The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  These narratives seem counterintuitive and were perceived as perverse by some subsequent Hindu commentators. But where did the idea come from?

  Retracing our footsteps, we can see the early stirrings of this concept of the sinner who goes to heaven despite his intentions, in the South Indian idea of “hate-devotion,” which takes on new dimensions in the late Puranas. By trying to kill the god, the antigod becomes passionate toward the god, and so the god loves the antigod, with or without repentance.92 After Krishna killed the ogress Putana (“Stinky”), her body gave off a sweet smell when it burned, for she had been purified by her death at his hands and by suckling him—even though she had done it with the intention of poisoning him. This doctrine, though sometimes challenged in bhakti texts that demanded a conscious turning toward god, was often upheld in texts justifying heresies: “Those who become non-Vedic Pashupatas and decry Vishnu really worship him through the spirit of hatred [dvesha-buddhi].”93 The Bhagavata Purana makes explicit the effect of this belief: “Desire, hatred, fear, or love toward the lord, filling the heart with bhakti, destroy all sins and bind one to the lord: The Gopis by desire, Kamsa by fear, the wicked kings by hatred, and his kinsmen by affection were bound to him as we are by bhakti.”94 Other elements too contributed to the development of the idea of accidental grace, such as the Tantric goal of merging with the god by flouting all the rules of conventional dharma.

  BY THE GRACE OF DOG

  In keeping with the other reversals of caste rules, dogs often play important roles in this theology:

  THE TRIDENT PAW

  An evil thief was killed by the king’s men. A dog came to eat him, and accidentally, unthinkingly, the dog’s nails made the mark of Shiva’s trident on the man’s forehead. As a result, Shiva’s messengers took the thief to Kailasa.95

  Now the dog, instead of the sinner, performs an accidental act of worship, as the three scratches of his nails (part of his foot, the lowest part of this lowest of creatures) form the triple lines of Shiva’s trident (trishula), just as Kannappar’s dogs left their paw marks on Shiva, and the natural genitals of male and female Tantrics are read as the signs of Shiva and Parvati. The thief’s generosity to the dog is part of his bhakti to the god. The dog who intends to eat the thief (and perhaps succeeds; the text does not say) unthinkingly blesses him. The thief goes to heaven, though the dog does not.

  Another dog blesses the sinner who feeds him in a retelling of the story of Kannappar, in the Skanda Purana:

  THE ACCIDENTALLY FED DOG

  Once upon a time there was a certain Kirata named Chanda [“Fierce”], a man of cruel addictions. He killed fish and animals and birds and even Brahmins, and his wife was just like him. One night, on the great Night of Shiva, he spent the night in a bilva tree, wide awake, hoping to kill a wild boar. There happened to be a Shiva linga under the tree. The leaves of the bilva tree [used in Shiva worship] that the hunter cut off to get a better view fell on the Shiva linga, and mouthfuls of water that he spat out chanced to land there too. And so, unknowingly, he performed a puja. His wife too stayed up all night worrying about him, for she feared he had been killed. But she went and found him and brought him food, and while they were bathing before their meal, a dog came and ate all the food. She became angry and started to kill the dog, but Chanda said, “It gives me great satisfaction to know that the dog has eaten the food. What use is this body anyway? Don’t be angry.” And so he enlightened her.

  Shiva sent his messengers with a heavenly chariot to take the Kirata to the world of Shiva, with his wife, because he had worshiped the linga on the Night of Shiva. But the Kirata said, “I am a violent hunter, a sinner. How can I go to heaven? How did I worship the Shiva-linga?” Then they told him how he had cut the bilva leaves and put them on the head of the linga, and he and his wife had stayed awake and fasted. And they brought the couple to heaven.96

  By eating the food, the dog inadvertently causes the Kirata and his wife to give food, a part of the puja that, like staying up all night, is prescribed for the Night of Shiva. Thus this story recapitulates and integrates three stories: of linga worship by mouthfuls of unclean food from a hunter (the tale of Kannappar), of inadvertent worship by someone violating Hindu dharma, and of salvation for a man touched by a dog. It also includes the man’s wife in the process of his salvation. Luck plays a part too.

  The Tantric argument that low people have to have low (or at least very simple and easy) sources of grace underlies a more complex story of salvation by dog, a variant of the myth of the evil king Vena,97 father of the good king Prithu:

  THE DOG THAT BROKE THE CHAIN OF EVIL

  As a result of his sins, Vena was born among the barbarians, afflicted with leprosy. He went to purify himself at the shrine of Shiva the Pillar (Sthanu), but the gods forbade him to bathe there. Now, there was a dog there who had been a man in a previous life but had been sinful and hence reborn as a dog. The dog came to the Sarasvati River and swam there, and his impurities were shaken off and his thirst slaked. Then he was hungry and entered Vena’s hut; when Vena saw the dog, he was afraid. Vena touched him gently, and the dog showered him with water from the bathing place. Vena plunged into the water, and by the power of the shrine, he was saved. Shiva offered Vena a boon, and Vena said, “I plunged into the lake out of fear of this dog, for the gods forbade me to bathe here. The dog did me a favor, and so I ask you to favor him.” Shiva was pleased and promised that the dog would be freed from sin and would go straight to Shiva’s heaven. And he promised Vena that he too would go to Shiva’s heaven—for a while.98

  The unclean dog first is cleansed and then transfers the water from his body to that of Vena, by shaking himself (as wet dogs always do); only then does he frighten Vena so much that Vena jumps into the water. I take the text to mean that Vena could jump into the water only after the dog had sprinkled him. He cannot enter the shrine before that, for reasons that are spelled out in another version of the story: As he approaches the shrine of Sthanu, the wind in the sky says, “Do not do this rash deed; protect the shrine. This man is enveloped in an evil so terrible that it would destroy the shrine.”99 This is the catch-22: The sinner would pollute the shrine before the shrine could purify the sinner; the sick man is too sick to take the medicine. The idea of contamination by contact with evil, transfer of evil, a variant of transfer of karma, comes from the zero-sum world of caste pollution; it determines whom you should avoid touching, the basis of the concept of untouchability. By contrast, the world of bhakti brings an open cosmogony and a new vision of the accidental grace of god (and of dog), both a response to and an inspiration for new visions of the grace that is possible for and between all human beings, including those of the excluded social classes. It’s a way of making room for people who have been kept outside the system, either by birth or by actions, since actions, as well as birth, can pollute people and marginalize them.

  The dog therefore intercedes for the sinner. He makes him a little less polluted, so that he becomes eligible for real purification. Similarly, the heretics to whom Shiva teaches the Tantras need to have worked off the curse, to have started on the path upward, before he can give them the Tantras, and in the view of some non-Tantrics, the Tantras make the Tantrics a little less benighted, so that they become eligible for real religion. Vena is not finished yet; there are other rebirths before he is finally freed. But the dog makes it possible for him to proceed on the path to his salvation. And finally, at the end of the myth, and a millennium or two after Yudhishthira’s dog in the Mahabharata vanished before he could enter heaven, this dog enters Shiva’s heaven.

  CHAPTER 18

  PHILOSOPHICAL FEUDS IN SOUTH INDIA AND KASHMIR

  800 to 1300 CE

  CHRONOLOGY (ALL DATES ARE CE)

  c. 788-820 Shankara, nondualist philosopher, lives in Kerala

  c. 975-1025 Abhinavagupta, Shaiva philosopher, lives in Kashmir

  1021 Ghaznavid (Turkish) Muslim capital established at Lahore

  c. 1056
-1137 Ramanuja, qualified nondualist philosopher, lives in Tamil country

  1192 Ghorid Muslim capital established at Delhi

  c. 1200 Jayadeva lives in Bengal

  1210-1526 The Delhi Sultanate is in power

  c. 1238-1317 Madhva, dualist philosopher, lives in Karnataka

  c. 1300 Shri Vaishnavas split into Cats and Monkeys

  In those long-gone days the Valley, which is now simply K, had other

  names. . . . “Kache-Mer” can be translated as “the place that hides a

  Sea.” But “Kosh-mar” . . . was the word for “nightmare.”iy

  Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990)1

  The sea that Kashmir hides (in this wordplay by Salman Rushdie) is the great Sanskrit Ocean of Story, composed in Kashmir, which Rushdie imagines submerged like other flooded lands in the Indian imagination. Kashmir is also the home of several famous debates about the philosophy of illusion, the belief that this world is nothing but a dream—or a nightmare. In this chapter we will consider those debates in narratives about quarrelsome philosophers, philosophical animals, and the recurrent Hindu nightmare of becoming a Pariah or a woman.

  PHILOSOPHICAL SCHOOLS

  Back to the banyan. Again we must double back to take a look at another branch of that tree, the philosophical branch, returning to the era of the beginning of bhakti in South India and the beginning of the Arab presence in India. The chapters on those two themes also provide the historical background for this chapter, which is about philosophy not as philosophy but as part of Hindu myth and ritual, in part because I am no philosopher and in part because that is not what this book is about, two not unrelated considerations. So I will deal with philosophy only when it gets out of the hands of the philosophers and into the hands of the people who tell stories about the philosophers and incorporate philosophical theories into their myths. For philosophy in India is debated in the worship life of ordinary people.

  My focus in this chapter will be on the myths that Hindus told about three great Vedantic philosophers, particularly (continuing the theme of inter- and intrareligious dialogue) stories that the followers of one philosopher told about another philosopher, and on myths that apply the philosophy of illusion to caste and gender and to the householder/renunciant tension, since one of the main arrows in the quiver of renunciation is the argument that the material world is not merely a deathtrap but an unreal deathtrap.

  Since this approach will ignore many other important philosophical themes, let me at least set the stage by briefly outlining the basic positions of the major schools of Hindu philosophy, the six Darshanas or “Points of View.” These schools had taken root in earlier centuries but became more fully developed from the twelfth century on, in conversation with one another.

  1. Mimamsa (“Critical Inquiry”) began with Jaimini (c. 400 BCE) and was devoted to the interpretation of the Vedas, taking the Vedas as the authority for dharma and karma. Jaimini guaranteed the sacrificer life in heaven after death and decreed that women could sacrifice but Shudras could not.2

  2. Vaisheshika began with Kanada (c. third century BCE), who presented an atomic cosmology, according to which all material objects are made of atoms of the nine elements: the four material elements—earth, water, fire, and air—plus five more abstract elements—space, time, ether, mind, and soul. In this view, god created the world, but not ex nihilo; he simply imposed order on pre-existing atoms. Shankara called the Vaisheshikas half nihilists.3

  3. Logic and reasoning began with Gautama (c. second century BCE, no relation to the Buddhist Gautama) and was an analytical philosophy basic not only to all later Hindu philosophy but to the scientific literature of the shastras.

  4. Patanjali’s Yoga-Sutras (c. 150 BCE) codified yogic practices that had been in place for centuries. Yoga assumes a personal god who controls the process of periodic creation and dissolution and is omniscient and omnipotent. This school emphasized exercises of the mind and the body, “including the very difficult exercise of not exercising them at all.”4 It believed that moksha came not from knowledge but from the concentration and discipline of the mind and the body.

  5. Sankhya as a philosophy has roots that date from the time of the Upanishads and are important in the Mahabharata (especially in the Gita) but were first formally codified by Ishvarakrishna (c. third century CE). Sankhya is dualistic, dividing the universe into a male purusha (spirit, self, or person) and a female prakriti (matter, nature). There are an infinite number of similar but separate purushas, no one superior to another. 5 Early Sankhya philosophers argued that god may or may not exist but is not needed to explain the universe; later Sankhya philosophers assumed that god does exist.

  6. And then comes Vedanta, the philosophical school that reads the Upanishads through the lens of the unity of the self (atman) and the cosmic principle (brahman). Often expressed in the form of commentaries on the Upanishads, on the Gita, and on Badarayana’s Vedanta-Sutras (c. 400 BCE), different branches of Vedanta tend to relegate the phenomenal world to the status of an epistemological error (avidya), a psychological imposition (adhyaya), or a metaphysical illusion (maya). Evil too, which the myths struggle to deal with, and, especially, death turn out to be nothing but an illusion.

  The great phase of Vedanta began with three great South Indian philosophers, all of whom were Brahmins.6 A basic schism separated the dualists, who argued that god and the universe (including the worshiper) were of two distinct substances, and the nondualists, who argued that they were of the same substance. Shankara, from Kerala, was a Shaiva exponent of pure nondualism (Advaita) and idealism. Ramanuja, from Kanchipuram (Kanjeevaram), in Tamil country, was a Tamil Vaishnava exponent of qualified nondualism (Vishishta Advaita) and of the religion of the Shri Vaishnavas (see below), who call their tradition the dual Vedanta because it combines the Sanskrit of the Veda with the Tamil of the Alvars.7 Madhva, also known as Madhvacharya (“Madhva the Teacher”), from Kalyan (in Karnataka), was the founder of the dualist (Dvaita) school of Vedanta. The followers, and opponents, of these three philosophers told many stories about them, from which we can gather some of the human implications of their philosophies and the wide range of diverse voices encoded in them. They were the subjects of a body of mythology in the style of the Puranas, which dramatized their views and assimilated those views to the hagiographic and folk traditions. For their philosophies were not limited to an elite circle of intellectuals but deeply affected devotional Hinduism, trickling down through mythology and folklore.

  VEDANTIC VENDETTAS IN MEDIEVAL NARRATIVES

  In medieval India, people cared about philosophy enough to fight about it. The “Conquest of the Four Corners of the World” (dig-vijaya), originally a royal and military concept, then a metaphor for a great pilgrimage tour, also became the term for the conquest of one philosopher by another.8 The philosophers fought mostly with words, occasionally with miracles (like the texts that floated upstream in the South Indian contest), more often with (and for) the purses of their patrons, and rarely with fisticuffs. They met on the page or the debating platform, not the battlefield. (Or almost always. It did come to fisticuffs at least once, according to an amazing painting in an illustrated copy of the Akbar-nama , said to depict “the Emperor Akbar watching a fight between two bands of Hindu devotees at Thaneshwar, Punjab, 1597-8.” There is close combat between dozens of yogis and ascetics and devotees of all stripes, shooting arrows from bows and slashing away at one another with swords, knives, and what appears to be anything else at hand.9)

  We have already encountered myths about the preaching of false philosophical and theological doctrines, in the course of Shiva’s conflicts with Daksha and Vishnu’s avatar as the Buddha. We have traced a rough (and not precisely chronological) progression of the myths of the Buddha avatar through three stages, from the assimilation of Buddhism into Hinduism, to the antagonistic myths of opposition to a Buddhism on the rise, and then to more appreciative myths about a Buddhism on the wane. Now we
encounter a fourth stage, in which Buddhism once again contributed in positive ways to the philosophy of idealism in South India and Kashmir (see below), while much of the former animosity against the Buddhists was channeled into animosity against Shankara, in myths modeled in many ways on the myth of Vishnu as the Buddha. Let us consider some of those myths.

  SHANKARA STORIES

  Shankara’s texts speak for his ideas, but the legends about him speak for his life. He is said to have started a reform movement, proposing a moral agenda that could compete with the noble eightfold path of the Buddhists10 (he was, as we will see, sometimes accused of owing too much to Buddhism) and a philosophy that may have been buoyed up by a need to respond to the monotheist philosophies of Islam. Shankara, regarded as a guru and proselytizer as well as a philosopher, is said to have founded the centers of learning (matts) that still thrive in his name in India today; his argument that the phenomenal world of everyday experience and its biological round of birth and death (samsara) was ultimately unreal and the source of our bondage was taken as the basis for a monastic or ascetic life of renunciation (samnyasa).11

  But Shankara argued that only Brahmins could renounce,12 and some of the more general animus against renunciation was channeled into hostility against him. While there had been renouncers in Hinduism since before the time the Upanishads mapped out the path of flame and Release, they lacked the institutional backing to become a major force—until Shankara. But Shankara took the idea of formal monastic orders and institutions from Buddhism and reworked it for Hinduism, an action that stirred up some Brahmins like a saffron flag waved in front of a bull. Ramanuja called Shankara a “crypto-Buddhist” (prachanna -bauddha).13