The Brahmanas

The characteristic move of this literature is the identification. A ritual act is performed, and the text states that the act is something else: this brick is the year, this offering is the sacrificer's own self, this number of verses corresponds to that division of the world. The connections are asserted rather than argued, and they are what make the rite effective, because the point of the sacrifice is to operate on the correspondences and not merely to give something to a god.

Alongside the identifications the texts supply etymologies, often playing on sound rather than derivation, and short narratives introduced to explain why a procedure takes the form it does. Those narratives are not told for their own sake and usually stop the moment the ritual point is made. The result is a body of prose that can be hard going and is enormously informative. It records not only what was done at the great sacrifices, in a level of procedural detail the hymn collections never supply, but what the priests performing them understood to be happening while they did it. It is also the earliest sustained prose in any Indian language, so it is a monument of literary history as well as of religion, and the shift from verse to argued prose is itself part of what it documents.

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.