Part II of the article discusses ten features of Indian civilization that I believe are relatively potent if not absolutely unique in India, that are of great importance to me personally, and that would be uplifting and valuable to anyone who spent time becoming familiar with them. These ten features of Indian culture and civilization might also provide people with a way of feeling pride in their cultural inheritance without having to turn a blind eye to India’s many problems, and without having to make exaggerated boasts about the importance of things in India that are not really very important.

It is reverence for the following ten features of Indian culture which makes a person Indian on the inside, regardless of what they look like or wear.

1. Cosmic Insight

India is the only culture whose traditional cosmologies bear any
resemblance to a scientific understanding of the universe. Of the many truly shocking insights that came out of ancient India, to me the most amazing is the relatively high level of accuracy of ancient Indian descriptions of what the world is and how it works. These descriptions hold up remarkably well when they are compared to our contemporary insights from physics, cosmology, and other basic sciences.

In terms of time, almost all other civilizations and people right up to the 20th century use time scales that are based upon individual human life and the cycle of generations. It was only in ancient India that the real dimensions of time were glimpsed. The “Kalpa,” or day of Brahma, lasts about four billion years, remarkably similar to our current estimate about the duration of life on earth. The cycle of all Kalpas, however, lasts about three hundred trillion years. In modern cosmology, we think of the Big Bang as having happened approximately fourteen billion years ago, and given the fact that many cosmologists today think of the universe as a series of Big Bangs, or as a multiverse, ancient Indian cosmology begins to seem prescient.

Along with the expansive approximation about time, traditional Indian cosmologies also understand that the universe is dynamic and changing. Albert Einstein himself originally conceived of the universe as static. A dynamic universe that is growing and expanding only entered Western cosmology in the 1920s when Edwin Hubble discovered that some of the so-called stars were actually entire galaxies, and that all the lights in the sky were racing away from each other in a cosmic expansion. But this seems to have been known to ancient Indians, who conceived of a cosmic egg that broke open to form an outward opening universe. As far back as the Buddhist Suttas, (approximately 500 years B.C.), the universe is understood to be a hubbub of constant change of gigantic proportions and of very long time scales. These insights were apparently reached by the Buddha directly through his own meditation. He envisioned a universe without beginning or end, but with cycles of expansion and contraction, an idea championed today by cosmologists Steinhardt and Turok, from Princeton and Cambridge universities.   

Along with time, space, and dynamism, ancient Indian science and cosmology was based upon an insight into the fact that the universe consists of atomic and sub-atomic particles that eventually collapse into vibrational waveforms. The particle-wave duality of light is one of the great discoveries of 20th century physics. Two thousand five hundred years ago, the Buddha had already described the human body, and all matter, as consisting of tiny particles, “kalapas,” consisting of even tinier particles, “uta-kalapas,” which consist of even tinier oscillations and vibrations. It appears that the deep reality-based meditations of ancient India, such as the Buddha’s own Vipassana meditation, revealed to ancient Indian civilization many of the discoveries that Western science considers to be new. In ancient India the universe was already understood to be a matter-energy combination in which vibrations became particles of matter, in which particles of matter built up the compounded world, in which the compounded world was a shifting arena of incessant change, all located in a vast, dynamic, and unthinkably ancient format. The Suttas, Vedas, and Puranas overlap and share different aspects of these stunning revelations. The fundamental coordinates of reality in ancient India dramatically differed from the fairytales of all other civilizations, and can be viewed as having essential, if not precise, accuracy.

2.Microcosm and Macrocosm

One of the axioms of Indian civilization is that the human mind and body are a microcosm that reflects the macrocosm of the entire universe. Throughout classical Indian culture, there is recognition of the continuity between the individual person and the world. This attitude forms the essence of Upanishadically derived Vedanta, one of the great philosophies of Hinduism, in which the individual person learns to see him or herself as containing, or contiguous with, the soul of the universe. The Buddha’s teaching differed to the extent that he argued that neither the universe nor the individual person contained a separate entity to be labeled as the soul. However, the Buddha’s teaching was related to the Vedanta in that the individual comes to understand the impersonal and changing universe by deeply examining his or her own mind and body. Similarly, in Hatha Yoga, with its Samkhya philosophy, the same axiom pertains: By coming to deeply intimate terms with one’s own mind and body, one comes to terms with ultimate realities. The Buddha’s Dhamma, Hindu Vedanta and Yoga are not all the same, and they contain some contrasts to each other, but all are quintessentially Indian and all share the attitude that the body and mind are the best and truest laboratory for the spiritual life. In these world views, religion is not about fawning in front of an external power source, but about deep psycho-physical self-knowledge.

3. Contemplation and Revelation

As a correlate of the idea that the individual mind and body form a gateway through which one enters universal truths, we find in India a traditional reverence for quiet and contemplative activity. For example, in the midst of a raging and multifaceted cultural and political revolution, Gandhi spent one day a week in silence; he spent time every day spinning and worshipping. Another example comes from Rabindranath Tagore. He became as popular as one of today’s rock stars, and was one of the first people to travel by airplane repeatedly to every corner of the inhabited world to present his poems, songs and plays. In the midst of such a whirlwind life, Tagore remained a devoted meditator. Although Nehru eschewed religions, proclaimed his agnosticism, and was a man given over to political action, his descriptions of looking at the Himalayas from his prison in Dehra Dun, as recorded in his letters to Indira, which later became the book, Towards Freedom, seem to me to be not only poetic and wise, but also classically Indian quietistic piety. Nehru could call himself an agnostic but I hear in his prose the traditional, highly valued contemplative streak.

In India, contemplation was never passivity for its own end. Traditional Indian contemplations and meditations were all based upon a faith in revelation. Quiet hours are valued because during them valuable life force will be kindled. Quiet activity is not an absence or a withdrawal, according to classical Indian culture, but is expectant nurturance for valued spiritual experience.

Although I cannot remember a single detail about the lecture on Sanskrit language and ancient India into which I reluctantly stumbled at the University of Chicago in the 1960s, I imagine it must have been the breath-taking cosmology, the microcosmic appreciation of the human body-and-mind, and the respect for interiority, that kindled my Indology flame into such a long-lasting light.

4. The Unity of the Ethical and the Numinous

Possibly the greatest discovery of ancient India, or in any case its most influential realization, was “the fusion of the numinous and the ethical.” This phrasing comes from the writing of Mircea Eliade, a mid-20th century scholar who spent much of his career at the University of Chicago. Eliade highlighted the differences among forms of religious thought. He emphasized how so much of religious life revolves around the wish to gain power and security through affiliation. The devotee feels helpless, but gains control by bribing, cajoling, or propitiating some divine power source, or actually believes he coerces the gods into allegiance through ritual. Morality either does not enter into this religious stage, or is included only as one more way to seek favor or to demand protection from the Power Source.

In mature religious development, however, ethics and divinity are not simply related but are understood to be the same thing.   This is the fusion of the numinous and the ethical. At this level of religious development, the devotee experiences the divine through ethical activity, and experiences ethical activity as intrinsically connected to the divine. Such a fusion of the numinous and the ethical is first clearly locatable in ancient India. We hear it formulated in Upanishadic writings, in Jainism, and in Buddhism. In these religious worldviews, ritualistic propitiation and bribery disappear from religious practice. Self-purification becomes the broadband, high-speed access to what is numinous, holy, or sacred in life. Gandhi echoed this view when he said that he saw God only when he was involved in social action.

Of particular note is ancient India’s emphasis on the emotion of peace, or equanimity, as central to purification. Equanimity is seen, in ancient Indian thought, as the true measure of one’s spiritual attainment. A person can be deeply at peace with themselves only if they have already relinquished hate, fear, passion and other unsettling psychological states. As a measure of the fusion of the numinous and the ethical, ancient India used the fusion of the ethical and the equanimous. Peaceful psychological states are the best measurement of the truly ethical life, and the ethical life is the holy life. The holy = the ethical = the peaceful.

Ancient India is probably the origin and is definitely the epi-center of religious emphasis on equanimity, psychological purification, and ethical lifestyle as the quintessence of religion. Over long centuries, these attitudes have spread around the world, although even today we find religions that foment psychological agitation and social violence. India has always been the land of people like barefooted Jain munis, who continue today to be witnesses to inner peace as they perambulate along truck-infested highways.

5. Blending of the Sacred and the Mundane

For most people, including many Indians, ancient India is associated with asceticism. Certainly asceticism is given a high value throughout many ancient legends and religious practices. But it is important to remember that from the first, ancient Indian culture and spiritual life emphasized as well the continuity of spirituality with daily life. This is most famously remembered today when people think about the Bhagavad Gita with its emphasis on Karma yoga. This is a worldview in which community service and worship of the deity are the same thing. Here we have not only a fusion of the numinous and the ethical, but an emphasis on social action as the most important form of the ethical. Gandhi’s reverence for the Gita with its emphasis on Karma Yoga brought ancient India alive in the twentieth century.

East Asian Buddhism is emblemized by a statue of the cross-legged Buddha, sitting still. But this iconography of an immobile Buddha actually represents a later development. Original Indian Buddhism was free of any image of the Buddha. Early Indian Buddhism represented the Buddha in the language of the Pali Canon as a physically and socially active teacher who is concerned with reaching out to his fellow human beings. The canonical description of the Buddha describes him as walking over thousands of miles, speaking and teaching with vigor and commitment. He is not portrayed as remote, aloof, or self-centered. Meditation is the Buddha’s formative activity but compassionate social action is the Buddha’s expressive activity.

Nothing is more characteristic of ancient Indian culture and civilization, its color, its energy, and its spirituality, than the literary text. The massive canon of Sanskrit and Pali and Tamil literature is the bedrock of the Indian sub-continent. Speaking literally and scientifically from the standpoint of modern earth sciences, the Indian sub-continent is a piece of Gondwana land, which split off from the southern mega-continent tens of millions of years ago and floated off to collide with Asia, attaching India to the bottom of the Asiatic continent, and forming the Himalayas during the collision of tectonic plates. Speaking spiritually, however, the solid core of India lies in its extensive classical literature, with the rhythms, the intuitions, and the transcendent concepts that are imbedded in the ancient languages and texts. Not too long ago, people kept the old texts alive in daily life as one more fluid connection between the august and the quotidian.

It is not just in the high-minded intellectual and literary life that ancient India expressed a continuity between the spiritual and the daily, and expressed the continuity between personal spiritual discovery and social commitment and action. In fact we find marbled through all of Indian culture these continuities. Social and spiritual ideas flow through the veins of almost every activity. In architecture, for example, the Jain temples of Mt. Abu combine a riotous sensuality with a subterranean asceticism. In Hatha Yoga, for example, Indian culture combined heightened awareness of bodily life to spiritual, rather than sensual, ends.

For the outsider who comes to India, and who looks for the essential inside, there is nothing that stands out more flamboyantly than Indian cuisine. Indian food simultaneously fulfills the mundane and sensual desires of an animal gaining nutriment, while at the same time Indian cooking echoes with references to spiritual festivals, mind-body health awareness, and the communion of human diet with the plants that spring up from the earth. Although vegetarianism is not the only Indian way of eating, and although vegetarianism is not unique to India, still we find that widespread concern with expressing non-harmfulness thorough diet is an emblematic Indian attitude. Through vegetarianism, as well as through so many other vehicles, ancient Indian culture reminds us that our most primitive appetites can be modulated and transformed into methodologies for self-purification, social compassion, and environmental consciousness.

It is characteristic of India to reduce the boundary between the sacred and the profane. We have seen that diet constitutes both necessity and uplift, and we have seen that architecture represents both beauty and transcendence. This is also well-expressed through India’s classical music forms, which paradoxically combine sensual entertainment with exquisite other-worldliness. North Indian classical music, with its fusion of Hindu and Muslim roots, is intrinsically ornamented, yet leads the listener upwards towards an auditory sense of divinity that has no final form.

6.   Spirit of the People

Many years ago, after a long absence from India, I met my dear old friend, the Gujarati poet Makarand Dave, at an obscure spot in a small and impoverished city in the interior of the sub-continent. Because I had not returned to India for a number of years, the boney people, the worn and tattered clothing, the not-infrequently misshapen limbs, the gaunt cattle and buffalo, all struck me with heightened impact because I had not yet regained my desensitization to them, as comes with residence in India. I expressed to Makarandbhai my anguish over the plight of India’s hundreds of millions of very poor people. Makarandbhai, who was a world-class poet, and familiar with conditions in Bombay, New York, and California, agreed with me. But then he suddenly added out of the depths of his Indian gnosis, another dimension. He told me:

“The poor people of India are like shrubs on a windy mountain top. The wind constantly beats them down. They grow deformed and crooked and it looks like they will never be able to survive. But whenever you come back to this mountaintop there will always be shrubs poking their heads up towards the sunlight in spite of the wind. The poor people of India are shrubs in the wind. They can never be beaten down and defeated.”

When we think of ancient India and what is great about Indian culture and civilization, and what we can glean today from India’s fabulous past, our minds tend to run to the great architecture, the great literature, the great intellectual life. But India is also its unlettered villagers. The spirit of India is also carried in the wind-bent shrubs. Every time we see a poor woman carrying on her head for miles a brass pot filled with water while she moves along swiftly, despite her heavy burden, with the grace and regal posture of a New York City ballet dancer, we are reminded that the common people of India are constantly signaling to us with a special élan. Ancient India, carried forward and brought into modern times by the poor people of India, contains some irrepressible nobility, some undefeatable endurance. This spirit can also be found in Guha in the Ramayana, and still emanates today from many a Kutchi goat herder, from many a Rebari camel trader, or from many a Tamil farmer planting rice under the hot sun.   

A number of years ago I completed a one-month meditation course under the guidance of my meditation teacher, S.N. Goenka, at his center, Dhammagiri in Igatpuri, Maharashtra. For 30 days I had talked to no one and had cast my eyes down, not looking around me at the kaleidoscope of the world, and focused inwardly on the continuity of “anicca,” the arising and passing of sensations within the “loka,” the world of my body. After 30 days were completed, I lifted up my eyes and took a walk outside of the meditation center and was stunned by the beauty of India. But the dry road on which I walked had almost no vegetation, little in the way of birds and animals, nothing at all in the way of architecture. Then what was so beautiful about India? It was the saris. In every direction, the tan and rocky landscape was spangled with the iridescent blues and sunrise reds of the women of India, whether they were 13 or 80. The saris of India are not just a clothing style   Even the rural poor women of India are so often radiantly resplendent with color. This is the feminine principle, this is the windy shrub principle, this is the reduction of separation between the spiritual and the mundane, this is the spirit of India manifested in the joyful appreciation and elaboration of life’s simplest gifts, like clothing. The birds of India and the women of India seem to have taken cues from each other.

7. Sacred Geography of Bharatavarsa

India is not merely a place. India is a sacred geography. When we read the Ramayana and follow Rama in his quest to rescue Sita as he travels down the spine of the Deccan, we are traversing a physical land and a sacred space. When we take a bus up the unending switchbacks that leave us feeling nauseated and terrified, as we climb from New Delhi up to Badrinath in the high Himalayas, we are going sightseeing but we are also entering into the realm of the sacred origins of the Ganges. Hardly a nubbin of countryside rock in India lacks its worshipper. The great triangle of the sub-continent that extends south from the Himalayas to Lanka is one gigantic holy land whose place names echo with legends, whose hilltops are jeweled with temples, and whose rivers express the deeds of mythic gods and goddesses. The intensity of its sunlight, the rugged desiccation of its landscape, battered for eons by ultraviolet rays followed by monsoon rains, is always dazzling, shadow-blackened, and monumental. India is after all, contents in collision, plate tectonics in action.

The India that we see today is an excoriated and depleted relic of the ecological richness of India a mere hundred years ago. Surely all of India represents an ecological disaster zone. In spite of that, India retains a specially haunting natural beauty that seems to call us into different dimensions of reality. The Ganges is polluted but when we stand on its banks in Haridwar, among hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, and watch thousands of gallons of water sweeping past us at high speed as the river reunites the snows of the Himalayas with the fertile Gangetic plain, it is hard to doubt that the Ganges is a sacred river. When we stop at a chai shop at a dusty road in a little village of Nowherepuram, and look up at a sagging electric wire to see an iridescent, electric fly-catcher, it is hard to doubt that somewhere above us and around us are colleagues of Jetayu and Jaambavaan.

8. A Nest for Human Kind

How many times have I heard in English, or translated from Gujarati, or translated from Hindi, someone tell me that “Guest is God”? At its best, Indian culture has been welcoming. In fact, one of the difficulties of defining Indian culture is that it has been absorptive and elastic, constantly filling itself with new attitudes and beliefs, and constantly expanding to hold more features. Most of the things that we consider Indian, like the Taj Mahal, are combinations of many streams of culture. India has welcomed not only cultures but people, starting with the Sanskrit-speaking Asian Aryans, and including in more recent times Jews, Parsees, and refugees from Sindh, Punjab and Bangladesh. When westerners ask me why I have gone to India so many times, one of the ways I answer them is to try to explain the multiple layers and colors of India’s internal cultural diversity. There is no one real people of India. Instead, we should say, “the peoples” of India. Even within one linguistic zone, there is ethno-cultural variation; for example, the way that the mountain peoples of Kerala’s Western Ghats differ from the fishing peoples of its coastal villages.

After Rabindranath Tagore had founded the school at Shantiniketan, had won the Nobel Prize, and had become world famous, he started a university which he called Viswa Bharati, whose motto was: “Where the whole world meets in one nest.”   Tagore’s welcoming spirit was a continuation of the Buddha’s “Metta,” an embracing loving-kindness that welcomes everyone into its fold.

It used to be a cliché that India had absorbed the Dravidians, the Aryans, the Turks, the Persians, and the Moghuls, but had been unable to absorb the British. Recent reevaluation of this cliché has reminded us how many British dived into Indian culture and lived the rest of their life in their new motherland. Gandhi’s friend and follower C.F. Andrews is an example of this. Another example was W.W. Pearson, who was Tagore’s secretary. Recently the great scholar Ramachandra Guha has written a definitive biography of Verrier Elwin, an Englishman who had originally come to India as a Christian missionary intent on converting the heathen, and who instead got converted to being a follower of Gandhi, and who became a preeminent collector of tribal literature and art, and who in 1947 surrendered his British passport and became an Indian citizen.

The welcoming attitude of India has not traditionally been limited to human beings. At the end of the Mahabharata, the hero, Yudhishthira, climbs up to Indra’s heaven in the company of his dog. The god, Indra, tells the hero he cannot get into heaven if he keeps his dog. Yudhishthira refuses to abandon his loyal friend, even if it means banishment from heaven. The dog then reveals his identity as Dharma, the god of loyalty to duty. The sculptures at Mahabalipuram, or images of the Deer Park at Benares, where the Buddha preached the Dhammacakkappavattana and set in motion the Wheel of Law; or the gods Hanuman and Ganesh, all serve to remind us how Indian culture has tended to break down the barriers between human and animal, and to unite living beings in one family.

9. Great Beings

I still cannot get over the words that were discovered, chiseled into many stone pillars scattered over India, carved in numerous scripts, well over two thousand years ago, by which Emperor Ashoka brought words of Dhamma to the far edges of his Empire. Ashoka’s ancient words are devoid of the primitive or archaic, and sound modern, universal and timeless. Of particular note is his emphasis on non-harmfulness, social service, compassion, and the desire to create the good world here on earth. “Liberality to friends?not injuring living beings?avoiding disputes, purity of heart, loyalty?no one should disparage other sects to exalt his own?self-examination?” As has been pointed out by scholars who have critically examined in detail the few surviving paragraphs of Ashoka’s political will, the great king of ancient India should not be misconstrued as a Buddhist. He was a humanist universalist. He does not refer his beliefs to the Buddha, but to the Dhamma, which means the empirical truth or universal law, unrelated to religion or theology. In the words of the seminal Pali scholar T.W. Rhys Davies: “The Dhamma was common property?was Indian rather than Buddhist.”   

India is full of great beings, some of them historical like Ashoka, some of them probably mythical. For me, some of the greatness of India is captured by the fact that the great beings have not ceased. India is not a world that once created great beings and now has dried up. My reverence for India and my sense of being a participant in its universal culture derives partly from the influence of the four great Indians of the 20th century.

Gandhi was a complex figure whose life encompassed many successes and failures. Praise of Gandhiji is a cliché, but India is more remarkable for its abandonment, rather than its loyalty, to him. His economics of village-based agrarian cottage industries was abandoned immediately. His pacifism was left behind during armed clashes with Portugal, China, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan, as realpolitik swept away his dreams. His opposition to affirmative action was swept aside. Nevertheless, he remains the greatest symbol of self-sacrifice in the service of peace that humankind has ever produced. He has been a beacon of hope, peace, and courage from Georgia and Alabama, to Gdansk and Prague. He has come to personify a shared, planetary-wide aspiration.

Tagore’s poetry captures the sense of relationship that every human being contains between our individual selves and the faceless eternal cosmos. Tagore alone has been able to create convincing and moving poetry in which the author is positioned as a man, a woman, a child, a beggar, a warrior, a sadhu, and a lover of life. His poetry locates us in the coordinates of eternity, while it inspires us to embrace the moment.

Nehru, who jokingly called himself “the last Englishman to rule India,” might less modestly have referred to himself as Ramachandra Guha does, “the Great Man.” Nehru was a prose poet, an historian, a tactician and a freedom fighter. How could anyone have given up so much wealth and opportunity to spend nine years in prison? Nehru knew when to attack with force, such as in the case of Goa or the Chinese border, and he could also choose to be a Gandhian, such as when he respected the U.N. borders with Pakistan despite India’s superior military strength and probable victory from all-out attack during Partition. Nehru cast an air of dignity over all he did and seemed to remain an ever-youthful crown prince.

Babasaheb Ambedkar parlayed his plight from a Mahar, shunned in school, to becoming the chief architect of the Indian Constitution. No one, not even the British, dared to confront Gandhi with such strength as Ambedkar did over the issue of affirmative action. Without Ambedkar, India’s freedom would not have extended to all the people of India. Yet he was free of violence in word and deed, and his most fiery weapons were constitutional law and spoken language.

10. A Gift

Individual personalities, and long standing cultures, share an indefinable, numinous, and malleable quality. It is understandable that at times human communities retreat into a defensive huddle and project a rigid stereotype of their own cultural identity, but such a stance short-changes the complexity, dignity, and richness of a great culture like India. To me it seems that the greatness of Indian culture is marked by its ability to evoke and express universal truths. Paradoxically, the gem in Indian culture is that it is incompatible with the views of its own chauvinistic proponents. After Bengali-born, Shantiniketan-educated Amartya Sen won the Economics Nobel Prize in 1998, he returned to writing philosophy. In his book The Argumentative Indian, he points out that the Rig Veda is intrinsically anti-authoritarian, and based more on questions and suggestion than on answers. Chauvinism isn’t Indian.

Indian culture is a sumptuous offering to people of all backgrounds. Like an ancient mosque of lacey arches and towering minarets, that contains no one image, so that the supreme object of worship can never be visually defined, but resides in the ineffable realms of beauty, stillness and reverence, so the richness of India cannot be reduced to domestic behavior patterns or quaint convictions.

India has a long history as a host, a nest, a light. I feel lucky to have received its glow. Although I may only see its deep inside from the outside, I believe I am correct to construe its essence as the giving of gifts. From the first Sanskrit scholar who awakened me even before I could comprehend him, to my doctor professors and colleagues in Bombay, and to my Vipassana teacher S.N. Goenka, India has been generous to me. What can be more Indian than to be a stranger and a beggar who receives alms while skirting the edge of the feast?

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