Translate

Monday 28 May 2018

The Role of Icons in Hinduism

The Role of Icons in Hinduism




The religious sentiment is universally present in all human beings. It is an essential component of every culture - from the most primitive to the most developed. It is the basis on which the society is organized - the norms of social behaviour, the distribution of wealth, the roles, the rights of individuals and so forth are defined in terms of certain beliefs about the nature and origin of the universe.

The religious impulse underlies man’s quest for going beyond the given, immediate world - the world of friends and foes, property and poverty, delight and disgust. It appears to be an attempt by the self to be in touch with something transcendent - immensely vast, immensely powerful, in comparison with which even this vast universe is like a speck of dust.

It is a kind of reality categorically different from what we perceive, conceptualise and describe. However it is somehow given to human consciousness through some channels of communication that forms that substance of depth psychological experience.

The fact that it is different from what we normally perceive and describe does not mean that it is not real or illusory.

The substance of this depth psychological or religious consciousness, by virtue of its intrinsic character requires a media for representing it distinct from language where the ordinary knowledge of the world is articulated. The non-discursive forms of presentation such as is available in art, music and poetry seems to be more apt than the language of words and syntactic structures. The icons of Hinduism along with its temple architecture and religious music and dance must be viewed as visual means of communicating this mute but deep consciousness of reality that goes beyond the bounds of sense and reaches the unconscious realms.

The icons point towards something that cannot in fact be represented or symbolised adequately in all its comprehensiveness. They are not like traffic lights where green means go, red means stop. They are functionally a bit like an arrow which points towards a direction outside itself. They tend to direct the attentional and thought processes of an individual not outwardly towards hither and thither but rather inwardly towards deeper levels of consciousness of reality. It is in this regard, I believe, icons differ from sculptures which are also visual, three dimensional communicative presentations.

We should not obfuscate the distinction between icons and sculptures, paintings and photography, mythology and science, poetry and logic. Most of the skepticism and unfounded criticism of religious life in general and Hinduism in particular arises from obliterating the above distinctions and mis-constructing their functional characteristics. The icons and sculptures belong to opposite poles of a continuum where three dimensional material media are used to communicate something incommunicable through language. Similarly for the others.

What poetry, mythology, paintings and icons communicate arise from religious consciousness. What sculptures, photographs, science and logic reveal is the structure of ordinary, normal human consciousness. There is a dynamic relationship between the two. One is deep and mute and the other surface level and articulate. But one forms the basis of the other - they interpenetrate each other. There are mythological elements in science and scientific elements in mythology. When we go from one to the other, we are not discarding one and adopting the other, rather we transform one into the form of the other. The unconscious is made an element of consciousness through conceptual understanding.

What I have said so far is general - it applies to icons of all religions. But each religion has its own icons that are characteristically different.

Why do we have, for example, so many icons in Hinduism? When god is one, why Murugan, Sivan, Vishnu, Kali, Uma, Laxmi and so forth? Why are they so much like human beings even though it is said that God is formless? Why again unusual and bizarre qualities like having four arms, long and sharp teeth that strike terror; sleeping on a snake, having a lotus growing on the navel, having a human like body but animal like face and so forth?

In order to understand this we should turn our attention to the vast store of Hindu mythologies or puranas - great and small. To the great tradition belongs to the puranas about Siva, Sakti, Vishnu and Kandan. To the smaller tradition belongs the innumerable puranas revolving around the minor deities, the village devatas and other subordinate elements in the Hindu pantheon. The best of Hindu icons such as Siva Nataraja, MahaVishnu in his many avatars, Sakti as Kali, Kandan as Murugan; the sacred marriage of Minatci to Siva, Siva as Trimurti, Taksinamurti, Mahayogi and so forth derive the motfits and themes from these puranas.

But what are these puranas? What do they signify? What is their relevance to the religious quest? I shall react to this in my personal capacity as a Hindu who has found Hinduism meaningful after a lengthy period of skepticism. I shall be speaking as a prodigal son who has returned to the fold after wandering far and wide.

A few months ago I wrote a poem in the style of the ancient aarrupadai where an invitation is extended to the young and old alike to visit Raja Rajesvari in a beautiful temple in Jalan Ulu Kelang, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. A human being grows from a stage of helpless infancy to adulthood through various stages of childhood and youth. Towards the end, old age creeps in making the person helpless again. This origination, development and decay proceeds inexorably - we cannot do anything about it. Each stage of development is characterised by its own set of problems and I wanted to convey the idea that the temple has something to offer to each and every person - no matter in what stage of development he is and no matter what kind of predicament he currently is facing. Also of course, instead of stages of development, it could also refer to the various moods an average person enters into.

To the infant the God is a mother who beacons lovingly and awaits with an open breast where the milk of knowledge flows.

To the child who through play, imitation and action removes the ignorance by developing its intelligence, the God is a lady of wisdom who removes puzzlement, a lady of grace who removes doubts, a lady of enormous intelligence who removes ignorance.

To the young girl who pines sexual love and laments the absence of attractive physical endowments, the Sakti manifests itself both in the infinitely beautiful and benign form of Uma and the vastly ugly and terror striking form of Kali. Also she appears as the mother who has on her right the eternally youthful Murugan without however, at this instance, his two consorts.

To the youth who stands aloof because of skepticism born of the intoxication with the immense advances of science and technology, Sakti is presented as the inseparable consort of Siva Nataraja. This itself is seen as the dynamic conception of reality where antagonistic principles meet to enact a drama where beings of different grades and forms come and go in an endless series of progression and dissolution.

A woman deserted by the husband, ridiculed by the relatives, mocked by the friends and misled by the community leaders by vain promises, grieves over her inability to even feed her children. The archetype of the goddess destroying the evil demon Mahisasuran with spears and riding on a tiger emerges in her soul, thereby giving her enough courage to be like the goddess Kali to destroy her own asuras.

A man fully grown and who has enough experience of the world is grieved by the inhumanity, fanaticism and blind cruelty of his fellow beings. Caught up with an idea of a just society where love and humanity dominates, he seeks the company of Vinayakar, to give him that deep courage that could enable him to achieve his ideal society by overcoming all the obstacles.

The old age has crept in. The limbs and senses are losing their power. The mind goes back to the past - the future is not around anymore. The thought of death looms large with a question: What is after that? To such a person, the sacred marriage of Siva to Sakti, the union of opposites that makes this universe deathless that continuously dissolves and regenerates itself is commended to convey the idea that the end in death is not the end of everything - it is only a single termination in a long series of origination and termination.

Certainly all these images are anthropomorphic - they are projections from things and forms of thought we are familiar in ordinary life. What is stated is not a proposition, a scientific hypothesis to be verified or disproved by observation of some sort or other. But what are communicated and given thus are not meaningless.

In these descriptions, the resources of ordinary language is being stretched from its normal area of use to something new. These images are the product of forms of cognitive functioning where thoughts and feelings are inseparably united.

These are the images through which I give meaning, make this vast, ceaseless universe that is superficially indifferent and remorseless, meaningful to me. These are the images through which I make my presence in the universe significant to me, comprehensible to me.

The icons of Hinduism are three dimensional representations of such images that arise in the context of myth-making process of the human mind. As such, they are not products of ignorance or lower levels of religious development. They are expressions of the basic religious sentiments of the human beings just as valid as any other.

And also they are not simple imaginative constructions of the individual as certain  school of Hindu philosophers are given to say. These are archetypes that emerge into consciousness from the unknown depths. They are mantric configurations that are products of the Dance of Siva that take hold of the human psyches and channel the perceptual processes thereby creating understandings that give meanings to the individuals.

Whether we recognise them and worship them or not, we cannot function as human beings without the assistance of these archetypes. It is this deep understanding of the role of archetypes in our cognitive processes that has necessitated the institution of image worship and the numerous fine arts that go along with it as central in Hinduism. 


ULLAGANAR

( editing and re-paragraphing by his student )

Tuesday 15 May 2018

A Short History of Metaphysical Tamil - Part 4

The Metaphysical Tamil - 4



Let it be noted that in the History of Indian Philosophy there does not exist a book like Civanjana Botam (CJB) that is a marvel of both depth of metaphysical insights and clarity of logical thinking. 


A divine gift, as the story goes, it established very firmly the metaphysical foundations for Saivism in the most inclusive sense i.e. a philosophy that accommodates all shades of metaphysical thinking but at the same time bent on pointing out the erroneous quite mercilessly so that only TRUTH prevails. Tantric Buddhism of MaNimekalai should be credited with its beginnings and the philosophical Jainism of Nilakeci with further and substantial developments. However it is Meykandar  who raised it to a level of astuteness that was the very peak of such a development never to be repeated ever since. 


Saivism stands like a solid rock, unshaken and unnerved by any kind of new philosophy that came to India and try to rob of its foundations. For the point is Meykandar accomplished through CJB something even beyond Husserl’s attempt to found philosophy as a rational science with his phenomenology of eidetic reduction and what not. It is not philosophy that has been transformed into a science but the whole realms of metaphysics and hence the religious dimensions of human existence itself. Of course the insights were already there in Tirumular’s Tirumantiram and the hymns of Appar, Sambantar, Sundarar, Manikkavasakar and so forth. But while these baktas opened new vistas through their aesthetics, there was also a requirement for the rational foundation of even this aesthetics and it is this that is accomplished by Meykandar and followed with AruNandi, Umapati and so forth.


Now we must note that CJB has TWO levels of logical structure, the General and Local. The General Structure pertains to the PROGRESSIVE structure of the text as a whole and which was noted in Tolkaappiyam as the Atikaara MuRaimai, how a text has SEQUENTIAL organization and which is simultaneously progressive. The truth of the First Sutra gives birth to the Second and which both collectively gives birth to the Third etc. So by the time we come the final sutra, the 12th, the truths of all the earlier sutras are presupposed. Now within this organizational structure is superimposed another - the Potu and CiRappu where the first 6 sutras are the Potu and remaining 6  are the CiRappu. What is Potu is the Metaphysica Generalis, metaphysical truths that are UNIVERSAL and hence already there in the understanding of all human beings, the past, present and future and not only among the Saivites but in the mind all people whatever their religion or culture. Such truths are the AXIOMATIC TRUTHS and therefore NOT the peculiar possession of any one-person, religion or culture. Now the CiRappu is Metaphysica Specialis and which is the APPLICATION to existence so that existence becomes AUTHENTIC - not the false and misleading but the true. The   true Existential Meanings are worked out and presented as what one OUGHT to seek out and hence what one OUGHT to do by way of attaining that for which existence is. And this true meaning is Moksa and which requires that one should worship BEING in attuviti anbu, in LOVE that sees no difference at all with any.


So collectively the whole text can be said to be Metaphysica Universalis with the component parts of Metaphysica Generalis and Metaphysica Specialis (to borrow some terms from Kant)



But what makes this exercise something in Hermeneutic Logic?


This is where the impact of Tolkaapiyam, MaNimekalai and  Nilakeci are evident. The whole text is cast within the structure showing in order, make others See what one has in fact seen. This kind of logical dialogue was called KaaNdikai Urai in Tol. where the word KaaNdikai is a noun derived from the injunctive KaaNdikaa! , Please you see.  This is also the structure of Nilakeci where the first chapter outlines the darsanas, what one has seen as truths and the remaining chapters deconstructed against this initial description of truths. The same structure is followed by Meykandar and which is quite visible in the LOCAL structure where each sutra is divided into various theses and each thesis is SHOWN to be true so that others can SEE what is shown and through that come to an agreement.


Each sutra is divided into a number of atikaraNam or theses where again collectively these atikaraNams would lead to the truth of the sutra. . But each atikaraNam has a MeeRkooL, the truth that is asserted accompanied with REASON (eetu) and UtaaraNam (argument). Here again we see the Circular structure that we also see in Tolkaappiyam and later taken over by Naiyaiyikas, where the Pratiknja is also the same as the Nigamana but with a change in the logical status, as Pratiknja it remains an assertion but as Nigamana it becomes something collectively agreed upon and hence accepted as truth. The MeeRkooL, that which is asserted or shown as true is given the REASON and illustrations so that others can also SEE what is shown. The term MeeRkooL is derived from the verb meeRkoLLal and means accepting as true, presupposing as true and so forth.


Thus in this way Meykandar gives a detailed and very elaborate structure to the Hermeneutic Logic, a kind of Communicative Logic and in which through an immensely rational activity of the mind, the gifted who has seen the Axiomatic Truths labors also to MAKE SEE OTHERS what one has seen and here not invoking any authority whatsoever. It is this aspect of it which makes the whole a text in science i.e. in Hermeneutic Science.


And as part of this Hermeneutic Logic, the deconstruction of UNTRUTHS is unavoidable and this is done in a masterly fashion of MeykaNdar throughout the whole text. For example  the first Axiomatic Truth is that there is BEING and He is ONE - not many. In showing that this is truth several schools of thought contrary to this are deconstructed and in that deconstruction the truth is allowed to emerge as that which cannot be deconstructed.  Here the  understanding is that the TRUTHS cannot be deconstructed, the attempt to deconstruct and with that destroy and disperse them will FAIL with that failure itself establishing it as a truth.


It is this insight available in CJB that is taken over and given an epic like dimensions in the massive Civanjana Cittiyaar by AruNandi where attempts is also made to delineate explicitly the Hermeneutic Logic of MeykaNdar in CJB.



ULLAGANAR

( editing and re-paragraphing by his student )