194 Part III: South Asia
analysis. Instead, we will move topically through the most significant charac-
teristics of religious faith and practice in South Asia, using examples from the
major traditions, texts, and practices as appropriate and as space allows.Early Core Ideas
New Ideas Emerge: Upanishadic Thought
In the many small kingdoms that dotted North India during the Late Vedic
Age, a new sophistication was emerging from court culture and early urbaniza-
tion. Kings gathered Brahmans, philosophers, and sages to their courts. There
were questions about the effectiveness of the sacrificial ritualism of the Brahmans
and puzzles about the nature of the universe and man’s relation to it. The texts that
record these new speculations are known as the Upanishads, the most philosophi-
cal of all early Indian texts, which were being written between 700 and 200 B.C.E.
A bit of the flavor of these discussions is captured in the Katha Upanishad.
A prince named Nachiketa calls Yama (Death) to his court and asks: “After
death, does a man still exist?” According to prevalent ideas of the afterlife, the
dead joined their ancestors in the pitr-lok, a vaguely understood “place of the
fathers.” Death was death, the end of existence. Religious activity in life was
about a good life, health, and prosperity, not about the afterlife.
Yama stalls. “Even the gods have trouble with this question,” he says.
“Wouldn’t you rather have gold? Fair maidens? Chariots? Music?” These were
the benefits of the current Brahmanical worldview and the rites over which Brah-
mans presided. “Isn’t this enough?” Yama was asking. The world-weary Prince
Nachiketa says, “These things last only until death. And they wear out the sense
organs. Besides, wealth doesn’t make a man happy. Even kings know that.” Yama
sighs and admits that Nachiketa has wisdom; he is seeking truth-knowledge.
The new ideas Yama explained to Nachiketa are indeed radical. It started
with a new cosmology. Beyond all that is seen and known, all the material
world with which we are familiar, beyond the gods is a greater nonmaterial
reality that can hardly be expressed in language. Vague nouns are used to
express it: the Ultimate, the Absolute, the Paratma (great soul), Brahman.
Brahman is so unknowable that one can only talk about him/it in metaphors:
the foundation of the universe, the first-born, the soul of all the gods, born in
the form of breath, created with the elements, the place where the sun rises and
sets, contains all the gods, is realized only by the mind, the unmanifest.
All material things that come into existence are transitory. All that we see
as the material world is impermanent, and therefore illusion (maya). Because
we, too, are matter, we are deluded by the material world in which we are
embedded, wrongly thinking it is real and enduring.
However, deep within our bodies lies the atma. Though the body will die,
decay, and disappear, the atma cannot; it is eternal. It, too, is described meta-
phorically: atma is not born, does not die, has not sprung from anything, is