|
A courageous attitude ... now forgotten
RANJIT HOSKOTE
“The Vedic-Vedantic
tradition is not one of changeless continuity or mindless veneration of
the past. Rather it stands for a courageous attitude of inquiry and
self-critique.
RAIN, loam and grass are powerful enemies. They can erase the traces of
human settlement with such vigour that, often,
nothing remains of a civilisation except a few potsherds, coins and
glass beads. And sometimes, a tablet survives, offering a key to the
mysterious scripts of the ancients. But the past speaks to us only
through the curator; because good civilisations, when they die, go to
the museum.
There is, however, another kind of space through which the ancestral
voices assert their presence: a museum of sounds so carefully preserved
that not a single alteration is permitted in the utterance of the
mantras which carry the distant thunder of revelation. But if this
sacred tradition seems like a live address from the past, it is as much
of a trap as the curator's glass cases — because revelation, to the
believer, is a warrant of continuity that stands above and beyond
history. That warrant makes the faithful contemptuous of change.
By contrast, the non-believer would suggest that every perspective is
altered by circumstances; and that many religious notions about the
world may be rendered redundant by the widening of knowledge. What,
then, is the status of the revealed word? In this context, the Vedanta
is an interesting example of how radical conceptual changes can take
place within a religious tradition (in this case, the Vedic) without
disturbing its apparent continuity.
While all Hindus accept the Vedas as revealed scripture, few Hindus have
in fact read these early texts. The actual practices of the Hindu
religion emerge from later sources like the Upanishads, the Bhagavad
Gita, the Puranas and the Shaivite, Vaishnavite and Shakta streams of
thought known as the agamas. The authority of Vedic revelation is,
therefore, a ceremonial fiction — insisted upon by the dharmashastras
as a matter of formal allegiance rather than of belief. So that,
although the Vedas are declared to be apaurusheya, "not created
by human agency", they are nonetheless subject to examination. This is
why the Vedanta is no simple continuation or "culmination" of the Vedas.
Engaging the Vedic ideas in dialogue, the Upanishads subject them to
critique and reformulation — marking, in the process, a paradigm shift
in Hindu thought.
It might be argued that while the Vedas demonstrate a spirit of
wonderment in the face of elemental realities, the Vedanta turns inward,
to analyse the realities of the self. If the Vedas are a response to the
phenomena of nature or prakriti, the Vedanta is preoccupied with
the principle of consciousness or brahman. The typical Vedic
questions were: What brought the universe into being? What force drives
the sun and the wind? What brings the sacrifice to fruition and ensures
the fertility of the land and the cattle? The typical Vedantic
questions, on the other hand, are: Who is the thinker of the thought I
think? Who am I? What happens to the personality after death, and what
is the ground of consciousness?
This shift may be traced, for instance, in the changing image of the sun
in the Vedas and the Vedanta. In the Rig Veda, the sun is a formidable
natural power, a deity who must be propitiated through the yajna
or sacrifice, so that his magic may ward off illness and misfortune: "As
you rise today, O sun, you who are honoured as a friend, climbing to the
highest sky, make me free of heartache and yellow pallor."
In the Isha Upanishad, on the other hand, the sun becomes a symbol of
the universal consciousness — to be approached through jnana,
wisdom, so that ignorance, the most paralysing of diseases, may be
dispelled: "Your golden orb hides the face of truth, O sun. Remove it,
so that I may see your blessed Self, that Self which I am, too!"
In a sense, of course, the heroes of the Upanishads — Nachiketas,
Shvetaketu, Satyakama — are driven by the same restless, questioning
spirit that charges the Rig Vedic "Hymn of Creation", in which the
sage-poet asks: "Who really knows how this creation arose? The one who
looks down on it from the highest heaven, only he knows — or perhaps she
does not know either." But the Vedanta occupies a wholly different
conceptual landscape from that of the Vedas: one in which revelation has
yielded place to discovery, reverence to understanding. The Vedic-Vedantic
tradition does not, therefore, enshrine a changeless continuity or a
mindless veneration of the past, so much as it does a courageous
attitude of inquiry and self-critique.
That attitude is sadly absent in contemporary India, and in contemporary
Hindu thought, which has permitted itself to be commandeered by the
ringmasters of an ersatz Hindutva. A religious system distinguished by
its freedom from dogma, its ecumenical responsiveness to radical ideas
and its ability to generate internal critique, has been reduced to a
blunt instrument of oppression, regimentation and terror.
The misguided attempt of Hindutva is to turn a living tradition into a
frozen image of itself, a museum of horrific fossils and mutants. This
is precisely the situation that J. Krishnamurti warned against when he
wrote, in The Only Revolution: "The brain carries the memory of
yesterday, which is tradition, and is frightened to let go, because it
cannot face something new. Tradition becomes our security, and when the
mind is secure it is in decay.”
The Hindu, Sunday, Jul 14, 2002
|