The Swami, the Priest, and the Rediscovery of the Indian Traditions

[Published on India-forum.com on 03/27/2007]

I will take up some of the general points, which I think are relevant to the Indian American community at large. First, let me say I am impressed by the dynamism present in this community. In spite of the demands of daily life, Indian Americans find the time and energy to engage in intellectual debates about the nature of their traditions. In spite of the discrimination and “religion oppression” [1] faced by them, there is a general sense of optimism about the future of these traditions.

It is important that this dynamism remain a positive force. Some Indian Americans have adopted the name-calling that we find among certain American academics. Whereas the latter call anyone who dares say a few positive words about the Indian traditions “a Hindutva sycophant,” the former trend to label any western intellectual who dares question the dominant representations of the Indian traditions as a “Witzellian.” The legitimate discontent about the academic representation of the Indian traditions should not lead us to a general anti-intellectual stance. Anti-intellectualism knows only one endpoint: the Taliban. Now, if there is one community aware of the duty to avoid that society moves towards that point, it is the Indian American community. Since intellectuals share this sense of duty, our study of the Indian traditions should show how they can contribute to making American society a more tolerant, open-minded and happier society.

As Chitra Raman affirms, the Indian traditions have been conceptualized in an extremely impoverished manner during the last few centuries. It is the hypothesis of our research group that this is the case because they have been viewed through a secularized biblical framework. [2] The same framework also puts conceptual limitations on the structure of American pluralism. This is not an assessment about the origins of this form of pluralism or a judgment about its biased nature, but rather a cognitive analysis of its contemporary structure. Such an analysis cannot be challenged by a moralizing judgement (e.g., that it justifies discrimination). The only way to really challenge my hypothesis is to develop another hypothesis about the structure of American pluralism. Naturally, its purpose is to develop new ways of solving the problems of pluralism in the U.S. To do so, one should indeed strive to bring American pluralism beyond its biblical straitjacket in the near future. Perhaps, no group is as qualified to do so as the Indian Americans.

But before they can take up this task, they should understand the depth of the predicament. Even more so, they have to become aware that they have appropriated the secularized Christian conception of the Indian traditions as a self-description. The predicament we face is cognitive in nature: the currently dominant conception of the Indian traditions makes sense only against the background of the biblical framework. It is cognitive in the sense that the way we currently think and talk about “Hinduism” leads to a distortion of the very nature of the Indian traditions. This dominant conception of “Hinduism” does not describe these traditions themselves, but rather how they appear through western and Christian lenses. Yet many Indians and Indian Americans talk as though this conception makes eminent sense to them.

Chitra Raman develops a nice analogy: it is like using the grammar of one language to understand another. One may adopt the words of the second language, but when one embeds them in the grammatical structure of the first language, one ends up with virtual gibberish. The analogy can be taken further: today, it is as though the native speakers of the second language have accepted the grammatical structure of the first language as the only correct one and they try to speak their own language in this way. This is the nature of our predicament: many Indians and Indian Americans have adopted the conceptual framework of Christianity to talk about their own traditions. They assume the Indian traditions are a belief system or religion with its own doctrines, commandments and rules. As I will try to show, this makes about as much sense as using the grammatical structure of one language to speak another completely different language.

To avoid any misunderstanding, let it be clear that the denial that the Indian traditions are of the same nature as biblical religion does not involve any value judgement. They also have a highly-developed structure, but this is so different from Judaism, Christianity and Islam that it is impossible to maintain that the Indian traditions and the latter three are instances of the same kind. In fact, once we appreciate how different the Indian traditions are from these religions, we will rediscover how rich and valuable they really are. To return to the language analogy: if we used the grammatical structure of one language to speak another, we would not be able to understand this second language and would also ignore its rich contributions to literature, philosophy and poetry. It is only when we rediscover the structure of this second language that its treasures become available to us. Similarly, when we rediscover the nature of the Indian traditions and rescue them from being transformed into just another religion, we will be able to show how they have contributed to the pursuit of knowledge at a level undreamt of.

The Priest and the Swami

In Facing the Challenge of American Pluralism, I argued that the Indian traditions revolve around the exploring and examining of one’s experience so as to attain perfect happiness. What does this mean? How is it different from what religions like Christianity and Islam do? As an entry point, take a Hindu swamiji and a Christian priest. The priest says “God is a Trinity.” The swamiji says “Tat Tvam Asi.” What is the difference between the two?

First the priest. The sentence “God is a Trinity” is a doctrine to him; it is a proposition about the world, which he takes to be absolutely true. Because it is a doctrine, the sentence is embedded in an elaborate theological system. It is related to other sentences that explain its true meaning: theological doctrines about Jesus being the Son of God and the Father, the Son and the Spirit being one substance, but three persons. Arguments have been developed to establish the truth of the Trinitarian doctrine. Its correct formulation was discussed and fixed at the First Council of Nicea in 325 AD. The result is the Nicene Creed: a set of beliefs that are held to reflect religious truth by most Christian denominations. As a Christian believer, when the priest says “God is a Trinity,” one is expected to accept this as a true belief, a doctrine embedded in a belief system that claims the one and only religious truth. As an orthodox Christian today, one should understand this doctrine, proclaim its truth and be able to defend it against its detractors. One should not question its truth and meaning. These have been fixed for good.

Now the swamiji. When he states “Tat Tvam Asi,” does he expect all Hindus to accept this sentence as a true doctrine? Does he want them to take this as a true belief, whose truth they should proclaim and defend against the “false beliefs” of other religions? Does he expect them to memorize the sentence and its related doctrines and arguments, and repeat them until eternity? No, he does not. When the swamiji teaches, he takes into account the different levels and experiences of his audience. He will explain “Tat Tvam Asi” in different ways according to the different experiential levels of individuals. The sentence does not have one fixed true meaning, precisely because it functions as an instruction for exploring one’s own experience. It suggests that the distinction between I and not-I is a temporary figment that results from interpreting our experience in a particular way. If we examine this experience at a deeper level, we will slowly discover that there is no such distinction there. The swamiji’s explanation of the sentence will make sense to us, according to where we are on the path towards this discovery.

Hence, neither the speech of the swamiji nor the texts of the Indian traditions can be understood as belief systems or doctrines, which have a fixed meaning and claim to reflect the one religious truth. They are “heuristics” that function as instructions for action to explore our own experience. To attain the insights embodied in these sentences, one has to examine them from all sides, relate them to one’s experience and question their truth repeatedly. Only in this way can they help us become better and happier human beings. The claim of the Indian traditions is not that we should accept them as true doctrines or that such acceptance is a precondition for attaining salvation. They do not postpone perfect happiness until after death. Neither do they claim that there is only one true path to attain this state. Rather, they claim that all human beings can attain perfect happiness here on earth and that there are countless ways to achieve this goal.

Those who conceptualize the Indian traditions as “belief systems,” “doctrines” or “religion” take away the unique nature of these traditions. They make the rich storehouse of experiential knowledge embodied by these traditions inaccessible and do so by transforming them into a belief system, the Hindu equivalent of Christianity or Islam. Let it be clear that the Indian traditions are neither belief systems nor religions. They are far more fascinating than that. I refer you to the piece by my teacher S. N. Balagangadhara (soon to be published on the India Forum website) to get a glimpse of how rich these traditions are. Here, just note that it is precisely the way in which the Indian traditions are different from belief systems, which makes them into extremely important but uncharted contributions to the human pursuit of knowledge.

Transforming the Swami into a Priest

But what happens when we reduce the Indian traditions into a Hindu “religion,” “world view” or “belief system”? What are the consequences of transforming the swamiji into a priest? Why is this development so harmful?

1. Firstly, it generates a tendency to trivialize the very nature of these traditions. For instance, Chitra Raman suggests that the claim that the Indian traditions give us so many ways to explore one’s experience and pursue perfect happiness makes them sound like “a recreational drug.” This reveals a misunderstanding of what happiness is. It conflates happiness with pleasure, while “happiness” refers to what lies beyond sukha-dukha. “Happiness” refers to Aristotle’s eudaimonia—the goal which all human beings seek to reach. Christianity has always claimed that such a perfect state cannot be attained on earth, because human beings are sinful. The only true happiness lies in the union of the soul with the biblical God after death, according to this religion. Therefore, all we can hope for on earth is pleasure (which in fact we ought to avoid, according to Christian asceticism). This conflation of happiness with pleasure trivializes the goal of the Indian traditions. It accepts a Christian assumption as a true fact about human beings.
2. Next, this transformation inevitably leads to the distortion and degradation of the Indian traditions. One reduces the variety of action heuristics and insights into human existence to simple-minded doctrines like “pantheism,” “panentheism,” “integral humanism” or “Hindu secularism.” In effect, such doctrines transform the Indian traditions into primitive versions of Christianity and the western humanistic tradition. The western tradition developed complex theories about theism, humanism and secularism. These may be problematic, but they do reflect a massive intellectual project of a culture. The Indian traditions have not developed such elaborate theories, because they focused on kinds of knowledge other than theory: performative and experiential knowledge. In their turn, these kinds of knowledge are underdeveloped in the western traditions. When one turns the learning of the Indian traditions into doctrines instead of appreciating their unique forms of knowledge, one makes them into less developed variants of the philosophies of the western-Christian tradition.
3. At the same time, this exercise brings in its wake the adoption of misunderstood and half-digested concepts from Christian theology and western philosophy. For instance, both “pantheism” and “panentheism” are concepts embedded in Christian theology. They refer to the belief that the biblical God (the theos in the theism) is immanent in the universe or that He is immanent but transcends the universe at the same time. Without the Christian theological framework, such concepts fail to make sense. Nevertheless, some Hindus proudly proclaim today that Hinduism has pantheism or panentheism. The same people take it that “Tat Tvam Asi” means that “your soul is wholly or partially the Ultimate Reality,” in the sense of “a mystical union with this Reality.” This is a half-baked version of the “salvation” of Christianity, a mystical union of the soul with God. The story about “the soul dissolving in Ultimate Reality” is popular among the New Age movement as a new doctrine, supposedly inspired by Hinduism. In reality, these are sentences that absorb the Indian traditions into the linguistic and conceptual framework of Christianity.

As a part of this exercise, one sometimes tries to appropriate English words like “God,” “pantheism,” “soul,” etc. and give them a “Hindu” meaning. One tries to give one’s own meanings to words from the European languages, which have a theological meaning that goes back more than fifteen centuries. While doing so, one inherits the original theology. But at the same time, there is no clarity as to the new meaning and how the resulting concepts differ from the original Christian concepts. Needless to say, the result is a linguistic and conceptual jumble, which dissolves the Indian traditions into opacity.

4. Once one makes these traditions into a belief system, one also runs the risk of transforming them into a rigid set of doctrines. Like the Nicene Creed, one will now get a Hindu creed that is supposed to reflect the true teachings of Hinduism. This is happening under our eyes. Especially in the United States and the United Kingdom, attempts are undertaken to present a clear and common set of Hindu teachings. This seems necessary, because school-going children should be able to explain to their peers as to “what they believe in.” These texts also become the foundation for the representation of the Indian traditions in textbooks and encyclopaedias. Instead of realizing that these traditions are profoundly different from Christianity and Islam, one generates a set of doctrines that becomes the Hindu equivalent of the Christian and Islamic doctrines.
5. In creating such Hindu creeds, one smuggles in a doctrinal intolerance into these traditions that is alien to them. Before there was rivalry in the sense that each of the Indian traditions advocated its own approach to the pursuit of happiness as the best and uniquely rewarding. Each tradition feels that it incorporates all others. Now, this degenerates into an aggressive defence of “the true teachings of Hinduism.” Those Indian traditions that refuse to accept these “true teachings” are turned into deviations from a normative mainstream. Basically, one begins to mimic the Christian orthodoxy and its stance towards “heresy.”
6. Moreover, one attempts to create an ecumenical common ground of Hindu doctrine. This imitates the attempts of the Christian ecumenical movement to retrieve the true revelation of the biblical God by uniting all Christian churches and all human beings around a common creed. This may seem very humane and sweet from a Christian perspective. From the perspective of the Indian traditions, however, it is nothing but a degradation of differences into deviations from the mainstream: differences become obstacles to the common ground that we supposedly need to live together.

Well, centuries of Indian history have demonstrated that a society does not need such a common ground among its different cultural, religious and traditional groups in order to create a relatively stable co-existence. For ages, Vaishnavas, Shaivas, Buddhists, Jainas, Christians, Muslims, etc. lived together without a common creed or legal framework. Naturally, there were conflicts and tensions in the Indian society, but it did not fall apart at any point. One of the fascinating questions about the Indian traditions is how they succeeded in doing this: what allowed them to live together without a common doctrinal or legal framework? The pursuit of an ecumenical common ground of Hinduism obliterates such questions and the answers that lie in the Indian traditions.

7. By creating a Hindu religion or belief system, one makes the swamijis into clerics. Instead of being guides on the different paths for the exploration of experience and the pursuit of happiness, the swamijis and gurujis now become priests, who have to expound Hindu doctrines. They are simply reduced to the representatives of a religion, who have to tell others about “the teachings of Hinduism.” A tendency then comes into being to create Hindu catechisms for the “benefit” of the Indian American youth. Mirroring the Protestant catechisms, the true Hindu teachings are presented in Q&A and FAQ forms. Thus, one takes away the creativity of thought of these traditions. All one can do is repeat the beliefs as though these are God’s own truth. While there is no denying that such efforts are of supreme import to Christianity, the Indian traditions have far more to offer. The experiential knowledge that has been developed by so many generations of wise men and women contains deep insights into human psychology and human cognition. Hence, the intellectual creativity of the Indian traditions is needed today more than ever.
8. Another nefarious consequence is that one begins to imitate the European colonial masters in one’s attitude towards the average Indian and Indian American: one accuses them of ignorance of their own religion. One complains about the superficial understanding of the true teachings of Hinduism among so-called Hindus. One begins to lament “the cultural ignorance of many Indians,” instead of realizing that the ignorance is one’s own. This is identical to what the British colonials did in the nineteenth century. Operating under the assumption that each culture had its own religion, they started looking for the doctrines of the Indian religion in the Sanskrit texts. They invented and extracted a Hindu theology and religious law from these “sacred books of the East.” Next, they began to complain that neither the “Brahmin priests” nor the “Hindu laymen” knew their own religion: they were taken to be ignorant of the content of the texts, the true meaning of the doctrines and the legal and moral principles of Hinduism. Thus, the colonials never realized that they were describing their own experience. It was theywho could make sense of the Indian traditions only as a Hindu religion, a variant of Christianity. They were not describing the Indians’ experience, since the Indians had never seen or heard about this religion. To the Indian traditions, doctrines and moral rules were of no importance. Some texts had a role to play, but this role was nowhere similar to that of the Bible in Christianity. Today, the self-appointed representatives of Hinduism are continuing this colonial attitude: if the Indians don’t know about “the true teachings of Hinduism,” it is not because these doctrines do not exist in India, but because the Indians are ignorant of their own culture.
9. One begins to be ashamed about the nature of certain aspects of the Indian traditions. That is, when the Indian traditions are absorbed into the Christian framework, their murtipujabecomes “idol-worship,” their devatas and devis become “manifestations of one Supreme God,” their sophisticated eroticism becomes “pornography,” their diversity becomes “confusion,” their recognition of all human emotions and behaviours becomes “depravity,” their beautifully crafted statues of naked devis become “seductive demons,” their diverse stories become “myths” or “scriptures.” Strikingly, even the suggestion that the Indian traditions are not a religion or belief system is then taken as an insult to these traditions, while in reality it reveals their riches. Adopting the western experience, one gets the feeling that the absence of fixed doctrines and rules in these traditions entails that they consist of “a slippery moral landscape.” One becomes embarrassed that the Indian traditions do not have an equivalent of the Ten Commandments and tries to construct such Hindu commandments.
10. To conclude, all these consequences can be stated as one succinct hypothesis: those who conceptualize the Indian traditions as a Hindu religion or belief system are reproducing the western-Christian experience of the Indian traditions. In that experience, these traditions are reduced into pale and erring variants of biblical religion. In other words, they have accepted the experience of one culture (the West) as the framework for understanding and describing another culture (India). The colonial inferiority complex emerges, because one begins to see the Indian traditions as deficient versions of the Christian religion and the western belief system. The next step of such a cultural inferiority complex is an aggressive denial of this consequence and a fanatical claim that “Hinduism is superior to all other religions.”

Saving the Swami from the Priest

The call for new and alternative ways of studying the Indian traditions does not stem from the academic’s fear to become obsolete. It stems from a fear that we will lose a vast and beautiful contribution to humanity that has explored aspects of human existence largely ignored by Judaism, Christianity, Islam and their cultural progeny: human experience and perfect happiness. These are two things shared by all human beings: the inevitability of experience and the pursuit of happiness. As members of the human species, therefore, it is our duty not to let the wisdom of generations slip away like this.

The rejuvenation of the Indian traditions will compel us to translate them into the language of the twenty-first century. It is not an attempt to revive the past, but to rediscover what these traditions already know. We need to show that their knowledge can compete with, and contribute to, the human sciences that emerged in the West. The world needs to realize that, thanks to these traditions, humanity has far more insights into human existence than has so far been assumed. This may well require reclaiming the Indian traditions—including Indian Islam and Indian Christianity—from their self-proclaimed secular critics as well as from their self-appointed religious representatives. It will most certainly require a genuinely scientific appreciation of the rich storehouse of knowledge produced by these traditions. It is only thus that we can show the true worth of the Indian traditions to humanity.

This effort also requires participation and support from the Indian American communities. Not only should they prevent a facile anti-intellectualism from spreading in their ranks, they should instead stimulate their children to aspire becoming true intellectuals. We need engineers, medical doctors and other professionals. Perhaps we even need people whose lives revolve around the accumulation of material wealth. But more than any of these, we need a new generation of intellectuals: human scientists who will look at the Indian traditions through new eyes. This generation will show to humanity the contribution of these traditions. They will become the teachers of teachers.

Now is the time to start taking steps towards the creation of such a generation of intellectuals. Practically, this will involve encouraging our children to join the humanities and social sciences. It will also require funding and an institutional framework: a think-tank or research institute needs to be set up for the study of the Indian traditions. But today the greatest need of all is new scientific research on these traditions and an open-mindedness towards the results of this research.

[1] As Khyati Joshi shows in her stimulating book on the experiences of second-generation Indian Americans, the term “religious oppression” captures many of these experiences. See Khyati Joshi, New Roots in America’s Sacred Ground: Religion, Race and Ethnicity in Indian America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005).

[2] Our research group at Ghent University, Belgium and Kuvempu University, India is perhaps the only academic group to engage in a joint effort to uphold the Indian traditions against the defamation they have been subjected to during the last four or five centuries. Those interested can look into some of our publications : S. N. Balagangadhara, “The Heathen in His Blindness…”: Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion (Leiden: Brill, 1994; second edition, New Delhi: Manohar, 2005); Jakob De Roover, “The Vacuity of Secularism: On the Indian Debate and Its Western Origins,” Economic and Political Weekly 37, no. 39(2002), 4047-4053; Raf Gelders and Willem Derde, “Mantras of Anti-Brahmanism: Colonial Experience of Indian Intellectuals,” Economic and Political Weekly 38, no. 43(2003), 4611-4617; Sarah Claerhout and Jakob De Roover, “The Question of Conversion in India,” Economic and Political Weekly 40, no. 28(2005), 3048-3055; S. N. Balagangadhara, “How to Speak for the Indian Traditions: An Agenda for the Future,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 73, no. 4(2005), 987-1013; S. N. Balagangadhara and Jakob De Roover, “The Secular State and Religious Conflict: Liberal Neutrality and the Indian Case of Pluralism,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 15, no. 1(2007), 67-92.

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