Tag: Hinduism

The era beginning around 500 B.C. marked a seismic shift in human consciousness. Greece saw its first, pre-Socratic philosophers (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, Xenophanes, Empedocles, and especially everyone’s favorite, Heraclitus) question the nature of reality for the first time.

In China

In the East, philosophical and religious revolutions were also taking place. British orientalist and sinologist Arthur Waley (who in the first half of the 20th century produced popular translations of China’s Tao Te Ching and Journey to the West, abbreviated in English as The Adventures of Monkey) provides some insight into the innovations in Chinese thought:

      I want to give some idea in this introduction of the interplay between two contrasting attitudes toward life, the pre-moral and the moral, and the gradual victory of the second over the first. All societies of which we know have passed through a pre-moral phase. Pre-moral is merely a negative name, so I have got into the habit of thinking of it as “auguristic-sacrificial,” for its tendency to make [its activity] center largely around the twin occupations of augury and sacrifice.

      These, however, are merely means toward a further end: the maintenance of communication between Heaven and Earth. It is easy enough to see what Earth means: It means the people who dwell on earth. Now Heaven, too, is a collective term and means the people who dwell in Heaven — the ancestors — and they are ruled over by the “supreme ancestor,” first of the ancestral line. They know the whole past of the tribe and therefore can calculate its whole future. By means of augury it is possible to use their knowledge. Of all elements in ritual, “none is more important than sacrifice” (Li Chi). Constantly in early Chinese literature the maintenance of offerings to the ancestors is represented as the ultimate aim of all social institutions. A country that is unable to keep up these offerings has lost its existence.

      Into this outlook there enters no notion of actions or feelings that are good in themselves. People of the tenth century B.C. would assuredly have been at a complete loss to understand what Mencius, in the second half of the third century [~250] B.C., meant by his passionate and moving plea for the theory that “man is by nature good.” Goodness, to these early people, meant obtaining lucky omens, keeping up the sacrifices; goodness meant conformity to the way of Heaven, that is to say, to the way of the Ancestors collectively; it meant the possession of “power” that this conformity brings. What possible meaning could it have to say that man is “born good”?

      Man, indeed, was discovering that he was a much more interesting creature than he had supposed. There dwelt inconspicuously within him a strange thing called a soul, which was of the same nature as the venerated Ancestors in Heaven, as the spirits of the rivers, hills and groves. There was, moreover, buried in his heart, a mysterious power which, if he would but use it, enabled him to distinguish between these two new classes into which he now divided everything — the morally good and the morally bad — to discriminate with a sense as unerring as that which enabled him to tell the sweet from the bitter, the light from the dark.

      Never in the most ancestor-fearing days, when Heaven had an eye that saw all, an ear that heard all, had it been suggested that the whole universe lay, concentrated as it were, inside the Supreme Ancestor or any one of the Dead Kings. Yet this was the claim that Mencius made for the common man: “The ten thousand things,” he said, meaning the whole cosmos, “are there complete, inside us.” ¹

During the same period in China appeared the doctrine of Confucius (551-479 B.C.), “an agnostic who was against Taoism and sought to resolve all difficulties in the world through morality. He was, according to Max Weber, ‘a rationalist absolutely free of the metaphysical and of any religious tradition who … built up a morality based on the nature of man and the needs of society.’” ²

From the above quotations we begin to see how in the period around 600 to 100 B.C., humanity underwent a major psychological shift. Whereas before Man had appeased his existential terror of the natural world through animal and human sacrifice to the ancestors or the gods, now he discovered something of value within himself — a hidden structure, a power, an ordering principle, a light — an immortal soul! This discovery internalized everything. No longer by ritual sacrifice would Man control Nature — but by renunciation, self-discipline and moral conduct! And so, by about 300 B.C., Morality and its twin Asceticism were born.

In India

Evidence of this psychological shift can be found, for example, in the Bhagavad Gita, the Song of the Lord, a foundational text of Hinduism and yoga composed around 200 B.C. The Gita produced a synthesis of all the major religious and philosophical strands current at the time, and attempted to present them as a nondualistic message of hope. Says the Lord: “All worship is mine. I am the goal of life.” (paraphrasing 9:18, 9:24). This consolidation was undertaken partly in response to the runaway success of the new ascetic and moralistic religions: Jainism and Buddhism. So the Gita preserved the doctrine of rebirth and transmigration as a result of people’s ignorance of the divine, of their own “true nature.”

Sri Krishna, an avatar or incarnation of Vishnu, is speaking:

      I am the Lord who dwells in every creature. (4:6) All paths lead to Me. (4:12) The body is mortal, but He who dwells in the body is immortal and immeasurable. (2:18) … You were never born; you will never die. You have never changed; you can never change. Unborn, eternal, immutable, immemorial, you do not die when the body dies. (2:20-21)

      The supreme sacrifice is made to Me as the Lord within you. (8:4) … Every creature in the universe is subject to rebirth, except the one who is united with Me. (8:16) … [Those who follow the path of wisdom] see that where there is One, that One is Me; where there are many, they are all Me. (9:15) … But those who fail to realize my true nature must be reborn. Those who worship devas go to the realm of the devas; those who worship the ancestors are united with them after death. Those who worship ghosts become ghosts; but my devotees come to Me. (9:24-25) ³

Practically overnight, man had become immortal. After death, in some subsequent state of being, he would reap rewards or punishments for his conduct in life. At best, he was reborn human in a cycle that never ends. So a person’s conduct must be moral now, in this very life, but the consequences of that conduct appear only after a delay and a transition to another state of being. Was it all a big lie?

Ethical, Moral and Atheistic Religion: Jainism

In the same period and as early as 600 B.C., the Jain (Jaina) religion appeared in India. Its founder, Mahavira (Mahavir) is considered to be the 24th ford-maker — literally, tirthankara — and supreme teacher of the present age, whose spiritual attainments and understanding formed a passage across the endless cycle of births and deaths (samsara) for others after him to follow.

Alain Daniélou, a French Indologist, musicologist, translator and writer who lived for 21 years in India, in the 1980s provided a general overview of the transition from the ritualistic sacrificial age into the Age of Morality, with a special focus on the religious developments of the East, and mentions Jaina in particular as the earliest of these:

      It was … with the development of agricultural, sedentary, and urban civilizations that Jainism appeared, whose first prophet, Rishabh, belongs to what we call prehistory. With him arose the notion of a moral, materialistic society with atheistic tendencies, which restrains individual liberty in the name of the common good and of the orderliness of the city, in opposition to Shaiva mysticism, which promotes the joy of living in communion with the divine work that [is] the natural world ….

      It was Jainism that introduced vegetarianism and nonviolence, as well as the theories of transmigration and karma, into the Indian world. Jainism also advocated suicide by fasting. [This is still true today.]

      The doctrine of karma, linked to that of transmigration, attributes differences between beings to their behavior in previous lives. The inequalities between living beings, and in particular between [people], are due to an automatic retribution after death for actions committed in life. This theory tends to replace the responsibility of an impermanent “I,” the transmitter of a genetic code that affects the species, with the evolution of a supposedly permanent “I.” This has significant consequences, morally speaking, and also eliminates the notions of grace, of the whim of the gods, and of their freedom of action. It is basically an atheistic theory, contrary to the conceptions of the mystical Shaivism and ritualistic Vedism. ⁴

In effect, Mahavir can be thought of as not just the tirthankara of our age but the very founder of Jainism, whose previous tirthankara, Parshva, is said to have lived in the 9th century B.C. — and may not have lived at all except to provide the requisite spiritual authority. Likewise, the Jaina concepts of reincarnation (the transmigration of souls from one life to another) and karma (a physical law of cause and effect that binds souls to reincarnation) seem to be innovations that originated with Mahavir.

Daniélou also provides a brief description of the religious and philosophical reforms of Mahavir. Quoting from Thomas McEvilley’s An Archeology of Yoga (I, 57), he writes:

      Mahavira was almost certainly twice-born [i.e., initiated into a tradition], an Aryan who had been converted from the religious goal of sexual power to that of ethical celibacy. [Mahavir’s] reform … was precisely to impose the law of celibacy where earlier it had not been in effect. He was overall the most antisexual of the religious teachers of his time. ⁵

Buddhism, Modeled on Jainism

Shortly after Mahavira founded Jainism in the sixth century B.C., around the year 520, Gotama Shakyamuni Buddha — “Awakened Sage of the Shakya clan,” better known simply as Buddha or “the historical Buddha” — borrowed the concepts of karma and reincarnation to play the same role of ford-maker across the ocean of rebirth in the Buddhism that he founded.

In his brief description of the new religion, Daniélou sketches the Shakya warrior caste as having been recently bankrupted by the priestly Brahmin caste. The dominant social class at the time, the Brahmanic priesthood was a vestige of the Vedic religion imposed by the Aryans after conquering the Indus Valley in the second millennium B.C. The rigid caste system itself, more or less still active today in India, was imposed by the conquering Aryans to confine the native Dravidian population to second, third and fourth class status. Even today, “Arya” means “noble” or “elect” in Sanskrit and Hindi. From Daniélou’s description:

      Gotama belonged to a princely family of the Shakya clan [that] reigned over the [wealthy] city of Kapilavastu in northeast India. At the time, the families of the warlike aristocracy were in revolt against the authority of the Brahmans and the rigid ritualism of the Vedic religion. Immense sacrificial ceremonies, … through which the Brahmans imposed their power, ruined the states financially. …

      [Gotama] undertook to reform Brahmanism on the basis of the fundamental atheistic concepts of the Jaina, in particular the prohibition of rites, nonviolence, reincarnation, the doctrine of karma, the negation of castes, the [imposition of ethical conduct], and so on. … His doctrine, under the name of Buddhism, was to have a great influence — first in India, and later in the Far East [and] Southeast Asia ….

      Adopted by the aristocratic and warlike class to which Gotama belonged, Buddhism became a powerful instrument of colonialism and cultural expansion, justifying, under the pretext of religious propaganda, the most savage conquests, such as that of Kalinga by the emperor Ashoka. Later, Christianity and Islam, other moralistic religions …, were to serve in the same way as a pretext for a conquering imperialism. Buddhism was to play a major role on the Indian scene for more than six centuries. …

      A development similar to that in India took place in all the territories occupied by the Aryans. … We can observe, in different parts of the world, the simultaneous appearance of doctrines so similar to each other that they all seem to have the same source — which, according to the Indians, would be the Jainism of Parshva (817-778 B.C.), the predecessor of Mahavira. … ⁶

Shaivism and Hinduism

Based of his in-depth study of Hinduism, Daniélou groups all of these innovations appearing in the mid-first millennium B.C. as “the doctrines of Arihat” ⁷ — a corrupt understanding of the cosmos and humanity’s place in it that had previously caused the fall of the Assurs. ⁸

      With the development of urban, industrial, and capitalist societies, the doctrines of the kind attributed to Arihat — moralistic, materialistic, and atheistic — filtered through into all subsequent religions, including modernized forms of Hinduism and Shaivism. We find their influence in Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and even Marxism …. ⁹

Maybe it’s the case that the Age of Morality — the age of the doctrines of Arihat — is finally coming to an close. It was declared so in the 1880s by one philosopher ¹⁰ in the Swiss Alps, and was declared so again in the 1980s by another philosopher ¹¹ also in the Swiss Alps. I declare it so again. Even if one wishes it were not so, the simple truth is that the age of clear moral values is over.

_________

¹ Arthur Waley, The Way and Its Power: A Study of the Tao Te Ching and Its Place in Chinese Thought, Grove Press (1958; text copyright 1934), 20-21, 23, 33.

² Alain Daniélou, While the Gods Play, Inner Traditions International (1987; original text, in French, copyright 1985), 26-27.

³ Eknath Easwaran (tr.), The Bhagavad Gita, Vintage Books (2000; text copyright 1985).

⁴ Daniélou, 22.

⁵ Ibid., 23.

⁶ Ibid., 23-25.

⁷ The name Arihat — “destroyer of pious people” (ibid., 203) — is likely Persian in origin. In the ancient Persian religion, Ahriman is the adversary of God, master of sorcery and king of the demons, the embodiment of absolute evil, chaos and destruction. Vedic religion itself may have originated in pre-Zoroastrian Persia, as seen in the clothing, hair and beard styles depicted in the iconography of both religions, in their common worship of fire, embodied as Agni in Veda, and even in the name Aryan, a self-designation of Persians that simply means Iranian.

⁸ Ibid., 200. For more, see the myth of the destruction of the Triple City in the same work. Still, unable to resist, I also summarize and briefly analyze it here.

The myth of the destruction of the Triple City tells the story of the corruption of the Assurs by Arihat, a being created specially for the purpose by Vishnu, god of “civic virtues” (202). It can also be read as the destruction of Shaiva worship by the invading Aryans and their new gods.

Under Shiva’s patronage, the Assurs had attained a “tremendously high standard of civilization” and had built three impregnable cities, a boon granted them by Shiva: one city was on the ground, another floated above the ground, and the third was “high in the heavens” (201). The Shiva Purana further tells us that this ancient civilization had the power to “control the sunlight” for “a great variety of uses”; “could even survive below the ocean without any trouble”; used “flying chariots, dazzling as the sun,” to travel “in all directions”; and had precious stones, “like moons, [that] lit up the cities” (201-202). Now the myth begins to sound a lot like the story of the City of Atlantis, which was also destroyed violently in one stroke and sank into the ocean.

Arihat goes to the Assur King to preach his new, perverse doctrine that inverts all previous virtues. With his head shaved, his clothing dirty, and carrying a basket to collect alms, Arihat recruited four disciples dressed in the same way and who also “covered their mouth with a piece of cloth to prevent them from swallowing insects” and “carried a small broom to sweep the ground in front of them for fear of crushing living creatures” (203-204). This is still an accurate description of Jaina adepts today.

And what were the new doctrines of Arihat? Essentially they were the equality of all beings and the virtues of nonviolence, chastity and the rejection of all earthly pleasure. “In a world born of sacrifice where nothing can survive without taking life, they declared, ‘You must not kill any living creatures.’ … They asserted that the individual … does not continue his existence though his progeny but survives death by transmigration from one body to another. The son [is] therefore no longer a continuation of the father but a stranger incarnated by chance. For this reason, the son no longer respects his father, nor the father his son” (204). These new values stood in sharp contrast to all that had come before.

Convinced by Arihat’s preaching, the Assur King converts to the new religion and many in the kingdom follow him. “The practice of the new religion stripped the Assurs of their virtues, virility, courage, and power. Puritanism made them liars and neurotics. Vegetarianism reduced their strength. Nonviolence made them fainthearted and extinguished their courage” (207). After a period of decline, their civilization was destroyed by Shiva, the just and benevolent god whom they had abandoned.

The Shaiva myth of the destruction of the Triple City is a layered and complex myth. On one hand it describes the destruction, some 60,000 years ago (200), of an advanced lost civilization; on the other, it memorializes in myth the destruction, and partial absorption, of the existing Shaiva culture by the Aryans. In the second sense, it serves as an origin myth of sorts for the Shaiva revival in our current age.

In the first sense, the myth encodes powerful cosmic symbolism when describing the method of destruction itself. First, Shiva waited for the three cities to “line up close to each other, as happened periodically. … When the three cities were in line, Shiva launched his most terrible weapon upon them, which shone like a thousand suns and made a horrifying sound, and in an instant burned everything, destroying all life. The three cities were reduced to ashes and collapsed into the middle of the four oceans. Not even the smallest creature escaped the fire which enveloped the three cities. … Seeing this destructive fire as brilliant as many suns, … the gods themselves were terrified” (206, quoting Shiva Purana 5.10-5.11).

This could only describe Shiva’s weapon the trishul or trident, better known as the vajra or cosmic thunderbolt, or even the fearsome weapon of Zeus, King of the Gods. All of its attributes — its brilliance, its fire, its horrifying sound, its instant annihilation, reducing all things to ashes — is consistent with what we know today about interplanetary electric discharge, which is caused by cosmic bodies with different electric potentials coming close enough to each other so that a current arcs between them (see, e.g., Thunderbolts.info).

The added details of one city being on earth, another floating in the sky, and the third one “high in the heavens” lend weight to the idea that the myth is describing a cosmic event. Even more, Shiva waits for the three cities to come into (planetary) alignment before releasing his weapon to destroy all three at once. Interpreted literally, this would mean Shiva’s thunderbolt striking the earth itself, a nearby object visible in the sky with the naked eye, and also a third object much farther away. Witnessing it, “the gods themselves were terrified” — in other words, the other planets shook in their orbits. It must have been an unforgettable event on an unimaginable scale. If anything ever has, surely such absolute power deserves to be called Ishvara or Lord? Or does this interpretation of the myth leave any room to doubt?

To sum up, the adoption of new moral values of nonviolence, vegetarianism and sexual abstinence was repaid with the most violent act of all: instant annihilation of all life in the cities corrupted by these values, innocent and guilty alike, as a gentle reminder that those are not the values of the gods. Caprice, wrath, pleasure, terror, joy all fall within the purview of the gods, whose favor can’t be bought by moral values but only bestowed by them through divine grace.

⁹ Ibid., 27.

¹⁰ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15, 1844, to August 25, 1900).

¹¹ Uppaluri Gopala “U.G.” Krishnamurti (July 9, 1918, to March 22, 2007).