The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His Time

8. Purusottama

We cannot do without the Orient. Open and free communication with it must exist. —Schelling (1806)1 And to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths. . . . —Walt Whitman In Mumbai near the Gateway of India, which once welcomed the English to one of the crown jewels of its empire, for a few rupees, a person can catch an old boat that travels into the harbor. The Gateway arch is near one of the grandest historic hotels in India, built in retaliation by the wealthy Parsi J. N. Tata for allegedly being denied entrance into one of Europe’s premier lodgings. Mumbai , one of the largest and most congested cities in the history of the earth, is also a city of Hindus and Muslims and is still haunted by the tensions that erupted during the Partition. It is a city full of temples and mosques as well as sa\dhus and sufis. Amidst the complexity of Islam and the countless expressions of Hinduism, such as S:iva, Vis≥n≥u, Brahma\, and Kr≥s≥n≥a, one also finds Sikhs and Jains, even Buddhists. Indeed, Mumbai is a vivid reminder that there is no such thing as an essential India, but rather there are ceaseless Indias, prompting the question, “Of whose India are we speaking?” Perhaps this heterogeneity is true of all places, but the extravagant diversity of India emphatically exemplifies it. Yet amidst the wealth of heterodoxy that lacks a clear, general explanatory principle and instead suggests a history of countless layers, one can nonetheless 219 8 Purus≥ottama travel into the harbor on an old boat to the island of Elephanta. There, amidst the vendors and rhesus monkeys, one can walk to the ancient caves of S:iva. Carved out of a hill, damaged by the gunshots of Portuguese soldiers, these stone monuments still speak of a unity among difference and difference among unity—a unity without foundation or true subject, a unity that is a figure for the play, the lêla\, of difference. Despite their proximity to a teeming populous, these caves must once have seemed remote, as if they were the conclusion of some long pilgrimage. They do not form the center of some city or town, but are located in a peripheral place. In a way their location is analogous to Kr≥s≥n≥a’s instruction to Arjuna to learn to meditate on the great divine secret by first learning to meditate on the tip of his nose.2 The nose seems like an arbitrary and unimportant location to begin training oneself to eventually behold the greatest of all mysteries , and indeed it is. Yet Vis≥n≥u is in all things: all things are its avatars, not just the institutions set aside for holy activities. All of nature—forests and mountains as well as cities and towns—is the temple. So too are the caves of S:iva, set aside as if they were on the nose of the earth, announcing to guests that they are now at the center of the world, nay, at the center of nature itself.3 The most prominent figure in the cave is the imposing trimu\rti or threefaced S:iva. Here one finds the face of the destroyer to one side, the creator to the other side, and, holding the two together in deep and abiding serenity, its eyes in the almost closed pose of sama\dhê, is the preserver. It holds together creation and destruction, life and death, natality and fatality—the conjunction that is the unity of a deeper life. And furthermore, the three faces of S:iva—qua faces—are the face, so to speak, of the S:iva that never emerges into visibility, that renders this depiction , despite its prescience, as yet more strands of Ma\ya\. If the hidden face were to appear, were, so to speak, to reveal itself, creation would not be able to endure the absolute range of its destruction.4 In this concluding chapter I will meditate upon the trimu\rti S:iva, and I propose to do so by bringing together two unlikely figures, Schelling and the early twentieth-century Indian Philosopher Sri Aurobindo Ghose. Furthermore , I will attempt to loosely direct my analysis around their complimentary readings of the Bhagavad-Gêta\, looking primarily at Schelling’s discussion of it in his 1842 Berlin lectures on the Philosophie der Mythologie (chiefly lectures 20–22).5 I will attempt to reinforce Schelling...