I have recently welcomed the corrective force of books like Andrew Nicholson’s Unifying Hinduism, which remind us that modern appropriations of Indian tradition have their own continuity with the evolving past tradition. I now find myself regularly reminded just how much such a corrective is needed. I have noted plenty of examples before, as with respect to Gregory Schopen and Donald Lopez. But I recently found perhaps the most striking example in the works of the contemporary Sanskrit scholar Herman Tull.
In a 1991 article on the Indologists Max Müller and A.B. Keith, Tull deconstructed Müller’s and Keith’s privileging of early Vedic tradition over various Indian traditions that would follow it, such as Sāyaṇa’s commentary on the Vedas. Tull notes that for Müller
the original meaning was forgotten and then recreated in a degenerate form, a process made famous by Müller’s colorful phrase, the “disease of language.”… That Mülller perceived such “misunderstandings” to be a disease, rather than a reinvigoration-an adding of new meaning as a way of maintaining the health of a tradition that was becoming obsolete-reflects his idealization of the ancient Aryans, on the one hand, and his disdain for “priestcraft,” on the other hand.(42)1
Elsewhere Müller describes the Brāḥmana texts themselves as “twaddle, and what is worse, theological twaddle.” (quoted on Tull 43) Tull understandably dislikes Müller’s unkind characterization of the Brāḥmaṇas and commentaries; in his title he uses Müller’s own characterization against him, referring to Müller’s privileging of the ancient over the recent as the “disease of Indology”.
Tull’s criticisms of Müller are all fairly made. But now observe what happens when Tull turns his gaze on a later interpretation of Indian by a modern and non-Indian interpreter. If we examine Tull’s bibliography on karma in the Oxford Bibliographies series, we find that his description of Annie Besant‘s book on karma appears as follows:
One of Besant’s manifestos regarding the karma doctrine; beyond her observation that karma must be viewed as a fundamental law, this booklet is filled with balderdash, such as references to “the Lords of Karma, the mighty Angels of Judgement, the Recorders of the Past” and so forth.
If there is a difference between “balderdash” and “twaddle”, it is a small one. Here we find Tull treating a modern Western reinterpretation of karma with the exact same contempt that he criticized as a “disease” in Müller and Keith. When Sāyaṇa and the authors of the Brāḥmaṇas reinterpret the Vedas for their times, it is “a reinvigoration-an adding of new meaning as a way of maintaining the health of a tradition that was becoming obsolete”. When the Theosophist Annie Besant does it, it is “balderdash” – and Tull further adds that “the underlying elements of Theosophy appear today to be outlandish at best…”
What we have here is a double standard. Tull is of course hardly alone in exercising this double standard. The critics of “Protestant Buddhism” delight in pointing out the ways in which modern Buddhists “misinterpret” earlier tradition, but make no such criticisms of medieval Chinese traditions that deviate far more from the texts they claim to adhere to. It is just that in Tull we find this double standard expressed most clearly – even though it is expressed in different writings, many years apart.
What motivates this double standard? One answer that might leap to mind is white guilt, or (more charitably) awareness of white privilege: Besant and Yavanayāna Buddhists come out of a cultural complex (the West) that wields cultural power over India, in a way that Chinese Buddhists or medieval Indian commentators did not. (Deepak Sarma’s attack on “White Hindu Converts” claims to made on such grounds.) Or could attribute it to the kind of cultural relativism that allows us to criticize only “our” culture and not others’. But this answer will not suffice, not in all cases at least. For the criticism of modernized tradition is often applied to people like Anagarika Dharmapala, born and raised as colonial subjects in South Asia.
What else is going on, then? In the particular case of “Protestant Buddhism”, one may detect a certain Catholic sectarian agenda, but one hesitates to assign such motives to writers like Tull, who do not throw around the P-word as a term of abuse. One might cite the inevitable desire of academics to proclaim themselves smarter than everybody else. One might imagine it a simple desire to criticize everything that comes out of the colonial 19th century. But one might also cite the modern Romantic desire for authenticity: those whose reinterpretations are too close to us in time, like Besant and the Buddhist modernists, seem tainted by the pandering modern consumerism we yearn to escape, in a way that Tiantai and Sāyaṇa do not.
I doubt that we can reduce this double standard to a single cause. It seems likely that several of these factors are operating at once. The more important point, it seems to me, is to recognize that this double standard operates – and that, at least as far as I can tell, it is intellectually unjustified. If we may not dismiss Sāyaṇa as twaddle, then neither should we dismiss Annie Besant as balderdash. If we do consider ourselves in a position to judge Theosophical writings as balderdash for their misinterpretations/reinterpretations, then we are effectively putting ourselves in the position to judge the Brāḥmaṇas the same way, and we should not have such contempt for those who do.
I have previously expressed my own take on the proper attitude for a philosopher to take to such thinkers who interpret their predecessors differently from the predecessors’ original context (one form of innovation through conservatism). It is important to acknowledge innovation as innovation: Sāyaṇa’s Ṛgveda is not the Ṛgveda as it would be understood by its authors, just as Annie Besant’s karma doctrine is not the karma doctrine of the classical Budhist texts. But we may still respect the new systems as systems worthy of consideration in their own right. Disagreement with their interpretation of their predecessors does not have to mean disagreement with the content of their thought.
1. Tull, Herman W. 1991. “F. Max Muller and A.B. Keith: ‘twaddle’, the ‘stupid’ myth, and the disease of Indology.” Numen 38(1): 27-58.
Another excellent article, Amod. I might add that another factor in this double standard is an assumption that “modern” interpretations, in order to be legitimate, must only be of a particular kind: namely, descriptive and non-theological. An author who takes a tradition seriously on its own terms and actually utilizes its conceptual resources to interpret reality is suspect. Terms like “New Age” or “fundamentalist” get thrown around. Only interpretations using categories other than those of the tradition itself (such as reading it through the lens of politics, economics, or psychology), asking questions other than those that the tradition is asking, counts as scholarship. The hidden assumption is that the assumed “we” of such scholarship cannot take seriously world views other than the dominant materialism of the contemporary academy (and therefore cannot take seriously as scholarship interpretations that violate this rule). Paul J. Griffiths explores this topic extremely well in ‘Religious Reading,’ a text which I highly recommend.
Agreed, Jeff. That point is closely related to what I’m talking about above, but not quite exactly the same thing. There are two different kinds of legitimacy that the typical modern perspective in religious studies is willing to grant: legitimacy as modern scholarship, and legitimacy as an authentic representative of tradition. And it usually makes a very sharp bifurcation between the two. You’re talking about the former and I’m talking about the latter. But modern reinterpretations of tradition (especially Western ones) usually get delegitimized on both counts, as in Tull’s work.
Now one can certainly take a debunker’s approach and say authenticity doesn’t matter and no representative of the traditions (including Sāyaṇa) is legitimate in the first place, as modern scholarship or anything else. I have many problems with that view, as you might imagine, but it is internally consistent in a way that this double standard is not.
Surely, though, there is a difference of “authenticity” — problematic though the term may be — between the Brahmanas’ revision of Vedic material, and theosophy’s? I am not a scholar of early 20th-c western interpretations (“appropriations,” some say) of Indian thought and culture, but the difference is not merely one of temporal distance. One has the sense that the Brahmana writers were connected to the tradition (whether they understood it as the rsis did or not) in a way that Besant was not and could not have been. Having said this, I want to underscore that I am only saying there is a difference, not that this difference is dispositive, or that it does not occasion a double standard. The problem is that one needs to look elsewhere for the criteria.
As for poor old Max, I think he — like a lot of the 19th-c scholars — has gotten a bad rap. He was a creature of his time, and though remarks like “…what’s worse, theological twaddle” are not him at his best (neither is his solar cult monism), he did a lot of invaluable work and I try to look past his “disease” diagnosis to the patterns he thought he was discerning.
Sorry to be so late in commenting.