A blend of natural learning ability, recitation skills, and dedication to hard work creates a successful Veda pandit out of a brahmacarin. In Chapter 2 the Vedic
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student was seen to begin his lifelong bond with Agni by daily agni-karya that he learned on the second day of his initiation ritual. He collects kindling for his guru and looks after one or more fires, offering, for example, seventeen twigs from a branch of a ravi or medi tree with a mantra for each, waiting to see that each is entirely burned, doing an expiation if he has missed a day. Today his guru is most probably his father or grandfather and he is therefore doing rou
tine household chores. But the hearth he cares for is not the ordinary kitchen one, although that may be an additional responsibility. Signs of the growing mystical liaison between brahmacarin and fire, the transforming power of Agni, occur in a moving passage in one of the two oldest Upanisads, Chandogya 4.6–
15, dated perhaps to the seventh century bce. When his guru is briefly away a stu dent receives instruction in the highest knowledge from the fires he is tending. Upon return the teacher discovers splendor, a glow of wisdom in his student, and asks who it could be who has taught him during his absence. In reply the guru hears: “These (fires) look like this now, but they were different.”2 And it is the older Konasima pandits who confess to wondrous experiences during rev eries sponsored by their fires. Baballa, for one, related two different luminous apparitions rising out of his fires, annunciations that he later understood to be the births of his son and, many years later, his second grandson. The emotions carried in such descriptions are quite unlike any others and reveal insights into the Agni-yajamana bond. The student begins to discover fire, to borrow Gaston
Bachelard’s phrase, as “one of the principles of universal explanation.”3 When his basic education is concluded and his wife of several years is at last able to join him, a household fire for the couple may now be established either in a separate hearth in his parents’ house or in a new residence. This aupasana fire receives the sthali-pakana cooked food (rice) offering and is now available for private domestic rituals such as homa offerings or life-cycle cer emonies. As described in Chapter 2 it cannot be used for soma or other srauta rites opened to the wider pandit community. It may be said that apprecia tion of the esoteric configurations of sacrifice arise later in life. Intimations of signal meanings, however, may occur in pre-teen years during adhyaya, as in the case of the Chandogya Upanisad student. Concentrating on retention of verses in order to feed them back correctly, he may also absorb the basic vocabulary of the soma sacrifice, for example, the minutiae of sacrificial ele ments, ritual tools, various deities, animals, priests, mystical constructions, and symbolic links between them all. His father or grandfather guru may be one who has done the ritual under study and “outside of class” favor him with accounts of the performance.
He may become intrigued by the mysteries of a particular sacrifice. The asva-medha horse sacrifice, for example, fascinated Kapilavayi Rama Sastri as
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a beginning brahmacarin learning TS 4.6.6–9, 4.7.15, and so on. Then after several more years he discovered the magnificent equine-cosmic catalogue that opens the Brhad-aranyaka Upanisad. It remains today his favorite ritual although, not being of royal lineage, one he cannot perform. Nor could he observe one or participate since it has been obsolete for centuries. It lingers as imaginative drama, a ritual of two years’ duration with an appreciative day
dreaming audience of one.
Only a fraction of the certified Veda pandits and patnis of Konasima estab lish three fires, perform agni-hotra twice daily, and move on to their first soma sacrifice, the agni-stoma. A few may elect to perform agni-hotra on a single fire after grhya adhana. Upadhyayula Nagendram, for example, in a multigenera tional family of ahitagni in Amalapuram, chose not to advance to agni-stoma. In this overview, however, all the featured ahitagni elected to perform adhana with multiple fires and proceed with yajna (agni-stoma). In some cases, Bulusu Vyaghresvara and Bulusu Kamesvara, for example, fire-setting and first soma rituals were scheduled on two successive days and within the year 1955 Mitranarayana did both. Normally, however, the distance between adhana and agni-stoma should be at least one year of agni-hotra. “The old tradition, doing them separately, is better,” said Duvvuri Yajulu, and so he advised his relative in Iragavaram, Pisapati, who did agni-stoma in 1991.