Some of the earliest documented myths come from Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent where the earliest farming communities built cities around temples. These stories spoke of gods who wanted to enjoy luxury without labour, so they created humans out of clay. That is why humans toil, serving the gods, fearful of their wrath that causes flood and famine.
This idea spread to the Greek world, which saw their gods, the Olympians, enjoying themselves in paradise, keeping all rivals at bay, distracting humans with wars and misery. The Greek hero defied the Greek gods. If he won the admiration of the gods, he was welcomed to their party. Else he was punished. The mediocre, the unremarkable were simply ignored.
But in Egypt a new idea arose, of a god who cares for humans, who became the one true god spelt in the singular with capitalisation – God. This all-powerful entity created the world for the pleasure of humans and asked them to obey his laws. This God treats all humans equally. Those who obey were rewarded with heaven. Those who disobey were punished in hell.
The idea of a transcendent God, one outside nature, became universal only after the spread of Christianity (300 AD) and Islam (700 AD). But in the East, in lands dominated by China, nature was supreme. Hunters and foragers in China believed nature showed the way – the path to food, to water, to shelters, to beauty. We just had to respect nature and pay attention to it. This was ‘The Way, Dao’.
The gods of China and Japan are nature spirits, not the transcendental divinity of the West. The gods create rhythm and balance using bureaucrats, so must humans. They know ‘The Way’.
The Chinese emperor privileged the ways that benefited humans. He established the court and imposed order. He domesticated imagination by placing value on tradition and filial piety. Virtue meant obeying parents, elders in the family and the community. Individualistic and rebellious thinking brought shame to the ancestors. This was the royal way, popularly known as the Confucian way. Walls were built to keep nature at bay.
The Chinese sage did not value rigid codes of conduct. The sage rejected structures, preferred fluidity and harmony. Everyone’s path was different. Everything needed to be balanced: masculinity with femininity; heat with cold; moisture with aridity; movement with stillness; the past with the future. This became popular as Daoism. It reminded everyone of heaven’s circularity beyond the rigid square of empire.
The Chinese emperors have always built walls – from the Great Wall to the Fire Wall – wary of foreign people and foreign ideas. Influenced by the Chinese way, even Koreans and Japanese established ‘hermit’ kingdoms, shunning outsiders.
But Buddhism from India, and later science from the West, did penetrate China. Both succeeded because they appealed both to the emperor and to the sage. However, everything the Chinese accepted was carefully filtered and adapted to find ‘The Way’.
Between East & West
India stands between the western world and the eastern world. From the West came the idea of one god (Islam, Christianity, Judaism) or one truth (individualism, liberalism, democracy, liberalism, secularism, human rights). From the East came ideas of walls (Great Walls, Firewalls) to keep out foreign ideas but embracing the dynamism of nature.
Indians found merit in all these ideas: Western and Eastern. This and That. Both. Neither. Like the Indian Headshake. This was the Indian way: using imagination to appreciate any social construct depending on the context.
The Indian way privileged imagination over culture, nature and transcendent gods. Imagination distinguishes humans from plants and animals. It is what makes humans capable of exceptional cruelty and exceptional kindness. Imagination cannot be measured or controlled. It knows no boundaries or limits. It can conceptualise both zero and infinity. It can render all structures fluid. It can construct a past and a future. It is different in different people, hidden within their bodies.
To accommodate the diversity of nature, culture and imagination, Indian sages came up the idea of rebirth. Those who ate returned to be eaten. Those who were eaten return to eat. Vedic stories spoke of visions of sages who saw themselves being eaten by plants and animals they had consumed in their lifetime. So the world is always full of predators and prey, which gives rise to allies and rivals, herds, packs and hives. Any attempt to domesticate nature, or human imagination, using cultural tools is futile.
Culture though necessary is a delusion ultimately, a limited truth. It engages in futile exercises of control and domination and conversion, striving for stability and certainty, which is never ever achieved. For the human imagination will always slip away, like water from a clenched wrist.
The Indian headshake thus captures the impermanence and limitations of all ideas, all lives, all thoughts, all gods, and an accommodation of all ideas, based on context.
