7
7
4
4
1
1
.
.
I
I
N
N
T
T
R
R
O
O
D
D
U
U
C
C
T
T
I
I
O
O
N
N
T
T
O
O
A
A
N
N
I
I
N
N
C
C
A
A
R
R
N
N
A
A
T
T
I
I
O
O
N
N
his devotees that an implication of the first of his above identifications is that they
‘should grow in prema’; the second, he presents to instil faith that a “vow” made
by traditional avatar figures to protect the ‘welfare and safety’
12
of their devotees
is ‘no empty assurance’; and the third he gives in the context of urging his devo-
tees not to have ‘hatred towards other religions’ but rather to focus upon ‘Divine
love’ which ‘will confer lasting Aanandha’. Shifts in purpose of this type—
“ethicizations” of tradition—are common in Sathya Sai Baba’s teachings. Looking
back at the first of his above-quoted proclamations on the avatar concept, we
might see ethicization even there: as he promises “salvation” from the common-
place modern afflictions of ‘petty desires and trivial pursuits’ rather than the more
traditional catastrophic, world-threatening, cosmological scenarios that accompany
many descriptions of the major traditional avatars; and as he poetically highlights
the primary purpose of the avatar (“descent”) as being ‘to raise man’ (rather than
the more traditional purposes of killing demons etc.). I should note, however, that
the last of these ideals is a common modern view of the avatars (see p.344 below);
if Sathya Sai Baba is innovating here, he is certainly not alone in doing so.
Some attention is due here to the question of what precisely we should under-
stand to be connoted by the term “innovation”. Before I can address this, I should
also say something of the term “tradition” that I have already found much occa-
sion to employ above. This latter concept especially has been much discussed and
variously understood by scholars—so variously in fact, that an attempt to summa-
rize the debate is beyond what I am able to accomplish here
13
. Any use of the
term “tradition”, or “traditional” is controversial, but I would argue that so long as
it is understood that I do not take this to indicate any absolute or unchanging en-
tity, there ought to be no major problem here
14
. Jan Heesterman (1985:1) sug-
gests that a (once prevalent) erroneous view of tradition in India as unchanging
‘owes much to the [modern Western academic] observer’s feeling of having lost
his own traditional moorings, which makes him cast around for the certainty of
tradition’, but, as I hope is already apparent, I personally do not attribute certainty
to any “tradition”, Indian or otherwise, and not even to the words of Sathya Sai
Baba—as is evident in Section 1.1. above, I have learned from experience not to do
(see p.232) rather than a human virtue (cf. p.243 below). On brahman, see p.94 below.
12
I.e. Bhagavad-Gītā 9:22.
13
See William Jackson (1994:260ff.) for a lengthy, if not, by his own admission, ‘exhaustive’ treat-
ment of ways that ‘tradition has already been troped traditionally’.
14
Burke (1993:189) concludes merely that it is ‘time to abandon the traditional notion of tradition’.
1
1
.
.
4
4
I
I
n
n
c
c
a
a
r
r
n
n
a
a
t
t
i
i
o
o
n
n
&
&
I
I
n
n
n
n
o
o
v
v
a
a
t
t
i
i
o
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n
n
7
7
5
5
so. And Heesterman himself goes on to point out that, in any case, Indian ‘scrip-
tures do indeed strongly project the image of a monolithic world order, the
dharma’; Sathya Sai Baba certainly holds dharma to be unchanging (see, e.g.,
p.206). Albeit that such a notion of tradition falls short of describing the ever-
developing reality behind his and most “scriptural” views, the changes in such
views that do take place over time are not always random or extreme—it seems
clear that there are some areas of genuine continuity and stability. By “tradition”,
then, I simply mean ideas that are handed down from one generation to another,
undergoing various degrees of change in form or function over time, but having
some determinable states or aspects upon which we might draw in contextualizing
later developments and in classifying them as innovative or traditional.
Of course, the dividing line will not always be clear-cut. Michael Williams, Col-
lett Cox, and Martin Jaffee (1992:10-11) suggest that rather than conceiving of in-
novation as ‘a “break” with tradition’, we should consider it to be ‘something
“natural” to religious tradition, as a modality of tradition itself’ (for more on this
see pp.190,211 below). Similarly, Sheldon Pollock (1991:19) cautions that ‘what at
first sight may appear to be innovation may in reality be amplification or elucida-
tion’. But Williams et al. (1992:7) acknowledge that ‘religious innovation’ may
nonetheless have some utility as an analytical category, defining ‘religious innova-
tion’ simply as ‘a “significant” change’. What I am attempting to do with terms
like “ethicization” and “spiritualization” is to highlight changes that strike me as
being significant. Williams et al. (1992:3,4,7) do raise the important rhetorical
question: ‘significant to whom?’ And they point out that:
the outsider to a tradition may see innovation in instances where the insider sees
continuity…. But the opposite “mistake” can also be made, so that an outsider fails
to notice innovation precisely where insiders happen to be quite self-conscious of
it…. Thus, while in the case of some categories in the comparative study of religion
(e.g., scripture, ritual) it might be possible to construct more absolute working defi-
nitions, this is not the case with religious innovation. By its very nature it is a rela-
tive category, and its analytical usefulness depends precisely upon the recognition of
this, and upon the identification of the interpretive perspectives that are appropriate
in different analytical situations.
In the above-quoted instances of what I have just classified as innovation on the
part of Sathya Sai Baba, the interpretive perspective in operation is obviously my
own—an outsider’s (“etic”) perspective (in that it is not me personally who is in-
novating here). It is true that Sathya Sai Baba himself does not usually present
such instances as innovative (he often speaks, rather, of finding the “inner mean-