She could be there – like the Creator's first creation among womankind: delicate, not too dark, with sparkling teeth, lips as red as a ripe bimba fruit, narrow-waisted and deep-navelled, with glances like a frightened doe. She'd have a languid walk from the weight of her hips and be slightly bent by (the weight of) her breasts.3
I do not deny that there have always been world-denying trends in Hinduism, especially in the more cerebral religions of the Sanskritic tradition. Thus the philosophical-theology of the monistic Advaita Vedānta, especially after Śaṃkara's time, tends to exalt an ascetic ideal according to which pravṛtti or a positive engagement with the world is denigrated in favour of nivṛtti or the path of world-renunciation or withdrawal. Unfortunately, though, this latter emphasis has been allowed to represent ‘Hindu spirituality’ for many non-Hindus. In this perspective, the reality of the world is deceptively evanescent, and devotion to God becomes but a stepping-stone to a higher vision in which all, including divine, individuality dissolves, and only the pure, homogeneous being of Brāhmaṇ, the Great One, remains. The world and its symbol, the body, are viewed largely as the source of spiritual delusion and disaster. Here is a statement from the Vivekacūdāmaṇi (‘The Crest Jewel of Wisdom’), a medieval and important Advaita Vedānta text, which encapsulates this perspective:
Having realized the [true] Form that is Being and untainted Awareness and Bliss, keep far away this [other] siren-form [the body], which is vile and senseless. Remember it no more. What's vomited out and then brought to mind can only repel.
(verse 414)
In most traditions of Hinduism, however, both ‘high’ and ‘low’, pravṛtti must be balanced by nivṛtti. It is a question of emphasis and context, and later Advaita overwhelmingly emphasizes nivṛtti at the expense of pravṛtti. It must also be admitted that there are many traditional (Sanskritic) myths that denigrate sex and sensibility as positive symbols of spiritual realities. These have indeed had a lasting effect on many Hindus. On the whole, though, largely through the impetus of the various bhakti movements in history, an ethical pravṛtti has a central place in Hindu spirituality. In the Hindu family of religions its role is sometimes dominant, sometimes recessive – depending on cult, phase of life, individual temperament – but it has always made its presence felt so that if the popular view that Hinduism represents world-denying religion is veridical, it is veridical in no obvious sense. In general, the Hindu attitude to the body, matter, and the teeming world of sensible reality is an ambivalent one (think of all those successful Hindu business folk and artistes), with positive and negative sides. But there is a positive side to this tension, and it is a vibrant one.
For the reflective person, however, images are not enough. Their significance must be interpreted through critical analysis, and it is the task of the philosopher and the theologian to give the lead in this matter. Hence the thinking traditions of religious Hinduism have always given careful attention to the role of reason, viz. the discerning faculty (buddhi) in its critical function (tarka). In his commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā 18.66, Śaṃkara speaks as follows:
The cognitive authority (prāmāṇya) of scripture (śruti) applies not to the objects of perception and the other [sources of knowledge], but to objects not known from such sources, viz. the practice and results of the Agnihotra sacrifice and so on. For the cognitive authority of scripture concerns objects whose scope lies beyond [empirical experience, viz. adnta] ... Even if a hundred scriptural utterances were to say that fire is cold or that it is not bright, they would have no cognitive authority. If they were to say that fire is cold or that it is not bright, we would have to assume that they intended some other meaning, otherwise scripture would cease to be a source of knowledge. For scripture is neither opposed to other sources of knowledge nor is it inconsistent with itself.
In other words, it is not the business of scripture to challenge the evidence of the senses, inference, etc., nor is it the business of such knowledge to challenge scripture's remit, whose cognitive authority ‘concerns objects whose scope lies beyond [empirical experience]’. With regard to our knowledge of the world, Śaṃkara is a realist;it is on this basis that he attacked the epis-temology of the Mahāyāna Buddhists. The common view that Saṃkara taught that the world is an illusion is a much too superficial reading of his thought. For Śaṃkara the world of sense objects is as real as we are;only the fabric of worldly reality, of which we are an integral part, has no ultimate reality-status. But here we are making the point that, like Hindu thinkers in general, Saṃkara was careful to distinguish the cognitive scope of scripture from the cognitive scope of sources of empirical knowledge.
Scripture teaches about verities outside the realm of worldly experience, viz. about the existence and nature of the ultimate Being and our relationship to it and to each other in the light of the transcendent, about what happens after death and the beings beyond this world, about the other-worldly effects of religious observances, and so on. And reason plays an important part in this understanding. In his teaching to his wife Maitreyi about the path to immortality, the sage Yājñavalkya insists that the Spirit (Ātman) which underlies and validates all that we hold dear in life – spouse, offspring, social status, wealth – ‘must be intuited, taught, reflected upon and contemplated’ (BĀUp. 2.4.5). Only then will everything fall into place. The journey of faith leading to ultimate realization necessarily includes reflection (manana), that is, the use of reason. Such advice echoes throughout Hinduism and was generally upheld by thinkers. The long history of Hindu philosophy and theology substantiates this view. Reason has been called upon to bolster faith, purify it of superstition, mark out its limits, render it plausible, refute opposing internal and external points of view, and provide justification for a critical commitment to religious belief. How successful it has been in fulfilling this role is open to scrutiny, but that it has been given this function cannot be denied. We have seen that in the nineteenth century Ram Mohan Roy sought to use rational argument to try and purge his ancestral faith of what he regarded as superstitions. And, for their part, in debate with him his Hindu opponents claimed equally to show reason's limitations in their defence of a number of the same so-called superstitions.4
By Ram Mohan's time in the early nineteenth century – certainly in his arguments for socio-religious reforms in Hinduism against the Christian Baptist Trinitarians on the one hand and Hindu conservative intellectuals on the other – the presumption was that reason had a universal function, that its fundamental rules and processes were not culture-specific. This presumption derived from established transnational rationalist discourse that was becoming increasingly globalized. This did not mean, of course, that Ram Mohan's arguments could not vary according to cultural context and goals. Killingley has shown in his pioneering doctoral thesis on Ram Mohan (1977) that in his Bengali works Ram Mohan's arguments take on an Advaitic context since it was this tradition that might weigh particularly with his compatriots. From early times, when Indians (i.e. ‘Hindus’, Buddhists, Jains) argued against each other, they distinguished implicitly or explicitly between ‘universal’ and culture-specific contexts. Universally, the logical rules of the excluded middle, of contradiction and identity etc. all obtained in inter-denominational argument, but these thinkers were also aware that reason and faith existed in a complementary relationship, that rationality could only be nurtured within a particular perspective on the meaning of life. Similarly, where ethics were concerned, they realized too that practical rationality was a conditioned thing.
Here are some examples. On the foundational religious issue of whether an ultimate transcendent reality or ‘God’ exists, viz. Brāhmaṇ, the Vedāntic thinkers were representative when they argued that the existence of Brāhmaṇ cannot be ‘proved’ by a process of pure reasoning. To argue that an omnipotent Being exists on the grounds, say, that it is the cause of the world, is to assume that the world is an effect in the first place. On what other than circular grounds can one as
sume that? Further, even if it were agreed that the world is an effect, that it was brought into being and designed, could one argue from this to an omnipotent and omniscient first cause rather than to a cause just powerful enough to bring an imperfect world into existence? No, they concluded. Reason cannot reach this conclusion per se. One is properly apprised of the existence of Brāhmaṇ as the origin, sustaining power and end of all things only on the basis of what scripture reveals. And the role of reason in ascertaining this conclusion is to make it critically coherent against objections that it is a reasonable belief to hold.
But did not the later Logicians or Naiyāyikas seek to prove the existence of an all-powerful God (īśvara) – not indeed a God who creates out of nothing (ex nihilo) but a God who fashions the world from pre-existent matter – on the basis not of scriptural revelation but of universal reason? Is this not the objective of the fifth chapter of the twelfth-century thinker, Udayana's, famous Nyāya-Kusumāñjali (‘Flower-Offering of Reasoning’)? Not quite. All of Udayana's arguments rely, more or less explicitly, on tradition-specific premisses to make their points, premisses affirming the pre-existence of material atoms from which the deity fashioned the world, the existence and infallibility of the Veda, the application of the law of karma and rebirth and so on.
The Naiyāyikas knew perfectly well that some of their rational assumptions were acceptable only to those who shared the relevant premisses of their views. The premiss that preexistent material atoms exist was acceptable to the Vaiṣeśikas but not to the Vedāntins or Buddhists, while the assumption that the Vedas had inalienable authority was accepted by the Vedāntins but not by the Buddhists. Thus the reasoning propounded by Udayana was an in-house, Brahminic reasoning to some extent. It was not meant to be an exercise in ‘pure rational thought’.
At another extreme, however, there have always been scriptural and other literalists in Hinduism who have been unresponsive to the moderating voice of reason. A number of modern (political) fundamentalists exemplify this approach. These literalists have sought uncritically, or cynically, to transplant ideas out of context from the past into the present; they wish to short-circuit, if not to bypass, the process of history. A good example of this is the evocation in recent times of the Rāma-rājya (‘Reign of Rāma’) concept derived from Vālmīki's Rāmāyaṇa (see Chapter 8), in connection with the so-called Rām-janma-bhūmi (‘Rama's birthplace’) – Babri Masjid (‘The Babri Mosque’) affair. This concerns a dispute, which goes back over a hundred years, between factions of Hindus and Muslims about the building of this mosque during Moghul rule in the sixteenth century on the same site as a temple that is believed to stand at the alleged birthplace of Rāma in Ayodhyā (the reputed ancient capital of Rāma's kingdom; see map). On 6th December 1992, Hindu extremists induced a riotous mob to demolish the mosque so that the site could be recovered exclusively for Hindu worship (see report in India Today, international ed., 31 December, 1992).
In a nuanced article, the archaeologist Julia Shaw has pointed to the multi-layered religious history of the site extending from several centuries before the beginning of the Common Era.
Ayodhyā’s religious landscape is an archaeological palimpsest, which for a period of over two thousand years has borne witness to the presence of Jainism, Buddhism, Saivism, Vaiṣṇavism and Islam, as well as sects and cults which transcend sectarian identification.
(2000:699)
The point is that this has always been a religiously ‘shared site’. The Ayodhyā-Māhātmya, a text that sings the praises of Ayodhyā, implicitly bears out this observation; its earliest recensions (ca. thirteenth-fourteenth centuries C.E.) give evidence of the city acting as the centre of pilgrimage for a number of religious traditions, both Hindu and non-Hindu, and not only for Vaiṣṇava (and hence by implication Rāma-ite) devotions. ‘The contrived nature of the Rāmaite landscape only comes out in the later recensions of the fifteenthth and sixteenth centuries when these older sites become “Ramatized” ...’ (ibid.:695). Thus it would be to subvert the wider archaeological evidence to prioritize one or two moments in the multilayered and imagined history of the site in terms of a recent polarized tension between two religious communities. This, of course, is not the point for the protagonists of this tension. The point is advocacy of the supremacy of one tradition over another, irrespective of wider claims in the matter. It is ironic that the concept of Rāma-rājya, originally meant to express harmonious co-existence between humans and nature under the benign rule of Rama, and which in modern times was interpreted by Gandhi in a way that was meant to encourage Hindus and Muslims to live together in amity, has become the grounds for Hindu–Muslim enmity – all the more so, since in Sanskrit Ayodhyā means ‘not-to-be-fought-over’!
Let us now return to our contention that it is characteristic of the Hindu intellectual tradition at its best to appreciate the conditioned nature of rationality. Faith and reason condition one another, not in a question-begging way – there is no attempt to ‘prove’ independently that faith depends on reason or vice versa –but as an inescapable feature of the human condition. The implication here is that empiricists or rationalists can adopt their respective positions only on the basis of a ‘faith interpretation’ of the world in which they live. In other words, to say that only empirical or rational evidence is valid while religious belief is not, is itself a view based on a faith stance about the kind of evidence that is acceptable in the first place; in effect, it is to exclude religious belief as viable on a priori grounds. As in the case of religious people, the rationality of empiricists and rationalists is sustained by their faith in their own rationality. One cannot perch on some rationally ‘neutral’ vantage-point so as to judge the truth of belief systems. This brings us to the way in which Hindus tend to understand the nature of truth or satya, and by extension, to their stance on religious tolerance.
Part II
For most religious Hindus, religious truth is ‘truth’ in a sense that does not deviate from the meaning of the word in everyday, secular usage. In other words, when the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava, for example, affirms that it is true that the Lord Kṛṣṇa assumed human form, that the Bhagavad Gītas analysis of the human condition is true, that it is true that Kṛṣṇa indwells his consecrated temple-image, s/he is using the word ‘true’ with the same sense of certitude with which people use ‘true’ for ordinary, empirical judgments. One often comes across the view – and it is not uncommon among Western-educated Hindus today – that religiously Hindus advocate a relativist sense of ‘truth’ where religious belief is concerned in the context of a ‘believe-what-you-want-and-let- others-do-the-same’ mentality. One can generalize this view as follows: ‘Do not argue over religious belief – which religion describes the true God and which does not, which faith shows the right way to salvation, and which leads people astray. How can you tell when it comes to transcendental matters? It is important rather to believe and act sincerely. Religious teachings are relative, and it is a mistake to take doctrine too seriously. This leads to strife. Does it matter whether Jesus existed or not, whether he was the “Son of God” or not? What matters is the fine moral teaching enshrined in the Gospels’, and so on. This view is then supposed to demonstrate the Hindu commitment to religious tolerance.
But the weight of history shows otherwise. Historically, Hindus have tended not to defend this view, and it does no justice to the sustained, often bitter doctrinal controversies that have been waged down the centuries not only among Hindus themselves but also between ‘Hindus’ (Advaitins, Śrī Vaiṣṇavas, Naiyāyikas etc.) and non-Hindus, such as the Jains and Buddhists. Discerning the truth matters. Here is how the Śrī Vaiṣṇava theologian, Rāmānjua, characterizes the Advaitic position that he vigorously opposed:
This view has been fabricated, through deceit and various inadmissible, bad arguments, by those who lack the specific virtues that occasion the blessing of the Supreme Person of the Upaniṣads. Their whole minds have been vitiated by a residue
of beginningless sin, so that the nature of words and sentences and their proper meaning as also the ways of correct reasoning which prescribe what one must do, derived from sources of knowledge like perception etc., are unknown to them. As such, this view is to be scorned by those who know the truth (yāthātmyavid) through the proper sources of knowledge and [scriptural] utterance ascertained by sound reasoning.5
Not much tolerance here! There are many similar indictments of opposing views by other thinkers in their quest for religious truth.
For many Hindus, the pursuit of truth, especially religious truth, is regarded as an existential matter, that is, as a matter in which the integrity of the whole person is involved. No doubt, there is an ‘objective’ propositional element at stake, ifby proposition one refers to the ‘given’ content of a statement. Either the odd-shaped jar is on the table by the window or it is not; if the jar sits there, the proposition that it is present on the table is true as an objective fact, a ‘given’. But even in acknowledging this simple given, the mind displays (a modicum of moral) integrity in so far as it submits in sincerity to the perceived evidence.
Many religious statements, inclusive of those referring to transcendent objects, have propositional content. As Rāmānuja's scathing condemnation implies, one must make every effort to justify belief in these statements by using not only all epistemological resources available (‘proper sources of knowledge ... sound reasoning’), but also moral integrity. The latter is achieved by humility, by not dissembling or prevaricating, by admitting, if necessary, that one has been wrong. Scripture was regarded as a valid epistemological resource only when, as mentioned earlier, reason was allowed to do its job properly in support of it. This produced reasoned belief. And because the object of scripture concerned saving and ultimate truth, it was all the more necessary to display moral integrity in pursuing it. This required a preparatory moral discipline. The same Śaṃkara, whose philosophical stance was censured so severely by Rāmānuja, insists that one of the necessary aids to a critical inquiry into (the Upaniṣadic) Brāhmaṇ is the cultivation of such virtues as forbearance (titikṣā), purifying and focusing the mind (samādhāna) etc. (see his Commentary on the Brahmā Sūtra 1.1.1).
Hindus: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (The Library of Religious Beliefs and Practices) Page 38