The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  The cosmology implicit in the Brahmana myth is stated explicitly in this text: “Vishnu revealed that the whole universe was in his body.” Bali is not allowed to excel as a sacrificer; Vishnu sends him to hell, where all antigods, even, or especially, virtuous antigods, belong.

  THE MAN-LION (NARASIMHA)

  Although the Man-Lion does not appear until the Puranas, the antigods whom he opposes—Prahlada and his father, Hiranyakashipu—have a history that stretches back to the Brahmanas. Prahlada in the Brahmanas and in parts of the Mahabharata is a typical, demonic demon—angry, lustful, opposing the gods.74 But in the Mahabharata he becomes a type that we recognize from the second alliance of gods, humans, and antigods, a too-virtuous antigod:

  INDRA BEGS FROM PRAHLADA

  Prahlada stole Indra’s kingdom, and Indra could not get it back because Prahlada was so virtuous. Indra went to Prahlada disguised as a Brahmin, and at Indra’s request, Prahlada taught Indra about eternal dharma [sanatana dharma]. Pleased with his pupil, Prahlada asked the Brahmin to choose a boon, and Indra as the Brahmin said, “I wish to have your virtue.” Indra left, taking Prahlada’s virtue and dharma with him, and Prahlada’s truth followed, and his good conduct, and his prosperity [Shri] (MB 12.124.19-63).

  We recognize here the pattern not only of second alliance myths that assume the need to steal or corrupt the religious power and/or virtue of anyone who threatens the gods, but also of a transformation of the pattern of the story of Ekalavya (who gave his teacher the very essence of what made him great, even as Prahlada gives his pupil his greatness), with perhaps a bit of a spin taken from the Tantric Pashupatas who stole the good karma of people whom they tricked into wronging them. We may also recognize the pattern of the story of Bali (an antigod whose generosity to Vishnu is his undoing); indeed, in many versions of the Bali myth, Prahlada, Bali’s grandfather, warns Bali that the dwarf is Vishnu, 75 and in one text, Prahlada complains bitterly that Vishnu as the dwarf deceived and robbed his grandson Bali, who was “truthful, without desire or anger, calm, generous, and a sacrificer.”76 (In a late version of the Bali myth that is even more strongly reminiscent of Ekalavya, Indra himself begs from Bali’s father, Virochana, who generously offers him anything he wants, “Even my own head,” to which Indra without batting an eye replies, “Give me your own head,” and the antigod cuts it off and gives it to him.77) The virtue of the antigod king—his eternal dharma—leads him to lose everything, even his sva-dharma as king of the antigods. The Vedic quality of generosity is still regarded as desirable here, but now we see its disadvantage.

  But then the Puranas rewind back to an earlier generation and make the villain of the piece no longer the virtuous Prahlada but his evil father. Now too the antigod’s opponent is not Indra but Vishnu as the Man-Lion, usually depicted as a lion’s head on a man’s body, though with many arms, equipped with terrible claws:

  THE MAN-LION KILLS HIRANYAKASHIPU

  The antigod Hiranyakashipu obtained a boon from Brahma that he could not be killed by man or god or beast, from inside or outside, by day or by night, on earth or in the air, or by any weapon animate or inanimate. Confident of his invulnerability, he began to trouble heaven and earth. His son, Prahlada, on the other hand, was a fervent devotee of Vishnu. Hiranyakashipu threatened to kill Prahlada, who insisted nevertheless that Vishnu was the god who pervaded the universe. Hiranyakashipu kicked a stone pillar and asked: “Is he in this pillar too?” Vishnu emerged from the pillar in the form of a Man-Lion and disemboweled Hiranyakashipu with his claws, at dusk, on his lap, on the threshold. Then Prahlada became king of the antigods; devoted to Vishnu, he abandoned his antigod nature and sacrificed to the gods.78

  The more general theme of the antigod who thinks he has a foolproof list of noncombatants but leaves out an essential clause of the contract (humans for Ravana, females for Mahisha) is joined with the theme of the Mahabharata tale of Indra and the antigod Vritra (or the antigod Namuchi), who had to be killed at twilight (neither night nor day), on the shore of the ocean (neither on land nor on sea), and with foam (a weapon neither wet nor dry) (MB 12.272-3).

  Here Prahlada is a devotee of Vishnu from the start, steadfast despite the threats and attacks by his father, who is furious not because Prahlada is virtuous but merely because he has no respect for his father and the family traditions—that is, because he is violating his sva-dharma, a matter of partisan loyalties as well as ethics. Hiranyakashipu tries in vain to have his prodigal son educated in antigod etiquette: rape and pillage. Ultimately, as always, Vishnu kills the antigod, but in the process he upholds bhakti in the face of caste law. Where Vishnu has to cheat Bali by using his virtue against him, now it’s OK for Prahlada to be a good antigod. Something has changed. Sva-dharma is abolished, while general dharma is preserved and assimilated to bhakti. The texts that tell the story this way do not even bother to explain why the young antigod should serve the gods in the first place, against all laws of antigod nature. By this time, bhakti is taken for granted.

  AMAZING GRACE

  What made it OK for Prahlada to go against the rules of his birth as an antigod? It required a shift in the shape of the universe.

  THE ZERO-SUM WORLD EGG

  The basic structures of Hindu cosmology, constantly reinterpreted, served as an armature on which authors in each generation sculpted their musings on the structure of human society. In the Rig Veda, the Hindu universe was an egg, the two halves of the eggshell forming heaven and earth, with the sun as the yolk in the middle; it was a sealed, perfectly enclosed space with a given amount of good and evil and a given number of souls. This is why the sage in the Upanishads asks why heaven does not get filled up with all the dead souls going into it. This closed structure began to prove problematic when many Puranic myths acted as or pamphlets for a particular shrine, magnifying its salvific powers, presumably to drum up business by boasting that anyone—even women and people of low castes—could go straight to heaven after any contact with the shrine. In reaction against this, therefore, the gods (read: Brahmins) in some myths worry that so many people are being saved at the new shrines that people in heaven will have to stand with their hands above their heads, like people in a rush-hour subway. To keep heaven a more exclusive club, the gods take measures to destroy the shrines, flooding them or filling them with sand or simply corrupting people (as in the Buddha avatar) so that they stop going to the shrine.79 Here, as throughout this corpus, we may read these debates about imaginary creatures as paper-thin overlays on the ongoing debate about very real social classes and sectarian and religious conflicts; both Hindu and Muslim rulers did indeed, before, after, and during this period, destroy great Hindu shrines.

  Ethically, this is a world of limited good or a zero-sum game: If someone is saved, someone else has to be damned. For Brahmins to be pure, Pariahs have to be impure. This is the jealous world of the second alliance: If you win, I lose. Since evil is a substance, space is a problem. This means, among other things, that evil, once created, cannot get out of the universe; the best you can do is just move it over to some spot where it will do the least possible harm, as the fire that fused Shiva’s anger and Kama’s erotic power was temporarily stashed in the doomsday mare at the bottom of the ocean.

  The good antigod is the figure that ultimately triggers a paradigm shift in this cosmology. At first, he is caught in the clash between a form of general dharma (sadharana dharma) and specific dharma (sva-dharma, in this case, the duties of an antigod), a conflict that already affects the good ogres such as Vibhishana in the Ramayana. One story about a good ogre is based upon a typical myth told at some length in the Ramayana (7.5-8), in which an ogre named Sukesha is at first very good (he and his three sons study the Veda and make generous gifts), then good but threatening (they amass great amounts of inner heat and are given boons of invincibility), and finally corrupted by pride (they harass the gods); Vishnu destroys them all in battle and sends them down to hell. When a Purana retells this story, it raises new issues:r />
  THE OGRE SUKESHIN GOES TO HEAVEN

  A great ogre named Sukeshin received from Shiva the boon that he could not be conquered or slain. He lived according to dharma, and one day he asked a hermitage full of sages to tell him about dharma. They began by describing the specific dharma of gods (to perform sacrifice), ogres (raping other men’s wives, coveting others’ wealth, worshiping Shiva), and others. Then they went on to explain general dharma, the tenfold dharma for all classes, such as noninjury, restraint, and generosity. They concluded: “No one should abandon the dharma ordained for his own class and stage of life or his sva-dharma.”

  Sukeshin taught all the ogres about general dharma, and when they practiced it, their brilliant luster paralyzed the sun, moon, and stars; night was like day; owls came out and crows killed them. Then the sun realized the ogres’ one weakness: they had abandoned their sva-dharma, a lapse that destroyed all their general dharma. Overpowered by anger, the sun shot his rays at them, and their city fell from the sky.

  But when Sukeshin saw the city falling, he said, “Honor to Shiva!” and Shiva cast his glance at the sun, which fell from the sky like a stone. The gods propitiated Shiva and put the sun back in his chariot, and they took Sukeshin to dwell in heaven.80

  The first of the three parts of this myth states the problem: the clash between general and specific dharma. The second defends sva-dharma, and the third overrules it, when Sukeshin plays the bhakti card to trump at least some of the aces of the caste system.

  At the start, Sukeshin is in a bind: He must not abandon his dharma of rape and pillage, but he must also practice self-restraint (not easily compatible with rape) and generosity (not easily compatible with stealing). The one ray of light in this dark conflict is the fact that the sva-dharma of an ogre here apparently includes the worship of Shiva. Sukeshin seizes upon this loophole and proselytizes, with devastating results: Innocent owls die, and the sun is disastrously still. The midnight sun (which drives Scandinavians and Russians to commit suicide in summer) is even worse than the midwinter, when there is no sun; human beings (and, apparently, gods) cannot stand too much light—too much goodness in the wrong place. This is the traditional view: For an ogre, evil is its own reward, and a good ogre (virtuous) is by definition a bad ogre (the white sheep of his family). The jealous sun puts an end to it—but no. The marines land, as the troops of bhakti blow sva-dharma out of the water. The solution, however, is implied rather than stated: Sukeshin alone goes to heaven, the token antigod there; the other antigods, whose massive luster caused all the problems, conveniently vanish. Not everyone can go to heaven, it appears. Even with bhakti, at this point, not all are saved; the masses, the lower castes, and unreformed sinners are not saved. Not yet, at any rate.

  BLOWING OFF THE ROOF

  But later bhakti texts blast through this impasse. The spirit of these texts is what Mircea Eliade celebrated as “breaking open the roof ” (briser le toit),81 and the later Puranas did it, cracking open the egg of the closed universe. We have seen one example of this sort of cosmological transformation in two different versions of hell, first with a Mahabharata king (Yudhishthira) who cannot transfer his personal good karma and then with a Puranic king (Vipashchit) who can. Now we will encounter a mythology in which, again, sinners are given good karma that they don’t deserve, but since now it is a god, rather than a human king, who transfers his powers, his compassion and forgiveness, the god, unlike the king, loses nothing by it, none of his good karma. The world of limited good gives way to a world of infinitely expansible good karma and bhakti; the generous donor keeps it all while the sinners benefit from it too, just as in the avatar the god remains entire in heaven even while he gives a portion of himself to the avatar on earth. Unlike texts such as the Gita, these texts are saying that even without bhakti on your part you can be saved from your sins; the god has enough bhakti for both of you.

  In several of the late Puranic texts, when a shrine offers universal access to heaven, raising the gods’ hackles, Shiva intervenes, preserves or restores the shrine, and takes everyone to “the abode of Brahma.”82 When the god of hell, Yama, complains that women, Shudras, and dog cookers all are going to heaven through one particular shrine, the Shaiva shrine of Somnath, putting Yama out of work, Shiva replies that they all have been purified by the sight of the shrine, and he dismisses Yama without another word.83 To the complaint that heaven is full of evil people, Shiva simply replies that the people in question are no longer evil, ignoring the other half of the complaint, that heaven is full, or Yama on the dole. (Somnath is, the reader will recall, the temple that Mahmud of Ghazni so notoriously destroyed in 1025, perhaps before this text was composed.) Apparently, Shiva’s new heaven cannot be filled; these texts imagine a new heaven that can stretch the envelope to accommodate everyone.84 Earlier the shape of the universe seemed to constrain the ethical possibilities, but when those possibilities grow intense, the cosmos changes its shape, and this in turn can change the way that human beings treat one another, at least in theory and perhaps in practice. As in the Gita, the payoff is still in the next life. Most of these texts are not saying that a Pariah can act like a Brahmin in this life, merely that he too can be freed from this life. But some of them seem to imply that people of all castes can change their forms of worship in this life and thus gain a better rebirth. And here again we must acknowledge that these stories are not merely about Pariahs but also about the relationship between all humans and their salvation.

  ACCIDENTAL GRACE

  Under the combined influence of bhakti, Deshification, and Islam, some texts take the challenge one step further. Now the god to whom the antigod is devoted comes to him and announces that he and all the other antigods are to be taken forever to the heaven of the god, which can accommodate not only all reformed sinners but even unreformed sinners too, as well as people of all classes.85 Indeed this heaven is particularly partial to unreformed sinners. This is the culminating myth of the third alliance: The gods love all of us, even the good (hence bad) antigods and, especially, the bad antigods. This is a world of not only unlimited good but undeserved good, of what might be called accidental grace.

  We can see a kind of development here. First comes the story of the good bhakta, a good man, a devotee of Shiva, whom Shiva saves from death; there are many stories of this type.86 Then comes the evil bhakta. The god of death is forced to spare all worshipers of Shiva, even if they are evildoers (or evil thinkers; heretics and liars also go to heaven if they worship Shiva) or antigods who worship Shiva against their sva-dharma of being evil;87 we have seen some of these. Then comes the story of a man who is neither good nor a bhakta:

  THE THIEF WHO RANG THE BELL

  A thief who killed Brahmins, drank wine, stole gold, and corrupted other men’s wives lost everything in a game of dice. That night he climbed on the head of a Shiva-linga and took away the bell [inadvertently ringing it]. Shiva sent his servants to the thief and brought him to Kailasa, where he became a servant of Shiva.88

  Three of the thief’s sins are those of lustful addiction—wine, women, and dice—and the fourth and fifth are the two defining sins of the Brahmin world: killing Brahmins and stealing (Brahmins’) gold. The thief’s brush with accidental bhakti does nothing at all to change him; presumably, he goes on dicing, womanizing, and drinking until he dies. Although in some stories the accidental act of worship changes the worshiper, more often the sinners remain unreformed like this and therefore (sic) go to heaven.

  Here is another story, about a very bad man, this one ironically named Ocean of Virtues (Gunanidhi):

  THE ADULTERER WHO LIT A LAMP

  Gunanidhi abandoned his wife for a prostitute and went to a temple at night to rob it; he made a new wick for the lamp in order to see what was worth stealing, found the treasure, took it, and then returned to his wicked ways. Years later, when he died, he won deliverance from hell and eternal life in heaven because he had lit a lamp for the god.89

  (Robbing temples, you will reca
ll, was a very real problem at this time: South Indian kings, Muslim conquerors, everyone was doing it.) Similarly, Devaraja (“King of the Gods”), a thoroughly no-good fellow, accidentally heard the Shiva Purana being recited when he was passing by on some foul errand, paid no attention to it at all, but was still saved, by that contact, from the consequences of his sins.90 Then there was the man of equally dastardly deeds, named Rogue (Kitava), who tripped while hastening to bring flowers to his whore; he fell down, dropped all the flowers, and cried out, “Shiva!”ix For offering flowers to Shiva, not only was he saved from being thrown into hell but he was given the throne of Indra, king of the gods, thus fulfilling his name. (He was eventually reborn as the antigod Bali, but that is another story.)91

  None of these sinners reforms as a result of his accidental encounter with the god; no one sees the light or turns over a new page; all go on whoring, robbing, and so forth until they die, presumably of syphilis, cirrhosis, or impalement. But the mere encounter is enough to save them. The theme of the undeserving devotee implicitly repositions ritualism, even apparently “mindless” ritualism, over bhakti. It argues that feelings, emotions, intentions do not count at all, that certain actions are efficacious in themselves in procuring salvation for the unwitting devotee. You don’t even have to know how to do the ritual, but you do it “naturally,” almost like the “natural” (sahaja) acts of Tantric ritual. In this sense, at least, these stories present a Tantric argument for the efficacy of a ritual useful for sinners in the Kali Age.