The most interesting woman (GlobalBabble) has been commenting on my blog lately about Hinduism. What she says is too good to languish in the comments section. Here's one of the things she said yesterday:
"As I see it, Hindu views on romance and Bollywood must diverge significantly on one point: most Bollywood films present a chaste view on man-woman love, on the other hand, we couldn't have bred a billion Hindus without indulging in a lot of non-chaste sex.
So I am never quite sure how to reconcile the opposites.
On Hindu religion... hmmm... I never thought so deeply about it because there were no taboos in Hinduism, really (other than the bizarre "no beef" rule). There are no ten commandments, no fixed days dedicated to god, and no rules as such. There is no heaven or hell.
There is the unfailing conviction that your actions or Karma will catch up with you, with or without prayers, beads, fasts etc. But you are mostly left to yourself to decide what is good Karma for you.
So you build your own taboos.
For example, we even have stories that look at the relativity of lying - if it is for a bigger cause, is it ok. Some of our supposed Gods indulged in it. They paid a price, but in the larger scheme of things it was better for one to the pay the price than the whole humanity - or at least that is the tantalising dilemma you are left to answer for yourself.
When it works, it works beautifully. And when it doesn't, you get your average corrupt guilt-free Indian bureaucrat exploiting everyone left right and centre."
5 comments:
We have always built our own taboos. Some of those are rational. The Jewish taboos about certain foods have a substantial logic to them. Almost all of the taboos foods are those which decay fast and cause illnesses. In the days before electricity it made total sense to avoid those foods. These were taboos made for good health.
Other taboos are made for control.
Look at the taboos about various kinds of sexual acts, for example.
Look at the taboos surrounding menstruating women and their supposed lack of cleanliness.
Look back into your own upbringing and the taboos created or perpetuated by parents and grandparents and which you now espouse unconsciously.
Nothing is taboo that is not created as taboo by a human being.
That's the trouble with Taboo's they look stupid and ugly when you get to 40 and see the world through different (wiser) eyes... :)
The "no beef" taboo may be an example of taboo building on a mass scale, according to a commentator on Gateway for India.
The commentator explains that in Vedic times there was no injunction against eating beef or any other meat.
In the Vedic times one of the sacrifices practiced was GouMedh. Gou, which can mean cow or senses, in that time meant senses. The idea was to withdraw the consciousness from the senses, in so doing sacrificing the lower pleasures of the senses for the higher pleasure of controlling the senses instead of being controlled and bound by them. If one were to acheive a state of complete silence while meditating, or performing some other action, then one would have successfully sacrificed the senses because then the "I" inside would not be influenced by the senses, it would sit above them and for as long as this state lasted the person would be in perfect accord with his universal duty, king of the senses and not servant.
But this was and is a hard thing to do, so it was easier over time to forget that gou also meant senses, and to take it to mean cow. As kali yuga began the people became more superstitous and took the easy route of sacrificing cows because they ignorantly believed this would give them some benefit and killed so many an injunction had to be made to stop the unnecessary killing. In the times before cows were important because of the benefits they bestowed upon society, and their milk was used in Vedic ceremonies as well as for food.
Kali Yuga is just the time when society is composed of 3 parts vice and 1 part virtue, when it is more common for people to behave in non-virtuous ways than virtuous, when human intelligence is degraded as well as human morality.
You can read about the characteristics of Kali Yuga here: http://www.hinduism.co.za/kaliyuga.htm and decide if society now mirrors these characteristics.
So the no beef taboo may be, and it seems very likely to me to be, a misconception. Misconception is the most common modality of thought. I saw an example of this in my TM days when it was often said that eating chocolate had the same effect as not meditating. This was a widely held truth, but I later met some people who had been present at a special course in Switzerland where the people just did a round of yoga asanas followed by a period of meditation and then repeated the whole thing throughout the day. Some of the people began to interrupt this schedule to walk to the nearby town to get some especially desirable chocolate, and Maharishi pointed out that going to get the chocolate deprived the chocolate eaters of time they could have spent meditating. This is how it came to be an almost universal truth among TM'ers that eating chocolate was bad.
The "no beef" taboo may be an example of taboo building on a mass scale, according to a commentator on Gateway for India.
The commentator explains that in Vedic times there was no injunction against eating beef or any other meat.
In the Vedic times one of the sacrifices practiced was GouMedh. Gou, which can mean cow or senses, in that time meant senses. The idea was to withdraw the consciousness from the senses, in so doing sacrificing the lower pleasures of the senses for the higher pleasure of controlling the senses instead of being controlled and bound by them. If one were to acheive a state of complete silence while meditating, or performing some other action, then one would have successfully sacrificed the senses because then the "I" inside would not be influenced by the senses, it would sit above them and for as long as this state lasted the person would be in perfect accord with his universal duty, king of the senses and not servant.
But this was and is a hard thing to do, so it was easier over time to forget that gou also meant senses, and to take it to mean cow. As kali yuga began the people became more superstitous and took the easy route of sacrificing cows because they ignorantly believed this would give them some benefit and killed so many an injunction had to be made to stop the unnecessary killing. In the times before cows were important because of the benefits they bestowed upon society, and their milk was used in Vedic ceremonies as well as for food.
Kali Yuga is just the time when society is composed of 3 parts vice and 1 part virtue, when it is more common for people to behave in non-virtuous ways than virtuous, when human intelligence is degraded as well as human morality.
You can read about the characteristics of Kali Yuga here: http://www.hinduism.co.za/kaliyuga.htm and decide if society now mirrors these characteristics.
So the no beef taboo may be, and it seems very likely to me to be, a misconception. Misconception is the most common modality of thought. I saw an example of this in my TM days when it was often said that eating chocolate had the same effect as not meditating. This was a widely held truth, but I later met some people who had been present at a special course in Switzerland where the people just did a round of yoga asanas followed by a period of meditation and then repeated the whole thing throughout the day. Some of the people began to interrupt this schedule to walk to the nearby town to get some especially desirable chocolate, and Maharishi pointed out that going to get the chocolate deprived the chocolate eaters of time they could have spent meditating. This is how it came to be an almost universal truth among TM'ers that eating chocolate was bad.
Pardon the double posting, I don't know why that happened. When I hit "publish" the computer asked me if I wanted to "navigate away from this page" and I chose "cancel" and then I see a double post- sorry!
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