Abstract
This essay explores the important connection between the miraculous and the ethical, primarily through a study of early modern Hindu devotional (bhakti) traditions. It investigates the role of ethics in categorizing different forms of wonder (e.g., as “miracle” versus “magic”) and examines the way that the specific narrative form of the miracle story often functions to cultivate virtues and ethical dispositions in its audiences. After illustrating a crucial distinction between the meanings of the term/category “miracle” in modern and pre-modern times, the essay delves into the hagiographical literature of a Mughal-period North Indian bhakti community in order to demonstrate how its miracle tales work as pedagogical devices for cultivating a distinctive social ethic of giving and service.
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Notes
- 1.
From Foucault’s perspective, ethical life is an arena in which subjects exercise a certain freedom in actively fashioning (constituting) themselves, but they do so in and through practices “proposed, suggested, imposed upon [them]” by culture, society, and community (Foucault, 1997, p. 291).
- 2.
This quote, found all over the internet, has been attributed to a post Williamson made on her Facebook page on 6/15/2014. An influential text in spreading such views is Helen Schucman’s A Course in Miracles (1975), which Williamson helped to popularize in a 1992 appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
- 3.
Furthermore, particularly in the modern age, “religious communities do not generally recognize the miracles of other, competing religious communities” (Kripal, 2014, p. 227). In other words, even when religious people do believe in modern-day miracles, they do not generally accept that the world is full of presence; e.g., Catholics who accept the Marian apparitions at Lourdes, would nevertheless almost universally reject the authenticity of other modern-day claims of presence whether “religious” (e.g., the 1995 Hindu miracle of Ganesh images in India drinking milk) or paranormal (e.g., poltergeists, UFO abductions, etc.). On the Ganesh milk-drinking miracle: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/magazine-38301718/the-milk-miracle-that-brought-indiato-a-standstill
- 4.
Prior to Augustine, this ethical distinction between “magic” and “miracle” was articulated in the later New Testament writing of 2 Timothy 3:8–9, where Pharaoh’s magicians are identified by name and condemned for their folly. I thank David Weddle for bringing this passage to my attention.
- 5.
The Arabic title of the work is Kitāb al-Bayān ‘an al-firaq bayna al-mu’jizāt wa al-karamāt wa al-ḥiyal wa al-kahānati wa al-si’ḥri wa al-nīranjāt, and the full name of its author is Abū Bakr Muḥammad al-Bāquillānī.
- 6.
Islamic sources maintain separate categories for the miracles of saints (karāmāt) and the miracles of prophets (mu‘jizāt), but both saints and prophets are understood as ethical exemplars and as passive conduits of divine power (i.e., the miracle is not performed by the saint/prophet, but rather through divine grace), in contrast to ethically depraved magicians and sorcerers who actively seek to manipulate powers other than God (though ultimately still in God’s control).
- 7.
The path-breaking work of Matthew Melvin-Koushki has demonstrated the vital importance of occult practices such as lettrism, astrology, geomancy, divination, talismanic magic, alchemy, and spirit communication among elites in the pre-modern Islamicate world, and particularly in the post-Mongol Persianate cosmopolis (spanning from southeastern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean to Central and South Asia) from the fourteenth century onward (Melvin-Koushki, 2017a). It is clear that post-Mongol Persianate rulers often seized upon the occult sciences to harness sacred power for political purposes (Melvin-Koushki, 2016). As I have referenced Ibn Khaldūn here, it is important to point out that his Muqaddimah was, in significant part, reacting to a fourteenth-century upsurge in the practice of, and socio-political respect given to, occult sciences and that his generally anti-occultist position would lose out to an increasing acceptance of occultism (Melvin-Koushki, 2017b). Nonetheless, an Islamic ethical-theological distinction between magic/sorcery and miracle persisted even amidst this renaissance of occultism (especially as a polemical device to mark the superiority of Islam/Sufism over its competitors), as South Asia Sufi literature—particularly hagiographical accounts of encounters with yogis—makes clear (Digby, 1970; Burchett, 2011).
- 8.
In previous work (Burchett, 2011), I have speculated that the Abrahamic notion of “miracle,” as a category established in contradistinction to “magic,” as the wondrous act of an all-powerful God wrought through the pious faith of a devotee, is one generally absent in Indian literature prior to Sufi presence in the subcontinent, and one not present in Hindu sources in any significant way until the hagiographies associated with the North India’s (Sufi-influenced) bhakti movement.
- 9.
As I have stressed in other work (Burchett, 2019), bhakti’s specific meanings shift depending on historical and regional contexts, and which community is using the term.
- 10.
Somewhat perplexing is the fact that Anantadās, despite the importance of his parcāīs in bhakti scholarship, does not seem to be remembered by the Rāmānandī tradition today in any significant way, unlike his contemporary Nābhādās, whose trailblazing devotional hagiography, the Bhaktamāl (c. 1600) is far more well-known than Anantadās’s works. In his Pīpā-parcāī 35:25–28, Anantadās traces his genealogy from Rāmānand to Anantānand to Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī to Agradās to his guru, Vinod. Despite this impeccable Rāmānandī lineage, his parcāīs seem to have been influential and remembered only among the Rajasthani religious communities of the Nirañjanīs and Dādū-panth, in whose manuscript collections his parcāīs are most often found, perhaps because they focus on devotee-saints who worshipped the sort of nirguṇ (formless, quality-less) Divine celebrated by these communities (as opposed to the saguṇ Divine, God in form—e.g., Krishna, Rama, etc.—celebrated in other communities).
- 11.
The tulsī, or basil, plant is considered a manifestation of the goddess Tulsi who was a great worshipper of Vishnu, thus it is sacred among Vaishnavas and a common feature of Vaishnava worship.
- 12.
Nāmdev parcaī 2.1–27; Callewaert, 2000, pp. 35–38. The composition of this text is dated to 1588 CE and Callewaert’s translation, which I have paraphrased here, relies on four manuscripts dated between 1658 and 1687.
- 13.
Einicke states that “the specific Indian concept of giving rejects the idea of direct reciprocity and thus excludes and forbids mundane rewards connected with the current life”; however, a giver was typically understood to gain a reward, “but an indirect, non-material one brought into effect by the impact of the concept of karman bearing fruition in future existences” (Einicke, 2017, p. 232).
- 14.
The ideal recipients of dāna are not those in need of support or pity but those most highly esteemed who “are given gifts because of the religiosity they represent. The recipient is regarded highly in part because he or she is represented as standing outside of the ordinary bonds of reciprocity that accrue to those participating in social and economic intercourse” (Heim, 2004, p. 58).
- 15.
Relatedly, we should also note that in addition to the combined wealth of the merchants in town, the “weight” (or spiritual value) of the traditional religious practices of the bhaktas’ religious competitors—sacrifices, rituals, ascetic powers (siddhis)—also could not budge Namdev’s tulsī leaf inscribed with half the name of God (Rām). The devotional recitation of the divine Name was perhaps the most characteristic practice of early modern bhakti communities and is explicitly presented here as having more spiritual worth than all rituals, powers, or material gifts.
- 16.
Dhanā parcaī 3.1–5.9; Callewaert, 2000, pp. 103–106. The composition of this text is dated to the late sixteenth century. Callewaert’s translation, which I paraphrase here, relies on a single eighteenth-century manuscript from Bikaner.
- 17.
In his influential essay, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, Marcel Mauss (1990) argues, most fundamentally, that exchange is part of the essential fabric of human social relations and that the most widespread form of such exchange in human history has been the system of the gift. While often conceived of as a free, generous, and individual act, Mauss argues that the gift is always obligatory, reciprocal, and social in nature. The gift acts to create a relationship between the giver and the receiver, binding them together. Thus, according to Mauss, solidarity, stratification, identity, and material and emotional support are achieved in a society through the social bonds created by gift exchange. Mauss invokes the Hindu case of dāna (to brahmans) to make his point; however, in a well-known essay, Jonathan Parry (1986) disputes Mauss’s reading of dāna-dharma as contractual and reciprocal, arguing that the most essential point of dāna-dharma gifts is that they must not be reciprocated.
- 18.
Pīpā parcaī 15.23; Callewaert, 2000, p. 174. Similarly, in another of Anantadās’s miracle tales, God tells the saint Aṅgad, “If anyone gives something to me, he will receive double that amount every day. Seen or unseen, if you give for my sake, even the smallest thing is counted…. If one does not give for my sake, then the gift is in vain.” Aṅgad parcaī 6.7; 6.8a.1; Callewaert, 2000, pp. 372–373.
- 19.
Aṅgad parcaī 2:6.9–10; Callewaert, 2000, p. 361.
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Burchett, P. (2022). The Ethics of Wonder: Miracles, Magic, and Morality in Devotional Hinduism. In: Zwier, K.R., Weddle, D.L., Knepper, T.D. (eds) Miracles: An Exercise in Comparative Philosophy of Religion. Comparative Philosophy of Religion, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14865-1_10
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