The Agnicayana Rite: Indigenous Origin?

Author(s): Hyla Stuntz Converse

Source: History of Religions, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Nov., 1974), pp. 81-95
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1062002 .
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Hyla Stuntz Converse

I.

LITERARY

AND

THE
A G N I CA Y A N A
RITE:
INDIGENOUS
ORIGIN?

ARCHAEOLOGICAL

CONSIDERATIONS

In the last twenty to twenty-five years archaeological investigation

has established the existence of two distinct, parallel cultures in
northern India between about 1100 B.C. and 500 B.C. One of these
cultures includes the Punjab and Doab areas and the lower
Chambal valley. This is the ancient Vedic heartland known from
geographical references in the Samihitas and Brahmanas. Archaeologically this culture is characterized by a Gray Ware pottery,
painted at first but evolving to an unpainted type. The second
culture is characterized by a Black-and-Red Ware pottery. This
culture, with some local variations, stretched from Kathiawar
eastward in an arc along the Narmada and up into the eastern
Gangetic plain. By 800-750 B.C. such cities as Ujjaini, Kasi,
Sravasti, and Ayodhya were in existence in the Black-and-Red
Ware territory close to the Gray Ware boundary. Other early
Black-and-Red Ware cities were Chirand, R&jghat, Sonpur,
Prahladpur, Rajghir, Vaisali, Eran, Nagda, and Maheshwar, to
name a few.
The remarkable thing about the two cultures is that they lived
side by side, but remained notably isolated from each other, with
no borrowings from each other of pottery techniques or styles, of
ornament fashions or decorative patterns, until around 600-500
81

Agnicayana: Indigenous Origin?

B.C.1 It is then that an exchange begins to be evident and a new
pottery, the Northern Black Polished Ware, begins to appear
in the major centers of both cultures. It is also between 500 and
300 B.C that Burrow finds a massive influx of Dravidian words
into Sanskrit, indicating the probability that this new encounter
and exchange between the intrusive Gray Ware people and the
indigenous Black-and-Red Ware people was an exchange between
Sanskrit-speaking Vedic people and indigenous Dravidian speakers.2 It is also between 600 and 500 B.C. that the new religious
ideas of karma and transmigration begin to appear in the secret
and elite Vedic lore of the Upanisads. And it is significant that,
without exception, all of the original holy places of Jainism and
Buddhism are located in the area of the Black-and-Red Ware
culture, none in the Gray Ware area.
It is against the background of the new archaeological evidence
for the existence of two separate and isolated cultures in northern
1 The
following sources have been used extensively as the basis for the archaeological statements made in this study: S. R. Rao, B. B. Lal, Bhola Nath, S. S.
Ghosh, and Krishna Lal, "Excavations at Rangpur and Other Explorations in
Gujerat," Ancient India, nos. 18, 19 (1962-63) (New Delhi: Director General
of Archaeology, 1963); see esp. pp. 17, 193-99. B. K. Thapar, "Prakash, 1955:
A Chalcolithic Site in the Tapti Valley," Ancient India, nos. 20-21 (1964-65)
(New Delhi: Director General of Archaeology, 1967). B. B. Lal, "From the Megalithic to Harappa: Tracing back the Grafitti on the Pottery," Ancient India, no.
16 (1960) (New Delhi: Director General of Archaeology, 1962). Lal, "Excavations
at Hastinapura," Ancient India, nos. 10, 11 (New Delhi: Director General of
Archaeology, 1954, 1955). N. R. Bannerjee, The Iron Age in India (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1965). R. E. M. Wheeler, Civilizations of the Indus Valley and
Beyond (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1966). Wheeler, Five Thousand Years
of Pakistan (London: Royal India and Pakistan Society, 1950). The significance
of the Black-and-Red Ware is still being debated. The basic question is this:
does the Black-and-Red Ware really represent a cultural complex whose continuity can be seen in other elements of the cultural context of this pottery, or is the
Black-and-Red Ware merely a technique that became widely disseminated and is
found in widely differing cultural contexts ? As more evidence comes in, especially
from the eastern Gangetic plain, a final answer to this question should be possible.
However, my assessment of the evidence that is already in leads me to conclude,
for the time being at least, that the Black-and-Red Ware does represent a cultural
complex and not just a floating technique. In any case, there is no doubt that the
Gray Ware culture was separate and different from the culture or cultures in which
the Black-and-Red Ware is found.
2 T. Burrow, The Sanskrit Language (London: Faber & Faber, 1955),p. 387. Of the
loan words, Burrow says: "It is evident from this survey that the main influence
of Dravidian on Indo-Aryan was concentrated at a particular historical period,
namely between the late Vedic period and the formation of the classical language.
This is significant from the point of view of the locality where the influence took
place. It is not possible that at this period such influence could have been exercised
by the Dravidian languages of the South. There were no intensive contacts with
South India before the Maurya period, by which time the majority of these words
had already been adopted by Indo-Aryan. If the influence took place in the North
in the central Gangetic plain and the classical Madhyadesa, the assumption that
the pre-Aryan population of the area contained a considerable element of Dravidian speakers would best account for the Dravidian words in Sanskrit." The date
500-300 B.C. is also discussed in this reference.
82

History of Religions
India during the Vedic period that my own studies have been
undertaken. The archaeological model of strata has been used in
reexamining the Rgveda, the Rgveda Brahmanas, the Taittiriya
Samihita, the Satapatha Brahmana, and the Brhad5ranayaka
and Chandogya Upanisads. The study of the Agnicayana rite is
part of this longer study.
The Agnicayana rite is found most fully developed in the
Satapatha Brahmana (SB), Kandas vi-ix, with Kanda x providing
further interpretation. In this section of the Brahmana, Sandilya
is the authority cited, rather than Yajfiavalkya, and the language
also distinguishes it from the rest of the Brahmana. The immediate
practical purpose of the Agnicayana rite is to build up for the
sacrificer an immortal body that is permanently beyond the reach
of the transitoriness, suffering, and death that, according to this
rite, characterize man's mortal existence. The purpose is to be
achieved by ritual analogy in the rebuilding of the "unstrung"
body of the god Prajapati. The rite includes a year's preparation
and then the placing of a minimum of 10,800 kiln-fired bricks (a
sizable brick-making operation) in minutely prescribed sequence
and position, in five layers, with the sacrificial fire placed on top.3
At every point, with every brick, special mantras are to be recited,
special actions carried out, and the religious meanings of each part
of the rite carefully explained.
The question of bricks is of major importance. The Harappa
civilization, whose last, flood-damaged strongholds in the north
were overthrown by the invading Aryans in battles commemorated
in the Rg-Veda, was a brick-using culture. The Harappans used
millions of kiln-fired bricks as well as countless sun-baked ones.
In the Kathiawar peninsula, after the devastating flood of between
1700 and 1500 B.C., the Harappan people rebuilt their cities,
continuing their brick-making and pottery traditions, but with a
slow deterioration of the ancient skills. The bricks of the Harappa
civilization in its mature phase were beautifully made, well fired,
and standardized in size. The basic size for the bricks was 111
inches long, 53 inches wide, and two or three inches thick. There
were also double bricks 11 inches square, and special bricks for
well copings, drain covers, corners, etc.
Now, in the whole of the Rg-Veda there is no word for brick,
nor any descriptive phrase for bricks. So far no ruins of brick
dwellings have been found that can be attributed to the Aryans
3 J.
Eggeling, trans. The Satapathabrdhmana, pt. 4, in Sacred Books of the East
(hereafter cited as SBE) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1882 ff.), 43:22, n. 1.
83

Agnicayana: Indigenous Origin?

in the early Rg-Vedic period. The Rg-Vedic references to houses
indicate that they were made of perishable wood and thatch.
Bricks were thus not part of the Rg-Vedic technical or ritual
accomplishments. There are also no references to bricks in the
.Rg-Veda Brahmanas and outside of the Agnicayana sections of the
Saihitas and Brahmanas of the Yajurveda tradition, no significant references to bricks occur in these or in the Samaveda
Brahmanas. Thus, in the Brahmanas, when references to bricks
begin to appear, their use is confined to one specialized rite, and
the rite itself is found only in the Yajurveda tradition. The fire
altars in other rites were made of packed earth, not bricks.
The size of the bricks to be used in the rite was one foot square,
and half-bricks were also to be used (SB vii,5,3,2; viii,7,2,17). This
size and shape corresponds very closely to that of the Harappa
bricks described above. The lack of any bricks in the early Vedic
tradition and the presence of bricks in large numbers and of the
same size in the adjacent indigenous Black-and-Red Ware
territory suggest that the Black-and-Red Ware culture is the source
of the Agnicayana brick-making skills.
The word for brick also suggests a probable non-Aryan origin.
As a Sanskrit word, istakd is related to the ritual use of bricks as
an oblation, an isti, and not to their general character as a building material. This suggests that bricks first came into Vedic usage
through this ritual function, rather than through their usual
building function. By contrast, the brick words in Dravidianbased languages such as Tamil are descriptive of the primary use
of bricks for building. For instance, one Tamil word for brick
is cengal; cennu means straightness, and kal or gal means stone
or clay. Another Tamil word for burnt (fired) brick is cutakal,
sutakal; again kal means clay or stone, and cutu, sutu means to
burn, to bake, to burn bricks.4 It is possible that an early form of
sutakal was the foreign phonetic basis of what becomes Sanskritized into istakd: an inversion (not uncommon in the incorporation
of Dravidian words into Sanskrit) of the s and the u, and the
dropping of the final 1 to conform to Sanskrit endings, would
give ustaka; the use of the bricks as isti would tend to bring about
the change from the initial u (not common in Sanskrit) to the
more common i.5 Whatever the source word, it was the Sanskrit
4 T. Burrow and M. B. Emeneau, A Dravidian
Etymological Dictionary (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1961), nos. 1091, 2185.
5 A similar inversion takes
place, for instance, as the Dravidian word for the
indigenous tree, the sacred Ficus religiosa, comes over into Sanskrit: atavam
(Tamil) becomes asvattha in Sanskrit, with the inversion of the v and t.
84

History of Religions
meaning of the approximate transliteration of the indigenous
word that was emphasized, and this Sanskrit word, istakd, in no
way reflects the building function of bricks but only their ritual
use.
The question of the fire pan is as significant as the bricks themselves. The first brick, three other special bricks, and the fire pan,
which was a sort of squarish pot, were to be prepared and fired a
year in advance of the actual building of the fire altar. The fire
lighted in the fire pan was then to be carried about by the sacrificer for part of each day during that year of preparation. The
four special bricks and the fire pan were to be fired in a pit kiln
and special instructions are given for this firing. And it is here
that an important detail comes to light. The fire pan was to be
fired with the bottom turned up (8B vi,5,4,4). This may seem like
an insignificant detail. But it was specifically this inverted firing
technique by which the Black-and-Red Ware, the distinctive
trait of the indigenous non-Vedic culture, was made black and red!
The technique was not used in the making of the Gray Ware,
except very sparsely at very late levels.6 Inverting the pot during
firing limits the oxidation in the interior of the pot, and this
partial reduction leaves the interior black, while the outside fires
to a red color because of the full reduction of the clays and washes
used.
The inverted firing technique is again required to be used in the
making of the Mahavira pot for the Pravargya or Gharma rite
(~B xiv,1,2,21), and it is explained there that the firing technique
is the same as in the Agnicayana for the fire pan. This special
reference to the inverted firing technique, linking it with the Agnicayana, implies that this technique differed from that ordinarily
followed, and I have found no other references to it. The Asvalayana Srauta Sutra, as Eggeling's note on this passage points out,
further explains that a substance, a wash, is to be rubbed onto
the pot before firing so as to make the outside of the pot red.
It is clearly a Black-and-Red Ware pot. The legendary explanation
of the Pravargya also suggests indigenous connections. It is stated
that Indra overcame this sacrifice and forbade the telling of the
secret by which the "head could be restored to it," the secret
that would make it effective. But, in spite of Indra, the Asvins
(through whom other indigenous practices and Dasa groups such
6 See the discussion
by B. B. Lal, "Excavations at Rangpur and Other Explorations," Ancient India, nos. 18-19 (New Delhi: Director General of Archaeology,
1963), pp. 17, 193-99.
85

Agnicayana:

Indigenous

Origin?

as the Tugryas of book viii of the Rg-Veda had been brought into
the Vedic community) got hold of the secret and told it to men.
The secret to which Indra was opposed was thus a rite which involves the making of the pot by the Black-and-Red Ware inverted
firing technique.
In the Agnicayana there is further evidence that the fire pan
and the technique for making it were taken over from the alien
indigenous culture. In the course of the ritual, the fire pan is
addressed as follows: "An Asura contrivance thou art, made in the
wonted manner" (SB vi,6,2,7); in the Satapatha Brahmana (and
in the Brahmana period generally) the Asuras were represented
as the divine beings of the enemy indigenous peoples. The reference
to the pot as an "Asura contrivance" and to the inverted firing
technique as the Asuras' wonted or habitual manner of making
pots acknowledges that the making of the pot has been taken over
from the enemy indigenous tradition. Thus the text independently
corroborates the archaeological evidence that the Black-and-Red
Ware technique was identified with the non-Vedic indigenous
culture. And this in turn underlines the close connection of the
Agnicayana rite with that culture.
If the Agnicayana was taken over from some form of indigenous
ritual, then one would expect to find in the Brahmanas both
opposition to it and explanations of the ways in which the Vedic
adaptation was superior to other ways of doing it. Passages of
both kinds do appear. A passage decisively denying the need for
performing the Agnicayana rite at all is found in the more
traditionally Vedic Yajiavalkya section of the Satapatha Brahmana (SB ii,3,3,17-18). Here it is stated that placing a stick on the
Agnihotra fire corresponds to placing a brick on the Agnicayana,
the same Yajus verses being chanted for both: "Whoever knows
this, just by offering the Agnihotra year by year, offers the equivalent of the Agnicayana." In another passage (SB ix,5,2,15) the
Vedic gods are represented as doubting the efficacy of the building
of an Agnicitya by Tura Kavaseya, who was one of the earliest
in the accounts to build a fire altar according to this rite. "The
gods asked him, 'Sage, seeing that they declare the building
of the fire altar not to be conducive to heaven, why then has thou
built one?"' The answer is vague and inconclusive.
The text notes over and again that only the correct Sandilya
form of the Agnicayana rite can be either effective or safe. At
Satapatha Brahmana viii,4,4,2-3 the Asuras are represented as
having their own rules for the building of a fire altar, but it is
86

History of Religions
pointed out that their efforts are bound to end in disaster because
they do not use the Sandilya form of the rite. In another passage
(8B x,5,5,8) some priests who were traveling about came upon
a fire altar whose shape was different from that of the Sandilya
fire altar: this one had "the head pulled out"; that is, it had a head
built out in front of the altar. The first of the five layers of the
8andilya fire altar does, indeed, have this shape: the altar is often
spoken of as being in the shape of a bird, with body, two wings, a
tail, and a head; these are represented by slight oblong projections
of the brick pattern on the north, south, and west; to the east on
the first layer a special series of bricks gives the appearance of a
neck and head. By the time the altar is built up to the fifth layer it
no longer has the appearance of having a neck and head on the
eastward side as in the first layer, and this is intentional, as the
fire itself, standing on the top of the altar, is to be the head. The
"pulled out head" is still present even in the fourth layer, being
obscured only in the fifth, and it is possible that the construction
with the "pulled out head" represents an original indigenous form.7
To build the fire altar in this way with the head pulled out, states
the text, results in the early death of the one who builds it.
This in turn is connected with another late Vedic use of the
same Agnicitya construction-its
use as a tomb or relic mound
In
this
case
the
head is to be built on the east
(SB xiii,8,1,1-4,12).
but
of
the
same
size
as
the
side,
wings and tail, thus making it
At
xiii,8,1,5 appears a most important comparative
symmetrical.
statement: "The people who are godly8 make their burial places
four-cornered, whilst those who are of the Asura nature, the
Easterners and others, (make them) round." The same sort of
comparison occurs again at xiii,8,2,1: "Whence those who are
godly people make their sepulchres so as not to be separate (from
the earth), whilst those (people) who are of the Asura nature, the
Easterners and others, (make their selpulchral mounds) so as to be
separated (from the earth), either on a camu or some such thing."
It should be recalled that the archaeological evidence shows the
presence of Black-and-Red Ware cities in the eastern Gangetic
plain during the late Brahmana period. The "people of the Asura
nature, those Easterners and others" were evidently non-Vedic
people in the Black-and-Red territory, who were already at this
early date in the habit of building round, solid, relic mounds raised
7
Eggeling, Satapathabrcihmana, pt. 4, in SBE, vol. 43. See diagramnsin the notes
on pp. 17, 24, 48, 71, 98.
8
I.e., the Vedic people.
87

Agnicayana: Indigenous Origin?

up off the ground, on a brickwork base of some kind. The Vedic
mounds were to be square, and, as the text goes on to say, they
were also to be much smaller (only three or four feet high) so as not
to attract the attention of marauders. Both kinds were solid,
and in them only the bones of the deceased were deposited, between
the bricks which were laid out like a bird at the lowest level. While
the Vedic forms are different, they parallel larger and more complex types attributed to the neighboring culture, types which
from their description very much resembled the later stupas.
A number of lines of evidence have been cited which indicate
the indigenous connections of the Agnicayana rite: the use of a
large number of kiln-baked bricks of approximately the same size
as those of the neighboring Black-and-Red Ware culture, although
the Vedic Aryans were not a brick-making people; the ritual
meaning of the word for brick in Sanskrit, rather than an ordinary
functional meaning; the instructions for the firing of the fire
pan, involving the very technique by which the indigenous Blackand-Red Ware is made black and red; the opposition of Indra to
the only other rite in which this firing technique is to be used; the
text as it addresses the pot, calling it an Asura contrivance made
in the habitual way; the opposition to the Agnicayana found in
other sections of the Satapatha Brahmana; the insistence that
while those Easterners and others of the Asura nature might be
engaged in larger, more complex constructions, only the Sandilya
rite was effective, showing indirectly the presence of developed
fire altar and relic-mound practices among the Black-and-Red
Ware people to the south and east.

II.

THEOLOGICAL

CONSIDERATIONS

Sufficient evidence has been cited to show that the 8andilya

tradition, centering around the Agnicayana, had many indigenous
characteristics and a probable indigenous source, although it had
been adapted to Vedic use, the building of an immortal body so
that at death the sacrificer could go to "yonder world," to the
Vedic gods and fathers. The indigenous connections of the
Sandilya tradition markedly heighten the importance of the fact,
noted by Eggeling and others, that the religious conceptions found
in the Sandilya section of the Satapatha Brahmana, as well as
vocabulary and grammar, differ significantly from the earlier RgVeda, the Rg-Veda Brahmanas, and the Yajniavalkya section of
88

History of Religions
the 8atapatha Brahmana.9 It is possible that the peculiar theology
of the Agnicayana may also represent indigenous influences.
In the Satapatha Brahmana the Agnicayana with its special
religious views (which will be referred to as the Prajapati theology)
appears to have been a distinct and developed tradition, added
to the Vedic Soma sacrifices. But the Prajapati legends and the
conceptions they conveyed had already been known before the two
lines were brought together. Eggeling points out that this accounts
for the occasional presence of Prajapati legends in the Rg-Veda
Brahmanas, where, however, they are bodily inserted and often
conflict with the context, and in the Yjniiavalkya section of the
satapatha Brahmana, where the references are often perfunctory.10

The purpose of the Agnicayana rite is to build up for the sacrificer an immortal self that is permanently beyond the reach of the
transitoriness, suffering, and death that are held to characterize
his mortal existence. This is done through the placing of the bricks
in the fire altar and an interwoven series of sacramental identifications, providing a ritual analogy to the rebuilding of the
"unstrung" body of the god Prajapati. This is explained through
repetitive and sometimes conflicting legends about Prajapati,
who symbolizes the creative-destructive process continually
occurring in nature. Frequently the sacrifice itself is seen in this
Prajapati theology as death-and-new-life, rather than in the older
Vedic terms of "gift" and strengthening food.
The primary deity in all of this is Prajapati. Prajapati first
appears in the Vedic literature in the small group of "philosophical" hymns in the final stratum (bk. i, 50-191; bk. x) of the
Rg-Veda. The language of these hymns connects them with the
small number of yatu or black sorcery hymns, also found for the
first time in the last stratum of the Rg-Veda, the philosophical
hymns and the curse hymns form a single tradition that differs
from the main body of book x.11 Furthermore, the yatu verses
contain practices and beliefs which in stratum 1 of the Rg-Veda
had been condemned as enemy alien ways, contrary to belief in
9
Eggeling, Satapathabrdhmana, pt. 1, in SBE, 12:xxxi, xlvi; A. B. Keith, The
Veda of the Black Yajus School Entitled Taittiriya Sanhita (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1914), pp. cxxvi ff. Both Eggeling and Keith discuss the
views of other scholars, as well as their own views, at these references.
10 Eggeling, Satapathabrahmana, pt. 4, in SBE, 43: xiii ff.; Keith, The Veda of the
Black Yajus School, p. cxxx; A. B. Keith, The Religion and Philosophy of the Vedas
and Upanishads (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1925), p. 440.
11 Edward V. Arnold, "The Rig Veda and the Atharva Veda," Journal of the
American Oriental Society 22 (1901): 309-20.
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Agnicayana: Indigenous Origin?

the Vedic gods and Vedic rites.l2 It is thus consistent with these
earlier references in the Rg-Veda to discover in the Agnicayana,
with its indigenous connections, that an exalted position is also
here accorded to the deities of the few philosophical hymns of
book x of the Rg-Veda. In those Rg-Vedic hymns honoring
Visvakarman, Purusa, Hiranyagarbha, Ka, and Prajapati, the
outstanding contrast with the other Vedic conceptions of deity
is the morbidity-fecundity character of these deities, the combination in each deity of both creative and destructive functions. In the
Agnicayana Prajapati is accorded the highest position, the other
deities of the philosophical hymns being subsumed under him.13
Many of the explanatory legends in the Agnicayana have to do
with a basic formula, whose details are varied to suit the particular
aspect of the ritual at hand. Prajapati came into being from the
golden embryo. He did not wish to remain alone and so he started
creating by austerities and desire. When he had finished creating,
"his limbs became unstrung," and he was totally helpless, the
equivalent of death to an immortal. The gods then, in return for
some promised favor from Prajapati, by means of some sacrifice,
put strength back into Prajapati. Men similarly can gain the same
benefit from Prajapati as did the gods by performing the equivalent sacrifice.
In the early Rg-Veda men offered gifts to the gods to strengthen
and please the gods, who in return rendered nature creative for
man's strengthening and enjoyment. That religious outlook
fundamentally affirmed the value of life in this world. What is
different in the Prajapati theology is the idea that creativity
bears always within it the seeds of death. In a Prajapati legend
(8B ii,4,2,2) the god declares to mortals: "Your offspring shall
be your death." In the early Rg-Veda, offspring were a
man's prosperity and his "immortality."14 In another passage
(8B ix,2,1,2) Agni (identified with Prajapati) is declared to be
12

This has all been set forth in an earlier, as yet unpublished study of mine.
instance, in the foundation of the altar, over which it is built up, is
placed first a lotus leaf; on that is laid a golden plate, and on that a golden image
of a man. At ~B vii,4,1,7-15 is one of the explanations which the text gives
(and they differ); it is said that the lotus leaf is the womb from which Agni (and
so the sacrificer also, who is identified with Agni) is to be born. The gold plate is
round, with twenty-one knobs; it is the sun. By placing it on the lotus leaf, the
sacrificer places Agni in the womb and impregnates it, and a verse is quoted:
"The womb of the existent and the nonexistent did he overspread"; the text then
goes on to quote more from Rg-Veda (RV) x, 121 about Hiranyagarbha. Then, on
the gold plate the gold man is laid: "He is Prajapati, he is Agni, he is the Sacrificer.
He is Purusa for Prajapati is Purusa." In other places Visvakarman and the
Self-existent are honored also (SB viii,2,1,10; ix,4,1,12).
14 See, for instance, RV vi,12,6; vi,70,3; x,63,13.
13 For

90

History of Religions
completely restored or renewed by the building of the fire altar,
"and is now equal to injuring (destroying) whomsoever he might
wish to injure" (my italics).
Prajapati's role as destroyer is most clearly marked when he is
identified with the sun, with Agni, or with the year-that machine
of impermanence, glutting itself on the transient, mortal existence
of all that lies this side of the sun but also, with the same indifference, proliferating new life. Both the sun and Agni are frequently
identified with death (as well as with generative power), and
Prajapati is identified with them and also directly with death.
In SB x,1,3,1, for instance, it is stated: "Prajapati created living
beings. From the out- (and in-) breathings he created the gods,
and from the downward breathings the mortal beings; and above
the mortal beings he created Death as their consumer." In the
Brhadaranyaka Upanisad (1,2,4-5), in another creation legend,
he is pictured as attempting to eat his own offspring as soon as it
was born.
One cannot look for consistency in these legends, but only for
the general conceptions which emerge. And there is evidence of
the hostility that appears to have existed between the tradition
represented by the Agnicayana and the older Vedic rites. In SB
x,4,3,1 ff., we find, "the Year is the same as Death," and "the
gods were afraid of this Prajapati, the Year, Death, the Ender,
lest he by day and night should reach the end of their life." They
tried all of the established Vedic rites (the Agnihotra, the new
moon and full moon sacrifices, etc.), and they were ineffective.
Then they tried out a fire altar, but it too did not work, until
Prajapati showed them just how to build it.
The strong emphasis on death, as well as fecundity, in the primal
divine being, Prajapati, who represents the cosmic process, tends
to produce or to reflect a particular religious attitude toward the
world; the believer regards the world, if not as suffering and evil
at least as ambiguous, as a condition from which he seeks to
escape. The world, the human situation, bears a negative valuation,
and religion is regarded as assisting man to extricate himself from
it. An important passage in this regard is 8B x,4,4,1 ff.: "When
Prajapati was creating living beings, Death, that evil, overpowered him. He practiced austerities for a thousand years, striving to leave evil behind him." The phenomenal world, the world
of created living beings, is the world of evil15 where death
15

See also, for instance, SB x,5,1,1 ff. where it is stated that this world is death.
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Agnicayana:

Indigenous

Origin?

overpowers, or is part of, even the divine and immortal being who
is lord of this world, "lord of creatures." The passage further emphasizes that the way to free oneself from evil is through the
practice of asceticism, over a long period of time, in fact the
equivalent of many lifetimes. This is made more explicit in paragraph 3 of the same passage: "In the one-thousandth year, he
cleansed himself all through; and he that cleansed all through is
this wind which here cleanses by blowing; and that evil which he
cleansed all through is this body." A dualism here opposes the
body, regarded as evil, to the spirit (with affinities to wind and
breath), regarded as pure. How antithetical this is to the early
Vedic hope, reiterated again and again, that the gods will make
available all bodily experienced delights and preserve from harm
"our own dear bodies"!16 The Satapatha Brahmana passage goes
on to state that through "knowledge," meditation on the mystic
identifications, one can appropriate for himself the equivalent
of Prajapati's 1,000 years of asceticism. But the sacrificer should
himself also practice asceticism: "Wherefore let him who knows
this by all means practice austerities: for indeed, when he who
knows this practices austerities, even to abstention from sexual
intercourse, every part of him will share in the world of heaven."
It is significant that the section ends with a quotation from the
Rg-Veda (i,179,3), a banal generality: "Not in vain is the labor
which the gods favor," whose only purpose here must be to
provide the ancient sanction of the Rg-Veda for a religious view
not characteristically Rg-Vedic.
In SB x.4 and 5 death is exalted to the position of the highest
deity, who himself does not die, who is the eye of the sun, bathed
in luminosity. It is through the sacrificer's identification with this
death-of-all-that-is-phenomenal that the sacrificer attains identity
of atman with that Ultimate which negates phenomenality and
brings men an immortality that is conceived very differently
from the older Vedic view of heaven as a place where all desires
are fulfilled. In this new view which exalts death, a new sort of
heaven is indicated in a cited verse for which no Vedic source has
been found: "They ascend to that state where desires have
vanished; sacrificial gifts go not thither, nor the fervid practicers
of rites without knowledge"; the Brahmana goes on: "For indeed,
he who does not know this, does not attain to that world either by
sacrificial gifts or by devout practices, but only to those who know
16

This phrase is from RV i,114,7.

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History of Religions
does that world belong" (SB x,5,4,16). At the end of the sixth
Adhyaya (Kanda x) Sandilya is quoted in reference to this
knowledge. He states that it is an omniscience, that the object
of knowledge is the atman which is intelligent spirit, the form of
light, speechless, and indifferent (my italics), and the same as the
person's own self. Thus in the section where death is stressed as
both the character of and the master over all phenomenal existence, the ultimate state includes all knowledge and indifference.
Nothing is said of the Vedic aim of gaining this world as well as
yonder world. The similarity to Jain types of doctrines is obvious:
life is suffering, the domain of death; the body is evil, an entrapment; the state of the released self, like that of the released jiva,
is omniscience and indifference; asceticism is a means to release.17
If Parsva is accepted as having been a historical person, as he now
generally is, then some sort of proto-Jainism was undoubtedly
being practiced near its original holy places in the Black-and-Red
Ware territory to the east and south of the Aryavarta at the time
the an.ldilya and Yajniavalkya traditions were brought together
in the Satapatha Brahmana.
There are a great many Prajapati passages in the Sandilya
section of the Satapatha Brahmana which interpret the world in
the sense of the passages above, as the domain of death, release
from which is to be sought through asceticism and meditation:
asceticism and meditation assist the devotee to "mount above"
the sun or the year or Agni as symbols of death and of the phenomenal world. But the anndilya tradition represents something
more. It represents the thorough adaptation of these conceptions
to the Vedic tradition, the result being an accommodation in which
both the world-affirming Vedic conceptions and the world-negating
non-Vedic conceptions are retained. How? The World negating
17 The alternatives of
complete release from phenomenal impermanence after
death, or of remaining somehow within its hold, are expressed but not clearly
resolved. Yet the emphasis is placed on attaining the good things of life in both
worlds through the ritual. The key doctrines of karma and transmigration do not
occur in the Agnicayana, although they appear to be known-and rejected by
Yajfiavalkya in the earlier parts of the Satapatha Brahmana. The Agnicayana
does contain a heavy concentration of punarmrtyu passages, a related doctrine
regarding the possible sufferings of the fathers, which may represent attempts to
neutralize the transmigration doctrine by adaptation and incorporation without
relinquishing the importance of this life and this world. The way of knowledge is
suggestive of yogic techniques of meditation in the passage cited, SB x,5,4,16: the
"person" in the right eye and the one in the left eye descend to the heart, they join
in maithuna, and the man becomes insensible. The man in the right eye and death
and Agni are all the same, and this state of insensibility to the outside world, of
indifference, is a foretaste of the ultimate state of the delivered soul, the highest
bliss (BB x,5,2,11).
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Agnicayana: Indigenous Origin?

views and practices are put to work to gain immediate, thisworldly Vedic ends. An important aspect of this accommodation is
that the asceticism undertaken here is not understood as a
negation of ritual but is a part of a ritual performance, and meditation or knowledge is meditation on and knowledge of the mystic
sacramental meaning of the ritual. Furthermore, both this world
and yonder world are important: the building up of the immortal
body for use in yonder world, in the piling of the fire altar, at the
same time assures the sacrificer of protection and bodily enjoyment
to the fullest possible extent in this world also (SB ix,5,1,10-11;
x,2,6,4; but as noted above, there are passages which do not refer
to this-worldly ends).
Far more than anywhere else in the Brahmanas, the Agnicayana
rite contains conceptions that have close affinities with the
conceptions of some type of early dualistic religious or philosophical outlook, such as Jainism and later Srmhkhya, and the
indigenous connections of the Agnicayana suggest that these
conceptions came into the Vedic tradition from the indigenous
culture also. But the indigenous conceptions were adapted in being
taken over. While the Prajapati theology emphasizes that death is
inherent in the nature of the world, that life is transitory and
subject to suffering and evil-a fundamental life-negating tenet
the Agnicayana also
of Jainism and later of Buddhism-yet
in
of
an
than a synthesis,
somewhat
rather
holds,
agglomeration
that the full and complete life to be attained by the rite includes
not only immortality but long life here and all its enjoymentsa very life-affirming Vedic value. Again, although the Prajapati
theology held that "immortality is founded on death," that only
through the identification with the death of this world can immortality be attained, yet asceticism, which is the suppression
or "death" of the experience of this world, is never a direct way
to immortality but relates to ritual performance whose ends are
worldly as well as otherworldly. This process of accommodation
is highly significant, as the same pattern of accommodation is
attested in many other instances. Here the threat or challenge of
an alien and wholly antithetical world view is dissipated and
relativized by incorporating it as a specialized means to a Vedic
end, by putting it to use in a Vedic ritual context. Of course the
alien view also affected the Vedic view in such an accommodation.
Yet the viability of this process of accommodation is surely evident
in the noteworthy continuity in the Indian tradition from the
Vedic period to the present.
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History of Religions
I have outlined some of the reasons why I am convinced that the
Prajapati theology, found most intensively in Vedic literature
in the Agnicayana rite, represents a separate strand of tradition
with an original indigenous origin, although as incorporated into
the Vedic materials, it had been adapted to Vedic ends. This is
in keeping with the available archaeological, literary, and linguistic evidence dealt with briefly in Section I of this study. I am
further convinced that the archaeological evidence for two separate
and relatively isolated cultures existing in north India during
the Vedic period and beginning to interact extensively about 500
B.C. provides a fruitful and illuminating interpretive structure
with which to pursue further studies. The two-culture situation
not only throws new light on the texts of the Brahmanas and
Upanisads. It also points to the rise of Buddhism in the Blackand-Red Ware territory as primarily a non-Vedic movement.l8
The concept of cultural encounter is immensely useful also in
clarifying the formative period of Hinduism and the amalgamative
process which was occurring then. Thus the study of the Agnicayana rite in this new archaeological context, while significant for
itself, is of importance also in sharpening the implications of the
new archaeological evidence, supported by linguistic and literary
findings, for a whole range of further studies.
School of Humanistic Studies, Oklahoma State University
18 It has been
noted that all of the original holy places of both Jainism and
Buddhism are to be found in the Black-and-Red Ware territory, none of them in
the Gray Ware territory. Thus the archaeological evidence supports those interpretations of the rise of Buddhism and the formative developments in early
Hinduism as involving a situation of cultural encounter of two peoples with wholly
different religious outlooks, the world-affirming Vedic view and the world-negating
Jain-Buddhist view. The rise of Buddhism can thus no longer be interpreted as a
class revolt of eastern Ksatriyas against Brahmin domination, for it is exactly
in the period of the rise of Buddhism that archaeological evidence shows the first
significant interaction between the two cultures began.

95