The Hindus (86 page)

Another dog blesses the sinner who feeds him in a retelling of the story of Kannappar, in the
Skanda Purana:

By eating the food, the dog inadvertently causes the Kirata and his wife to give food, a part of the
puja
that, like staying up all night, is prescribed for the Night of Shiva. Thus this story recapitulates and integrates three stories: of linga worship by mouthfuls of unclean food from a hunter (the tale of Kannappar), of inadvertent worship by someone violating Hindu dharma, and of salvation for a man touched by a dog. It also includes the man’s wife in the process of his salvation. Luck plays a part too.

The Tantric argument that low people have to have low (or at least very simple and easy) sources of grace underlies a more complex story of salvation by dog, a variant of the myth of the evil king Vena,
⁹⁷
father of the good king Prithu:

The unclean dog first is cleansed and then transfers the water from his body to that of Vena, by shaking himself (as wet dogs always do); only then does he frighten Vena so much that Vena jumps into the water. I take the text to mean that Vena could jump into the water only after the dog had sprinkled him. He cannot enter the shrine before that, for reasons that are spelled out in another version of the story: As he approaches the shrine of Sthanu, the wind in the sky says, “Do not do this rash deed; protect the shrine. This man is enveloped in an evil so terrible that it would destroy the shrine.”
⁹⁹
This is the catch-22: The sinner would pollute the shrine before the shrine could purify the sinner; the sick man is too sick to take the medicine. The idea of contamination by contact with evil, transfer of evil, a variant of transfer of karma, comes from the zero-sum world of caste pollution; it determines whom you should avoid touching, the basis of the concept of untouchability. By contrast, the world of bhakti brings an open cosmogony and a new vision of the accidental grace of god (and of dog), both a response to and an inspiration for new visions of the grace that is possible for and between all human beings, including those of the excluded social classes. It’s a way of making room for people who have been kept outside the system, either by birth or by actions, since actions, as well as birth, can pollute people and marginalize them.

The dog therefore intercedes for the sinner. He makes him a little less polluted, so that he becomes eligible for real purification. Similarly, the heretics to whom Shiva teaches the Tantras need to have worked off the curse, to have started on the path upward, before he can give them the Tantras, and in the view of some non-Tantrics, the Tantras make the Tantrics a little less benighted, so that they become eligible for real religion. Vena is not finished yet; there are other rebirths before he is finally freed. But the dog makes it possible for him to proceed on the path to his salvation. And finally, at the end of the myth, and a millennium or two after Yudhishthira’s dog in the
Mahabharata
vanished before he could enter heaven, this dog enters Shiva’s heaven.

CHAPTER 18

In those long-gone days the Valley, which is now simply K, had other
names. . . . “Kache-Mer” can be translated as “the place that hides a
Sea.” But “Kosh-mar” . . . was the word for “nightmare.”
^iy

Salman Rushdie,
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
(1990)
¹

 

The sea that Kashmir hides (in this wordplay by Salman Rushdie) is the great Sanskrit Ocean of Story, composed in Kashmir, which Rushdie imagines submerged like other flooded lands in the Indian imagination. Kashmir is also the home of several famous debates about the philosophy of illusion, the belief that this world is nothing but a dream—or a nightmare. In this chapter we will consider those debates in narratives about quarrelsome philosophers, philosophical animals, and the recurrent Hindu nightmare of becoming a Pariah or a woman.

Back to the banyan. Again we must double back to take a look at another branch of that tree, the philosophical branch, returning to the era of the beginning of bhakti in South India and the beginning of the Arab presence in India. The chapters on those two themes also provide the historical background for this chapter, which is about philosophy not as philosophy but as part of Hindu myth and ritual, in part because I am no philosopher and in part because that is not what this book is about, two not unrelated considerations. So I will deal with philosophy only when it gets out of the hands of the philosophers and into the hands of the people who tell stories about the philosophers and incorporate philosophical theories into their myths. For philosophy in India is debated in the worship life of ordinary people.

My focus in this chapter will be on the myths that Hindus told about three great Vedantic philosophers, particularly (continuing the theme of inter- and intrareligious dialogue) stories that the followers of one philosopher told about another philosopher, and on myths that apply the philosophy of illusion to caste and gender and to the householder/renunciant tension, since one of the main arrows in the quiver of renunciation is the argument that the material world is not merely a deathtrap but an
unreal
deathtrap.

Since this approach will ignore many other important philosophical themes, let me at least set the stage by
briefly
outlining the basic positions of the major schools of Hindu philosophy, the six Darshanas or “Points of View.” These schools had taken root in earlier centuries but became more fully developed from the twelfth century on, in conversation with one another.

1. Mimamsa (“Critical Inquiry”) began with Jaimini (c. 400 BCE) and was devoted to the interpretation of the Vedas, taking the Vedas as the authority for dharma and karma. Jaimini guaranteed the sacrificer life in heaven after death and decreed that women could sacrifice but Shudras could not.
²

2. Vaisheshika began with Kanada (c. third century BCE), who presented an atomic cosmology, according to which all material objects are made of atoms of the nine elements: the four material elements—earth, water, fire, and air—plus five more abstract elements—space, time, ether, mind, and soul. In this view, god created the world, but not ex nihilo; he simply imposed order on pre-existing atoms. Shankara called the Vaisheshikas half nihilists.
³

3. Logic and reasoning began with Gautama (c. second century BCE, no relation to the Buddhist Gautama) and was an analytical philosophy basic not only to all later Hindu philosophy but to the scientific literature of the
shastras
.

4. Patanjali’s
Yoga-Sutras
(c. 150 BCE) codified yogic practices that had been in place for centuries. Yoga assumes a personal god who controls the process of periodic creation and dissolution and is omniscient and omnipotent. This school emphasized exercises of the mind and the body, “including the very difficult exercise of not exercising them at all.”
⁴
It believed that
moksha
came not from knowledge but from the concentration and discipline of the mind and the body.

5. Sankhya as a philosophy has roots that date from the time of the Upanishads and are important in the
Mahabharata
(especially in the
Gita
) but were first formally codified by Ishvarakrishna (c. third century CE). Sankhya is dualistic, dividing the universe into a male
purusha
(spirit, self, or person) and a female
prakriti
(matter, nature). There are an infinite number of similar but separate
purushas
, no one superior to another.
⁵
Early Sankhya philosophers argued that god may or may not exist but is not needed to explain the universe; later Sankhya philosophers assumed that god does exist.

6. And then comes Vedanta, the philosophical school that reads the Upanishads through the lens of the unity of the self (
atman
) and the cosmic principle (
brahman
). Often expressed in the form of commentaries on the Upanishads, on the
Gita
, and on Badarayana’s
Vedanta-Sutras
(c. 400 BCE), different branches of Vedanta tend to relegate the phenomenal world to the status of an epistemological error (
avidya
), a psychological imposition (
adhyaya
), or a metaphysical illusion (
maya
). Evil too, which the myths struggle to deal with, and, especially, death turn out to be nothing but an illusion.

The great phase of Vedanta began with three great South Indian philosophers, all of whom were Brahmins.
⁶
A basic schism separated the dualists, who argued that god and the universe (including the worshiper) were of two distinct substances, and the nondualists, who argued that they were of the same substance. Shankara, from Kerala, was a Shaiva exponent of pure nondualism (Advaita) and idealism. Ramanuja, from Kanchipuram (Kanjeevaram), in Tamil country, was a Tamil Vaishnava exponent of qualified nondualism (Vishishta Advaita) and of the religion of the Shri Vaishnavas (see below), who call their tradition the dual Vedanta because it combines the Sanskrit of the Veda with the Tamil of the Alvars.
⁷
Madhva, also known as Madhvacharya (“Madhva the Teacher”), from Kalyan (in Karnataka), was the founder of the dualist (Dvaita) school of Vedanta. The followers, and opponents, of these three philosophers told many stories about them, from which we can gather some of the human implications of their philosophies and the wide range of diverse voices encoded in them. They were the subjects of a body of mythology in the style of the Puranas, which dramatized their views and assimilated those views to the hagiographic and folk traditions. For their philosophies were not limited to an elite circle of intellectuals but deeply affected devotional Hinduism, trickling down through mythology and folklore.

In medieval India, people cared about philosophy enough to fight about it. The “Conquest of the Four Corners of the World” (
dig-vijaya
), originally a royal and military concept, then a metaphor for a great pilgrimage tour, also became the term for the conquest of one philosopher by another.
⁸
The philosophers fought mostly with words, occasionally with miracles (like the texts that floated upstream in the South Indian contest), more often with (and for) the purses of their patrons, and rarely with fisticuffs. They met on the page or the debating platform, not the battlefield. (Or almost always. It did come to fisticuffs at least once, according to an amazing painting in an illustrated copy of the
Akbar-nama
, said to depict “the Emperor Akbar watching a fight between two bands of Hindu devotees at Thaneshwar, Punjab, 1597-8.” There is close combat between dozens of yogis and ascetics and devotees of all stripes, shooting arrows from bows and slashing away at one another with swords, knives, and what appears to be anything else at hand.
⁹
)