“Who Really Knows?”: Religion and Ritual: the Poetics and Performance of the Ineffable

Abstract

to explore the ways in which the very ineffability of the divine is conceived and expressed across five world religions-Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. We were particularly interested in the productive tension between kataphatic (positing) and apophatic (negating) modes of understanding the divine. For my own research, the quest after Bapophatic negation^pointed me to Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad's Bneti neti^declaration, its student-teacher questioning, to Nāsadīya Sūkta's dialetheism, and its ultimate unknowability. The Bneti neti^(na-iti naiti) ādeśa instructs the seeker of ultimate knowledge of brahman that no matter how one describes it, no matter which and how many predicates one uses, brahman is Bnot so, not so.^Occasionally in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, as in the dialogue between Yājñavalkya and Gārgī, it is said that the pursuit of brahman with incessant questioning will only cause one's Bhead^to Bshatter.^What Bneti neti^and such head shattering dialogues suggest is that any attempts to contain the infinity of brahman in the confines of rational thought or language will have to be negated, and in the act of negation itself that the infinity is projected. With Bneti neti^on one side, the other necessary brink of ineffability was the Nāsadīya Sūkta-the Hymn of Creation in the Ṛgveda. The hymn famously brings into play the twin of ineffability, namely, unknowability. It imaginatively and poetically posits the process of creation, yet plays constantly with various types of negation and contradiction, and most importantly, interrupts itself throughout the verse asking the question Bwho really knows?^. The question ultimately proves to be radically rhetorical: the hymn not only owns its own uncertainty, ignorance, and inability to know the nature of creation or the creator, but also doubts