Maya and mind games

Wendy Doniger's book is an education for everyone, familiar and unfamiliar with India, looking to navigate the maze-like world of dreams and illusions

Dreams, Illusions and other Realities

Author: Wendy Doniger

Publisher: Speaking Tiger

Pages: 360

Price: Rs 699

A frequently quoted aphorism in Sanskrit proclaims that the gods love conversing in riddles. Simple, direct speech does not quite make the cut; to be heard in the corridors of heaven, human beings must master the art of metaphor and recondite prose. And so, the reasoning follows, the ancients composed their myths, philosophical treatises and epic poetry to mimic a spider’s web, drawing the narrative yarn around ideas of illusion, reality, life and death in delicate, tangled loops.

The ancient Indian literary universe (oral and written) is often compared to a dense forest. It hides a million different stories, speaks in many voices, defies logic and rationality and can be stubbornly resistant to comprehension. This book picks an area that has been particularly difficult to understand: The boundaries that define reality, imagined reality, dreams and illusion.

Ancient Indian literature has for long been fascinated with the relationship between a real tangible universe and an imagined, invisible one. There are numerous stories and hypotheses on dreams, transformed reality, alternative universes and illusions. Are they all that different from the real universe that we inhabit? Is there a unique Indian frame of reference for understanding the human psyche through dreams? And what does the idea of an illusory universe or maya seek to convey?

Wendy Doniger picks the questions, ideas and related concepts and stories threadbare in the book Dreams, Illusions and other Realities that was first published in 1984, whose Indian edition has just hit the stands. The book, organised as chapters around different papers and presentations made at seminars and conferences, adopts a professorial lens to look at the ideas around dreams and illusions.

There is an entire chapter on the idea of maya, for instance, where Dr Doniger tracks the many versions of a story about how Narada was taught the true meaning of illusions. The story goes that Narada fancied himself as an ascetic of the highest calibre and believed that he had conquered the world of maya. Vishnu disagrees and proceeds to show him just how vulnerable everyone is, including the greatest sages, to the emotional and material connections that human beings construct around their lives. Vishnu’s lesson is wrapped in a story about transformations and dreams where the lines around reality are as illusory as illusion itself. At the end of it all, Narada realises that maya can be all consuming and none is exempt from its allure—neither god, nor devotee.

Dr Doniger deftly unpacks the layers that have formed around this story to show how the same story is used by different writers and philosophers to convey different meanings. She also digs up other stories around maya that could help readers discover a raft of new meanings around the concept.

The book gives readers a glimpse into how ancient Indians contemplated about the human psyche and how deeply they explored the meaning of reality. Many Indian myths, for instance, are captivated with the idea of shadows and doubles. Doubles are figures created by the gods or by humans seeking a temporary reprieve from a pressing predicament. Doubles are lookalikes that can take on the role of the person they replace without anyone being aware of the switch. There is a myth about the sun god where his wife runs away, but leaves her shadow (chaya) behind to look after her children. Her trick goes unnoticed for a long time, until of course, she is caught and brought back.

In one of the versions of the Ramayana, Sita’s shadow was abducted by Ravana while the real one hid herself inside the earth. Another version has a story where Sita was tricked—some say by Surpanakha (Ravana’s sister) while others have Shanta (Rama’s sister) playing the part—into creating a shadow Ravana. Sita was asked to sketch a likeness of Ravana, but she protested saying that all she had seen of her abductor was his toe. Her tormentors persisted and asked her to draw a toe, if that was the case. From that image, emerged a shadow Ravana who manifested himself into Sita’s bedroom. An angry Rama accused Sita of infidelity, but at the right moment, the shadow Ravana disappeared into the sketch, proving her innocence, yet again.

The imagined is real and the real, imagined, the story seems to tell its listeners. The book looks at many such stories—popular and obscure—found in the ancient texts, the Vedas, Puranas and the Upanishads and interestingly, the Yogavasishtha. Composed in Kashmir somewhere between the 9th and 12th centuries, the Yogavasishtha has not been subject to as much scrutiny as other Indian texts, but is a revelation when it comes to the Indian explorations around the mind.

Dr Doniger builds a comparative framework around her work with the Indian texts, referencing the stories and other literary material with similar Western texts. The idea is to help people who are not familiar with Indian thinking and ways of life understand the stories better, she writes. The truth is, the book is an education for everyone, familiar and unfamiliar with the country, looking to navigate the maze-like world of dreams and illusions.