The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  Both Cats and Monkeys value bhakti, but less than they value prapatti (“surrender”), jc an idea that may owe something to the Muslim idea of surrender (which is what Islam means). Members of the Monkey school, who regarded themselves as twice born people liberated through ritual devotion, sometimes said that the Cat school was designed for the lower castes, because they were not allowed in temples and hence were unable to perform the rituals and could be liberated only through surrender. They therefore regarded Cat bhakti as necessary for those castes, like the Tantras in the Puranic view.

  THE SNAKE AND THE ROPE

  Another important philosophical animal was the illusory snake that was really a rope. For the Vedantins, the claim that the world is unreal does not mean that it is entirely unreal in the way that the son of a barren woman (a favorite Vedantic example) is unreal. There is, in some sense, a rope, and, at a deeper level, brahman does in fact exist. The error lies, rather, in our perception of the rope as something it isn’t (the snake).

  Unlike other topics that only erudite Indian philosophers wrestled with, illusion got into the very fabric of Hindu culture, so that just about everyone knows about maya and the difficulty of telling a snake from a rope. Maya (from the verb ma [“to make”]) is what is made, artificial, constructed, something that seems to be there but has no substance; it is the path of rebirth, the worship of gods with qualities (sa-guna). It is magic, cosmic sleight of hand. Maya begins in the earliest text, the Rig Veda (1.32) in which the god Indra (the first great magician; magic is called Indra’s Net [indra-jala]) uses his magic against his equally magical enemy Vritra (for all the antigods are magicians): Indra magically turns himself into the hair of one of his horses’ tails, and Vritra magically conjures up a storm. Magic illusions of various sorts play a crucial role in the Valmiki Ramayana, in the shadow Sita of later traditions, and in Hindu thinking across the board.

  As we have seen, the idea of darshan, of seeing the god and, more important, of knowing that the god sees you, is central to Hinduism and accounts for the extraordinary emphasis on the eyes in Hindu mythology. It was therefore a brilliant move of nondual Vedanta to reverse the valence of vision/sight/gaze by making the image of false seeing—of classically mistaking a rope for a snake or a piece of shell for a piece of silver—an enduring trope for the larger mistake of taking the visual world to be the real world. Nondualists imagined gods to be without any visual form or physical qualities (nir-guna) but to take on, for various reasons, apparent visual form and physical qualities (sa-guna) so that we can worship them. The gods themselves produce the illusion, just as they produce the deluding texts in the story of the Buddha avatar.

  The Upanishads speak of four stages of consciousness: waking, dreaming, dreamless sleep, and “the fourth,” the supernatural, transcendent state of identity with brahman.40 Waking is the most distorted image of brahman, furthest from it; dreaming is a bit better, dreamless sleep better yet. To be enlightened is to realize that the stage of waking is the illusory end of the spectrum and to begin to progress toward the fourth stage. Or to put it differently, to realize that the stage of waking is the illusory end of the spectrum is to realize that dreaming is more real than is conventionally understood.41 It is no accident that the word svapna in Sanskrit means both the physical state of “sleep” (the English word is a cognate of the Sanskrit) and the mental construct of “dream”; there is no difference between matter and mind.

  Mistaking one thing for another, such as a rope for a snake, is easily rectified upon closer inspection, but the recollection of our false mental state before we took that second look may trigger our acknowledgment of the far more important mistake that we make all the time, in taking the material world to be real (brahman) when it is merely maya. When you realize that the snake is not a snake but a rope, you go on to realize that there is not even a rope at all.

  ILLUSIONS OF CASTE AND GENDER IN THE YOGAVASISHTHA

  The philosophy of illusion was developed in a particularly imaginative and brilliant way in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Kashmir, with heavy input from South India. We have noted the communication back and forth between North and South India in the development of bhakti, Tantra, and the Shaiva Siddhanta. The extreme idealist position in the philosophy of illusion was developed by the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna, who is said to have been born a Brahmin in South India, converted to Buddhism, moved to Kashmir (where his school of idealism flourished during the Kushana period), and, when Buddhism came under attack in Kashmir, moved back to South India. Shaiva philosophers in Kashmir combined all these elements, including the Buddhist ideas, with the monistic ideas of Shankara and fused them into a new philosophy of their own, known as Kashmir Shaivism, also called the Recognition (Pratijna) school.42 A key figure in this movement was the great Shaiva philosopher Abhinavagupta (975-1025), who was also largely responsible for developing the right-hand householder form of Tantrism. Jettisoning the dualism of Shaiva Siddhanta (while retaining much of its ritual), Kashmir Shaivism was relentlessly monistic.

  Kashmir Shaivism had died out in Kashmir by the end of the twelfth century, in large part because of a hostile Muslim presence there,43 and Shaiva Siddhanta went back south, taking its dualism with it. But other traditions developed in Kashmir in this period not in spite of but because of the foreign presences there. The school of the Muslim philosopher Ibn ‘Arabi (1165-1240), who argued that all that is not a part of divine reality is an illusion, is said to have had a major influence on Hindu philosophy at this time, while in return the use of heterosexual love as a symbol for divine love in a few Sufi scriptures from the Mughal period may have been inspired by Kashmiri Tantrism.44

  Located as it is on the northern border of India, Kashmir is close to the Central Asian strongholds of Buddhism (whose philosophers developed their own major doctrines of illusion) and a number of Muslim (Turkish and Arabic) cultures with highly developed storytelling traditions that rivaled those of ancient India. Eventually a brand of idealist philosophy that was already a mix of Buddhism and Hinduism married a brand of storytelling that was already a mix of Hinduism and Islam, enlivened by a dash of Abhinavagupta’s writings on the artistic transformation of the emotions. It was here, therefore, and at this time that the great Indian traditions of storytelling and illusion blossomed in the text of the great Ocean of Story (Katha-sarit-sagara) and, above all, in the Yoga-vasishtha (in full, the Yoga-Vasishtha-Maha-Ramayana or “The Great Story of Rama in Which Vasishtha Teaches His Yoga”). This text heavily influenced the collection of stories often called the Arabian Nights, a constantly shifting corpus with narrative traces as early as the tenth century, probably put together in the thirteenth century. Another, later contribution from Hinduism to Islam was made when the great Mughal emperor Akbar had the Yoga-vasishtha translated from Sanskrit to Persian; Nizam Panipati dedicated his abridged Persian translation to the crown prince Salim, who (when he became the emperor Jahangir) commissioned a new, illustrated translation.45 The book became so famous that there were Persian and Arabic satires on it.46

  That Kashmir Shaivism was called the Recognition school is not irrelevant to the main theme of the Yoga-vasishtha narratives, which turn on an individual’s recognition of his or her own identity and ontological status. But the glory of the Yoga-vasishtha is that it transforms a rather difficult philosophy into a series of engaging narratives.jd It all goes back, like so much else, to that fork in the road in the Upanishads. For Vedantic thinkers like Shankara, following the path of Release meant awakening from the dream of the material world to the reality of brahman. The twist that the Yoga-vasishtha adds is that you cannot wake up from the dream, because it may be someone else’s dream.je For householders on the path of rebirth, Release means staying asleep but being aware that you are dreaming. This is also the message of a large corpus of myths in which kings, beginning with Indra, king of the gods, become enlightened, wish to awaken (that is, to renounce material life), but must be persuaded to renounce even the wish to re
nounce, to remain engaged in life with the major distinction of understanding that it is an illusion. It is a variant of the final advice that Krishna gives to Arjuna in the Gita (though the Yoga-vasishtha arrives at that point after a very different journey): Continue to act, though with a newly transformed understanding of the unreality of actions and therefore without the desire for the fruits of actions.

  The frame story of the Yoga-vasishtha presents the text as an episode that Valmiki left out of his version of the Ramayana; it claims to fill in the supposed gaps in the older text on which it purports to be based, just as many folk versions of the Ramayana actually do.jf It frames the story in terms of the ancient tension between the householder life and the truth claims of renunciation. The Yogavasishtha takes the form of a long conversation between Rama and the sage Vasishtha, at a moment when Rama has returned from a pilgrimage in a state of depression and madness (or so his father and the courtiers describe it): Rama says that anyone who says, “Act like a king,” is out of his mind, that everything is unreal, that it is false to believe in the reality of the world, that everything is just the imagination of the mind. Rama’s father consults two great sages (always get a second opinion), Vishvamitra and Vasishtha, who assure him that Rama is perfectly right in his understanding of the world, that he has become enlightened, and then offer to cure him.47 That is, they promise to remove his depression and make him socially functional, while leaving his (correct) metaphysical apprehensions unimpaired.

  THE ILLUSION OF GENDER

  The Yoga-vasishtha tells a tale about another king who returns from renunciation to rule his kingdom and, along the way, realizes the illusory nature of both sex and gender:

  CHUDALA: THE WOMAN WHO PRETENDED TO BE A MAN WHO BECAME A WOMAN

  Queen Chudala and her husband, King Shikhidhvaja, were passionately in love. In time, the queen became enlightened and acquired magic powers, including the ability to fly, but she concealed these powers from her husband, and when she attempted to instruct him, he spurned her as a foolish and presumptuous woman. Eventually the king decided to seek his own enlightenment and withdrew to the forest to meditate; he renounced his throne and refused to let her accompany him but left her to govern the kingdom.

  After eighteen years she decided to visit him; she took the form of a young Brahmin boy named Kumbha [“Pot”] and was welcomed by the king, who did not recognize her but remarked that Chudala as Kumbha looked very much like his queen, Chudala. After a while the king became very fond of Chudala as Kumbha, who instructed him and enlightened him, and she began to be aroused by her handsome husband. And so Chudala as Kumbha went away for a while. When she returned, she told the king that a sage had cursed her to become a woman, with breasts and long hair, every night. That night, before the king’s eyes, Chudala as Kumbha changed into a woman named Madanika, who cried out in a stammering voice, “I feel as if I am falling, trembling, melting. I am so ashamed as I see myself becoming a woman. Alas, my chest is sprouting breasts, and jewelry is growing right out of my body.” Eventually they married and made love all night.

  Thus they lived as dear friends during the day and as husband and wife at night. Eventually, the queen changed from Chudala as Kumbha as Madanika to Chudala and told the king all that she had done. He embraced her passionately and said, “You are the most wonderful wife who ever lived!” Then he made love to her all night and returned with her to resume his duties as king. He ruled for ten thousand years and finally attained Release.48

  Chudala wishes to be her husband’s mistress both in the sense of lover and in the sense of teacher, schoolmistress. She has already played the first role but is now denied it, and he refuses to grant her the second role, without relinquishing the first. She succeeds by destabilizing gender through a double gender transformation.

  The double woman whom she creates-Chudala as Kumbha as Madanika—is her real self, the negation of the negation of her femininity; the jewelry that actually grows out of her body is what she would have worn as Queen Chudala at the start of the story. This double deception works well enough and may express her full fantasy: to be her husband’s intellectual superior under the sun and his erotic partner by moonlight. But since the two roles belong to two different personae, she wants to merge them and to play them both as her original self.

  The playful juggling of the genders demonstrates both the unreality of appearances and the falsity of the belief that one gender is better than the other or even different from the other. This extraordinary openness to gender bending in ancient India may be an indirect benefit of the rigid social order: Since other social categories are taken for granted, the text can use them as a springboard for gender role-playing. But the roles, when we look closer, revert to the rigid categories in the end. Chudala has to become a man to teach her husband, and she has to become a woman again to sleep with him. In the Hindu view, Chudala is like a man to begin with, aggressive, resourceful, and wise. Moreover, the relationship between Chudala and the king is never the relationship of a real husband and wife. She is a magician; in other times and places she might have been called a witch. She functions like a Yogini (she can fly) or perhaps even a goddess, giving him her grace and leading him up the garden path of enlightenment, setting up a divine illusion and then revealing herself to him as the gods reveal themselves.

  Eventually Chudala repairs the split between kama and moksha by revealing the illusory nature of both sexual love and renunciation. Like Rama in the frame of the text, the king comes back to his duties as king. As she has gone from female to male to female, he has worked through his own double transformation from kama to moksha and back to kama.

  THE ILLUSION OF CASTE

  Two other tales from the Yogavasishtha deconstruct caste as the tale of Chudala deconstructs gender, taking as the central, transformative experiences the demotion of first a king and then a Brahmin to Pariahs. The first, the tale of King Lavana, is relatively straightforward, though it begins to challenge the linearity of time and consciousness; the second, the tale of the Brahmin Gadhi, goes further in blurring the line. They are rather long stories, but I will summarize them as briefly as I can, one by one:

  LAVANA: THE KING WHO DREAMED HE WAS A PARIAH

  There was a king named Lavana, who seemed to fall into a trance one day while gazing at a horse; when he regained his senses, he told this story: “I imagined that I mounted the horse, which bolted and carried me far away to a village of Pariahs [Chandalas], where the low branch of a tree swept me off the galloping horse. I met a Pariah girl, married her, raised two sons and two daughters with her, and lived there for sixty years; I forgot that I had been a king. Then there was a famine, and as I was about to throw myself into a fire so that my children could eat my flesh and survive, I awoke here on my throne.” The courtiers were amazed. The king set out the next day, with his ministers, to find that village again, and he did. He found an old woman there who told him that a king had come there and married her daughter, and then there was a famine and everyone had died. The king returned to his palace.49

  The king is “carried away” by the bolting horse, a motif taken from the theme of royal addiction to hunting as well as from the recurrent metaphor of a horse as sensuality out of control. The existence of a village, and people, that we at first assume to exist only in the king’s imagination but that then leave evidence that others can see (the old woman mentions a number of very specific details from the king’s life among the Pariahs) poses a serious challenge to our concept of the limits of the imagination. Lavana seems to seek public corroboration, first in the courtiers and then in the woman in the village, of the truth he knows by himself. The text sets these paradoxes within its own Kashmir Shaiva metaphysics: The mind imposes its idea on the spirit/matter dough of reality, cutting it up as with a cookie cutter, now into stars, now into gingerbread men, now into a palace, now into a village. It makes them, and it finds them already there, like a bricoleur, who makes new forms out of objets trouvés. In the end, the king retu
rns to his original life, even though he believes that his other life is just as real (or, as the case may be, unreal); this return is part of the lesson that Rama must also learn.

  The theme of the king who becomes, or dreams that he becomes, a Pariah (or vice versa) has an ancient provenance in India.50 One of the early Upanishads describes the paradigmatic dream in these terms: “When he dreams, he seems to become a great king. Then he seems to become a great Brahmin. He seems to enter into the high and the low.”51 (The “low” would be the Pariah nightmare.) And the theme of kings actually becoming Pariahs or tribals is refracted in the episodes in both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana in which the king (Yudhishthira, Nala, Rama) is exiled among the common people before he can ascend his throne, to learn how the other half lives. The actual banishment and the dream of banishment are combined in the Markandeya Purana tale of King Harishchandra, who is (according to the Yoga-vasishtha) Lavana’s grandfather:

  HARISHCHANDRA: THE KING WHO BECAME A PARIAH WHO DREAMED HE WAS A PARIAH

  King Harishchandra was cursed to become a Chandala, and he lost his wife and son. He lived for years as a Chandala and one night dreamed that he was a Pulkasa [another Pariah caste], born in the womb of a Pulkasa woman; when he was seven years old, some Brahmins, annoyed with him, said, “Behave yourself. Harishchandra annoyed some Brahmins and was cursed to be a Pulkasa.” Then they cursed him to go to hell, and he went there for a day and was tortured. He was reborn as a dog, eating carrion and vomit and enduring cold and heat. The dog died and was then reborn as a donkey, an elephant, a monkey, a tortoise, wild boar, porcupine, cock, parrot, crane, and snake. Then he was born as a king who lost his kingdom at dice and lost his wife and son. Finally he awakened, still as a Chandala, working in a cremation ground. One day he met his wife carrying his dead son to be cremated; he and his wife resolved to immolate themselves on their son’s pyre. Just then Indra and Dharma came there, revived the son, and took all three of them to heaven.52