Anyone who wants to understand Indian Civilization has to grapple with its metaphysics or the way metaphysics is understood and the Symbolic Life it occasions. The temple culture, the home shrines and other kinds of ritualistic life including dance, music and such other fine arts have a distinct quality of their own and which cannot be detached from the metaphysics they presuppose. And along with it, reflective inquiry is also enshrined as an integral part of it.
The appropriation of the metaphysical realms experientially is one thing, the reflective grasp of the contents is another. Meykandar says the contents of five fold existential states, the wakeful state of vigilance ( saakkiram), the dream states ( coppanam) and the higher must be brought into the Iladattaanam, into the realms of clear consciousness so that there in no more IGNORANCE as part of the human understanding.
Thus unlike in many other cultures where philosophical disputations are frowned upon or actively discouraged, in Indian Culture it is fostered as an integral part of religious life. In the Upanisads we hear of Parishads after the Yajna, in Tolkaappiyam we hear of disputations among the philosophic as part of the PuRat tiNai, and in MaNimekalai and Sillapatikaaram we hear of Paddi ManRam where philosophers come and propound their own schools of thoughts and this as part of the Indra Viza .
We have also the very extensive field of Tarkka Sastras., the art of intellectual disputations.
It is out of this kind of thinking culture that Buddhism and Jainism arose and later declined and Bakthi was recovered and reestablished. It was also just at that time the different schools of Vedanta arose, precipitating now another kind of cultural dynamics that saw the birth of Saiva Siddhanta , Sri VaishNava philosophies and later the enormous burst of Siddha literature especially in the Tamil country.
To understand Indian Civilization is to UNDERSTAND the tremendous cultural upheavals that took place then and see how they can be welded into the modern and provide thereby a cultural continuity. It is with such intentions that I pursue these reflections in the nature of Hermeneutics, that of UNDERSTANDING it all.
And I do not think that the different philosophical understanding mean the same - that will be just too simplistic though emotionally it may be laudable. We have to UNDERSTAND these different darsanas in order to understand the hidden dynamics of Indian Civilization for such momentous events are quite peculiar to India and certainly of enormous significance.
And here we notice that it took place in the South which from ancient times has been the meeting ground of both Tamil and Sanskrit cultures. There is a cultural dynamics, a conflict of a kind but immensely productive for one cannot understand bakthi and metaphysical insights it enshrines unless there was Buddhism, Jainism and Vedanta. Bakthi has to forged itself against the metaphysical forces that tended to wipe it out and hence forced to articulate with an understanding and vehemence it did not have earlier.
One of the basic metaphysical UNDERSTANDING that underlies this momentous event is what I have already said: metaphysics is all about understanding EXISTENCE in its depths and that there were different strands of understanding: Being-with-BEING-and-the World (BWBaW), Being-with-only -BEING (BWB) and Being-with-only-the -World (BBW).
Having attained this clarity we have to pursue the matter further and here I notice that whole the Bakthi nourished itself with BWBaW, while it was the kind of understanding that is enshrined in the Saiva-VaishaNa Bakthi poetry, in the logical positivism of the Buddhists it was BWW and with with idealisms of the Vedantic schools it was mainly BWB.
We must also notice that both the logical positivism of the Buddhists and the Idealisms of Vedantic schools are immensely sophisticated, a sophistication that we do not find elsewhere ( as far as i know). And here we can also draw a broad division - while Bakthi became the life force of Tamil language it was not so in Sanskrit (except perhaps much later). Bakthi was also not just simply enjoying piety - it was an immense social revolution, a revolution in which there was an attempt to wipe out the varnasrama dharma and also reinstate the Tamil language as the language of the Tamil people and this against Sanskrit that was trying to displace Tamil.
But there is more to this than what I have said above and I want to touch upon it now.
There is a parallel between the birth of Western logical positivism and that of the Indian and within which is written the birth of this philosophical Bakthi.
Let me use the terms Viddhantic and Siddhantic to capture the difference in the thought processes underlying these intellectual upheavals.
The Viddhantic is CONSTRUCTIVE and siddhantic HERMENEUTICAL and while the former was fostered by Sanskrit, the latter by Tamil and because of which while the Vedantic thinking prospered in Sanskrit and the Siddhantic in Tamil ( to put it very roughly, overlooking a lot of niceties) constituting the different faces of what constitutes the immensely complex face of Indian Culture or as S Kalyanaraman keeps on saying, the culture of Bharata
The commonality in the Viddhantic lies in escaping from BWBaW and enclosing oneself either in BWW ( the Buddhists) or BWB (the Vedantic). But what is the parallel?
We can see it as follows: When Russel described his Theory of Descriptions in order to bring the whole of Pure Mathematics into Logic, he reconstructed statements such as "The King of France is bald" into the logical conjunctions of " There exists x" " For all x , if it is x then it is y" where 'x' and 'y' stand for descriptions and here 'king of France " and 'bald". Equating both as the same hence the sentence displaceable with those with existential and universal descriptions, he claimed that the referentiality implicit in the statements analyzed is no more and hence the whole statement in its logical aspects is detached from the world and hence made entirely LOGICAL. Thus making something purely LOGICAL is actually DETACHING or NEGATING the referentiality to the world the assertion has as part of its meaning.
Rudolf Carnap , Richard Von Mises and a host of logical positivists took off from this and tried to extend this theory of descriptions to the whole range of sciences especially the socio-psychological so that references to the soul (and God) and so forth do not occur.
Of course those who are familiar with the History of Logical Positivism will know that this movement collapsed in the wake of which the Ordinary Language became something very important and along with it the notions of Speech Act , Discourse Analysis, Ethnomethology, Conversational Analysis, Natural Logic and so forth.
This trend in Logical Positivism in the West is an example of what I have called the Viddhantic expression of the human mind and something that we also find but of course in a different garb in Indian thinking especially in the Vedantic. I put forward the following verse from Panca Dasi of Vidyaranya (Translated by Swami Swahananda) as evidence towards this.
47.
In the sentence "this is that Devadatta", "this" and 'that' refer to different time, place and circumstances. When the particular connotations of "this" and 'that' are rejected, Devadatta remains as their common basis.
48.
Similarly, when the adjuncts, Maya and Avidya( the conflicting connotations in the proposition "That thou art") of Brahman, and Jiva, are negated, there remains the indivisible supreme Brahman, whose nature is existence, consciousness and bliss.
Thus we see an attempt in both to get rid of referentiality or simply NEGATE it mentally and attain a consciousness devoid of particularity, the CudduNarvu of Meykandar. We do not TRANSCEND the the-tic consciousness but rather NEGATE it by constructive moves of the mind to rid of it in thinking.
And the same is applied to the world -- NEGATE everything worldly, abstract the essence , the PURE and there you are, you get BRAHMAN and with is also that "Atman is Brahman "etc.
But what is the historical roots of such intellectual exercise and its dominance in the Sanskritic culture.
I think PaNiNi should be credited for this immense sophistication : when he abstracted from the living language Sanskrit as opposed Prakrit, the worldly, he already established a model for the Viddhantic.
And also for Varnasrama Dharma: The Pure Bramanah is a social construct akin to Sanskrit and hence the non-Brahmanah, is akin to Prakrit, the worldly.
But the linguistic tradition of Tolkappiyam does not have this distinction -- it has only the living language both as Vazakku, the speech and CeyyuL the literature both expressions of the spirit in the flow of life. Hence essentially Siddhantic.
ULLAGANAR
( editing and re-paragraphing by his student )
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