Joanna Jurewicz

This monograph is a continuation of the research presented in 'Fire and Cognition in the Ṛgveda' (2010). The sources which I analyze here are: the late hymns of the Ṛgveda, the “philosophical” hymns of the Atharvaveda, cosmogonies of the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa and selected parts of the oldest Upaniṣads, composed before the Buddha (Bṛhadāraṇyaka, Chāndogya, Aitareya, Taittirīya and Kauṣītaki). The basic claims of the research are as follows. Firstly, the composers of these texts continue the metaphysical assumptions of the Ṛgveda, according to which fire is the metaphysical principle underlying reality. This continuity is expressed not only in the exegesis expressed in the texts, but also in the ritual practice which is presented in detail in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa. Secondly, the diachronic approach allows me to track how the thought changed, how new concepts and theories appear and develop. It also allows me to propose possible reasons for these changes. Thirdly, my approach allows me to reconstruct the belief in rebirth which is presented in these texts. As in my previous book, my tools are traditional philology and cognitive linguistics, because the features of these texts are similar to the Ṛgveda and their explicit form is difficult to comprehend, especially as far as the philosophical content is concerned. The early Indian texts open the way to the beginnings of human philosophical thinking and show that abstract and general thinking can be created in the oral tradition.

The concept of a secret language dates back to the Indo-European era. Researchers dealing with the reconstruction of Indo-European poetic tradition compared the oldest literary texts and noticed two planes of discourse, which they called ”the language of men” and ”the language of gods.”. The language of men constitutes the lower level — the level of everyday conversation. The language of gods belongs to the sphere of formalised poetic statements. As Cavert Watkins puts it, in the archaic lexis there was an opposition between semantically unmarked expressions used every day and rarer, more ”weighty” phrases that were semantically marked. The principles of creating and distinguishing the language of gods from the language of men are very precise; a detailed analysis would not fit into the spatial constraints of the present article. In general terms, the polarity between the language of gods and the language of men consists in differentiating between the commonplace and the ancient or traditional, between ordinary poetic expressions and a higher poetry which may be described as prophetic, and finally, between the explicit and the vague and implicit.

’The actual fragments of the Presocratic thinkers are preserved as quotations in subsequent ancient authors, from Plato in the fourth century B.C. to Simplicius in the sixth century A.D”- reads the introductory note to The Presocratic philosophers. Researchers of the oldest thought of Hindu philosophy are thus in a much better situation. The thought is present in a huge corpus of works collectively referred to as the Veda, and has survived into modern times. The oldest text of Vedic literature, the Rigveda, composed by an Indo-European people the Aryans, is dated to circa the eighth century B.C. and comprises 1028 hymns. Other texts, which include the remaining three Vedas, the Brahmanas, the Aranyakas, the Upanishads, are spacious compositions, both in verse and prose, and all of them attest the Old Hindu love of wisdom.

Philosophy, ritual and performativity in ancient Indian thought on the example of the Chandogia Upanishad 6.2.4 The paper discusses cosmogony presented by Uddālaka Āruṇi attested in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad (6.1-6), according to which world forms arise by giving them a name. I argue that the experience that motivates the thinking of Uddālaka is ritual, the essence of which is to give people and objects a name, thanks to which their status dramatically changes for the duration of the ritual. An analysis of a selected passage of the king’s coronation described in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa (5.3.4) reveals the fundamental importance of the verses uttered during preparation of the water for the consecration. The reconstruction of an experience that influences philosophical thought makes it possible to see its coherence and depth, and the fact that this experience is a ritual, a common experience of humanity, enables it to be better understood by those who grew up in other philosophical traditions as well.

In this book I reconstruct the efforts of ancient Indian thinkers to understand the world and themselves as expressed in the Ṛgveda. I analyse how they created a consistent philosophical system and began to formulate abstract ideas. The first issue has led to the reconstruction of the metaphysical theory of which the central concept was Agni, the fire. The second has shown that the Ṛgveda can be regarded as one of the sources of philosophical thinking seen as a universal human endeavour. For this book I got the Prime Minister Award for the Outstanding Scholar Achievement (2011).