ORTHODOXY AND HETERODOXY

ORTHODOXY AND HETERODOXY may be considered not only from the religious standpoint, as is usually the case in the West, but also from the much more general standpoint of tradition in all its modes; indeed, with regard to India it is only in the latter way that it is possible to understand these terms, since nothing of a properly religious nature exists there, whereas in the West on the contrary there is nothing genuinely traditional outside religion. So far as metaphysics and everything that derives more or less directly from it is concerned, the heterodoxy of a conception is at bottom nothing more or less than its falsity, resulting from its disagreement with fundamental principles; more often than not this falsity even appears as a manifest absurdity, once the question is reduced to essentials: it could hardly be otherwise, since metaphysics, as we have already explained, excludes everything of a hypothetical character, only admitting those things the comprehension of which involves immediate certitude. Under these circumstances, orthodoxy becomes one with true knowledge, since it consists in an unbroken accord with the principles; and since these principles, in the case of the Hindu tradition, are contained in essence in the Veda, it is evidently agreement with the Veda that is here the criterion of orthodoxy. Only it should be understood that it is not so much a question of having recourse to the authority of the written texts as of observing the perfect coherence of the traditional teaching as a whole; agreement or disagreement with the Vedic texts is after all only an exterior sign of the intrinsic truth or falseness of a conception; it is this truth or falseness which really constitutes its orthodoxy or heterodoxy. It will be objected perhaps that if this is so, then why is it not sufficient to speak quite simply of truth or falsity? The reason is that the unity of the traditional doctrine, with all the power inherent in it, furnishes the most trustworthy guide for preventing individual aberrations from being carried too far; moreover, the influence diffused by the tradition itself is sufficient for this purpose without there being a need for the restraining influence of any authority more or less analogous to a religious authority: this follows from what has been said on the subject of the real nature of Hindu unity. The confusion brought about by an unbridled development and expansion of the most hazardous and contradictory opinions, in circumstances where this power of the tradition is lacking and where there is not even an external authority able in some measure to take its place, is illustrated only too well by the example of modern Western philosophy; if false conceptions arise so easily in the West and even succeed in forcing themselves upon the minds of the people in general, it is because a reference to principles is no longer possible, since no principles in the true sense of the word are recognized any longer. On the contrary, in an essentially traditional civilization, the principles are never lost sight of and it only remains to apply them, directly or indirectly, in whatever sphere it is desired to do so. Consequently, deviations occur much more rarely and are even exceptional; if they do nevertheless arise sometimes, they are never very widely accredited: they always remain the anomalies they were in the first instance, and if they become serious to the point of incompatibility with the most essential principles of the tradition, they finish by being rejected on this account from the civilization in which they arose.

To illustrate the point just mentioned we will take the case of atomism, to which we shall also have to refer again later: this conception is clearly heterodox, since it is in formal disagreement with the Veda, and furthermore its falsity may easily be demonstrated since it contains certain self-contradictory elements; fundamentally, therefore, heterodoxy and absurdity are really synonymous. In India, atomism appeared first of all in the cosmological school of Kanāda, and it may be noted here that it would hardly be possible for heterodox conceptions to arise in the schools devoted to purely metaphysical speculation, because in the realm of principles absurdity is much more immediately apparent than in the realm of secondary applications. So far as the Hindus are concerned this atomist theory never represented anything but a simple anomaly of no great importance, so long at least as nothing more serious came to be added to it; thus it only enjoyed a very limited success, especially in comparison with the influence it was to acquire later with the Greeks, where, because the traditional principles were already in default, it was readily accepted by various schools of 'physical philosophy'; Epicureanism, in particular, gained for it a widespread recognition, giving it an influence still to be felt in the modern West.

To return to India, atomism was at first only put forward as a special cosmological theory, therefore quite limited in its scope; but for those who accepted this theory, heterodoxy on that particular point logically entailed heterodoxy on many other points also, since everything is closely linked together in a traditional doctrine. Thus, the conception of atoms as constitutive elements of things has as its corollary the idea of a void in which these atoms can move; there was therefore a likelihood of a theory of 'the universal void' arising sooner or later, this expression being taken not in a metaphysical sense as referring to the 'non-manifest', but on the contrary in a physical or cosmological sense. That is what actually happened in certain Buddhist schools, which came to identify this void with ākāsha or ether. Thence they were naturally led on to a denial of the existence of ether as a corporeal element, so that they no longer admitted five, but only four such elements. It must also be noted in this connection that the majority of the Greek philosophers also admitted only four elements, like the Buddhist schools in question; if, nevertheless, some of them spoke of ether, they only did so in a rather restricted sense, giving it a much more special and also much less clear meaning than the Hindus.

We have already indicated to which side borrowing must be attributed when concordances such as this come to be noticed, especially when the borrowing is made in an incomplete form, which is perhaps the most revealing evidence of all. It cannot be objected that the Hindus 'invented' ether at a subsequent date for more or less plausible reasons analogous to those which cause it to be fairly generally accepted by modern physicists. In the first place, their reasons are of quite another order and are not the result of experiment; moreover, as we have already explained, there is no such thing as an 'evolution' of traditional conceptions, and the testimony of the Vedic texts is in fact just as explicit on the subject of ether as of the four remaining corporeal elements. It seems therefore that the Greeks, when they came into contact with Hindu thought, in many cases only received that thought deformed and mutilated, and moreover it is probable that they did not always expound it exactly as they had received it; it is also possible, as we mentioned before, that in the course of their history they were in closer and more continuous touch with some of the Buddhists than with the Hindus.

However that may be, it must be understood, as regards atomism, that its principal danger lies in the fact that it can easily be made to serve as the foundation of a 'naturalism' that is in general as contrary to the ways of Eastern thought as it is frequent, under more or less explicit forms, in Western conceptions; in fact it can be said that if all naturalistic theories are not necessarily atomic, atomism is always more or less naturalistic, at least in tendency. When it is incorporated in a philosophical system, as it was with the Greeks, it even becomes mechanistic, which does not necessarily mean materialistic, for materialism is something entirely modern. This is of little importance here, however, since in India there is no question of philosophical systems any more than of religious dogmas; even the deviations of Hindu thought have never been either philosophical or religious in nature, and this also holds good of Buddhism, even though, in all the East, its doctrine is the one which at first sight might appear to approach closest to Western points of view in certain respects; and that is the very reason why it lends itself all the more easily to those false assimilations that are so dear to orientalists. For this reason, although the study of Buddhism does not really form part of our subject, we must nevertheless say a few words about it, if only to dispel certain confusions that are commonly entertained in the West.