V · Oral Tradition & Authority
The fifth episode deconstructs a single word, authority, and asks where, in an oral tradition, it lives. We are inclined to hear authority as the policeman with the gun, the schoolmaster, the one who can compel us. But there is another authority, the authority of knowledge, the source we actually turn to when it counts. Many profess their faith in natural healing, yet, faced with a grave illness, they go straight to the finest cancer clinic they can find; and when it is tested, the authority shows itself in where they turn, not in what they profess.
Such authority arises from consensus, from a mutual understanding within the circle it serves. The dictionary holds authority for those who speak English, the grandfather for his family, the Acharya for his Akhara, and none of them by their own proclamation; authority is granted, and so it can be disputed, never fixed for all. The question this course keeps returning to sharpens here: does the authority for knowledge rest in the printed text, or in the living voice?
And so to the oral tradition itself. It is not a club to join or a doctrine to believe; it is a way of culture, the way by which knowledge was carried for most of human history, alive and passed from guru to disciple, its authority drawn from experience rather than from any page. I speak from inside it, after forty-five years, which is why I am taken for a contrarian, though the only difference is the angle: a different access to the same questions, and with it the chance to think what the book and the lecture circuit leave unthought.
Suppose the words of the oral tradition were one day written down, and written down perfectly, exactly as they left the mouth of the one who held the authority. Even then something happens. The words are cut off from the speaker and frozen, and they are edited, given a beginning and an end and the look of a closed and finished system. But the oral tradition has no closure; it goes on, and circumstances and histories shift around it, and it answers to them. This is the weakness in the textual bias the Academy carries toward Indian knowledge: the printed page offers a completeness that the living thing never claimed.
And the oral tradition is never a single voice. You do not receive it from one guru. In our tradition a sannyasi begins with five gurus, each from a different lineage; I have had eleven within the tradition over my life. It is built of a harmony and a cacophony of voices, not one voice and not one idea, and that very diversity is what holds it open. The monolith is the thing it refuses.
I speak of all this in its twilight, and there is nothing to be done about that. India is in flux, and the sadhus and babas now carry mobile phones, and watch YouTube, and settle matters over the screen. There was a network among us we called the ātma tar, the soul-wire, by which word of a great soul’s passing would reach us at once, anywhere; the mobile phone has taken its place. In the West people came to a guru for his teaching; in India they come, still, for his blessing, that a life might turn, a sickness lift. The post-Enlightenment assumptions have entered India too, through its English schooling, and the tradition thins. I set it before you while it can still be seen, for by our grandchildren’s time only a fraction will remain. Think of these sessions, then, as a conversation, and as a boat ride through my territory, with me for your guide.
