Dharma's Angkor exurb

Dharma's Angkor exurb Having the honour of prefacing the new edition of Prof. Kshitij Patukale's masterpiece *Angkorvat Vishnudham, the Biggest Temple in the World*, I should sketch the reason of Angkor's and Cambodia's importance to Hindu civilization. Most conspicuously, they serve as proofs that Hindu Dharma is not intrinsically confined to the South-Asian subcontinent, and need not remain so in the future. The word Hindū is in origin bound up with the Indian subcontinent. It was a Persian geographical term corresponding to Sindhū, i.e. the Indus river, and meant: anyone living near or beyond the Indus, regardless of creed or sect. Their territory was called Hindustān. When the Muslim conquerors invaded India, they kept the term Hindustān in its purely geographical sense (e.g. on pilgrimage in West Asia, they would identify themselves as being from Hindustan), but gave an additional ideo-cultural dimension to their newly imported term Hindū: "any Indian Unbeliever". Indians gradually interiorized this new term as an overarching name for all recognizably Indian varieties of religion and culture, distinct from the foreign-originated Islamic (soon extended to also embrace Christian) religion and culture. On the one hand, this Hindu religio-cultural continuum was typologically similar to many aspects of foreign religio-cultural landscapes. Thus, the Hindu emphasis on ritualism, even inside its theoretically more otherworldly forms like Vedanta or Buddhism, was in common with practically all pre-Enlightenment cultures worldwide. Its mūrtipūjaka or statue-worshipping aspect was less universal but still very widespread. Its yoga practices were much rarer but still not exclusive to India, see Chinese Daoism. Countries outside India generally didn't need an import from India to acquire such Hindu-like elements, e.g. foreign sun-worship need not be deduced from Hindu sun-worship. Indeed, unlike tourists gawking at the local Indian idiosyncrasies, Jihadis or Missionaries would immediately recognize the underlying "Pagan" commonality. On the other hand, some parts of the world did explicitly embrace Hindu elements, including their local colouring. They imported Hindu lore that had been absent from their own culture, but was found desirable as soon as they encountered it. This could vary in extent, e.g. China imported Buddhism as a system but at once integrated it in an already-existing religio-philosophical culture, leaving many of its outer forms at the entrance door; but Southeast Asia, less steeped in a proud high culture of its own, adopted far more of the Indian language in which they found Indian-originated ideas and narratives couched. This was a repeat of a process that had taken place in India itself. In important respects, many parts of India had adopted the elements now identified as Hindu from smaller centres elsewhere inside India. In its early years, at the dawn of the Ṛg-Veda, the fledgling Vedic tradition was limited to king Bharata's Paurava tribe (descendents of Purū, himself a scion of the Lunar Dynasty) in northern Haryana, between the Sarasvatī and Dṛṣadvatī rivers. It is at his Court that priest Bharadvāja composed the first Vedic hymns. The Pauravas called the region "Ilā's footstep" (after the Lunar dynasty's foremother Ilā, daughter of patriarch Manu Vaivasvata), "the navel of the world", and "the best place on earth", true to people's universal attachment to their motherland. But compared to present-day India, it was an insignificant statelet. In its smallness it was perhaps best comparable to my own country, Belgium. But that was only the beginning. Some of Bharata's successor-kings, like Divodāsa and Sudās, conquered territory around this core area and ultimately made the Bhārata (i.e. belonging to king Bharata) territory as large as Northwestern India: from western Uttar Pradesh to the Afghan border. Sometimes even beyond, so as to include the Afghan region of Kambuja (the region from where the Vedic people imported their horses), though its population was mostly Iranian. The name is known through the Achaemenid emperors Cambyses I and II: on the model of "prince of Wales", they had the title "lord of Kambuja". Please remember that name for later in our story. Then, internal reversals such as the war of succession which became the core of the Mahābhārata, the "great (epic) of Bharata's clan", were to halt this expansion through conquest. But no matter: the Vedic tradition of recited and transmitted poetry, preserved in its purity by a class of priests set apart for it, and soon to be the backbone of an array of auxiliary sciences (Vedāṅgas), gained such a prestige that the neighbouring kings started voluntarily importing it. This way they reckoned they could add lustre to their own dynasties. By the last millennium BCE, kings in far South India gave tax concessions and set urban neighbourhoods or villages (agrahāras) apart for specialists of Vedic recitation and of the concomitant sciences, if willing to settle in their domains. This way, gradually the whole subcontinent became Vedaland, Bhārata. Or at least, the Vedic tradition gained a presence everywhere, alongside existing local traditions. This way, the Vedas ended up becoming the overarching framework that would unite different branches of what would later become known as Hinduism. Thus, the distinctly un-Vedic but now omnipresent tradition of devotion to gods personified in mūrtis ("icons") housed in temples; or the doctrine of karma; or the practice of meditation and asceticism for the pursuit of Liberation; all became part of an integrated Hindu continuum presided over by the Vedas. And through the conduit of an all-India Vedicized culture, other cultural strands such as the ascetic traditions from Greater Magadha (of which Jainism and Buddhism remain extant) likewise gained an all-India presence. And even there it didn't stop. In Central Asia, starting with historical Kambuja, we find a deep Indian influx going back to the Harappan age, with implements and jewelry of undeniably Indian origin, and with archaeological attestations of Vedic motifs as far as Kazakhstan and Russia. Śaiva and especially Bauddha Dharma were to spread there, to the point of becoming dominant in some regions. Unfortunately this heritage was comprehensively destroyed in the Islamic invasions, or only remains as ruin, like the Bamian Buddhas. But in the region neighbouring India from the opposite side it has largely continued till today. As far as the record reaches back, a first known contact with Southeast Asia was established when in the last century BC the South-Indian young man Kaundinya landed in a country that soon became known as Kambuja Deśa. He lives on in the local Khmer language as Preah Thong, his consort Somā as Neang Neakii (together they feature in a giant statue in Sihanoukville). He is considered as the founder of a pre-Angkor kingdom called Funan. There are different stories woven around his place in history, see the present book, but there is a near-consensus about his foundational role in the emergence of a Cambodian state. More formally, the Khmer state dates from 802, when Jayavarman II, a prince from an obviously already Hinduized Java, took power and declared himself cakravartin, "universal ruler". Locally, starting with an inscription from arguably 944 inside the Angkor complex that is the topic of this book, the name Kambuja (whence Kampuchea, Cambodge, Cambodia) is explained through a story of sage Kambu. This was reportedly a Śaiva hermit who fell in love with a heavenly nymph (apsarā), Mīrā. Together they became the progenitors of Cambodian royalty, who were henceforth known as Kambu-ja, "born from Kambu". But this seems to be a case of folk etymology, a concept that requires a little excursus if we want to do justice to it. In ancient culture, and even more so among nomads and migrants, language was the principal canvas of art and entertainment. Unlike sculptures or architecture, you could take it with you everywhere. Hence in ancient literary utterances, we find plenty of language play, such as puns and invented etymologies inserted to embellish or enliven the narrative. One that has always struck me and that I keep hearing regularly from assorted ācāryas, is that the word gu-rū comes from a word gu, "dark", and rū, "light", hence meaning: one who takes you "from darkness to light". In reality, gurū means "heavy", reason why it became the name of Jupiter as the heaviest planet. It is related to Latin gravis, "heavy", and thence English gravity and grave, "weighty, serious". Gurūs are therefore "heavy men", i.e. important, non-ignorable. Another case is the curious explanation of the Vedic river-name Vipāśa, the current Beas. A later story was made up about Vedic sage Vasiṣṭha who, grieving over the murder of his sons, decided to commit suicide, tied himself with ropes and threw himself into this river. But the river somehow loosened his ropes and left him safely on the riverside. This should explain the (much older) river-name, by analysing it as vi-pāśa, "out of the noose", "unbound". Often deep philosophical concepts have their origins in mere puns and folk etymologies. To start with an example from outside India: the Bible. When the Egyptian but Hebrew-born prince Moses had become a fugitive and found asylum among the Midianite Beduins, he watched a desert plant catch fire (a natural phenomenon: its ethereal vapours started burning in the midday heat). From this "burning bush" he heard a voice saying: "I am what I am." This presence was henceforth named YaHWeH, analysed in Hebrew as a present participle of the verb "to be": "he who is", "the being one". Later, theologians would use this name as proof of God's existence: God is the one who, given the testimony of his name, necessarily is. But this is only correct if a mistake against Hebrew grammar is taken in stride; its real etymology appears if the word is analysed in the closely related Arabic, the language of the Beduins. There, it is the present participle of a verb meaning "to move in the sky", and can mean (1) the wind blowing over the desert and causing sandstorms; (2) a bird swooping down to catch its prey; and (3) the stars making their nightly movement through the firmament. All three are images of God's role in human life. Moses took this divine imagery, mixed it with the fledgling monotheism in vogue at the Egyptian court, and thus created the god Yahweh who went on to become central in Jewish and then Christian and Islamic religion. All for a mere etymological misunderstanding. In India, no one has done more for identifying the crucial role of puns and folk etymology than Shrikant Talageri. The following four examples have been borrowed from his book The Rigveda and the Avesta (2008) or from personal communication with him. After a conflict had developed between the Vedic Paurava tribe and the proto-Iranian Ānavas (descendents of Purū's brother Anu), the latter rejected their common deity, storm-god Indra. They demonized him as Aṅgra Mainyu, "destructive spirit". The latter word is one of Indra's regular epithets, the former is a pun on the priestly clan ensuring his worship, the Aṅgiras ṛṣis. Conversely, the hereditary priestly clan employed by the Avestan Kavi dynasty, of which everybody knows the priest and poet Zarathuštra, had as family name Spitama. To this the Avestan concept Spenta Mainyu alludes, "bounteous spirit”, usually translated as “holy spirit". Both Aṅgra and Spenta Mainyu were to remain cornerstones of Zoroastrian theology. Something entirely different and more recent: why does Draupadī have five husbands? Her given name was Kṛṣṇā, the dark one”; Draupadī was her patronym, "daughter of Drupada". He was the king of Pañcāla (western Uttar Pradesh), so she was also known by the ethnonym Pāñcālī, on the same pattern as Kaikeyī from Kekeya and Gāndhārī from Gandhāra. Now, this name seemed obviously linked with the numeral pañca, "five", hence it got understood as "Mrs. Five". And then poetic imagination did the rest. Or consider the theonym Dattātreya. This is a deity made up of the fusing of the Trimūrti/Trinity of Brahma, Viṣņu and Śiva. In fact, it is properly analyzed as a given name plus a patronym: "Datta, son/scion of Atri". But the part -treya got linked with the numeral tri-, "three", and the trinitarian theological implication followed. Alright, this was a long detour to prepare for the correct explanation of Kambuja. The suffix -ja, "born (from)", is a normal part of Sankrit words or names, like Padmaja, "born from a lotus", the lotus itself being nicknamed Paṅkaja, "born in the mud". Or the philosopher's name Rāma-anu-ja, "born after Rāma", i.e. Rāma's younger brother. So Kambuja got interpreted as "born from Kambu",-- a Kambu who got invented just to make sense of this name. In reality, it was just a transposition of a geographical term from India: the name of the Afghan region Kambuja, which was outside but in close touch with the Subcontinent, now transferred to another such region. The reason for this transfer is as yet obscure: there is no known way in which Cambodia played the same role as Kambuja; it was no provider of ace horses, for instance. Perhaps a leading Hindu settler had been a 1st- or 2nd generation migrant originating there, and he wanted to commemorate his country of provenance, as migrants tend to do. Thus, the Afghan river Harahvaitī (now Arghandab, a tributary of the Helmand) reproduces in Iranian pronunciation the Haryana river name Sarasvatī, clearly the work of westward Iranian migrants. The name was taken from this new location even further west, but now as the ethnonym Harahvaita, becoming Hrvati, better known as Croats. They took over the Slavic language of their new Serbian neighbours, but retained a sense of their ancient Scythian-Iranian tribal identity. In this Scythian-Iranian westward migration the river-name Rasā, “moisture”, a western tributary of the Indus, was similarly transferred in its Iranian form Rahā to the Oxus or Amu Darya which forms Afghanistan’s northern border, and again to Russia’s Volga river. Another reason why name transfers take place is illustrated by the nearby Thai city of Ayutthaya. It reproduces the name Ayodhyā to buttress the local kings' claim on the name Rāma, a political consequence of their embracing the Rāmāyaṇa epic. Less well-known is that the Indian name Ayodhyā itself was already a reused name. Rāma’s capital was actually a young city, founded by his grandfather Aja. He was a scion of the Solar Dynasty started by Manu’s son Ikṣvāku, which had been calling its capital Ayodhyā since time immemorial,-- but before Aja, who seems have lived in the 20th century BCE, it must have been another city. (The good side is that finding the Solar Dynasty’s elusive original capital remains a tantalizing challenge for discovery-oriented archaeologists.) While we have to leave the question of the reasons for “Kambuja” partly open, we have to focus briefly on the reasons for “Angkor”. This is a Khmer derivative of nokor, “kingdom”, which in turn has a Sanskrit origin: nagara, “city”. It was the Khmer designation of the city called in Sanskrit Yaśodharapura, built by king Yaśovarmaṇ on a hill next to the preceding capital Hariharālaya. It was abandoned in 1431, politically in favour of the rivalling power centre Ayutthaya, now in Thailand, and demographically of the nearby city Longvek. In its 6 centuries of life, the city perfected an impressive temple structure, Angkor Wat (“temple”), of which the people involved may not have realized that it was the biggest in the world. This was in keeping with the size of the city, which recent researches have found to have been the biggest of its time, worldwide. But since all the secular buildings were made of perishable materials, the unforgivingly hot and humid climate cleared them away and the only remains left standing are the giant temple structures. To the invocation of their greatness, I have nothing to add: this book is more than complete. I only want to put on record my regrets over the conflict between Bauddha and Vaiṣṇava sects that have marred Angkor’s history somewhat. Then again, with a temple complex for Viṣṇu being repurposed as a temple exclusively for the Buddha yet staying fully intact, the damage was, all in all, quite limited. The sects’ common commitment to dharma has kept them from taking their quarrels too far. If only all the religious conflicts in world history had remained this restrained. Mumbai, 4 January 2024 Dr. Koenraad ELST, Orientalist
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Jainas and Buddhists in Ayodhya

(Pragyata, 16 August 2022) The recent upheaval about a Hindu temple for Thalaivetti Muniyappan (“Muni Baba with the broken head”) in Salem TN, apparently a patched-up and restored Buddha statue, and therefore taken away from its worshippers by Court order with the prospect of giving it to the Buddhists (see ch.25), reminds us of a similar line of argument in the Ayodhya debate of 1990-91. Then, the anti-temple party claimed that, if at all there had been Islamic aggression against Hinduism, surely the Hindu repression against Buddhism had been no better. Some even argued that the destroyed Rama birthplace temple had itself been built in replacement of a Buddhist temple. This was just the typical tactics of the Eminent Historians or their less scholarly followers in those days: absolutely any claim (including mutually contradictory claims) that could serve as a hurdle to the Hindu rights to the site would do. They never mustered any evidence for a Buddhist or Jaina presence at the contentious site. The wealth of archaeological evidence dug up on multiple occasions since then does not contain any such evidence either. The resulting picture is that Vaishnava, Shaiva, Jaina and Bauddha places of worship existed peacefully side by side. And all of them were destroyed on the same footing by the Islamic invaders. Thus, one of the main Jaina sites, the birthplace temple for Ādināth, the first Tīrthaṅkara, was destroyed by the general who had conquered the city in 1193, Shah Zuran Ghori. For Islam, all non-Muslims, whatever the fine distinctions between them, are equally fodder for Jihad and hellfire. This stark equality in the Kāfir (unbeliever) status and the concomitant treatment is another fact that the mendacious nitpicking about a Brahmanical-Buddhist conflict seeks to cover up. The Jaina and Buddhist sites in Ayodhya are largely the topic of a book by archaeologist Lalta Prasad Pandey: Ayodhyā, the Abode of Rāma and the Dharmakṣetra of Lord Buddha and the Jaina Tīrthaṅkaras. A Historical and Critical Study. Published in 2009, it never received the attention it deserved. So, inspired by recent events in Salem, we will now look into it. As an expert, Pandey is aware of the limitations on our knowledge of the city: "Archaeology depends also on chance discoveries. Therefore, without having the entire city of Ayodhyā dug on a larger scale, its antiquity and full period of life can never be known. Archaeological excavations of the bed of the Sarayū are also required, because the city, situated on the bank of a turbulent river like Sarayū, may have been washed away. (...) An aerial view of the site and its surroundings gives an impression that the course of the river has certainly shifted from its old site inundating the city situated on its bank." (p.6) Indeed, “it is difficult to prove the exact place where Rāma was born (…) As a historian, the author would not like to stress upon this point too much. Rāma was born no doubt in Ayodhyā (…) different localities of a city move from one part of the city to the other. Constructions are destroyed by time and they are rebuilt, but they may change their places.” (p.90) So, don’t conclude too fast that this cannot be the city that contained the Solar Dynasty’s palace, where prince Rama must have been born. There’s still so much to discover in Ayodhya. From the Śatapathabrāhmaṇa onwards, when the Vedic horizon widens from Haryana into wat is now eastern Uttar Pradesh and western Bihar, the late Vedic literature regularly mentions the kings of Kośala (Ayodhyā and Śrāvastī), starting with Para Atnāra and Kṣemadhanva in the sixty-eighth Solar/Aikṣvāku generation after Manu, or seven generations after Rama. But the city of Ayodhya itself is already mentioned in the AtharvaVeda 10:2:32 (quoted p.83, repeated in the Taittirīya Āraṇyaka), where it seems to function as the city par excellence, here serving as a model for the human body: “Nine gates (navadvārāḥ) and eight crossings (aṣṭacakrāḥ) has Ayodhya, city of the Gods.” For this proverbial usage, it already must have been a prominent city. The Buddhist literature speaks of a flood at the site, causing emigration, and then the construction of a new town on the outskirts of Ayodhya, Sāketa, at the command of the young king of Kośala, Prasenajit, a friend of the Buddha. The renewal of a city by building a new city on its outskirts in a common event in history, e.g. Old Delhi expanded to New Delhi. Once the city was flourishing, “the association of the Buddha with this city is also known. It is stated that he had lived in its garden, called Añjanavana, many times. It is here that he had delivered his sermon called the Sāketasutta.” (p.16) Other Buddhists too lived or visited there, already during the lifetime of the Buddha. It’s where he had discussions with Kakudha Mendasīra, Kuṇḍalīya, Sāriputta Moggalana, Aniruddha and the nun Jaṭilagāhikā. Later Buddhist philosophers who worked there include Aśvaghoṣa, Asaṅga and Vasubandhu. Similarly with the Jainas: “The Ādipurāṇa and the Vividha Tīrthakalpa, texts of the early medieval period, describe it as one of the great centres of Jaina religion” (p.16), locating at least the first (Ṛṣabha or Ādināth, p.68) and the fourth Tīrthaṅkara there, probably five of them, while Pārśvanāth and Mahāvīra visited the town. Jaina philosophers like Acalabhānu also lived there. Prof. Pandey details the town’s general history, like how it was occupied by the Indo-Greeks and liberated by Puṣyamitra Śuṅga, or how Kaniṣka, both I and II, waged war against the king of Sāketa. He also gives all the archaeological information, such as the apparent decline and revival of Ayodhya, or how Sāketa goes as deep as the Northern Black Polished Ware, one layer younger than the Painted Grey Ware characterizing the Mahābhārata sites and Ayodhya proper. For those prosaic data, we refer to the book itself. Let us rather focus on what this says about the interaction between the different sects of Hinduism broadly defined. One thing we learn is how the supposedly superstitious Brahmanism is confirmed by the supposedly rational Buddhism. The Jātaka stories about the Buddha’s past life famously contain his embracing of Rama as an earlier incarnation (as well as an older relative within the Solar dynasty, the Buddha himself being a royal prince) of the Buddha. Here we see, by the way, the origin of the integration of the Buddha into the series of Vishnu’s incarnations together with Rama: far from being some Brahmanical concoction swallowing the Buddha against his will, it is actually suggested by the Buddha himself. If he is a reincarnation of Rama, and Rama is reinterpreted as Vishnu’s incarnation, then automatically he too becomes Vishnu’s incarnation. (p.35) Less well-known is the Māndhātājātaka: the Buddha had also been the Ayodhya king Māndhātā in a past life. This Solar king militarily helped the Lunar Paurava tribe against the Druhyu tribe shortly before the oldest hymns in the ṚgVeda. This is about as deep as you can get into the Indian past. But by the Buddha’s day and later, he had merely become a proverbially powerful king and serves as such in the Puranic literature as well as in the Buddha’s own narrative. Several other kings of Ayodhya also figure in earlier-incarnation stories. This confirms that at least the Buddhist tradition was always in dialogue and interaction with the Vedic and Itihāsa-Purāṇa traditions. To make a long story short, the really striking part of this book is what remains absent. Though Jainas, Buddhists, Vaishnavas and Shaivas lived cheek by jowl here, their debates never spilled over into violent conflict. The destruction that Salar Masud Ghaznavi, Shah Zuran Ghori and Zahiruddin Babar brought to Ayodhya over a mere religious doctrine was new to them. Lalta Prasad Pandey: Ayodhyā, the Abode of Rāma and the Dharmakṣetra of Lord Buddha and the Jaina Tīrthaṅkaras. A Historical and Critical Study, Munshiram Manoharlal, Delhi 2009.
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True Hindu Greatness

 

Hindus make bold to be the inheritors of a great and exceptional civilization. And they are.

Indeed, a wider recognition of this ancestral greatness would solve a number of contemporary problems Hinduism faces. Separatism, the phenomenon that Hindu sects declare that they are non-Hindu and back-project that they never have been Hindus, is largely due to the bad reputation of Hinduism. Nobody wants to stay on a sinking ship (especially not the rats, the true nature of most defectors). Hinduism is slandered as “caste, wholly caste and nothing but caste”, and when at all it is admitted to be something else on top, it must be widow self-immolation, child marriage, dowry murders, nowadays the rapes that make headlines, and other human rights violations. Moreover, it is seen as superstitious, incoherent, flaky, and worst of all, weak. Hinduism has an intensely bad image, and that is why the Jains, Buddhists, Lingayats, Sikhs, Arya Samajis, Ramakrishna Mission and others insist that they are not Hindus, while another category of malcontents defect by converting to Christianity or Islam.

Yet, Hindu civilization has everything to make its scions proud. If this greatness were highlighted rather than its real and imagined shortcomings, the defecting sects would eagerly come back. Those Sikhs who militated for Khalistan only yesterday, will turn around and shout: “Sikhs are Hindus”, or rather: “We Sikhs are more Hindu than you!”

Consider for instance the Vedic seers. Mind you, historically, “Hindu” is every Indian Pagan, i.e. every non-Christian and non-Muslim Indian. This implies that it includes many more people and more traditions than the strictly Vedic lineage, to which a certain hostile discourse tries to narrow “Hinduism” down. But even this much-maligned Vedic lineage has given the world enough to make all Hindus proud.

First of all, we have their praiseworthy choice of what things not to do.  The Vedic seers did not invent fairy-tales about their tradition being eternal and God-given. Whereas the Quran and the Biblical Ten Commandments are in the form of God addressing man, the Vedic hymns are more truthfully in the form of men addressing the gods. I am aware that some Hindus try to understand the Vedas as a kind of Quran, eternal and revealed. They like to crawl under the heavy weight of scriptures ascribed to a divine author, showing the lack of self-understanding common in this age of degeneracy of Hinduism. Fortunately, the Vedic seers knew better: they walked upright and composed those scriptures themselves. The Vedas were not created by a superhuman source and then memorized by dumb and uncreative human beings; they were created by skilful and understanding human beings, the ancestors of contemporary Hindu civilization.

And then there are the things they did do. First of all, they created great poetry using elaborate metaphors, crafty verse forms and a unique system of memorization. Hindu society set apart a class whose job it was to memorize and pass on the tradition, genealogies and literature. Vedic recitations today are deemed, even by hostile Indologists, as undeniably a kind of tape-recording of the original recitation thousands of years ago. It is this class of reciters that nowadays comes in for the harshest criticism. All the separatist sects invariably flaunt an anti-Brahmin hate discourse. They thereby prove they don’t value the transmission of knowledge. In their rants that “the Brahmins monopolized knowledge”, they seem not to care about the “knowledge” part, nor do they busy themselves with acquiring or transmitting this knowledge.  To be sure, inertia and the psychological effect of being honoured by society caused some pride and smugness among the less meritorious members of the Brahmin class, a human phenomenon known in societies the world over. But the merits of this class, and especially of the society that set it apart, are unique.

Next, consider the insights captured in the literature they transmitted. Many great ideas that were to come in full bloom in later philosophies of India, East Asia, and more recently the West, already existed in germ in the Vedic hymns thousands of years ago. Thus, the correspondence between microcosmos and macrocosmos, between man and universe; the identity of man with the intelligence of the sun (so’ham); or the vibratory nature of reality (aum), still central also in Buddhism (om namo amituo fu, om mani padme hum) and in Sikhism (omkar), are already themes in Vedic poetry. Such elementary concepts as the division of the year in 12 and 360, and such profundities as the monistic unity underlying the plurality of gods, or the distinction between the ordinary self acting and the real Self merely observing, are all present in a single Vedic hymn – ideas to which entire schools of philosophy are mere commentaries. Later, the doctrine of the Self was explicitated by seers like Yajnavalkya, who is up there with Plato as an ideas man next to whom a whole philosophical tradition is but a series of footnotes. Even the Buddhist no-Self doctrine, which spread around Asia, can only be comprehended by presupposing the concept of the Self.

The seers’ pluralistic outlook is not equally exceptional, at least not when compared with Chinese or ancient Greek worldviews,-- but nowadays the majority of mankind is in thrall to two religions (the Religion of Love and the Religion of Peace) that believe in suppressing pluralism and claiming the sole truth for themselves. Against their narrow-minded exclusivism, the Hindu tradition offers the solution. Inside and outside the Vedas, almost everywhere in India, we find a religiosity that makes no truth claims about God. The devotional rituals practised in all temples, before sacred trees or in sacred groves, simply express awe for the sacred, the most fundamental and universal layer of all religions.

Secularists advocate superficiality and philosophical illiteracy, which is now having its effects on India’s population. A rediscovery of the real treasures of Hindu tradition will gladden the hearts of all those who can call themselves its inheritors. Say with pride: we are Hindus!

 

(published in Prabodhan, the book edited by Prof. Saradindu Mukherji and made public at the World Hindu Congress, Delhi, 21-23 November 2014)


(its introduction also contains this paragraph summarizing my views:)

The borders of "Hinduism"

 The Hindu territory has constantly been shrinking for more than a thousand years: Kabul, most of Southeast Asia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, de facto also Kashmir and parts of the Northeast, these have all been lost. But the conceptual domainof "Hindu" has also been shrinking. Originally, Muslim invaders introduced the term as meaning: all Indian Pagans (non-Abrahamics), whether Buddhists, Jains,tribals, low-castes, high-castes, and by implication also younger sects like Virashaivism, Sikhism, the Arya Samaj or the Ramakrishna Mission. The insistence by many castes that they are "not Hindus" stems from two circumstances: the very negative reputation of Hinduism, contrasting with its fair name in de 19th century; and the fogginess around the definition of "Hinduism", only aggravated in recent decades by a deliberate manipulation of the word's meaning. After sketching some details of this phenomenon, we proceed to show that a correct assessment of the basic texts and the history of Hinduism would largely remedy both the bad name of Hinduism and the shifting sands of the term's meaning. It may sometimes be diplomatically wise to speak of "Buddhists and Hindus" or "Hindus and Sikhs", but the scholarly fact to be clearly realized and kept in mind is that the sect founders Shakyamuni Buddha and Guru Nanak never meant to break away from Hinduism, anymore than Shankara did when he founded his Dashanami monastic order, Hindu par excellence.

  

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The Vienna conference: Dominik Wujastyk on the Buddhist element in the Yoga Sutra

 

 

    At the conference on "Yoga in Transformation" (Vienna, September 2013), Prof. Dominik Wujastyk highlighted some less frequently realized Buddhist elements in Patañjali's Yoga Sutra. The final editing of the Yoga Sutra is conventionally dated to the 4th century (though the text's core may be centuries older), some 4 centuries after the final editing of the Pali canon and at least 7 centuries after the Buddha. 

 

    Among the more obvious and widely acknowledged Buddhist elements in the Yoga Sutra are the four Brahma-Vihara-s (divine states): maitri (benevolence), karuna (compassion), mudita (fellow-joy) and upeksha (indifference), all four together attested in the Buddhist canon. Incidentally, the Buddha's choice of the term Brahma-Vihara is very inconvenient to those who would like Buddhism to have been a "anti-Vedic revolt".

 

    Already in the interbellum, Louis de la Vallée-Poussin of Ghent University noted a number of items in the Yoga Sutra that could only be properly understood by taking the Buddhist or Jain surroundings into account. Among these are such key concepts as kaivalya, "isolation" (corresponding to Jain "kevala"), karma, duhkha ("suffering"), and, most consequential and controversial of all, isvara. Wujastyk didn't go into the latter example, but I will apply his insights here.

    

    I advisedly write isvara without capital, because in Buddhism and Jainism it never had the sense of "Creator" (the universe's endless causal chain not admitting of a beginning) or "Supreme Being" -- and neither did it for Patañjali. The interpretation of isvara as "God", leading even to Madhva's 13th-century division of the Sankhya school (of which Patañjali was a consistent exponent) into Nirisvara Sankhya ("godless Sankhya", or just Sankhya) and Sesvara Sankhya ("Sankhya-with-God", being Patañjali's Yoga), is now a common assumption among Hindus. Yet, if Patañjali had wanted to define isvara as "God" and yoga as "Union with God", he would have said so explicitly. But he doesn't. Isvara is simply a person or consciousness unit without desire -- a realized being or guru, otherwise strangely absent from this yoga classic. If he had wanted to turn isvara into the Creator or so, he would have left us in no doubt about that.

 

    Now, in this paper, Wujastyk proposed to focus on a few cases that are not so well-known yet. The first one is YS 1.11, containing the word asampramosa, "(memory is) not forgetting". Numerous mediëval commentators and modern translators till today explain this from the root mos,"to steal", or medial "to disappear", so that "memory is non-slippage"; but in fact, it is a clumsy sanskritization of Pali mus-, "forget", corresponding to Sanskrir mrs-, "forget".,' attested in the Buddhist Sutra of Golden Light: "so that the memory may not be forgotten".

    The second one is YS 2.47, containing the word "anantya-samapatti", the attainment of infinitude. Many commentators and translators, mostly in the past, interpret this word with reference to Ananta, "the infinite one", a name of the world snake. In fact, among the 8 samapatti-s ("attainments") or stages of Buddhist meditation (several of which are continuations of practices the Buddha in his apprentice years learned from "Hindu" yogis), the 5th and 6th stages are called the Akasa-Anantya-Ayatana and the Vijnana-Anantya-Ayatana, i.e. focusing on the "infinitude of space" and the "infinitude of consciousness". Both the Buddha and Patañjali borrowed from an existing culture of meditation practices. 

 

    Finally, the reference in YS 4:29 to dharmameghah, "the cloud raining down righteousness", actually refers to one of the Buddhist descriptions of the duties of a king: being like a cloud (megha) that rains down righteousness (dharma) on his people. Wujastyk concludes what his data suggest, viz. that Patañjali was a child of his time, borrowing from or re-applying concepts from his intellectual environment, including Jainism and Buddhism.

Some commentators on the YS mistranslated phrases because they had become unaware of the Buddhist context. This observation can also be applied to passages not discussed here, such as the references to isvara, where an entire doctrine has been elevated among late- and post-mediëval Hindu philosophers attributing theism to Patañjali, all on the basis of a mistaken interpretation of the word isvara.

 

I might add that the reverse is also true: as Johannes Bronkhorst shows in his book Buddhism in the Shadow of Brahmanism, the Buddha repeatedly referred to passages of Yajñavalkya's Brhadaranyaka Upanisad, and Pali Canon editors misunderstood these passages because they did not recognize their referential character. This is what you can expect from Hindu sectarianism: as I first noted among Western followers of Hindu gurus, but later also among born Hindus: most people only know their own sectarian tradition and have no grasp at all of the larger picture. Both the followers of Patañjali and those of the Buddha were so fixated on their own sectarian traditions that they failed to see how their own respective masters had borrowed from other traditions, which were beyond their ken.

    Leaving Wujastyk for now and developing my own conclusions, I would say that this does not illustrate what most people would like to read into it, viz. that Patañjali was essentially a variator on Buddhist thought, and that everything profound in Hinduism is but an outgrowth of Buddhism. Instead, what Patañjali had in common with the Buddha was partly borrowed from the Buddha, and partly elements of an older tradition from which Buddhism had borrowed. This is already suggested by the common indebtedness to Kapila, the legendary founder of the Sankhya school whose conceptual framework Patañjali uses and who donated the land for the town in which the Buddha grew up, viz. Kapilavastu. Sankhya has influenced both the Upanishads and Buddhism, the main "orthodox" and "heterodox" traditions, and is thus a truly pan-Indian school.

 

Of course, it has been eclipsed at least by the time of Sankara (8th century) by Vedanta, and more recently totally eclipsed by theistic Vedanta, the conceptual backbone of the devotional (Bhakti) mass movement. Sankara also holds it against Patañjali that he doesn't quote the Vedas or concede to them any position of authority, which is perhaps not such a bad thing. At any rate, Hindus would do well to rediscover and revaluate Sankhya and admit Patañjali a place of pride within it.

Another far-reaching conclusion which I venture to draw from this analysis of misunderstandings: the commentators and even the masters, who together form the venerable "tradition", were only fallible human beings. The tradition contains many mistakes. Some stray examples from other fields: the Puranas discuss the relation between the Vedic seers Visvamitra and Vasistha in terms of caste rivalry, when caste was not yet an issue in early Vedic times; the Puranic genealogies of the Vedic seers conflict with the information on the seers which a close analysis of the Vedic texts themselves reveals; the Puranas call the Kanvas and Atris the first seer families, when the Rg-Veda clearly starts with the Angiras seers, etc. So, unlike traditionalist Hindus who crawl before tradition and venerate it to the letter, and whose boastful knowledge of tradition does not amount to more than quoting it by heart, we are free to dissent from tradition and deal with it critically.

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Atheism in Indian philosophy

(In Cork, Ireland, on 20-22 September 2013, the British Friedrich Nietzsche Society organized its regular conference, featuring the book Also Sprach Zarathustra and the relevance of Nietzsche in the Asian philosophies. I was due to read this paper there, was prevented from doing so by other pressing duties, but this is my text in hand-out form. A fully referenced paper with bibliography will appear shortly.)

 

Friedrich Nietzsche was not familiar with Indian philosophy (much less even with Chinese philosophy), though he was in a position to be fairly well-informed about Indian thought. This was a cornerstone of the Indo-European philology then animating German intellectuals and progressing fast under the hands of the Orientalists. G.W.F. Hegel already wrote a philosophical discussion of the Bhagavad Gītā in 1829. Even earlier, J.W. Goethe and Franz Schubert praised Kālidās’s play Śakuntalā. Arthur Schopenhauer practically built his philosophy on the precedent of the Upaniṣads, the “confidential teachings” of the Veda (“knowledge”) collections of hymns,  and on Buddhism. So, through his knowledge of German philosophy, Nietzsche must have been exposed to some conclusions of Indian thought. But for his direct knowledge about it, he learned little from the discipline of Orientalism, then very much flourishing in the German speech community and certainly accessible to a professor of Classical Philology. Instead he relied on the theories of colourful amateurs like Louis Jacolliot. Nietzsche therefore didn’t know, or at any rate didn’t let on, that the godless philosophy which he tried to found, already existed in India. He also didn’t know that, centuries ago, this Indian atheism had ended up largely losing the battle against a revitalized theism. His Christian critics must take heart from this development, showing how history proves that religion is anchored in man’s nature: if you chase it away, it returns with a vengeance. This paper deals with what he missed, and how the Indian atheist schools of thought reflect several typical Nietzschean themes.

A practical matter: since this is a survey covering a lot of ground and addressing a non-Indologist audience, a few background facts have to be explained at the outset. Writing appeared in India ca. 300 BCE, after which a flood of writings come to our attention. It is a common mistake to date the ideas expressed therein to the last centuries BC. Some of them may be far older, but have appeared in writing only when that medium became available. A fact of Indian intellectual life is the towering position of the Veda (“knowledge”), four collections of hymns dating to beyond 1000 BC, and their ancillary literature. According to a now-common opinion, gradually developed as the memory of their composition receded, the Veda-s were divinely revealed at the beginning of time. In reality, the names of their composers are known, elements of their genealogy, historical facts such as battles and celestial configurations, and geographical data such as the names of mountains and rivers. They take the form of man addressing the gods – the reverse of the Ten Commandments or the Quran, where God addresses man. Either way, the Vedas dominate the intellectual landscape. The orally transmitted stories about human and divine history are collected in the Purāna-s (“antiquities”), a very large body of literature written down in the 1^st millennium CE or even later. Though lip-service is paid to the Veda’s, the Purāṇa stories have far more influence on the life of the masses, together with the two epics, Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata, written down around the time of Christ but their core narratives much older. However, these stories have little relevance for our history of philosophical atheism.

 

Free death

A lot of Hindus boast that one can call oneself a Hindu and be other things besides, “even” an atheist. Thus, Vināyak Dāmodar Sāvarkar in his epoch-making book Hindutva (“Hinduness”, 1923), the manifesto of Hindu nationalism, writes that even an agnostic or an atheist can be a Hindu. And the current internet paper Centre Right India argues: “The Vedas in Hinduism are not absolute, and have been criticized by people who did not subscribe to their view, since time immemorial. This did not make the critics any less Hindu. Indeed, Hinduism is not alien to atheism, or agnostic schools of thought.” (Pulakesh Upadhyaya: “Atheism and Hindutva – Carvaka to Savarkar”, 3 July 2012) However, this view of matters only covers exceptions. The typical modern Hindu, of Nietzsche’s day as well as of our own, will use “atheist” as a swearword. His main religious practice consists in offering worship through a devotional ritual (pūjā) to a “chosen deity” (iṣṭa devatā).

A theme pioneeringly dealt with in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is “free death”, taking one’s own life. Sāvarkar himself was an atheist, he refused religious funeral rites, but in 1966 he chose to die by sallekhānā, i.e. fasting unto death, as is fairly common since time immemorial among Jain and other monks. Nietzsche probably didn’t realize that the “free death” he advocated was common not just among the pre-Christian Romans  (advocated by Seneca) but was still alive as an ideal among Hindus, or at least among their religious personnel. Another committer of fasting unto death was Gandhian activist Vinobā Bhāve. On his deathbed in 1982, under popular applause, he received a visit from the Prime Minister Indīrā Gāndhī. But at the same time, secularists in the media were fulminating that he should be imprisoned and force-fed as he was “trespassing against the law of the land”. Strictly speaking this was true, as the British colonizers had enacted a law against suicide and euthanasia in the 19^th century, which was still on the statute books. This law was inspired by the purely Christian principle that man is not the master of his own life and death, only God is. But the positive reaction of the people to Bhāve’s self-choice of his death showed the native sensibilities accurately: they were convinced that if certain conditions are met (for this should of course not be done lightly, e.g. out of youthful lovesickness), a free death is acceptable and even the best course of action.

 

Atheism: heterodox

Meanwhile, “Hindu atheism” is mostly bygone glory. Today’s Hindus use “atheist” as a swearword to designate the enemy or to make the difference between themselves and “godless Buddhism”. Yet, Hinduism has a powerful premodern tradition of atheism. It has been superseded by theist philosophies at least from the 9^th century CE, and by 1500 it was not even a memory, as we shall explain.

On the one hand we have a number of schools deemed heterodox, i.e. not in awe of the Veda-s. Buddhism, famous for its doctrine that all is suffering caused by desire, and that the way out of this vale of tears is meditation upto the point of liberation, doesn’t altogether deny the existence of the Vedic gods. These are narratively used in the Buddhist canon to ask the Buddha, who has just reached Liberation, to teach his way to others. The Buddha advised both his monks and lay politicians that a community functions best if its religious traditions are upheld, e.g. its festivals and pilgrimages associated with the Vedic gods. His monks would later take the Vedic gods all the way to Japan and build temples for them there. However, the gods play no role whatsoever in the Buddha’s analysis of the human condition and method of remedy, neither in its moral nor in its meditative aspects. You as an individual have earned your merits and demerits and you yourself have to work them off and earn your liberation; no god or other being can do it in your stead. In 2005 there was a textbook controversy in Thailand, where the Buddhist clergy objected to the mentioning of God in schoolbooks, as this “illusion” had no place in Buddhism and had allegedly been smuggled in by the Christian missionaries.

However, from its early centuries there developed a devotional Buddhism in which prayers are said to the Buddha or a related entity in order to take away your demerits and your sorrows. Indian Buddhism was finished off ca. 1194 by the Islamic invaders, so it could not degenerate all the way, but in East Asia, varieties of the devotional “Pure Land Buddhism” attract the loyalty of most lay Buddhists.

Lokāyata, ”worldliness”, a sceptical yet ascetic sect, is popular among modern Marxists but despised by rivalling contemporaneous philosophers. This school was radically anti-religious and rejected the concepts of supernatural beings, eternal soul, life after death and reincarnation. Makkhali Gośāla, who preached contemporaneously with the Buddha, compared life, considered a source of endless suffering by the Buddhists, to a fish: alas, it has fishbones, but these can be discarded, and then we can enjoy the fish’s flesh. Similarly, life contains suffering, but this can be minimized and reasonably dealt with, and the rest can be a great source of joy. This outlook can be likened to Epicureanism.

Jainism is an ascetic tradition that upholds the “extremism” in ascetic practices which the Buddha as a moderate ended up rejecting. It has remained confined to India until the modern age, and to a few million adherents in the business class. The lay Jains chose this line of work because it does not entail any form of violence, the gravest sin in Jainism. This is a fully atheistic religion. It doesn’t believe in God (singular or plural) in any form. However, they do practice religion and worship in temples, but these are dedicated to human beings who have achieved the state of liberation.

 

Atheism: orthodox

On the other hand we have several philosophies deemed orthodox, which once were atheist in outlook. Later they disappeared or conformed to the rising wave of theism. The Vedic school of philosophy par excellence, the Mīmānsā, “hermeneutics”, focused on the interpretation of Vedic ritual. Though working in a context which was religious par excellence, it said that the gods invoked are but labels of components of the ritual, existing only by the mental effort of their worshippers. This school is regularly credited with being the first articulately atheist school in the world, certainly the first one which takes the human fact of religion into account but gives it a non-theistic explanation. After a high tide, it was eclipsed in the early second millennium.

 The Sāmkhya (“enumeration”, viz. of the 25 substances which make up the cosmos) school ended up classified as “orthodox” but is in fact non-Vedic. The well-known philosopher Śaṅkara, really more of a Veda theologian than an autonomous thinker, criticized it for never referring to the Vedas. It must have been in existence for a long time, and Vedic literature also borrows from it. Well-known is the Sāṁkhya simile from the Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad (300 BCE?) that an unborn and three-coloured (black, red and white) woman waves goodbye to an unborn man who has had his pleasure with her but has had enough, and receives another unborn man who has his pleasure with her. The woman represents nature, wherein three qualities can be discerned, represented by the colours (more on these below). The men represent the different units of consciousness, or persons. Some persons have enjoyed nature long enough, lose their interest and seek liberation; other persons are still busy enjoying all that nature has to offer. The one nature and the many consciousness units form the two poles that make up the universe. The liberation of consciousness amounts to its separation from nature. Note that God plays no role whatsoever in this system. However, it lost its steam in the first millennium CE, and after a blip of revival in ca. 1400, it ceased being a living school.

Vaiśeṣika (“distinction-making”, “focused on particulars”) taught that the universe consists of a finite and unchangeable number of smallest particles, and these are eternal. The universe has never been created: either it is eternal or it has been created, but if so, it was created by an eternal uncreated being, which only shifts the burden of eternality to a purely supposed rather than an actual being. So we might as well assume the eternality of the universe. However, later this school united with the theistic Nyāya (“judgment”, logic) school and became theistic.

Uttara-Mīmāṁsā (“later hermeneutics”), better known as Vedānta (“final part of the Veda”), forms a deliberate continuation of the Upaniṣad-s (“confidential teaching”), the philosophical closing texts of the Veda-s. Unlike the Vedic hymns and the ancillary Brāhmaṇa-s (“priestly books”), concerned with ritual, the Upaniṣad-s deal with knowledge, i.e. knowledge of the Self (ātman), i.e. pure, unconditioned, impersonal consciousness. Their central doctrine is that the Self is fully the same as the Absolute (Brahman), like the drop is made of the same substance as the ocean. It follows that the unchanging and undying Absolute is nothing but consciousness. The different subschools of Vedānta will try to define the exact relationship between the Self and the Absolute. The best-known worldwide, and the most popular in the modern West, is Advaitā Vedānta (“non-dualistic Vedānta”), thought up by Śaṅkara in ca. 800 CE. This teaches the uncompromising unity of the Self and the Absolute. For Westerners tired of Christian dualism, this is welcomed as a relief. However, in real life, Śaṅkara also worshipped the gods, just as the Stoic philosopher Emperor Marcus Aurelius religiously observed his daily sacrifice routine after his philosophical meditations. Śaṅkara is venerated in India for his debating skills and for the institutions he founded, but his non-dualistic viewpoint has largely been forgotten. It is at any rate much less representative for Indian thought than his Western fans assume.  

His simple and radical scheme was soon sidelined by the far more important dualistic (or nominally “qualified non-dualistic” and “difference-yet-no-difference”) schools of Vedānta. These schools, which elbowed out the remaining non-Vedānta viewpoints, effectively became the framework of the religious wave at the mass level, Bhakti (devotion). Among the gods of Hinduism, one was chosen, extolled and worshipped. In most Hindu temples, five gods are worshipped of whom one is central: Viṣṇu (“the all-pervader”), Śiva (“the benefactor”, actually an apotropaic euphemism for the storm-god Rudra, “the red/furious one”), Devī (“the goddess”), Gaṇeśa (“lord of groups”) and Sūrya (“the sun”). By contrast, Brahma (“increase”) as the personification of the Absolute is practically not worshipped. In devotional Hinduism, as theorized by the dualistic Vedānta philosophers, the situation is like in Christian mysticism: the supreme being is mostly conceived as a person and one can ascend to God but never unite with Him. One can contemplate Him but never be His equal.

This way, we have gotten modern Hinduism: a landscape studded with temples and idols, a shrine or separate room in the houses for devotional rituals (pūjā), and but very rarely an odd intellectual who stands aloof from the belief in a supernatural being. Atheism has been in the ascendant for some centuries, but that was two thousand years ago.

 

Sāṁkhya

Buddhism describes Sāṁkhya as its own source, founded by the sage Kapila who gave the Buddha’s wandering ancestors a domain where they could build the settlement Kapilavastu (“Kapila’s habitation”), in which the future Buddha was to grow up. Patañjali’s Yoga (“discipline, control”), now reckoned as a separate philosophy, was anciently (and rightly) considered an application-oriented subschool of Sāṁkhya. Like Buddhism, it vaguely  recognizes the existence of the gods (unless our understanding of the Sanskrit words is anachronistic) but gives them no place whatsoever in its analysis of the human problem nor in its proposed way out. Only in the modern age have theistic Hindus magnified the religious element in it and renamed it as Seśvara Sāṁkhya, i.e. Sāṁkhya-with-God. Even then, the relative absence of God contrasts conspicuously with the really theistic systems.

The monistic Vedānta philosophy, which won the day in Hinduism and is espoused by most sects in its theistic form (Bhakti, “devotion”), criticizes Sāṁkhya for not basing itself on the Veda-s, i.e. for being a real philosophy rather than a scripture-quoting theology. However, Vedic texts refer to some typical concepts of Sāṁkhya, which has its sources much earlier. Its dualism of consciousness vs. nature (reminiscent of thinking vs. extension, res cogitans vs. res extensa) is in fact an elaboration of the common-sense view, contrasting with the mystical attractiveness of the heady Vedānta view. In the latter, everything is the Absolute, so all is one --  gee, that’s cosmic! In Sāṁkhya, by contrast, the irreducible separateness of the different “persons” or units of consciousness is taken for granted. Your memories make you unique and separate from me with my memories, we are distinct persons, and there is no reason to remedy this condition.

Had Nietzsche known it sufficiently, he could have approved of Sāṁkhya’s atheism. It is reminiscent of his beloved pre-Socratic philosophies. The great Sāṁkhya classic, the Sāṁkhya-Kārikā (2^nd century?) does not even mention a supreme being. In Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra (“aphorisms on control”), some concessions are made to believers, but Yoga is defined purely technically as the silencing of the mind, not as a “union with God”. The late Sāṁkhya-Sutra (14^th century), operating in a religious landscape that had become completely theistic, argues elaborately against the existence of God, and in favour of the eternality of the universe. But perhaps its relative pessimism about the world’s inherent suffering, radicalized in Buddhism (“all is suffering”), can be reckoned as un-Nietzschean.

 (Bhadāraṇyaka 4,4,5; Taittirī

Karma: beyond good and evil

A very prominent doctrine in Indian thought is that of reincarnation and karma. In the Vedic hymns (pre-1000 BC), the word karma still had its etymological meaning "do, make", whence "action, ritual". Therefrom, it came to connote “action at a distance”, viz. between the ritual and its intended fruits, e.g. restoration of health, victory on the battlefield, a woman saying yes etc. Even the Mīmāṁsā philosophers, sceptical of the involvement of any divine persons in the ritual, believed in the magical “action at a distance” of the Vedic rituals.

In the Bhagavad-Gītā (200 BC?), the word karma-mārga, “the way of ritual action”, still has this meaning (and not “doing your duty”, “ethical living” “the yoga of action in the daily life”, as is often said since Swami Vivekananda gave it this meaning in ca. 1895): it refers to Vedic ritual. There, it contrast with jñāna-mārga, “the way of knowledge”, developed in the Upaniṣads after and in reaction against the emphasis on ritual action in the Vedic period; and with bhakti-mārga, “the way of devotion”, chiefly devotion to the deified hero Kṛṣṇa, the proper and innovative message of the book, hugely influential in popular Hinduism. The way of knowledge is chiefly concerned with meditation, as the path to knowledge of the Self, i.e. pure consciousness, the object of most philosophies and the goal of most Hindu monks. The way of devotion means the religious practice maintained by the vast majority of Hindus, viz. worship of the gods, mainly one’s own “chosen deity”.  

Meanwhile, without letting it give a new meaning to the term karma, the Gītā introduces the notion of reincarnation. It attaches no moral sense to rebirth yet, just like the reincarnation beliefs attested elsewhere, e.g. among the Levantine Druze and many Amerindians, but affirms that dying is like undressing before going to sleep and getting dressed again tomorrow. It is part of Kṛṣṇa’s exhortation to the hesitant hero Arjuna, that it is alright to do battle: you need not be afraid to die, nor have scruples to kill, because if you die or if your enemy dies, it is only a temporary phase while moving on to a next life. No specific link, moral or otherwise, between this life and the next is posited here. It is the naked theory of reincarnation that we find here, without the moralistic interpretative apparatus which later Hinduism and Buddhism have attached to it.

We should be careful not to amalgamate this doctrine too easily with Nietzsche’s “eternal return”. The reason for this eternal return is that the number of possible causes is finite while time is infinite, so that the chain of causes effecting the present state of affairs will necessarily repeat itself. Reincarnation is distantly akin, it may stem from a similar intuition, but any non-superficial comparison will find them different.

Then, “action at a distance” is reinterpreted and applied to the successive incarnations. The moralistic version, popular among the masses east of the Indus, including the East-Asian countries where Buddhism has spread it, views the contents of the next life as a reward or punishment for one’s acts in a previous life. Good and evil get a very prominent place here. Unlike Immanuel Kant’s notion of doing the good for its own sake, and virtue being its own reward, good and evil acts here get the power to determine one’s apparent “fate” in the next life. A secular view of life posits no link between one’s fate and the moral quality of one’s acts: even a saint can get robbed or killed. Here, by contrast, morality controls the universe, which is inherently moral.

However, there exists a more subtle version of the karma doctrine. When we die, the motive force that spurs us on to return to this world in a new body is desire. Our deeds and experiences have shaped a pattern of non-satisfaction due to preference and aversion, and this leads to seeking new chances to satisfy these. Therefore, if the desire is quelled, and neutrality takes the place of preferences and aversion, there is no motive force anymore that drives you to a new birth. That is how desire leads to rebirth, while the cessation of desire leads to liberation or nirvāṇa (“blowing out”). But outside the circle of ascetics, this more subtle version of the karma doctrine is little known. Note that this version is “beyond good and evil”.

Few people realize (and many Hindus will be startled if not angry to hear us assert it) that the karma doctrine is inherently linked with atheism, even in its vulgar moralistic version. Because the world is deemed inherently just, with a certain type of deeds automatically leading to a certain type of experiences, there is no need for a Father in heaven to dispense justice. In history, the most atheistic schools, especially Jainism, have had the most radical and uncompromising conception of karma. You are deemed stuck with your own karmic record, you have to work it off yourself and bear all the consequences yourself for any karma you incur further. No other being, whether human or divine, can relieve you of even the smallest quantity of karma. By contrast, in theistic Hinduism, lip-service is paid to the notion of karma, but in fact it is very watered down. People pray to a divine being for the diminution of karma, somewhat like Catholics can buy indulgences to be freed from so many years of purgatory. 

               

The parable of the three stages

             A detail worth analyzing is how the age-old Sāṁkhya cosmological scheme of triguṇa, “three qualities”, authentically fits the famous parable of Camel-Lion-Child. Like we have a yin/yang bipolarity in Chinese thought, we have a tripolarity in Indian thought. Every society of gods or men was deemed to be divided in three parts, having to do with order, action and sustenance: (1) sattva, “beingness, truth, goodness”, the pole of calm, clarity and order, symbolized by the daylight, the white colour and the majestic heavens; (2) rajas, “turbulence”, the pole of dynamism and passion, symbolized by the twilight, the red colour and the stormy atmosphere; (3) tamas, “darkness”, the pole of inertia, materiality, quantity and sustenance, symbolized by the night, the dark colours and the all-bearing earth.  (To complicate matters and take the equivocity of symbolism into account, the twilight with its moderate temperature and sacral mood can also count as sattva, the daytime with its heat can also count as rajas.) 

          In society, the three poles correspond to three social functions and the classes performing them: (1) order and legitimacy are the province of judges, poets, priests and of the king in his sacral role as embodiment of a nation’s sovereignty; (2) action is the province of administrators and soldiers, and of the king in his role as commander-in-chief; (3) sustenance is the province of the farmers, craftsmen and other producing classes, of healthcare providers and entertainers, and of all members of society in so far as they partake in the process of fertility and multiplication. The scheme corresponds as follows with the Puranic divine trinity (trimūrti): the creator Brahma corresponds to the dawn, or rajas; the sustainer and solar deity Viṣṇu to the daylight, or sattva; the leveller and moon-god Śiva to the night, tamas.

          In Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, in the protagonist’s first sermon, he discusses the three transformations, the three phases of growth. Firstly, the human mind becomes a camel, slow and eager for heavy loads, obedient but strong, labouring and blindly following. This is evidently the pole tamas. Secondly, it becomes a lion, full of fury and passion, not obeying the “you should” commandment, but asserting his “I will” volition and his freedom. This is visibly the pole rajas. Finally, it becomes a child, light and innocent. This is the stage of transparency, of the third pole, sattva. This way, Nietzsche’s newfound simile actually corresponds to an age-old thought model, best articulated in Sāṁkhya.

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When did the Buddha break away from Hinduism?

 

 

 

Orientalists have started treating Buddhism as a separate religion because they discovered it outside India, without any conspicuous link with India, where Buddhism was not in evidence. At first, they didn’t even know that the Buddha had been an Indian. It had at any rate gone through centuries of development unrelated to anything happening in India at the same time. Therefore, it is understandable that Buddhism was already the object of a separate discipline even before any connection with Hinduism could be made.

 

 

Buddhism in modern India

 

In India, all kinds of invention, somewhat logically connected to this status of separate religion, were then added. Especially the Ambedkarite movement, springing from the conversion of Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar in 1956, was very driven in retro-actively producing an anti-Hindu programme for the Buddha. Conversion itself, not just the embracing of a new tradition (which any Hindu is free to do, all while staying a Hindu) but the renouncing of one’s previous religion, as the Hindu-born politician Ambedkar did, is a typically Christian concept. The model event was the conversion of the Frankish king Clovis, possibly in 496, who “burned what he had worshipped and worshipped what he had burnt”. (Let it pass for now that the Christian chroniclers slandered their victims by positing a false symmetry: the Heathens hadn’t been in the business of destroying Christian symbols.) So, in his understanding of the history of Bauddha Dharma (Buddhism), Ambedkar was less than reliable, in spite of his sterling contributions regarding the history of Islam and some parts of the history of caste. But where he was a bit right and a bit mistaken, his later followers have gone all the way and made nothing but a gross caricature of history, and especially about the place of Buddhism in Hindu history.

 

The Ambedkarite worldview has ultimately only radicalized the moderately anti-Hindu version of the reigning Nehruvians. Under Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, Buddhism was turned into the unofficial state religion of India, adopting the “lion pillar” of the Buddhist Emperor Ashoka as state symbol and putting the 24-spoked Cakravarti wheel in the national flag. Essentially, Nehru’s knowledge of Indian history was limited to two spiritual figures, viz. the Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi, and three political leaders: Ashoka, Akbar and himself. The concept of Cakravarti (“wheel-turner”, universal ruler) was in fact much older than Ashoka, and the 24-spoked wheel can also be read in other senses, e.g. the Sankhya philosophy’s worldview, with the central Purusha/Subject and the 24 elements of Prakrti/Nature. The anglicized Nehru, “India’s last Viceroy”, prided himself on his illiteracy in Hindu culture, so he didn’t know any of this, but was satisfied that these symbols could glorify Ashoka and belittle Hinduism, deemed a separate religion from which Ashoka had broken away by accepting Buddhism. More broadly, he thought that everything of value in India was a gift of Buddhism (and Islam) to the undeserving Hindus. Thus, the fabled Hindu tolerance was according to him a value borrowed from Buddhism. In reality, the Buddha had been a beneficiary of an already established Hindu tradition of pluralism. In a Muslim country, he would never have preached his doctrine in peace and comfort for 45 years, but in Hindu society, this was a matter of course. There were some attempts on his life, but they emanated not from “Hindus” but from jealous disciples within his own monastic order.

 

So, both Nehru and Ambedkar, as well as their followers , believed by implication that at some point in his life, the Hindu-born renunciate Buddha had broken away from Hinduism and adopted a new religion, Buddhism. This notion is now omnipresent, and through school textbooks, most Indians have lapped this up and don’t know any better. However, numerous though they are, none of the believers in this story have ever told us at what moment in his life the Buddha broke way from Hinduism. When did he revolt against it? Very many Indians repeat the Nehruvian account, but so far, never has any of them been able to pinpoint an event in the Buddha's life which constituted a break with Hinduism.

 

 

The term “Hinduism”

 

Their first line of defence, when put on the spot, is sure to be: “Actually, Hinduism did not yet exist at the time.” So, their position really is: Hinduism did not exist yet, but somehow the Buddha broke away from it. Yeah, the secular position is that he was a miracle-worker.

 

Let us correct that: the word “Hinduism” did not exist yet. When Darius of the Achaemenid Persians, a near-contemporary of the Buddha, used the word “Hindu”, it was purely in a geographical sense: anyone from inside or beyond the Indus region. When the medieval Muslim invaders brought the term into India, they used it to mean: any Indian except for the Indian Muslims, Christians or Jews. It did not have a specific doctrinal content except “non-Abrahamic”, a negative definition. It meant every Indian Pagan, including the Brahmins, Buddhists (“clean-shaven Brahmins”), Jains, other ascetics, low-castes, intermediate castes, tribals, and by implication also the as yet unborn Lingayats, Sikhs, Hare Krishnas, Arya Samajis, Ramakrishnaites, secularists and others who nowadays reject the label “Hindu”. This definition was essentially also adopted by VD Savarkar in his book Hindutva (1923) and by the Hindu Marriage Act (1955). By this historical definition, which also has the advantages of primacy and of not being thought up by the wily Brahmins, the Buddha and all his Indian followers are unquestionably Hindus. In that sense, Savarkar was right when he called Ambedkar’s taking refuge in Buddhism “a sure jump into the Hindu fold”.

 

But the word “Hindu” is a favourite object of manipulation. Thus, secularists say that all kinds of groups (Dravidians, low-castes, Sikhs etc.) are “not Hindu”, yet when Hindus complain of the self-righteousness and aggression of the minorities, secularists laugh at this concern: “How can the Hindus feel threatened? They are more than 80%!” The missionaries call the tribals “not Hindus”, but when the tribals riot against the Christians who have murdered their Swami, we read about “Hindu rioters”. In the Buddha’s case, “Hindu” is often narrowed down to “Vedic” when convenient, then restored to its wider meaning when expedient.

 

One meaning which the word “Hindu” definitely does not have, and did not have when it was introduced, is “Vedic”. Shankara holds it against Patanjali and the Sankhya school (just like the Buddha) that they don’t bother to cite the Vedas, yet they have a place in every history of Hindu thought. Hinduism includes a lot of elements which have only a thin Vedic veneer, and numerous ones which are not Vedic at all. Scholars say that it consists of a “Great Tradition” and many “Little Traditions”, local cults allowed to subsist under the aegis of the prestigious Vedic line. However, if we want to classify the Buddha in these terms, he should rather be included in the Great Tradition.  

 

Siddhartha Gautama the Buddha was a Kshatriya, a scion of the Solar or Aikshvaku dynasty, a descendant of Manu, a self-described reincarnation of Rama, the son of the Raja (president-for-life) of the Shakya tribe, a member of its Senate, and belonging to the Gautama gotra (roughly “clan”). Though monks are often known by their monastic name, Buddhists prefer to name the Buddha after his descent group, viz. the Shakyamuni, “renunciate of the Shakya tribe”. This tribe was as Hindu as could be, consisting according to its own belief of the progeny of the eldest children of patriarch Manu, who were repudiated at the insistence of his later, younger wife. The Buddha is not known to have rejected this name, not even at the end of his life when the Shakyas had earned the wrath of king Vidudabha of Kosala and were massacred. The doctrine that he was one in a line of incarnations which also included Rama is not a deceitful Brahmin Puranic invention but was launched by the Buddha himself, who claimed Rama as an earlier incarnation of his. The numerous scholars who like to explain every Hindu idea or custom as “borrowed from Buddhism” could well counter Ambedkar’s rejection of this “Hindu” doctrine by pointing out very aptly that it was “borrowed from Buddhism”.

 

 

Career

 

At 29, he renounced society, but not Hinduism. Indeed, it is a typical thing among Hindus to exit from society, laying off your caste marks including your civil name. The Rg-Veda already describes the Muni-s as having matted hair and going about sky-clad: such are what we now know as Naga Sadhus. Asceticism was a recognized practice in Vedic society long before the Buddha. Yajnavalkya, the Upanishadic originator of the notion of Self, renounced life in society after a successful career as court priest and an equally happy family life with two wives. By leaving his family and renouncing his future in politics, the Buddha followed an existing tradition within Hindu society. He didn’t practice Vedic rituals anymore, which is normal for a Vedic renunciate (though Zen Buddhists still recite the Heart Sutra in the Vedic fashion, ending with “sowaka”, i.e. svaha). He was a late follower of a movement very much in evidence in the Upanishads, viz. of spurning rituals (Karmakanda) in favour of knowledge (Jnanakanda). After he had done the Hindu thing by going to the forest, he tried several methods, including the techniques he learned from two masters and which did not fully satisfy him,-- but nonetheless enough to include them in his own and the Buddhist curriculum. Among other techniques, he practised Anapanasati, “attention to the breathing process”, the archetypal yoga practice popular in practically all yoga schools till today. For a while he also practised an extreme form of asceticism, still existing in the Hindu sect of Jainism. He exercised his Hindu freedom to join a sect devoted to certain techniques, and later the freedom to leave it, remaining a Hindu at every stage.

 

He then added a technique of his own, or at least that is what the Buddhist sources tell us, for in the paucity of reliable information, we don’t know for sure that he hadn’t learned the Vipassana (“mindfulness”) technique elsewhere. Unless evidence of the contrary comes to the surface, we assume that he invented this technique all by himself, as a Hindu is free to do. He then achieved Bodhi, the “Awakening”. By his own admission, he was by no means the first to do so. Instead, he had only walked the same path of other Awakened beings before him.

 

At the bidding of the Vedic gods Brahma and Indra, he left his self-contained state of Awakening and started teaching his way to others. When he “set in motion the wheel of the Law” (Dharma-cakra-pravartana, Chinese Falungong), he gave no indication whatsoever of breaking with an existing system. On the contrary, by his use of existing Vedic and Upanishadic terminology (Arya, “Vedically civilized”; Dharma), he confirmed his Vedic roots and implied that his system was a restoration of the Vedic ideal which had become degenerate. He taught his techniques and his analysis of the human condition to his disciples, promising them to achieve the same Awakening if they practiced these diligently. 

 

 

Caste

 

On caste, we find him is full cooperation with existing caste society. Being an elitist, he mainly recruited among the upper castes, with over 40% Brahmins. These would later furnish all the great philosophers who made Buddhism synonymous with conceptual sophistication. Conversely, the Buddhist universities trained well-known non-Buddhist scientists such as the astronomer Aryabhata. Lest the impression be created that universities are a gift of Buddhism to India, it may be pointed out that the Buddha’s friends Bandhula and Prasenadi (and, according to a speculation, maybe the young Siddhartha himself) had studied at the university of Takshashila, clearly established before there were any Buddhists around to do so. Instead, the Buddhists greatly developed an institution which they had inherited from Hindu society.

 

The kings and magnates of the eastern Ganga plain treated the Buddha as one of their own (because that is what he was) and gladly patronized his fast-growing monastic order, commanding their servants and subjects to build a network of monasteries for it. He predicted the coming of a future Awakened leader like himself, the Maitreya (“the one practising friendship/charity”), and specified that he would be born in a Brahmin family. When king Prasenadi discovered that his wife was not a Shakya princess but the daughter of the Shakya ruler by a maid-servant, he repudiated her and their son; but his friend the Buddha made him take them back.

 

Did he achieve this by saying that birth is unimportant, that “caste is bad” or that “caste doesn’t matter”, as the Ambedkarites claim? No, he reminded the king of the old view (then apparently in the process of being replaced with a stricter view) that caste was passed on exclusively in the paternal line. Among hybrids of horses and donkeys, the progeny of a horse stallion and a donkey mare whinnies, like its father, while the progeny of a donkey stallion and a horse mare brays, also like its father. So, in the oldest Upanishad, Satyakama Jabala is accepted by his Brahmins-only teacher because his father is deduced to be a Brahmin, regardless of his mother being a maid-servant. And similarly, king Prasenadi should accept his son as a Kshatriya, eventhough his mother was not a full-blooded Shakya Kshatriya.

 

When he died, the elites of eight cities made a successful bid for his ashes on the plea: "We are Kshatriyas, he was a Kshatriya, therefore we have a right to his ashes". After almost half a century, his disciples didn’t mind being seen in public as still observing caste in a context which was par excellence Buddhist. The reason is that the Buddha in his many teachings never had told them to give up caste, e.g. to give their daughters in marriage to men of other castes. This was perfectly logical: as a man with a spiritual message, the Buddha wanted to lose as little time as possible on social matters. If satisfying your own miserable desires is difficult enough, satisfying the desire for an egalitarian society provides an endless distraction from your spiritual practice.

 

 

 

The Seven Rules

 

There never was a separate non-Hindu Buddhist society. Most Hindus worship various gods and teachers, adding and sometimes removing one or more pictures or statues to their house altar. This way, there were some lay worshippers of the Buddha, but they were not a society separate from the worshippers of other gods or Awakened masters. This box-type division of society in different sects is another Christian prejudice infused into modern Hindu society by Nehruvian secularism. There were only Hindus, members of Hindu castes, some of whom had a veneration for the Buddha among others.  

 

Buddhist buildings in India often follow the designs of Vedic habitat ecology or Vastu Shastra. Buddhist temple conventions follow an established Hindu pattern. Buddhist mantras, also outside India, follow the pattern of Vedic mantras. When Buddhism spread to China and Japan, Buddhist monks took the Vedic gods (e.g. the twelve Aditya’s) with them and built temples for them. In Japan, every town has a temple for the river-goddess Benzaiten, i.e. “Saraswati Devi”, the goddess Saraswati. She was not introduced there by wily Brahmins, but by Buddhists.

 

At the fag end of his long life, the Buddha described the seven principles by which a society does not perish (which Sita Ram Goel has given more body in his historical novel Sapta Shila, in Hindi), and among them are included: respecting and maintaining the existing festivals, pilgrimages and rituals; and revering the holy men. These festivals etc. were mainly “Vedic”, of course, like the pilgrimage to the Saraswati which Balaram made in the Mahabharata, or the pilgrimage to the Ganga which the elderly Pandava brothers made. Far from being a revolutionary, the Buddha emphatically outed himself as a conservative, both in social and in religious matters. He was not a rebel or a revolutionary, but wanted the existing customs to continue. The Buddha was every inch a Hindu.

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