There are many crimes a scholar can commit. Inaccuracy and sloppiness are two of them, and the imposition of his own ideas (for the sake of originality, fame, or whatever) is another. But collectively the scholarly community knows of one unforgivable crime: to make a fascinating subject boring. Thereby it prevents future generations from deriving the delight and edification they are entitled to from it.

In the following pages I have tried to demonstrate that the study of the traditional Indian religions can be delightful and edifying. Mountains are simply there, justifying the climbing of them. But books can be justified only if they have not been there before. For many years I have found it disconcerting to be asked by friends, acquaintances and strangers what the study of Indian religions is all about, why I enjoy doing it and what possible benefits could be derived from it. I was unable to refer them to a single book that might provide them with some representative ideas about it. The opportunity to remedy the situation arose when I was invited to deliver the Wilde Lectures in Comparative Religion at the University of Oxford over the period of 1985 to 1987. These lectures are open to all members of the university and the general public. Given that I had to address specialists in my own discipline, colleagues learned in other subjects, undergraduates and a variety of interested non-academics, I had in front of me an ideal crosssection of curious humanity whom I could, once and for all, convince of the virtues of my own subject.

It would not be difficult to derive, from the description of safe havens offered so far, rather romantic associations, for example of a homely, cosy environment pervaded by peace, tranquility, love and harmony. As we shall presently see, such a pastel-coloured picture has indeed been painted in certain quarters. However, let us first expose ourselves to some very different aspects of a world that endeavours to set up protected territories. Any such romantic image stands in remarkable contrast to the almost obsessive preoccupation of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century missionaries with the violence and cruelty they perceived, particularly in Hinduism. One of their favourite topics with which to illustrate this was the caste system. So let me quote a few sentences from the Abbé Dubois (who lived in Southern India between 1792 and 1823). He is talking here about a group of untouchables, the paṟaiyār, which, incidentally, gave rise to the English word ‘pariah’.

The contempt and aversion with which the other castes … regard these unfortunate people are carried to such an excess that in many places their presence, or even their footprints, are considered sufficient to defile the whole neighbourhood. They are forbidden to cross a street in which Brahmins are living. Should they be so ill-advised as to do so, the latter would have the right, not to strike them themselves, because they could not do so without defilement, or even touch them with the end of a long stick, but to order them to be severely beaten by other people.

We sailed on, over seas still uncharted, with a following wind all the time. And then one night as we stood in the prow, watchful but carefree, a cloud appeared overhead, blacking out the sky. It was a monstrous, fearsome thing, and the sight of it filled our hearts with dread. ‘Heavenly Power, ’ I exclaimed, ‘what divine threat or mystery is this that the sea and the elements confront us with, for I am persuaded that it is something more than a storm?’

I had scarcely spoken when a figure took shape in the air before our gaze. It was of fantastic form and size and powerful build, with a heavy jowl, unkempt beard, and sunken eyes. Its expression was evil and terrifying, its complexion of an earthy pallor. Yellow teeth showed in its cavernous mouth, and its crisp hair was matted with clay.

And then it spoke, in a mighty, terrifying voice that seemed to come from the depths of the sea. Our flesh went creepy and our hair stood on end as we looked and listened.

‘So, you daring race,’ it said, ‘bolder in enterprise than any the world has yet seen, tireless in the waging of cruel wars as in the pursuit of hopeless undertakings: so you have crossed the forbidden portals and presumed to sail on these seas of mine, that I have held and guarded for so long against all comers.

Once upon a time there ruled six kings over six different kingdoms in India. As fate would have it [which actually means here, as their karma was influencing events], they all came to know, in different ways, of a princess called Mallī, the daughter of the king of Mithilā. The chief queen of one of these six kings was performing the Snake Festival on such a lavish scale that the king boasted to one of his ministers that surely he had never seen anything like it anywhere else. Indeed I have, was the answer, at the birthday party of Mallī. Similarly the pride another king took in the grand Bathing Festival he had arranged for his daughter got dampened. A third king asked sea merchants about their adventures, and they told him not just about storms and ogres, foreign lands and dangers, but also about the extraordinary beauty of Mallī. The king of Kāśi heard about her beauty from goldsmiths who, because of their incompetence, had been banished by her father. A painter scheming revenge for his banishment from Mithilā (his skill–to infer the whole person from seeing merely a toe–had not been appreciated by Mallī's father, when he saw her painted in a compromising harem scene) showed her picture to a fifth king. A Ṥaivite nun, defeated by the Jaina Mallī in an argument over true religion, went and told the sixth king about her beauty.

We have noticed some rather strange pointers beyond the realms of Power and Love in the direction of a third, Wisdom. There has been the gruesome battlefield–soon to be covered with the corpses of soldiers and the carcasses of war-elephants–on which Kṛṣṇa, God incarnate, has told prince Arjuna that his ultimate destiny depends on fighting the war in the spirit of total submission and love. Similarly we have heard about the hero who steps on to the ‘large chariot’ (mahā-yāna) in order to drive out into an apparent void, motivated by compassion and protected by the armour of ‘perfect wisdom’. Soon we shall hear about Bhartrhari who had his chariot waiting to take him to the tranquility of meditation, away from the crumpled sheets stained with saffron and squashed flowers that tell the tale of Kāma's frenzied battle. Such pointers towards the wise man evoke in our minds images of peace and silence.

Let me introduce you to José Arcadio Buendía–adventurer, colonist and founder of a lineage that is to last for a hundred years. Somewhere in a fictionalized Colombia and isolated from the rest of the world, a dynastic history unrolls that is filled with violence, mercenary sex and frustrated love. It is an earthy history that is subject to an inexorable and cruel fate and that condemns five generations of Buendfas to lives of mental and emotional solitude.

José Buendía, we are told, had been a friend of Melquíades, a gypsy who, shortly before his death, had left José a parchment purporting to reveal to him the future destiny of his descendants. And a mysterious destiny it was to be! Pure lust and strict adherence to a code of wifely duty, but never love, motivated the procreation of Buendfa children. For the family was bedevilled by a strange fascination–that of nephew for aunt and of aunt for nephew. As the generations passed, this obsession came increasingly close to realization in an act of physical love. But the dread of producing a child ‘with a cartilaginous tail in the shape of a corkscrew and with a small tuft of hair on the tip’ prevented this time and again. Yet during the last phase of the Buendfas' history, such a child was actually produced- ‘the only one in a century who had been engendered with love’.

In the early 1980s, travellers on the M4 motorway into London, just before coming into Chiswick, could study a remarkable phenomenon. On the left is a row of terraced houses with slate-covered roofs, and on one of them was written, in large white capital letters: THE ROOF. I have no idea what the real significance of it could have been; for all I know, it might have advertised a punk-band. But the dozens of times it jolted me out of my morning drowsiness set my own train of thought in motion–which, naturally, is directly relevant to what we have been discussing. The universe is filled with things or phenomena which we, in our everyday lives, perceive merely as an amorphous collection, and not in their individuality. When philosophizing, we abstract even further and speculate on the genus or species, and not the individual object. We speak of ‘the human soul’, ‘the nature of aesthetic experience’, or ‘the world of phenomena’, but not of ‘the soul of Mr Smith’, etc. It is perhaps with reference to such generalizations that Canetti produced the biting aphorism: ‘Most philosophers have too limited a vision of the variety of human customs and potentials.’ THE ROOF can serve us as a reminder that, in spite of the existence of a set of millions and millions of very similar objects called ‘roofs’, the individual roof cannot be totally subsumed under the universality of the set.

It is clear that an Upanisadic passage such as this does not merely want to make a theoretical point (e.g. that the ātman is essentially identical with the Brahman). Its author desires to express what I have called a ‘self-authenticating experience’. Beyond all rational analysis, the experience carries its own validity, ‘conviction’. The world is made sense of not by means of mythical images, correlational constructions, or quasi-scientific analysis, but through a different mode. Let us call it, temporarily, ‘mystical’.

But what do we mean by ‘mystical’? Within the Christian tradition, the word appears to refer to experiences which are granted to a few select and saintly individuals and which simply happen to them. Not so in ancient India. There such experiences are understood to lie within the potential of every human being, provided he knows how to go about it. Let us first look at a passage in which the continuity with other forms of experiencing the world is suggested.

Let us accompany an imaginary tourist on a trip to India. Almost inevitably, after the heat and the noise, the next major challenge for him will be the slums. For many this is such an obstacle that it ruins the whole trip. But let us assume that our traveller succeeds in breaking through this powerful veil and realizes that he is actually looking at a monument to industrial ‘progress’ of very recent origin. It then becomes possible to look behind the veil and explore facets of the India that these pages have been talking about. For in no immediate sense do the slums throw light on traditional Indian culture, nor are they an integral aspect of it. Go to Rio de Janeiro, Bogotá, Lagos, or Manila and spot the difference! But what lies behind the veil? Visually most obvious are an endless variety of shrines and temples, which are often extremely complex architectural structures that might approximate the size of a small town. At least in medieval India, Buddhist monasteries may also have looked very similar. Still on the visual side, our tourist is bound to encounter a marriage ceremony, a popular festival, or domestic rites; he may be so lucky as to be able to witness the daily or seasonal rituals performed in a temple. The enormous scale and attention to minute detail of these rituals are bound to stun him.

In one of his provocative aphorisms, Canetti says: ‘Human beings can only be saved by other human beings; therefore God dresses up as man.’ The types of religion we are exploring at present, namely Indian theism and monotheism, certainly share his sentiment. But when we look at the range of forms this ‘dressing up as man ’ may take, a number of surprises are in store for us. The love that is perceived to pervade the cosmos, to constitute the relational dimension within the divine, and to possess there its transcendental foundation does not stay abstract and impersonal. The divine has to im-personate and in-carnate itself to communicate to man its nature and its loving intentions. In terms of our formula of subject-desire-object, the previous pages have already shown to what extent this abstract ‘object’ itself is a loving subject, internally and in relation to man. From such a transcendental subject flows forth beauty and grace, but also power and even aggression (I am thinking here particularly of the Goddess), which aims at subjugating man. However, this is still a one-sided description. Logically we can ask, how can man know of such a transcendental reality which is at the same time the object of his desire and the subject of his salvation? Our traditions agree that pure logic, speculation, or inference alone cannot tell us about Bhagavān. It is only because he chooses to reveal himself that our logic can complete the drive in our hearts that aims at a non-transitory object of our desires.

Although the last chapter dealt with deadly duels, bloodthirsty ogres and horrific sorcerers' battles, there cannot be any doubt that a romanticizing tendency was at work there. Our vidyādharas, nāgas, etc. are made to appear quite amiable on the whole. The odd man-eating yaksa or demon may crop up, but there is always the chance of pacifying the creature and obtaining a vidyā from him, or of winning the love of a girl through him. As far as the vidyās are concerned, they are treated as related more to the ‘battle’ between the sexes than to anything really dangerous, such as the making of things by interfering in nature, breaking nature up and reconstituting it at will, or annihilating it altogether. This in turn means that, as far as the material discussed so far is concerned, the nightmarish fears which we find in our own imaginative projection of what our vidyās can do are not expressed. I am thinking here of all-pervasive themes like the mad German scientist or the ‘Dr No's of our popular films and novels; of alien empires that must be destroyed through our futuristic weapon technology. Our Indian stories read much more like the exploits of modern heroes such as 007, although even here an unease about the role of science in the wrong hands does express itself.

Thus, to suggest against the background of Western fears and doubts a correlation of the Grand Story and its related material with Western science may not appear obvious.

We have been looking at a view of the universe on a grand scale, where only the imagination sets the limits. It is a world filled with weird and wonderful beings and powers and held together through the common fate of transmigration. In many ways it is a terrifying world, frightening not only because of its enormous proportions, but also because it is pervaded by violence and a constant struggle for power between the different beings. Here is one example of how the popular imagination has envisaged such threats and power struggles. It takes us back to King Ploughman, whose adventures we have heard about previously. After his generous refusal to accept the amorous pleasures offered to him by Jewel-Lustre in her underworld palace, the king arrived at an ascetic's hermitage near the confluence of the ‘seven Godāvarīs’ with its temple of Śiva, and was welcomed there. But disaster had struck the seemingly idyllic place, as the ascetic told him.

You can't extricate from Hindu myths some general principles, or ‘laws of nature’, and use them to describe the world as we know it. That was the lesson Haribhadra wanted to teach his Jain readers in his Prakrit Tale of the Rogues. Instead, something rational and reasonable, like the Mahāvīra's teaching, must be used for that purpose. This seems to introduce a straightforward contrast between myth and science, and offers us the cue to turn away from rogues and ruthless politicians to areas of greater profundity.

Let us first look a bit closer at the material which has been criticized here through the mouths of the various rogues. The reductio ad absurdum undertaken by Haribhadra may not do full justice to every aspect of myth. Not that I would want to perpetuate certain romantic views commonly associated with it–myth as the expression of human ‘wholeness’, as a vision of the cosmos still imbued with the sense of the sacred and ‘holy’. This stance has to be discussed separately, and I shall do that presently. But what could a ‘non-romantic’ view of Hindu mythology be, other than what Haribhadra has already offered? Let us look at some examples, to find out.

Yama, the god of death, was standing at the gates of heaven and interrogating three women. ‘What have you done with your life?’ he asked the first one.

The Spanish mystic Íñigo de Loyola wrote in a letter of 1551 to a Student: ‘You should practise looking for the presence of our Lord in all things, in walking, seeing, hearing, tasting, thinking.’ This is familiar ground to us: to seek out, as it were, divine love present in the world, and to absorb it through our senses. Now the same author includes in his famous Spiritual Exercises a meditation entitled ‘in order to obtain love’. There one should meditate ‘how God works and acts for my sake in all created things on the face of the earth’. A curious phrase in Latin is added: ‘that means how he acts as if he is working ’. The whole exercise concludes with a prayer: ‘that I may love and serve in everything his divine majesty’.

This now introduces a theme which has not been encountered so far. The divine presence is not just something to be experienced in all its beauty or accepted in all its gruesomeness, sung about and danced to in states of ecstasy, but demands specific action. Indeed, there is a common link between Íñigo and our Indian material: no positivistic Law is spelled out. The individual has to search for his particular call, and his particular mode of reacting to it. In the previous chapter I pointed out how the Indian monotheistic material we looked at possesses such an ‘anarchic’ quality.

However ‘self-authenticating’ a religious experience may be and however much it may want to enclose itself within its own transcendental bliss, for a number of different reasons it cannot totally write off the world of phenomena. This may be, as we have seen, for reasons of social justification and explanation, of providing a rational exposition and of showing itself to be the most reasonable course of action to take. Or it may be that the causal role of the phenomena in the experience is acknowledged. The human body and mental make-up may yield meditationally gained insights, or a particular constellation of phenomena may suddenly trigger them off, or other persons may be required to convey the initial knowledge necessary for entering the path of meditation. Or finally, it may be that the religious experience itself contains a reference to the cosmos and the world: the realization of a universal soul present in all beings, or the stimulus towards compassion for all beings. Whatever the individual case may be, it raises the issue of a balanced attitude, and also of providing the latter with a theoretical basis.

The previous chapter concentrated on such speculative balancing exercises. It explored how this relationship between the phenomena and the insight into some deeper dimension of theirs found conceptual expression as advaya (on the Buddhist side) and advaita (among the thinkers of the Vedānta tradition).

Towards the end of the nineteenth century The Times carried a review of Edwin Arnold's verse translations of Indian Poetry. There we could read: ‘Nothing could be more graceful and delicate than the shades by which Krishna is portrayed in the gradual process of being weaned by the love of “Beautiful Radha, jasmine-bosomed Radha”, from the allurements of the forest nymphs, in whom the five senses are typified.’ And the Standard comments on the same book: ‘The poem abounds with imagery of Eastern luxuriousness and sensuousness; the air seems laden with the spicy odours of the tropics.’

In 1925 the Polish composer Karol Szymanowski completed his opera King Roger, set in the Sicily of the twelfth century. This setting is not arbitrary in terms of the composer's own interests, for here at the court of Palermo he could find a meeting of Europe and the East, of Christian and Arab culture, which mirrored his own musical pursuits. In the opera, a strange and bewitching young man turns up at the royal court and greets the king with the following words: ‘I greet you well, and in the great name of love!’ When the king asks him where he comes from he replies: ‘I come from smiling southern stars. Far are the lands whither my steps have led me. I offered my prayer for you in white Benares; and here I bring you greeting from the lotus of Indra.