While the Gods Play

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While the Gods Play Page 1

by Alain Daniélou




  Note on the Transliteration of Sanskrit Terms

  AS EXACT A PRONUNCIATION AS POSSIBLE IS AS MUCH essential for the ritual formulae and the magical sense of words as for establishing the parallels between different languages. The Sanskrit alphabet is a syllabic alphabet consisting of fifty-two phonetic signs. The syllables can be long (â) or short (a). The consonants are voiceless or aspirated (t or th). Certain vowels of the old phonetic system have disappeared from the pronunciation of modern Sanskrit. Such is the case with ë (as in the English word above), these days pronounced "ri," which is transcribed either as e or ri, and with ü (which does not occur in English, but is closest to the French u as in vu), pronounced "lri" and transcribed either as ü or lri. An a occurring at the end of a word is not pronounced in Sanskrit. It corresponds to the final silent e in English. It is denoted by ä. Yogä should be pronounced "Yog", Shivä as "Shiv." Shivâ is feminine, a name of the goddess.

  The retroflex consonants are shown underscored: t, th, d, dh, sh, n. The palatal nasal is written ñ, the guttural nasal .

  The English sound oo (as in book) is represented by the letter u. The modern Tamil alphabet is based on the same phonetic system. Sanskrit words are written with a capital letter in the text, and the plural is neither shown by an s nor otherwise indicated. I have added an (s) for clarity.

  In the translation of Sanskrit and Tamil texts I sometimes incorporated some explanatory words added by the scholars who quote them or taken from commentaries. Later I added some quotes from modern works that I noted in the course of my research.

  In the exposition of the doctrines of Shaivism, I have followed the terminology of the Sanskrit versions of the Sâmkhyä(s) and the Ägamä(s). At times I have added Dravidian terms to the Sanskrit words or to their translation.

  Contents

  Cover Image

  Title Page

  Note on the Transliteration of Sanskrit Terms

  Introduction to the American Edition

  PART ONE: THE HUMAN ADVENTURE

  Chapter 1. Origins

  The Dravidians

  The Aryans

  Chapter 2. The Religions of the Kali Yugä

  Shaivism

  The Return of Arihat

  Gosâlä

  Mahâvîrä

  Gautamä Buddhä

  The Religion of Nature and the Religion of the City

  The Kali Yugä in the World

  The Shaiva Revival

  Lakulishä

  Mahâyanä

  Chapter 3. Rediscovered Tradition

  Texts

  Hindu Decadence

  The West

  India Today

  PART TWO: SHAIVA PHILOSOPHY

  Chapter 1. The Ways of Knowledge

  Approaches (Darshanä)

  Chapter 2. Vaïsheshikä and Nyâyä

  Science and Logic

  The Experimental Method (Vaïsheshikä)

  Logic (Nyâyä)

  Aphorisms of the Nyâyä

  Chapter 3. The Sâmkhyä: The Study of the Macrocosm

  The Quest for Constants (Aksharä)

  The Texts of the Sâmkhyä

  Concepts of the Sâmkhyä

  Nature and Perception

  The Three Tendencies of Prakriti, the Nature of Nature

  The Definables (Tattvä): The Twenty-five Constituents of the World

  The Plan (Purushä)

  The World-Substance (Prakriti)

  Cosmic Intelligence (Mahat)

  The Principle of Individuality (Ahamkarä)

  The Modes of Interaction of Matter (Tanmâträ)

  The Principles of the Senses (Mahabhûtä)

  The Powers of Perception and Action (Indriyä)

  The Living Being

  Chapter 4. The Exploration of Man's Inner Universe

  The Being of Flesh and the Being of Knowledge

  The Sexual Body (Lingä-Sharirä) or Transmittable Body

  The Nature of the Transmigrant Body

  Chapter 5. The Being of Knowledge

  Universal Law (Sanâtanä Dharmä) and the Heritage of Knowledge

  The Seers (Rishi)

  The Sacred Books

  Chapter 6. Yogä

  Yogä: Study of the Microcosm

  Method

  The Structure of Living Beings

  The Five Vital Energies (Prânä)

  Magic Powers (Siddhi)

  Reincarnation

  Transubstantiation

  Liberation (Mokshä)

  Immortality

  Yogä and Tantrism

  Aryanized Yogä

  PART THREE: THE MÎMNS: THE RELIGIOUS, RITUALISTIC, AND MYSTICAL APPROACH

  Chapter 1. The Two Mîmânsâ

  The Gods

  Aspects of Maheshvarä

  Shivä, Tamas

  Sattvä, the Goddess, and Vishnu

  Rajas, Prajâpati-Brahmâ

  Symbols of the Gods

  The Cult of the Lingä

  The Assimilated Gods

  Monotheism

  Chapter 2. The Doctrine of the Pâshupatä

  The Teaching of Lakulishä

  Texts

  Pashupati: Lord of the Animals

  Pati: The Herder

  Pashu: The Animal

  Pâshä: The Snare

  The Creative Power of the Sovereign Being (Ishvarä-Kartri-Vâdä)

  The Cause (Kâranä)

  The Work (Kâryä)

  Divisibility (Kalâ)

  Method (Vidhi)

  Meritorious Deeds (Kriyâ)

  The Temple

  Union (Yogä)

  The End of Suffering (Dukhântä)

  Chapter 3. Communities and Monastic Orders

  The Monastic Orders

  The Black Faces (Kâlâmukhä)

  The Skull-Bearers (Kâpâlikä)

  Practices (Charyâ)

  The Five M's

  Malä and Muträ

  Meat (Mansä) and Sacrifice (Medhä)

  Human Sacrifice

  Intoxicating Liquors (Madhyä)

  Drugs

  Sexual Rites (Maithunä)

  Love and Death

  The Great Vow (Mahâvratä)

  Initiation of the Pâshupatä

  Chapter 4. Preliminary Practices

  Advice to a Mlecchä, by Sadhu Shambhudâsä

  PART FOUR: SOCIAL MAN

  Chapter 1. The Individual and the Species

  The Clan (Jâti)

  Procreation

  The Castes (Varnä)

  The Lineage (Goträ)

  The Popular Framework

  Coexistence

  Woman

  The Family (Kulä)

  The Servants of the Gods

  The Third Nature (Tritîya Prakriti)

  Chapter 2. The Transmission of Knowledge

  The Master (Guru)

  The Guru's Responsibilities

  The Limits of Knowledge

  The Choice of a Disciple

  The Wanderers of the Path of Knowledge (Brahmächârî)

  PART FIVE: THE THEORY OF CYCLES

  Chapter 1. The Duration of the Universe

  The Cycles of the Yugä

  The Flood

  Chapter 2. The Three Cities

  The Ages (Yugä)

  The Destruction of the Assurs

  PART SIX: FORESTALLING THE END

  Chapter 1. Predictions

  Precursory Signs

  The End of the World

  Accidental or Induced Destruction (Naïmittikä Pralayä)

  The Disappearance or Natural Death (Prâkritä Pralayä) of the World

  Chapter 2. Forestalling the Final Day

  The Return to Shaivism

  Chapter 3. Conclusions

  APPENDIX I: LANGUAG
E: INSTRUMENT FOR THE TRANSMISSION OF KNOWLEDGE

  The Nature of Language

  The Manifestation of Thought

  Texts

  The Maheshvarä Sûträ

  The Nine Vowels

  The Consonants

  The Five Groups (Vargä)

  The Tattvä

  Creation by the Word

  Monosyllabic Dictionaries

  Magic Formulae (Manträ)

  Elements of the Musical Vocabulary

  The Various Forms of Language

  Visual Languages

  A Geometric Language (Yanträ)

  The Swastika

  APPENDIX II: CHRONOLOGY OF THE KALI YUGÄ

  Endnotes

  Bibliography

  Other Books by Alain Daniélou

  About the Author

  About Inner Traditions • Bear & Company

  Books of Related Interest

  Copyright & Permissions

  Introduction

  WE ARE SO ACCUSTOMED TO REGARDING THE EVOLUtion of humanity as a constant progression, and the development of knowledge over the course of several centuries or even several decades as a continuous forward movement, that we sometimes have difficulty in realizing that contrary forces also exist which periodically return peoples to states of incredible barbarism.

  Important civilizations pass away, their highly developed scientific knowledge suddenly annihilated. In such cases, the only lingering echo is the vague remembrance of a Golden Age, or sometimes a few monuments remain which reveal a knowledge so evolved that our ancestors of only a few generations ago were not only incapable of deciphering it but even of having any idea of what sort of knowledge they were witnessing.

  We use the rather vague term tradition to evoke the fragments, which have come down to us through secret and esoteric channels, of this ancient and prestigious knowledge, whose substance we have lost even though we have preserved its memory. There are periods in the course of history in which we encounter attempts to recover something of this ancient knowledge. The emperor Hadrian gathered together a great number of scholars to try to recapture the science of the ancient Egyptians. Later on, in Italy, a group of artists, scholars, and philosophers formed the Accademia Vitruviana, then the Accademia Romana, providing the beginning impulse of what is called the Renaissance in Europe. This group had also sought to recover elements of the knowledge of the Egyptians, the Etruscans, and the Pelasgeans. Its members were tortured and massacred by the Borgia popes, and the survivors dispersed, leaving only a few enigmatic writings.

  In India, around the time of Christ, there was an astonishing personality called Lakulishä who dared to stand in opposition to official Vedism and Buddhism, and enabled the ancient Shaiva religion to be reborn. With it the sciences and religious and philosophic concepts that had been "underground" for nearly two millennia came to the fore and provoked a prodigious effervescence in the domain of culture and the arts. Its representatives were likewise gradually eliminated, and modern Hinduism retains only a degraded remnant of it. The true knowledge is once again enclosed in esotericism.

  Some texts dating from the pre-Aryan civilization of India were partially recuperated during the period of the Shaiva revival. I have attempted, often with difficulty, to study and understand the conceptions they present of ancient Shaivism concerning the nature of the world and the destiny of man, and to present certain aspects of these conceptions in this book. Obviously I can give here only a brief summary. The upholders of the tradition, always under threat, are reticent and secretive. Their knowledge is often fragmentary, and the level of the concepts sometimes goes quite beyond the scientific and philosophic notions with which I am familiar, posing arduous problems of comprehension and terminology. There remains, however, a vast corpus of texts, for the most part unpublished, which represent a body of knowledge coming from the depths of the ages. These texts deserve to be studied by people more qualified than I. I have limited myself to the texts that I thought understandable concerning cosmology, the nature of language, and musical semantics. I was not competent to approach the texts on mathematics, astronomy, or medicine, and hope that others will be able to explore them. What is important in such research is, first of all, to be conscious of the limits of our own knowledge and neither to reject nor to seek to bring to our level notions that seem bizarre or incomprehensible at first approach. The situation is analogous to that of a man of the eighteenth century being able, by a phenomenon of vision, to read certain texts of modern physics.

  Vanity on the part of ethnologists and Orientalists often leads them to aberrant interpretations and absurd judgments.

  My work will be useful if it succeeds in awakening the curiosity of even a few scientists at the forefront of research, several of whom have indicated to me their astonishment at the discovery, clearly expressed in this ancient knowledge, of concepts that they themselves hardly dare to envisage, such as the structural identity of the cells which form the galaxies and the cells which form our bodies, or the necessity of the omnipresence of consciousness as one of the essential components of interstellar and atomic matter, the relativity of time, and the purely energetic nature of matter, all of which are concepts familiar to the Sâmkhyä.

  PART ONE

  THE HUMAN ADVENTURE

  1

  Origins

  ACCORDING TO THE CHRONOLOGY OF THE PURNÄ, THE present humanity would have appeared about 58,000 years ago, a figure that corresponds to twelve and a half times what Shaiva cosmology calls the Age of the Ancestors (Pitri), that is, the duration of a lineage, a particular species of men. But men or similar beings existed before the present humanity. The human species that have succeeded each other on earth have each achieved a very high level of development and knowledge, then disappeared at the time of planetary catastrophes, leaving, however, traces that served as the bases for the development and knowledge of subsequent humanities, which, when they reach the limits of the knowledge permitted man in the plan of creation, are, in their turn, destined to disappear.

  Creation is a continuous phenomenon. Species evolve. New species appear; others cease to exist. No species is born of a single couple. Even if a mutation can be the act of an individual, the appearance of a new species is always a global phenomenon. Man is no exception. Since the birth of the present humanity, four species of men have appeared at precise moments in the cycle. Thus they are in different ages of their development.

  The history of humanity is not, therefore, a single phenomenon. It is marked by conflicts between peoples in different ages of their development. The principal problem for all civilizations is to know how to organize their coexistence.

  To try to understand the history of man, anthropologists and archaeologists excavate, layer by layer, the places he has lived. They discover primitive forms of habitations, but also vestiges of civilizations prestigious for their arts and technology which are sometimes contemporaneous with them, belonging to lineages of men who are in different ages of their destiny. In any case, archaeology gives us information only about eras when humans used stone and metal, which are not indispensable ingredients for a sophisticated civilization. The spiritual decadence of man, according to Hindu tradition, goes hand in hand with progress in metallurgy from the Golden Age (Satyä Yugä) to the Iron Age (Kali Yugä). The scientific cautiousness that only recognizes the existence of man according to the material objects left surviving is a very unreliable method, since it depends on chance discoveries and only has value in respect to civilizations using stone or metal. It is very dangerous to draw any conclusions from such a method. After the destruction of the magnificent cities of the Indus by the Aryans, stone was not used in the construction of cities for a millennium. The eras that we call Stone Age are, in reality, ages of timber, of adobe, and of clay bricks.

  Today in India, not far from Pondicherry, there are populations who construct the hulls of ships from curved wood, pierced in a fire and bound together with oakum, without any use of metal, and in w
hich they are able to cross the seas. There are also artists there capable of constructing wonderful timber palaces covered with frescoes like those at Trichur in Kerala or in some Himalayan cities. The oldest temples dug into rock (at Ajanta), duplicate very elaborate timber architecture of which no trace remains.

  In Africa, the sites of cities once famous for their splendor can no longer be found.

  In Japan, it has been possible to save some timber temples thanks to the periodic replacement of damaged parts.

  The men who decorated the cave sanctuaries of what we call prehistory did not live underground. They also painted frescoes on their earthen or timber houses, as is still done today in the villages of India.

  When we see important vestiges of lost civilizations appear, it is often at a very high level of urbanism, art, literature, knowledge of astronomy, and philosophical myths, which represent a long past. Some megalithic monuments of India and Europe, as well as structures in certain forgotten cities of ancient America, necessitated the transport and polishing of blocks of stone so enormous that they required technical means that seem unachievable today. Their orientation implies a very advanced understanding of astronomy.

  There exists no primitive language, a language that does not allow the expression of the most abstract notions. One cannot judge the level of culture of peoples or civilizations by the "permanent" vestiges that have survived or by the customs of new peoples wrongly called primitive. The astronomical, medical, mathematical, and physical knowledge of the Indians, but also of other peoples on various continents several millennia B.C., was, in some cases, more advanced than that of Europeans only two centuries ago. The modern world is much closer to Kapila, Pythagoras, Euclid, and Aristotle than to the theologians of the Middle Ages. Astrophysicists who study the birth, formation, and evolution of the world are coming closer and closer to the ancient theories of Shaiva cosmology whose elements India has retained.

  The idea that modern civilization started practically from scratch, from a single source of ape-men several millennia ago, has distorted, or caused to be ignored, information that has reached us just as much by tradition as through archaeological finds. We are so fascinated by the technological advances of the last centuries of modern civilization that we simply forget the periods of obscurantism that preceded them and the differences in the level of development of the various peoples of the world. We tend to consider "progress" a continuous and general phenomenon stretching from the apes to Einstein. Yet the history of man is not one of regular development. It is characterized by a succession of developments and regressions related to astrological and climatic cycles. Barbaric races, still in their infancy, destroy civilizations that had been developed by older, more evolved populations, doing away with the sciences and arts, yet allowing some scraps of knowledge to survive which serve as the basis of the development of new cultures. On all continents we can find traces of outstanding cultures and advanced technologies belonging to bygone ages, followed by periods of barbarism and ignorance.

 

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