Detranscendentalizing Canons

Mahesh Paudyal

One of my students and a youth activist Ganesh Aagam Dhungana recently twitted, “To those people who ask you the relevance of ancient wisdom, ask back, ‘What is the relevance of the sun and the moon?’”To this, an American follower Sean Casey  wrote a rejoinder: “I find that ‘ancient wisdom’ often reflects ideas made to get men in power and keep them in power. Tradition is largely the blind belief in old ideas for nostalgia more than reason. Ideas/beliefs aren’t right just because they’re old.”Christine Toniolo, another commentator wrote, “I am not sure if I understand all in English, but I am always surprised about Nepal: tradition is always present, too much for me! And sometimes I think it does not help this country to make progress!”

Joining the discussion, Art Kaufman of the World Movement for Democracy wrote, “I think the important thing is the dialogue between the old and the new based on reason. It is the most difficult thing because much of what has to be considered is intangible. But since only human beings, to my knowledge, are capable of reason, it seems incumbent upon us to use it to determine what should be carried forward and what should be left behind in our civilizations. And in some cases, our decisions based on reason may need to be tempered somehow by the intangible things we choose to keep with us.”

The tweet and the comments that followed lead up to a discussion: how we the easterners look at tradition, and how the Westerners see in our obsession with tradition the very roots of our underdevelopment. In fact, our chauvinistic mindset immediately inspires us to brush aside every comment that comes against our faith, but then, when reviewed objectively, there is a lot of food for thought in what the Americans wrote against the tweet. What they said has given me grounds to confirm one of my old convictions: tradition is too much in us! Yet, the need for discriminating tradition with ancient wisdom is always dire!

A case came up in one of the literary gatherings held a year back in Dhading, where most of the prominent critics had convened. In the midst of the discussion, an issue popped us: Devkota has more limitations than strength! He is dismally impracticable, and rests mostly on vague abstractions and fantasies. No sooner had the critique been made than a group of Sanskrit-background critics rose, pounded on the table and said, Devkota was beyond criticism.

Over the years, I have very closely observed not only literary exercises, but also social activism that takes ‘tradition’ as something taken for granted. A group of Oriental scholars teach the Nepalese youth to take pride in what they call ‘ancient glory’, and their citations are ancient astrology that named the planets before Copernicus, or stitched an elephants’ head on Ganesh’s torso and made him living. These ancient references, undistinguished as myth or science, have crept into the mass mind in religious wrappings, and have stayed ever since as unquestionable noble truths.

Such transcendentalization — of literary, religious or cultural canons — and making them a reason for puffed hubris is extremely dangerous. In the first place, it makes an individual retrospective, and seldom visionary. Those who rejoice in the past are like grave-diggers in Hamlet, trying to strike at something formidable, and ending up in nothing but humor in spite of their own honor.

One classic case of the fate of retrospective and prospective civilizations can be drawn from the Greek and Latin experience. The more or less abstract education of the ancient Greeks taught their children to philosophize, while those in Roman civilization taught construction. After two millennia, Greece is at the nadir or its economic, infrastructural and intellectual development, whereas the Romans—Italians today—stand as one of the most coveted nations of the world. The question is: what happened to Sophocles, Aristotle, Plato, Alexander the Great, Acropolis or Troy?

The same applies to Nepal. We have three important pedestals upon which we rest our claim of pride for our ancient glory. First, we have Mount Everest some natural disaster somehow placed on our chest and asked us to cash it. And, in the long run, we could not. One simplest example is the fact that though we are owners of eight of the fourteen eight-thousand plus mountains of the world, our mountaineering guides come with a certificate from Swiss Alps. Aren’t we ourselves expected to produce mountaineering guides for the entire world, as owners for the Himalayas? Our second claim for ancient glory is the Buddha, whose accidental birth in our territory has given us an interminable squabbling ground for political reasons, while countries neighboring ours have shown us how the Buddha could be assimilated in life! One simplest example to support this claim is that, at most of the Buddhist shrines and monasteries inside Nepal, the prayer flags have writings foreign to Nepali eyes. In short, an ordinary Nepali cannot read what is written on Buddhist prayer flags. And ironically, the Buddha is a glory of Nepal!

Our third claim for mastery over ancient wisdom is the possession of the Vedas and scriptures following them, including the Puranas, Upanishads and the Brahman scriptures. But less than one percent of the total Nepali population today—sorry for this vague speculation—can tell for sure what the Vedas are all about. Irony!

These experiences warn us not to befool ourselves by citing stars at the distant sky. The Westerners constantly debated with their own past, and revolted, and even rebelled when necessary and invented executable truths. When Gionardo Bruno and Galileo undid Biblical claims about the Universe, the firmament did not rupture. When Allan Sinfield and Jonathan Dollimore called Shakespeare a political, especially a colonial thinker, Western episteme did not collapse. When the feminists found moles on the heart of John Milton, Milton discourses did not end. Yet, every single critical revision of the past their made the canon more timeless, and the West more powerful.

At ours, after naming the Buddha and Mount Everest—both accidental happenings—I see no third invention of our intellect upon which we could brag with dignity. Over the centuries, we have not been able to build an edifice of knowledge or development that we can patent. Our obsession with the distant past, and our dismally myopic attitude towards the future are reasons for the same. We make a hue and cry when someone picks up Devkota and says, his Muna-Madan, in spite of its sweetness and poignancy, is ‘politics of emotion’, but we seldom stop to think if this criticism is right. We have always gullibly believed that Devkota was totally sublime, Shankar Lamichhane was the peak of personal essays, Parijat was an existentialist writer and Mohan Koirala launched our modernism in poetry.

Such belief, over-reliance on authority and obsession with distant, unverified past makes us a very un-critical generation. And un-critical generation does not often invent. We ought to not always believe the Westerners’ critique of our failure at present because of the way we handle ancient wisdom, but we must definitely see why the tradition did not work! At some point of this contrapuntal reading, I am sure we will discover where our tradition did not work for us, or where our ancient wisdom was lopsided. We must take this courage to detranscendentalise our canons. Only then can we raise our first step towards real intellectual development.