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Oppiliappan List Archive: Message 00115 Sep 2003

 
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A few years ago there was a report in an Indian newspaper about how a 
majority of candidates taking an All-India Civil Services examination 
failed to give correct answers to questions like "Who was the author 
of the Vishnu-Sahasranama?", "What is "ashva~mEdha-yagnya", "Name the 
6 chapters of the Ramayana". 

I was once watching a Quiz-show on popular TV. The brightest pair of 
students from a prestigious school in New Delhi was competing and 
they had ready answers to posers like "Who is the author 
of "Canterbury Tales" but were stumped when asked "Who wrote 
the "vivEka-choodAmani"? 

It is general fact that amongst the youth of India today, whether at 
home or abroad, there is little awareness of nativity and roots ... 
or of religion, traditions, customs, manners, history or literature.

Sadly, the ignorance of adult Indians exceeds even that of their 
young brethren. One day some years ago I ventured to conduct my own 
version of a lunch-hour gallup poll amongst a dozen collegues of mine 
at office (all highly educated, wordly-wise and hailing from 
different parts of India). Seated around a table in the cafeteria, I 
casually put to them a question, "What is Vedanta?". Their answers 
were amazingly varied, beginning with the rather rude "I don't know, 
I don't really care" to the vague and uncomfortable, "I don't really 
know, but I guess it's the stuff Vivekananda -- or Chinamayananda and 
the like -- deal with". The polled responses revealed to me the 
varying degrees of ignorance prevailing amongst modern-day ordinary 
Indians about Vedanta. Not one came up with the simple, direct answer 
I was expecting viz.: "Vedanta is Indian philosophy". 

************

Ever since I did the poll, I have often found myself wondering why at 
the very mention of the word "Vedanta", ordinary Indians today (like 
my friendly office co-workers, for example), become embarrassed or 
discomfited. Why do they respond with feelings that one can only 
characterize as uneasy, lukewarm or callous --- feelings such as 
apathy, disinterest, derison and ignorance? To me the answer seems to 
be this: 

The average Indian today prefers to pursue the practical to the 
virtual exclusion of the profound. "Philosophy bakes no bread; so why 
waste time on it?" is the argument. I I have heard many close friends 
and colleagues similarly saying to me, "Our religion, philosophy, 
Vedanta, 'pUrANa' and all that... of what practical use really are 
they to me in the present day? What relevance do they have in the 
world we live in? A world plagued by terrorism, war, job-losses, HIV 
and ozone-depletion? I find I'm better off just concentrating on my 
work, profession or career. I'd rather put my faith in the 
motto, "Work is Worship". As for religion, Vedanta and all that... 
well, my mantra has always been: "Ignorance is bliss".

The oft-quoted mantra of "Ignorance is bliss" is a clever but 
specious quip. It has raised the status of Ignorance to a modern 
pseudo-virtue. Many Indians (especially "young and upwardly-mobile" 
members of the SriVaishnava community) are quite fond of quoting it 
to justify to themselves their general indifference to all things 
religious or scriptural. But they actually do so rather unthinkingly. 
What they believe is some kind of wise maxim is actually a statement 
of sad and profound irony. They have no idea of its original source. 
The line appears at the end of a poem by the English poet Thomas Gray 
(1716-1771) titled "Ode on a distant prospect of Eton College":

"Alas, regardless of their doom
The little victims play!
No sense have they of ills to come
Nor care beyond today: ....

Yet ah! why should they know their fate .....
Thought would destroy their paradise...
where Ignorance is bliss,
'Tis folly to be wise.

The "Ode" by Thomas Gray is a poem of great moral despair and it ends 
with those famous lines on a deeply ironical note. It was written at 
a time when England was in the throes of great economic and social 
turmoil caused by the advent of the Industrial Revolution. The poet 
was reflecting upon the many ills and injustices that were 
bedevilling his country but of which his countrymen, the silent and 
thoughtless majority, seemed utterly ignorant. The line "Where 
Ignorance is bliss, 'Tis folly to be wise" actually was meant to 
describe the young but ignorant English masses of those times. They 
had really "no sense of ills to come"; they didn't seem to 
know "their fate". They busied themselves only with the humdrum, day-
to-day cares of personal life and livelihood. They did not seem 
to "care beyond today", believing that any thought of the Beyond 
would only "destroy their (petty, private) paradise". 

No one who really knew the context or significance of Gray's famous 
line would ever really wish to quote it to make a moral case for 
Ignorance. 

***********

Vedanta is generally acclaimed to be India's highest contribution to 
human thought and civilization. The first Western philosopher to come 
across Vedantic literature (the Upanishads) was the great Arthur 
Schopenhauer. After reading the Upanishads he made a famous statement 
about it:

"From every sentence deep, original and sublime thoughts arise, and 
the whole is pervaded by a high and holy and earnest spirit. In the 
whole world... there is no study.. so beneficial and so elevating as 
that of the Upanishads. They are destined sooner or later to become 
the faith of the people". 

Schopenhauer's statement is to Vedanta what the astronaut, Neil 
Armstrong's statement was to Man's historic landing on the Moon: "One 
small step for man; a giant leap for mankind." It is therefore one of 
the saddest stories of the times that India's Vedantic 'step', 
representing one of the most historic 'leaps' of human thought in the 
history of mankind, did not, alas, become the "faith of the people" 
as Sri.Schopenhauer had predicted. Not even 1 in a 1000 people in 
India today -- not even those who might regard themselves 
as "religious-minded" or "God-fearing" -- might be able to correctly 
name, if asked, the 10 principal Upanishads! Vedanta does not anymore 
cause (as once it did) Indian hearts to flutter, as proudly as the 
glorious tri-colour. The average Indian, instead, finds far greater 
reason to gloat that his great country today contributes to, say, 
making some odd new suite of Microsoft-software run successfully in 
America...

Young India today represents the complete triumph of the practical 
over the profound. And the general consequence: young India prides 
itself on its roller-coaster romance with mundane-ness... a romance 
in which Ignorance rules bliss as surely as the heart rules the head. 

***********

(to be continued)

dAsan,
Sudarshan





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