Revenge of a Logician
Two friends grew up together in their gurukula, school. One studied astrology, another logic. They both became quite established in their fields. The logician (Naiyāyika) wrote a good number of commentaries and introduced some new categories. The astrologer made tons of money. Tired of his poverty, the logician embarked to see his successful friend and ask for his help.
It is hard to imagine how quickly people change when they become successful. The astrologer could not stop making fun of the poor logician for the choice of his subject. And the villagers laughed at his cost. Heart-broken, the logician said farewell. When his friend tried to give him some money, he asked for just one single hair. The astrologer happily pulled one hair and gave it as a gift.
Confused, some villagers followed the logician and asked, why would you need a hair from the astrologer? The logician replied, “oh! you poor villagers have no idea he is a Maha Siddha, a person with supernatural powers. A single hair from his body well kept in my house will make me a rich man."+++(5)+++
That was all it was needed for the villagers to gather and pull all the hairs from the body of the astrologer.
Vivekananda
What I like the most about Vivekananda is that he made his spiritual quest a part of rational human inquiry.+++(5)+++ He did not pose himself as some supernatural being; he explored rational grounds for his beliefs and he trashed beliefs that he deemed irrational. He did not invoke his authority on the basis of his origins or his private experiences. While his teachings are grounded on Advaita, he did not use non-duality to market himself as God. It is his humanity that makes him great.
Clown
A friend of mine rejected to submit his dissertation and instead decided to be an entertainer. He sang, played guitar, and sometimes became a clown and cherished children in their birthday parties. I wanted to see him before leaving town when I took my first big job. There I found him in a park, cheering up children with his painted face and funny sounds. he graciously hugged me and whispered, ‘do not forget we are all in entertainment business!’
When Vardhamana walked out of Vaishali barefoot, he must have had the zeal to learn, to discover, and not to be entertained. when he stood up in deep meditation for years and years, i do not believe anybody cheered or clapped.May be he soaked all the desire in humanity to learn. all we want today is carnival. without Bakhtin, we would not even know what we really want.
Udayana
Murder
Udayana may have committed a murder. They say he jumped off a palm tree saying “Vedas are the valid means of knowledge” and challenged the competing Buddhist monk to do the same saying “Vedas are NOT the valid means of knowledge.” They say the monk could not survive the fall. Now, if Udayana believed that his opponent had a false belief, he should not have allowed the monk to jump.
Dialogue
I still love Udayana. For, look at his way of reasoning: parānabhyupagamena hetvasiddheś ca | The reason you give is unfounded because that is not accepted by the other party.+++(5)+++
Today’s religious dialogues and even broader social conversations rest on private reasoning; you say it is P because it is Y but only you know why Y should confirm P. And if someone asks for concomitance (vyāpti), you pull out Gun.
Readers and Writers
Eco was brutally honest when he said, “You know, I don’t read, I write."+++(Actually no- that’s Eco’s answer to ward off fan enquiries about whether he’s read this or that book.)+++ I myself am struggling in between. It is not a lack of devotion on reading, neither is the loss in appetite to write. These two hungers are insatiable. You can convince Quixote or even Trump that they have saved the world from the monster windmill but you cannot convince yourself that you have read enough if you are a reader, or have written enough, if you like to write.+++(5)+++
My teachers did not train me to write. Our job was to read and our teachers’ task was to create passionate readers.+++(5)+++ When someone approached my grand teacher Padma Prasad Bhattarai to write on Nyaya, his response was: first read all that is written and then come back to me with requests like that. And my teachers like Mukunda and Dirgharaj and Bidur never tired of citing their teacher for the virtue in not writing. Kabir went the other direction, he saw meaninglessness in reading. He never said anything about writing though. A friend of mine recently caught me while reading and cited Kabir: nobody has been wise by reading books. He did not answer though when I asked why is he reading Kabir then?
Any way, readers seem to have a different dharma to uphold than the writers. Readers admire the pearl but writers cut it out of the shell. Readers can afford to not read some writers but writers have to read not just what they like but they have to particularly read what they do not like.+++(4)+++ Writers are like Shiva who relish in their enclosure, enchanted with their romantic thoughts, while readers are like Agni the fire that receives the first seeds of wisdom or the waters that nourish ideas so that the children they raise can have multiple heads.+++(4)+++
Conference
We all must have been to one or another conference but we hardly contemplate upon its taxonomy. For example, do you know the difference between Coyote conference and Rat conference? Have you even heard of the Skunk conference?
Let me tell you. A Coyote Conference is where the folks gather and talk about their grievances; they share how their cultures have been colonized and how their native lands have been encroached, and how they have to be united against the empire. These conferences generally last for half an hour and the objective of the conference is to show who can scream loudly. And this makes the foundation for electing the leader.
A Rat conference, on the other hand, is a gathering of the victims where nobody has the courage to act and the cats still lack the bell.
Skunk conference is very difficult for the non-skunks to fathom. For, they all scream and run around releasing the gas but they themselves are immune to it. Skunks are very parochial in that regard.
The Birth of Bhāmati
Attuned to the unfolding of the words being measured to reflect deeper dimensions, Vācaspati is not even aware that the day has fallen and darkness has crawled in. With a sudden glow of light, he rushes to finish the last sentence of the day. At this moment, dark ink spreads over the page, some drops of water confronting its white surface. Surprised, Vācaspati looks above, only to encounter an elderly woman with wrinkles and gray hair. Astonished he asks, ‘who are you?’ The lady replies, “I am your wife my lord. You have been so busy with your studies, you never manged time to see my face from the youth of my teens to now sixties. I have spent half a century together, my lord, and finally today you have noticed me.”
Like a tiny frog in a big lake, she remained hidden, underneath the surface level of consciousness. All Vācaspati thought in those five decades were interrelated and disconnected thoughts.
Many die without feeling guilty. They can as well argue that there is no emotional experience of guilt. Vācaspati would have died just the same had he not felt guilty for once in his lifetime. Approaching her feet, he begs for her forgiveness. “My lord”, she responds, “there is nothing to forgive. I have served you well, have remained your faithful wife, and I would have been old with or without you noticing. I do not know if I would have felt carnal pleasure but I sure would have loved a child from you.”
Vācaspati may have been the first philosopher to recognize mimetic corporeality besides the genetic one. We live mimesis, and Bhartṛhari would have added, all is speech anyway. It is one way to see matter and another way to see speech. Now the machine beings call it codes. He names the text as Bhāmati, and offers it to her, saying, ’this is your daughter.’
We can always find meaninglessness in Vācaspati’s way of life but I leave that to the exitsentialists. There really is nothing that is inherently meaningful and neither is there anything that cannot be made meaningful. It is like beauty; meaning is something you have to see. The first time I opened Bhāmati, I was just a teenager and I could feel her friendly touch. This book has been very personal to me.
Many must have fantasized Bhāmati with her dark curly hair and big almond eyes but Bhāmati has chosen to age with me. Even though the cover is worn and parts torn, Bhamati still reconnects with me. Vācaspati did not leave his body but he did leave his mind. And the offering he made does reflect his basic nature.
Academic Calendar
Is it too early to float the idea of having a longer winter vacation and a short summer vacation? We do not know if this Corona is going to be seasonal. Even if we take total control over this virus, cold and flu affect faculty, student and families every year and winter is always the worst.
We also have lost the rationale behind the summer vacation. Our students do not help their families to grow crops during the summer. In many places summer heat is more manageable than the winter snowstorms. Unlike the vrātyas and śramaṇas, we do not wander in the forest either.
To me, it makes more sense that we change our academic calendar and make winter a three month vacation.
Descartes
Let me entertain you with the first rule of Descartes for the direction of the mind:
“The aim of our studies should be to direct the mind with a view to forming true and sound judgments about whatever comes before it. "
Apparently there was time when scholars actually believed things like truth.
The ball
It was not an ordinary ball. I have not seen anything like this before, for it appeared a ball from one side and a perfect cube from the other. Sraddha had no plan as such for an adventure but it all started with the breakfast and an unplanned introduction with Shen Sheng, and Jerome that ended up with this mystical ball that could have been very well a cube. If not for that breakfast, this whole fuss would not have even started.
Jerome was in India for a vacation. New to India, he was excited to meet chatty Sraddha over the continental breakfast and learn the correct way of doing Namaste. Shen Sheng came tumbling, for he needed some coffee to combat the jet lag. One thing led to another, and they decided to climb the mountain and even chance exploring the cavern that Sheng had read somewhere in the chronicles as the house of a dragon. There was no Sanskrit text to support the myth but the locals said a great sage has been meditating inside for the last one thousand years.
The hills were still gold being caressed by the morning glow. The first climb was daunting but a plateau turned into a valley and they even met some villagers in the upper hills. Slowly the scene changed and the climb ascended again, with a steep slope daring the novices. They had not even seen the face of the cave when they tumbled into this rock. First it was just the shape that drew their attention. And Sraddha screamed, what a perfect ball!, but the same time Jerome from the opposite side screamed, what a perfect cube! Sheng does not speak much but the paradox drew his attention, and as if the contradiction did not even matter, he retorted, really good “square ball.”
They decided to carry the object down the hill and so the adventure was terminated. They also talked about the ownership, as Sraddha was particularly passionate to name it and define it. Jerome called it “adbhuta” while Sraddha called it Rama rock. Shen, not knowing what to say, kept quiet. Shen held the object just so that the two do not kill each other but then it started vibrating. Shen screamed, it is alive, and he dropped and the object vanished. Now they have decided to hire some Indologists to determine the object that is no more there.
Nagarjuna vs Shankara
Nagarjuna:
Is it the mustache that has the Buddha or is this the Buddha that has the mustache?
Buddha is emptiness and so is the mustache.
Mustache Buddha is like a rabbit horn or a mirage.
Shamkara:
Buddha is an illusion and so does not exist.
But the mustache does.
As the Sruti says: brahma puccham pratistha | (तैत्तिरीयोपनिषत्)
Indian Conference
If you are interested in ethnography, conference is a real site. It is in the conference that you can observe what individuals and societies display, and by that, you can fathom what they cover.
I just had an opportunity to participate a conference. It is in a conference that you can observe that those who know less speak the most. And those who have less time left exhaust the limits of time the most.
Conferences in the West are all about papers. Who reads what, and who confronts what? In India, we do care about those, but most importantly, we care about who came and who did not.
The venue matters the most. We spend more time decorating the venue than carving the paper.
People in the West prefer if all the papers say something different. We in India like it more, if we all say the same thing. After all, we believe in singularity. The soul of conference, for us, lies not in papers but in maintaining harmony.
We can have a speaker talking on botany who is a potential Nobel winner in astrophysics. You can ask an economist to speak on Chinese literature. It is not about whether they know more. It is about their presence, their willingness to participate the conference that matters.
What we seek from conferences is very different. Like a wedding, conferences are for us an occasion to celebrate our togetherness. We love food and spend more on music and venue than on management. Because for us, management is not an issue of some individuals: we all are supposed to have some role in the management. It is like the way we drive. When we deshis drive, everybody takes part in driving: go right, go slow, give a signal. And this makes an adventure commonly shared. It is all mechanical in the West. It is not the word that matters but the presence. I have been invited to some conferences fully paid and not have my name as a speaker. They pay for your trip and give you the bonus by not making you speak. Not this time, but I love those occasions when I am saved from the task of “arasikeṣu kavitva-nivedanam.”
Blogs
Those days I was an undergraduate student in Kathmandu and working in manuscript research project under the guidance of Mahes dai. I am always in debt of my three big brothers: Keshab dai, Purushottam dai, and Mahes dai.
I do not recall Keshab dai particularly teaching me something but he was an ideal role model for me to follow.
Puru dai, on the other hand, taught me how to write. He gave me my own column in his weekly magazine when I was just an undergraduate student. And he taught me how to argue with the Maoists. And he taught me how to define my personal parameters outside of a narrow well.
Mahes dai was an odd character. He mostly taught me negation. He repeatedly made me believe that whatever I was doing was wrong. He laughed at me for the idea of being a scholar while writing a blog. He wanted me to learn Indology; he thought scholars work on history and the rest are idiots. And I always went back to my Nyaya and Vedanta teachers and asked about history. They all were abhorred of the very idea of reducing their philosophical discourse into some history, any history.
As an undergraduate student, I was confused. I think it was on vimarsha, reflexive consciousness. I wrote a small blog, and shared the magazine with Mahes dai. It was so funny when he picked the magazine and instantaneously dumped it out of the window. He never had any ill will on me. He saw that the folks I was hanging out with were erasing the possibility that I had for my future.
When I left Kathmandu for Varanasi, I promised Mahes dai that I will not write a blog ever again. I told him I will return back a real scholar. And he smirked.
Decades have passed. Mahes dai has retired and is now living in Kathmandu. And he still loves history, as I can say from the blogs that he is writing these days for some weekly magazines.
Poor philosopher
Kaṇāda earned his name for eating the leftover. Pippalāda earned his name for relying on tiny figs from the Pippala tree. Once upon a time, it was prestigious to be poor if you were also a philosopher.
Absent subject
The absent subject:
There are two ways subjects have remained absent:
being absent in the scene as you own the theater,
and being absent by renouncing the theater.
The works of modern objectivity are the first.
I write books and essays
and never engage myself in my personal conversation.
I am absent from the entire scene.
But at the same time, I am the owner of the theater.
I am the God of my world.
As I am the author.
And there are others, who have given us the life-blood of civilization,
have carved the path of rational thinking,
but have remained behind the curtain.
Not by owning the theater though,
as they have renounced their authorship.
We call these Agamas,
the texts that come without any authorship.
The ethos of the Rishis was to rise above subjectivity.
And the Agamas carry on this tradition.
But authorless Agamas are not the only literature we have in hand.
We have some generic names such as Vyasa.
We have some pseudo-authors,
like many of the devotional poems attributed to Shamkara.
And we have liturgies and countless manuals,
all coming with absent authors.
There is a contrast in the classical and modern denials of subjects in the visible field.
They both seek to ground objectivity,
no matter what their topic of conversation is.
Both an early manual on witchcraft and a modern textbook on physics come from the same conviction
that they are recording the truth,
that they are recording science.
They both have assumed that bracketing subjectivity
is a precondition for constructing objectivity.
But the ancient ones go one step further
and completely erase themselves from the screen of memory.
They become the absent subject.
On the contrary, modern authors are absent in the discourse
but are obsessed with their words,
as they believe the words belong to them,
they believe they are the owners of the words.
Our quest for the truth should never be about a pure object or a subject manipulating objects.
Like a milkmaid, we should only be carrying the truth and not making it.
And if the truth demands that we come to the screen,
so should we.
But we should also be willing to bracket ourselves from the scene,
actually erase ourselves in totality, if need be.
But in all accounts,
we should not resign from the quest for the truth
while allowing our words to wander in the field