Father of Faith

The story of Harishchandra (here from the 1991 version of Vishwamitra) ends with the once king being charged with the job of executing his own wife. To make matters worse he knows perfectly well that his wife is innocent and has been wrongly accused of murdering a prince.

In the Triangulations blog Sabio Lantz doesn't really add much understanding beyond giving his limited opinion.

The issue facing Harishchandra is well documented, in the West most famously handled in the Sophocles tragedy of Antigone. Does Antigone respect her duty as a citizen to obey the state ruling that her shamed brother Oedipus should remain unburied, or does she perform her duty as a sister to bury her brother. She chooses the latter and suffers the consequences.

Unlike Antigone Harishchandra does not obey his duty as a husband, but rather obeys his role as an executioner.

Now there is important value in the story (rather lost to Sabio Lantz). The issue facing us all is whether to allow the conditional world to influence us, or whether to remain steadfast to unconditional Truth. Sin and evil after all are none other than people being weak and swaying from what they should do.

It is commonly said in the West even today that every man has his price. Every man has is breaking point. That is the bet that Vishwamitra made with the gods and he won. Harishchandra had no breaking point, he was absolutely resolute in the face of conditional sufferings. In metaphysical terms his will and his mind were a single point, a diamond without flaw. This is why he is so highly valued.

Truth in the story of Harishchandra is to fulfil what you need to fulfil. I do not know enough about Hindu duties, but it seems that your role in society was a greater duty than your duty to your wife. The Bhagavad Gita is exactly the same message to Arjuna. There is no point saying you will take a swim in an ice cold lake, but then when you test the water back out. This is allowing the mind to be determined by conditional forces, and this is mortality. Even in Buddhism (which is quite opposed in fact to the Hindu message) there is the same message in Dhammapada Flowers:

Death sweeps away

The person obsessed

With gathering flowers,

As a great flood sweeps away a sleeping village.

The person obsessed

With gathering flowers,

Insatiable for sense pleasures,

Is under the sway of Death.

Those who seek to be defined by the conditional world, who in Hindu terms base their decisions not on what is right but upon what is apparent are in the grip of death. To beat death we must look inside our minds and shore them up against the influence of the impermanent and changing world. The pure mind is unchanging, and only the man who knows this can follow the path of truth unbroken.

Now it is interesting as Sabio Lantz points out that we have the same test set for Abraham in the old testament. This is currently dated to about 250BCE. This is several hundred years after the Harishchandra story. But they are all Iron Age, when Asia saw the rise again of great Kings and Kingdoms after the Bronze Age collapse.

Abraham begins the great religions of Judeism and its off shoots Christianity, Islam and Ba'hai. His importance lies in his obedience to direct commands from God. Kierkegaard in "Fear and Trembling" examines how such a "direct command" could occur. We commonly have two types of command. The Ethical command from the community law (Antigone being told by the state to leave her brother unburied conflicting with the sisterly law to bury him), and the Aesthetic command from our own wishes. Harishchandra typifies the strength of a person to overcome his Aesthetic wishes even in extreme cases. But Abraham is neither. There is no law that commands he must sacrifice his son. If he personally wishes to sacrifice his son then he is a monster displaying no love or parental duty to his child. But this cannot be the case because Abraham does not sacrifice his son in the end. Soren concludes there must be a "divine madness" that is incomprehensible to people outside the Divine connection, but which never-the-less is more than a personal wish by Abraham.

Regardless the metaphysics both stories end the same. Having proved their willingness to obey external orders far beyond the breaking point of mere mortals, showing complete command over themselves God reveals himself and ends the test.

Perhaps some might think of concentration camps and people doing horrific things under orders. The difference here is that in most cases of people subordinating themselves to authority they were not personally involved. Were someone asked to kill their own family they might think again. And if they were prepared to do so, we might assume they were too traumatised and numbed to the situation that they did not know what they were doing. Yet Abraham and Harishchandra are of good mind. Indeed that is the point they are of the best mind.

So I wonder if comparing these similar stories side by side we gain some insight into both of them and into the root ideas that fed these cultures and religions.

todo: apparently we can roll Job into this as well, but I have not studied that story.