The Myths They Preserve and the Turn They Prepare

Some of the most important narratives in Indian religion are first found in these texts. Prajapati, the creator who exhausts himself in producing the world and must be reassembled by the sacrifice, is essentially a figure of this literature. So is the account of the man warned by a fish to build a boat against a coming flood, which stands as the earliest Indian version of a story with parallels far to the west. Others, such as the tale of the mortal and the celestial woman who leaves him, would be reworked in the epic and classical literature for centuries afterwards. The texts also contain the beginning of their own supersession.

As the identifications multiply, the emphasis moves from the physical act to knowing what the act means, and a person who knows the correspondence is said to obtain the result of a rite without performing it. That move, made inside the ritual literature itself and by its own logic, is what the forest books and then the Upanishads take up and carry to its conclusion. The philosophical turn in Indian thought does not arrive from outside the sacrificial tradition, and it is not a reaction against it by people who had left. It grows out of an argument this literature was already having with itself about whether the knowing or the doing is the operative part, and the texts that appear to abandon the sacrifice are attached to the very works that describe it.