Additional comments on Hinduism

After reviewing assignments or getting certain questions I often send out messages through Nicenet dealing with points that have come up.  For each section I am going to include some of these past messages and occasionally add to them.


THE SOCIAL BENEFIT OF A BELIEF IN REINCARNATION

I've been following the postings so far but thought that perhaps there was one point not yet being considered.  Most of you have stressed the idea of reincarnation or having many chances, as I've put it) as basically reducing a sense of pressure, which some saw as positive for the society and others as somewhat negative.  Another angle to be considered is the societal payoff in terms of preventing individuals from challenging their status.  In India, if I am not in one of the privileged castes, I am to accept my position and the relative absence of social mobility as something I brought on myself in a past life.  If I live according to the rules (dharma) of my present caste, I can hope for upward mobility in the future.

The question might then be seen as this: Is it better for a society to have individuals thinking they have a right to "the pursuit of happiness" (the phrase in the Declaration of Independence--originally it had been "life, liberty, and property"--that in court has been understood to refer to the chance to improve one's worldly position) and so be potential rebels in a situation in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, or is it better to have a society in which different social ranks are clearly understood and accepted?

Karl Marx, in looking at Victorian England (read Charles Dickens to understand what it was like), argued that religion was "the opiate of the people," a phrase prefaced by  "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions."  Christianity at the time also urged those who were poor to accept their condition as God's will, and the concept of a blessed afterlife was supposedly the basis for accepting their present misery. 

Those of you with a sense of history can decide which outlook seems more favorable to retaining social boundaries and therefore benefiting a society in which inequality is a given.


GETTING DOWN WITH THE UPANISHADS

Keep in mind that the Upanishads were composed by individuals who were very much into asceticism--denying themselves food and sleep and ordinary comforts in order to achieve a psychological breakthrough.  Psychologists today point out that one of the effects of such ascetic exercises is a loss of the sense of individuality (the sense of being "me") in favor of a unitive experience (a sense of oneness with whatever is ultimately real) that is extraordinarily blissful.

The phrase tat tvam asi (the That are thou) is like E=MC² in the manner in which it expresses what these individuals saw as the ultimate reality of the universe.  It also expresses the key to Hinduism as a mystical tradition.  Keep in mind that those who claimed such an experience would not longer see caste as signficant, and the decision to search out this experience by itself put an individual outside of ordinary caste boundaries.  It still exists in India with the fakirs, the "poor men" who practice extreme asceticism in pursuit of this blissful oneness with the divine.

Shortly you will read more about Buddhism, whose founder began his life as a royal prince (according to legend) but then went off to the jungle to meditate in the traditional extreme manner. What is significant is what happens when this man does achieve whatever we can mean by enlightenment: he rejects the extreme asceticism in favor of what he will call "a middle way."  In doing so he offers a new lifestyle for those attempting to escape the wheel of rebirth this time around.  Those who follow his teaching, whether as monks or as lay people, continue to accept the idea of reincarnation but now they will reject the importance of caste.

What will continue is the idea that the experience of losing one's sense of self is extraordinarily blissful.  This is the importance of the term samadhi and it is the key to the Buddhist notion of nirvana as the state in which the self is finally disposed of so that all that remains is a state of consciousness that is ultimate happiness.

In Western religions there is a long history of mystical tradition, especially with those who follow a monastic life.  While it is less common to find the same language as we have in the Upanishads, there is a similar recognition of the blurring of boundaries.  One thing I hope is that as you read about Hinduism and then Buddhism you will be able to read more about this other side of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.


MORE NOTES ON ASCETICISM

Earlier I had you read my web page on the forest ascetics of India--the individuals who pursued a spiritual path by extreme self-denial.  There are different theories about why these individuals went to the lengths they did: barely eating, sleeping little, and generally living in a way that, at the least, was most uncomfortable.  One idea is that all this has an effect on the chemistry of the brain so that the physical discomfort is matched by a state of euphoria analogous to what earlier had resulted from the ingestion of soma (most likely an hallucinogenic fungus).

With the schools of Samkhya and Yoga and the writings of the sage Patanjali, the theoretical basis for this asceticism came to be seen as the effort to unbind the purusha--this pure "atom" of consciousness that makes each of us what we are by interacting like a catalyst with the material basis that is prakriti--by deliberately disciplining first the body and then the mind itself. The result would ideally be a loss of the false sense of being a particular person (a "me") and the resulting bliss that would be the natural state of a purisha.

The two major movements that reacted to traditional Hinduism by rejecting the Vedas and the caste system while keeping the idea of rebirth went in opposite directions when it came to asceticism.  For the Jains, the concept was that all action bound the spirit (jiva) to the physical world, so the goal, especially for the monk, was to shut down the system, above all by rejecting any action that was in the least harmful to any other living thing.  For the Buddhists, ahimsa or non-injury was also a key value, but the life style of either the monk or the lay person was far more moderate.  This was the middle path between extreme asceticism and self-indulgence, and the concept was that it was the freedom from desire that would lead to an end of rebirth.

The Buddhists differed from Yoga and Jainism alike by denying the existence of some permanent entity as it were hiding inside ourselves.  Later in Hinduism itself there was a similar reaction to asceticism with the teaching of the Bhagavad Gita, which placed the path of righteous action (karma yoga) above both the path of the ascetic and the path of the sage and then went one better by advocating the path of action undertaken out of devotion to God (bhakti yoga).  Still later, the Vedanta of the philosopher Shankara, like Buddhism, similarly allowed a more ordinary lifestyle by seeing meditation as the means by which one could overcome the illusion of being a separate self.

All these approaches still exist in India.  There are the bed-of-nails street-corner ascetics, there are the Jain monks who continue an extreme lifestyle, and there are both the Hindu and Buddhist monks who live a more restricted manner but do not go to extremes.  Meanwhile, ordinary individuals, Hindu or Buddhist, are not expected to fast or otherwise engage in what we might think of as the penitential practices expected in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. 

One thing that I would like to stress is that while a dualist approach defines Yoga and Jainism, there is not the concept of the body or the material world being somehow evil.  Instead, there is the belief that what we think of as spiritual--our minds or souls--are just part of nature while the "real" spirit is something else altogether.  What I think as "me" is not immortal, as we would say in the west, but just a temporary rental for what is the true self, which is not at all personal (no memories, no desires).

In the second half of the course we are coming back to the notion of an ascetic lifestyle, especially as it appears in Christianity in the various monastic traditions.  And this time there is the ghost of a Persian dualism that does see the material world, including our own bodies, as somehow evil in itself.


THE IDEA OF A SECRET TEACHING

My suspicion is that many of you may feel somewhat lost in looking over the material.  There are two quick reasons.  One is that it calls on you to think in terms of what in philosophy is called the area of metaphysics--questions about what it means to call something "real"--and it is here that there are the most striking differences from what most of you might be used to as Westerners when you talk about God and the human soul.   Another is that the selections I suggest reading (see the links on the study guides I have for both Hinduism and Buddhism) do not reflect anything of what most ordinary Hindus and Buddhists themselves are used to.

A lot of this goes back to the idea emerging with the Upanishads that there is a secret teaching meant to be passed on only from guru to disciple.  What you have with that phrase "tat tvam asi" is a concept that would completely change the disciple's understanding of what he would have been doing when he went to the temple and participated in traditional ceremonies. 

Buddhist philosophy in the same way would be studied in the monastery but not necessarily be reflected in what was done by ordinary people.  The English writer John Blofeld tells the story of staying in a Chinese Zen monastery at the time of a particularly important festival.  To his shock the Zen monks began setting up statues for the local folks to come worship (of course, leaving offerings for the monks themselves as they did so).  Since Blofeld understood that the monks themselves did not think in terms of gods and worship, he had to ask the head monk to explain this seeming hypocrisy.  The monk's answer was that, even though this was not the "real" truth, this was the way ordinary people could take another step toward enlightenment, perhaps even coming closer to being reborn as monks themselves.

In Judaism or Christianity or Islam we do not find this idea of there being, as it were, two truths--one for ordinary people and another for those following a more intense spiritual path (think how the concept of reincarnation makes a difference here).  It does, however, reflect the general Asian mood that thinks not in terms of either this or that being the right answer (the right way to live, for example) but instead finds a way to accommodate different types of answers.