“When a tree falls from a river bank, the bird leaves the tree; when he abandons this body in like manner, the ascetic escapes the alligator’s painful grasp” (MDh 6.78). In Manu’s description of the four stages or modes of life that constitute “the āśrama system” (Olivelle 1993 )—the student, the householder, the forest dweller, and the wandering ascetic (yati )—the first three are said to comprise debts that must be paid off before one may enter the fourth, incurred obligations to study the Vedas, have a family, and offer sacrifices (6.35–6.37). He (or she, for at 8.363 Manu explicitly considers that wandering ascetics may be of either gender) has studied the Veda, run a household to raise a family, and, in the forest, has offered sacrifices in order to purify or perfect the self (6.29). If for a forest dweller the emphasis is on “controlling the self and mastering the organs” (6.1), the wandering ascetic, as someone who has paid three debts, has “his mind set on renunciation (mokṣa )” (6.35). The aim is to avoid being brought down by the collapse of the body as one nears death; it is not, however, to avoid death, for “he should long neither for death nor for life, but simply await his appointed time, as a servant his wages” (6.45). Now, “with himself as his only companion” (6.49), in solitude “he pulls his organs back as they are being drawn away by sensory objects” (6.59), “withdrawing the organs from their attachments” (6.75), and while immersing in a practice of meditation, “he should reflect on the subtle nature of the highest self and on its appearance in the highest and lowest of bodies” (6.65; cf. 6.73).
The form this reflection takes consists of what the Greco-Roman ancients had called “techniques of the self” or “spiritual exercises” (askesis ), practices not just of normal philosophical study such as reading, debating, listening, and inquiry, but also activities that as part of a “way of life” require repetition, practices of attention (prosoche ), meditation (meletai ), memorization of doctrine, self-mastery (enkrateia ), the therapy of the passions, the remembrance of good things, the accomplishment of duties, and the cultivation of indifference toward indifferent things (Hadot 1995 : 84). Manu notes two spiritual exercises. There is first an exercise of imagined disembodiment:
He should reflect on the diverse paths humans take as a result of their evil deeds; on how they fall into hell; on the tortures they endure in the abode of Yama; on how they are separated from the ones they love and united with the ones they hate; on how they are overcome by old age and tormented by diseases; on how the inner self departs from this body, takes birth again in a womb, and migrates though tens of billions of wombs; and on how embodied beings become linked with pain as a result of pursuing what is against the Law and with imperishable happiness as a result of pursuing the Law as one’s goal. (MDh 6.61–6.64)
That is, one imagines the collapse and the fall into the alligator’s jaws, being brought down by old age and disease, how it is the very nature of embodiment to be in pain. One thinks too that one can “depart from” the body, at least in imagination, and take up again in an extended act of renewal. Manu’s second technique of the self aims to engender a sense of disgust in and alienation from the body:
Constructed with beams of bones, fastened with tendons, plastered with flesh and blood, covered with skin, foul-smelling, filled with urine and excrement, infested with old age and sorrow, the abode of sickness, full of pain, covered with dust, and impermanent—he must abandon this dwelling place of ghosts.
(MDh 6.76–6.77)
One will certainly not want to identify oneself with anything so repulsive, and the purpose of the exercises is to dismantle an embodied sense of self. One technique shows that it is conceivable, or at least, imaginable, that one is distinct from one’s body; the other technique shows that it is desirable that this should be so. Yet however powerful these reflections are, they remain essentially intellectual exercises; that is to say, they show that detachment is conceivable and desirable, but not how to make it actual. Manu, therefore, refers to the wandering ascetic as someone who “pulls his organs back as they are being drawn away by sensory objects,” echoing no doubt that famous verse from the Bhāgavad-gītā where the action is likened to a tortoise withdrawing its limbs: “And when he draws in on every side his senses from their proper objects, as a tortoise its limbs,—firm-established is the wisdom of such a man” (BhG 2.58). What is important is that this is an act of what we might call “attentional retraction,” in which one desists from attending to the perceived world without ceasing to perceive it. Perceptual attention is a focusing on something in the perceptual field, something that might have captured one’s attention or to which one’s attention is directed. Conscious perceptual attention is what is controlled and mastered by those with learning, whose “perfecting” or “purifying” of self consists in the training of attention: “As his organs meander amidst the alluring sense objects, a learned man should strive hard to control them, like a charioteer his horses” (MDh 2.88). Having one’s perceptual attention under conscious control means that one is not at the mercy of the sensory field, as one would be if one’s mind is pulled here and there by whatever catches the attention, and Manu claims that this significantly alters the affective or phenomenological relation one has to the world: “When a man feels neither elation nor revulsion at hearing, touching, seeing, eating, or smelling anything, he should be recognised as a man who has mastered his organs” (MDh 2.98). A practice of attention becomes in this way a therapy of the passions. Having made his mind dispassionate by controlling the attention, the ascetic now strives to desist from attentional tasks altogether. The aim of “pulling back” the sense organs is not to bring about a state of total sensory deprivation but to suspend grounded attention, that is, attention grounded in the five sense faculties, attention to the world outside through the body and the bodily sense organs. The transition from forest dweller to wandering ascetic is thus a move from attentional control to attentional retraction.
Notice here what Manu does not say. He does not say that attentional retraction consists in a redirection of the attention from the outer to the inner; he does not say that the ascetic “looks within,” nor does he employ any similar metaphor of inwardness. He says only that the ascetic is “with himself as his only companion”: the suspension of attention leaves one alone with oneself. Manu’s ascetic does not enter a quest to find “the truth within” (Flood 2013 ), but seeks so to transform what is within as to be free in his commerce with the world. The effect of attentional retraction is to leave the ascetic in a state we might describe as inattentional awareness, not to be confused with any idea of inner perception or introspection or interiority. Inattentional awareness differs from attended perceptual awareness, whether that be in the uncontrolled modality of the householder or the controlled manner of the forest dweller. Yet it is still a form of perceptual engagement with the world around.
It is for this reason that the tortoise wins when pitched against the alligator. Awareness that is grounded in perceptual attention is embodied, it is individuated or at least influenced by the body, and as the body collapses, so too must this kind of awareness. According to the so-called embodied-mind thesis, the nature of one’s appetites and other dimensions of one’s experience are subject to bodily criteria (Lakoff and Johnson 1999 ; Shapiro 2004 ; Gallagher 2005 ). Here the thesis is affirmed of perceptual attention. Along with the decay of the body, there is a corresponding decay in one’s cognitive relationship to the world, and, as long as one identifies oneself with the sum or center of one’s states of attentional perceptual awareness, one falls with the body into the alligator’s toothy clutch. The alligator is a metaphor for the phenomenology of such disintegration: it is a phenomenology of grasping and of being grasped, a phenomenology of worldliness. Inattentional awareness, the claim seems to be, is not a kind of embodied cognition but rather an experiential relation that is immune to bodily decay. One’s phenomenological state will then not be subject to bodily criteria of individuation. When—motivated by reflection and spiritual askesis and practicing attentional retraction—the ascetic comes to identify with the inhabitation of this other kind of phenomenological state, the ascetic self is no longer threatened with a collapse. This is not an insurance policy against death, a form of immortality through disembodiment, but a phenomenological autonomy from the ravages inflicted upon the body. Such, for Manu, is renunciation (mokṣa ), and Olivelle (1993 : 140) notes that Manu uses the term mokṣa to refer to the life of a renouncer rather than to some imagined state of liberation after death. I would add only that the term refers to a specific aspect of the renouncer’s experiential life, namely that it consists in an inattentional phenomenology. To have one’s mind set on renunciation is thus to engage in spiritual exercises whose effect is to replace an embodied awareness, grounded in perceptual attention, with an inattentional mode of postreflective awareness. This is, to repeat, not because the mind is turned in upon itself, thinking only about itself, aware only of itself, but rather a distinct ascetic cognitive relationship with the world. Ascetic awareness is not a sort of introspection. It is not introspection because the self features in the reflective task as a companion , not as an object . The argument is rather that attention is associated with affect, and attentional retraction is, therefore, the method by which to bring into being a dispassionate state of awareness.
Does the conjecture that there exists an ascetic phenomenology that consists of inattentional awareness have any empirical support? Some contemporary psychologists have used evidence from experiments in so-called inattentional blindness, to argue that awareness requires attention. Mack and Rock presented subjects with the image of a crosshair, and tasked them to judge which of the crossing lines is longer, meanwhile flashing up a word or shape. When asked if they had seen anything other than the crosshair many responded that they had not. Mack and Rock conclude that “the single most important lesson is that there seems to be no conscious perception without attention” (1998 : ix). In another famous experiment, Simons and Chabris (1999 ) asked subjects to watch a video of a basketball being passed between players and asked them to count the number of times. Also in the video, unmentioned by the experimenter, a man in a gorilla suit walked by in full view, something many subjects reported no awareness of when probed. What these inattentional blindness experiments show is that when a subject is fully taken up in a demanding attentional task, they are not aware of unattended objects in the perceptual field. Other results, however, point to two areas where an immunity to inattentional blindness is displayed: gist perception and salience. When a natural scene flashed briefly and unexpectedly, observers will accurately report the overall gist of the scene, and, when a salient target is searched for in the visual field, the accuracy of the search seems uncompromised by absence of attention. In summary, the current state of contemporary research into attention and awareness indicates:
visual awareness of stimuli well outside the current attention focus (i.e. in the near absence of attention) appears to be considerable. It includes simple attributes of salient stimuli and suffices to extract scene gist and to identify certain object classes…Not included in this “ambient”’ awareness are non-salient objects and more complex attributes of salient objects. The latter type of information requires attention in order to reach awareness. (Braun 2009 : 70)
Ascetic subjectivity, I conjecture, consists in the ambience of awareness without attention.
As we now have the text, Manu’s Code of Law begins with a remarkable narrative about the beginning of the world:
There was this world—pitch-black, indiscernible, without distinguishing marks, unthinkable, incomprehensible, in a kind of deep sleep all over. Then the self-existent (svayambhū ) Lord appeared—the Unmanifest manifesting this world beginning with the elements, projecting his might, and dispelling the darkness. That One—who is beyond the range of the senses; who cannot be grasped; who is subtle, unmanifest, and eternal; who contains all beings; and who transcends thought—it is he who shone forth on his own. (MDh 1.5–1.7)
The Self-existent One, having shone forth on his own, then “focused his thought with the desire of bringing forth diverse creatures from his own body” (1.8), and having created the world, he draws out from his body first mind (manas ), then “I-making” (ahaṃkāra ), then self (ātman ), and finally the five senses:
From his body, moreover, he drew out the mind having the nature of both the existent and the non-existent; and from the mind, the ego (ahaṃkāra ‘I-making’)—producer of self-awareness (abhimantṛ ) and ruler (īśvara )—as also the great self, all things composed of the three attributes, and gradually the five sensory organs that grasp the sensory objects. (1.14–1.15; Tr. Olivelle)
Mind is that which belongs to organs both of perception and action (2.92); it is that cognitive module that engages with the world through sentience and agency. I-making, as a capacity for self-consciousness, is what gives rise to a sense or notion of “I”: “The term for the feeling that ‘I am,’ especially the sense that I have of being an individual through time who has a unique first-person perspective and who is a thinker of thoughts and a doer of deeds, literally means ‘I-making’ (ahaṃkāra )” (Thompson 2015 : 325).
I read this narrative not as a creation myth but as a phenomenological genealogy, a genealogy of phenomenal experience. A genealogy is a causal story, a history, whether actual or imagined, about the origin of a doctrine, idea, or practice. While Nietzsche used genealogy to subvert the dogmas of Christian morality (ironically drawing much inspiration from Manu: Doniger and Smith 1991 : xx–xxi), a genealogy can also be vindicatory, explaining and justifying the practice whose ancestry it pretends to tell. Thus:
[Genealogies] can be subversive, or vindicatory, of the doctrines or practices whose origins (factual, imaginary, and conjectural) they claim to describe. They may at the same time be explanatory, accounting for the existence of whatever it is that they vindicate or subvert. In theory, at least, they may be merely explanatory, evaluatively neutral…They can remind us of the contingency of our institutions and standards, communicating a sense of how easily they might have been different, and of how different they might have been. Or they can have the opposite tendency, implying a kind of necessity: given a few basic facts about human nature and our conditions of life, this was the only way things could have turned out.…Some genealogies are vindicatory: the story they tell is in one way or another a recommendation of whatever it is they tell us the story of. […] The genealogies—by which I mean the causal stories—of many of our beliefs are intrinsically justificatory in a very strong sense: they give an essential place to the very facts believed in, so if that is how they came about they must be true.
(Craig 2007 : 182–3)
Read genealogically, what Manu’s account of creation is providing is an explanation of perceptual awareness, of the world as manifest. It does so by telling a story about the origins of the manifest world as coming into being of the sort that implies a kind of necessity. There can be no experience of a world, first of all, unless there is individual mind, self, and self-consciousness; and there can be no individual mind, self and self-consciousness unless there is a non-egological self-subsisting (svambhū ) consciousness consisting simply in a “shining forth.” An explanatory causal story about the origins of that too can be told, one that depicts it as emerging from a darkness that is yet not a nothingness. The overall significance of this genealogy of phenomenal experience, I venture, lies with its demonstration that a rival claim, that experience must have the phenomenology of illusion (māyā ), is false: it vindicates experience and in doing so subverts the Advaita Vedāntic exegesis of the Upaniṣads.
Let me say something about each of the steps in Manu’s phenomenological genealogy. What of the claim, first of all, that experience, “having a world in view,” requires self, mind, and self-consciousness? Kant famously defends one version of this claim. Kant argued that it is not possible to have a conception of an objective world without thinking of that world as spatial, and of oneself as located within it and following a spatiotemporal route through it. A self-conscious subject is one who is in a position to think of their experience as including perceptions of objects in what Strawson calls “the weighty sense,” that is, as being particular items that are capable of being perceived and of existing unperceived (1966 : 28). In order to make sense of the idea that one can perceive what can also exist unperceived, one must think of perception as having certain spatiotemporal enabling conditions , such that, in order to perceive something, one must be appropriately located—both spatially and temporally—with respect to it. One can then make sense of the fact that a perceivable object is not actually perceived by thinking that the enabling conditions for its perception are not satisfied. Grasping the idea that perception is subject to spatiotemporal enabling conditions requires that one think of perceiver and thing perceived as standing in a suitable spatiotemporal relation, and so of oneself as having a location in the world. Likewise, grasping the idea that a temporal sequence of perceptions are of one and the same object requires that one think of the thing perceived and the perceiver as standing in a more or less stable spatial relation over a period of time, and so of oneself as following a continuous path through space. For Kant there is consequently an “I think” that accompanies all experience.
This Kantian reasoning does have a resonance in certain Nyāya arguments about the self (Ganeri 2012 : 283–303), but it seems remote from anything in the Dharmaśāstra. There is, however, a second, more modest way to defend the claim. Phenomenologists like Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Henry have argued that there must be a mode of prereflective self-awareness in the background to all experience, a “for-me-ness” that is prior to any thematic awareness I might have of myself. We might call it a sense of “mineness,” or simply the subjectivity or subjective aspect of experience. Sartre puts the idea as follows:
It is not reflection which reveals the consciousness reflected-on to itself. Quite the contrary, it is the non-reflective consciousness which renders the reflection possible; there is a pre-reflective cogito which is the cognition of the Cartesian cogito …The self-consciousness we ought to consider not as a new consciousness, but as the only mode of existence which is possible for a consciousness of something…Pre-reflective consciousness is self-consciousness. It is this same notion of self which must be studied, for it defines the very being of consciousness. (2003 : 9, 10, 100)
Dan Zahavi has expressed the view felicitously as being that self-consciousness or subjectivity is the dative of manifestation, the how rather than the what of experience (2014 : 19, 22). What it is like to enjoy a certain experience is always a matter of what it is like for me to enjoy it, and “when I have experiences, I, so to speak, have them minely” (2014: 22). What Sartre describes as prereflective self-consciousness and Zahavi calls the first-personal dative of manifestation is perhaps a good way to understand the concept of “I-making” (ahaṃkāra ) in Manu, where his “self” is then reflective self-consciousness or the “I” conceived thematically.
Experiential mineness, the sense of “I,” is itself given a genealogical explanation in Manu’s narrative of origins. There is something without which prereflective self-consciousness could not arise at all, namely a nonegological form of awareness that “shines forth on its own” and is inaccessible to cognition. This nonegological awareness consists in impersonal illumination, a simple power to dispel the darkness of insentience. It is clear here that light is being called on to provide an analogy with consciousness, an endorsement of the conception according to which “consciousness is that which is luminous […and…] self-appearing” (Thompson 2015 : 18), light illuminating itself in the course of illuminating other things. This impersonal luminosity, “Self-existent One,” the enabling condition for egological self-awareness, is, to draw on a distinction of Block (1995 ), a form of phenomenal consciousness that is cognitively inaccessible. It is “subtle” insofar as its content is nonconceptual, and it is “unmanifest” insofar as it is that in virtue of which world-manifesting experience comes to be. As for the claim that it “contains all beings,” I suggest that this, too, can be understood by appeal to Block’s distinction between phenomenal character and cognitive availability. Is perceptual consciousness richer than cognitive access? That is to say, is the capacity of experience greater than that which gets globally broadcast to centers of deliberation and report? Block (2011 ) describes this question as “one of the most important issues concerning the foundations of conscious perception” and he appeals to an experimental paradigm developed by George Sperling to propose what he calls “the overflow argument.” In Sperling’s experiment, subjects are briefly shown an array of three rows of four letters. Afterward, they are able to report only three or four items from the array; yet if a particular row is cued, they could report all nor nearly all the letters along it. The conclusion Block draws is that “according to the overflow argument, all or almost all of the 12 items are consciously represented…However, only 3 to 4 of these items can be cognitively accessed, indicating a larger capacity in conscious phenomenology than in cognitive access.” Let us imagine next that Sperling’s experiment is scaled up, so that the content of the grid is not merely a four-by-three grid but the entire cosmos. Then, applying the same reasoning, one arrives at a state of phenomenal consciousness that “contains all beings and transcends thought.” The impersonal luminosity that is the Self-existent One is a phenomenal consciousness whose capacity is the entire cosmos and whose content is inaccessible to cognition.
The claim that self and other must originate from something egologically neutral can be contested. Zahavi, for example, rejects the hypothesis: “Some have claimed that the only way to solve the problem of intersubjectivity and avoid a threatened solipsism is by conceiving of the difference between self and other as a founded and derived difference, a difference arising out of an undifferentiated anonymous life” (2014 : 189). He obviously is not referring explicitly to the cosmology in Manu’s Code of Law , but his comment is nevertheless very apt. He continues:
However,…this “solution” does not solve the problem of intersubjectivity, it dissolves it. To speak of a fundamental anonymity prior to any distinction between self and other obscures that which has to be clarified, namely, intersubjectivity understood as the relation between subjectivities. On the level of this fundamental anonymity there is neither individuation nor selfhood, but nor is there any differentiation, otherness, or transcendence, and there is consequently room for neither subjectivity nor intersubjectivity. To put it differently, the fundamental anonymity thesis threatens not only our concept of a self-given subject; it also threatens our notion of an irreducible other. (2014: 189)
Yet the distinction between self and other can hardly itself be fundamental: there must surely be some account to be had of its emergence from something not intrinsically subjective.
According to the genealogical story, this single luminosity, out of which self and other arise, itself arises from something, something that is “pitch-black, indiscernible, without distinguishing marks, unthinkable, incomprehensible, in a kind of deep sleep all over.” It is cognitively closed: not merely inaccessible to cognition, but quite beyond the reach of the powers of conceptualization. It lies outside the limits of thought. It is pitch-black because it is the enabling condition for illumination, and it is featureless. Most tellingly, perhaps it is “in a kind of deep sleep.” Vedānta thinkers claim that deep sleep is itself a mode of consciousness, and indeed, they characterize it in terms very similar to the illuminating consciousness we have just described. But for that very reason this cannot be the Dharmaśāstra view: the state is that from which illumination comes and so cannot itself consist of luminosity. Medhātithi provides an intriguing explanation (1886: 10). He says that the reference to deep sleep is by way of analogy. For what happens is that, in dreamless sleep there is no consciousness, yet one can infer on waking, that one was in a state of dreamless sleep, and indeed that one existed at that earlier time, because one feels on waking, that “I slept soundly” (on the general form of this argument, see Murti 1933 ; Thompson 2015 : 237–46). So too we can infer that the cosmos existed in a prior state, which, although pitch-black, unilluminated, is known to have been present because of the state of impersonal luminosity to which it gave rise. The constructed genealogy of this latter state is as it were an inference to the best explanation of the possibility of its existence. For Medhātithi stresses that nothing can come into existence out of nothing, and, therefore, there must have been some prior state, even though there can be no conception of it other than this.
The phenomenological genealogy with which Manu’s Code of Law begins has distinguished four primary modes of being: let me call them pitch blackness, impersonal luminosity, subjective phenomenality, and world-manifesting experience. It is a causal story about the way each comes into being through an effect of the one before. This story is not intended as a contribution to the science of developmental psychology, however; it is a type of explanation that shows how a state is possible and what its requirements are, by providing an imaginary account of origins. Notice that when each mode of being “gives rise” to the next, it does not thereby itself disappear. The Self-existent One does not vanish, having brought forth the world from his body. In other words, each one of these four modes of consciousness is present in the conscious attentive, grounded perceptual experience of a student, a householder, and even a forest dweller. What is the effect of attentional retraction on that complex state of consciousness? What can this phenomenological genealogy of experience help us to see about the ambient awareness of the wandering ascetic?
Gavin Flood has noted that there is “a kind of correlation between psychology and cosmology in the Indian systems” in which “psychology recapitulates cosmology” (2004 : 78). He provides an astute analysis of the correlation at work in the Yogaśāstra of Patañjali, where four cosmological levels are also distinguished: the undifferentiated, the differentiated (liṅga-mātra ), the unparticularized (aviśeṣa ), and the particularized (viśeṣa ). The undifferentiated corresponds to the Sāṃkhya category of unmanifest or potential matter (avyakta-prakṛti ), the differentiated to the Sāṃkhya notion of buddhi or higher mind, the unparticularized to the sense of I (asmitā ) and the five potentialities that form the manifest world, and the particularized to the mind (manas ). This cosmology is roughly equivalent to the one incorporated into the opening chapter of Manu, for buddhi is “effulgent light…linked to the absorption of the mind in pure subjectivity or I-ness” (Flood 2004 : 78), and, thus, after all, something like a notion of impersonal luminosity. Flood comments, “these levels of the cosmos are levels of experience” and he sees in Patañjali’s account of asceticism a process of return:
Refining consciousness, as described by Patañjali, through the levels of samādhi is to retrace cosmogony through the levels of emanation described in the Sāṃkhya tradition, until a critical break is reached and the self realises its non-attachment to matter. The spiritual path is therefore both a journey into the self and a journey through the hierarchical cosmos to its unmanifest (avyakta ) or undifferentiated source (aliṅga ), [so that] to delve into the heart of the self is also to delve into the heart of the universe. (2004: 77)
This is said of Patañjali, and I will make a somewhat different claim about Manu, namely, that the phenomenological genealogy genetically explains the structure of the self in just such a way that the transformation engendered in the ascetic mind is made intelligible. This is not correctly described as a “retracing,” but rather as progress, and, while I can agree with Flood’s final remark that for Indians “progress is linked to cognitive skill rather than to the development of virtue, as it is in the Christian systems” (2004 : 78), the cognitive skill in question here is the cultivation of inattentional awareness. Let us remember that Manu’s wandering ascetics have both obligations and entitlements (MDh 5.137; 8.407; 11.219). They are not otherworldly or depersonalized: the wandering ascetic still wanders and, therefore, experiences and acts. The outcome of reflective spiritual practices and cultivated attentional retraction cannot, therefore, be to return the ascetic to a nonegological state of impersonal luminosity. Following attentional retraction, the “experiential self” of the wandering ascetic, the for-me-ness, which is the dative of experiential manifestation, remains intact. What has been withdrawn is the attention, not the subject. For it is said that ascetics have themselves as their only companions; so ascetic consciousness is an ambient subjective awareness. Not quite analogously, when Manu says that “by the passion of his spirit (bhāvena ) he frees himself from attachment to every object of passion (sarvabhāveṣu )” (6.80), the clear implication is that what is declined in the instrumental case does not fall within the scope of the locative. The ascetic’s inattentive state is not the collapse of first-personal awareness into a state unmarked by “I” or “you,” a state of fundamental anonymity.
The inattentional awareness of the wandering ascetic in the Mānava-Dharmaśāstra , we have seen, is not incompatible with the claim that an ascetic way of life carries its own duties and responsibilities. Insofar as the wandering ascetic practices detachment, it is a detachment of attention not of action. Contrast this with the idea of renunciation in the Bhāgavad-gītā , where Kṛṣṇa famously advises detachment from the fruits of action. As Olivelle puts it,
The argument of the Gītā …seeks to show that true renunciation does not consist in physical abstention from activity but in the proper mental attitude towards action. Abandonment of desire for the results of one’s actions is true renunciation, which the Gītā sees as an inner virtue rather than an external life style.
(1993: 105)
An epic detachment of concern now contrasts with Dharmaśāstric detachment of attention. Yet these two conceptions of detachment have something nevertheless in common, for in both, the ascetic continues to engage with the world and, indeed, to experience the world; detachment is seen as a cognitive rather than a practical achievement. There seems in Vedānta to be dissatisfaction with the adequacy of any such cognitive conception of detachment, a dissatisfaction most vividly on display in the extraordinary claim that a fifth āśrama should be identified. The unique Pañcamāśramavidhāna (twice edited and translated by Olivelle), reaffirms the point that the wandering ascetic still has duties, and has this to say:
As there is no bliss of renunciation and detachment in the householder’s āśrama , so there is no non-corporeal bliss (videha-sukha ) in the fourth āśrama , because permanent and occasional activities, such as the staff tarpaṇa , are present in it. For the sake of bliss without activity, therefore, one accepts the fifth āśrama . The same is called the path of an Avadhūta. Furthermore, as after abandoning the topknot, sacrificial cord and so forth, and (entering) the fourth āśrama one immediately takes possession of the staff and the rest, so after abandoning the staff and the like and (entering) the fifth āśrama one takes possession of nothing at all. On the contrary, the very abandonment of everything constitutes the principal state of a Paramahaṃsa. (Tr. Olivelle 1993 : 233)
Responding to the claim of the Gītā that one should act if only for the sake of the welfare of the world (BhG 3.20), the author of this treatise reveals an Advaitic affiliation in opining that “The welfare of the world (has relevance) only to those who consider the world as real. What does the world’s welfare mean to those who regard the world as unreal? It is of no concern to one whose self is pure consciousness” (Olivelle 1993 : 233). For the Advaitic ascetic, who, indeed, seeks a return to a state of undifferentiated luminosity, detachment is not from attention to the world nor is it from concern about the results of one’s acts, but rather it is an “abandonment of everything” in order to remain in a state of disincarnate contentment.
Manu takes the Upaniṣadic episteme (to which he refers in MDh 6.83) in a direction different from that of Vedānta, because individuality is preserved in some form and neither it nor the world is held to be merely an illusion. Indeed, he leaves us in no doubt which of the āsramas he prefers: “Yet, as the Veda and the Smṛtis state, the householder is the best of all these, for he supports the other three” (MDh 6.89). For Manu, one can reach the highest state from any of the four āsramas : one does not need to progress through them as through a series of stages. As Olivelle remarks, “It is clear, therefore, that for Manu the passage through the four āsramas was one among several paradigms for leading a religious life. Although Manu presents the classical system, it is neither as central nor as normative in this law book as it is in later Brāhmiṇical literature” (1993 : 142). The function of the āśrama system in the early period was to legitimate various styles of living, including that of the ascetic, rather than, as later, to present a sequence of stages within a single life.
The life of the wandering ascetic is accorded legitimacy as one of several possible ways to live, a life devoted to the cultivation of a particular cognitive skill, the skill of attentional retraction. Attentional retraction does not imply a “retracing” to some more primal mode of consciousness in the genealogical narrative. It is instead a form of development. Attention “is the selective or contrastive aspect of the mind: when you are attending to something you are contrasting what you pick out with what remains in the background” (Watzl 2011: 843); attention “allows us to selectively process the vast amount of information with which we are confronted, prioritizing some aspects of information while ignoring others by focusing on a certain location or aspect of the visual scene” (Carrasco 2014: 183). Without selective attention, there remains an ambient awareness of the surroundings. There is no longer in the visual field something that stands out against a background or as prioritized; rather, everything in the visual field is of equal weight in the content of experience. There is now no foreground and background, but an equal degree of perceptual engagement with all. Attention, let us recall, is associated with affect: bringing something into focus, channeling cognitive resources toward it, is itself a form of emotional investment.
The best clue to the ascetic’s cultivated state of mind is perhaps contained in the verse that concludes the whole treatise: “When a man thus sees by the self all beings as self, he becomes equal towards all and reaches Brahman, the highest state” (MDh 12.125). This is not a contraction or dissolution of selfhood but rather an expansion. One achieves equanimity by letting nothing gain greater or lesser experiential significance, but instead, one is impartial as to all that is presented. All that is experienced is experienced as for-me: the dative of manifestation, a companion not an object, is ever present. The gaze of the ascetic fixes on nothing, yet their eyes are not closed.