Ethically, this is a world of limited good or a zero-sum game: If someone is saved, someone else has to be damned. For Brahmins to be pure, Pariahs have to be impure. This is the jealous world of the second alliance: If you win, I lose. Since evil is a substance, space is a problem. This means, among other things, that evil, once created, cannot get out of the universe; the best you can do is just move it over to some spot where it will do the least possible harm, as the fire that fused Shiva’s anger and Kama’s erotic power was temporarily stashed in the doomsday mare at the bottom of the ocean.
The good antigod is the figure that ultimately triggers a paradigm shift in this cosmology. At first, he is caught in the clash between a form of general dharma (
sadharana dharma
) and specific dharma (
sva-dharma,
in this case, the duties of an antigod), a conflict that already affects the good ogres such as Vibhishana in the
Ramayana.
One story about a good ogre is based upon a typical myth told at some length in the
Ramayana
(7.5-8), in which an ogre named Sukesha is at first very good (he and his three sons study the Veda and make generous gifts), then good but threatening (they amass great amounts of inner heat and are given boons of invincibility), and finally corrupted by pride (they harass the gods); Vishnu destroys them all in battle and sends them down to hell. When a Purana retells this story, it raises new issues:
THE OGRE SUKESHIN GOES TO HEAVEN
A great ogre named Sukeshin received from Shiva the boon that he could not be conquered or slain. He lived according to dharma, and one day he asked a hermitage full of sages to tell him about dharma. They began by describing the specific dharma of gods (to perform sacrifice), ogres (raping other men’s wives, coveting others’ wealth, worshiping Shiva), and others. Then they went on to explain general dharma, the tenfold dharma for all classes, such as noninjury, restraint, and generosity. They concluded: “No one should abandon the dharma ordained for his own class and stage of life or his
sva-dharma.
”
Sukeshin taught all the ogres about general dharma, and when they practiced it, their brilliant luster paralyzed the sun, moon, and stars; night was like day; owls came out and crows killed them. Then the sun realized the ogres’ one weakness: they had abandoned their
sva-dharma,
a lapse that destroyed all their general dharma
.
Overpowered by anger, the sun shot his rays at them, and their city fell from the sky.
But when Sukeshin saw the city falling, he said, “Honor to Shiva!” and Shiva cast his glance at the sun, which fell from the sky like a stone. The gods propitiated Shiva and put the sun back in his chariot, and they took Sukeshin to dwell in heaven.
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The first of the three parts of this myth states the problem: the clash between general and specific dharma. The second defends
sva-dharma,
and the third overrules it, when Sukeshin plays the bhakti card to trump at least some of the aces of the caste system.
At the start, Sukeshin is in a bind: He must not abandon his dharma of rape and pillage, but he must also practice self-restraint (not easily compatible with rape) and generosity (not easily compatible with stealing). The one ray of light in this dark conflict is the fact that the
sva-dharma
of an ogre here apparently includes the worship of Shiva. Sukeshin seizes upon this loophole and proselytizes, with devastating results: Innocent owls die, and the sun is disastrously still. The midnight sun (which drives Scandinavians and Russians to commit suicide in summer) is even worse than the midwinter, when there is no sun; human beings (and, apparently, gods) cannot stand too much light—too much goodness in the wrong place. This is the traditional view: For an ogre, evil is its own reward, and a good ogre (virtuous) is by definition a bad ogre (the white sheep of his family). The jealous sun puts an end to it—but no. The marines land, as the troops of bhakti blow
sva-dharma
out of the water. The solution, however, is implied rather than stated: Sukeshin alone goes to heaven, the token antigod there; the other antigods, whose massive luster caused all the problems, conveniently vanish. Not everyone can go to heaven, it appears. Even with bhakti, at this point, not all are saved; the masses, the lower castes, and unreformed sinners are not saved. Not yet, at any rate.
BLOWING OFF THE ROOF
But later bhakti texts blast through this impasse. The spirit of these texts is what Mircea Eliade celebrated as “breaking open the roof ” (
briser le toit
),
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and the later Puranas did it, cracking open the egg of the closed universe. We have seen one example of this sort of cosmological transformation in two different versions of hell, first with a
Mahabharata
king (Yudhishthira) who cannot transfer his personal good karma and then with a Puranic king (Vipashchit) who can. Now we will encounter a mythology in which, again, sinners are given good karma that they don’t deserve, but since now it is a god, rather than a human king, who transfers his powers, his compassion and forgiveness, the god, unlike the king, loses nothing by it, none of his good karma. The world of limited good gives way to a world of infinitely expansible good karma and bhakti; the generous donor keeps it all while the sinners benefit from it too, just as in the avatar the god remains entire in heaven even while he gives a portion of himself to the avatar on earth. Unlike texts such as the
Gita,
these texts are saying that even without bhakti on your part you can be saved from your sins; the god has enough bhakti for both of you.
In several of the late Puranic texts, when a shrine offers universal access to heaven, raising the gods’ hackles, Shiva intervenes, preserves or restores the shrine, and takes everyone to “the abode of Brahma.”
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When the god of hell, Yama, complains that women, Shudras, and dog cookers all are going to heaven through one particular shrine, the Shaiva shrine of Somnath, putting Yama out of work, Shiva replies that they all have been purified by the sight of the shrine, and he dismisses Yama without another word.
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To the complaint that heaven is full of evil people, Shiva simply replies that the people in question are no longer evil, ignoring the other half of the complaint, that heaven is full, or Yama on the dole. (Somnath is, the reader will recall, the temple that Mahmud of Ghazni so notoriously destroyed in 1025, perhaps before this text was composed.) Apparently, Shiva’s new heaven cannot be filled; these texts imagine a new heaven that can stretch the envelope to accommodate everyone.
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Earlier the shape of the universe seemed to constrain the ethical possibilities, but when those possibilities grow intense, the cosmos changes its shape, and this in turn can change the way that human beings treat one another, at least in theory and perhaps in practice. As in the
Gita,
the payoff is still in the next life. Most of these texts are not saying that a Pariah can act like a Brahmin in this life, merely that he too can be freed from this life. But some of them seem to imply that people of all castes can change their forms of worship in
this
life and thus gain a better rebirth. And here again we must acknowledge that these stories are not merely about Pariahs but also about the relationship between all humans and their salvation.
Under the combined influence of bhakti, Deshification, and Islam, some texts take the challenge one step further. Now the god to whom the antigod is devoted comes to him and announces that he and all the other antigods are to be taken forever to the heaven of the god, which can accommodate not only all reformed sinners but even
unreformed
sinners too, as well as people of all classes.
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Indeed this heaven is
particularly
partial to unreformed sinners. This is the culminating myth of the third alliance: The gods love all of us, even the good (hence bad) antigods and, especially, the bad antigods. This is a world of not only unlimited good but undeserved good, of what might be called accidental grace.
We can see a kind of development here. First comes the story of the good bhakta, a good man, a devotee of Shiva, whom Shiva saves from death; there are many stories of this type.
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Then comes the evil bhakta. The god of death is forced to spare all worshipers of Shiva, even if they are evildoers (or evil thinkers; heretics and liars also go to heaven if they worship Shiva) or antigods who worship Shiva against their
sva-dharma
of being evil;
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we have seen some of these. Then comes the story of a man who is neither good nor a bhakta:
THE THIEF WHO RANG THE BELL
A thief who killed Brahmins, drank wine, stole gold, and corrupted other men’s wives lost everything in a game of dice. That night he climbed on the head of a Shiva-linga and took away the bell [inadvertently ringing it]. Shiva sent his servants to the thief and brought him to Kailasa, where he became a servant of Shiva.
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Three of the thief’s sins are those of lustful addiction—wine, women, and dice—and the fourth and fifth are the two defining sins of the Brahmin world: killing Brahmins and stealing (Brahmins’) gold. The thief’s brush with accidental bhakti does nothing at all to change him; presumably, he goes on dicing, womanizing, and drinking until he dies. Although in some stories the accidental act of worship changes the worshiper, more often the sinners remain unreformed like this and therefore (
sic
) go to heaven.
Here is another story, about a very bad man, this one ironically named Ocean of Virtues (Gunanidhi):
THE ADULTERER WHO LIT A LAMP
Gunanidhi abandoned his wife for a prostitute and went to a temple at night to rob it; he made a new wick for the lamp in order to see what was worth stealing, found the treasure, took it, and then returned to his wicked ways. Years later, when he died, he won deliverance from hell and eternal life in heaven because he had lit a lamp for the god.
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(Robbing temples, you will recall, was a very real problem at this time: South Indian kings, Muslim conquerors, everyone was doing it.) Similarly, Devaraja (“King of the Gods”), a thoroughly no-good fellow, accidentally heard the
Shiva Purana
being recited when he was passing by on some foul errand, paid no attention to it at all, but was still saved, by that contact, from the consequences of his sins.
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Then there was the man of equally dastardly deeds, named Rogue (Kitava), who tripped while hastening to bring flowers to his whore; he fell down, dropped all the flowers, and cried out, “Shiva!”
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For offering flowers to Shiva, not only was he saved from being thrown into hell but he was given the throne of Indra, king of the gods, thus fulfilling his name. (He was eventually reborn as the antigod Bali, but that is another story.)
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None of these sinners reforms as a result of his accidental encounter with the god; no one sees the light or turns over a new page; all go on whoring, robbing, and so forth until they die, presumably of syphilis, cirrhosis, or impalement. But the mere encounter is enough to save them. The theme of the undeserving devotee implicitly repositions ritualism, even apparently “mindless” ritualism, over bhakti. It argues that feelings, emotions, intentions do not count at all, that certain actions are efficacious in themselves in procuring salvation for the unwitting devotee. You don’t even have to know how to do the ritual, but you do it “naturally,” almost like the “natural” (
sahaja
) acts of Tantric ritual. In this sense, at least, these stories present a Tantric argument for the efficacy of a ritual useful for sinners in the Kali Age.
These narratives seem counterintuitive and were perceived as perverse by some subsequent Hindu commentators. But where did the idea come from?
Retracing our footsteps, we can see the early stirrings of this concept of the sinner who goes to heaven despite his intentions, in the South Indian idea of “hate-devotion,” which takes on new dimensions in the late Puranas. By trying to kill the god, the antigod becomes passionate toward the god, and so the god loves the antigod, with or without repentance.
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After Krishna killed the ogress Putana (“Stinky”), her body gave off a sweet smell when it burned, for she had been purified by her death at his hands and by suckling him—even though she had done it with the intention of poisoning him. This doctrine, though sometimes challenged in bhakti texts that demanded a conscious turning toward god, was often upheld in texts justifying heresies: “Those who become non-Vedic Pashupatas and decry Vishnu really worship him through the spirit of hatred [
dvesha-buddhi
].”
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The
Bhagavata Purana
makes explicit the effect of this belief: “Desire, hatred, fear, or love toward the lord, filling the heart with bhakti, destroy all sins and bind one to the lord: The Gopis by desire, Kamsa by fear, the wicked kings by hatred, and his kinsmen by affection were bound to him as we are by bhakti.”
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Other elements too contributed to the development of the idea of accidental grace, such as the Tantric goal of merging with the god by flouting all the rules of conventional dharma.
In keeping with the other reversals of caste rules, dogs often play important roles in this theology:
THE TRIDENT PAW
An evil thief was killed by the king’s men. A dog came to eat him, and accidentally, unthinkingly, the dog’s nails made the mark of Shiva’s trident on the man’s forehead. As a result, Shiva’s messengers took the thief to Kailasa.
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Now the dog, instead of the sinner, performs an accidental act of worship, as the three scratches of his nails (part of his foot, the lowest part of this lowest of creatures) form the triple lines of Shiva’s trident (
trishula
), just as Kannappar’s dogs left their paw marks on Shiva, and the natural genitals of male and female Tantrics are read as the signs of Shiva and Parvati. The thief’s generosity to the dog is part of his bhakti to the god. The dog who intends to eat the thief (and perhaps succeeds; the text does not say) unthinkingly blesses him. The thief goes to heaven, though the dog does not.