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.

Revelation and Reason Part II

Mutazili and Reason in Islam

A Srinivas Rao

May 8^th 2011

Lazing as a couch potato would, remote in hand I accidentally chanced upon an interesting biopic titled “Destiny” by Yousseff Chahine (NDTV Lumiere) on the life of the last of the Islamic Philosophers Averroes (Inb Rushd) (CE 1126-1198). So impressive was his life and scholarship that I thought it a pity that we haven’t been educated as legatees of the whole of human history of thought. What is more impressive, less acknowledged and ironic is that the West received Greek-Hellenic thought thanks to the legacy of Islam who had nurtured the rationalist traditions of the Greeks until the Renaissance. It was due to the great Islamic scholars Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd) that the West re-discovered the legacy of Greek and Hellenic thought. What however is tragic is that Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sina were denounced by their own people for using frameworks that were non-Islamic especially Greek methods of logic to clarify ideas within Islam. What is ironic is that the West celebrates their achievements. Even today in the great painting called “The School of Athens” by Raphael, Averroes has a prominent place, So also in Giorgion's painting the Three Philosophers. What follows is the context of the times of Averroes (not his biography).

In the long and tortuous history of human rationality we unwittingly promote a myth that rationality is a precious legacy of the modern West. There is a corollary to it that the non-West was utterly devoid of rationalist traditions.  The great contest in every society between faith and reason is an interesting tale to tell for ears that would care to hear. Even in Ancient India the tale unfolds as the contest between the Mimamasakaras of the Brahmin orthodoxy and the rationalist discourse of the Buddhists; but that’s a different story.

Revelation and Reason Part I

Modernisation is not Modernism

A Srinivas Rao

1^st May 2011

Sangay Lobsang of Harvard was appointed last week as the Prime Minister of the Tibetans and more than 500 years of tradition yielded to a modern view of separation of the Church ( as represented by the Dalai Lama) from the State. Somewhere along the way, the discomfiture within Islam in our times also stems from the unitary conception of Church and State and the inability to separate the two. Of course there is no hierarchically organized church in Islam (nor is there one in Vajrayana Buddhism). Yet the principle of separating the institutions of the state fashioned on reason and church founded on faith and revelation has been inexorably continuing on a secular trajectory.  All modern institutions of the state and by contagion all public institutions (except those of religion) follow this as a cardinal principle, including the separation of the domain of ethics from that of religion. Indeed the definition of modernity is often predicated on such a separation of powers; a quarantine between faith and reason. Often when as a faculty I have noticed well meaning prayer invocations in Sanskrit and celebration of religious festivals, I have felt that the school more than others must reflect on the place of religion in society and while giving it its due, keep enshrined not loyalties or traditions but reason in its prayer halls. What is the genesis of this and what are the values it assumes and makes us complicit in is what I would attempt to write.