Puruṣa

Summary

Puruṣa is the Sanskrit word for a man, a human being, and in hymn 10.90 of the Rigveda he is the first man from whose body the world was made. The hymn opens with a description of him: a thousand heads, a thousand eyes, a thousand feet; he covered the earth on every side and reached ten fingers beyond it. He is all that has been and all that will be; a quarter of him is all creatures, and three quarters are deathless in heaven. From him Virāj was born, and from Virāj Puruṣa.

Then the hymn tells of the sacrifice. The gods held a sacrifice with Puruṣa as the victim: spring was its ghee, summer its fuel, autumn its offering. They sprinkled him on the strewn grass, bound him as victim and offered him. Out of the sacrifice came the dripping fat, the creatures of the air, the beasts of the wild and of the village, horses, cattle, goats and sheep, and the hymns, metres and ritual formulas. Then the singer asks: when they divided Puruṣa, how many portions did they make? What were his mouth, his arms, his thighs and his feet? He answers: the Brahmin was his mouth, the warrior was made of his arms, his thighs became the farmer and trader, and from his feet the servant was born. The moon was born of his mind, the sun of his eye, Indra and Agni of his mouth, Vāyu the wind of his breath; the mid-air came from his navel, the sky from his head, the earth from his feet and the quarters from his ear. It closes: "the gods sacrificed the sacrifice with the sacrifice; these were the first ordinances".

The idea the hymn turns on is that the world and the community are one body. The sun is its eye, the wind its breath, the earth its feet, and the orders of people its members: the priest sits at the mouth because his work is speech, the warrior at the arms, the farmer and trader at the thighs, the servant at the feet. No member has life once it is cut off from the body. What made all this was a sacrifice, which is why the hymn calls it "the first ordinances": every later sacrifice repeats it. Macdonell notes that this is one of the latest hymns of the Rigveda and the only place in it that names the four orders.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Drop the final vowel of पुरुष, Puruṣa, and puruṣ remains, with p, r and ṣ: Arabic bashar, the reading the Indian essay ranks "most probable". In Lane bashar is the human being, male or female, one or many, and abū al-bashar, "father of mankind", is Adam; basharah is the outer skin of a person. Sanskrit p becomes b because Arabic has no p, Sanskrit ṣ is sh, and r is r, except that in the Sanskrit name r comes before ṣ while in bashar it comes after sh. On this reading Puruṣa is "the human being", the first man, which is what the hymn makes him: a man whose body became the world and its people.

Linguistic Root

Puruṣa and bashar

Monier-Williams gives the word's senses: a man, male, human being, in the plural people; a person; a servant; the height of a man as a measure; the pupil of the eye; then the primaeval man as soul and source of the universe, as in hymn 10.90; then the animating spirit in a person; then the Supreme Soul; and in Sāṃkhya philosophy the spirit as passive spectator of nature. He thinks the word probably comes from a verb meaning "to fill", which is what Puruṣa does at the start of the hymn, filling the earth and reaching beyond it. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad explains it otherwise: he is the dweller in all the forts, that is, the bodies, from pur "fort" and śaya "lying".

Lane: bashar is the human being, said of one, two or many; abū al-bashar is Adam; some say man is called bashar because his basharah, his skin, is bare of hair and wool. Basharah is the outer skin, and basharat al-arḍ is the herbage that appears on the face of the earth. The root joins a person's skin and the face of the earth, and the hymn joins them when it makes the earth from the first man's feet.

The sounds: p is b; Sanskrit retroflex ṣ is sh, as Arabic sh surfaces as s or sh in the Juthoor tables; r is r. What remains is the order of the two consonants, r before ṣ in puruṣ, sh before r in bashar; an exchange of two neighbouring consonants is a metathesis the Juthoor method counts in its correspondences.

Other readings in the essay

After bashar the Indian essay gives fāris and faras, "the warrior who rides the cosmos". It keeps the consonants in their order: f for p, as Old Persian Pārsa became Arabic Fāris, then r, then s for ṣ. In the dictionary it means horse and horseman, and the first man of the hymn is no horse. Yet the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad opens with another cosmic body, the sacrificial horse: the dawn is its head, the sun its eye, the wind its breath, fire its open mouth, the year its body, the sky its back, the mid-air its belly and the earth its underbelly. So the second reading meets the image of the cosmic body in the shape of a horse, while bashar stays closer to what the word means. The third reading is baraza, to come out into view after being hidden; it keeps the order with z for ṣ, and the hymn says that as soon as he was born he spread east and west over the earth.

Key Mythic Narratives

The one who split in two

The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad returns to the first man in another story. In the beginning this world was a single self in the shape of a person. He looked around and saw nothing but himself, and he was afraid, which is why one who is alone is afraid. Then he found no delight, which is why one alone has no delight, and he wished for a second. He was as large as a man and a woman embracing, so he split himself in two, and from the halves came husband and wife; they came together, and from them human beings were born. Here the first man does not become earth and sky; he becomes a couple from whom people are born.

From body to spirit

The meaning of the word changes after the Rigveda. In the Upaniṣads Puruṣa is the dweller in the body, in Sāṃkhya philosophy the spirit that watches nature at work, and in later books a name of the highest being, given to Brahmā, Viṣṇu and Śiva. The man who became the world in the hymn later became the spirit in every person.

Symbolic Reading

The essay "Rereading Indian Myths" reads the birth of the orders from Puruṣa's body economically: head, arms, thighs and feet are members the body cannot do without, and so are priest, warrior, trader and worker, so that the system was at first a division of labour, as in any economy. The essay holds that history turned it from a flexible system of functions into a rigid hereditary one, and calls that a corruption of the original idea. That is the essay's reading. The hymn itself makes the orders parts of a divided victim and sets them beside sun, moon, wind and earth, so that for the hymn the ordering of people belongs to the ordering of the world.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Puruṣa is the third of three in the cosmic body pattern. Pangu grows alive between sky and earth, and after his death his eyes become sun and moon and his breath the wind, with no one killing him. Odin and his brothers kill Ymir, and his flesh becomes the earth, his blood the sea, his skull the sky. Puruṣa is bound as a victim and divided in a sacrifice, and the human orders come out of him with the cosmos. In Babylon Marduk kills Tiamat and splits her in two, making the sky of one half and the earth of the other. In every version the body is divided; what divides it differs: death alone in China, victory in the North and in Babylon, sacrifice in India.

The Indian essay compares Puruṣa with Adam, "the first man from whom everything was created", and in Lisān al-ʿArab Adam is abū al-bashar, "father of mankind". As a reading proposed on the method, the two names meet in the skin: basharah is the outer skin of a person, adamah and adīm are skin, and adīm al-arḍ is the face of the earth, as Lane records, so both Arabic names of the first man come from the surface of the body.

In Iran the world gives the body back at the end of time: Ohrmazd asks the bone back from the earth, the blood from the water and the hair from the plants, and the saviour raises the dead; see Saoshyant.