Prof. Dr. Lawrence A. Babb
In this book I frequently use the expression "ritual culture." In doing so I have more in mind than the scarcely controversial notion that rituals are manifestations of culture. Rather, I want to suggest that rituals actually occur within a cultural mini-milieu, a cultural domain associated specifically with rituals. I want to suggest further that this domain can be treated as a partly autonomous context of investigation. Ritual culture in the sense I have in mind is not just a bundle of recipes for the performance of rites of worship. Nor is it merely an ideology that justifies or rationalizes ritual activities. Rather, it is an internally coherent body of skills, kinetic habits (such as patterned physical gestures expressive of deference), conventions, expectations, beliefs, procedures, and sanctioned interpretations of the meaning of ritual acts. It is, one might say, an entire symbolic and behavioral medium within which ritual acts are invested with cognitive, affective, and moral "sense."
Ritual culture, thus defined, is carried - in part - as a component of the general cultural repertoire of those who perform rituals. It also forms a sort of peninsula of what might be called "religious culture," although for those whose contact with a religious system is primarily in the sphere of ritual, ritual culture may indeed be the continent and not the appendage. Its boundaries are thus always a bit hazy. It is never a closed system. But it can nevertheless be seen as a partly independent reality - independent in the same sense, let us say, that "political culture" can be treated as a cultural subsystem. In traditions that have them, ritual specialists can act as special repositories and transmitters of ritual culture. To some extent, laymen who have acquired special ritual expertise play this role in Svetambar Jainism, as do some monks, although the latter are not seen as ritual specialists. Ritual culture is also deposited in, and transmitted by, certain kinds of writings. These may be writings that instruct people about how to perform rituals, texts sung or recited in rituals, or texts of other kinds; the important thing is that they are part of the immediate surround in which rituals are performed. Writings of this sort, mostly authored by monks or nuns, are a very important aspect of the ritual culture of temple-going Svetambar Jains. Ritual culture is also embodied in, and transmitted by, the ongoing talk about ritual - instruction, rationalization, interpretation, whatever - that takes place in a given community of co-ritualists. But although ritual culture is carried in a variety of media - writing, talk, even emotional and motor habit - it becomes visible mainly in actual ritual performances.
The allusion to "performance" is not accidental and brings us to an important point. The rituals discussed in this book are excellent examples of what Milton Singer has called "cultural performances" - performances that encapsulate culture in such a way that it can be exhibited to the performers themselves and also to outside observers (1972: 71). In fact, the dramaturgic comparison can be pressed even further than this. As readers will see, the rituals discussed in this book bear a close resemblance to actual theatrical performances. But they are not just the same as theatrical performances, and the difference is important.
As Richard Schechner has pointed out (1988, esp. Ch. 4), theater and ritual belong on the same general continuum of "performance," and whether a given performance is theater - in the strict sense - or ritual depends mainly on its context and ostensible function. The real essence of what we normally consider theater is its function as entertainment. Ritual, on the other hand, is supposed to be efficacious, by which we mean that it is supposed to bring about transformations of some kind or another. Associated with this difference, in turn, are others, and perhaps the most important of these has to do with the relationship between performers and audience. Where entertainment prevails - that is, in theater - the audience and performers are separated. To be a member of the audience in theater is to be "out of the action," a spectator and a potential critic. To the degree that a performance belongs to the ritual category, on the other hand, audience and performers are one and the same.
These insights provide us with a useful way to view Jain ritual. Jain rites of worship are certainly theater-like performances, but at the same time they are not quite theater in the usual sense of the English word. As we shall see, the question of what actually constitutes the "efficacy" of ritual is one of the central problematics of Jain religious life. Nonetheless, in Schechner's terms, efficacy, not entertainment, is what Jain rites are basically about, although this certainly does not preclude individuals from taking pleasure in the spectacle of their own performances or of those of others. Moreover, this is theater in which the players are largely their own audience. It is true that groups of participants sometimes assume a spectator-like stance in some Jain rituals, but the general principle still holds that the audience is part of the action. The principle finds its logical limiting case in one of the most important Jain rites of worship - the eightfold worship (astprakari puja) - in which the performer and audience can be said to be a single person.
Where there is theater, of course, there are performers playing in roles, and this brings us back to the matter of ritual culture. As is true of the larger stage of social life, the roles played by actors in the theater-like performances of ritual are manifested in interactions with the occupants of other roles. In this sense, rituals can be understood not only as performances but as minute and ephemeral social systems. Ritual culture is the environment - cognitive, affective, and even motor-habitual-that supplies much of the content of such role-governed interaction and also the wider frame of reference within which that content is meaningful to ritual performers.[1] Ritual roles and ritual culture are thus mutually dependent. Ritual roles may be said to express ritual culture; ritual culture in turn shapes ritual roles.
These ideas are unremarkable, but to them I add what may strike some readers as an unusual twist. To assert that human participants in rituals play roles is uncontroversial. They walk on the ritual stage as supplicants, offerers, experts, interested onlookers, or whatever - the list is potentially long. Here, however, I shall interpret the entities who are objects of worship as also "playing" a role. I shall say further that such entities are, from an analytical standpoint, role players whether or not they are living persons.
Moreover, I shall say this role - that of object of worship - is one of the two basic constituent features of any rite of worship. That is, in the simplest instance a rite of worship necessarily encompasses two elementary roles. There is, first, the role (which may be differentiated into sub-roles) of those who worship; these are the human performers of ritual acts. They initiate ritual performances, set the stage, make offerings and direct other kinds of honorific attentions to the object or objects of worship, and bring matters to a conclusion. They typically expect results (Schechner's efficacy) to flow from what they have done. They may play differently scripted parts in the performance, but in the widest frame of reference they may all be considered "worshipers." Second is the role occupied by certain very special others, the objects of worship. From the standpoint of our model, worshipers and objects of worship may be considered ritual/social "alters" of each other.
The possible objection that, in rites of worship, the worshiper's alter - the object of worship - is not "real" is irrelevant to this formulation. In the first place, the role of object of worship is often occupied by living human persons. This is frequently true in Jainism as well as in other South Asian religious traditions. But even more important, whether this role is occupied by a living (and thus kinetically and verbally interacting) person or an (apparently) lifeless image, or even a completely disembodied or disengaged being, the crucial thing for the worshiper is how he or she thinks the ritual other reacts (or does not react) to ritual acts, and this is always imaginary from the worshiper's perspective. This is true whether or not the alter is a living person. It is enough that the act of worship takes place; if it does, then from the standpoint of the worshiper an interaction has occurred, and the ritual alter may be said to be as real as the interaction itself is felt to be real.
To push matters slightly further, I shall also say that the roles of worshiper and object of worship must be seen as reflexes of each other. This is because both roles are shaped by their mutual interaction; they are the "others" of each other, and thus each is - in part at least - a product of the other. It is, moreover, precisely in this mutually creative relationship that the behavioral characteristics of ritual roles and the content of ritual culture most dramatically intersect. What worshiper and worshiped actually are to each other depends on ambient habits of thought, emotion, evaluation, as well as on prevailing assumptions about the nature of the world and the nature of persons or beings in the world. That is, it depends on the general cultural background of ritualists and, more immediately, on their ritual culture. In turn, this ambient atmosphere, having been given embodiment in the form of ritual acts (whether or not the occupants of all roles act in the kinetic sense) of a particular kind, is thereby supported and regenerated. For example, a conception of the object of worship as lofty and remote fits well with a worshiper's ritually enacted attitude of humility. This relationship, in turn, is deeply resonant with a more general notion of the worshiper as slavelike and dependent on an all-powerful other, and these notions, in turn, can open out into a complex theology of divine majesty and power. All this can and does come together in crystallized form in ritual interactions. By contrast - and as one sees especially in some subtraditions of the worship of the Hindu deity Krsna - a portrayal of the object of worship as childlike meshes with a worshiper's role defined as nurturant and maternal. This, in turn, supports, and is supported by, a very different vision of the world and the worshiper's place in it: a theology of reciprocated parental and filial devotion. All this, too, can be distilled in ritualized interactions between devotees and the objects of worship.
But what if, as in Jainism, the principal object of worship is absent? What implications would this have for the worshiper's identity and for the cultural surround of these ritual roles? These issues provide the basic point of departure of this book. What kind of a ritual system results, we wish to know, when a commitment to asceticism as a value is so powerful as to push objects of worship into a condition of transactional nonexistence?
There is one final point to be made about ritual roles. For human worshipers - the self-audiences of this particular kind of theater - playing such roles leaves deposits of feeling and conviction that can outlast the ritual situation, augmenting a worshiper's sense of identity on both the personal and social planes.[2] The ritual setting is extraordinary, a special time and place set apart from all mundane times and places. Given this extraordinary context, the object of worship is not only a social alter of the worshiper but an alter quite unlike any other - a hypersignificant other in a hypersignificant situation. When the worshiper enters a relationship with such a being, he or she is thrust into a defined role in relation to this being. Depending on how the ambient ritual culture characterizes the situation, this role can impart to the worshiper a sense of extramundane personal identity - as one who is powerful in some special way, or beloved of God, or redeemed, or on the road to liberation. Moreover, and as this book will show, it can also - and at the same time - impart a special kind of significance and energy to a worshiper's social identity, in the present case that of clan and caste. In the materials to be presented here, ritual emerges not just as theater-like, but as a theater of soteriological and social identities.
The concepts of ritual culture and role constitute the basic frame of reference within which Jain materials are interpreted in this book. One important consequence of this approach is the manner in which materials are presented here. Religious traditions are often described and analyzed as "systems of belief." An account based on this idea typically describes religious ideas and values first, with ritual coming only later. The basic (though usually unstated) idea is that ritual is a kind of behavior that is somehow deductively related to beliefs. In this book, however, I take the opposite approach. Instead of treating ritual as a behavioral surface of beliefs, I treat the entire domain of ritual as an analytical shell within which matters of belief are (sometimes) best understood. In my view, this is far closer than the conventional approach to the tradition's experiential reality for most Jains. As a practical matter this means that in this study we begin with rituals instead of ending with them, and what we learn of beliefs we learn from rituals and the texts associated with rituals.
A second consequence of this approach is that this book stresses ritual roles and interactions, and indeed is organized around these concepts. In this sense the book might be understood as an attempt to push social concepts to the center of the analysis of religious symbolism. Who are the dramatis personae in ritual performances? Who is worshiped? Who does the worshiping? How do these roles interact in ritual settings, and what significance do these patterns have for the over-arching question of how Jainism (or one variety of Jainism) deals with the tensions between otherworldly values and the requirements of life in the physical and social worlds? These are the guiding questions taken up here.
In approaching these questions, moreover, we shall give special attention to the kinds of exchanges and transactions that are engaged in, or are not engaged in, by occupants of ritual roles. This connects the study with a tradition of social analysis that can be said to have begun with Marcel Mauss (1967; orig. 1924) and that more recently has - especially in the work of McKim Marriott (1976, 1990), Jonathan Parry (1986, 1994), Gloria Raheja (1988), and Thomas Trautmann (1981) - produced major advances in social scientific understanding of ritual gifting in South Asia. These new insights will play an important part in the book's final chapter in which Jain ritual patterns are compared with other South Asian ritual cultures.
