The Hindus (89 page)

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.
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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.
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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 renounce, 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.
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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
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 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.

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:

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 returns 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:

We can see the seeds of the story of Lavana here, but without the Kashmir Shaiva frame: A curse, rather than a meditation, turns Harishchandra into a real, rather than dreamed, Pariah, though within that real life he also dreams as Lavana dreams. In both stories, the death of the son and the decision to enter the fire trigger the awakening. But in this text, which is framed by samsara and bhakti, the final release is not
moksha
but physical transportation to heaven, the sensuous heaven of Indra. (We can also see a South Indian bhakti thread in the child whom the gods pretend to kill but then revive.) The curse destabilizes caste to a certain extent: If someone can be cursed to become a Pariah, the Pariah you meet might have been a king even in
this
life. The philosophy of illusion further destabilizes it: Not even a curse but just a dream could change you. In either case, caste is not necessarily part of your inalienable substance, the way that the dharma texts say it is.

In the end, Harishchandra and his wife do not return to their original life, as Lavana does, but leave both the earthly dream and the earthly reality, the royal pleasures and the Pariah horrors. In this, they are more Buddhist than Hindu, and indeed the story of Harishchandra may have influenced and/or been influenced by the Buddhist
Vessantara Jataka,
which tells a very similar tale.
⁵³
(Another shared Hindu-Buddhist theme appears when Lavana plans to feed his children on his own flesh, a theme we know from the Hindu-Buddhist stories of the rabbit in the moon and of King Shibi.) The more basic Buddhist paradigm, however, is the life of Gautama Shakyamuni himself, the Buddha, who (according to the Pali texts) leaves his luxurious palace in order to live among the suffering people and never returns; this plot is the very opposite of the Hindu myths of this corpus, in which the king almost always returns.
⁵⁴

A nicely self-referential moment occurs when the Brahmins, not recognizing that the Chandala they are talking to is Harishchandra, tell him his own story. But they make him a Pulkasa rather than a Chandala, as Harishchandra himself does in his dream. For the repetitions are never quite alike, and one sort of Pariah may mistake himself (and be mistaken by others) for another sort of Pariah. These variations become more vivid still when the
Yoga-vasishstha
tells a story that both is and is not like the story of Lavana, the story of Gadhi:
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