Sufism and the Yogic Bodies

[Music] [Music] for the sake of Discovery the term entanglement is one which I have not approached as a technical one but I'm interested in metaphors that we use for classification of culture and I'm tired of syncretism of these uh metaphors which presuppose uh dietic oppositions that are imperfectly mixed up together and treated in a derogatory fashion uh in other words the sort of um there's a sort of essentialism that lurks beneath a lot of these terms so I was curious to think about a couple of texts that deal with the problem of uh the yogic body that emerge from The Matrix of the the Sufi tradition uh and before I get into that I want to give a a little transition from what we've just been hearing from uh kalman's really excellent uh presentation in involving issues of translation the examples I'm going to give to you uh are part of a larger project that I'm working on with a a group of Scholars which we called the perso Indica project and this is investigating describing and analyzing a millennium long translation movement from Sanskrit into Persian and um this has been neglected and considered u in the words of one scholar to be the realm of homeless texts which are neither claimed by the Indians because they're not Indian enough nor by the Persians because they're not Persian enough to fit the demands of modern nationalistic identities so um there's an enormous literature we hope to be producing the first of four volumes of descriptive uh articles uh within the next couple of years with a treatment of about 75 texts dating from the period before the emperor Akbar uh that is to say before 15 uh 5 three is that about right Bruce uh so that is a background and I'll also throw out another term of uh perhaps a couple of statistics about that just to give you a some reference it's been pointed out by Juan Cole that in the year 1600 in Persia proper there were about 150,000 readers of Persian literate people in other words at the same time there were about a million in India many of them Hindus uh Persian was a language which according to Hanway and Spooner exercised a greater Monopoly over literacy during the Millennium that ended in the 19th century uh than any other language in other words Geographic and temporal reach compared to Arabic Latin Chinese or Sanskrit uh Persian was the most dominant language of literacy so that's sort of a context for the U discussion I'm going to give you today the illustration is from a manuscript that you can examine yourself if you go over to the uh rare book collection in the Wilson Library uh it's from a text which is one of two I'm going to talk about today the Bal hayat or the ocean of Life by a Sufi named Muhammad G uh composed around 1550 and I'll show you a couple of I'll show you one comparison of three different copies of a particular uh illustration from from different different manuscripts so um let's take a look I want to start off with a some general remarks about the concept of the body in Islamic culture just to take a starting point and then I have two texts to look at the first one attributed to mooin chishi the most famous of the great Sufi who came into India in the early uh 13th century although there were some Curiosities about the text which I'll explore then second is the ocean of Life by Muhammad k for fun I want to take a look at some diagrams of um the chakras that we find in some of the manuscripts and then I'll have a concluding postcript uh to reflect on is and the fundamental issue that we have here is that in Islamic culture if we follow the suggestions of shahad Basher in his article on body in the book critical terms in Islamic Studies he talks about three types of body the first being the microcosm of the macrocosm this is the galenic body of greo Arabic Medical Science the four humors the four elements the 12 signs of the zodiac the seven planets are all interconnected on the surface of it there's nothing particularly Islamic about this it's inherited from the from the Greeks but it was deeply edged into the perception of the world in uh Islamic culture and as far as the sufis are concerned this is the most relevant category of body Shazad also refers to the body as regulated by Islamic law and the extraordinary bodies of figures like the prophet Muhammad and Mary but that is a different subject so let me take you into these texts and so the first one is the uh Trea us on the body by muan chishi this is from a mugul miniature which depicts him as kind of the uh Master of the world he is known popularly as uh the Emperor of India and his Shrine in ajmir is perhaps the most heavily attended site of pilgrimage for uh Sufi shrines in in that region attracts probably a million and a half pilgrims every year uh many of them non non-muslims um here's a famous U miniature painting from the Mogul era which has there's two figures you can see in the center if you if you can uh look in the second row from the top the taller of the two is identified as Moine chishi and this is said to be his tomb in ajmir with dervishes going into ecstasy and down in the bottom row is a group of Hindu Aesthetics which includes Kabir and many other important figures uh famous from the uh the stories of uh bakti devotionalism and other forms of spiritual uh training but it's interesting that they sit in a separate row and so this is s suggestive of perhaps this problem of entanglement uh if we can try that metaphor out at this point um sharing the same spaces occupied with many of the same concerns but perhaps sitting in a different section so the Trea on the human body is an interesting uh work uh the title is R vuda now now if you know anything about the vocabulary of Arabic you're going to say wait a minute this is not about the human body this is about existence because the term wud means being or existence in the philosophical uh tradition but there's an older meaning of the term which is the human body and this text has nothing to do with metaphysics of the Aristotelian uh type that we'd find in the works of Ian Cena and others the there are a little over more than 20 manuscripts which the earliest is dated 1673 uh that is to say uh about 450 years after the death of M now that in itself is not an argument against its uh authenticity we have very few manuscripts from as early as the 13th century but there are some problems about the authorship for one thing although madin chishi and his immediate successors are incredibly respected and famous according to his fifth generation Su successor nin Mahmud chag none of them wrote anything nevertheless Works appeared to fill the Gap including conversations discourses Etc and this little uh text which is not very long in the different copies there are numerous different titles which you can see on the screen um some of which talk about breathing some of which talk about veins uh yoga the horizons and the souls this is reference to a chonic verse which helps to connect the Heavens to the inner uh part of the human being uh and so forth uh the structure of the text is uh threefold or three chapters and I will read you uh the opening section of this it begins very abruptly no introduction whatever but it launches directly into descript description of physiology know that in the human being the first thing that appeared was the vein called sukna then came ingula and pingala these are the three veins now if you're a yoga Enthusiast you might have run into something similar to this uh in the Sanskrit form it's suum and but you will find that the two uh subsidiary nerves that uh this is the nerve that goes up the spine they're called AA and pingala but here we have a vernacularization ingala pingala sometimes H ping and so um in other words it gets really technical but in a very locally inflected way uh right from the start uh this chapter uh then goes on to give you further details about the smaller veins the 360 ones that in other words it's a a data heavy description of physiology subtle physiology which is not visible to the naked eye and talks about how you can go into 40-day Meditation Retreat and control your breath the second chapter is quite different it tells us about how God using quranic references created the four elements the four breaths the four Realms the four souls you're seeing all these patterns here uh the Zodiac the planets and the terms macrocosm and microcosm are abundantly uh used here these two chapters look like they're completely detached from each other the first one is all all indic and the second one is all Islamic they are however connected in the third chapter where the four breaths are connected with angels of uh konic background and I'll show you a chart which depicts them then most amazingly we have a description of the Ascension of the Prophet Muhammad into heaven which is of course one of the central revelational event of his story there it turns out what he the secret that he really learned was the secret of the yogic body moreover he confided this secret to mooin chishi who is referred to only the third person however and he's told not to reveal it to anyone except those who are his loyal followers so this is an amazing uh little project and I'll show you some of the visual aspects of it this is from the Persian text this is a relatively recent manuscript which uh was sent to me by um someone that people in this room know uh Pier Zia in IAT Khan who got his PhD from duke around uh 10 12 years ago and he sent me a couple of these copies from his own library and asked me to translate them they're kind of wildly different considering they're supposed to be the same text this is how we would translate this diagram it's got the four elements and then the four different types of soul from the chonic psych ology uh this is uh where we find the entangling of the two different kinds of uh religious Traditions taking place here's a more complicated series of uh correspondences in which we have four parts of the body the ear the top of the head the navl and the tongue correlated with different Realms of the universe colors tastes Etc and most interestingly breath measured by fingers what does this mean it's the amount of force that the breath has coming from that particular location that it will Ex be expelled so many fingers distance from the nostrils and there's another interesting uh Gambit that takes place here which is um probably first attested in the U late 15th century by a chishi Sufi named Abdul kadus who can who takes a particular quranic verse or two verses 17 and 80 from the 17th Surah and this is a these two verses are often thought to encourage uh late night meditation because it uses the term tahajud uh the hour of the first watch this is the extra credit prayers uh that you can do by staying up late at night and um there we find two phrases that are put into the accusative the exalted station and the sustaining power M mm and sulan N these now become turned into two stations of spirit ual attainment both of whom which are referred to as Sultan not in the sense of a royal uh title but a proof or power at least that's the quranic uh uh sense so now the text refers repeatedly to Sultan nir and Sultan Mahmud using these two quranic passages to locate the experiences of the yogic body to summarize I think what how I would describe this is an adoption of the yogic physiology and an assimilation to Islamic cosmological views most powerfully is there the attribution to Islamic authorities and then this uh textual uh connection as well to the Quran these are the kind of devices that are being used to connect these two uh bodies of knowledge so now we'll quickly look at the second text and I this is a very complicated project I've been working on for many years and um I have a volume of essays that just came out that cover most of this but I'm going to have to try to summarize this at some point in the next couple of years the the ocean of life is the third of three translations uh that go back ultimately to a completely an unknown text in Sanskrit in other words it's stated to be translated from a text we have the title of but there are no known copies of this text in existence uh however they're actually based upon an Arabic version that was circulated probably around the 15 around 1500 and um the uh redactors of these different Persian translations complain that the earlier ones got the mantras all wrong which is easy to do in the Arabic script and I won't go into the background but anyway uh the third translation was uh achieved by a Sufi named Muhammad R who died in 1562 this is his Shrine in Northern India in the town of guor uh built supposedly by the emperor Akbar and Muhammad gra is also famous for his prominent disciple Tansen the great musician of the court of Akbar um he wrote this text uh in 1550 when he was in garat during the interregnum when um akbar's father homayun was expelled from India by a rival Dynasty um there are four copies known to be Illustrated with uh full page uh depictions of yogic postures these are probably the earliest paintings that depict yogic postures uh in portrait form and they were done as accompaniments to the Persian text uh illustrating each of them has 21 illustrations it's the same program as you can see see from comparison just a quick glance at these three you can see that the same basic design is in place although there are some differences in style and focus so for instance the the large uh earrings of the not jois which you can see in the left-and portrait and on the right are not present in the second one which is the UNC copy and there differences in the vegetation that one on the right looks like a piece of kale to me okay um the oldest of them is the Chester batty Library copy uh which is dated to about 1604 and it's been convincingly suggested that this was commissioned by the uh jangar while he was sitting around waiting for Akbar to die because he also we also know that he commissioned a number of other manuscripts on on Hindu topics during that time um so these are apparently taken from life from uh models um art historians have talked about possibly four different painters employed in this but uh the depictions of the postures are reasonably clear although I wouldn't try this at home and uh how are we doing on time when when did we start start at 5 o' okay so if there's any questions I can you know give you a sample of a description of one of the postures interestingly in the text um it although Muhammad is familiar with the term Asana or which is what we use for the postures he describes them as recitations of chance zicker in other words the key thing for him is not the physical attitude but what you are saying that is the essence of it what you are reciting and he also combines the term ziker with the Hindi word shabda now before I these are just for fun these views of the chakras I'd like to read you what Muhammad GA says about the body because he has a relatively sophisticated description of uh the problems going on he notes that the yogis regard the spirit as Eternal and primordial the Quran however tells us that the spirit was created by God basically he says it doesn't Accord with the theory of the yogis this should be compared he says so that it becomes the actual condition and the correctness of their unveiling is corrected its practice is produced as a condition requires the siddi yogis say we are in agreement with the realized dervishes the sufis regarding the essence of spirit in so far as things descend manifest and progress very neoplatonic formulation he says this is true but in recognizing reality they have left out they the Sufi have left out something which he calls the link the order of JIS has found the link they preserve and follow it because from the link of the body knowledge of reality appears when they preserve this perfectly by this link the perfect encounter is attained whatever manifests is from the link of the body the order of JIS say however much the body ages it gives a different description and they realize more and more for this reason preserving the body is necessary so this becomes a justification of of the practice of yoga he says that this does not fit with the theological or cosmological doctrines of Islam but it works so there's a cognitive issue here that is quite complicated and I'll be interested to hear what your thoughts are whether entanglement does helps us to understand this properly um and I think I've got about five minutes for my presentation so um I'll just show you a few of these illustrations and I'll take you to a concluding problem um the one this is a depiction of the constellations of the of the heart which seems to rely a bit more on Islamic precedents uh than Indian ones but there's we have in fact a Bismillah in the vertical section and then we have on the left and the right we have different psychological qualities uh described but the chakras are quite fascinating uh these are from some manuscripts in uh Hyderabad India which uh use uh some nice quantities of gold leaf for to good effect in many of the manuscripts the illustrations are path pathetic and U badly done and often turn into Arabic letters because that's what the scribes know how to do but these are kind of interesting we're looking at the seven chakras and uh going from number one at the base of the spine up to the top of the head sometimes they're wildly different the one on the right is from a print lithograph printed Edition that was produced about 1895 one on the left suggests a kind of nested Mandola you can see some Arabic script creeping in's chakra what is a chakra in yogic uh psychology psychophysiology there are seven it's a circle and there are seven of these spots ranging from the base of the spine all the way up to the crown of the head and this is where the powers of psychic energy are released by um juxtaposition of chanting mantras and uh sometimes visualizing deities or uh spirits and this was uh transmitted in this particular text in the seventh chapter in particular there's detailed discussion of this of the chakras most of the time I mean they're just called places spots but um I'm sure there are places in in Durham and Chapel Hill where you can learn how to open up your chakras uh for a reasonable fee carbo of course um it has a rather original thing at the end where there's a a meditation which I haven't seen in textual form elsewhere where you combine all seven chakras into your visualization field at once and then amazing things happen now um the last thing I want to conclude with is a kind of a postcript because I G well let me just summarize the uh the strategy of Muhammad G it's pragmatic he actually spent a couple of years hanging out with with JIS and his Persian translation of the preceding Arabic text is about five times as long as its original it's Amplified with a lot of stuff that he added from additional sources there is this rather Frank acknowledge ment of uh doctrinal conflict which doesn't stop him from using this uh but then there are these mapping problems and I didn't give you examples of this but um in this and several other texts like it there's a reflexive turn to the four elements as the standard way of understanding any kind of natural body but the Indian categories are different in ayurveda there are the three doas and my colleague U fabrio spale who works in the history of medicine for our project has shown how awkwardly the Persian translators wrestled with the problem of mapping the three qualities of the body according to ayurvedic medicine onto the four humors of galenic medicine it's three and four are different and um the same thing happens the Indians talk about five elements all the time now you say well what about the quintessence of well that doesn't really count because it's only in the heavens but you have all five elements right here uh on Earth according to Indian cosmology so we have these ing incommensurable uh problems but what is really striking is that I think the the way that Muhammad compensates for the cognitive dissonance of these doctrinal problems is to heavily inesh his discussion with konic quotations and by uh essentially analyzing The yogic Experience through terms that are derived from the Sufi Tradition now the last thing I want to present is a little problem about these bodily entanglements which is about the female body in the in this Tradition now what is quite striking is that the oldest stratum of this in Arabic uh we find in the the ninth chapter of the pool of nectar unmistakable presence of uh feminine entities which are referred to as Spiritual Beings in Arabic ranat their names their number and their description make it unmistakable that these are the yogi goddesses a very prominent aspect of popular religion in India from probably the 10th to the 18th Century uh celebrated with open air temples uh throughout much of of India many of the uh Persian manuscripts reduce this lengthy chapter on goddesses to a single paragraph not all now how do we explain an absence one is tempted to say that there was some anxiety about these goddesses although some of the translators very cheerfully talk about how you summon these goddesses to your presence and command them with mantras and obtain amazing results there is one uh version of this text that was um acquired by an Italian traveler in Persia not in India in the 17th century petro deali and he tells us in his Memoirs that he's tried it out and it works his copy is in the Vatican Library it's the only complete version so I began to think maybe they were some kind of um in the notth ji tradition from which this comes uh it's heavily uh male oriented in terms of the practitioners and unlike the tantric Traditions uh proper uh it does not really deal with the the the feminine in any substantial way except through the highly abstract opposition between the Sun and Moon breaths associated with the left and right nostrils but when I read more extensively in this text in the 10th Final Chapter there's amazing cosmology and I've never seen anything quite like it it's simultaneously chonic and puronic it has a very poetic uh account of the origin of the world based upon the interaction between a voice and an echo but partway through it shifts into a very familiar type of narrative about the the world being formed out of a an ocean with a tree growing in the center that is rotated around this there's famous vadic and ponic myths of this type that are well known in this particular one a female figure emerges she's not given a name she looks into the palm of her hand and sees several three red blisters from which emerge none other and Vishnu Shiva and Brahma comparison indicates that this is a narrative from a text called the Davi bhavat purana a u celebration of the goddess which places her in a supreme position over those great uh three deities of uh of Hinduism what it is doing here I have no idea but it seems to me that the goddess decided to get back into the text somehow so I just am struck with the simultaneously disappearance and reappearance of the female body from this uh series of text I think I'll stop there and ask you for your comments on the proper metaphors to describe this material I was really struck by the two um visual rhetorics you might say of the pictorial the VIS material you have very pictorial Miniatures of scenes painted drawn quite realistically or relatively realistic and then you have these interesting geometrical devices these schematic diagrams can you talk I I I just love to hear you say a bit more about how these visual idioms were used differently was the diagram doing something that the pictorial scheme couldn't do and vice versa the portraits ostensibly show us how to do the posture they also depict the uh the yogis in their natural habitat in Huts in the jungle remote places usually accompanied with a little dog although they look more like cats to some and then their apparatus so it's kind of realistic in that sense but the no it's uh showing you how to put your hands on the ground and then lift your knees up and and it gives you uh I mean I can give you a description of a one of the postures if you like but um and then it tells you what to what to do and what to expect uh although I can't say that these are sufficient in themselves and even within terms of its own uh location people would say that you have to have informed instruction from a an expert rather than just use the text um given the possible commissioning of this by a royal Patron one could argue that these paintings were more of a aesthetic project than anything else and art historians have proposed there were four different painters one of whom was rather famous so that's one way of locating the the portraits uh I doubt that they were seriously intended for practitioners the copies that I've looked at that um appear to be well-used show uh marginal Corrections sometimes with regard to these little uh abstract diagrams in other words careful readers have been comparing manuscripts and noting it torial differences uh on the margins I think that these um little diagrams were intended practically to be a guide for visualization in other words that you would in effect close your eyes and try to recreate this uh this visual appearance uh through concentration well um you can find um a lot of examples of this uh in which there will be most of them that you will if you just did a Google search you would find uh a deity a mantra in Sanskrit and uh they're oftentimes arranged around the the the chart of the body uh they're sometimes called by other names like lotuses um but the other thing is that I mentioned how the different uh Persian translations complained about the earlier ones getting the mantras wrong the Arabic script is not well suited to preserving the vowels of Sanskrit and so it's really easy to see how they would have gone wrong very quickly and in this type of practice getting the mantras right is what it's all about so there's something frustratingly self-defeating about the about Lost in Translation yeah yeah David word you you translated as link when you were talking about the yogis saying you missed something and the thing that you missed was the link that you missed what what was the word that he used oh now I should be able to recall that it's a persan term it's not it's not bu it wouldn't be used to translate bu bu like the Sanskrit Bund like not well that comes up mhm but they're but that's not the word it's not like a word like that thing no no that term does appear yeah sure okay thanks I have often wondered about dark matter and dark energy our present day concepts of this and whether there is any allusion to this in the ancient manuscripts or the ancient doctrines could you in some way make some association between those Concepts that matter and energy and similar Concepts in the ancient writings you know I mean there are concepts of Chaos in the uh here tradition uh in suies talk about the Dark Mist at the beginning um I think conceptually that might there might be some matches for that sort of thing but uh highly speculative because dark matter is something which is based upon reasoning from physical science in other words it's not based on observation but there's something missing the calculation revealed we can't find any other way so I think it's probably on a different level of of knowledge you there's a tendency you know I can understand the temptation to go after it poetically I have heard [Music] one not even a hypothesis one musing that um all the souls of the Dead contribute to dark energy in the universe one might say this is are fairy stuff and so on but what goes around sort of comes around and ancient Concepts have validity in in present day nuts and Bol science so my mind goes along those way and someone as learned as you or the panelists might contribute something to help me understand what I'm saying I think it's a little out of my reach each of you has been very restrained in not asking the others questions after their talks and it sounds like now you're really starting to do that so if you could do that a bit more publicly I think we would all appreciate it so let's start with that please well we started talking about just now and we could continue a bit bit in this vein if we want to or we could switch things a bit but um you know we we've all been talking in some manner or another about bodies but the the the question or one question that came up just now is what these bodies um or the discussion about these bodies say about what we can't know about the subject that is certainly um you know when if you're going to talk about a cosmic body of God that has infinite proportions it's not a body in any conventional sort of sense that you've so stretched the definition of what a body is that it's in fact telling you that well God doesn't really have a body like that whatever that really is so the so these ways of talking about ineffability uh is it's not philosophical language it's certainly not in biblical terms but it's somehow embedded in the way you describe things paradoxically and I I think that it's actually some an element that I I may not perceive everything quite right in the other two talks but I think by resorting to some other kind of discourse other than regular sort of human bodies it captures something about The Unknown about Divine about the Divine so I'm going to actually push back Mark go ahead because one of the examples you had so I only know the biblical material well me too is the Isaiah example right which you used in your third category I use in my second Isaiah 6 is the number two no no no the Isaiah the trto Isaiah oh oh the third Isaiah Isaiah 66 666 which is which does at least have the language right so the the land is my we my foot stool right so are you really sure the Bible ever really disembodies God word uh rag I I remember so of my it's it's literally the stool of my feet okay and the word foot is very much there so sure I'm not sure I'm less sure of your third category in the Bible sure so um uh if the uh I I think they use body terms to reference or to somehow talk about this kind of category whatever it is it's certainly not the same as the first two whatever it is to my mind but bodies remain to some extent a reference point for even describing that which is Indescribable um certainly certainly if if we think of this Cosmic body I'm going to use this term I talked about the lurgical body for the second body if the third body is a kind of cosmic body metaphorical and or otherwise what it is is compared to the second body you see the foot stol of the god uh it with the second body in in in in Exodus 24 it's it to my mind it's it's not only a relocation real estate real estate real estate uh Etc but it's also a way of of reconfiguring what the feet are that is I imagine that when Moses and some of the elders Etc see this body you're seeing a body that is large but it's not something that is as large as the Earth right and that so that this means something different so that's I mean from my point of view I'd push back against you're pushing back by saying that the scale is something that it's not only using the body term but how the scale is being represented is no small part of Isaiah 661 so in other words you're saying when it's so large it's no longer it's not what they're doing is it it's like an index it's a it's pointing to something Beyond itself or beyond the the common the common understanding of what even a second body is which itself is a kind of extrapolation why why you mean why do it or why when do bodies stop being bodies I mean that's what I'm really curious about here can I jump in with something about large bodies yes I wish you I wish you would I first noticed this when I was in Central Asia I was in summeran and was taken to the tomb of job job is there sorry yeah no the AL job is there too but actually what I'm really thinking about is the tomb of Daniel okay he's there too he's there too okay uh thanks to teamour who when he got to Nineveh heard that there were amazing properties of protection in the body of Daniel and so he took it but the Tomb in uh in summeran is uh 70 ft long and the you may not most people are not aware of this but there's a tomb of Eve in jeda or there was and how long is she 200 feet all right you're serious I'm not kidding you um I'll refer you to a book by Brandon wheeler called Mecca and Eden it's a great chapter on the giant tombs they were big people in those days you know like the Giants of well AG of Bashan so that's something that's kind of hyperbole of size indicat something in other Realms as well that's my guess right but they are still regular bodies when matchs and they're dead that's true I would also add there's a it might be cited in the book you had one reference uh to an Islamic uh description of God or something like that yeah Wesley Williams article in Jos but there there's a an amazing article by Joseph vanz the German oh yeah scholar called uh the youthful God anthropomorphism in early Islam where we learn among other things that God is a man with black hair looks about 30 why 30 you may ask hasn't got his first gray hair yet and he's Hollow from the waist down and he's what hollow hollow from the waist down that part I don't understand but there is some very interesting and crazy stuff in there that only vaness could put together but it would make amusing reading for you I think comparatively because it we all know that Islamic theology downplays anthropomorphism but the face of God the hand of God are very pervasive in the quranic text and people decided not to interpret that or to interpret it rationally but not realistically but metaphors have power and when and why did that happen use it similar to what my M did with with the Hebrew Bible Cal you might want to well he was trained in Cordova you know the same school as iben rush so uh yeah rational allegory is the way to go well I don't know whether this is push or push back or pushing back against the pushing dear me but to go beyond the biblical text itself the way it was understood in the history of tradition I'm a little bit surprised that no reference has been made to the song of songs which in some people's minds is is um um a vestage of of pagan views of a physical God so that the lover being described in the Poetry of Song of Songs was originally a deity and that it got secularized to be wedding human beings and then at a subsequent point it was all understood metaphorically is physically describing the god of Israel so I'm a little bit surprised you think it's gone it goes around full Circ this can't possibly mean what it says God forbid so Song of Songs is a potential Source in the Bible yeah for physical imagining of the deity and the the language used is very Illuminating yeah the the person who I mean I I could have t i could have talked about this at excruciating length the person who proposed this Theory perhaps in the most expansive possible was my teacher Marvin pop who I referenced earlier uh who wrote a long 800 page commentary on the song of songs for the anchor Bible series little known to most people he actually submitted the manuscript it was double that length and he submitted it in handwriting in pencil um yellow pads or yeah yeah yellow pads and that that's what he submitted as his well it was another era um and yes I mean he's also the one who told me about you know the medieval Shir coma that I was mentioned before and all these other things he had worked at this very extensively you know he's he he his parts of his theory came in for certain criticisms not the least of which was by Jack sassin in M AR ra a journal in our field and I think in in in part H Jack's no longer here yeah well Jack left a little early he was I'm pointing to the trace the empty chair the empty throne here it's not cherub but it's close enough into the body yeah um and and in part you know there po Pope's theorizing about this is is especially the rub as it were between this kind of sort of literal reading of the Poetry as well the size is so great I mean this is essentially was his argument the size of these figures in the metaphors about them are so great that they have to go back to deities and I think I I I think that that that kind of level of argument for this sort of love poetry was was uh you know came in for a lot of discussion as we'll say as one would say I actually have a a kind of sympathy about this Theory I have a different configuration of it well so what else is new by Scholars but I think you know that I he was paying attention to some of the details of the text that that people resisted and so on but you know he saw deities almost everywhere um it was one it was all deities and sex for Marvin and death and dogs well he lost his dog box so he didn't he didn't have everything about the dog well that's another story but in any case um he had a very he had a great imagination and I I yes you could he could bring in Song of Songs very much into this discussion the imagery in a sense is what lines up without getting into you know what exactly these superum bodies are about well people have different views but I it's but I I found it very inspiring um as a student and then even later on are comments to each other kala wna is a really it's like the greatest bestseller before modern times the text that he was talking about it was translated into dozens of languages and appeared in English in 1570 kton kton 1570 yeah first thing was translation right yeah just saying that the uh the stories appeared in English in 1570 one of the first English Publications in the early days uh by Thomas kton I think his name was so the kalila wmna stories had such an enormous popularity what do you what do you think is the secret of its appeal see see the secret of Secret of of of its appeal and it get it keeps getting recast yeah well I think each of the places where it took root and flourished would have a different set of um explanations for why it was why grab people's imagination I don't think there's one common explanation all the way through I know that my answer to Bruce talking about the medieval period 12 13th century I think one of its appeals beyond the charm of the stories of animals behaving like humans and the adventure of what life in court is like part of the appeal was that it it's Indian origin its Providence they went out of their way to make to emphasize that these are stories that originated with the Hindu wise men and there was some that that by itself created a great deal of interest and charged the stories with more significance than eso's fables did the two streams of medieval Fable literature are the Greek ESOP stories and the other one is the khila andna collection that begins in the panchatantra and in the mahabarata so Europeans knew the Latin versions of ESOP so that creates a fertile environment for animal stories to flourish and when you get on top of the esian tradition this stuff coming from India that carries all the aura of the mysterious East and the stories are so charming and they sound so familiar but so different at the same time that they capture people's imagination I think that's that's at least in the 12th and 13th century the Jews who TR at least the one Jew who I know who translated it into Hebrew in the 13th century Jacob and ell AR we know a lot about him because he was also a poet and he wrote like alhara he wrote mamot P picaresque rhyme narratives of adventure stories tricksters and we have 10 of his mamot and they're they're wonderful acts of imagination and his interest in really subversive um um Innovative thinking was fueled by his work with the the uh the fables I think fables were a permission to people to think outside conservative traditional lines they they invited they they uninhibited thinkers so in his in his case I think he was deeply stimulated by the imaginary world of the labs and it inspired him to write the kind of um picaresque novels that he did some of them involved animals but not all of them did some of them were just love stories in which extraordinary things happened it's not animals behaving like human beings but many of his stories have crossdressing in them where women dress as Warriors and there are two women who fight over this one man and they have a tournament and they're dressed in full armor and they joust so it's just taking the basic idea of fable and transferring it not literally to human beings so I think it's inspiring creativity it's a license to uninhibit he's one of the few medieval Hebrew authors who who writes about crossdressing and by the way I think there are hints in the Hebrew versions of the hobble bird story because way Hebrew Works in grammar a dove is going to be feminine the word is Yona so when the Raven is looking at it and says the omniscient narrator says it's the most beautiful walk of all and the Raven wanted to learn how to do it so his line to her is to himself top I want to walk like her and I think the gender implications are there I don't know how many of the people in the audience picked up on it but I think that the authors of that version of the story who are writing burlesque and parody of ttic literature are playing with an ocean of crossdressing which is a which is a noce of entanglement and I think that the fables in inspired all of that kind of heterodox breaking down of barrier thinking and it all came stamped with the Providence of India i' I've become quite fascinated by the hold on medieval Jewish imagination of things India Hindu as well as Buddhist the the Buddhist biography Finds Its way into medieval Hebrew versions that's the uh well the barlam and Yap but there are other he Arabic versions of Buddha's biography that medieval Jews would have known and it you see it permeating so one of the things that's exciting to me about all of this is the boringness of interfaith dialogue Jews Christians and Muslims as if that's the the sum total of religious cultures in the world um Hinduism and Buddhism should have an equal voice in the discussion and I think by using it as leverage it'll break down some of the ethnocentricity and the narrowness of thinking scripturally based do doctrinally based that's the way the medieval Jews looked at the Indian stories it was a way out from underneath the traditional way of talking it was liberating for them so I think that today it would be a very nice thing if we can liberate ourselves elv for those people who are into interface dialogue to begin talking about on an an equal status to the so-called paganism so there's a great favor that things India could do for us so to me it was it was mindblowing my teachers in rabinal school if they thought that the ponet Tantra and the mahabarata found their way into Rabin Hebrew in the Middle Ages they wouldn't have known what to do with themselves they wouldn't have they would have denied it it can't be so but lo and behold it is so and it's very liberating yeah that's music to my soul of course what it just said um are you from India from India from lots of places here but you know mixed hybrid somehow but uh sorry I missed all the talks I was teaching a class but you mentioned the Mahabharat so I'm going to jump in without any clue of what you've talked about so forgive me if I'm really out of it but you mentioned the Mahabharata calman and uh I've just come you know we're discussing the ramayana the other epic the other Hindu epic in my class on Ray yeah and it's really fascinating just to hear you know you talk about large bodies and you know um ENT tuming them and that you know we just had this animated discussion in class about how the hero of uh the protagonist of the ramayana gets involved in a fight between two monkeys uh who uh and he shoots one of the monkeys from behind because he's pledged his allegiance to the other and it's a complicated story but the end of at the end of it what it results in is this fascinating discussion on what it means to be uh what it means to have human intelligence in an animal body and it's just this fascinating you know collation or grafting I don't know what word is maybe entanglement of U you know when that kind of Consciousness travels across different bodies what might you know what might ethics look like what might something else look like what the gender look like one of the stories that I quote is from um mahabarata and it's transmigration of a human King who is quite evil so he's reborn as a Jackle and he remembers What a wicked guy he was and he does penance for so he becomes a vegetarian Jackal and he um he's compassionate to All Creatures it's exactly that case of transmigration when the Sanskrit was translated into Persian by a Christian cleric he preserved the transmigration detail when it got into Arabic in the 8th century and thereafter they got rid of the transmigration stuff so they couldn't understand why this Jacko was a vegetarian so they had to invent other explanations because they didn't like reincarnation it was there are some Muslim groups who believed in reincarnation and there were Jewish Mystics who believed in it but mainstream Judaism in Islam and I think Christianity not happy with transmigration so they just erased that detail in the story it's exactly what your Middle Ages they erased we shouldn't do that in the 20 first century well the mahabarata is certainly one of those ethics which is replete with discussions of what it means to have a body in the first place you know um just any kind of species encased in any kind of body means what and you know you talk about transgender and transvest there's there's a fantastic sub thread in the Mahabharata in which a woman is uh you know is is wronged and she takes the body of a man in order to avenge her killer and then she's stuck in this body because she's exchanged it with someone else and so what is that all that you know so this you know I don't know if you remember this but you know this whole question of what it means to be inhabiting another body uh and when especially when you can't return to your original what does that do to memory and to you know the infractions that come with that it's just kind of fascinating stuff out there Lily your comment inspires me to think about a text that I should be using in my Islamic civilization course next year which is the debate between the animals and the humans yeah about who should have priority and every argument that the humans say strength there's an animal that can beat that speed you know you go down to the list everything mental acuity there's nothing that's left untouched because I add a footnote from that same pass that same text the humans say that we're Superior in animals should be our slaves we can do whatever we want with them and to prove that the animals say prove it and the humans say well God sent us religion he revealed prophets Revelation law prayer and so the animals response saying all of that counts against you God religion is like a doctor being sent you only call a doctor if you're sick you human beings are so corrupt that God needed to give you religion we animals don't need religion because we're not as wicked and rebellious and as awful as you are and that's very typical of of the way the story goes yeah it's a powerful story oh yeah it's terrific oh yeah translated into Hebrew in the 14th century my guys knew it very well and wrote about her did they herze it in any way did they herraiz it or judaize it they they just translated the Arabic into Hebrew they even translated literally when it said the Quran given by God through his true Prophet Muhammad when the translator got to that passage he translated it literally he preserved it literally where was it where did he where is it preserved it's preserved if you read Arabic you'll find it in the Epistles of the Yana saf and if you don't there's a new translation by L Goodman okay this was um an encyclopedia produced by a group they call themselves the Brethren of Purity and they had 52 Epistles or letters or texts ranging from music and Pythagorean mathematics to astronomy everything and so this is the sort of Pinnacle of the of the text it's number it's the last tretis if I'm not mistaken it's in the section on Natural Science after they introduce Aristotelian physics on what animals are then after they finish the science he can't hear you oh it comes at the end of the section and the na the encyclopedia has a section devoted to the Natural Sciences so there's a section about animals and it gives very scientific information when they're finished with that so now we've got it now that we've described you how animal bodies work we want to show you how bad human beings can be even though they have the potential to being angels and they tell this extended fable about how the animals rebel against humans and in order to get Justice they bring their case to the king of the Jin we need somebody neutral so they have a trial and the hum a thousand years ago yeah in Baghdad and the the you'll find the text translated by Len Goodman and the title of the thing is a trial of animals versus humans in Thea in the king of the Jin very it's readily available published by The isma Institute in London he translated he translated that text from Arabic into Hebrew Colonius spent Colonus a Jew living in southern France in the 14th century so what I am curious about as we start to bring this to a close some of you were more skeptical than others when I encouraged you to bring entanglement into the way in which you were looking at the material and most of you were not very familiar with this notion so I think it would be very helpful to hear a straightforward evaluation of of this concept both as helping us to understand how the textural material which you are looking at is very entangled and as a as a methodology for analyzing that material I'm happy to I'm happy to talk about it but I'm also happy to let you begin if you'd like well let me begin with a question to you then uh because um this is a a term which has a certain uh it's a term of art to a certain extent and so um I am thinking about it more in a metaphorical sense good um and I just would allude to uh the work of lake off and Johnson on metaphors and how they're built into our thought processes and uh the categories that we use have very physical sub references uh so [Music] entanglement suggestion very quickly the 19th century nationalism and imperialism invented the scholarly business of who influenced who the relationship between cultures was in terms of influence influence means flowing from the higher to the lower it's also astrologic well that's where come flowing down St astrological energy coming down from the Heavens to Earth entanglement is a wonderful way of displacing the imperialistic politics of influence with a better and more humane way of charting how cultures and ethnicity relate to each other so I find it I found it a useful way of replacing the obnoxiousness of influence with something much more positive [Music] um to my mind as far as I can tell um just as an observation what entanglement means uh for those who use it uh is as varied as those who use it and there is this way in which it is a very suggestive sort of metaphorical term that is in part to respond uh is is a way of trying to get away from um certain forms of certitude um and I I think and also certain ways of of sort of trying to quantify things that we study um your comment reminds me of hotter sort of saying well you know in Social Network Theory everyone was trying to sort of quantify these relationships in in all kinds of map them out and quantify them and that entanglement as a as a way of I think it's really as much as anything a kind of perspective to sort of that's pushing back against that kind of effort to um you know have things to be certain or quantify Etc because the nature of our materials are by definition to go back to Mark's almost your very opening comment about how things are messy and to sort of accept you know you you can you can you can build models uh you know for certain things but models are are very limited they're not the thing itself I mean like my three bodies is a kind of mod model or typology but it's not the thing itself I mean each passage is different and I think that entanglement to some degree helps uh it doesn't mean that we desist from analysis but there is a way in which I think uh it poses uh it's a helpful way of of posing challenge to whatever generalizations we we come up with the generalizations are useful but they also remain models and they're not the thing itself and to my mind that's that's a large part of the value of of the category um or perspective I should really say that's the way it strikes me more than anything it's not a particular way of analysis to my mind it might take that form in certain fields or among certain practitioners of a field who sort of agree but it it strikes me as as something that's so varied when you look across the fields that it's it's more kind of a a term that captures a problem about our knowledge and that we build in our own sense of the epistemological problem into our analysis and thinking and I to me that's what the value of the term is and at least as I understand it entanglement often suggests that periods geographical areas that are not directly connected should be more connected in the way in which we look at things so perhaps as a final question uh I'd really love to hear from each of you something that you're now going to look at in your own field or your own work based on the observation of observations of somebody else in the past very quickly uh from Carl's paper um you call to our attention the insistence that yoga practice was not in accord with quranic teaching that there was no attempt to synthesize them and that makes me think again in looking at the materials that I deal with usually trying to reconcile Aristotelian philosophy with tradition that maybe more often than I think the authors are trying to show incompatibility rather than compatibility so I found that very useful thank you I'm I'm not sure that that this will relate directly to entanglement per se I mean one might say these are forms of entanglement that were raised by Colman's paper and Carl's paper um but there were things that strike that struck me as things that I would like to think more about um from comm's paper translations convert into different religious Traditions translators convert to different religions struck me as a very interesting and suggestive um notion that i' I'd like to think more about in terms of ancient scribal cultures and the way that they accommodate or they appropriate uh other materials from other cultures which is a I I'm I'm starting to be involved with a seminar at Princeton at the University that simply is devoted to uh ancient textual cultures from India to Rome um and um so this is this is a a very interesting uh sort of way of thinking and to my mind it resonated with Carl's point about homeless texts as sort of the the opposite sort of phenomenon where you have you have a you have texts known in more than one culture but does do not really fit into a particular national identity struck me as again something that these are these are both forms of entanglement that I'd like to think more about uh more broadly um and I I I benefit from that I think well I think I've already revealed what I'm going to steal from calman today which is the uh the animals and the humans and and I I jumped over to the Brethren of Purity that text the debate about you know between the El but which obviously resonated with you so I feel like I've been leaving that out of the discussion but the relation between animals and humans is deeply entangled if I may say as is the relationship between gods and people and then as you said gods and animals so we have truly come full circle I would like to thank our audience and especially like to thank the three of you for wonderful wonderful papers thank thank you produced by Duke University online at duke.edu

Channel: John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke U.

Views: 118,930

Keywords: Sufism, Duke University, Yoga, Islam, Mulsim, mysticism, John Hope Franklin, Humanities Futures, humanities, Duke FHI, religious studies

Id: 7u8wfd0-QI8

Length: 87min 52sec (5272 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 28 2017