Namaste !
This post brings reporting and commenting on our meetings up to date. We have met three times since the last reported meeting of December 14, 2008. Gita and Hinduism Group met on December 21 and 28 and the Upanishads Study Group met on December 26.
We have had quite a lively discussion in each meeting and we handled very trying issues with many insights offered. I will highlight one point from each hour of discussion. We had six hours of meeting, so it comes to six points of discussion. I will briefly point out the issue in each and then advance the discussion by my commentary.
This is the second post of its type: highlighting and commenting on the proceedings of the two groups' meetings. I will be happy to receive any responses, positive and negative, but preferably supported by some reasoning. You can either post your comment on the blog or email me at rpatel45324@yahoo.com.
This may become heavy reading at points. Read on, if you want to challenge yourself intellectually. Better yet, initiate a discussion by saying where and why you disagree.
GITA AND HINDUISM GROUP MEETING OF SUNDAY, DECEMBER 21, 2008
1. Who is Dhata?
In chapter 10, verse 33d Shri-krishna says he is the omni-faced or omni-facing dhata. Last time around we saw him saying in the same verse that he was dvandva among compounds. That is typical of chapter 10 narration of special manifestations or vibhutis of Krishna. A part of common experience embodying a group of entities is pointed to and the outstanding among the group is said to be Krishna's vibhuti. But in some cases, such as the present one, since there is no group where group members can be compared, something that stands out in our experience in general is pointed out as a vibhuti.
For example, in the present verse Krishna says I am inexhaustible time. Since time stands out in our expereince in general as a unique entity, there is no comparison of it with any thing else of its kind. In the same way, Krishna says he is dhata who faces all directions. The question is who or what is dhata.
Dhata or Vidhata is readily understood by most Hindus as the creator God Brahma or his energy Sarasvati or a form of Brahma who visits every newborn on the sixth day after birth to write on the forehead of the baby his or her prarabdha or destiny.
Recall that prarabdha is that portion of anyone's accummulated karma at death that gives one the next body to start another life. This portion of karma has to be gone through and it cannot be avoided, even by liberated sages or self-realized souls. So, obviously there is only one dhata who functions as the writer of destiny who faces all directions and seeks out anyone and everyone who is born anywhere and writes the destiny on his or her forehead.
It is important to keep in mind that dhata does not decide anyone's destiny. Everyone kind of asks for the destiny depending on what kinds of action or karma one has performed previously. Dhata knows it all because he is omni-facing and then records it on the forehead.
Knowing that dhata is Brahma or God in his creative function, one needs to think of his traditional form. The Hindu tradition regards Brahma as having four faces, facing all the four directions and constantly reciting the four Vedas, one from each mouth. So, in this sense too dhata is omni-facing.
A third meaning of dhata would take us to the Vedic texts themselves. Such as the Isha Upanishad, which is actually the last chapter of the Yajur-veda. It says that God places everything is its proper place. In other words God makes orderly cosmos out of what would otherwise be a chaotic universe. Everything is what it is because God or dhata has placed it where it belongs, giving it the form and function it is supposed to have. Mountains are mountains, rivers are rivers, ocean is ocean and so forth, because the world has an order which is given to it by dhata or the creative function of God.
You may ask which, out of these three, is the right meaning of the word dhata? Any or all. Take the five verses of the Gita, from 23 to 27 in chapter 17. There Krishna says that the highest reality called Brahman is indicated in no less than three different ways called OM, TAT and SAT. He goes on to say that while OM and TAT are used in one sense each, SAT is used in five meanings and he lists all the five.
Texts having multiple meanings is not at all unusual in Hinduism. So, it is not appropriate to get hung up on the idea that there should be only one correct meaning of any text. Some think that going for a single meaning makes for simplicity. Hinduism has always been complex and has hardly sought simplistic answers to hard problems of life except by way of temporary reaction to excessive complexity..
2. Premature Renunciation
Section VI of my book Philosophy of the Gita toward the end talks about scholastic Vedanta's ascetic attitude of minimizing the value of this life and world. It even makes a provocative statement that this attitude could even have cheered Arjuna in his initial phase of vairagya or dispassion which hits him hard in the first chapter of the Gita.
If Arjuna had an ordinary charioteer rather than God Himself, scholastic Vedanta which deprecates samsara or the social world and applauds vairagya would have encouraged Arjuna to quit the vasanas or attractions of the world and become a renunciate, celibate monk wandering around living on alms (pari-vrajaka parma-hamsa sannyasin).
At this point Krishnakantbhai disagreed and pointed out many texts and examples of sages who would not recommend premature renunciation. This is good and valid as well as important to point out.
From the viewpoint of householders and the sages who laid down the duties of householders while being householders themselves, a person is presented a choice at the time of his graduation from the student stage. He (there was not much of a she here, unfortunately) can either become a householder or, if he had strong spiritual will, can enter the renunciate stage of celibacy and full-time dedication to spirituality either of bhakti or devotion type or of jnana or knowledge type.
Once a householder, however, a person is not encouraged to run from his responsibilities to his family, relatives and community to embrace renunciation, especially in a huff of emotion when struck by a depressing event like death in the family (shmashana-vairagya).
But Hinduism does not end here. In fact, under the influence of Buddhism and Jainism which successfully (especially Buddhism under Ashoka) vied for royal patronage for nearly fifteen centuries from the Buddha and Mahavira to Shankaracharya, renunciation became highly respectable and got so much in vogue that parents took pride in offering their young children to monastic orders. Shankaracharya established four large monasteries where renunciates would set an example to the householders on what spiritual dedication can bring to life.
Actually, Hindus generally still deeply revere renunciate gurus and swamis and instinctively admire their courage in giving up everything for spritual end. Vedanta through and after Shankara produced, at the intellectual level, the commentaries and sub-commentaries on the Brahma-sutra and, at the social level, put the renunciates on a pedestal more to admire and respect them than to really follow them in their example or precepts. Hinduism is not alone in this sort of an outcome.
In this atmosphere it came into vogue to denounce even important duties toward one's wife and children as vasana or just physical attraction. Making enough money to care for one's dependents was also often called vasana. A comparable example in Christianity is Jesus who asked a rich seeker to give away his wealth and family ties and just follow him. Albert Schwitzer called this the typical Indian "life-negating attitude" brought on by high fever of asceticism. It even struck Mahatma Gandhi deeply though he never formally renounced the samsara.
Contemporary Hindu writers have generally reacted negatively and defensively to the charge of life-negating attitude of Indians observed by Westerners. Broadly, they pointed out India's past when life was affirmed and celebrated. But that was the case during the Vedic times when good life in this world and beyond was sought after in the tradition of huge sacrifices of great social and political significance.
But scholastic Vedanta loudly rejected this by calling it mere karma-kanda at the social level and vasana at the individual level. When kings like Bhartri-hari and Gopichand, let alone Buddha and Mahavira, renounced, their act was endlessly and loudly praised, regardless of who they left behind and in what condition as a result of their deserting their wives and family.
Hence my remark in the book that scholastic Vedanta whose essence it is to achieve moksha at the cost of other three positive ends of life (kama, artha and dharma) would have cheered and encouraged Arjuna's desire to quit the world but for God who asked him rather to turn inwardly to the spiritual and retain a foot in this life by disinterested action.
Scholastic Vedanta would retort, however, asking why would one waste time or struggle to keep one foot in samsara which is mithya or unreal (Shankaracharya) or tuchchha or trivial (other bhakti type scholastic acharyas) after all. Renunciates even started to denounce intellectual and scholastic Vedantins as shushka vedantins and continue to call them names like being bookish, merely conceptual, just paying lip service, etc. They have to pay lip service to householders themselves and they do it just enough to secure their patronatge but they mince no words still in calling all worldly aspects as infected by vasana. But, not wanting to rock the boat that keeps them afloat, they surreptitiously grant some worldly duties or dharma to their clients and allow them a good measure of artha but very little of kama.
Isn't this being too harsh on the highly revered asceticism in Hindu tradition? As Krishnakantbhai pointed out so well, there are many examples where premature renunciation was discouraged by householder sages. Compared to the enormous litrature adulating formal asceticism, there are only scant and short references to when a decision to renounce is to be regarded premature.
There is hardly any discussion of the terrible plight of women, children and ailing senior parents left behind on the footprints of men who renounced to pursue their own moksha or enlightenment. Yes, some of them returned to do the voluntarily work of guiding us common folks. Cynics would say they came back to recruit more of their type and wreck even more havoc on the society overall.
A story of the Buddha is in order. A young woman approached the Buddha as he, in his monk's robes, was making his daily round for alms. The woman asked the Buddha to allow her to enter his sangha or monastery so that she could reach nirvana or enlightenment.
The Buddha asked if she had any debts to pay off. She was a prostitute, she responded, adding that she only had an ailing mother that she nursed at home. The Buddha thereupon asked her not to renounce until her mother was provided for and permitted her to take the step.
Too bad the Buddhists did not follow this simple rule of the Buddha and started recruiting even youngsters innocent of what was happening. Later, Maha-yana Buddhism and its monasteries became so corrupt that conservative old-style Buddhists like Rahul Sanskrityayana have openly declared Buddhist corruption as the cause of Buddhism's discrediting and demise in India. Of course Hindus think Buddhism was driven out of India by Shankaracharya.
In this context it should be mentioned that the sages who wrote the smritis and dharma-shastras piled rules upon rules with no explanation of the rationale for the rules. So, we are left to make wild guesses as to the reasons, social, economic, political or cultural and religious, for any given rule. Being full of reverence for the sages fundamentalist Hindus ask all to follow all rules without question. Reformists want us to throw all of them out for they in their view made us slaves for the last few hundreds of years.
I am for the moderate middle path where we do not throw the baby away with dirty water but clean up the baby. More particularly, here we examine all the rules, keep the samanya or universal ones and revise the vishesha or specific ones as necessary. More of this approach is explained in the section 4 of my book, called "The Humanity of Hinduism."
UPANISHADS STUDY GROUP MEETING OF FRIDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2008
3. Vidya-avidya and sambhuti-asambhuti
The Isha Upanishad devotes three verses to vidya-avidya and three to sambhuti-asumbhuti. We discussed these six verses and their meaning at this meeting. I was not very effective at this meeting in communicating my preferred interpretation which I have derived from an application of Madhusudan Ojha's Vedic philosophy. I referred to this in my last commentary. But let me try yet another brief narrative.
I am not happy to leave the Sanskrit words untranslated. But there is just no simple alternative. Shankaracharya interprets avidya as ritual karma and vidya as knowledge of deities. He also regards sambhuti as Hiranya-garbha and asambhuti as avyakta prakriti. We saw in the meeting how this is not very enlightening, even after looking at Radhakrishnan's verbal efforts to advocate, explain, modernize and spiritualize Shankaracharya's interpretations.
What Radhakrishnan says on the matter seems to make spiritual sense but it does not fit the text. You can just accept it and forget the whole thing as settled. But that won't settle the matter for me. I continue to look for something that makes obvious sense and am reluctant to leave the matter on obviously insecure grounds.
The essence of the matter as I understand it is the two-stage nature of self-realization according to Isha. In the first stage one uses avidya and asmbhuti to cross over mrityu or death and then uses vidya and sambhuti to obtain amrita or eternity (you will get just confused by thinking that amrita means immortality here).
The word tirtva makes abundantly clear that one crosses over death first and only then embarks on the next stage of obtaining eternity. That is why two stages are clearly involved. Both Shankaracharya and Radhakrishnan have a hard time with this and so end up conflating the two and even saying that sambhuti may mean asambhuti. That clearly is not satisfactory. My own Ojha-oriented interpretation is not completely satisfying either and that is why I am not able to communicate it very effectively being not satisfied myself. But it seems to make more sense than any alternative I know. If someone comes up with a better alternative, I will be happy to consider it.
For one thing, Isha's view of self-realization is its own and it is not necessary to think that it is the only correct spiritual path. Given that there is the further obstacle that my preferred interpretation involves Ojha's Vedic philosoophy.
It took the Vedic Philosophy Group about a year of two-hour fortnightly meetings to become familiar with the basics of Vedic philosophy. It is a vast and complex system as those of you who have been with me throughout this journey know well. So, I cannot go into details of it without writing a big book on the subject. So, let me express the matter briefly and as clearly as I can.
Brahman is described in the Upanishads as standing on four legs (chatushpad brahman). These are parat-para, avyaya (II), akshara (NI) and kshara (PI). Avyaya has five phases, not to be confused with the five koshas or sheaths familiar to later, scholastic Vedanta. Avyaya develops through its central phase which is dual, half of which develops as the universe in combination with two phases and the other half remains dormant but is activated at the time of cosmic dissolution or in the process of individual enlightenment.
The cosmic two and a half phases are called avidya and the anti-cosmic two and a half phases are called vidya. This is the epistemic situation. When the situation is viewed metaphysically rather, the two appear as sambhuti and asambhuti. The point of the Isha is that one has to use avidya and asambhuti in order to get over the worldly or mrityu aspects in the first place. Here we use reversing aspects of avidya itself to cross over avidya's nefarious aspects. But we are not done yet. In the next stage we must seek to get independent and unconditioned bliss by using vidya and sambhuti. I am not going to expound on this further because that will involve going over vast details of Vedic philosophy we have covered through laborious hours.
4. Radhakrishnan and Shankaracharya
In the second hour of the Upanishads Study Group meeting of December 26 we turned to reading from Radhakrishnan's massive introduction to the Upanishads. We saw that Radhakrishnan largely follows Shankaracharya but tries to make more sense of Shankaracharya's interpretations by modernizing and spiritualizing them. He makes Shankaracharya more relevant, more accessible and more respectable as a result.
Radhakrishnan also subscribes to the Western scholarly view that the Vedic literature developed historically through four stages of composition of the Samhitas, Brahmanas, Aranyakas and finally the Upanishads. He also thinks that none of these four stages involves systematic and rational thinking typical of complex systems of scholastic Vedanta.
Shankaracharya, on the other hand, thinks that all the four areas of Veda or shruti are equally and absolutely authentic and their word has to be taken as ultimate truth. So, Radhakrishnan ends up trying to smooth some rough corners as he proceeds to support Shanskacharya's views in a modern form which is more spiritual than philosophical. Spirituality can tolerate taking some liberties with logic and this apparently gets Radhakrishnan out of some muddled waters. Philosophy, however, has zero tolerance of any claims of going beyond logic. That is why we will occasionally run into messy situations like vidya-avidya and sambhuti-asambhuti in the Isha Upanishad.
GITA AND HINDUISM GROUP MEETING OF SUNDAY, DECEMBER 28, 2008:
5. Feminist Side of Krishna
At this meeting we studied the tenth chapter of the Gita further. Verse 34cd there says: kirtih shrir vak cha narinam smritir medha dhritih kshama. Krishna says that among women he is fame, beauty, speech, memory, intelligence, patience and forgiveness. The group did not seem inclined to cede any ground to let women get anything positive as Krishna's intent. My efforts in the direction of obtaining some credit for women went nowhere.
At first the group sought to move toward the thought that the seven virtues mentioned by Krishna as women must indicate the feminine gender in which they are used grammatically. So, Krishna has selected seven words indicating seven virtues and, because they are used in feminine gender in Sanskrit, he associates them with women.
On this interpretation Krishna should not be taken to mean any preference for women as bearers of virtue as against men. I pointed out that elsewhere in the Gita Krishna mentions kama, krodha, lobha and moha as vices, but all of them happen to be masculine gender words. Is he trying to suggest that women are more prone to virtues and men to vices?!
The group also toyed with the notion that the seven virtues mentioned as women should be connected to female deities. I facilitated this by pointing out that the first three, that is, kirti, shri and vak can be connected with Shakti, Lakshmi and Sarasvati, the three chief goddesses of Hinduism, the energy counterparts of Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma, respectively. Shri and Vak can be easily taken to mean Lakshmi and Sarasvati. Kirti as Shakti is a stretch but can be granted any way. But the rest, four of them, are hard to connect with familiar female deities of Hinduism.
Why not take Krishna at his face value any way? As we saw in the point one above, Krishna is engaged here in pointing out any outstanding entity in a group as his own special manifestation. Here he says that among women he is these seven virtues. The straightforward meaning would be that according to him women embody these virtues in an outstanding way compared, of course, to who else but men. Does hurt the male ego, though?
6. Two Spiritual Giants in Disagreement: Shankaracharya and Patanjali
Reading further into section 6 of my book Philosophy of the Gita led us into a lively discussion of holism in relation to monism and pluralism. The point of discussion turned on the ego vanishing from the seeker in the moment of self-realization. It was said that the ego completely vanishes in the ultimate spiritual experience.
I said that in case ego is totally destroyed, there would be no way for the seeker to come back to normal state of consciousness to talk about it. So, in some sense an awareness of the ultimate experience must linger even as the experience is taking place.
Shankaracharya would not tolerate Brahman or Atman grasped within the bounds of subject-object awareness. That is why he strongly opposes the Cartesian claim to know the self because the self finds itself thinking. Patanjali agrees to a point but his Yoga-sutra has to leave room for an infinite number of purushas each of whom can attain self-realization separately from all others and retain the individuality of each for ever.
I tried to point out that in order to achieve a view that self-realization is individual one has to make the self as one who has consciousness rather than one who is pure consciousness itself. I gave the example of redness, showing that redness cannot exist apart from something which it colors red. Similarly, consciousness cannot exist without someone who is conscious.
This would be the obviously logical way in which an ultimate plurality of selves can be established. Just as all rednesses will collapse into a single redness if divorced from a substance in which it inheres, all individual consciousnesses will collapse into a Brahman-like singularity divorced from one who is conscious. This would be Shankaracharya's viewpoint. Patanjali has to secure the divorce if he is to retain the plurality of selves or purushas. But the divorce would mean that the ego would not disappear completely and a semblance of inner awareness of individuality would always infect the purity of ego-transcendence of final spiritual experience.
The question is whether self is finite or infinite. Shankaracharya's self is infinite while Patanjali's is bound to remain finite. Logically Shankaracharya is more secure because ultimate reality can only be infinite if it is to be the ground of all reality. Patanjali will have to make up for the finitude of selves by projecting an infinite number of them. So he does. But even as he grants objectless monistic state in the final experience the finitude, uniqueness and solitude (kaivalya) of the self will inger for ever.
It was said that both Shankaracharya and Patanjali could be right by thinking that the self at a deeper level is connected with all other selves but experiences separateness only at the surface level. This would be a New Age kind of holistic view where the universe is one interconnected whole. Owen pointed out Leibnitz's pluralism in this context and offered other insights..
I drew attention to holism being a half-way house between monism and pluralism, between Shankaracharya and Patanjali so to say. I also said why, despite its popularity among New Age thinkers, holism was hardly a feature of Eastern thinking. The Buddhist alaya-vijnana or store consciousness came close to Jung's collective unconscious but both lack the spiritual centrality enjoyed by Shunyata and Brahman.
I sought to express the point that both monism and pluralism of selves or consciousness have problems as well as advantages and should be accommodated in a view that includes but goes beyond both. Roger offered an insight that a reason why New Age is stuck at an unhappy half-way house like holism is that it cannot divorce itself from its strong heritage of separation of God and souls in Western religions which prevents it from embracing monism.
That's all, folks, for now. See you at the future meetings.
--Ramesh
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