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Nirvana and the Germans
aryanviking
Date: 2001-05-05 16:05:40 PST
German philosophers are known for their logic and directness. KEKIN. DARUWALLA looks at the ways in which these men have come to terms with a concept as ineffable as Nirvana.
LAYMEN, like this writer, view German thought as something so rock-solid, that if used as a weapon, it could cause serious hurt. This was especially so in the 19th Century. Everything had to be defined and substantiated. Logic was reduced to a staircase - each step leading to the other till you arrived at the terrace. (German logic could put Euclid to shame).
Death meant a dead body. And if the corpse was missing or had gone for a walk, German philosophical thought as a whole was liable to get most upset. How would such a people grapple with a concept as ineffable as Nirvana, as evanescent as nirvana - because even as you catch the concept by the forelock, it has slipped out and gone roving into the outer reaches of the cosmos.
For people as direct as the Germans, they got to Indian philosophy in a very circuitous manner.
The Frenchman, Anqutil Duperron, who had translated the Zend Avesta in the 1770s, translated the Upanishads for the first time (1801-1802) in a European language - Latin. And the original from which he translated was none other than Dara Shikoh's Persian translation completed in 1657, two years before he was executed by his loving brother, Aurangzeb.
In 1808 came a German translation of Duperron's Latin version. Now you cannot get anymore circuitous than that.
As for Buddhism, their connection came through German travellers to China and the South-east. Their conclusions were sometimes weird. Walter Leifer tells us in his book India and the Germans that Englebert Kaempfer (1651-1715), one such traveller, believed "that Buddha must originally have been an Egyptian priest who sought refuge in India when the Persian King, Cambyses occupied the land on the Nile".
Hegel objected to divinity being ascribed to the Buddha. He described the religions of India as "religions of substance". "They see God as ultimate 'substance', pure, abstract being-in-itself".
Substance meant to him an abstract unity, "out of which everything arises, and in which it vanishes again". He defined the concept of brahman (Brahm) as substance without subjectivity (Substanz ohne Subjectivat.) (One needs to read Wilhelm Halbfass's India and Europe).
For Hegel, nothingness as a notion, was the principle of Nirvana. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History he equated Nirvana with "being nothing, feeling nothing, desiring nothing". He saw in the concept, only the negation of the corporeal and the finite, not their transcendence.
Nirvana was seen as negative bliss.
Even Arthur Schopenhauer, who had great empathy for Buddhism, said that the highest reward for the loftiest deeds "may only be expressed in a negative way ... of never more being incarnated". He also defined Nirvana as "a state in which four things do not exist: birth, age, sickness and death". Schopenhauer's pro-Buddhist writings spawned a whole Nirvana school of literature in Germany. Even music did not remain free from this influence. Wagner even wanted to write an opera on the Buddha, entitled "Der Sieger" (The Victor.)
Once, the obsession with Nirvana led to tragedy, or if one could put it that way, the blackest of black comedies. The day after his book Die Philosophie der Erlosung (The Philosphy of Salvation) was published on August 1, 1876, the phiosopher Philipp Mainlander (pseudonym for Philipp Batz) shot himself in an attempt to attain Nirvana through suicide.
That was the West getting its goal with one shot what the poor Easterner took over 80 births to attain.
Christian theology also stood in the way of the Germans fully grasping Buddhist concepts sympathetically. There was no tangible heaven or hell or purgatory here, no doctrine of salvation with the son of God himself appearing in the world as saviour and redeeming mankind from original sin. The concepts of sin and retribution were marginalised in Indian thought.
What came through was attachment, leading to rebirth.
What one had to strive for was non-attachment, more than virtue. And people who looked at time as linear were confronted with this circular reasoning, with everything recurring again and again and the soul being born endlessly till it either merges with some superior state or Parmatman, as in Hinduism, or attains the Buddhistic nirvana - that beatific state of nothingness or non-being.
Nirvana, obviously derives from moksa, with its emphasis on the dwindling of attachment. Buddhist Nirvana, which literally means extinction, is free from the immortality concept of absorption in the brahman. It includes among its components, freedom from illusion (maya), and false knowledge (avidya), "and hence the nullification of karman".
Margaret and James Stutley give Nirvana the most difficult tag I have come across: "In ontology it means the dispersion of all definite shape, in logic, the (dis)solution of all definition, in psychology, the (dis)solution of all individual desire".
The Visuddhi-Magga (Chapter XXII) is simpler, and talks of Nirvana following upon the state when "rebirth-causing corruptions" get exhausted; and then the arrival "at a state of not being liable to be reborn in the future and unable to reproduce itself in the next existence, the cessation of the last consciousness becomes like a fire without fuel and passes into Nirvana without attachment".
It was Herman Hesse (pronounced Hessay, not Hess, as any German will tell you) who grasped the concept intuitively and made literature out of it.
Both his parents, as also his maternal grandfather, were active in missionary work in India. In 1911, at the age of 33, Hesse himself visited India. He had a fascination for the East and mysticism, though his novel Journeying East was a disaster - vague locales and no storyline. Even The Glass Bead Game, much acclaimed when it came out in 1943 (three years before he got the Nobel Prize) was pretentious.
In the introduction he claimed that "the Glass Bead game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture".
Talking of music, he says, "Music arises from Measure and is rooted in the great Oneness. The Great Oneness begets the two poles; the two poles beget the power of Darkness and Light." Here he sounds like some pseudo Indian savant preaching to a lot of semi-literate hippies.
The novel Siddhartha is different. There is a sure touch to it from the start, where the protagonist, Siddhartha, like Gautama, leaves home and wanders with the Samanas in search of an answer to his spiritual thirst. He suffers an anchorite's privations - heat, cold, hunger. This does not impress him. He could have learnt more from prostitutes, he tells his disciple-friend, Govinda.
There is a bold confrontation with Gautam Buddha himself. Siddhartha falls into the carnal web of the courtesan, Kamala and works for the trader Kamaswamy. He enjoys a luxurious life for decades. Then comes a dream about a dead songbird found in a golden cage - the symbolism literally creaks. So he takes to the road again. It is when he leaves all that and goes to the river and the Ferryman, Vasudeva, that he learns to listen to the river.
He listens "with a waiting open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgment, without opinions".
From now on a profound vein of panthesim permeates the novel. The river becomes time and also teaches Siddharta and Vasudeva that there is no such thing as time. River, time and existence all become fused on a different plane of reality, a tranquil reality, free from fret. The river becomes symbolic of meditation itself and Siddhartha attains a sort of a nirvanic peace, just sitting by her side, finding that his own life too was a river, his childhood, adulthood and old age separated merely by shadows.
The mystic and the pantheistic element appealed to a war-torn, Nazi-bludgeoned world. Politically, Hesse had done the right thing - he had shunned the Naziazis and moved to Switzerland in the 1930s itself. The Nobel Prize was a natural corollary.
The writer is a leading Indian poet writing in English.]
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