Thus those in power were expected to provide the right moral environment for general well-being, spiritual as well as physical, or else The Law of the Fish would prevail. One wonders, however, at the moral context implied here, for on occasion the end seems to justify the means. Thus, not only spies, double agents and courtesans, but even monks and nuns are encouraged to deceive for the sake of a stable regime. Perhaps in a world where territorial ambition was the order of the day, it was believed that this end was so important that all else justified it.
There is one other feature of the Artha Śāstra that is deserving of mention. The text seems clearly to imply that political and religious authority are to be kept apart. There was to be no established religion, regardless of the faith of the majority of the king's subjects. This does not mean, though, that in the course of history Hindu rulers did not sometimes try to favour or enforce a particular religion, even on occasion by means of persecution. On the whole, however, rulers have done what the Sastra suggests, thus endorsing the image of Hindu religious tolerance. Perhaps this helps to explain why India's independence from colonial rule could be negotiated in terms of a ‘secular’ state, which in the Indian context simply means that, while one has the right to practise a religion, no particular faith is constitutionally privileged. This puts into perspective those right-wing political parties today that wish to act against the weight of history and establish a ‘Hindu’ regime.
It was expected not only of politicians but also of others, e.g. religious thinkers, to be aware of what running a stable state implied. After all, it was only in a stable environment that religion could be freely practised. People needed artha to patronize the ritual, finance the inevitable and numerous rites of passage, construct images and temples, maintain pilgrimage centres and shrines, and so on. The paraphernalia of religious practice was ubiquitous and costly, not to mention the priests’ fee for services rendered (called daksinna) which figured on every religious agenda. And so to kāma.
Just as there were prasthāna-vākyas for artha, dharma and mokṣa (this last in the broad sense of the ultimate state of being, on which we have the Brahmā Sūtra), so there were prasthāna-vākyas for kāma or worldly satisfaction. Hindus leave nothing to chance. The model for this pursuit is the kāma Sūtra, whose name is known to so many but whose content is known by only a few.
This treatise, which is based stylistically to some extent on the Artha Śāstra and which has been dated to the third–fourth centuries C.E., is ascribed to the sage Vātsyāyana (also called Mallanāga). It too may well be a compilation; it mentions various earlier authorities by name and makes it clear that it is preceded by a substantial tradition of thought on the subject.
The kāma Sūtra is a fairly extensive work (36 short chapters under seven headings) and deals with kāma in the general sense of the pleasurable awareness that arises from ‘hearing, touch, sight, taste and smell in appropriate contact with their distinctive objects, controlled by the mind in conjunction with the spiritual self’ (G.D. Shastri edition 1929, verse 1.2.11;see also 1.2.12). Sexual pleasure, then, is only a part of kāma, though for the Sūtra it is a leading part. The Sūtra is directly addressed to the nāgarika or refined urban man. This is not to say that others, and even women and Śūdras (the cultured Śūdra was not a rare phenomenon in certain contexts), were not expected to learn from it. Yet, allowing for the times, the Sūtra is less chauvinist than one might expect. Although the work is the product of men for the gratification of men, its aim is not to titillate – in this it succeeds! – nor are women treated merely as sexual objects. Lovers from both sexes are expected to show sensitivity and understanding towards their partners.
As in the case of the Artha Śāstra, an ethical context for the pursuit of kāma is implied:
One should [plan to] live for a hundred years and so should divide one's time in order to serve the three goals [listed as dharma, artha and kāma] in such a way that they interrelate and do not harm one another (1.2.1) ... When the three co-exist, the preceding goal is superior to the one that follows [i.e. dharma is superior to artha which is superior to kāma; 1.2.14].
kāma is put in its place. Nevertheless, as in the case of the Artha Śāstra, some of the moral implications may seem disquieting. Not only are various sexual types and activities described, but also the arts of courting and seduction, the behaviour of courtesans, the preparation of aphrodisiacs and so on, appear to be recommended. Clearly, one of Vātsyāyana's aims was to classify dispassionately without reference to moral judgement all the significant options and facts known to him under this topic. The treatise is also a fund of cultural information for the period, with a bias probably towards the northern part of the subcontinent.
For Brahminic Hinduism, the kāma Sūtra became immensely authoritative and, either directly or through subsequent texts for which it was a model, it greatly influenced art, literature and drama, as well as features of religious imagery. The great poet Kālidāsa (ca. fifth century) seems to have been influenced by it or at least drew from the same tradition. Many a stylized description of the love between the Lord and his devotee, depicted in verse or sculpture, shows signs of the influence of the kāma Sūtra. Today, it has only a residual impact on urbanized society, but its very presence and longstanding influence suggest that Hindu civilization has a developed and refined tradition of enjoying life's pleasures to the full, though in ethical context.
And so it continues. There are prasthāna-vākyas, ancient and less so, similarly across a whole range of human activity. There are cautionary tales and animal fables, treatises that give instruction on how images should be constructed and from what material, texts for temple building and worship, dance and music, astrology and herbal lore, etc. It is remarkable that they still exert a pervasive if subtle influence among Hindus in all walks of life. Temples and images are still being constructed according to traditional principles across the land, aesthetic ideals continue to be enforced and assimilated, as are age-old practices of herbal and medical lore, etc. The Ancient Banyan has lived through change and continuity almost in equal measure.
We come finally to the third authoritative summons to which Hindus have traditionally been attentive when shaping their religious responses: that of personal experience. This topic will be discussed in the next chapter.
10
The voice of experience
Part I
So far we have discussed various features of the ‘public’ voices of scripture and tradition – or collective experience – to which Hindus have been attentive in shaping their lives. We must now do the same for the ‘private’ voice of personal experience. Hindu tradition has always insisted on this as a crucial component of one's response to life.
Here the evidence of the senses and of reason has always been given a vital role. Sense experience has generally been regarded as a necessary stepping-stone of the religious vision. We have seen how positively the householder stage of life (gārhasthya) has been evaluated in the traditional view. This implied the ethical cultivation of artha and kāma, of sensuous and sensual experience. It is common for Hindu preceptors to teach that one can best appreciate the spiritual limitations of worldly goals by first passing through the critical fires of the dharmic pursuit of artha and kāma. With respect to kāma, let me illustrate this with a story about the theologian Saṃkara, the great proponent of Advaita, a stance that has always advocated the superiority of ascetic values.
Tradition has it that Saṃkaraembraced the renouncer's life from an early age; this implied the vow of celibacy. While still a young man he toured the land engaging in theological debate with rival teachers. There is a story that on one occasion his opponent was a well-known Ritualist or Pūrva Mīmāṃsaka, Maṇḍana Miśra. After a great public debate, Śāmkara seemed to have got the better of Maṇḍana, but before he could claim victory, Bhāratī, Maṇḍana's wife and also a reputed thinker, insisted that Śaṃkara would have to defeat her too, since she was the other part of Maṇ�
�ana's debating team. Śaṃkara had no option but to agree. Things were again going well for him until the canny Bhāratī led the debate into an area concerning dharmic action that required a personal knowledge of sex. The nonplussed celibate asked for a month's time-out to come up with a solution, which was granted. It so happened that after he had left the debating hall he passed by a place where a king had dropped dead while on a hunting expedition, to the utter dismay of his attendant queens who all promptly fainted. The scene was set for Śaṃkara to take advantage of the situation. By means of his superior yogic powers the great Advaitin projected his soul into the king's corpse while his own body remained in a state of suspended animation under his disciples’ secret care.
Imagine the joy of the queens when they discovered that their lord and master was not dead after all, but apparently alive and well! For the next month or so the ‘king’ was certainly not occupied with affairs of state. Then Śaṃkara's soul returned to his own body, the ex-king's poor wives had reason to lament once more, and Saṃkara, still celibate in his own body but suitably educated in the lore of sex, hurried back to resume his debate with Bhāratī. Needless to say, and no doubt to Bhāratī’s amazement, Śaṃkara now knew what he was talking about, and of course won the debate. The story ends with Maṇḍana acknowledging defeat and becoming one of Saṃkara's most illustrious disciples.
Let us not worry too much about the exploitative nature of the story where Śaṃkara's behaviour is concerned (or with the fact that in the story, at least, celibacy has more to do with Śaṃkara's preservation of physical virginity than with purity of intention). After all, it is only a story, revealing more about the hagiographer than about Śaṃkara (about whom very little is known personally). The point of the story is that it was generally regarded as indispensable, even for a celibate, to appreciate the place of kāma in a well-ordered life. Such fundamentals could not be dismissed by teachers with an airy wave of the hand. Many Hindu preceptors, whether they become celibates or not later in life, are portrayed as first experiencing the married state before embracing celibacy in due course. This is to teach that wisdom is acquired on the basis of a rounded life.
Sensuous and sensual experience, therefore, is not just to be tolerated, however basic some of its expressions are. On the contrary, it is to be embraced in the context of dharma, for repression, in the absence of sublimation, will lead to unhealthy consequences, spiritual or otherwise. Of course, the pursuit of kāma is not the highest human goal and it is fraught with spiritual danger. But for the ordinary person its outright rejection is even more dangerous spiritually, while its ordered pursuit is conducive to spiritual progress. This understanding is very much in evidence today. It is common for religious teachers, including those respected for their celibate way of life, to be asked for and to give advice freely on worldly matters, including sexual, marital and financial problems. Usually – though not always – they evaluate the (restrained) seeking of artha and kāma positively. After all, as the weight of Hindu tradition teaches, artha and kāma are necessary to invigorate society so that all may flourish, even those who wish to practise renunciation and celibacy.
Thus pravṛtti or engagement with the world has an important role in the traditional Hindu vision of life. The roots of the Hindu stress on pravṛtti can be traced to early Vedic religion, and possibly also to a Harappan contribution. We have seen in an earlier chapter that the religion of the ‘Aryans’ was strongly grounded in the affirmation of this-worldly images and realities. Aryan religion was concerned as much with wellbeing in this life as with immortality in a postmortem existence (which in any case was evoked as an intensification of worldly joys). Typical of this world-affirming attitude is the following Vedic prayer:
O Agni! May our sacrifice yield abundant sheep, cows and horses. May it be fit for the valiant and forever indestructible! Great hero, may it renew us and bring us many offspring. Firmly established, may it grant great wealth and be of wide assembly.
(RV.4.2.5)
Agni, as we have seen, is the deva of fire, especially the sacrificial fire. Similar invocations were made to the devas and devī’s of the sun, dawn, rivers, rain, the storm, war and so on. I argued earlier that this was not polytheism bur rather what has been called ‘polymorphic theism’, for early Vedic religion represents the polycentric attempt to relate to a transcendent reality (the ‘One’) manifesting through many worldly forms (Chapter 2). This idea became the basis for taking everyday experience seriously in the spiritual life, so that – not without change and development it is true – we find the same approach present, in spite of a growing emphasis on ascetic ideals, in the imagery of the Upaniṣads, and subsequently in Hindu tradition.
The contribution of the Indus civilization encountered by the ‘Aryans’, on the other hand, is obscure. We have already noted that its script is yet to be deciphered, but from the pictorial use made of vegetation and (sometimes composite) animals on numerous seals seemingly depicting religious activity, and from the clay figurines of what may have been a goddess cult, we may perhaps conjecture that experience of worldly realities played an important part in Harappan religion. As noted earlier, it may be that the later Hindu idea of yoga, viz. the harmonious union of different levels and facets of the practitioner, derived from this religion. Classical Yoga recommends the integration – and subsequent transcending – of sense-experience in the spiritual life.
In fact, one can discern a prominent strand of what we may describe as materialist thought and practice running through the tapestry of Hindu culture from very early times. These materialists were called Cārvākas or Lokāyatas. They dismissed the spiritual ideals of the dominant Hindu faiths that endorsed Vedic and Brahminic authority, belief in and arguments for the existence of spirit (ātman/puruṣa), God, heaven (or hell), and the final spiritual state etc. They even rejected the logical validity of inference as a source of certitude, the basis of so many nonmaterialist conclusions, and they boldly advocated a hedonist way of life. Here are two quotations attributed to materialist thinkers. The first is on the nature and destiny of the human person, by one Ajita Keśakambalin, a contemporary of the Buddha:
Man is formed of the four elements. When he dies, earth returns to the aggregate of earth, water to water, fire to fire, and air to air, while his senses vanish into space. Four men with the bier take up the corpse: they gossip ... as far as the burning-ground, where his bones turn the colour of a dove's wing and his sacrifices end in ashes.
They are fools who preach almsgiving, and those who maintain the existence (of immaterial categories) speak vain and lying nonsense. When the body dies both fool and wise alike are cut off and perish. They do not survive after death.
(Quoted and translated from the Dīghanikāya by Basham 1967:299)
This is typical of Hindu materialist attitudes, though some modern materialists or ‘rationalists’ as they call themselves, may not be so dismissive of altruistic values. And on religious belief and practice, here is another biting attack as quoted in the Sarva-darśana-saṃgraha (ca. fourteenth century C.E.), a text noted for its summary of various darśanas, including that of the materialist:
There is neither heaven nor liberation nor spirit in the after-life,
Nor do deeds appropriate to the castes and stages of life produce other-worldly
fruit.
The Agnihotra sacrifice, the three Vedas, and ascetic practices– smearing oneself
with ashes, bearing three staves –
Are nature's way of providing a livelihood for those without virility or brains.
If a beast slaughtered during the Jyotistoma sacrifice will go to heaven,
Then why isn't his own father killed by the sacrificer during the rite?
If [food-offerings during] the śrāddha rite gratified dead beings,
Then oil would increase the flame of an extinguished lamp! ...
Enjoy life while you can, run up debts and feed on ghee [clarified butter],
Can you
return [to face a reckoning] once the body is turned to ashes? ...
Whence rites for the dead are simply a means to a living laid down by Brahmins,
There is no proof any where to the contrary.
Those who implement the three Vedas are buffoons, rascals and revellers.1
No doubt, these views were condemned as reprehensible by religious Brahmins, but the fact that they existed in the cultural fabric acted as a constant challenge to religious teachers to reassess their commitment to and interpretation of the texts. Materialist critiques – and here, from the Hindu standpoint, these included the views of the Buddhists – may well have influenced Hindu teachers to reappraise the (dharmic) pursuit of artha and kāma as a positive value; there is even a tendency in the tradition to think it necessary for renouncers to have enjoyed sensual experience at an earlier stage, the better to appreciate the spiritual value of their new way of life. For such experience produced a rounded personality which, by offering sound advice and living a good life, contributed to the welfare of society.
Hindu scriptures of all persuasions are replete with worldly imagery as a basis for understanding how to live a good life and for attaining spiritual fulfillment. Let us now turn to the Upaniṣads. Here images of sun, moon, fire, lightning, air, water, birds, flowers, insects, animals, eggs, the sounds of musical instruments, giving birth, and even sex, are used positively to explain spiritual realities and relationships. ‘As the spider emits its web, as small sparks shower from fire’, says the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, ‘even so from this Self come forth all breaths, all worlds, all gods, all beings’ (2.1.20). In the same Upaniṣad, when describing a mystical state, the sage Yājñavalkya says: ‘As a man embraced deeply by a dear wife knows nothing outside or within, even so the person embraced deeply by the wise self knows nothing outside or within’ (4.3.21). In a famous passage (6.1.3f.), the Chāndogya Upaniṣad teaches that ‘just as everything made of clay is known from but one lump of clay – the change [of shape of the clay] being only a designation based on speech while the truth is that it is really clay’, so should we understand the relationship between the unknown, underlying Source of all being and the objects of experience. Of course, it is up to the theologian or teacher to interpret these passages in the appropriate way. Again, based on the analogy of the war-chariot of ancient times, which had two occupants, the combatant (i.e. the ‘master of the chariot’) and his charioteer who drove and manoeuvred the chariot, here is teaching about how the individual should function as a union of body and soul to reach the spiritual goal:
Hindus: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (The Library of Religious Beliefs and Practices) Page 36