The Hindus (87 page)

We have already encountered myths about the preaching of false philosophical and theological doctrines, in the course of Shiva’s conflicts with Daksha and Vishnu’s avatar as the Buddha. We have traced a rough (and not precisely chronological) progression of the myths of the Buddha avatar through three stages, from the assimilation of Buddhism into Hinduism, to the antagonistic myths of opposition to a Buddhism on the rise, and then to more appreciative myths about a Buddhism on the wane. Now we encounter a fourth stage, in which Buddhism once again contributed in positive ways to the philosophy of idealism in South India and Kashmir (see below), while much of the former animosity against the Buddhists was channeled into animosity against Shankara, in myths modeled in many ways on the myth of Vishnu as the Buddha. Let us consider some of those myths.

Shankara’s texts speak for his ideas, but the legends about him speak for his life. He is said to have started a reform movement, proposing a moral agenda that could compete with the noble eightfold path of the Buddhists
¹⁰
(he was, as we will see, sometimes accused of owing too much to Buddhism) and a philosophy that may have been buoyed up by a need to respond to the monotheist philosophies of Islam. Shankara, regarded as a guru and proselytizer as well as a philosopher, is said to have founded the centers of learning (
matts
) that still thrive in his name in India today; his argument that the phenomenal world of everyday experience and its biological round of birth and death (
samsara
) was ultimately unreal and the source of our bondage was taken as the basis for a monastic or ascetic life of renunciation (
samnyasa
).
¹¹

But Shankara argued that only Brahmins could renounce,
¹²
and some of the more general animus against renunciation was channeled into hostility against him. While there had been renouncers in Hinduism since before the time the Upanishads mapped out the path of flame and Release, they lacked the institutional backing to become a major force—until Shankara. But Shankara took the idea of formal monastic orders and institutions from Buddhism and reworked it for Hinduism, an action that stirred up some Brahmins like a saffron flag waved in front of a bull. Ramanuja called Shankara a “crypto-Buddhist” (
prachanna -bauddha
).
¹³

Shankara’s nondualism was challenged first by Ramanuja’s qualified nondualism and, later, by Madhva’s dualism; the followers of Madhva argued that Shankara championed monism because he was so stupid that he could only count to one.
¹⁴
Nondualism has the disadvantage that you cannot love god or worship god if you
are
god, or if your god is without any qualities (
nir-guna
), a technicality that Shankara allegedly ignored when he wrote the passionate, beautiful poems to Shiva that are attributed to him. Nondualists could get around this by worshiping god with a kind of “as if” for the forms “with qualities” (
sa-guna
): He appears “as if” he were a god with qualities. If, however, you assume that there is a dualism separating you from god and that god has qualities, as Madhva assumes, worship poses no problem.

The hagiographies of Shankara arise at a time when (1) bhakti is rampant, spreading so fast that it even gets into philosophy, like ants at a picnic, and (2) Buddhists and Muslims, as well as Christians in Kerala (Shankara’s home territory), are gaining ground. And so, just as the human avatars were in part a response to the human dimension of Buddhism in an earlier age, Shankara, someone who was, like the Buddha (and Muhammad and Jesus), a human founder of a religion, was the answer now.

Born into a high-caste Brahmin family, Shankara taught and debated with many other philosophers. In his journeys throughout India, his biographies claim, he vehemently debated with Buddhists and tried to persuade kings and other influential people to withdraw their support from Buddhist monasteries. One text depicts Shankara as an incarnation of Shiva, sent to earth to combat Vishnu’s Buddha avatar:

As usual, the heresy goes too far, destroying the allies as well as the enemies of the gods, and must be combated by the intervention of god.

The myths from this period reveal that it wasn’t only non-Hindus in conflict with Shankara; Mimamsa philosophers and other Vedanta schools also apparently had tense relations with Shankara, some of which turned on the question of renouncing desire and sexuality:

This tale contrasts sex and renunciation in such a way that the renunciant philosopher is able to have his cake and eat it, to triumph not only in the world of the mind (in which, before this episode begins, he wins a series of debates against the nonrenouncing male Mimamsa philosopher) but in the world of the body, represented by the philosopher’s wife (not to mention the harem women who clearly prefer Shankara to the king in bed). This double superiority—for it appears that, like Shiva, this Shankara stored up impressive erotic powers during his years of chastity—rather than the inherent power (or relevance) of nondualism, is apparently what persuades both the philosopher and his wife.

Renunciation took its toll on parents as well as partners, and this story addresses that issue:

This is a story about the need to compromise, to satisfy the concerns of family as well as renunciation—parents want to see their grandchildren—but it is built upon an old story that had been told before to make very different points. The
Rig Veda
(10.28.11) mentions crocodiles that drag people away by their legs; the bodhisattva (in a Jataka story carved at Amaravati) and Vishnu
¹⁸
are said to have rescued an elephant whose leg had been grabbed by a crocodile, and the Shaiva saint Cuntarar (the same one said to have contested with the Jainas) saves a Brahmin boy from a crocodile. It is easy to see how this story could have been picked up and adapted to the needs of the hagiographers of Shankara.

The chain of sectarian myths does not end with Shankara. Many stories are told about Ramanuja’s clash not with disciples of Shankara but with other Shaivas. Ramanuja is said to have challenged the Shaivas in a great temple in Andhra Pradesh; he won not by debate but by the god’s action in “picking up and wearing the Vaishnava emblems, while leaving the Shaiva emblems unused on the floor.”
¹⁹
On another occasion, the Chola king, a Shaiva, tried to make Ramanuja sign a declaration that there was no god but Shiva, but Ramanuja sent two of his disciples, one of them dressed to look like him, in his place; when one of them made a pun on the word “Shiva,” the king ordered both men’s eyes put out. Ramanuja escaped to Mysore, where he is said to have converted the Hoysala king from Jainism to Shri Vaishnavism and persuaded him to endow a number of Vaishnava temples with lands that had previously belonged to many Jaina temples.

There are also stories of Ramanuja’s actions against Muslims, as when he went to Delhi to help recover the lost image of Ranganatha: he found the image, cried, “Beloved son!” and the image jumped into his arms.
²⁰
Ramanuja is also said to have defeated a thousand Jaina ascetics in a debate involving a contest of miracles, whereupon the Jaina monks committed suicide rather than convert.
²¹
The martyrdom by blinding, the miraculous debate, and the deaths of thousands of Jainas are reminiscent of other South Indian tales told about Shaiva saints, and these about Ramanuja are equally mythological: The historical record documents no mass suicides (or, for that matter, miracles). Most of the kings of that era were not fanatics but supported Shaiva, Vaishnava, Jaina, and Buddhist institutions, nor is there any evidence that the Hoysala king was originally a Jaina or withdrew his supported from the Jainas.
²²
But the stories have survived for centuries.

Shankara’s followers often came into conflict with the followers of the Vaishnava philosopher Madhva, who is said to have accomplished a number of miracles, some of which were also attributed to Christ in the New Testament: walking on water,
²³
feeding many with a few loaves of bread, calming rough waters, and becoming a “fisher of men.”
²⁴
Madhva (or his hagiographers) may have been influenced by Christians, who had been established, since at least the sixth century CE, in Kerala and at Kalyan (in Karnataka), Madhva’s birthplace. But it is Buddhism, rather than Christianity, that figures officially in Madhva’s conflict with Shaivas. For Madhva placed another new twist on the myth of the Buddha avatar, substituting the Shaiva scriptures for the Buddhist doctrines: Citing a Puranic text in which Shiva agrees to teach false doctrines,
²⁵
Madhva said that Shiva composed the Shaiva scriptures at Vishnu’s command, in order to delude humans with false doctrines, to destroy the true religion (the worship of Vishnu), to reveal Shiva, and to conceal Vishnu.
²⁶
And this was just the beginning:
²⁷

The accusation that Shankara seduced the wife of his Brahmin host may be an allusion to the story of Shankara’s vying with the Mimamsa philosopher’s wife on the subject of erotic seduction (and using his magic arts to sleep with a king’s wives), and the accusation that he pretended to be teaching Vedanta when he taught Buddhism is a product of the recurrent suspicion of Buddhist elements in Shankara’s brand of Vedanta. In this text, Manimat joins the already extant Buddhists (instead of founding them, as Vishnu as Buddha does), reverses the incarnation of Shankara (who is now an avatar not of Shiva but of an ogre named Manimat), and is followed by a third avatar, of the god of the wind as Madhva.
^iz
The idea that the gods are sent to corrupt the antigods (as in the myth of the Buddha avatar), combined with the implication that the resulting heretics are antigods (or related to antigods in some way), undergoes a major reversal: The antigods now are not the ones who are corrupted but the ones who do the corrupting. The Madhvas’ identification of Shankara as an antigod is particularly harsh in light of the fact that the Madhvas, almost alone among Hindu philosophers, believe that antigods and heretics are doomed to eternal damnation in hell. Finally, this corruption takes place, as usual, in the Kali Age, and the Madhvas take advantage of this to pun on the name of their enemy: Shankara (“he who gives peace,” an epithet of Shiva given to many Shaivas) becomes Sankara (also written
sam-kara
), a word that denotes indiscriminate mixture, particularly the breaking down of barriers between classes that is the principal sign of the advent of the Kali Age. In keeping with this name, Sankara is said to be the bastard son of a widow.
²⁹

One of the philosophical reactions against the excessive hierarchy of the caste system was to devise (or, rather, to revise, for it began in the Upanishads) a philosophical system devoid of hierarchy, indeed of any distinctions at all: monism (which assumes that all living things are elements of a single, universal being). But many of the Vedantic philosophical orders organized themselves into groups that were in fact highly hierarchical (for example, as we have seen, Shankara excluded Shudras) and often intolerant of other orders.