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6 Time, Religion and History in India Harbans Mukhia Making Sense of Time: Towards a Universal Typology of Conceptual Foundations of Historical Consciousness Jörn Rüsen

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10 Wittgenstein ~29 6 Wittgenstein, On Certainty (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1969), 33.

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30 overinterpretation Cyril G. WilliamsBasic Themes in the Comparative Study of Religion (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), 2 The Status of Scriptures: Some Comparative Contours 11~ ~48 51

31 Paul Ricoeur ~ Paul Ricoeur, The Sacred Text and Community, in David Pellauer tran., Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 69~

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34 27 Three Debates on Wang Yangming s Four Sentences Doctrine (Si-Ju-Jiao) and Its Hermeneutic Significance Li-sheng Chen Abstract The present paper consists of five sections. Section I reviews the main content and purpose of the paper. Sections II-IV discuss these three debates on Wang Yangming s four sentences doctrine (Si-Ju-Jiao) following the historical order. Section V discloses the similarities and differences among these three debates and analyzes their hermeneutic significance. It is pointed that there were some changes in rhetoric and bed-rock faith used and presupposed by each partner in these three debates, which reflected the tendency of thought in later Ming Dynasty and contextuality, respectively. The dimensions involved in the debates, such as sage authority orientation, scripture orientation, praxis orientation and experience orientation, were in the discursive state. The three debates also reflected a kind of reciprocity between the Confucian community and the sacred text. Keywords: Four sentences doctrine (Si-Ju-Jiao), Beyond good and evil, Debate, Hermeneutic.

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40 陁 12 Chun-fang Yu, The Renewal of Buddhism in China: Chu-hung and the Late Ming Synthesis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). 13 7

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49 42 deontological ethics Gesinnungsethik teleological ethics Erfolgsethick William K. Frankena, Ethics (New Jersey: Englewood Cliffs, 1973), 14~ ~

50 43 194~104 B.C. das höchste Gute

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52 45 Stoic ~ ~ virtue ethics Cynthia J. Brokaw, The Ledgers of Merit and Demerit: Social Change and Moral Order in Late Imperial China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991)

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68 61 Wang Ji and Buddhism Guoxiang Peng Abstract As a key figure in the unfolding of Yangming Learning in the late Ming, Wang Ji is generally regarded to be much closer to Chan Buddhism. But what on earth was the relation between Wang Ji and Buddhism? It seems this topic has been neglected in the scholarship community. This monograph first examines the communication between Wang Ji and some famous Buddhists, like Yuzhi Faju and Yunxi Zhuhong, and then analyses Wang Ji s absorption of Buddhism and creative interpretation of some basic concepts of Buddhism, which is based on his Confucian standpoint. This monograph, which joins historical study and philosophical argument, probes in detail the relation between Wang Ji and Buddhism, points out the ontological difference between Confucianism and Buddhism, and provides a case study for the interaction between Confucianism, especially Yangming Learning and Buddhism in the late Ming. Keywords: Wang Ji, Buddhism, Yangming Learning in the late Ming.

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91 84 To Save the Nation is the Duty of Men? The Women of the Hsia Family During the Ming-Ching Transition Huei-min Sun Abstract During the Ming-Ch ing transition, all of the male members of the Hsia family in Sung Chang died because of their connection with the anti-ch ing movement. Though the male members were so loyal to the Ming dynasty, they did not ask their female family members to die with them or to take revenge for them, because they believed that to save the nation was the duty of men. After losing their husband, sons and brothers with whom the daughters of different family names connected, the Hsia women no longer lived with their in-laws. Instead of preserving the broken patriarchal family, the Hsia wife, concubine, and daughter-in-law chose to live with their own daughter. The Hsia daughter and daughter-in-law of Hou family, Shu-chi, was the only Hsia woman to live with her in-laws. In fact, the cohabiting Hou widows had transformed their in-law relation into a religious sisterhood. For a long time, the main theme of the story of the Hsia women has been their chastity and hardship to preserve the offspring of the loyalist family. During the Sino-Japanese war in , writers began to emphasize the support and participation in the anti-ch ing movement of the Hsia women. It appears that the idea

92 85 has changed, especially in the minds of the Nationalists in the Republican era: to save the country is no longer the duty only of men, but both of men and women. Keywords: women, nation, Hsia Yun-I, Hsia Wan-ch un, family.

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94 29 BIBLID (2002)29p ~ * *

95 ~ Yu Ying-Shih, Changing Conceptions of National History in Twentieth-Century China, in Erik Lönnroth, Karl Molin & Ragnar Björk eds., Conceptions of National History (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1994), pp ; ~

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110 103 * Peter Zarrow

111 104 The Rise of National Learning : Confucianism, the Various Ancient Philosophers, and the Yellow Emperor in Chinese Intellectuals Search for a Symbol of National Identity in the Late Qing Zhi-tian Luo Abstract After the Boxer Uprising of 1900, many Chinese intellectuals lost confidence in the Qing government and searched for a symbol of national identity that could represent the Chinese nation. This resulted in a contest between two chronologies, one marking time from Confucius and the other from the Yellow Emperor. At the same time, the attempt of the national studies school to find a national essence in the larger traditional learning turned attention to the thought of the various ancient schools (zhuzi) that had been marginalized with the establishment of Confucian orthodoxy. This led to a struggle between the intellectual systems of the various (non-confucian) schools and Confucianism. All these efforts were a response to the cultural war between China and the West. A symbol of China, regardless of whether it was to be found in tradition or simply invented, had thus to be open and all-inclusive. The result was a comprehensive intellectual amalgamation that included both the Yellow Emperor and Confucius. Such national learning or national spirit would not only inherit the long tradition of Chinese learning through reinterpretation of the past but also provide room for the re-creation of a new intellectual system appropriate to the modern nation-state.

112 105 Keywords National Learning, National Spirit, National Identity, the Yellow Emperor, Confucianism, thought of the various ancient schools.

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115 108 Henri Bergson, 1859~1941 W. William Mc Dougall, 1871~ Guy S. Alitto DynamicIntuition

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132 125 Intuition and Critique of Instrumental Reason: Liang Shuming s Cultural Interpretations of Confucian Classics Rui-quan Gao Abstract As for the Neo-Confucians in the 20 th century, intuition was one of their common concerns, though there were different interpretations and concrete uses of this concept in each system of the Neo-Confucian philosophy. In the course of his critique modernity along with instrumental reason as its key account, Mr. Liang Shuming elucidated his intuition theory with the aid of his cultural interpretation of Confucian and Buddhist classics. He held the view that the western value crisis resulted from the misuse of instrumental reason, and that this crisis made human beings and Mother nature seriously opposed in the debate of heaven and man, caused human beings to be concerned by the paradox of utilitarianism and individualism in the debates of collective and individual, and brought about a split and poverty in man s inner world in the debate of principle and desire. In order to cure public morals, Liang maintained that we should seek spiritual resources from traditional Chinese culture. For this purpose, he interpreted independently the Confucian and Buddhist classics such as Zhu-yi and Lun-yu, etc. and developed the Buddhist theory of the Wei-shi sect, so that the core concept intuition and its new

133 126 significance could be excavated. Liang considered that intuition first a metaphysical method, which is an important feature of ancient Chinese metaphysics; Secondly he thought that intuition was also the way of acquiring knowledge, which mainly referred to that of meanings and values, in its strict sense. As a result, intuition became a basic principle of ethics in ancient China, because not only was the intuition of goodness related to establishment of virtuous ego, but also by virtue of its selfless feelings as the strong motive forces of moral actions it could spontaneously and willingly enter into the field of practice. Liang s theory, by his own account, was once influenced by some elements of western psychology, which was one of the reasons that he was inclined to psychologize pan-intuitionalism. Liang s intuition theory as a system was not perfect, but he was the first man to remind the academic circles that we should notice the important role played by intuition in traditional Chinese culture and philosophy, to probe into the concept of intuition systematically and comprehensively, and gradually eliminated the irrational ingredients from his former system of theory. All the above scholastic attainments are enough to prove that Mr. Liang was a pioneer in the philosophical movement of Neo-Confucianism. Keywords: Liang Shuming, intuition, instrumental reason, Ren, ethics, psyche.

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173 166 The Interpretation of Filial Piety by the Japanese Yomeigaku Scholars, Nakae Toju and Oshio Chusai Kun-chiang Chang Abstract The main purpose of this article is to expound on the particular thought found in the Classic of the Filial Piety by Nakae Toju, the founder of the Tokugawa Japan s Yangming Learning, and his late Tokugawa successor, Oshio Chusai. It shows that both scholars religiously dignified the thought of the filial piety. characteristic of Japanese Yangming Learning. In the first section, this article argues briefly that Japanese Yangming Learning should not be treated from a view-point of nationalistic passion, held by both modern Chinese and Japanese intellectuals, which falsified the Yangming Learning. In the second section, the article analyzes Chu Hsi's Corrections to the Classic of Filial Piety ( ) and his interpretation of filial piety that provoked controversy among later Confucians. In principle: 1) in his Corrections, Chu pointed out that the phrase a strict father equals Heaven in the original text of the Classic of Filial Piety would make people presumptuous. 2) As to the interrelation between benevolence and filial piety, he argued that filial piety is the foundation of benevolence. This led to the question whether the term benevolence includes both transcendentalism and universalism of a moralistic substance in its

174 167 meaning. Toju solved the matter of transcendentalism, while Chu Hsi criticized the matter of universalism, replacing benevolence with filial piety as a transcendental and universalistic substance. The third section explains how Toju dealt with Chu's criticism of the concept enshrine Father as Heaven ( ), thus, strengthening filial piety in a religious sense. The fourth section manifests the way Oshio Chusai completed Toju s criticism of Chu Hsi, strengthening filial piety as a moral substance, and switching the substantial interrelation between benevolence and filial piety. Lastly, this work arrives at a succinct conclusion that also touches upon the religious traits of the Japanese Yangming Learning in terms of the definition of 'filial piety' by the both scholars. Keywords: Nakae Toju, Oshio Chusai, Filial Piety, Tokugawa Japan, Yangming Learning, Classic of Filial Piety.

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176 29 BIBLID (2002)29p ~ Time, Religion and History in India Harbans Mukhia * Abstract The conventional Positivist division of historical time into linear (Western) and cyclical (Oriental) is based upon tearing the discussion, especially that of cyclical time, away from its religio-philosophical context and treating it entirely as an empirical given. In reality, in various strands of Indian philosophy time is perceived as a mosaic of patterns rather than a monochrome, and is fluid, open to varying interpretations, rather than frozen. Nor is time in India viewed exclusively as a mythical moment. This paper briefly seeks to trace the outlines of the mosaic. It goes on to discuss the altogether new concept of historical time introduced by Islam in India s medieval centuries and the Western concept by the British in the 19 th and 20 th. It concludes by touching upon the residual, pre-literate notion of time in India s tribal culture. Keywords: Indian Philosophy, linear time, cyclical time, ancient India, medieval India, modern India. * Professor of Medieval History and Rector at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. 169

177 170 Harbans Mukhia I Even as the Positivist notion of historical time as linear, premised on irreversible universal human progress through the instrumentality of scientific reasoning and technological means of realising it, has dominated the generation of historical knowledge around the world over the past two centuries, its inevitable consequence has been the subjugation of diverse conceptions of history. The linear concept of time becoming the reference point has also meant deriding all other notions of time, displacing them from the very process of accretion of universal knowledge. That this displacement has coincided with the relationship of hegemony and subjugation of vast regions of the world s economies and civilizations by Western Europe, home of the origin of Positivism, is clearly no accident. One of the simplest and most prevalent distinctions between the Western and the Indian notions of time was the characterisation of the former as linear and the latter as cyclical. The linearity of one ensured the society s triumphal onward march, mediated through constant and irreversible change, often occurring as transformation revolution was the favoured term, and the cyclicity of the other equally ensured endless repetition, changelessness and stagnation to infinity. Cyclical time in other words amounted to a denial of history. James Mill, author of the very influential The History of British India (10 vols., first published 1817), contemptuously describes this notion as a boastful and turgid vanity [which] distinguishes remarkably the oriental nations ; these are indeed rude nations. 1 The Asiatic social system, for him, was one in which all progress had ceased thousands of years ago. 2 Montesquieu was among the earliest of modern thinkers to underline the denial of history in the Orient. The laws, customs and manners of the 1 James Mill, The History of British India, vol. 1, 5th ed. (London: J. Madden, 1858), Marian Sawer, Marxism and the Question of the Asiatic Mode of Production (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977), 30.

178 Time, Religion and History in India 171 Orient even the most trivial, such as mode of dress remain the same as they were a thousand years ago. 3 The image of an unchanging East remained pervasive in European thought. For Hegel, the Hindoos have no History in the form of annals [Historia] they have no History in the form of transactions [Regestrae]; that is no growth expanding into a veritable political condition. 4 Therefore, when Karl Marx announced in 1853 that Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history. What we call its history is but the history of successive intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society, 5 he was merely reiterating the well-established European cliché about the East. Nor was the cliché reconsidered even into the waning decades of the twentieth century. Arnold Toynbee considers the Hindu philosophical notion of kalpa a notion of immense time and cannot conceal his contempt for it, calling it an everlasting cosmic practical joke a certain meaningless measure of time [which] cannot fail to stultify all our human exertions by reproducing the same situation again and again ad infinitum. 6 In modern Western perception then a single, undifferentiated notion of cyclical time characterised Indian civilization and, taken entirely as an empirical description, divorced from its religio-philosophical context, it signified the singular absence of any change in social, political and civilizational, i.e. material history. It drew very sharp demarcating lines between mythology and history. It defined the West and its other. Returned to the contexts of Indian religio-philosophical systems, the notion of cyclical time emerges at best as one among several notions and even as cyclical time, it does not implicate closure of social change. Indeed one commentator puts his suspicion of the single notion of cyclical time 3 Cited in Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: N.L.B. 1974), G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Willey Book Co., 1944), Karl Marx, The Future Results of the British Rule in India, in The First Indian War of Independence, , by Karl Marx and F. Engels (Moscow: Foreign Languages Pub. House, [1960]), Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, rev. and abridged in 1 vol. (New York: n.p., 1972),

179 172 Harbans Mukhia rather forcefully: 7 It appears that the description of the Hindu notion of time as cyclical is so lop-sided as to be misleading. It overlooks the fact that the Sruti [lit. what has been heard; a form of sacred literature] is almost free of such a notion and it further overlooks the fact that Smrti [lit. memory, also a form of sacred] literature provides striking exceptions and limitations to this cyclical notion of time. The Hindu notion of time is not a monochrome but a mosaic; it is too complex to be described as merely cyclical. This questioning finds favour in another scholar s observation: [A]lthough the appellation of cyclic time features so often in the Western encounter with the Indian tradition, the idea can hardly be identified as the view of any particular school of Brahmanical philosophy or even as an issue for debate in polemical literature. This scholar too emphasises the existence of the great diversity of views within the fold of Hindu philosophical traditions and pleads that To ignore this variety of views and to reduce them under the single caption of cyclic time is to distort the image of a complex and a major tradition of world-religions. 8 The perception of cyclical time in Hinduism derives strength chiefly from the notion of four Yugas (ages) which move in several concentric cycles. Truth, perfection, long human life, plenitude of material comforts, absence of greed, etc., mark the first, Krtā Yuga. It lasts anywhere between 4,800 years and 4,000x360, i.e. 1,440,000 years according to different sources. The next Tretā Yuga witnesses some decline compared to the first and is also shorter, and so on, to the Dwāpar Yuga until the last, the Kali Yuga, the one of the present time. Human beings in this age will live up to a maximum of 100 years and this would be marked by a general decline of truth and rectitude. According to Visnu Purāna, 9 in this Yuga, 7 Arvind Sharma, The Notion of Cyclical Time in Hinduism, in Time in Indian Philosophy: A Collection of Essays, ed. Hari Shankar Prasad (Delhi: n.p., 1992), Anindita N Balslev, Time and the Hindu Experience, in Religion and Time, ed. A. N. Balslev and J. N. Mohanty (Leiden: n.p., 1992), Visnu Purāna, IV, 24.

180 Time, Religion and History in India 173 property alone would confer social rank, wealth would become the sole criterion of virtue, passion and lewdness the sole bonds between mates, falsehood the condition of success in life, sexuality the sole means of enjoyment and an outward, purely ritualistic religion would get confounded with spirituality. The declining duration of each Yuga corresponds to the declining ethical and moral standards, construed as dharma (literally religion, but more akin to a code of moral behaviour). Incidentally, the names of the Yugas are derived from the throws of dice. 10 The throw here does not suggest chance, but degrees of perfection: figure 4 is construed in Hinduism as signifying perfection, completeness; 3 is thus slightly less perfect and so forth. 11 The yugas move in a cycle, one complete cycle comprising a mahā-yuga, a grand age. The link between the rarefied conceptualisation of time in the Brahmanic tradition, with Vedic texts as its primary source, 12 and popular traditions too has been the subject of scrutiny. The notion of the Absolute Time (Kālavāda) is not only a very ancient concept but above all, it is a widely held popular view, belonging probably to the less Brahmanic stratum of Indian tradition. 13 Indeed, Mircea Eliade in a celebrated essay spatially and temporally expands the scope of the evolution of what is largely accepted as the specifically Hindu view and forcefully argues that The myth of cyclical Time of the cosmic cycles that repeat themselves ad 10 P. V. Kane, History of Dharmasāstra (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1946), vol. 3, Mircea Eliade, Time and Eternity in Indian Thought, in Time in Indian Philosophy, The Atharva Veda, fourth in the series of earliest scriptural texts, is the first to encapsulate Time in various aspects, especially as the creator of the creator : Time engendered Heaven above Time (also) engendered the Earths we see Set in motion by Time, which were Are and shall be assigned their place See Raimundo Panikkar, Time and History in the Tradition of India: Kala and Karma, in Time in Indian Philosophy, Ibid. 173

181 174 Harbans Mukhia infinitum is not an innovation of Indian speculation. 14 As he has shown in his The Myth of Eternal Return, traditional societies conceive of man s temporal existence not only as an infinite repetition of certain archetypes and exemplary gestures but also as an eternal renewal. In symbols and rituals, the world is renewed periodically. 15 Richard Lannoy too points to the tribal origins of the ideal of the Krtā Yuga: Hindu society was probably aware that the time sense of the surrounding tribal societies was even more consistently non-linear than their own. 16 The hegemonic Western view has perceived in cyclical time in Hindu thought the implication of inescapable destiny and therefore a disincentive to human intervention to seek to alter it. We have seen above the derisive references to the Orient s comfort in changelessness; there are too many others in the same genre to bear repetition. A second intuitive implication derived from inevitable destiny is one of the denial of the existence of reality, everything life, world, time, wealth being an illusion, māyā. This prevailing perception has of course no space for any change, no evolution, whatever. Timelessness of the object of analysis thus gets embedded in the subjective perception itself. This should have worried the commentators, for there are indeed numerous qualifications to this rather simplistic construction. In one important strand of Hindu philosophy, time itself is defined not in its own terms but in terms of action. Even as time for the philosopher Bhartrhari is absolute inasmuch as there is no division of it into the past, the present and the future in its own terms, it is because of difference in action (kryā bhed) that differentiation and division occur and time gets crystallised in relation to an action which suggests a before and an after, speed or tardiness. The Mahābhārata already speaks of change (parināma) in beings that forces us to accept the reality of time. 17 Indeed the term for destiny, 14 M. Eliade, Time and Eternity in Indian Thought, M. Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York and London: Pantheon Books, 1954). 16 Richard Lannoy, The Speaking Tree: A Study of Indian Culture and Society, (London: n.p., 1971), R. Panikkar, Time and History, 28-9.

182 Time, Religion and History in India 175 gati also means motion. If the metaphor of the wheel for time, a constant feature in Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism, has been understood to mean infinity and unbreakability of time, this meaning is restricted to a two dimensional phenomenon; this by itself is suggestive of the opposite context of multidimensionality of reality and the invitation to break free of the circumference of time. If time encloses, it also provides escape routes through the attainment of jnān (contemplation), yoga (union) and karma (action). Moksa, freedom from the binding of time is the ultimate aim of human existence. Life or the world as māyā (illusion, among many other meanings) is not unreal in the sense of not being in existence but being transitory in the context of time s eternity. Any event in history thus becomes illusory in the sense of being transitory, even as the occurrence of the event is a reality. But then time itself is perceived in some strands of Indian philosophy as eternal and in some others as ephemeral. In the Buddhist philosophy in particular, even as the Buddha himself is the Absolute and timeless, having transcended the aeons, time comprises neither the past nor the future; it is constantly the present and therefore transitory, impermanent. 18 In one school of Yoga, time has no absolute, objective existence outside of human experience. Yoga Vasistha insists that instants and cosmic ages are non-existent as objective realities; depending upon the state of one s mind, an instant might appear as a kalpa (aeon), or a kalpa might be experienced as a single instant. In short, time per se does not exist. 19 II The arrival of Islam first to the periphery of India (in Sind, now the western region of Pakistan) in early 8 th century and later to the heartland of 18 G. C. Pande, Time in Buddhism, in Time and Religion, 183-9; M. Eliade, Time and Eternity, R. Panikkar, Time and History,

183 176 Harbans Mukhia northern India from the beginning of the 11 th century on, brought a new religion, a new conception of time and of history to the ancient land. A legatee to the Judaic-Christian monotheistic tradition, Islam also inherited the concept of linear time, from the Creation to the Day of Judgement. This was its only concept. There was a strong coincidence of eschatological and historical time within Islam. The debates on the notions of time were limited to the date of the creation of the world and the equivalence between human and divine time. Consensually, creation is located 14,000 years ago and the birth of Adam 7,000 years later, though there is divergence of opinion on both. The Quran itself establishes the equivalence of one eschatological day and 1,000 earthly years. It is on this basis that the historian al-tabari calculates the age of the universe to be 14,000 earthly years, equally divided between Creation and the birth of Adam and from there to the Coming of the Hour. 20 The age of Adam, however, is subject to different estimates. The great medieval Indian historian, Abu l Fazl, cites Imam Ja far al-sadiq and Ibn al-arabi to the effect that there were thousands of Adams before Adam and one race of Adam was succeeded by another, some parts of their existence overlapping with one another. 21 On the origins of the universe too, Abu l Fazl takes account of the evidence of astronomy, reliable ancient books of the Hindus and of Cathay and successive chronicles of the sages of those regions and observes: [I]t appears that the beginning of the universe and its inhabitants and the source of the manifestation of attributes of divinity has not become visible. Either it is eternal or of such antiquity as to merge in eternity. 22 After enumerating several notions of time and therefore of the origin of the universe, he eclectically remarks: Traditions and stories like these are current in the vast expanse of God s creation and it is not impossible that 20 Tarif Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 8, Abu al-fazl ibn Mubarak, Akbar Nāmā, ed. I. Maulavi Abd al-rahim (Calcutta, Susil Gupta: n.p., 1877), Ibid.,

184 Time, Religion and History in India 177 these may [all] be true. 23 Islam also brought a new vision of history to India. In the home of its origin, the Arab land, the birth of Islam drew a sharp dividing line in historical time: the age of the world before Islam, characterised by jahiliyat, ignorance, savagery, and after when ignorance was terminated. History became a narrative of events in actual time, very precisely measured in years, months and days, at times even in hours. Since Mohammad was the last of all prophets and God had revealed the ultimate truth through him in the Quran, this truth would in the end triumph in the entire world. All history is therefore world history, a feature that is an essential element in the Arab-Muslim historiographical tradition. 24 Most of the histories written during India s medieval centuries belong to this genre. They were written by courtiers, mostly Muslim, in the Persian language and in Arab-Muslim and Perso-Mongol tradition. 25 However, within the Islamic world there were dissenting voices. If Islamic religious and historical scholarship operated with the temporal dividing line drawn around A.D. 622, the inaugural year of the hijri era, there were alternative constructions too which envisioned historical time as an uninterrupted flow either from the beginning of the universe or from the beginning of humanity with the birth of Adam. Abu l Fazl is the most outstanding of such historians and posits an alternative to the hegemonic Islamic temporal vision, for embedded in that vision was legitimation of strife, conquest and subjugation of one religious sect of humanity by another. To this Abu l Fazl posits the alternative of a universal religiosity deriving from one universal God in lieu of several religions each with its own sectarian god and all at war with one another. By eliminating the Islamic dividing line in historical time, Abu l Fazl is fundamentally questioning all received wisdom from around his intellectual milieu Ibid., Tarif Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, See Peter Hardy, Historians of Medieval India (London: Luzac, 1960); M. Hasan ed., Historians of Medieval India (Meerut: Meenakashi Prakashan, 1968); Harbans Mukhia, Historians and Historiography during the Reign of Akbar (New Delhi: Vikas Pub. House, 1976). 26 Harbans Mukhia, Historians and Historiography, 72-84; Idem, Medieval India : An Alien 177

185 178 Harbans Mukhia Interestingly, the historian had complete support of the contemporary state in his endeavour. He was a courtier, friend and admirer of the Mughal emperor Akbar (r ), himself keen to distance the functioning of the state from Islamic moorings and seeking to establish a polity where the religious identity of a subject became neither a basis of privilege nor punishment. Such however was not the fate of another contemporary scholar in neighbouring Iran where Azar Kayvan also sought to erase the Islamic dividing line in his country s political history by linking the lineage of the current rulers to pre-adamite Adam, Mahābad. Unable to face persecution in his home, he had to seek refuge in Mughal India in the end. But, unlike Abu l Fazl, Azar Kayvan was merely asserting Iran s pre-islamic Sasanian identity and displacing the Islamic identity from centrestage; he did not envisage an alternative vision of universal history. 27 We might add that unlike Abu l Fazl again, who was in his personal life a devout Muslim, Azar Kayvan was a Zoroastrian. Even as time is visualised as linear in Islam, it is perceived as eternal and infinite in some strands 28 and a discontinuous juxtaposition of instants in others, each finite in the context of an infinite totality, until the day of judgement. 29 In medieval India then, even as Sanskrit texts expounding the ambivalent old scholarship continued their course, the notion of time and history brought forth by the Muslim tradition became hegemonic, even when the historians themselves were Hindu. The two continued to be practiced as parallel streams. Conceptual Hegemony? The Medieval History Journal 1, no. 1 (1998): See for an excellent treatment of the intellectual movement inspired by Azar Kayvan s historical vision, Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, Contested Memories of Pre-Islamic Iran, The Medieval History Journal 2, no. 2 (1999): Paul E. Walker, Eternal Cosmos and the Womb of History: Time in Early Ismaili Thought, International Journal of Middle East Studies 9 (1978): 357; L. E. Goodman, Time in Islam, in Time and Religion, Louis Massignon, Time in Islamic Thought, in Man and Time, vol. 3 of Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, Bollingen Series, no. 30 ([New York]: Pantheon Books, 1957), 108-9; L. E. Goodman, Time in Islam.

186 Time, Religion and History in India 179 III The Modern [i.e. Western] notion of time in history came to India steadily in two parallel strands: one of patronising approval of India s ancient wisdom and the other of strident denunciation of it. Either way, the Eastern and the Western were constituted as two ends of the spectrum. Since the idea of irreversible progress inhered in both linear historical time and in the tripartite division of history into Antiquity, Middle (or Dark) Ages and Modern Times, its introduction to India by James Mill in 1817 was heavily qualified by the utilitarian assumption that progress was the end result of science and reason which were opposed to religion; hence all of India s pre-british past was one chunk of stasis and rigidity that are characteristic of societies with religion as the guiding force. Hence, the tripartite division was modified as the Hindu, the Muslim and the British periods of Indian history. The asymmetry between the three is quite well thought out and emphatic. In the beginning of the 20 th century, in 1903 to be precise, Ancient, Medieval and Modern were first used again by a British historian, Stanley Lane-Poole. 30 But the terms hid under them the old basis of division and these continued to remain interchangeable right into the 1960s. The growing influence of Marxism on Indian historiography during the mid-1950s until about three decades later also emphasised linear change and progress, sometimes going contrary to Marx s own evaluation of India s past. 31 With focus shifting to social, economic and technological change where the earlier preoccupation was with the history of ruling dynasties, the boundaries of ancient, medieval and modern got redefined, but the tripartite division remained in tact. It is in the last decade of the twentieth century and the first of the new century that ever newer problematiques of the history of time, space, habitat, cultural mores and interpersonal relations are coming centrestage and the conventional temporal divides are under a strain, for these problematiques defy easy placement within defined temporal boxes. 30 Stanley Lane-Poole, Mediaeval India under Mohammadan Rule: A.D (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1903). 31 Harbans Mukhia, Marx on Pre-Colonial India: An Evaluation, in Marxian Theory and the Third World, ed. Diptendra Banerjee (New Delhi: n.p., 1985),

187 180 Harbans Mukhia IV There is still the persistence of a certain notion of time and history to be considered: the one that appertains to nearly a quarter of India s population, i.e. the tribes. With no literate tradition surviving from the past, their myths recorded by outsiders are the only facts available for retrieving their construction of time, with rarely an explicit elaboration. Their notions come nowhere near what is construed as history or time in high culture zones. Their time is independent of virtually any kind of measurement in aeons, millennia, centuries or years; there is no explicit logic, nor an elaborate and cogent construction of an argument; there is no conscious retrieval, nor denial of history as we understand it. Yet, there is a strongly implicit sense of the present and the past in their ever evolving myths. Usually, these myths relate to their origin which implicate their present status vis-à-vis other groups they come into contact with, either caste groups representing social power or others representing state power. In constructing their origin myths, which vary according to each situation, they either visualise a continuous flow of time since their origin, or fractured time, indicating consciousness of their own changed status and power. 32 If several strands of Hindu thought have drawn upon some of these elements to weave their own conceptual mosaics, the autonomous being of these implicit and scattered notions of time and history, expressed in the medium of myths, still remains a strong presence across the length and breadth of the country and outside of, though related to the dominant Brahmanic Hindu ethos. 32 Neeladri Bhattacharya, Mythic Time and Historical Time (unpublished, n.p., n.d.).

188 29 BIBLID p ~ * 1666~ ~1705 *

189 Masao Maruyama, translated by Mikiso Hane, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan(Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1974)

190 183 correlate Hayden White

191 184 event inter-textual: P. Ricoeul discourse inter-discoursial space

192 185 P. Bourdieu

193

194 187 habitus 1829~ ~1916

195 188

196 29 BIBLID (2002)29p ~ Making Sense of Time: Towards a Universal Typology of Conceptual Foundations of Historical Consciousness Jörn Rüsen * Abstract The article conceptualizes a general theory of cultural strategies to give time experiences in the human world a cultural meaning. It refers to anthropological universals of time experience and related universal cultural strategies of interpreting them. So, e.g., the interpretation of contingency in the change of the human world is done by telling a story. The enormous complexity of time experience and time interpretation is reduced to some general structures and typological differences. It characterizes modes of experience, dimensions of ordering it, sense criteria for the interpretation of time, modes of realizing this interpretation and, finally, some ideas about comprehensive developments in the understanding of time across different cultures. This theoretical and typological approach to understand the understanding of time is presented as a means for empirical research, mainly in intercultural comparison. Keywords: time, historical consciousness, philosophy of history, typology of time interpretation. * President of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in the Scientific Centre of Northrhine-Westphalia (Essen) and Professor for General History and Historical Culture at the University of Witten-Herdecke.

197 190 Jörn Rüsen The following argumentation 1 is developed in the context of research dedicated to historiography in a comparative perspective. Such a comparison can be easily done within a cultural context which is grounded on the same or at least on similar principles of understanding the past as history. Substantial research and interpretation of Western historical thinking in a comparative way has been done. It is much more difficult to compare the treatment of the past which leads to historical thinking in an intercultural perspective. Not much work has been done in this field; and such work as there is tends to take the most advanced form of historical thinking, namely the Western one, as a parameter, and look at other cultures in terms of similarities and differences. This is where the problem lies; one mode of historical thinking is taken as a parameter of comparison regardless of what the other mode of thinking may be: that leads to a distortion of perspectives. What can we do to avoid this distortion? First of all there is a need to develop the parameter of comparison in a theoretical way, so that we can check and prove how the perspective of comparison is worked out, what it makes visible and what it tends to obscure or hide. 2 In order to avoid the dominance of the conceptual frameworks of one culture over those of another it is necessary to start this theory by finding and asserting fundamental and universal elements of man's relationship to the past. Such an anthropology of time concept is abstract and lets all differences vanish. But however generalised it may be, it can serve as a starting point. In order to bring differences into view, it is necessary to develop this anthropology of time concepts further into a typology of different categories for making concrete these time concepts. Time is a basic dimension of human life. It is embedded in growth and decline, birth and death, change and continuity. It is structurally distracted 1 I would like to thank Achim Mittag for extremely valuable comments, critique and hints to Chinese examples. The use of his proposals lies, of course, exclusively in my responsibility. 2 Jörn Rüsen, Some Theoretical Approaches to Intercultural Comparison of Historiography, in History and Theory, Theme Issue 35: Chinese Historiography in Comparative Perspective (1996), 5-22.

198 Making Sense of Time 191 by contingency and can only be pursued by following temporal perspectives in the cultural framework of human activity and suffering. There is no cultural orientation of human life without a complex interrelationship of memory and expectations. Husserl has characterized the underlying two main intentions of the human consciousness as retention and protention. 3 The human mind 4 always mediates both by working through the experience of change and giving it a meaning by interpretation which can function as a source and impulse for future perspectives. History as we are used to understand it, cannot be found in all cultures and all times. But in every human culture the human mind conceptualizes time in a special way so that it distinguishes between different time dimensions related to past, present and future (in a very variable way); and in every human culture the experience of the past is brought into a pattern of significance which makes temporal change in the present day world conceivable and understandable and enables people to guide their activities (and suffering) along the line of an idea of change however vague it may be. Then they can understand what change means and how it is related to the human mind, its threats and hopes, its expectations and memories. In all cultures there is one mental procedure and cultural practice which brings about this interpretation in a way that change itself is presented as sense-bearing and significant for the purposes of human activity. This is the universal and fundamental mental strategy of telling a story. 5 3 Edmund Husserl, Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, ed. Martin Heidegger, 2nd ed. (Tübingen, 1980). 4 Speaking of mind, I want to point out that its scope of meaning embraces what in the Chinese tradition was called hsin ( the heart-and-mind ). 5 Cf. Paul Ricoeur s fundamental philosophical analysis: Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative. 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). I have discussed narration as a fundamental operation of historical thinking in a closer relationship to historical studies: Studies in Metahistory. (Pretoria 1993), 3-14; Historische Vernunft. Grundzüge einer Historik I: Die Grundlagen der Geschichtswissenschaf't (Göttingen, 1983); Rekonstruktion der Vergangenheit. Grundzüge einer Historik II: Die Prinzipien der historischen Forschung (Göttingen, 1986); Lebendige Geschichte. Grundzüge einer Historik III: Formen und Funktionen des historischen Wissens (Göttingen, 1989); Zerbrechende Zeit. Über den Sinn der Geschichte. (Köln: Böhlau, 2001).