Macrohistoric Case for India's Civilizational Primacy, Part 3

The Śukras and Bṛhaspatis, the Bhṛgus and Āṅgirasas, the fire-bringers and the metallurgy-magicians, had done their job. They had laid down the palimpsest that is Bhārata, but much more was to be carved atop yet. Each layer of India’s civilizational trajectory builds atop another, and with the Vedic Indians it was time for yet another layer. It was time for our civilization to become fractal.

When you (re)embed the same wisdom and insights at every new level of civilizational trajectory, you give to your civilization a fractal character. No matter what level one zooms into, or out to, one finds the same themes playing out- the same civilizational ethos and archetypes.

What Vasiṣṭha did for the Vedic Indians was no different to what Śukra did for the Samudra Manthan-ing Devas and Asuras. But to do it all over again, at a higher level of civilization, is to embed fractal resilience. We call this resilience because, given this consolidation, when civilization was unsettled again- this time by geology itself- it gave birth to one of the greatest Indians of all time. But before we reach him, let us understand the next fundamental problem in civilizational trajectory.

4: The Fundamental Problem of Individual Well-being

Imagine a world that has suitably resolved all the problems we have listed above. Does that create a utopia then? Is civilizational trajectory over, the end of history? Western civilization would have us believe so. In its narrative, it has resolved all previous problems and history is over. The future only consists of those joining this civilizational consensus, or those losing their culture to European museums which descendants will pay handsomely to visit. But when the jana gets resolved with such hyper-chauvinistic focus, it is the jīva that suffers.

Take Korea, a civilization that has taken two opposing routes on the trajectory, and consider the jīva not in North but South Korea. This jīva lives in great economic and infrastructural prosperity. He/she lives under a healthy, functioning democracy. The jīva can participate in global discourse through mind-bogglingly high internet speeds, and the jīva can benefit from economic prosperity and travel to anywhere in the world he/she wants to. But Seoul, the capital of South Korea, also has one of the world’s highest depression and suicide rates.

Take USA, the capital of Western civilization. The pinnacle of democracy. The land of freedom, equality, liberty and justice. The shrine of jīva rights, the altar where individual liberty is given sacred stature. A place where women’s rights means an abundance of pornographic material by consenting women, while fascistic anti-abortion measures are imposed (let us not open a Pandora’s box on the morality of abortion here). A place where jīvas live alone, cut-off even from the family unit- a pre-civilizational condition of sapient existence. A place where people need pills to sleep, and opioids for everything else. A place where teenage parents feed their babies synthetic food designed for infants.

No great revelation of god, no civilizational prosperity, no amount of highways and high-speed internet prevent jīvas from torture and misery, for the fundamental jīva experience is separate from the fundamental jana experience. Civilization and individual consciousness may be comparable, but a former that gives no platform to the latter fails on a fundamental problem of civilizational trajectory- there is no happy jana without happy jīvas.

Now this fundamental jīva experience is as old as humanity itself, and indeed perhaps older- so we do not claim civilizational primacy for India on that count. But when Western civilization today develops things like ‘goat-yoga’ and ‘retail-therapy,’ when the Chinese civilization decides how much and when to reproduce, and when the Islamic civilization considers deserters punishable by death, we will not be amiss in reflecting on what our ancestors did for similar problems. Problems that, by ~2000 BC, were certainly stark, present and real.

A great river was drying up, the totem river of the Ṛgveda no less- Sarasvatī.

Yet another wave of civilizational trajectory was coming to a close, triggered in no small part by the 4.2 kiloyear event- younger sibling of the 8.2 kiloyear event that gave rise to Pṛthu Vainya millennia before.

And a young man, son of a Vāsiṣṭha, set out to travel across his country. He noticed the fall of dharma. The despair of people. The prevalence of adharma. The decay of civilizational wisdom.

He could not bear it, and he resolved to do something about it. For reasons we do not know, he was not set upon the path by his father, who in turn was a Ṛgvedic ṛṣi.

Instead, the young man, born on an island and thus named Dvaipāyana, encountered a personality busy in compiling the knowledge of his land and assembling it into a coherent whole. This personality, named Jātūkarṇa, was the 27th of his line- the line of assemblers, or vyāsas.

But the disciple, the young Dvaipāyana, soon to become the 28th and final (known) of his line, was not content to simply compile and assemble. He was navigating through a more existential problem.

The problem of embedding dharma in jīvas, such that dilution at jana level would not lead to civilizational death. The problem was of building a dharma vṛkṣa- roots, shoots, leaves and branches all.

The wisdom existed, this much he knew. The accumulated tales of Indian sūtas and māgadhas, the folk songs of forest dwellers and riparine tribes, the esoteric sound-instruments of the Ṛgvedic ṛṣis, the hidden rituals of the mountain caves, the memories of great avatāras and cakravartins- all these and more contained the wisdom of how each jīva must live his/her life in accordance with ṛta- or in the most harmonious and prosperous way possible. But the wisdom was decentralized, diluted even, and decaying fast. The lessons that ancestral grandmothers and grandfathers had embedded into each level of civilization, creating the Fractal Bhārata, needed to be preserved.

What was needed was to bring civilization back home- to complete the circle. To form the śūnya. What was needed was the maṇḍala, the whole that both completes the journey and encompasses it.

It was this young man, the kṛṣṇa-tvaca Dvaipāyana, the Vyāsa of Bhārata’s Vidya, or Veda, who created the maṇḍala. And within it he embedded what was needed for civilization at this stage of trajectory. The Puruṣārthas- the means to jīva fulfillment. Only fulfilled jīvas could bring the jana revival that was now needed. The wheel of civilization moves on. The vartana is never-ending. It is the vartin that is always needed. This was Veda Vyāsa. A Vāsiṣṭha. A founding father of Dharma.

Thousands of years before Carl Jung mused on the idea of archetypes, and insisted that the fundamental human experience is the same for all humans, Indian ancestors had realized and internalized this, and come up with a solution. The Puruṣa, or the jīva, the ātman consigned to a physical existence of limited time, before the cycle repeats anew, needs a purpose in the physical realm. And the purpose must be in accordance with ṛta, if the life is to be harmonious.

There is so much of this condition outside our control. We cannot control what we are born into, or with what capacities. We cannot control what privilege or lack of it we are granted. The only thing in our control is the inner felt-experience. The saguṇa existence cast into our mind, within this nirguṇa reality. But even as all these stations are different for each of us, our impulses and desires are the same. We are all human, and we share human archetypes.

We desire wealth.

We desire pleasure.

We desire deliverance.

Artha. Kāma. Mokṣa.

And since ours is a ṛta-driven civilization, we know that the requisite is a balance of human impulses. Any desire chased to the extreme takes us away from ṛta. Only when all desires are given natural space, but managed with restrain, will we achieve what is the ultimate objective to begin with- dharma- existence in accordance with ṛta.

And so when Veda Vyāsa (re)created the Fractal, he knew to embed into every layer this Pauruṣārthika wisdom. No longer were the ballads historical or lore- they were appropriated for the dharma project. Finally, history was made important for the lessons it could teach to us.

And thus we learnt of the avatāras, the fractal containing Mahāviṣṇus and Mahāśivas at any zoom-level. We learnt of the cakravartins- but not of their imperial conquests. Of how they upheld or re-established dharma. Of the personal conducts and sacrifices they embodied. We learnt of the Samudra Manthana, but more than learning of how ancient Indians embarked on agriculture, animal domestication and metallurgy, we learnt how they consumed amṛta, or the ṛta-upholding dhārmika code.

We learnt of the centuries of conflict preceding the high civilization of Mature Harappan. Of Divodāsa, Sudās and others’ dozens of battles big and small, of the ways in which we might have reverted to the old tribal days of Daityas and Ādityas. But these were encoded into the same instruments of sound that would form the kernel of the Fractal Maṇḍala- the Vedas. No longer was any ancient Indian a historical personality alone. They were all elevated beings to learn from, to derive meaning such that us mortals of the ‘present’ could live our life with purpose and fulfillment. Ṛgveda. Sāmaveda. Yajurveda. Atharvaveda. Mahābhārata. Purāṇa.

Each a maṇḍala in itself. Each a whole, yet each forming one pearl in a string, the string itself a maṇḍala. A fractal at every layer, all re-iterating the same truth over and over again, from different angles, as if we are in a civilizational psychedelic trip of cosmic import. And yet, the trajectory is not complete. The maṇḍala is woven, the fractals are embedded. But what is the super-structure? What will mesh dharma, artha, kāma and mokṣa into a stable whole that can become sanātana- or eternal?

5: The Fundamental Problem of Stewarding it All

What is capitalism? What is communism? What is an open market? What is a welfare state? What are taxes? What is Amazon? What is Elon Musk’s soon-to-come Starlink Satellite Internet? What is a patent, or a copyright? What is the Bilderberg meeting? What is a glass-ceiling, and what is nepotism?

You see, what a civilization does best is generate collective wealth. Not only of the physical kind, but also of the intellectual and aesthetic kinds. And if/when the preceding four fundamental problems are solved, civilization still faces the ultimate problem. What is to be done with this wealth? How is it to be managed? Who should own it? What checks to embed into the system?

Capitalism argues that we ought to just let it be. Give civilization a free reign, and in enough time it stabilizes and diffuses equity across the jana, such that no jīva need be born into a lack of opportunity. But given that with this free reign we are fast destroying the planet, and that the elite on Mars will be the descendants of the elite of Earth, and it anyway began with some already on a head-start over others, we must ask how many planets will be needed before we reach this utopian equity.

Communism argues that we must embed all control in a single entity, the State, and let the State take care of the rest. Let alone how contrary this is to the historical record, it effectively argues for us to grapple with the second fundamental problem all over again. It is no solution at all.

In reality, some people work harder than others. Some are smarter than others. Some cannot get their heads out of the dirt, content to study small bugs for the rest of their lives. Some are always staring at the stars, asking a hundred existential questions simply for the joy of doing so. Some are greedy and desire power, with no qualms in oppressing others. Even others are content with family, kinship and the simple life. Some destroy their lives to create that one piece of art that defines them, even if no reward ever comes their way. Some look at their country’s flag and feel the desire to fight for it, to lay down their lives to defend it if need be. Some join the army anyway, curious to know what it is to kill a man. Some believe they have solutions to offer, they speak out and actively work to create the reality they believe in. Some feel no attachment to life, whether through some trauma or through dependence on substances that are slowly killing them. Some want to teach what they know, some want to learn forever. Some want to go to distant places and learn foreign languages, others never feel the desire to leave their humble village.

When the nirguṇa reality falls upon each of us, it takes a saguṇa shape. But each shape is different. Each jīva is different. We are all born with different qualia, into different conditions. We are all born with different varṇas, into different jātis. This is the human condition.

Having solved fundamental issues of tribal conflict and leadership, having established an emergent order aspiring to be harmony with ṛta, having understood what it takes to defend one’s civilizational ethos, and having embedded deep cultural wisdom relevant to the well-being of any jīva, this is the final super-structure our civilization understood.

It is not casteism, this much should be evident from the trajectory so far. Or if it is, then so is the fact that Trump’s daughter and son-in-law got to be in the government. So is the fact that the Indian National Congress has been ruled by a Gandhi dynast forever. So is the fact that the Kapoors now dominate Bollywood. So is the fact that there are families sending their sons and daughters into the military, generation after generation, and others that encourage their children to learn risk and profit from a young age on. And so is the fact that a son of academics finds interest in history and knowledge.

Authored by Amritanshu Pandey. Published by Brhat.