India, Sri Lanka, Tibet

India thinks in images. Symbol and metaphor have been available to Indian thought in an intimacy unparalleled in any other advanced civilization. Unlike Greece, its mythology was never devalued by philosophers nor were the great legends transformed into allegories by poets. Hindu myth has remained archaic, the collective heritage of a religious community which even today continues to refashion and reshape what is the most complex living culture in the world. Just as the traditional Indian system of social organization, caste, has grown over the past three and a half millennia through incorporation, not abolishing the customs of newly assimilated peoples but assigning them to a low place in the hierarchy, so Indian mythology rejected few beliefs, but included them in its own developing form, even if they seemed incompatible at first sight. Thus Sri Ramakrishna could say of his devotions towards the end of the nineteenth century: ‘I have practised all religions, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, and I have also followed the paths of the different Hindu sects. I have found that it is the same God towards whom all are directing their steps, though along different paths. You must try all beliefs and traverse all the different ways once.’ While Mahatma Gandhi may have been correct in describing Ramakrishna's life as ‘a story of religion in practice’, the Bengali holy man did not once waver in his allegiance to the Divine Mother, whose aspect as Kali, the Black One, derives from her satiation with the blood of her innumerable victims.

Such a monistic view of the universe, whose every part is seen as alive and a manifestation of the total divinity, is fundamental to Hinduism, despite the hosts of gods and superhuman beings with which its mythology teems. The multitudes of apparitions are only aspects of the eternal cycle of creation, duration, and dissolution. To escape the endless round of rebirth and to enter into the unconditioned reality beneath the surface of daily appearances is the quest of the sage, the ascetic. Moksa, ‘release, liberation, freedom, rescue, deliverance’: this was the inner, non-dual perception of Ramakrishna and those others who attain the ultimate vision in samadhi. The understanding of this unity is the goal of Hindu wisdom. Beyond aversion and desire lies the union and coincidence of all kinds of opposites in one, transcendent source. Birth, love, joy, friendship, beauty, anger, sickness, pain, terror, and death have their rightful place in the constant universal evolution of the basic reality.

The Rig Veda, a collection of hymns, contains the earliest details we have of the gods of the Aryan invaders who overthrew the ancient Indus valley civilization about 1700 BC. Their chief god was Indra, god of the storm, whose weapon was the thunderbolt, and he rode to battle in a golden chariot drawn by two ruddy horses. As puramdara, the ‘fortdestroyer’, he gave the nomadic Aryans victory over the sophisticated agriculturalists living in the cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. The Indus valley civilization extended over an area much larger than either Egypt or Sumer and appears to have reached its zenith about 2500 BC. In spite of evidence suggesting trade links with Mesopotamia the Indus valley cities display a more highly developed architecture as well as a notable absence of temples. Conspicuous at Mohenjo-Daro was a public building housing a bathing-pool with chambers; it prefigures the holy bathing-places of later India, such as are found now along the sacred rivers and within temple compounds. ‘In places without tanks’, a more recent Hindu text declares, ‘gods are not present.’ The two main Indus valley cults were phallic worship and sacrifice to the mother goddess, the ancestress of Kali. In addition to the phallic lingam, fragments unearthed by archaeologists that anticipate other attributes of Shiva include the cosmic dancer and the three-faced yogi. These few remains indicate the tantalizing possibility of a continuous mythological tradition extending over no less than 4,000 years. There may have been a resurgence of old beliefs in the subsequent displacement of the Vedic deities worshipped by the Aryan invaders, and the triumph of Vishnu, Shiva, and Devi, the mother goddess, over Indra, Brahma, and their kin.

The history of the period after the collapse of the Indus valley civilization is still obscure, the archaeological record of the next phase of urban life dating only from 1000 BC. The scene has shifted to the Ganges valley, where settlements with ramparts appear on fertile riverside clearings amid the dense jungles then covering the northern plains. Artefacts discovered there reveal an evolved society and from 400 BC onwards are found the remains of Buddhist temples and stupas, funerary monuments usually containing a relic of the Buddha. Four castes existed: the brahmins, or priests; the kshatriyas, or warriors; the vaisyas, or peasant farmers; and the sudras, slaves and servants, probably formed of the non-Aryan, indigenous people. To this latter caste in time were added the untouchables in the same way that their southern neighbours were transformed into the demonology of Hinduism.

Indra has fallen into the second rank. He is inferior to the triad of Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer. Initially conceived as a personification of the Brahman, the transcendent and immanent absolute, Brahma always lacked a mythological roundness. He was the positive aspect of the life process in the universe, and was never represented as destroying what he had created. A spiritual concentration ignoring the enigmatic and disturbing side of creation, therefore, left scope for the rise of Vishnu and Shiva as deities comprehending birth, life, and death. But Brahma does provide the timescale of the universe and here it is that Indian mythology stands out in stark contrast with the rest of the world. For though the world cycles of Hinduism are subdivided in four yugas or ages, not unlike the Greco-Roman ages of gold, silver, brass, and iron, they follow each other in the apparently endless stream of time. The wheel of birth and death, reincarnation, encompasses the individual, the species, the social structure, the planet, the gods, the universe: it is the timescale of Nature herself. Endless, irreversible, unquenchable are the processes of alteration and change. The cycle of emanation, fruition, dissolution, and re-emanation from the primeval substance, has a vastness incomprehensible to mankind. Even Indra finds it hard to grasp the truth when on one occasion Shiva and Vishnu tell him that there has already existed an army of Indras. These deities themselves recur in each slowly moving cycle to repeat their mythological actions. As the boar avatar, carrying the earth goddess whom he has rescued from the waters of the deep, Vishnu remarks: ‘Every time I carry you this way…’

Indian computation of time is an exercise in adding noughts. A kalpa, a day and night of Brahma, is 8,640,000,000 years of human reckoning, and comprises 2,000 world cycles. At the end of one hundred Brahma years of Brahma days and nights there occurs a total dissolution, before a Brahma century of quiescence having elapsed, the universal cycle may start anew, or there may be a final passing away of creation. Anxiety over this cosmic uncertainty is somewhat allayed by the knowledge that it is approximately 31,000,000,000,000 years away. An entirely different perspective on the world was devised by the seventeenth-century Anglican divine James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, who calculated from evidence in the Old Testament that the date of the creation of the earth was 4004BC. In 1642 Dr Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, refined the dating and declared it was 23 October 4004 BC, at nine o'clock in the morning–an academic commencement if there ever was one. Although their calculation has long been disregarded, the underlying assumption informs present-day thinking in the West, which views events as unique, unrepeatable phenomena.

Related to the boundlessness of time in Indian mythology is the concept of maya, perhaps the most difficult and fundamental of all notions. Our word ‘magic’ has connections and carries something of its meaning. Maya can mean an illusion created by supernatural agency. In the ninth century Sankara, looked upon by some as an incarnation of Shiva, by others as the pre-eminent medieval teacher and saint, considered the visible cosmos was maya, an illusion imposed upon the adamantine soul, jiva, through the unpurged senses and the unilluminated mind. Yet at the same time maya is the generative force within the primeval substance: it gives shape to the myriad forms of creation, sustaining gods, saints, and men. A favourite metaphor is the snake and the rope. Ignorant of the character of a rope lying on the ground, a man believes he sees a snake. The chief aim of Hinduism is to unveil the oneness within the play of maya.

Buddha, ‘the enlightened one’, also literally awakened from the dream-like process of maya. He escaped the net of illusory experience, the continuous round of being, samsara, and his ministry was nothing more than a pointing of the way. Gautama Siddhartha (c. 563––479 BC), the North Indian prince who became the Buddha, lived during a period when men were turning their attention inward. According to a Sri Lankan tradition the Buddha realized his Enlightenment was ineffable but Brahma persuaded him to teach those few capable of following him. Another source recounts the setbacks he encountered when he tried to communicate his vision of sunyata, the universal void. Finding men frightened, he passed on his deeper message to the nagas, or serpent genii, who in the second century initiated Nagarjuna, the philosopher of Mayahana Buddhism. Though the Buddha, like Lao-tzu the founder of Chinese Taoism, knew that his experience could not be adequately explained in words, and deliberately restricted pictorial representations of his life and deeds, there developed an intricate mythology which in India eventually synthesized with Hinduism, but elsewhere has continued to develop and influence other traditions. The conversion of King Asoka to the Buddhist faith in the third century BC ranks, for Asia, with the conversion of the Emperor Constantine to Christianity six centuries afterwards for Europe. It inaugurated an unprecedented era of religious activity which spread Buddhism to Central Asia, then to China, Korea, and Japan; to South India and Sri Lanka, and to South-east Asia.

The Buddha, however, was not alone on his inward journey. In 526 BC died Mahavira, the last of the twenty-four Jain tirthankaras, ‘makers of the river-crossing’. Today there are only about 2,000,000 Jains in India but they still support the astonishingly austere group of ascetics, both male and female, at the centre of this ancient belief, perhaps one surviving from the remote antiquity of pre-Aryan times. A tirthankara is superior to the gods and untouched by the endless changes of the eternal cosmic order. Dwelling near the crown of the universe, the tirthankaras are sublimely detached from celestial as well as terrestrial affairs. Since the Jains posit neither creator god nor creation, the sole function of these ascetic beings is to signify the ultimate destination, a supernal level where liberated souls float in infinite knowledge and bliss. The colossal statue of Gommatesvara, standing on its granite eminence at Sravana Belgola in Mysore, perfectly sums up the Jain attitude of dismissing the body, kayotsarga. Naked, digambara, ‘sky-clad’, ethereal, the saint's posture is of an ascetic superman whose consciousness is anchored on things above the concerns of men or gods.

Jainism pictures the universe as a giant human figure: either male or female. Indeed, cosmological diagrams have been always a matter of intense speculation. With time conceived as eternal, Jains even succeed in making the Hindu and Buddhist interest in cycles of events appear hasty. The pre-Aryan roots of Jainism are probably revealed in the dualistic nature of their universe, because matter itself holds karma, the sinful trigger of rebirth, and pollutes the immaterial soul. A Jain ascetic would carry a broom to sweep his path, lest his feet crush minute creatures and earn further disability. The rite of sallekhana, or fasting until death, is favoured as a way of final withdrawal by advanced ascetics. Kalanos, the holy man who burned himself on a pyre at Susa in front of the bewildered troops of Alexander's army, could have been a Jain.

Opposed to this drastic life renunciation was Tantric Buddhism and Hinduism, a movement culminating at the turn of the first millennium and finding its enduring monuments in the temples at Khajuraho and Bhubaneswar. Impressive for their erotic sculpture, whose loving figures exalt in mithuna, ‘the state of being a couple’, these were the places of worship for Hindus seeking oneness with the primeval substance through the biological impulses. Ritual was devised in order to contemplate the divine without any rejection of maya: in sexual union devotees experienced momentarily non-duality, the erasure of all distinctions. It was known in Tibetan Buddhism as Yab-Yum. The mystical marriage of opposites, the male and the female principles, antagonistic yet cooperating forces, like Shiva and his consort, his sakti, marked the return of the mother goddess, Devi, and the start of her present ascendancy. Yet the austere symbol of the stone phallus had hardly left the safety of its position in the earth womb. The most sacred image of the Hindu temple has remained the lingam within the garbhagrha, ‘the womb house’, a small chamber situated at the very centre of the building. In this man-made sanctuary, as dark as the cave in the mountain, the individual may be spiritually reborn through realization of the unconditioned character of the primeval substance. For in India congregational worship has only limited scope.

Ramakrishna went through the tantrika-sadhana with a nun in his worship of Devi, and travellers report that till the beginning of this century the vestiges of temple prostitution were still evident. Mother Kali, however, does not obscure her darker sides from her devotees. Like Shiva and Vishnu, she has the whole range of attributes–creation, preservation, and dissolution. When asked by a disciple why Mother Kali keeps the world as it is, Ramakrishna replied: ‘That is Her Will. She wants to continue playing with Her created beings.’

India is the holy land for South, Central, and East Asia. Out of its spiritual wrestlings came not only the evangelism of the Buddhist faith but also the profound influence exerted by Hinduism on the peoples living in South-east Asia, whose most imposing monument, Ankor Wat in Cambodia, today stands witness. But the impact of Indian mythology was greatest upon the countries immediately adjacent to its borders, namely Sri Lanka and Tibet. Their later adaptation and development of Buddhism, a process of accommodation to two separate traditions of indigenous belief, could be said to have been delayed until the faith became extinct in India. With the revival of Hinduism at the beginning of the second millennium the followers of Buddha in Tibet and Sri Lanka found themselves free to interpret the scriptures in their own ways.

Legend credits Sri Lanka with three visits by the Buddha. Once he went to the top of Adam's Peak, and there left his footprint. Along with the relic of the tooth, a left eye-tooth of the Buddha imported in fifth century, the footprint remains a magnet for pilgrims, and is a potent symbol of popular belief that Sri Lanka is the dhammadipa, the island which acts as the guardian of the true doctrine. Even before King Asoka commended the Buddhist religion to Devanampiya Tissa, King of Tambapanni (Sri Lanka), there had appeared divisions among the sangha, the monk community. From these doctrinal differences, and changes in attitude towards the monastic life, a new movement within Buddhism emerged, which finally became known as the ‘Greater Vehicle’, Mahayana. Its emphasis on compassion and the ideal of the bodhisattva, or Buddha-to-be, a saviour-like figure reminiscent of Christianity, contrasts with the spiritual wisdom so prized in the older tradition, thereafter called Hinayana, the ‘Lesser Vehicle’. Whereas the people of Sri Lanka came to adhere to the monastic goals of Hinayana, whose lineage is traced back directly to Ananda, one of the Buddha's principal disciples, the conversion of the Tibetans was to Mahayana doctrines.

Perhaps the more evolved iconography of the ‘Greater Vehicle’ accounts for the comparative vigour of Tibetan myth. Or the land itself may have been a contributory factor. Far removed from lush Sri Lanka are the snow-covered peaks of the Tibetan mountains, where icy winds and thunderstorms bring hailstones which are heavy enough to kill. Destruction has always been close to the Tibetans. They portray Yama as the epitome of annihilation, a monster who crushes the wheel of life in his deadly grasp. Though King Stron-btsan-sgam-po (died 650) is regarded as the original Buddhist ruler, not till the end of the first millennium did the imported religion oust Bon, the Tibetan form of that old animist-shamanist faith which at one time was widespread not only in Siberia but throughout the whole of Central and North-east Asia. The relative merits of Indian and Chinese forms of Buddhism were debated at Lha-sa in 792, to the advantage of the former, but not until 1042 did a leading Indian teacher visit Tibet. Then Atisa, who had previously even travelled to Sumatra at the invitation of its Buddhist rulers, arrived and expounded doctrine, before he moved on to Sri Lanka. During the Mongol conquest of China (1279–1368) the Tibetans converted the nomad invaders to their form of Buddhism, and such was the influence of the lamas in the Celestial Empire that in 1322 when copper for coins was becoming scarce, a 300-ton statute of the Buddha was cast for a temple near Peking. Shortly after this period they applied the notion of reincarnation to the succession of chief monks. It was believed that the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara was reborn in the person of each Dalai Lama: the fourteenth in the series now lives as an exile in India. By this century the idea had spread throughout the monasteries of Tibet so that numerous abbots are conceived of as the reincarnations of their predecessors.

Yet the significant figure in South and Central Asia remains the outsider, the saint. He is the one for whom everything is holy. According to a Hindu legend, an ascetic once slept with his feet resting on the lingam, Shiva's symbol. A brahmin saw this desecration and rebuked him fiercely. The ascetic said he was sorry and asked for his feet to be placed where there was no lingam. Angered, the brahmin seized the ankles of the ascetic, but wherever he swung them a lingam sprang from the ground. Thereupon the brahmin reverently bowed to the reposing saint and went his way.