Myths

Summary

  • The particular stories of deva-s (such as battles with asura-s) are not to be taken literally, according to the veda-s and upaniShats themselves.
  • To derive benefits from the deva-s, one does not need epistemological belief in peripheral things like flying yogi-s, texts composing themselves and the like (even, from the perspective of brahma-jnana - reincarnation, deities proffering boons).
  • At the same time, the hindu need not let questions like “How can monkeys talk?” hinder his enjoyment of the rAmAyaNa epics or his observance of rAmanavamI rituals. The wise should know what the Gods and sages intend to communicate in the language of myth.

Implications

  • The nature of myths easily implies non-absoluteness/ non-literalness of texts (More in the bases/books page).

Benefits

  • These stories intend to teach us other things, such as
    • how to visualize and adore the deva-s
    • how to think and feel about our own (internal and social) conflicts and situations.
  • In this conversation between a bAlinese hindu and a German christian about the historicity of rAMa, the pestered hindu asks: “Do you want to know whether the story is true, or merely whether it occurred?” [Orientalism and Religion: Post-Colonial Theory, India and “The Mystic East” By Richard King, pp. 39-40].

राम-तापिन्याम् अपि -

चिन्मयस्याद्वितीयस्य
निष्कलस्याशरीरिणः ।
उपासकानां कार्यार्थं
ब्रह्मणो रूप-कल्पना ॥ ७॥
रूप-स्थानां देवतानां
पुं-स्त्र्य्-अङ्गास्त्रादि-कल्पना ।
द्वि-चत्वारि-षड्-अष्टानां
दश द्वादश षोडश ॥ ८॥

अष्टा-दशामी कथिता
हस्ताः शङ्खादिभिर्युताः ।
सहस्रान्तास्, तथा तासां
वर्ण-वाहन-कल्पना ॥ ९॥
शक्ति-सेना-कल्पना च
ब्रह्मण्य् एवं हि पञ्च-धा (हस्त-वर्ण-शक्ति-सेना-वाहनानि)।

Non-literalness in Hindu traditions

dhArmika traditions comfortably got along without needing to read these as literal facts. (Eg. The concept of arthavAda.)

  • shatapatha-brAhmaNa asura-parAbhava part in 11.1.6.8-10
  • Also see rAma-tApiny-upaniShad above.
  • There are many mythic elements in the purANa-s and the itihAsa-s, which guard against them being taken too literally (as more than allegories). The very nature of the hindu deities (multiple arms, animal heads etc..) ensure that they are not taken as literal statements of fact.
  • The concept of arthavAda was used in pUrva-mImAmsa to understand tales in the Veda-s, itihAsa-s and purANa-s as stories used to encourage dhArmika practice, rather than as history. However, they held that the veda-s are eternal expression of the divine order and that Vedic injunction is the sole means of knowing dharma. [AL01, shabara-kumArIla-gangAdhara ]
    • This concept has been used by several later traditions as well.
  • Many modern and traditional scholars interpret claims and stories from hindu lore at multiple levels: Adhi-bhautika (phyiscal), Adhi-daivika (stories of the deva-s/ divine metaphors), and AdhyAtmika (spiritual allegories).

Comparable attitudes

Aesthetes

Aesthetes rely on the concept of “aesthetic distance”. Consider an actor in a play: he does not think “this is not real, I am not this character, this is a made up story” etc.. when acting. Neither does the full-hearted audience (sahRdaya rasika) insulate himself from feeling empathy with the characters on stage or in a book with similar questions.

Some practitioners who might regard the Gods as non-living or merely metaphorical share this attitude. (It would be a fallacy though to think that everyone who does not take myths literally does not consider the Gods true or real in a more substantial sense).

I don’t believe anyone believes in a one-eyed man who is riding about on a horse with eight feet,” Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, told Reuters. “We see the stories as poetic metaphors and a manifestation of the forces of nature and human psychology.” … The priest said the gods are viewed as mystical and symbolic. Most modern worshipers don’t consider them to be living beings that are capable of flying down from the clouds. … The Asatru religion might describe itself as poetic–but if some Christians, especially those in the Western hemisphere, were to take a literal look at the new altar to pagan gods they might consider it satanic.

(The high priest of Ásatrúarfélagið, the norse temple in DailyBeast)

Contrasts

Not mere fiction

we are no different than people in the West who make religion out of Harry Potter or the Jedi from Star Wars.

  • आर्यपरिगृहीतत्वे हि भेदः ।
  • पुनः, देव-प्रेरितत्वे, आर्षप्रणीतत्वे च भेदः।

In contrast to mere fiction, myths are divinely inspired, come from sages and are highly beneficial.

Distinction from kavi-samaya

Kavi-samaya is unlike myth. Both the kavi and the rasika know that what is accepted as kavi-samaya doesn’t hold good in their everyday life. For example, the rasika will not get perturbed if he doesn’t see cakoras feasting on chandrika or cAtakas waiting for monsoon clouds to quench their thirst. On the other hand, common people get perturbed if someone tells them, for example, that there is no proof for the existence of Vishnu or Shiva.

  • shankara

Not fake history

“Fake history” (eg. “shankara was from 5th century BCE with this chain of AchArya-s leading up to our current pontiff”) should be separated from “myth” (eg. rAmA was from treta-yuga, which was so many eons ago).

True myth operates at a different epistemological level. Further, it is oft marked by supernatural episodes.

Note divergence from abrahamisms, which are more “history” centric.

Proving myths fallacy

Despite this, some modern Hindu scholars have tried too hard “prove” myths as facts.

nAgarAja’s summary of bAlagangAdhara’s thought here:

  • 7. One point is that narratives that can roughly be categorized as myth and legend have been there in a huge number throughout the world in all the ancient civilizations, in all the tribal and rural societies spread throughout the world. once the modern discipline and category of ‘history’ came into existence as part of modernity, this new category along with all the elements of modernity got privileged over all other traditional forms of narrative. As a result, throughout the world, people started to attempt to prove their ‘believed to be true’ narratives as ‘historical’.
  • 8. Meanwhile, myth became a huge obsession in the west during modern period. People from various disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, cultural anthropology, philology etc., began to theorize myth. The pejorative use of the word myth as a word for non-real , false nation etc. took back seat in the wake of all these new theories. Some of these theories viewed myth as a kind of a ‘degenerated’/‘corrupted’ history. But most of these theories posited myth as containing a different ’truth’ than the one attempted to be captured by ‘science’ (of which ‘history’ is a part).
  • 9. But attempts to trace ‘historical’ facts from Greco-Roman myths became a fashionable academic activity among general educated Europeans. It is such Europeans who after encountering Sanskrit books such as Mahabharata applied that approach to these Sanskrit books too.
  • 10. Thus what these European scholars did is first, they viewed Mahabharata, Ramayana as ‘mythology’ equating them with Greco-Roman mythology and then they did the ’looking for history’ thing that they did to Greco-Roman mythology to these Indian books too.
  • 11. Many Indian scholars blindly followed both these steps closely and plunged into big debates of various competing historical interpretations of a certain story of Mahabharata, Ramayana or various Puranas.