Epistemology in Narrative: Tales from the Yogavāsiṣṭha
In my approach to the Indian myths about illusion and dreams thus far, I have made a formal attempt to separate the texts from the arguments, the stories from the commentaries. This is in part a concession to a Western audience that is accustomed to viewing stories and arguments as two different genres; but it could also be argued, on one level at least, that in India, too, they are significantly different genres. Philosophy is not narrative; philosophy thinks out ideas in formal order, using arguments to indicate a proof. Narratives do not constitute proofs; they act out proofs. Narratives, such as myths, constitute a genre that views the same problems that are elsewhere treated philosophically, but views them through a story.
Myths do not prove anything; they merely tell you what is for them a truth, and you either accept it or you don’t; it either matches an experience of your own, or it doesn’t. The sequence of events is by its very nature compelling, and its philosophy is implicit. Narrative says: “This happened once.” This is a basic form of human communication, because it makes an immediate contact, gathering the hearer into the speaker. The hearer then responds, either by saying, “Yes, it was like that with me, too, it happened to me, too,” or, “It was different with me.”1 Narrative makes it possible for us to share our dreams by transforming them into stories and exchanging them for other peoples’ stories. Narrative does not make it possible for us to prove that our dreams are real—it is, as we shall see in this chapter, impossible to prove the reality of a dream, philosophically or logically—but it makes it possible for us to imagine how we might try to prove that they are real.
Yet narrative does not function in dreams precisely as it functions in myth. The compelling causative sequence of events is absent from dreams; the thread of the plot is replaced by a pattern of images that suggest but never actually spell out the story. For this reason, too, proofs cannot be accomplished within dreams, for proofs depend upon the skeletal structure of cause and result that dreams lack. Myths add to dreams precisely the structure that makes such seeming proofs possible.
Narrative implicitly expresses a theory of causation through the sequence of its events. Nowadays, in the West, myth is boxed between history (which is regarded as true) and the novel (which is regarded as untrue), an ambiguous status. But in illo tempore, and in India, to say that something happened is to say that it is true, to force the hand of belief. The only place in which the power of narrative still functions in this way in Western culture is in psychoanalytic case histories—a sharing of dreams—where the truth of the past can often be expressed only when it is formulated as a story.2
Indian narratives have a peculiar penchant for incorporating into themselves elements that we would label philosophy: formal arguments and long discussions that interrupt the story. In our tradition, such matters would be relegated to textual commentaries. India has these, too; but much of what might be placed in a separate commentary is actually drawn into the narrative text, so that the text carries its own commentary around with it, the way a snail carries its house or a turtle its shell. To a Western reader, these passages often seem to spoil the story; such didactic ramblings in the great Sanskrit epics were invariably labeled “interpolations” by the Western scholars who stubbed their toes on them over and over again in the course of a good story. But to an Indian audience, there is no harsh break between the stories and the commentaries; indeed, the Indian audience tends to view the matter quite the other way around: it sees the philosophical argument as the basic genre and the stories as set into it like gems, as focal points, as moments when the philosophy gathers momentum and breaks out of a problem it cannot solve into a mode of thinking that at least allows it to state the problem and to share it in a parable. Ask a European scholar what the Mahābhārata is about and he will probably say, “The battle between the Kurus and the Pāṇḍavas.” An Indian might give the same answer, but most Indians would say, “It is about dharma” What is foreground for one culture is background for another.
An example of the weight that Indians place on the philosophical content of their stories can be seen in the subject matter of the illustrations in the Chester Beatty manuscript of the Yogavāsiṣṭha, There are forty-one of these, and over a third of them (fifteen) depict not the events told in the stories but rather the people who are telling and explaining the stories. In other words, these illustrations depict what we would regard as the frame rather than the picture. Six illustrate the outer frame; of these, three involve Vasiṣṭha and Rāma. Sir Thomas Arnold, the editor of the catalogue, helpfully summarizes what it is that they are all talking about, but these summaries are entirely arbitrary; the pictures are just pictures of people engaged in conversation. These are the ideas that Arnold would print in invisible balloons above the heads of the figures in the drawings: Vasiṣṭha instructs Rāma “as to the means of attaining moksha (salvation)” or “how the Universe is nothing but a mode of the consciousness of Atma” or “how self-introspection may be attained.” Other teachers are said to be telling other people about “the nature of true knowledge” or about “that bliss of perfect knowledge in which there is no pain” or “the true nature of Maya (illusion).” And the final illustration in the manuscript, a painting of two ascetics, apparently catches them at a moment when they are “discussing the origin of the Universe.” To the Western eye, these are like frozen frames in a “talking” motion picture with the sound track turned off; but to the Indians, who already know the sound track by heart, they are highly evocative pictures, full of the motion, not of the body, but of the mind.
In the West, myth is usually the handmaiden of philosophy. Plato lapses into myth from time to time (as in the myth of the dream of Er in the Republic) to state things that, as he himself admits, can never be entirely spelled out in argument.3 This is, I think, a valid parallel as far as it goes, but there are two important distinctions between the ways in which Plato and the Indian narrators fused philosophy and narrative. In the first place, Plato often invented his myths or called on myths that his audience was not familiar with, while the Indian narrator usually has only to remind his audience of a story that they already know well. Second, there was a complex system by which the Indian stories and commentaries were constantly interleaved, interpenetrating each other until we cannot really tell where the argument leaves off and the story begins. They have become each other, like salt placed in water (in the Upaniṣadic metaphor for the pervasion of the universe by the Godhead).4
In India, just as the commentaries are themselves regarded as a form of literature and are built right into the narratives, so, too, is the audience built into the story. Every Indian text is its own metatext, every Epic is its own epi-Epic, which tells you how to react to the text.5 The story that we hear or read is told by a narrator to another person, who answers him and asks questions, speaking for the audience. Often this answerer is himself an actor within the story that is being told; sometimes the narrator tells his own story in the first person. We are familiar with this technique from the way in which Homer uses Odysseus as the singer of tales in his own story; in India, the process is elaborated and manipulated so that there are often several interlocutors on several levels, each raising different philosophical points that arise from the narrative. In keeping track of the story, one often has to supply a series of encapsulating quotation marks: “‘“”’”. These tales are parables about parables, stories about storytelling as well as examples of storytelling. They build the philosophy into the story by placing a running commentary in the mouths of the characters on each of several different levels of narrative. In a similar way, the secondary elaboration is an explicit part of a dream.
In devotional literature, in particular, the speaker and the listener become collapsed into one as the narrative’s functions of communication and communion merge together. People listen to stories not merely to learn something new (communication) but to relive, together, the stories they already know, stories about themselves (communion).6 A. K. Ramanujan once remarked that no Indian ever hears the Mahābhārata for the first time;7 here is a case of cultural déjà vu, a parallel to the déjà vu of lovers on the personal level. In the Rāmāyaṇa, Rāma listens to the two bards, who are his unrecognized sons, telling him his own story, and through the storytelling he eventually recognizes them.8 And in the Adhyātma-Rāmāyaṇa, when Sītā is admonished by Rāma not to come with him to the forest, she replies in exasperation: “Many Rāmāyaṇas have been heard many times by many Brahmins. Tell me, does Rāma ever go to the forest without Sītā in any of them?”9
The fact that the audience can be expected to know the story has other uses, as well. The text can use the audience’s assumptions and expectations to serve new purposes; it does not necessarily fulfill their expectations.10 In this way, a philosophical text can manipulate stories to make a didactic point, using the stories against themselves, setting up traditional tales in order to undermine and change traditional ways of thinking about traditional philosophical problems. In India, philosophy is the context of narrative. We may, if we wish, seek other contexts as well—sociological, economic, psychological—but always the wave of the story casts us up on the sands of philosophy. As philosophy changes over the years, the same story may be asked to serve several different masters. Indians are not troubled by the simultaneous existence of several variants; they know that texts, too, have many doubles.
The Yogavāsiṣṭtha is a text that makes use of traditional motifs in this creative way. The presence in it of numerous intricately intertwined scraps from the ancient Sanskrit and from contemporary folktales indicates that the author of the Yogavāsiṣṭha had a number of stories to call on to illustrate the points he wished to make. It is particularly striking that few of those earlier sources cared to make those points, to explain how it could be that dreams and waking life might interact as they seem to do. To some extent, it is a matter of priorities. The authors of the earlier texts doubtless knew about māyā; this knowledge adds the color and spice and profundity to the basic stories. They make their own points, both implicitly, in the narration of what happens to people, and occasionally explicitly, as when a character justifies his actions or the narrator comments on his actions. But the deeper philosophical points made in the Yogavāsiṣṭha are not drawn out in earlier Sanskrit texts and folktales.
This was because the philosophical arguments were either not yet fully enough developed or not widely enough diffused in the nonphilosophical segments of the culture to be slipped into a story. But, even more, it was because the story was always bigger, more profound, than any explicit argument that could be made to gloss it; the story always symbolized an insight that spilled over, beyond what the storyteller himself could say it meant. The story is a river whose fish keep jumping out. Paul Ricoeur has said that the symbol gives rise to thought; mythology precedes philosophy. More than that: philosophy is a vain attempt to catch up with mythology; philosophy races after mythology and gets closer and closer but never catches it, just as Achilles never quite reaches the tortoise in Zeno’s paradox.
The story does not merely illustrate a theory, as, for instance, George Gamow wrote the tale of Mr. Tomkins in Wonderland to illustrate the theory of relativity. The story may give an example of the theory, but it also says things that the theory does not account for. There is a kind of mutual feedback between story and theory akin to the feedback that we have seen between myth and dream: each nourishes the other. The author of the Yogavāsiṣṭtha hauls the tales in out of the Indian past and spruces them up to pass inspection by a very different judge. Their old meanings, always there if never fully understood, are dragged out to answer new questions, and they stand there squinting and awkwardly flinching in the unaccustomed light. In this new setting, the stories offer a poetic solution to certain metaphysical problems, creating a metaphysic out of imagery.11
The Yogavāsiṣṭtha is a massive Sanskrit text, consisting of some 27,687 stanzas. It was probably composed in Kashmir, sometime between the sixth and twelfth centuries of our era (its date, like that of most Indian texts, is much disputed).12 In the course of this long philosophical argument, the sage Vasiṣṭha tells about fifty-five stories; many of them are brief parables, but several are long, baroque, elaborately poetic renditions of complex adventures. These stories are both traditional and non-traditional; that is, they build on certain standard Indian narratives of illusion and dreams, but they build new stories out of the old themes, often with an entirely new philosophical point.
The stories in the Yogavāsiṣṭha are stories within another story. The full title of the Yogavāsiṣṭha is the Yogavāsiṣṭtha-Mahā-Rāmāyaṇa, or “The great tale of Rāma as told by the sage Vasiṣṭha in order to expound his philosophy of yoga.” This long poem is attributed to the poet Vālmīki (who is the author of the first Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa) and is about an incident in the life of Rāma that was not dealt with in the earlier Rāmāyaṇa: a long conversation with the sage Vasiṣṭha. Thus, even the Yogavāsiṣṭha as a whole is a metatext, filling in the supposed gaps in the older text on which it purports to be based, just as many folk versions of the Rāmāyaṇa do. Similarly, Tom Stoppard’s Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead fills in certain gaps in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
The Yogavāsiṣṭha is well loved by Indians; it has been translated into many of the vernacular languages of India and has found its way into “anonymous” oral traditions.13 In this way, although it is a highly sophisticated Sanskrit composition, it both grows out of folklore and grows back into folklore in yet another instance of mutual feedback. (A parallel might be seen in the way in which “Old Man River,” composed by the sophisticated Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, is based on folk themes and regarded by many Americans as a folk song.) The Yogavāsiṣṭha was (and may have been intended to be) a means by which sophisticated philosophical ideas were transmitted to an audience that was well educated (able to read Sanskrit) but probably not well trained in philosophy. The text is a curious blend of abstract, classical Indian philosophy and vivid, detailed Indian folklore, a kind of Classic Comics version of the doctrine of illusion.14 In it, a philosophy that often seems hollow or arbitrary comes to life when the narrative spells out its widest implications. It is as if someone took the abstract concept “The universe is illusory” and made it somehow anthropomorphic, producing a kind of teaching device to make us understand what it feels like to realize that everything is an illusion. And it can’t be done; in our hearts, we don’t believe it. But the narrative does not merely discuss this problem; it enacts it. Like dreams, which are not so much thought (with logic and causation) as experienced (emotionally and in images), the Yogavāsiṣṭha presents us with experiences that make the thoughts real. The narrative allows us—nay, forces us—to imagine ourselves in a situation in which we must believe in the doctrine of illusion, in which we must act out the paradox.
Among the many tales in the Yogavāsiṣṭha, I have chosen a few that seem to me particularly powerful and beautiful examples of this genre.15 Two of them are, I think, best read together, as expressions of the Yogavāsistha’ s approach to the problem of psychology or epistemology; these are the tales of King Lavaṇa and the Brahmin Gādhi. Later we will look at other stories, such as the tale of the monk who met the people in his dreams, which reformulate these same problems and make a more direct approach to the problem of ontology.
The King Who Dreamed He Was an Untouchable and Awoke to Find It Was True
Let us begin with the story of King Lavaṇa.
In the lush country of the Northern Pāṇḍavas there once reigned a virtuous king named Lavaṇa, born in the family of Hariścandra. One day when Lavaṇa was seated on his throne in the assembly hall, a magician entered, bowed, and said to the king, “While you sit on your throne, watch this marvelous trick.” Then he waved his peacock-feather wand, and a man from Sindh entered, leading a horse; and as the king gazed at the horse, he remained motionless upon his throne, his eyes fixed and staring, as if in meditation. His courtiers were worried, but they remained still and silent, and after a few minutes the king awoke and began to fall from his throne. Servants caught him as he fell, and the king asked, in confusion, “What is this place? Whose is this hall?” When he finally regained his senses, he told this story:
“While I was sitting in front of the horse and looking at the waving wand of the magician, I had the delusion that I mounted the horse and went out hunting alone. Carried far away, I arrived at a great desert, which I crossed to reach a jungle, and under a tree a creeper caught me and suspended me by the shoulders. As I was hanging there, the horse went out from under me. [See plate 4.] I spent the night in that tree, sleepless and terrified. As I wandered about the next day, I saw a dark-skinned young girl carrying a pot of food, and, since I was starving, I asked her for some food. She told me that she was an Untouchable [a Caṇḍāla] and said that she would feed me only if I married her. I agreed to this, and, after she fed me, she took me back to her village, where I married her and became a foster Untouchable. [See plate 5.]
“She bore me two sons and two daughters, and I spent sixty years with her there, wearing a loincloth stinking and mildewed and full of lice, drinking the still-warm blood of wild animals I killed, eating carrion in the cremation grounds. Though I was the only son of a king, I grew old and gray and worn out, and I forgot that I had been a king; I became firmly established as an Untouchable. One day, when a terrible famine arose and an enormous drought and forest fire, I took my family and escaped into another forest. As my wife slept, I said to my younger son, ‘Cook my flesh and eat it,’ and he agreed to this, as it was his only hope of staying alive. I resolved to die and made a funeral pyre, and, just as I was about to throw myself on it, at that very moment, I, the king, fell from this throne. Then I was awakened by shouts of ‘Hurrah!’ and the sound of music. This is the illusion that the magician wrought upon me.”
As King Lavaṇa finished this speech, the magician suddenly vanished. Then the courtiers, their eyes wide with amazement, said, “My lord, this was no magician; this was some divine illusion sent to give enlightenment about the material world that is a mere mental delusion.” The king set out the very next day to go to the desert, having resolved to find once more the wasteland that had been reflected in the mirror of his mind. With his ministers, he wandered until he found an enormous desert just like the one he had known in his thoughts, and to his amazement he discovered all the exact details he had imagined: he recognized outcaste hunters who were his acquaintances, and he found the village where he had been a foster Untouchable, and he saw this and that man, and this and that woman, and all the various things that people use, and the trees that had been withered by the drought, and the orphaned hunter children. [See plate 6.] And he saw an old woman who was his mother-in-law. He asked her, “What happened here? Who are you?” She told him the story: a king had come there and married her daughter, and they had had children, and then the drought came and all the villagers died. The king became amazed and full of pity. He asked many more questions, and her answers convinced him that the woman was telling the story of his own experience of the Untouchables. Then he returned to the city and to his own palace, where the people welcomed him back.16
The Brahmin Who Dreamed He Was an Untouchable Who Dreamed He Was a King
The story of King Lavaṇa, though complete in itself, is further illuminated by comparison with the story of the Brahmin Gādhi.
There was once a wise and dispassionate Brahmin named Gādhi, who performed asceticism by submerging himself in a lake until the god Viṣṇu appeared to him and offered him a boon. [See plate 7.] Gādhi asked to see Viṣṇu’s power of illusion, and Viṣṇu promised him that he would see illusion and then reject it. After Viṣṇu vanished, Gādhi came out of the lake and went about his business for several days. One day he went again to bathe in the lake, and as he went into the water he lost consciousness and saw his own body dead in his own house, being mourned by his wife and his mother and all his friends and relatives, and then he saw them carry his body to the burning grounds and burn his corpse to ashes.
Then, as he remained in the water, Gādhi saw himself reborn as an Untouchable [a Pulkasa] named Katañja: he saw himself squashed inside the disgusting womb of an Untouchable woman, then born, and then growing up as a child. He went hunting with his dogs, married a dark Untouchable woman, made love to her, had many children, and gradually became old. Then, since he outlived all his family, he wandered alone in the wilderness until, one day, he came to the capital city, where the king had just died. The royal elephant picked him up with its trunk, and he was anointed King Gavala in the city of the Kīras, since no one knew that he was an Untouchable. He reigned for eight years, until one day an old Untouchable saw him when he was alone and without his regalia; the old man addressed him as his friend Katañja, thereby identifying him as an Untouchable, and this encounter was witnessed by several people. Though the king repudiated what the Untouchable had said, all his servants refused to touch him, just as if he were a corpse; the people fled from him, his Brahmin ministers all committed suicide because they had been polluted, and the city was in chaos. Realizing that all this was his fault, Gavala decided to immolate himself along with his ministers. As the body named Gavala fell into the fire and became a tangle of limbs, the painful spasms of the burning of his own body in the fire awakened Gādhi in the water.
Gādhi came to his senses and got out of the lake, but he was puzzled when he recalled the wife and mother who had mourned for him, since his parents had died when he was an infant, and he had no wife, nor indeed had he ever seen the true form of a woman’s body. He went home and lived as before, until, after a few days, a Brahmin guest came to his house and casually mentioned that in the Kīra country an Untouchable had been king for eight years until he was discovered and immolated himself, together with hundreds of Brahmin ministers. Gādhi asked him many questions and verified all the details, in amazement and dismay. Then he went to see for himself, and he found the country that he had thought of in his mind: the Untouchables’ huts and all the rest. He asked about Katañja and was told that he had outlived all of his large family, left the village, and become king of the Kīras for eight years, until the citizens unmasked him and he entered the funeral pyre. The Brahmin Gādhi spent a month in the village and learned all the details from the villagers, just as he had experienced it. Then he journeyed to the city of the Kīras and saw all the places he had seen and experienced, and there too he asked and learned about the Untouchable king, who had, they said, died twelve years ago. Seeing the new king, as if he were seeing his own former life before his own eyes, Gādhi felt as if he were experiencing a waking dream, an illusion, a magic net of mistakes.
Then he remembered that Viṣṇu had promised to demonstrate the great power of illusion, and he realized that his enigmatic experience had been precisely that demonstration. He went out of the city and lived for a year and a half in mounting curiosity and puzzlement, until Viṣṇu came to him and explained the nature of his illusion. When Viṣṇu vanished, Gādhi went back to the Untouchables once more to test his delusion; more convinced than ever that he really had been there, and therefore more puzzled than ever, he propitiated Viṣṇu again, and again Viṣṇu explained how Gādhi had seen what he had seen. When Viṣṇu had vanished, Gādhi’s mind was all the more full of agony; then Viṣṇu returned and explained it all to him a third time, and then, at last, Gādhi’s mind found peace.17
Lavaṇa and Gādhi: Mutual Similes
These stories of Lavaṇa and Gādhi are long and complex; they occupy over sixty pages of Sanskrit text and are marbled with various metaphysical asides, to which we will turn our attention soon. It may seem perverse to combine two stories each of which is challenging enough on its own; in particular, it may appear to be asking for trouble to explain the story of Lavaṇa by having recourse to the story of Gādhi, which is so complex that the story of Lavaṇa seems a mere anecdote by comparison. Yet, when we set the stories side by side, they produce a double image of mutually illuminating similes, each standing for the other.
Comparison of the two stories is justifiable on the grounds that the Hindus themselves would have been likely to compare them. The Yogavāsiṣṭha tells over fifty stories, but these two are among the longest and the most important, and both of them are well known in India. Surely the Hindus would have noted, as did von Glasenapp, the striking similarities between the two tales.18 Lavaṇa is a king who dreams that he is an Untouchable in a cremation ground and then goes back to being a king. Gādhi is a Brahmin who dreams first that he is in a cremation ground (his own death place) and then that he is an Untouchable in an Untouchable village, who pretends to be a king, goes back to being an Untouchable when he is unmasked, and ends up as a Brahmin once more. Lavaṇa’s experience of the woman who appears to him in the desert and vanishes when he returns to court is structurally similar to that of King Taladhvaja, the man to whom the female Nārada appears; Gādhi, on the other hand, is far closer to Nārada himself, undergoing his transformation under water and returning to his ascetic life at the end. When we set the Gādhi pattern against the Lavaṇa pattern, it might appear that Lavaṇa takes up the Gādhi story at midpoint: a king who remembers that he has been an Untouchable (see figure 2).
Certain things happen to both of them in the same way. From the standpoint of the onlookers in the outer scene, both are said to have spent only a few “moments” (muhūrtas) in the alternative reality, but, from the standpoint of the participants in the inner scene, they were said to have lived there for many years. Lavaṇa, when he is an Untouchable, forgets that he was a king, and Gādhi, when he is a king, forgets that he was an Untouchable. In addition to the fires in which both commit suicide, each experiences a major conflagration like doomsday: for Lavaṇa it is the forest fire that arises in the drought; for Gādhi it is the great communal immolation fire. And the verses describing the ghastliness of the Untouchables’ villages are strikingly similar in the two stories.
Lavaṇa undergoes an initiation that is like a death and rebirth, but there is no clear break; he enters the Untouchable village in the persona of a king and only gradually sheds it (just as Gādhi enters the city as an Untouchable and changes into a king). This is the mild form of the transformation, brought about in a natural way by motion through space (by horse or on foot); it is the equivalent of the romantic adventure in which the hero simply rides his horse into the other world. Both Lavaṇa and Gādhi experience mild transitions of this kind. Lavaṇa is recognized as a king in the Untouchable village; though he gradually forgets this identity, his mother-in-law remembers that a king had married her daughter. He can be recognized because the two adventures happen in a single time-span. Similarly, Gādhi (Gavala) is recognized as an Untouchable in the royal city, for the same reason, and he still remembers that he is an Untouchable; he lies, but he knows the truth.
Figure 2. Lavaṇa and Gādhi: Mutual Similes
(Numbers indicate the sequence of events within each myth.)
But the mother-in-law does not recognize Lavaṇa when he returns to the village, nor do the townspeople recognize Gādhi when he returns to ask his questions. This is because each of them has experienced a return journey that is not a simple natural voyage but is, rather, a rude awakening, a violent transition by fire. On the way back, they have become reborn, losing in a single moment the many years they had amassed in the course of their gradual journey into the other world. To this extent, their experiences are roughly the same in their inner structure (a mild transition followed by a violent transition), though they are mirror opposites in the actual content of that structure: where Lavaṇa goes from king to Untouchable, Gādhi goes from Untouchable to king.
But the reversals are even more striking. What is real for Lavaṇa becomes a simile for Gādhi, and what is real for Gādhi is merely a simile for Lavaṇa. The stories are most vividly opposed in their outer structures. Before his mild transition, Gādhi actually dies; he is then reborn and experiences an entirely new life, beginning with his existence as an embryo. This transition (which takes place under water, like Nārada’s transformation) never happens to Lavaṇa at all. Lavaṇa learns that his illusion is “like seeing one’s own death in a dream,”19 but Gādhi actually does watch his own death and rebirth. On the other hand, the death that Lavaṇa as Katañja really does experience (in the inner story), as a result of the drought and the forest fire, appears as a recurrent simile in the story of Gādhi as an Untouchable: Gādhi sees his corpse “like a leaf that has lost its sap, like a tree that has been brought down by a terrible storm, like a village in a drought, like an old tree covered with eagles”; when he grows old as an Untouchable, he is worn out like the ground in a drought, and his body dries up like a tree in a drought; his family is carried away by death, like forest leaves carried off by a torrent of rain, and he leaves the forest as a bird leaves a lake in a drought; death cuts away his whole family, as a forest fire cuts down a whole forest. The courtiers flee from Gādhi as Gavala, refusing to touch him, as if he were a corpse; yet when Gādhi as Brahmin sees the ruins of his old house, he is like the soul looking at its dried-up corpse.20 One man’s reality is another man’s simile.
In this way, the Lavaṇa story, seen as framed by the Gādhi story, may imply another level, retroactively: A Brahmin may have dreamed that he was Lavaṇa, who dreamed that he was an Untouchable. On a simpler plane, the following questions might arise when we compare the two stories: Which is the object and which is the image of it? What is like what? What is a simile for what? The idea, on the philosophical level, that everything is merely a reflected image of something else (pratibhāsa) is supported on the rhetorical level by the compelling network of similes: everything is likened to something else.
The metaphysical stances of the two tales also differ greatly. Lavaṇa is inside his story and is entirely overwhelmed and mystified by it until the very end; to him, his persona as king certainly seems far more real than his persona as Untouchable, yet he forgets that he ever was a king. The creator of the mirage, the demon or god who is laughing at him, the puppeteer working the strings, remains offstage, invisible to Lavaṇa and to us. Gādhi, by contrast, is outside his story all the time, watching himself play out his scene like a television actor with one eye on the monitor. Sir Ernst Gombrich has suggested that, for visual phenomena, “Illusion, we will find, is hard to describe or analyze, for though we may be intellectually aware of the fact that any given experience must be an illusion, we cannot, strictly speaking, watch ourselves having an illusion.”21 Lavaṇa cannot watch himself having an illusion, though he later realizes that he has had one and comes to understand it and to extricate himself from it. But Gādhi quite literally watches himself watching. To Gādhi, his persona as an Untouchable is far more real than his persona as a king—which is merely a mask within a dream, twice removed from even apparent reality—but both are equally unreal in comparison with his true persona as a Brahmin.
For us, as Westerners, the finality of the Brahmin persona is challenged by the self-perpetuating layers of the story: Why could there not be a woman, say, dreaming that she was a king dreaming . . .? In fact, this cannot happen in our text. For the Hindu, the chain stops with the Brahmin, the linchpin of reality, the witness of the truth. To the extent that the Brahmin represents purity and renunciation, he is real, safely outside the maelstrom of saṃsāra and illusion. Our confusion about our own place in the frames of memory, one contained within another like nesting Chinese boxes, is shared by Lavaṇa until the very end of his tale. But to Gādhi, who is, after all, a Brahmin, the god who pulls the strings is directly manifest and takes pains to open up his bag of tricks right from the start; moreover, he returns three times at the end to make sure that Gādhi has understood his lesson properly.
One implication of this structure is that the entire series of frames is a model of society.22 It is in the nature of social distinctions such as caste to allow each person to frame the whole set of the others. Caste is not a simple stratification but a set of interlocking hierarchies: each person’s circle encompasses the circle of all others. If we turn for a moment from the Yogavāsiṣṭtha stories to Hindu society in general, it is obvious that, from the standpoint of the Brahmin, the Untouchable is impure. It is less obvious, but equally true and equally important, that, from the standpoint of the Untouchable, the Brahmin is impure. Louis Dumont was the first to point out (in Homo Hierarchicus) some of the ramifications of this complex system, which is reflected in the metaphysics rather than in the muted social conscience of the Yogavāsiṣṭha (to which we will soon return). From the standpoint of caste and the criterion of purity, the Brahmin and the Untouchable live in a kind of symbiosis, a paradox of reciprocity. From the standpoint of power, which is so often the partner of purity in Indian conceptual schemes, the king and the Untouchable form such a reciprocal bond. And from the standpoint of society as a whole, the king and the Brahmin supply the double axis from which all other interrelationships are derived. Yet they alone cannot provide the entire grid on which the social cosmos can be mapped. Though the Brahmin provides the latitude and the king the longitude, the Untouchable provides a pole of pollution by which both of the others orient themselves. The Brahmin, the king, and the Untouchable are the players in the eternal triangle of purity, power, and pollution.
The dream of becoming either a Brahmin or a king is a very ancient theme in India. One of the earliest Upaniṣads, composed before 700 B.C., describes the paradigmatic dream in these terms:
When he dreams, these worlds are his. Then he seems to become a great king. Then he seems to become a great Brahmin. He seems to enter into the high and low. As a great king takes his people and moves about in his own country just as he wishes, just so this one takes his own senses and moves about in his own body just as he wishes.23
Here the metaphor of the king preempts the metaphor of the Brahmin and becomes the basis of an extended somatic simile: the human body is indeed a model of society.
The experience of the king who becomes an Untouchable and the experience of the Brahmin who becomes an Untouchable share certain themes but diverge in several important ways. As we will see, either can be transformed into an Untouchable for any of a number of reasons: as punishment for a sin, or in order to learn something of value, or as part of an initiation. But just as the initiation of a king (royal consecration) is different in both form and purpose from the initiation of a Brahmin (preparation for sacred office), so, too, the kinds of transformations that Lavaṇa and Gādhi undergo are very different. The drama of Lavaṇa’s transformation lies in the contrast between the splendor of his life at court and the squalor of his life in the village. The drama of Gādhi’s transformation lies in the contrast between his purity as a Brahmin and his impurity as an Untouchable. In both cases, the fall in social status is extreme; but the king loses, in addition, what we might term economic or political status, while the Brahmin loses sacred or religious status. Let us deal separately with the different problems the king and the Brahmin face when each of them becomes an Untouchable.
The Suffering of the Hindu King
The problem encountered by the Untouchable king is reflected in the quandary described in the frame of the Lavaṇa story, the conversation between Rāma and Vasiṣṭha. The occasion for the discussion is this: Rāma has returned from a pilgrimage in a state of depression and madness (or so his father and the courtiers describe it). Rāma regards as a babbling madman anyone who says, “Act like a king,” though he himself laughs like a holy man whose mind is possessed. He says that everything is unreal, that it is false to believe in the reality of the world, that everything is but the imagination of the mind. He is physically wasting away. The sage Viśvāmitra, who is called in by Rāma’s father, the great emperor Daśaratha, says that Rāma is perfectly right in his understanding of the world, that he has been enlightened. Viśvāmitra then offers to cure him.24
We thus encounter, right at the start, several conflicting interpretations of human reality. Is Rāma crazy, or is he right? Is everyone else crazy? Why does Viśvāmitra offer to cure him if he is not mad? The Yogavāsiṣṭtha suggests that enlightenment by a suitable spiritual authority will remove Rāma’s depression while leaving his (correct) metaphysical apprehensions unimpaired. In Western terms, this is a kind of psychoanalysis that allows the fantasy to continue while making the patient socially functional; stated in Yogavāsiṣṭha terms, it allows the fantasy to be dispelled while making the patient socially functional. Thus Rāma’s father calls in the sage Vasiṣṭha to assist Viśvāmitra, and Vasiṣṭha cures Rāma by assuring him that he is perfectly right. Viśvāmitra says, “What Rāma knows inside him, when he hears that from the mouth of a good man who says, ‘That is true reality,’ then he will have peace of mind.”25 In the tale of Lavaṇa, as in the framing story of Rāma, this corroborating function is performed by the sage Vasiṣṭha.
But the true nature of Rāma’s madness is hinted at when people tell him to act like a king, and this madness can best be understood in the context of Indian mythology. Rāma’s pilgrimage has been his first experience of suffering, and in reaction to this he has reevaluated his life as a king and found it to be unreal. The sage who persuades him to go on living his life despite this new insight is performing a role close to that of the incarnate god Kṛṣṇa in the Mahābhārata; for there, when Arjuna is depressed by the imminent death of his relatives (the situation that was used to extricate Lavaṇa and Nārada from their dream existences), Kṛṣṇa persuades him to go on anyway, to “act like a warrior.” Several verses of this dialogue (the Bhagavad Gītā) are closely akin to some in the Yogavāsiṣṭha and may have been in the back of its author’s mind.26 To this extent, at least, the Yogavāsiṣṭha argues that the most important reality—that is, what is most valued, if not necessarily most solid physically—is social reality. This is, of course, a most orthodox Hindu point of view. In this logic, to know that a course of action is intrinsically unreal is an argument to do it, not an argument not to do it. When Arjuna realizes that he is not really killing his cousins, he can go on and kill them; when Rāma realizes that he is not really a king, he can go on and rule.
The Indian king found himself by definition in an ambivalent position. His basic dharma, or social duty, was to rule, to “act like a king,” and this dharma is affirmed even in the myths of illusion. When Nārada returns to being Nārada after having been a queen, Viṣṇu advises his erstwhile dream-world husband, King Tāladhvaja, to stop neglecting his royal duties, and the king returns to his responsibilities. According to the Hindu textbooks on dharma, the king is not allowed to renounce his kingdom; in the Mahābhārata, King Yudhiṣṭhira agonizes over this problem for a long time and finally resigns himself to remaining king. In Buddhism, however, as we will see, kings do renounce their office. The Buddha himself set the example, and it is relevant to note that Yudhiṣṭhira, like the philosopher Śankara, was accused of being a closet Buddhist (pracchannabauddha). Moreover, the Mahābhārata heroes do spend twelve years in exile, and the Rāma of the Vālmîki Rāmāyaṇa, who has certain Buddhist leanings, is forced to renounce his throne for a while; he dwells among animals and demons in the forest and in Lankā (a kind of other world) before he returns to resume his duties as the true king. This theme of royal renunciation appears in the Yogavāsiṣṭha when Rāma returns from his pilgrimage and does not wish to be a king. Torn between the Hindu and Buddhist concepts of kingship and renunciation, what better compromise could an Indian king find than to dream of renouncing?
This compromise is also reflected in a subepisode of the tale of Lavaṇa in which the king creates a mental sacrifice. When Rāma expresses his puzzlement at the apparent contradictions in the story of Lavaṇa, Vasiṣṭha tells this story:
Once, in the past, Lavaṇa recalled that his grandfather, Hariścandra, had performed the sacrifice of royal consecration, and he resolved to perform that sacrifice in his mind. He made all the preparations mentally: he summoned the priests and honored the sages, invited the gods and kindled the fires. A whole year passed as he sacrificed to the gods and sages in the forest, but then the king awoke at the end of a single day, right there in the palace grove. Thus by his mind alone King Lavaṇa achieved the fruits of the sacrifice of royal consecration. [See plate 8.] But those who perform the sacrifice experience twelve years of suffering through various tortures and hardships. Therefore Indra sent a messenger of the gods from heaven in order to make Lavaṇa suffer. This messenger was the magician, who created great misfortune for the king who had performed the sacrificial ritual of consecration, and then the messenger returned to heaven.27
Out of his compassion for King Lavaṇa, Indra substitutes for the real suffering he would normally have undergone an experience of suffering (a long period of existence as an Untouchable) that occupies just a moment in his life as a king. What is perhaps most striking in terms of the problem set forth by the text—the interaction between mental experience and physical evidence—is the fact that, in order to ground the king’s mental experience in physical reality (so that he may have the fruits of the mental sacrifice in his real life), the gods send him imaginary sufferings that he may fulfill the (real) requirements of the traditional initiation. For his imaginary sufferings among the Untouchables are less real than an actual consecration, involving hardships, but more real than an imaginary consecration involving no hardships. Unhappiness is more real than happiness.
Lavaṇa’s initiation bears a certain resemblance to shamanic initiations.28 But there is a source for the theme of the imaginary consecration that is more specifically Indian than the Central Asian shamanistic corpus and is also more directly relevant to the tale of Lavaṇa. To this day, many Indian sects hold that anyone who dreams that he is initiated has in fact been initiated. This belief has an ancient precedent. In the Vedic sacrifice (the very one that Lavaṇa managed to perform mentally, though with the assistance of a number of mentally conjured priests, as the text and plate 8 demonstrate), one particular priest was employed as the witness. This priest, the Brāhman, did absolutely nothing; his job was to sit there and to think the sacrifice while the others did it. He was the silent witness, essential to the sacrifice, in particular because he was responsible for ensuring that no mistakes occurred. From this practice (three priests performing the sacrifice, while one—the “transcendent fourth” in Indian culture—performed it mentally) it was not a very large step to take to reach the practice in the Upaniṣads, where meditation on the sacrifice was far more important than its actual performance; and from there it was no great further distance to the purely imaginary sacrifice of the Yogavāsiṣṭtha.
Hariścandra among the Untouchables
It is particularly ironic that Lavaṇa modeled his imaginary consecration on that of his grandfather, Hariścandra, since Hariścandra himself experienced a dreamlike initiation among Untouchables, like that of Lavaṇa himself, in addition to his conventional initiation. This story, which can be traced back to the eighth century B.C.,29 is told more elaborately in the Purāṇas:
One day when King Hariścandra was hunting in the forest, the King of Obstacles, who was jealous of Hariścandra’s great achievements, entered him. As a result of this possession, Hariścandra in fury cursed Viśvāmitra to fall into a deep sleep. Viśvāmitra then became furious in turn, and Hariścandra became contrite and begged Viśvāmitra to forgive him. Viśvāmitra made Hariścandra promise to give him everything he had, and, in order to pay Viśvāmitra, Hariścandra sold his wife and son to an old Brahmin. Then Hariścandra said, “I am no human, but an ogre, or even more evil than that.” Still Viśvāmitra demanded more payment, and then the god Dharma approached Hariścandra in the form of an Untouchable [a Caṇḍāla], foul-smelling and disfigured, and, in order to pay Viśvāmitra, Hariścandra sold himself in slavery to the Untouchable and went to work in the cremation ground, stripping the corpses of their clothing. With its jackals and vultures, heaps of bones and half-burnt bodies, the burning ground was like the world at doomsday. The singing of the throngs of vampires and ghouls sounded like the screams of doomsday, and the yells and moans of the mourners sounded like the cries of hell. Thus the king, while still alive, entered another birth, and thus he passed a year that seemed like a hundred years.
One day Hariścandra fell into an exhausted sleep, motionlessly dreaming that he paid for his lapse by suffering for twelve years. He saw a great wonder: He saw himself reborn as a Pulkasa [a different kind of Untouchable], out of the womb of a Pulkasa woman. He grew up, and when he was seven years old he went to work in the cremation ground. One day some Brahmins brought a dead Brahmin there, and when the boy asked them for the payment due him they refused, saying, “Go on and do your evil job. Once upon a time, Viśvāmitra cursed King Hariścandra to be a Pulkasa because he had lost his merit by injuring the Brahmin with sleep.” They went on mocking him like this, and, when he could no longer bear it, they cursed him to go to hell. Immediately he was dragged off to hell, where he was horribly tortured, still in the form of a seven-year-old Pulkasa. He stayed there for one day, which was a hundred years, for that is what the denizens of hell call a hundred years.
Then he was reborn on earth as a dog, eating carrion and vomit. And he saw himself reborn as a donkey, an elephant, a monkey, an ox, a goat, a cat, a heron, a bull, a sheep, a bird, a worm, a fish, a tortoise, a wild boar, a porcupine, a cock, a parrot, a crane, a snake, and many other creatures; and a day was like a hundred years. Finally he saw himself reborn again as a king, who lost his kingdom playing dice; his wife and son were taken from him, and he wandered alone into the forest. At last he went up to heaven, but Yama’s servants came to drag him away to hell with nooses made of serpents. At that moment, however, Viśvāmitra spoke to Yama about Hariścandra, and Yama told his servants what Viśvāmitra had done. Then the change in him that had come about from a violation of dharma ceased to grow. Yama said to him, “Viśvāmitra’s anger is terrible; he is even going to kill your son. Go back to the world of men and experience the rest of your suffering, and then you will find happiness.” These were all the conditions that Hariścandra saw in his dream and experienced for twelve years. And at the end of this period of twelve years of suffering, the king fell from the sky, hurled out by Yama’s messengers.
As he fell, he woke up in confusion [sambhramāt], thinking, “In my dream I saw great suffering, with no end. But have twelve years passed, as I saw in my dream?” He asked the Pulkasas who were standing there, and when they said, “No,” the miserable king sought refuge with the gods, praying, “Let all be well with me, and with my wife and son.” Then he went back to work as a Pulkasa, selling corpses, and seemed to lose his memory; there was no wife or child within the range of his lost memory.
One day his wife came there, bringing the body of their son, who had died of snakebite. As she grieved over the little corpse, Hariścandra saw her and hastened toward her, thinking only to take the clothing from the corpse. She saw him, too, but they had been so changed by their sufferings in their long exile that they did not recognize each other; she was so transformed that she looked like a woman in another birth. But when the king saw the dead child, he remembered his own son, and when he heard the queen lamenting for her husband, Hariścandra, he recognized his wife and son. He spoke, and the queen recognized his voice; she also recognized the shape of his nose and the spacing of his teeth. But when she saw that he was an Untouchable, she clasped him around the neck and said, “O King, is this a dream, or is it real [tathyam]? Tell me what you think, for my mind is confused [mohita].” The king told her how he had come to be a dog-cooker, and she told him how their son had died. They resolved to immolate themselves together on the pyre of their dead son, but at that moment Indra and Dharma came there with all the gods and told them that they had won the right to eternal worlds, together with their son. Indra revived the boy and brought all three of them to heaven.30
In this story, metaphors and transformations replace one another, as do demons and Untouchables. Hariścandra says that he is like an ogre long before he becomes an Untouchable, and even that transition takes place not by magic (by a sudden transformation of his skin and body, as in the case of Triśanku) but simply by habit: he acts like an Untouchable, and so he is an Untouchable. Years of behaving like an Untouchable transform him until even his wife cannot recognize him at first. Her recognition involves physical evidence: she recognizes his voice and his physiognomy, hard material signs that shine through despite the dirt and disease and scars and wrinkles. But when she sees that he is an Untouchable, dark-skinned after years of working in the sun, and hideously clad, she rejects the reality of that vision, calling him “King” and hoping to dismiss the whole tragedy by saying, “It is all just a dream.”
Many of the motifs in this myth appear in the tales of Lavaṇa and Gādhi. The death of a son and the decision to enter the fire lead to the sudden awakening, and the experience of life as an Untouchable purifies the king and gives him release. But in this text (which is set in the context of saṃsāric traditions and devotional values), that release is not mokṣa but physical transportation to heaven, and it is a worldly heaven, like Triśanku’s, not an abstract merging with Godhead. In the end, Hariścandra and his wife do not go back to their original life, as Lavaṇa and Gādhi do; they leave both the earthly dream and the earthly reality, the royal pleasures and the Untouchable horrors. And Hariścandra’s wife from the real world suffers with him inside the other world (though not inside the dream within the dream or even in the same part of the other world, the same Untouchable village). Hariścandra has no Untouchable wife, therefore, and no Untouchable child; his entire family moves into the nightmare with him, and at the end they move out of it with him to heaven. Even the child whose death precipitates the awakening is himself awakened from the dead in time to go to heaven, a bhakti twist that wipes out the final traces of any orientation toward mokṣa. The heaven to which they are all transported is probably not yet the eternal, infinite heaven of the full-fledged bhakti movement but simply the heaven of Indra, a place where earthly pleasures are greatly magnified and from which one must eventually return to earth.
The metaphor of transformation is acted out in several ways. Hariścandra is “like” an Untouchable and then becomes one; he is “as if” reborn and then dreams that he is actually reborn; the cremation ground is “like” hell, and then Hariścandra dreams that he is actually in hell. And the metaphor of the expansion and contraction of time is realized in several ways. Because of the ghastliness of the king’s experience among the Untouchables, each year seems like a hundred years (a characteristic of dream adventures in general). But when the king dreams that he is in hell, he discovers that, in that world, there is another system of time reckoning: the people in hell call what we would call a hundred years “a day.” And when the king dreams that he must suffer for twelve years to expiate his sin, he believes this; when he wakes up, he is deeply depressed to discover that twelve years have not, in fact, elapsed in the waking world; only one night has passed, the night in which he dreamed. He is convinced of this by some Pulkasas—the same Pulkasas who were there in his dream; now they are outside the dream, and they set the standard of reality. Unlike King Lavaṇa, Hariścandra must suffer in reality, in real time, the twelve years of suffering that are the traditional initiation of a king; the dream of twelve years does not count.
The Suffering of the Buddhist King
The tale of Hariścandra may well have been influenced by the Vessantara Jātaka, the famous Buddhist story of a king who was generous to a fault. As Richard Gombrich remarks, the tale of Vessantara is a thoroughly Buddhist story, but “it is interesting that another story of a man who gave away his family, Hariścandra, is extremely popular in Hindu Bengal. We posit that a story, like any other social phenomenon, is most likely to survive and flourish when it answers the most disparate purposes, in other words when its appeal is overdetermined.”31 In addition to the purposes that it served for the Buddhists, the tale of Vessantara clearly had meanings for the Hindus, meanings that we have encountered in other, related stories, and particularly in the tale of Hariścandra.
King Vessantara gave away everything; one day he gave away the royal elephant, and for this excess he was banished. While he wandered in the forest with his wife, Maddī, and their two children, a wicked Brahmin named Jūjaka determined to ask Vessantara for the children. That night, Maddī dreamed that a black man wearing yellow robes, with red flowers in his ears, dragged her out of the hut by her hair, threw her down on her back, and, ignoring her screams, tore out her two eyes, cut off her two arms, cut open her breast, and tore out her heart and carried it away, dripping with blood. She awoke in terror and went to Vessantara’s hut to ask him to interpret her dream. At first he asked her why she had violated her promise not to approach him at night except during her fertile season, but she said, “It is not improper desires which bring me here; I have had a nightmare.” Then he asked her to tell him her dream, and when he heard it he realized that it meant that someone would ask him for his children, the final test and perfection of his generosity. But he said to Maddī, to calm her, “Don’t worry; because you were lying in an awkward position, or perhaps because you ate something that disagreed with you, your mind was disturbed.” She was deceived and consoled by this; she kissed the children and embraced them and left them in Vessantara’s care.
Then Jūjaka came and asked for the children, and Vessantara gave them to him. As Maddī returned to the hermitage, she thought about the nightmare she had had, and so she hurried home. Then her right eye began to throb, and trees with fruit seemed bare, and bare trees seemed to have fruit, and she completely lost her bearings. Eventually, Vessantara told her what had happened, and she praised his generosity. Indra then took the form of a Brahmin and asked Vessantara to give Maddī to him; he did so, but then Indra gave her back again. Finally, Vessantara was called back out of exile, and he and Maddī were reunited with their children. And the noble king Vessantara, full of wisdom after so much giving, at the dissolution of his body was reborn in heaven.32
Many of the elements in this story seem to be transformations of another famous Buddhist story that we have seen, the dream of Aśoka. Maddi’s dream, like Anoka’s, is a textbook nightmare that foretells a tragedy that will befall a child, a nightmare that does come true. Vessantara lies to her about it, as Aśoka’s wicked queen lies to him; the interpreter of the dream—Vessantara in the one tale, Aśoka’s wife in the other—knows that the dream is truly prophetic but says that it is merely somatic. Maddi (like Aśoka’s son, Kunāla) sees and rightly interprets a set of evil omens and the image of a topsy-turvy world. The roles are curiously mixed in their transformations: Maddī is like Aśoka in having the dream, but she is like Aśoka’s wife in her sexual threat to the king, and it is Vessantara, not Maddī, who is the primary hero of the tale. In the end, all is restored; after his nightmare existence in the wilderness, Vessantara returns to the royal city. There he sets free all living creatures, even the cats, and gives everything away. This is what a king ideally, but never actually, does. The ambiguity of the king who gives everything away may be traced back to the Brāhmanas, where it is said that the ideal sacrificer (of whom the epitome is the king) should give everything away and go to heaven immediately; yet the sacrificer is warned not to do this, and he is explicitly told to make certain that he comes back from heaven when he goes there during the sacrifice.33 The king’s tension between renunciation and life in this world is already manifest in these early texts.
Vessantara returns to rule, but to rule as a renouncing king and perhaps not for very long. When he dies, he goes to a heaven like Hariścandra’s, not a permanent release but a temporary way station full of superearthly pleasures. The ambiguity of this ending is retained in a Hindu retelling of the tale of Vessantara.34 There the king is named Tārāvaloka, and he has twin sons named Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa, but he is still married to a woman named Maddī (Madrī, in the Sanskrit). When Tārāvaloka has been reunited with his children, he becomes king not of his own human kingdom but of the realm of the Vidyādharas, or celestial magicians, and he flies through the air to their land and learns all of their secret knowledge by the grace of the goddess Lakṣmī. This ending, with the hero flying away in the arms of a female magician, comes straight from the Hindu tales of dream adventures; it celebrates the worldly, saṃsāra-oriented values of that genre. But suddenly, at the end, the story is given a mokṣa-based (or Buddhist) twist: Tarāvaloka becomes disgusted with all worldly pleasures and retires to the forest as an ascetic.
Vessantara and Tarāvaloka do not live among Untouchables, as the kings in the Hindu paradigm do, because for the Buddhists, who are outside the caste system, the Untouchables cannot symbolize human reversals or royal sufferings. Yet suffering of one sort or another is still the key to the experience of the Buddhist as well as the Hindu kings. Suffering is what alerts us to the insubstantiality of saṃsāra, in part because it makes us want to believe that our pain is unreal, and in part because pain is a useful shock mechanism to awaken someone from a dream. A myth of cosmogony narrated in the Yogavāsiṣṭtha expresses this power of suffering:
When Brahmā made the universe, he created, in the land of India, all the people who are plagued by disease and pain. When Brahmā saw their misery [duḥkha], he felt pity, as a father feels pity for the unhappiness of his son. Realizing that there was no end to their misery except through nirvāṇa and release from rebirth, Brahmā created Vasiṣṭha and said to him, “Come, my son. For just a moment I will cause your mind, fickle as a monkey, to be engulfed in ignorance.” As soon as he cursed Vasiṣṭha in this way, Vasiṣṭha forgot everything he knew; he was tortured by misery, sorrow, and confusion. Then he asked Brahmā, “My lord, how did such misery enter into worldly existence [saṃsāra], and how can a man get rid of it?” And in answer to Vasiṣṭha’s question, Brahmā taught him the supreme knowledge. Then he restored Vasiṣṭha to his natural condition and said, “I used a curse to make you ignorant, and as a result of your ignorance you began to ask questions, my son. That was why you wanted to have this essential knowledge in order to help all people.”35
Until Vasiṣṭha experiences suffering, he lacks the impetus to seek knowledge; the experience of the illusion of ignorance is necessary before one can understand the illusion of reality. The particular emphasis on ignorance (avidyā, or Pali avijjā) as the root of suffering, together with the exhortation to help all people, are clues to the Buddhist sympathies of this story.
The story of Lavaṇa involves just such an enlightening “curse,” one that occurs in a brief moment (muhūrtam) but has effects that last for a lifetime. The key to Lavaṇa’s enlightenment lies, moreover, not merely in his own suffering but in his exposure to other people who are by definition beyond the pale of comfortable Hindu society. These people are epitomized by the Untouchables, but other sorts of outcastes are assimilated to them, principally demons and women. Thus the king is enlightened in two related ways: by his own suffering and by being exposed to people outside his court; that is, he is forced to learn from people who are entirely different from him.
Ironically, this very theme—of learning from people who are “outside” (bahiṣkṛta)—comes to the author of the Yogavāsiṣṭha from people who are outside his tradition, the Buddhists. Another unmistakable hint of this heritage may be seen in the use of nirvāṇa (“extinction”) as the term for release in the myth of Vasiṣṭha’s suffering, for this is the Buddhist term for what a Hindu would normally refer to as mokṣa. So, too, duḥkha (suffering) is the key to Buddhist formulations of the nature and origins of the world. But a far more extensive Buddhist influence in narrative themes (as well as in the philosophical discussion of illusion) pervades the Yogavāsiṣṭtha as a whole.
For in early Buddhism as well as in Hinduism we find the paradigm of the king who is enlightened by suffering, and in light of the heavy Buddhist influence on the extreme form of the doctrine of illusion (and hence upon the philosophy of the Yogavāsiṣṭtha), the borrowing of this Buddhist theme should not surprise us. Looming behind Rāma’s experience of suffering—as behind that of Lavaṇa, whose debasement among the Untouchables is so graphically described—is the story of the Buddha, Gautama Śākyamuni, a king who never left his palace until he was a grown man and who did so then to discover the existence of suffering as the basis of enlightenment.
This episode is retold in Buddhist texts over many centuries, and the variations tell us much about the shifting spectrum of Buddhist concepts of reality and illusion. In one set of texts, within the Pali canon (and hence probably, but not certainly, the oldest version of the story), the future Buddha or Bodhisattva simply thinks about the three forms of suffering: old age, disease, and death. Indeed, he merely thinks about someone else thinking about these things. Gautama tells his own story in the first person:
Monks, I was delicately nurtured. . . . I had three palaces. . . . In the four months of the rains . . . I came not down from my palace. To me . . . this thought occurred: surely one of the uneducated manyfolk, though himself subject to old age and decay, not having passed beyond old age and decay, when he sees another broken down with age, is troubled, ashamed, disgusted, forgetful that he himself is such a one. . . . When he sees another person diseased . . . [and] when he sees another person subject to death . . . .36
In another set of Pali texts, Gautama does not merely think about someone seeing an old man, a sick man, and a dead man; he himself actually sees such men:
When the Bodhisattva was fourteen years old, he drove out of the eastern gate of the city and happened to see an old man with a white head. He asked his charioteer, “What is that man?” “It is an old man.” . . . Some time later, he went out of the southern gate of the city and happened to see a sick man. . . . Some time later, he went out of the western gate of the city and happened to see a dead man. And as he returned home in his chariot, he happened to see a holy man, a renouncer.37
This text not only depicts the three men as physically real rather than imagined by Gautama; it also adds a fourth man, also physically real, who represents the answer to the question posed by the first three: the holy man, the transcendent fourth, who counterbalances the worldly triad.
A Tibetan text follows the pattern of this last version, with one significant variation: the Bodhisattva sees a (real) old man, sick man, and dead man, but the fourth is different:
And yet on another occasion he met a deva [god] of the pure abode who had assumed the appearance of a shaved and shorn mendicant, bearing an alms-bowl and going from door to door. . . .38
Why did a god assume the form of a mendicant? One can imagine several good reasons: the transcendent fourth is of a nature different from the preceding three; the real mendicant—the Buddhist monk—does not yet exist, since the Buddha has yet to invent him. Yet our second text was not troubled by the first objection, and none of the other texts that we will encounter is troubled by the second; for if there were as yet no Buddhist monks in India, there were certainly other kinds of renouncers. A better answer to the question is, I think, supplied by the hypothesis that the Tibetan text has conflated the second version (in which Gautama actually sees the men) and the story as it is told in a number of other texts, beginning with the Pali introduction to the Jātaka, in which the gods take the form of all four of the men. The Bodhisattva goes in his chariot to a park, and at that moment the gods think, “The time for the enlightenment of Prince Siddhattha draws near; we must show him a sign.” They change one of their number into a decrepit old man, visible to no one but Siddhattha. Subsequently the Bodhisattva encounters a diseased man whom the gods had fashioned, a dead man whom the gods had fashioned, and a monk whom the gods had fashioned.39
A Sanskrit version of this episode continues to regard the four men as products of the gods rather than as natural occurrences or thoughts, but the fourth man continues to be distinguished from the other three:
When the gods saw the city as joyful as paradise itself, they made a man worn out by old age in order to incite the son of the king to go forth. . . . He asked the charioteer, “Is this some transformation in the man, or his natural state?” Then the gods deluded [moha] the charioteer’s mind so that he spoke of what he should have kept secret, not seeing the fault [in speaking]. . . . The gods created a man diseased. . . . Then the Bodhisattva began to think about old age, and disease, and death. A man dressed as a monk [bhikṣu] came up to him, unseen by other men, and spoke to him. Then, as the king’s son was watching, he flew up to the sky. For he was a god who had taken that form; he had seen other Buddhas and had come to him to make him remember.40
The charioteer, who answered freely in the first Pali text, now identifies the three men only because the gods have deluded him; yet it is because of this delusion that he speaks the truth instead of lying, as the Bodhisattva’s father would have had him do. And where the gods make the first three men, one of them actually becomes the fourth and speaks to Gautama, which none of the others does. Moreover, though the first three men are visible to the charioteer as well as to the Buddha (and, presumably, to other men as well, as are the “real” men in the other versions), the fourth man is visible only to the future Buddha; he flies up right before the Buddha’s eyes, just as Athena does in the Odyssey when no one but Odysseus knows that she is a god. Why must the gods make the first three men if they behave just like “natural” men (i.e., they are visible to others besides the Buddha, unlike dream images or thoughts)? Because, according to this text, the king had gone to great pains to remove from his son’s path all of the real old, sick, and dead men that he might encounter. Thus the gods have to produce an illusion in order to replace the reality that has been unnaturally distorted, even as they have to delude the charioteer in order to make sure that he will speak the truth.
A final version of this episode further encases the four sights within the framework of other dreams; indeed, the chapter in which the prince encounters the four men is called “Dreams”:
King Śuddhodana, Gautama’s father, had a dream in which he saw his son leaving the palace surrounded by gods, and he saw that he became a wandering religious mendicant, wearing an ochre robe. And so he had three palaces built and stationed five hundred men on the stairs so that the prince could not leave without being noticed. When the prince announced his intention to go out to the pleasure garden, the king stationed his men all along the prince’s route; but at the very instant when the Bodhisattva [Gautama] came out of the eastern gate of the city, by the mental power of the Bodhisattva himself there appeared an old man. The Bodhisattva asked his charioteer who the man was, and the charioteer told him about old age. Another time, as the Bodhisattva went out of the southern gate, he saw a sick man, and another time, by the western gate, he saw a dead man. Finally, when he went out of the northern gate, the gods used Gautama’s own mental powers to fashion on the road the image of a holy man. When the Bodhisattva saw him, he asked his charioteer about him, and the charioteer replied, “That is a man called a monk [bhikṣu].”41
Gautama’s father, the king, has a predictive dream that he rightly interprets and tries to avert. Yet the Bodhisattva manages to escape all the same, and the dream comes true. By his own mental powers (anubhāva: authority, belief, intention) he produces the illusion of a man he has never seen and does not understand (for he asks the charioteer about him). Then he “sees” (a verb that can indicate the perception of a dream as well as a waking reality) a sick man and a dead man. The fourth man, the monk, is the ambiguous pivot: his ochre robe, always an evil omen in a Hindu dream, is a symbol of evil for King Suddhodana; but for the Bodhisattva, and for the Buddhist reader, it takes on a new meaning as the emblem of the future order that Gautama is about to create. This fourth man appears first in the king’s dream and then outside; he is visible to the charioteer, just as the other three men were. All four images are thus accessible to public corroboration, whether they are naturally there to be seen or are made by the gods or imagined by the Bodhisattva.
This last text goes on to describe other dreams that occur when the king continues to fight against the omens. This episode is also a part of our very first Pali text (in which the Buddha merely thinks of the three men), which tells it thus:
When the Tathāgata [Gautama] was not yet wholly awakened but was awakening, he had five great dreams. He dreamt that the world was his bed of state, that the mountain Himalaya was his pillow; this meant that he was becoming fully awakened. Then he dreamt that grass came out of his navel and grew till it reached the clouds; this meant that he would proclaim the noble doctrine of the eightfold path as far as gods and men exist. He dreamt that white worms with black heads crept up over his feet to his knees; this meant that white-robed householders would find life-long refuge in him. He dreamt that four birds of various colors fell at his feet and became pure white; the four classes of society [varṇas] would take up renunciation and find release. And, finally, he dreamt that he walked on a great mountain of shit but wasn’t dirtied by it; this meant that he would receive robes, alms, lodgings, and medicine but would not be attached to them.42
We have encountered several of these dreams in traditional Hindu dream books; indeed, the Buddhist commentator on this passage shows his awareness of this heritage when he rehearses the four causes of dreams: somatic disturbances due to bile, etc., will produce dreams such as falling from a precipice or flying or being chased by a beast or a robber; other dreams are caused by previous events, by possession by the gods (sometimes for one’s good, sometimes otherwise), and as premonitions (the Buddha’s dreams were of this fourth, premonitory, type). There are also a few personal or universal themes. But all of these motifs, personal or traditional, are given decidedly untraditional (i.e., non-Hindu) Buddhist glosses. The archaic image of the magic plant growing out of the navel (which appears in Hinduism as the lotus growing out of Viṣṇu’s navel) becomes the doctrine of the eightfold path; the worms that surge over Gautama’s feet are merely householders; the falling birds, so pregnant with meaning for ancient Indians as well as ancient Greeks, now become (by virtue of a pun on the word varṇa, “color” or “class”) symbols of the classes of society; and the mountain of shit, which looms so ominously in Hindu dreams, is reduced to being a symbol of the material goods that Buddhist monks had perforce to receive from Buddhist lay people—a problem that is indeed highly charged for Buddhists, but culturally rather than personally charged.
In the Sanskrit text that tells of King Śuddhodana’s dream, the dream that the Bodhisattva himself dreamed is also related, in terms somewhat different from those of the Pali canon:
He saw enormous hands and feet waving about in the waters of the four oceans; the whole earth became a magnificent bed, and Mount Meru a crown. He saw the shadows of darkness clearing away, and a great umbrella, which came out of the earth to shed light on the triple world and dispel its suffering. Four black-and-white animals licked their feet; birds of four colors came and became one color. He climbed a great mountain of disgusting shit, but he wasn’t soiled by it. He saw a river in spate, carrying along millions of creatures in its current, and he became a boat and carried them to the far bank. He saw many people suffering from diseases, and he became a doctor and gave them medicine and saved them all. Then he sat on Mount Meru, his throne, and he saw his disciples and the gods bowing low before him. He saw victory in battle, and a joyous cry from the gods in the sky.43
Some of the more dreamlike images from the Pali-canon version are omitted (the grass from the navel, the worms on the feet). The more conventional, culturally accessible images are retained and expanded. As a result of this editing, and perhaps also as a result of the assumption that the audience would be familiar with the Pali story, the explicit commentary is omitted; the secondary elaboration is subtly integrated into the dream itself.
This Sanskrit text had added, we saw, as a prelude to Gautama’s own dream, a description of his father’s dream, which consisted of a fairly simple, entirely realistic vision of the Bodhisattva’s renunciation. It also added, as a kind of postlude to the half-illusory experience of the four men (and as a prelude to Gautama’s own dream, which comes at the very end), the dream that Gautama’s wife had on the eve of his awakening. This dream is more elaborate and surreal than Gautama’s dream, but it, too, echoes many traditional Indian dream motifs:
When King Śuddhodana learned that the Bodhisattva had seen these sights, he guarded him all the more carefully and ordered the women of the harim to double their efforts to seduce him. That night, as Gautama slept in the same bed with his wife, Gopā, she saw this dream: The earth shook, trees dried up and fell to earth, the sun and moon fell from the sky. She saw her own hair cut off, and her hands cut off, and her feet, and she was completely naked, stripped of her ornaments. . . . She awakened from this dream and asked Gautama what it meant, for, she said, “My own memory is full of error [bhrānti]; I can’t see anything any more, and my mind is disturbed by sadness.” He told her that the earthquake meant that she would be honored by all the gods, demons, and ghosts; the uprooted trees and torn-out hair meant that she would soon uproot from her mind the trap set by impure emotions. The fallen moon and sun meant that the enemies born of the emotions would soon be cast down. That she had seen her body naked meant that she would soon cease to be a woman and would become a man. . . . “Go to sleep, Gopā,” he said; “these are good omens for you.”44
Gopā’s nightmare predicts her loss of her husband and hence her loss of status as a woman; the dream contains a number of images that traditional Indian dream books identify as bad omens—bad, that is, from the point of view of saṃsāra, which is the point of view of the dream books: loss of power, loss of beauty, loss of children, and so forth. Yet, from the Bodhisattva’s point of view—the mokṣa standpoint—they are good omens. Once again we see that there is no such thing as a good dream from an absolute point of view; dreams, like everything else, are relative to the observer and to the interpreter. Gautama’s interpretation of Gopā’s dream is thus slanted (like Vessantara’s interpretation of Maddī’s dream), but the text accepts his view as the true one.
For our purposes, however, the importance of the dreams that Śuddhodana and Gopā and the Bodhisattva himself have is not so much their content as the implications of the context that they supply for the story. The fact that all three dream similar dreams (that is, dreams having the same latent content though somewhat different manifest content) establishes Gautama’s experience as a kind of shared dream, shared by the two people closest to him, his father and his wife. That the dream is for them a nightmare and for him a happy dream demonstrates the way in which a single reality—the fact that Gautama is about to leave the palace—is differently reflected in different minds. But the fact that these three dreams appear in the chapter in which Gautama sees the four men has other implications as well. Does this mean that the four men, too, are his dreams? If so, these Sanskrit texts are direct expansions of those Pali versions in which the Buddha merely thinks about the four men (or three men). In any case, the Buddhist texts—of which the examples I have cited are just a few of many, though they cover the major patterns—do not seem to care whether the sights appear naturally or mentally or supernaturally. The Buddha’s vision of reality is a vision of the suffering that the king has taken such great pains to conceal from his son, building ever higher dams to hold back the floods of human experience. The irony lies in the fact that this vision is sometimes real but sometimes just an illusion, created by the gods or by the Bodhisattva’s own unconscious (the part of his mind that knows what he does not know that he knows) to replace the reality that he is unable to see. He sees only a shadow of the world in which men grow old and sick and then die, even though that world really does exist and is the world in which he is going to spend the rest of his life. It is illusion that shows him what is real.
Gautama rode out of his palace on his horse, Kanthaka, just as Lavaṇa rode out of his palace on the magic horse from Sindh, and the two figures have many other things in common as well. But there are great differences: the Buddha sought his enlightenment after the birth, not after the death, of his son; unlike Rāma and Arjuna, the Buddha did not go back to being a royal emperor but became instead a spiritual emperor; and the Buddha witnessed the sufferings of others, and pitied them, whereas Lavaṇa suffered primarily for his own sake, though he did witness the sufferings of the Untouchables. More important, where the Buddhist king may awaken from kingship, the Hindu king must, finally, awaken to kingship. David Shulman has shown why this is so:
The king is linked with transcendence in more than one way. His “exile” opens up his world to the outside, i.e., to a deeper reality—one in which evil is tangibly revealed; in which truth is expressed bluntly; in which his normal social self is held up for scrutiny, and found wanting. This contact with a darker face of reality ultimately nourishes the king; his “descent” is painful, dangerous, unhappy, but clearly necessary. It leads directly to his rebirth: we have seen that there is a correspondence between the king’s exile and his dīkṣā [initiation]. The ritual of kingship must include this stage; it is no less constituent of the king’s role than his “white” periods.45
Once more we see the myths acting out a metaphor. Where the usual initiation is “like” a rebirth, the initiation of the king in the myth may involve actually becoming an embryo in a new womb. Midway between the two, between the saṃsāra-oriented consecration ritual and the mokṣa-oriented myths of complete rebirth, fall many of the stories in this corpus, in which the king keeps one foot in each world by dreaming of his rebirth.
Hariścandra and Tārāvaloka, like the Buddha, do not return to their kingdoms; Lavaṇa, Arjuna, and Rāma do. Triśanku and Vessantara are ambiguous cases. The myth of the king among the Untouchables thus remains open-ended, and this allows it to express both saṃsāra-oriented and mokṣa-oriented value systems. This same open-endedness is what enables the pattern to be applied not only to the king but also to the Brahmin who is transformed into an Untouchable—to Gādhi as well as to Lavaṇa. The Hindu king (like Lavaṇa) begins within saṃsāra and goes out of that world into Untouchability, which he experiences as a kind of renunciation; but he usually ends up back inside the material world. The Buddhist king—in the paradigm set by Gautama—begins inside the material world, too, but he ends up outside it, “released” either into renunciation on earth or into eternal bliss in heaven (or in nirvāṇa). Hariścandra, though a Hindu king, follows the Buddhist pattern or, rather, the early bhakti pattern, which owes much to Buddhism: though he ends up in a limited heaven, there is the possibility of a final release into a heaven that is infinite in time and space, a combination of mokṣa and the pleasures of saṃsāra.
A similar set of options is available to the Brahmin/Untouchable in these tales. The Brahmin householder (whom we will soon encounter in a folk variant of the tale of Gādhi) is like the Hindu king: he begins in the material world and then experiences Untouchability, but he returns to the world of the Brahmin householder. The Brahmin ascetic (like Nārada or Gādhi in the Sanskrit text) by contrast begins as a renouncer, outside the material and marital world, and experiences Untouchability as a kind of involvement in the world, complete with a wife and family that he does not have in his original life. In the end, he ends up outside the world again. Thus, of all four of the main protagonists—Hindu king, Buddhist king, Brahmin ascetic, and Brahmin householder—only one, the Buddhist king, undergoes, at the end of the myth, a final transformation, a complete change in his world. The other three undergo an experience that transforms their understanding of their lives, worldly or nonworldly, but does not lead them to abandon those lives. For them, the other world is a nice place to visit but not a place where they want to live forever. It is a place where they learn and from which they return.
But the world to which they return is not exactly the same as the world from which they began their journey; they have changed, and it has changed. We have seen that the child who believes that his dreams are real and the adult who believes that his dreams are real are only superficially alike; for the adult who returns to his belief does so only after he has passed through the stage of the grownup child who believes that his dreams are not real. So, too, the involvement in worldly life of the king who has passed through his stage of renunciation is quite different from the involvement of the king who has never known any other kind of life. After the journey, the king is in a sense released from involvement even while he is engaged in it. Kṛṣṇa in the Gītā taught Arjuna that, once he understood the truth, he would be free from the danger of amassing karma while performing his actions. He could, as it were, import a kind of mokṣa back into his life of apparent saṃsāra; he could have both at once. Similarly, Nāgārjuna taught that the truly realized person knows that saṃsāra and nirvāṇa are the same; he lives in saṃsāra but experiences nirvāṇa. And the Brahmin renouncer, Gādhi or Nārada, undergoes a similar transformation. His renunciation is flawed, at first, because he does not understand the nature of involvement; once he has experienced it and rejected it, he becomes truly free for the first time. The paradigm of Gautama, too, is more complex than it appears at first. Though Gautama goes from the world of involvement (as a king) into the world of renunciation (as a monk), he also can be said to go from an unreal world (the artificial ivory tower that his father constructs for him, the illusory palace in the sky) to a real world (the world of suffering). He goes from the other world into this world. We might chart these various paradigms as they appear in figure 3, where “O” stands for the other world, “S” for samsāra, and “M” for mokṣa (in the broad sense of freedom from the fruits of involvement rather than in the sense of final release and absorption into Godhead or nirvāṇa),46
It is tempting for a Western reader to believe that the Hindu king’s experience among the Untouchables was enlightening in a social sense—that he realized how the Untouchables suffered and resolved to use his kingship somehow to mitigate their sufferings. Such a resolution might well be supported, if not inspired, by the philosophical point of the story, that the caste distinctions between king and Untouchable are just as illusory as all the other mental structures that man imposes arbitrarily upon the universe. It must be stated, however, that this is not the point that the story is designed to convey; quite the contrary. Although caste has no ultimate reality, the text tells us, there are only two possible lines of action that one can take when one has come to this realization: either one withdraws from the social system entirely (this is the ascetic or mokṣa or Buddhist solution,47 which Rāma is at first tempted to embrace) or one accepts it for what it is and does not worry about the enormous disparity between the king’s riches and the Untouchable’s poverty, since neither one is ultimately real (this is the saṃsāra solution). The doctrine of illusion could have been used to challenge the baseless strictures of the social system, but it was not; it was used, instead, to preserve the stability of the socioeconomic and political status quo, rechanneling whatever discontent there might be into abstract formulations.48 Lavaṇa is said to experience pity when he returns to the Untouchable village, but he does not do anything about it (as a compassionate Buddhist king would do). Unlike King Lear, who experiences a less violent physical transformation but a more violent psychological transformation, Lavaṇa does not change his character or even his life. He does, however, become much more of what he was before—a wiser and more powerful king.
Mary Douglas has suggested that the Indian kings are an example of that group of people who want to grab and hold power, while the Brahmins represent that group who (like Isaiah Berlin’s “intelligentsia”) don’t want power and try to keep their hands clean of it (also allowing themselves full license to criticize those who have it). Only the Brahmins could make the doctrine of illusion fundamental to their whole epistemology. Even so, the doctrine of illusion could provide a basis either for a hopeless revolt against tyranny or for an acquiescence in its inevitability.49 India went the way of acquiescence, but not before managing to formulate a theory of ideal kingship in which kings were persuaded to take upon themselves the attitude more characteristic of Brahmins. Thus the kings were placed in a position where they had both to exercise power and to shun it.
Figure 3. Hindu and Buddhist Kings and Ascetics
For a Hindu who reads the Yogavāsiṣṭtha, the gruesome description of the life lived by the Untouchables shows not how unhappy they are but how horrid they are. The king is the one whose sufferings, caused by the Untouchables, matter. He is the one whose suffering is therefore real; theirs may be, or may not be. The myths of illusion reveal the vanity of society and the hollowness of proof by consensus, but they do not challenge the cruelties brought about by society.
The bias of the myths of the Untouchable kings is also demonstrated by the fact that the transformation works in only one direction: the hero, whether king or Brahmin, can fall into Untouchability, but we have no tales of Untouchables who succeed in “dreaming” themselves into being kings or Brahmins (though in some South Indian village myths Untouchables masquerade as Brahmins). In the inner frame of the Gādhi story, where an apparent Untouchable rises to kingship (not by dreaming or dying but simply by masquerading), he is unmasked and destroyed, like Triśanku in the Rāmāyaṇa. That the Yogavāsiṣṭha is not primarily concerned with the problem of caste as a social problem is, I think, indicated by the casualness with which the question of pollution is treated. Why do the courtiers not reject King Lavaṇa when they learn that he has lived so many years as an Untouchable? This could be because they do not treat his miraculous experiences as really real; for, in contrast, when it was revealed that King Gavala had been born as an Untouchable and had merely walked from his Untouchable village to the royal city, without crossing any ontological barrier, he was indeed treated as a polluted man. Similarly, in the Devīhhāgavata Purāṇa version of the tale of Triśanku, the Goddess purifies Satyavrata (after he has become a flesh-eating ghoul) so that he may ascend the throne. These instances demonstrate that the Hindus were aware of the pollution that resulted from the king’s sojourn among the Untouchables or nonvegetarian demons. Yet, against these examples, we have, in addition to the story of King Lavaṇa, many tales of kings who became kings again after being Untouchables and even—like Hariścandra—went to heaven after being Untouchables. Either the dream experience is treated as unreal—which is not, I think, the case in the Yogavāsiṣṭtha—or the king is purified after his sojourn (by asceticism, or by devotion, or by coming to understand the basic unreality of all experience, not the dream experience in particular). In any case, it is the mental, not the social, transformation of the king that is stressed in all of the myths of illusion.
A key to this distinction lies in the fact that, though the king may be an Untouchable, his wife may not. Hariścandra and his wife do not return to the palace after their sojourn among the Untouchables, nor can Lavaṇa bring his Untouchable wife back to court. Conveniently, as well as traditionally (in dream tales the world over), the polluting wife dies in her own world. For the hard, social reality that would be implied if the king were to bring the wife back into the waking world goes against the grain of everything the text is trying to demonstrate. Only the far softer, more elusive reality of enlightenment clings to the king as he crosses the barrier back into his court. The context of the myth is philosophy, not sociology.
The people with whom the king undergoes his sufferings represent the experience of the extremity of misery; they also represent the reversal of normal social values, reversals that take place in time of crisis and may provide the stimulus for religious conversion. But these people are also a source of unorthodox knowledge. The Untouchables are closely associated with women and demons, both of whom are purveyors of valuable, if dangerous, antinomian doctrines. In the Yogavāsiṣṭha, Queen Cūḍālā is the heroine of a long story in which she manipulates a series of complex illusions in order to enlighten her husband (see plate 9).50 Several other women also appear as interlocutors: besides Līlā, whom we have already encountered, there are Surucī, Viśucī, and Sarasvatī, to name a few. The translator, Mitra, regards this as “curious” in view of the fact that, after the time of the Upaniṣads, “female education was subsequently abrogated by law.”51 Women do, indeed, appear as teachers in the Upaniṣads, the fountainhead of Hindu misogyny, so the paradox is an ancient one.
Moreover, in the Yogavāsiṣṭha, two of the key figures in the tales of Lavaṇa and Gādhi are simultaneously women and Untouchables (the women whom Lavaṇa and Gādhi marry). Another character is at once a woman and a demon: the ogress Karkaṭī, who narrates many of the tales in the Yogavāsiṣṭha, Many texts, Buddhist as well as Hindu, describe female spirits (Yakṣinīs) who come to men in the night and give them magic powers in return for the sexual gratification that these succubi so ravenously crave.52 In one text it is said: “He who desires to have intercourse with supernatural women can evoke with his mantras all kinds of female demons and live with them in the nether world [pātāla] for a complete world period [kalpa].”53 Teun Goudriaan comments on the composite image of demon and damsel:
It is perhaps striking that experiences similar to those just described, viz. the appearance at first of demons evoking fear and afterwards of beautiful damsels offering their love, were part of the Buddha’s “temptation by Mara”; and siddhis like these also occur to the yogins or Buddhist monks who strive after release by way of a course of introspective psychical exertion. A yogin might be able to make use of these siddhis if he chooses to do so; but he should abstain from them if he really clings to liberation from existence as his direct goal.54
There are two ways of viewing this ambiguity. The phrase “offering their love” may be regarded as a threat (to Hindu or Buddhist yogins headed for mokṣa) or as a reward (to folk heroes committed to saṃsāra). The dream may therefore represent an initiatory test, conveying (to the ascetic) powers that should be rejected or (to the prince) magic powers that are highly prized. Conventional, saṃsāra-oriented Hinduism viewed women in general (and demons in general) as bad, while antinomian, mokṣa-oriented Hinduism generally viewed both women and demons as good (or at least as potentially good).
Yet mokṣa-oriented Hinduism also regarded women, particularly demonic women, as the root of all evil. Women were considered illusion incarnate, the sexual power that deludes and maddens otherwise sane and rational men. The saint and poet Kabīr called Māyā a demonic woman, an ogress (ḍākiṇī or “hell-cat, hungry for flesh”): “Māyā is an Ogress,/she eats up everything:/You whore, I’ll knock out all your teeth,/if you dare come near the Saints!”55 Thus, depending on one’s point of view, women are the perpetrators of illusion or the people who teach one to become free from illusion. Apparently it takes one to know one.
Demonic women are of course particularly ambiguous in this regard. The ogress Karkaṭī met a king in the Himālayas and was about to devour him when she discovered that he had supernatural knowledge; the king invited her to his palace and provided her with the bodies of murderers and other criminals so that she could continue to indulge her carnivorous tastes while devoting herself constantly to her meditations (see plate 10).56 In this tale there is a direct correspondence between the antisocial sin of eating human flesh and the (also antisocial) seeking of superhuman knowledge. Uneasy about this connection, the text attempts to rationalize it by providing Karkati with the bodies only of evildoers, a familiar maneuver in Indian theodicies.57 Another attempt to deal with the combination of cannibalism and special demonic knowledge appears elsewhere in the Yogavāsiṣṭha: a male vampire addicted to human flesh but nevertheless deeply ethical would not eat anyone who could answer certain questions (of which one is, “Countless lives are generated like dreams within dreams; whose dreams are they?”). He met a king who answered his questions brilliantly, and so the vampire did not eat him (see plate 11).58 (The story of the king and the vampire is a well-known Indian tale; in one famous variant, the king is Vikramāditya.)59
A special kind of magic power is somehow held by these creatures who live beyond the human pale and beyond human laws. As the traditional masters of māyā, demons know better than anyone else how treacherous and how convincing it can be. Since they use it themselves, they are less likely than anyone else to be taken in by it; they alone can see through it (though they are sometimes outillusioned by the gods, hoist by their own petard).60 Moreover, as outsiders, as antinomian figures, challengers of the householder establishment, demons are in many ways analogues of the ascetic sages—people like Nārada and the Buddha—who wandered about ancient India, teaching doctrines of mokṣa that challenged the values of the world of saṃsāra.61 And the experience of life among the demons, or of life as a woman or as an Untouchable, is the experience of the shadow side of humanity and of happiness, an experience that breaks through the deluding surface of seductive pleasures to expose an underworld that expresses the treacherous flimsiness of life.
Finally, there is a power that inheres in the demons’ addiction to human flesh and in their position outside the Hindu pale, and that is a power they share with Untouchables. Throughout the Yogavāsiṣṭha, the equation between Untouchables and demons is explicit. Lavaṇa’s Untouchable wife tells him, “I am like a female ghoul, an eater of men, horses, and elephants; . . . my father is like a vampire.”62 Lavaṇa says, “I acted like a vampire, prowling about for fish on the banks of the river, . . . and I was so horrible that even the vampires ran from me in terror.”63 So, too, in the tale of Gādhi, the Untouchable who becomes a king is said to be like a flesh-eating ogre from whom all the people flee, and the people among whom the Untouchable lives are called Bhūtas (“ghosts” or “has-beens”).64 The demonic illusory power is deeply ingrained in the world: the universe is said to be like a ghoul made to frighten children.65
As the Untouchables are demons, so their village is the home of demons: it is hell. The king says: “The girl brought me to her father, as if the Fury of Torture (Yatanā) were leading me to hell. I was like a man who had fallen into hell, and after escaping from those foul hell-grounds, I lay exhausted, as if I had escaped from hell.”66 The descent into hell appears throughout Indian mythology (and beyond) as a metaphor for the spiritual journey of initiation; elements of that pattern are clearly relevant here. In the tale of Gādhi, when the Brahmin returns to the village where he lived as an Untouchable, he regards it as hell.67
The experience of suffering takes place among liminal people in a liminal time and place. Geographically, the king crosses the threshold into his other life in the Vindhyas, the mountain range that forms the southernmost border of the “Aryan land” of the north and hence the boundary of classical Hindu civilization. Temporally, the time is doomsday, the moment of the death and rebirth of the universe or, more precisely, the moment when all the things that seemed to be real are reduced to the nothingness that was always their true nature, the moment when the magic picture-show machine is turned off at last. The recurrent image of doomsday in these myths serves to emphasize the insubstantiality of the world; the things we think of as hard and permanent are constantly destroyed and recreated.
Doomsday images bombard us: the magician’s wand whirls like a cloud of fire at doomsday; the king rides the horse like a doomsday cloud on a mountain shaken by earthquakes; the king is carried along as swiftly as the floods of doomsday; the desert is burnt out like the universe at doomsday; the king wanders in the jungle as Doom wanders over the empty universe at doomsday; the huts of the Untouchables are like the clusters of ghosts at doomsday; famine comes to the village as doomsday comes to the material world; an untimely doomsday leaves the place a burnt-out shell, like the universe burnt by the fire of the twelve doomsday suns.68 And in the tale of Gādhi, the cremation fire burns Gādhi’s corpse as the submarine doomsday fire burns the ocean waters; when his city is filled with fires in which people commit suicide, it is like the doomsday blaze; when he returns to the Untouchable village, it is broken down and ruined like the universe at doomsday.69
One particular doomsday image recurs throughout the story of Lavaṇa: the image of Mārkaṇḍeya slipping out of the mouth of the sleeping Viṣṇu. King Lavaṇa’s attendants and ministers question him as he awakens from his trance, just as the gods questioned Mārkaṇḍeya when he was terrified by the doomsday flood; Lavaṇa reaches the tree from which he is about to be suspended, just as Mārkaṇḍeya reached the great banyan tree after wandering about in the universal ocean, and Lavaṇa spends the night—which seems an eternity—by that tree; he is also plunged into delusion, just as Mārkaṇḍeya plunged into the universal ocean.70 Like Mārkaṇḍeya, too, he loses touch with what he initially thinks of as reality; he experiences a new vision of reality but loses it again when he returns to his first world. For both of them, the transition represents not merely the death of the individual, the dreamer, but the death of the entire world of the dreamer: doomsday.
The world of the Untouchables is, therefore, not merely the place where people at the bottom of the Indian social scale dwell; it is symbolic of the shadow side of the entire universe. The symbolism of the king’s adventure among the Untouchables is all the more compelling because the story is an ancient one in India, so widespread as to be almost a set-piece. We have already encountered important variants of it in the tales of Triśanku and Hariścandra, but there are other texts that link the theme even more closely to the Yogavāsiṣṭha, both through the names of the protagonists and through the motifs that recur throughout the corpus. The Rāmāyaṇa, in particular, narrates several cycles of stories of this type, all of which revolve around the two sages, Viśvāmitra and Vasiṣṭha, who are the doctrinal anchor pins of the Yogavāsiṣṭha.
Vasiṣṭha is a Brahmin, like Gādhi. Viśvāmitra is a king, like Lavaṇa, but he is a king who becomes a priest and who competes with Vasiṣṭha as royal sage versus Brahmin sage. In the Epics, Viśvāmitra is connected by birth with a king named Gādhi (“Singer”) and another named Gālava.71 Viśvāmitra thus provides in his person a link between the split personalities of Gādhi and Gavala, the Brahmin and the king. Viśvāmitra and Vasiṣṭha are also closely involved in the saga of Lavaṇa’s grandfather, Hariścandra, and Viśvāmitra himself is implicated in several myths in which he moves among Untouchables who eat not only dogs and cows but people.72 In all of these tales, Viśvāmitra and Vasiṣṭha interact with kings who are cursed to sojourn among Untouchables in another world that is an inversion of our waking world.
This other world is an upside-down world in which people eat people. This practice is, more than anything else, the mark of the world of the Untouchables, but it is also the mark of all human society under extraordinary circumstances. For many Indian texts relate that in time of drought—and particularly during droughts that last for twelve years, the period of the king’s sufferings or initiation—people eat one another; parents even eat their children, and children their parents.73 For children to eat their parents is the milder form of the violation of normal codes of behavior, because Indians believe that the child in the womb eats the body of the mother and, of course, once born drinks her milk (which is made of her blood).74 But for parents to eat their children is a particularly extreme reversal of normal behavior; this is the sin that plagued the ancient Greeks (as in the theme of Thyestes’ feast in the Oresteia). It appears in India as a metaphor for the upside-down world of the saints: “the cow is sucking at the calf’s teat.”75
The other world is equated with the part of this world that is beyond the pale, the village of the Untouchables; it is also equated with the part of all of us that is normally held in bounds by society but that bursts out in times of emergency. The other world is a place where those whom we eat in this world eat us.76 The nightmares that haunt the unconscious mind—the mind that dreams—appear in the writings of Plato and Freud as their version of the other world, the shadow of rational human experience. In the poetry of the Indian saints, the normal, illusory universe is itself characterized by such inversions of normal action, in verses designed to shock us out of our faith in the world that has such social forms; thus Kabīr speaks of a “jolly woman eating her neighbors for breakfast” along with a buffalo smoking a pipe and leeches who cough.77
Folk Variants on the Tales of Lavaṇa and Gādhi
The relationship between this world and the other world and the relationship between the world of social reality and the world of dreams are differently conceived in some of the folk variants of the stories of Gādhi and Lavaṇa. Gādhi appears as a Brahmin householder rather than a Brahmin ascetic in a story recorded by John Hinton Knowles in Srinagar, Kashmir, in 1893. Knowles calls this tale “Metempsychosis,” and he reports that he heard it from Narayan Kol of Fateh Kadel (who did not associate it with the Yogavāsiṣṭtha):
A young man who had fasted for twelve years and thought that he had “perfected himself in religious matters” rested under a tree. A crow perched above him and shat on his head. He was very much annoyed at this and turned toward the bird; and the bird died. The young man continued his journey and reached a house, where he begged for food. The woman of the house asked him to wait until her husband arrived; the holy man was angry at this reply and was about to curse her when she interrupted him by saying, “I am not a crow, that you can burn me with your angry looks.” The young man fell silent, wondering how she had come to know of the incident of the crow. Her husband returned, they all had dinner, and afterwards the man of the house told this tale:
“A Brahmin prayed for years to know something of the state of the departed. At last the gods complied with his request. Early one morning, while he was bathing according to custom, his spirit left him and went into the body of an infant, the child of a cobbler. He grew up, married, and had many children. One day, he was made aware of his [former] high caste; he went away and became king when he was chosen by the royal elephant and hawk.
“But the wife he had had as a cobbler got to know of his whereabouts and went to join him. When it became known that he and his wife were cobblers, people fled or burnt themselves to death, and the king immolated himself, too. His spirit went and reoccupied the corpse of the Brahmin, which remained by the riverside, and the Brahmin went home. ‘How quickly you have performed your ablutions this morning!’ said his wife. The Brahmin wondered if he had seen the future state or merely experienced a dream. A few days later, a beggar came with the tale of the king who was a cobbler. The Brahmin mused, ‘How can these things be? I have been a cobbler for several years. I have reigned as a king for several years—and this man confirms the truth of my thoughts. Yet my wife declares that I have not been absent from this house more than the usual time; and I believe her, for she does not look any older, nor is the place changed in any way.’
“Thus ends my story, whereof the explanation is this: The soul passes through various stages of existence according to a man’s thoughts, words, and acts, and in the great Hereafter a day is equal to a yug [Sanskrit yuga, aeon], and a yug is equal to a day.”
At the end of the story, the woman asked the stranger if he wanted anything more. He replied, “Only happiness.” She advised him to go home to his parents, “who,” she said, “have wept themselves blind because of you.”78
This folk variant transforms several elements of the Sanskrit text. The frame story acts out a simile that plays an important part in the explanatory portion of the Gādhi story, the maxim of the crow and the fruit in the tree, a symbol of inexplicable coincidence that we will meet in chapter six. Women are more important in this text than in the Sanskrit version. The frame story contains a good wife, the purveyor of special wisdom, like the female interlocutors in the Yogavāsiṣṭha, but also of worldly wisdom: it is this woman who points the final moral and sends the boy back to his worldly life with his parents, even as Vasiṣṭha sends Rāma back to his duties as a young king. In doing so she invokes yet another frame for the story: from the standpoint of the parents, who are “weeping themselves blind,” the young man is the lost son in yet another story, one that we are never told. In the innermost story, a woman is also important. The cobbler—Untouchable because he handles leather, the skin of the cow—has a wife who does not die, as Gādhi’s dream wife does; she is the instrument of his unmasking as a king. But the most striking departure from the Sanskrit text lies in the fact that the Brahmin in the intermediate layer—the Brahmin who is imagined by the householder and who imagines the cobbler—has a wife. Gàdhi does not; indeed, it is this fact that Gādhi uses as the basis of his argument when he first dismisses his dream life: it does not correspond with the chaste circumstances of his waking life. Nārada, too, has no wife in his waking life, but in his dream life as a woman he has a husband who, like the cobbler’s wife, survives. Finally, Hanuman vehemently denies that he can be the same as the “shadow” Hanuman who has a wife. The wife of the Brahmin in the Kashmiri text is, moreover, the pivot of his argument. It is because of her that he does not trust or attempt to prove (as Gādhi eventually does) his vision as a cobbler/king, for she has persuaded him to reject and therefore not to attempt to validate this vision. The Brahmin here dismisses the report of the man who “confirms his vision,” a man who is, significantly, merely “a beggar” in this text and not, as in the Sanskrit, “a Brahmin guest”—the ultimate authority for verification. Instead, he is completely won over by the common-sense, banal details of his wife’s arguments and by the unchanging quality of his bourgeois life, even though the storyteller does offer a perfectly good explanation for the validity of the cobbler/king episode: the soul moves very fast, and therefore many things can actually happen to the soul when it is out of the Brahmin’s body, while just a moment passes for the body in its slower time frame. The qualities of the transmigrating soul are more explicitly relevant here than in the Sanskrit tale of Gādhi; here the cobbler goes to the city as a result of his recollecting his previous high caste (the high caste of the Brahmin who is dreaming that he is a cobbler) and not as the result of the death of his family (one of whom, the wife, remains alive to expose him). The text does not tell us how it is that the cobbler realized he was part of a Brahmin’s dream or why he tried to regain his waking status inside his dream life instead of waking up. Nor are the text’s explanations ever actually narrated to the Brahmin, the way Gādhi’s experiences are explained by Viṣṇu. The worldly values of the Kashmiri folk tradition have twisted the point of the story and given the Brahmin both a wife and the down-to-earth skepticism appropriate to a married man.
In this Kashmiri folk version, the validity of the dream episode is never tested and, therefore, never proven. It is most likely that the folk variant represents the original version, on which the Yogavāsistha has rung an important change, for the tale lacking the test at the end is found elsewhere in India as well. R. K. Narayan tells the story of Lavaṇa, “From the Yogavāsistha,” but it ends at the moment when the king, waking up and crying, “Where is that magician?”, finds that the magician has vanished.79 The point of the story in these simpler variants is that the whole thing was just an illusion, and so it never occurs to anyone to test it.
A similar transformation takes place in the tales of Nārada; the earlier ones merely describe the illusion, while only one later version begins to investigate the reality status of the people in the illusion. So, too, in a late Sanskrit retelling of the tale of Lavaṇa, the point is simply that some people can enter into other peoples’ bodies.80 Appropriately, the king is here called not Lavaṇa (“Salt”) but Sravana (a “renouncer,” particularly a Buddhist monk):
There was a king named Sravaṇa, who sat in his assembly hall surrounded by his ministers and attendants. He was deluded by a magician: he mounted a splendid horse and wandered over the whole earth until the horse threw him in a deserted place. Overcome by hunger and thirst, he met an Untouchable [a Cāṇḍāla] girl and promised to marry her if she would give him food and water, which she did then and there. He had many children with her, but after some time they all began to starve. Thinking, “Let them eat my cooked body,” he entered the blazing fire. Then in a moment, as he opened his eyes, he was filled with amazement, and to the assembled ministers and servants and kings he narrated that whole adventure in a single moment. This is the story in the Vāsiṣṭharāmāyaṇa, and there are many other stories of this type, which tell about people who enter another body.81
This text is doubly attributed, rightly to the Yogavāsiṣṭha and wrongly (I think) to the Varāha Purāṇa. This vague pedigree is encouraged by the text’s assurance that “there are many other stories of this type.” The Hindi commentary makes explicit the point about the finality of the illusion: “It was māyā after all. The moment he opened his eyes, the king became what he was: the same gathering, the same ministers. The king narrated the happenings to the courtiers from the beginning to the end. Everyone was astonished at the magician’s feat and made lavish promises to him.”
These folk variants clearly present the first half of the Yogavāsiṣṭtha’s implicit argument, that certain illusions and dreams seem quite real until we wake up; but they ignore the second half of the argument, that even when we are awake we can sometimes establish the reality of the dream/illusion.82 The Yogavāsiṣṭha goes into this proof, this vindication of the shared dream, through complex arguments, to which we will turn our attention below.
In contrast with the simplifying tendencies of the folk variants, there is a rather recent and more sophisticated rendition of the story of Lavaṇa that goes even farther than the Yogavāsiṣṭha in developing the second half of the story. This variant was composed at the end of the nineteenth century by the Telugu poet Guru Jada Appa Rao; it is called “The Dream of King Lavaṇa,” and is one of a group of poems called Strings of Pearls (Mutyala Saralu).
King Lavaṇa was in his court when a magician approached him and said, “Great king, I will show you a magic feat. Watch!” He waved his peacock-feather brush and there appeared a white horse that stole the king’s heart. While the amazed king looked at the horse, which stood before him, he sat as still as if there were no sign of life in him. His courtiers were upset, but he came back to life in a short while. As he looked around and saw his court, his disturbed mind gradually pieced together the past events, one by one. The king said, “Where is the magician, and where is the horse? Years have gone by.” But his courtiers said, “Lord, it was only seven minutes.” Then the king matched in his mind the illusions of being and non-being, and in wonder he realized the power of time. He said,
“Have seven minutes lasted seven years? Or have seven years been captured in seven minutes? Does the mind cause all of this, the little things and the big? A king mounted a magic horse and was swept away by his mind, speeding to unknown lands. At dawn, he grabbed a vine that hung from a tree, and the horse sped away. The exhausted king fell asleep, and when he awoke, as if reborn into another life, he saw before him a new world full of beauty. He heard a voice singing a song and felt as if his past memories were calling him. He forgot his hunger—which burned in him like the underwater doomsday mare—as he listened in bliss and saw the beautiful dark young girl who was singing. Who was the lucky person she was singing for? I thought I heard her sing his name—Lavaṇa. Boldly I said to her, ‘I am starving for food, but a different, more powerful hunger burns me and makes me follow you.’ The girl said, ‘You want me, but you do not know who I am. I am an Untouchable girl. My heart breaks when I see that I cannot feed you. And I could give this food to a man only if I were married to him.’ I grabbed her hand and took her in my arms and kissed her, stroking her braided hair. ‘I will marry you,’ I said. ‘Give me food.’
“She gave me food more delicious than the nectar that Viṣṇu gave the gods. Her father said to me, ‘Son, I have been looking for you all this time. Take my daughter, who is dearer than my life. We came from that world, and we want to go back there; but this daughter has kept me here, chaining me to her golden love.’ Through many harvests I lived in heavenly pleasure with that girl, and we had sons fit to be emperors. Knowing that the love of grandchildren would be a new bondage to life, her father left this world, taking the path of renunciation. Then there was a famine, and our children were starving. My wife came to me and said, ‘Do not grieve, for we will die by fire, and there is no better fortune than death. We will have in the future what we think of when we die. I will live in your company all my future lives until the day of final release.’ And so we thrust aside our grief and entered the fire, hand in hand.”
This is the story that Lavaṇa told with deep sorrow in his eyes. Then the pandits in his court said, “Do not grieve. This is illusion.” The king frowned in anger and replied, “What do you mean, ‘Do not grieve. This is illusion’? Does grief disappear if you just say, ‘It is illusion’? You pandits speak like parrots, repeating words you learned in books. You do not have experience; you do not know what it is like. Whatever is experienced is real for that time. In the future, everything will be unreal, but what about now? The mind is rooted in thoughts that shake you in constant grief and hit you on the head. But no one can explain how this happens. Where is that mysterious land? Where are my dear children? Can anyone show me my wife, who is dearer to me than life?”
Overcome with sorrow, the king covered his eyes with his hands and sat there, lost in grief. Then, suddenly, there was a flourish at the door of the court, and the guard came to announce, “A sage and a lady on a horse have come to see you, O king.” “Show them in right away,” said the king. And no sooner had he spoken than a woman as beautiful as a celestial nymph [apsaras] entered the court hall, mounted on a pure white horse and accompanied by a sage. The sage blessed the king and said, “May you have great happiness. The Yavana king of Sindh, who was a friend of your father, has sent you a gift: this girl, his beloved daughter. He also sends you this horse—there is nothing like it in the world.” The king did not even hear these words. He looked at the girl in amazement and walked to her, saying, “My dear, have you come?”83
The theme of death and rebirth, which is woven in and out of the background of the Sanskrit version of the story of Lavaṇa, is brought into sharper focus in this Telugu version. The king seems to be dead while he is in his trance and then to come back to life; between this death and rebirth he falls asleep (under the tree) and awakens. A corollary of the rebirth motif, the theme of the memory of past lives, appears in the king’s statement that the girl’s song seemed to awaken such memories in him and that she seemed to remember him (or at least his name) from her own previous lives. And when the girl’s father speaks of “that world” to which he wishes to return (and, apparently, does return, when he renounces life), he may be referring to his own memories of a former life or of another world.
The king angrily rejects the simplistic statement of the doctrine of illusion and refuses to apply it as a balm to his grief: he will not say “It was just a dream” to erase the pain of losing his happy dream, the way one would say “It is just a dream” to escape from a nightmare. Yet he does not deny the illusory nature of his experience or, like the Sanskrit Lavaṇa, try to prove its reality; nor does this text state or even imply that the girl and the Untouchable village were really there, as they are in the Sanskrit text. Instead, this Telugu Lavaṇa argues that even an unprovable illusion that is valued is emotionally real; everything that is experienced is real, he says, and it has a power and meaning that the pandits, who know only books, not life, can never comprehend. The Telugu king takes no active part in holding on to his illusory happiness; he experiences it passively and helplessly. Nor does the girl who comes to him at the end prove to the courtiers the reality of his dream experience. From their standpoint, she is a different girl, the daughter of a king of Sindh, not the daughter of an Untouchable villager. But the king knows, privately, that she is the same girl, keeping her promise to live with him in all his future lives. Though the text merely invokes a tired cliché when it says that she was as beautiful as an apsaras, a woman from heaven, the king knows that she really does come from the other world. Similarly, when the horse reaches the court, he is reduced to being a merely metaphorically otherworldly horse, not a truly magic horse, like the horse in the dream. The horse and the girl share the same ambiguous earthly ties, and both of them come from Sindh, like the horse in the Sanskrit tale of Lavaṇa. The fact that the girl has the horse with her when she comes to court might be evidence that she is the girl in the dream—if we were sure that the horse in court was the horse in the dream. In the end, the king simply recognizes the girl—or, rather, he thinks he does. The story ends on a question. Nothing has been proved, but everything has been felt.
This Telugu text apparently combines the theme of the king who dreams of his princess and finds her and the theme of the king who has a dream adventure with an Untouchable woman. Such a combination, resulting in the final reunion of the king and the woman, would have been unthinkable during the classical period in which the Sanskrit texts were composed, and it was not even possible in the nineteenth-century Kashmiri text; for there, when the Untouchable woman (the cobbler’s wife) comes to court, the king is ruined. Indeed, the king does not really have an Untouchable wife even in our Telugu text, for the girl who comes to him in his court is not, literally, an Untouchable girl. She is a rather clever compromise, by which the modern Telugu poet takes advantage of the social reforms of his time without actually trampling on Brahmin sensibilities. The girl is said to be the daughter of a Yavana, a Greek (or other foreigner),84 and thus is technically a non-Hindu and hence an Untouchable in the broadest sense. In fact (or, rather, in history), many Indian kings did marry Greek princesses, from the time of Alexander the Great’s entrance into India in 321 B.C., and they did so without any loss of caste.
Despite this manipulation of the caste of the girl whom the king marries at the end, the Telugu poet works a major transformation on the Sanskrit text’s attitude toward the Untouchables. The world of the Untouchables in this Telugu text is a world of beauty, not a world of horror, and a world of goodness, not a world of evil. This is spelled out in two long speeches, as well as in the general description of Lavaṇa’s dream. When the girl first protests to the king that she is an Untouchable, he mentally runs through all the Hindu law books (śāstras) to find some justification for marrying the girl, and this is what he comes up with:
“Are the Untouchables really impure? If people who kill animals are low in caste, how can those who persecute human beings be high? If a system gives low status to people whose bodies are unclean but high status to people whose minds are unclean, that system is surely unfair. There are only two castes among human beings, the good and the bad. If good people are Untouchables, then I would rather be one of them.”
Then, when he meets the girl’s father, the father immediately speaks these reassuring words:
“I am a low-born Untouchable, yet by the grace of my guru I rejected the unclean profession of Untouchables. I live by feeding cows. I taught my kinsmen to reject all their unclean acts. We do not kill cows. Our religion is peace.”
The father even speaks words from the Vedas to join the king and the girl in holy matrimony. This part of the text goes directly against the grain of the Sanskrit story, giving it a social message that is not only irrelevant but antithetical to the point of the Yogavāsiṣṭtha. The Telugu poem at last provides a sociological context for the tale of Lavaṇa, but it is not the context of the original story. Moreover, it still constitutes only a distant background; the philosophical and poetical contexts are the foreground.
Ways of Knowing for Sure: Authorities
In all of the versions of the stories of Lavaṇa and Gādhi, different and often directly contradictory points of view are presented. Sometimes one will be chosen over another, and the grounds for such a choice are the degree to which each argument rests on one or more of the traditional Indian authorities—not authorities in the sense of persons but in the sense of types of evidence. (Authoritative persons are merely one of the several types of evidence.) The choice between several points of view, bolstered in this way by traditionally accepted ways of knowing, is further complicated by the fact that these ways of knowing are themselves hierarchically ranked, and ranked differently by different schools of epistemology.
The tension between saṃsāra-oriented and mokṣa-oriented value systems gives rise to a conflict between the social validation of experience (“Be a king”) and the private validation of experience (“Believe in your unshared dream”). Throughout Indian mythology we find both a willingness to tolerate the inner tension of a personal reality shared by no one else and a desire to “validate” that reality by public corroboration. Thus, as we have seen, when Rāma’s father, King Daśaratha, wants to persuade Rāma to take up his royal duties once again, despite Rāma’s (true) perception of the unreality of those duties, Daśaratha calls in Viśvāmitra, who says, “What Rāma knows inside him, when he hears that from the mouth of a good man who says, ‘That is true reality,’ then he will have peace of mind.”85 The “good man” is one of the classical Indian sources of validation, on the social rather than the private side of the spectrum. The text deals at length with this and other forms of validation.
When Vasiṣṭha tells Rāma that Lavaṇa was able to establish his kingship through an imaginary consecration, Rāma is puzzled by the implicit paradox. He asks Vasiṣṭha, “What authoritative way of knowing for sure [pramāṇa] could there be for this consecration, since it was achieved through a magic web of imagination?” Vasiṣṭha said, “At the time when the magician arrived at the palace hall of Lavaṇa, right then I myself was living there and saw it with my own eyes. And when the magician had gone, I myself, in the presence of the assembled people, asked the king what had happened. As a witness I saw all of this with my own eyes. I did not hear it from someone else.”86 Vasiṣṭha here simultaneously invokes three forms of evidence: the evidence of “another” corroborating witness (Vasiṣṭha, to corroborate Lavaṇa); the evidence of his own eyewitness participation in the event; and, by implication, the evidence of his spiritual superiority. (The fact that Vasiṣṭha was present only at the telling of the adventure, not at the adventure itself, is a point to which we will return.)
The question of reliable authorities or “good reasons” (pramāṇas, ways of knowing and proving) is one that is central to all Indian philosophical enterprises. Different philosophers have held distinct views about the number and nature of the various pramāṇas, and a good analysis of them is given by Karl Potter.87 The most important ones are inference (anumāṇa), argument (tarka, or, as Potter defines it, “the use of various and assorted forms of reasons to indicate absurdity in the opponent’s thesis”), perception (pratyakṣa, direct witnessing with one’s own eyes), and verbal authority or śabda, “which consists in knowledge gained from hearing authoritative words, which usually means the śruti or sacred scriptures, such as the Vedas and Upanishads.”88 Of these various forms, argument (tarka) is usually ranked below inference (anumāṇa); both are less reliable than direct perception and verbal authority, and verbal authority generally outranks perception. Potter points out why perception is not ranked at the top:
All sources of immediate experience, and not only the awareness born of the functioning of the sense-organs, are included [in perception, pratyakṣa] (although there are those who would limit perception to knowledge born of sensation). . . . Memory is a kind of perception, although of a second order. . . . But there is disagreement among the schools of Indian philosophy as to whether each or any of these nonsensory forms of experience is trustworthy, and indeed as to whether it is proper to class them as pratyakṣa.89
Among these “nonsensory” perceptions, Potter inclues the yogin’s special awareness (alaukika, “uncommon, not of this world, or not within the scope of normal people”) and the “mental perception” (mānasapratyakṣa) of the Buddhists. These are generally, though by no means always, accepted as authoritative, but both they and the more conventional forms of perception may be erroneous.90
Of the many possible ways of knowing (pramāṇas), the Yogavāsiṣṭha recognizes three of the classical four: direct perception, inference, and verbal authority. It ignores the fourth, disputation (tarka). There is no structure in the Yogavāsiṣṭha in which true dialogue could take place; the people whom Vasiṣṭha and the other sages address do not fight back or keep interjecting puzzled pleas for clarification or even mutter, “Yes, of course you are right, Socrates,” though they do ask the questions that trigger the long explanations. In place of disputation, the Yogavāsiṣṭha makes frequent use of another classical way of knowing: analogy (upamāna). The particular form that analogy takes in the Yogavāsiṣṭha—which is, after all, a poem—is simile or example (dṛṣṭānta).91 The work is a tissue of similes; some, which we will examine in chapter six—the rope and the snake, the magic city in the sky, the child of a barren woman, and the crow and the palm tree—occur so often that one begins to accept them as proven facts rather than mere poetic suggestions.
Though the Yogavāsiṣṭha accepts the authoritative word (śabda) as a means of knowledge and mentions various canonical works and traditionally revered types of wise men as bearers of this kind of authority, the proof that is regarded as by far the best is that of direct experience (pratyakṣa): “Of all proofs, eyewitness evidence is the one basic proof, as the ocean is basic to all rivers; analogy and the others are just aspects of direct perception.”92 This would seem to challenge the traditional hierarchy, in which verbal authority is higher than perception. But perception is dependent on what we would call authority, for the reliable eyewitness proof “is not the direct perception of an ordinary individual but that of a Yogi,”93 i.e., it is the perception of someone who can be relied on to know the difference between reality and illusion. Moreover, according to the Yogavāsiṣṭha, the other means of knowledge are only auxiliaries of the one reliable form of direct perception, which is “the result of a sustained personal effort of a qualified aspirant.”94 Finally, the authority of pratyakṣa is undermined on the most basic level by the implicit contrast between pratyakṣa and parokṣa, between what is visible and what is invisible. For parokṣa means not only what is invisible but what is mysterious and secret, and the gods love what is parokṣa. Pratyakṣa is therefore what is most profane and most material and hence, in Indian terms, least real. Pratyakṣa lacks divine support.
The concept of authority may seem an inappropriately culture-bound criterion to interject into a scientific argument. But Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann have shown how deeply social influences predetermine our construction of reality, and Thomas Kuhn has demonstrated the social nature of much of the inspiration (and proof) of scientific theory. And it could be argued that in the West our scientists are our Brahmins; they are the authority figures whom we believe even when they tell us such unlikely things as that space is curved and full of black holes.95 Thus, though some texts seem to regard direct perception (pratyakṣa) as the best authority, while others regard scripture (śabda) as the best authority, there is no real contradiction between them. For, as we will see, perception is best for lower-level problems, while scripture is best for high problems. Finally, since scripture is regarded as embodied in persons of known wisdom—Brahmins or yogins—the ultimate authority is a combination of perception and scripture: it is the direct perception of a man deeply versed in scripture.
But this proof—the authoritative person’s eye-witness account (pratyakṣa)—is, after all, a subjective one: “I saw it with my eyes,” says Vasiṣṭha. And it will be the ultimate work of the Yogavāsiṣṭtha to undermine the value of both personal perception and corroborating witnesses as proof. An apparent reality may in fact be an illusion even if you see it with your own eyes, or even if other people agree with you that they saw it with their eyes, too. In arguing that the universe is illusory, the Yogavāsiṣṭha says that the world is like an experience that has no witness (adraṣṭakam).96 The Yogavāsiṣṭtha teaches us that we need other people to assure us that what we think we see is not there; we need assistance in our public unreality-testing. And the key to this quandary is whose eyes have witnessed the events; what matters, in the end, is the spiritual authority of the corroborator.
Karl Potter has discussed the ways in which Advaita philosophers like Śankara approached the problem of testing reality. In discussing this same topic, I have often used the instance of the snake and the rope, but Potter uses the classic example favored by Advaita, where someone sees a piece of shell and mistakes it for a piece of silver.
For the Advaitin, gaining knowledge is like finding that silver is really shell, or like waking up from a dream. It is important to ask how we know we have discovered an object to be more adequate than another. What is the test of the relatively more true (real, adequate) according to Advaita? It is not at all obvious that the correction of common illusions like the shell-silver case is the same process as correcting dream-illusions. To test the former error, we bend down and reach for the object; if we are still deluded, we carry it to the market and try to get a metallurgist to assay its worth. When do we perceive our error? We may perceive it when our senses show us that its qualities are different on closer examination than we had thought previously, but we may not—sometimes it will take the force of public or trained opinion, e.g., the metallurgist’s, to convince us that we are the victim of an illusion. (This analogy may help to explain the importance of the ṛṣis or wise men who wrote the Vedas and Upanishads: they are to Truth what the metallurgist is to truth in our stock example.) Discovering an illusion, then, is a more drawn-out process, frequently, than waking up from a dream.97
Testing a mistake (a temporary illusion) is a more complex process than testing a dream, because there are a series of steps that one is instructed to take, steps that involve a series of corroborators and authorities. Testing a dream or the all-encompassing Illusion is quicker, but it is also harder; there are no other people to whom one can appeal.
Is there, nevertheless, a relationship between the process of correcting a mistake and the process of emerging from an illusion? Indian tradition suggests that a person who becomes aware of a minor distortion, such as an optical illusion, may be unwittingly taking the first step on the path toward becoming aware of a more general kind of distortion that is built into all experience. Unexpected results in the trivial sphere may occasionally inspire a reformulation of the values implicit in one’s definition of reality; a mote that troubles the mind’s eye may eventually shake the entire edifice of perception. Within the entire illusion that the Yogavāsiṣṭha depicts there are numerous mistakes. The characters in the drama are at first aware of neither the mistakes nor the illusions; they come to recognize that there must have been some mistakes; finally, they recognize the entire illusion.
Rāmānuja discussed the relevance of various forms of authority for overcoming both minor and major distortions. He argued that if one sees two moons or mistakes a rope for a snake, no amount of testimony or any quantity of “reliable bystanders” saying, “That is not a snake, but a rope,” would be of any use to the deluded person. Only proper experiential knowledge would convince him that there is only one moon or a rope. But when one attempts to dispel illusion itself, neither bystanders nor experience is of any use; here, only scripture can help; only scripture can lead us, after death, to brahman,98 Thus, though it is impossible to test Illusion through experience, it is not impossible to test illusions—to test mistakes and mirages. Or, more precisely, as we saw in chapter one, it is possible to falsify a dream—that is, to verify the fact that it is “merely” a dream and not a reality—by waking up. But it is not possible to verify a dream—to prove that it is a reality and not a dream—by never waking up. All that we can do is to prove that the data provided by several different dreams form a coherent whole, and this is a very limited sort of test. To verify the dream as a dream would be to verify the entire illusion—which is, as we have seen, impossible. No amount of testing or arguing can accomplish such a proof.
We have seen a possible link between the two levels of disconfirmation in Indian epistemological theory in the suggestion that small bits of disconfirming data, facts that do not fit the existing paradigm, build up until the entire paradigm is thrown into question. Yet it is argued by other philosophers that such minor incidents alone, no matter how often they occur and how much pressure they may build up, do not overthrow paradigms; only a change in world-view, a leap of imagination, can do this. The question of steps versus leaps is much debated in Indian philosophy: How many rope/snakes does it take to make us realize that even the rope does not exist? Karl Potter has used this as the criterion by which to distinguish certain Indian doctrines of enlightenment as “leap philosophies” (ajātivāda), in which faith can be gained only by a sudden leap of insight, in contrast with “progress philosophies,” in which such conviction or faith can be gained progressively by action, devotion, or understanding.99
Advaita Vedānta is a leap philosophy. By assimilating illusion to dreams, it invokes an analogy: the final awakening from a dream or an illusion is both faster, once it happens, and slower, in beginning to happen, than the partial awakening from minor perceptual errors:
It is not as a result of any conscious decision on the part of either the dream-self or the waking self that we wake up from dreams—this just seems to happen. The analogy with respect to gaining release ought to be that it just happens, and this leads fairly directly to leap philosophy, perhaps of that type which makes release dependent upon the grace of God.100
Yet the progress schools imply, by their very existence, that bhrama-awareness leads to māyā-awareness. This is the point of the discipline of yoga and the teaching of Indian metaphysics, of the devotion to the guru and the painstaking memorizing of sacred texts: effort counts. These efforts generally take place within the realm of saṃsāra: one works gradually toward mokṣa within the realm of material commitment; it is not necessary to leave one’s wife and children in order to find God. Yet other Indians regard enlightenment as an all-or-nothing affair: they leave their families and wander about naked, defying all human conventions. Such violent divorces from conventional life may be reflected in the violent transitions from caste Hinduism to Untouchability in our myths. Thus the Indian evidence suggests that the cumulative awareness of bhrama sometimes does, and sometimes does not, lead to an awareness of māyā. Even if, logically, bhrama cannot force the hand of māyā, being of an entirely different order of argument, bhrama may be capable, illogically, of triggering the response to māyā, of short-circuiting the wires that normally protect us from seeing māyā for what it is.
Is man helpless in the face of this dilemma? Is the process by which one is or is not drawn through the awareness of bhrama to the awareness of māyā accidental or not? This argument was taken up in South India in the form of a debate about the nature of divine grace. The Cat School argued that one need not work at salvation, for God picks up the sinner as a mother cat picks up a kitten; all the kitten has to do is to go limp. (Indeed, according to certain extreme branches of this school, one interferes with the process of grace if one makes any effort at all to bring it about.) But the Monkey School argued that one did have to work at it, for God picks up the sinner as a mother monkey picks up a baby monkey: the baby monkey has to hang on for dear life. The problem of bhrama is a monkey problem: we can work hard, with good results, at ironing out our mistakes, at falsifying our theories, at testing our dreams. But the problem of māyā is a cat problem; either we wake up from the dream—and there is no effort that we can make to do so—or we go on dreaming forever.
Lavaṇa and Gādhi do attempt to test their dreams. Moreover, their reactions to their illusory experiences and their use of public and authoritative corroboration are significantly different. As soon as Lavaṇa has his vision, he is persuaded by the emotional impact of his experience as an Untouchable, and therefore he is immediately troubled by what he perceives as a contradiction: the courtiers thought he was on his throne, while he thought he was living in an Untouchable village. He sets out the very next morning to “find the wasteland that had been reflected in the mirror of his mind,” yet he was at that time the only one who regarded his vision as real, and he had not a shred of evidence with which to defend his faith in it. Gādhi, on the other hand, is not surprised at his vision inside the water, but he assumes that it is nothing but a vision. Gādhi does nothing at first to test his vision, nor does he tell anyone about it. Only when someone else offers him evidence of the reality of his dream does he decide to test it. Even then he is puzzled, not by the massive paradox of his simultaneous experience of two lives, but by the nagging detail of the inconsistency of one particular aspect of his “second” life: he is puzzled by the fact that his visionary self has a wife and a mother, while he himself has none. He decides to set his mind at rest by going to look into the matter of his own existence as an Untouchable.101 Because he is a wise man, free of passion, Gādhi is all the more able to recover physically the land of his imagination. As Vasiṣṭha remarks of him, “Wise men who exert themselves win even the kingdom of the mind; Gādhi went to find what he had seen in a dream, and he found it all. Seeing the illusion of the universe, Gādhi made an effort to make it an object of authoritative knowledge [pramāṇa].”102 In this, Gādhi is acting not like the Hindu yogin who dispels illusion but like the Tibetan Buddhist yogin who creates reality.
When statements are made in India about a person’s being in two places at once or a person’s remembering his past lives, usually no one bothers to prove or disprove the statement. This may be because such statements are not taken as cognitive propositions or theorems in need of proof; they present no challenge to cognitive consistency or scientific rigor because they are not even apprehended in those terms. They are apprehended, rather, in terms of the value that such beliefs have for the people to whom they are told. Even if one assumed that it was possible to prove that a person really was in two places at once and that material evidence of this could be presented, there still might be no attempt actually to carry out a proof, any more than there would be, on the part of the realists, an attempt to prove that such a thing is not possible. For most people simply do not bother to test their basic cosmological assumptions; when the presupposition is so deeply ingrained, proof seems superfluous.
But the possibility that one might believe that it could be true that someone could be in two places at one time and might go ahead and attempt a proof of this is what is imagined in the Yogavāsiṣṭtha, India offers various philosophical explanations for the paradoxical experiences of Lavaṇa and Gādhi. We will discuss in chapter five the question of ontology—what reality is; here it is useful to pursue the question of epistemology—how reality is perceived. When faced with experiences that cannot, apparently, be real, why is it that some people ignore them, others accept them on faith, and still others—like Lavaṇa and Gādhi—set out to prove them?
Before beginning to answer this question, we must recall that the myths of Lavaṇa and Gādhi do not demonstrate that ancient Indians performed experiments to prove that their dreams were real. These myths, like the myths about shared dreams, demonstrate only that the ancient Indians imagined episodes in which people set out to prove that their dreams were real. Moreover, even within the stories, the actors do not set up experiments; they merely follow up a chain of events that is set in motion by a chance circumstance that might never recur. If anyone ever did actually try to validate a dream in ancient India, we have no records of it. What we have are records of predictive dreams that came true, and this is evidence of a quite different order. At best it is evidence for the validity of the theory; it is not evidence that anyone ever set out to prove the theory. The Hindus knew an unfalsifiable hypothesis when they saw one quite as well as Sir Karl Popper; unlike him, they did not let that knowledge stop them from believing in it.
Lavaṇa and Gādhi, like many scientists, are driven to carry out their investigations by their refusal to tolerate what Leon Festinger has called “cognitive dissonance”: a discord that results when religious faith maintains a valued belief in the teeth of overwhelming factual data that contradicts it.103 Lavaṇa and Gādhi want their religious and their practical views, their sacred and their profane experiences, to be brought somehow into harmony. Their refusal to tolerate cognitive dissonance is, in one sense, a refusal to accept a contradiction: either Lavaṇa was in court or he was in the Untouchable village. Yet, as we have seen, Indians often seem able to live comfortably with such contradictions without attempting to resolve them. (This might be yet another reason why one would not think of proving one’s assumptions about such a contradictory experience.) It would seem, therefore, that we have stumbled on yet another cultural spectrum of ideas about a basic epistemological assumption. Let us look at this spectrum more closely.
Common Sense and Contradiction
What are the assumptions with which the hero of the story begins? What are the assumptions of the author, and what assumptions does he expect his audience to have? To answer these questions, we must return to the problem of common sense that we touched on in the Introduction. Indians did not regard common sense as an element that ought to be taken into account in constructing a proof. Common sense is not one of the classical authorities (pramāṇas) or ways of knowing; direct perception (pratyakṣa) may include common sense by implication, but technically it is an entirely separate way of knowing. There are exceptions to this general rule; some people did regard common sense as formally significant. Jayaśrī, for example, who was a skeptic rather than a mystic, demolished all philosophical arguments and finally maintained that we must rely on normal common sense, the consensus of the people (laukika mārga).104 So, too, many mystics argued that truth (brahman) is self-evident (saprakāśa) and need not be philosophized about. Such thinkers were very much in the minority among philosophers, but they may have represented a general, popular level of feeling; people do, after all, tend to take common sense seriously, even if philosophers do not. Indeed, our stories begin precisely at the moment when direct perception comes into violent conflict with common sense—Indian common sense.
Since peoples’ responses to experiences such as Lavaṇa’s and Gādhi’s are, at least to some extent, socially conditioned, it is necessary to try to take into account, in attempting to understand their attitudes, what most people in that society at that time would have expected. Only when we have some idea of what would have been surprising to most people can we begin to wonder why some people were more surprised than others (about such experiences) or why some people did something about their surprise and others did not.
There are two clusters of evidence in the data we have already encountered that indicate that the Indian man in the street at the time of the composition of the Yogavāsiṣṭtha had two kinds of cultural common sense available to him; evidence of this is provided by the general literature of ancient and medieval India and by the Yogavāsiṣṭha itself. We know that the philosophy of illusion in its basic form (as in our myths of illusion) was well known in India from the time of the Upaniṣads, a millennium and a half before the Yogavāsiṣṭha was composed. We know, therefore, that most Hindus would not find the tales of Lavaṇa and Gādhi as surprising as we do; they have heard that sort of story before, though probably not in so striking a form. It is also evident that the author of the Yogavāsiṣṭha has great sympathy for the doctrine that reality is illusory, illusion real; this appears not only from his explicit philosophical arguments but from the power with which he depicts the vivid dream experiences.
Yet this doctrine of illusion may not have been the predominant cultural assumption, the shared common sense, in India at the time the Yogavāsiṣṭha was composed. We know that there were many skeptics in India who took reality to be as solid as any Victorian empiricist would have taken it to be. Once again we encounter evidence for these ideas: that no one can believe that he does not exist or that the universe does not exist; that illusion must always be defined by contrast with what is real; and that something must be real.
Throughout the Sanskrit texts, people express amazement at the miracles that are performed by various gods and yogins. A typical incident occurs in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa:
Akrūra seated Kṛṣṇa and Balarāma in his chariot and took his leave of them. But when he went to bathe in the river, he saw the two of them, Balarāma and Kṛṣṇa, together there, and he thought. “How can the two of them be in the chariot and also be right here? If they are here, they cannot be in the chariot.” And with this in mind, he got out of the water and looked for them. But he saw them there in the chariot, just as before, sitting there. He plunged back into the water, thinking, “Was my vision of them in the water, then, false?” . . . He praised Kṛṣṇa, who withdrew his form from the water, like an actor playing a part. And when Akrūra saw that Kr$na had vanished from the water, he came out and returned to the chariot in amazement. Then Kṛṣṇa, who was in the chariot, asked him, “Have you seen some miracle on the land or in the sky or in the water? You look as if you had.”105
Like Gādhi, Akrūra has a vision when he is in the water, and the vision is sent by Viṣṇu (Kṛṣṇa). This vision, however, is in direct conflict with his common sense, which tells him that one person cannot be in two places at the same time. He tests his hypothesis twice: he looks for Kṛṣṇa and Balarāma on the land and then, finding them there, returns to see if they are also still in the water. When he still finds them in both places, he becomes amazed (at first, apparently, he was just puzzled). The fact that such things happen in India does not mean that everyone believes in them. (The opposite situation, where people do believe in things that don’t happen, arises in many Buddhist texts that explicitly forbid the aspiring Bodhisattva to perform miracles of levitation, clairvoyance, etc. They assume—through common sense—that people are perfectly capable of levitation, etc., but they regard such showing-oflf as neither tactful nor safe.106 These considerations led the Buddha to ground his monks.)
A second body of evidence also indicates that common sense in ancient India did not normally stretch to accommodate the possibility that a person could be in two places at one time. This evidence comes from the Yogavāsiṣṭtha, from the words spoken by the unenlightened witnesses of the various metaphysical paradoxes. When Līlā returns to her palace after traveling with the goddess Sarasvatī to the scenes of her dead husband’s future lives, she wonders which of the worlds she has seen is an erroneous perception (bhrāntimaya) and which partakes of the true essence of things (pāramārthika); she cannot tell the artificial from the non-artificial. When Sarasvatī asks her to explain what she means by these terms, Līlā replies, “That I am standing here, and you are near me—this is the unartificial world; this is what I know. And when my husband now stands by me, that is the artificial world, I think, since what is empty cannot be filled with time and place and so on.” And even when Sarasvatī explains it all to her, Līlā accuses her of lying, since it cannot be that all the things she saw could somehow fit into the small room she was in when she saw them.107
When, much later, Līlā has overcome her common-sense objections and has projected her astral body into the palace where her husband has been reborn in another body, the miracle is ignored by everyone there, whose common sense blinds them to the truth of what they are seeing. Rāma wonders about these people and asks Vasiṣṭha, “When the people who lived in the palace saw Līlā, did they think her to be real or imaginary?” And Vasiṣṭha replies, “They would have thought, ‘This sad queen standing here must be some friend or other of our queen; she must have come here from somewhere.’ What doubt would they have? For cattle are without discernment; they think things are as they appear. Why would they puzzle about it?”108 Similarly, in the Hindi folktale about the magic pot, those who see the doubles of the peasant and his wife simply assume that they are the peasant’s brother and sister-in-law.
The amazement that is constantly expressed by the characters within the Yogavāsiṣṭha—including the amazement of Lavaṇa and Gādhi, who are greatly reluctant to accept the extreme idealistic explanations offered to them—surely indicates that the Indians’ cultural consensus about common sense at that time included a stubborn disinclination to believe that the visions of Lavaṇa and Gādhi were materially real. And in the tale of the monk’s dream, which I will discuss in chapter five, the text repeatedly insists that the characters in the story were amazed to find that the lives they had taken for real were merely parts of someone else’s dreams or, contrariwise, that people they had just dreamed about turned out to be real people they could talk to. They are amazed at both implications: the implication that their real lives are dreams and the implication that their dreams are real—or, rather, as real as their waking lives. They had assumed, as we usually assume, that dreams are unreal and that lives are real. Even at the very end of the story of the monk’s dream, Rāma cannot understand how the dream figures could become real, and the commentator explains his quandary: “Rāma asked his question because he did not think it was possible that the matter could be as it seemed and as it had just been said to be, or that in that way Rudra could make a hundred people by making the monk have a hundred dreams.”109 Even Rudra himself is said to have been amazed by his realization that the people in his hundred dreams had thought themselves to be real, though he then conquers his amazement and carefully figures it all out.110
It must be granted that the narrator’s insistence on the amazement of the characters in the story is, in part, simply a literary device, employed also in Christian miracle tales, to emphasize the importance of the extraordinary event and to provide us with doubting fools, fall guys, or “stupid disciples,” set up either to be converted or to serve as a foil for those who are converted. Nevertheless, these amazed participants and bystanders must also represent the point of view that the narrator expected to find in at least some of his audience. One might argue that the experience of surprise at reality-switching is more common—and hence less surprising—in India than in the West, since Hindus’ basic epistemo-logical assumptions make it possible to cross these borders more easily and more often.111 Yet the boundary itself is taken for granted, even in India.
The fact that we Westerners also experience amazement or even disbelief when we first hear this story is not, I think, irrelevant. In any case, we will read ourselves into any text that we read. Not only may we ask our own questions of the text; we cannot help asking our own questions. But the common sense of the text itself is indicated not by the questions that it inspires in us but by the questions that it inspired in the interlocutors who are part of the text. It is gratifying to note that many of the questions asked by the characters in the story are the very questions that would occur to an American first encountering the story—literal-minded, earth-bound, flat-footed questions. But we also ask questions that they do not ask, and they ask questions that would not occur to us. Moreover, we ask them at different points; they bother us before, or after, they drive the Indian audience to interrupt the narrative. This is because, in addition to the common sense that the two cultures share, each has its own peculiar kind of common sense as well. And their common sense leads Indian thinkers to deal with contradiction in ways different from ours.
In order to explain how, and why, Lavaṇa’s illusion was produced, Vasiṣṭha offers Rāma various explanations, various relevant bits of the doctrine of illusion that the story is meant to illustrate. How did Lavaṇa’s dream come to be witnessed by others? Vasiṣṭha, who was present in Lavaṇa’s court when the king had his vision, tells Rāma what he had told Lavaṇa himself:
Vasiṣṭha said to Rāma, “In the morning, the king asked me, ‘How can a dream become something right in front of one’s eyes? I was amazed when everything was told [by the Untouchables] just the way it had been [in my dream], with all the precise details of reality.’” And, hearing, the story, Rāma asked Vasiṣṭha, “How did the dream become real? Tell me, good Brahmin.” Vasiṣṭha said, “Ignorance gives rise to all of this, so that what has not happened happens, as when one dreams of one’s own death. The mind experiences precisely the things that it itself has caused to arise, though such things do not truly exist, nor, on the other hand, are they unreal. What happened in the Untouchable village to King Lavaṇa appeared as an image in his mind and was either real or unreal, or else the delusion that Lavaṇa saw immediately became a conscious perception in the mind of the Untouchables. The image of Lavaṇa climbed into the mind of the Untouchables, and the conscious perception of the Untouchables climbed into the mind of the king. For just as quite similar sayings appear in the minds of many people, even so, similar time, place, and even action may appear in many peoples’ minds, as in a dream. And, just as the mind can forget things that have been done, no matter how important they may be, so, too, one can certainly remember something as having been done even though it has not been done.”112
This is not an explanation; it is a cornucopia of explanations, containing all the possibilities on the spectrum of māyā: mass hallucination or, more precisely, dual hallucination, the rêve à deux; the projection of an image from one mind to another; archetypal images, universally shared; the simple tricks of memory; and the sense of déjà vu.
These various explanations account in part for various different sorts of mistakes that are made by different characters within our story, and the way that these different explanations pull against one another produces a tension in the plot. When Lavaṇa has awakened on his throne, after his supposed adventures among the Untouchables, and the magician has vanished (and the courtiers have suggested that the magician was an instrument sent by the gods to teach the king about illusion), we might expect the story to end, as many of the simpler tales of Nārada and as many of the folk variants of the tales of Lavaṇa and Gādhi do end. But our text goes on to make an extraordinary statement: “King Lavaṇa, realizing the mistake [bhrama], set out on the very next day to go to the great desert. For, he reasoned, ‘I remember that wasteland as it was reflected in the mirror of my mind, and so it can be found again somehow.’”113
What does the text mean when it says that the king has realized his “mistake”? On the first, superficial, level, it would mean that he has been mistaken in thinking that he had really lived among the Untouchables, since all his courtiers assure him that he had never budged from his throne. But if this were the case, the king would not go to find the wasteland; he would regard it as a mere fantasy and dismiss it as a mental aberration without a physical basis. Instead, he regards it as a reflected image (pratibhāsa), which here implies that it was reflected (imaginarily) from a place where it was real, and this is what the king sets out to prove. This is the second level of mistake, and in some parts of the multifaceted explanation it is the accepted level: there was a real Untouchable village, and the king felt its reflection in his mind; this is the village that he seeks and finds. On a third level, however, both the king’s court and the Untouchable village are imaginary reflections of something else—or of nothing; Lavaṇa never comes to see this, but, outside the frame, Rāma (and, through him, the wider audience of the Yogavāsiṣṭtha) transcends this final mistake as well as the more obvious first-level mistake.
The ambiguities in the text mount up and cluster into opposed groups until they constitute a contradiction, a paradox, an incongruity, or simply a situation that thumbs its nose at common sense. Either Lavaṇa was sitting on his throne at court or he was living in the Untouchable village: how can both things be true at once? The contradictions in the text are met with contradictory explanations, as we have seen: either Lavaṇa and the Untouchables projected and received images of real people or they imagined unreal ones.
The tale of Gādhi is similarly glossed by several overlapping theories of illusion:
Viṣṇu said, “Gādhi, not a single thing is external, not the sky, mountains, water, earth, or anything else; everything is in one’s own mind. Since the glory of the mind can establish the infinite universe, why does it amaze you that its magic should reveal Untouchableness? The quality of being an Untouchable was fastened on to you by the power of the image. And the Brahmin guest who came to you and ate and slept and told a tale—all this that you saw was a mistake [sambhrama]; and when you went back to the village of the Untouchables and saw the ruined house of Kaṭañja, and when you went to the Kīra city and heard the story of the Untouchable who became king—all of those things were merely a mistake that you thought you saw. There was no guest; there were no Untouchables, no Kīras, and no city; it was all a delusion.” When Gādhi thought about this for six months but was still quite confused, Viṣṇu returned and offered him the explanation of the phenomenon of mass hallucination and archetypal images. Again he vanished, leaving Gādhi more confused than ever, and finally he returned and said, “Now listen, and I will tell you how it really was, with no mistakes. A certain Untouchable named Kaṭañja built a house at the edge of that village once in the past. He lost his family in the very way [that you imagined] and went to another country and became king of the Kīras and entered the fire. When you were in the water, the image of that very form of Kaṭañja entered your mind, and the things that happened to Kaṭañja became an image.” Then Viṣṇu disappeared, and Gādhi became serene.114
Viṣṇu begins by giving Gādhi the soft-line Vedāntic view: nothing at all is real, and one might therefore just as well substitute one illusion for another, since they are all equivalent. This serves primarily to confuse Gādhi, however, and so Viṣṇu returns to flesh out his first gloss with the compatible theory of the archetypes. But when Gādhi finds this still too difficult to take (as the rank-and-file Hindu must have done), Viṣṇu gives him a much harder version of the doctrine: There was a real Untouchable, but it was not Gādhi; and Gādhi (also real) somehow tuned into the experiences of the other man, as one might tune into another telephone conversation on a party line. In the first version, the experience of the life of the Untouchable (and the life of the king) was all māyā; in the third version, the Untouchable episode was merely bhrama, a mistake interjected into what was otherwise, for all intents and purposes, a real life.
We have seen that Indians are not, in general, troubled by contradiction. The various contradictory explanations offered by the Yogavāsiṣṭtha derive in part from the Indian theory that there are many different true ways of understanding any single phenomenon, each suitable for one sort of person at one level of metaphysical acuity. This doctrine, which appears in Buddhism as the concept of “skill in means” (upāya), assumes that anyone can be taught anything if you go about it correctly; it corresponds roughly (quite roughly) to our belief in “different strokes for different folks.” But when the explanations pile up too frenetically, they serve in part to make us permanently distrustful of any explanation. Freud taught us to be suspicious of too many excuses for a single fault (like the man who borrowed a horse, brought it back lame, and argued that the horse was sound now, that the horse had been lame when he borrowed it, and that he had never borrowed it).115 Yet the Yogavāsiṣṭha does not leave us with a hermeneutics of suspicion; for between the soft line (that everything is unreal) and the hard line (that everything is real, but we mistake it for what is unreal), there is also a middle path. This middle line represents the common-sense view of the Yogavāsiṣṭha in general.
The text presents us with an extreme form of the philosophical doctrine of illusion, and it states that “truly enlightened people” will not be amazed by such phenomena. But then it presents us with a number of people who are astonished when presented with evidence that the doctrine of illusion might be literally true. In order to suggest the possibility that experiences like Lavaṇa’s and Gādhi’s might in fact be real, the author imagines that someone has actually tested this possibility, and he imagines what would happen if the test proved positive. He draws on the “toolbox” of beliefs—the full range of possible explanations available to Hindus. He sets up a conflict and picks a fight in an area where most people had long ago made a tacit peace with ontology. The people in Lavaṇa’s court were skeptics; it was for their sake, as much as for his own, that Lavaṇa had to prove the reality of his vision. The author of the Yogavāsiṣṭha projects the presumed skepticism of a large part of his audience onto the characters in the court, including the central figures. But the author himself is maintaining (in his heart, or for the sake of a pretty story—who can tell?) the stance of idealism, both absolute and modified. The decision to apply criteria of skepticism to this idealism is brought about by his knowledge of the cultural common sense of his audience.
In the light of this cultural cognitive dissonance, built in even before the adventure begins, we might view the adventures of Lavaṇa and Gādhi as designed not merely to test the particular dreams but to introduce more clarity and self-awareness into the internally inconsistent model as a whole. The contradiction is not eliminated, for the final result is even more ambiguous than the starting point—but it is explicitly so; and it is precisely this explicitness that is its achievement. It forces into the open the conflicting assumptions that its society usually keeps hidden. The net effect, therefore, is to validate and support the original value system, despite its internal contradictions.
Was Lavaṇa sitting on his throne at court, or was he living in the Untouchable village? How can they both be true at once? This contradiction is the key to the process of enlightenment. The word that 1 have translated as “reflected image” (prātibhāsika), as when the image of Lavaṇa was projected into the minds of the Untouchables, might also be called a “contradictory image.” The word refers to light rays that are bounced “back” or “against” other images. Dasgupta discusses the term as it relates to the nature of the world-appearance according to Śankara:
The world-appearance is not, however, so illusory as the perception of silver in the conch shell, for the latter type of worldly illusions is called prātibhāsika, as they are contradicted by other, later, experiences, whereas the illusion of world-appearances is never contradicted in this worldly stage and is thus called vyavahārika [from vyavahāra, practice, i.e., that on which all our practical movements are based]. So long as the right knowledge of the Brahman as the only reality does not dawn, the world-appearance runs on in an orderly manner, uncontradicted by the accumulated experience of all men, and as such it must be held to be true. It is only because there comes a stage in which the world-appearance ceases to manifest itself that we have to say that, from the ultimate and absolute point of view, the world-appearance is false and unreal. . . . Thus the prātibhāsika experience lasts for a much shorter period of time than the vyavahārika.116
In other words, it is easier to correct mistakes than to correct illusions; or, as Karl Potter has pointed out, we will be moved more quickly to test a temporary contradictory illusion (the prātibhāsika experience) than to awaken from a dream or from a larger uncontradicted illusion (the vyavahārika experience), though the process of extricating ourselves from the contradiction takes longer than extricating ourselves from the uncontradicted illusion, once we begin. The obvious contradiction, which sooner or later exposes the distorted image for what it is, is the clue to a hidden contradiction that we may never step back far enough to see. Gādhi’s contradictory experience lasts far longer than Lavaṇa’s, though Gàdhi is, from the start, far more sophisticated metaphysically than Lavaṇa. We see the mistake right away, for it is contradicted by common sense; but the illusion, which is supported by our common sense (vyavahāra), may never be dispelled.
In the stories of Lavaṇa and Gādhi, the author of the text, unable to sustain the position of pure idealism, lapses into a modified materialism; this materialism, the need to say that something is real, may take different forms, sometimes in favor of the subjective, sometimes denying the subjective. In the end, however, the position of absolute idealism simply becomes top-heavy and falls by its own weight. In the old animated Tom and Jerry cartoons, the cat, fleeing madly from some terror devised by the mouse, runs off the edge of a cliff and continues to run in the air, in a line parallel to the earth, until he happens to look down and discovers that he is standing on the air, in defiance of all the laws of gravity and of his own common sense; he then plummets to earth. The idealism of the Yogavāsiṣṭtha runs on, carried forward by the impetus of its own complex narratives and elaborate metaphors, until, every once in a while, the author looks down and sees that he is walking on idealistic air—flying, in other words, as he did not believe it possible to fly but as one so often does in a dream. Sometimes he then falls bathetically into skepticism, but sometimes he does not; sometimes he keeps on flying.
When we turn back to examine our Western common sense regarding dreams and proofs, we might look first at our attitude to our own stories about these matters. Stories demonstrating the reality of dreams dart in and out of the history of Western literature, though often at an oblique angle; they have been taken seriously enough to be suppressed.117 One has only to glance at Gnosticism, Chrétien de Troyes, and E. T. A. Hoffmann, to say nothing of our surrealists (whom I will discuss in chapters five and six), to realize that any superficial contrast between India and the West on the issue of the reality of dreams is, more precisely, a contrast with only one of the positions taken in Western discourse and philosophy. Arabic sources tell many tales in which a sleeping man awakes to find himself in a situation designed to prove to him that he is dreaming while he is, in fact, awake. Stories of this type were also known in Spain and in China and Japan. But there is, I think, a significant difference of tone between the Indian and Western examples of this genre.118
In the first place, when we look at the distribution of the specific theme of the dreamer who takes his dream for real until he awakes or who finds that it was real even after he awakes, we begin to see a pattern, a complex maṇḍala that has India as its center. The Chinese and Japanese stories were based on tales carried to the East by Indian Buddhists, and the Spanish stories were retellings of tales brought by Islamic traders from India. This is, at heart, an Indian theme. However, it is a theme that serves a different purpose in India and the West. The story of the dream adventure was regarded in the West primarily as an exotic and rather off-beat delicacy, an appetizer to titillate the mind for a while before getting down to serious philosophizing. In India, however, it was the main course, philosophically speaking; it was taken very seriously indeed, as an elusive clue to a real truth. Moreover, this truth was stated far more positively in India than it was in the West. As Roger Caillois remarks of the dream adventure in European romantic literature,
Very frequently the dream remains a fairy tale that is dispelled by the awakening and to which at times a cumbersome allegorical value is attributed; it has nothing in common with the intellectual complications of the Oriental dream. “It was only a dream,” the sleeper cries out upon awakening, occasionally disappointed, occasionally relieved, all according to whether the dream gratified or oppressed him. It is never more than an illusion, which may have been pleasing or distressing, but which the opening of the eyelids suffices to send back into nothingness.119
In India, by contrast, the dream adventure often proves the very opposite point; it proves the “nothingness” of the world that we see when we open our eyes, or it proves the substantial reality of the dream itself.
One good reason why such stories about the reality of dreams occupy a less respectable place in Western culture than they do in India can be surmised when we look at the common-sense view that dominates (though it never entirely permeates) Western thought. The empiricists and realists have been quick to label nonempiricists and nonrealists as lunatic dreamers. The leader of this group is Sir Karl Popper, whose reaction to idealism was the typical Western abhorrence of solipsism: “To me, idealism appears absurd, for it also implies something like this: that it is my mind which creates this beautiful world. But I know I am not its Creator. . . . Denying realism amounts to megalomania.”120 Here Popper fails to take into account the possibility (basic to all Indian thinking) that “my mind” and the mind of the “Creator” are one, a basic Indian assumption that we first encountered in chapter three and will meet again in chapter five. A very similar assumption underlies Michael Polanyi’s answer (both to solipsism and to Popper):
Any presumed contact with reality inevitably claims universality. If I, left alone in the world, and knowing myself to be alone, should believe in a fact, I would still claim universal acceptance for it. . . . I may rely on an existing consensus, as a clue to the truth, or else may dissent from it, for my own reasons. In either case my answer will be made with universal intent, saying what I believe to be the truth, and what the consensus ought therefore to be. . . . This position is not solipsistic, since it is based on a belief in an external reality and implies the existence of other persons who can likewise approach the same reality.121
As we will see, Polanyi’s confidence in the universality of his private truth rests on his faith in the existence of a Power who is part of our minds.
Thus Polanyi argues that even when one is alone one may be confident of an uncorroborated belief. But what of the opposite situation? What happens if a whole group corroborates a delusion? This is the apparent situation in the story of Lavaṇa. It is also, as we shall see, the situation of those scientists who are locked into a Kuhnian paradigm and of the people in Festinger’s study of cognitive dissonance who prophesied a doomsday that did not take place:
The individual believer must have social support. It is unlikely that one isolated believer could withstand the kind of disconfirming evidence we have specified. If, however, the believer is a member of a group of convinced persons who can support one another, we would expect the belief to be maintained and the believers to attempt to proselyte or to persuade nonmembers that the belief is correct.122
This was in fact the case with the group that Festinger studied: when their doomsday predictions failed to come true, they did not relinquish their beliefs, nor did they try to hide from public ridicule; instead, they rededicated themselves to proselyting. Festinger remarks upon this syndrome: “Consider the extreme case: if everyone in the whole world believed something, there would be no question at all as to the validity of this belief.”123 It is interesting to compare Festinger’s “extreme case” with Polanyi’s statement about faith: “If I, left alone in the world, and knowing myself to be alone, should believe in a fact, I would still claim universal acceptance for it.”124 Where Polanyi would maintain his belief despite the group, Festinger would argue that a delusion looks like a truth if enough people believe in it.
But the existence of a group that corroborates an opinion is not, in itself, regarded as sufficient evidence in Western science, though it weighs heavily. Testing is what distinguishes the madman from the mad scientist. Bertrand Russell argued that the inductive method, rather than the weight of group opinion, was the essential element in determining truth: “If not, there is no intellectual difference between sanity and insanity. The lunatic who believes that he is a poached egg is to be condemned solely on the ground that he is in a minority.”125
In the West we fall back ultimately on the consensus of the group for the verification of phenomena that cannot be tested. Such phenomena include, according to Thomas Kuhn, scientific theories. It was once generally held that scientists were led to change their paradigms when they were faced with disconfirming data; Kuhn has argued, with a qualified success, that scientists hold on to their paradigms despite almost any amount of disconfirming data. The first view involves bhrama: sooner or later, the evidence convinces us that the snake is in fact a rope. In Kuhn’s view, what is involved is māyā: no amount of evidence can convince us that the rope exists. The first view is generally held (especially by scientists) to be scientific; the second is religious. The Yogavāsiṣṭha demonstrates that science is useless in addressing the problem of reality.
Yet, when we look more closely at science and religion, we find that their difference is generally a matter of degree: at some point, some weight of data becomes decisive for most people. At least for some, long practice at eliminating errors eventually leads to an understanding of the truth. Scientists like to think that they have a lower “disconfirmation” threshold than religious believers have, and indeed this may be the case. It may be that scientists are monkeys while theologians are cats; or it may be that scientists address monkey problems while theologians address cat problems.126
Kuhn suggests that it is peculiar that so many scientists agree about their findings:
No wonder, then, that in the early stages of the development of any science different men confronting the same range of phenomena, but not usually all the same particular phenomena, describe and interpret them in different ways. What is surprising, and perhaps also unique in its degree to the field we call science, is that such initial divergences should ever largely disappear.127
These differences of opinion are gradually eroded by the pressure of the group—and not just any group:
The solutions that satisfy [the scientist] may not be merely personal but must instead be accepted as solutions by many. The group that shares them may not, however, be drawn at random from society as a whole, but is rather the well-defined community of the scientist’s professional compeers. One of the strongest, if still unwritten, rules of scientific life is the prohibition of appeals to the populace at large in matters scientific.128
In other words, it is the Brahmins who supply the authority. The circularity of the scientific authority structure, like all authority structures, is evident when we realize that the authority who validates the solution is a man whose authority is validated by the fact that he has produced solutions the validity of which has been established by authorities who . . . . Once again we enter the phenomenon of mutual feedback; the scientist is the chicken and the test is his egg. Paul Feyerabend has pointed out that the “auxiliary hypothesis of intersubjectivity”—the belief that several scientists see the same thing and therefore establish its validity—underlies scientific authority:
But this hypothesis is false, as is shown by the moon illusion, the phenomenon of fata morgana, the rainbow, haloes, by the many microscopic illusions which are so vividly described by Tolansky, by the phenomena of witchcraft (every woman reported an incubus to have an ice-cold member), and by numerous other phenomena.129
In other words, the whole group may be wrong. Even when they share dreams—or scientific hypotheses—they may all be sharing a false dream.
From the materialist point of view—what the Indians call the vyavahārika or practical level—our definitions of reality are functional; they help us to avoid bumping into things. Sir Karl Popper defends his faith in the validity of testing thus:
The disappointment of some of the expectations with which we once eagerly approached reality plays a most significant part in this procedure. It may be compared with the experience of a blind man who touches, or runs into, an obstacle, and so becomes aware of its existence. It is through the falsification of our suppositions that we actually get in touch with “reality.” It is the discovery and elimination of our errors which alone constitute that “positive” experience which we gain from reality.130
Halfway through the paragraph, reality takes on quotation marks; this is apparently what makes Popper nonnaïve. But these quotations marks do not remain in place for long; nor do they succeed in generating an illusory force field around material objects. The objects are there, and we know it because we bump into them. Science in this sense is very practical.
Everyone knows how to avoid bumping into chairs. But even within the realms of science, the plot begins to thicken when we engage in enterprises more complicated than navigating in drawing rooms, when we begin to hypothesize scientific forces and processes that cannot be measured by radar and sonar. And though there is no scientific problem about validation when people have a negative attitude to material reality (we can tell when people bump into chairs they think are not there), there is a validation problem when people have a positive attitude to ideal reality (when they think they bump into chairs we think are not there). The latter is the situation of Lavaṇa and Gādhi, and it is a situation to which not only Western idealists but Western historians of science, and philosophers, have devoted much attention. The problem arises because, though there may perhaps be a way of testing a real discovery, there is—according to materialist theory—apparently no way of testing an unreal discovery; there is no way of testing a dream. And we would do well to recall that all of our visual perceptions are based on guesses, most of which are seldom if ever tested and some of which cannot be tested. Yet the tale of Lavaṇa demonstrates how one might test—and prove—the validity of an illusion. It may be madness to go on dreaming and never want to wake up, to hang on to a belief and never want to test it; but Lavaṇa does wake up, and he does test his dream.
The use of straightforward tests is sufficient, in R. L. Gregory’s opinion, to demonstrate to any sane man the difference between illusion and reality:
It is sometimes said that “all is illusion.” But perception allows us to avoid bumping into things; perceptions are predictive, and check with the behavior or testimony of other people, and with instrumental data. If we call perception illusion, the word “illusion” ceases to have significance. So this is not a profitable gambit.131
Yet, as we have seen, when the precise factors that concern Professor Gregory—prediction and the testimony of others—are taken up by more sophisticated exponents of the Indian theory of illusion, such as the Yogavāsiṣṭha, that theory does indeed become a “profitable gambit.”
The literature of dreams, in Western as well as Eastern traditions, attempts to come to terms with the demands of scientific verification. As Roger Caillois writes, one approach to the problem of the relationship between the dream and the waking world “involves the possibility of bringing back from the world of dreams some object—a scar, a mark, a token—which will be proof of the dream’s reality, something solid and tangible which will survive after the illusions of the dream have faded away, to attest to the unimpeachable existence of the world from which it had been brought.”132 The bridle that Bellerophon found after his dream of Pegasus is an example of this “solid and tangible proof”; the huts in Lavaṇa’s Untouchable village are another.
Western science would accept the evidence of Bellerophon’s bridle but not the evidence of Pindar’s description of a bridle as “proof” of a dream. The implication is that the dreamer can project his mental images (his desires, his memories) into his dream but cannot project a physical object (a material bridle) out of his dream. As we have seen, Indians do not share this assumption. But even in the West we have become increasingly aware of the ways in which mental projections influence our perceptions of physical objects. J. S. Bruner and Leo Postman constructed an experiment that demonstrated the power of such a projection. They showed people a series of cards, among which was a red six of spades. Most people simply projected onto the incongruent card their own image of either a black six or a red heart, but under repeated exposure they began to waver, and some of them became quite upset. One subject finally blurted out, “I’m not even sure now what a spade looks like. My God!”133 So strong is the power of mental projection that it will often completely neutralize the data that we receive from the external world; this is bhrama. But when we come to perceive the projection, we may come to question the nature of the actual data—to wonder if we have ever, in fact, seen a spade. This is māyā.
Sir Ernst Gombrich has taught us much about the way in which the process of projection applies not only to our manipulation of sense data (as in the case of the red six of spades) but to our experience of art, where “we tend to project life and expression onto the arrested image and supplement from our experience what is not actually present.”134 Projections of this sort appear in India as the reflected or contradictory images (pratibhāsa) that cause landscapes that exist in a distant place or in someone’s mind to be perceived as if they had come to life before our eyes. Indian and Western theories of projection seem to suggest that we perceive illusion and reality in the same way, a way characterized by memory, hypothesis, and emotion. This view is at variance with that of classical nineteenth-century empiricism; it is a metaphysical rather than a physical approach to reality.
As Thomas Kuhn has demonstrated, for scientists to break out of one paradigm and into another requires the same kind of self-awareness and bootstraps shift of perspective that is required for the dreamer to realize that he is dreaming in order to wake up. It requires a leap. As we saw at the close of chapter one, adults can retain the child’s ability to make such a paradigm shift in redefining the reality status of dreams. The process of shifting paradigms is closely akin to the process of religious conversion:
These facts . . . have most often been taken to indicate that scientists, being only human, cannot always admit their errors, even when confronted with strict proof. I would argue, rather, that in these matters neither proof nor error is at issue. The transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a conversion experience that cannot be forced.135
This conversion experience often takes place in the middle of the night or even during sleep.136
Once the scientist has dreamed his new dream, he is faced with the problem of converting everyone else, just like the people in Festinger’s doomsday group. We may find other parallels in the structures of some of the myths of illusion. Many of the myths of the mouth of God, such as the tale of Mārkaṇḍeya falling out of Viṣṇu’s mouth or the story of Nārada’s transformation, depict highly individual or even alienating or antisocial experiences; so do the initial episodes of the myths of the shared dream, when the hero is still the only one who believes that his dream is real. In these tales the individual must defend his own private vision against society as a whole forever, or at least until he finds proof, either in the actual existence of his dream companion or in some other kind of physical evidence. These myths may be contrasted with the better-known genre of the myths of social charter, the myths of shared experience; in these tales the group reminds itself of events that happened to it as a whole and became the basis for its existence as a group.137 The transition from what Kuhn calls extraordinary science (the discovery of a new paradigm) to normal science (the period in which all scientists in a given field are working within that once-new paradigm) is the transition from the solitary dreamer (the man who has fallen, alone, out of the mouth of God) to the group that shares the dream (the myth of social charter).
Arthur Koestler likened scientists to sleepwalkers acting out their dreams. In the Egyptian universe, eclipses were regarded as the enactment of cosmic, mythic tragedies, “But these tragedies were, like those in a dream, both real and not; inside his box or womb, the dreamer felt fairly safe.”138 That is, if challenged, the scientist could always draw back and say, “It’s only a dream.” Since Galileo, however, scientists have come out of their boxes and insisted that their dreams are real, not merely abstract speculations on what might be real. The shift from one paradigm to another is then not just the shift from one dream to another dream but the shift from dreaming to waking up. Yet we have seen the problem involved in any attempt to prove that one is finally awake.
Scientists since Galileo have claimed to be constantly awakening from a series of dreams; this process is called progress. In this view we do not merely swap one dream for another but continue to wake up from each dream; we do not feel that each subsequent dream is simply a linear variation on its predecessors but that each new dream encompasses all the others. In all the centuries since Galileo until our own, each new scientific paradigm has been presented as a full and final awakening: now at last we were no longer dreaming. But the twist has come with the more recent paradigms, those of Einstein and Heisenberg and Gödel, who have argued that we are, in fact, dreaming after all and that the very nature of the process of scientific observation makes it impossible for us ever to wake up. At last we are in the position that Plato and the Indian sages argued for: we are dreaming still, but now we know that we are dreaming. The transition from pre-Galilean to Galilean to post-Einsteinian science is not, therefore, a transition from science as dream to science as waking and then back to science as dream. Just as adults who believe their dreams are real are not the same as young children who believe their dreams are real, so, too, the scientists who are now aware that they are dreaming know that they are still capable of getting closer and closer to the state of awakening, though they can never reach it. They can approach, but not reach, the point where the subtle awareness of mistakes (bhrama) leads to the awareness of illusion (māyā).
Michael Polanyi’s thought represents a kind of synthesis of the views of Popper and Kuhn. Though Polanyi holds, like Kuhn, that the scientist in some sense dreams the world, he also holds, like Popper, that the world is out there and that the scientist then goes out and finds it—and finds that it is, in fact, as he had dreamed it. This extraordinary coincidence is made possible by the fact, always implied by Polanyi, that the mind of the scientist and the form of the universe are made in the same way—indeed, probably by the same Power. The dream and the physical reality correspond, not only in general structure but even in minute detail, because both the structure and the detail are made by that same overarching Power. If the universe is, in a sense, made of mind, then, even if science remains within the realm of mind, it is in direct contact with the world. The universe is a dream that we share with God.
We must beware, therefore, of placing too much faith in the tests that scientists carry out after formulating their hypotheses; for we learn, both from Indian texts like the Yogavāsiṣṭha and from historians of science like Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, that these tests are ultimately beset by the same uncertainties that devastate all mental perceptions of the world. Tests, too, fall within the range not only of bhrama (which many scientists admit) but even of māyā (which most scientists do not admit). The characters in the Yogavāsiṣṭha go about systematically proving their unrealities, and they succeed, just as scientists succeed: they make predictions that contradict their own common sense, and they test them and find them valid. But the lesson that the Yogavāsiṣṭha teaches us is that these tests do not prove anything at all, because common sense, the arena in which the game is played, constantly recedes.
The technique of the tale within a tale, like nested Chinese boxes or Russian dolls, allows the storyteller to dramatize the closely related theme of the dream within the dream:
Someone, in a dream, wakes up—or rather believes that he has awakened, although he continues to dream—and now lies expecting another awakening, which this time may be real but may also be as illusionary as the first. In this way he will be transported from one dream to another, from one awakening to another, without ever being absolutely certain whether he has finally arrived at the true awakening, the one that will restore him to the world of reality. . . . Since, at every moment of the dream, the sleeper is unaware of the fact that he is dreaming, and is even convinced that he is awake, it is clear that there can never be a moment in which a person who believes himself to be awake does not have to entertain the suspicion of a doubt that he might perhaps at that time actually be dreaming. This problem has benefitted from a long and complex philosophical history.139
Stories about dreams, like scientific proofs, often deliberately obfuscate the understructure of common sense in such a way as to leave the reader uncertain which is the real level. The joker in the deck of unreality-testing is the level of the frames: within the dream or vision it is always possible to prove that something is real, but all the author need do is to point out that the whole dream is an unreal part of something else, and all subproofs are then rendered irrelevant. One cannot win the game of unreality-testing, for it is always possible that someone will come along and change all the rules. The reality of the world is not a falsifiable hypothesis. Even when scientific principles are applied inside a paradigm, faith encompasses the paradigm on the outermost layer—or, rather, on what appears, at any given moment, to be the outermost layer. Faith can never be grounded. Not only can we never know when we have awakened from the last frame; we can never know how we might go about trying to awaken from it even if we did know that we were in it.
As we have seen, the hypothesis “This is real” can be falsified (when we wake up) but not verified, while the hypothesis “This is a dream” can be verified (again, when we awaken) but not falsified. To this extent, if we accept falsification as the only reasonable criterion (as Popper would have us do), we are doomed to realism, to the only falsifiable hypothesis. Although one’s mistakes may be subjected—successfully—to scientific falsification, this test does not verify or falsify the reality of the life of the scientist (the Brahmin or king) who is inspired to seek that proof. The extreme form of Indian idealism regards tests such as Lavaṇa and Gādhi carried out as a mere arbitrary construction of reality, the conjuring-up of just one more set of mental images to set against the given set of mental images. When Gādhi was finally convinced by the report of his Brahmin guest and the testimony of the Untouchables and the words of the people in the city of the Kīras, he thought his dream was real. But then Viṣṇu came and told him not only that his dream was not real but, indeed, that the people who had corroborated his dream, who had witnessed his test—the Brahmin guest, the Untouchables, and the Kīras—were all equally unreal. By implication, Lavaṇa’s second trip to the Untouchable village did not really prove that he had been there before, since that trip, too, might have been a dream—this time a dream that his courtiers happened to share. (This is a view of scientific method that might be regarded as an extreme reduction of the attitude of Thomas Kuhn.) The more moderate and realistic form of Indian philosophy, on the other hand, regards the testing as an actual attempt to seek data whose existence is predicted by the hypothesis, data that either do or do not exist; and whether they do or do not exist is a question that will be decided one way or another by the experiment. (This is a view of scientific method that bears the same general relationship to the theories of Sir Karl Popper that the first view bears to those of Kuhn.) In the case of Lavaṇa and Gādhi, the hypothesis is that the visionary experiences actually did take place.
It is impossible to verify the reality of the scientist verifying the test; it is also impossible to verify the reality of the lives of us who listen to his story. This must be taken on faith, and the Yogavāsistha argues for such faith, though it also argues against it and implies that there is no reason to believe that our lives are real. It presents both the argument for the destruction of faith and the argument for the creation of faith. The original complacency of Lavaṇa and Gādhi is undermined; they are taught that reality is not as real as they thought it was. This was the message of the myths of the mouth of God, too. But in the outer frame, Rāma is taught that reality is realer than he thought it was, or at least that it can survive in a contingent fashion; he is convinced of the necessity of carrying on with a life whose intrinsic vanity he has, correctly, perceived. This was the message of some of the myths of the king and the Untouchables. The first argument, undermining the reality of waking life, is mokṣa-oriented; the second, affirming the reality of dreams, is saṃsāra-oriented.
The shock of enlightenment comes when the text suddenly changes the lens on the telescope through which the story is being viewed, drawing back and bracketing (as the phenomenologists say) the entire action that has led us to suspend our disbelief. A striking example of the way in which the frame can be removed from a test of reality in order to negate everything that has preceded it is provided (unconsciously) by Sigmund Freud. Having stated his hypothesis that all dreams are wish-fulfillments, he begins to defend himself against his critics, among whom are several of his patients:
A contradiction to my theory of dreams produced by another of my woman patients (the cleverest of all my dreamers) was resolved more simply, but upon the same pattern: namely that the non-fulfilment of one wish meant the fulfilment of another. One day I had been explaining to her that dreams are fulfilments of wishes. Next day she brought me a dream in which she was travelling down with her mother-in-law to the place in the country where they were to spend their holidays together. Now I knew that she had violently rebelled against the idea of spending the summer near her mother-in-law and that a few days earlier she had successfully avoided the propinquity she dreaded by engaging rooms in a far distant resort. And now her dream had undone the solution she had wished for; was this not the sharpest possible contradiction of my theory that in dreams wishes are fulfilled? No doubt; and it was only necessary to follow the dream’s logical consequence in order to arrive at its interpretation. The dream showed that I was wrong. Thus it was her wish that I might be wrong, and her dream showed that wish fulfilled.140
Within the myth or dream, reality is defined by a consistent set of rules, in which one may build up increasing confidence. But when the author interjects himself into the scene, applying the same rules but on another level of reality, one that encompasses and supersedes the previous one (“It was only a dream” or “It was her wish that I might be wrong”), the inner scene is exposed in all of its softness. The memory of a non-wish-fulfilling dream dreamt before we encountered Freud might be taken as counterevidence; but this Freud cannot provide, because anyone who tells him a dream is telling it to him. We might do it, of course; but now we have read Freud . . . .
In fact, the Freudian frames recede still farther. After remarking on the relentlessness with which his patients continue to produce “counter-wish dreams” precisely in order to stymie him, Freud comments:
During the last few years similar “counter-wish dreams” have repeatedly been reported to me by people who have heard me lecturing, as a reaction to first making the acquaintance of my “wishful” theory of dreams. . . . Indeed, it is to be expected that the same thing will happen to some of the readers of the present book: they will be quite ready to have one of their wishes frustrated in a dream if only their wish that I may be wrong can be fulfilled.141
Here Freud leaps right off the page, out of the frame of the story that he is telling, into the life of the reader. There is no frame that Freud cannot ultimately pull back far enough to produce a focus that will validate his hypothesis. This is science at its very softest.142
Sir Karl Popper has nothing but scorn for the problem of the receding dream frame:
Common sense is unquestionably on the side of realism; there are, of course, even before Descartes—in fact ever since Heraclitus—a few hints of doubt whether or not our ordinary world is perhaps just our dream. But even Descartes and Locke were realists. . . . In its simplest form, idealism says: the world (which includes my present audience) is just my dream. Now it is clear that this theory (though you will know it is false) is not refutable: whatever you, my audience, may do to convince me of your reality—talking to me, or writing a letter, or perhaps kicking me—it cannot possibly assume the force of a refutation; for I would continue to say that I am dreaming that you are talking to me, or that I received a letter, or felt a kick. . . . Of course, this argument for realism is logically no more conclusive than any other, because I may merely dream that I am using descriptive language and arguments; but this argument for realism is nevertheless strong and rational. . . . This, of course, does not refute an idealist, who would reply that we are only dreaming that we have refuted idealism. . . . I do not think it worth pursuing these exercises in cleverness; and I repeat that, until some new arguments are offered, I shall naïvely accept realism.143
Naïve or nonnaïve, Popper is not naive enough to fall into the trap that Freud set for himself; Popper knows when he is pulling back from the receding frame and knows also when an idealistic opponent can pull the frame out from under him. Yet, like the Bellman in The Hunting of the Snark (“What I tell you three times is true”), Popper hopes that, by affirming again and again that he does not care if the frame recedes from him, he will convince us that it has not, in fact, receded. By defining reality only in terms of value, he sidesteps the ontological issue; he shuts his eyes and hopes that the problem of the receding frame will recede.
Yet Popper does trip himself up in the inward-spiraling loops of his own ropes when he tries to tie down his idealistic opponents. Though he admits that “Common sense typically breaks down when applied to itself” and that “The attempt to establish (rather than reduce) by these means the meaning (or truth) [of certain theories] leads to an infinite regress,”144 he insists on making that attempt himself:
The relativistic thesis that the framework cannot be criticially discussed is a thesis which can be critically discussed and which does not stand up to criticism. I have dubbed this thesis The Myth of the Framework, and I have discussed it on various occasions. I regard it as a logical and philosophical mistake. (I remember that Kuhn does not like my usage of the word ‘mistake’; but this dislike is merely part of his relativism.)145
Popper’s maneuver in the final sentence of this statement—itself a fine example of frame reasoning—is strongly reminiscent of Freud’s attempt to extricate himself from his “clever” patient. Popper goes on to argue that, although we are indeed prisoners of our theoretical frameworks, “if we try, we can break out of our framework at any time. Admittedly, we shall find ourselves again in a framework, but it will be a better and roomier one; and we can at any moment break out of it again.”146 How are we to break out? Popper’s suggestion takes the form of a mixed metaphor: “This is how we lift ourselves by our bootstraps out of the morass of our ignorance; how we throw a rope into the air and then swarm up it—if it gets any purchase, however precarious, on any little twig.”147 Bootstrap-lifting is precisely what the Indian mystics are trying to do with their paradoxical stories; and who but the Indians would throw a rope (or a snake?) into the air and try to climb up it? It is typical of Popper to suggest that this might be accomplished only if the rope caught on a twig; the whole point of the Indian metaphor is that one must climb up on thin air—on faith.
Kuhn recognized the inevitable circularity that tends to trap us within a paradigm, even as he recognized the fact that we do, in fact, break out; but, unlike Popper, he argued that it was persuasion of an emotional rather than a rational nature that catapulted one out of the frame.148 As usual, Paul Feyerabend takes the Kuhnian stance to a mischievous extreme:
How can we discover the kind of world we presuppose when proceeding as we do? The answer is clear: we cannot discover it from the inside. We need an external standard of criticism, we need a set of alternative assumptions or, as these assumptions will be quite general, constituting, as it were, an entire alternative world, we need a dream-world in order to discover the features of the real world we think we inhabit (and which may actually be just another dream-world).149
The dream is what helps us to crash through the frame of apparent reality—the last visible frame—even though the dream, too, is a frame, and not the last frame, either. This is Feyerabend’s hotheaded counterattack against Popper’s cool assumption that he can simply reason himself out of the final frame.
The problem of breaking out of the paradigm is the problem of watching yourself having an illusion; as Gombrich puts it, “I cannot make use of an illusion and watch it.”150 Douglas Hofstadter explains why this is so:
It is important to see the distinction between perceiving oneself and transcending oneself. You can gain visions of yourself in all sorts of ways—in a mirror, in photos or movies, on tape, through the descriptions of others, by getting psychoanalyzed, and so on. But you cannot break out of your own skin and be on the outside of yourself. . . . This is reminiscent of the humorous paradoxical question, “Can God make a stone so heavy that he can’t lift it?”151
In India, as we will see in chapter five, God can make a stone that he cannot lift, and He can dream a dream from which He cannot awaken. Moreover, in India, as we learned from the tale of Gādhi, it is possible to watch onself having an illusion.
The problem arises when one tries to watch not the dreamer but the dream, not as Rāma watched Gādhi, but as Rāma watched Katañja (the Untouchable as whom Gādhi was reborn in his dream). Dement was aware of the pitfalls in his attempts to obtain “direct verbal descriptions of ongoing REM periods”:
Would the dreamer narrate the activity? Or would he speak only as one of the characters in the dream fantasy? Is the whole idea as absurd as asking an actor to describe a scene while he is in the middle of acting it out?152
It is impossible to be inside the dream and outside the dream at the same time; yet we are inside and outside, in another sense, every time we dream. The best way to express this paradox, perhaps, is to imagine what it might be like to live the dream and to tell it at the same time, and this is what the Indian myths attempt to do.
The ever-widening circles of the receding frames never seem to end; they indicate, though of course they do not reach, infinity. Zeno’s paradox is the paradox of the receding frame: one can jump half way to the shore, then half of the remaining distance, and then half of that . . . , but one never reaches the shore. You can, however, get closer and closer, and this is what the scientist with his ever-more-refined guesses, and the theologian with his ever-more-subtle metaphors, hopes to do. In the myths, the adding-on of circle after circle produces a kind of obfuscation effect: you wear out your listener until he thinks that you have come to a conclusion, though in fact the problem remains unsolved forever. In the Upaniṣads, this technique is both used and mocked. When the sage Yā-jñavalkya is asked, “How many gods are there?”, he answers, at first, “Three thousand three hundred and six”; then, pressed further, he reduces the number to thirty-three, six, three, two, one and a half (!), and one.153 But when Gargī asks him what water is woven on (wind), and what wind is woven on (the atmosphere), and so on, through the sun, moon, stars, gods, and, finally, brahman, and when she asks him what the worlds of brahman are woven on, he replies, “Gargī, do not question too much, or your head will fall off.”154 There is a pedagogic point in pressing on toward the infinite; the Zen Buddhists perfected this technique of setting the mind in motion toward something that it could not, by definition, ever reach. But if one actually tries to reach it, one’s head falls off.155
The attempt to approach infinity, to produce the illusion that one has described infinity, drives us inevitably into narrative, into parable and metaphor. James Joyce’s famous description of hell suggests infinity in this way: There is a mountain of sand a million miles high and a million miles broad and a million miles thick; and at the end of every million years a little bird carries away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand; and when the bird has carried it all away, not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended.156
The infinity of space may be approached in a similar manner, through a visual metaphor that suggests what it cannot possibly represent. The Hindu cosmos is a series of receding frames (see figure 4), circles within circles, expressed as a series of concentric oceans of various fluids (salt water, milk, honey, and so forth). This arrangement apparently exasperated Thomas Macaulay, who felt that his government should not “countenance, at public expense, . . . geography made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter.”157 But, as Diana Eck has pointed out, India has a kind of “systematic geography” in place of our systematic theology. It is not surprising that there should be an analogy between cosmology and the concentric loops of narrative structure, since both geography and mythology map the world and thus, either implicitly or explicitly, order it.158
Figure 4. One Kind of Indian Universe
a = Mount Meru, the axis mundi
b = Lokāloka, “World-non-World,” the encircling mountain
This chart includes many other features, such as something that resembles a stack of flapjacks on the bottom, a cupcake suspended in midair above the world beneath a flying saucer, a swarm of mosquitoes above the flying saucer, and various triangles, squares, crescent moons, and suns scattered here and there. These all represent physical and spiritual dimensions of the Buddhist cosmos that are not relevant to my present argument. The points I wish to make are limited to the general complexity of the scheme and the relationship between Mount Meru and the World-non-World range. This chart, which is part of Paula Richman’s Ph.D. dissertation, “Religious Rhetoric in Maṇimekalai” (University of Chicago, 1982), is the result of Ms. Richman’s collaboration with Eugene Hoerauf, cartographer, Department of Geography, Western Washington University. I am grateful to Ms. Richman, who holds the copyright on this chart, for permission to reproduce it here.
Moreover, the charts of cosmology (like the implicit charts of the narrative) offer a spatial representation of time as well as space.159 It is our notions of time that are most violently assaulted in the tales of illusion, perhaps because we tend to think that time is irreversible, while space is not. Long before Einstein suggested that we think of time as a fourth dimension, Indians mapped time onto their mythological globe and then flattened it out, with the inevitable distortions, in a story.
The outermost circle of the Indian cosmology is a ring of mountains called World-non-World (Lokāloka), the point where the world and whatever is not the world meet. This is a boundary that is not a boundary; it is a spot where the map lapses into what in our code would be a series of elipsis dots. This is the moment when centrifugal force takes over, when the drone of the great numbers begins to make reason doze, and we feel the stirrings of infinity.
The ring of mountains named World-non-World is a paradox that allows us to stop drawing circles. It is a statement that spits in the face of anyone trying to get to the end of the system, the equivalent of the threat that your head will fall off. Such paradoxes always proliferate on the boundaries of cultural systems, as Don Handelman has pointed out:
As the limits of such systems are approached, there is a radical increase in paradoxes of cognition and perception—mechanisms which permit the system to be self-limiting, and so systemic, while hiding this knowledge from itself. The boundaries of such cultural systems are composed of such paradoxes, which cannot be resolved in accordance with the underlying logic of the taken-for-granted features of everyday life.160
The paradoxes that bound such systems may be visual or verbal. Sometimes they involve a peculiar twist or strange loop, an inversion, as we will see in chapter five. Sometimes, however, they involve nothing more than a statement of simple faith: “God exists” or “I think, therefore I am.” If we try too hard to puzzle it all out, we trip over our own feet, as Gargī did. It either happens to you or it doesn’t. And to reach the spot from which it can happen to you, you must pass through common sense and go beyond it, just as one must pass through a concept of māyā as the force that empties the material world to the concept of māyā that fills the mental world (chapter three) and as one must also pass through the ten-year-old’s concept of the dream as unreal to the adult’s concept of the dream as real (chapter one). Common sense is the star by which we navigate the shoals of bhrama; faith is what steers us across the ocean of māyā.
