Nowadays, multiculturalist state authorities in Western countries encourage the newer and more exotic religious denominations to produce textbooks explaining in simple language their own traditions and doctrines. While formally serving as textbooks for the religion’s own followers and their children, their interest for the authorities lies in the religion’s self-presentation to society at large. This way they know what gestures to make and what gaffes to avoid, and what holidays to acknowledge in the official calendar. An additional benefit is that it streamlines the religions’ self-understanding in a multiculturalism-friendly sense: even religions with a record of intolerance find they cannot get away with a straightforward restatement of their monopolistic claims on truth, and end up teaching pluralism to their children in spite of their inherited dogmas.
This latter consideration is really quite unnecessary in the case of Hinduism, because the Hindus never needed any prodding from outside to take a pluralistic view of religion. Hinduism itself is already a commonwealth of communities, doctrines and practices, so it is thoroughly comfortable with peaceful co-existence in spite of differences. The Dutch, British and American textbooks of Hinduism that we have seen are simply being authentic when they declare unisono that Hinduism has a hoary tradition of heartfelt pluralism. Thus also the latest Hinduism textbook, under review here, The History of Hindu India from Ancient to Modern Times, by the editors of Hinduism Today magazine (Kauai, Hawaii) and Prof. em. Shiva Bajpai. It says: “Hinduism does not dictate one way as the only way. Hindus believe ‘truth is one, paths are many’” (p.6), and: “Hindus accept the spiritual efficacy of other paths and never proselytize” (p.107) So, no chest-thumping let alone the sound of war-drums in this pleasantly shaped Social Studies “textbook for all ages”.
General appreciation
The internal plurality of Hinduism is at once a major challenge for those who cherish an ambition to present the religion to the world in a not-too-bulky textbook. In comparing Dutch and British textbooks published by the Arya Samaj, Vivekananda Centre, Vishva Hindu Parishad, ISKCON and other Hindu groups, we could not help noticing a certain bias in favour of the publishers’ own sectarian assumptions in spite of a serious over-all effort to make the presentation inclusive of all strands of Hinduism.
Thus, the ISKCON textbook speaks of the Devas (normally translated as “gods” or “deities”) as “the demigods”, in keeping with the quasi-monotheistic ISKCON view that only Krishna is God, all while recognizing the other gods as lesser but nonetheless divine beings. The edits proposed by the Vedic Foundation in the California textbook affair included the systematic replacement of “the gods” by “God” or “the manifestations of God”, obviously from an internalized Anglo-modernist bias (borrowed from Christianity) against polytheism. What such organizations should keep in mind during their editing is whether every Hindu can recognize his own religion in the description they give of it. We don’t believe that the Vedic seers thought of Indra as merely a “demi-god”, or that today’s ordinary Hindu devotee thinks of Ganesha, Lakshmi and Saraswati, the three deities he worships on Diwali, as lacking in distinct identities.
The great step forward made in this book is that it is consistent in its attempt to represent Hinduism rather than just one of its sects. While some textbooks try to confine Hinduism to the Vedic tradition, here we read that by 600 BCE, “the social, religious and philosophical ideas and practices central to Hinduism are fully evident. These are in continuity with the religion of the Indus-Sarasvati culture, the teachings of the Vedas, Dravidian culture and elements of the tribal religions.” (p.4) If any bias was to be expected here, given the affiliation of the Hinduism Today editors, it would be to Tamil Shaiva bhakti, embodied in the tradition of the Nayanar poets. These get hardly half a page (p.33), and after having been ignored in so many introductions to Hinduism, it was about time they got their due. (For the same reason, it is commendable that Tiruvalluvar, recently honoured with a giant statue on India’s southern tip, is highlighted, p.77-78.)
The general structure of the book is chronological, from the Vedic poets and Harappan cities down to modern Indian democracy and its state religion, “secularism”. These chapters are interspersed as appropriate with cultural intermezzos on dress, food, the arts, rituals, pilgrimage cycles, etc. As a didactic device, every chapter opens with a challenge about what you would do in a thorny situation in which Hindus have found themselves, and ends with a list of exam-type questions. Where would you go if you lived in a Harappan village and you found the river on your doorstep, the Saraswati, was drying up? If in the present age, you are given the chance to go to college, would you abandon your family of blacksmiths back in the village? If after growing up in the West with a resolve to be independent, you meet the prospective groom your country-born parents have sought out for you, what would you do?
The hard part
And when faced with the back-breaking toleration tax and numerous discriminations imposed by the Delhi Sultans and Aurangzeb, would you convert to Islam? For indeed, this book doesn’t avoid the unpleasant issues of Islamic persecution and “British rule’s mixed blessings” (p.62). We can only commend the spirit in which the authors go about this challenge: “We now enter what historians call a ‘difficult period’ of Indian history. (…) Muslim historians recount in detail the destruction of cities, sacking of temples, slaughter of noncombatants and enslavement of captives. British accounts reveal the mismanagement and greed that led to famines that killed tens of millions of people and ruined the local industry during their rule. (…) It is difficult to study such unpleasant pasts in a way that leads to understanding, not hatred. (…) True reconciliation comes when people honestly face the past, forgive misdeeds, learn to truly respect each other’s religious beliefs and traditions and promise to move forward in peace.” (p.42)
Very briefly, the canard is laid to rest that Hindus lost to Muslims because of the caste system, a claim heard from both anti-Hindu missionaries and Hindu reformists. In fact, many castes participated in warfare together. As any strategist could have told the moralizing caste-mongers, victory was by virtue of “superior military organization, strategy, training, weapons, horses and mobility”, which the natives had neglected. (p.45) Conversely, “the caste system was a main obstacle to conversion. It guaranteed to Hindus a secure identity and place in their community, which they would lose by converting.” (p.49) In their revolt against Muslim rule, Hindus observed a certain morality of warfare: “While Shivaji was not above sacking an enemy’s city if he needed the money, he did not kill noncombatants, take slaves or damage Muslim holy sites.” (p.48)
Far from fostering resentment, these chapters breathe a spirit of positive thinking. As illustrated by the title of chapter 3, “Hinduism endures: 1100 to 1850”, it emphasizes Hinduism’s capacity for survival over its losses. In the time of Muslim and then British domination, “the country remained overwhelmingly Hindu despite foreign domination and religious oppression”. (p.41) Since all is well that ends well, this makes it easier for Hindus to take a cool view of these painful episodes than for, say, the Zoroastrians or the Australian Aboriginals.
If anything, this book errs on the side of being over-diplomatic in describing inter-religious conflict. Consider this: “India’s transition to freedom brought with it a terrible tragedy. Pakistan was partitioned from India on the basis of religion. A huge migration followed as 7.5 m Muslims moved to Pakistan from India and an equal number of Hindus and Sikhs fled Pakistan.” (p.65) The first two sentences keep the active agent of Partition out of view, as if it was impersonal destiny overcoming India, when in fact it was the Muslim League’s violent agitation that forced both the British and Congress into compliance. The last sentence suggests a symmetry between the Muslim and Hindu-Sikh “migrations”. In fact, Hindus and Sikhs were terrorized into fleeing their ancestral homes which they had wanted to stay inside multicultural India, whereas the Muslims simply moved to the promised land they had carved out for themselves (with the seeming exception of East Panjab where the Muslims were put to flight, but only after millions of hapless Hindu-Sikh refugees from their own new state started streaming in with their horror stories).
Historicity
On the whole, this book respects the findings of modern scholarship, rather than sweepingly committing its allegiance to either the traditionalist or the secularist position. Thus, rather than speaking out prematurely, it acknowledges uncertainty where appropriate: “The relationship between the people of the Indus-Saravati civilization and those who composed the Vedas is not clearly understood.” (p.3) Rather than triumphantly dismissing the Aryan Invasion Theory as a well-refuted colonial conspiracy, it soberly observes: “Many scholars now dispute this theory because all the evidence for it is questionable.” (p.4)
Another nod to prevailing scholarly custom is the periodization implicit in this chapter title: “Hindu India: 300 to 1100 CE” (p.21), for indeed, the Orientalists divided Indian history into a Vedic, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and British period. Concerning the authorship of the Vedas, the existing belief is noted: “Hindus regard them as spoken by God” (p.3), only to return to the realistic assumption of human authorship: “the holy texts had to be composed well before 2000 BCE” (because by that time the mighty Saraswati had shriveled, p.3), and “a few [women] even composed several of the holy Vedic hymns” (p.5).So, clearly the Vedic hymns were the handiwork of human poets.
On the other hand, introducing the epic’s hero Krishna as “the eighth incarnation of Lord Vishnu” (p.9), without quote marks, detracts from the book’s purpose of teaching “history”. Let alone the secularist deconstruction, even in the epic itself he is a down-to-earth war consultant and womanizer suffering an all too human fate, with most of the Bharata clan killed in the fraternal war in which he guides them, all his own relatives killing each other while drunk, and he himself dying in a silly hunting accident. It is only in later interpolations like the Bhagavad Gita that he gets deified.
Fault-finding
In a book review, it is only proper to indulge in some fault-finding, if only by way of useful suggestion to the publishers for well-deserved future editions. So, please bear with the pedantry that follows.
There are extremely few spelling errors in this book, but I found a few on the maps, where Tapti is rendered as “Tapi” (p.112), and Mizoram as “Mizeram” (p.87). The river-name Satlej is given the sloppy British-colonial transcription Sutluj, following the same confusing pattern as Panjab/”Punjab”, Pashtu/”Pushtu”, Pandit/”Pundit”. No big deal, but considering the importance the Vedic seers accorded to correct pronunciation, why not just do our best? And speaking of maps, the map of pilgrimage sites (p.87) should have covered the Islam-occupied parts of the subcontinent along with the Republic of remainder-India, so as to include places like Hinglaj and Nankana Sahib.
The epic’s name Mahâbhârata does not mean “Great India” (p.9). Rather, it means “great [epic of Vedic king] Bharata’s clan”, just as Bhâratanatyam, discussed on p.55, refers not to Bhârat/India but to the dance style conceived or at least described by an ancient choreographer named Bharata.
Likewise, it is admittedly traditional but by scholarly standards not acceptable to analyze the word guru thus: “gu means darkness and ru means remover.” (p.14) Well, guru is cognate with Latin gravis, whence English gravity, and means “heavy”. Anyone is free to fantasize meanings into words, but a textbook should aspire to higher standards.
The history of the caste system is complicated and the authors have wisely chosen to treat it only briefly. Still, they could have done better than this: “Later on, the varnas divided into hundreds of sub-sections called jatis (castes).” (p.4) Varna and jâti are two distinct systems that ended up combining, and if at all one preceded the other, certainly jati came first. Varna is the layeredness of complex societies, characteristic of late-Vedic society when it started expanding from the Saraswati-Yamuna region to the rest of India; jati means “tribe” and was the social formation prevailing in most of India. As these tribes integrated into the wider Hindu society, they retained their identity through endogamy and became castes. In most of India they received or grabbed a place in the varna hierarchy, but that was mainly a ritual label immaterial to their internal self-organization. Varna is late-Vedic, jati is pre-Vedic.
Finally, in our opinion it was not a good idea to include a section on the chakras (p.94-95). Kundalini yoga and the chakra system are medieval innovations, i.e. fairly recent by Indian standards, and have remained very marginal before becoming fads in the 20th century. Of all pre-Independence Hindus, 99% never heard of them. Writing their exact history is a job that largely remains to be done, and an introductory textbook is not the place to do it.
That said, among social studies textbooks this book is now the best introduction to Hinduism.
Shiva Bajpai & editors of Hinduism Today magazine, 2011: The History of Hindu India from Ancient to Modern Times. A Textbook for All Ages (a Social Studies textbook), Himalayan Academy Publications, Kapaa (Hawaii), 119 pp., US $ 19.95, ISBN 978-1-934145-38-8, also available as e-book.
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Showing posts with label book review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book review. Show all posts
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Against Hindu identity
Among Indologists, it is now advised to avoid or at least problematize the word “Hindu”. Among the reasons for this wariness: Hindus themselves have only been using it for a few centuries, it is not mentioned in scripture but was tagged onto them by outsiders, it blurs important inter-Hindu distinctions and conflicts, and most objectionably, it is now the badge claimed by Hindu nationalists. Retired Delhi University historian Dwijendra Narayan Jha has continued the process of “Deconstructing Hindu identity” in an essay for the general public with that title, and it has now been published in a booklet, Rethinking Hindu Identity, along with essays on the “myth” of Hindu tolerance and on the sacred cow.
Regarding the latter point, his case is convincing enough. A good handful of passages in ancient texts are shown to confirm that the Vedic cattle-herders considered beef a normal part of their diet. In the pre-Buddhist age, the cow’s (like the horse’s) very aura of sacredness sometimes caused it to be ritually eaten. Her inviolability is among the sclerotic-eccentric traits typical only of the Puranic-Shastric phase of Hinduism crystallized from the Shunga era (2nd BCE) onwards.
On Hindu identity too, he doesn’t find it difficult to show that the term “Hindu” is fairly recent and introduced by Muslims in the catch-all sense of “any Indian non-Muslim”. Even in modern legislation, “Hindu” is only a “negative appellation” comprising “all non-Abrahamic religions” of India (p.65). The term Sanâtana Dharma, by contrast, is already “mentioned frequently in the Brahmanical texts”, though in varied meanings, but it too only acquired its value of indigenous synonym for the exonym “Hinduism” in the 19th century (p.20-21). Likewise, the notion of Bhâratvarsha, far from being eternal in its classical sense of “the Subcontinent”, is documented to have originally referred to smaller territories, not including Magadha and the Deccan. Alas, this paper is marred by an unsubstantiated accusation against colleague Prof. B.B. Lal, dean of Indian archaeology, for “systematic abuse of archaeology” (p.14), viz. for seeing continuities between Harappan and Hindu material culture.
Prof. Jha’s bias is showing badly in his paper on tolerance, which attacks the received wisdom that Hinduism is comparatively tolerant of other religions and of dissent in its own ranks. Here, he casts his net for instances of “Hindu intolerance” very wide. Mere doctrinal disputes, the very life-blood of intellectual culture, are cited as proving “inherent intolerance”, e.g. the denunciation of the Buddha as a false prophet incarnated merely to “brainwash” the demons (p.45). So is the principle that non-Hindus were welcome to convert, and ex-Hindus to reconvert, to Hinduism (p.47); or that the Virashaivas “engaged in conversion activities in a systematic manner” (p.44). Perhaps he doesn’t realize the implication of his own position, viz. that by these standards, proselytising religions like Christianity and Islam, even without counting crusades and jihad, are ipso facto intrinsically “intolerant”. That point has indeed been made often enough by apostate Christians and Muslims, but in India it is usually vetoed as “Hindu communalist propaganda”.
His eagerness to accumulate incriminating testimony makes him include allegations made by modern and arguably partisan sources as if they were actual evidence, e.g. a colleague is cited as claiming a Tibetan chronicle Pag-sam-jon-zang for “the burning of the library of Nalanda by some ‘Hindu fanatics’, not by Bakhtiyar Khilji as is commonly believed” (p.35). This Tibetan chronicle can be consulted online, and we haven’t found anything about “Hindu fanatics” there. This allegation is a 20th-century “interpretation” at best, far from the primary testimony a historian should prefer. It is also highly implausible.
It says, after all, that mostly Hindu kings of the Ganga plain had patronized Buddhist institutions for 16 centuries (-5th to +12th), letting them flourish mightily according to Chinese and Tibetan visitors, then suddenly destroyed them in the nick of time before the arrival of the Muslim conquerors, who boast in their records of having destroyed the Buddhist institutions of which they had only found the smoking ruins. Khilji’s starring role in the destruction of Indian Buddhism is well-documented in contemporaneous Muslim sources and cannot be shifted to unnamed Hindu bogeys so cavalierly.
During the Government-sponsored scholars’ debate on the evidence for the demolished Ayodhya temple in 1990-91, Jha was a member of the Babri Masjid Action Committee’s delegation against the Vishva Hindu Parishad. Like then, his intervention now in the debate on the purported tolerance and the very existence of “Hinduism” is not an impartisan source from which debaters could borrow authoritative arguments; it is itself one side of the polemic. Which is permitted, but should be kept in mind by the reader.
Review of D.N. Jha: Rethinking Hindu Identity, London/Oakville: Equinox, 2009. 100 pp., $85 HB, $28,95 PB. Published in Journal of Asian Studies, Cambridge University Press, August 2011, p.872-874.
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Regarding the latter point, his case is convincing enough. A good handful of passages in ancient texts are shown to confirm that the Vedic cattle-herders considered beef a normal part of their diet. In the pre-Buddhist age, the cow’s (like the horse’s) very aura of sacredness sometimes caused it to be ritually eaten. Her inviolability is among the sclerotic-eccentric traits typical only of the Puranic-Shastric phase of Hinduism crystallized from the Shunga era (2nd BCE) onwards.
On Hindu identity too, he doesn’t find it difficult to show that the term “Hindu” is fairly recent and introduced by Muslims in the catch-all sense of “any Indian non-Muslim”. Even in modern legislation, “Hindu” is only a “negative appellation” comprising “all non-Abrahamic religions” of India (p.65). The term Sanâtana Dharma, by contrast, is already “mentioned frequently in the Brahmanical texts”, though in varied meanings, but it too only acquired its value of indigenous synonym for the exonym “Hinduism” in the 19th century (p.20-21). Likewise, the notion of Bhâratvarsha, far from being eternal in its classical sense of “the Subcontinent”, is documented to have originally referred to smaller territories, not including Magadha and the Deccan. Alas, this paper is marred by an unsubstantiated accusation against colleague Prof. B.B. Lal, dean of Indian archaeology, for “systematic abuse of archaeology” (p.14), viz. for seeing continuities between Harappan and Hindu material culture.
Prof. Jha’s bias is showing badly in his paper on tolerance, which attacks the received wisdom that Hinduism is comparatively tolerant of other religions and of dissent in its own ranks. Here, he casts his net for instances of “Hindu intolerance” very wide. Mere doctrinal disputes, the very life-blood of intellectual culture, are cited as proving “inherent intolerance”, e.g. the denunciation of the Buddha as a false prophet incarnated merely to “brainwash” the demons (p.45). So is the principle that non-Hindus were welcome to convert, and ex-Hindus to reconvert, to Hinduism (p.47); or that the Virashaivas “engaged in conversion activities in a systematic manner” (p.44). Perhaps he doesn’t realize the implication of his own position, viz. that by these standards, proselytising religions like Christianity and Islam, even without counting crusades and jihad, are ipso facto intrinsically “intolerant”. That point has indeed been made often enough by apostate Christians and Muslims, but in India it is usually vetoed as “Hindu communalist propaganda”.
His eagerness to accumulate incriminating testimony makes him include allegations made by modern and arguably partisan sources as if they were actual evidence, e.g. a colleague is cited as claiming a Tibetan chronicle Pag-sam-jon-zang for “the burning of the library of Nalanda by some ‘Hindu fanatics’, not by Bakhtiyar Khilji as is commonly believed” (p.35). This Tibetan chronicle can be consulted online, and we haven’t found anything about “Hindu fanatics” there. This allegation is a 20th-century “interpretation” at best, far from the primary testimony a historian should prefer. It is also highly implausible.
It says, after all, that mostly Hindu kings of the Ganga plain had patronized Buddhist institutions for 16 centuries (-5th to +12th), letting them flourish mightily according to Chinese and Tibetan visitors, then suddenly destroyed them in the nick of time before the arrival of the Muslim conquerors, who boast in their records of having destroyed the Buddhist institutions of which they had only found the smoking ruins. Khilji’s starring role in the destruction of Indian Buddhism is well-documented in contemporaneous Muslim sources and cannot be shifted to unnamed Hindu bogeys so cavalierly.
During the Government-sponsored scholars’ debate on the evidence for the demolished Ayodhya temple in 1990-91, Jha was a member of the Babri Masjid Action Committee’s delegation against the Vishva Hindu Parishad. Like then, his intervention now in the debate on the purported tolerance and the very existence of “Hinduism” is not an impartisan source from which debaters could borrow authoritative arguments; it is itself one side of the polemic. Which is permitted, but should be kept in mind by the reader.
Review of D.N. Jha: Rethinking Hindu Identity, London/Oakville: Equinox, 2009. 100 pp., $85 HB, $28,95 PB. Published in Journal of Asian Studies, Cambridge University Press, August 2011, p.872-874.
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Friday, October 7, 2011
Clash of civilizations cancelled
After the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the attention of the public intellectuals was drawn by two influential books spelling out the post-Cold-War world situation. Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History claimed that utopia had started with the definitive victory of liberal-democratic capitalism, which would soon turn the whole world into a US suburb. Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations provided a dystopian counterpoint, predicting that all civilizational identities would reassert themselves and provide the grounds for new worldwide conflicts, especially between the still-dominant West and two challengers, the Islamic world and the “Confucian” civilization of China.
However, no one has really gone on to theorize the conflict of interests between the West and China in civilizational terms, framing it rather as old-style Great-Power politics. So, the “clash of civilizations” effectively means the conflict between the West and Islam. Incidentally, Huntington was not aware that already in the 1980s, Times of India editor Girilal Jain discussed the triangular Hindu-Islamic-Western conflicts of interest in civilisational terms. Apart from the clash’s Western and westernized-Indian theorists, the vast majority of adherents to the doctrine of civilizational conflict are militant Muslims, who see this as merely a continuation of the religious war declared by Mohammed against the Infidels.
Now two French intellectuals, demographer Youssef Courbage and historian-anthropologist Emmanuel Todd, have come out with a presentation of demographic and anthropological data that should undermine the whole notion of the fabled clash. It is titled Le Rendez-Vous des Civilisations (Le Seuil, Paris), i.e. “the meeting of civilizations”. In the main, they develop two theses. One, the demographic explosion of the Muslim world so feared by Westerners (and Hindus) is largely a thing of the past. Two, Islam is highly insufficient as explanation for the conduct and the policies of “Muslim” societies, because they preserve many local pre-Islamic customs and sensibilities, often sharing these with societies on the other side of the “civilizational” border, as well as adopting post-Islamic ideologies, most of all nationalism.
Muslims no different
The authors give a detailed overview of demographic evolutions worldwide of the past few centuries and identify the factors of a decline in birth figures. Exceptions notwithstanding, the best predictor of a decline in fertility is female literacy, with 50% female literacy typically coinciding within a decade or so with a sharp downturn in fertility. This trend is as visible among Muslim as among Christian and Hindu populations. But truth to tell, the authors’ own data, while confirming a similar trend among Muslims, also show that by and large, the resultant fertility level among educated and affluent Muslim populations is still sizably higher than among non-Muslims, even remaining very high in wealthy Saudi Arabia, so that they continue to gain demographic ground over the non-Muslim populations.
And in cases where Muslims do follow Christians (or, most ahead, the Japanese) to a fertility figure below replacement level, a threshold recently crossed in Iran and in Bosnia, the fact that it happened much later among Muslims assures further comparative demographic gains before a net population decline sets in. Thus, in Iran the number of children including girls has grown rapidly in the preceding decades, so now the number of young mothers is still rising and even with fewer than 2.1 births per woman, the number of births also continues to rise. And when that number finally starts to decline, it will still for many years be higher than that of elderly Iranians dying, so in the authors’ estimate, Iran’s population will still rise another 20 million or so before levelling off. Even if the reproductive conduct of Muslim societies cannot be described as “demographic aggression”, it does lead to a steady rise in Muslim percentage in practically every country concerned.
For South Asia, the authors’ data, based on many surveys and sources beside the official census reports, confirm the picture given by A.P. Joshi, M.D. Srinivas and J.K. Bajaj in their detailed study Religious Demography of India (Centre for Policy Studies, Chennai 2003). In every state in India without exception, including the economically and educationally most advanced, the Muslim growth rate is far above replacement level and far above the figures for the Hindu majority and for other minorities. If stated by a Hindu, Indian secularists usually dismiss this finding as mere “hate propaganda”. In 1993, Mani Shankar Aiyar claimed that the Muslim percentage in India would forever remain at 11%; but only 15 years later, it is easily 14%. And on top of this, India is outpaced by her Muslim neighbours Pakistan and Bangladesh, whence millions more are bound to seek living space in India.
With 4,6 children per woman in 2005, Pakistan grows faster than the Arab countries (except for Yemen and the Palestinians) and much faster than India. Indeed, it is on course to overtaking the US as third most populous country in the world well before the end of the century. Bangladesh used to be praised by demographers because it realised a downturn in birth rate in 1970, decades before reaching 50% female literacy (simply due to the physical pressures of overpopulation), but now disappoints them with a continually low marriage age and with a birth rate steady at ca. 3 per woman. According to Courbage and Todd, “the Muslim population of the Indian subcontinent would reach 820 million by 2050 against 1200 million non-Muslims. Equal numbers with and even bypassing of the non-Muslim would be possible by century’s end.” (p.103)
Mind you, these are the findings of two scholars who have set out to counter the current anti-Muslim alarmist feelings in Europe and, by extension, in India. If any bias could be detected here, it would be on the slightly pro-Muslim side. Thus, they claim that the stagnation in Bangladesh’s population control policies is due to low literacy rather than to the impact of Islam, overlooking the fact that religion does have an impact on a society’s enthusiasm for literacy. They relay, doubtlessly in good faith, the Pakistani-cum-secularist story that the “Urdu-speaking Mohajirs” were “expelled from India after the Partition in 1947”, when in fact the Mohajirs migrated by choice to Pakistan, the promised land they themselves had created by campaigning for Partition in the preceding years. The “symmetry fallacy” of evenly distributing guilt between two warring parties, in this case by pretending that Muslims in India had been given the same eliminationist treatment as Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan, is one of the cheapest disinformation techniques around, because it resonates with the public’s mental laziness so averse to making distinctions.
The “Islamophobic” image of the Muslims as a phalanx united and mobilized for demographic warfare is successfully deconstructed here, yet the hard data keep on showing a Muslim advance. While rising Muslim percentages may not stem from a conspiracy, Muslim leaders do read strategic implications into the trend. Thus, Algeria’s Houari Boumédienne and Libya’s Moammar al-Kadhafi have openly said that they expect to take over Europe by breeding a Muslim majority there. They certainly believe in a clash of civilizations and expect to come out victorious.
If there need not be much of a clash, as I am inclined to think, the reasons are other than demographical. It is simply that born Muslims may lose their commitment to Islam, and in many places are indeed leaving Islam, either formally or at least mentally. Even Islamic militants are interiorizing modern “Western” values and modes of thinking faster than they realize. Thus, the Islamic Republic of Iran has a flourishing film industry. Even if films are made glorifying Muslim heroes in order to instil Islamic enthusiasm in the audience, the very use of the medium of cinema is already intrinsically un-Islamic. Apart from breaking the taboo on the depiction of human beings, it brings in all kinds of ideas and attitudes typical of Infidel centres of soft power like Jewish-dominated Hollywood and Hindu-tainted Bollywood.
In Holland, two competing Muslim media corporations are doing a good job of presenting the Muslim angle of current developments, and here again the medium proves to be the message that overrules the Islamic message. Smartly dressed and camera-savvy Muslims with a fine Dutch accent conduct group discussions or interviews brimful of borrowed Western values, e.g. invoking principles of free speech or freedom of religion while defending Muslim interests against the ambient Infidel society. They (like the “Islamophobes”) think they are making clever use of Western values as weapons in the service of Islam, but in the process they themselves are getting transformed.
Pre-Islamic customs
Courbage and Todd also develop another line of argument against the black-and-white view of civilizations in confrontation. Deep social and cultural structures exist underneath people’s surface adherence to historical religions. Often these constitute a common heritage of different societies now seemingly living in conflict. Thus, a common Mediterranean attitude to marriage and sexuality, e.g. emphasizing a bride’s virginity and threatening honour vengeance, exist both in Arab and (at least until recently) in Latin countries, contrasting jointly with Nordic or African mores.
In particular, the pre-Islamic layer in Muslim society may explain some unexpected or otherwise puzzling data. Islam is reputedly harsh to women, so why is it that the Arab countries don’t have the problem of massive female foeticide that afflicts Korea, China and India? The authors don’t explain this, as Muslim preachers would, with reference to Mohammed’s condemnation of female infanticide. They point out the ancient difference in family structure.
In patriarchal societies like Confucian China and Hindu India, a daughter leaves her family upon getting married. This affects the status of the girl child negatively, making her education into a burden on the family that will only profit another family. Arab society, pre-Islamic as well as Islamic, is no less patriarchal, but there the girl child benefits of an idiosyncratic factor: tribal inbreeding. Hindu society is thoroughly familiar with endogamy, but this inbreeding within castes was counterbalanced by gotra (clan) exogamy. Brahmanical tradition, like the Roman Catholic Church, frowned upon inbreeding and imposed forbidden degrees of consanguinity. This taboo does not exist in most West-Asian and North-African countries. More often than not, a young man will marry his first or second cousin; or a slightly older man, his niece. (A similar system prevailed in Dravidian societies until the penetration of the North-Indian marriage rules.)
One consequence is that a newborn girl is expected later to marry a young man who is now already known to her parents, viz. their young nephew living in the same home or at least growing up nearby in their brother’s house. Conversely, the bride joining her husband in his parents’ home is not a stranger on whom a frustrated mother-in-law can avenge her dissatisfactions. No, since birth she was known to her in-laws, a member of their extended family, and is treated accordingly. (One objection often raised against Western society by Muslims in e.g. the Dutch TV talk shows mentioned, is that it is lacking in the human warmth which they have experienced in their home families.) There is no occasion then for the Indian attitude that “raising a daughter is like tilling your neighbour’s land”, since that neighbour is a close relative and your daughter remains a member of your extended family even after being married off. This way, these Muslim societies have less of an incentive to treat girls like a wasted effort or to pre-emptively abort them.
So, that’s a point worth pondering, especially for certain wealthy communities in India who can easily afford a daughter’s dowry yet set records in female foeticide. But the deep pre-Islamic structures of Muslim societies also have entirely different consequences relevant to the “clash of civilizations” debate.
Consider the situation in Iraq. The Americans’ stated goal was to introduce Western democracy there, a post-Islamic system presupposing a new post-Islamic mindset. That was not a big success. Yet, recently major progress has been made in containing Al-Qaida and mobilizing Iraqis on the American side. The secret was not to insist on establishing post-Islamic institutions anymore, but to return to a pre-Islamic structure and mentality silently underlying the Islamic institutions that have held sway there for some 13 centuries: the tribe and its tribal loyalty. While only highly ideologized young men will take to arms to fight for a cause dictated by a shady leader living (or dead) in a cave on the Pak-Afghan border, it is easy to recruit fighters for the militia led by their own tribal leader whom they have known and learned to respect since infancy. This is not typically Islamic, it would be true anywhere, and it can be turned against those who wage the holy war of Islam.
In conclusion, this book is a welcome antidote to the narrow focus on the religious factor now common in analyses of the world situation. Especially because it is never sweeping and exaggerated nor dishonest, as “secularist” attempts at arguing the same point often are. The authors don’t deny the importance of religion in motivating societies, but keep it in perspective.
(VijayVaani, October 2008)
Read more!
However, no one has really gone on to theorize the conflict of interests between the West and China in civilizational terms, framing it rather as old-style Great-Power politics. So, the “clash of civilizations” effectively means the conflict between the West and Islam. Incidentally, Huntington was not aware that already in the 1980s, Times of India editor Girilal Jain discussed the triangular Hindu-Islamic-Western conflicts of interest in civilisational terms. Apart from the clash’s Western and westernized-Indian theorists, the vast majority of adherents to the doctrine of civilizational conflict are militant Muslims, who see this as merely a continuation of the religious war declared by Mohammed against the Infidels.
Now two French intellectuals, demographer Youssef Courbage and historian-anthropologist Emmanuel Todd, have come out with a presentation of demographic and anthropological data that should undermine the whole notion of the fabled clash. It is titled Le Rendez-Vous des Civilisations (Le Seuil, Paris), i.e. “the meeting of civilizations”. In the main, they develop two theses. One, the demographic explosion of the Muslim world so feared by Westerners (and Hindus) is largely a thing of the past. Two, Islam is highly insufficient as explanation for the conduct and the policies of “Muslim” societies, because they preserve many local pre-Islamic customs and sensibilities, often sharing these with societies on the other side of the “civilizational” border, as well as adopting post-Islamic ideologies, most of all nationalism.
Muslims no different
The authors give a detailed overview of demographic evolutions worldwide of the past few centuries and identify the factors of a decline in birth figures. Exceptions notwithstanding, the best predictor of a decline in fertility is female literacy, with 50% female literacy typically coinciding within a decade or so with a sharp downturn in fertility. This trend is as visible among Muslim as among Christian and Hindu populations. But truth to tell, the authors’ own data, while confirming a similar trend among Muslims, also show that by and large, the resultant fertility level among educated and affluent Muslim populations is still sizably higher than among non-Muslims, even remaining very high in wealthy Saudi Arabia, so that they continue to gain demographic ground over the non-Muslim populations.
And in cases where Muslims do follow Christians (or, most ahead, the Japanese) to a fertility figure below replacement level, a threshold recently crossed in Iran and in Bosnia, the fact that it happened much later among Muslims assures further comparative demographic gains before a net population decline sets in. Thus, in Iran the number of children including girls has grown rapidly in the preceding decades, so now the number of young mothers is still rising and even with fewer than 2.1 births per woman, the number of births also continues to rise. And when that number finally starts to decline, it will still for many years be higher than that of elderly Iranians dying, so in the authors’ estimate, Iran’s population will still rise another 20 million or so before levelling off. Even if the reproductive conduct of Muslim societies cannot be described as “demographic aggression”, it does lead to a steady rise in Muslim percentage in practically every country concerned.
For South Asia, the authors’ data, based on many surveys and sources beside the official census reports, confirm the picture given by A.P. Joshi, M.D. Srinivas and J.K. Bajaj in their detailed study Religious Demography of India (Centre for Policy Studies, Chennai 2003). In every state in India without exception, including the economically and educationally most advanced, the Muslim growth rate is far above replacement level and far above the figures for the Hindu majority and for other minorities. If stated by a Hindu, Indian secularists usually dismiss this finding as mere “hate propaganda”. In 1993, Mani Shankar Aiyar claimed that the Muslim percentage in India would forever remain at 11%; but only 15 years later, it is easily 14%. And on top of this, India is outpaced by her Muslim neighbours Pakistan and Bangladesh, whence millions more are bound to seek living space in India.
With 4,6 children per woman in 2005, Pakistan grows faster than the Arab countries (except for Yemen and the Palestinians) and much faster than India. Indeed, it is on course to overtaking the US as third most populous country in the world well before the end of the century. Bangladesh used to be praised by demographers because it realised a downturn in birth rate in 1970, decades before reaching 50% female literacy (simply due to the physical pressures of overpopulation), but now disappoints them with a continually low marriage age and with a birth rate steady at ca. 3 per woman. According to Courbage and Todd, “the Muslim population of the Indian subcontinent would reach 820 million by 2050 against 1200 million non-Muslims. Equal numbers with and even bypassing of the non-Muslim would be possible by century’s end.” (p.103)
Mind you, these are the findings of two scholars who have set out to counter the current anti-Muslim alarmist feelings in Europe and, by extension, in India. If any bias could be detected here, it would be on the slightly pro-Muslim side. Thus, they claim that the stagnation in Bangladesh’s population control policies is due to low literacy rather than to the impact of Islam, overlooking the fact that religion does have an impact on a society’s enthusiasm for literacy. They relay, doubtlessly in good faith, the Pakistani-cum-secularist story that the “Urdu-speaking Mohajirs” were “expelled from India after the Partition in 1947”, when in fact the Mohajirs migrated by choice to Pakistan, the promised land they themselves had created by campaigning for Partition in the preceding years. The “symmetry fallacy” of evenly distributing guilt between two warring parties, in this case by pretending that Muslims in India had been given the same eliminationist treatment as Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan, is one of the cheapest disinformation techniques around, because it resonates with the public’s mental laziness so averse to making distinctions.
The “Islamophobic” image of the Muslims as a phalanx united and mobilized for demographic warfare is successfully deconstructed here, yet the hard data keep on showing a Muslim advance. While rising Muslim percentages may not stem from a conspiracy, Muslim leaders do read strategic implications into the trend. Thus, Algeria’s Houari Boumédienne and Libya’s Moammar al-Kadhafi have openly said that they expect to take over Europe by breeding a Muslim majority there. They certainly believe in a clash of civilizations and expect to come out victorious.
If there need not be much of a clash, as I am inclined to think, the reasons are other than demographical. It is simply that born Muslims may lose their commitment to Islam, and in many places are indeed leaving Islam, either formally or at least mentally. Even Islamic militants are interiorizing modern “Western” values and modes of thinking faster than they realize. Thus, the Islamic Republic of Iran has a flourishing film industry. Even if films are made glorifying Muslim heroes in order to instil Islamic enthusiasm in the audience, the very use of the medium of cinema is already intrinsically un-Islamic. Apart from breaking the taboo on the depiction of human beings, it brings in all kinds of ideas and attitudes typical of Infidel centres of soft power like Jewish-dominated Hollywood and Hindu-tainted Bollywood.
In Holland, two competing Muslim media corporations are doing a good job of presenting the Muslim angle of current developments, and here again the medium proves to be the message that overrules the Islamic message. Smartly dressed and camera-savvy Muslims with a fine Dutch accent conduct group discussions or interviews brimful of borrowed Western values, e.g. invoking principles of free speech or freedom of religion while defending Muslim interests against the ambient Infidel society. They (like the “Islamophobes”) think they are making clever use of Western values as weapons in the service of Islam, but in the process they themselves are getting transformed.
Pre-Islamic customs
Courbage and Todd also develop another line of argument against the black-and-white view of civilizations in confrontation. Deep social and cultural structures exist underneath people’s surface adherence to historical religions. Often these constitute a common heritage of different societies now seemingly living in conflict. Thus, a common Mediterranean attitude to marriage and sexuality, e.g. emphasizing a bride’s virginity and threatening honour vengeance, exist both in Arab and (at least until recently) in Latin countries, contrasting jointly with Nordic or African mores.
In particular, the pre-Islamic layer in Muslim society may explain some unexpected or otherwise puzzling data. Islam is reputedly harsh to women, so why is it that the Arab countries don’t have the problem of massive female foeticide that afflicts Korea, China and India? The authors don’t explain this, as Muslim preachers would, with reference to Mohammed’s condemnation of female infanticide. They point out the ancient difference in family structure.
In patriarchal societies like Confucian China and Hindu India, a daughter leaves her family upon getting married. This affects the status of the girl child negatively, making her education into a burden on the family that will only profit another family. Arab society, pre-Islamic as well as Islamic, is no less patriarchal, but there the girl child benefits of an idiosyncratic factor: tribal inbreeding. Hindu society is thoroughly familiar with endogamy, but this inbreeding within castes was counterbalanced by gotra (clan) exogamy. Brahmanical tradition, like the Roman Catholic Church, frowned upon inbreeding and imposed forbidden degrees of consanguinity. This taboo does not exist in most West-Asian and North-African countries. More often than not, a young man will marry his first or second cousin; or a slightly older man, his niece. (A similar system prevailed in Dravidian societies until the penetration of the North-Indian marriage rules.)
One consequence is that a newborn girl is expected later to marry a young man who is now already known to her parents, viz. their young nephew living in the same home or at least growing up nearby in their brother’s house. Conversely, the bride joining her husband in his parents’ home is not a stranger on whom a frustrated mother-in-law can avenge her dissatisfactions. No, since birth she was known to her in-laws, a member of their extended family, and is treated accordingly. (One objection often raised against Western society by Muslims in e.g. the Dutch TV talk shows mentioned, is that it is lacking in the human warmth which they have experienced in their home families.) There is no occasion then for the Indian attitude that “raising a daughter is like tilling your neighbour’s land”, since that neighbour is a close relative and your daughter remains a member of your extended family even after being married off. This way, these Muslim societies have less of an incentive to treat girls like a wasted effort or to pre-emptively abort them.
So, that’s a point worth pondering, especially for certain wealthy communities in India who can easily afford a daughter’s dowry yet set records in female foeticide. But the deep pre-Islamic structures of Muslim societies also have entirely different consequences relevant to the “clash of civilizations” debate.
Consider the situation in Iraq. The Americans’ stated goal was to introduce Western democracy there, a post-Islamic system presupposing a new post-Islamic mindset. That was not a big success. Yet, recently major progress has been made in containing Al-Qaida and mobilizing Iraqis on the American side. The secret was not to insist on establishing post-Islamic institutions anymore, but to return to a pre-Islamic structure and mentality silently underlying the Islamic institutions that have held sway there for some 13 centuries: the tribe and its tribal loyalty. While only highly ideologized young men will take to arms to fight for a cause dictated by a shady leader living (or dead) in a cave on the Pak-Afghan border, it is easy to recruit fighters for the militia led by their own tribal leader whom they have known and learned to respect since infancy. This is not typically Islamic, it would be true anywhere, and it can be turned against those who wage the holy war of Islam.
In conclusion, this book is a welcome antidote to the narrow focus on the religious factor now common in analyses of the world situation. Especially because it is never sweeping and exaggerated nor dishonest, as “secularist” attempts at arguing the same point often are. The authors don’t deny the importance of religion in motivating societies, but keep it in perspective.
(VijayVaani, October 2008)
Read more!
Saturday, July 17, 2010
The monkey under Patañjali’s yoke
While numerous Asian philosophical texts remain untranslated, a few suffer from a surplus of translations: the Bhagavad-Gītā, the Yijing, the Daodejing, and also Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra (YS). Why did Christopher Key Chapple, the Doshi professor of Indic and Comparative Theology at Loyola Marymount University and an experienced practitioner of yoga, consider it necessary to add one more presentation of the Pātañjala Yoga system?
Yoga and the Luminous: Patañjali’s Spiritual Path to Freedom, by Christopher Key Chapple, State University of New York Press, Albany 2008, 301 pp.
The most important new service the author renders to yoga practitioners and students of India’s intellectual history is a thorough cross-referencing of Patañjali’s concepts with the Rg-Veda (embryonic), the contemporaneous systems of Sānkhya, Buddhism, Jainism, the younger systems of the Nāth Yogis and Sikhs, and the westernized yoga teachings propagated by travelling Gurus. Patañjali really gets his specific place in the Indian network of ideas here. His was “a masterful contribution, communicated through non-judgmentally presenting diverse practices” and “a methodology rooted in ahimsā” (p.113). He and his commentators pioneered the “thoughtful, probing study of the religion of one’s neighbours” and showed that “syncretism can be an effective tool for societal peace” (p.15). Most centrally, he “compiled a host of techniques to facilitate” the attainment of “the power of pure witnessing”, rooted in the self which “sees change but does not itself change” (p.62). Yet note that Chapple also warns us “not to take the self as a static state”, not to “reify” it: the self is “an experience”, “a state of silent absorption” (p.3).
Another obvious merit of his book Yoga and the Luminous is the core part, the detailed translation with grammatical analysis of the text (reproduced in Devanagari and transcription), indologically impeccable but pleasantly readable for the educated layman. It is always a reviewer’s pleasure if he can sincerely and wholeheartedly recommend the book he just read, and that is the case here. There is one point, though, where I want to take issue with Chapple’s understanding of the YS, and it is at the conceptual centre, though in the text it is at the very beginning.
In Laozi’s Daodejing, the most controversial line among competent translators is the very first, Dao ke dao fei chang dao, popularly rendered as “The way that can be said, is not the eternal way”. This is grammatically untenable but appeals greatly to the anti-intellectual slant which Western readers tend to read into Daoism. The misreading had a history in China ever since the word dao acquired the extra meaning of “addressing thus, saying”. A similar slant bedevils the usual interpretation of the Yoga Sūtra’s key term yoga. In this case too, the misreading appeals to intellectual fashions in the West, but started in the country of origin, where it won the day, so that most modern Hindus accept it.
The proper and intended meaning of yoga in Patañjali’s system is the one suggested by its English cognate “yoke”, viz. “subjection, disciplining, control, restraint”. His definition of yoga as citta-vrtti-nirodhah, “the restraint of the fluctuations of the mind” (YS 1:2, tra. p.143) concerns the subjection of the mind’s tendency to monkey around and get attached to its objects. Silencing the mind is presented as a psycho-technical discipline, without direct metaphysical claims.
Unfortunately, in his word-for-word explanation, Chapple forgets his own translation of this definition and explains yoga as “union, connection, joining” (p.143), without problematizing this common interpretation. With this, I must find fault, even if it is the majority view by far. What “union” is this, between what and what? Modern Hindus will say: “between ātman and paramātman”, or more colloquially, “between the soul and God”. That would approximately be the right answer in the case of Bhakti or Sufi mysticism, but is Patañjali’s yoga system a similar theistic mysticism? I think not. Nor does Chapple say it is, but he could have addressed the question more explicitly, and his mere use of the word “union” will confirm Hindus in their theistic understanding.
Patañjali wrote when theism was at a low ebb. In modern self-presentations of Hinduism, you would not know that it was ever anything else than devotional-theistic. At some point, a theistic coup d’état has eclipsed the godless schools of thought and written them out of the record. The Gītā is a blatant instance, with Krishna imposing his presence as object of devotion on chapters named after (and giving an otherwise fair summary of) godless philosophies like Sānkhya. Some have argued that the YS started with a godless core and had theistic elements added later on, to the point that Hindus came to call it Seśvara Sānkhya, i.e. “Sānkhya-with-God”. This is plausible, but the reconstruction of a text’s editorial history is notoriously susceptible to speculative excess, so let us cautiously focus on another and unmistakably operative method of theistic incorporation, viz. leaving the text intact but reinterpreting key terms.
Thus, “Īśvara” is defined merely as “a distinct purusa untouched by afflictions, actions, fruitions or their residue” in YS 1:24, but has been assigned the exclusive meaning of “God/Shiva”, nowadays assumed in the expression “Īśvarapranidhāna” (YS 1:23, 2:1, 2:32, 2:45). It is on the basis of little else than this expression’s repeated appearance that the YS is classified among the theistic systems. Even if it means “devotion to God”, that still does not make Yoga theistic, for God still plays no role in the definition and structure of the system, only the devotion itself is credited with playing a helpful role in the yogi’s progress. Nowhere does Patañjali say that “union” is sought with God nor with anything else. On the contrary, the stated goal of his system is kaivalya, “isolation, separation”, the very opposite of “union”, and equivalent with the notion kevala of the atheistic Jaina system. Patañjali accommodates the devotee yet avoids burdening the unbeliever with a requirement to believe.
Read more!
Yoga and the Luminous: Patañjali’s Spiritual Path to Freedom, by Christopher Key Chapple, State University of New York Press, Albany 2008, 301 pp.
The most important new service the author renders to yoga practitioners and students of India’s intellectual history is a thorough cross-referencing of Patañjali’s concepts with the Rg-Veda (embryonic), the contemporaneous systems of Sānkhya, Buddhism, Jainism, the younger systems of the Nāth Yogis and Sikhs, and the westernized yoga teachings propagated by travelling Gurus. Patañjali really gets his specific place in the Indian network of ideas here. His was “a masterful contribution, communicated through non-judgmentally presenting diverse practices” and “a methodology rooted in ahimsā” (p.113). He and his commentators pioneered the “thoughtful, probing study of the religion of one’s neighbours” and showed that “syncretism can be an effective tool for societal peace” (p.15). Most centrally, he “compiled a host of techniques to facilitate” the attainment of “the power of pure witnessing”, rooted in the self which “sees change but does not itself change” (p.62). Yet note that Chapple also warns us “not to take the self as a static state”, not to “reify” it: the self is “an experience”, “a state of silent absorption” (p.3).
Another obvious merit of his book Yoga and the Luminous is the core part, the detailed translation with grammatical analysis of the text (reproduced in Devanagari and transcription), indologically impeccable but pleasantly readable for the educated layman. It is always a reviewer’s pleasure if he can sincerely and wholeheartedly recommend the book he just read, and that is the case here. There is one point, though, where I want to take issue with Chapple’s understanding of the YS, and it is at the conceptual centre, though in the text it is at the very beginning.
In Laozi’s Daodejing, the most controversial line among competent translators is the very first, Dao ke dao fei chang dao, popularly rendered as “The way that can be said, is not the eternal way”. This is grammatically untenable but appeals greatly to the anti-intellectual slant which Western readers tend to read into Daoism. The misreading had a history in China ever since the word dao acquired the extra meaning of “addressing thus, saying”. A similar slant bedevils the usual interpretation of the Yoga Sūtra’s key term yoga. In this case too, the misreading appeals to intellectual fashions in the West, but started in the country of origin, where it won the day, so that most modern Hindus accept it.
The proper and intended meaning of yoga in Patañjali’s system is the one suggested by its English cognate “yoke”, viz. “subjection, disciplining, control, restraint”. His definition of yoga as citta-vrtti-nirodhah, “the restraint of the fluctuations of the mind” (YS 1:2, tra. p.143) concerns the subjection of the mind’s tendency to monkey around and get attached to its objects. Silencing the mind is presented as a psycho-technical discipline, without direct metaphysical claims.
Unfortunately, in his word-for-word explanation, Chapple forgets his own translation of this definition and explains yoga as “union, connection, joining” (p.143), without problematizing this common interpretation. With this, I must find fault, even if it is the majority view by far. What “union” is this, between what and what? Modern Hindus will say: “between ātman and paramātman”, or more colloquially, “between the soul and God”. That would approximately be the right answer in the case of Bhakti or Sufi mysticism, but is Patañjali’s yoga system a similar theistic mysticism? I think not. Nor does Chapple say it is, but he could have addressed the question more explicitly, and his mere use of the word “union” will confirm Hindus in their theistic understanding.
Patañjali wrote when theism was at a low ebb. In modern self-presentations of Hinduism, you would not know that it was ever anything else than devotional-theistic. At some point, a theistic coup d’état has eclipsed the godless schools of thought and written them out of the record. The Gītā is a blatant instance, with Krishna imposing his presence as object of devotion on chapters named after (and giving an otherwise fair summary of) godless philosophies like Sānkhya. Some have argued that the YS started with a godless core and had theistic elements added later on, to the point that Hindus came to call it Seśvara Sānkhya, i.e. “Sānkhya-with-God”. This is plausible, but the reconstruction of a text’s editorial history is notoriously susceptible to speculative excess, so let us cautiously focus on another and unmistakably operative method of theistic incorporation, viz. leaving the text intact but reinterpreting key terms.
Thus, “Īśvara” is defined merely as “a distinct purusa untouched by afflictions, actions, fruitions or their residue” in YS 1:24, but has been assigned the exclusive meaning of “God/Shiva”, nowadays assumed in the expression “Īśvarapranidhāna” (YS 1:23, 2:1, 2:32, 2:45). It is on the basis of little else than this expression’s repeated appearance that the YS is classified among the theistic systems. Even if it means “devotion to God”, that still does not make Yoga theistic, for God still plays no role in the definition and structure of the system, only the devotion itself is credited with playing a helpful role in the yogi’s progress. Nowhere does Patañjali say that “union” is sought with God nor with anything else. On the contrary, the stated goal of his system is kaivalya, “isolation, separation”, the very opposite of “union”, and equivalent with the notion kevala of the atheistic Jaina system. Patañjali accommodates the devotee yet avoids burdening the unbeliever with a requirement to believe.
Read more!
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