The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c4.s1: 1

The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c4.s1

Language: English

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To say that a society and its culture depend on tradition is as good as tautological. Tradition, therefore, cannot but share in the flexibility and adaptiveness of culture. It is not only permissive of change, it can even be seen to be the means to formulate and legitimize change. It is not necessary to revise the long-standing and largely inconclusive tradition-modernity debate and to argue once more the resilience and adaptiveness of tradition¹. Nonetheless "traditional society," if not a term of opprobrium, for all its nostalgic value, still describes a world seen as irrationally resisting change, a world without history other than aberration, decline, and final failure. This notion, though eroded by undeniable economic and technological progress, is still applied with much conviction to India, especially when it comes to her problems and shortcomings. India continues to be seen as the repository of hallowed but obstructive tradition. This seems especially to be the case in the matter of caste, which is considered to hold Indian society in its iron grip. It may be that the lingering notion of India's persistent traditionality owes much to the observer's feeling of having lost his own traditional moorings, which makes him cast around for the certainty of tradition. India thus becomes a screen on which to project our nostalgia for a world we have lost, even when we know that the good old times were not all that good.

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Granted, Indian civilization in no small degree contributes to the notion of a predetermined and immutable order of things. Its scriptures do indeed strongly project the image of a monolithic world order, the *dharma*, although man can and will deviate from it. The rule of dharma may diminish as a result of the progressive decadence of the world but the dharma itself is still there as the incontrovertible and immutable model. Man can always, alone if not collectively, return to the rightful path of the dharma's universal order.

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This is a powerful ideal. Here it will no longer do to invoke the flexibility and adaptiveness of tradition. The well-known statement on the essential dharmic behavior proper to each of the four ages—austerity, knowledge, sacrifice, and gift—is not meant to give a brief for change. It only reflects man’s diminished capacity to live the dharma in full. The atemporal dharma itself, however, remains immune to the changes of the ages.² Man will be ignorant and confused because “Dharma and Adharma do not go about saying here we are, nor do gods, gandharvas, or ancestors say: This is dharma that is adharma.”³ But this does not affect the integrity of the eternal dharma. The proper guideline is the conduct of the correct and well instructed, the *śiṣṭa*, who acts disinterestedly and without any mundane attachment. The essential condition of true dharmic behavior is the absence of worldly cause or motivation.⁴ In this way, the dharma presents itself as the unbroken tradition of a monolithic and eternal order carried forward over the generations by the disinterested conduct of the *śiṣṭas*.

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There is, then, strong support for the notion of India’s unchanging tradition which goes well beyond mere resilience under pressure of changing circumstances. It is even guaranteed against such pressures by the absence of worldly causes or motivations. But it is exactly this unworldliness that brings out a problem. The dharma is universal and as such must take into account worldly concerns and interests, but at the same time its atemporal character requires a total withdrawal from those secular realities. The dharma does not propound a fixed institutional order, as we are all too prone to assume; it poses an insoluble dilemma.

Linked texts (1)

Mahābhārata — Vyāsa, Sanskrit