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Connecting Art with Spirituality Within the Indian Aesthetics of Advaita Vedanta

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Connecting Art with Spirituality Within the Indian Aesthetics of Advaita Vedanta 1536-08_SIS18(2008)_02_Keating 30-10-2008 13:17 Pagina 25 Studies in Spirituality 18, 25-37. doi: 10.2143/SIS.18.0.2033281 © 2008 by Studies in Spirituality. All rights reserved. ROSS KEATING CONNECTING ART WITH SPIRITUALITY WITHIN THE INDIAN AESTHETICS OF ADVAITA VEDANTA SUMMARY — This paper presents an exploration of how aesthetic expe- rience could be interpreted along the lines of the Hindu philosophy of Advaita Vedanta and how Western art could be viewed as an expression of a deeper spiritual reality, albeit defined in Vedantic terms. According to Advaita Vedanta every entity has five characteristics namely, existence, cognizability, inherent appeal, form, and name. Of these, the first three characteristics are seen as spiritual and the following two constitute the appearance of the entity in the world. Advaita Vedanta holds that it is specifically the characteristics of form and name that distinguishes one entity from another while it is the three former characteristics, which all entities have in common, that spiritually unites everything. Furthermore, within this philosophy, existence, cognizability, and inherent appeal are seen as stemming from Brahman, the Being of all beings, whose nature is Satcitanandna (Existence-Knowledge-Bliss). Religious or sacred art within this thinking is that art which has the potential to take the beholder, through an act of concentration on the work’s form and name – its appearance in the world, into a deeper experience, into a momen- tary ‘glimpse’ of Satcitanandna. This epiphanic experience is conjointly for the beholder an awakening experience of recognition to his or her own inherent spiritual depth, for the same mysterious nature of Satcitanandna that underpins the artwork underpins the beholder. Indian philosophy is based upon a collection of texts, the Vedas (knowledge), written between 1500 BCE and 600 BCE. The content of these texts, however, find their source in an oral tradition that extends further back into ancient times of India. ‘Vedanta’ means the ‘end of the Vedas’ and refers principally to three texts: the Upanishads, the Brahma sutras and the Bhagavadgita. There are also three main and philosophically distinct Vedanta schools that have attempted to systematise these three texts into an integrated body of thought: Shankara’s (ca. 788-820) Advaita (non-dualism) school; Ramanuja’s (ca. 1017-1137) Visis- tadvaita (qualified non-dualism) school; and Madhva’s (1238-1317) Dvaita (dualism) school. Each of these schools has undergone further internal division throughout the centuries at the hands of other thinkers. According to the Advaita Vedanta school, Reality is not separate from Self and is one, infinite, 1536-08_SIS18(2008)_02_Keating 30-10-2008 13:17 Pagina 26 26 ROSS KEATING and eternal existence; this Self being the innermost self of each person. This is the meaning of a non-dual Reality that is not constituted by parts. Within this paper I will attempt to shape my thoughts in accordance with this foundational idea as expressed by Shankara. The relationship between the appearance of manyness in the world and the idea of a non-dual Reality is argued within Advaita Vedanta in the following manner. Every entity has five characteristics namely, existence, cognizability, inherent appeal, form, and name. Of these, the first three characteristics are seen as spiritual and the following two constitute the appearance of the entity in the world. Advaita Vedanta holds that it is specifically the characteristics of form and name that distinguishes one entity from another while it is the three former characteristics, which all entities have in common, that spiritually unites every- thing. According to this vision of Reality, existence, cognizability, and inherent appeal, stem from Brahman, the Being of all beings, whose nature is Satci- tanandna (Existence-Knowledge-Bliss). Form and name being individual are relative; existence, cognizability, and inherent appeal being eternally present in all entities are real. Religious or sacred art within this thinking is that art which has the potential to take the beholder, through an act of concentration on the work’s form and name – its appearance in the world, into a deeper experience, into a momentary ‘glimpse’ of Satcitanandna. This epiphanic experience is con- jointly for the beholder an awakening experience of recognition to his or her own inherent spiritual depth, for the same mysterious nature of Satcitanandna that underpins the artwork underpins the beholder. 1. ADVAITA VEDANTA Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877-1947), one of the cardinal exponents of the perennial understanding of art and aesthetic experience, made the claim that in the traditional thinking of the East, philosophy does not ‘mean either a mere epistemology or the mere history of “what men [sic] believed”, but rather an all embracing metaphysics or science of first principals and of the true nature of real- ity’.1 And as a necessary and vital adjunct to this comprehensive theory or vision of reality, art provided the means to verify such a vision in actual experience. Reli- gion also, like art, played a similar role of verification through community-cen- tred ritualistic practices, guiding followers along a certain path that re-linked (re-ligio) them with their shared vision of reality. According to Coomaraswamy’s traditional view the embodiment and enactment of an all-encompassing vision of reality established for each individual a felt sense of integral unity – body, 1 Quoted in Roger Lipsey, Coomaraswamy: His life and work, Princeton (NJ) 1977, 275. 1536-08_SIS18(2008)_02_Keating 30-10-2008 13:17 Pagina 27 CONNECTING ART WITH SPIRITUALITY 27 mind, and spirit in harmonious accord – which then became reflected into a wider social harmony creating, over time, an integrated spiritual culture. The Hindu philosophy of Advaita Vedanta is one such traditional philosophy, which according to one of it most authoritative contemporary exponents, Eliot Deutsch, is today ‘the most widely accepted system of thought among philoso- phers in India’.2 For Deutsch, the idea of knowing as direct experience in a con- scious act of being is a cornerstone of Advaita Vedanta. He writes: The Advaitin is convinced that ‘to know’ is ‘to be’; that one acquires knowledge only in an act of conscious being which is akin to what one knows and is the con- tent of direct experience. ‘Disease’, Samkara notes, ‘is not cured by pronouncing “medicine”, but by taking it’. Advaita Vedanta is a religion as much as it is a tech- nical philosophy; it is a way of spiritual realization as well as a system of thought.3 The goal of Advaita Vedanta (from here on referred to in this paper as simply Vedanta) is to find what is real, in an absolute sense, beyond the duality of sub- ject and object, sleep and wakefulness, life and death. Get that, they argue, for thou art that: imperishable, stable, constant, and immortal – this is your real self, the only real knowledge; the rest is hearsay. The reality that Vedantic philoso- phers are seeking is therefore not a category of knowledge. What is real, within their way of thinking, can never be an object of knowing; it can only be known through lived experience, a knowing which is synonymous with self-identity. In the same way, for instance, that a person knows that he or she exists but not as something separate from his or her self-identity. Vedantists see themselves as occupying the middle ground in Western philos- ophy between the polar opposites of idealism and realism for they argue that both mind and matter are not opposites but rather belong ‘in the same category – both are objects of knowledge’.4 This philosophical position makes it difficult for Western philosophers to engage with Vedantists. For instance, when both ideal- ists and realists ask Vedantists, what then is real, if mind and matter are mere categories of knowledge? The Vedantists reply: pure consciousness, but not, they stress, as some quality of mind or metaphysical essence but as experience, as a state of being. Soon after a moment of knotted silence, the Western philosophers usually respond with something along the lines of, if this is the case then what you’re saying is that everything in the world, including our personal feeling and thoughts, are all unreal? Here the Vedantists generally fall back upon their beliefs by stating, ‘The world according to Shankara, “is and is not”. Its fundamental unreality can only be understood in reference to the ultimate mystical experience 2 Eliot Deutsch, Advaita Vedanta: A philosophical reconstruction, Honolulu 1973, 3. 3 Ibid., 4. 4 Shankara, Crest-jewel of discrimination (trans. Swami Prabhavananda & Christopher Isher- wood), Hollywood 1978 (orig. publ. 1947), 8. 1536-08_SIS18(2008)_02_Keating 30-10-2008 13:17 Pagina 28 28 ROSS KEATING of an illumined soul [when] all perception of multiplicity ceases [and] there is no longer any sense of “mine” and “thine”, [for] the world as we ordinarily know it has vanished’.5 And here the discussion, more often than not, comes to an abrupt halt. But another possible way of trying to understand Vedanta is to focus upon its approach to aesthetic experience. For aesthetic experience, regardless of cul- ture, raises issues that straddle idealism and realism. In this paper, I will attempt to present a discussion on how aesthetic experience could be interpreted along the lines of Vedanta and how Western art could be viewed as an expression of a deeper spiritual reality, albeit defined in Vedantic terms. The goal of such an
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