The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  Shankara’s nondualism was challenged first by Ramanuja’s qualified nondualism and, later, by Madhva’s dualism; the followers of Madhva argued that Shankara championed monism because he was so stupid that he could only count to one.14 Nondualism has the disadvantage that you cannot love god or worship god if you are god, or if your god is without any qualities (nir-guna), a technicality that Shankara allegedly ignored when he wrote the passionate, beautiful poems to Shiva that are attributed to him. Nondualists could get around this by worshiping god with a kind of “as if” for the forms “with qualities” (sa-guna): He appears “as if” he were a god with qualities. If, however, you assume that there is a dualism separating you from god and that god has qualities, as Madhva assumes, worship poses no problem.

  The hagiographies of Shankara arise at a time when (1) bhakti is rampant, spreading so fast that it even gets into philosophy, like ants at a picnic, and (2) Buddhists and Muslims, as well as Christians in Kerala (Shankara’s home territory), are gaining ground. And so, just as the human avatars were in part a response to the human dimension of Buddhism in an earlier age, Shankara, someone who was, like the Buddha (and Muhammad and Jesus), a human founder of a religion, was the answer now.

  Born into a high-caste Brahmin family, Shankara taught and debated with many other philosophers. In his journeys throughout India, his biographies claim, he vehemently debated with Buddhists and tried to persuade kings and other influential people to withdraw their support from Buddhist monasteries. One text depicts Shankara as an incarnation of Shiva, sent to earth to combat Vishnu’s Buddha avatar:

  SHIVA AS SHANKARA VERSUS VISHNU AS BUDDHA

  The gods complained to Shiva that Vishnu had entered the body of the Buddha on earth for their sake, but now the haters of religion, despising Brahmins and the dharma of class and stage of life, filled the earth. “Not a single man performs a ritual, for all have become heretics—Buddhists, Kapalikas, and so forth—and so we eat no offerings.” Shiva consented to become incarnate as Shankara, to reestablish Vedic dharma, which keeps the universe happy, and to destroy evil behavior.15

  As usual, the heresy goes too far, destroying the allies as well as the enemies of the gods, and must be combated by the intervention of god.

  The myths from this period reveal that it wasn’t only non-Hindus in conflict with Shankara; Mimamsa philosophers and other Vedanta schools also apparently had tense relations with Shankara, some of which turned on the question of renouncing desire and sexuality:

  SHANKARA AND THE PHILOSOPHER’S WIFE

  The Mimamsa philosopher named Mandanamishra had a wife, Bharati, who challenged Shankara to a debate about the art of love, about which he was woefully ignorant, since he had always been chaste, a renouncer. Stymied by a question about sex, he asked for time out and took on the body, but not the soul, of a king who had a large harem, to the relief both of the exhausted king and of the unsatisfied women. After a month of pleasant research and fieldwork, Shankara returned to his philosophical body and won the argument. Both Bharati and her husband then became nondualists.16

  This tale contrasts sex and renunciation in such a way that the renunciant philosopher is able to have his cake and eat it, to triumph not only in the world of the mind (in which, before this episode begins, he wins a series of debates against the nonrenouncing male Mimamsa philosopher) but in the world of the body, represented by the philosopher’s wife (not to mention the harem women who clearly prefer Shankara to the king in bed). This double superiority—for it appears that, like Shiva, this Shankara stored up impressive erotic powers during his years of chastity—rather than the inherent power (or relevance) of nondualism, is apparently what persuades both the philosopher and his wife.

  Renunciation took its toll on parents as well as partners, and this story addresses that issue:

  SHANKARA AND THE CROCODILE

  As a young boy of eight, Shankara is said to have vowed to become a renouncer, to the dismay of his mother, who kept postponing the moment when she would give him her permission. One day while he was bathing in a river a crocodile grabbed his leg. He shouted out, and his mother came to the riverbank. As he was presumably going to die right away, and this was his last chance to achieve Release, the only hope was for him to become a renouncer there and then. His mother agreed, whereupon the crocodile let him go. He became a renouncer but promised his mother he would be with her during her last days and perform her funeral rites, which he did.17

  This is a story about the need to compromise, to satisfy the concerns of family as well as renunciation—parents want to see their grandchildren—but it is built upon an old story that had been told before to make very different points. The Rig Veda (10.28.11) mentions crocodiles that drag people away by their legs; the bodhisattva (in a Jataka story carved at Amaravati) and Vishnu18 are said to have rescued an elephant whose leg had been grabbed by a crocodile, and the Shaiva saint Cuntarar (the same one said to have contested with the Jainas) saves a Brahmin boy from a crocodile. It is easy to see how this story could have been picked up and adapted to the needs of the hagiographers of Shankara.

  STORIES OF RAMANUJA AND MADHVA

  The chain of sectarian myths does not end with Shankara. Many stories are told about Ramanuja’s clash not with disciples of Shankara but with other Shaivas. Ramanuja is said to have challenged the Shaivas in a great temple in Andhra Pradesh; he won not by debate but by the god’s action in “picking up and wearing the Vaishnava emblems, while leaving the Shaiva emblems unused on the floor.”19 On another occasion, the Chola king, a Shaiva, tried to make Ramanuja sign a declaration that there was no god but Shiva, but Ramanuja sent two of his disciples, one of them dressed to look like him, in his place; when one of them made a pun on the word “Shiva,” the king ordered both men’s eyes put out. Ramanuja escaped to Mysore, where he is said to have converted the Hoysala king from Jainism to Shri Vaishnavism and persuaded him to endow a number of Vaishnava temples with lands that had previously belonged to many Jaina temples.

  There are also stories of Ramanuja’s actions against Muslims, as when he went to Delhi to help recover the lost image of Ranganatha: he found the image, cried, “Beloved son!” and the image jumped into his arms.20 Ramanuja is also said to have defeated a thousand Jaina ascetics in a debate involving a contest of miracles, whereupon the Jaina monks committed suicide rather than convert. 21 The martyrdom by blinding, the miraculous debate, and the deaths of thousands of Jainas are reminiscent of other South Indian tales told about Shaiva saints, and these about Ramanuja are equally mythological: The historical record documents no mass suicides (or, for that matter, miracles). Most of the kings of that era were not fanatics but supported Shaiva, Vaishnava, Jaina, and Buddhist institutions, nor is there any evidence that the Hoysala king was originally a Jaina or withdrew his supported from the Jainas.22 But the stories have survived for centuries.

  Shankara’s followers often came into conflict with the followers of the Vaishnava philosopher Madhva, who is said to have accomplished a number of miracles, some of which were also attributed to Christ in the New Testament: walking on water,23 feeding many with a few loaves of bread, calming rough waters, and becoming a “fisher of men.”24 Madhva (or his hagiographers) may have been influenced by Christians, who had been established, since at least the sixth century CE, in Kerala and at Kalyan (in Karnataka), Madhva’s birthplace. But it is Buddhism, rather than Christianity, that figures officially in Madhva’s conflict with Shaivas. For Madhva placed another new twist on the myth of the Buddha avatar, substituting the Shaiva scriptures for the Buddhist doctrines: Citing a Puranic text in which Shiva agrees to teach false doctrines,25 Madhva said that Shiva composed the Shaiva scriptures at Vishnu’s command, in order to delude humans with false doctrines, to destroy the true religion (the worship of Vishnu), to reveal Shiva, and to conceal Vishnu.26 And this was just the beginning:27

  MADHVA VERSUS SHANKARA

  At the beginning of the Kali Age, the earth was under the sway of
Buddhism. Then an ogre named Manimat was born as a widow’s bastard’s son, named Sankara [sic]. He seduced the wife of his Brahmin host and made many converts by his magic arts. He studied the shastras with Shiva’s blessings. The depraved welcomed him and the antigods hailed him as their savior. On their advice, he joined the Buddhists and taught Buddhism under cover of teaching the Vedanta, and he performed various wicked deeds. His doctrines were like those of the Materialists [Lokayatas], Jainas, and Pashupatas, but more obnoxious and injurious. His followers were tyrannical people who burned down monasteries, destroyed cattle, and killed women and children. He had people whipped because they were not Vedic and converted others by force. When he died, the god of the wind became incarnate as Madhva, to refute the teachings of Manimat-Sankara .28

  The accusation that Shankara seduced the wife of his Brahmin host may be an allusion to the story of Shankara’s vying with the Mimamsa philosopher’s wife on the subject of erotic seduction (and using his magic arts to sleep with a king’s wives), and the accusation that he pretended to be teaching Vedanta when he taught Buddhism is a product of the recurrent suspicion of Buddhist elements in Shankara’s brand of Vedanta. In this text, Manimat joins the already extant Buddhists (instead of founding them, as Vishnu as Buddha does), reverses the incarnation of Shankara (who is now an avatar not of Shiva but of an ogre named Manimat), and is followed by a third avatar, of the god of the wind as Madhva.iz The idea that the gods are sent to corrupt the antigods (as in the myth of the Buddha avatar), combined with the implication that the resulting heretics are antigods (or related to antigods in some way), undergoes a major reversal: The antigods now are not the ones who are corrupted but the ones who do the corrupting. The Madhvas’ identification of Shankara as an antigod is particularly harsh in light of the fact that the Madhvas, almost alone among Hindu philosophers, believe that antigods and heretics are doomed to eternal damnation in hell. Finally, this corruption takes place, as usual, in the Kali Age, and the Madhvas take advantage of this to pun on the name of their enemy: Shankara (“he who gives peace,” an epithet of Shiva given to many Shaivas) becomes Sankara (also written sam-kara), a word that denotes indiscriminate mixture, particularly the breaking down of barriers between classes that is the principal sign of the advent of the Kali Age. In keeping with this name, Sankara is said to be the bastard son of a widow.29

  MONISM AND CONVERSION IN VEDANTA

  One of the philosophical reactions against the excessive hierarchy of the caste system was to devise (or, rather, to revise, for it began in the Upanishads) a philosophical system devoid of hierarchy, indeed of any distinctions at all: monism (which assumes that all living things are elements of a single, universal being). But many of the Vedantic philosophical orders organized themselves into groups that were in fact highly hierarchical (for example, as we have seen, Shankara excluded Shudras) and often intolerant of other orders.

  The monistic philosophers asserted that there was one truth, which they knew, and so they proceeded to proselytize. Logically, Hindu universalism (of the sort that assumed that all religions have access to the truth) should have led polytheistic Hindus to the belief that there was no point in trying to convert anyone else to Hinduism, yet this was not always the case. Orthoprax Vedic Hindus certainly made no efforts to proselytize, assuming that you had to be born a Hindu to be a Hindu. But some of the Vedantic Hindus, lapsing into the shadows of orthodoxy,ja argued that their particular brand of monism was more monistic than thine and did indeed proselytize. And although proselytizing is not in itself necessarily intolerant, it does close the open-ended door of pluralism.

  PHILOSOPHICAL ANIMALS

  The quarrels of these great South Indian philosophers had repercussions throughout India, particularly in far-off Kashmir. It all began with two South Indian sects that expressed their doctrines primarily through animal metaphors.

  SHAIVA SIDDHANTA BEASTS IN A SNARE

  One movement for which animal metaphors were central was the Shaiva Siddhanta, which arose at this time in South India to cast a net of theory around some of the unrulier aspects of bhakti. Among other things, it theologized the doctrine of accidental grace.

  The philosophy of Shaiva Siddhanta traces its roots back in a general way to the devotional hymns that the Shaiva Nayanmars had written from the fifth to the ninth century. That tradition found its way up to Kashmir, to become one of the elements of Kashmir Shaivism in the ninth century CE. But then Tirumular, a mystic and reformer, is said to have come from Kashmir to South India to found the Shaiva Siddhanta philosophical school, and othersjb systematized the doctrines of the Nayanmars. The Shaiva Siddhanta in Kashmir had taken elements of Kashmir Tantrism and fused them into a householder’s religion,30 and the Southern Shaiva Siddhantins continued and intensified this transformation. It thrived under royal Hindu patronage and in powerful temple centers, reinfused with Tamil bhakti and transformed, in effect, from a philosophy into a powerful religious culture that thrives there today. Though the Shaiva Siddhantins paid lip service to the Vedas, they rejected caste (or, rather, they were open to everyone but women, children, the old, the mad, and the disabled31) and asceticism, and believed, like the Virashaivas, that the body is the true temple of Shiva. Theirs was a separate sect, established in Shaiva temples, into which members had to be initiated.32 Like other aspects of bhakti, it spread north, reinfusing the Kashmir Shaivism that had in part inspired it.

  In conscious opposition to the idealism and nondualism of both Shankara and Kashmir Shaivism, which regarded god and the soul as one and the universe as illusory, the Shaiva Siddhanta was a realistic and dualistic philosophy. It taught that the lord (pati) was not identical with the soul but connected to the soul (pashu [“the sacrificial or domesticated animal”]) by a bond (pasha), as a leash connects a dog (the ultimate bhakta) to its owner. The bond consists of Shiva’s will and his power of illusion (maya), the illusion made of the universe of all mental and material phenomena—phenomena that, in contrast with the teachings of pure idealism, were real because they were divine.33 Just as in Tantra Shiva makes some people heretics in the first place so that he can ultimately enlighten them, so in Shaiva Siddhanta he makes people into beasts so that he can release them from the condition of beasts; he deludes people in order to reveal their beast nature, lust and hatred, and then he releases them from that nature. The bond, which was the functional equivalent of bhakti in connecting the worshiper to the god, had negative as well as positive valences.34

  The central metaphor of the Shaiva Siddhanta became so well known in Hinduism that it was eventually adopted for uses far from its original meaning for the theologians who coined it, uses such as the literalizing of the metaphor in the actual sacrifice of a beast in a snare. For animal sacrifices continued to take place despite the growing force of the doctrine of nonviolence; the philosopher Madhva (like Manu before him) encouraged Hindus to substitute animals made of dough for real animals in sacrificial rituals,35 and his need to make this suggestion, again, suggests that animals were still being sacrificed. The Agni Purana prescribes an animal sacrifice in the course of the initiation of a Vaishnava pupil by his guru, but it cloaks the ritual in euphemisms derived from the Shaiva Siddhanta:

  LIBERATING THE BEAST FROM THE SNARE

  Enter the temple of worship and worship the image of Vishnu while circumambulating him to the right, saying, “You alone are the refuge for Release from the snares that bind the beasts sunk in the ocean of rebirth; you always look upon your devotees as a cow looks upon her calf. God of gods, have mercy; by your favor, I will release all these beasts that are bound by the snares and bonds of nature.” When you have announced this to the lord of gods, have the beasts enter there; purify them with the chants and perfect them with fire. Place them in contact with the image of Vishnu and close their eyes.36

  “Close their eyes” is a euphemism for killing the sacrificial animals: the Vedic texts used a different euphemism, speaking of “quieting” the animal. The killing is said to
give the beast ultimate Release, here equated with release from the snares (or noose, or bonds) that we know from Shaiva Siddhanta terminology. In this text, however, these philosophies are embodied in an actual rather than a metaphorical beast and a real snare.

  SHRI VAISHNAVA MONKEYS AND CATS

  Another South Indian movement, this one devoted to Vishnu rather than Shiva, used an animal analogy, and a maternal metaphor, to express a fork in the road to salvation. This was the Shri Vaishnava sect, which took shape when, in support of the rising sectarian movement of devotion to the child Krishna, Vaishnava theologians in the early medieval period (900-1300 CE) in South India established new scholastic and monastic lineages.37 In the fourteenth century they branched into the Cat school (Tenkalai, in Tamil) in the south and the Monkey school (Vadakalai) in the north of the Tamil country.38 Originally a split about a theological belief, epitomized by these two animals, it was caught up into the clash between two separate monastic centers vying for the control of temples, a dispute in which the king played a major adjudicating role:39 Two Vijayanagara royal agents established the Cat school, and the priest of another king established the Monkey school by setting up a temple at Tirupati.

  In the Monkey school, the devotee actively clings to god, who saves him through his grace, just as a baby monkey clings to its mother as she moves through the trees. In the Cat school, by contrast, the devotee is passive and is saved through grace alone, as kittens allow a mother cat to pick them up by the scruffs of their necks and carry them without any effort on their part. Indeed the Cat devotee should not make any effort, should go limp as a kitten, since any effort would simply get in the way of the mother cat. The passive, accidental bhakti of the Cats toward the grace of god was echoed in the doctrine of accidental grace toward unrepentant sinners in the theology of the later Puranas.