“Myth” is not the same as “falsehood.” Myth is a narrative structure used to convey some of the deepest truths we humans can glean. Myths are not believed in but unpacked and lived.This is especially important in our society today because we have forgotten the difference between myth and fiction, conflating both with the category of the unreal, which is then automatically compared unfavorably with the real, which is seen as truth and (implicitly) as accessible through only one method—whether scriptural literalism or scientism. And having (awesome!) TV shows called Mythbusters doesn't really help the reputation of myths either.
This was known to thinkers of the past, most notably Ibn ‘Arabī, who exalted the power of the human imagination as a way to access something of value about the real and the true. As Rabbi Rami beautifully puts it:
If we reclaimed the power of myth, and understood its role in our lives, we could reclaim the world’s religions as keepers of myth and train clergy to be guides to myth who can help us live out the mythic and imaginal dimensions of our lives through acts of compassion and contemplative spiritual practice.The rational without the imaginative is robotic; the imaginative without the rational is hallucinatory.
<UPDATE>
Sheldon Pollock has written a fascinating article on the Mīmāṃsaka and literary theorist Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka, whose Hṛdayadarpaṇa ("Mirror of the Heart") was a response to, and a critique of, Ānandavardhana's game-changing Sahṛdayāloka. Sadly Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka's work is no longer extant, but elements of his ideas have survived and Pollock masterfully reconstructs his ideas from these stray references. He notes that
"Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka did not just borrow a term here or there from Mīmāṃsā, however, as scholars like Ānandavardhana did; he borrowed, and in doing so rethought, an entire conceptual scheme." (p. 144)But what relevance does this have to truth and fiction and myth? The school of Mīmāṃsā, of which Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka was an acknowledged master, is best known for its resolute defence of Vedic orthodoxy against all other intellectual players in classical India, most importantly the Buddhists, but also the Hindu Naiyāyika natural theologians and the Vaiyākaraṇa grammarians. Pollock points out that "Mīmāṃsā's views on the nature of discourse were the most sophisticated of any in the premodern world; only recently have Western scholars begun to make real sense of its complexity, and many aspects await serious clarification" (p. 149). Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka applied and adapted this complex theory of discourse to the world of literature, and in doing so drew important distinctions among different domains of language.
Pollock summarizes:
As Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka was at pains to make clear, the output of literary discourse is thus as different from other discursive genres as its input: just as literature's dual treatment of wording and meaning differs from that of both scripture and itihāsa [history] (where wording has primacy in the one case, and meaning in the other), so does literature differ in it [sic] effects: whereas scripture leads to moral action and history to knowledge, literature leads to pleasure." (p. 161)Elsewhere Pollock presents a very interesting analogy offered, apparently for the first time, by Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka:
"[W]orldly knowledge is in the province of historical discourse, which can thus be likened to a friend who advises; moral precepts in the province of scripture, which can thus be likened to a master who commands; and literature in the province of rasa, which can thus be likened to a beloved who seduces." (p. 152)References
Pollock, Sheldon. "What was Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka Saying? The Hermeneutical Transformation of Indian Aesthetics." In Sheldon Pollock, ed. Epic and Argument in Sanskrit Literary History: Essays in Honor of Robert P. Goldman. Delhi: Manohar, 2010, pp. 143-184. Available for download here.
</UPDATE>
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