[00:00:00] ANNOUNCER:
The Foerster Lectureship on the Immortality of the Soul was established in 1928. Its aim is to bring to Berkeley, at least once a year, a lecture on the immortality of the soul or a similar topic. The lecturer has to be an authority specially qualified and chosen for that purpose.
In the past, such lectures have been given by Loren Eiseley, T. M. P. Mahadevan, Aldous Huxley, Georges Devereux, and many other distinguished scholars. This year’s Foerster’s Lecturer, Professor Wendy O’Flaherty of the University of Chicago, was trained as a dancer under George Balanchine and Martha Graham before she began the study of Sanskrit at Radcliffe College. She holds a PhD from Harvard University and a DPhil from the University of Oxford.
She taught ancient Indian history at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London, taught two years at Berkeley on this campus, and also at the Graduate Theological Union, and is, since nineteen seventy-eight, Professor of the History of Religions and Indian Studies at the University of Chicago, where she has succeeded Mircea Eliade. You will of course wonder why Professor O’Flaherty did not stay with us and went to that cold and windy city. Since everyone always asks this question, I will not simply ignore it here.
Moreover, it tells you a lot about Professor O’Flaherty and the subjects of her interest. One general reason is that it is always a little difficult to imagine Wendy O’Flaherty as a Sanskritist. Sanskrit is not only a formidable subject, like differential geometry or solid state physics, but it also has an air of stateliness, if not mustiness about it.
It has been, in addition, the almost exclusive free occupation of male scholars only. True, there were women sages in ancient India, but as a rule, a woman even of the highest caste cannot be initiated into the Vedic tradition or receive a Vedic mantra. Now, Wendy is of course a formidable woman with a stately dash, though there is no hint of mustiness about her.
More than that, she is very attractive and charming, though one is nowadays given to believe that this ought not to be mentioned. On top of it, she likes to talk and write about sex, and does so brilliantly. You can imagine the threats she embodies and the ripples and repercussions she leaves behind.
And now I shall mention two specific reasons for Wendy O’Flaherty’s departure, which tell you something about ourselves. They are utterly at variance with each other. Berkeley is one of the leading centers of Sanskrit studies, and not only in this country.
Scholars come from all over the world to consult with our Sanskrit experts. Precisely for that reason, it is difficult to appoint another Sanskritist unless a slot happens to fall vacant. The opposite holds in the area of religious studies, where on our campus, for reasons of academic ideology and university policy, nothing happens Above the undergraduate level.
No wonder that Chicago attracted Wendy O’Flaherty. They had a fine ear for her qualities, attuned as they were to the study of Indian religion by Mircea Eliade, who had himself started his ac-academic career as a Sanskritist studying Indian philosophy with Surendranath Dasgupta. Of course, whatever the reasons, it was our foolishness that permitted Wendy to leave Berkeley.
All the more reason for us to be grateful and pleased that she is now with us for at least one evening. Professor O’Flaherty’s publications are numerous, and I can give you no more than an inkling of their various contents. The first of her contributions that drew worldwide attention appeared in the book on Soma by Gordon Wasson, that retired banker who became a professional ethnomycologist and who argued that the sacred Soma plant of the Vedic Indians was a hallucinogenic mushroom, the Amanita muscaria or fly agaric.
O’Flaherty contributed to this now famous work all the chapters on the post-Vedic history of the Soma plant. Her next books deal more specifically with Indian and Hindu mythology. As you know, the two chief deities of the Hindu pantheon are Shiva and Vishnu.
While Shiva is generally dancing or hunting, Vishnu stands straight without motion like a pillar. Vishnu is a dull deity, pompous, pretentious, and very similar to our Western gods and leaders. In contrast, Shiva is sexy and erotic.
At the same time, a great ascetic and yogi, totally irresponsible and mysterious. Numerous unexciting publications are devoted to Vishnu, but very few studies have dared to tackle Shiva. Wendy O’Flaherty, with characteristic good judgment, taste, and sense, went straight for Shiva.
Her 1973 book, Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Shiva, has been heralded, heralded as one of the half dozen most important studies of Indian religion and culture in modern times. One reason for this high acclaim is Professor O’Flaherty’s innovative analysis of the material. She has distinguished and studied forty-five motifs in the mythology of Shiva with innumerable micro-themes woven together into an impressive structural texture.
But if you think this book is therefore abstruse or tedious, you would be quite mistaken. Wendy O’Flaherty is exceptionally good at telling the stories and legends of Indian mythology. As a result, the Shiva book is not only scholarly, but can be read for pure enjoyment.
The same holds for all the other books she has published subsequently and in rapid succession. In The Origin of Evil in Indian mythology, or the Evil Book as she calls it herself, she has shown that there is a problem of evil in India, even though Indologists and philosophers had ignored it. This work is also full of interesting detail.
Having studied the miraculous properties of the Soma plant in the Rig Veda, Professor O’Flaherty discovered in the Atharva Veda a wiping-off plant called Apamarga, which removes sins. The Veda addresses this as follows: “Yad dushkrutam, yac chamalam, yad va cherima papaya, tvayat tat, vishvatomukha, apamarga apa mrujmahe.” Whatever we have badly done, stained or done destructively, we wipe it off with you, you universal wipe-off.
If this reminds you of detergents or toilet paper, these associations would be un-Indian. In 1975, Professor O’Flaherty selected and translated seventy-five Indian myths which appeared as a Penguin classic with the title Hindu Myths. You can still find this book in kiosks all over the civilized world.
In 1980, she published one work entitled Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts, and edited another called Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions. Though I am intrigued by androgynes, I have no time to talk about these two publications. Her last book to date, less than six months old, is even more impressive and another achievement.
One of the scandals of Sanskrit scholarship has always been the non-existence of a good translation into English of the Rigveda, the earliest literary monument of Indo-European culture, a notoriously difficult composition, and one of the great treasures of humanity. Translated completely into German, almost completely into French, and extensively into Russian as well as Japanese, its only English translation dates of 1889 and is hopelessly inadequate and out of date. Wendy O’Flaherty has taken this bull by the horns and spent several years translating more than one hundred Rigvedic hymns.
The result has also appeared as a Penguin classic and should finally bring the Rig Veda out of its closet. In her evil book, Professor O’Flaherty has written that one should never take too seriously what Indologists or philosophers say. Since I am both, I am fully qualified to share her opinion.
Therefore, don’t listen to me any longer, but give your attention to Professor Wendy O’Flaherty, who will now speak on former lives or the man who met the people in his dream.
(applause)
[00:08:08] WENDY O’FLAHERTY:
It seems hardly necessary to give a lecture after that at all. We could all just go home. It is, of course, a very great honor to be invited to give the Foerster Lecture, and that honor gives me great pleasure.
But it’s an even greater source of happiness for me to be able to give the Foerster Lecture in the presence of so many good friends from my previous incarnation in Berkeley. To say that returning to Berkeley under such happy circumstances is like a dream come true would be to commit a cardinal cliché. But that cliché, together with the sensation of returning to the scene of a former life, if not a former crime, provides the topic for my lecture tonight.
I want to tell you an Indian story about two philosophical ideas, a story about the way that the mind apprehends the world, and about the way that the world is. More particularly, it’s a story about the way that the two problems are related, the way that our minds affect the world and the world exists in our minds. It’s a kind of religious parable, but more than that, it’s a kind of meta-parable, a parable about parables, for it is about storytelling as well as an example of storytelling.
It builds the philosophy into the story by placing a running commentary in the mouths of several of the central characters. And it builds our minds, the minds of us, the audience, as we listen to the tale, into the text by drawing us deeper and deeper into the tale within the tale, by showing us an author in search of his characters. In this way, it embodies, as well as talks about, the paradox of the author who is a character in someone else’s story, the dreamer who is a figure in someone else’s dream.
It’s a rather long story, but I think it’s a very good one. Here it is. Once upon a time, there was a monk who was inclined to imagine things rather a lot.
He would meditate and study all the time and fast for days on end. One day, this fancy came to him, “Just for fun, I will experience what happens to ordinary people.” As soon as he had this idea, his thoughts somehow took the form of another man.
And that man, even though he was just made of thought, wished for an identity and a name. And by pure accident, he thought, “I am Jivata.” This dream man, Jivata, enjoyed himself for a long time in a town made in a dream.
There he drank too much and fell into a heavy sleep, and in his dream, he saw a Brahmin who read all day long. One day that Brahmin fell asleep, worn out from the day’s work. But those daily activities were still alive within him like a tree inside a seed, and so he saw himself in a dream as a prince.
One day that prince fell asleep after a heavy meal, and in his dream, he saw himself as a king who ruled many lands and indulged in every sort of luxury. One day that king fell asleep, having gorged himself on his every desire, and in his dream, he saw himself as a celestial woman. That woman fell into a deep sleep in the languor that followed making love, and she saw herself as a doe with darting eyes.
That doe one day fell asleep and dreamed that she was a clinging vine because she had been accustomed to eating vines. For animals dream, too, and they always remember what they’ve seen and heard. The vine saw herself as a bee that used to buzz among the vines.
The bee fell in love with a lotus in a lotus pond and became so intoxicated by the lotus sap he drank that his wits became numb. And one day, an elephant came to that pond and trampled the lotus, and the bee, still attached to the lotus, was crushed with it on the elephant’s tusk. As the bee looked at the elephant, he saw himself as an elephant in rut.
That elephant in rut fell into a deep pit and became the favorite elephant of a king. One day, the elephant was cut to pieces by a sword in battle, and as he went to his final resting place, he saw a swarm of bees hovering over the sweet ichor that oozed from his temples, and so the elephant became a bee again. The bee returned to the lotus pond and was trampled under the foot of an elephant, and just then he noticed a goose beside him in the pond, and so he became a goose.
That goose moved through other births, other wombs for a long time, until one day when he was a goose in a flock of other geese, he realized that being a goose, he was the same as the swan of Brahma, the creator. Just as he had this thought, he was shot by a hunter and he died, and then he was born as the swan of Brahma. One day, the swan saw the god Rudra, and he thought with sudden certainty, “I am Rudra.”
Immediately, that idea was reflected like an image in a mirror, and he took on the form of Rudra. This Rudra indulged in every pleasure that entered his mind, living in the palace of Rudra and attended by Rudra’s servants. But the Rudra that he had become had a special power of knowledge, and in his mind, he could see every single one of his former experiences.
He was amazed by the hundred dreams he had had, and he said to himself, “How wonderful.” This complicated illusion fools everyone. What is unreal seems to be real, like water in a desert that turns out to be a mirage.
I am something that can be thought, and I have been thought. There happened to be a soul that by chance became a monk in some universe, and he experienced what he had been thinking about. He became Jivata.
But because Jivata admired Brahmins, he saw himself as a Brahmin. And since the Brahmin had thought about princes all the time, he became a prince. And since that prince was inclined to do things in order to run a kingdom, he became a king.
And because the king was full of lust, he became a celestial woman. And that fickle woman was so jealous of the beautiful eyes of a doe that she became a doe. And the doe became a vine that she had noticed, and the vine saw herself as a bee that she had observed for a long time, and the bee was trampled under the feet of an elephant that he had seen, and he wandered in and out of a series of rebirths.
At the end of the round of a hundred rebirths is Rudra, and I am Rudra. I am he, the one who stands in the flux of rebirths where everyone is fooled by his own mind. “For my amusement, I will raise up all those creatures who are my own rebirths, and I will look at them.
And by giving them the ability to look at the matter as it really is, I will make them unite into one.” When Rudra had decided upon this, he went to that universe where the monk was sleeping in his monastery like a corpse. You remember the monk, do you?
Joining his mind to the monk’s mind, Rudra woke him up. And then the monk realized the error he had made in believing his life as Jivata to be real. And when the monk looked at Rudra, who was the monk himself and was also made of Jivata and all the others, he was amazed.
The one who was truly enlightened would not have found cause for amazement. Then Rudra and the monk went, the two of them together, to a certain place in the corner of the space of the mind where Jivatara had been reborn. And then they saw him asleep, unconscious, still holding a sword in his hand, the corpse of Jivatara.
Joining their minds to his mind, they woke him up, and then though they were one, they had three forms, Rudra and Jivatara and the monk. Though they were awake, they did not seem to be awake. They were amazed and yet not amazed, and they stood there in silence for a moment like images painted in a picture.
Then all three of them went through the sky to the place echoing in the empty air where the Brahman had been reborn. And there they saw the Brahman in his house, fast asleep with his wife, the Brahman lady, clasping him around the neck. They joined their minds to his mind and woke him up, and they all stood there overcome with amazement.
Then they went to the place where the king had been reborn, and they awakened him with their mind, and then they wandered through the other rebirths until they reached the swan of Brahma. And at that moment, they all united together and became Rudra, a hundred Rudras in one. Then they were all awakened by Rudra, and they all rejoiced and looked upon one another’s rebirths, seeing illusion for what it was.
Then Rudra said, “Now go back to your own places and enjoy yourselves there with your families for a while, and then come back to me. And at doomsday, all of us, the bands of creatures who were a part of me, will go to the ultimate resting place.” And Rudra vanished, and Jivata and the Brahman and all the others went back to their own places with their own families.
But after a while, they will wear out their bodies and will unite again back in the world of Rudra, and they will be seen as stars in the sky. Now, this story is a highly sophisticated variant of a much-loved Indo-European folk motif, which includes the story of Chicken Licken, who told Henny Penny, who told Foxy Loxy that the sky was falling, and the house that Jack built. The theme also appears in European literature as the motif of the man who’s magically made to believe himself to be the bishop, the archbishop, and the pope, and then wakes up again.
But instead of piling up barnyard animals or clergymen, the Indian text piles up nested figments of the imagination. This extraordinary story speaks directly to us here in America in 1982, even though it is a part of a text, the Yoga Vasistha Maharamayana, that was composed in India, probably in Kashmir, more than a thousand years ago. It is, I think, possible for us to ask our own questions of this text, 20th-century American questions.
But before we can do this, we must first try to understand as well as we can what questions the author meant us to ask of it. This task is greatly facilitated for us by the fact that many of these questions are written right into the text. The story that I’ve just told you is narrated by the great sage Vasishta to Prince Rama, the same Rama who’s the hero of the great Indian epic, the Ramayana.
And Rama asks Vasishta a number of questions, many of them the very questions that would occur to an American first encountering this story. Literal-minded, earthbound, rather flat-footed questions, it would seem. Here’s one.
Rama said, “How did Jivata and the Brahman and the other forms that the monk imagined become real?” “How can an object of the imagination be real?” But Vasistha said, “The reality of the imagination is only partial.
Do not take it for something entirely real. What isn’t there isn’t there. Yet the true nature of what is seen in a dream or visualized by the imagination exists at all times.
Everything exists in a corner of the mind.” Then Rama asked, “What became of the hundred Ru-Rudras?” Were they all Rudras or weren’t they?
And how could a hundred minds be made from a single mind? How could they be made by that Rudra who was himself made in someone’s dream?” Vasishtha replied, “The monk visualized a hundred bodies and a hundred dreams, but all those forms in the dreams were in fact Rudra, a hundredfold Rudra.
For those who have removed the veil from reality can imagine things so precisely that those mental perceptions are actually experienced. And because of the omnipresence of the universal soul, something that is experienced in a particular way and in a particular place by a mind with true understanding will actually come into existence in that way at that very place. Now, on the one hand, the text seems to say all the things that we think are real are only parts of a dream, our dream or someone else’s dream.
On the other hand, there is a reality in dreams, for the things that we imagine or dream are reflections of some reality which does exist at all times and in all places, and happens to get into our minds by accident, like the accident that makes the monk think that he is Jivata. In this view, mental images are reflections of an underlying reality. There was a Jivata, and the monk dreamt of him.
It only remained then for Rudra to find the Jivata that the monk had dreamt of and introduce the two of them. Though the monk dreamed of a hundred people, those people did exist as a part of the god Rudra. Yet the text also implies that the monk had the power to dream them into existence from his mind upward, all the way up the line from the monk to the swan to Rudra.
And Rudra had the power to think them all into existence as part of himself from his mind downward, all the way from the swan back to the monk. The text tells us that all the people in the dream are part of Rudra physically, and it also says that they are part of his mind, his dream. These are not contradictions.
For Rudra to think of something is for him both to make it exist and to find that it has always existed. These two kinds of creation, making or finding, are the same, for in both cases, the mind imposes its idea upon the spirit-matter dough of reality, cutting it up like a cookie cutter, now into stars, now into hearts, now into elephants, now into swans. It makes them, and it finds them already there.
Woodward’s mind is the mold that stamps out images, all of which ultimately derive from Him. He stamps this mold upon the spirit-matter continuum of the universe in such a way that it breaks up into separate, or rather apparently separate, consciousnesses of all of us. The images that He sketches in our minds were already there, in the continuum and in our minds, but we cannot know them until His mind touches ours, or as the text says, until He joins His mind to our mind.
Finally, when we really know Rudra, the images vanish and the continuum is seen as it really is, devoid of the fragments of individual figures. Then the background becomes the foreground. This philosophy is made explicit at many points throughout the text, particularly in the form of explanatory remarks made by the storyteller, Vashishtha, to clarify what he regards as difficult or important points in the story, often in response to questions.
It is a philosophy well known in India from the time of the Upanishads, at least a millennium and a half before our text, the Yoga Vasishtha, was composed. Yet it may not have been the predominant cultural assumption in India at that time of the text. It may not have been the shared common sense of Indians at that period.
This is, I think, evident from the text’s repeated insistence that all the characters in the story were amazed to find that the lives they had taken for real were merely part of someone else’s dream, or, contrary-wise, that people they had just dreamed about turned out to be real people they could talk to. They are amazed at both implications. The implication that their real lives are dreams, and the implication that their dreams are real, or rather as real as their waking lives.
They had assumed, as we usually assume, that dreams are unreal and lives are real. Even at the very end of the story, Rama cannot understand how the hundred Rudras could become real. And the commentator explains his quandary.
He says, “Rama asked his question because he did not think it was possible that the matter could be as it seemed and as it had just been said to be, as in the verse that stated, ‘He awakened the monk, joining mind to mind.’ That is, he did not think that one could awaken the monk and the others by transferring consciousness from Rudra’s mind, or that in that way, Rudra could make a hundred people by making the monk have a hundred dreams.” Even Rudra himself is said to have been amazed by his realization that his hundred dreams had thought themselves to be real, though he then conquers his amazement and carefully puzzles it all out.
The text thus presents us with a rather extreme philosophical doctrine that there is no crucial difference, or perhaps no recognizable or testable difference between waking reality and dream images. Thus, it states that truly enlightened people would not have been amazed by the monk’s experience. And then it presents us with a number of people who are astonished when presented with evidence that this might be true.
But the paradox does not rest there. Rama asks another set of questions that move the dilemma onto another level altogether. When Vasistha had finished speaking, Rama asked, “Is there such a monk?
Search within yourself and tell me right away.” Vasistha said, “Tonight I will go into a deep trance and search the universe to find out if there is such a monk or not, and tomorrow morning I’ll tell you.” When they assembled again on the next morning, Vasistha said, “Rama, I searched for that monk for a long time yesterday with the eye of knowledge, the eye of meditation.
Hoping to see such a monk, I wandered through the seven continents and over the mountains of the Earth. But no matter how far I went, I could not find such a monk. For how could something from the realm of the mind be found outside it?
But then, near dawn, once more I went north in my mind to a glorious country named Jina, where there is a famous monastery built over an anthill. And in that monastery, in the corner of a hut, there was a monk named Far-sight who had been meditating for twenty-one nights. His own servants did not enter his firmly bolted house, for they feared they might disturb his meditation.
And in a former age, there was once another monk of the very same sort, and this one today is a second. Then just in play, I searched through other universes, and finally I found in a universe in the corner of space in the future, a another monk just like that with the same powers. And even in this very assembly here today, there are people who will someday have the very same experiences and take on such a form and do such things when this illusion will cast its spell over them.
(breathing)
Then Rama’s father, the king Dasharatha, said to Vashishta, “Greatest of sages, let me send my men to the hut of that monk to awaken him and bring him right back here.” Vashishta said, “Great king, the body of that monk no longer has the breath of life in it. It is dissolved with rot.
It is no longer the vessel of a living creature. The soul of that monk has become the swan of Brahma. During his own lifetime, he has been released and is no longer subject to rebirth.
At the end of a month, the month that– at the end of a month, the monk’s servants, longing to see him, will force open the bolts, and they will wash his body and throw it out. Since the monk himself has left that body and has gone somewhere else, how could anyone wake up that ruined corpse in the monastery? Now, what are we to make of this epilogue?
Rama’s question begins to consider the possible reality, not of the characters in the monk’s dream, but of the monk himself. That is, the reality status of a character in a story told by Vasishta. And in his response to Rama, Vasishta jumps out of the frame of the narrative and into his own story, just as the monk jumps out of the frame of his dream to meet the people he dreams of, or perhaps as Rudra jumps out of the frame of his divine mind to meet the thoughts in it.
This adds a new dimension to the nested levels of the dream, for now we have Vasishta thinking of Rudra, who is realizing the monk who is dreaming of Jivata and the others. It also adds another figure, Vasishta, to the list of those who are privileged to manipulate the strings of the puppets within the cosmic drama by giving physical form to their mental images. Vashishta is at first skeptical of any possibility that his mental constructs could be real.
As he says to Rama, “No fa– no matter how far I went, I could not find such a monk, for how could something from the realm of the mind be found outside it?” It would appear that at this point, at least, Vashishta aligns himself with those who are amazed to find their mental constructs coming to life. Yet he does go to look for the monk, nevertheless.
By seeking the monk, Vashishta acts out the idealistic assumptions of the text, assumptions that have already been challenged by the skepticism of Rama, whose doubts are at first echoed by Vashishta himself. But Vashishta finds the monk. By finding him, Vashishta not only discredits that skepticism, but greatly strengthens and enhances the idealistic argument, for he demonstrates that not only dreams, but even works of artistic creation, the stories that we make up to prove a point, reflect some aspect of reality, one that most of us do not have the powers to prove, as Vasistha did.
This is an important extension, for it implies that this reality is reflected not only in dreams, which we take to be real while dreaming, but retroactively define as unreal when we awaken, but even in stories which we take to be unreal from the very start. If the indistinguishable nature of dreams and reality were the only point or even the main point of the text, then why would Vashista have bothered to set out to find the monk? And more troublesome still, how could he have found the monk after all?
The first question is a question of psychology. It involves conflicting cultural expectations and the norms of scientific verification. The second question raises the thornier problem of ontology.
What does the text believe to be the nature of reality? Let us examine these problems one by one. Why did Vashistha think that he could find the monk, since the monk was merely a creature in a story he had told and supposedly made up himself?
The commentary suggests that Rama might have wrestled with this problem before framing his question to Vashishta. Rama was full of doubt and curiosity. He praised his guru and recognized the purpose of instruction, but he said, “Search within yourself and ask yourself this question: Even though I imagined this monk and spoke about him in order to enlighten you, Rama, nevertheless, did he actually come into existence somewhere?
For it is simply not possible that a person that you would talk about would not have some sort of true essence. Rama was amazed by the tale of the monk’s dream. That is, he shared to some extent our common sense intuition that dreams are not real.
Yet Rama’s question and Vashista’s implicit in– affirmative answer, for he does go to look for the monk, suggests that both of them were at least half convinced of the real existence of the monk. That is, they shared to some extent the philosophies set forth in the text in flagrant violation of their own common sense. Their ambivalence is explicitly stated.
They were amazed and not amazed. They wanted to find out for sure, and so Vasishta set out to test his hypothesis. Both Rama and Vasishta felt that there was, in fact, a possibility that Vasishta’s mental creations might have a physical reality.
This is the psychology of the text. The monk’s existence might be explained in at least two ways, corresponding to Rudra’s finding or making the figures in his dreams. Each of these explanations carries with it a different implication about the nature of reality, and together they provide an expression of the ontology of the text.
The first, implicit in the commentator’s gloss, is the possibility that certain people might have the power instinctively to tune in on some real, already existing physical phenomenon, a person, a life, a city, while apparently just imagining such a phenomenon in a spirit of pure play or by pure chance. This is what Rama means when he says, “Whatever a person like you, that is the great sage Vasishta, would talk about must have some sort of true essence.” Such a sage would instinctively make up something real even when constructing a hypothetical case.
Later, when Rama asked Vashistha if the hundred Rudras were real, Vashistha says, “The hundred bodies that the monk saw in his dreams, all of that was just thought up for the sake of explanation, and so I did not talk about them in detail.” Well, Vashistha did not bother to invent all the details. The details were there.
Vashistha just told Rama there were a hundred Rudras to make his pedagogic point. In the same way, the monk dreamed of Jivita, and there was a Jivita whom he later found with Rudra’s help. The second explanation is one that the text has already dwelt upon at some length.
Certain people, of whom Vashishtha is apparently one, have the power of making their mental projections, their dreams, become real physical objects, objects that had not existed until the powerful dreamer dreamed them into reality. In the context of our story, these two explanations are mutually supportive, not contradictory. Thus, when Dasharatha, the king, asks Vashishta to bring the monk to court, Vashishta gently points out the stupidity of this question, not on the basis of the argument that one could hardly expect to find the monk at all, which was the tentative and quickly disproved hypothesis with which Vashishta had at first ridiculed Rama’s question about the reality of the monk, but rather because the monk’s body was so very real that it had, like all real bodies, eventually ceased to exist.
It had rotted away. The reality of that body is brought home to us by the great detail in which the situation at the monk’s hut is described, his name, the barred door, the worried servants. If then the monk is real, either as a result of Vashistha’s creation of him, or as a result of some former creation which Vashistha instinctively recognized when he made up his story, how long has he been real?
To put the question more broadly, do the people in the monk’s dream exist for just the one episode that Vashista tells us about, perhaps a few months of an adult life, and suddenly vanish when he wakes up or dies? Or do they live entire lives from birth to death, of which the monk witnesses only a brief fragment? Before we can answer this, we must try to decide whether this is a story about dreams or a story about rebirth.
Certainly, it is at least in part a story about rebirth. The figures at the beginning and the end of the chain of the monk’s dream, directly inside the outer frame formed by the monk and Rudra, are a man named Jivata and a swan. Jivata, the only character in the dream who is given a proper name, is a derivative of Jiva, the ordinary Sanskrit word used to denote the individual life or the transmigrating soul.
The swan is an ancient Indian symbol for the soul, and more particularly for the returning soul, the transmigrating soul, perhaps based on the natural symbolism of the swan’s migration. Each of the levels within the monk’s dream is thus in some sense the complete rebirth of a soul that goes from Rudra to the monk, to Jiva, to the, to the Brahman, and so forth, until it subsides back into Rudra again. In this way, we must assume that the monk transferred his consciousness into an already existent Jivata, taking up Jivata’s life in Mediya’s race, as it were, and Jivata joined consciousness with an already existent Brahman and so forth.
This would also explain how all of them continued to exist when the monk awoke, and how they were able to meet and talk together when Rudra found them all. We do not see the entire rebirth of each of the characters in this story. None of them is born, and most of them do not die within the story.
The monk falls into a deep trance, Jivata passes out in a drunken stupor, the Brahmin falls asleep after a hard day’s reading, the king and the celestial harlot are exhausted by pleasure, and so forth. These people dream and become what they have habitually dreamt about. Yet near the end of the chain, some of the animals do seem to die and become what they happen to see at the moment of death.
The bee is pulverized on the tusk of an elephant, the elephant cut to pieces by a sword, The bee is trampled by another elephant. The elephant is actually, if euphemistically, said to have died, and the others experience violent accidents. The penultimate transition is explicitly said to be a death.
The goose dies, shot by a hunter, and becomes the swan of Brahma. The swan then experiences the final and most subtle transition. As soon as he realizes that he is Rudra, his idea is instantly reflected like an image in a mirror.
That is, it is projected outside of himself and becomes a solid figure, or if you prefer, it becomes reflected in the already existing figure of Rudra himself. The swan then takes the form of Rudra and abandons his swan body, just as the scent of a cluster of blossoms leaves the blossoms behind and is wafted away on the wind. It would appear that the figures are arranged in a kind of hierarchy, and that the higher consciousnesses merely dream of a partial rebirth, while the lower ones must actually die, must endure physically what the others have merely experienced mentally.
Setting aside for the moment the monk as a special case to which we will return, we can see that the characters form three groups that steadily descend in metaphysical acuity. Jivata is defined as an ordinary sort of man who loves life, hence he is the logical starting point for an odyssey which is designed to dramatize for ordinary people, the ones who are amazed when the dividing line between dream and reality melts away, the doctrines of illusion and rebirth. He is, moreover, the random sample, the man in the street.
The monk thinks of him by pure chance. Jivata is the literal embodiment of every man. Paired with Jivata, we encounter the highest human type, the learned Brahman, and after the Brahman come the prince and the king, the royal image divided into two, of which the first is lower than the second, as was the case with our first pair.
Below the king is a triad of females who form the transition from higher to lower consciousness. One semi-divine, the celestial woman, one animal, the doe, and one vegetable, the vine. These three figures are still part of the higher echelon who dream rather than die, and who become what they have always known, not what they see as they die.
The text tells us that animals do dream. So, too, the vine is conscious. She’s said to see in herself the embodiment of the loveliness that had been asleep and numb inside the doe for a long time.
The vine is the incarnation of the metaphor of female beauty. Graceful women are always called clinging vines in Sanskrit poetry, even as Jivata is the embodiment of the soul. The next quartet, like the first, is divided into two pairs.
The elephant and the bee are animals closely associated with violence and eroticism. The wildness of the male elephant and rut carries fairly obvious symbolic meaning, and bees in Indian love poetry are said to form the bowstring of the god of lust and to plunge deep inside the flowers that ooze with sap, even as the elephant’s temples ooze with rut. In our text, the bee perishes because his lust for the lotus stupefies him and makes him stick to her even in death.
The bee and the elephant find violent deaths over and over again. Then we encounter the last pair, the goose who becomes a swan. Here, the hierarchy doubles back on itself.
The lowest becomes the highest, and the swan becomes the god Rudra. The true break comes within this pair. The goose has to be shot dead to become the swan, the only explicit death in the story and the most violent transition.
But the swan merely reflects itself into Rudra, the least violent transition. Once we have reached the swan, we’re home. At this point, there’s no more dreaming.
Now we begin to unravel all that has been dreamt. The creatures in the monk’s dream form a pattern that is a masterful combination of order and chance. They are distributed so as to cover the full spectrum of consciousness, a point that the text emphasizes by its overall groupings, human males, non-human females, and male animals and insects.
These groups are, I think, meant to depict a steady general decline. Yet within each group are upswings. Jivatam moves up when he becomes a Brahmin or a prince, the bee improves his lot when he becomes an elephant, and the goose becomes a very special swan.
Moreover, there are switchbacks, the elephant who re-relapses into beehood. Redundancies, there are several bees, and finally a catch-all group of etceteras at the end. These irregularities convey the richness and randomness of the process of reincarnation.
This random variation also characterizes the pattern through which all of us will, at some time before the end of infinity, become incarnate as that same monk in much the same way as the monkey playing at his typewriter will eventually compose the complete works of Shakespeare. Yet although anything can happen, certain things are more likely to happen. This is the way that karma skews and orders the chaos of the universe.
As the same dream gets into different people’s heads, in this case, the dream of the monk who meets the people in his dream, there may be minor variations on the theme, minor changes in the manifestations of the archetype. The text says, “Again and again, these lives revolve in creation like the waves in water, and some rebirths are strikingly similar to what they were before, and others are about half the same. Some are a little bit the same, some not very much alike at all, and sometimes they are once again just exactly the same.
This flexibility, together with the elements of pure chance and the gravity of karmic tendencies, makes certain coincidences not only possible but likely. Midway through the round of rebirth, the text moves from dreams to deaths, and then begins to talk of them simultaneously, using the two images to illuminate one another. Death is like a dream, or rather like an awakening, and a dream or an illusion is experienced as a kind of death.
We awaken from ignorance or from sleep or from life. The same verbal root covers all of these in Sanskrit. Ultimately, the contrast between creatures who dream and creatures who die is exposed as meaningless, as one more variation on the false distinction between mind and matter.
Illusion and rebirth melt together from the very start in the short poem with which the commentary introduces the whole story. It says, “The story of Jivata is about the way in which people wrongly perceive that they have obtained various bodies. Such a wrong perception operated in the mind of the monk as a result of his various karmic memory traces.”
What are these karmic memory traces? In classical Indian philosophy, on which our text constantly draws, they are the bits of experience that adhere to the transmigrating soul and that predispose it to act in one way or another in its new life. They may also be experienced as inexplicable, tantalizing memories, the uneasy aftermath of a dream that has been forgotten by the conscious mind, but that continues to haunt the deeper mind, the, the subconscious or unconscious mind as the Freudians and Jungians would term it.
Our text tells us, for example, that after the bee had become an elephant and was then reborn as a bee again, he went back to the same lotus pond where he had previously met with his unfortunate accident because, it says, “People who are not aware of their karmic traces find it hard to give up their bad habits.” So, too, when the beautiful woman becomes a doe because she envies the beauty of the doe’s eyes, Rudram remarks, “Alas, the delusion that results from the karmic traces causes such misery among creatures.” All of the people in the dream are reborn in a particular form because they want something.
There is a hunger left unsated in their present lives, and this propels them across the barrier of death into a new birth, where that still unfulfilled longing leads them to do what they do. The monk is the only one who understands this. He is freed from the unfulfilled longings that animate the creatures in his dreams.
The monk at the top of the human hierarchy is the point at which the dream and the rebirth converge and diverge. Rudra says that the monk was a soul that by chance became a monk. When Rudra re-returns to find the monk and awaken him in the main story before the epilogue, the monk is asleep as if he were a corpse.
He is the dreaming soul. In the epilogue, however, when Vashishta goes inside the story himself to find the monk, he finds only a dead body. The soul has escaped and gone back to Rudra, and the monk really is nothing but a corpse.
Thus, the monk is the soul that seems to be born and die, though the soul is in fact merely dreaming and being dreamt. The monk’s story acts out the basic metaphor of the text that what seems to be life and death is merely a dream and an awakening. The monk’s involvement in rebirth is different from that of all the other characters in Vasistha’s story or within the monk’s dream.
The text insists that the monk himself was born purely by chance and that he in turn became Jivata by accident. That is, the monk did not become reborn to quench a thirst, but merely dreamed of another life out of pure intellectual curiosity. He becomes Jivata merely in play, the word for purposeless sport being the same as the one used in classical philosophical texts to describe why it is that God, who has no desires, bothers to make the universe at all.
Rudra repeats that the monk indulged in pure play when he imagined Jivata, and it’s this same spirit of pure play that leads Rudra himself to decide to travel through the universes to wake up all the figures in the monk’s dream. This is what sets the monk apart from all the others. He alone can control his mental imaging, which means that he is not forced willy-nilly to become what he does not want to be, or for that matter, what he wants to be, and also that he can project his own mental images onto other minds or onto the fabric of reality itself.
The text takes pains to tell us about this. It was the purity of his mind and the powers developed in meditation that gave him the ability to become what he thought of. That is, he emptied his mind of all but the one thing he wanted to become so that he was nothing but that thought.
The commentator is even more specific about the monk’s powers. In the manner of ascetics, he assumed the form of another man, for yogis can enter other people’s real existing bodies. This is a common motif in Indian folktales.
Yet the monk is caught up like the others in his own imaginings. Like them, he is astonished when brought face to face with the people in his dreams. And Rudra says that the monk became Jivata because of his still decaying karmic memory traces.
The monk experiences precisely what they all experience, even though unlike them, he set out to do it on purpose. Thus, the introductory verse tells us that the monk was the victim of a mistaken perception, for he took the people in his dream to be real, and he did not, on the other hand, realize at first that he was merely part of Rudra’s dream. As soon as he wished to become someone else, his mind lost its calm, like an ocean stirred by a whirlpool.
When Rudra replays the story in his own mind, he says that the monk’s form changed because of the emotion that shook him at that time. Rama is puzzled by this problem and asks Vasistha how a monk of such spiritual distinction could be caught up in the web of delusion. Vasistha does not answer this question specifically, but the subsequent analysis makes it clear that the monk’s great degree of mental control, though temporarily swept aside by the intensity of the dream, reasserted itself so that the monk could realize the dream of Rudra, could become awakened.
Thus, the commentator introduces the last chapter with this verse. In this chapter, the body of the monk is destroyed when he has been released through his meditation. And just as the monk was first bound by and then released from his false perception, so too other people become bound and are released at their own awakenings.
The monk is part of the chain gang of rebirth like all the rest of us, but he is first in line. And this text describes the moment when he breaks out to set an example for all of us. For at the end of the story, the monk is described as one who has become released from the wheel of rebirth during his lifetime.
Even ordinary people become what they concentrate on, volens nolens. This is the power that drives the machine of rebirth. Extraordinary people, however, can do this on purpose And without dying.
The imaginings of gods are a thousandfold more powerful even than the imaginings of yogis and monks. And Rudra is not only the supreme god in this text, he’s also the supreme yogi. Rudra is the warp upon which we all weave our dreams.
He is the fluid in which we all flow together like the particles in a suspension. He is the place where we all meet in our dreams, the infinity where our parallel lives converge. The text tells us that the lives that the monk imagined could not see one another living as they did in separate universes, except through the knowledge of Rudra.
This last phrase is, I think, purposely ambiguous. It means that only people who know Rudra, in particular who know that they are Rudra, can meet the people in their dreams or meet the people that they were in their former lives and will be in their future lives. But it also means that only through the fact that Rudra knows them can they hope to bridge the gap between the apparently separate souls, that Rudra will show them that they are one another because they are He.
For though, as Rama points out, Rudra is merely a character in someone’s dream, the monk’s dream at first and the swan’s dream at last, he is also the dreamer of all dreams, including the dream of the one who dreams him, the dream of the monk. Thus, when the text says that Jivata lives in a universe in a corner of the mind, the immediate meaning is that it’s a corner of the mind of the monk. But as the tale unfolds, we come to understand that the monk himself exists only in the corner of another mind, Rudra’s mind.
Moreover, when the monk merely dreams of Rudra, Rudra produces the monk in a more direct fashion. The monk is a partial incarnation of Rudra, an atom flowing in the veins of Rudra. Rudra is made of Jivata and the others, the text says.
Yet despite his extraordinary ontological status, the actual mental processes of Rudra are flawed, like those of even the best of his dream creatures, the monk. The monk who unknowingly imitates Rudra’s play begins dispassionately enough, but as soon as he imagines a person with passions, the earthy Jivata, he is caught up in those passions himself, forced to follow the game into realms he had not intended to explore. So too, Rudra is caught up in his own sport.
He is amazed to see what creatures people the brave new world of his imagination. He, too, has karmic residues, more than anyone else, since he experiences everyone’s lives. Though he is the mold that cuts the forms, those forms also create themselves beyond his control once the process is set in motion.
Like the monk, Rudra discovers that creation inevitably leads to imperfection, to the self-perpetuating desire to go on creating. Like the monk, Rudra indulges his frivolity, his creative urge. Even Rudra, then, is not a true model of freedom from karma.
Not even Rudra can remain deaf to the songs of the sirens he imagines. Is there then no one who is impervious, safe, out of bounds? There seems to be one, Vasistha.
Like the monk and Rudra, he is able to make his dreams come true, and not merely his dreams, but even his conscious didactic examples. Like the shaman, he can range over the entire universe of time and space. But most important, Vashista is not amazed at the things that happen in his story, not even at the fact that his story turns out to be true.
He creates not out of idle curiosity or even a spirit of playfulness, but to teach Rama a lesson. Unlike the Brahman in the monk’s dream, who although a Brahman, was not a particularly subtle theologian or an accomplished sage, Vashista knows all the answers. He alone never seems to be fooled.
Vashista is the key to the paradox of the dreamer dreamt. The tale of the monk involved us in what Douglas Hofstadter has called a strange loop or a tangled hierarchy. Each dream seems to be nested inside another until when we encounter the final innermost dream, it is identified with the outermost dream.
Rudra is the monk who was dreaming about Rudra. What we thought was a spiral turns out to be a kind of Möbius strip that bends in on itself forever. This bothers Rama.
He says, “How could a hundred Rudras be made by Rudra who was himself made in someone’s dream?” Tangled hierarchies of this sort abound in logic as a special kind of paradox, of which perhaps the most famous is the self-referential paradox of Epimenides, the Cretan who stated, “All Cretans are liars.” Lewis Carroll, who was fascinated by paradoxes of this sort, dramatized the same one that animated the tale of the monk’s dream.
Alice dreams that the Red King dreams of her. In visual form, such tangled hierarchies appear in the etchings of Escher, such as Drawing Hands. A hand draws a picture of a hand that draws a picture that draws the first hand.
In literature and art, these paradoxes can be solved if one cheats by stepping back out of the frame altogether to what Hofstadter calls the inviolate level. The answer to Lewis Carroll’s question, who dreamed the dream? The dream of Alice dreaming that the Red King dreamed of Alice.
The answer is Lewis Carroll. And it is M.C. Escher who drew the hands drawing the hands drawing the hands.
In our Hindu myth, we are tempted to st-step back in rhythm with all the other characters who leap from frame to frame. We move from Rudra, who was dreamt by the swan, who was dreamt by the goose, to the monk who was imagined by Vasistha, who was a character in a book, The Yoga Vasistha Maharamayana, that is being read at this very moment by me, who am, I hope, still being listened to by you. When we reach Vasistha, we think we have reached the inviolate level, but this turns out to be only the first of several inviolate levels.
We may avoid being tricked into accepting the involuted twist in Vashista’s story, the moment when the monk leads us back to Rudra, back once more into the secret heart of the labyrinth from which the characters in the story can never escape. But have we escaped after all? I think not.
Vashista experiences doubts about the monk’s non-existence, and so he cannot resist acting in his own tale, just like the monk in Rudra. The story teaches us that authors are caught up in their stories. So too are readers.
If Vashista can plunge into the page and come face to face with the monk in his own story, we cannot rest confident in our assumption that our level of the story is the final inviolate level, the level of the artist or the storyteller. If there is one inviolate level, it is the level of the Godhead, the impersonal continuum beyond even Rudra. This is the level of the universal soul, the source of all mental images that assume material form.
For though monks and great sages and poets and gods can project themselves into physical bodies whenever they want to. All of us, princes and harlots and bees and university professors, helplessly spin out of our desires the lives that we have inherited from our former selves. Sooner or later, our dreams do become real, whether we want them to or not, whether they are nightmares or wishes that we long to have fulfilled.
The difference between most of us and Indian sages like Vasishtha is that we are unaware of our dreams, unaware of our repeated lives, or rather unwilling to accept the possibility that the former lives and the dreams may be as real or unreal as our waking experiences and thoughts. Thank you.
(applause and cheering)