stake for the wider community is the need to discern who, in the wild world of religious experience, should be taken seriously. Ritual morphology is thrown into a historical light in John Brockington’s article on uses of j@pa recitative practice in the J@pakop@khy@na. Brockington highlights a shift from the Vedic recitation of mantras to recitation as a ‘viable alternative’ to the usual methods of yogic concentration, and finally to devotional recitation of the names of deities. Brockington’s careful analysis reveals the way in which these different forms of j@pa flicker in and out of sight in the patchwork theology of the Mah@bh@rata. Here too rules of change are revealed: whilst contrasting with yoga in form, j@pa must perform the same function as that for which it is a substitution (the nirodha, or suppressive elements of yogic meditation), and in its emerging function as a bhakti practice those functions will be extended to facilitate a ‘yogic’ form of devotion. We see ritual actions assume new identities for new functions, much as ‘ViX>u ‘becomes’ Brahm@ when he acts as the creator’. In the transition, we see practices directed at brahman redirected towards Brahm@, and a missing link between the Ved@ntic divinity and the creator deity is, perhaps, restored. 8 Ritual and Practice in Hindu Studies References Bourdieu, P., 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Goody, J., ed., Nice, R., trans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eck, D., 1998. Darshan: Seeing the Divine Image in India. New York: Columbia University Press. Elgood, H., 1999. Hinduism and the Religious Arts. London: Cassell. Flood, G., 1996. An Introduction to Hinduism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freeman, R., 1998. ‘Formalised possession among the Tantris and Teyyams of Malabar.’ South Asia Research 18: 73–98. Haberman, D., 2003. The Bhaktiras@mPtasindhu, pp. 100–106. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass/ Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts. Hausner, S., 2011. ‘Ascetic Traditions’. In: Frazier, J. (ed). The Continuum Companion to Hindu Studies, pp. 100–106. London: Continuum. McDaniel, J., 1989. The Madness of the Saints: Ecstatic Religion in Bengal. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Michaels, A., Wulff, C., 2009. The Body in India: Ritual, Transgression, Performativity, pp. 9–24. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Patton, L., 2005. Bringing the Gods to Mind: Mantra and Ritual in Early Indian Sacrifice. London: University of California Press. Samuels, G., 2008. The Origins of Yoga and Tantra: Indic Religions to the Thirteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Downloaded from http://jhs.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on April 27, 2012 Finally, McComas Taylor’s discussion of phalaśruti texts in the Skanda purana shows the extraordinary symbiosis of text and practice that developed in popular Hinduism. By reclassifying the genre of literature that enjoins the audience to certain practices as paratexts, Taylor highlights the aspects of religious texts that consciously create a culture of practice by promising practical rewards and punishments. Taylor notes that such a direct engagement with real actions and consequences helps the text to ‘function as “true”’, laying foundations in the worldly rewards of k@ma and artha, and the heavenly rewards of dharma and mokXa. Concurrently, it helps to create an actual socioeconomic reality of priests, scribes, pilgrims, and practitioners that frames the Pur@>as. An understanding of the function of these texts brings into focus the way in which control of practice contributes to control of society: any idea that claims causal implications in the ‘real’ world lifts itself into the real world through the actions of its ‘targeted epistemic community’. But this does not always imply the self-perpetuation of dominant traditions; often it is those regional traditions facing a ‘vulnerable and uncertain’ future that need to create their own sustaining realities. Taylor thus shows us that discourses of practice mark a meeting place between idea and reality, allowing a proposed habitus to bring itself into actuality. Once it is ‘alive’, a practice acquires what Staal called ‘a life of its own’ through which it develops in unforeseen generative patterns of historical growth. In rituals and practices, then, we see some of the key protagonists of Hindu history: a community of action traditions undergoing a slow but rich growth in the culture, and ‘collaborating’ with practitioners to shape individual experiences of Hindu life. Jessica Frazier 9 Sax, W., 2002. Performing the Self: Personhood and Performance in the Pandav Lila of Garhwal. New York: Oxford University Press. Staal, F., 1983. The Vedic Ritual of the Fire Altar, Vol. 1. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Staal, F., 1989. Rules without Meaning: Ritual, Mantras and the Human Sciences. New York: Peter Lang. Staal, F., 1996. Rituals and Mantras: Rules without Meaning. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Valpey, K., 2011. ‘Hindu Iconology and Worship’. In: Frazier, J. (ed). The Continuum Companion to Hinduism, pp. 158–170. London: Continuum. White, D., 2009. ‘Yogic Rays: The Self-Externalisation of the Yogi in Ritual, Narrative and Philosophy’. In: Michaels, A., Wulff, C. (eds). ‘The Body in India: Ritual, Transgression, Performativity, pp. 64–77. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. 1 Bhagavad Gat@ 18.11 and 4.17. 2 See Mahoney, W., 1998. The Artful Universe: An Introduction to the Vedic Religious Imagination. Albany: State University of New York, p. 3. 3 Bhagavad Gat@. Smith, J. D. (trans.) 2009. BhaXm@parvan, 25:5-8. London: Penguin, p. 355. 4 See Wujastyk, D., 2009. ‘Interpreting the image of the human body in pre-modern India.’ International Journal of Hindu Studies, 13: 189–228. 5 See Jacobsen, K. A. (ed.), 2008. South Asian Religions on Display: Religious Processions in South Asia and in the Diaspora. Abingdon: Routledge. Downloaded from http://jhs.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on April 27, 2012 Notes