Baba Rampuri - Hindu Scriptures in the Sanatan Dharma

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• published: 19 Aug 2012
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http://rampuri.com Baba Rampuri talks about the role and nature of sacred text, Hindu scriptures, and the Oral Tradition in the Sanatan Dharma. The monotheist religions require a central doctrine, and a central text, which is the basis for that doctrine, that's why they have been called the Religions of the Book. "The Book" was originally manuscripts, and eventually printed texts. Their authority lies within the "book." When the colonizers of the 18th-19th centuries and their scribes in the human sciences wanted to map Indian thinking, they had the daunting task of defining indigenous Indian religion in such a way that it could fit in the categories laid out for it and put it on the grid of all things. They had to construct, as it were, an Indian religion, so that it also would have a central definitive doctrine and a central text. A printed text. The printed text has been indispensable to knowledge in our modern world until the advent of the video screen and internet. We have critical editions of Indian texts, which scholars have created by comparing several different manuscripts of the same text. Scholars then edited out obvious errors, and used their academically honed deductive logic to determine other mistakes, omissions and additions, and determined originality and genesis. And these "original" manuscripts were often commissioned by the aristocracy, so that someone listened to an oral rendition of a text or its commentary and wrote it down. And of course, when word got out that Europeans were looking for manuscripts, the frauds and forgeries also appeared, by the truckload. One of the most famous being the "Ezourvedam," a fraudulent text composed by Jesuit missionaries in Pondicherry (French colony in India), to demonstrate the inferiority of the idolatrous Indians compared to Christianity. Voltaire, God bless his soul, used this text, believing its authenticity, to demonstrate the subtlety and superiority of Indian thought to a decadent Christianity. You have a yogi in the oral tradition, who is reading the Book of the World and commenting on it daily, and someone comes along and writes down what he says or sings. And then his words, or at least what are recorded as his words, are removed from his body, from his lips. This is the manuscript. It's as if a snapshot of a day in the life of the oral tradition. I'm reminded of Magritte's painting of a pipe that has the words prominently written across the canvas, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." Well, can you smoke it? The words require a voice, and that particular voice of authority in the oral tradition provides the context and the exegesis. Once removed from its source the text may now take on a life of its own. Interpretations may be read into it, it may be edited, updated, made more clear, translated. The words may undergo some sort of transformation, according to the needs of the academy, not according to the dynamic of tradition. And, they are forbidden from leaving their pages, imprisoned by the front and end covers of the book. Guttenberg and his printing press started the modern process of taming the wild profusion of knowledge, "civilizing" vast overgrown tracts of wilderness. Knowledge started migrating into the printed page, where it could be safe, and where it could be safely displayed like the wild animals in the cages of a zoo. The more it migrated, the more it became information and the more it lost its context. But in the process, it gained a much larger audience than that only within the reach of a voice, and as such, usurped the authority of that voice. Books demand literacy, which was rare when they first started showing their covers. A modern education, culture and discursive reasoning were necessary if they were to be useful, even if one could find access to the product, itself. Amazon was a big woman in those days. But most important of all, the culture of literacy demanded a change in the way language was used. Language and the World became disconnected. Language began to express man's ideas about the world rather than being an articulation of the world itself. A new mapping process began. Words got lost, they no longer marked anything and were condemned to live only on the pages of books, from which they were borrowed to colonize people's speech.