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The Notion of Totality in Indian Thought
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Extract
The East has seen totality in a far more consistent and systematic way than the West; and India more so than any other civilisation in the East. When the Swami Siddheswarananda came to France to lecture on Vedic philosophy, he entitled his address, Outline of a Philosophy of Totality’. The expression could have been applied to the philosophies of India as a whole. But the world of thought, coextensive with culture, is far broader than philosophy. It is no exaggeration to assert that India is the land of totality par excellence. Is it not even, according to one dictum, bigger than the world … ? The notion of totality, implicit or conscious, poetic or theoretical, original or final, is present throughout Indian culture, both in its religion and in its arts, both in its customs as in its language. The Mahabharata, the largest epic poem ever conceived, proclaims: everything in the Mahabharata can be found elsewhere, but what is not in the Mahabharata cannot be found anywhere. Whilst the absolute beginning of a piece of Western music is in keeping with a dramatic time analogous to that of the Creation, Indian music seems to come from the eternity of a universe without transcendence. The body takes on a cosmic meaning through dance. By performing the tandava, the cosmic dance, Shiva Nataraja (‘Lord of the dance’) endlessly creates and destroys worlds. Indian art is an art of proliferation: both the reiteration of motifs sculpted in architecture and the litanies and metaphors spun out in epic poetry are symbolic attempts to capture the totality of the world. Every single element, being, movement or thing within this continuous space and time points towards all the others. The texts describe the sky of Indra with its web of pearls arranged in such a way that when one looks into one, one sees all the others reflecting in it; in the same way, each object of this world is not merely itself but comprises every one of the others and actually is all the others. The culture of India is one of plenitude, presence and continuity. At the opposite extreme, Japan developed a culture based upon the values of emptiness, absence and the interval. When a guru speaks, Valmiki and Vyasa know that it will take them many scores of verses. A Zen master's reply to his disciple takes up a single-line anecdote, or a word, or even a silence. At the other extreme, hundreds of statues line the gopuram of the temple at Madurai: not all of the thirty-three million gods ‘recognized’ in the writings are there, of course, but at least their unbelievable abundance gives us a plausible image of them.
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Notes
1. The present article is rewritten from a chapter taken from a work (La Philosophie, volume 3 of La Totalité) to appear with Champ Vallon in Autumn 2000.
2. Swami Siddheswaranda, Quelques aspects de la philosophie védantique (Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1967), p. 73.
3. A myth tells of Shiva's devastating temper when he sees that Parvati, his wife, had fallen asleep during his speech - which had already lasted for many thousands of years …
4. More recently, there was the assimilation of English democracy and administration by a quite radically opposed system (the caste system).
5. The religion furthest from Brahmanism in every way.
6. The Dîn-I-Ilâhî of Akbar and the Sikh religion.
7. But neither did Europe, far from it.
8. Krishnamurti, L'Éveil de l'intelligence, trans. A. Duché (Stock, 1975), p. 632.
9. Krishnamurti, Commentaires sur la vie, vol. III, trans. N. Tisserand (Buchet-Chastel, 1974), p. 384 ff.
10. This is the same root that one finds in the Latin salvus, healthy, in good health.
11. Consequently, we do not follow E. Guillon's thesis, Les Philosophies bouddhistes (PUF, 1995), p. 9, which opposes the thought of the Whole to the thought of Being with regard to the substantialisation of brahman in the Upanishads.
12. ‘Each time the gods notice a fissure in sacrifice, they close it up with inserted lines: these lines form the suture of sacrifice. Just as someone continually gathers the edges of a garment with a needle, so the one who knows how repairs the break in sacrifice', cited by L. Silburn, Instant et cause. Le discontinu dans la pensée philosophique de l'Inde (De Boccard, 1989), p. 88.
13. Ibid., p. 3.
14. Krishnamurti, Commentaires sur la vie, vol. III, op. cit., p. 381.
15. La Perfection de sagesse, trans. G. Driessens (Seuil, 1996), pp. 189-191.
16. For instance, the piling up of metaphors in epic literature, the superimposition of motifs and sculptures upon temple surfaces.
17. L. Dumont, La Civilisation indienne et nous (A. Colin, 1975).
18. Hence the lack of portraiture in painting, which only began with the Persian-influenced miniature.
19. E. Guillon, Les Philosophies bouddhistes, op. cit., p. 111.
20. S. Arguillère, ‘La réalité de la totalité dans l'idéalisme bouddhique' in Nirvana (Éditions de l'Herne, 1993), p. 275.
21. India is not aware of the thematic and the conflict of subject and object, of self and other, which to a great extent make up the foundations of classical Western philosophy. In addition, the gift and the sacrifice are not seen as subtractions chipping away at an original totality but as points of radiating energy. (On the contrary, very early in the West the self is defined as an owner of goods and faculties, as an indirect consequence of which sacrifice and the gift are seen as reductions of the whole.) In India, the ascetic deprives himself of nothing, even though he abstains (from nourishment, from pleasures), yet he pours out- that is to say, into the universe from which he is never separated - the energy condensed within him.
22. [Translator's note: The phrase in question is perhaps the following: ‘I am all this creation collectively, and besides me there exists no other being.' It is cited twice by Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Represen tation, trans. E.F.J. Payne, vol. I (New York: Dover, 1969), pp. 181 and 205-206.]
23. Through the mediation of four elements represented by their symbolic animals (makara, kâla and naga for water; hamsa and kinnara for air; vyakala for fire; elephant and lion for earth). J. Auboyer, Le Trône et son symbolisme dans l'Inde ancienne (PUF, 1949), pp. 105 ff.
24. The body (kosha) of the chariot corresponds to the intermediary space (antariksha) between Heaven and the Earth, the axle (aksha) represents the axis of the world, and the two wheels, at once combined and separated, are Heaven and Earth.
25. The pillar (skambah) that stands in the courtyard of certain temples. ‘In the Skambah has this universe entered completely' (Atharva Veda, X, 7).
26. Indeed, the seesaw is not merely playful: it symbolizes abundance and power, it refers to erotic games and represents the Sun (compared by poets to a golden swing that travels to and fro from one end of the sky to the other).
27. Our four points of the compass and the four intermediary directions.
28. The mandala, in square and/or circular form, is a symbol and a summary of the universe. Drawn and painted, it represents an aid for meditation. The plans for temples and stupas are mandalas.
The Jaina svastika (which Nazism transformed into a sinister emblem by pivoting it 45 degrees) also has a cosmic meaning. Its four arms represent respectively the universe of the gods (the top arm), that of men (the left arm), that of animals (the right arm), and that of hell (the bottom arm).
29. In the same way that the point potentially contains the entire universe, the simplest mantra, the syllable AUM, which begins every sacred hymn tirelessly repeated by devotees, and which is inscribed upon all kinds of media, from stone to paper, by way of earth and skin, this simplest mantra is supposed to summarize and condense the universe. Its three phonetic elements (A, U, M) govern an endless series of triads which takes in the totality of things and beings (the three gods of Trimurti, the three worlds, the three higher castes, the three qualities, the three components of personality, etc.).
30. II, 2, 11.
31. J. Varenne, Sept Upanishads (Seuil, 1981), p. 76.
32. The image of Shiva in Ardhanarishvara represents not only the synthesis of the masculine and the feminine but also that of Purusha and Prakriti. The English language has a word that designates this iconographic condensation: syntheticism. See M. Unvala Jamshedji, ‘Syntheticism in Indian iconography', Journal of Bom bay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Bombay, vol. 1, no. 2, 1925.
33. Some paintings show Krishna in the form of a hybrid animal; a peacock head and neck, leg of an elephant, leg of a tiger, a cow's chest, back and leg, a cobra for a tail and a human arm - a symbolic way of signifying the universal power of god, his identity with all the beings of nature.
34. Monism (a philosophy of one substance). Advaita means non-duality in Sanskrit.
35. Le Traité de Bodhidharma, trad. B. Fauré (Éditions Le Mail, 1986), p. 78.
36. Hegel used the term ‘acosmism' (absence of world) to describe Spinoza's philosophy.
37. H. de Glasenapp, La Philosophie indienne, trans. A.-M. Esnoul (Payot, 1951), pp. 354 and 356.
38. Let us not forget that zero was an Indian invention.