The Indian Way

An Introduction to the Philosophies & Religions of India

John M Koller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315507392
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

There is no other book that explains both the philosophies and religions of India in their full historical development. The Indian Way is accessible to beginning students, and does justice to the Indian tradition's richness of religious and philosophical thought. Clear and powerful explanations of yajna and dharma, and appealing, intimate descriptions of Krishna, Kali, and Shiva allow students to read some of the great Indian texts for themselves.

1

Introduction: Diversity, Change, and Continuity

Images of India are diverse and contrasting. On the one hand, India is seen in terms of wise and compassionate world leaders, helping to devise the U.N. charter, holding Oxford appointments, winning Nobel prizes in science or literature, or directing multinational companies. The names of Nehru, Gandhi, Radhakrishnan, Tagore, Bose, and Birla come readily to mind. Others think of India in terms of yogins and fakirs, half-starved ascetics and naked sādhus. In medieval times the prevailing image was that of an exotic land of fabulous wealth. Today many people think of India as the home of one billion people crushed together in poverty. But others see thrifty, hard-working people successfully engaged in agriculture and commerce. Still, the image of a dreamy people, denying the reality of this world, longing only for relief from life itself, persists. And while some think of India’s great humanistic creations in religion and philosophy—the systems of Jainism and Buddhism, for example—others see only a plurality of deities worshipped in every conceivable way. Those who know something about Indian history point proudly to her wonderful accomplishments in astronomy, chemistry, medicine, and mathematics, noting that the base ten number system and the zero, which made possible a revolution in mathematics, are India’s gift to the world.

Which is the real India? Actually, all these images—plus many other contrasting ones—capture something of the real India. Despite a common, but mistaken, impression that change has bypassed India, that she has remained committed to the same ancient and unchanging ideas and practices for thousands of years, the truth is that her history is one of amazing diversity and continuous change.

DIVERSITY

India’s diversity begins with her geography, for it is undeniable that diverse geographical conditions contribute to cultural diversity. As every traveler quickly realizes, the Indian subcontinent, including the modern nations of Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and India—is a land of many different climates and land types. In the North stretches the great Himalayan mountain chain, interrupting the cloud movements and causing the monsoon rains to fall on the hot and parched lands extending from the foothills all the way down into central and southern India. Except for the coastal regions, all of India depends upon these monsoon rains for the water of life. In Bengal, north to Assam, rainfall may measure between 60 and 200 inches a year, bringing annual threats of floods as well as the promise of lush growth. But in the West, rainfall may be less than 10 inches per year, creating large tracts of desert. The South is tropical, with very modest seasonal changes, but in the North the winters are bitterly cold and the summer temperatures frequently exceed 110°F. The Indus and Ganges valleys are rich, relatively flat, usually well-watered, agricultural lands, but the central plateau is hilly and rocky, land from which it is difficult to wrest a living even when the climate is favorable. It may well be that no one cultural region in the world has greater diversity of land and climate than does the subcontinent.

A second important source of diversity is linguistic, for India is the home of more than a hundred different languages, with fourteen major languages and four basic language families that are totally unrelated to each other. The ten major languages of the North are all rooted in a Sanskritic base. They have practically nothing in common with the four major languages of the South that belong to the Dravidic family and that may predate the Sanskrit-based languages. There are also ancient Sino-Tibetan languages, the Munda languages, and a number of unwritten tribal languages that are probably older still and that continue to be used to this day. Because language and culture are so closely related, it is not surprising that North and South India continue to exhibit great cultural differences, contributing to a rich diversity of Indian ways of thought and practice.

Foreign influences through migrations, conquests, and trade are a third source of change and diversity. Evidence from Indus sites reveals that four thousand years ago India was already a meeting place of races—a fact revealed to every traveler by the racial intermixture of today’s population. Negroid, Mongolian, Mediterranean, Proto-Australoid, Alpine, and Armenoid racial types were all living in the Indus region four thousand years ago. It is only natural that these different races would also represent cultural differences and that different ideas and ways of living would have come into contact with and influenced each other, making ancient India a dynamic and vibrant society of great diversity.

But India’s diversity goes back to a much more remote past. Archaeological evidence reveals human settlements on the subcontinent more than 200,000 years ago, and the tools these early inhabitants of India left behind reveal at least two quite distinct cultures. The people of the North used the stone flakes they chipped for their tools and weapons and threw away the cores. In the South the stones cores prepared by chipping away the unwanted exterior portions were saved as tools and weapons and the flakes were discarded. This great cultural difference between North and South is also attested to by the totally different linguistical families that survive to this day and by significant cultural differences between them.

Pygmy tools, resembling those found in France, England, and East Africa, dating from around 30,000 B.C.E., suggest postglacial migration from Europe to the central portions of the subcontinent around this time, adding to the existing diversity and stimulating further change.

Stimulation from interaction with foreign cultures has continued right up to modern times. We are all aware of the Western—especially British—influence of the last two hundred years. However, for seven hundred years before the Europeans made their presence felt in India, the Muslims ruled most of the subcontinent, bringing one of the world’s great medieval civilizations into the mainstream of Indian life. But these are only two chapters in a long history of foreign influence.

More than two thousand years before the British came to India, sometime toward the end of the sixth century B.C.E., Darius I conquered the Indus Valley, bringing Persian civilization to the northwestern portion of India. When Alexander the Great defeated the Persians, just two centuries later, the Greeks moved into this area. Although they were “Indianized” to a greater extent than were the Indians Hellenized, their influence is clearly seen in the Gandhāra art style and in coinage.

Later, during the Roman unification, Greco-Roman influence was felt along the coastal areas, for there was extensive trade with South India. One source tells us that more than 120 ships sailed to India’s southern coast every year from Egypt alone, and Tamil poets refer to the endless prosperity of the foreigners bringing their wealth and wine to trade for Indian spices, gems, silks, cottons, and perfumed wood. Indeed, the present-day Christians and Jews of South India trace their beginnings in India to the early days of this trade.

That Indian silks were available for export to Rome is due to earlier contact between China and India, for the silk industry was imported from China. Two thousand years ago trade with China was extensive, a source of contact and interaction frequently overlooked. Also frequently overlooked is the extensive influence that India wielded in the East Indies and Southeast Asia—which for a long period resembled economic and cultural colonies of India more than anything else.

Central Asia also played a significant role in Indian history, as the Parthians (called Pahlavas in India) gained control of Persia early in the second century B.C.E. and took control of northwestern India within a few years of King Menander’s death in about 130 B.C.E. Parthians were followed by Scythians, better known in India as Śakas, who ruled a large part of India for about a hundred years, only to be replaced by the Yueh-chi tribes known as Kushans. The best known Kushan ruler was Kaniṣka, a generous patron of Buddhism, who was won over by Indian culture in general, and by Buddhism in particular. The Śakas, pushed South and West by the Kushans, eventually found a home in Western India, becoming the primary stock of the present-day Marathas, adopting a majority of Indian ideas and practices, including their places within the caste system.

This pattern of contact through trade in the South and contact through conquest in the Northwest continued over the centuries, with the rule of great kingdoms lasting less than a hundred years on average and sometimes changing hands three or four times within a century. When Islam came in the eighth century it followed the age-old pattern, arriving via trading ships in the South and with the conqueror’s sword in the North.

Granted such extensive political change, significant intercultural contacts and great racial, linguistic, and geographical diversities, what is surprising is not that Indian culture was constantly changing, but that it was able to maintain its continuity at all through these changes and in spite of this amazing diversity. This continuity is a testament to the power of the great ideas in cultural life that constitute the basis of the Indian way.

But these ideas do not fit into a monolithic and unchanging pattern by any means. India’s political, linguistic, geographical, and racial diversities are matched by the diversity of her thought. Some Indian philosophers are materialists, others idealists; some are monists, others dualists or pluralists; some emphasize empirical knowledge, others meditational insight. While Ājīvikas denied human freedom completely, emphasizing the totally determined nature of the universe, advocates of yoga emphasized the possibility of liberating oneself from nature’s determining influences. And while great sages saw knowledge as the vehicle of self-realization, skeptics were rejecting the ways of knowing postulated by other philosophers and questioning the possibility of any knowledge whatever.

Some philosophers maintained that reality consists of discrete things, each complete in itself and not dependent on other things for its existence. But others regarded reality as a seamless web in which all aspects and moments of existence are interconnected with every other aspect or moment, denying independence to individual things or processes—whether mental or material. The materialists emphasized the material world, admitting as real only what could be sensed, with many advocating living for the moment in such a way as to derive the greatest amount of pleasure from each moment of life. At the same time ascetics, convinced that material reality was a form of bondage, were avoiding pleasure and contact with the world to achieve a higher, nonmaterial mode of life.

Religious thought is equally diverse. Some religions, Jainism and Buddhism, for example, are even atheistic, but Vishnuism and Shivaism are theistic. Some Hindus worship one Supreme God while other Hindus worship many deities. Jainas believe in a spiritual self separate from the body, a self that can be liberated at death, but Buddhists reject such an idea. For some Hindus devotion is the way to salvation, while for others knowledge or action are the essential means. And the list of differences—seemingly endless when details are considered—goes on. There is probably no more diverse and pluralistic culture in the world than the Indian. Certainly no one image or description could possibly capture the rich diversity of four thousand years of Indian thought.

Perhaps a sense of India’s contemporary diversity, and also its connections with the past, can be provided by two vignettes, the first featuring a North Indian urban family, the second a rural, South Indian family.¹ Prithya is a 48-year-old college graduate, mother of a 23-year-old son, Raj, and a 21-year-old daughter, Lakshi, who lives in a New Delhi suburb with her widowed mother, her children and her husband in a modest bungalow. Prithya works as a computer programmer for a hi-tech company in New Delhi, while her husband, Manu, works as an engineer for an airline company. Socially and economically, they are part of India’s growing upper-middle class with incomes more than 40 times the country’s average per capita income. Raj, still single and not interested in marrying for a few more years, designs Web-based software for a very successful new company that started up only three years ago, and already earns more than both of his parents. Lakshi, while resisting her parents’ efforts to find a husband for her, is trying to decide whether to go to graduate school in New Delhi, where she can continue living with her family and enjoy the company of her friends, or in America, where she thinks she may find more employment opportunities and a more exciting life.

Prithya has just returned from a week-long pilgrimage, taken with her mother, her aunt, and two friends, to Varanasi, perhaps India’s holiest city and one of its most sacred pilgrimage sites for more than three thousand years. She describes the excitement of the 80 pilgrims, squeezed into every available seat on the deluxe tour bus, as the loudspeakers blared one devotional song after another, interrupted only by a continuous stream of devotional videos playing on the one large and three small screens in the bus. For all, this was a wonderful opportunity for darśana, the seeing of God, and the being seen by God, that is central to Hindu religious life. Prithya recalls the powerful feelings of purification and sanctification that came over her when, along with thousands of other people, she bathed in the waters of the holy Gāṅga. And she shares with her family the awesome encounter with the divine presence in the sacred center (Garbha Gṛha) of dozens of temples in this sacred city that filled her with ecstatic anticipation. As she describes the sight of thousands of happy old people who have travelled here from all over India for the privilege of drawing their last breaths in this holiest of places, her mother, fingering her prayer beads, nods agreement and sighs contentedly. Manu recalls his own pilgrimage to Varanasi, some ten years before, and reminds the family that this river and this city actually embody the sacred presence of Lord Śiva, making it the spiritual center of the universe. Because all of the spiritual power of the universe is concentrated there, the pilgrims who come to die are confident that this will be their final death, marking their release from the long cycle of reincarnations, enabling them to finally experience the incredible joy of mokṣa, the final liberation.

Raj and Lakshi, however, have grown impatient. Raj thinks that religion is ultimately nothing but a bunch of superstitions, rooted in fears of old age and death. He respects his parents and does not want to upset them, but he feels that he does not really share their faith. And right now he would rather be in the Metropolitan Mall, only ten minutes away, in Gurgaon, sipping coffee with his friends at Barista Coffee (Indian Starbucks), or eating at McDonalds, discussing whether to buy a motorcycle, a sports car, or a sports utility vehicle when he gets his next bonus. Lakshi is not sure whether she shares her parents’ faith or not, but at this moment would rather hang with her friends at the mall, maybe shop at some of the Western stores, and then see a new Bollywood film that has just opened. Neither Lakshi nor Raj join their parents in their daily worship rituals in the shrine room, a small room off the kitchen that is, in effect, a small temple complete with images and holy pictures. Every morning, after bathing and putting on fresh clothes, and after a few minutes of purifying yoga exercises and meditation, Manu and Prithya enter the shrine room, ring a bell to awaken the deity, and opening the door of a miniature temple, take out the bronze image of the deity, Lord Kṛṣṇa, inviting him to be their special guest. After bathing and drying the image, they anoint the Lord with sandalwood paste, rose water, honey, and milk, dress him in fine clothes and beautiful jewels and place him in a special chair. After entertaining him with songs and stories praising his wonderful accomplishments, they offer a variety of flowers, fruits, and foods. Then, sometimes after special requests and words of praise and thanksgiving, they invite the Lord to take his leave and return to his abode, returning the image to the miniature temple.

Let us turn now to a rural, Dalit (formerly called “untouchables”) family, living in the small village of Kanyaka some 60 miles east of Madurai, in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. Yadav, 38, his wife, Arati, and their three daughters and two...