Revelation and Reason Part III

Sabda –Revelation and the Brahmin Orthodoxy

A. Srinivas Rao

11^th May 2011

In the last of the series on the contest between revelation and reason is the small but significant tale that took place in ancient India. The reason I like to tell this tale is of course that it was in India but also that it entirely captured the debate within a branch of philosophy called epistemology or the theory of knowledge. The tale is sophisticated and also raises issues that deal with aesthetics, hermeneutics and linguistics.

It was the period 800-200 BCE. It was the age of the greatest of the titans of human thought. It was the age that forever lit the ways of thought as never before and made a divinity of being human. It was called the Axial Age. The great Zarathushtra had just died near Persia, reclusive thinkers in Indian forests were challenging the stranglehold of Brahmin orthodoxy and one of the ford makers Parshwanath had just passed away. The very heavens refused to let the grand old man Lao Tzu into their midst pleading with him to go back and be human again and show man the Way, the Tao. In China Confucius was holding forth his Analects on the good human being and a great bureaucrat. Soon Socrates would walk absentmindedly in the agoras of Athens questioning people, dutifully followed by Plato, showered with a bucketful of water by his wife, in frustration. It seemed that the very gods wanted to send Prometheus back to man, this time with the heavenly fire of Reason and it seemed around the globe several unearthly suns made a simultaneous dawn flooding the earth with a light that would never diminish.

In the thick forests of the Gangetic plains at that time shone the ethereal incandescence from the nimbus of two men; one robed by air and the other in ochre, resplendent in their crown of wisdom, Mahavira the ford maker and the awakened one the Buddha. Strange were these men who inhabited the forests who called themselves ‘sramanas’, some walked clad with nothing, some wore thick blankets of hair, all lost in contemplation, perennially questioning how to bring the light of reason to the fires of ritual and passion. They had only one thing in common despite their diversity of faith, following, creed and tongue, constantly questioning every certainty handed down by tradition. The Brahmins fearful of their loss of authority of scripture and thus livelihood soon realised that unless their revelation of the Veda was subordinated to reason, they would be left out of the intellectual revolution unfolding in their midst. These Brahmins were called the mimamsakaras or the analysts and would be at the vanguard of defining what orthodoxy was. It was not just the Jains and Buddhists who opposed them but also some bacchanalian party goers who sang “rinam kritva ghritam pibet” …”have a rocking time even if you have to borrow for it” “for this is all there is to the non mystery of life”.

Some of these men then were debating on the sources of knowledge. In the theory of knowledge, valid knowledge (prama) emerges from the object to be known (prameya), the means of knowing the object (pramana) and the knower (pramata). In those times (as also this day) there were/are two primary sources/means of knowledge i.e. direct perception (pratyaksha), and inference (anumana). All that the human mind can comprehend is revealed by these two. All other sources like analogy, example, etc were secondary and variants of inference. The Brahmins brought in a third and called it revelation (sabda) which is also called verbal testimony of the Veda. What the Brahmin or orthodoxy was saying was that human experience while sufficient to understand nature, transcends itself and points to something not accessible by the mind (yato vacho nivartante) and revealed by the Veda. What the Buddhist was arguing was that human experience in its widest sense exhausts reality and what cannot be accessed by the mind does not exist. Sabda was not just revelation claimed the Brahmin but intuition tempered by reason and the weight of tradition. It also meant, the Word or Logos or Form, and went on to suggest that the world is linguistically constituted (i.e. we know the world only through the word) and that the word (sabda) and its meaning (artha) are indivisible and eternally constituted and uncreated (nityatva and apaurusheya). Where the Buddhist argues that the word and its meaning were a social convention the Brahmin posited an eternal union (celebrated by Kalidasa as vakarthavivasampraktau vakartha pratipaataye, the union between the word and its meaning) between the word and its meaning that preceded thought.

Under the relentless scrutiny by the Buddhist to come clear with the nature of revelation the Brahmin was to use reason in his defence of revelation. To prevent the intrusion of every dogma as revelation he posited a series of conditions that revealed truth can only be that which is extra empirical (anupalabdhi); that what is revealed should not contradict perception or inference (abadhita), in other words should be coherent. It also said that revelation should seem plausible i.e. reason should foreshadow revelation; that revelation should help choosing between two contesting but plausible explanations. It finally stated that that revelation should be a collective intuition. The result of all these should be a unique perspective or vision the Darshana. With such a definition of Sabda six schools of orthodoxy (darshanas) emerged, the Mimamsa, the Vaiseshika, Nyaya, Sankhya, Yoga, and Vedanta. What was common in all these Brahminical schools was the belief in the revealed truth of the Veda. All other schools who contested the infallibility of the Veda were the heterodoxy. These were the Jain, the Buddhist, Ajivika, Lokayata/Charavaka and others which we have irretrievably lost. These believed that inquiry should begin with no presuppositions. Over time however with the redaction of the Pali canon around the time of Emperor Ashoka the word of the Buddha was also a revelation though subject to ones own investigation i.e. it was a provisional truth.

Sabda went on to become also a theory of interpretation or exegesis of a text among the mimamsakaras. One example of it is their (mimamsakara's) declaration that the meaning of a sentence is not just the fragmentary meaning of its words but conditioned by their mutual expectancy (akanksha) appropriateness (yogyata) and contiguity (sannidhi). It was later developed by Bhartrihari in his famous work Vakyapadiya that raised the Word or Logos to that of the Supreme Being Sabdabrahaman. Eventually Sabda became a vehicle of all plastic arts and was a synonym for Rupa or Form and the unity of the word  and its meaning (sabda-artha) was transposed to the unity between the form and its content or substance (rupa-artha); the basis of all theory of art. Aesthetic theory now claimed that aesthetic experience was itself transcendent, sapient experience or Rasa next only to spiritual bliss (Brahmanandasahodara).

Such were the far reaching consequences of the contest on revelation provoked by the Buddhists and its adaptive response of the Brahmin orthodoxy.  A sophisticated theory of linguistics emerged based on Sabda by Bhartrihari in the 4^th century CE called Sphotavada or the explosive theory of meaning. Together with the with audience cantered aesthetics these theories found resonance only in the nineteenth century in Western thought. The spirit of enquiry sustained the civilization for a long while and ensured the flourishing of a rationalist strain right until the tenth century. From then on India somehow lost its confidence and its ability to generate imaginative solutions with the use of reason. It was soon mired in a nitpicking on commentaries of past texts and lost its capacity to be original.