In his prodigiously researched Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, Nicholas Ostler writes in his chapter about Sanskrit:"Sanskrit appears to us, as do most of its Indo-European sister languages, as the speech of conquering warriors, well capable of using horses and wheeled vehicles to establish domination over their neighbours, and turn them into serfs and subjects. The way of life is familiar from heroic poetry of Indo-European peoples in every direction: men who fight from chariots, speak forthrightly, and care for their own personal honour more than life itself. When, in the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata, Krishna advises Arjuna on his duty that day, he could be speaking to the Greek Achilles attacking Troy (a thousand years earlier), or the Irishman Cuchulainn standing against the hosts of Connacht (in a thousand years to come)."
After quoting Krishna's famed exhortation to Arjuna, in which the god encourages the king not to flinch from his duty as a warrior, Ostler continues:
"Being a Hindu god, Krishna does go on to ground this exposition of the heroic code within a theology of reincarnation and a theory of knowledge that reduces the world of action to a shadow-play of appearances; but the basic ethic of nobility expressed through courage and military prowess is clear."
Although I was struck by the historic-militaristic trend Ostler identifies within the Indo-European language group (particularly since I had just watched Die Hard 4, in which Bruce Willis single-handedly takes on an army of computer wizards, martial artists and men with guns), I did take note of how quickly Ostler skips through the caveat about Krishna's "theory of knowledge".
I began to experiment with Indian epistemology, as filtered through several thousand years of Chinese, Japanese and American culture, about five years ago, although it wasn't until just this last year or so I realized that that was what I was doing. In one sense, Buddhist meditation is experiential epistemological research, and its roots, while plural, are certainly as much Indian as anything.
As Dan Lusthaus writes in his exposition of Yogacara Buddhism, Buddhist Phenomology, "While it is not uncommon for Western philosophical systems to begin with ontological commitments or assumptions (this is especially true in Theological philosophy, but generally true in other forms as well, including Analytic Philosophy, which has bestowed a virtual ontological status on language and statements [and, I might add, of science, which has enshrined the 'facts' uncovered by 'the scientific method' as unassailably primary]) and secondarily to generate epistemological criteria and methods whereby those commitments and assumptions can be verified, in India the situation is reversed. Indian philosophers, including the theologians, begin with epistemology, and only once they have satisfactorily established the criteria for valid means of knowledge can they move on to make ontological, metaphysical or ethical claims. The various Indian schools and sects, Buddhist as well as non-Buddhist, spent as least as much time arguing over what constituted valid means of knowledge as they did arguing about other matters."
Returning to Ostler, while he may be correct in pointing out the existence of a tradition of militaristic heroism extending through Indo-European history, he glosses too quickly over the importance of epistemology as a dividing factor in that tradition. As my South Asian History professor at CU told my Indian history class many times, it took Indian armies close to a thousand years after the first Muslim invasions in the 8th century CE to begin using tactics. Not just ballistics, but tactics of any kind. To try to conceal oneself or deceive an opponent was seen not just as cowardice but as apostasy, insofar as Hinduism has such a thing. For while battle, as a kind of theater, made sense to Hindu devotees, trickery in battle amounted to denying the connection, symbiosis, or even the unity of oneself and one's enemy, and that made no sense at all. Now I certainly won't vouch that each and every Indian soldier saw his imminent slaughter at the hands of Arab armies, Turkish slave-generals or Afghan empire-builders as a 'shadow-play of appearances', but it is clear that the Indian epistemology which gave birth to that notion was very much underpinning their lives.
And what, then, was the crux of that epistemology? Roberto Calasso writes the following in Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India, his dazzling retelling and elucidation of the Vedas:
"Masters of the goaded, greased, hard-brushed, well-honed word, the rsis were dazzled by one revelation: the elementary fact of being conscious. There was no need to drink soma or develop techniques or be inspired. The bare fact of being conscious was enough in itself. Everything else was a supplementary hallucination superimposed over the primary hallucination: that of living inside a mind. Beset by nature's profusion, they shriveled it with a glance. For nothing, in nature, led to the mind. While nature itself might turn out to be but a brief experiment, a mise-en-scene of the mind."
What Calasso is getting at is the Indic fascination, unparalleled in human history, with the phenomenon of consciousness. Where Des Cartes made due with thought as the locus of the self, the Indians demanded more rigor: If the self is the thinker, who is the self that watches the thinker? Before they exercised consciousness outward, they wanted to step inward to know its origin, and that step proved to be not an initial but a determinative one, for the workings of internality were found to be manifold, complex and possibly infinite. But how could the mind know the mind? And how could one person's knowledge of his own mind be transmitted to another? Certainly not without language.
"No artifacts have come down to us from the Vedic era," writes Calasso. "Nothing that those who intoned the hymns of the Rg Veda has survived. Not merely because wood rots faster in a tropical climate. Not merely because they chose not to build in stone. Not merely because they decided not to have temples. The hymns speak of palaces with a hundred gates. They speak of well-crafted jewels. Of bronze palisades. They list the paraphernalia of ritual. They speak of arms and chariots. It is as if everything had been pure mental reality that allows the object to appear, then reabsorbs it...Between the conquering Aryas and the Buddha: a thousand years and not a single object. Not a stone, not a seal, not a city wall. Wood: burned, rotted, decayed. Yet the texts speak of paintings and jewels. Immensely complex metrics - and the void. One thousand and twenty-eight hymns collected by the Rg Veda. Not a trace of a dwelling. Rites described in meticulous detail. Not a single ritual object that has survived. Those who glorified the leftover left nothing over themselves, except what was filtered through the word. A highly articulated language, fine-wrought as a palace."
In their search for the meaning and origin of consciousness, then, the Indians put language at the forefront. Sacrificial chants, ritual intonations, a generative grammar (Panini's) that has never been equalled, and an entire caste of people dedicated to the propagation of sacred scripts. But the risk in all this was that language would prove a maze, a trap. As I wrote in an earlier blog entry, it is commonly accepted by linguists today that language is a fundamentally self-referential phenomenon. Like a pair of exceptionally effective gloves that we use to handle 'the world', language allows us to communicate in our manipulations of energy, but what we feel when we use it is not the energetic 'objects' themselves, but the gloves. This is a big problem for religions that would depend on language.
One solution is to assert that one's language is, unlike all other languages, objective. It is not a stretch to say that Orthodox Judaism is inconceivable without this premise. The Hebrew of the Torah is said to be the language of God and thus the language of reality, and this assertion is backed up in various ways - analysis of the shapes of letters and words, comparative etymology within the language, and, most potently, the system of gematria, wherein each Hebrew letter has a numerical value, and numerical comparison of words can lead to astonishing conceptual linkages. (Gematria is deeply intertwined with Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, and it is these days a common factor in the conversion of secular Jews into believers, as it is indeed difficult to believe that its sophistication is within the power of the human intellect.)
The Indians too made the case that their language, at least in the case of the Vedas, was "not from man", but India was a yogic culture, a culture that placed high value on experiential knowledge, and with the Buddha, that value became a clear emphasis. In the hands of Buddhism, language would not have to claim divinity to warrant use in accessing true reality. It would become, rather, a tool grasped firmly in the hand of meditative silence. And to what end?
Writes Lusthaus: "Literature is the attempt to fill the gap between sensation and discourse with meaning, an activity that is both a reduction of sensation to language and an evocation of sensation by language. It could be argued that beginning with the Prajnaparamita literature, the Buddhist theory of verbal and textual authority hinges on the ability of fictitious literature to evoke soterically expedient sensations."
Language could thus be transcendent not through connection to higher powers or effects in unseen spiritual realms, but in its ability to radically inflect the felt experience of human beings, to disrupt the cognitive loop in which it normally plays so crucial a part.
When the Muslim armies came with force into India, the Hindus did not use tactics, but the Buddhists did not fight at all. By the 11th or 12th centuries, what had formerly been almost entirely Buddhist populations - in modern Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh - had either fled, been killed or converted to Islam. But inquiries into transcendent language and its possible uses were continuing farther to the north. The Buddhist literature of India had been assiduously translated and copied by Chinese monks for more than six centuries by that point. But following the translations from Sanskrit and Pali to Chinese, we cannot say that the language was being written anymore. It was, in a sense, being drawn.
No comments:
Post a Comment