Have Western Orientalists Ruined the Qur’an?

     After the Qur’an was translated into Latin in 1143 by Robert of Ketton, or Robertus Rotensis, it wasn’t published until 1543, and then it fell stillborn from the press until the 17th century. Another Latin translation was made by Ludovico Marracci, confessor to the Pope, in 1698, although a French translation had been made earlier by Andre Du Ryer in 1647. As Robert Irwin points out, the purpose of these translations was to mistranslate them; otherwise one ran the risk of being a crypto-Muslim. (Irwin 48) If we assume the Qur’an was given its first edition in 650 under Uthman, it lay dormant for 500 years until it was translated into Latin; and then another 500 years of dormancy passed before it was translated into French, soon followed by an English version in 1649. Europeans either did not care, or were so cowed by Christianity they were fearful of their own curiosity, so conformist was the Christian ethos. Why then did an entire millennium pass? The Crusades occurred without anyone bothering to read up on the cause or reputed cause of the conflict? How than can the Crusades be considered a Holy War? Knowing the enemy was not an option. On top of that, as Bulliet says, “few Muslims were resident in European Christian lands so there weren’t locals to kill when preachers whipped their congregations into an Islamophobic froth.” (Bulliet 8) Conversely that meant Muslims would be total strangers to the Christians. All the while the Greek Orthodox Byzantines provided more than enough of an enemy, since they were closer to the Muslims, and the Catholics. This hatred of co-religionists could not have been based on doctrine either. The dispute over the Holy Trinity is so abstruse as to not be a credible casus belli to a soldier dying on the field. The sovereignty of the Pope on the other hand—that could be easily understood in a political sense, and the politics of the papacy, mirrored by Martin Luther later, could conceivably cause a war, because of the territoriality or politics. As far as religion was concerned the following events occurred without theology: “ . . . the fall of Crusader Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187; the fall of Byzantine Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, and the nearly successful Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1529.” (Bulliet 7) How can one dispute with an opponent of whom one knows nothing, or possibly how can one not dispute with an opponent about whom one knows nothing? Other religious wars from within Europe soon followed: the Thirty Years War, the French Wars of Religion, the Dutch/Spanish Wars of Religion, and the English Civil War of Religion in 1649. Religious wars were great then as now as rallying cries; but what sanctified murders had to do with religion, who can say?
1649 was the very year the Qur’an first entered the English language, and it was still not a highly anticipated event. The Qur’an was reborn, translated, and published by one Alexander Ross, a Scotsman, based on Du Ryer’s French version.
Ross, in the midst of his own English Civil War, introduces the Qur’an with statements, and warnings, like these: “[The Alcoran is] newly Englished, for the satisfaction of all that desire to look into the Turkish vanities,” and “I present to thee, having taken the pains only to translate it out of French, not doubting, though it hath been a poyson, that hath infected a very great, but most unsound part of the Universe, it may prove an Antidote, to confirm in thee the health of Christianity.” (Ross 1) The year was 1649, a significant year, the year of the beheading of Charles I, and the beginning of Cromwell’s Protectorate. Unfortunately for Ross, he had been chaplain to the King. That the Qur’an was thrown into the fray is probably no coincidence. It would serve as an excellent test of orthodoxy, Catholic or Puritan, to castigate Muhammad before the eyes of King Charles I, or Cromwell. That the Qur’an was introduced as a polemic was not just due to a Catholic confirmation bias: everything was polemical to Alexander Ross. He unfailingly attacked authorities and philosophers from the wrong side, the side of the crank! For example, he attacked Copernicus and his defenders for heliocentrism; he attacked Thomas Browne for Browne’s generally accurate theory of crystals (Ross claimed crystals were just fossils of ice); he attacked William Gilbert for his lack of recognition of the role, Ross thought, garlic played in hindering magnetism; Ross thought William Harvey’s theory of the circulation of the blood ludicrous; he accused Spinoza of not believing in the immortality of the soul (did Spinoza care?); and he clashed with Thomas Hobbes, for Hobbes’ being an atheist and amongst other things an “ . . . Anthropomorphist . . . Arabian . . . Manichee . . . Mohammedan . . . and Jew.” (Ross)
Without any Arabic and relying on the French translation of Andre du Ryer, is it any wonder this was a hatchet job? And that is what the West knew, wanted to know, and still wants to know, in some cases. Not until 1734 was there even another attempt in English. This version, as introduced by a Protestant, George Sale, is less hostile: “The remembrance of the calamities brought on so many nations by the conquests of the Arabians may possibly raise some indignation against him who formed them to empire; but this being equally applicable to all conquerors, could not, of itself, occasion all the detestation with which the name of Mohammed is loaded.” (Sale 1) E. Denison Ross said of Sale’s Qur’an, “[before Sale] . . . What was good in Muhammadism was entirely ignored, and what was not good, in the eyes of Europe, was exaggerated or misinterpreted.” (Sale vii) Sale depended on Maracci, not Ross. According to Mohammad Khalifa, “This was because he could not fully master the Arabic language.” (Khalifa 65) And yet it has gone through, by 1983, thirty editions, retranslated into Dutch, German, French, Russian, Swedish, and Bulgarian. (Khalifa 65) In any case, Sale’s Qur’an was good enough to win over not just Jefferson, but also Gibbon and Voltaire. Then again the Enlightenment was beginning to see through prejudices, traditions, and superstitions, and the Qur’an also served free-thinkers’ desires to shake a royal throne here and there.
Here is a comparison, taken from “The Spider” xxix.45., of three famous translations of the Qur’an:
Alexander Ross: “Dispute with mildness against them that have knowledg of the written Law; except against the wicked that are among them. Say unto them, We believe in what hath been taught you, and in what hath been taught us: Your God, and our God is one God; we are resigned to his divine will.”
George Sale: “Dispute not against those who have received the scriptures, unless in the mildest manner; except against such of them as behave injuriously towards you: and say, We believe in the revelation which hath been sent down, and also in that which hath been sent down unto you; our GOD and your GOD is one, and unto him are we resigned.”
Edward William Lane: “Dispute not with the people of the Scripture unless in the kindliest manner, except against such of them as deal evilly [with you]; and say [unto them], We believe in that which hath been sent down unto us and [that which] hath been sent down unto you, and our God and your God is one, and to Him are we self-surrendered.” (Lane 38)
One can trace a change in attitude over two hundred years in the orientalists themselves. Ross’ lukewarm uncapitalized “divine will” isn’t quite as forceful as Sale’s capitalized “GOD” to whom we are resigned, but even better is a hundred years later the Lane version, “to Him are we self-surrendered.” Lane’s coinage is peculiarly apt and shows a feel for poetry that evinces warmth toward the subject, absent in Ross and distant in Sale. This “warming up” has continued. Nevertheless, George Sale set the bar for all who came after him: E. H. Palmer in 1880, the first (Indian) Muslim, Mirza abul-Fazl in 1911, the first convert (English) Marmaduke Pickthall in 1930, and A. J. Arberry in 1955. (Khalifa 65) With Arberry we have traveled to the antipodes of Ross. Three hundred years separate the Crusading Papist Ross from the Oxonian, semi-Sufi Arberry, who is completely sympathetic to Islam. Now there are a plethora of translations by Muslims and non-Muslims alike, though both sides concede it is impossible, and yet all of them owe a debt to George Sale.
Despite the initial reaction of silence, then horror, we now see a greater, deeper understanding of the Qur’an on the part of scholars. Thirteen hundred years now have passed since the birth of the Qur’an, and history is telling us it’s the People, not the Book, causing misunderstandings, and what the orientalists ruined the orientalists can repair.

                                                                             Works cited
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Esack, Farid. The Qur’an: A User’s Guide. Oxford: Oneworld, 2005. Print.

Irwin, Robert. Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents. Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 2006. Print.

Khalifa, Mohammad. The Sublime Qur’ān and Orientalism. London: Longman, 1983. Print.

Lane, Edward William. Selections from the Kur’an. London. Trubner & Co., Ludgate Hill. 1879. Print.

Ross, Alexander. The Alcoran. “EEBO: Early English Books Online.” EEBO: Early English Books Online. Web. 06 Dec. 2015

Sale, George. The Koran. London: Frederick Warne and Co. Ltd. 1734. Print.

“Significant Scots – Alexander Ross.” Significant Scots – Alexander Ross. Web. 06 Dec. 2015.

                                                       Buddhist Scriptures along the Silk Road

China went in search for horses, and with them came Buddhism. Under the First Emperor of China, the Chinese had unified the Celestial Kingdom, but under Emperor Gaozu, the founder of the Han dynasty, they had to band together to face a common enemy, the nomads to the north, the Xiong-nu. For that they needed bigger, better horses. Ironically, the commercial interest in a war machine brought along with it, besides the creation of the Silk Road, a world religion given to contemplation and retirement from life.
During Alexander’s invasions of Central Asia, China was undergoing constant wars between city-states, until finally the Qin Empire leveled the playing field, consolidated power, standardized currency and roads, formed a bureaucracy, engaged in massive public works projects, gathered in taxes, and built the Great Wall as far out as Gansu, thus establishing China as a nation. But, to the North, the nomads were still harassing the Chinese, and the Chinese were in dire need of horses to ward off the threat. China needed allies, and the most likely allies were the Yue-zhi in Gansu. For this reason, in 138 B.C.E., Han Wu the Emperor sent the officer and diplomat Zhang Qian to the West, specifically Bactria, where Zhang Qian discovered a market that had had dealings with India, including Chinese goods! This was the Han’s first encounter with the West, and fittingly they bumped into the Greeks, whom they called Da Yuan, or Big Ionians. Whilst in their Warring Kingdoms period, the armies clashing by night in Qin, were unaware that Alexander the Great had conquered the Persian Empire, and that his route of conquest paved the way for the Silk Road; and by the same token when Alexander pushed into Samarkand by the Syr Darya, he had lain the tracks to Chang An, China’s capital, not knowing it was there. After skirting China, Alexander followed a route through Kandahar in Bactria, then went up into the Hindu Kush to Bactra over the Amu Darya to Samarkand and over the Syr Darya, back down to Nysa, over the Indus River into Punjab, south through Gandhara and down the Indus river to the Arabian Sea. (Vollmer 6) The Persian Empire already had an infrastructure to facilitate this conquest, along with administrators, postal stations, and a whole commercial network in place. What Alexander did do was establish a link between India and Greece; what he could not do was control this vast expanse, and after his death, the Seleucid dynasty soon lost Bactria and Punjab—and faced a Parthian revolt. (Vollmer 8) But the door had been opened to India, whose knowledge of mathematics, astronomy, and science in general traveled back to the Silk Road, East and West. For the Chinese still in need of a cavalry, the Northern route of the Silk Road, leading through Turfan to the Tian Shan, was Xiong-nu territory, so the Southern route to Khotan and the Pamirs was the only viable route. There had been tea routes from Yunnan to Lhasa and spice routes in the South of China linking up with India, but nothing as yet close to a constant flow of traffic. While the Chinese treasured the jade and lapis lazuli of Khotan, the trip of Zhang Qian to find horses brought back new goods—especially grapes and alfalfa grass. (Vollmer 12) Markets were opening, and China had just the right stuff to play the game: bolts of silk. With the development of silk as a commodity, China had a currency with which to buy goods from its neighbors, and its neighbors beat a path to its door, carrying jade and bringing horses from the West, and gold and spices from the South. (Frye 154)
Between Rome and Chang An, after the Persian and Seleucid Empires fell, arose the Kushan and Sogdian empires—important middlemen along with the Parthians. China, in the 1st century B. C. E., was linked to Rome, through Ctesiphon, Merv, Bukhara, Kashgar, Khotan, and Dunhuang. China also had a Southern Silk Road, which linked Bukhara, Balkh, Taxila, and Mathura to ports on the Arabian Sea. These ports lead to sea routes into the India Ocean to the Ganges, around Malaysia and up to Hanoi and Guangzhou. (Vollmer 26) The Chinese could also sail west to the Red Sea and Yemen (Arabia Felix).
Hundreds of years passed between the death of the Buddha and the first reference to Buddhism in Chinese literature, which was a comment about a Buddhist Shramana, or monastery, mentioned by an official in 130 C. E., though probably the first Buddhists had trickled in a hundred years earlier. (Wright 21) This argues for a less than zealous spirit for a missionary religion. Were it not for some fortuitous circumstances, Buddhism could have fizzled out altogether. It needed the impetus of the Mauryan dynasty of Ashoka just to establish missionaries in Bactria by the first century C.E., where they worked in Dunhuang, Kucha, and Khotan. (Frye 161) But most fortuitous of all was that the Kushan Empire endorsed Buddhism, as it did all religions, but Buddhism ended up with pride of place for various reasons, having to do with good timing, or luck.
Buddhism’s draw to China also coincided with Confucianism’s having run its course, at a time when many scholars turned toward the Taoist classics. By 250 C.E. Taoists dominated Chinese intellectual life. (Wright 24) The Logicians, the Legalists, and the Taoists replaced the Confucians who were to blame for everything from famine, plague, drought, and flood. But the masses especially in this time of troubles, turned to the Taoists, who functioned as a welfare agency and charity to the poor. But for the Kushan Empire on the Silk Road between India and China, Buddhism might have died out altogether. After the Mauryan and Gupta dynasties, Hinduism made a comeback; but Hinduism is not a missionary religion, and it stayed at home, and pushed Buddhism out, after absorbing what it could from it. The Kushans, at a cultural crossroads, accepted Buddhism, and later this Greco-Bactrian intersection would bear fruit in the art of the Gandharan style. The Kushans provided a great service to humanity with their window of diversity, which seems attributable to Kanishkas I, II, and III, especially Kanishka the Great, Kanishka II. It was Kanishka II who called for a council in Kashmir, although himself not a Buddhist, at which it was decided to translate the mostly Prakrit texts into Sanskrit.
Kushan patronage of Buddhism like this also enabled Kushan commercial interests. (Liu 42) From about 50 C.E. to 250 C.E. the Kushans prospered, even though these nomads had settled in Bactria and had no script, no history, and no historians. “Their administration did not even reach the village level to collect a tax from farmers.” (Liu 43) Turkestan, back in the Kushan day, was populated with Sogdians, Bactrians, Kuchans, and Khotanese; it was perfect for the philosophy of Buddha, which is rootless and cosmopolitan. Richard Frye points out the cultural differences between Central Asians and Chinese, by quoting an old Buddhist poem that says, “The Khotanese do not value the Law (Buddhist teachings) at all in Khotanese. They understand it badly in Indian. In Khotanese it does not seem to them to be the Law. [But] For the Chinese the Law is in Chinese.” The Central Asians wanted the original texts in Sanskrit or Pali, and learned those languages for the authentic word; but the Chinese wanted the original texts in Chinese, thereby making the texts gain in translation, adding an aura of authentication by making Buddhism Chinese to the Chinese.
The original Buddhist texts circulated in Prakrits, or Sanskrit vernaculars, for example Pali, Gandhari, and Magadhan. Then, and only after the first texts of the Hinayana tradition gravitated toward Sri Lanka to form the Pali canon, did the later tradition of Mahayana, draw upon the dead language of Sanskrit to create the later texts. From those Sanskrit texts, which were later, Tibetan and Chinese texts were created. These translations were done under the auspices of the Kushans; eventually the texts preserved in Tibetan came to be some of the only versions to survive in any language. The Kushans adopted the Persian satrapies, which the Parthians and Sakas followed up on too; their governors were ksatrapas and mahaksatrapas, maha is Sanskrit for great. “The Kushans used Sanskrit titles because the largest population of the region including Bactrian spoke several vernacular dialects of Sanskrit, the language of India’s orthodox Brahmanical culture.” (Liu 46) The Persians had brought Aramaic to India where it evolved into the Kharoshthi and Brahmi scripts, though in Bactria and Gandhari the Greek script was used. The Kushans reached a stage of affluence such that they minted their own coins and these coins reveal a mélange of every known culture in the world. Truly and almost bewilderingly, the Kushans benefitted from their multiculturalism, which saved them when the Parthian empire collapsed, around the 3rd century, as trade fell off, prices spiked upward, security crumbled, and it looked as if the sea routes were the best bet to connect Romans and Han Chinese and all the middlemen interested in making a living from trade, peace, and prosperity. Still filling in the gap, the Kushans reigned between Kashgar and Bukhara, although Rome could still reach Chang An from the Red Sea by sailing to the Gulf of Tonkin. From Augustus to Aurelius, trade had connected Alexandria, Axum, Arabia, India, and China—so much so that the Roman emperors would complain of the specie drain on the economy. In fact the lack of gold drove Trajan to an attempt to take over Parthia, causing trade along the Silk Road to collapse even further by the 3rd century, due to Rome’s overreaching itself. (Vollmer 26) Sasanians assumed the Parthian mantle, but the Sasanians blocked Rome completely, and the Ethiopians on the Red Sea blocked Byzantium; it didn’t really matter though, because at this point the Han dynasty collapsed. When the Han dynasty collapsed, belief in the Confucian system faded. (Wright 17) The Sasanian Empire soon monopolized the area—because it contained the sea routes too.
Even with these disruptions going on, along with harassment from the nomads to the North of the Silk Road, Buddhists and, for a while, Manicheans, formed communities, which protected merchants. Alongside the caravans were the missionaries. Buddhist monks and pilgrims made their way, building temples and centers, which provided safe havens for tradesmen. Buddhism in China came to be perceived as “civilized” compared with shamanism, and something on an intellectual par with Confucianism; while at the same time commoners and barbarians to the North perceived Buddhism as having a “superior magical power.” (Wright 57)
There was no uniform movement of texts along the Silk Road. Much of the literature dealt with vinaya, or the monastic lifestyle, and other literature dealt with nikaya, or commentary, and even before the Silk Road, there were eighteen different schools to choose from for nikaya. (Foltz 39) Of those eighteen, one survived to this day, the Theravada, which is the “way of the elders” from the Sanskrit Sthaviravada. Along the Silk Road, the three major schools were the Dharmaguptakas, the Sarvastivadins, and the Mahasanghikas (who built the Bamiyan statues); later the Mahayana dominated, especially around Khotan. Possibly, the Mahayana was not even that popular until it reached Central Asia. (Foltz 41)
The first translator of Buddhist texts generally acknowledged was a Parthian, An Shingao (An is a Parthian surname); he traveled to and lived in Loyang, where he translated 13 books of Theravada Buddhism from the Pali. It was mostly Parthians who also translated the Mahayana and nikaya texts. A generation later, Lokakshema also translated works of Mahayana Buddhism from the Sanskrit; the cosmopolitan nature of this era is evidenced by Lokakshema. He was a Yue-zhi Kushan from Gandhara, who spoke Bactrian and translated from Sanskrit to Chinese; his assistants were Taoists. It was Lokakshema who translated the Perfection of Wisdom sutra, the Prajnaparamita sutra, and some of the early texts of Amithaba Buddhism into Chinese. In fact, from the time of An Shigao in the 2nd century to Bodhidharma (440-528) in the fifth, almost all the important translators were Parthians, Kushans, or Kucheans. Kumarajiva, the most famous translator of them all, was a Kuchean. Kumarajiva’s father, Kumarayana, converted to Buddhism and moved to Kucha, where he married the sister of the King, Jiva. Kucha was a major Buddhist center, where there were a thousand Buddhist temples and stupas, the stupa form later transforming into the pagoda in China. (Dwivedi 160)
Kumarajiva studied Mahayana texts and translated over 300 texts into Chinese. Kumarajiva and his mother Jiva also studied in Kashmir for a while.
Probably the most influential sutra in East Asia was the Lotus Sutra, written around 100 C. E., which featured Avalokiteshvara, the god of mercy, who became Kuan Yin in China and Kannon in Japan, after having changed gender. Other bodhisattvas were coming out of Mahayana Buddhism, reflecting a more worldly view of the world, a world in which making money was not frowned upon, and a merchant could look forward to (at the end of his life) the Amitabha’s Western Pure Land. This kind of enabling allowed Buddhist monasteries to be endowed by wealthy merchants who had not left the world in the Theravada style, because the bodhisattva, theoretically, must save the world before himself.
In the other direction, the route to find Buddhism was still the Silk Road. From Chang An, the goal, for monks like Fa Xian and Xuan Zhang, was to reach the mouth of the Ganges, via the Buddhist landmarks—Kapilavastu, Sarnath, Benares, and Bodh Gaya. Near the end of the 4th century, the Emperor of China had decided that the monasteries had become unruly; therefore, he wanted a book of monastic discipline. That was the vinaya, the authoritative manuals, which take up three volumes in themselves of The Sacred Books of the East, edited by Max Muller. At about the same time the Mogao caves were being illustrated with passages from the Sukhavativyuha Sutra, the Maitreya Sutra, but especially the Saddharma pundarika, or the Lotus Sutra. (Dwivedi 97) This is where the Diamond Sutra, printed in 868, had been housed for a thousand years until Aurel Stein tricked a local Taoist priest into selling it. “Tricked” but then the priest needed the money to protect the cave, which the Chinese government was unwilling to do. (Dwivedi 99)
Fa Xian was looking for the tripitaka (the three baskets): the sutras, the vinaya, and the abhidharma. But especially the vinaya. These were the least esoteric teachings available. Fa Xian, on his journey west through the Tarim Basin, stayed with Buddhists, who were now, circa 400 A. D., at the height of their Central Asian influence. Fa Xian’s own account, A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms, describes the journey. Much later, James Legge relates in his introduction, Buddhism had so fallen out of favor that later Chinese thought Fa Xian was wrong to say he stayed with Buddhists in Khotan, because “everybody knew” that the Khotanese were all Muslims. (Fa Hien 5) Evidently the Takla Makan desert was too much for Fa Xian, because he took the sea route home. James Legge, in my translation, quotes Porter Smith on the Gobi Desert, or “The River of Sand,” asserting that, in one of its storms, “360 cities were all buried within the space of twenty-four hours.” (Fa Hien 12, footnote) Perhaps he chose sea over land because of the dangerous deserts; no matter, the ship he took home sprang a leak, although he somehow reached Java and Nanking in 414.
Xuan Zhang wanted a Yogacara text, Asanga’s Treatise on the Stages of Yoga Practice; he traveled to Dunhuang, Kucha, Tashkent, Samarqand, Bukhara, Kish, Balkh, Bamiyan, and over the Hindu Kush. (Foltz 56) He returned with 657 Sanskrit manuscripts, returning roundabout through Southern India up through Bombay to Kabul, where he picked up the Silk Road back to Khotan, Miran, Dunhuang, and to Chang An; he since has been immortalized as China’s greatest pilgrim.
The Kushans, or the Yueh-chih, were a mix of Indian, Iranian, and Greek. So much blending went on, for example, that, in murals, the Maitreya Buddha looked like the Zoroastrian Saoshyant, stories of a Trojan horse attacking the Buddha circulated, and Maitreya morphed into Mithra and Jesus. (Foltz 46)
Eventually Parthians replaced the Kushans; and Merv became the Buddhist center, establishing an Iranian Buddhism. The Kushans were eventually absorbed by the Sasanians, the Guptas, and the Hephthalites.
It had been a natural flow for Buddhist missionaries to trek northward, because the Buddhist religion was essentially rootless, and it had been drifting into China since the 2nd century from India. India had valorized knowledge of other sorts too: medicine, mathematics, and astronomy. The Tang court accumulated wealth, encouraged education, and cultivated poetry and calligraphy. Education, under the Han examination system, created a class of administrators, who became the officials, mandarins, artists, and writers; there were no castes, so merit was encouraged and therefore curiosity was allowed. Naturally Buddhist literature, highly sophisticated and even a little familiar to Chinese acquainted with Taoism, meshed with Chinese culture in this context, because the timing was right in three areas: India, Kushan, and China. Buddhism traveled so well in fact, it went right on through to Korea and Japan, where, during the Heian era, Buddhism, mixed with Shintoism was to be the national “religion” from thenceforward to today.
Gradually, in China, the Tang Court over spent itself, forced higher taxes, and evicted peasants, who, in revolt, broke the Dynasty’s back. Loyang and Chang An were looted by Rokshan, a Turkish commander who had mutinied. Uighurs and Khitans attacked from the North, Tibetans from the West, and the Yunnanese took control of the Southern sea routes. China retrenched and began to persecute Buddhists, just as it had once blamed the Confucians of the Han Dynasty, for the social disorder—the Buddhists were bad luck and a drain on the economy.
After that came the Arab conquest at the Battle of Talas, which closed off the Buddhist influence, and that was followed by a hegemony of Uighurs to the North, who converted to Islam. By the eighth century, Buddhism had stalled out on the Silk Road, but the Scriptures of Buddhism had found a new home.

                                                                    Works Cited

Dwivedi, Sunita. In Quest of the Buddha: A Journey on the Silk Road. New Delhi, India: Rupa & Co., 2009. Print.

Fa-Hien. A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1965. Print.

Foltz, Richard C. Religions of the Silk Road: Overland Trade and Cultural Exchange from Antiquity to the Fifteenth Century. New York, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Print.

Frye, Richard Nelson. The Heritage of Central Asia: From Antiquity to the Turkish Expansion. Princeton, NJ: Wiener, 1996. Print.

Liu, Xinru. The Silk Road in World History. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010. Print.

Vollmer, John, E. J. Keall, and E. Nagai-Berthrong. Silk Roads, China Ships. Toronto, Ont.: Royal Ontario Museum, 1983. Print.

Wright, Arthur F. Buddhism in Chinese History. Stanford: Calif., 1970. Print.

                                                            Ferdowsi’s Shanameh

     Ferdowsi’s Shanameh is the single longest epic written by one person ever. It is over 50,000 couplets, although 1000 lines were borrowed from a previous attempt at an epic. What we know of Ferdowsi is limited to his own text. We know Ferdowsi was a small landowner, relatively well-off to begin with. We know he died in 1026. He had a daughter, for whom he expected to provide a dowry off the proceeds of patronage. The local tax collector remitted his taxes, and for that kind act Ferdowsi said the tax collector’s name “will endure till the Resurrection, and Kings will read it.” He was a Shi’ite, accused of being a Mu’tazili, but he was Persian first and foremost, to the point where he openly disparaged Arabs, some saying that he avoided an Arabic word where a Persian word would do; he loved antiquarian books, the history of his homeland, and epic. Also I can attest from my reading, he hated growing old, and laments this often; this might not have been the case if he had not been so vastly under-appreciated in his own time. Ironically one of the legends has it that after Mahmud of Ghaznah was lukewarm to the poem, he overheard two lines, greatly impressed by them, then set out to remunerate Ferdowsi, sending him a great sum of money, which reached the gates of Tus, just as Ferdowsi’s coffin was coming out. The money was offered to his daughter, but she rejected it proudly.
Khorasan is the homeland of the Shanameh, and Modern Persian is the language. Much of the action takes place near the Oxus river, the traditional border between the Iranians and the Turanians; Turan was populated by Turks under the Sasanians.
The Shahnameh begins with the beginning of the world, not in Islamic terms, but in terms of the old Persian myths, the Zoroastrian myths, and it relies on the Zend Avesta.
The first man, a king, is Persian, Kayumars, or Gayomart, or Adam, lord of the world, his farr shining from him, his people dressed in leopard skins, while he sits in a cave. The king prays to God, Ahura Mazda, for good and the defeat of Ahriman; his descendants discover fire, iron, how to domesticate animals, and how to write in thirty languages, for example.
Some myths go back to before the Indo-Iranian split, so that there are even Hindu strains in the book, as for instance the Mazdian Jamshiid is the same Underworld God as the Hindu Yama. Jamshiid used his farr to build himself a throne, which shone like the Sun, and everything was perfect until Jamshiid said everything was perfect, and then he lost his farr, through pride. Schooled by Iblis, Zahlak usurps the throne, and reigns a thousand years, with two snakes growing from his shoulders feeding on human brains. Feraydun is seen in a dream of Zahlak’s, whose reign is over once Feraydun is born to replace Zahlak. Zahlak is told, “You’ve been pushed out, like a hair found in dough.”
Feraydun had three sons, who he shared his kingdom with in three parts: the West for Salm, China and Turan for Tur, and Persia for Iraj. The two older brothers conspired to kill Iraj, the younger. Feraydun wept so long over this “the grass grew up to his chest.” Feraydun had another son, Manuchehr, who grew up and attacked the two brothers, “ . . . the plain became a sea of blood, as if red tulips had sprung up everywhere, and the elephants’ legs glowed like pillars of coral.”
After 120 years, Manuchehr grew old and died. Afrasyab, the Turk, or Turanian, invaded the kingdom. The fight or feud continues between Persians and Turks is a major theme, but now Rostam enters as the Iranian hero par excellence, although he is the child of a Hindu woman. Rostam wears a tiger-skin, like Hercules; but he is also a “trickster.” He always “saves the day.” Rostam undergoes seven trials, the seventh the combat with the white demon, or dev. Kay Kavus took to the Iranian throne and served well but fell for Subadeh, who then fell for Siyavosh, her stepson. Siyavosh, was quite athletic too: one day, playing polo, Siyavosh hit the ball so hard it went up into the sky and disappeared. A large portion of the book deals with this whole episode, with the death of Siyavosh and the birth of Kay Khosrow, his son, who will avenge him. When Kay Khosrow was seven he made his own bow, when he was ten he hunted boars, wolves, and bears. The wars between Iran and Turan continued, but eventually Kay Khosrow won the throne and his grandfather Kay Kavus retired. Kay Khosrow, washing his head in a stream, reciting the Zend Avesta, disappeared. Rostam has to find him.
At this point in the story, Ferdowsi interjects Daqiqi’s text, which prefigures Zoroaster coming to court Lohrasp, and a whole new cycle begins, which is that of Rostam versus Esfandyar. With Rostam’s death we have reached only the beginning of the Sasanian dynasty, with Ardashir, great-great-great-great grandson of Sasan, the founder of the Sasanian dynasty. A descendant of Ardashir turns out to be Sekandar, or Alexander the Great, who has been Persianized. Ferdowsi gives at least a hundred pages to Alexander, who plays a major role in the book: he is a legendary figure, his father was Iranian, he himself was Christian, and he is a seeker of knowledge as much as a warrior. When Ardashir dies, we have an account of the reign of Shapur, during whose reign we meet up with Mani the Prophet, who was also a Painter; that won him no friends and Shapur had him flayed. There follow long accounts of Sasanian kings: Yazdegard, Bahram Gur, and Kesra Nushin-Ravan, and Khosrow Parviz—whom Ferdowsi blamed for letting things fall apart. The empire crumbles in chaos and the Arabs show up at the front door with a new message.
The Achaemenids and the Parthians are not explored as deeply as the Sasanians. According to Dick Davis (Davis xxiv) in his introduction to his translation, this is due to the Sasanians wiping out the historical records of the Parthians. Ferdowsi might not have had sources for the Persian Empire as extensive as his Sasanian sources. Many of the themes involve patricide and the inadvertent deaths of heirs to the throne, with the idea of farr as the subtext.
The famous rejection of the text is partially due to Ferdowsi’s celebrating victories of Iranians over Turks. This was fine under the Iranian Samanids, but the Samanids fell to Mahmud of Ghazni, who was a Turk. Another problem: Ferdowsi sent it in. He never met with Mahmoud. He died unappreciated, but he must have known what an accomplishment he had achieved!
One thousand years after his death, Ferdowsi’s verses are still recited on the streets of Iran, when the holiday of Nowus rolls around, a day of celebration; it would be hard to think of an English author receiving this royal treatment, if only because English has hardly been around that long.

                                          Henri Bergson’s Theory of Laughter Across Cultures

      Henri Bergson in his essay “Laughter” claims that for something or someone to be funny, somewhere in the object of our laughter, we perceive a “mechanism” instead of what we had expected of a lively, organic human being. Suddenly there is nothing of grace, flexibility, and consciousness (Sypher 82). Our minds are geared to detect anomalies, but they are based on ideal templates of nature, and when our mental maps–our ideas of ourselves and everybody else as conscious human beings– conflict with our actual bodies, which are mere matter, we experience a sense of anomaly. Something has gotten in the way of the seamless ballet of human interactions on a “spirit level” and we experience a cognitive contradiction. Laughter, according to Bergson, releases that energy like light.
Bergson’s idea of “mechanism” must be opposed to his idea of “duration.” Duree is fundamental to Bergson’s philosophy of life. “We perceive duration as a stream against which we cannot go. It is the foundation of our being, and, as we feel, the very substance of the world in which we live”, (Bergson 45). “We do not think real time. But we live it, because life transcends intellect”, (53). Science to Bergson is “concerned only with the aspect of repetition”, (34). Duration is our accumulated storehouse of sensations, our awareness of our organic being as evolved through nature, and our individualities.
Whatever is not part of “duration” is “mechanism.” For Bergson the collision between duration and mechanism is the source of successful comedy and the laughter that it causes, which is the mechanism of laughing. Laughing is caused by the conflict between the mechanical and the conscious when the conscious agent, appearing to have lost all agency, forces us to re-process the discrepancy, to re-think our assumptions and re-adjust our world views.
Two strangers who look almost exactly the same might strike us as funny, because flexible flowing
nature seems to have goofed by repeating itself; or we meet someone’s brother or sister and the resemblance seems funny, because nature in its infinite variety, seems to have run out of ideas.
Suddenly nature’s nature looks mechanical, and we perceive the mechanism behind nature, our world of phenomenon, and the reality of it hits us like the unveiling of the Wizard of Oz to Dorothy.
Laughter reduces the whale of expectation to the minnow of the real. In a flash, we acknowledge the discrepancy between the real and the unreal with a sort of “condition noted” marker, and the thought: “That was funny.” We assume life is no machine; after all, the evolution of hominins precedes the first machine or mechanism, the first tool, the first use of fire, the first weapon, and the first agricultural settlement. Plants are never funny, animals only with regard to accidental human qualities. Landscapes tell no jokes. Only human beings laugh and then usually with others present as social reinforcement.
But the machine, the mechanical, the predictable, the stereotypically ritualized behavior of a factory or an assembly line is not funny until, say, Lucille Ball falls behind in her job of packaging chocolates on the line and eats them to keep up, or when Charlie Chaplin is ground into the giant cogwheels himself in Modern Times. We perceive their personalities as mechanical parts, against nature; and we perceive the vast machine behind their individualities looming; we are subject to becoming mechanisms for profit or control, reducing consciousness to levers, wrenches, buttons, motors. The trans-mechanization shocks us, and it’s funny.
I suppose a dyed-in-the-wool materialist, a person who sees human beings in a behaviorist, conditioned response mindset might not have much of a sense of humor, because to him the universe is already a clockwork mechanism. Also his spiritualized opposite, an idealist who sees the world as a vast vale of tears, and the prospects of another world as so much more real, also would not have much of a sense of humor either, because his psychology has ossified so as not to allow his fall from such lofty heights for fear of ridicule. The man who never laughs or smiles causes us to wonder–that’s odd, that’s funny. When Dorothy Parker on the death of Calvin Coolidge quipped: “How can you tell?” we perceive the once living President as a robot sleepwalking through his term in office. We perceive the
man as mechanism, going through the motions, faking it, an imposter who got elected, fooling us he was one of us, a child’s windup toy soldier, with no theory of mind in its movements.
Bergson’s example is: “A man, running along the street, stumbles and falls; the passers-by burst out laughing.” If the man had merely sat down, no one would have laughed (Sypher 126). Our own idea of our own agency in controlling our environment we assume to be an iron law, like a cogito ergo sum.
But outside of us is Murphy. Murphy has his own Iron Law.
At a fall, our world view shifts into “mechanism,” and this event subverts what appears to have been
a rather lofty, egotistical, and proud vision of ourselves as disembodied intellects, role models, and upright citizens. When we laugh we are caught between two worlds, the desire to laugh and the desire to suppress the laugh (and help the poor man up), as if two areas in our brains are competing for our attention. The laughter “breaks out” when these two areas confront each other with opposing plans.
There is a dualism at play, “mechanical inelasticity” versus “spiritual flexibility.” Not the ghost in the machine, but the machine in the ghost. In the corner of the room we see a snake; turn on the lights, no it is just a belt. We think we see a ghost; turn on the lights, no it was the wind in the curtains. It was pure “mechanism” and we laugh, relieved.
And this friction is the spark, according to Bergson, for laughter, as well as the enjoyment of comedy, the basis for humor, and everything that goes along with “why we laugh.”
Or for that matter, why we don’t laugh. If spiritual inflexibility predominates to the point that mechanical inelasticity is overridden, the religious fanaticism that demands perfection will obliterate humor; if the mechanical, inelastic mode predominates, we have in its crudest form the humor of aggression–Punch and Judy, banana peels, the Three Stooges, and pratfalls. And they too will lose their funniness when they become too predictable, because the mechanism has taken over, and that has become so mechanical as to no longer conflict with preconceptions.
This is why comedy is two-dimensional. Traditionally, types are always a potential source of comedy. Types are the fixed, flat characters that never change. Stock characters repeat themselves so
as to resemble mechanisms. They are never character driven. They can’t change, they can’t perceive their own mechanism, even when they are easily impersonated. The village atheist, the village idiot, the village whatever. Miles Gloriosus is a Baron Munchausen; Falstaff is a Gargantua; Ignatius O’Reilly is a Don Quixote; Milo Finderbinder is a Figaro. They themselves exemplify a rigidity of behavior that is so mechanical, they are doomed, and we sit back and smile and watch their antics with a mild schadenfreude, as if we know better, and would never fall into the trap of a rigid persona like theirs. Impersonation is funny, because the impersonator has found the “mechanism” in the subject’s psyche. The subject’s public persona clashes with the newly revealed predictability of the subject, stock phrases, mannerisms, and tics, the stereotypes of the stereotype–everything that seems to bring to our minds a human being “running on automatic.” As far as automatons go, if a robot slipped on a banana peel, according to Bergson, it would only be funny with regard to the human agency, the AI experts and MIT engineers behind the robot, who could be held to account for this event, and thus laughable.
Bergson insists that the comic is strictly human. If we go to pick up a heavy, cast-iron frying pan, and it turns out to be lighter than a Jiffy Pop, we might laugh at ourselves, our own mechanism that was set on an expectation of heaviness, which was then upset by the real. So that the mechanism can be ourselves even when dealing with objects.
Before Bergson, the accepted view of humor was that is was an outgrowth of pride, cruelty, dominance, or a discharge of pent-up energy–a sort of safety valve. “Letting off steam” would be the prevailing 19th century model. Before that most classical authors subscribed to a more cruel theory of humor, which wasn’t necessarily condemning cruelty as bad. A gradual emphasis developed in the Enlightenment that comedy was based on upset expectation. A rational explanation of a something that upsets another rational explanation, although still expressing a truth. It is as if we are approaching through a progressive interiorization a more precise theory, and Bergson’s contribution is to go one layer deeper into human nature than those before him. The ancients were biased by their own privileged rank or caste, the moderns by the science of their day.
The ancients held to a hierarchical view, the Renaissance to a physiological treatment, and the Enlightenment to a cognitive analysis–roughly speaking.
Bergson’s improvement and consolidation can answer the question, “What makes a character funny?” The first two theories seem to say social status and expulsion of nervous tension do. But Bergson’s theory asserts that the character in fiction is funny because of his inconsistency with his environment, his social milieu, or himself.
Bergson’s theory can subsume the previous theories. If everybody thinks they are each “smarter than the average bear” to begin with, and each encounters a contradictory situation, or an impossibility, and then releases the tension by a reflexive laugh when finally getting the explanation, or the punchline of the joke, we can combine all three.
Other recent, psychological theories of humor are variations and combinations of these three themes, and the thoughts closest to Bergson’s are now under the rubric of “Incongruity Theory” (Gimbel).
George Meredith’s theory, in “An Essay on Comedy,” (which precedes Bergson’s theory), draws more upon social context. Meredith believes sees laughter as a “civilizing” influence (Sypher 32). He claims laughter has a social function; it provides a judgment on inelastic types who violate the social fabric; laughter is a social lubricant for the collective. This provides a sort of evolutionary context, but doesn’t change Bergson’s rule; it merely adds the evolutionary angle, but it doesn’t answer the question of why we laugh at Lord Willoughby Patterne in Meredith’s The Egoist, wherein the rich narcissist, Lord Willoughby, loses all hope of getting married, because his idea of women is hopelessly behind the times, so that his prospects desert him, as best they can. He is a type of snob. Even his name “Patterne” suggests a cookie-cut of a person. Lord Willoughby claims that no wife of his would ever be allowed to write, or practice an art (besides housekeeping), because that would be catering to what he calls “The Beast,” or the mob, or the public. By general consensus, and I agree, the funniest scene in this novel is a sort of “dream sequence” wherein Lord Willoughby, with no chance of wedding the young Clara, oblivious to her wishes in general, imagines her coming back on bended knee to placate her Lord. The
reader knows this is preposterous.
And was it my fault, my poor girl? Am I to blame, that you have passed
a lonely unloved youth?
No, Willoughby; the irreparable error was mine, the blame is mine, mine only. I live to repent it. I do not seek, for I have not deserved, your pardon. Had I it, I should need my own self-esteem to presume to clasp it to a bosom ever unworthy of you.
I may have been impatient, Clara: we are human! (Meredith 186).
We see through Willoughby, we see the “mechanism” that drives his self-delusion, and we laugh at his blind spot–he can’t see himself in the mirror. All his flaws are somehow dismissed when he has to consider his own behavior. It never changes. Willoughby is Willoughby forever going through life like a dumb, solipsistic machine. We have to laugh him to scorn.
Charles Pooter in The Diary of a Nobody is invited to the Lord Mayor’s Mansion reception. Pooter is over excited to have an opportunity to climb the social ladder. Charles and his wife Carrie fuss over every detail. In their excitement on the day of the grand ball, Charles trips over a cabbage in the basement, cuts his chin, tears his pants. But off they go. The highpoint of their social lives starts to unravel when the lowly village ironmonger pigeonholes Charles, and then other lowly village tradesmen treat Charles like a lowly village tradesman. His wife is shocked. He decides to dance with his wife, but his boots are slippery new, and he falls knocking his head on the floor. The room laughs. His wife thinks he drank too much. He blames his hangover on the “lobster mayonnaise.” Worse still, the next day Pooter’s sees that his name has been omitted from the social column of their newspaper– this after he ordered a dozen copies to show off to all his friends. After a letter campaign, the paper publishes their names as “Mr and Mrs C. Porter.” He writes back. The next edition states that “We have received two letters from Mr and Mrs Charles Pewter, requesting us to announce the important fact that they were at the Mansion House Ball.” Pooter responds “I tore up the paper and threw it in the
wastepaper basket. My time is far too valuable to bother about such trifles” (Grossmith 60). The mechanism of social climbing breaks down in front of our eyes.
In Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, the narrator and two friends are planning what food to take along with them on their vacation boating up the local river. They rule out cheese. The narrator recalls the time in Liverpool he bought, for a friend in London, some cheeses “with a two hundred horse-power scent about them that might have been warranted to carry three miles, and knock over a man at two hundred yards” (Jerome 24). The cab he takes to his friend’s house, with his cheeses, spooks the horse of the horse-drawn carriage, and drives the horse crazy. At the train station everyone moves away. Inside the train, a man says it smells like a dead baby. His friend’s wife, smelling the cheeses, moves into a hotel. His friend receives the cheeses but throws the cheeses into the canal. Bargemen complain. He retrieves the cheeses and ditches the cheeses in the parish mortuary. A coroner catches him. He takes the cheeses back, and then buries them on a beach, which later becomes a spot for consumptives to gather for the beach’s “strong air” (Jerome 27).
The mechanism is the machine-like reaction of everyone to the smell of a bad cheese.
In P. G. Wodehouse’s Leave it to Psmith, Psmith begins to pursue a woman, Eve, when he sees her at a bus stop in the rain. Smitten, he offers Eve an umbrella and finds out where she is going (Blandings Castle); he goes there, and he goes so far as to pose as a poet, who was invited to Blandings Castle but whom Psmith now knows won’t show up. Psmith claims to be Ralston McTodd the poet, but the poet happens to be married to Eve’s best friend Cynthia McTodd. Psmith gets caught up in his own tangled web of lies. Eventually, Eve meets up with Cynthia, who says her husband is in Paris. Psmith has already lied to Eve saying that he has divorced Cynthia not legally but spiritually, and when he sees that Eve is shocked by this news of divorce, he lies again and claims that Cynthia has thrown dishes of bacon at his head several times at breakfast, that she kicked their pet cat over two chairs “ . . . all because there were no mushrooms,” and this was all probably because Cynthia had “taken to drink,” and had gone so far as to install her own private still in their home, which caused her to “rage through
the house like a devastating cyclone” (Wodehouse 117). The reader knows that none of this remotely true. Eve confronts Psmith with the fact that she was with Cynthia when “ . . . I caught sight of you from the inn window, walking along the High Street. I pointed you out to Cynthia, and she said she had never seen you before in her life.”
“Women soon forget,” sighed Psmith (Wodehouse 172).
The mechanism is in Psmith. He becomes the stereotype of a playful liar, but we don’t see it as malicious, because Wodehouse exemplifies another element of humor, which is play.
Representative of British humor, Willoughby, Pooter, the narrator in Three Men in a Boat, and Psmith exhibit Bergson’s stereotypical trait: a too predictable person is upsetting the natural order in unpredictable ways.
Arthur Koestler’s theory of humor, in The Act of Creation, is that laughter springs from the same impulse as scientific discovery (Koestler 85). Science and art pivot on eureka moments. Frames of unconscious reference collide. In this paradigm shift version, one of the paradigms acts as a standard model, and then the new phenomena of the other paradigm is the anomaly. The resolution of the two into a new standard model elicits the aha moment, which is a kind of discovery.
The scientist detects “something funny” and then investigates the mechanics of it (121).
Bergson, Meredith, and Koestler are saying the same thing, but they are also, as a group, disagreeing with the traditionalists who held that laughter is a reflex of scorn and contempt, which opinion was shared by Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes. That was the accepted opinion. Maybe it was magical thinking, but most Greek and Latin literature lacks humor, so that nowadays maybe only Aristophanes, Lucian of Samosata, and Plautus could still make us laugh outright.
Then the Dark Ages. I guess we can safely assume that all across modern Europe for about a thousand years or so, nobody laughed. The Bible was all they had, and as Alfred North Whitehead once remarked somewhere, the problem with the Old Testament is that it lacks humor. Indeed the New Testament is no barrel of monkeys, and the Qu’ran cannot be laughed at. Although Mohammad had his
earthy side, in the Hadith, at one point, one of his men gets stuck in a tree so that he looks like a chicken because his bare legs are exposed, Mohammad admonishes the laughers to stop; probably because he detected the scorn and ridicule involved. Scorn and ridicule could be the source of division, and it makes a kind of sense to rein it in, or it will invite retaliation. Plato’s Republic, having banned artists and writers for possible subversion, for their weapons of mass diversion, also would have no comedians. Possibly our sense of humor reflects a class structure in which the rich can scorn the poor, but not vice versa. Not until the printing press, the rise of the university, the city, the middle class, and the democratization of power through the wealth of nations do things get funnier; in other words the people had been given more of a voice, which lead to confidence, criticism, and satire of the upper classes.
Not until the Renaissance did it became officially okay to laugh again: the rise of the vernacular helps to re-introduce the ordinary lives of all classes, and the rise of the picaresque helps to introduce the situations that lead to comedy. So for examples we have Commedia del’Arte, Bocaccio’s Decameron, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, Rabelais, Shakespeare’s Comedies, Don Quixote, Moliere, and Fielding.
But even then, the ancients predominated in their influence. In a way that makes humor seem not universal. The average European still laughed at midgets, dwarves, giants, hunchbacks, bedlamites, and even hanged criminals. Yet these “deformities of the norm” still reflect the Bergsonian “mechanism” model in that congenital traits like dwarfism represent the perfect human model of a human being being broken, different, and hence, for them, even laughable.
Eighteenth and nineteenth century revolutions upset the old supercilious attitudes toward the masses, so that our culture now disapproves of laughter in the context of cruelty. It appears that comedy can be culturally conditioned, adjusted, and fine tuned—or at least shifted away from outright cruelty.
In American humor, this newer attitude can be seen in Mark Twain.
In Roughing It Twain contrasts the wish-fulfilling ideal of striking it rich with the reality of the work
involved in digging for gold:
We climbed far up on the mountain side and went to work on a little rubbishy claim of ours that had a shaft on it eight feet deep. Higbie descended into it and worked bravely with his pick till he had loosened up a deal of rock and dirt and then I went down with a long-handled shovel (the most awkward invention yet contrived by man) to throw it out. You must brace the shovel
forward with the side of your knee till it is full, and then, with a skilful toss, throw it backward over your left shoulder. I made the toss, and landed the mess just on the edge of the shaft and it all came back on my head and down the back of my neck. I never said a word, but climbed out and walked home. I inwardly resolved that I would starve before I would
make a target of myself and shoot rubbish at it with a long-handled
shovel (Twain, 56).
After Twain we have not much American humor until the Jewish humor settled in the Catskills
resort towns (“Borscht Belt”) and the vaudeville of acts like the Marx Brothers, and from there to Catch-22, which is the perfect expression of the paradoxical nature of humor. The “catch” is like a double bind or dilemma that we resolve by believing in two opposites at once. If you’re insane enough to want to get out of the Army you’re sane, and if you are sane, you can’t get out of the army.
A catch-22 epitomizes the “mechanism” of society at large in the role of machine.
In A Confederacy of Dunces, the protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly, abhors modern society, and valorizes tradition; reproached with body odor he counters that with a rather wooden appeal to custom, while putting down an author who he thinks really “stinks”:
Well, what do you expect? The human body, when confined, produces certain odors which we tend to forget in this age of deodorants and other perversions. Actually, I find the atmosphere of this room rather
comforting. Schiller needed the scent of apples rotting in his desk in order to write. I, too, have my needs. You may remember that Mark Twain preferred to lie supinely in bed while composing those rather dated and boring efforts which contemporary scholars try to prove meaningful. Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate” (Toole, 60).
Christopher Moore in Lamb, or the Gospel According to Biff, plays on “mechanism” with his depiction of the naïve Jesus getting clued in by his wingman Biff. Our notions of Jesus of Nazareth are so elevated that anything Jesus says or does will be somewhat of a fall from our preconception. When Joshua (Jesus) and Biff travel to India to attain the secret knowledge during the “lost years of Jesus” we have a typical defamiliarization routine of Moore’s:
I think this is a bodhi tree, I [Biff] said, just like Buddha sat under!
It’s so exciting. I’m feeling sort of enlightened just standing here. Really, I can feel ripe bodhies squishing between my toes.
Joshua looked at my feet.
I don’t think those are bodhies. There was a cow here before us. I lifted my foot out of the mess.
Cows are overrated in this country. Under the Buddha’s tree too. Is nothing sacred? (Moore, 268).
Christopher Moore gets a lot mileage out of contrasting a sacred account of two thousand years ago with a modern point of view in modern slang. Here Jesus is the “mechanism,” his predictable naivete causing him to have to learn from his pal Biff.
Twain, Toole, and Moore are the successful transplants of British humor, modified by lessening of class consciousness, but still relying on laughs from the perception of mechanism.
Poprishchin in Gogol’s Diary of a Madman has become unravelled from working a thankless clerk’s
job in a bureaucratic office, where he is marginalized. He believes he overhears dogs talking and thinks they write letters to each other about him. Upon hearing that the King of Spain died, he believes himself to be the next King and dresses as such in his cut-up government uniform. He claims to have gone to Spain, but for some reason all the men there have shaved heads, and get beaten with sticks. That is because he’s in a mental ward. (Gogol 14).
The “mechanism” is his madness presented to us in a way that we laugh despite ourselves
In Lu Xun’s Diary of a Madman the narrator becomes increasingly paranoid and he concludes everyone wants to kill him and eat him. Whenever he picks up a classic and canonical work of Chinese philosophy he keeps seeing the words, “Eat Men.” It is all there in plain view. In desperation his last entry is: “Save the Children!” (Lu Xun 41)
Lu Xun in Ah Q—The Real Story presents Ah Q, the village idler, bullied and beaten, who rationalizes that he is at least “Number 1” at being bullied and beaten. Everything he does wrong he rationalizes as right. Arrested, jailed, framed, and sentenced to death, he has to sign a confession. He can’t. The officials tell him to draw a circle instead; he can’t even do that. He says to himself, “It would take a real jackass to draw a nice round circle anyway” (Lu Xun 2, 191).
Lu Xun disguised his critique in allegory. Ah Q is China. China or the Qing Dynasty is running on automatic–while foreign countries are carving it up and colonizing it at the end of the 19th century.
The character Li Kui in The Water Margins (by Shi Nai’an writing in the Ming Dynasty) is a drunk, a gambler, a brute, and a murderer. Also someone has been impersonating Li Kui and committing crimes in his name, terrorizing the countryside. One day, he is enlisted by fellow criminals and fugitives to meet the ringleader Song Jiang of the uprising in his mountain redoubt.
Li Kiu kowtowed to Song Jiang, and his two axes were restored to him. He related how he had taken his mother from Yiling, how she had been devoured by a savage beast, and how, because of this he had killed four tigers. Tears coursed down his cheeks as he told this story. But when he
went on to relate how he killed the robber who was masquerading as himself, everybody laughed.
Song Jiang replies “ . . . that calls for a celebration (Shi Na’ian 720).
In The Scholars by Wu Ching-Tzu, writing around 1750, we have a novel about the corrupt examination system and bureaucracy at the time. In it we have a passage about a monk who is an archetypal swindler and fraudster:
Before a Magistrate the defrauded farmer says of the monk:
. . . this monk came back to claim that this cow [he sold me] was his father so I must pay him some more, because he had sold it too cheaply. When I wouldn’t give him more money, he started abusing me. I’ve heard say that the cow wasn’t his father at all. For years now this monk has shaved his head and put salt on it; and whenever he sees cattle grazing, he picks out the fattest cow and kneels before it, so that the cow licks his head. Any cow licking salt will shed tears. Then he declares that this cow is his father and goes crying to the owner to ask to have it given him; and when gets it he sells it. He has done this many times (Wu Ching-tzu 266).
The monk is devious, but repeats this strange trick too many times. The Magistrate detects the “mechanism” and sentences the monk to twenty strokes.
Shi Nai’an, Wu Ching-tzu, and Lu Xun use the same device of upset expectation as the Europeans and the Americans.
In the Middle East we turn to The Arabian Nights. “The Hunchback’s Tale” is the story of a tailor and his wife, who encounter an amusing hunchback, who belongs to the King of China, and invite him to their home, where he inadvertently chokes on a fishbone and dies during dinner. The couple decide to pretend he is their son, stricken with smallpox, and they take him to a Jewish doctor, in whose house they dump the hunchback by the stairs and when the Jewish doctor arrives he stumbles on the
hunchback and assumes he killed him. The Jewish doctor decides to dump the hunchback on his Muslim neighbor, propping him up inside, where he is mistaken for a burglar and clubbed by a Muslim steward. The Muslim steward, afraid of being accused of murder, takes the dead hunchback to a market, where he is mistaken for a thief by a drunken Christian, who beats him, until he too thinks he killed the hunchback. The Christian is arrested and sentenced to hang. The Muslim steward comes forward and confesses; sentenced to hang, the Jewish doctor confesses and saves the Muslim; the Jewish doctor, sentenced to hang, is saved by the tailor, who confesses. Eventually all parties are brought before the King of China and absolved (Haddawy 214).
In The Assemblies by Al-Hariri, writing in the 12th century, the narrator on his travels continually bumps into the learned rogue Abu Zayd under various guises for scams. It begins with the narrator encountering a preacher in the marketplace, who is sermonizing:
“ . . . You think your wealth will save your Judgment Day arrives? . . . The rubies of gifts cling to your heart more than the seasons of prayer. The heightening of dowries is preferred to the continuance of almsgiving (Shah 2).”
The preacher falls silent. The crowd showers him with money. But the narrator follows the preacher, Abu Zayd, home; home is a luxurious cave with servants, where Abu Zayd is having white bread, lamb, and date wine. The narrator confronts him, and Abu Zayd replies in convoluted abstractness:
“Out of my preaching I make a noose, for Fortune has forced me to make my way even to the thicket of the lion by the subtlety of my beguiling. Yet, do not think that I fear its change, I am steeled against it. Nor does a covetous mind lead me to water at any well that will soil my honor (Shah 3).” And so it goes for another 49 “assemblies” or sessions with Abu Zayd, always posing as a beggar of immense learning, and ripping off whomever without shame. The reader laughs at this type of rogue, going about preaching the Qu’ran and violating it every step of the hypocritical way. Again we laugh at the mechanical way Abu Zayd persists in his mendacious behavior.
In the 20th century, the Indian writer Premchand wrote a short story “Kafan,” in which a father and
son are in mourning for the son’s wife, who has just died in childbirth. The duo are dalits and don’t like work. They don’t have money for a proper burial, but raise the funds from sympathetic villagers so that the father and son can buy a decent shroud (kafan). Instead they blow the money on food and drink, and get drunk (Premchand 192 ). In Premchand’s short story “The Chess Players” two men are so absorbed in their chess playing that they ignore the fact that the Indian Sepoy Mutiny is going on all around them. Out of sight, the war over their shoulders, the chess match continues until the players get into an argument about whose move it is. They duel and kill each other over the game, but not the war (Premchand 2,158). The reader catches the irony of their dying over a game and laughs at their persistent idiocy, their fixed ritualistic behavior that benefits no one and destroys themselves.
The Pakistani Saadat Manto, in his “Toba Tek Singh,” portrays the inmates of an asylum in Pakistan, two years after the Partition and Independence. They learn that they are involved in a “lunatic exchange program” between India and Pakistan, modeled on a previous prisoner exchange program. They react with insanity to something they perceive as insanity to begin with. In the end, the Sikh inmate lies down on the border refusing to move, unsure of where he is supposed to be (Manto 17).
In The Palm Wine Drinkard, by Amos Tutuola, a 20th century Nigerian writer, a man devoted to palm wine consumption loses his palm tree tapster friend and must seek him in Deads’ Town so that he can drink more wine. We laugh at his journey to the underworld, which he is making just so he can keep drinking (Tutuola 5).
In Shank’s Mare by Jippensha Ikku, two friends, Yaji and Kita, during the Edo period, are making a picaresque pilgrimage to a shrine in Northern Japan. Along the way they stop at an inn, where they
encounter a mad woman who had seen the ghost of the landlord’s dead wife, who hanged herself over their extramarital affair. Spooked, later that night they are too afraid to leave their rooms to go to the outhouse, they open the window shutters, see a ghost, and Yaji falls from the window into the inn’s garden. The landlord awakes and shows them that their ghost is clothes on a clothesline (Ikku 122).
Now that we have completed our circumnavigation of world literature in search of a few laughs, we
can see that the emotion of humor is humanistic, secular, and universal. What makes a fictional character funny then is the mechanical way he acts in character. The realist contradicts the idealist although they are one and same person. There is always a friction that has to be dissipated, and that friction is something all cultures, if not under totalitarian rule, recreate in their stories. Why? Everyone has an area in the brain (the anterior cingulate cortex) that is tooled to pick out any discrepancy in the environment, any reversal of social hierarchy, any. Following that excitement, the prefrontal cortex, as overseer, imposes the learned, individual reset, the laugh or not laugh response, given social context. In this way perhaps laughter causes a social bonding, because the sharing of laughter acts like an oxytocin or endorphin to repair our frail interpersonal relationships, which at first react in a knee-jerk flight or fight response (Sapolsky 59).
Thus the paradox: Anyone outside the social construct is liable to be considered “mad.” But anyone who hasn’t learned to laugh risks a rigidity that will drive him and those around him “insane.”
Joseph Campbell points out that traditional societies, especially pre-agricultural societies, often had sacred clown societies, which were allowed to break taboos; for example they might smear themselves with excrement in a ritual (Campbell 72). Campbell finds connections among the shaman, the trickster, and the clown. Since the trickster is a super shaman, the trickster exists everywhere that shamanistic peoples existed, and that existence is almost universal (274). In Polynesia, the trickster is named Maui. Examples for Native Americans are Coyote and Raven; for Africans, Anansi the Spider and the Great Hare; for Europeans, Reynard the Fox and Loki.
Therefore Bergson’s theory of humor is a universal, and the differences in our senses of humor are due only to arbitrary man-made, cultural add-ons. Our brains are wired in the same odd way to
detect what is odd in people, and, whether it strikes our funny bones or not, our reflex to the laughter is reinforced by others, who share in the social cohesion that hones our minds to perceive the sensical and the nonsensical, the wheat and the chaff.

                                                                    Works Cited

Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. New York, NY: Random House, 1944. Print. Campbell, Joseph. Primitive Mythology. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1969. Print. Gimbel, Steven. “The Philosophy of Humor.” The Great Courses. Web. 2018.
<http://thegreatcourses.com/>. 04 Dec. 2018.
Gogol, Nikolai. The Diary of a Madman. New York, NY: Signet Classics, 1978. Print.
Grossmith, George, et al. The Diary of a Nobody. London: Penguin Books, 1999. Print.
Hariri Al-Qasim Ibn-ʻAli al-, and Thomas Chenery. The Assemblies. London: Octagon Press, 1980.
Print.
Jerome, Jerome K. Three Men in a Boat. London: Penguin Books, 1994. Print.
Jippensha, Ikku. Shanks Mare; Japans Great Comic Novel of Travel and Ribaldry. Rutland, Vermont
& Tokyo, Japan: Tuttle, 1961. Print.
Koestler, Arthur. The Act of Creation: a Study of the Conscious and Unconscious in Science and Art.
New York, N. Y., Dell Publishing, 1975. Print.
Lu, Xun. The Diary of a Madman. Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1990. Print.
Lu, Xun, and Julia Lovell. The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China: the Complete Fiction of
Lu Xun ; Translated with an Introduction by Julia Lovell ; with an Afterword by Yiyun Li.
London: Penguin Books, 2009. Print.
Mahdi, Muhsin, and Husain Haddawy. The Arabian Nights. New York, NY: W. W. Norton &
Company, 2008. Print.
Manto Saʻadat Hasan, and Khalid Hasan. Selected Stories. New York, N Y: Penguin Group, 2010.
Print.
Meredith, George. The Egoist. New York & London: W. W. Norton, 1979. Print.
Moore, Christopher. Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christs Childhood Pal. New York, NY:
HarperCollins, 2013. Print.
Premacanda. The World of Premchand, Trans. by David Rubin. Bloomington, Indiana & London:
Indiana University Press, 1969. Print.
Premacanda, et al. The Illustrated Premchand: Selected Short Stories. Delhi, India: Ratna Sagar P.
Ltd, 2012. Print.
Pritchett, V. S. George Meredith and English Comedy. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd.: 1970. Print. Sapolsky, Robert M. Behave: the Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. New York, NY: Penguin
Books, 2018. Print.
Shih, Nai-an. The Water Margins. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1988. Print.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Humor. “The Philosophy of Humor.” Stanford University. Web. <https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/humor/>. 04 Dec. 2018.
Sypher, Wylie, et al. Comedy: an Essay on Comedy by George Meredith Laughter by Henri Bergson. Garden City, New York. Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956. Print.
Toole, John Kennedy. A Confederacy of Dunces. New York, NY: Grove Press, 1980. Print.
Tutuola, Amos. The Palm-Wine Drinkard;and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. New York, NY: Grove
Press, 1953. Print.
Twain, Mark. Roughing It. New York, NY: Signet Classics, 1962. Print. Wodehouse, P. G. Leave it to Psmith. New York, NY: Random House, 1975. Print. Wu, Jingzi. The Scholars. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1983.

                                             Max Mueller’s Rig Veda and Hindu Nationalism

         Rarely has a translation had such political consequences as Max Mueller’s translation of the Rig Veda from Sanskrit to English. When Max Mueller set out on his career as a Sanskritist from Germany, to France, and to England, did he think of himself as a philologist and Orientalist, following in the footsteps of his teachers, the linguists Franz Bopp and Eugene Burnouf—or was he the fulfillment of the prophecy of Tukurama, who said that whoever gives himself over to the study of the Vedas “gets tangled up and dies therein”? (Patton 37) When Mueller completed his translation in 1873, it was embraced by Hindus across the board, Mueller assuming he had provided a spiritual link between Europe and India. In fact it was picked up such nationalists as Dayananda Saraswati, the founder of the Arya Samaj, who “it was reported . . . carried the edition with him,” although he did not know English. (Chaudhuri 327) 120 years later after the translation, Diane Eck, commenting on the World’s Parliament of Religions, held in 1893, says “Hindus in India who espouse old-fashioned Vivekananda tolerance [as Mueller did] scarcely dare speak of themselves as Hindus today, so identified has the term become with religious extremism.” (Eck 93) Mueller’s own motto was that “ . . . behind all religions there is one eternal, one universal religion.” Even Mueller’s pluralism comes under scrutiny by Eck for the use of the word “religion” in the singular, as if there could only be one, and that one would be suspect for being fundamentally crypto-Christian or actually Lutheran, in Mueller’s case. The very vocabulary of Mueller is Western and also suspect, says Eck, for words like: scripture, prayer, sacrifice, myth, symbol, and ritual. (Eck 96) For his very “universalism” Mueller has come under attack by a host of critics who argue that his bias contaminated his outlook on Indian religions, pre-packaging them as “world religions” granting them a status he was not qualified to give. If he had not translated the Rig Veda, perhaps he would not have been so controversial, but as Laurie Patton says, “ . . . the Vedic tradition remains a kind of prestigious and ancient touchstone around which Hindu religious arguments revolve.” (Patton 37) According to Simone Sawhney the Rig Veda “ . . . has been accorded the honor due to a monument . . . a beacon . . . a fortress . . . a mysterious temple in whose precincts we are no longer at ease.” And from the other side, such a critic as Dayananda Saraswati “ . . . was very hard on Mueller. He could not understand why Mueller cared for the Vedas at all if he did not accept their divine origin.” (Chaudhuri 327)
Outside of India, only Germany (more precisely the German Romantics) had a real interest in Indology during the 19th century, with the English possibly being the least interested. (Chaudhuri 125) William Jones, Wilkins, and Colebrooke were famous all over Germany. Although Goethe admired Kalidasa, “Hindu art repelled him . . . such things will drive us mad.” (Chaudhuri 128) But it was the Germans like Hegel who constructed the orientalist India as the land of spirituality. (Chaudhuri 129) The British approach was utilitarian; the Rig Veda to them was a source of information, possibly of use in helping them to govern, or in helping them to govern poorly. The debate was epitomized by James Mill’s attacking William Jones for his having “ . . . adopted the hypothesis of a high state of civilization in the principal countries of Asia.” (Chaudhuri 133) “Oriental” Jones was ridiculed for his having gone native. From one Orientalist to another, Max Mueller main goal was to trace the “evolution of religious and philosophical thought.” (Chaudhuri 135) Colebrooke had discussed the Vedas in 1805 and a Latin translation of the first book came out in 1838. As such it existed in India only in an oral form. For Wilfrid Smith, Mueller’s printed edition was “an entrancing instance of nineteenth-century western cultural imperialism, here quietly imposing the western sense of ‘scripture.’” (Sawhney 3) Thomas Coburn even asserts that the Rig Veda was meant to be recited not understood. (Sawhney 3) And when Veena Das refers to Hubert and Mauss’ profound thesis that “ . . . sacrifice to god and sacrifice of god are to be seen as parallel notions,” one can only wonder why did she quote Hubert and Mauss? (Das 458) These are the exact words from the Rig Veda itself. Had she read the Rig Veda? “With the sacrifice the gods sacrificed to the sacrifice.” (The Rig Veda 31)
In any case, the mistakes of Max Mueller multiply left and right like rabbits. From the left he is the appropriator of another nation’s heritage, like the Elgin marbles; not only that, but his imprimatur on this text as “scripture” comes from a Western blessing, and that blessing was internalized in India as a validation of caste, something which had always been transmitted by the Brahmins to the Brahmins. At the same time as the British East India Company was sponsoring the dissemination of Indian texts, and these were being read in Europe for the first time, Brahmo Samaj was founded in 1828 by Ram Mohun Roy—it was to be a religion that was a distillation of the Vedas, shorn of idolatry, and whose social views were anti-caste, the empowerment of women, and social reform. It was a mutual appropriation society among the Indian Vedantists and the British Orientalists, and there was Mueller in the middle as go-between, even though Mueller essentially democratized the Vedas by taking them out of the hands of the pundits, who had monopolized all interpretations. Mueller essentially secularized the Vedas, even profaned them in the purists’ eyes, and yet in his day his achievement was celebrated by all and sundry—the very opposite of the attitude of modernity and the scholars thereof, who see Mueller as the arch-conservative, quasi-racist, anti-feminist, arrogant khan of Oxford, who basically invented the Rig Veda, canonized it, packaged it, and sent it off into the future for the BJP to swear oaths by. And yet, in India it was the only text in any language of its most holy text; so holy that some pundits in Puna risked their careers by attending a recitation of the Rig Veda, because they had heard that cow’s blood had gotten into the ink, so that the books themselves were contaminated, and they would not touch them with a ten-foot pole. (Chaudhuri 263) It was only a hundred years after Mueller’s death did the right and the left, and not just in India, exhume his remains and have him drawn and quartered. Why did the re-examination of his case take so long? As Sawhney politely complains, actually no one reads the Rig Veda. (Sawhney 5) Also as an orthodox text, it is already too alive. In fact, it only does exist in oral tradition (pace Thomas Coburn), ironically, because it is still unread; it is either praised as the Holy Bible, or treated like a copy of Mein Kampf—after hearing so much about it, why read it? (And then the further irony of this obscure and epigraphic text, is that even if the purist of the pure were to adhere to the oral tradition strictly speaking, and perform the rituals to the letter—it would still be complete hypocrisy, for the very blind spot of there being no soma in the ceremony.)
Even more to Mueller’s discredit, to his critics, is the bad timing with which he, like a feeder into a larger stream, joined or was joined to the Brahmo Samaj. Under this aegis, Hindu spirituality was even further sharpened into something of Hindu pride, as placed in opposition to the materialism of the West, but also lifting Hinduism up to be on a par with “world religions.” Vivekananda at one and the same time privileged the Vedas as the primordial Hinduism and legitimized India as a nation equal to the nation of England. Unwittingly, this double empowerment of a Unitarian communitas by Vivekananda appealed to Keshav Hedgewar, who in 1925, founded the RSS, adopting Vivekananda as the spiritual godfather to a movement that was pro-British, pro-Manu, pro-caste, and later, anti-Constitutionalist, and in part behind the assassination of Gandhi. From the trunk of the RSS branched off the BJP. Over the last thirty years, India has had numerous nationalist riots from Babri Masjid to Godhra in Gujarat to the next one under Modi’s watch; and the line of transmission does indeed go right through Max Mueller to Ram Mohun Roy.
With perfect hindsight, Eastern and Western academics never fail to point out the association of Mueller’s linguistic search for a proto-language uniting India to Greece and his tracing this linguistic evolution, through historical movements, migrations, invasions, to an ethnic group known as “Aryan.” His dabbling in history has ever since allowed scholars to rubberstamp “Racist” on Mueller’s academic passport, as it were. Since theories on racial superiority were in the air in the 19th century and came to head with Arthur de Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of Human Races, which came out in 1855, the idea of privileging Sanskrit with Greek itself was racist, and further caused the blur that made scholars think that Mueller thought: not only that Indo-Aryan languages were superior, but that the Indo-Aryans themselves were superior, on account of their Indo-Aryan language, which was superior, because this family of tongues had the novel feature (apparently an innovation as great as the steam engine) of inflected endings. But hadn’t Mueller made himself clear: “an ethnologist who speaks of Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes and hair, is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar?” (Mueller) Even Sawhney claims “ . . . Mueller set himself the task of discovering the lost history of the Aryan people . . . connected with the desire to discover and establish a common heritage for the Aryan race.” This distorts his true purpose, which was to establish an equal relationship between Europeans and South Asians as a brotherhood, with a common heritage, so that Indians would no longer be denigrated by British society, and there the racism was real. Did Mueller mean to exclude the rest of the world as inferiors European-Iranian-Indians? No, he never said, meant, or lived this; and yet every academic repeats this narrative as fixed a discourse as a license plate. And yet even one of his greatest critics admits, “ . . . no other prominent philologist spoke in his strong support of his protest against the racialized use of philology . . . the fact of his opposition seems to have been completely erased . . . [his] indictment of the racialist ethnology was not implied but quite explicit.” (Masuzawa 242, 3)
So in this regard Mueller cannot rightfully be appropriated by self-righteous Western academics as a Hindu nationalist, so as to imply that he was also anti-Muslim, and by implication the enemy of an open society; however, he did feed into Hindu nationalism for supporting Vedantists like Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, and of course he was friends with the ancien regime, the Tagore dynasty, Keshab Chandra Sen, and other practicing Hindu nationalists. These religious reformers along with Mueller fed into the thoughts of V. D. Savarkar, but Savarkar’s thoughts did not travel upstream to feed into theirs; the river forked, the Savarkar side flowed into the philosophy of Hedgewar and the RSS, and beyond. On the other hand, the Rig Veda was also appropriated by the theosophists, whom Mueller could not stand, and the occultists who wanted Jesus to have traveled to India, for “secret knowledge.” The Indian origin of Christianity soon loomed large as an idea in the air of Europe. Mueller registered his chagrin at this when he read in a popular French book of the time, which “quoted” from the Veda, “La femme c’est l’ame de l’humanite.” Mueller commented, “We find many childish and foolish things in the Veda . . . [but] it is not difficult to see that this [quotation] is the folly of the nineteenth century, and not of the childhood of the human race.” (Masuzawa 247) I mention this only to point out that the Vedas had quickly come to mean all things to all people. Patton claims that British missionaries were responsible for the “creation of a false Veda.” (Patton 45) But that implies there is one “true” Veda, and Patton pooh poohs Mueller’s edition in quotation marks, his “critical edition,” meaning his uncritical edition. (Patton 45)
True, Mueller naively put India on a pedestal, and he wrote many a paean to the “wonder that was India.” Asked to point to a land that offered the greatest and profoundest thought and philosophy, Mueller’s stock answer was “I point to India.” But Mueller’s purplest passage pales compared with Savarkar’s rhetoric, for example: “ . . . every page of our history shows that the ancient Ganges of our blood has come down from the altitudes of the sublime Vedic heights to the plains of our modern history fertilizing much, incorporating many a noble stream and purifying many a lost soul . . .” (Savarkar 31) And Sanskrit itself is not just a language “ . . . it is a Mantra, to all it is a music.” (Savarkar 35) The Vedic schools “ . . . sounded the deepest secrets of thoughts and . . . soared to the highest altitudes of ecstasy . . . [and study of the Vedas] is the science of religion applied.” (Savarkar 40) “Science of religion” alludes to Mueller directly. Mueller had been a dead Aryan for over twenty years and so could not have read Savarkar, whose rules of Hindutva would have barred Mueller from being Hindu, even if he wanted to be a Hindu, Savarkar privileging all Hindus as “Aryans” even if non-Aryan, even though there never were any Hindus, the word “Hindu” being of foreign origin. As Ambedkar says, the word “Hindu” did not exist in the Vedas, because the Hindus did not exist. There was no need to have a term to unite the peoples of the landmass south of the Himalayas—because it was “ . . . only a collection of castes.” (Ambedkar 14)
Referring back to the Vedic age historically is a doomed construction, much as construing the daily life of Iranians would be if based on the Zend Avesta. Yet Savarkar’s Hindutva claims the Vedic age was golden, and in so doing aspires to make a Qur’an out of the Rig Veda, which is what Max Mueller did not want. In fact, he wrote, “I wish to warn against . . . overvaluing it [the Rig Veda], and interpreting it as was never meant to be interpreted, of which you may see a painful instance in Dayananda Saraswati’s labours on the Veda.” (Chaudhuri 358) Mueller’s labors on comparative religions also went misunderstood, especially his Gifford Lectures, for which he was accused of finding “something good in every religion, except in Christianity.” Also, the lectures were “blasphemous” and Mueller’s “pantheism was atheism in disguise.” (Chaudhuri 361,2)
Romila Thapur says: “The notion of an Aryan race has now been generally discarded in scholarship . . .” (Thapur 226) but Uma Chakravarti manages to make her readers believe that Aryanism=Orientalism, and so it never really went away. Chakravarti says, “With Colebrooke the Orientalists came to focus their attention directly upon the women’s question . . .” although this makes it sound like the Orientalists were a team, with Colebrooke leading the way, essay on sati in Asiatic Researches in one hand, burning like a torch in the forest. “For many decades thereafter a reference to Hindus appears to have evoked the image of a burning woman as recorded by Max Mueller almost eighty years later.” (Chakravarti 31) What she is referring to here is neither obvious nor applicable to Victorian, pre-suffragette society as a whole. Chakravarti’s spleen for Max Mueller can only be understood as a displaced aversion to the contemporary politicians of India. Chakravarti claims that Mueller “went on to imply that the Aryans were racially superior to the Turanian and Semitic races.” (Chakravarti 40) If he did, he explicitly renounced this for the umpteenth time as quoted above and in many other contexts. Chakravarti goes on to say, “Much of Max Mueller’s writing was directed at young I.C.S. trainees in England with the prospect of a career in post-Mutiny India . . .” (Chakravarti 41) This statement has no source. She says, “There is nothing in Max Mueller’s writing to suggest that he considered women to be spiritual, or learned, in the Vedic period. He himself attached little significance to the inferior position held by women.” (Chakravarti 41) In reality, Mueller personally helped Hindu women; for example, Ramabai, a widow in dire straits in India and a Sanskritist, was destitute enough to try her luck in England. While staying in a Christian house of charity, her maidservant tried to kill her, to prevent her from converting; failing this, her maidservant killed herself. Distraught, Ramabai decided to seek out Max Mueller; she showed up, he put her up, and, because of her nervous prostration, Mueller had one of his maidservants stay with her at night to keep her company until she recovered. Ramabai went on to found a home for young Hindu widows in India and wrote Life of a High Caste Woman. (Chaudhuri 299)
So nebulous has Max Mueller become, that he seems to have been constructed by both the right and the left—for purely political reasons, which is to say he is a mere symbol. Embraced by the right, hated by the left. There are as many Max Muellers as there versions of the Ramayana. To the feminists like Uma Charkvarti, Colebrooke’s view of the Hindu woman was not just wrong, it was also Max Mueller’s. Not only that, but all the British Orientalists were engaged in an attempt to change the discourse on the rights of women, and further, the cabal was in cahoots with the proto-fascist politicians who demanded independence, and who were to lose self-control later, having provoked incidents like the Babri Masjid Affair. A thousand dead is hardly an affair, but that is a measure of how hot the irons have become in India. Understandably, Indian intellectuals flail about for the causes of this growth in violence expressed in mass riots; after all India is the country whose ancient language, Sanskrit means “civilization.” How could such barbarity exist in India—unless British colonialism had not already constructed the Hindu-Muslim antagonism? The British took power from the Mughals by forming alliances with the Indian Brahmins, and at the same time took power from the Hindus by privileging the Muslim elite over the Hindus, creating rifts in Indian society that have yet to heal. Much of Mueller’s imbroglio might stem from his being British, as opposed to Franz Bopp and Eugene Burnouf—who are rarely mentioned as orientalists per se in India, although Bopp and Burnouf, are considered German and French giants of Indology; whereas Jones, Colebrooke, and Mueller as a British triumvirate, are more or less branded as small-minded imperialists who happened to take an interest in India as a sideshow, while working for the British East India Company.
So Mueller is complicit in Hindu nationalism, for helping to paint the Orientalist picture of a primordial paradise, which has been used against him; and it is not that this is a mindless charge, which is so bothersome, it is that the charge of “aryanism” has been repeated so often with regard to Mueller that it has become a truism, which discredits those who still have the voice of reason in India. Because he dealt with the Rig Veda, because he was British, because he investigated racial theories, and because he befriended Hindu nationalists, he does indeed appear to be guilty by association, but in fact the jury will be out on the peculiar case of Max Mueller until India solves its own political problems peacefully.

                                                                  Works Cited

Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji. “Annihilation of caste with a reply to Mahatma Gandhi.” (1944).

Chakravarti, Uma. “Whatever happened to the Vedic Dasi? Orientalism, nationalism and a script for the past.” Recasting women: Essays in colonial history (1989): 27-87.

Chaudhuri, Nirad C. Scholar extraordinary: the life of professor the Rt. Hon. Friedrich Max Mueller. Oxford University Press, 1974.

Das, Veena. “Language of sacrifice.” Man (1983): 445-462.

Eck, Diana L. “In the Name of Religions.” The Wilson Quarterly (1976-) 17.4 (1993): 90–100. Web.

Masuzawa, Tomoko. The Invention of World Religions: or, how European universalism was preserved in the language of pluralism. University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Mittal, Sushil, and Gene Thursby, eds. Chapter Two Veda and Upanishad. The Hindu World. Routledge, 2004.

Müller, F. Max. Biographies of Words and the Home of the Aryas (1888), Kessinger Publishing reprint, 2004, p 120.

Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar. “Essentials of Hindutva.” Samagra Savarākar Wangmaya (1964).

Sawhney, Simona. “Remembering the Veda: Accumulations of Interest.” The Literature and Culture of the Indian Subcontinent in the Post-Colonial Web,[On-line], URL: http://www. postcolonialweb. org/india/religion/hindu/sawhney1b. html (1999).

Thapar, Romila. “Imagined religious communities? Ancient history and the modern search for a Hindu identity.” Modern Asian Studies 23.02 (1989): 209-231.

The Rig Veda: an anthology: one hundred and eight hymns. Penguin books, 1981.

                                                 Ahura Mazda, Zoroaster, and the Vendidad

This Vendidad is 301 pages, and is a hard-copy reprint of the 1880 James Darmesteter translation for the Sacred Books of the East series, volume 4, which includes the entire Zend Avesta among 50 other sacred texts published by the Oxford University Press. This version is no-frills: no appendices, no maps, no bibliography, no index, but it does include Darmesteters’s introduction and footnotes. The book costs about $10.00.
The scope of the Zend Avesta is enormous, being one of the earliest manifestations of religious thought extant, inasmuch as it is an afterthought of the Gathas of Zoroaster, whose mission or message covered Greater Iran, which extended from the Euphrates to the Indus. The Vendidad deals with ethics and rituals of the religion of Ahura Mazda. The focus is on ritual purification, and more specifically, on the prevention of pollution by the devils and the evil spirit of Ahriman. In the Vendidad, for every good action there is an equal and opposite evil action. There is a constant struggle to remain clean or pure, because evil is all around and just waiting for an opening.
The purpose of the book is to define the rules of Mazdaism for the Zoroastrians, the Parsis, or Aryans of Iran, howsoever they might be termed, so that the law is uniform for every varying degree of devoutness. Much of the text revolves around hellish punishments for taboo violations, threatening more with hell than rewarding with heaven; the authors or priests, who remain anonymous, purport to relate a dialogue between Ahura Mazda and Zoroaster, with Zoroaster prompting Ahura Mazda, who then prescribes the law for everyone. But the fight between Airyaman and Angra Mainyu continues until the end of time. Here we find the formula: Good thoughts, good words, good deeds.
The forces of good and evil are always at war; and as James Darmesteter says in the introduction “Persia took her demons in real earnest,” as juxtaposed to the Vedic context next door, where the Indic fiends were “driven into the background.”
The book provides: a mythology for the ancient Iranian people, accounts for the beginning and the end of the world, along with the first man, and describes the haoma, or tree of immortality, which good men will drink from upon the Day of Resurrection.
One of the major themes is an immense respect for the environment, which man can only pollute with his death. Dogs are the equals of human beings. The animal world is divided up into good and evil too. Hedgehogs, weasels, and foxes all fight daevas or demons; and the ant too, “Do not harm the corn-carrying ant.” This was something too much for Ferdowsi himself a millennium later, according to Darmesteter, and Ferdowsi drew the line there.
The book is not for general consumption, without a good introduction. The terminology is archaic, and the Avestan names overcrowd the text, which is in need of a glossary. Scholarly indeed, and in that sense tedious; but it is still remarkable, given the age and its longevity, for its unique culture. It sheds light on man’s past when without medicine or empiricism—and these were one of the civilized peoples of the world—man mapped out a reality with which to understand nature, and nature to the Magian peoples was always surrounded and permeated with death.
I am interested in the Sacred Books of the East, or any classics, and the Zend Avesta has always been on my list. It was useful to me read it, instead of read about it. There is much there that bears more scrutiny, in particular the religious aspect in so far as it becomes a philosophy, and the curious role of haoma, in the ceremonies.
I wish now to read the Gathas.