God in India

 

Dr. Joris Gielen studied History, Science of Religion and Theology at the Catholic University of Leuven and also obtained the MA in Indian Philosophy and Religion at Banaras Hindu University. So, when I saw his Dutch-language book God in India (Lannoo, Tielt 2013), I thought to myself: at last, this might be someone who knows what he’s talking about. The book is rather oblivious to unconventional forms of Hinduism, such as that of the chillum-smoking Sadhus, but it gives a realistic account of scriptural Hinduism.

 

Current ideas

He tries his hand at an “emic” approach, i.e. from the inside out, rendering the intentions of the insiders rather than an “objective” description from the outside. As a start, he acknowledges contemporary problems in this discipline, such as whether there even is such a thing as “religion” in India, and when the term “Hinduism” came into use. This is by no means a parlour book about Hinduism, full of nice pictures but with a bland content; it wants to come to grips with a number of contemporary problems. He mentions Edward Said’s notion of “Orientalism”, which he buys into to some extent, given its omnipresence. Here like on many contentious points, he remains moderate and polite where a certain harshness would have been entirely appropriate. “Orientalism”, originally the name of the discipline of Asian history and philology, is used here as the term for the ideological dimension of colonialism. Said’s influential book Orientalism, apart from ignoring the German-speaking world as the main wellspring of Oriental studies (and, alas for Said, with no Asian colonies), being very Islamocentric in its focus and containing numerous factual mistakes, essentially offers a grand conspiracy theory. Though we know that most Orientalists were adventurous individualists, often with eccentric and unpredictable opinions and sometimes “going native”, he makes them all into agents of one evil plan, viz. subjecting the natives. Gielen doesn’t want to go that far, but as a junior scholar, he has to go along somewhat with this much-applauded theory. The example given of Orientalists treating Asian cultures as static, with e.g. ancient texts on caste being used by British administrators to codify caste in modern society, makes the very mistake it accuses the Orientalists of, viz. ignoring the native contribution. Hindus themselves had been using ancient texts to justify present-day social relations.    

In Gielen’s opinion, the main difference between the Abrahamic and the Dharmic religions is it “for every one of the Indic religions it is very difficult to arrive at a minimum definition because of the internal diversity”. (p.40) He doesn’t mention Christianity’s or Islam’s ambition of world conquest nor their history-centricity (followers have to believe in certain historic events around Jesus c.q. Mohammed in order to be real members), which Hindu scholars would consider far for fundamental differences. I wouldn’t think that for sects like Jainism and Sikhism a doctrinal definition is all that difficult, especially because people on the periphery practice but don’t celebrate their “diversity”, and instead agree that certain core teachings are normative even if they don’t practice them. In their case, the confusion does not exist in the religion-minded communities concerned, but in the diversity-minded scholars. Buddhism, after having spread far and wide, knows a much larger diversity, but the person of the Buddha and the notion of Liberation (even if admittedly unattainable for many “in this birth”) do provide a  common ground that unites all Buddhists. As for “Hinduism”, this is indeed very diverse and difficult to define, but it was never meant to be the name of a specific religion. When the Muslim invaders introduced this Persian geographical term, it simply meant “every Indian who is not an Abrahamic”, i.e. an Indian Pagan. This term didn’t specify any defining doctrine. It obviously and uncontroversially included the Indian Buddhists (“clean-shaven Brahmins”), the Jain and the then as yet unborn Sikhs. To take Sikhism as a separate religion, after summarizing its genesis as a sect within the Hindu movement of Nirguna Bhakti (“devotion to the one without qualities”), is another compromise with prevailing opinion. The scholarly but isolating view is that this is simply a Hindu sect.

The Vedas have a prominent place and unique prestige among Hindus, but can’t figure in a definition. Much in Hinduism is only given a Vedic veneer, or not even that, and is of non-Vedic origin. Hinduism is a synthesis between a Vedic backbone and local flesh, or roughly what scholars call the “great tradition” and the “little traditions”. Conversely, the fact that a sect does not refer to the Vedas, as is the case with Jainism and Buddhism (unlike Sikhism, and though some of their concepts originate in the Vedas), cannot be used to call them “non-Hindu”. Thus, the arch-Hindu philosopher Shankara holds it against Patañjali and the Sankhya school that they don’t cite the Vedas, yet they are counted among the “Vedic” or “orthodox” viewpoints and figure in every history of “Hinduism”.

 

The Aryan debate

Very exceptionally, Gielen gives a fair-minded account of the Aryan invasion debate, with the conclusion: “In emulation of specialists such as Edwin Bryant, it seems preferable to take an agnostic position concerning the origin of Vedic culture and religion. On the basis of the present state of research, we cannot know for sure whence the rich Vedic culture and religion have their provenance and source.”(p.51) Very slowly, the insight is gaining ground that the Aryan invasion theory is not as sure as Westerners tend to think. A full account of the multifarious havoc that the AIT has wrought in Indian society is not given, only the use the British made of it to justify their colonization: in occupying India, they themselves would only be doing what their Aryan “cousins” had done thousands of years ago. But Gielen’s acknowledgment may now be used as proof that there is not some grand Western conspiracy to belittle India, as many Hindus claim. Given the proper facts, at least one Westerner proves to be sensitive to the arguments for an Indian homeland.  

A very detailed account is devoted to the Buddha and the different sects of Buddhism, as also to Jainism. The status of Buddhism as a separate religion is a historical accident, mainly to be explained by the circumstance that it was first discovered by Western scholars outside India, to the extent that it took some time before they even realized that the Buddha lived in India. Most Hindus now consider the Buddha one of theirs (as he considered himself one of theirs), admittedly encouraged in this by the prestige the Buddha has gained in the West. From a scholarly viewpoint, though, I would observe that this disproportionate attention for the Buddha only draws attention to the equally disproportionate non-attention to other great minds in India, such as Dirghatamas, Yajñavalkya and Abhinavagupta. They are passed over in silence. What, the readers have never heard these names? Well, that is precisely what I mean. Not just this book, but most introductory works on Indian religion disregard the most important Hindu thinkers. Dirghatamas was one the earliest and greatest Vedic seers, author of many well-known sayings and similes including “the wise call the true one by many names”; Yajnavalkya was the greatest Upanishadic thinker and originator of the notion of the Self (fundamental also to Buddhism, though adversatively); and Abhinavagupta was a polymath and greatest thinker of Kashmiri Shaiva Tantra. The task of a new book should be to fill the gaps in people’s knowledge, and these great names are great gaps indeed.  

 

Conversion

If Gielen does a good job on the whole, with an eye for the differences between scripture and practice, he does remain a child of his time and of his professional circles.  Long ago, when I looked in the Leuven Theology library for the Niyogi Committee Report, which documents the misbehavior of the Christian missionaries in Central India in the 1950s, I couldn’t get it (someone whispered that it was in their confidential collection, but don’t know), while the Christian reply to it was readily available. The dominant view of India in Catholic circles remains that Hindus and Muslims are barbarians killing people who don’t belong to their own religion, but that the few Christians among them are innocent sheep. Thus, our press has reported the riots against Christians in Orissa in 2008, but not the trigger of those riots: the murder of a Hindu monk and four of his assistents by Christians (whom spokesmen of the Church then tried to disown, blaming the Maoists). If you don’t go to the source of the information, you are a victim of the control of the information stream by various anti-Hindu forces, and so the European-Christian understanding of Indian religious affairs in completely warped.   

The writer has done his best to be nuanced in his brief account of Hindu nationalism, and yet, he suddenly asks the question “whether Muslims and Christians are ever able to pay enough respect to the Hindu culture postulated by the Hindutva ideology without converting to Hinduism.” Then he gives his answer: “The forced conversions of Christians and Muslims to Hinduism by backers of the Hindutva ideology feed the suspicion that in the eyes of many Hindu nationalists this is not the case and that conversion is therefore necessary.” (p.62)

I have studied Hindu nationalism for 24 years, reading its less-known literature and interviewing hundreds of activists including 3 presidents of its core organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and 3 presidents of the Bharatiya Janata Party (which no scholar on which Gielen bases himself, has ever done), and inevitably also getting to talk to its many enemies; and I have never encountered a single case of a “forced conversion to Hinduism”. Among Christians, this notion of their victimhood at the hands of the ugly overbearing Hindus is very popular, but if you look more closely, little remains. Anyway, if there were a case of forced conversion, it would not prove the strength but the weakness and clumsiness of Hinduism. Forced conversions are not much practised anymore. Today Islam and Christianity, which in the past had millions of forced conversions to their credit, operate more subtly. When a Hindu falls in love with a Muslim, he or she is almost invariably pressured by the Muslim family to convert. Christians use untold billions of dollars to make it materially and socially profitable to convert, and use every trick in the book to lure the tribals and other poor Hindus. Strictly speaking, however, their conversions are not forced – but nonetheless ethically questionable.

The very notion of conversion is un-Hindu, it is a projection of a Christian concern. Hindu, like Jewish, is an identity you have by birth. Even most Westerners who practice yoga and other Hindu things, will refrain from calling themselves Hindu. They may be initiated by this or that guru, but they have not “converted to Hinduism”. To allow the “freedom to convert” as part of the freedom of religion (as the Indian Constitution does) betrays a Christian bias. And of course, any account of the religious situation is not complete without identifying the utterly anti-Hindu design of India’s state religion, viz. secularism. In Europe, this was an arrangement created in defence against the influence of Christianity against the state, but in India, it was introduced as a weapon to belittle Hinduism, and is therefore strongly supported by the (disproportionately powerful) Churches. Mahatma Gandhi was strongly against conversion because it divided families and villages, and because it implied a lack of confidence in God, who can work through different religions. But today, the “secularists” who invoke Gandhi’s name are scornful or worse if you dare to problematize conversion.

So, most readers won’t even notice that single lost sentence on forced conversions, but it detracts greatly from the scholarly objectivity of the book. Otherwise, this is an improvement and a welcome addition to the existing literature on religion in India.

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Gandhi and Mandela

Now that Nelson Mandela is leaving the stage, we can take stock of his role in history. His name will remain associated with two major turnarounds: the conversion of the nonviolent African National Congress (ANC) to the armed struggle in 1961, and the non-violent transition of South Africa from a white minority regime to non-racial majority rule in 1994. The latter leads to the frequent comparison of Mandela with Mahatma Gandhi, but the former was a conscious break with a policy that was inspired by the same Gandhi.

When the ANC was founded in 1912 (then as Native National Congress), Gandhi lived in South Africa and led the non-violent struggle of the Indian community for more equal rights with Europeans, with some success. Note that Gandhi did not work for the coloureds or blacks, and found it a great injustice that the diligent Indians were treated on a par with the "indolent" and "naked" blacks. He did not question the disparity between black and white, only the ranking of the Indians as black rather than white. Nevertheless, the budding ANC took over the non-violent strategy typical of Gandhi’s movement.

Later in India, he would lead the fight for a very ambitious goal, namely home-rule and finally the full independence of England's largest colony. That was more than the English would grant him, and in spite of the usual myths, Gandhi's mass movement (by 1947 a fading memory) contributed but little to the eventual decolonization. As Clement Attlee, Prime Minister at the time of India's independence, testified later, Gandhi's importance in the decision to let go of India was "minimal". In South Africa, however, the stakes were not that high. The struggle was over the status of the small Indian minority, without much effect on the British administration. For example, the overzealous decision to only recognize Christian marriages was a great source of annoyance to the Indians, but without much importance to the maintenance of colonial rule: it could easily be reversed on Gandhi's insistence.

The fight for the rights of the Indians was conducted non-violently. The Mahatma did not tarnish the fight for a noble cause with the use of evil means. However he was not entirely averse to violence: he took part in the Boer War (1899-1902) and Second Zulu War (1906) as a voluntary stretcher-bearer and recruited among Indians to participate in the First World War. His somewhat naive calculation was that for his sincere cooperation in the war, the British rulers would grant him political concessions in return.

In Mandela, we see that combination of armed struggle and non-violent political achievements. In 1961, the ANC noted that the peaceful struggle had only yielded failure and decline: the blacks were even worse off in the self-governing South Africa than under British colonial rule. A Gandhian analysis would be that the ANC had mastered the method of non-violent protest insufficiently, but it is understandable that the ANC saw as this as a failing method.

Spurred on by younger leaders like Nelson Mandela, the organization founded an armed wing, the Umkhonto we Sizwe, "Spear of the Nation". It is no exaggeration to label the policy of the ANC and Mandela in the following years as "terrorist". When Mandela was put in prison, he was in possession of a large quantity of weapons and explosives. Very recently, my compatriot Hélène Passtoors admitted that she was complicit in a 1983 ANC bomb attack with 19 fatalities and 200 injuries.

As the memory of this face of the ANC dies, we pay more attention to the Mandela of 1994 and subsequent years. While the armed struggle was bloody but militarily fruitless, the ANC gained much more on another front: the mobilization of international public opinion against the Apartheid Government. This forced the white rulers to negotiate with the released Mandela, who now showed a lot of conciliatory goodwill. It was due to him that the transfer of power was peaceful. Later there would nonetheless be a wave of violence against the whites, with the frequent plaasmoorde (farm murders), but by then Mandela had already retired from politics.

Like Gandhi, he deserves a nuanced assessment. Both remain associated in our memory with a non-violent transfer of power, but have had their share of armed conflict too.

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Yoga is not religious

 

Yoga is Hindu, but it is not religious. When Hindus go deep into the issues raised by the San Diego court verdict ("yoga is not Hindu"), they are bound to encounter some problems with their own tradition.

In my opinion, Christians who allege that Hindus mix up yoga with the worship of another supreme being than the jealous god Yahweh, have a point. And Hindus who think that yoga implies the worship of a Hindu god likewise have a point,-- the same point. But those are modern Hindus who talk a lot about yoga but are unlikely to practise it. Contemporay Hinduism is a lot more God-centred than the ancient originators of yoga, such as Patanjali, or even the late-medieval pioneers of Hatha Yoga. Ancient Yoga was certainly “Hindu” in any normal use of the term, but it was not theistic.

On Rajiv Malhotra’s discussion list, where the verdict is debated, one Hindu recently quoted Arya Samaj fouder Swami Dayananda Saraswati with approval as asserting that Yoga is “restraining all activities (vritti-s) of mind (chitta) from all evil and unrighteous affairs and fixing the same in God alone, for the bliss and beatitude is Yoga and disobedience of God's injunction and indulgence in evil thoughts and deeds is Viyoga, i.e., remaining away from God”. I am not sure about the exactness of this “quote”, but it gives the gist of Dayanada’s thinking, and it certainly renders the thinking of this particular Hindu and many millions of contemporary Hindus.

In reality, yoga is not about evil at all. It restrains good motions of the mind (i.e. thoughts) as much as evil ones. Hinduism is quite conscious of good and evil, but unlike Christianity, it subordinates this concern (on which the Christian core doctrines of hereditary sin and salvation are based) to the concern for Liberation. Patañjali defines yoga as “restraining the movements of the mind”, full stop. Dayananda’s additional considerations of good and evil, and especially his bringing in “God”, are typical of modern devotional Hinduism or bhakti. This very successful movement, which eclipsed the non-theistic trends in Hinduism (Advaita Vedanta, Sankhya, Mimansa, Buddhism), is the historical antagonist of Hatha Yoga. It teaches that Liberation does not mean “isolation” (of consciousness from its objects, Patañjali’s goal), does not mean identity with the Absolute, but aspires no higher than watching God face to face, much like Sufi and Christian mysticism. It also rejects the emphasis yoga puts on techniques. If God’s grace is there to help you, what use are techniques? By contrast, yoga means reaching the goal, Liberation, by means of techniques.

The trouble already started with the Bhagavad Gita. I have it on good Hindu authority, but I have also seen it for myself, that the Gita is a work of “synthesis”. Then already, Hindus were enamoured of synthesis. Thus, this is where we first find the notion of an equality between three disciplines: karma yoga, “the discipline of action” (then meaning Vedic sacrifice, now moralistically interpreted as good works), jñana yoga, “the discipline of knowledge” (meaning Upanishadic knowledge of the Self, i.e. yoga proper), and bhakti yoga, “the discipline of devotion”. In fact, when Yajñavalkya introduces the notion of the Self, he pits its knowledge against the Vedic rituals. The ancient Vedas and esp. the Brahmanas (the technical manuals of ritual) are centred on karmakanda, “the (ritual) action half”, while the Upanishads are centred on jñanakanda, “the knowledge half”. While yogis would simply choose the latter, the Gita proposes a synthesis, viz. the third pole, bhakti.

The book discusses a number of then-popular Hindu philosophies, but interjects in every chapter one sentence that does not follow from these philosophies at all, namely that all this shall be given to you if you are but devoted to Me, Krishna. You can read Patañjali’s Yoga Sutra, but you will not find Krishna there. You can read the Buddha’s teachings on meditation, but Krishna is not there. Yoga can perfectly exist without Krishna.

Modern bhakti Hindus project their own bhakti beliefs on the whole of Hindu history. They deny the reality of change (both progress and degeneration) in Hindu history. In fact, it is they who realize the Westerners’ fond image of Hinduism as frozen in time, unchangeable. So, they rewrite the theory of yoga as dealing with God. In fact, the more God, the less yoga, and the more yoga, the less God.

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Is yoga Hindu? The court verdict

 

A county judge in San Diego CA has ruled that yoga is not always religious (Washington Post, 2 July 2013). Parents in a San Diego school district had complained that yoga is intrinsically intertwined with the Hindu religion and that its practice in a public school setting violates the constitutional separation of church and state. The court ruling means that these parents had it wrong: it is possible to divorce yoga from Hinduism, and that is how the local school authorities have gone about their yoga classes.

While yoga may be religious in some contexts, and then notably Hindu, it can also be practised and taught purely for its benefits. Modern school authorities see these benefits mostly in the form of strength, suppleness and nervous relaxation, as well as combating aggressiveness and bullying. Therapists might add the benefit of restoring or at least improving normalcy in individuals afflicted with burn-out, nervous breakdown, certain complexes and other mental disorders. Serious practitioners would invoke calmness, renunciation, even Liberation (howsoever defined), as worthy goals for human beings who are perfectly healthy from the beginning. But all of them would do so without reference to Shiva or Ganesha or whichever God it is that Hindu yogis invoke.

 

Yoga is intrinsically Hindu

This judgment is part of a broader struggle over the origins and nature of yoga. Some Christians, apparently including the litigating parents from San Diego, object that Yoga is intrinsically Hindu and that it serves as a conduit for Hindu polytheistic God-worship and even for “evil Hindu social mores” such as caste discrimination, arranged marriage and widow-burning. It is of course also debated in how far these mores and this polytheism are bound up with Hinduism, but it is universally agreed that at least as a system of worship, Hinduism is different from Christianity. For the same reason, these circles had in the past opposed Transcendental Meditation, a simplified form of mantra meditation, for being obviously Hindu eventhough advertised as “scientific”. They had hired specialized lawyers (or “cult busters”) to show that the various Gurus who seduced Americans into yoga were salesmen of Hinduism-based cults.

These Christians find odd allies in the Hindus who insist that yoga is indeed naturally Hindu, and that the bead-counting and incense-waving and greeting gestures and indeed prayers that Hindu yogis practise all come with the Yoga package and cannot be divorced from it. They criticize American yoga aficionados such as many showbiz stars and indeed the San Diego yoga schoolteachers for reducing yoga to a fitness system without its cultural roots.

 

Yoga is up for grabs

On the other side of the divide are those Hindus who say that yoga is scientific and universal, so that it is only normal for it to take on local cultural forms wherever it goes. The motorcar was invented in Germany, but few people driving a Japanese car still remember this. The aeroplane was invented in America, but this invention is now available to travelers all over the world. The Chinese don’t put a sign “invented in America” on their planes, nor do they pay intellectual property rights on them. Of course, Chinese textbooks have a line or two on the aeroplane’s invention by the Wright brothers, and that nod to American honour will suffice. As the late Bal Thackeray used to say: “You cannot take the ‘national produce’ (swadeshi) policy too far, for then Indians would have to do away with the light bulb.” So, Hindus should be happy that Americans are willing to practise their yoga, and apart from a historical detail of origins, India or Hinduism no longer come in the picture.

And this still is a neutral rendering of the viewpoint of a sizable number of Hindus. We don’t even mention money-makers like Deepak Chopra who try to obscure yoga’s Hindu origins in order to claim certain yoga techniques as their own. Some yoga schools, whether manned by native Hindus or by Christian-born Westerners, have patented their own brand name and techniques so that nobody, and certainly not Hindu tradition, can claim these. This tendency is strengthened by the attempt of some Hindus to deny a Hindu identity even to the worldview they themselves are advertising, e.g. the Hare Krishnas worship Krishna, a Hindu god par excellence, yet tell Western audiences that they are not Hindu; or the Ramakrishna Mission, founded in the late 19^th century under the motto “Say with pride, we are Hindus”, now say that their message is “universal” rather than “narrowly Hindu”. 

Again these Hindus find odd allies in many Christians, both of the lukewarm and of the activist kind. Lukewarm Christians as well as New Age ex-Christians see yoga as a neutral and universal commodity. For them, it can be practised as a fitness system without having any serious implications on their worldview or religion. Just as the European colonizers used the compass and gunpowder without bothering that these were Chinese inventions, American yogis have taken yoga for its tangible benefits without bothering about its Hindu origins. Even the Sanskrit names of the yoga exercises have been translated, so that you can become an accomplished yogi without even being reminded of its exotic origins.

Activist Christians, by contrast, admit that yoga is not religiously neutral. They want to adapt yoga because of its inherent attractiveness and transform it into “Christian yoga”. To them, yoga has indeed historically been linked with Hinduism, but can be delinked from it and tied to another religion. We have even reached the stage where some Christian centres and schools in India offer classes in “Christian yoga”.  

 

Yoga has Hindu roots

So, the San Diego verdict was a victory for lukewarm Hindus and adaptable Christians, and a defeat for serious Hindus and doctrine-conscious Christians. But what do we ourselves make of the issue?

First off, it is a matter of course that Yoga is Hindu. The word “Hindu” is a very general term encompassing every Indian form of Pagan religion no matter how old. It is therefore simply silly to say “Yoga is older than Hinduism”, as salesman Deepak Chopra does. The question then becomes: whether Yoga can be divorced from Hinduism and given a neutral universal identity, as claimed by the San Diego yoga teachers, or even relinked to another religion, as is claimed by the adepts of “Christian Yoga”.

A system of physical fitness, if it is only that, can certainly be integrated in modern Western or purportedly global culture. The Shetashvatara Upanishad already says, and the later Hatha Yoga classics more colourfully assert, that the Yoga practitioner develops a healthy and lustrous body. They even lure the readers into practice by intimating that one becomes irresistible to the opposite sex – the very reason why most modern Americans take up Yoga. Like the aeroplane or the light-bulb, a system of physical fitness can be exported and inculturated, divested of its original couleur locale.

However, it is worth emphasizing that yoga, and even particularly hatha yoga, does have Hindu roots, because this seemingly trivial knowledge is now being challenged. A few academics have claimed that Chinese “internal alchemy” (neidan) travelled overseas to coastal India and influenced Indian Siddha yoga and Siddha medicine. A few techniques of hatha yoga do seem similar to Daoist exercises from China. The influence has been posited but by no means proven. I am willing to consider it probable, but even then it was only an influence on a few exercises in a long-existing native tradition. It is nobody’s case that the Rg-Vedic reference to “muni-s”, wandering ascetics with ashes over their naked bodies (still recognizable as the Naga Sadhu-s), or the Upanishadic glorification of the breath as the key to consciousness and self-mastery, or Patañjali’s description of a whole yoga system, is due to foreign influence.

Very recently, the American media have gone gaga over a theory claiming that hatha yoga is very recent and is essentially a gift of the British colonizers. This can of course not be said for the breathing exercises so typical of hatha yoga, but many of the postures are said to be standard exercises of British soldiers, or to be part of Western systems of gymnastics. Even in this limited form, the claim is ridiculous. The essence of hatha-yogic postures is relaxation and allowing a steadily-held pose to take its effect over time. By contrast, Western gymnastics pride themselves on being “dynamic”, on emphasizing movement and muscle strength. Further, a very physical circumstance comes in the way: yogic exercises are mostly done on the floor. In cold England, the floor is avoided, witness the generalized use of chairs and of the “English” water closet. Any influence would have to be confined to the standing exercises. At any rate, if at all there was Western influence, it can never have been more than an influence touching the skin of an already old native tradition. 

But even hatha yoga sees its physical and breathing exercises only as a means to a higher end: liberation. A fortiori, the ancient yoga synthesized by Patañjali was totally geared towards liberation, howsoever defined. The definition of the Buddha’s nirvana (“blowing out”, as of a burning candle) is to get off from the wheel of reincarnations by stopping its motor, viz. desire. Patañjali’s definition is less metaphysical: quieting the mind so that it consciously rests in itself and is not absorbed by its usual objects. It doesn’t matter whether you believe in reincarnation or an afterlife or nothing at all: it suffices to let the Self rest in itself, right now. Whatever liberation may be, it is definitely different from, and incompatible with Christian salvation.

But this is a goal not pursued in most American yoga studios. They aim to make singers better singers, caregivers better caregivers, workers better workers. This has been done before: after the Buddhists had familiarized the Chinese with meditation, some Confucians still rejected the Buddhist philosophy of renunciation and liberation but embraced the practice of meditation, just to "tune their instrument", to function better in society. You can do this, but it is not the fullness of yoga. Also, all the Western therapeutic adaptations of yoga, as a treatment of physical or mental ailments, are designed to make a defective human being normal; while the original yoga was meant to make normal people liberated. So, by commodifying yoga, Americans are importing something from India, but not the whole package.

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Leonhard Euler

 

Ghent University organizes all these interesting events. Just now, I have returned from a conference on Leonhard Euler, the 18^th-century mathematician and physicist. Enlightenment philosophy and the early history of science are not my field, but I was intrigued by Euler’s combining the scientific outlook with a serious commitment to the Christian religion. He polemicized a lot with the encyclopédistes and other deists and atheists in defence of his old-time religion.

My suspicion, fostered by the sight of contemporary polemic between the “new atheists” and the diehard Christians, is that the exact sciences don’t foster critical thinking about human topics such as religion. The humanities, starting with philological criticism of the Bible, then psychology (Sigmund Freud: Religion, the Future of an Illusion) and sociology, reduce religion to a human artifact. They really deconstruct actually practiced religion. By contrast, till today, the faculties of science comprise numerous professors who have compartmentalized their thinking: critical when doing science, naïve when doing religion. All the time, you see Evangelical polemicists bring up the names of scientists who were also, after hours, believing Christians. Thus, Isaac Newton was a great aficionado of Biblical chronology, predicting the time of the Second Coming (he reassured his contemporaries that they would not live to see it; if anything, it was only for the 21^st century). Among contemporary scientists, we hear of neo-Darwinian atheists like Richard Dawkins, but many more of his colleagues line up on the side of his Christian opponents.

 

In his time, Leonhard Euler defended religion against a rising tide of skepticism and was derided by icons of the Enlightenment such as Voltaire and Frederick the Great. These incidents in his admittedly weird biography gave me the impression that, in spite of his sophistication in science, he was very rustic in matters of religion. At the same time, his Briefe an eine deutsche Prinzessin (“Letters to a German Princess”) show that he was also an anti-fundamentalist: the only way to do science after Copernicus was to interpret the Biblical passages about nature symbolically, e.g. about the sun moving and the earth standing still. No special pleading to save the letter of the Bible from the challenge of science. His Protestant outlook on the Bible also made him less respectful of the elements of Greek philosophy that had entered Catholic theology. Thus, a rare case of that overrated influence of theology on physics is how he could criticize the notion of “emanation” (stemming from Neoplatonic philosophy, which greatly influenced Christian thought) when encountering it as a proposed explanation of the phenomenon of light.

 

Euler set the precedent of how modern believers could reconcile their religion with the findings of science. Till today, Christian apologetic works keep on reproducing his approach: sacrifice the elements from the Bible that cannot be saved, but stand fully by the core of the Christian religion and declare it off limits to science.  Some Christians go all the way and try to defend a literal reading of the Bible (with the world created in six days), but they don’t follow Euler’s approach. He, at any rate, did not see science as a real challenge to the truth of the Bible, moderately interpreted.

 

It had seemed to me, until this conference, that Euler was a prototype of the believing scientist. However, the debates he waged against the ideas he encountered were far better informed than the naïve religious discourse you hear from the token Christian scientists today. Whereas nowadays you can build an academic career as a scientist without ever having to deal with the great questions of metaphysics and religion, back then it was the done thing for fledgling science to address these fundamental questions. The basic concepts of science still had a theological component. Thus, Newton brought God into His creation by understanding space as an emanation of God.

It is said that Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ca. 1700 (or Johann Wolfgang Goethe, ca. 1800), was “the last man who knew everything”, i.e. who had a command of the state of the art in all sciences of his day. Today, this has become impossible. In this age of specialization, it is even frowned upon if you speak out on a matter outside your competence. That is another reason for the naïveté of today’s scientists: a physicist is not supposed to “meddle” in a metaphysical debate. Back then, it was still possible to be at the forefront of natural science and be competent on the ultimate questions of being as well.

There is also a simple fact that helps explain the religious naïveté of most contemporary scientists as well as the sophistication of the scientists in Euler’s day. Now, scientists are immediately thrown into a bath of nothing but science, in which they can develop and show their proficiency. They have to master Euler’s theorems but also the findings of Albert Einstein, of the quantum physicists and so much else that has been developed since. By contrast, in Euler’s day, science was far more limited and left more leisure for other pursuits. Moreover, students of science first had to study philosophy, typically for two years, often after they had had a religious upbringing far more thorough than anything we are used to now. So, they were far more aware of the extra dimensions of their scientific discoveries.

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Stalked by a "John Hopkins"

(Browsing through my extant articles in the computer, I ran into an unpublished testimony I jotted down in early May 2006. The Ayub Khan referred to as criticizing me has been answered in a chapter of my book The Problem with Secularism, Delhi 2007. I publish it here just for archival reasons.)

  

In the present case, I didn’t think Ayub Khan’s hostile but predictable and inconsequential attack on me warranted the effort.  However, my hand has been forced by the intervention of a certain “John Hopkins”, also operating through a variety of other false identities.  As per the search engines, none of these have ever been associated with any intellectual project or book publication worth mentioning.  But what I did find is that he has been advertising himself as an “esoteric consultant”, “intuition trainer” and “clairvoyant” in Germany, Austria and Thailand.  I surmise that the contradiction between his money-making status as an occultist and his aspirations to be acknowledged by academics as a serious researcher explains his attempts to cover his tracks by means of pseudonyms. 

The fellow also advertises himself as a trainer of meditation teachers.  Mind you, not just a meditation expert, not just a teacher of meditation, but a teacher to aspiring teachers (i.e. experienced practitioners) of meditation.  That should conjure up the image of an accomplished yogi, dignified, cool, with a radiant peace of mind.  In the reality of our internet discussions, however, he turned out to be just the opposite: immature, chaotic, spiteful, obsessed, hyper-aggressive and simply nasty.  Maybe it really is the same person, but once sober and once on drugs.

In April-July 2005, this character made a series of appearances on the IndianCivilization@yahoogroups.com internet discussion list, distinguishing himself by a diarrhoea of insinuations, insults and nonsensical jumps in topical focus, all in unfinished sentences in ungrammatical English, and either unsigned or signed with false names. “John Hopkins” also briefly tried his luck on the academic list Indo-Eurasian_Research@yahoogroups.com, where the august professors gave him the cold shoulder when he tried to derail a discussion of Indo-European origins into a political discussion of the New Right, one of his obsessions. 

His main obsession, however, was Nazism, which may be understandable in a German or Austrian, so in every corner he tried to see Nazism, a topic quite unrelated to Indian civilization.  He was extremely self-centred and held it against people as a serious ground for suspicion if they hadn’t read and approved the latest book that he himself happened to have read.  Because of his impolite and destructive conduct, he was repeatedly barred from further participation on the IndianCivilization list, but came back, twice through a new name and address, once through the address of what is probably a really existing other person, though again I can’t be sure it wasn’t yet another alias.  The latter person unsubscribed himself when the moderator asked him to come clean about his identity. 

His presence soon became a crusade against Hinduism and Hindu self-defence as well as against me personally.  On his labyrinthine website, now defunct, he posted some interesting and decent articles about European or general religious history, but when it came to India or Hinduism, he merely reproduced all the worn-out secularist hate rhetoric.  Typically, he tried to reduce colonial-age Indian religious and political phenomena (Arya Samaj reformism, organized Sanatani traditionalism, Gandhism, Hindu nationalism, etc.) to the impact of Western occult movements and secret societies like Theosophy and Freemasonry, thus combining a still-common Eurocentrism with his personal penchant for the occult. 

In the rare instances of original research, there was reason to suspect cheating.  Thus, in a purported field report from Orissa about Hindu-Christian tensions there, he made an alleged RSS spokesman say that his chief worry was Dalit assertiveness.  This is something which Christians always allege of the RSS, viz. that it’s an upper-caste movement whose animus against Christian missionaries is but a cover for the desire to keep the low castes in bondage; whereas RSS men are trained to ignore caste (when you ask their caste, they say “Hindu”), and whereas no upper-caste chauvinists, RSS or non-RSS, would ever use the intrinsically anti-Hindu neologism Dalit (which, like Adivasi or “aboriginal”, is a falsely native-sounding recent Christian coinage) nor declare himself opposed to the advancement of the lower castes.  So there we have an RSS crown witness speaking totally out of character but perfectly acting the part which the enemies of Hindu society always impute to the RSS; and this with no name or otherwise verifiable reference given.  I think it’s safe to surmise that such a “testimonony” has been made up.

It is common enough even for normal and well-meaning intellectuals to switch to the hate mode when discussing Hindu revivalism.  The reason is simply that people mainly go by the information that has been fed to them.  Life is short and there’s only so much information that you can go and check at the source, and few people care to do so in the case of a seemingly unimportant topic like Hindu politics.  Since the concert of anti-Hindu reporting is rarely interrupted by a corrective voice, you can spend a career parroting anti-Hindu “information” without even realizing that something is amiss.  But if you then do get to hear such a corrective voice, you may feel highly embarrassed for having been fooled all this time by your trusted “secularist” sources.  At that point, you can either revise your position, thus putting yourself in the despised camp of the objective reporters, routinely denounced as “Hindutva apologists”; or you can cling to the more profitable dominant camp and try to stamp out the dissident voices.  It seems that, after having encountered my criticism of the secularist make-believe discourse somewhere, John Hopkins has made his choice and reconfirmed his adherence to the anti-Hindu camp.

In a grotesque application of the “straw man” technique of argument distortion, “John Hopkins” frequently attributed political opinions or associations to me which weren’t mine.  Thus, from the fact that I had attested that Georges Dumézil’s theory of “Indo-European trifunctionality” had gained wide acceptance, against his own uninformed claim that it had been generally rejected, he somehow deduced that I share any and every position ever taken by Dumézil.  When refuted, he simply levelled yet another claim about my supposed viewpoints, then another, and yet another.  Clearly, his crusade by then was not so much against a scholarly theory or political ideology, but against my person.  Let me tell you, it’s no fun being stalked by such a deranged character.

Among his personal attacks on me, he repeatedly included the claim that my “research methodology had been discredited”, with link to the electronic version of Ayub Khan’s review of the book based on my doctoral research.  Poor John clearly wasn’t familiar with the academic procedure which yields the doctor’s title of which he himself seemed so envious.  Mutual criticism is normal between researchers, and a doctoral defence in particular typically contains fierce criticism of the promovendus’s methodology by at least one of the jury members,-- who nonetheless adds his signature to the doctoral diploma.  Outsider Hopkins himself, by contrast, considered criticism as something extremely dramatic.  His own bad conscience seemed to make him panicky at the very sight of criticism, as if it reminded him of the possibility that someone may expose his own frauds. 

In conclusion, let me say that I greatly regret the personal animosity between this multi-masked character and myself.  After all, I too have on occasion been guilty of rhetorical excesses, and the topics that interested John Hopkins are or have been topics of interest to me as well.  In better circumstances, we might have been friends.  The record shows that I have done nothing whatsoever to provoke his ire, and that I have maintained a correct debating style long after his own lapsing into smears and insults.  It was his own fancy to attack me in reaction to my publicly known positions on certain philosophical, historical and political topics.

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A Palestinian idol

 

 

Palestinian singer Mohammed Assaf is providing his people with a different role model than the holy warrior or suicide bomber. He won the song contest Arab Idol, much to the enthusiasm of his compatriots. The Palestinian struggle is not my struggle, but I acknowledge everyone’s right to advocate his own nation’s interests. It is better to do this with music than with terror.

The Flemish daily De Standaard (24 June 2013) hailed his victory with the title: Idool wordt icoon, i.e. “Idol becomes icon”. This pro-Islamic paper doesn’t seem to realize that it highlights two un-Islamic concepts. An “idol” is a sculpture of a Pagan god, an “icon” is a painting of the Christian saviour. Both are un-Islamic by being associated with other religions as well as by being depictions.

The young singer has already been arrested many times by the Islamic Hamas government. Mohammed was against music, and therefore Moghul emperor Aurangzeb (against whom the former palace artists held a demonstration carrying a coffin of the Muse) and Ayatollah Khomeini did away with it. There is no such thing as "Muslim music", only universal music which many Muslims happen to like, in spite of Islam. Music brings out their common humanity underneath the added layer of Islam.

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