Sight, Duality, and Hinduism

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“Hindu thought is most distinctive for its refusal to make the one and the many into opposites. For most, the manyness of the divine is not superseded by oneness. Rather, the two are held simultaneously and are inextricably linked.” (Eck, pg. 28)


The section of Darśan: Seeing the Divine Image in India was really interesting to me. Usually when you see something you take it as face value, instinctively categorizing it into whatever niche your brain thinks it fits. We divide animals, plants, objects, even other humans into often arbitrary categories when our vision goes unchecked. In such a sight-based religious practice, it would be easy to see how one could think of deities as unattached to each other, each having distinct and separate attributions mutually exclusive with others. However, in Hinduism, this difference does not mutually exclude oneness.


When explaining away the visual distinctions we make between humans, whether it be due to race or gender or body shape or some other visually prominent category our society has constructed, we tend to dismiss difference. We say people may look different, but that is an illusion. We are all the same. Our eyes are deceiving us. We have to dismiss the differences we perceive through our eyes in order to get to our core similarities. Difference and similarity become mutually exclusive categories.


This distinction, however, does not exist in Hinduism according to this book. Differences and similarities do not have to fall into separate categories. Differences taken in by the eyes do not have to be treated as an illusion. The surface differentness and the oneness underneath are not mutually exclusive. Both components of the divine have value and are always linked together. This kind of duality, acknowledging both what can be seen by the eyes and what cannot without dismissing either, is strengthened by a religion as sight-focused as Hinduism.

http://groupthreeftw.blogspot.com/p/hindu-artist-during-classical-period.html

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