Grammar and God

One of the most famous verses in Sanskrit is the opening verse of Kālidāsa’s Raghuvaṃśa:

vāg-arthāv iva sampṛktau vāg-artha-pratipattaye |

jagataḥ pitarau vande pārvatīparameśvarau ||

Here, Śiva and Pārvatī are seen to be inextricably intertwined like a word and its meaning.

Another verse I came across today expresses a similar relation, but between different pairs of upamānas and upameyas:

rāsa-vilāsa-vilolaṃ smarata murārer mano-haraṃ rūpam |

prakṛtiṣu yat pratyayavat praty-ekaṃ gopikāsu sammilitam ||

May you remember that enchanting form of Mura’s Conqueror,
        dancing around playfully in the Rāsa-līlā,
        united individually with all of the milkmaids,
                like a suffix with flexional bases.

As may be imagined, this is the opening verse of a grammatical text: the Prakriyā-sarvasva of Mēlpattūr Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭatiri, who is most famous for his composition of the Nārāyaṇīyam addressed to Kṛṣṇa. As to why Kṛṣṇa should be seen as a suffix (which, in English at least, sounds like it’s subordinate somehow to the word to which it’s added), it’s because the Pāṇinian tradition of grammar sees the suffix’s meaning as dominating the word’s meaning. Moreover, a suffix can be added to far more words than a word can take suffixes, and so it has greater “freedom of union” in that sense. Finally, and conveniently, the word for suffix, pratyaya, takes masculine gender, while the word for flexional base, prakṛti, takes the feminine gender.

Appayya Dīkṣita on figurative language

(This post is a draft, and I will likely edit my translations below, multiple times.)

In his Vṛttivārttika (“An Explication of Linguistic Operations”), Appayya Dīkṣita briefly outlines his theory of semantics, focusing on the processes by which words give rise to different meanings. As befits a good ālaṅkārika, literary theorist, in the post-Ānandavardhana universe, he accepts three such operations: 

• abhidhā, “denotation”,
• lakṣaṇā, “figuration” or something similar, and 
• vyañjanā, “suggestion”. 

This work of his, though, only defines abhidhā and lakṣaṇā. Does that mean the Vṛttivārttika is incomplete? Or is it the case that Appayya wanted to focus only on these two, postponing discussion of the often-problematic vyañjanā? Things are unclear, but what we do know is that in his other works (see the many articles by Yigal Bronner on Appayya) Appayya wants to reduce the role taken up by dhvani in poetics, and it is possible that this also means he wants to give abhidhā and lakṣaṇā more importance than post-Mammaṭa alaṅkāraśāstra permits.

Now, Appayya Dīkṣita argues that there are seven subtypes of lakṣaṇā. (This is one more than Mukulabhaṭṭa defines in his Abhidhāvṛttimātṛkā. One reason Mukulabhaṭṭa was so expansive was because he entirely denied the existence of a separate linguistic operation called vyañjanā, trying instead to bring it entirely under the domain of lakṣaṇā. I wonder what this says about Appayya’s intentions?) He offers examples for each of them, and some day I will try to list them all out systematically. For now, though, I restrict myself to his last two subtypes of lakṣaṇā, both of which he exemplifies using the single verse offered below.

ā pādam ā cikura-bhāram aśeṣam aṅgam 
ānanda-bṛnda-lasitaṃ sudṛśām asīmam |
antar mama sphuratu santatam antarātmann
ambhoja-locana tava śrita-hasti-śailam ||

śuddha-sâropa-lakṣaṇā yathā ‘ā pādam’ iti | atra bhagavad-aṅgeṣv ānanda-kāritvena ānanda-padasya sāropa-lakṣaṇā | ānanda-karaṇe itara-vailakṣaṇya-dyotanaṃ phalam |  ānanda-kāriṇi viṣaya-nigaraṇena “ānando ’yam” iti prayoge sâdhyavasāya-lakṣaṇā | ānandâvyabhicāra-dyotanaṃ phalam  ||

From feet up to thick, curly locks,
May Your entire body
        shimmering endlessly with clusters of pure bliss
        for those with blessed sight,
shine resplendent eternally within me,

O Indweller of my soul,
Lotus-eyed Lord 
         who lives atop Elephant Hill!

Śuddhā sâropā lakṣaṇā is exemplified in the verse that begins with the words ā pādam. Here, the word ānanda (“bliss”) refers to the Lord’s limbs through sâropā lakṣaṇā, because of their being causers of bliss. The result is the illumination of the impossibility of any other thing being an instrument of bliss.

The word ānanda refers to a causer of bliss through sâdhyavasāya-lakṣaṇā via the usage “it is bliss”, because in that case the topic at hand (i.e., the causer of bliss) gets wholly subsumed by the description (i.e., bliss). The result of this is the illumination of the total non-deviation of bliss from the causer of bliss.


What Appayya Dīkṣita does not mention is the source of his example verse. It turns out to be the 105th, and last, verse of the Śrī Varadarāja Stava, his long, highly poetically ornate praise-poem dedicated to Lord Varadarāja, the form of Viṣṇu manifested in the temple icon at Elephant Hill in the city of Kanchipuram, Appayya Dīkṣita’s hometown.

“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.

Indulge me, por favor

I don’t normally soar away in flights of fantasy; I enjoy feeling grass underneath my feet and sand between my toes far too much. But just this once, I request you, gentle reader, to forgive my rhapsodizing. If it doesn’t make sense, well, it wasn’t necessarily meant to!


So here goes: Each of us is a link in an infinite chain of being that spans space and time. Each of these links is, of course, comprised of smaller links, ad infinitum; each of this links, of course, participates in a greater link, ad infinitum. Do I exaggerate when I speak of twin infinities? Maybe, and maybe not.


What I’m really trying to say is that everything is doubly emergent.


Now materialist reductionism is the idea that things can be understood entirely by parsing them into their constituent material parts. It is a remarkably powerful, persuasive idea, and the basis of much modern theoretical and practical advancement, but according to at least some thinkers, it cannot explain the phenomenon of emergence. For them, an anthill is more than the sum of its parts; similarly, each of us human beings is more than the sum of our parts. There is something about our complexity that is irreducible to the parts that constitute us. (Note that emergence does not automatically reject materialism; it does, however, reject reductionism.)


But at the same time, we ourselves are also parts of a bigger, emergent reality—society, we call it. We take it for granted and thus forget how much of who we are (of our emergent selves!) is both affected and effected by this layer of abstraction that lies atop organized collections of interacting human beings. 


We are different from computers because our operating systems are able to rewire the physical hardware on which they run.


And paradoxically, the more “concrete” and “elementary” our constituents get, the more conceptual and abstract they become! We smash atoms into electrons and protons and neutrons, only to find that these “elementary” particles are probability distributions; we take them apart even further, and are ultimately left with vibrating 26-dimensional strings. And yet somehow causality travels up this chain in powerful, largely well-understood ways!


We have become accustomed to thinking of causality purely in instrumental terms. In that sense, it is of course true that it is the parts that alter the whole. But we forget that the word “cause” used to have a much wider sense. What we think of as the “cause” these days is only the Aristotelian “effective cause”. We have forgotten that other “causes” exist and have real effects. The “formal cause”, for instance, can be seen as the way in which higher layers of abstraction limit and direct lower layers. Again, this does not necessitate a belief in a Platonic realm of Forms. When a carpenter builds a chair, it is obviously true that his tools operating on the wood are the “effective causes” of what is produced. But is it not true that a “formal cause”—an understanding of what it means to be a chair, which is necessarily influenced by his social position—also has a part to play in this? We no longer think of this as causality, but as a result we are unable to fully grasp what’s going on here. Causality goes both upwards and downwards (and maybe sidewards as well!) over the web of existence.


Levels of description matter. “Romeo loved Juliet” is as true as “a certain well-structured collection of organic compounds produced certain levels of serotonin and oxytocin in the presence of a similarly well-structured collection of organic compounds”, but they don’t mean the same thing. Even if you ignore the fact that Romeo and Juliet are literary figures! Levels of description matter, and although the same truth can be expressed at different levels, it is significant in different ways at those levels. This is very similar to Karl Popper’s “Three Worlds”, but I think “Three” is too much and too little: too much, because there is only one world; too little, because that one world exists and interacts at many, many different levels. This is not the same as saying there are “Two Truths”; there aren’t, and there cannot be. But the same truth can be expressed at different levels.


Some who face this tower of concrete-yet-abstract layers dismiss it all as illusion or as emptiness. I think the exact opposite is the case. This is reality: a unified whole, an infinitely diverse, infinitely layered, fractal, organic tower that grows, breathes, becomes self-conscious, tries to comprehend all of itself, and shrinks.

A quote from Niebuhr

A remarkably powerful quote from Reinhold Niebuhr, one of President Obama’s favorite thinkers and theologians, on the necessarily incomplete and imperfect nature of all human action:

“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.”

A long article from the New York Review of Books on Niebuhr’s work in international relations and on the dangers of nationalistic hubris can be read here.

A never-ending marvel

An always-evolving, never-ending, always-fresh fractal landscape from Vimeo:

Surface detail from subBlue on Vimeo.

The structures that evolve out of this are incredible. This is both jamāl and jalāl, both mysterium fascinans and mysterium tremendum.

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>

Godā Stuti, 2

vaideśikaḥ śruti-girām api bhūyasīnāṃ
varṇeṣu māti mahimā na hi mādṛśāṃ te |
itthaṃ vidantam api māṃ sahasaiva Gode
mauna-druho mukharayanti guṇās tvadīyāḥ || 2 ||

Smell and memory

I've never read Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, but I've certainly heard about the famous madeleine episode in which the narrator's experience of seeing, smelling, and tasting a madeleine leads to a flood of past memories (and a voluminous novel!). This is perhaps the best-known contemporary account of the incredible power of the sense of smell, and its profound connection to our deepest emotions. The smell of a favorite dish, of a lover's cologne, of petrichor after summer rains, of a flower: all of these smells can immediately and instantaneously transport us to a different time and place and emotional state.

It is perhaps for this reason that smell plays an extremely important role in Indic culture. David Shulman has written a fascinating article called "The Scent of Memory in Hindu South India" (Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 13 (1987): 123–133) in which he explores some of the connections among smells, memories, emotions, and aesthetics. 

A Sanskrit benediction

The great sixteenth-century intellectual Appayya Dīkṣita opens his introductory treatise on Sanskrit poetics, the Kuvalayānanda or the "Joy of the Water-Lily", with three beautiful benedictions, or maṅgalācaraṇas, dedicated to the Devī, to Śiva and Pārvatī, and to Kṛṣṇa / Mukunda. I'm trying to read this work right now along with my friends BW and MS, and we worked out rough-ish translations for these verses. The opening verse, in particular, is beautifully structured both in terms of its aural effect and in terms of its coherence of meaning.

amarī-kabarī-bhāra-bhramarī-mukharī-kṛtam |

dūrīkarotu duritaṁ Gaurī-caraṇa-paṅkajam || 1 ||

|| 1 || 

May the lotuses that are the feet of Gaurī,

        resonant with the buzzing bees that are the dense, braided locks of goddesses,

dispel impurity!

As befits a work that attempts to (re)define the hugely complex world of Sanskrit formalist literary theory, this opening verse is worthy of deeper analysis, in order to figure out precisely how it depicst a fully coherent poetic image. In particular, Nirañjan Miśrā's twentieth-century Hindi commentary on the Kuvalayānanda sheds some useful light on the poetic images here. 

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.

New Swadharma post

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

On the mysteries of consciousness: an interlude

A friend recently sent me this story called "Article of Faith" by Michael Resnick. It's the first overtly Christian-themed science fiction short story I've read in a while, and asks some provocative questions about theology, consciousness, and social customs.

My comments on the story are largely going to be restricted to its themes. This is not because I believe sci-fi / fantasy is an inferior branch of literature—there are poorly written sci-fi stories just as there are poorly written romances or detective stories, but that does not mean all science fiction is poorly written. For evidence, look to Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (hard science, thorough areographical analysis, compelling characters, and thought-provoking plots), to Dan Simmon's Shrike series (some truly amazing writing here, never mind the foreign settings), to the classic Asimov Foundation series. Science fiction and fantasy novels choose their own settings and rules, which allows them to examine particular facets of humanity that may otherwise go unexplored. When you think about it, how different is this, really, from reading an epistolary novel set in eighteenth-century Paris? It is an illusion that a novel written to describe the author's contemporary setting is more real and hence more authentic than a novel written to describe an entirely imaginary setting. To me, what matter are the relations of the characters to one another and to their setting; if a certain setting highlights certain relations more transparently than others, so be it! (It goes without saying that the quality of the writing has a major role to play in the presentation of the relations.) But in the case of this story, I'm interested in the philosophical-themes-masquerading-as-relations, and not the narrative styles.

So, what about this story? It is tempting to read this story, the quest of a robot for redemption in God, as an allegory. The fact that the author repeatedly connects the economic travails of the narrator's parish to the increasing use of robots suggests a striking parallel to the US economy, as immigrants displace Americans from jobs and disrupt existing social and economic patterns, while simultaneously trying to assimilate into American culture in both appearance and thought. How many immigrants have tried to adapt to and adopt new customs and been rudely brushed away by the locals who are fearful and resentful of change? And how many age-old ways of life have been rudely brushed away by technological or political or social transformation?

But to read the story as allegory is to gloss over one of its core questions: just what is the soul? This question gives rise to many related questions: How does consciousness relate to the soul? How is a particular conception of God or non-God related to the soul? How do we humans decide when some entity can be deemed to possess a soul? And how, in our opinion, will a supreme God relate to a creature that may not have a soul and yet desires redemption? Is it even possible to not have a soul and yet desire redemption? Is it possible to have a soul and not desire redemption?

If I had answers to these questions, I wouldn't be here writing a blog post! Still, it's always worth taking a crack at what the story seems to be saying. For starters, the narrator-pastor introduces the concept of God to the robot through a child's version of the usual argument from effects (just as, in our experience, artifacts are always created by agents, so too must this entire universe be an artifact created by an Agent), and then introduces the Bible to the robot. Later he becomes greatly troubled at two levels: that a robot could have the temerity to want to join a congregation of God, and that a man of God like him could be so troubled that a robot could have the temerity to want to join a congregation of God. The narrator is also willing to let his parish decide the matter for themselves, but is then so profoundly disturbed by their decision (or perhaps by the manner in which this decision is attained) that he abandons the church entirely.

There are a number of issues to be examined here:

1) Leaving aside the means by which a self-reflective robot could have been programmed, how natural is it for an obviously created being to assume that the entire universe must, in fact, be created? Is it any easier for the robot to accept this view than it is for us humans, who are born through a natural process that does not have an obvious agent? (Our mothers are better seen as instruments, their bodies working through biological and unconscious processes to create babies.) Not being a robot (at least as far as I know), I cannot tell.

2) Is a religious text like the Bible even amenable to a reading by non-humans? I've always thought that core religious texts are particularly conducive to a variety of readings that allow the adherents of the tradition to reshape the meaning of the text (usually by means of methods sanctified by the tradition itself) to suit their contexts. How, then, is a creature that the narrator claims cannot even understand a human smile supposed to understand a text as complicated as the Bible? The narrator argues that the robot understood the Bible literally—just as some of his parishioners did—but how is that reconciled with the fact that a literal reading of the Bible poses logical puzzles (if not contradictions)?

3) I know very little about Christian theology, particularly about Christian ideas of the soul. But the fact that the pastor is willing to teach the robot a Christian worldview while denying it the right to join the congregation because it lacks a soul suggests that for the narrator, a soul is distinct both from a purely rational faculty (which was presumably programmed into the robot) and from the combined rational-emotional faculty that we normally call consciousness (some semblance of which was either programmed into the robot, or which emerged over the course of the robot's time with the narrator). This issue is deeply problematic, for it denies the most obvious criterion human beings could use to determine what sorts of creatures have a soul. We can usually tell if something is alive (it has faculties for sustenance and reproduction, at the very least), and we can identify different levels of cognitive capability, although not precisely enough (are dolphins sentient? are chimpanzees? ant-hills?). The robot challenges our first conception of being alive, but it certainly passes the Turing test of consciousness. But if we still cannot tell what has a soul, then what are we to do?

One option is to adopt the position of the classical Islamic Murji'a school, and to "defer" the question to God; in other words, to treat consciousness as a "good enough" indicator, but to let God decide whether the robot actually possesses a soul. After all, if God is omniscient, then God should know if the robot possesses a soul; indeed, God probably infused (or chose not to infuse) the robot with a soul in the first place. But this does not offer an answer to the narrator's (and the parishioners') question about the robot: does it have a soul? Indeed, it chooses not to ask precisely this question.

4) The narrator's decision to submit the question to his parish, and his parishioners' eventual decision, bring up the important issue that religion (perhaps in contrast with spirituality) is a deeply, maybe even inherently, a social phenomenon. Does that mean souls are social phenomena too? In other words, the robot lacks a soul because he is denied a soul? A cynic would observe that the church would have found some way to prove the existence of the robot's soul had it been to the church's advantage. But this does not address the ontological status of the soul, unless we concede that such things as souls are social constructs lacking independent existence. This may serve to distinguish it from consciousness ... but only if we decide that consciousness exists independently of society, which also seems problematic given the difficulties feral children face when re-integrating into human society.

5) Indeed, the narrator's decision to leave the church , and his terrible confusion afterwards, only serves to highlight the tremendous complexity of this issue. There just seem to be no clear answers, even though there are a number of different positions that can be defended.

For what it's worth, I'm okay with holding that consciousness is the same as possessing a soul; in other words, I find it hard to believe that a creature that has the capacity to decide for itself that it wants to follow a particular religious path for intellectual reasons is nevertheless disqualified from that path when there are clearly far less qualified individuals on that path.

From al-Ash`arī's "Vindication of Kalām"

This is a very interesting statement that al-Ash`arī makes when defending the practice of kalām against those who argue that it is a needless, unimportant, irrelevant, or misleading innovation (bid`a) because the Prophet said nothing about it.

"But when new and specific questions pertaining to the basic dogmas arise, every intelligent Muslim ought to refer judgment on them to the sum of principles accepted on the grounds of reason, sense experience, intuition, etc. For judgment on legal questions which belong to the category of the traditional is to be based on reference to legal principles which likewise belong to the category of the traditional. And judgment on questions involving the data of reason and the senses should be a matter of referring every such instance to (something within) its own category, without confounding the rational with the traditional, or the traditional with the rational."

(p. 131, The Theology of al-Ash`arī, translated by Richard J. McCarthy)

It seems that al-Ash`arī considers the intellectual world to be sharply divided between reason and tradition, with each having its own domain of operations. Let's see how well that intuition holds up as I continue to read. I can sense one wrinkle already: how does one come to agree on what, precisely, the "tradition" constitutes? Only the Qur'ān? The Qur'ān and the Sunna? Are all the various madhhabs of jurisprudence included in this? And so on. I'm very eager to see how this turns out.

Islamic Philosophy and Theology, VII: Life under the `Abbāsids

First, apologies for not updating this series of posts in a while. I've been busy with a few other things, but am going to try to squeeze in as many posts as I can before school starts.

Let me mention that my reading net has broadened to include Wikipedia as well. This is officially no longer a simple note-taking exercise while reading a book, but a full-fledged endeavor to understand as much as I can, using what few resources I have access to. I'm not going to be linking to Wikipedia since there are enough links as it is and a simple Google search will get you there anyway. I will, however, continue to cite my book sources as accurately as I can, out of respect for their authors' intellectual labor and in order to encourage you, gentle reader, to get your own hands on the books too!

I'd left off earlier with the overthrow of the Umayyad caliphs in 750 CE at the hands of the `Abbāsids, mentioning briefly that the latter had smartly articulated their message to appeal to disaffected Shī`ites (including Zaydites), Qadarites of different flavors, and the mawālis, who were mostly Persian converts to Islam. With this defeat, the caliphate officially passed to the hands of the `Abbāsids, and the remnants of the Umayyads fled to Spain to establish another kingdom there. 

The major social players during the `Abbāsids

Lots of important things happen during the effective reign of the `Abbāsids (that is to say, during the period within which the `Abbāsids were not merely puppet caliphs but actual overlords), foremost among which are the hardening of the divide between the Sunnis and the Shī`ites, and what Watt describes as the "first wave" of Hellenic thought to influence Islamic theology, and the development of distinct approaches within Islamic philosophy, rational theology, and jurisprudence. The connections between these changes and the rise and fall of new social / political groups are also interesting.

From the social perspective, two groups acquired great importance. First, the old Arab patron - Persian client (mawāli) power dynamic that had been so important under the Umayyads changed in some important ways. The administration of the empire remained in the hands of the ethnically Persianate bureaucrats, descendants of the sophisticated Sassanid aristocratic administration, and they continued to resent the prominent positions held by Arabs in the Muslim empire. Watts notes that these bureaucrats had mostly been Zoroastrians under the Sassanids, with some Christians in the mix. During the Umayyad and early `Abbāsid periods, most of them converted to Islam; a cynic might observe that this would probably have been due to the universal tendency of bureaucrats to gravitate towards whatever is most likely to advance their careers. Whatever the reason, the `Abbāsid era saw the rise of the Shu`ūbite (from sha`ab, meaning "nation") movement in literature, where government officials began to produce works design to denigrate and insult all things Arab. One of the most important consequences of this movement was the redemption and revival of Persian literature, especially in far eastern Khorāsān, as `Abbāsid power waned.

Second, the mainstream religious intellectuals who had opposed the Umayyads and supported the `Abbāsid uprising began to organize themselves better into a class of scholars well versed in Islamic knowledge (`ilm), the `ulamā' (sing. `ālim). Watt argues that the struggle between the bureaucrats and the `ulamā' eventually hardened into the divide between Shī`ism and Sunnism, respectively, saying

"where the Shī`ites in difficulties sought a divinely-inspired leader, an imām, their opponents held that salvation came through carefully following the divine law as expressed in the Qur'ān and in the sunna or example of the Prophet. Since the ulema were accepted as the accredited interpreters of the divine law, the Sunnite position gave them great power." (p. 34)

Now I don't find this terribly convincing. Perhaps it's just the manner in which Watt has phrased it here, but I think this statement as it stands grossly oversimplifies the considerable diversity in positions held by the `ulamā'. To argue that scholars who held diametrically opposed views on, say, God's qadar or the (un)createdness of the Qur'ān, were all Sunni simply because this position gave them more "power" seems terribly weak to me. Moreover, it glosses over the ethnic dimension of the situation—surely not all `ulamā' were of pure Arab origin? There certainly seems to be much more scope for overlap between the Shu`ūbite movement and many theological questions than Watt seems to acknowledge.

The major intellectual players

Within the Islamic intellectual movement itself, a number of terms crop up that I want to list here, for their histories are so intertwined that I found Watt's normally clear, historically driven narrative somewhat confusing. The first is falāsifa (sing., faylasūf), the students of Hellenic philosophy who translated these works into Arabic; most, but not all of the, were Muslim, and not all of them chose to reconcile the tensions between their philosophical work and their religion. (This last is a sense I got from a preliminary skim, and may be inaccurate.) The second is kalām, literally, "speech" in Arabic. Wolfson states at the very beginning of his work that

"the term kalām, which literally means "speech" or "word," is used in Arabic translations of the works of Greek philosophers as a rendering of the term logos in its various senses of "word," "reason," and "argument." The term kalām is also used in those Arabic translations from the Greek in the sense of any special branch of learning, and the plural participle, mutakallimūn (singular: mutakallim), is used as a designation of the masters or exponents of any special branch of learning." (p. 1)

However, kalām also has a more restrictive sense, when it is applied to a particular school ("method" may make even better sense) of Islamic philosophical thought that is to be contrasted with the falāsifa. In this more restrictive sense, the mutakallimūn are Islamic theologians who explicitly see themselves as Muslim, and who embark upon the ambitious task of reconciling reason and revelation. The two great schools of kalām that flourished during the `Abbāsid period were the Mu`tazilites and the Ash`arites. 

In addition to these two groups of philosophers, a number of schools (madhāhib) of jurisprudence (fiqh) grew up during the `Abbāsid period. Watt broadly refers to them as the Ahl al-Ḥadīth, since their primary motivation seemed to have been the desire to systematize the collection and study of the various ḥadīth of the Prophet along with their chains of transmission (isnāds), in order to justify and substantiate legal positions for which no direct Qur'ānic corroboration could be found. The fāqih al-Shāfi`ī first articulated the common principles of jurisprudence (usūl al-fiqh), which he arranged in the hierarchical order:

1) the Qur'ān

2) the Ḥadīth of the Prophet, systematized most prominently into the ṣaḥīḥ of al-Bukhārī and of Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj

3) qiyās, or analogy (and not all schools accepted this)

4) ijmā`, or the consensus (whether of scholars or of the active, devout community of Muslims)

The four most prominent Sunni schools, all founded during the `Abbāsid era and all surviving until today, are the Ḥanafite, the Shāfi`ite, the Mālikite, and the Ḥanbalite. The most important Shī`ite school is the Ja`farite.

It's important to note that theology and jurisprudence were distinct fields, and that in general a particular theological position did not necessarily bind a mutakallim to any madhhab, or vice versa. The one exception was the Ḥanbalite madhhab, which had its own small theological school. Broadly speaking, though, the "rational" study of the mutakallimūn was rejected by the fuqahā', who held that it was only through thorough study of the usūl al-fiqh that a Muslim could lead a good life. (This is an oversimplified, overgeneralized position, to some extent.)

Watt mentions one term as rising in use only much later, but whose referent is recognizable even during `Abbāsid times. This is the ahl al-Sunna, or the Sunnis, the term given to the mainstream of Islamic practice once certain concrete beliefs are generally agreed upon. These beliefs are positive statements that also serve to distinguish other groups as not being part of the "mainstream", and this "adversarial" sense of the components of the ahl al-Sunna is captured in Watt's prose here:

"Against the Khārijites (and with the Murji'ites) it was agreed that sinners whose intellectual belief was sound were not excluded from the community because of their sin. Against the Shī`ites it was agreed that the first four caliphs were genuine caliphs, and that the chronological order was the order of excellence. Against the Qadarites and Mu`tazilites it was agreed that all events are determined by God. It was also agreed that the Qur'ān was the uncreated word or speech of God, though there were differences about the human utterance of the Qur'ān." (p. 59)

The only other thing to note at this point is that the Shī`ite position is clarified during the `Abbāsid era largely along Imāmite (the so-called "Twelver" or ithnā`ashariyya) lines. The two other flavors of Shī`ite thought, the Ismā`īlite and the Zaydite, gain prominence under other dynasties (for the former, most prominently under the Fāṭimid caliphs of North Africa).