Astronomical evidence and the Upanishads

 

A famous Flemish emeritus professor recently reacted to my off-hand mention of a date for the major Upanishads, viz. “second millennium BCE”. He thought that this should be 900-500 BCE, a date obviously borrowed from the textbooks. It is no big deal that a Western philosopher, not specializing in the chronology of Indian history, should abide by the received wisdom in this matter; but the few specialists know it to be highly controversial.

When scholar upon scholar claims just as off-hand that the Brhadaranyaka, Chandogya, Katha etc. Upanishads date from 900-500 BC, I always wonder: how do they know this? Where did they get it? The texts themselves never give such a date, nor other premodern texts referring to them.

A few scholars even date them all later than 500 BCE, the time of the Buddha. Animated by the “Hinduism bad, Buddhism good” doctrine, they are puzzled by the existence of undeniably profound ideas in the Upanishads, clearly related to the Buddhist teachings, so they want to explain these as “borrowed from Buddhism”. Of course, the notion of Buddhism as a separate religion was constructed only recently, by the first Western Buddhologists, whereas Hindu tradition rightly considers the Buddha as only one of the Hindu sect founders/leaders of his time, though for sociological reasons (his high birth and top connections) the most successful one. Hindu writers of idol-making manuals treat the Buddha on a par with Krishna and the others.


At any rate, the linguistic anteriority of the preclassical Sanskrit of the Upanishads date them to before the Buddha and to his probable contemporary Panini, the codifier of classical Sanskrit. Though most Western and Westernized scholars share this “Hinduism bad, Buddhism good” framework, they still agree that the great Upanishads definitely predate the Buddha. That is why these works don’t refer to any specifically Buddhist concept.

But for them, 900 BCE is more than enough time distance to 500 BC. The Upanishads should not be dated earlier, for then the Aryan invasion framework runs into difficulties. This is roughly as follows:

·         1700-1500 BCE: Indo-European or “Aryan” nomads invade India;

·         1500-1200 BCE: they compose the Rg-Veda;

·         1300-500 BCE: they compose the other Vedas and their ancillary literature;

·         900 BCE onwards: among these writings are the Upanishads.       

In Chinese history, all important and numerous unimportant events are dated precisely from at least the 8^th century BCE, and approximately so for a thousand years earlier. In Indian history, by contrast, many important events or the birth years of famous persons are only vaguely known, mostly but not even always in their proper chronological order, and without any absolute chronology. We maintain that the usual estimate for the first Upanishads misses the mark by at least five hundred years.

There are only few chronologically relevant references in the Upanishads, and that mostly to other insecurely dated characters of Hindu literature. Thus, Yajnavalkya of Brhadaranyaka fame wins a debate at the court of king Janaka of Videha, and this king is usually taken to be the father of the Ramayana’s heroine Sita, also known by her patronymic Janaki. But that doesn’t get us very far, if only because the paucity of data makes it difficult to be sure that the same Janaka is meant, as this is not an unusual name. But the larger literary framework contains better chronological clues.

The ecliptic was divided into 28 lunar houses, like in China and Arabia, rather than in the 12 Babylonian-Hellenistic signs of the Zodiac. The precession of the equinoxes, at 1° per ca. 71 years, makes data about the relation between fixed stars and equinoxes or solstices or other seasonal phenomena into a secure chronological pointer. For instance, an ancillary work of the Vedas, the Vedanga Jyotisha (“Veda-Ancillary of Stellar Science”, at that time meaning astronomy though now used to refer to astrology), conventionally dated to 500-200 BCE, dates itself twice to ca. 1350 BCE, viz. by explicitating which stars are on the winter solstice and spring equinox points. This is an explicitly post-Rg-Vedic texts, so the Rg-Veda was already complete by the time the Aryan Invasion Theory lets the Aryans invade India. It is quite amusing to read the mental and verbal acrobatics which conformistic scholars try out to neutralize this inconvenient evidence.

 The Atharva-Veda lists all the lunar houses, starting with Krttika/Pleiades, presumably because it was on the spring equinox point, which it was ca. 2300 BCE. The Yajur-Veda also gives this position thrice. But could this not be a reminiscence, a classical enumeration which endured even when the asterism concerned had, after some 900 years, shifted and left the place of honour to the next asterism? Unlikely, for astrologers typically change the list to reflect the changing of asterisms on the equinoctial point; they no longer treat Krttika as number 1. The Shatapatha Brahmana, traditionally held to be from the same period (but which modern textbooks date to 900 BCE or so), later than the Rg-Veda but just before the Upanishads, confirms this synchronism by referring to the same position, telling us that Krttika “never swerves from the east”, i.e. from the equinox, the intersection of ecliptic and equatorial plane. This passage, like the Vedanga Jyotisha passages, is part of a practical instruction under which to conduct a certain ritual, so it is observational par excellence, not a traditional prayer-type text where an ancient reminiscence might have survived.

The Kaushitaki Brahmana points to the same period, ca. 2300 BCE, by means of a different astronomical pointer, viz. the star Regulus on the summer solstice point. Another text where the position of Regulus is mentioned, is the epic Mahabharata, but there it is said that an event, the death of the hero Bhishma coinciding with the full moon near Regulus, took place after the winter solstice, i.e. centuries after 2300 BCE.

The importance of this information is that it shows how the astronomical evidence does not always support a high chronology. Indians say that the war described in the Mahabharata took place in 3139 BCE. This is based on the length of the Four Ages given in the Puranas, a type of mythohistorical literature from the first millennium CE. The doctrine of Four Ages is very ancient, attested also in Greek and Germanic mythology, but their quantification is apparently linked with the precession of the equinoxes, discovered by Hipparchos ca. 150 BCE and introduced in India only in subsequent centuries. There are no pre-Hellenistic mentions of the fourth age starting in the 32th century BCE, 37 years after the Mahabharata war, as Hindus traditionally (i.e. Puranically) believe. The astronomical evidence of the Mahabharata itself, however, points to well after 2300 BC.   

This lower chronology is supported by another passage from the Puranas. As said, it mixes historical data with mythology, so we have to be very cautious, but the following sentence is sufficiently clear. The Puranas record that either 1050 or 1015 years elapsed between the birth of Mahabharata hero Arjuna’s grandson Parikshit and Magadha-based emperor Mahapadma Nanda’s coronation in either 378 or 382 BCE. This puts the Mahabharata war (predating Parikshit’s birth by less than a year) in about 1400 BCE. This is earlier than the textbooks’ date of 900 BC, but lower than the traditional date. It is further confirmed by archaeological periodization. The second half of the second millennium BCE marked the high tide of chariot warfare, cfr. the war between the Hittite and Egyptian empires or the Trojan war. Chariot warfare is central to the Mahabharata story, not some literary addition by a later editor. And there was simply no chariot warfare in 3139 BCE.

According to Hindu tradition, the grandfather of the Mahabharata heroes is the one who ordered the Vedas in their definitive and still prevailing form: Krishna Dvaipayana alias Veda-Vyasa, “analyser/editor of the Veda”. In the oldest Upanishads already, the Rg-, Sama- and Yajur-Veda are mentioned as known and complete wholes. So, the Upanishads started at or after the time of the Mahabharata battle, though at a different location. The Bharata clan was based between the Yamuna and the Saraswati/Ghaggar, in present-day Haryana, while Yajnavalkya, the philosopher featured in the first Upanishad, is shown winning a debate at the court of king Janaka in Mithila, in the present-day Bihar, far to the east. At any rate, the first eight or so of the Upanishads easily predate the Buddha. The line of thought laid down in the Upanishads thus had almost a thousand years to develop, between the Mahabharata war (ca. -1400) and the Buddha (-500).

Conclusion: the astronomical evidence (not treated in its completeness here) is internally consistent, faithfully following the relative chronology of the different Vedic writings, e.g. it does not date the Upanishads earlier than the Rg-Veda. It is higher than the conventional AIT chronology, irreconcilable with it. But it is also lower than some of the wilder chronologies popular in India.

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The Leipzig workshop

 

For some mysterious reason, I find myself penetrating a little bit deeper into the far part of Germany, the erstwhile German Democratic Republic, every time I go there. This time I took the train to Dresden, past Eisenach, Erfurt and Weimar which I already visited the latest times around, but got off before the end station,  at the city of Leipzig. It is here that Napoleon was defeated in the Nations Battle exactly 200 years ago.

On 2-3 December 2013, I participated in the interdisciplinary workshop on Indo-European, “Talking Neolithic”, which brought together geneticists, archaeologists and linguists. It was surprisingly well-organized and the papers were original (sometimes revolutionary) and at a high level. Socializing was also fun, both meeting new people and finally getting to see some famous people I only knew from their publications, like James Mallory, whose dictionary of Indo-European I often use though he turns out to be an archaeologist. I had hoped to meet Joanna Nichols, who had at first been announced, if only to hear out her erstwhile Bactrian homeland thesis, but it seems health problems kept her back. Nonetheless, I had a very good time.

I haven’t taken notes and will not do a full report, but a few papers have made such an impression that I have to mention them here. It goes without saying that the responsibility for any misrepresentation of the speakers’ ideas, no matter how involuntary, will be mine. My apologies to the speakers who are left undiscussed here.

 

State of the art

Co-organizer Guus Kroonen, a Dutch linguist teaching in Copenhagen, introduced the workshop by summarizing the state of the art. Ever new data or deeper knowledge about existing data confirm that the Indo-Europeans in Europe borrowed a lot of their agricultural and botanical terminology from lost indigenous languages. This contrasts with the terminology from pastoralism and wheeled locomotion, which is fully Proto-Indo-European. Therefore, many scholars have suspected that the Indo-Europeans in their steppe homeland knew no agriculture at all. As pastoralists, they established a hierarchical relation with the native European agriculturalists, so that for reasons of prestige, the common folk abandoned their mother tongue and adopted the Indo-European language of the elite, transforming it along the way into the daughter languages known from history.  However, Kroonen’s own work finds that the Indo-Europeans did know at least some agriculture, though they adopted new cultivars and techniques from the Old Europeans.

Nonetheless, he also mentioned the consequential fact that east of the Dniepr in Ukraine, and in the vast stretch of land where the home of the Proto-Indo-Europeans is usually situated, no trace of agriculture has been found prior to 2000 BCE. I deduce that this area may fit the putative homeland of PIE pastoralists, who did not know any agriculture, but cannot possibly fit a PIE population of whom it has been established that it knew at least some agriculture. Whether this is really the case, this workshop was meant to verify.

The next speaker, James Mallory from Belfast, gave a historical overview of how the agricultural question had been treated in two centuries of IE studies. Very entertaining, and what I have taken away from it, is that around 1900, the homeland was often situated in Bactria as the northern rim of the original wheat cultivation zone, stretching from the Euphrates to the Indus valleys. This makes sense: Bactria, like Northwestern India and Mesopotamia, was an area propitious to agriculture and demographic growth. If in such an area a famine or a conflict forces a part of the population to leave, it may be a small percentage in its homeland, but a mighty big group in the endless steppelands, capable of imposing its language. The unparalleled success of the Indo-Europeans in spreading or imposing their language is far better explained by postulating a thickly-populated homeland rather than the bare and backward steppes.

He confirmed the surprising lack of names for cultivars common to Indo-Iranian and the European branches. While the currently most favoured explanation is that different groups of pastoralists from Russia separately entered Europe and India, it was thought then that the absence of agricultural terms in Indo-Iranian could be explained by a division of labour: the European-to-be tribes lived in the Oxus valley proper tilling the fields and took their agricultural terms with them from there, while the eastern-oriented Indo-Iranians trekked through the Hindu Kush and Pamir hill slopes with their herds.

 

My own paper

The choice to introduce my own paper at this point, though in reality it was scheduled only on the second day, is not inspired by a lack of modesty. I simply need to clarify where I stand on this matter, so that the reader can see how I had to interpret the other papers.

Incidentally, organizational and technical gave me only 25 minutes to read my paper, so I hurried through it and had no time left for questions, which I had kind of counted on. While I had a fairly original message on the homeland question, I found that during the subsequent lunch and over drinks, only a few people had any questions about it, let alone objections. This was mostly not a matter of politely hiding their scepticism (as Germans are wont to do, but the many Dutch and Anglophone participants are more forthright), but of a profound disinterest in the matter. Either they have interiorized the SW-Russian homeland theory during their schooling and simply cannot imagine Indo-European history otherwise (to the extent that quite a few have not even heard of an Indian challenge), and consequently are deaf to or immune against any alternative; or they have vaguely heard that this is a wild conspiracy theory promoted only by Hindu nationalists, which can safely be ignored.

In my paper, I argued that agricultural terminology in Germanic are usually taken to confirm the established picture. Words corresponding with Indo-Iranian terms, hence fully Indo-European, have an agricultural meaning in Germanic, but not in Indo-Iranian (Dutch tarwe/”wheat” but Sanskrit durva, “grass”, apparently the original meaning; or harvest but kṛpāṇi, “sword”, both from a root meaning “cut” but only in Europe specialized to an agricultural setting). The usual reading of this is that in their Russian homeland, the Proto-Indo-Europeans were pastoralists without agriculture, that the Indo-Iranians took this level of culture along with them to Afghanistan and India, while the European branches showed a quick immersion in an agricultural society, attested either by the specialization of Indo-European terms to agricultural meanings, or by borrowing agricultural terms from the Old European natives.

I then revisited a paper from 1979 by Colin Masica, as well as his 1991 standard handbook of Indo-Aryan linguistics, to evaluate his list of Indo-Aryan agricultural, botanical and pastoralist terms. Of these, over 9 % are deduced from Dravidian, mostly because corresponding Dravidian words are attested, sometimes just because they look Dravidian; likewise, over 5% of Munda. Some 24% are from Persian or otherwise foreign, and need not detain us here. Various Indo-Aryan or even Indo-Iranian groups amounts to some 44%, and the rest is unexplained. In fact, quite a few of the other categories are not securely explained either. Now, many of these words look perfectly Indo-Aryan, either because Hindi-speaking mouths have successfully integrated them, or because they simply are. The criterion that a word can only be Indo-European if it occurs in at least two branches, is conventionally assumed but in fact arbitrary. An Indian homeland would almost necessitate that numerous terms for Indian plants were forgotten along with the plants themselves by all non-Indian branches as people left India and never encountered, say, a banyan tree again.

According to Michael Witzel, some 4% of Rg-Vedic terminology is non-Indo-European. That would make the Rg-Veda the purest Indo-European text by far. And even that 4 % is a generous estimate, for the words he lists as borrowed have a disputed origin and some may just be Indo-European. Witzel lists bīja, “seed”, which exists also in Iranian, as borrowed from the purely hypothetical “Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex” language, but Masica opines that it is from Dravidian. As for parṣa, “sheaf”, I learned from another speaker that it is one of the few agricultural terms attested both in India and in Europe (Greek), viz. as part of the name of grain goddess Demeter’s daughter Persephone < perso-g^when- = Skt. parṣa-han-, “sheaf-beater”, i.e. thresher. In Germanic, the number of words deemed loans has been halved in recent decades by identifying cognates in other branches, e.g. swim turns out to have cognates in Baltic and Celtic, though meaning “move” or “hunt”; it is not impossible that such cognates will yet be found for Sankrit too.

But not that there is anything against loans into Sanskrit or Indo-Aryan. Munda was the language of a rice-cultivating society around the mouth of the Ganga, Dravidian that of the Gujarat part of the Harappan area, dimly bordering on the Sankrit speech area (separated by the Rajasthan desert), which moreover was to assimilate many Munda- and Dravidian areas into the expanding Indo-Aryan community. Moreover, South-Indian kings invited Brahmin communities to settle and give Vedic prestige to their dynasties, upon which they integrated Dravidian words into later Sanskrit, e.g. mīṇa, “fish”, or kāṇa, one-eyed. This expansion is attested by well-known historical developments and doesn’t require, let alone prove, an Indo-Aryan invasion from abroad. As for the European branches, they borrowed words but often also gave a new agricultural meaning to general IE words, e.g. Skt. ajra, “empty land” but Latin ager, “field”. But this doesn’t mean that Sanskrit had no agricultural terms, e.g. sītā, “furrow” (from PIE seh, “sow”), kṣetra, “field”.    

Masica considers his findings as incompatible with the Indian tradition of an Indian homeland. We think we have shown otherwise. Of the other arguments, he knew a few but more have been added since: (1) linguistic paleontology: agreed here not to prove a cold homeland or any homeland at all; (2) common developments with Greek, and generally the geographical distribution of the isoglosses, is better explained by an Indian “extreme” homeland than by radiation from the Russian centre; (3) Finno-Ugric has hundreds of Iranian loanwords but imparted no words to Iranian or Indo-Aryan (the seeming exception of Guṅgu, “moon”, can either be a coincidental homonymy, date from an earlier Nostratic period, or was somehow a loan from Indo-Iranian), which is typical for a colonial situation, with Scythian Iranian imparting words and also borrowing some but not communicating them back to the homeland; (4) Mitannic can be shown to belong to the youngest layer of the Ṛg-Veda, so allowing for the language to emigrate and to become a dead substrate of Hurrian (and the similar case of Kassite), the Ṛg-Veda must have been complete by 1800 BC or so; 5) geographical distribution has the homeland typically in a far corner (Amerind superfamily, Bantu/Austronesian family, Turkic group, Arabic/Russian language), not in the centre (IE: Volga), which also is not the zone of greatest diversity, on the contrary; (6) Vedic literature contains a few astronomical passages datable because of the precession (ca. 1° in 71 years), e.g. Kauṣītaki Brāhmaṇa 2300 BC instead of ca. 1000 BC, Vedāṅga Jyotiṣa 1300 BC instead of ca. 400 BC, incompatible with an invasion scenario ca. 1500 BC; (7) kentum substrate in Bangani, India, e.g. dokru instead of expected daśru, “tear”; (8) Vedic and Puranic literature refers several times to emigrations, never to early immigrations, and the Northwest was not venerated as an area of origin; (9) the agricultural terminology proves, contra Masica, to be compatible with an Indian homeland.

 

Skepticism

Hans-Jürgen Bartelt, teaching in Hamburg, analyzed the way the label “interdisciplinary” is misused by scholars, so that linguists hide behind findings supposedly done by archaeologists or vice-versa. Genetics is another mute science with a tremendous promise but hitherto of limited or largely false use in linguistic reconstruction.

Ranko Matasović from Zagreb, Croatia, asked if there are loans in Indo-European from North-Causasian, and after surveying some candidates, he concluded that there weren’t any. If the Proto-Indo-Europeans had been their northern neighbours in their Russian homeland, they should reasonably have taken some loans with them to their respective historical habitats. I conclude that, like with Uralic, the homeland had no point of contact with North Causasian, and therefore was not in the peri-Caspian steppe zone.  

Paul Heggarty from Cambridge analysed linguistic paleontology to extinction. The basic supposition of linguistic paleontology is that from the vocabulary, you can deduce all about a society and its environment. But words can undergo semantic shifts, so that a general word at an unidentifiable moment gets specialized towards a specific technological meaning. As for glottochronology, the calculation of the time at which a certain rate of linguistic change has taken place, it is an outrageous failure. This is shown by the rate of change calculated for languages known from their beginnings onwards, e.g. Portuguese and Italian are calculated to have separated less than 1000 years ago. This was a plea against the old and hazy methods and in favour of modern precision. Applying Bayesian phylogenetics, on the basis of linguistic facts furnished by the linguists themselves, gets better results. Between the Russian and the Anatolian homelands (an Indian homeland is not taken seriously by the researchers, or not even known), it judges strongly in favour of the Anatolian one. Nevertheless, most people present thought, on other linguistic grounds, that Anatolia was definitely not the homeland, among other reasons because the Hittite language spoken there has all the marks of a result of foreign conquest, with a very large substratal element both in the language and in the mythology. Note also that with the new fancy methods, the split between Indian and Iranian is estimated at 2800 BC, a more realistic date than the 1600 BC or so required by the Aryan Invasion Theory.

Robert Mailhammer from Sydney discussed six words for wheeled locomotion, which are as consistently present in all Indo-European branches as the words for relatives or the numbers. We give a Germanic example plus the Sanskrit: wagon/vahati (cart, conduct); rad/ratha (wheel, cart); wheel/cakra; ahs/akṣa (axle); ar/īṣā (pole, rudder); yoke/yuga. It seems that Indo-European had a full vocabulary for wheeled locomotion because this technology had just been developed in the Proto-Indo-European community. Indeed, I deduce that wheeled technology was part of the reason for the successful expansion of Indo-European. This technology gave them as edge over others, and by the time their neighbours had acquired it, the Indo-European language family was already spread from India to Ireland. Colin Renfrew may have been wrong with his Anatolian homeland theory, but he has the merit of explaining the Indo-European expansion: the shift to agriculture gave the population concerned a great demographic edge, and as the people spread, their language spread with them. If we deem Renfrew wrong, we have at least to think of another reason for this success.

Question time after Mailhammer’s lecture became a debate with Heggarty, who, for my taste, went a bit too far in his doubt that a vocabulary can teach us anything at all. Thus, the existence of words for “wheel”, “yoke” and “axle” in Proto-Indo-European does not strictly prove that the Indo-Europeans  had wheeled technology, e.g. the words for “wheel” may simply have meant “turn, revolve”, a type of motion that also exists in the natural world. But in that case, it is unlikely that all branches of later Indo-European would all have adapted the same terms for natural phenomena to name the freshly invented wheel technology. Like most linguists, I believe that in this case, the evidence of the vocabulary is so strong and so consistent as to allow the inference that the cart technology was alive already in the Proto-Indo-European stage.

Joseph Salmons from Wisconsin applied the suppositions of the Indo-Europeanists to the present-day language situation in America. While American English does have words of Amerindian origin (moose, squirrel, skunk), the southern dialects do not have any words specifically from the local Cherokee language, nor the Wisconsin dialects from the local Algonquian (only the Algonquians themselves intersperse their English with some of these). Dialectal American English does have many local formations unknown to any outsiders, even in this audience consisting mostly of linguists. Some of these are variations on English expressions, other are onomatopoeic or of unknown origin. If we already don’t understand the finesses of these local variations on the language in which the workshop was conducted, what are our chances in a language situation thousands of years before its first writing? At any rate, the test of linguistic mechanisms posited for PIE (Grimm’s law, Venner’s law, etc.) is whether they could explain linguistic processes today.

I do not remember who it was that cited a couple of leading linguists as affirming that the homeland must have been a mountainous area with thunderstorms and heat, since Proto-Indo-European had words for “mountain”, “thunder” and “hot”. Well, what could be the homeland where people would never experience thunderstorms or feel hot? Yes, Antarctica might fit the bill (though it inconveniently has a few mountains), and we might all be found willing to scrap Antarctica from the list of possible homelands of Indo-European. For me, the point of this example, or of some names in Mallory’s historical survey, is that this academic discipline has thrown up quite a few people in positions of authority who in seriousness held theories that could not stand the test of common sense.

 

Isoglosses

Hrach Martirosyan, an Armenian working in Leiden, showed that Armenian shared many isoglosses (common linguistic innovations, starting with common new vocabulary) with Greek. These had had to have shared most of the way from the homeland, wherever it lay, to their historical habitats in Armenia and the southeast corner of the Black sea coast, c.q. in the southern Balkans and the Aegean Sea. This pleads against a Pontic (steppe) homeland, as Greek would probably have to go west through the Balkans while Armenian would have to go south through the Caucasus. By contrast, in an Indian homeland scenario, Greek and Armenian (as well as the extinct and little-attested Phrygian) would follow the same route, thus fitting these languages’ isoglosses.

From Adam Hyllested, who spoke about the roots for “carrot”, I retained that unlike all other branches, Slavic had not been searched for substrate words because, as the language of the homeland, it had had no non-Indo-European substrate language. In fact, another explanation is possible: Slavic was preceded by other Indo-European languages who cleared the way and assimilated the substrate populations. Unlike even its Baltic twin, it was not in touch with non-Indo-European. It may have adopted substrate words, but through other Indo-European language, so by definition in common with other branches and hence classed as Indo-European so far. Note also that even in the Russian homeland theory, it was not the language of the homeland: united Slavic had Slovakia or so as its habitat, Central Europe and not the steppes, which for more than a thousand years were the realm of the Iranian-speaking Scythians.  

Lucien van Beek from Leiden showed that while names of grains are either pan-Indo-European or at least common to the European branches, the names for five species of pulses are undeniably borrowed from a substrate layer. Moreover, it turns out that they are cognate in the Greek and Albanian branches, and often also in the other European branches. The borrowing from this Old Balkanic language group sometimes produced doubles, e.g. orobos and erebinthos, “pea” c.q. “chick pea”, borrowed at different times or places from different variants of the native language. The strengthening (as opposed to the denying) prefix a- and the suffix inth- are instances of features regularly appearing in Greek that must stem from this Balkanic language.

Two etymologies he stated drew my attention. Odysseus and his men are at one point locked up by a one-eyed giant, the Cyclops. Folk-etymologically, this means “(he with the) circular eye”, but the speaker quoted Paul Thieme as saying that this Ky-klops came from pku-klop-, “cattle (Latin pecus, German Vieh) thief (cfr. kleptomania, ‘compulsive stealing’)”, the image of violent and lawless raiders that the Old European farmers must have had of the pastoralist intruders. The other is Persephone, Perso-g^when-, “she who beats the sheafs”, which makes a hole in Witzel’s theory that Skt. parṣa, “sheaf”, is a BMAC loan into Indo-Iranian.

Rosemarie Lühr from Berlin was an old-school professor who did not bring a power-point but read her whole lecture quite literally from her paper. Nonetheless, her message put the final nail in the coffin of the “Northwest block” theory. This language, also known as “Belgian”, was a hypothetical Indo-European language spoken in the low countries. Like Phrygian, Anatolian and Tocharian, it died out, i.c. around the time of the Roman conquest. However, it left traces in Germanic, mostly the hard-to-explain words starting with initial p-, such as pool and plough. She argued that within Germanic itself, mechanisms are available to explain these words without having to bring in the uneconomical hypothesis of an extra language. Other linguists agreed but thought that, as far as they were concerned, the theory had already been abandoned.

 

When the Neolithic people talked

Peter Schrijver, who teaches Celtic languages in Utrecht, ended the workshop with a revolutionary paper, exploring the possibility that Sumerian and Hattic, and perhaps even Minoan (linear-A), were dialects of the same language. When you compare classical Sumerian, which was studied for many centuries after its disappearance as a living language ca. 2000 BC, you will find little that resembles Hattic. But when you go to the oldest Sumerian available, many resemblances start to appear. The differences that remain, on the other hand, prove a great time-depth: the original language must have broken up already several thousands of years earlier. This chronology makes it entirely possible that theirs was the language of the Neolithic Revolution, expanding from Syria to southern Mesopotamia (Sumerian), Anatolia (Hattic) and Crete (Minoan), before Semitic and Indo-European took over.

Most participants at the workshop agreed that Colin Renfrew had been wrong with his proposal that Indo-European was spread along with agriculture from an Anatolian homeland. The two developments, agriculturization and Indo-Europeanization, had been separated by at the very least a thousand years, and the Indo-Europeans found an agriculture-based economy ready-made when they entered Europe. But the earlier spread of Hattic-related languages along with agriculture may be a defensible proposal.

 

Conclusion

We concluded with an informal drink. Everyone applauded when Paul Heggarty proposed a toast to William Jones, the founder of Indo-European linguistics. Note that Jones worked as a judge in Kolkata at the time, in the far corner of the Indo-European expansion zone, east even of a putative Indian homeland in the western Ganga basin. In India, many know of his depiction on a frieze displayed in Oxford Chapel, where he is seen taking notes while being fed information by native informers. Without the tradition of Sanskrit learning, his scholarship might not have been that rich, and he might have missed his breakthrough to the recognition of a kinship between the languages now known as Indo-European.

Unlike at most conferences I have attended, all the papers read here were interesting to most participants, and certainly to me. They came not only to rattle off their own findings, but to listen and learn. In spite of what I hear in India, where comparative-historical linguistics is lambasted as a “pseudo-science” dealing in “ghost languages”, this discipline is really making progress.

Except for myself, everyone present seemed to believe the Russian (or at any rate a non-Indian) homeland theory. Yet some of their findings strengthened the case for an Indian homeland.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Vikas Swarup

 

In the framework of Europalia India, a string of institutions including my Alma Mater, the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, hosts a series of exhibitions, performances, films showings, conferences and lectures. Last Tuesday and Wednesday, Tehelka editor Tarun Tejpal was to speak in Brussels and Leuven, but he didn't show up, being detained in a sex scandal. The next day, on Thursday 21 November 2013, the speaker in Leuven was Vikas Swarup, philosopher-psychologist by diploma and diplomat by profession, but best known as the writer of the novel Q&A. This book was first published in Dutch translation in 2004, well before the English original came out. Unfortunately, I had (or made) no time to read his novel, until I saw its filmed version, Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire directed by Danny Boyle.

 

The Accidental Apprentice

He mainly talked about two more recent novels, for which he also has film contracts now. The Accidental Appentice is about a talented girl forced to work as a salesgirl, who gets a surprising offer from a rich businessman: he wants her to become the CEO of his empire, on condition that she can pass the seven tests of life. Like Q&A, it is a fast-paced social thriller, but this time about the lower middle class rather than the real poor.

To a question about forced marriage, involved in one of the tests, he clarifies that unlike arranged marriage, really forced marriages are relatively rare in India. Either way, love does not enjoy much respect. The institution of arranged marriage goes hand in hand with the caste system: if you let youngsters choose for themselves, their hormones or their emotions will rarely dictate a choice of partner from among the same caste. But as modernization spreads, such customs as having your partner chosen by your parents are gradually falling by the wayside. But then, in a country of 1,2 billion, there are still cases, as there are of child labour and other abuses.

Corruption? Yes, corruption exists. But in 2005, a very far-reaching law was passed, the Right to Information Act. Every law or decree and every government contract or contract bidding has to be published on the internet. You can go to court if you see information according to which you should be given the contract.

Involuntary donations of organs? The donor can only be a family member, according to the law. But there is a loophole: the altruist donor, the friend of the family, and it is surprising how fast an altruist donor can appear once money is involved. So, the main problem is commercialized voluntary donation, though a few cases of involuntary donation cannot be ruled out.

In the book, one character, Nirmala Behn, is inspired by Anna Hazare, a Gandhian crusader. He sat on a fast for the Lokpal (ombudsman) Bill and gathered a lot of popular support. But many people considered it blackmail of an elected legislative body by an unelected activist.  People supported his cause, not his methods. If you die by fasting unto death, you are, in fact, contravening the anti-suicide law. We have to take the anti-corruption cause to the level where it can really make a difference. Therefore, Hazare’s companion Arvind Kejriwal floated his own political party.

Reality shows and abuse of young women who want to be stars?. Reality TV has taken over India. Everyone fancies himself as a superstar. In my hometown of Allahabad, 2 teenage girls from a village wanted me to introduce them to Danny Boyle. What are your credentials? In the past, fame was a by-product of talent, now fame is sought for its own sake. Singers go up in price once they have appeared on television. Yes,O reality shows are more influential than in Europe. India is a nation of wannabes.

 

The Six Suspects

Another novel is called The Six Suspects. Viki Rai, son of the UP Chief Minister, is a criminal. He drives six people to death in an accident, but when the case goes on trial, his father buys off the witnesses. A second crime goes on trial, but the only witness dies before the court can hear testimony. In a third trial, the case drags on for 7 years, the witnesses renege, and Viki is let off again. (It goes without saying that real-life politics offers ample precedent for these mistrials.) He celebrates the acquittal in a big way. At midnight the lights briefly go out, and when they  switch on again, Viki is found to have been shot.

Six people turn out to have a gun on them and are treated as suspects. Four of them are regular Indians, though with a peculiar individual story. One of them has Indian citizenship, but is a freshly arrived tribal from the Andaman islands – from the Stone Age to the modern world with its disco parties and its guns. And one is a traveller from Texas (where nearly everyone has a gun), a disappointed collector of a mail-order bride, for whom the photograph of an actress was used, the same one who happens to be one of his fellow suspects. So, a promising plot.

 

Slumdog Millionaire

Well, anyway, what followed was question time. I asked Vikas Swarup whether he was disappointed or otherwise not so happy with the changes Danny Boyle had made while turning the novel Q&A into the movie Slumdog Millionaire. He acknowledged that changes had been made. Upon signing the contract, the representative of the movie crew had promised him that “the soul of the novel” would be respected, a sure way of saying that its body would be distorted. But he took this as normal and fairly insignificant. In reality, the changes were highly consequential and significant for Boyle’s agenda and perhaps for what western audiences have come to expect from a film located in India.

He explained how he had named the protagonist Ram Mohammed Thomas, representing every street kid in India, while Boyle had changed this into Jamal Malik, a fully Muslim name. He communalized the plot, with Jamal’s mother being killed by Hindu communal rioters and a Rama impersonation presiding over the violence. Boyle turned the protagonist into a poor hapless Muslim and the Hindus into the bad guys. In this context, blinding a child-beggar to make him earn more by singing a Hindu religious song (a practice of which even the missionary sister Jeanne Devos says she has never come across an actual case during decades of social work in Mumbai), and of course not a Muslim song, adds to the image of Hinduism as gruesome. Briefly, he turned an innocent story into an anti-Hindu story.

The fact that the writer, as a somewhat secularized Hindu, representative for dozens or even hundreds of millions of similar Hindus, fails to see the hostile intention and the very partisan effect of this manipulation, says a lot about the silly and ultimately suicidal mentality prevalent among Hindus. Only a community of sleepwalkers could willingly come to the humiliating situation of the Hindus in India and the flood of anti-Hindu slander in the media.

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The Hindu Republic of Nepal?

 

“Upcoming elections in Nepal. The rule of law for a democratic and peaceful process”: on 13 November 2013, the Brussels-based European Institute for Asian Studies held a conference to prepare us for the second elections for a Constituent Assembly in Nepal. In 2008, the Nepalese people had already elected a first Constituent Assembly, but it did not succeed in working out a Constitution acceptable to the required majority of its members. After five years, the Supreme Court demanded its dissolution and subjection to a renewed popular vote. So, on 19 November, the citizenry of Nepal gets another shot at creating a successful Constituent Assembly.

The conference was chaired by the EIAS’s vice-chairman Dick Gupwell, and featured a number of human rights-minded Eurocrats. However, all eyes were on Ms. Mandira Sharma of the Advocacy Forum (AF) of Nepal, who has worked for democracy in Nepal for decades, and should at last be approaching her goal. She described the political situation in her country, dominated by two major political parties, the Maoists and the Congress. A fringe group splintered off from the Maoists calls on the voters to boycott the upcoming elections and even promised to sabotage them by using violence.

In 1959, Parliamentary democracy was briefly tried, but called off after a year. Instead came Panchayati Raj, rule by the village councils. This sounded like a good indigenous alternative to “Western” democracy, but in fact it had the same flaws as the Parliamentary system. The village councils elected a single person to the district council, which then elected a single person to the national level, so contact with the grassroots was lost, and effectively, the autocratic king could do as he pleased. However, the aura of the king Birendra as a supposed incarnation of Vishnu was shattered when his son Dipendra killed the whole royal family during a dinner party in 2001. His brother Gyanendra tried to revive autocratic rule, but untimately had to hand over power to the politicians including the Maoists.

The major problem, according to the Nepalese people, is not famines or defective infrastructure. It is not any problem that can be solved by a policy, but is the lack of trustworthy and competent politicians. The incapability of reaching a consensus about a Constitution is but symptomatic for the fissiparous mentality among the political class. Then there is the corruption, a familiar problem to Indians, with convicted criminals as election candidates. The AF lays a special stress on cleaning the election process by eliminating these rotten apples. Specific for the Nepalese situation are the veterans of the guerrilla struggle with a record of human rights violations. The Maoists want immunity for them, i.e. impunity for the crimes they have committed in the service of the “people’s war”.

Maoist leader and former Prime Minister Prachanda (Pushpa Kamal Dahal, r.2008-09) declared during the armed struggle: “I hate revisionists”, i.e. non-revolutionary Marxists, who have “strayed” from the revolutionary path. Yet it seems that he has no qualms with having become a revisionist himself. He agrees that multi-party elections are the only viable way for Nepal.

 None of the speakers at the conference mentioned religion, eventhough this had been a central issue during the political take-over. Until 2008, Nepal welcomed visitors to “the only Hindu Kingdom in the world”. The Hindu state religion was abolished along with the monarchy.

When I enquired about religion, I was told that it is not much of an issue anymore. It may seem like that to campaigners focused on corruption and democratic institutions. Or those who engineered the removal of Hinduism from its official position may have had an interest in making uninformed Westerners believe that it was no longer an issue. At any rate, for the powers behind this conference, it seemed to be very important, as there is more here than meets the eye. Of the 8 organizing NGO’s in the Nepal Dialogue Forum for Peace and Human Rights, 3 are already recognizable as missionary outfits by their very name, while two others may have the same agenda and at any rate have names that knowledgeable people will immediately recognize as anti-Hindu. Thus, “Adivasi Coordination Germany” contains the tell-tale word Adivasi, “Aboriginal”. This term was coined in the British colonial period as a pseudo-indigenous term conveying that the tribal populations are “aboriginal” – and hence the non-tribals are not. This is an utterly dishonest projection of the American situation, with Amerindian “natives” and European settlers, onto South Asia; and much beloved of Maoists and missionaries. The dreamy people attracted to human rights campaigns wouldn’t know the real agenda of those who smuggle such words into the discourse, and can safely be employed as useful idiots. Another word the anti-Hindu forces like to propagate, and that is not so innocent in their mouths, is that they want Nepal to be a “secular” democracy.

According to a poll in 2011, 63% of the Nepalese people were in favour of a “Hindu democracy”, 34% wanted a “secular democracy”. (Insights South Asia. Nepal Survey 2011 Results, SADP/Gallup, presented by one of the speakers) That is a very clear majority in favour of a Hindu democracy. If Nepal is going to be a democracy, the first test will be whether it will get its democratically desired Hindu state.

I bet it won’t, because the Nepali Hindus are not organized as such, while their enemies are. And if at all the Hindu opposition proves insurmountable, it will be bought off with a token concession, since its leaders (if they come forward at all) do not know the difference between mere words and tangible power. For decades they have sleepwalked into this situation, and there is no sign that they have awoken yet. Ms. Sharma informed us that one political party “wants the King back”. The monarchy cannot and should not be saved; it was all along a big mistake to tie Hinduism to the person of the King, and even to venerate him as an incarnation of Vishnu. There was no movement thinking through a viable Hindu alternative to this feudal hold-over, and there still isn’t one.

Like in the case of the California textbooks case (2005-09), I will get some hate-mail from Hindu activists for daring to state the fact of the massive Hindu defeat in Nepal. They insist on fooling themselves that they are going from victory to victory, when in fact they have been stumbling from defeat to ignominious defeat. If ever you hope to score a victory, the first  thing to do is to acknowledge your shortcomings, the defects on which you have to improve.

The one consolation is that Hinduism is still present within the dominant parties. Also, a religion promoted by the state will become weak, as witnessed by the state of Hinduism after centuries of royal patronage. So, it may revive its inner strength during the coming long years of non-Hindu rule. 

(14 November 2013, published in Centre Right India and in Hindu Human Rights)

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The Aryan debate: isoglosses, asymmetrical expansion

On the cybalist@yahoogroups.com, 8 November 2013, I answered some objections:

 

Talageri's chronology of the Rg-Veda is based on Oldenberg and other Western scholars, as he himself explains and specifies whenever the issue comes up. But for that, it is necessary to read his book, not a review. That e.g. book 6 is older than book 3 may not be universally acknowledged, but that the family books predate the others is a widely shared opinion, which I learned in university in the eighties, from AIT believing-professors and before the Aryan question became an issue again. And in this scheme, the elephant is mentioned before the Afghan animals, of whom the camel is only one.

Colin Masica's contribution to Aryan + non-Arya (1979) contains a claim that ushtra meant Buffalo in Vedic and camel only in the MBh. That is certainly disputed, but let's assume he is right. In that case, he proves the same thing as Talageri: an Indian animal early, an Afghan animal late. So, for what it is worth, the movement suggested is India to Afghanistan, not the reverse.

There is no funnel theory of the isoglosses in Talageri. HH Hock projects this approach onto Talageri, and then sets out to refute it. Talageri has most of the IE languages take shape after leaving India. He  should not have tried to put this process on a map, as we really don't know,-- though in that respect he does no worse than the many scholars who have attempted similar scheme elsewhere on the map, such as the much-quoted C Carpelan + A Parpola's situating the whole genealogy of both the Uralic and the IE families on the map of the Wolga area. He also underestimates the substratal influence of the native European languages in making the incoming IE dialects quickly grow apart into different languages. But otherwise, his treatment of the isoglosses is fine, and solves questions which the many existing genealogies of the IE language groups and their account of the isoglosses have failed to do.

Meanwhile, observation among Indo-European linguists teaches that while those competent to defend the OIT can be counted on one hand, those capable of defending the AIT are, in spite of massive institutional support, not much more numerous. Precisely because the AIT is the established theory, students are spoonfed the AIT framework without questioning it. In their later work, they all just assume the AIT and its concomitant chronology without, for that, being capable of refuting alternative frameworks. Thus, many cite the centrality of the steppe Urheimat within the IE expansion area as an argument in favour; whereas even a layman can see that the application of this same principle would make Panama or so the homeland of Amerind, Zambia or so the homeland of Bantu, Turkmenistan the homeland of Turkic, mid-Siberia the homeland of Russian, Libya the homeland of Arabic, etc.

One German professor who tried to argue this point, said that Austronesian (which is deemed to have originated in its northern corner, viz. Fujian/Taiwan, and not at all in its centre) was given this homeland following the criterion of greatest diversity, which should be greater near the homeland. Fine. But the Wolga region is by no means the area of greatest diversity. For a millennium or so, the only IE language spoken there, for thousands of miles at a stretch, was Scythian Iranian. Later, just as lonely, it became Russian. Areas of far greater diversity are any areas where two IE language families border each other, and especially the Balkans, meeting-place of Slavic, Germanic, Romance, Albanian, Greek and Indo-Aryan (Romany). Secondly, the southward expansion of Austronesian contrasting with the total absence of a northward expansion (which the professor attributed to the presence of the strong Chinese) illustrates my point, viz. that the factors determining the direction of expansion and constraining it, may be of many kinds, but are rarely geographically symmetrical. That is why Bantu expanded southeastwards from the West-African Sahel, into areas fit for agriculture and animal husbandry, and not northward into the Sahara. And that is why it was perfectly possible for the Indo-Europeans to expand from NW India all the way to the Atlantic coast, rather than symmetrically in both directions from the Wolga area.

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Drugs and yoga

 

 

(written in July 2013, published on 7 November 2013 in Bharat-Bharati))

 

A meeting with like-minded people

 

Very recently, I met several yoga initiates who told me of their experiences with ayahuasca, a “plant teacher” which they regularly took. For me, this was a blast from the past. Thirty or more years ago, I have taken LSD trips about a dozen times and two mescaline trips. Like a few friends, but unlike most contemporaries, I saw these psychedelics as a spiritual way rather than as a form of recreation. Nowadays, the accepted term would be “Shamanism”, a Siberian-cum-Amerindian tradition involving vision quests and journeys in the spirit world.  

Like many of my then friends, I quit the scene by age 25. By now, age 53, I was so completely out of it that I didn’t even think to myself of mind-altering substances as the explanation for a few strange things I saw about the people concerned. It was to my surprise that I heard the true story. Since one of them has wondered in my presence whether to keep on combining regular ayahuasca use with daily yoga practice, I have given the matter some thought.

Let me clarify first of all that I am not inclined to moralize about this. Those people and their motives are so recognizable to me. I am one of them, thirty years down the line. I also need not go into the medical drawbacks of drug use: these are together people who are in no direct danger of suffering the irritability or worse that I have seen in some users. Nonetheless, I am already showing my hand by adding that if I had remained in this scene, I would never have achieved what I have achieved now.

One reason why this revelation surprised me, is that by now I had become firmly convinced of the power of yoga to make these shortcuts to some kind of zero experience unnecessary. From Woodstock on down, numerous people have abandoned the drug scene upon initiation into yoga. As a yoga adept was introducing hippies at Woodstock to yoga, he explained: “Now the drugs do it for you. Then, you do it yourself.” On the other hand, I have to admit – and remember only too well – that there is a grey area of being attracted to both alternatives. When I was first initiated into Kriya Yoga by Swami Hariharananda and his Dutch assistant in Amsterdam, more than thirty years ago, I was actually in Amsterdam to buy drugs. I saw the poster announcing the initiation, went there quite unprepared, and my life changed profoundly. It still took a few years before I had quit the drug scene altogether, though. I also learned that the Swami had picked up his Dutch assistant, who by then had become an accomplished yogi, from the Indian gutter where he had landed as a drug addict. Once you discover yoga, it mostly means you choose the exit from the artificial paradise of mind-altering substances.

 

Patanjali’s definition

 

As Patañjali’s classical definition says: yogaścittavṛttinirodhaḥ, “yoga is the cessation of the motions of the mind”. It is as simple as that. By contrast, the complicated visions and sensations unleashed by psychedelic drugs are, as much as our everyday experiences, cases of “motions of the mind”. Yoga is not about visions and sensations, but about mental silence and peace.

Maybe that doesn’t sound very adventurous. Drug-taking is only rarely done to “escape from reality”, as the bourgeoisie thinks. It is mostly done out of adventurousness, because everyday life is rather boring while spirit journeys challenge your attention. Also, there is a curiousness for the world beyond that the “plant teacher” is revealing to you, a warm enthusiasm. So, the abstract proposition that instead you could opt for a way to silence and peace might seem dull by comparison. But this changes radically when you meet accomplished yogis, like Swami X and Swami Y [names withheld as I don’t want to associate respected people with my controversial self], who led the retreat where I met the people concerned. There you find and feel that nothing compares with yogic bliss.

Yoga is a way of turning inward. The sensations given by ayahuasca are not an external affair, one that can be seen by outsiders. This might give the impression that it is comparable to yoga. But by yogic standards, these “inner” sensations detract as much from pure consciousness as any outward experience would. Whether you are adventuring outdoors or sitting in your armchair enjoying the effects of ayahuasca, in both cases your mind is preoccupied with the sensations you encounter, not with the Self.

 

Shamanism and Yoga

 

But am I not being insulting to the Shamans and the spiritual traditions of their peoples? Many communities know of no higher state than that achieved with the help of “plant teachers”. For many thousands of years, varieties of Shamanism were the main religion of mankind. In China, the revival of openly practised religion is bringing to the fore Shamanic practices at the popular level, like people becoming channels for ghosts during exuberant public festivals. Daoism is in fact an evolved form of Shamanism; when a Daoist priest is ordained, he is given a list of spirits that he is empowered to command.

In India too, popular  religion still has many elements of Shamanism, such as ecstatic dancing. The Paraias (in English usually spelt Pariahs, the proverbial untouchables) are a community of drum-makers and drummers. They use the archetypal Shamanic instrument, nicknamed “the Shaman’s horse” because it is their vehicle on journeys in the spirit world, to whip themselves into a Shamanic trance. In that state, they are consulted for predicting the future. This penchant for the paranormal is still in evidence in a low-caste Indian community which we are all familiar with: the Gypsies, whose women are known as fortune tellers.

In recent centuries, purity-conscious Brahmins used to keep these Shamans at a distance (and vice-versa) because these were deemed to carry the world of the dead with them, with which they were known to communicate. However, at a longer distance in time they were some kind of Shamans themselves. The ninth book of the Ṛg-Veda is devoted to soma, “pressed juice”, the product of an uncertainly identified plant. The most popular theory identifies it as ephedra (whence ephedrine, a type of amphetamine or “speed”), but we are not sure at all.  Some modern moralistic Hindus deny that soma was a plant at all, they say the word soma referred to a yogic state. Others say it was the fluid state of a metal during the fiery stage of metallurgy. I am aware of these theories but till now, the “plant teacher” explanation is the most common and consistent by far. The juice is described as conferring a state of great clarity, incidentally also a property ascribed to ayahuasca, said to make its users “see through” situations and other people. Since man wanted to sacrifice to the gods the very best he had, soma was among the goods thrown into the fire in order to “feed the gods”; Indra is said to be a great consumer of soma.

So, with a little exaggeration: before the Brahmins, heirs of the Vedic seers, became dry scholars, they were tripping poets getting high on soma juice and composing drinking carols now known as Vedic hymns. A remnant of it is what I witnessed when I stayed at Banaras Hindu University during the Night of Shiva (Śivarātrī, an annual festival): very scholarly professors getting high on bhaṅg, a cannabis brew. Another remnant is perhaps in evidence in Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra: whereas the Buddha lists truth, non-violence, non-stealing, chastity and non-intoxication as his five basic rules (pañca-sīla), Patañjali’s list of five basic rules (pañca-yama) is identical except that it replaces non-intoxication with non-covetousness. Apparently Patañjali didn’t want to go as far as to categorically forbid intoxicants. He also admitted that taking drugs is one of the ways to attain siddhis, “achievements”, i.e. special powers. Especially clairvoyance is said to be an effect of the mental state conferred by plant teachers. But then, these siddhis only detract from the real goal of yoga.

Till today, you can see some Sadhus smoking their chillums full of marihuana. But rather than taking them as role-models, you should be aware that they only exemplify the freedom which Hinduism grants to its followers. These men can do their thing, but they are of low rank in the natural hierarchy. Gurus who intoxicate themselves with alcohol or drugs are not taken seriously. It is a bit like consuming meat: the majority of Hindus do eat meat, but they venerate vegetarians and rank them as more virtuous. So, even those who cannot do without their chillum, do realize that their intoxication is only a phase, and that they still have a long way to go.

 

An evolutionary view of yoga

 

As we have been taught, according to Mircea Eliade, yoga is an evolute of Shamanism. I am aware that among many Hindus, this view will not go down very well; nor among modern Westerners. Hindus will object that yoga is eternal, that the Vedic hymns were an expression of a yogic state, and that it is blasphemous to derive yoga from anything else. Westerners, who recently have been taught to approach every subject with the dogma of equality, will object that this evolutionary view establishes an inequality: Shamanism is the childhood stage, yoga the next, more mature stage. Still, I stand by it.

The ordinary people in India are the same as the people everywhere else, but the tradition to which they are exposed is – dare I use the word? – superior. The difference is that they know they have the example of liberated masters living in their midst. For them, venerable beings are not just talked about in sacred books, they are alive and nearby. The people may not practise yoga themselves but they know they can turn to yogis, who radiate the fruits of their meditation to their surroundings. It simply feels very good to be in their company once in a while. India is not so great in some respects, but at least it has this cardinal virtue: whereas people in most places are like orphans left alone, ordinary Hindus are like children playing in the park while their mother is watching.

Hindus like to boast that the evolutionary theory is already present in the series of Viṣṇu’s incarnations: fish, tortoise, boar, man-lion, then a dwarf starting the sequence of human beings. We see in this system that lower animal species are followed by higher animal species (fish, reptile, mammal), then half-men and then full men. So, they should make no problem in applying the evolutionary model to their own tradition. It has been found that some motifs of the yoga tradition are already known in other, even reputedly “primitive” cultures. Thus, the practice of meditation was also known among the Greek Stoics, who sat every morning for “staying in the present” (i.e. preventing the mind from wandering to memories of past experiences and plans for the future). The concept of kuṇḍalinī, an energy working its way up the spine, is also applied in Chinese energy-work (qigong), where the “microcosmic orbit” (xiaozhoutian) is practised: the energy is led by the breath/attention upwards along he spine, then downwards again. But even among the distant cultures of the San (Bushmen) and the Australian Aborigines, the awareness of the rise of heat in the spine is known.  So, whatever its precise history in India, kuṇḍalinī yoga is only a mature form, developed in India, of a reality intuited among a number of divergent peoples. It is a knowledge that, once developed, people in all countries can profit from.

Similarly, the yogic value of non-violence has an interesting prehistory. When eating animals was abolished, sacrificing animals was eliminated with it. But earlier, when animals were indeed sacrificed, explanations were constructed why this was not really slaughter, why it was better for an animal to be sacrificed rather than just eaten. While some violence was deemed necessary to bring the proper sacrifices to the gods, the priests were at the same time embarrassed to inflict this violence on the sacrificial animal. This was but the Indian form of a phenomenon also witnessed among the Amerindians and other Shamanic cultures: hunters begging forgiveness from their prey for killing and eating it. So, Hinduism shares a certain inspiration and outlook with the Shamanic cultures, but it has taken this a step further: while other cultures still kill and eat animals eventhough they say sorry, Indians (or at least some norm-setting classes of Hindus)  have abolished animal-killing altogether and taken to vegetarianism. Admittedly, India was helped by its climate, which allows for eating vegetables all year long, whereas natives of Canada or Siberia in their cold climate have had to await modern times to acquaint themselves with the vegetarian alternative. Even in this respect, I would venture to utter the S-word: India’s climate is superior.

So, India has started with a Shamanic culture, preserved much of it, but has gone beyond it in some respects. This way, experts on the inner life went from “making spirit journeys” to meditating. They went from drug-induced altered states to mental stillness. From Shamanism to yoga.

Liberal Westerners will hold it against you if you dare to see an inequality between Shamanism and the yoga system. They cherish this new dogma that all worldviews are equal. And they can get nasty when you posit an inequality between two worldviews. Well, no matter, for the inequality is real. Children do not go from primary to secondary school  because they feel like trying something different, but because, in their natural urge to expand and learn, they understand that secondary school is more advanced. So also, methodically developing peace of mind is more advanced than conversing with spirits.

 

Conclusion

 

In our post-Christian society, it was perhaps inevitable that people went back to pre-Christian cultures to explore Shamanism. It is also a pleasant break from humdrum existence to have a vision quest, go to a sweat-lodge, dance sky-clad in the forest under the full moon, spend the night lying in your own grave, and indeed take ayahuasca. But now we have to move on.

Ken Kesey, the writer of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as well as an LSD pioneer, was arrested after the state of California outlawed the use of LSD. According to Tom Wolfe, who wrote a book about Kesey’s exploits (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test), he was allowed to shorten his incarceration in exchange for giving a speech on TV explaining to his followers why the LSD experiment had lasted long enough. He said that LSD had functioned as a door, an exit from the highly conditioned existence in bourgeois society. But once you have opened the door, you don’t stay there to play with it. You go in. And so, he told his audience, it is time to leave the door behind, to throw away the ladder that brought us up, and to go beyond. 

Well, if he didn’t say that, at least he should have said it. I am at any rate willing to repeat it. To the people concerned, my message would be: I love you, I even understand you, but you would be wise to move on. Especially now that you have such a promising alternative.

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