|
In this article Prof. Thomas J. Hopkins presents a broad historical
view of issues of scriptural and institutional authority. He compares
these issues as they appear in the main Abrahamic religions with
their counterparts in Hinduism, and specifically how they affect
ISKCON. We are taken on a tour of the development of Christianity,
Islam and Judaism and shown how these developments are informed
and moulded by debate over where authority lies. These developments
are then compared to developments in Hinduism. These are issues
that will confront ISKCON, and history may contain some useful lessons
for our own development.
The issue of authority is as old as human culture. Every human institution
poses the question of how order will be maintained, and no institution
or social group - including ISKCON - can survive over time without
resolving this question in some way. Who should be in charge? What
directions or standards should be followed? How are these issues to
be decided? To what extent should the present community and its institutions
be influenced by people, ideas, or arrangements from the past? How
can the community decide when change is needed and when it should
be resisted? How can the transition from past to future be negotiated
in the constantly moving present, and what should guide this process?
How can order and freedom be balanced within the chosen system of
authority, and what values influence this balance?
Origins
The need for authority can be traced back to the central reality of
human life, the relationship of parents and children. We all enter
the world as helpless infants, dependent on our parents for life itself.
Our first experience of authority is thus very personal and largely
informal; authority is implicit in family relationships and defined
by habit, tradition, and the dynamics of daily interactions. This
pattern continues through years of childcare, during which we are
socialised and acculturated first to the family unit and then to the
surrounding society. In the course of this process, however, the innate
authority of the family is gradually superseded by that of larger
social units with more formal and explicit claims to authority. Authority
then becomes an issue, because the new forms of authority are no longer
based on the natural relationships within a family but on a variety
of external social conditions. Biology, we might say, gives way at
this point to cultural history.
In the early stages of human culture the largest social units were
usually clans or tribes, which still preserved a 'family' sense of
biological connection. As societies became more complex, more diverse,
and more stratified, however, social order and cohesion required new
forms of authority that transcended biological ties. Whatever form
such 'higher' authority took, it was necessarily less innate than
family structures of authority and had to depend on different criteria
to legitimise it. This stage of development was reached at different
times in different places; both the forms of authority and the asserted
grounds for their legitimisation therefore became as diverse as the
purposes they served and the cultures in which they appeared. Political,
social, economic, and religious authority took different forms to
suit these various spheres of activity, and the legitimisation for
each was suitably different. Thus, over time, we see the emergence
of culturally different political systems, laws, social and economic
rules, and religious teachings that define authority within each sphere.
This stage of development has typically been reached at different
times for different spheres of activity even within the same cultural
tradition, and different cultural traditions differ even more from
each other in how and when they define the various forms of authority.
Moreover, even when authority has been defined within each sphere,
this is not the end of the process. Political authority even within
a well-defined system is always subject to competing forces; laws
must be constantly changed or supplemented; social and economic rules
must be revised to fit new circumstances; and religious teachings
must always be interpreted anew to meet the needs of each new time
and place. Having clearly defined sources and statements of authority
helps in each of these spheres, but does not guarantee finality. However
legitimate authority may be, each new community and each new generation
must re-examine its claims and accept its terms in its own unique
way.
Conflicts of authority within religious traditions
The need for communities and new generations to re-examine their claims
of authority is certainly no less true of religious authority than
of any other, despite the typical claims of legitimisation at the
highest level. Even setting aside the conflicting claims between religious
traditions, no historical tradition has lasted for long without internal
conflicts over its own sources of authority. What are the legitimate
sources of authority, and what legitimises them? What priority should
each have? How - and by whom - should disputes over priority be resolved?
How should the sources of authority be understood, and who has the
right to interpret them? How should the accepted authority be applied
within the religious community, on what grounds, and by whom? Can
earlier decisions on these issues be changed, and if so, how and by
whom?
ISKCON has had to face many of these issues in the years since Prabhupada's
passing away in 1977. Prabhupada may have had to deal with similar
questions when he was starting ISKCON, but during his lifetime he
himself was seen as the source of authority for his followers. Very
few of the movement's early members knew about the tradition of Bengal
Vaisnavism that formed the background for Prabhupada's devotional
life and teachings, and even fewer knew about the work of Bhaktivinoda
Thakura and Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati that led Prabhupada's mission
to the West. All of this background was channelled into ISKCON through
Prabhupada, and he was the one who had to select and present the received
authorities to Westerners through English translations of Bengali
and Sanskrit sources and through commentaries and teachings that made
these sources meaningful to those who had no prior knowledge of their
origins or contents. It was thus only after Prabhupada passed away
that his disciples had to face the problems of authority directly
for themselves and sort out the tangled web of texts, organisations,
and teachers on which Prabhupada had drawn for his own authoritative
leadership.
These questions about authority are familiar not just because they
are relevant to ISKCON but because they are almost universal in the
major world religions and are central in religions, such as Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam, that claim divine revelation as their foundation.
Judaism, for example, considers the Hebrew Scriptures to have been
revealed by God, but these scriptures also reflect the historic tension
within the Jewish community between the authoritative roles of priests,
prophets, and rabbis. Priests emphasised the ritual texts that governed
their sphere of activity, while the texts produced by prophets often
criticised priests for putting ritual ahead of morality and justice.
This tension was only resolved after the Roman destruction of the
Temple in 70 CE (which made the temple priests irrelevant) and the
rise of the Christian Roman Empire (which made the role of prophets
irrelevant among a largely Diaspora Jewish community). By that time,
however, religious authority had shifted to the rabbis who interpreted
Jewish Law on a local basis.
The ultimate authority for the rabbis remained the Hebrew Scriptures
- especially the first five books known as Torah - but application
of their laws to changing social conditions required new interpretations
of Scripture. Eventually, these interpretations were brought together
in what became known as the Talmud, a massive collection of rabbinic
commentaries and discussions of religious law that define what we
know as Rabbinic Judaism (or simply 'Judaism,' since no other form
now exists). The Hebrew Scriptures formed the core of the Talmudic
texts, but over time the scriptures themselves became less influential
than the Talmudic texts on which later rabbinic authority is largely
based. In more recent centuries, rabbinic authority itself has been
differently understood in the Orthodox, Conservative, and Reformed
versions of Rabbinic Judaism, especially with regard to how traditional
Jewish laws apply to modern culture. The result is conflict not only
over which texts have authority but whose interpretations should be
followed in applying them.
Islam has gone through a similar struggle with problems of authority.
All Muslims believe that Allah conveyed the Koran to Muhammad
in a series of revelations, that Muhammad transmitted them to his
followers in Arabic, and that the Koran is the verbatim record
of these revelations. Some or all of the revelations may have been
written down at the time (though not by Muhammad), but they were also
memorised and organised in their present form during or soon after
Muhammad's lifetime. The resulting text consists of individual revelations
in Arabic arranged in order of decreasing length to aid memorisation,
and it is this Arabic text alone that has final authority as the Word
of Allah.
Muhammad, however, was not just the one to whom Allah's words were
revealed; he was also the political and legal authority for the new
Muslim community. He directed the campaigns by which his followers
gained control of Arabia and the surrounding areas, and he adjudicated
disputes within the Islamic community at every level from personal
and family concerns to affairs of state. It was thus not only the
revealed words of Allah that had authority for his followers but also
the example of Muhammad's own actions and judgements during the years
of his leadership. Like the revelations he received, what he did and
said on specific occasions was remembered by those directly involved
and became part of his permanent legacy.
When Muhammad died, the immediate problem for his successors was to
collect both his revelations and the reports of his deeds and sayings
in the most accurate form possible. The latter had seldom been written
down, so a system had to be set up to assess the circumstances under
which they occurred and the reliability of those who claimed to have
received and remembered them. These remembered examples were in time
codified as what was called Hadith, reports of Muhammad's teaching
and conduct as certified by the authority of their transmitters. Within
a few centuries of Muhammad's death, there were six authoritative
collections of Hadith recognised by the Sunni ('mainstream')
Muslim community and another adopted by the rival Shiite community
that gave special authority to the Shiite imams, their distinctive
spiritual leaders. Different schools of law developed around these
collections, each attempting in its own way to determine the relevant
authority of the Koran, the Hadith collections, and
local practices to create normative community standards.
It was not only Muhammad's moral and legal guidance that had to be
maintained when he died, however, but also his political leadership.
From the moment of his death onward, there were questions about who
should be his Caliph or 'Successor' and what standards should be used
to select him. Should he be chosen on the basis of his relationship
to Muhammad, his spiritual character, his political/military skills,
or his membership in a particular family or community? Should there
be one Caliph to rule over all Muslims, or should leadership be more
decentralised and based on more regional or cultural factors? These
issues surfaced in various forms in almost every generation, and a
major conflict over succession eventually split the Muslim community
into the rival Sunni and Shiite branches. This split did not resolve
other problems, however, and disputes about the authority of different
Hadith collections, legal schools, and leadership principles
continue to generate factional conflicts within each branch.
Authority in Christianity
It is fair to say from this brief overview that issues of authority
have had significant influences on both Judaism and Islam from their
origins to the present. By contrast, however, the problems of authority
in these two traditions are minimal compared to the struggles over
authority within Christianity. Both the letters of Paul the Apostle
(the earliest Christian writings) and the four Gospels (the next oldest)
indicate that issues of authority began during the ministry of Jesus
and became critical during the first few generations after his death.
The first and most basic question was whether Jesus was the predicted
Messiah (in Greek, the Christ or 'Anointed One'). If he was the Messiah/Christ,
he had great authority; if he was not, then it was not clear what
authority he might have as a simple itinerant teacher. This question
was not resolved for his followers until after his death, when his
resurrection and appearance to his disciples proved to them that he
was in fact the one anointed by God to bring a new message of salvation.
But what was this message, this 'Good News' (Gospel) of salvation
brought by Jesus? Jesus' teachings over a period of several years
were remembered by his disciples, but the authority of the teachings
depended on the authority of Jesus as the Risen Christ. How was this
authority to be understood, and how did the message of this Jewish
teacher relate to earlier Jewish scriptures whose authority he accepted?
Even more critically, to whom did the Gospel apply? Was it intended
only for Jews, who made up his initial following, or did it apply
also to Gentiles, non-Jews, who were the main population of the Roman
Empire and whose political rule covered even the Jewish homeland in
Judea and its capital Jerusalem?
From the beginning, there was tension within the new Christian community
between those who wanted to maintain Jewish identity and practices
(the so-called 'Judaisers') and those, like Paul, who wanted to include
Gentiles within the Christian community and make Jewish practices
optional. This issue was effectively resolved in 70 CE, a few years
after Paul's death, when the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem
- an event that ended the authoritative role of temple priests in
Jewish life and greatly diminished the importance of Jerusalem for
both Jews and Christians. Rabbinic Judaism and its synagogues remained
alive and well in other parts of the Roman Empire, but the appeal
of the early 'Judaisers' rapidly declined, and Christianity soon became
a predominantly Gentile religion co-existing with Diaspora Judaism
and Roman paganism. Christians still relied on the Hebrew Scriptures
as their only authoritative scriptures, however, and did not agree
on the contents of their own distinctive scriptural authority (the
New Testament) until after Constantine had adopted Christianity as
the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE.
Struggles over several different kinds of authority characterised
these early Christian centuries. How authoritative should Jewish practices
be for Christians? What was the authority of the Hebrew Scriptures,
and how did their authority relate to that of the new specifically
Christian scriptures? How should Christians relate to the classical
Greek culture that characterised the eastern regions of the Roman
Empire? Which of the existing Christian writings (all in Greek) should
be given canonical authority, and whose authority should decide this?
What authority should Christians grant to the Roman Empire, and what
authority must they reserve for themselves in order to be true to
their faith? What essential beliefs and practices defined who was
a Christian, and on whose authority was this to be decided?
Debates over these issues turned into power struggles between Christian
churches and communities in different parts of the Mediterranean world.
Official recognition of the Church in the fourth century CE led imperial
authorities to intervene in these disputes with a series of Church
councils that brought charges of heresy against several Christian
communities and their churches, blurring the lines between political
and religious authority and creating tensions between the Western
(Latin) and Eastern (Greek) churches. These tensions were further
increased by a series of conflicts over a period of several centuries
between the Bishop of Rome (the Pope) and the patriarchs of the Greek-language
churches in the eastern Mediterranean - conflicts which came to a
head in 1054 CE when the Patriarch of Constantinople was commanded
to acknowledge the papacy in Rome as the supreme church authority.
When the patriarch refused and negotiations failed, the eastern churches
were excommunicated by Rome and in turn declared themselves and their
Eastern Orthodox tradition independent of the Roman papacy.
By this point in Christian history, at the start of the second millennium
CE, many different forms of Christianity had evolved from the early
community of Jewish disciples who followed Jesus. An originally Jewish
movement had moved outward into the Gentile world of the Roman Empire,
created its own scriptural canon in Greek, and spread from the eastern
Mediterranean region westward into Latin Europe, southward into Egypt
and North Africa, eastward into Asia as far as India and China, and
northward into Eastern Europe. Each development had brought changes,
some creating conflicts with other branches, and each set of new conditions
created a need for new policies, theologies, and institutions. Issues
of authority figured in every stage of this process: the authority
of Jesus as a teacher, the continuing authority of the Hebrew Scriptures
and Jewish law, the authority of the Risen Christ as a Saviour, the
authority of Apostles such as Peter and Paul, the individual and collective
authority of the New Testament scriptures, the authority of the early
Greek and Latin Church Fathers, the authority of church leaders such
as the patriarchs and the Pope, the relative authority of Church and
Empire, etc.
What Christianity meant to any given individual at this point thus
depended on how all of these authorities were understood and accepted
or rejected by his or her branch of the Christian tradition, by the
relevant local church leaders, and by himself or herself. Some of
the possible meanings were unacceptable to those who relied on different
authorities, so Christianity as a whole contained mutually incompatible
parts. The Nestorian, Coptic, and Syrian Orthodox churches were declared
heretical by fifth century imperial church councils and remained as
'Separated' churches outside the authority of both Eastern Orthodox
patriarchs and the Roman Pope. The latter two authorities were then
themselves made mutually exclusive by the events of 1054 and remained
separate from that point on. A thousand years from its origins, Christianity
clearly was a different thing for members of each of these churches
even though they accepted many of the same authorities. As in many
basic conflicts, it was the relatively few things that they did not
agree on that split them apart and led them to argue over the meaning
of even those authorities they held in common, most notably Jesus
Christ and the New Testament scriptures.
The Protestant Reformation
Christianity was not yet finished with its splits by the early second
millennium, however. Most of the divisions so far had taken place
within the eastern regions of the Church, culminating in the split
between the papal authority in Rome and the Eastern Orthodox churches.
Papal authority and Roman Christianity were at that point still supreme
in the western Mediterranean regions and had expanded to include
all of Western Europe, inspiring and in turn benefiting from the great
European intellectual and cultural Renaissance in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries. By the sixteenth century, however, large-scale
political and economic changes and new religious ideas were sparking
challenges to papal authority and prompting calls for church reform.
These trends finally reached fruition during the first half of the
century in what is called the Protestant Reformation, a series of
regional religious movements in Western Europe that had in common
mainly their concern to free Christian faith and practice from the
control of papal and priestly authority.
Like the earlier conflicts and splits within Christianity, the Protestant
Reformation had deep-seated roots and far-reaching consequences that
cannot be explored here in any detail. All of the numerous protest
and reform movements that made up the Reformation, however, had grievances
against both papal authority and many of the institutions and practices
of the Church that rested on that authority. Luther and Calvin, the
most influential Reformers, challenged papal authority with the authority
of the Scriptures, the 'word of God,' and argued that a faithful Church
should not teach, legislate, or institutionalise anything not contained
in the Scriptures and thereby sanctioned as God's will. Salvation
in their view could never be conveyed by human institutions or rituals
but only by God's grace administered by the Holy Spirit, and it is
granted not on the basis of human works but to those who have faith.
Neither the Pope nor priests therefore have the power either to grant
salvation or to withhold it, because salvation is a gift of God given
directly to all who have faith in Him.
Luther, Calvin, and other Reformation leaders did not initially seek
separation from the Roman (or, as it came to call itself, the Roman
Catholic) Church. Their challenges and protests, however, involved
issues that could not be resolved without an agreement on papal authority
- and this in the long run proved impossible. The result was the gradual
emergence of a variety of so-called Protestant churches out from under
the jurisdiction of the Pope and the Church of Rome - churches that
often did not agree among themselves on many matters beyond their
rejection of papal authority. The Reformation thus gave rise not to
a unified Protestant Church but to many separate forms of Protestant
Christianity that were often in conflict with each other as well as
with Roman Catholicism and that have, over the past few centuries,
continued both to divide into new denominations and recombine into
new Protestant churches.
One need not follow the tangled web of Protestant history in detail
to recognise the effects of rejecting papal authority in favour of
Scripture and personal faith. The Roman Catholic Church by the sixteenth
century was a highly centralised religious institution in which authority
radiated outward from the Pope through the ordained celibate priesthood
and monastic orders (collectively called 'the religious') to ordinary
laypersons by means of rituals, preaching, and the teachings of the
Church. The version of the Bible used in the Roman Church was the
Latin Vulgate, a fourth-century translation of the Hebrew Old Testament
and the Greek New Testament that was inaccessible to most laypersons
both because of its language and because it existed only in the form
of hand-copied manuscripts in Church libraries. What laypersons knew
of the Scriptures was thus necessarily second-hand, mediated to them
by the priests in rituals and sermons or interpreted for them by Church
teachings.
All of this was turned on its head by the Protestant Reformation,
beginning with the work of Martin Luther in Germany. For Luther, Scripture
as the revelation of God's Word was the sole authority for the Church
and for the individual Christian. There was no exclusive papal right
to interpret the Scriptures as claimed by the Roman Church, and no
need for priests to mediate Scripture to laypersons. Every Christian
believer was in fact a priest by virtue of baptism, and this 'priesthood
of all believers' made it possible for each believer to appropriate
the Scriptures directly without the intervention of papal authority
- a task that Luther made simpler by translating the New Testament
from Greek into idiomatic German and publishing it for a mass readership
by means of the recently invented printing press. Furthermore, if
laypersons were priests, then there was no reason for a celibate clergy
(an argument that Luther manifested in his own life by marrying a
former nun) and the life and work of laypersons should be given the
same respect as that of clergy, monks, and nuns whom the Church had
formerly labelled 'the religious' in contrast to laypersons. Since
salvation is by faith, and faith is an individual matter, there is
no privileged class with special authority to mediate God's grace
and grant salvation to others.
While various Reformers disagreed with some of Luther's positions
on other matters, all of them basically accepted these fundamental
principles. All gave primary authority to the Scriptures, all rejected
required celibacy for the clergy, all insisted on the importance of
marriage and the dignity of lay life and lay occupations, and all
believed in salvation of the individual believer by faith. Access
to the Scriptures and study of the Scriptures thus became essential
concerns of the Protestant churches, married clergy became the norm,
and there was substantial lay involvement in activities such as preaching,
teaching, and church management that the Roman Church reserved for
the celibate clergy. Protestant churches continued to ordain clergy,
but ordination was seen not as entry into a priestly role dependent
on papal authority but as a commission to perform special duties prescribed
by Scripture on behalf of the ordaining church. Across the many differences
that separated Lutherans, Calvinists, and Anabaptists - to name only
the three largest early Protestant divisions - these features as well
as the common rejection of papal authority came to define Protestantism
as a distinctive branch of the Christian tradition alongside the older
Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches.
How could such a variety of churches come forth from the simple early
Christian community in Judea? Or, to put it another way, how could
accepting Jesus as the Messiah/Christ and Saviour have so many different
results? If we look only at the beginning and the end points, it is
hard to see how all of the latter can connect to the single starting
point. If we start at the beginning and go forward step by step, however,
we can see that the gradual branching out into different churches
was the product of a series of decisions made at critical junctures,
most of them involving conflicts over authority. In most cases, moreover,
those who made these decisions - on both sides of the conflict - believed
that they were preserving the original or true tradition against threats
to important Christian principles.
This was certainly the case in the early Church Councils, where the
churches that were soon to be 'Separated' defended the authority of
their patriarchs and their theological principles against the victorious
parties and continued to defend them even after being excluded from
the mainstream Church - a Church that was 'mainstream' because it
was victorious in the councils and received both imperial and papal
backing. The same was also true when the Eastern Orthodox churches
rejected what they considered an illegitimate claim to supreme authority
by the Pope and the Roman Church and were excommunicated because the
Pope believed that they were refusing an authority sanctioned by Christ
through the Apostle Peter. Finally, some four and a half centuries
later, that same papal authority was challenged by the Protestant
reformers in a conflict that led to the last major split in the Christian
Church, leaving in place a series of conflicts over authority within
the Church as a whole that have still not been resolved even today.
It should be noted that not all of these conflicts and splits have
been of the same kind. Before the Reformation, the major conflicts
were between established churches whose patriarchs or bishops claimed
authority for their current institutional doctrines and practices.
The Protestant churches, however, introduced a new element - appeal
to the authority of Scripture alone - that gave the scriptural canon
of the early Church greater authority than the institutions and leadership
of the later Church. This authority, moreover, was not reserved for
the hierarchy of the church or even for the clergy at large; it was
in principle in the hands of all of the members, clergy and lay alike,
through their direct access to the Scriptures. Unlike the earlier
Orthodox and Roman churches, the Protestant churches were therefore
inherently decentralised in terms of institutional authority. They
were also inherently unstable, because every church's authority at
any time could be challenged by appeals to Scripture and the standards
of the early Church. Later Protestant history shows this in the numerous
divisions and transformations of the original Reformation churches,
a process that might be considered - and by Protestants, with pride
- as a continual Reformation that remains true to the authority of
Scripture over against that of institutions.
It is clear that the Protestant type of authority does not give precedence
to institutional order or church hierarchies, but tries to return
to the authority of revelation as mediated through Scripture and embodied
in the diverse forms of the early Church. Diversity is the key factor
here, because the Scriptures and the forms and institutions of the
early Church are quite diverse and allow for multiple interpretations.
Order and hierarchy depend on reducing diversity and ambiguity in
favour of narrower 'official' interpretations and clear priorities.
The Protestant churches' strategy, if we may call it that, is to seek
authority in a time before the Church developed its centralised order
and locate that authority in texts and churches diverse enough to
allow for new interpretations and new priorities. Later institutions
filtered out much of the rich content of these sources when they tried
to systematise them, but removing the filters - so Protestants believe
- will help recover the full meaning of the divine revelation and
the initial human responses to it. Given these assumptions, it is
not surprising that Protestants have led the way in historical studies
of the early Church and in Biblical criticism - i.e., in careful evaluations
of the earliest sources of authority to give their faith the most
accurate foundation possible.
Hinduism and the Abrahamic religions
Authority, as we can see from these examples, has many forms and has
played many different roles in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. It
is evident, moreover, that authority does not appear in the abstract;
it always appears in a particular context with a specific identity
and form. Jews find it in Torah and rabbinic teachings, and
at times grant it to specific individuals, but what is authority for
some Jews may not be authority for others. Muslims in general locate
authority in the Koran and in the teachings and sayings of
Muhammad, but only some Muslims grant authority to specific schools
of law and only specific branches of Shiite Islam acknowledge the
authority of certain imams such as the Iranian ayatollahs or the Agha
Khan. There is even more variation within Christianity, because the
process of division began earlier and the many branches have remained
parts of the larger tradition - still separated, for the most part,
by the same conflicts over authority that gave rise to the initial
divisions.
All of these religions, we must note, worship a single God who is
in principle the same God for Jews, Muslims, and Christians; they
all trace their origins back to the patriarch Abraham; they acknowledge
many of the same prophets; and there is much similarity or overlap
in their scriptures. If there is so much variation in the forms and
sources of authority within these closely related monotheistic religions
of Middle Eastern and Semitic origin, then how much similarity can
there be between them and a religious tradition such as Hinduism
in terms of what authority means and how it functions? Surprisingly,
quite a lot, with some very important implications for ISKCON.
There is no denying the great differences between Hinduism and the
Middle Eastern or Abrahamic religions, beginning with their concepts
of divinity. Judaism, Islam, and Christianity all believe that there
is only one God who has created the world and all its beings, and
they believe that this God alone should be worshiped. They thus reject
any form of polytheism, and deny that any deity other than the one
God exists. The one true God, moreover, in their common view, cannot
be represented by any material form, and thus the worship of any image
of a divine being (a practice which all three call 'idolatry') is
necessarily worship of a false god. All of these positions were first
stated in the Hebrew Scriptures, were adopted from there by Christianity,
and were restated even more forcibly in the Koran, making them
among the most basic beliefs of the three monotheistic Abrahamic religions
and among the most deeply rooted in their respective authoritative
scriptures. They also, of course, represent basic conflicts between
these religions and the polytheism and image worship that characterise
much of Hinduism, making any commonality seem unlikely.
Similar contrasts emerge if we compare religious institutions, although
here there are also major differences between the three Abrahamic
religions. Christianity was organised into centralised regional churches
ruled by patriarchs or bishops from early in its history, and this
pattern continued in most branches of the Church even after the Reformation
churches introduced new institutional patterns in the sixteenth century.
Judaism and Islam, however, never had centralised institutions or
hierarchical authorities with the same kind of formalised power. Neither
temple priests nor rabbis had more than local authority in early Judaism,
and both were subject to the authority of Torah. Islam recognised
no religious organisation other than the community of the faithful,
and authority for the community was vested in the Koran and
Hadith. The Ulema, the Muslim scholars of scripture and the
law, played a role similar to that of Jewish rabbis as non-priestly
teachers of the scriptures and tradition whose authority depended
on personal knowledge rather than hierarchical status. Neither rabbis
nor Ulema have close equivalents in Christianity, and the role of
both is quite different from the ritual role of Christian priests
and ministers.
Hinduism, from these comparisons, stands in a rather odd relationship
to the monotheistic religions of Abraham. Its tolerance of polytheism
and image worship - or, more aptly, its celebration of them - is in
sharp contrast to the absolute prohibition of both in Judaism and
Islam and the strong antipathies to both seen in much of Christianity
- although some see the veneration of Mary and the images and icons
of Jesus in certain churches as exceptions to the general Christian
rule. At the level of religious institutions, however, the non-centralised
Muslim and Jewish traditions have more in common with Hinduism than
they do with Christianity - even with most of the denominations of
Protestant Christianity. Jewish rabbis and Muslim Koranic scholars
in the Ulema share many characteristics and roles with Hindu Brahmins
in their scholarly and teaching roles, although they differ from them
in their priestly roles, and all three differ from mainstream Christianity
in the absence of anything like a Church to ordain them to the ministry
or priesthood. The essential religious institutions for all three
non-Christian traditions are decentralised in local communities, and
there is no reliance on a centralised institutional authority to maintain
the religious life of these communities. Perhaps most strikingly,
Islam and Hinduism - which are in the sharpest conflict over polytheism
and images - are the closest in agreement on this latter point.
As these examples indicate, it is hard to compare these traditions
meaningfully in terms of either their beliefs or their institutional
forms. They agree on certain specifics and disagree on others, and
it is difficult to see which of these instances is most important.
The only useful way to compare different traditions such as these
is to ask what is at stake for each tradition on any given issue:
i.e., how essential is this particular belief or practice or institution
to each tradition, and why? The real issue in any comparison is not
so much the specifics as the authority on which they are based. If
certain features rest on weak or uncertain authority, they are clearly
less essential to that tradition than other features - and less essential
than the same features may be to another tradition that gives them
greater authority. But who in a given tradition decides whether certain
features have strong authoritative backing or whether they are less
authoritative - i.e., whether or not they can be minimised or dispensed
with without losing something essential?
In Christianity, this last question could be answered by reference
to the central authority: the patriarch or Pope, for example, or a
hierarchical ruling body designated to decide such issues. In Judaism
or Islam, which have no centralised authority, decisions about beliefs
and practices would typically be answered by rabbis or the Ulema with
reference to the defining scriptures of the tradition and to past
decisions by scholars on relevant issues. In Hinduism, however, the
question is much harder to answer because there is neither a centralised
authority nor a single authoritative scripture on which all Hindus
agree. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all know exactly what is meant
by 'the Scriptures' in their tradition: the Hebrew Scriptures for
Jews; the Hebrew Scriptures ('Old Testament') and New Testament for
Christians, with some variation between branches over whether certain
inter-testamental texts called the Apocrypha should also be included;
and the Koran for Muslims. Scriptural authority for each tradition
derives solely from its respective canonical texts, with the use and
importance of that scriptural authority dependent on the tradition's
overall structure of authority: for Jews, Muslims, and Protestants,
extensive use and great importance of the authority of their scriptures;
for Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches, relatively less
use and importance compared to the authority of the institutional
hierarchies.
If we turn to Hinduism, we find a very different situation. There
is indeed a set of scriptures, the Vedas, whose authority is accepted
by all Hindus. This acceptance, however, has little to do with actual
use or even knowledge by most Hindus apart from the chanting of a
few Vedic mantras in rituals and a general awareness of the teachings
of the Upanisads. The Vedas from the beginning were primarily ritual
texts known in depth only by a small minority even of Brahmins and
largely unknown by most others - and of course prohibited to the majority
of the population who were not in the 'twice-born' classes. The only
non-ritual portions of the Vedas, the Upanisads, were likewise little
known as Vedic texts per se, but were known mainly through their appropriation
by philosophical schools (darsanas) such as Vedanta and Sankhya-Yoga.
There is no doubt that the Vedic texts, both ritual and philosophical,
have had enormous influence on the religious language and concepts
of Hinduism. In that sense the Vedas are authoritative and deserve
their traditional status as revealed truth captured in sound by the
ancient rsis. Nevertheless, they have not played a role in
Hindu religious life equivalent to that of the scriptures of Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam. That role has been taken by texts such as
the Epics and Puranas, whose authoritative status both individually
and collectively is one of the major issues in understanding authority
within Hinduism.
Authority in Hinduism
All Hindus would agree that the Vedas are authoritative, and in fact
this agreement is one of the major characteristics defining what we
mean by 'Hinduism.' Not all Hindus, however, agree on the authoritative
status of other texts that are central to the religious tradition
of some Hindus and marginal at best for some others. The most significant
texts in this category are the two great epics, the Mahabharata
and Ramayana, which have great importance especially for
worshipers of Krsna and Rama. Krsna appears often in the Mahabharata,
usually as a princely advisor to the Pandavas and the special friend
of the Pandava prince Arjuna, but he also appears in the section known
as the Bhagavad-gita as the Supreme Lord who has created the
universe, controls the destiny of its beings, and teaches Arjuna the
path to salvation through devotion to Him. Rama is of course the hero
of the Ramayana. There is no doubt that these two epics lay
the foundation for the worship of Krsna and Rama, and they are accordingly
designated as authoritative scriptures by Vaisnava devotional traditions.
Yet not all Hindus would agree on this designation in the same way
or to the same degree as they would to the claim of authority for
the Vedas. For some Hindus, for example, the Mahabharata is
considered 'The Fifth Veda,' while other Hindus consider this claim
an insult to the original Four Vedas (Rg, Sama, Yajur,
and Atharva), whose authority is unquestioned. Some would grant
the Bhagavad-gita special authority - as does the Vedanta school,
which puts it on a par with the Upanisads - but would deny the same
authority to other portions of the epic. The same general pattern
applies to the Ramayana, which is a highly authoritative text
for some but not for others, although it does not have a special section
like the Bhagavad-gita that has been granted independent authority.
As would be expected, those who worship Krsna and Rama give greater
authority to these two texts than do non-Vaisnavas, although even
they disagree on the relative degree of authority that should be given
to each.
Even greater variation appears when we move to the next stage of Hindu
texts, the Puranas. While everyone would agree that there are only
two great epics regardless of what authority one grants them, there
is no such agreement even on the number of Puranas. Some eighteen
'Great Puranas' have traditionally been recognised by name, but there
is some disagreement over which of several lists of names is most
accurate and which existing texts correspond to the names listed.
Some of the Puranas are quite eclectic and advocate worship of many
different deities, while others are more sectarian. Of the sectarian
Puranas, some are primarily concerned with the worship of Siva and/or
various forms of the goddess Sakti, others with Visnu and His incarnations.
Given this uncertainty of status and variety of content, it is not
surprising that there are also great differences in the degree of
authority given to these texts by various Hindu groups.
But who decides these matters? Once we move beyond the Vedas, there
is no unanimity within Hinduism on authoritative scriptures. Every
Hindu religious community nonetheless has its own recognised authoritative
scriptures in addition to the Vedas, and some grant them authority
equal to or even greater than the Vedas - or, as is sometimes the
case, consider them also Vedic and claim Vedic authority for them.
Where does this authority come from? It is not inherent in the texts
themselves, for then everyone would consider them authoritative. But
neither is it purely arbitrary, for then there could be no collective
agreement on the claimed authority over time. There must instead be
a resonance of some sort between the religious message of the text
and the religious needs of a particular Hindu community. Typically,
this happens when new religious leaders or new religious movements
stimulate religious activity that does not find adequate expression
or legitimisation in existing authoritative texts. The solution is
new texts that fit the new circumstances better than existing texts
and that can serve as a better foundation for the community's religious
life.
Where do these new texts come from? Are they absolutely new in the
sense that they never existed before in any form, or are they only
newly revealed? The texts themselves say the latter, and typically
give a line of transmission from the authoritative - usually divine
- source to the final recipient, the one who makes the text available
to others in the present time and place. The authority of the text
thus depends on whether the source is considered authoritative and
whether the line of transmission is accepted as authoritative. A text
that meets both standards in the view of a given community is authoritative
for that community even though others may differ with its judgment.
The issue is ultimately a theological matter, or a matter of faith:
outsiders see only the moment when a given scripture appears historically,
while the community of faith sees its prior existence in a source
outside history. ISKCON, for example, accepts the Bhagavad-gita,
the Srimad-Bhagavatam, and the Caitanya-caritamrta as
revealed scriptures because their authority has been affirmed by a
succession of teachers who themselves are considered authoritative
by the tradition in which ISKCON stands - i.e., the Caitanya branch
of the Vaisnava devotional tradition. This branch as a whole begins
of course with Caitanya, but there are a number of subsequent parallel
lineages or guru-paramparas tracing back to different early
disciples of Caitanya. ISKCON grants primary authority to one of these
lineages: the one that culminates in Bhaktivinoda Thakura, Bhaktisiddhanta
Sarasvati, and A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. Since these teachers
are accepted as authoritative, their acceptance of certain scriptures
as authoritative puts these texts in a special category for their
followers.
Not all authoritative texts within the tradition have the same importance
at any given time, however. The fact that this process has been going
on since Caitanya's time means that a great many authoritative texts
have accumulated within the lineage that may or may not fit the needs
of any given authoritative leader in his particular circumstances.
Bhaktivinoda Thakura, for example, spent much of his effort in the
nineteenth century sorting through the received tradition to determine
which texts had the most authority and the most value for Caitanya
devotees faced with the impact of modern Western culture, and he used
modern Western scholarly methods to date these texts and identify
their historical place in the tradition. He and his son Bhaktisiddhanta
Sarasvati translated and published many of the authoritative texts
that had been selected out by this process, establishing what was
in effect a modern collection of authoritative texts available as
far as possible in English translations as well as in Sanskrit and
Bengali.
Authority in ISKCON
Prabhupada, as ISKCON devotees know, continued this process with his
many English translations of authoritative texts, most notably Bhagavad-gita,
Srimad-Bhagavatam, and Caitanya-caritamrta. It should
be noted, however, that there were many authoritative texts within
his tradition that he did not translate or teach, either because he
had no time to do so or because he thought that his young Western
followers were not yet ready to understand them. In this he followed
the pattern of earlier teachers, all of whom had to be selective in
what they taught their followers. What this meant in practice is that
Prabhupada could hand on only part of the rich tradition of texts
known to Bhaktivinoda and Bhaktisiddhanta, just as they could transmit
only a portion of what was available to them. Any living tradition
always has an unexplored reserve of authoritative teachings and scriptures
from the past to be rediscovered, and ISKCON is fortunate to have
such a resource in abundance. It is certainly no criticism of Prabhupada
to look at the tradition that came before him for renewed insights,
because such discoveries only confirm the importance of his own authoritative
teachings that derived from that tradition.
It should be noted that the pattern we find in ISKCON is similar in
many ways to what we find in other religions whose ultimate authority
comes from revelation. Judaism accepts the Torah as revelation
because it accepts the revelation of the Law to Moses at Sinai, a
divine act that confers authority on Moses and thus on the first five
books of the Hebrew Scriptures - the Torah or Pentateuch
- that are credited to him as author. The New Testament has authority
for Christians because of the authority of Jesus as the Christ or
Messiah, the related authority of his chosen disciples, and the authority
of Paul as an Apostle converted to Christianity by a divine revelation
after Jesus' death. The Koran has authority for Muslims because
it is a verbatim record of the revelations to Muhammad that marked
the beginning of Islam as a community of faith, and the Hadith
has authority because of Muhammad's authority as the Prophet of Allah.
In all of these cases, the revelations are understood as divine truths
that enter history at particular times and places but are themselves
beyond history - i.e., their essential authority is in the divine
truths that they reveal, not in how or when they are received. Their
entry into history, however, means that they are received by particular
people in a historical time and place and have historical significance
- whatever their essential truth - only if they are considered authoritative
by those who receive them and by those to whom they are further revealed.
This process of accepting revelations as valid and confirming their
authority for a larger community necessarily takes time, because accepting
a revelation as authoritative has serious implications.
In the case of Islam, the time before acceptance was only the few
years during which Muhammad - guided by the revelations that would
become the Koran - went from his initial obscure status in
Mecca to being the leader of an expanding community in Medina. The
Hebrew Scriptures, by contrast, evolved slowly and in stages over
more than a millennium between the time of Moses and the acceptance
of late additions to what would become the Jewish canon. In the third
century BCE, these Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek as
the Septuagint for use by Hellenised Jews, and it was this version
that was also used later by the early Christians as their authoritative
scriptures. The Hebrew Scriptures themselves remained the authoritative
texts for Jewish rabbis, however, and by the end of the first century
CE - perhaps as a response to the destruction of the Temple in 70
CE - they had established a canonical text that remained authoritative
from that point on.
Christians had no authoritative scriptures except the Septuagint for
several generations after the death of Jesus. It was not until the
middle of the first century CE that the apostle Paul laid the foundation
for a specifically Christian set of scriptures with the first of his
many letters, and it was not until early in the second century that
most of the eventual contents of the New Testament had been produced.
These later materials included a variety of texts that had found acceptance
in Christian churches, among them four separate accounts of Jesus'
ministry and death (the Four Gospels) and an account of the ministry
of the early apostles (the Acts of the Apostles). These were not the
only Christian writings from this period, however, and for some time
there was no agreed procedure to distinguish them from other texts
- some of them also popular in the early churches - that represented
different theological views. It took until late in the fourth century
CE before there was general agreement on which of the circulating
texts had true 'apostolic authority' - i.e., represented the truth
revealed to the apostles by Christ and the Holy Spirit - and which
should be excluded from the canon because they lacked that authority.
It is clear from these examples that accepting certain texts as authoritative
depends on more than the quality of the texts or the claims they may
make for their own authority. It depends also - and for practical
purposes, critically - on the recognition of the texts as authoritative
by some authoritative religious body. It is here that Hinduism differs
most from the three Abrahamic religions just described, because it
has no dominant institutional authority to confer such recognition.
Muhammad's immediate followers recognised the Koran as authoritative
even during his lifetime as they saw Allah's guidance leading them
to victory after victory and as Muhammad's teachings - later collected
as Hadith - transformed the moral and religious life of Arabia.
The Hebrew Scriptures took shape slowly over many centuries, but their
authority had been recognised by Temple priests and rabbis, the two
most authoritative Jewish religious groups, long before the rabbis
gave them canonical status in their final form. Christianity conferred
canonical status on its chosen scriptures with a series of Church
decrees in the fourth century that established an official New Testament.
There are no corresponding authoritative bodies in Hinduism, however,
and thus no process acknowledged by all Hindus to grant any given
scriptures canonical status.
The Vedas represent something of an exception to the general rule
for Hinduism, but their recognised authority comes from a far distant
past when the central importance of Vedic fire sacrifices led the
performing priests to agree on a common body of mantras, ritual procedures,
and metaphysical concepts to support their activities. Once Vedic
fire sacrifices declined in importance and the great royal sacrifices
ceased with the rise of Buddhism and the Mauryan Empire, there was
no longer a dominant ritual institution to unify and support priestly
activity. The Vedic canon was effectively closed by the second century
BCE, and priests spent their creative intellectual energies after
that on new types of texts such as the Dharma Sutras and Dharma Sastras
(The Laws of Manu, etc.), the sutras of the emerging philosophical
schools, and texts supporting the new theistic movements centred on
Visnu and his incarnations. Priests also took over the role of editors
of the early bardic Mahabharata at about the same time, and
contributed new teachings to both this epic and the Ramayana.
Priests continued to learn the Vedas for their continuing ritual performances,
although most of their activity was now concerned with family samskara
rituals, and they brought much of their Vedic knowledge over into
their other intellectual pursuits, but they no longer constituted
a coherent authoritative body focused on a single common religious
purpose.
Since the Vedic canon was closed, there has thus been no central Hindu
body with the authority to confer general canonical status on newly
revealed scriptures. But this also means that there is no central
body that can deny canonical authority to any given text. The recognition
of texts as true and authoritative has therefore depended for the
past two thousand years on more specific groups or traditions such
as Bhagavatas, Saivites, Saktas, worshipers of Krsna or Rama, etc.
There are as a result many Hindu texts that are authoritative for
some religious communities and not for others, or are considered revelation
by some faith traditions and have no value to others. This is true,
moreover, not only of scriptures that are considered divinely revealed
but also of the teachings - including poetry and songs - of various
saints and religious leaders expressing their own personal experiences:
the poetry of the Tamil saints known as the slvars, for example, the
writings of Ramanuja, the Marathi songs of Namdev and Tukaram, the
Braj poetry of Surdas and Mira Bai, or the writings of the Six Goswamis
in Vrndavana. To these and many other personal religious expressions
too numerous to mention might be added the many accounts of the lives
of saints and religious leaders such as the biographies of Ramanuja
and Sankara or the Caitanya-caritamrta, Krsnadasa Kaviraja's
monumental account of Caitanya's life and teachings.
Given this situation, what does it mean for a Hindu text or scripture
to be authoritative? Unless we are talking about the Vedas, we have
to say that a given text is authoritative when a particular tradition
or a group within a tradition considers it to be authoritative - and
then, of course, it is authoritative only for them unless some other
group agrees to accept its authority. Vaisnavas in general may accept
the Bhagavad-gita and the Bhagavata Purana (the Srimad-Bhagavatam)
as divine revelation, but only some Vaisnavas would accept the slvars'
poetry of devotion to Krsna or the theology of the Goswamis - and
Saivites would likely reject them all. This pattern has given rise
to the concept of sampradayas, specific traditions within the
larger Hindu framework that accept the authority of particular scriptures,
worship particular deities, have particular religious practices, and
follow a particular line of teachers. It is even possible - in fact,
based on historical experience, likely - that divisions will emerge
within sampradayas over matters such as variations in ritual
practice, differing interpretations of scriptures, organisational
disputes, or a choice of one teacher and his lineage over another.
Such divisions are in fact apparent in contemporary Vaisnava institutions
such as the Gaudiya Mathas, and are potential problems even within
ISKCON.
Hinduism is of course not the only religion to face such problems
of conflicting authority. We can especially see certain similarities
between Hinduism and Protestant Christianity in the absence of a central
institutional authority and the division over time into separate branches
representing different positions on basic religious issues. Although
Protestants claim the right of each believer and each church to interpret
scripture independently of central institutional authority, they nonetheless
recognise only the canonical Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament
as having scriptural authority. Protestants must therefore express
their religious differences through different interpretations of the
same scriptures, not by embracing scriptures outside the received
canon. Hindus have historically recognised no such limitation, and
have accepted numerous scriptures into the tradition since the Vedic
canon was closed. The only general Hindu requirement has been that
these new (or newly received) scriptures should not directly reject
the authority of the Vedas - although, as many examples from the Bhagavad-gita
and other literatures illustrate, they may criticise Vedic teachings
on certain issues. Certainly many scriptures have been more religiously
important and influential to most Hindus than have the Vedas, although
these scriptures are often represented as being extensions of the
Vedas or as being revelations from the same source, and thus respect
for the Vedas is preserved.
But finally, who decides these issues of authority within the Hindu
tradition? In the absence of a central institutional authority or
a single recognised scriptural authority, each branch of Hinduism
- often, but not always, expressed in terms of sampradayas -
must settle its own issues of authority in its own terms. This means
among other things deciding which scriptures it accepts as authoritative,
how those scriptures are to be interpreted, what interpretation is
to be given precedence, what its religious practices will be and which
are most important, how its leadership will be organised, and what
teacher or lineage of teachers will have final authority. This is
more than a matter of deciding on a scripture or set of scriptures
or identifying with a particular sampradaya; it ultimately
involves choosing a teacher and thus a lineage of teachers, because
personal authority is always expressed in terms of the line of teachers
- the guru-parampara - on which that authority is based.
This may require that the question of authority be constantly revisited
or renegotiated within Hinduism in general or within a particular
group or branch of Hinduism. There is no overall authority to decide
such issues, and the range of options is so great that problems of
authority almost inevitably arise. It is normal to feel the tension
between competing authorities and to wish that the tensions would
go away, but new problems of authority will certainly arise. What
has to be remembered is that all religious traditions have struggled
with problems of authority, and all of them still alive are still
dealing with them. For traditions as for organisms, the absence of
change is a sure sign of death. Change is the normal and essential
condition of living, and to change means to confront new challenges
- and each new challenge involves more often than not a change in
the existing balance of authority within the tradition.
The issue of authority for any tradition is thus never finally settled.
If the scriptural authority is not in question, the interpretation
of scripture may be. Leadership will inevitably change and new issues
of authority will emerge. Since the world around it changes, the interaction
with it also will change and raise new questions about existing patterns
of authority. The question is not whether such issues and problems
can be avoided, which they cannot, but how they will be handled. This
of course also raises issues of authority, because dealing with new
issues may require drawing on sources of authority that are not now
being used.
Any tradition that has been around for centuries has many latent
resources, and an important part of the response to new challenges
is to seek sources of authority that may have been forgotten. No
tradition can use all of its potential resources at one time, and
no leader or teacher can pass on all that he knows or all that his
teachers and their teachers have known. It is the job of each generation
to recognise this and keep the full range of resources alive - i.e.,
to recognise the richness of its inheritance from the past and make
use of the authority available there to solve current problems.
The best way to show respect for past leaders and past authority
is to respect the authority and the past that those authorities
respected and to draw on them all for the future. This is certainly
the task facing ISKCON at this moment, and its future depends on
how well it musters its resources for the continual process of rediscovery
and renewal.
|
|
