I saw my own eyes and smile on the faces of Yoga poses in sanskrit so many young girls throughout Kabul. They gave me hope when they had so little, Yoga poses in sanskrit which I tried to return to them. When you can see your own soul in another human being, you have attained yoga, and the world becomes an intimate place where your significance in it becomes clear again. All you need is to keep quietly alert, enquiring into the real nature of yourself. This is the only way to peace. I Am That by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj How appropriate for me that this year Ash Wednesday fell on the day before Valentine s Day. Ash Wednesday is a Christian holy day, followed by Lent, which commemorates the forty days that Jesus Christ spent wandering in the desert. It leads up to Good Friday, when He died on the cross.
The introduction of the karma and liberation discourse was not a minor intellectual incident. It reflected a major shift in the thinking, perception, values and priorities of the Axial Age. The implication in this shift was for instance that the all-crucial old sacrifices lost their symbolic signification and power. Some Brahmins tried to adapt to this by framing the new practices and discourses of liberation, as they were only a continuation of their existing discourses: meditation and release were presented and framed as a new ritual of self-sacrifice (Heestermann 1964).m
So why did some Brahmins then change, if it was such a painful and risky process? In short they – or at least some of them – had to adapt and change their ideas or move significantly down the social ranking ladder. The era of Vedic Early Iron Age (and its Archaic state form) was coming to an end with its simple kingdoms, low social stratification, complex ritual cycles, pastoralism, village life, and kinship organisation. The Brahmins found themselves in the midst of 300 years of heavy urbanisation, growth of trade, social stratification, territorial state power, large scale warfare, monetisation, slavery, strong population growth, agriculture – all culminating in the emergence of a single empire ruling Northern India: first the Nandas, then the Mauryas (Erdosy 1995, 1995b, Graeber 2011).
My general hypothesis is that the conservative Brahmins struggled to adapt to the new social matrix of the Axial Age civilisation, where aristocratic warrior clans were on a meteoric rise and new intellectual groups like the Sramanas evolved. The Brahmins fought a losing battle for the maintenance of the status quo. As a consequence many of them withdrew from society and lived off the land, which they often controlled. They gave up public communal sacrifice and focussed on private rites of transition. Only relatively few Brahmin clans in this period changed and adapted to the new general Axial Age ideational system (episteme). They became the co-authors of the Upanishads where first karma and later the yoga sign emerged.
