The Son of Man or the Son of Woman

The Son of Man or the Son of Woman?

A German author, a biographical historian, Emil Ludwig, has written the life of Jesus under the heading, The Son of Man. An English author, a literary critic, Middleton Murry, has written a work, The Son of Woman and also another volume, The Life of Jesus. At first thought, it seems paradoxical that one should have styled the male the Son of Man, the Other the Son of Woman, as if the son were not of both man and woman.

The “Son of Man” is the reverential biblical name for Jesus, which he himself used, if I recollect aright, for the first time in his saying, “The son of Man hath not where to lay his head.” But Jesus was previously hinted at as the son of God, by the voice from Heaven, after his baptism and before the temptation.

The  “Son of Woman” is the name Murry has chosen for delineating D. H. Lawrence’s character, and the last sentence of the preface to the reader, lest we should judge Lawrence, reads: “He alone could judge Lawrence, and he also spoke the words, ‘Judge not that ye be not judged,” of course, meaning Jesus.

Why these paradoxical definitions should have risen in the West and not in the East, has led me to ponder over it. The biblical story of us being born of a virgin, by the visitation of the Holy Ghost, is very peculiar and characteristically not the way, which the Hindu mind conceived the avatars of God. Even Sri Krishna, the purna (full) avatar, he is called, was born of man and woman, for the Hindu considers that God Himself is subject to the natural laws of the Universe, and it was in accordance with nature that the Lord should be born of man and woman.

Like Jesus, it is said that Krishna too exercised after his birth his miraculous powers, which enabled the child to break the jail and be taken across the Jamuna, whose floods were made to subside. It may be that persons interested in the welfare of Vasudeva’s children might have given dope to the sentinels and that the Jamuna’s floods subsided by accident.

The legend of the birth of Jesus of a virgin itself proclaims to the East that Christianity has felt, even from its origins, that sex is a sin, as the story in the Genesis describes the fall of man from Heaven by the temptation of woman.

These thoughts passed through my mind, because Hilton Brown of The Punch (late of the Indian Civil Service), who has known India better than Miss Mayo and persons of that ilk, has said in a private letter, “So much awful rubbish has been written about the sex aspect of Hinduism that we cannot have enough exponents of what I, for one, am quite convinced is the real state of affairs. Give us some more of this………i.e., “the delineation of the elusive delicate relationship, at once humdrum and sublime, implied in the Hindu marriage.”

I however, just now propose, as a Hindu imbued with somewhat of the Hindu culture, despite western education, to refer to some of the taboos, as the westerner would put it, namely, to some of the rules of the conduct of life of the Hindu, under which normally the human personality of the male is not broken up by fierce conflicts of the soul, as in the case of D. H. Lawrence.

Murry’s subject had never been able to resolve his Oedipus complex, i.e., the love of the son for the mother, which has its physical beginnings in the suckling of the babe at the woman’s breast. (Sophocles’ play of Oedipus the King gave rise to the use of this word). The complex requires sublimation at the adolescent age, when the love is transferred to another woman somewhat younger than the male, who later finds joy in the companionship of marriage. As Murry puts it, in describing the illness of Paul in his sixteenth year, (from Sons and Lovers, which is auto-biographical) after quoting the sentence, “He put his head on her breast and took ease of her for love”:

“It is terribly poignant, and terribly wrong. Almost better that a boy should die than have such an effort forced upon him by such means. He is called upon to feel in full consciousness for his mother all that a full-grown man might feel for the wife of his bosom.”

When I read the Bible, especially Matthew and Mark of the New Testament, a second time, at the age of thirty, I had doubts that Jesus, though aged over 30 years like Adi Sankara, the World-Preacher of Vedanta, had never known woman–an opinion endorsed also by Ludwig. But Jesus discerned well enough to interpret the lust of flesh in the covetous glance of man at woman, at the synagogue; and his saying, profound with meaning, “Whosoever looketh on woman to lust after her hath already committed adultery with her in his heart,” is the dictum needed for the ethics of man’s social, nay, spiritual life.

Sankara too passed away from this world of ours, at about the age of thirty-two, quite young like Jesus; and his later story is interesting. When he met the wife of Mandana Misra, she foils the young ascetic, by discussing, not spiritual love, a part of Vedantic teaching, but the love of a man and woman. He begs a month’s time to consider the question; and it is said that he experienced the sex-act by his soul entering the body of a dead king before its cremation, creating the phantasm of the king coming to life, which the queen detected, and returning to his own physical body some days after. I refer to this story of Sankara mainly with one purpose. The ancient Hindu thinkers, who were adepts in the study of the human mind, have been quite conscious of the Oedipus and Electra complexes, and of the necessity for their sublimation; and that idea is portrayed, for instance, in the mythical episode of Ganesa or Vighnewara, the son of Siva and Parvati. When Ganesa came of age and was pressed to marry he puts the question, “Find me a woman just like my mother.” The story goes on to say that the gods got quite enraged and cursed him with the life of brahmacharya (celibacy). Perhaps it is the intention to convey the lesson to the human mind that normally such persons, as are obsessed with the physical love for the mother, should not try the experiment of marriage. This, to my mind, is the lesson that Murry teaches, even though unconsciously, when he portrays what was the tragedy of Lawrence.

I have referred in my book, Life’s Shadows to the sacredness of the person of man and woman. This is a very important psychic factor in the fondling of the son by the mother, or of the daughter by the father. Such cuddling, hugging and kissing of the child is usually left off in the Hindu household within a couple of years of the birth of the child, both by the father and the mother. It may be, that the semi-nakedness of the children in the East, and the lesser clothes which the Hindu children wear do not create the obsession of sex in the maturing Hindu mind. It is typically said of the Hindu that he adores his mother and worships her. It is this adoration of the mother, which does not cause the tragedy I alluded to above. It is a matter of common observation that the daughter is addressed by the Tamil Hindu–not even by her name but as “Ammale,” meaning diminutive mother. The word “Amman” also means Iswari. The northern Indian father addresses his daughter as “Devi.” which is even more expressive of the feeling of adoration of the girl-child. The Electra complex too is thus sublimated.

While on this subject, it is curious to note that Persian poets sing of the beauty of boys, and not of women, probably on account of the purdah system prevailing in that country, while all Sanskrit poets praise the beauty of woman. It is apparent how natural and sane life can be without these artificial restrictions laid by man on woman who is not trusted in regard to her chastity.

I must now branch off to certain aspects of the Christian and Hindu religion. I have mentioned the Holy Ghost earlier. It is the third aspect of the Christian Trinity, the first two, being Father and Son. God is the Father; and Christ, the Son (sacrificed as a lamb), stands as the intermediary, to bear the burden of the sins of the whole of humanity, if we believe in him, while the Holy Ghost may be the Spirit of Man. The Bible says to blaspheme or sin against the Holy Ghost is unpardonable, which saying is rather hard to understand.

Be it as it may, I shall first refer to the more common concepts of Trinity in Hindu Religion, which have, by folklore, become part and parcel of the Hindu mind, on an evolutionary basis of the idea, as I imagine it. In the early stages of Hindu civilisation, when nature’s forces seemed paramount, Godhead was represented by three names, the Sun (Surya), the Waters (Apah) and the Earth (Prithvi), without which life could not exist. When, later, it was realised that in human life, nay, in all life, there were the three facts of birth, growth and death, the Hindu personified God Himself taking on three aspects, as Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver and Siva the Destroyer. It is noteworthy that the three gods are all male. Later still when it was understood that sex was a universal phenomenon in the whole of creation, these three gods were given wives in the Pantheon, Saraswati, Lakshmi and Parvati respectively. They had sons too, Narada, Manmatha (Cupid) and Ganesa or Kumara (because Ganesa was later ousted by Kumara in worship).

The concept of Siva as Ardhanariswara (half-man and half-woman) was a great flight of imagination, and it is pertinent to observe that the wives of Brahma and Vishnu were never merged in the unity of the cosmic, principle. Nay, Vishnu had two wives, as represented in a picture by Ravi Varma. Though Saraswati is the Goddess of Learning, Lakshmi of Prosperity, yet it is Parvati, who is more appealed to as the Mother of the Universe by the mass-mind of South India. For, the Father is indeed an august personage, and the Son seeks the grace of the Father through the intervention of the Mother.

The Vishnu worshipper may say that the aspect of mother is present also in the worship of Lakshmi, typified by the prayer to Sita, when the invocation to Sri Rama did not bear fruit in the alleviation of suffering of the devotee Ramadas of Pandharpur (Sita was not patently conceived as “the Mother” in the Ramayana, of Valmiki). The Trinity of human relationship here was not complete, as it did not embrace the son-aspect, since Manmatha became ananga (disembodied), and Narada, a mere saint in mythic lore.

Having posited Siva as Mahadeva in the act of contemplation, Parvati was invested with the powers of energy of the living Universe and became possessed also of the fearful aspects of Nature, which took shape in the worship of ‘Durga’, as in Bengal. The Kamakshi temple at Conjeeveram is an instance of a similar worship in South India. Northern India, in the recent past of a thousand years, under the aegis of Mahomedan rule, had come to accept the purdah of the conqueror, which may be a reason why today we are unable to see any temples for worship of Iswari, the consort of Siva, at Benares for instance. When a South Indian visits, for the first time, the Visveswara Temple at Benares next to the huge mosque, he is struck by two important variations in the ritual of worship at he is accustomed to. The devotee himself pours the offering of water over the stone image and offers the bilva leaves, without the priest intervening as in South India, and drops the coin for the priest to pick up the owner of the temple. And there is no Iswari temple where he can say homage of worship. So the devotee goes to the Visalakshi Temple a little far off, built by a South Indian in recent years, to satisfy his religious need.

Similarly, at the temple at Belur on the banks of the Ganges, beside the temple of Durga with a lolling red tongue, stand next door the images of Radha and Krishna, featuring not as man and wife, but as man and beloved. They convey no meaning at all to the South Indian who visits the home of the late saint Ramakrishna Paramahamsa.

I have now to refer to the work of Adi Sankara in South India, where the worship of ‘Durga’ was transformed into the worship of the graceful and divine, loving Mother. He should also have felt that the Ardhanariswra ideal alone would lead man to sexual orgies. A Siva temple was erected by the side of every Iswari temple, and at the portals of the Iswari temple was placed at a mans height in a niche the figure of Ganesa, face to face i.e., both looking at each other, the mother at the son and vice versa. If one visits the temple of Jambukeswara at Thiruvanaikaval in the island of Srirangam, one will find the routine of worship there to be thus. First, the visit to the Siva temple where everything is quiet, austere and serene. Next to the shrine of Parvati, Akhilandeswari, meaning ‘the Mother of the entire Universe.’ Instead of blood pouring out of animal sacrifice, we see that kumkum (red vermilion) is the offering and a portion of the offering is returned by the priest to the married woman for her to wear on her forehead as a symbol of chaste motherhood. And on his way , the worshipper sees Ganesa, offers his prayer and departs.

For the non-Hindu reader, it may be stated that Parvati, Durga, Visalakshi, Kamakshi are different names for Iswari. Similarly, Rudra Mahadeva, Parameswara, Sankara are the names of Siva. The word ‘Siva’ means ‘the Good’. However, owing to the previous association of that word with the aspect of Destroyer, the mind conceives Him not only as Good, releasing the soul to seek a finer body and brain at re-birth, or from the cycle of births and deaths, but also as the God who infuses the terror of Moral Law in one who does evil. The Hindu mind, in its health, cannot condone the suffering of man brought on himself as a result of his evil deeds against man and society, since the stern law of Karma gives no room for the ‘flabby ideas’ of Christian forgiveness of evil deeds, and the mockings of the moral law by the materialist.

The projection by the human mind of the idea of man, woman and son, idealised in the human relationship of Father, Mother and Son, finds the most complete Trinity of Godhead in Siva, Parvati and Kumara, and this possessing a survival value, has given the Hindu mind a sanity of the Vision of Life.^*

^* The earliest sculpture in South India of Somaskanda, i.e., of Siva and Parvathi with Kumara sitting between them, is to be found in cave-temples of the early seventh century A.D.