The Hindus (88 page)

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.

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.

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 others
^jb
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 disabled
³¹
) 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:

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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