The wakefulness the Upaniṣads speak of (and the Ṛgveda before them) is a state opposed, not to sleep, but to another kind of wakefulness—inattentive, inert, automatic. Awakening means rousing oneself from that kind of wakefulness, as from a vapid dream. Philosophers have not regarded this swerve within the mind as worthy of consideration, but it became the focus of thought in one place and in one period: in India, in the time between the Veda and the Buddha—and then reverberated unremittingly through all the centuries thereafter.
The first reference, in the Ṛgveda, was clear, blunt: “The gods seek someone who crushes soma; they do not need sleep; tireless, they set off on journeys.” Even if men cannot say what “journeys” the gods endlessly devote themselves to, their duty is clearly indicated: to remain alert and, with their labor, to prepare the intoxicating drug.
But what is the relationship between the Buddha and the Veda? It is a difficult, delicate, and intricate question. However much we may emphasize their opposing positions, there remains a vast, obscure common background on which every contrast is laid out. We can see this background in the name of the Buddha himself, in the verb budh-, “to awaken,” “to pay attention.” The primacy of awakening over every other mental action was not an innovation of the Buddha, who simply offered a version of it that was both radical and by and large destructive of all that had gone before. The concern for awakening and its centrality had always been present in the Vedic texts. Awakening was embedded in the ritual, in the moments when it was more vulnerable, more likely to fall to pieces. Deep attention (ours toward what is happening, and of the god toward us) is the support the officiant needs, even when he is obliged to perform “that which is incorrect”—and this occurs at various times, since life itself is incorrect. One instance arises when the sacrificial ashes are thrown into the water: “When he throws Agni into the water, he performs that which is wrong; now he apologizes to him so as not to harm him. With two verses connected to Agni he adores, for it is to Agni that he apologizes, and they will be such as to contain the verb budh-, so that Agni can pay attention to his words.” The gesture with which the ash is thrown into the water is nevertheless an offense to the fire, since it interrupts a desire that is total. In fact, “it is for all his desires that he has prepared that fire.” Here again, a healing gesture is also needed, which “rejoins and recomposes,” in a perpetual labor of reconstruction and restoration. But what is needed to attract the benevolence of Agni, the injured party, in such a delicate situation? Only upon awakening can help be sought, at the crucial moment. And the first awakening is directed to Agni, at the moment when the fire has become ash and is scattered on the waters. The fire has been “all his desires.” Awakening happens as soon as his desire is extinguished and returns to its watery abode. It alone can now act. It is as though this ceremonial conduct toward Agni contained, prearranged and prefigured within it, the whole of later history culminating in the awakening of the Buddha, under a tree that no flame could harm.
Awakening is the decisive act in life. We can see this from the passage in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad where it is said that in the beginning there was only brahman, and brahman “was everything.” Then “it [brahman] became the gods, as they gradually awakened [pratyabudhyata, where the root budh- follows the prefix prati-, which indicates a movement forward, as if rousing from sleep].” But the gods are only the first category of beings, those who set the example. They are followed by the ṛṣis, and lastly mankind: “So also [did] the ṛṣis, so also men.” If becoming brahman is the target, then awakening is the appropriate instrument (the only one named: in this passage, for once, there is no reference to sacrifice). But this establishes a worrying proximity and affinity between mankind and the gods. And for this the gods use all possible means, even the lowest, to prevent man from reawakening. The text is abrupt. He who thinks that “divinity is one thing and I another,” that person “does not know.” The presumption is that men and gods are fundamentally one and the same thing. Nothing is more insidious and disturbing for the gods than this: “So they are not pleased that men know this.” It is no surprise that the authorities in the Castle ensured that a torpid haze fell upon K. as soon as he came close to discovering their secrets.
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What appears under the name brahman is arcane, far more so than the gods. If seen as a group, and not each in their own dazzling singularity, the gods appeared as beings who had been fortunate: they had succeeded in passing from the earth to the sky, they had succeeded in becoming immortal. And yet they were obliged perpetually to fight and continually defeat the Asuras, their elder brothers before being downgraded to demons. And this is already a diminution of their supremacy, which ought to have been continually protected and maintained. The Devas had to be allies of the ṛṣis, though not always regarded by them with benevolence—or even with mere respect.
But brahman is neuter, untarnished, untarnishable. The seven suggested translations of the word listed in the St. Petersburg Lexicon are all inadequate. But so too are more recent attempts, such as those of Renou and Jan C. Heesterman, which show keen insight but also end up in a disastrous paraphrase: “connecting energy compressed in enigmas” (Renou); “the link between life and death” (Heesterman). In the end, it can be said only that brahman is the peak from which everything else follows.
And yet brahman is also a “world,” brahmaloka—and it is a world that can be entered (“he enters brahman”). But what allows access? Not power, nor piety, nor good works. But simple consciousness, contact with perpetual wakefulness: “He who is wakeful among sleepers, the mind that edifies the various desires, this one is pure, this is brahman, this is what is called the immortal. All worlds rest on it: no one goes beyond.” At last, in this passage in the Kaṭha Upaniṣad, we discover—under the name of *brahman—*what constituted from the very beginning the Knowledge, which is the Veda. Though the Upaniṣads explain it (indeed: they are described as texts that seek above all to explain it), this secret of brahman as wakefulness and consciousness is already present, “unspoken,” throughout the Ṛgveda. In a hymn such as 5.44, for example, which Geldner describes as “the most difficult hymn in the Ṛgveda.” Here “divinity is everywhere unspoken (anirukta).” Here, according to Renou, “the phraseology, the esoteric intention, undeniably indicated the Viśvedevāḥ character” (meaning: this type of composition places the hymn among those to the Viśvedevāḥ, All-the-gods, a peculiarly Vedic entity). No single god is named, apart from Agni in stanza 15, at the end of a hymn where, wrote Geldner, “the final verses seem to be the solution to a riddle,” adding: “and this is undoubtedly all it seeks to be.” To a large extent it remains a riddle: Oldenberg, the father of all Vedists, had already laid down his arms in the face of such a tough obstacle (“Both the explanation and the textual analysis of this hymn remain for the most part doubtful and without solution”). And yet, even though the exposition of the riddle remains largely impenetrable, the “solution” speaks with marvelous clarity—and refers to the supremacy of wakefulness over everything. With these words: “He who is wakeful, the stanzas love him; he who is wakeful, the ritual chants also go to him. He who is wakeful, soma says to him: in your friendship (I feel as if) at home.” Since the hymns are the very formulation of brahman—in other words the expression of brahman as a “word of power” (Kramrisch)—the nexus that connects power to the word is already acknowledged here in wakefulness.
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“The life of sacrifice is therefore an infinite series of deaths and births,” wrote Sylvain Lévi. And so will be, in the first place, the initiation that is implicit in the sacrifice. To celebrate a sacrifice, the sacrificer must first be consecrated. And the consecration is a form of sacrifice—an endless circle on which everything turns. But for the initiand, more than for the others taking part in the ritual, birth and death must be as literal as possible. This is what distinguishes the initiand. During one part of the ceremony he will be the one who is still unborn: “He then wraps his head. For he who is consecrated becomes an embryo; and embryos are enveloped by the amniotic fluid and by the outer membrane; so he covers his head.” The veiled head, which we come across in Greek initiations and for which the texts give us no convincing justification, is explained here in a few brief words: the initiand, he who is consecrated, is an embryo—and the primary characteristic of an embryo is that of being hidden, veiled by a membrane. The turban therefore recalls that state of concealment, that of the initiand as an embryo, in the same way as its shape suggests Vāc’s womb torn open by Indra.
Of course, for the initiand to be literally an embryo raises certain difficulties, which might seem frivolous, like many other details of the ritual. For example: what does he do if, during the ceremony, he feels an itch? The rules are very strict: “He shall not scratch with a splinter of wood or with a fingernail. For he who is consecrated becomes an embryo: and if an embryo is scratched with a wooden splinter or a fingernail, the amniotic fluid could escape and he would die. Thereafter the consecrated one might suffer from itchiness; and his offspring might also be born with itchiness. Now the womb does not damage the embryo, and since the horn of the black antelope is the womb, it does not damage it; so the consecrated one should scratch himself with the horn of the black antelope and with nothing other than the horn of the black antelope.” The pictures conjured up by the rite are never just metaphors, in the sense of a lame literary device. They are invisible presences and at the same time are to be understood in a strict literal sense. If the consecrated one becomes an embryo, this must determine his behavior even at the most casual, unexpected, and insignificant moment: for example, when he feels an itch. And so we discover the subtle answer of the womb, which, with motherly concern, soothes the embryo within it. But how? With the horn of a black antelope, which, contrary to all evidence and appearance, is declared to be the womb. And so, the consecrated one scratches himself with the horn of a black antelope during the ceremony.
When the initiand is finally born, who is his father? The new birth that takes place through initiation makes it possible to escape the old worry of pater semper incertus. The father will now be one alone—and is neuter: brahman. And brahman, whatever it might be, is an intrinsic presence in the sacrifice, so that it could be said that “only he who is born from brahman is truly born,” but at the same time that “he who is born from the sacrifice is born from brahman.” Beyond this acquired paternity, anyone might also be the child or the descendant of one of those Rakṣas who wandered the land and went “hunting for women,” like the angels in Genesis copulating with the daughters of men.
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The night before the ceremony in which a person kindles his fires with the agnyādheya ritual is a most delicate moment. Until then he was a “mere man”—and what he did was unimportant. But now, if he wants to start building a relationship with the gods, the ritualists suggest he should remain awake through the night. And here lies the crucial point. What is the prime characteristic of the gods that we can emulate? Not power: ours will always be limited. Not immortality: we don’t have it—at most we may fool ourselves into thinking we have gained temporary immortality, after long practice. But it’s an immortality that gradually crumbles away, like every conquest gained by merit. Not knowledge, because it is far inferior to that of the gods: we don’t even know the mind of our neighbor, while “the gods know the minds of men.” So then, what? The pure fact of consciousness: of being awake. “The gods are awake”: moving closer to the gods means being awake. Not performing good works, not pleasing the gods with homage and offerings. Simply being awake. This is what enables anyone to become “more divine, more calm, more ardent,” in other words, richer in tapas. And was it not tapas that had enabled the gods to become gods? By isolating the pure fact of being awake and giving it supremacy over everything else, the ritualists made known their particular view with the utmost clarity. Everything could be traced back to this. And everything else could be eliminated, except this.
Becoming divine was not an ultimate experience reserved for the mystics: it was instead the experience of anyone who enters the sacrificial ceremony, immediately after having been consecrated: “He who is consecrated moves toward the gods; he becomes one of the divinities.” This is the passage to which Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss refer when they describe entering the sacrifice as follows: “All that touches the gods must be divine; the sacrificer is obliged to become a god himself to be able to act over them.” Hidden in a hut built purposefully to keep him apart from the human world, shaved, washed, oiled, dressed in white linen and covered by a black antelope skin, the “consecrated one,” dīkṣita, gradually transformed into a divine embryo. He was made to move back and forth around the fire like the fetus kicking in the uterus. As always, the ritualists note the most subtle details: it is essential that the consecrated one holds his fists clenched. But not out of anger or despair. With that gesture he tries to seize the sacrifice. At that moment he says: “With the mind I take hold of the sacrifice.” It must be like this, because the sacrifice is invisible, like the gods: “The sacrifice is not visibly taken hold of, in fact, like this stick or a garment, but invisible are the gods, invisible the sacrifice.” Every event will be accurately described only if the description includes two parts: the visible and the invisible. And so the correct moment to unclench the fists is indicated with precision. Then the fetus “is born to divine existence, it is god.”
But even though the consecrated one, during the sacrificial journey, gradually moved closer to the gods, there still remained a vast distance. Revealed above all by one fact: the gods do not sleep, men are not granted sleeplessness. This, ironically, is enough to thwart human claims: not only do you have to die, but you are also unable to avoid sleep. And this again is why wakefulness was the highest good, the moment of greatest proximity to divine life. Otherwise, in ordinary life, when people found themselves in rites that lasted days and days, all they could do when overcome by sleep was to turn to Agni, the good awakener: may he rouse us, whole, after everything has abandoned us in sleep, everything but breath.
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Having listed the other sacrifices, the sacrifice to brahman still has to be described. And so we read: “The sacrifice to brahman is the daily study of the Veda.” There is a line that starts off with the sacrifice as a long ceremony, structured into hundreds of movements and actions—and therefore entirely visible—and which leads up to a later and invaluable variant, the sacrifice as an invisible and imperceptible activity, as it is performed through the study of the Veda.
Study of the Veda, known as svādhyāya or “inner recitation,” had to be done beyond the confines of the village, to the east or north, where the roofs were out of sight. It was the first indication of a process by which the simple acquisition of knowledge would get gradually more distant from society and unshackled by it. But study could also be carried out in other ways, even in bed: “And, in truth, if he studies his lesson, even stretched out on a soft bed, oiled, adorned and completely fulfilled, he is burned by tapas up to the tips of his fingernails: and so the daily lesson must be studied.” Here we see a figure we thought was modern: the reader, described much as the young Proust might have been described, given over to his journées de lecture. Once again we can see Vedic open-mindedness: to practice tapas we don’t have to cross our legs or subject ourselves to those “mortifications” that some regard as the very meaning of the word tapas. No, even luxe, calme et volupté may help—or at least not hinder. It is enough that the fervor of the mind runs without respite, and burns “up to the tips of the fingernails.”