Asceticism Religion And Biological Evolution

Author(s): Johannes Bronkhorst
Publisher: Johannes Bronkhorst

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JOHANNES BRONKHORST
ASCETICISM, RELIGION, AND BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION
397
any will be completely overgrown by traits belonging to the specific culture in which it expresses itself. The more we concentrate on those differing cultural traits, the more the common universal will, predictably, recede into the background. This does not prove that there are no universals, but merely that culturalists follow a methodology which excludes a priori that there might be any.
It will be useful to make a comparison with the case of language. Languages are infinitely diverse i.e., have features that are culturally specific), and the more languages one studies, the more differences are likely to appear. It is possible to study what language users in different cultures have thought and think) about their own language, but the results, though interesting, may not be of much use to the linguist interested in studying language per se. (An important exception is constituted by the indigenous tradition of Sansknt grammar, which has been able to provide European linguists with new insights.) In spite of this great variety between languages, there is a growing consensus among linguists that human language has an innate component.
More will be said about language below. The few remarks so far made allow us already to draw some provisional conclusions. If-and for the time being 1 emphasize if-the set of ascetic practices and religious beliefs studied in the preceding sections are somehow expressive of one or more general human predispositions, it is not necessarily of interest to know what the actors involved thought about this themselves, or how it was embedded in the cultural situation to which they belonged. An exclusive emphasis on "understanding in context" might have the effect of obfuscating the universal predisposition that expresses itself through the phenomena at stake. This does not exclude that the local understanding of these phenomena-such as the Indian conviction discussed above to the extent that certain forms of asceticism and beliefs about the inactive nature of the soul are inherently related to each other-may occasionally add to our understanding of them. But they do not exhaust or limit our understanding of them.
Partly because of the specific cultural situations in which innate predispositions are always embedded, they may be difficult to recognize. If it is true, as has been suggested above, that the parallel complexes of religious practices and ideas found in India and in Christian antiquity are to be understood in terms of a common innate predisposition, the question has to be addressed how such an
innate predisposition can be described and distinguished from the numerous accompanying features that reflect the cultural situations in which it finds expression.
There can be no doubt that human beings are born with a variety of innate predispositions. Perhaps the most obvious one is sexuality, which humanity shares with a large number of other animals. We will not deal with this particular instinct, but note that it can express itself in a great variety of ways. Indeed, the editors of a recent volume on sexuality distinguish between sex, which is a natural fact and lies outside history and culture, and sexuality, which "refers to the cultural interpretation of the human body's erogenous zones and sexual capacities" (Halperin et al. 1989: 3). It is also important to observe that this perhaps most essential of human instincts does not inevitably lead to sexual activity, the celibacy of the ascetics studied in this article proves that an important number of people tried and try to resist its urges, no doubt with varying degrees of success. Here as elsewhere it is important not to identify human predispositions with "fixed programs"; as Boyer (1998: 91) rightly points out, such fixed programs would be maladaptive.
It will not be of much use to compare the universal which we suspect may be linked to aspects of religious and ascetic behavior and thought with sexuality (or sex). Religious and ascetic behavior, unlike sexuality, are confined to human beings, without clear parallels in other animal species. Moreover, though many manifestations of what is commonly called religion are heavily infused with emotion, the aspects that have attracted our attention in the preceding sections are not. Both asceticism (of the kind under consideration here) and the views about the nature of the self appear to be essentially dissociated from emotion, or even ways to conquer it. The emotions to be conquered include, of course, sexual emotion. It therefore does not make senise to see in these practices and beliefs the expression of a universal, an instinct, that has much in common with sexuality, its enemy. In order to make a useful comparison with the propensity that inter ests us we need another universal that is confined exclusively to human beings and devoid of strong emotional dimensions. One such universal confined to human beings and devoid of a strong emo
Jaina authors, for example, have always been adamant that the voluntary death chosen by their ascetics is not suicide, precisely because the latter involves the pas sions (Dundas 1992: 155)