The snake and the mongoose : the emergence of identity in early Indian religion

Author / Creator

McGovern, Nathan, 1981- author

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Online

Physical

Summary

This book turns the commonly accepted model of the origins of the early Indian religions on its head. Since the beginning of modern Indology in the 19th century, the relationship between the major ...

This book turns the commonly accepted model of the origins of the early Indian religions on its head. Since the beginning of modern Indology in the 19th century, the relationship between the major early Indian religions of Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism has been based on an assumed dichotomy between two metahistorical identities: "the Brahmans" and the newer "non-Brahmanical" śramaṇa movements. Textbook and scholarly accounts typically purport an "opposition" between these two groups by citing the 2nd century BCE Sanskrit grammarian Patañjali, often stating erroneously that he compared their animosity for one another to that of the snake and the mongoose. This book seeks to de-center the Hindu Brahman from our understanding of Indian religion by "taming the snake and the mongoose" - that is, abandoning the anachronistic distinction between "Brahmanical" and "non-Brahmanical" and letting the earliest articulations of identity in Indian religion speak for themselves on their own terms. It accomplishes this goal through a comparative reading of texts preserved by the three major groups that emerged from the social, political, cultural, and religious foment of the late first millennium BCE: the Buddhists and Jains as they represented themselves in their earliest sūtras, and the Vedic Brahmans as they represented themselves in their Dharma Sūtras. The picture that emerges is not of a fundamental dichotomy between Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical, but rather of many different groups who all saw themselves as Brahmanical, and out of whose contestation with one another the distinction between Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical the snake and the mongoose emerged.

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