The Truth-Universalism of the Tamils
K. Loganathan
The Truth-Universalism of the Tamils
Dr K.Loganthan 5-3-2015
Essay 1
There is a kind of universalism that is prevalent in Tamil literature from very ancient times here including the SumeruTamil period that is the era of the First Tamil SaGkam of the Tamil historians. I have been puzzled by such great clauses like KaNiyan PuuGkunRanaar’s famous “yaathum uuree yaavarung keeLir’ meaning ‘The whole world is my own city and all are my brethren”. Here we have a Sociopolitical Universalism that sees no national and political boundaries as well as the tribal alienations among people. Coming as does from tha land of Brahamanaical Varnasrama Dharma and the tribal casteism that has led to it, this is immensely surprising.
KaNiyanaar lived probably around 200 B.C or so, But in a further development of such universalisms is the 7th Cent Tirumular declaring “OnRee kulamaum oruvaneet teevanum” meaning BEING is One and so are the whole of mankind. This typically Saiva universalism is Metaphysical Universalism that is a product of very profound metaphysical reaches. The Saivite metaphysics even in the times of Tirumular has reached depths that no other Indian groups seems to have reached. This may apply also to the whole world- the various kinds of universalisms in the world does not seem to match the depths of the Tamilian and stands peculiarly unique.
I want to explore in this series on this enormously interesting and profound Tamil Universalism that I have termed Truth Universalism as it seems to be founded on the rightly famous declarations of TiruvaLLuvar “ yaar yaar vaay keedpiinum ettanmaittaayinum meypporuL kaaNatu aRivu: that it is the mark of intelligence to inquire into the TRUTH of whatever asserted by whoever may it be. This boldness and penchant for TRUTH and nothing else remains to this day (quite unfortunately) unique to the Tamils (please don’t jump and dismiss this as something chauvinistic- you will be foolish iif you do that).
In this series I shall explore roots of the Truth Universalism of the Tamils and seek out the depths to the best of my ability and establish the essences of thus kind of universalism against the various other universalisms in the world including the Western Universalism that Dr Rajiv Malhotra and his friends are so vehemently opposed to but without due regards to this Tamilian TTruth Univarsalism that he does not seem to be familiar with. ( Which Northern Indian scholar is familiar with the philosophical literature of the Tamils and even if familiar who respects it?)
First let us explore briefly the various universalism available now as a useful preamble towards deeper explorations. The following account is succinct and very much to the point
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universalism
Universalism is religious, theological, and philosophical concepts with universal application or applicability. Universalism doctrines consider all people in their formation.
In terms of religion, in a broad sense, universalism claims that religion is a universal human quality. This can be contrasted with non-universalist religions. Religion in this context is defined as a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.[1]
In Christianity, universal reconciliation is the doctrine that all sinful and alienated human souls — because of divine love and mercy — will ultimately be reconciled to God.[2] Unitarian Universalism believes that religion is a universal human quality, emphasizing the universal principles of most religions and accepting other religions in an inclusive manner, believing in a universal reconciliation between humanity and the divine. Universalism has had a strong influence on modern Hinduism, in turn influencing western modern spirituality.[3]
A community that calls itself universalist may emphasize the universal principles of most religions and accept other religions in an inclusive manner, believing in a universal reconciliation between humanity and the divine. For example, some forms of Abrahamic religions happened to claim the universal value of their doctrine and moral principles, and feel inclusive.[4] A belief in one common truth is also another important tenet. The living truth is seen as more far-reaching than national, cultural, or religious boundaries.
I want to draw special attention to the following:
< In Christianity, universal reconciliation is the doctrine that all sinful and alienated human souls — because of divine love and mercy — will ultimately be reconciled to God.[2] Unitarian Universalism believes that religion is a universal human quality, emphasizing the universal principles of most religions and accepting other religions in an inclusive manner, believing in a universal reconciliation between humanity and the divine. Universalism has had a strong influence on modern Hinduism, in turn influencing western modern spirituality.[3]
This ‘unitarian universalism” that is quite widespread in India where all religions are compared to the various rivers but which ultimately merge in one sea, and which is also expressed by Tirumular and so forth, though quite valid but we are not clear as to its foundations.
Why different religions move towards one and same SEA and merge there and disappear? What makes a religion a religion and why should there be many but only to merge into a vast SEA and disappear?
I believe that underlying all such religioins is man’s search for the Absolute Truths and which si here metaphorically expressed as the vast Sea.
Tirumular uses the metaphor of a city instead of the sea but to commuinicathe same.
1558
ஒன்றது பேரூர் வழி ஆறு அதற்குள்
என்றதுபோல இருமுச் சமயமும்
நன்றிது தீதிது என்றுரை யாளர்கள்
குன்று குரைத்தெழு நாயை யொத்தார்களே
உரை:
ஓர் பேரூரைச் சென்றடைய வழிகள் ஆறு அதாவது பொதுவாக பல வழிகள் உள்ளன. அதேப் போலத்தான் இறைவன் ஒருவந்தான், அவனை அடைய இந்த ஆறு சமயங்கள் அதாவது பலவகையான சமயங்கள் இருக்கின்றன. இவற்றின் முடிவு எல்லாம் ஒன்றென அறியாது சமயவாதிகள் இந்த சமயமே நல்லது அது தீங்கான என்று கூறி வெறியாடுகின்றனர். அவர்கள் குன்றினைப் பார்த்துக் குரைக்கும் நாய்களாகக் குரைத்து கலகம் விளைவிக்கின்றவர்கள் ஆகும்.
There are many routes towards a massive city but despite differences in the routes taken, ultimately all reach the same city ( I,e BEING tha absolute). People not knowing this bark at each other in ignorance like dogs barking at the huge mountain!
The metaphor of routes or ways of life that lead ultimately to the city and not to somewhere else is further explained by Tirumular as Truth-Seeking Way and where the different routes are conditioned by the different temperament and intellectual capacity of the people.
This is deeply psychological as well as metaphysical. We shal inquire into this in the essays to follow.
Loga
K. Loganathan
Dear Loga Sir,
Very nice topic.." Truth Universalism of Tamils". Very much required for the strife-torn divided modern world and is the need of the hour.Tamils, being the creators of the first civilization, do have the responsibility to guide the world on principles of living.We should reiterate to the world, the first philosophical principles, Neri of Chivan (Sumer) civilization, and the 5000 year old tried and tested Chankam (Sangam) literary thoughts.We should filter out the original Tamil thoughts from Vetham, removing the Kotha (Goth) corruptions, refine all the Sanathana Dharma or Chinthana Dharma in other words, தமிழ் (மக்களின்) சிந்தனைகள் and pass it back to the World.Regards,Raj
வந்தாரை வாழ வைக்கும் சிவன் பூமி!!
__._,_.___
Reply via web post • Reply to sender • Reply to group • Start a New Topic • Messages in this topic (2) ............................................
Tamil Software Download (eMail, Internet, word processing, KeyBoard)
http://www.tamil.net/newtamil/ekalappai_1.html
.............................................
eMail setup:
http://www.gbizg.com/Tamilfonts/Tamil-Outlook-Express.htm
..................................
Tamil Fonts, Keyboard drivers and help:
http://www.gbizg.com/tamil/Using_ekalappai.htm
..................................
PDF-Adobe instructions for installing Tamil font and eKalappai
http://www.tamil.net/special/ekalappai3.pdf
..................................
.
__,_._,___
K. Loganathan
The Truth-Universalism of the Tamils
Dr K.Loganthan 5-3-2015
Essay 2 A Critique of Rajiv Malhotra
Before we explore further the various similarities and differences between various concepts of Universalism specially in the West and how it compares with the Truth-Universalism of the Tamils, we have to consider what is the Western Universalism of Rajiv Malhotra and how he criticizes it. I have not read any of his books but this account is based upon some summaries and essays I managed to locate in the Cyber Space and written by him. So there may be some errors and I hope scholars well read on this matter will point out my errors. But I think I am right in saying that Rajiv Malhotra and many other Northern Indian scholars are not familiar with the Tamil Universalism available among the Tamils from Sumerian times. This may apply even to many Tamil scholars itself for they do not any more study carefully the great MeykaNda Sastras where there are hundreds of them studied however only by a narrow band of scholars. The Dravidian movement of recent times seems to have wiped out scholarly interest in such texts.
The following are excerpts from Rajiv Malhotra’s article below where I select only the most relevant points.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/beingdifferent/2012/03/challenging-western-universalism/
Challenging Western Universalism
March 9, 2012 by Rajiv Malhotra 0 Comments
The main objective is :
<One of the most important objectives of my recent book, Being Different, An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism (HarperCollins, 2011) is to refute Western claims of universalism. According to these claims, the West is both the driver of history and the ultimate, desirable destination of the entire world. The West purportedly provides the ideal template to which all other civilizations and cultures must contort, be pruned, trimmed or reconfigured to fit, or else be eliminated or sidelined by some means.>
Well to summarise his essential critique, the West < tends to superimpose it’s own cultural paradigms, often through force, upon other cultures > Then there is an accusation of a serious kind as in the following paragraph.
<Ensconced thus in the drivers seat, with its undeniably ethnocentric blueprint of what the world should look like, the Western collective ego has embarked on scores of missions – religious and secular (colonization), to bring about this Westernization. When such attempts collide with contrasting and contradictory worldviews, the response has been one of many tactics – acculturation, religious conversion, colonization, isolation, disparagement, genocide and appropriation. What matters most in this process is that Western identity must remain perpetually at the helm of human affairs, it’s own grand narrative further strengthened at each encounter, and the rest of the world only the frontier for it to play out it’s manifest destiny. The cultural fruits of other civilizations are appropriated, seen as useful, destined to fit and enrich the western template, but the cultures themselves are left uprooted and barren, their coherence and fecundity shattered. When the unity of a culture is thus broken, a select few parts taken, possibly refurbished and plugged into a Western taxonomy, that act is nothing short of systematic dispossession and an act of cultural genocide.>
By Western Universalism Rajiv also means the grand claims made by the West of its pre-eminent place in world history:
< In fact, Hegel, the German thinker and philosopher who has had a far reaching impact on Western identity, did so through his attempts to initially construct an identity for the Germans who had lost out in the pecking order to the French and Italians in the initial rounds of such nationalistic identity construction. He emerged as one of the most towering figures of European thought and developed a powerful and influential philosophy of history which included the past, present and future of all civilizations represented in a single, linear template. According to Hegel, there is a World Spirit (Weltgeist) that journeys through a series of stages until it reaches the highest form of self-realization. This spirit evolves from lower to higher forms as nations of the world, placing the various nations at different stages of evolution. He declared his template to be a universal one and on such a universal template, history moved from East to West, with Europe as the penultimate end of universal history. Asia (Near-East) was the beginning and India in his world view had “no history” at all. According to Hegel, only the West had been endowed with reason and thus entitled to be in the driver’s seat as part of God’s plan, destined to be the central agent of world history.>
Furthermore he also says:
<Hegel’s theory of history has led to liberal Western supremacy, which hides behind the notion of providing the “universals”. These European Enlightenment presuppositions became embedded in academia, philosophy, social theories and even scientific methodologies. Later on, these influences informed Indology and they haunt South Asian Studies today.>
Thus this is the essence of what Rajiv calls Western Universalism and this is what he is challenging in his book where he says <In Being Different, I challenge this Western penchant of universalizing its own norms. I’ve explicated some key differences between the West and Indian civilization, and I offer that these differences, once acknowledged rather than obliterated, could bring new paradigms for solving the pressing issues of our time.>
Despite the fact that I have not read the book but the above account itself is enough for me to raise some basic questions.
The main point that he is making is that the West projects that its cultural norms are in fact the best and hence must be followed by the rest of the world and which justifies colonization religious conversions and so forth- in fact the intolerance any thing DIFFERENT from the West
Now while this may be true in politics and theology but how in the area of Science and Technology, can we say that it is the West that dominates and that the growing presence of science and technology all over the globe is a kind of Westernization implying that the non Western countries developed no sciences at all till the arrival of Europeans?
There are also questions like: Was there archaeology anthropology evolutionary biology genetics and so forth before the arrival of the Europeans? And even though we can rightly accuse the West to have introduced racialism as a factor in the politics of mankind, they are also the people who explored the globe and through the genetic study of the fossils established the possibility of the whole of mankind to have developed out of homo sapiens who fist came to existence in North Africa and who migrated out gradually to colonize the whole globe?
I can list a few more such Western contributions and which have changed our understanding of mankind and its evolution and where in a way supports and strengthens the Dravidian Truth Universalism but not perhaps the supremacist sociologies and philosophies of Brahmanism of India that passes now for Hinduism and which seems to be favored by Rajiv Malhotra.
The Hinduism that Rajiv favors and which is essentially Brahmanism while being DIFFERENT from the Western notions of equality of all and so firth, it has not contributed anything at all to furthering the universal dimensions of World History such as the Europeans have done.
The West at least from the days of the Greeks who might have been influended by the Sumerian-Akkadian scientific culture through the Black Athenians, has developed the sciences that have reshaped human history and which cannot be called cultural imperialism colonization and so forth. When science and technology changed the shape of culture in Japan by making a highly technological nation out of the earlier essentially agrarian, it has not become a Western colony of a kind.
The important point is that, there are dimensions of cultural influences which are not matters of colonization and religious conversions but rather matters of developing further cultural tendencies ALREADY there is the mind of all. Science is in the mind of all, it is neither Western or Eastern but rather simply human, a universal tendency already in man (perhaps also in some animals)
However despite such universal tendencies being already there as possibility for all, it may not have developed until the present moment.
I believe the Truth Universalism of Tamils is such a universal tendency but something while reasonably developed among the Tamils but not so even among the Europeans.
We shall attempt to demonstrate this in essays to follow
To continue
Loga