Incarnations Read online

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  If Mahavira’s austerity represented a direct challenge to Brahminism, and stood as a reproach to the softer “middle path” of the Buddha, it was nevertheless a clear extension of the martial mores of Mahavira’s warrior caste—though directed to a very different end. As Dundas puts it, “The notion of vigour, of heroism, very much informs the Jain ascetic ideal. I think in a modern world, many of us view asceticism in rather more negative terms. But fasting, forms of physical torture or pain which certain types of religious people have always inflicted on themselves—in India this was regarded in a highly positive way, as almost a form of warrior activity.” As it would later be for Gandhi (38), the endurance of physical and psychological hardship was seen as necessary to becoming a nonviolent actor.

  This conquering spirit extended itself into the intellectual realm. The disputes reflected in the biographies of the Buddha and Mahavira were set within a broader context of intellectual competition between rival philosophers and teachers. Alongside the Kalpa and Acharanga Sutras, one of the earliest Jain texts contains the doctrines of sects with whom the Jains actively disagreed. These may have included materialists, who denied the existence of a spiritual realm and therefore the possibility of salvation, and fatalists, who denied that human beings could exert any influence whatsoever on their paths to spiritual liberation.

  Mahavira and subsequent Jains attacked these views, basing their own claims to preeminence on the rigorous requirements of Jain religious practice, and on their analysis of reality. These, in turn, were supposedly the fruits of revelation. According to Jainism, Mahavira’s enlightenment, and the enlightenments of the other ford makers, constituted a state of omniscience. We might say that he became like the man who knew the elephant for what it was, and could help transmit that knowledge to his followers.

  Yet such a thoroughgoing philosophical victory contained a paradox within it. The Jain analysis of reality was founded largely on anekantavada, the doctrine of many-sidedness, with its inherent critique of the limitations of human understanding. On what basis, then, could Mahavira and his philosophy claim to speak from a position of omniscience? This was also a problem for later commentators who wished to link anekantavada directly to ahimsa. While the early Jains may have been socially tolerant, they maintained a faith in their own intellectual and religious certitude. Ultimately, anekantavada was not a doctrine of relativism: the blind men were, in the end, arguing over the same elephant. As Dundas has written, “Jainism’s consistent historical stance with regard to itself is that … it is at the most profound level different from and superior to other paths.”

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  Today, we can see Mahavira’s brand of extreme asceticism and spiritual confidence embodied in the beautiful sculptural forms of the Jain tradition, which represent the ford makers and other mythical Jains. With spare, powerful physiques and lustrous skin—a luster, it is said, that comes with the renunciation of many foods—these sculptures stand in an ethereal nakedness, which was once described by the German Indologist Heinrich Zimmer as “a strange but perfect aloofness, a nudity of chilling majesty.” So still are they in their rejection of earthly life that they often have climbing vines carved around their thighs.

  The most remarkable of these monoliths is the statue of Bahubali, or Gommata, who, according to one Jain sect, was the first person other than a ford maker to achieve liberation. Erected at the end of the tenth century, in a period when Buddhism and Buddhist sites in India seem to have been under attack, it still looms above the plains of southern Karnataka. At seventeen meters high and eight meters wide, it’s one of the biggest statues of the human form anywhere in the world.

  Despite Jainism’s intellectual aggression, and its hostility to the power of the Brahmin caste, over the course of its history the religion seems to have engendered little retaliatory violence. Perhaps ahimsa made the Jains seem innocuous, or perhaps the Jains themselves recognized that a religion whose monastic and lay members were drawn largely from the middle and lower castes could not afford to antagonize its neighbors and trading partners. At the same time, the austerity that protected the religion may also have limited its appeal, and prevented it from spreading, as Buddhism did, outside India. Remaining small in scale, perhaps it was never seen as a threat.

  The faith also saw internal schisms. One issue that continues to divide the Jain community is whether women, too, can advance on the path to enlightenment. The strictest of the leading Jain traditions contends that women can’t be ordained ascetics, since their bodies produce eggs that are killed during menstruation. In addition, it argues that only those who abandon all possessions, clothes included, and live “sky clad”—the lovely Jain phrase for nakedness—can wander toward grace.

  It was difficult in Mahavira’s time to be a hard-core Jain practitioner, and it is difficult in modern India, too. Attributed to him are five uncompromising ethical rules that continue to guide Jains in their struggle toward salvation: the renunciation of killing, of speaking untruths, of sexual pleasure, of greed, and of all attachments to living beings and nonliving things. Of course, not all five million or so current followers of Jainism can strictly adhere to these principles. There is a large lay community, especially among the trading castes, that, while observing strict vegetarianism, continues to do business, procreate, and support the small number of Jain monks and, in some sects, nuns.

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  So why did Gandhi, as he advocated his views on religious tolerance and nonviolence amid the turmoil of pre-Independence India, reach for this ancient, renunciatory tradition? It has been argued that his understanding of nonviolence was shaped more by the example of Christ, and specifically by Tolstoy’s ideas, than by Jainism. Yet perhaps the political message of Gandhi’s nonviolence, which extended beyond the Jain conception, at the same time demanded a specifically Indian expression. Gandhi was not only pursuing religious amity; he was fighting for freedom from the British, for a sovereign India for Indians. And, for him, Indian self-rule had to begin with rule over the self, something he believed his soldiers of nonviolence had achieved. “Only they saw deeper and truer in their profession, and found the secret of a true, happy, honorable and godly life,” Gandhi wrote of them. “Let us be joint sharers with these teachers and this land of ours will once more be the abode of gods.”

  3

  PANINI

  Catching the Ocean in a Cow’s Hoofprint

  Fourth century BCE

  At the end of the last century, Bangalore became synonymous with Indian software. In this century, it’s not entirely outlandish to think that Indians may become synonymous with American start-ups. Already, according to Google’s Eric Schmidt, around 40 percent of start-ups in California’s Silicon Valley are run by people from Indian backgrounds.

  One reason for this predominance is that Indians have the highest incomes of any group of American immigrants, and can secure elite, high-tech U.S. educations. Similarly rigorous educations can be acquired in India, at places such as the Indian Institutes of Technology, modeled on MIT and established by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Yet perhaps there is another, subtler reason for the rise of Indians in IT, one that takes us back twenty-five hundred years, to the original nerd.

  His name was Panini, and he created, in what amounts to a mere forty pages, the most complete linguistic system in history. This masterwork, known as the Ashtadhyayi, or Eight Chapters, helped to make Sanskrit the lingua franca of the Asian world for more than a thousand years. “It’s one of the most astonishing intellectual achievements of the human mind, and a very beautiful system,” Paul Kiparsky, a professor of linguistics at Stanford University, says. “It’s intensely pleasurable to explore—and one reason to be pre-occupied with it is that there’s so much more to find out.”

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  Panini was born into the Brahmin varna, the highest of the Hindu orders, and the only one whose members were permitted to use the Sanskrit language. It’s believed he lived ar
ound the fourth century BCE, in the subcontinent’s northwest, in a town called Salatura, near today’s Peshawar, close to Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. The outlines of Panini’s life are misty, but the imprint of his mind on the Ashtadhyayi is unmistakable. It’s quite clearly the work of a single individual, an ancient obsessive fascinated with deconstructing things in order to understand how they work.

  What Panini took apart and held up to the light of his mind was Sanskrit, the language of the Vedas. Transmitted by memorized recitation, the sounds and rhythms of these sacred hymns and incantations, and the language itself, were believed to reflect eternal truths about the universe. To analyze and understand this language, the task of Brahminic scholars, or pandits, such as Panini, was nothing less than to grasp the nature of the cosmos. “Precisely understanding human action, which includes language, is a source of religious merit,” Kiparsky explains. “Just as in yoga, the idea is that we breathe mindful of the breath itself, and that is a way toward salvation—so, if we speak mindful of the structure of the system underlying speech, that also brings us closer to salvation.”

  Sanskrit means “perfectly made.” It is a language of extraordinary precision. In English, for example, the role that nouns play in a sentence (subject, direct object, indirect object, and so forth) can usually be gleaned only from the context. But Sanskrit uses eight different suffixes to embed these meanings into the form of the words themselves. You can tell from a single Sanskrit noun, even in isolation, its syntactical function: that is, whether it is the possessor of some object or quality, the instrument with which some action was performed, the location where a process unfolded, and more. Other features of the language can be equally expressive of such subtleties.

  Panini set out to capture in exacting detail how this sacred language worked. To do this, he needed what linguists call a metalanguage—a way of talking about the features and structure of Sanskrit that wasn’t entirely present in Sanskrit itself. When you encounter terms like noun and indirect object in English, you’re encountering bits of a metalanguage invented so we can better discuss the language. Panini’s metalanguage, however, had to be concise enough to be committed to memory and passed on orally. Describing Sanskrit in ordinary terms would have been unwieldy, so he developed a shorthand or code that he used to express its grammatical structure and other features.

  To create his coded metalanguage, Panini borrowed the building blocks of Sanskrit. He split the spiritually charged language into its constituent sounds, and assigned to each a coded linguistic meaning. In Panini’s system, various features of Sanskrit (noun cases, classes of sounds, and so on) are represented by abbreviations, often single syllables or letters. Panini then combined these abbreviations into verselike strings, or sutras, which set out the rules of Sanskrit in a highly compressed form. Take this sutra, for example, which consists entirely of code “words”: iko yaṇ aci. Decoded and translated into English, it means “i, u, ṛ, and ḷ are replaced by y, v, r and l respectively when followed by a vowel.” Though one recent English translation ran to more than thirteen hundred pages, the four thousand sutras that Panini created to describe Sanskrit’s phonology, morphology, and syntax can be recited in around two and a half hours.

  Concision was only one of Panini’s goals. He wanted his account of Sanskrit to be exhaustive as well. This ambition was far greater than it might at first seem: Panini didn’t want his system just to describe all the features of Sanskrit; he wanted it to be capable of generating a virtually infinite number of well-formed words and grammatically correct sentences. Any Sanskrit utterance from the Vedas, or any possible Sanskrit sentence created elsewhere in the world, should be derivable using Panini’s system.

  This aim led Panini to his most important innovation. The sutras of the Ashtadhyayi were expressed as a set of procedures for transforming linguistic inputs (for example, the equivalent of the English to be) into various well-formed Sanskrit outputs (such as “they are” and “they have been,” instead of “they been” and “they have are”). He structured these rules so that they would interact in highly complex ways—like the steps of a tough algorithm, or the lines of a computer program. The outputs that were produced by some rules could become the inputs of other rules, and could combine with other outputs to become the inputs of still further rules—and so on. Through combinations of a finite number of general rules and specific exceptions, the system could transform basic linguistic inputs (many of which were listed in appendices to the Ashtadhyayi) into a limitless number of grammatical words and sentences—some of which may not even be part of actual usage.

  In modern linguistics, Panini’s system is what’s known as a “generative grammar.” The term was coined only in the late 1950s, when contemporary research into language finally caught up with what Panini and his subsequent pandit commentators had been doing for twenty-five hundred years. (There is a story to be written tracing the direct links between Panini’s work and the emergence of modern linguistics: three founders of the field—Ferdinand de Saussure, Leonard Bloomfield, and Zellig Harris—were all scholars of Sanskrit.)

  Kiparsky was part of the first-generation students of the Western version of this type of linguistics. “When I started studying generative grammar with Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle back in 1962, we were trying to write precise and comprehensive descriptions of languages,” he says. “Our main interest was in the question of what all languages have in common and how it’s possible to acquire a language. In order to study that question, we tried to construct explicit and comprehensive grammars. I was quite amazed to find that Panini already had one that was beautifully constructed. It’s a kind of miracle that this was achieved on the basis of one language.” So awesome was Panini’s ability to articulate and compress the rules of Sanskrit that it was said he had managed to capture the ocean in a cow’s hoofprint.

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  The Sanskrit word used to describe Panini’s work is vyakarana. Often translated as “grammar,” its meaning is broader—something closer to “language analysis.” Among pandits, vyakarana was one of the six “auxiliary sciences,” or “limbs,” of the Veda, learning not found within the Vedas, but essential for comprehending them. These ancillary disciplines were the mother lodes of Sanskrit knowledge, the basis of all other understanding. Among them, vyakarana was preeminent; it was known as the sastranam sastram, the “science of sciences.”

  Indeed, many scholars have seen vyakarana as the paradigm for other major fields of inquiry in ancient India, such as astronomy and philosophy. The Dutch linguist and philosopher Frits Staal, for one, often compared the derivational qualities of Panini’s grammar to the deductive principles of Euclid’s geometry, and argued that Panini had played as foundational a role in creating standards for inquiry and knowledge in India as Euclid had in the Hellenistic world, and later in the West. At the very least, many if not all the classical Indian thinkers who subsequently worked in Sanskrit would have studied the language’s grammar “and therefore undergone the influence of Panini.”

  Though the extent of the epistemological influence of Panini’s grammar remains uncertain, its broader cultural impact was undeniable. In large part because Sanskrit was considered the timeless language of the divine, it also had extraordinary currency in the historical world of men. Perhaps paradoxically, no one seems to have done more to enable the extension of this currency than Panini.

  In Panini’s own time, Sanskrit was monopolized by Brahmins like him, and confined to a relatively small area of India’s northwest (though he himself recognized, and designed the Ashtadhyayi so that it could cope with, regional variations and non-Vedic uses of Sanskrit). But the language’s privileged status made it desirable to other social orders and religious traditions, and Sanskrit gradually took wing. It became a language in which great works of literature were composed and, as it spread in the centuries after Panini, helped give India a cultural and social cohesion that no political power would be able to establish until at least the t
wentieth century. It also did something else: it made India an exporter of cultural capital. From the start of the Common Era and for well over a millennium thereafter, Sanskrit bound together a huge civilizational territory, continental in scale.

  Sheldon Pollock, a professor of Sanskrit at Columbia University, has called this the “Sanskrit cosmopolis.” At its peak, a quarter of the world’s population lived within it. Sanskrit became, he says, “the sign, across this vast space, for a kind of style of polity and civility and beauty—across an entire world, from Afghanistan to Java. And it lasted for a thousand years, because it was cool, it was beautiful. It was a sign of participating in a big world—you’re not just a little local person; you have people in Cambodia quoting you and you’re living in Delhi.”

  For Sanskrit recitations on the Indochinese peninsula to feature the work of northern Indian poets, regional variation had to be kept to an absolute minimum. Cambodian princes wrote a Sanskrit no different from poets in Tamil Nadu and Gujarat. Panini’s grammar played a role in securing that coherent intelligibility, setting standards to which later users of classical Sanskrit strove to adhere. As literacy spread through the subcontinent, his oral codification of Sanskrit was eventually written down. Ultimately, this made it harder to restrict access to the classical Sanskrit that Panini in large part helped create. In this way, the revered vyakarana of the Brahmin Panini became a pathway for the expansion of Sanskrit to new groups, both within and beyond the Hindu varna system. From its origins as the language of power, Sanskrit became the language in which people could create and participate in a shared literary imagination—one that sometimes questioned power itself.