On hunting birds and God

I just came across Galway Kinnell’s beautiful To Christ Our Lord on this blog post by Alan Jacobs:

The legs of the elk punctured the snow’s crust

And wolves floated lightfooted on the land

Hunting Christmas elk living and frozen;

Inside snow melted in a basin, and a woman basted

A bird spread over coals by its wings and head.

Snow had sealed the windows; candles lit

The Christmas meal. The Christmas grace chilled

The cooked bird, being long-winded and the room cold.

During the words a boy thought, is it fitting

To eat this creature killed on the wing?

He had killed it himself, climbing out

Alone on snowshoes in the Christmas dawn,

The fallen snow swirling and the snowfall gone,

Heard its throat scream as the gunshot scattered,

Watched it drop, and fished from the snow the dead.

He had not wanted to shoot. The sound

Of wings beating into the hushed air

Had stirred his love, and his fingers

Froze in his gloves, and he wondered,

Famishing, could he fire? Then he fired.

Now the grace praised his wicked act. At its end

The bird on the plate

Stared at his stricken appetite.

There had been nothing to do but surrender,

To kill and to eat; he ate as he had killed, with wonder.

At night on snowshoes on the drifting field

He wondered again, for whom had love stirred?

The stars glittered on the snow and nothing answered.

Then the Swan spread her wings, cross of the cold north,

The pattern and mirror of the acts of earth.

Reading it on the first clear night after the first real snowfall of this winter, I could not help but think of the beginning of the Rāmāyaṇa and of the birth of poetry in Sanskrit. The great seer (and composer of the Rāmāyaṇa) Vālmīki witnesses a hunter killing one of a pair of birds mating. Appalled, and overtaken by grief, he curses the hunter with what forms the first poem in Sanskrit:

mā niṣāda pratiṣṭhāṃ tvam agamaḥ śāśvatīḥ samāḥ |

yat krauñca-mithunād ekam avadhīḥ kāma-mohitam ||

I wrote about this poem and about its ingenious re-reading by the medieval Śrīvaiṣṇava commentator Govindarāja earlier on this blog.

“A Hymn to Śrī”: The Śrī Stuti of Śrī Vedānta Deśika

It is said that Śrī Vedānta Deśika composed his famous Śrī Stuti when a pious but poor young man came to him for help: he wanted to get married, and needed some money to convince his father-in-law-to-be that he was worth it. No sooner had Śrī Vedānta Deśika finished reciting the Śrī Stuti than a shower of gold coins poured down from the heavens, making the young man rich and making Śrī Vedānta Deśika even more famous than he had been.

What follows is a first draft at translating this most beautiful of hymns praising the Goddess Śrī. All that is good in this comes from the beauty of the original; whatever isn’t, stems from my own deficiencies. May I be forgiven my myriad faults!

|| Śrīḥ ||

The noble Veṅkaṭanātha,

        blessed with śrī,

        saffron-maned lion among poets and philosophers,

        teacher of the Vedānta—

may he be enshrined in my heart forever!

|| 1 || 

Magnificent beyond all measure,

Auspicious even to all things auspicious,

Resting on the chest of Madhu’s conqueror

Ornamenting it by Her lustre,

Felicity personified for all people

        who seek material and spiritual prosperity—

        to you, o Śrī, do I,

                who have no other refuge,

        surrender!

Religion and narrative

This post on The Daily Dish, on religion as theater, has got me thinking: All the talk these days of faith versus reason, of religion versus science, seem to me to be misplaced. A lot of this stems from what I think is a misplaced emphasis on religion as “blind faith”. Perhaps we would do better to think of religion as “shared stories” (or better yet, “shared experiences”), for every religious community has a particular narrative about the human condition.

To the “non-believers”, the “outsiders”, it is the “story” that matters—whether the content is “true” or “false”, “historical” or “mythological”, “revealed” or “constructed”. Hence arguments about whether Genesis can literally be true or whether Rāma actually had a bridge built to Laṅkā.

To the “believers”, the “faithful”, the “insiders”, it is the “shared” part that matters—the fact that these stories resonate not just with one person but with an entire community; the fact that this resonance has held true for this community over time (even if, and possible especially if, it has resonated with different concerns at different times); and the fact that these stories will continue to be shared with the community to come, if the current generation does its job right. In fact, I think that this “shared” aspect is so important that the “stories” themselves gradually change over time, emphasizing certain things and downplaying others—but always in a way that allows them to be shared and accepted by the majority of the community.

To the “Truthseeker”, both aspects matter equally—if it is false, then it is not worth pursuing; if it cannot be shared, in at least some dilute form, then it cannot be a goal towards which one can guide others, around which a community can be built.

“God-obsessed”

A fascinating essay by Tony Woodlief, called “Dreaming God”:

We are god-obsessed and god-seeking and at least the intellectuals of earlier ages—even if they couldn’t bring themselves to belief—recognized this. So many of today’s intellectuals are so far removed from religion that they don’t know the half of how deeply it’s intertwined in the lives and hearts of the rest of us.

And even more provocative:

We are god-obsessed because we have lost God or we are running from God or we are hopelessly seeking Him, and maybe all of these at once.

An extremely interesting analogy:

We are god-obsessed the way a child snatched from his mother will always have his heart and flesh tuned to her, even after he forgets her face. Cover the earth with orphans and you will find grown men fashioning images of mothers and worshipping strong women and crafting myths about mothers who have left or were taken or whose spirits dwell in the trees.
And at the edges of their tribal fires will stand the anthropologist and the philosopher, reasoning that all this mother-talk is simply proof that men are prone to invent stories about mothers, which is itself proof that no single story about a mother could be true, which is proof that the brain just evolved to work that way.

I’ll comment on this one of these days when I get more time.

On freedom, choice(s), and democracy

Snowed in, I spent all of today reading a very interesting book by Prof. Loren J. Samons II of Boston University, with a very provocative thesis. The book's not-so-subtle title, What's Wrong with Democracy? From Athenian Practice to American Worship, belies its careful argument. Although the bulk of the book involves a close study of historical sources in order to examine the actual practices of the government of the Athenian polis, the author's overarching motivation is not the reassessment of contemporary perceptions of a long-extinct society merely for the sake of historical understanding. His point, rather, is to 

"present and foster criticism of modern democracy … [that is] aimed at the philosophical foundations of democracy, the popular conception of democracy, the practice of representative government through democratic elections, and the social and intellectual environment generated by democratic thought and practice in contemporary America" (p. 1). 

I hesitate to offer a summary of the book for fear of oversimplifying its complex, historically sensitive argument. Very crudely put, Prof. Samons: 

More on truth and fiction and myth

This post, by a rabbi on Christmas, speaks to a question that I have often wondered about. I've chatted earlier about the differences among truth, fiction, and myth, and Rabbi Rami's response to both Christian literalists and to atheists / agnostics is worth pondering over:

“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>

On Pūrva Mīmāṃsā

Prof. Francis Clooney's article "Why the Veda has No Author" [1] is an excellent survey of the early work of the Hindu school of thought known as (Pūrva) Mīmāṃsā. The word pūrva also means "early" or "prior", but Prof. Clooney's reference here to the "early work" does not mean the distinction between (Pūrva) Mīmāṃsā and Uttara Mīmāṃsā, better known as Vedānta, but to the historically earliest work done by scholars who identified themselves as Mīmāṃsakas: Jaimini, the 2nd century BC author of the Pūrva-mīmāṃsā-sūtra, and Śabara, the great commentator who came four hundred years later. This is important because the school of Mīmāṃsā later splits into two traditions, the Bhāṭṭa, deriving authority from the formidable Kumārila Bhaṭṭa, and the Prābhākara, from Prabhākara Miśra. (The initial long 'ā' in the names of the schools, as opposed to the short 'a' in the names of their founders, is not a typo but a well-established Sanskrit grammatical phenomenon known as vṛddhi. In this particular case, vṛddhi is effected by the use of the so-called aṆ suffix, which has the sense of "descendant" or "offspring".)

Prof. Clooney notes that Mīmāṃsā is

"a worldview and mode of inquiry that developed in a context of reflection on the meaning of the action of sacrifice. In Mīmāṃsā, notions such as "God," the "sacred text," the "author" and the "anthropocentric ordering of reality" were already subjected to a radical critique more than two thousand years ago, and the primary vehicle of this critique was an uncompromising commitment to a reworking of religious discourse on a ritual basis." (p. 660)

The earliest textual evidence for this particular Weltanschauung is Jaimini's Pūrva-mīmāṃsā-sūtra, which, as Prof. Clooney notes, argues that

"[1] religion includes meanings and values appropriate to human beings, but the sum of its meaning necessarily exceeds the human perspective;

[2] the sacred Sanskrit-language Scripture known as the Veda is not a 'book' to be read, nor a source of information about a world exterior to itself; and

[3] the Veda has no author, no meaning beyond the words and the sacrificial intentions themselves; one cannot appeal to a pre-verbal intention to get beyond the words." (p. 660)

The Mīmāṃsakas operated in a religious world dominated by "two interconnected systems", that of the "traditional sacrifices, which had been practiced and described even a thousand years earlier," and that of the "Veda, the totality of the texts relevant to the sacrifices" (p. 661). This dynamic duo of text and ritual, each highly structured on its own and also deeply linked to the other, was what the Mīmāṃsakas investigated and defended against all attacks, both from within the "Hindu" system, such as the Naiyāyika natural theologians, and from without, such as the Buddhists and Jains. A large part of the Mīmāṃsā enterprise thus boils down to a sophisticated process of exegesis whose initial motivation was to understand instructions for the performance of ritual, but whose eventual scope broadened to pretty much any situation where texts were read and actions were performed.

Turning again to Prof. Clooney, "each generation of Mīmāṃsakas sought to elaborate more and more sweeping rules by which to govern the preceding set of meta-rules, although the search for generality was constantly subverted by the precise demands posed by the concrete ritual situations to which the interpreter eventually would have to return" (p. 662). It wasn't that the Mīmāṃsakas formulated ritual handbooks (those had been composed and circulated possibly a thousand years before Jaimini); what they were concerned with was a process closer to what we might consider legal reasoning. (Don Davis's new book, The Spirit of Hindu Law [2], constructs a useful analogy between Mīmāṃsaka thinking and the complexities of navigating the US tax law system.) In the process, they also defended particular positions within the philosophy of language—but always with an eye to preserve the integrity of the sacrifice.

More interestingly, from our perspective outside the dynamic dyad, the Mīmāṃsakas also asked and answered (to their satisfaction, at least) questions regarding the underlying assumptions of their worldview, about "the overall purposes of sacrifices, or the basis on which one can say that the Vedic scriptures are absolutely true, or the manner of verifying the efficacy of sacrifices" (p. 662). This was all the more important because the great rivals of the Brahminical orthodoxy were the Buddhists and Jains, who questioned (as we might today) the whole purpose and efficacy of the Vedic sacrificial system.

Prof. Clooney points out insightfully that

"Mīmāṃsā's response to the whole range of criticisms was to rethink its world without reliance on any single viewpoint, effectively undercutting the possibility of a single perspective. It sought a justification for sacrifice that needed no external validation, either from active gods or satisfied humans, and that required the positing neither of any supernatural realities nor a reliable world order beyond that of good Sanskrit texts, well-performed sacrifices, and a set of rules for integrating the two.

"Jaimini and his commentator Śabara primarily were concerned with achieving a right understanding of the rules of sacrificial action and sacrificial text so as to ensure that what one saw and heard at a sacifice would cohere—be intelligible—regardless of what anyone might say about it from some particular perspective. In discovering these rules they sought to repplace the 'laws of the cosmos' with the 'laws of language and ritual,' and reliance on gods and humans (as norms for meaning) with an appreciation for the harmony of text and action (and everything accompanying them, even in orthodox society as a whole) that underlay the well-wrought sacrifice." (p. 663)

Read the rest of the awesome article to find out more about the Mīmāṃsā worldview, and what it may mean for us today when we no longer follow the Vedic system of sacrifice.

<UPDATE>

I simply had to include this line from the article that compares the Mīmāṃsā exegetical enterprise to Foucault:

"The Mīmāṃsā theory of authorlessness [apauruṣeyatva; emphasis in the original], with its underlying concern to 'liberate' the sacred texts from its author, approaches Michel Foucault's influential interpretation of the common (though not universal) way in which the author-function is used as a societal tool to restrain language, assign responsibility, and confine the meaning of texts. Foucault shows how this author-function … actually restricts texts by ordering them to a designated author, whose intentions determine what the texts are allowed to mean … [Mīmāṃsā] decided that reference to the author as the privileged source of meaning limited the Veda, cut it off from its ritual context, and made it liable to the mistakes and limitations of the author."

</UPDATE>

References
[1] Clooney, Francis X. "Why the Veda Has No Author: Language as Ritual in Early Mīmāṃsā and Post-Modern Theology," Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Winter), pp. 659–684. Available here from JSTOR.

[2] Davis, Jr., Donald R. The Spirit of Hindu Law. Cambridge University Press, 2010. Available here from Amazon.

A beautiful verse on Kṛṣṇa (but what does it mean?)

This is a gorgeous verse on Kṛṣṇa, in a style that I've never seen before.

mand(r)a-kvāṇita-veṇur ahni śithile vyāvartayan gokulam
barhâpīḍakam uttamâṅga-racitaṃ go-dhūli-dhūmraṃ dadhat |
mlāyantyā vana-mālayā parigrahaḥ śrānto 'pi ramyâkṛtiḥ
gopa-strī-nayanôtsavo vitaratu śreyāṃsi vaḥ keśavaḥ ||

The version that Michael Coulson cites in Teach Yourself Sanskrit to illustrate the meter (the awesomely named Śārdūlavikrīḍitā) uses the word manda; another version of the verse I found online here (which claims that this is from the Subhāṣita-ratna-kośa anthology of Vidyākara, who attributes it to a certain Śubhaṅkara) uses mandra. The Padyāvalī of Rūpa Gosvāmin (available here) also cites the verse with the word mandra, and opens it with the context atha sāyaṃ Harer Vrajâgamanam. I'm going to try to translate it thus:

The day slackens—
His flute's music slow and soft, he circles Gokula,

        embraced by a garland of withered wildflowers,
        the crest-jewel peacock feather adorning his head all red from the cows' dust,
        tired, and yet beautiful to look at:
May Keśava—
        the delight of the gopīs' eyes!—
bestow felicity upon us!

Śreyas is a difficult word to translate. It conveys all manners of positive qualities—"virtue," "blessings," "good," "happiness," possibly "excellence".

I'm curious about the possible theological implications of such a depiction of Kṛṣṇa. What does it mean to depict a form of God (and at least for Rūpa Gosvāmin and many modern Hindus, the supreme form of God) in this particular mode? This is a very human portrayal of Kṛṣṇa, much more so than those of Kṛṣṇa as a playful child or a beautiful young man, and associates with him the human qualities (some would call them "failings") of exhaustion and dustiness; even the flowers he wears are withered. And despite all of that, he is gopa-strī-nayanôtsavaḥ, the limitless joy and exultation of the eyes of the lovely women of Vraja. Why? How? What does this mean?

One possibility is that the composer was simply building poetically on the image of Kṛṣṇa the cosmic cowherd, but that just doesn't seem as interesting to me. What is really interesting is the phrase śrānto 'pi ramyâkṛtiḥ / gopa-strī-nayanôtsavaḥ, where the presence of the particle api suggests that the verse really is intentionally drawing a contrast between the fact of Kṛṣṇa's "objective" tiredness on the one hand and his "objectively" beautiful form that is "subjectively" delightful to the gopa-strīs. Is it that they are willing to overlook Kṛṣṇa's "faults" because of their love for him? Or is it that Kṛṣṇa chooses to manifest as a tired cowherd for the sake of "realism," for the sake of the milkmaids who know no other life? Perhaps what is mundane and prosaic for those of little faith is in fact what is truly transcendental for those of faith.

(An expanded version of this Swadharma post)

PS: For those of you who care, the meter Śārdūlavikrīḍitā ("playful like a tiger"?) is defined thus:

sūryâśvair yadi māt sa-jau sa-ta-ta-gāḥ Śārdūlavikrīḍitā

In other (non-)words, — — — x x — x — x x x — / — — x — — x — (where the / marks a caesura). Best of all, in the tradition of Sanskrit meter, the definition of a meter is offered in the meter itself!

Reconciling God and Evolution

This is a short and interesting article by Prof. Sarah Coakley at Harvard Divinity School. She argues that "the three most profound problems for Christian theism since the advent of Darwinism, so profound as to cause many to see Darwinism as a "defeater" of Christian belief" are:

1. "[T]here is the issue of how we should understand the relation of God's providence to prehuman dimensions of creation and their development."
2. "[T]here is the issue of how God's providence can relate to the specific arena of human freedom and creativity."
3. "[T]here is the problem of evil, the question of why what happens in the first two realms manifests so much destructiveness, suffering, and outright evil, if God is indeed omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent."

Her response, particularly to (1), essentially boils down to this: "God is that-without-which-there-would-be-no-evolution-at-all; God is the atemporal undergirder and sustainer of the whole process of apparent contingency or "randomness," yet—we can say in the spirit of Augustine—simultaneously closer to its inner workings than it is to itself." * This allows her to conceive of God as ever-intervening (indeed, without whose intervention at every stage the world would simply cease to be), but whose interventions are masked by the order of the universe (which in itself stems from God).

From what little I know, this view is fairly close to the classical theologians of Islam, particularly Imâm Ghazâlî (without the trinitarian interpretations, of course!). Imâm Ghazâlî in no way denies that the world is orderly and is governed by "natural" laws; what he says, though, is that this order is a contingent one that is sustained by God at every moment. I've always thought that this is a pretty neat way to fully and healthily accommodate scientific investigation of the spatiotemporal universe while not losing sight of religious / spiritual insight. (It's certainly a far more nuanced position than either "it's obvious that a tall old man in a white beard made all this" or "it's obvious that we're nothing more than a handy way to help a few large molecules self-replicate"!)

I'm not convinced by her later argument, that recent discoveries showing the importance of cooperation in evolution help build the case for getting evolutionary biologists and theologians talk to each other. I suspect that given the nature of the scientific method, no dialogue between a scientific discipline and a non-scientific discipline can be well founded on the basis of particular scientific explanations. (All it takes is one paper that shows that what we think is cooperation is really just selfish genes, and poof! vanishes your bridgehead.) No, I think true dialogue must depend on two things:

1. The fact that science and theology are both committed to using reason reasonably to discover something about the world—with the caveat that "world" likely means different things to scientists (probably depending on their institutional and disciplinary affiliation!) and theologians.
2. The fact that it is not particular scientific theories or hypotheses that bind scientists together as a community, but the scientific method per se. In other words, if you want to show that sensible science and intelligent religion are not incompatible, then find a way to accommodate the scientific method into your theology (or vice versa, if you prefer).

In case you think faith and reason are irreconcilable and separated by an unbridgeable gap—welcome to theology! Thinkers affiliated to all the major religious traditions I can think of have invested great efforts into thinking rationally about God and the universe and all that jazz, and I think the modern debate is deeply impoverished by our inability and unwillingness to incorporate their ideas into our discourse. For what it's worth, I think there are at least two solid reasons for encouraging a fruitful dialogue of this sort:

1. Like it or not, the scientific method truly has transformed the depth and breadth of our knowledge of the physical world. It is the single best method we have come up with that explains how the world is (or, more precisely, how the world is not). It would be utter folly for serious modern thinkers to ignore these insights when trying to understand our place in the cosmos—particularly when it is the case that many, if not most, earlier thinkers were willing to do the same.
2. Like it or not, the scientific method alone cannot really offer guidance of any sort—emotional, social, moral, spiritual. And while this does not mean that the only alternative has to be a religious worldview, it does mean that our scientific insights must be contextualized within a broader intellectual framework. What these frameworks can be is up to us—whether we pick mechanistic deterministic nihilism or evanescent illusionary idealism or infinitely fruitful pan(en)theism or whatever else floats our boat—but we need something more.

* This is not a rigorous statement as it stands. The article does a better job of explaining why this may be the case, but also acknowledges that this is but one starting point for a deeper philosophical and theological investigation of a problem that, as is currently being debated, really could do with more sophisticated, more inclusive arguments from both sides.

"The Rose-garden of Secrets"

The first two verses of the Gulshan-i Rāz of Maḥmūd Shabistarī are among the most exquisite verses I have ever read in my whole life.

بنام آنکه جان را فکرت آموخت

چراغ دل بنور جان بر افروخت

ز فضلش هر دو عالم گشت روشن

ز فضلش خاک آدم گشت گلشن

There is no way I can capture their power and compactness in English, but I am driven (like a moth to the flame?) to try to translate them:

In the Name of Him, who taught the soul to think,

Who kindled the lamp of the heart with the light of the soul.

From His excellence, the Two Worlds are illuminated;

From His excellence, Adam's dust becomes a rose-garden.

How can I capture the majesty and the beauty of such lines?

New Swadharma post

New post up on Swadharma entitled "The many paths to felicity".

New blog!

I've been invited to join Swadharma, the blogging community run by Harvard's undergraduate Hindu community. I will be posting there every Saturday, and will post trackbacks here from my posts there.