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5.0 out of 5 stars
A Masterwork: from pre-Vedic India to ancient Greece, from Tantra to the science of dreams, June 15, 2008
This review is from: Shiva and the Primordial Tradition: From the Tantras to the Science of Dreams (Paperback)
It is impossible to speak or write of Alain Danielou's works without saying something of the man himself, for the force of his personality infuses his work in a way that is the case with only a very few authors outside of fiction, and seen even more rarely in works of scholarship.
Alain Daniélou was born near Paris in 1907, the child of an ardently Catholic and traditionalist mother and an anti-clerical, Breton politican father who served as minister in several cabinets. Alain Daniélou's brother, Jean, entered the Roman Catholic clergy and was made a cardinal by Pope Paul VI, afterward being elected to the Academie Francaise. Alain himself had in youth rejected Christanity in general and Catholicism in particular in favor of Asian spiritual paths, and was avowedly and enthusiastically homosexual in an era when such an identification would invite disgrace and rejection and could even entail loss of life or livelihood.
Alain Daniélou spent most of his childhood with tutors, a library and a piano. During these formative years, he discovered music and painting. As a young man he left France to attend an American school at Annapolis, where he earned pocket-money by selling his paintings and playing the piano at silent movie theatres. On his return to France, he studied singing under Charles Panzéra, as well as classical dancing with Nicholas Legat, Nijinski's master, and composition with Max d'Olonne. He gave recitals and exhibited his paintings. A keen sportsman, Alain Daniélou was a canoeing champion and an expert race car driver. In 1932, he made a trip to explore the Afghan Pamir, and, in 1934, an endurance test by car from Paris to Calcutta. Together with the Swiss photographer, Raymond Burnier, he then departed for the East, travelling in North Africa, the Middle-East, India, Indonesia, China and Japan. He finally established himself in India, initially with Rabindranath Tagore, who entrusted him with missions to his friends (Paul Valéry, Romain Rolland, André Gide, Paul Morand, Benedetto Croce) and appointed him director of his school of music at Shantiniketan.
Alain Daniélou eventually retired to Benares, living on the banks of the Ganges. There he discovered the traditional culture of India, into which he was initiated over time. He was to stay in Benares for fifteen years, studying classical Indian music with the prestigious master Shivendranath Basu, along with Hindi which he spoke and wrote fluently as his own mother- tongue, Sanskrit and philosophy, with masters who were among the highest authorities of tradition.
In this work, Danielou explores the relationship between Shaivism and the Western world. Shaivite philosophy does not oppose theology, cosmology and the sciences because it recognizes their common aim: to seek to understand and explain the nature of the world. In the West, the notion of bridging the divide between science and religion is just beginning to touch the edges of mainstream thought. "Shiva and the Primordial Tradition" is a collection of the author's short essays and offers an extensive examination of the cultural and philosophic underpinnings of Shaivism. It provides a detailed look at Samkhya, the cosmological doctrine of the Shaivite tradition.
The author supplies his reader with important information that is barely available to the non-reader of Sanskrit - revelations would not be too intense a word - on the science of dreams, the role of poetry and sexuality in the Sacred, the person and word of the great saint, Shankara, and the Shiavite influence on the Scythian, Parthian and Hellenic world.
Daniélou, far better known in Europe than the US, has been rather marginalized by academia largely owing to his having broken the rule of objectivity in his study of Hinduism, for allowing himself to become too original in his thinking and too "open-minded."
Danielou writes of his immersion in the life and thought of India that:
"Little by little I entered into a mode of thinking so subtle, so complex and so difficult that I sometimes felt myself reaching the limits of my mental faculties and capacity for understanding. I found myself immersed in a society whose conceptions of nature, of the Divine, of morality, of love, and of wisdom were so radically different from those of the world where I was born that I had to make a clean sweep of everything I thought I knew. This system of values could not have been more strange to me if I had been miraculously transported into Egypt during the reign of Ramses II."
For the spiritual seeker, however, Alain Danielou's works are immensely valuable in bridging the gap between polytheistic Hinduism and Western monotheism, the latter of which the author views as the soul of the West's central philosophic error, which has been "hardly interested in anything but philosophies infected by this germ," as well as in the East, where keepers of the "primordial" traditions have sought to fend off its predations. For Danielou, monotheism's error lies in the fact that it is but a false deification of the idea of individualism - the separation of humanity from nature - and that by acknowledging the presence of the Sacred in everything and everyone we can recognize the imprint of the primordial tradition. According to Daniélou, the healing power of Shaivism lies in opening oneself up to the divine spark in all things. More specifically, he shows how the disciplines of yoga and tantra, now familiar to many in the West, derive from this ancient tradition and are doorways into a deeper and more fulfilling existence.
As is clear from this small volume, Daniélou's Shaivic pluralism has much to say to an increasingly war-ridden, factionalized and materialistic culture and deserves a wide audience.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
a tradition worth reviving, December 5, 2011
This review is from: Shiva and the Primordial Tradition: From the Tantras to the Science of Dreams (Paperback)
First off: The title may be misleading. This is not an introduction to Shiva in the sense of describing all the different facets of Shiva and recounting traditional stories about Shiva. This book is much more focused on the second part of its title: the "primordial tradition," which is a spiritual-cosmological body of knowledge that is universal, but that, at least in ancient India, was developed and practiced, according to Danielou, by followers of the Shiva sect. In this cosmology, Shiva is more of an absolute, impersonal, transcendent principle than a "god" in the Judeo-Christian sense of a personal creator or savior. One thing that stands out for me in Danielou's writings is his idea that the primordial tradition pre-dates the Vedas and the Vedic era. According to his account, the primordial tradition is the source of yoga and tantra, which are the practical expressions of that universal cosmological system that describes, in precise terminology, the step-by-step process by which the Absolute manifests as creation. This cosmological system is called Samkhya. The teachings/scriptures of this tradition are the Agamas, Pancharatras, and Puranas, and also the major epics like the Mahabharata and Ramayana, which may have been composed originally in a Dravidian or other non-Sanskrit language. In this scheme of things, these were all non-Vedic texts, although some of them - like the Puranas and epics - have since been made to square with the Vedas. Similarly, the Samkhya being referred to here is not identical to the Samkhya of the six classical philosophical systems (darshanas) but is an earlier, and more complete, system. Its main practitioners were wandering (and somewhat wild) sadhus-sannyasis - renunciate practitioners of yoga and tantra. This tradition is related to tribal and shamanic practices and can be aimed either at acquiring magical, mystical powers or at attaining liberation. Its spirit is experimental, experiential, and non-judgmental, demonstrating a willingness to whole-heartedly and whole-bodily explore and use all facets of life as a means to spiritual awakening. In contrast, the Vedic tradition is a relatively tamer, more orthodox, moralistic, and hierarchical "religious" system (more concerned with establishing and maintaining social order) focused on elaborate sacrificial rituals performed by Brahmin priests. At some point, still in ancient times, Vedism rose to prominence and the primordial tradition went underground, where its secrets were preserved by various sects - although official Vedism adopted many of its beliefs and practices. Later, around 200 C.E., the primordial tradition - now somewhat "Vedicized" - began a revival and blended with other influences (like the monotheistic Christian-Muslim influenced Advaita Vedanta non-dualism of Shankara in the 800's and devotional Bhakti movements) to eventually form what is now called popular "Hinduism." This is an interesting account of Indian history - but not one that everyone will accept, partly because it is based on the seemingly increasingly discredited theory that "Aryan invaders" brought the Vedas to India from afar. A contrasting theory, put forward by writers like David Frawley, is that the Vedas, in their original form, are indigenous to India and are themselves at the very root of the primordial tradition; but that over time people forgot their true, deepest meaning. But whether the primordial tradition pre-dates the Vedas or whether the Vedas were originally part of the primordial tradition, the important distinction - one that Danielou makes as well as anyone I know - is that there is indeed a primordial tradition that is quite distinct in many important ways from relatively more degraded, simplified, overly rational (narrow, dogmatic), or overly irrational (speculative, sentimental) religious systems that have since emerged all over the world. After establishing his version of a historical background, the remaining chapters (the whole book is a posthumous collection of articles and lectures) provide specific examples of how the primordial tradition sees and interacts with the cosmos. This can be a bit technical and dry at times, but I found it fascinating nonetheless. Much of it has to do with the way that various ratios - musical notes, geometric shapes, architectural designs - can be made to correspond to vibratory patterns that are direct expressions of the subtle, spiritual forces and beings that create and "rule" manifest reality. The proper use of sound and space/shape can thus be used to establish connections with the subtle and transcendent aspects of reality and to explore and bring to perfection our own subtle inner selves. This is similar to the aspects of Baba Rampuri's "Autobiography of a Sadhu" that I found most moving and powerful (see separate review). What strikes me about Danielou's presentation of this ancient samkhya-yoga-tantra-based view of reality is how scientific it is. I expected a "primordial" tradition to be purely intuitive and non-rational. Instead, it is indeed deeply intuitive, but in a way that makes perfect, rational sense. It is not scientific in the modern sense, of course; but modern science has, in my opinion, unreasonably discarded inner, subjective, conscious experience as a realm of valid evidence, experimentation, and exploration. The primordial tradition as Danielou presents it is simply a broader, more holistic science than our modern version. The ancients who were willing (as Danielou himself seemed to be) to throw themselves with their entire being into the mystery of direct experience and dissolve into this mysterious cosmos discovered thereby an intimately interconnected and conscious cosmos of meaningful correspondences. These correspondences form the proper basis for meaningful human society - a society where language, music, art, buildings, worship, and everything else connect us to the underlying laws of the cosmos and guide us to realize our true potentials. In contrast, in modern, secular society, we now tend to limit ourselves to a much narrower bandwidth of experience-consciousness; and consequently can only come up with materialistic consumerism as the basis for our ego-centric, violent, disintegrative, empty, and crazy way of life!
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