Nature, Culture and Religion at the Crossroads of Asia

Marie Lecomte-Tilouine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351588096
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Religionsphilosophie

This book explores how ethnic groups living in the Himalayan regions understand nature and culture. The first part addresses the opposition between nature and culture in Asia's major religious traditions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Shamanism. The second part brings together specialists of different representative groups living in the heterogeneous Himalayan region. They examine how these indigenous groups perceive their world. This includes understanding their mythic past, in particular, the place of animals and spirits in the world of humans as they see it and the role of ritual in the everyday lives of these people. The book takes into account how these various perceptions of the Himalayan peoples are shaped by a globalized world. The volume thus provides new ways of viewing the relationship between humans and their environment.

PART I
HINDUISM, BUDDHISM, ISLAM AND SHAMANISM

At the Articulation of Nature and Artifice The Rite

CHARLES MALAMOUD

Osmosis with Nature, Western Nepal

(Photo: Marie Lecomte-Tilouine)

This article originally appeared as ‘À l’articulation de la nature et de l’artifice: le rite’. Le Genre humain 12, Les usages de la nature, 1985: 233–46. English translation by M. Lecomte-Tilouine.

Ancient India

The forest hermitage (in Sanskrit tapovana, literally ‘wood of asceticism’, or dharmâranya, ‘forest of observance’) is a favourite theme in Indian literature, especially in Sanskrit literature.¹ In the two great epics, the Mahâbhârata and the Râmâyana, in the dramas (several of which borrow their subject from one of these epics), in the ‘Antiquities’, the vast collection of cosmological legends that are the Purâna, in folktales, novels, and learned poetry (kâvya), the evocation of forestial loneliness and of the men and women who undertake a retreat there, be it voluntary or not, forms an essential ingredient. In these texts, the retreat into the forest is usually presented as a means of access to a purer or stronger form of their being.

Poetic creation impetuously illustrates the prescriptions of the normative treatises (çâstra), which teach what life of men should be. It also somehow blurs its contours, as we will see. These codes, among which the most famous is the book of the Laws of Manu, state and explain the observances which constitute the socio-religious norm (dharma) of Brâhmanism and Hinduism.² (In the epics, some didactic developments, in the form of narratives placed in the mouth of such or such character, represent verbal versions of these dharmaçâstra).

This norm, as it is known, states that the life of man is divided into four stages. Man, or more precisely the Twice-Born, i.e., the man born in one of the three superior classes (varna), at the end of his childhood acquires a second birth by an initiatory rite (upanyana). He then must be a ‘brahmanical student’ (brahmacarin) devoted to chastity and to the service of the master with whom he studies the Veda. Then comes the second stage: the Twice-Born gets married, lights his sacrificial fires and carries on the life of a ‘householder’ (grihastha). This is an eminently social period, devoted to procreation, economical activity and the celebration of rites. Upon old age, the Twice-Born is supposed to leave the village, and, alone or accompanied by his wife, become a vânaprastha, ‘one who leaves for the forest’. He then ceases to work and accumulate material goods, his relations with people loosen, and he imposes upon himself all kinds of new restrictions about food, and more generally, about corporal pleasures. But he continues to offer sacrifices (as far as it is compatible with his distance from the village and with his impoverishment), and devotes most of his time to rituals, to thought collection and meditation.

This third stage is normally the last one. However, the texts consider that the Twice-Born may engage in a fourth one, the stage of ‘renouncement’ (samnydsa). The break is then radical: the ‘renouncer’ abandons any kind of social life. He lives alone and practises extreme austerities. He abandons the rites through a rather spectacular ritual and from then on, the sacrificial fires he used to take care of burn inside his own body. Ascetic fervour may produce a double effect: it confers formidable powers. The ascetic heat (tapas) accumulated in the body can be transformed into a kind of splendour (tejas) which allows any being, including the gods, to be burnt or at least, neutralized. But this kind of power made possible by forceful mortification, characterizes the ascetic who has not truly abandoned desire. For the true ‘renouncer’, strictly speaking, tapas (combined with an obsession not to harm life and complete attention focused on breath control) is overall the means of exterminating his affective and corporal being. It is also the means of reducing the residue of his karman, i.e., the set of actions he performed in this life or in his preceding ones, which condemns him to be indefinitely reborn as long as the effects of his actions are not exhausted and the movement which, under the pressure of desire leads him to act, is not redeemed. The renouncer’s austerities aim at the annihilation of desire and karman: it is under this condition and by this path that man may obtain liberation (moksha), or the possibility to escape the unceasing cycle of rebirth. It must be specified that according to the Brâhmanic doctrine, strictly speaking, ‘renouncement’ is only accessible to men and, in principle, restricted to Brahmans.

The Forest of Utopia

Such is the theoretical scheme of the succession of life stages. However, whereas normative texts forcefully declare that one must go through the first three stages before committing oneself to the fourth, and underline the features which distinguish the extreme ‘renouncer’ from the simple hermit, literary texts present a much richer and nuanced description. In these texts, men, and sometimes women, undertake a kind of training in the forest, not to put an end to their lives, but to experience exile or to practise austerities which may help them fulfil a wish. The trials that they impose upon themselves combine hermit and ‘renouncer’ practices in various ways. The setting is the forest, terrifying at times, pleasing at others, but always filled with animals, and always favourable to romantic encounters.

In India, the ‘woods of asceticism’ are the simple and perfect form of utopia. And the utopian kingdom is foremost the one where there are numerous hermitages enjoying peace which nothing can trouble.³ Their utopian nature is owed first to the fact that they are, par excellence, the residence of vânaprastha. The status of these people in the third stage of their existence is remarkable for harmoniously combining features of ‘mundane life’ and other features which characterize solitary life, as if they were compatible. The hermit lives far from the village, in this non-social place which is the forest. Usually, it is to form a pacifist, pure, and homogenous society in the forest with other hermits or couples of hermits. Herein there is no real work division and even, it can be said, no distinction between the ones holding power and those subjected to it. At most, one may notice that in the ideal image reflected in poetry and drama, these ‘âshram’ are gathered around a particularly revered spiritual master, a rishi, or inspired ‘seer’ who received the revelation of the Veda and transmitted it to men.

The traveller lost in the forest realizes that he is near a ‘wood of asceticism’ by the following signs:

The deer are confident here, they come and go without fear… The trees, whose branches are full of flowers and fruits, are maintained with love. No cultivated field around. No doubt: it is a hermitage. Smoke rises above numerous hearths.⁴

The hermits merge with the wilderness and gradually become its ally in a gentle way, without renouncing their social being. Resolved contradiction: they perform rites, celebrate sacrifices, and at the same time, succeed in keeping nature intact by not splitting the earth with the plough.

The forest offers them what is necessary to live and to make offerings. A wonderful paradox, if we consider that by definition, vegetal offerings are cultivated cereals (as well as animal victims which must be domestic animals). It is the very presence of hermits which determines this good will of nature:

For having lived in contact with hermits, the beasts became tamed… The banks of the Tamasâ (the Tenebrous) are not desolated, for hermits inhabit there. Tenebrous, it dissipates darkness…⁵

Râma and Sîtâ, back from exile, contemplate with emotion some paintings in which the painter has represented their past adventures and the forest which was the theatre of their trials and love. Râma exclaims:

Here, on the banks of these mountain creeks—in these forests of retreat whose trees shelter hermits—where the householders devoted to the duty of hospitality, their senses calmed down, live in their houses and cook handfuls of wild rice.⁶

Later, Râma returns to this place:

Here it is, this forest—I see it again now… This is where we have lived for a long time, hermits and householders together, rejoicing in our duty and enjoying the pleasures of this world… Here are these mountains where peacocks were crying, and these wooded plains with their intoxicated deer—and there, with their bamboo of harmonious murmurs and their clumps of dark blue rush, the river banks.⁷

Ascetic Prowesses of the Divine Princess

Other texts, though of the same inspiration, go further: friendship between man and nature is transformed into a kind of osmosis. And this ‘naturalization’ of man is not determined by the cessation of rites, as in the case of the ‘renouncer’, but, on the contrary, by a will to devote oneself entirely to them. An example is provided by Kâlidâsa’s Kumdrasambhava.⁸ Actually, the character described in this vast mythological poem is not a mortal but a divine princess, Pârvatî, whose destiny is to marry Shiva. In any case, emotions and ascetic achievements, as well as the behaviour of Pârvatî, conform to the stereotypes of ‘those who leave for the forest’. The fact of her being a woman makes the marvellous and utopian nature of this lifestyle even more conspicuous. In her retreat, Pârvatî harmoniously combines rite and nature. She also displays, like many other Indian heroines, the contrast of a tender and delicate body, accustomed to luxury and the commodities of palaces, with the rough austerities to which she submits herself. Târaka the demon threatens to destroy the world. No one but a son of Shiva may get rid of him. However Shiva is absorbed in meditation from which nothing can distract him, especially not amorous thoughts. The love god (Kãma) himself tries to pierce him with his arrow in order to create a quake of desire. But Shiva punishes him by reducing him to ashes with a single glance. Princess Pârvatî wants to be the one who will receive Shiva’s semen and give the world a saviour. To force Shiva to come out of his yogic concentration and to get him to make love to her, Pârvatî relies on the power of austerities. She takes the vow to live alone in the forest until Shiva takes her as his spouse.

There was no way of changing her resolve. She removed her necklace⁹ the rows of which brushed against the sandal wood paste (which perfumed her chest). She donned reddish bark, the colour of early dawn, which tore open under the pressure of her breasts. Her hand no longer touched her lips, now free of any trace of red. Finished too the game with the ball, which used to become red on rubbing against the make-up covering her breasts. (Now) her fingers were slit by clutching kuça grass blades and rosary beads. Engaged in austerities, she placed these two things into two (recipients) as a wage, to take them back later: to the thin creepers she entrusted the grace of her gestures; to the deer, her wavering gaze. Without ever flagging, she made shrubs grow with the flow from her jug (from her breasts, so it seemed), as it fell on them. Guha¹⁰ himself would not have deprived them of this maternal touch, which they deserved as elders. Enticed by the wild grains Pârvatî offered them in her hands, the deer showed such trust in her that she was able to measure the size of her eyes against theirs, out of curiosity, in the company of her friends.¹¹ She was going about her ritual ablutions and making her offerings to the Jâtadevas fire.¹² For clothes on the upper part of her body, she wore (tree) skin; she recited sacred texts. In their desire to see her, the rishi approached her: a tender age is of no import for beings that observance has made mature. Animals hostile towards each other had shaken off their primal egoism; trees were honouring their guests with their most precious fruits; fires were lit inside the leaf huts. Thus lay the hermitage, a purification of the world.¹³ (But) once she understood that the austerities and concentration that she had so far performed were not enough to obtain the desired fruit, she indulged in extreme mortification, with no concern for her delicate body. She, whom a simple ball game used to exhaust, now engaged in the munis’ observances.¹⁴ Her body was a gold lotus: delicate yet robust and overflowing with strength. In the pure summer season, this woman with a pure smile,¹⁵ whose body is so thin in the middle,¹⁶ went to stay in the middle of four blazing fires.¹⁷ She triumphed over the brightness which destroys sight, fixing the sun without averting her eyes. As food, she had, without asking for it, only water, as well as the rays of the one whose essence is ambrosia and who is the lord of the constellations;¹⁸ her way of life was truly no different from trees’ means of subsistence. Severely burnt by the many fires, the fire moving in the sky and the one made up of pyres, Pârvatî, once the heat gone, was wetted by the new wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part I Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam And Shamanism
• Part II Himalayan Case Studies
• Contributors
• Index