The saṃnyāsin, -“renouncer"

The saṃnyāsin, the “renouncer,” in whose traits Louis Dumont had the farsightedness to recognize the archetypal individual in the Western sense, is a figure who does not appear in the earliest stratum of the Vedic texts. The system, at that time, is compact and leaves no such space. Having once entered the process of cosmic interaction on birth, there is no way out. But on reaching the Upaniṣads, which take ritualist reasoning to an extreme, the saṃnyāsin makes his appearance—the first defector, not because he rejects the complex system of interaction on which ritual is based, but because he seeks to absorb it within himself, in the inaccessible space of the mind. So the agnihotra becomes the prāṇāgnihotra, the first case of the complete internalization of an event, an invisible ceremony that takes place in an individual’s “breath,” prāṇa. There is no longer any fire, there is no longer any milk to pour on it, the words of the texts are no longer to be heard. But all this still exists: in silence, in the activity of the mind. And so the inner man makes his first appearance in history. He is the “individual-outside-the-world,” who has severed his links with society—and who will eventually prove to be enormously effective in his action upon society. Dumont recognizes in him the earliest figure of the intellectual, right up to his most recent awkward or lethal manifestations.
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The saṃnyāsin can quite properly be described as the inner man, since it is he who first internalized the sacrificial fires. Thanks to a subtle elaboration of correspondences, the factors that made up the liturgy of the Vedic sacrifice are moved into the body and into the mind of the saṃnyāsin; and so he becomes the only being who need not keep fires burning, since he keeps them within himself. With the advent of the renouncer, sacrificial violence no longer leaves any visible traces. All is absorbed into this solitary, emaciated, wandering being, who would eventually become the very image of India. Not the man in his village or in his house. But the man of the forest—a place of secret learning, a place far removed from social constraints.
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This is the moment where the figure of the renouncer emerges: when he takes his first step toward the forest, without looking back and knowing he will never return. In this instant, the brahmin cuts all links with his previous life. Never again will he have to celebrate the agnihotra at dawn and sunset, pouring milk on the fire, performing a hundred or so prescribed gestures, reciting formulas. Indeed, the renouncer no longer has to kindle and feed the sacrificial fires, since he will tend them within himself. Nor will he have to comply with countless obligations that make up his life as a brahmin. Now he will eat nothing but berries and roots when he finds them in the forest. His life will interfere only to a minimal extent with the course of nature.
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There is a subtle distinction between renunciation and detachment. To accept the life of the renouncer means following an āśrama, a stage of life like the three that have preceded it. And each stage brings its own guilt and restrictions. “Detachment,” tyāga, is something else—a mental attitude that can pertain to any stage of life. Simone Weil is extremely clear on this point: “Detachment and renouncement: often synonyms in Sanskrit, but not in the Gītā: here ‘renouncement’ (saṃnyāsa) is the lower form that consists of becoming a hermit, sitting beneath a tree and moving no further. ‘Detachment’ (tyāga) is making use of this world as if not using it.”

Roberto Calasso
Ardorl