Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (45 page)

The gold ring and the rest of the treasure are then hidden in the Rhine, where it has been ever since.

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When we come to Asia, however, the story is a very different one—especially in India, China, Japan, and other places where Hinduism, Buddhism, and Shintoism are vigorous, widely practiced religions, deeply rooted in the myths of a very distant past. Nearly as old as Egypt and Mesopotamia, the civilizations of India and China, in particular, retain aspects of mythical systems that were born in the deep mists of prehistory. While understanding these ancient traditions—seemingly so “foreign” to Western experience—has always been intriguing and important, the need to gain a firmer grasp of the beliefs that form the soul of so much of Asia is greater now than ever before.

The reasons why should be fairly obvious. For one thing, our world is changing. Fast. Travel has made the globe smaller. Technology has made it spin more rapidly. When you call your bank or computer maker’s “tech support” from New York, the phone may be answered in New Delhi. The decisions made in Beijing and Bombay—more than ever before—affect people in Boise, Buenos Aires, Berlin, and the Bronx. The clashing ideologies of East meeting West have complicated our lives. And sophisticated weaponry has made it all the more dangerous.

Yes, “East is East and West is West.” But the twain now meet in cyberspace, on telephone call centers, and, certainly, in superstores, where Western shelves are loaded largely with Eastern-manufactured consumer goods.

Then there are the simple, raw numbers—populations are shifting and exploding. Though currently the world’s most populous nation, with more than 1.3 billion people in 2003, China will eventually be surpassed for that dubious distinction by India, which passed the 1 billion mark in 1999. Together, these two countries already account for nearly one-third of the planet’s population. And their ranks are swelling rapidly, even as Western birth rates slow or shrink.

Historians are often asked what the most important event at any given moment might be. Although it is impossible to answer definitely, it would be safe to guess that some of the most important things happening in the world in the early years of the twenty-first century won’t be happening in the capitals of Europe or America. Chances are they will happen in India, China, or elsewhere in Asia, where booming populations and economies are changing global realities. Viewed not so long ago as developing “third-world” nations, these countries are quickly industrializing and taking the lead in science and engineering. Like the Western superpowers, they possess nuclear arsenals and have ambitions in space. And with a very old tradition as innovators in science and technology, they will gain economic strength and vie for a leadership role in the world.

So where does myth fit into the geopolitical picture? Arguably, front and center. To understand where the world is going, we need a better understanding of where this part of the world has been. How better to gain some insight than to know their myths and see how these myths reveal some part of their collective soul?

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Consider that scene. One of the most significant moments in human history has just occurred. and it is marked not by a passage from the Bible, or a Greek philosopher, or Shakespeare, but by an obscure reference from an ancient mythic tradition. To many Westerners accustomed to Judeo-Christian doctrines and the rationalism that began in Greece and flowered in Europe’s Enlightenment, India’s mythic legacy remains inscrutable. It is a magical mystery tour of the exotic and wondrous. A blue-tinged god with surplus arms. An elephant-headed deity who rides around on the back of a rat. A terrifying goddess adorned with severed body parts. A monkey king who would be at home in
The Wizard of Oz
. An awesome divinity who dances the world into destruction. And a thousand-year-old temple adorned with a host of X-rated figures in bewildering contortions.

It is the unfurling of millions of yoga mats in gyms around the world, turning a three-thousand-year-old path to enlightenment into the latest fitness craze. It is “Instant Karma” and the
Kama Sutra
combined, a picture muddled for many Westerners by saffron-robed groups hustling spare change at the airport as they chant “Hare Krishna.”

And what is the story with those “sacred cows”?

Occupying a triangular peninsula about the size of continental Europe that juts down from Asia’s landmass into the Indian Ocean, India is a place of enormous physical contrasts—extraordinary mountains, a great desert, broad plains, winding rivers, tropical lowlands, and lush rain forests watered by life-giving but sometimes destructive monsoons. Part of this diverse country’s fortunes in ancient times lay in the fact that it was largely set apart by its physical boundaries—the Arabian Sea and a large desert, the Thar, to the west; the Bay of Bengal to the east; and to the north, the towering, snowcapped Himalayas that separated India from China.

Yet remote, obscure India beckoned to the West for centuries. First for its silks and spices. Then, later, for its approach to contemplating the “Big Questions”—eternity, good, evil, and the meaning of life. With a cosmic view completely at odds with traditional Western thought, India has long been interested in the transcendent and the immortal, the idea that creation and destruction are an endless cycle, that the soul is an essence searching for perfection through reincarnation. These ideas found expression in what mythologist Arthur Cotterell has called “a range of myth and legend which is unrivaled anywhere else in the world.”

The roots of those Indian myths are also very old, stretching back more than 4,500 years to the broad plains of the Indus River Valley. Once centered in what is now the border region between northwestern India and southern Pakistan, the ancient Indus Valley civilization flourished for a thousand years. Most likely, it was anchored by a very ancient, fertility-based, goddess worship, as well as the worship of cows deemed sacred for the milk they provided and the dung that helped fertilize their crops. This civilization lasted until a group of warlike nomads swept in around 1500 BCE. Speaking a language called “Sanskrit,” which is at the root of all other Indo-European languages, these new arrivals probably originated near the Caucasus Mountains in central Asia. They called themselves arya (meaning “kinsmen” or “noble ones”), and eventually came to be known as Aryans.
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Just as the people later called “Mycenaeans” had barreled into Greece bringing some of their own gods with them and absorbing some of the local deities they found, the Aryans conquered the remnants of the Indus civilization and imposed their “alpha male” pantheon of gods on the locals. That is, at least, the prevailing view; another school of thinking holds that this was a kinder, gentler Aryan migration.

Once settled, the Aryans spread to the south and east, eventually extending their rule over most of India. Over time, the gods and culture of the Aryans gradually combined with those of the existing local cultures, and what Westerners later called “Hinduism” evolved from this ancient marriage. Although the Aryans never developed a great and voracious imperial government intent upon world conquest—just as no dominant state emerged in ancient Greece—their myths eventually knit together the people of this vast and diverse “subcontinent” as no single state or government bureaucracy ever could. Their beliefs and sacred rituals, the Sanskrit language, the holy temples to the cosmos of gods and goddesses—and the unshatterable “caste” system their beliefs cemented rigidly in place—formed the soul of Indian culture.

Yet to talk about “Hinduism” as a monolithic religion is a mistake. It has no pope or hierarchy. No founder or central prophet. No uniting creed. No Vatican or Mecca or Jerusalem. As it exists today, Hinduism—along with its two most significant offshoots, Buddhism and Jainism—is a complex collection of beliefs with a vast pantheon of gods and differing schools of thought. Its dizzying diversity has led writers such as historian Ninian Smart to comment, “Even to talk of a single something called Hinduism can be misleading because of the great variety of customs, forms of worship, gods, myths, philosophies, types of ritual, movements and styles of art and music contained loosely within the bounds of the religion…It is as if many Hinduisms had merged into one. It is now more like the trunk of a single ordinary tree; but its past is a tangle of most divergent roots.”

From those ancient roots—the stories, legends, and ancient myths—comes a vibrant, pulsing religion with a collective consciousness that has few parallels in other cultures or belief systems, either East or West.

How do we know what the ancient Indians believed?

The Egyptians left us their Book of the Dead, the Mesopotamians their
Gilgamesh
. The Greeks gave us Homer and Hesiod. The Celts left stories that were later preserved by monks. But when it comes to the myths of ancient India, we have a vast collection of mythic and religious writing that dwarfs all others. If anybody deserves the sobriquet “people of the book,” it may well be the compilers of India’s vast libraries.

When the Aryans arrived in the Indus Valley sometime between 1700 and 1500 BCE, they brought along Sanskrit, the oldest known written language of India. Although Sanskrit died out as a “living language” by about 100 BCE, it was used—like the Latin of medieval Europe—as the “learned language” of poetry, science, philosophy, and religion. Forming the core of Hinduism’s beliefs and practices, the collections of Sanskrit hymns, poetry, philosophical dialogues, and legends all exist in an imposing set of texts that include, most significantly, the Vedas and Upanishads, the epic poems
Ramayana
and the
Mahabharata
—which contains an important section called the Bhagavad-Gita—and the Puranas.

The oldest sacred Sanskrit writings, the Vedas were thought to be composed beginning about 1400 BCE over a period of nearly 1,000 years, an era in India’s history called the “Vedic period.” The Vedas are considered to be older than the sacred writings of any other major existing religion, including the Hebrew Old Testament. Only the ancient Egyptian pyramid texts are older. Like many mythic and religious documents, the Vedas probably first existed in oral form for centuries, and may go back as far as 4000 BCE. Hindu tradition holds that they were composed in 3500 BCE, in the time of Krishna, an earthly incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, before they were finally written down by some anonymous scribes.

There are four Vedas, beginning with the oldest and most famous, the Rig-Veda. (The later Vedas include Sama-Veda, Yajur-Veda, and Atharva-Veda.) Written in archaic Sanskrit and first translated for the West by Max Müller in the mid-nineteenth century, the Vedas have been studied not only for their religious significance, but for their connection to the early history of the Indo-European languages, including the Greek, Latin, Germanic, and Slavic language families, which are derived from archaic Sanskrit. Ancient Sanskrit is also the original source for many languages spoken in modern India, including Hindi and Urdu. To many Westerners, Sanskrit is more obscure and indecipherable than Greek or Latin. But many linguists consider ancient Sanskrit a highly polished and systematic language with precise rules of grammar.

The word “Veda” means “knowledge,” and sacred knowledge in particular. Roughly equivalent to the Hebrew Psalms of the Old Testament, the Vedas are poetic collections that provided the songbook for the holy rites of the early Vedic religion. The Rig-Veda contains more than one thousand hymns, totaling more than ten thousand verses—an enormous number, compared to the 150 biblical Psalms.

Later additions to the Rig-Veda include two other important texts, which were composed as commentaries on the Vedas—the Brahmanas and the Upanishads.

Brahmanas are long prose essays; they explain the myths and theology behind the sacred rituals that include offerings to gods, chanting, pilgrimages, and acts of charity or self-denial, such as food taboos. According to Devdutt Pattanaik’s
Indian Mythology
, “The human custodian of these manuals was known as the brahmana. As keepers of Vedic lore…brahmanas served as the link between the material and spiritual realms. They knew the secret of the cosmos…. As people, communities and tribes mingled and merged, the Vedic brahmanas tried to retain their superior position and their spiritual purity by not sharing food or their daughters with nonbrahmanas.” Organized around this priesthood, the system came to be called Brahminism, led by the Vedic priests who came to be known as Brahmins (also spelled Brahmans), a hereditary priesthood occupying the highest place in society. And just as Christianity’s sacred religious language, Latin, was written and read almost exclusively by the priesthood, Sanskrit became the preserve of the Brahmins. Knowledge is, was, and always has been Power.

Upanishads are deeply philosophical works, one hundred and eight of which have been preserved; they appeared between 800 and 600 BCE and formed a basic part of Hinduism as it evolved. “Upanishads” roughly means “sitting near devotedly,” or “to sit close to.” They were composed, like certain works of Greek philosophy, as dialogues between a teacher and student.

At the core of the Upanishads is the notion of Brahman, the divine universal power that lives in the whole of creation, including the human soul, which is believed to be eternal. Expressing the idea that knowledge brings spiritual uplift, the Upanishads also introduced the notion that one lifetime is not enough to gather all the necessary knowledge. By accumulating knowledge over many rebirths, one can finally be rejoined with Brahman and achieve
moksha
, the ultimate “release” or “salvation” that is the true goal of all human beings.

Another key source of India’s myths is the
Mahabharata
, one of the longest literary works in history, more than seven times the combined length of the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
. One of India’s two epic poems, the
Mahabharata
was said to have been dictated to Ganesh, the elephant-headed god of wisdom. In fact, it is a collection of Sanskrit writings by several authors who lived at various times, and parts of it may be more than 2,500 years old.

Mahabharata
literally means “Great King Bharata,” and the poem recounts a cataclysmic family feud between the descendants of King Bharata—two related families, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, who lived in northern India, perhaps about 1200 BCE. The Pandava brothers lose their kingdom to their Kaurava cousins and engage in a mighty struggle to win it back.