The Heart of Hinduism

Having early cast off the Midwest Protestantism in which I was baptized and confirmed, I, like others of my generation, I found much to admire and accept in philosophical Daoism and Ch’an Buddhism. I marveled at the marvelous symbolic webs of Hindu mythology but could, at the time, accept them no more than the metaphoric figures of the ancient Greeks or the Bible. Through neo-Vedanta, Isherwood and Huxley, then Watts and Ginsberg, but even more through reading the Upanishads, I believe I have glimpsed some significant peaks of Hindu thought. I am aware of the criticism by some of the tradition descending from Ramakrishna as Westernized. Perhaps it is, and perhaps that need not be a criticism.

I quote from Robert Ernest Hume’s The Thirteen Principal Upanishads (Oxford: Oxford Press, 1921).



     For me the heart of Hinduism is expressed in the Upanishads. I recognize that very likely most Indians would prefer the passionate devotion, magnificent poetry, and ethical authority of the Bhagavad Gita, but for those seeking philosophy the Upanishads must be preeminent. I am innocent of Sanskrit and no expert on even European philosophy, but to me the essential insights of the forest sages are sublime.
     The definition of Hinduism can be elusive. Its own self-images tend to suggest a very accommodating tent. Buddha is commonly considered an incarnation of Vishnu . Much to their chagrin, Sikhs are treated as a subgroup of Hindus by the Indian constitution. Even tribal groups whose traditions have nothing in common with Hinduism are labeled “scheduled castes” and enrolled in the Hindu world order, albeit at the very bottom.
     Hinduism’s extraordinary breadth of inclusiveness is suggested by a survey of its accepted theological schools. Among the six orthodox traditions that generally accept the authority of the Vedas are reckoned [1] the Mimāṃsās who continue to focus on the ancient Vedic rituals dedicated to a range of deities and the generally monist Vedantists. There are also the dualist Samkhyas with little interest in gods, and the Nyayas whose central focus was the refinement of logic and who were originally atheist, though some of their later authors were theists. The Vaiśeṣikas engaged in atomist and scientific speculation with little reference to the supernatural. Finally, there are practitioners of the various forms of yoga. Thus among these lineages alone only the first could be considered really fundamentalist. Some may use religious rhetoric because that vocabulary was the only one available for intellectual speculation. One may be a Hindu while believing in no god, one god, many gods, or some more nuanced formulation between these options; one may accept or reject the divine revelation and hence the infallibility of certain ancient texts. One may practice puja daily in any of a bewildering variety of forms or use none at all.
     Hinduism, however, is willing to go further yet and to embrace even those who reject the ancient scriptures: the essentially godless Buddhists and Jains as well as the uncompromisingly atheist and materialist Cārvākas, the deterministic atheists associated with the Ājīvika school, and the utterly skeptical and hence agnostic Ajñana philosophers.
     The observer may also sort the countless “denominations” of Hinduism according the favored deity: most commonly Vishnu or Shiva, while the Bhakti practitioners generally honor some form of the goddess Devi such as Kali or Durga. Smartas avoid the choice by declaring that all the deities are in the end alike. Add to these factors the immense land area and varied historical experiences of different parts of India, and it will be no surprise that Hinduism is so resistant to definition.
     Surely one reason for the elasticity of the term Hindu is that the word was originally not an ideological but a geographical or ethnic term, indicating the people of the Indus area. Though it is possible for foreigners to convert to Hinduism, in the eyes of many Indians, a true Hindu must be an Indian. [2] Those from other countries are necessarily outcaste.
     It is no surprise that the Upanishads which provide the philosophic theory to accompany the ritual practice laid out in the earlier Vedas are the portion more accessible to Western readers. Though Indian philosophy is capable of exceeding subtlety and Sanskrit has an immense and erudite tradition of scholarship and hermeneutics, for me the heart of Hinduism is adequately suggested by what are perhaps the best known phrases from these two and a half millennia old texts.
     The author of the Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad allows himself a lyric flight before declaring his apophatic intuition of the divine Brahma. “The form of this Person is like a saffron-colored robe, like white wool, like the [red] Indrapropa beetle, like a flame of fire, like the [white] lotus-flower, like a sudden flash of lightning . . . Hence, now, there is the teaching ‘Not thus! Not so!’ (neti, neti), for there is nothing higher than this, that he is thus.” [3] This is a cautionary corrective, warning against idolatrous error, reminding the listener in the oral tradition or the reader of the written word that perhaps the most adequate definition if deity is “that which one does not know.” The same insight is recorded in traditions around the world and through the centuries, particularly by mystical poets, but it is dramatic here paired as it is in Hindu tradition with the Vedic texts with their plethora of supernatural beings, their advocacy of the psychedelic soma, and their obsession with ritual. [4]
     Simply reading, or even being convinced by the principle of neti, neti is insufficient. For liberation the truth of the formula must be experienced. The system of guru/disciple relationships serves this necessarily experiential enlightenment. The use of entheogens, practice of sacrifice, and visualizations of a world of symbolic deities may, however, be considered as aids to the critical alteration of consciousness that alone can free the individual from suffering.
     There is a dialectic counterpart to this via negativa, though it, too, may be elusive, though omnipresent. Most people seek Ultimate Reality in cultivating a relationship with specific deities, but in the Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad when questioned about the number of the gods, Yajnavalkya provides first a scriptural response “As many as are mentioned in the Nivid of the Hymn to All the Gods, namely, three hundred and three, and three thousand and three.” Upon repeated questioning, he eventually declares there to be a single god, Brahma. [5]
     The monad, variably named Atman, Brahma, or Ishvara, may be too immense to wrap the mind around. Beginning, as Descartes did (following Aristotle and others) with the self-evident certainty of their own consciousnesses, the ancient forest sages made the bold leap from subjectivity to a plenum. [6] To them one’s own perceived reality, partial and even distorted as it might be, is identified with Reality in the formula “tat tvam asi” (often translated “that art thou”). Recognized as one of the Mahavakyas or great sayings of the Upanishad in the Advaita tradition [7], this simple intuitive assertion, rests on neither ratiocination nor revelation. Further, the experience of the whole is identified with pleasure. [8] These claims arise not from authority but through experience, the practice, already ancient, of meditation and ascetic practices that produced a myriad ecstatic philosophers.
     In the Katha Upanishad which specifically addresses mortality in Naciketas’ questioning of Yama “tat tvam asi” occurs thirteen times, each a hammer blow to ignorance and fear. [9] When the ego dissolves, where is unease to be found?
     These visionary insights are repeated in many different ways in the Upanishads and are then affirmed by later authors -- Adi Shankara, Dattatreya, and others. For the apprentice sannyasi it may have been at the thousandth iteration that the realization arrived.
     Hinduism will remain multifarious with as many faces as a Khajuraho temple. One can only wish the best to people placing hibiscus petals before Kali or Mallomars for Ganesh. Those performing works of dana (caritas) are surely meritworthy as well. All humanity can sympathize with those who swoon with devotional love (bhakti). For those of an intellectual or mystical sensibility, though, the paradoxical insights of the Upanishads can provide a route to liberation from suffering and a whiff of the exhilaration of the sublime. Realizing in one’s back-brain that the divine cannot be described and yet that it is everything allows the very certainty of one’s own existence that might inspire anxiety or despair to be transformed into a consciousness of the holy.
     These concepts are simple and clear, yet it remains true that the path to their full realization is “a sharpened edge of a razor, hard to traverse,/ A difficult path is this – poets declare!”



1. These are called astika (“there is,” “there exists”) in distinction to the five nastika (“there is not”) schools.

2. I am reminded of how well-meaning people have long insisted “Judaism is a religion, not a race” yet many atheists identify themselves as Jews, and, of course, to the orthodox, the child of a Jewish mother is Jewish willy-nilly.

3. See Brihad-Arayaka Upanishad 2.3.6. The phrase is repeated at 3.9.26, 4.2.2, and 4.5.15.

4. In the Kena Upanishad even the great Vedic gods such as Agni, Vayu, and Indra are said to be ignorant of Brahma (14 ff.).

5. 3.9.1-3.9.9.

6. After his convincing demonstration of skepticism, Descartes made a far feebler attempt to rebuild the intellectual universe familiar to him including Catholic orthodoxy, though he was insufficiently orthodox still for the Roman Church which banned his books in 1663.

7. The other three Mahavakyas are similar in meaning. They are prajñānam brahma ("Prajñāna is Brahman" from the Aitareya Upanishad 3.3, ayam ātmā brahma ("This Self is Brahman" from the Mandukya Upanishad 1.2, and aham brahmāsmi ("I am Brahman", Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad 1.4.10.

8. Chandogya Upanishad 7.23-4.

9. From 4.3 through 5.8. The author is not averse to figurative half-truths as well, though, describing the soul as a chariot with the intellect as driver (3.3 ff.) and the executive in the mind as a homunculus “the measure of a thumb” (4.13).

10. Katha Upanishad, 3.14.

This and That 2

If these brief pieces were called flash essays would they seem more au courant?


     For many years I have wondered how it can be that the rotation of the moon is so precisely coincidental with its revolutions that we on earth see only a single side. It seemed to me implausible that the correspondence could be so precise that there would be no change even over thousands of years. Only recently did I read the simple explanation. It seems the earth’s gravitational pull is exerted on the surface of the moon. While the moon’s lesser pull is manifested on earth in the tides, the more powerful earthly pull on the moon caused one lunar side to bulge out such that that side was permanently locked into the earth’s attraction.
     I retain, though a scientific curiosity about a biological point. While I can understand the function of our human bodily hair, I do not see how the hair on the head can have evolved to grow indefinitely. Surely hair on the top of the head will become inconvenient to any individual after a short time. It is worse than a peacock’s tail. Hunter gatherers without control of fire must still cut their hair. But there is no animal (though some come close) who, without artificial breeding, has developed such troublesome hair. How can this have happened?



     One might think that the idea of a philosophia perennis is a modern convenience, picking from belief patterns which were a portion of the web of culture in a given time and place only those tenets that appeal to our own age. Out of original context and juxtaposed instead to practices from far different environments, can the ideas they imply retain meaning? Does not such a selection inevitably speak more of the modern synthesizer than the ancient devotee?
     On the other hand gathering the elements of faith and belief that are most widespread must infallibly indicate those which are most essential for our species. Elements that are less meaningful, more accidental fall away, revealing more clearly what is significant. I, at any rate, accept the idea of a psycho-spiritual unity of our species transcending the admittedly powerful and myriad differences that separate us and impede understanding.



     In these belated days, when modern higher education has virtually vanished having given way to vocational school, and money has displaced knowledge as the goal of a university education, the etymology of the word school is worth remembering. It is derived from the Greek scholē, meaning leisure, or the activities of leisure such as learned research or disputation. Thus the disinterested and playful use of our most highly developed capabilities is removed from banal job training.
     Similarly, the liberal arts are those studies that cultivate intellectual growth without regard for making a living. Their study is characteristic of free people which is to say those who are unemployed. Liberal arts are opposed to the servile or mechanical arts which may be quite necessary to one’s comfort but boring when examined for their own sake. Though the term “liberal arts” was not used until late in the Middle Ages, it indicated the verbal and philosophic skills which according to the ancient Greeks were essential not only for citizenship but, more importantly, for the fulfilment of human potential.
     In this age, when technology has advanced to the point that work merely to support ourselves need take very little of anyone’s day, we fin d that many are working far longer hours than their Stone Age ancestors. Of course, most people today must perforce make a living, but that fact need not lead to the abandonment of true education and pure research, directed at no application whatever, self-justifying, the highest end of humankind. How absurd to see mortuary science and turf management as college subjects, but they are little worse than business schools and degrees in communication. When universities made a place for the so-called learned professions of law, medicine, and divinity, they little knew that these guests in the home of higher education would, like invading barbarians, seize entire institutions and take over.



     I am amused as I watch words turn into their own opposites like minute Derridean yang-yin fireworks. A number of such so-called contronyms have long existed in the language: apology, bolt, cleave, dust, garnish, peer, sanguine, strike, and the like. I feel I see several others transforming before my eyes.
     Everyone has heard “literally” used to mean figuratively; “cordial” to mean coldly polite, and “nonplussed” to mean indifferent or unaffected. Such objections are time-limited. One need only open Henry Watson Fowler to find his distaste for the use of “meticulous” to mean what it does to everyone today.

 


     Many homosexuals today make a polemical point of their sexual orientation as a fundamental identity. It is important for them to assert gayness as an element of their nature. Yet it is clear from ancient Greek and Roman history and a good many Islamic courts, medieval and more recent, that a considerable number, though not all, men will engage in same-sex activities if such liaisons are approved or tolerated by society. Surely the fact must be that people – men and women – occupy a variety of places along a spectrum from very strongly heterosexual to equally strongly homosexual in preference. Given taboos and sanctions, many more mildly attracted to same-sex relationships will fail to act on such impulses, while those with more intensely defined tastes will find them impossible to resist.
     Further complicating factors exist. In animals homosexual behavior is commonly observed, but may usually be regarded as a simple error, since individuals virtually never display a consistent proclivity for homosexual partners. Even this is not an absolute rule, though. Ten per cent of rams among domestic sheep refuse to mate with ewes while readily having sex with other males. Finally, it is little surprising is social and psychological factors are powerful in directing even such elemental behavior. Our genitals, of course, cannot tell what may be stimulating them. We know only in the mind.

 


     I have read many explanations of medieval courtly love conventions. To some they imply social norms that accept adultery, while to others the poetry was always part of a sophisticated game involving strictly circumscribed ritual flirtation. To some they are a sign of the influence of Arabic poetry such as Ibn Hazm’s The Ring of the Dove, to others a reflection of Catharism or Mariolatry. To some courtly love is merely an apparition which does not in fact exist. Why has nobody suggested the simplest and most likely element in what is surely a phenomenon with multiple causes: the attitude of vassalage before the feminine is nothing but an accurate representation of the male’s total subjection to sexual allure? Who among men has not felt very like the wolf in the 1940s cartoon whose jaw drops to the floor as his eyes bug out at the sight of a lovely female figure? The poems seem to me to exaggerate not one bit.



     In this area the word town is used to mean a subdivision of a county, the political unit elsewhere called a township. In some instances such as where I live in Goshen the town has the same name as one of its municipalities. Thus, as one departs Goshen, a sign declares “entering town of Goshen” when in fact the driver is leaving the village of Goshen, what in common usage is called a “town,” and entering the countryside. This usage applies throughout New England.
     In much of the United States townships (as they are more generally called) are a sort of phantom political division without independent governance. As a child I relished knowing that I loved in Milton Township largely because one never heard the name.
     Townships under that name are thickly populated and, in popular usage, non-white in South Africa (and colonial Rhodesia), or simply thinly populated as in Scotland, Australia, and Canada,

"Rot" by Johannes Becher

This poem first appeared in Kurt Pinthus’ influential 1920 anthology titled Menschheits Dämmerung (The Twilight of Humanity) with a subtitle “Symphonie jüngster Dichtung” (a “symphony of the youngest poets”). The collection opens with Jakob Van Hoddis’ “Weltende” (“The End of the World”) and includes work by Georg Heym, Georg Trakl, Iwan Goll, Franz Werfel, Gottfried Benn, and others.

The career of Johannes R. Becher traces many of the most significant artistic and political developments of the first half of the twentieth century. At the age of nineteen he participated in a last gasp of German Romanticism by entering a suicide pact (he did admire Kleist) with his lover whom he killed with a bullet though he only wounded himself. His first book Die Gnade eines Frühlings (“The Grace of Springtime”; 1912) contains thoroughly Romantic poems. While coping with morphine addiction he associated with Futurist and Expressionist groupings in the art world and with revolutionary organizations such as the Spartacist League and then the Communist Party in politics. His pacifist novel, (CHCI=CH)3As (Levisite) oder Der einzig gerechte Krieg was banned in 1925 and he was indicted for "literarischer Hochverrat" or "literary high treason.” And that was under Weimar. When the Nazi regime took over, he escaped arrest by going into hiding, then making his way to the Soviet Union where he likely found he had little choice and eventually declared his adherence to the socialist realism of Zhdanov. Implicated in the purges of suspected Trotskyites, he informed on others, then suffered depression and attempted suicide again. After the war he returned to the eastern zone of Germany to accolades as the great poet of the new era. He was made Minister of Culture in 1954. His business had become the suppression of young dissidents such as he himself had once been. He wrote the national anthem of the German Democratic Republic. In his memoirs, unpublished until thirty years after his death, he renounced not just his service to the East German Stalinist government but to socialism itself as the great mistake of his life.

In “Verfall” (“Rot”) Becher expresses a real punk sensibility, insisting that the most appropriate images for the age are ugly, even disgusting. For all Becher’s leftist activism, his taste resembles that of the fascist anti-Semite Céline.


Our bodies already rotten,
let us dig while singing
these intoxicated evenings,
awash in night storms and the sea,
our hot blood dried up,
an abscess of pus trickles away
mouth ear eye in disguise
sleep dream earth the wind.

Yellowish carrier worms
on a narrow-wounded passage,
throbbing rolling storms,
our eyelashes, blood red and long.
“Am I a crumbling wall,
a silent pillar by the roadside?
or a tree in mourning
that leans over the abyss?”
Ah, the sweet smell of decadence
filling the room, the house, the head!
In the flowers, the waving grasses,
in the birds, in their songs!

”Yes, the trunk is rotten.”
Mold. Groans. Moans.
Flight under a teeming sky!
A frightful clamor ensues.
Kettle-drums! Tuba grunts.
Thunder and wild flames of light!
Cymbals. A sound of percussion.
A drum-roll. It’s breaking up!

I gave myself to you,
wide world, ah! too easily trusting,
see how the poor flesh fails
yet my mind looks still homeward.
Oh, night, your sleep’s a solace
The mouth rests deep and poor.
Bright day, you dissolve me
in total and harmless unease.

There’s no way out,
Oh, I’m torn in two!
Blinkered, soon, soon blind and bandaged.
No kiss can heal me!
That I find no way out,
I'm the only one to blame:
A wild current, wind of blood and fire.
Shame, impatience.

The day brings sharp bitterness!
May night bring dreams and wisdom!
Shit, contortion, cut and tear!
A cool resting place –
everything must be far off –
far, oh so far from me –
blooming aloft in the shine of the stars –
my home, there! above!

One day I will stand by the road,
pensive, gazing at a metropolis.
Light falls through the dull clouds’ course.
Enchanted forms, wrapped in white,
My hands make the move
toward heaven, filled with gold,
instantly opening doors of wonder!

The fields and the forests rise,
Waters roll on. Bridges.
A roof. Endless streams are running.
Grey mountain ridge.
Red and dreadful thunder rises.
A dragon. Earth spews.
Torn throat. The sun roars.
Disgust. Laughing. Cries.


Fade to black. The taste of dirt and blood.
A ball. A huge bloodbath . . .
. . . “oh, timeless day, when will you dawn?
Is there still time?
When will you blow, oh sounding horn,
are you screaming the tide’s time?
Out of the underbrush, the moorlands, tomb and thorns,
Calling the sleepers here”