Incarnations Read online

  Shankara explicated this moral vision in volume after volume—some estimate the number at four hundred—of subtle commentaries on the Upanishadic texts. In other modes, Shankara could be direct—for instance, in his popular call to devotion, Bhaja Govindam. Yet in his efforts to capture the ineffable oneness of the universe, he produced a beautiful, if at times confounding, literature:

  I am neither earth nor water nor fire nor air nor sense-organ nor the aggregate of all these; for all these are transient, variable by nature … I am neither above nor below, neither inside nor outside, neither middle nor across, neither the east nor west; for I am indivisible, one by nature, and all pervading like space.

  * * *

  Though the term Hindu, denoting those who lived in the subcontinent, beyond the Indus River, was known to the Greek historian Herodotus in the fifth century BCE, Hinduism entered the historical record only around Shankara’s time. It was a name used by Arabs who were attempting to describe the different religious strands they encountered in India. Indeed, some scholars see in Shankara a response to the first incursions into the subcontinent of that great proselytizing monotheistic religion, Islam, in the mid-seventh century (and many later monistic Hindu sects became proselytizing themselves, emulating what they opposed). But Shankara’s monism was crucially different from monotheism. Unlike the jealous, paternal God of the Abrahamic faiths or the superhuman personal gods of the Vedic pantheon, his Brahman was without positive attributes, an essential substance rather than a divine agent.

  Arguably more important than any response Shankara may have been making to Islam was the way he took on Buddhism, then by no means at the end of its Indian decline. Throughout the subcontinent, he engaged in verbal combat with Buddhist philosophers, who taught, as the Buddha had, such doctrines as the momentariness of all things, and the denial of the existence of a deity. At the same time, however, he learned a trick or two from them and also adopted in his mutths organizational aspects of the Buddhist sangha. Some later critics spoke of Shankara’s “hidden Buddhism.” Others denounced his theory of monism by quipping that Shankara was simply too dim to count beyond one. Yet perhaps his ability to adopt important features of Buddhist practice, such as the monastic order, into Hindu tradition was one small part of what forced Buddhism into its long dormancy on the subcontinent.

  Unlike Buddhism at its inception, and during its Dalit renewal in the middle of the twentieth century, Hindu monistic doctrines, of which Shankara’s became the most prominent, sometimes slid toward intolerance. Shankara himself maintained that only Brahmins could renounce the world (and thus achieve moksha). Moreover, as Wendy Doniger, a professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago, has argued, the belief that the lived world is “ultimately unreal generally siphons off the impulse to take action against social injustices, against poverty and cruelty.”

  Even commentators sympathetic to Shankara detected troubling contradictions in his account of liberation. In particular, the lack of distinction between atman and Brahman led to a sort of paradox of inquiry: If we are one with the undifferentiated, qualityless essence of the universe, how can we possibly reflect on that universe in order to discover what we truly are? Furthermore, if the Vedas, Vedanta, and Shankara’s own thought are all part of the illusory world of maya, how can we hope to find in them the truth of the unity of being?

  According to Jonardon Ganeri, Shankara’s most startling idea (one shared by Hindu philosophers in other, connected schools) was that “the way out of colossal error” (out of maya) was “to embed within the illusion the catalyst of its own destruction.” In other words, Shankara turned on its head the example of the imagined but no less fatal snakebite: even (the right set of) illusory beliefs and practices can help lever one into an awareness of the truth.

  * * *

  By midmorning, Sringeri fills with pilgrims and tourists who swarm the mutth and temples. It’s a sight repeated on most days at the four corners of the country. Shankara’s monasteries continue to thrive and (along with a fifth, established at Kanchi) have become some of the most important Hindu religious sites in modern India. Each one is headed by a Shankaracharya, who adopts Shankara’s name as an official title.

  In his lifetime, Shankara’s teachings gained him many devoted followers, but it’s the afterlife of his teachings that makes his doctrine far more popular today than it ever was in the eighth century. His pruned-down version of Hinduism caught the interest of the broad-minded Mughal emperor Akbar (16) in the sixteenth century, and later found a ready ear among India’s nineteenth-century colonial masters. Doniger explains:

  One branch of Hinduism, which includes the Shankara tradition, the philosophical tradition, was very attractive to the British when they came to India and established the Raj. They liked the fact that there was a philosophical tradition; they could come to terms with it. The rest of Hinduism, which is to say most of Hinduism—with the gods with many arms and goddesses that drink warm blood—the British didn’t really like that part of Hinduism.

  In addition, Christian missionaries, who were often the forerunners to the colonial administrators and factory men of the Raj, sought to undermine the various forms of Hinduism they encountered. “They wanted to find points of weakness, and polytheism was one of the principal targets,” Ganeri says. “They accused Hinduism of not being a well-organized, coherent religion precisely because of its polytheism.”

  Many educated Indians, working closely with British overlords in the vast machinery of the subcontinental empire, came to adopt these prejudices—and the Christian model of religion, if not its content, seeped into the culture at large. Elite Hindus grew ashamed of the lack of systematization and scriptural authority in their religion, yet, according to Doniger, they did not abandon Hinduism altogether: “They became proud of the philosophy of Shankara.”

  In this way, the absorption of British prejudices had the contradictory effect of consolidating Hinduism, albeit in a very particular form. At the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Hindu revivalists and Indian nationalists embraced Shankara’s philosophy as a muscular indigenous religion. Thinkers such as Swami Vivekananda (28) invoked Shankara’s ideas and argued for the creation of schools to promote Advaita Vedanta and foster national pride.

  Despite the powerful afterlife of Shankara’s doctrine, even today his version of the religion is by no means one that all Hindus would recognize. Doniger has compared Hinduism to a Venn diagram without a center: clusters of overlapping practices and beliefs, with no single feature shared by all the religion’s many manifestations. “Shankara’s there, everybody knows about him,” Doniger says. “Some people use him as their own guide to thinking about the meaning of life, and those people say that’s what Hinduism really is. But that’s really not true: it’s what some of Hinduism is.”

  * * *

  On a hill leading up to the Sringeri mutth is a clutch of market stalls selling trinkets, images of Shankara and other religious paraphernalia—the kind of thing I imagine that Shankara himself would not have had much time for: idols within a world of illusion. At the top of the path that leads to the monastery, you can hear monks reciting mantras, apparently oblivious to Shankara’s rejection of such practices.

  But it’s that constant capacity to allow beliefs, however abstract, to be observed and practiced in different ways that keeps Hinduism invigorated. Shankara’s thought, Ganeri says, “performed an admirable function by providing a Hindu analog of European ways of thinking, but it was just the opposite from what I think is the essence of Hinduism: its great diversity and polycentricity and plurality.”

  That plurality clearly survives. The present-day Shankaracharyas may be the nearest thing Hinduism has to a pope or papacy, but Hinduism itself remains much as it was in the eighth century, when the Arabs first tried to label it: multiple in form, bubbling with internal arguments, accepting of different types of belief. There is no single, defining text or interpreter. What we have are mesmer
izing questions, puzzles, early-morning doubts about the nature of our perceptions, the limits of self, and the relationship between that self and the wider flow of time.

  9

  RAJARAJA CHOLA

  Cosmos, Temple, and Territory

  Tenth century CE

  Most South Indian cities have a temple at their heart. The one in Tamil Nadu’s Thanjavur, or Tanjore, is a thousand years old. Locals call this stone building Periya Kovil, “the Big Temple”; the scholar David Shulman has termed it a “rhapsody to size.” A decade in the making, it was crowned by a gilded finial that stretched its superstructure to sixty-six meters high—making it for centuries the tallest temple in India. It was the signal architectural achievement of the Chola dynasty, which from the late ninth century to the late thirteenth sustained one of India’s most sophisticated cultures. The ruler who ordered its construction was born with the name Arulmozhivarman, but ascending the Chola throne in 985, he became simply Rajaraja, the “King of Kings.” His temple, which stood at the center of a loosely assembled empire whose influence extended from the Maldives to Indonesia and the South China Sea, was a symbol of his power, his munificence, and his proximity to the divine.

  “He builds a temple which he modestly names after himself, the Rajarajeshwara temple, and it is really the most magnificent temple of the early eleventh century anywhere in India,” says George Michell, an expert on Indian architectural history. “It stands to this day as a testimony to the financial resources, the architectural magnificence and the artistic skills that Rajaraja could command to build this great monument.” There were important South Indian temples before this, Michell adds, “but suddenly, with Rajaraja, everything gets three or four times larger.”

  Nineteenth-century British colonialists found the height quite useful: they mounted a theodolite on the temple’s shimmering spire as part of their quest to survey the Indian landscape. But it must have seemed unearthly to the medieval peasants of the Kaveri river belt who watched the structure rise, block by granite block, over their rice paddies, a great pyramid of tiered stone to evoke the Himalayan abodes of the gods.

  I have always wondered if the building of this grand temple was a sign of how uneasy Rajaraja was about his power. He had acquired the throne at a shaky moment in Chola history, and much in his world was shifting and tenuous. The Cholas were one of several South Indian dynasties; about a century before Rajaraja’s birth, these kingdoms had almost fought themselves into exhaustion, and the Cholas had begun to assert themselves. But when Rajaraja came to power, his kingdom was still recovering from a significant defeat at the hands of rival Kannada rulers. In addition, the realm he governed comprised many networks of local kings and village strongmen; merchant groups, traders, and port controllers; Brahmins; and the masses tending the paddy—along with a cacophony of local cults of worship connected with different deities and caste groups. Rajaraja had to bring this diverse society under his command without the benefit of a standing army or the sort of octopus-like bureaucracy Kautilya (4) had prescribed.

  Yet he succeeded. His genius lay in cultivating a command over the imagination of his subjects—and he did this by creating an inclusive religious and imperial ideology centered on the temple at Thanjavur, which celebrated Rajaraja both as a conqueror and as a devotee of unbounded generosity. The shrine combined his worship of the god Shiva with elements drawn from Vedic Hinduism, southern devotional traditions, and popular cults, and served as a metaphor for the unification of South Indian society under his rule.

  “Building a temple is a major legitimating device,” says Professor R. Champakalakshmi, a scholar of the Chola political system. “Unless you build a temple, you cannot claim to be a sovereign, you cannot claim to have sovereign rights over the territory you wish to control.” Rajaraja’s temple went even further, though:

  It was the symbol of royal and political power, and he tries to combine in this temple all kinds of art—sculpture, painting, music, dance, everything—into one, making it culturally the most significant of all the South Indian temples. Yet the importance also has something to do with the expression of the territorial control over a very large area, which is now called Tamil Nadu but was then divided into smaller subcultural regions. All these were integrated into a single whole—and that is what this temple represents.

  In short, according to Champakalakshmi, Rajaraja created “an equivalence” between “cosmos, temple, and territory.”

  * * *

  A narrow, high-ceilinged corridor skirts the temple’s dark inner sanctum, and around one corner you’ll find one of the richest examples of wall painting in Hindu art. It’s part of a cycle of murals—a form usually associated, in early Indian history, with Buddhism—that was painted over at some point during the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The murals were rediscovered in 1931, by a Madras professor wielding a Baby Petromax kerosene lantern.

  In the dim light, you can just make out a large portrait of Lord Shiva. He’s smiling impassively as his dancing feet trample Apasmara, an epileptic dwarf who, in Hindu mythology, personifies ignorance. To Shiva’s right, under a canopy, stands a muscular, bearded man, lightly dressed and with no adornments, his black hair pulled up in a bun. He’s leaning forward in a stance of worship, palms outward, offering flowers to his lord. According to George Michell, this is the earliest identifiable portrait of any king in Indian painting—it is Rajaraja himself, installed beside the temple’s deity. This is a temple to him as much as to any god.

  Some people argue that, over the centuries, South India has sustained a purer Vedic Hinduism, because, unlike the north, it wasn’t set upon by central Asian and Islamic invaders. Yet nowhere in the country will you find religion set in amber—not even in this somberly beautiful place. Throughout the temple are images of Shiva (often as Nataraja, the creator and destroyer) carved into the walls. Rajaraja and his Brahmin priests practiced an eclectic Shaivism, drawing on bhakti forms of puja, or worship of images of the deity, by offering flowers, clothing, food, and precious things—practices whose purpose and payoff were different from those of Vedic sacrificial rituals.

  At the center of the temple is a massive lingam, a phallic monolith nearly four meters tall that represents Shiva. According to Champakalakshmi, the symbol derives from the Puranic tradition of Hinduism—in many ways an earthier, if not necessarily a more demotic, strain. There are Vedic gods here, too (the Dikpalakas, or “Guardians of the Directions”), but they are posted outside the main sanctuary.

  Drawing on various religious streams, but expressing a distinct hierarchy, the temple iconography echoes the structure of Chola society. “Rajaraja had to bring together these people who are of different ethnic groups, different tribal groups, who worship different deities,” Champakalakshmi says. “The temple is an instrument of integration, and not only for various religious rituals and deities, together building up a pantheon. It also brings all these ethnic and other groups into the Brahminical order of society.” As part of this cultural assimilation, which surely included elements of coercion, Rajaraja took those of his subjects who had previously been outside the varna system and incorporated them into the fourth—the Shudra, or servant—estate.

  He also invested in the creation of exquisite portable icons of Shiva and the other gods, statues that remain some of the greatest products of Indian sculptural art. At its consecration, he arranged a gift of sixty such figures to the temple. They were solid and cast largely from bronze, often over half a meter tall; some of the metal that went into them is likely to have come from across the seas. Perhaps the most famous depict Shiva as he is in the mural near the temple’s sanctum sanctorum: as Nataraja, encircled by flames, serenely dancing the cosmos into destruction and renewal.

  We see these Chola bronzes today as ethereal figures, frozen in movements that are at once dynamic and perfectly poised, emanating sensuous elegance. Yet in Chola times, they were adorned with the finest muslin and silk, jewels and flowers, and carried by priestly assist
ants at the head of raucous parades. Drums were beaten, conch shells were blown, and many coconuts were cracked.

  In the Chola temples, darshan, or worship through the act of seeing or being seen by a deity, was strictly out of bounds to the lower castes. In fact, their men were allowed into the temple compound only to sweep and service it. As for women, while inscriptions tell us of some who donated gold and jewels, only queens and devadasis, or ritual temple dancers, could enter. So the festive outdoor processions of the bronze gods were among the few occasions when peasants could “receive” darshan, a spiritually charged glimpse of their gods. In the lives of the very poor, these were dancing, chanting, ecstatic events—and Rajaraja got credit for them.

  * * *

  In the mural near the temple’s center, three queens stand to Rajaraja’s side and a little behind him. They are small women made more substantial by their heavily jeweled cuffs and belts. It’s no accident that the skin of each woman varies in shade: the queens are each of a different ethnic origin. The mural testifies, with more subtlety than usual for the Chola emperor, to the breadth of the dominion he achieved.

  “King of Jewels, Incomparable Chola, Great Saviour, Jewel of the Solar Dynasty, Lion among Kings”—these were Rajaraja’s titles, which he had engraved in stone and on hundreds of pieces of copperplate. Religious institutions anywhere you go reflect secular and historical truths, in addition to transcendental ones, and Rajaraja understood that well. The walls of his temple are covered in thousands upon thousands of verses, in the Tamil language and script; many are testaments to his generosity and devotional renunciation. The temple had other donors, and one can see records of their gifts all over these walls, too. But it was Rajaraja who gave the most—more than two hundred kilograms of gold by the end of his reign, along with copious amounts of silver and jewels. These contributions, and those he made to Indian architecture and art, were financed in part by trade and taxation, and in part by plunder.