Review Article : The Sacred and the Profane in Ancient Indian Myth and Literature

Abstract

I . ,Religion is human and derived from human nature. It has never been satisfactorily explained in terms provided by religion, which are acceptable to all men. Certain naturalistic approaches have therefore advocated that one shouid look at man for an understanding of this human phenomenon. Love is one of the universal expressions of human behaviour which Lee Siegel explores in an attempt to relate the human and the divine, the ,religious and the secular. Siegel moves back and forth between the particular and the universal to make explicit what is implicit in the Gitagovinda, to discern the component of the sacred in an evidently profane description of human love. Emile Durkheim, who was one of the earliest spokesmen of the viewpoint that religion is a product and an expression of social life, observed .that all known religious beliefs present one common characteristic: they presuppose a classification of all things, real and ideal, into two classes of* opposed groups, generally designated by two distinct terms-profane and sacred. Durkheim suggested a clear division of the world into two domains, she one containing all that is sacred and the other all that is profane. He however drew our attention to a very important aspect of the sacred: the circle of sacred objects cannot be determined once and for all; its extent varies infinitely. 2 Peter Berger further qualifies the nature of the sacred. He says that although the sacred is apprehended as other than man, yet it refers to man, relating to him in a way in which other non-human phenomena do not. Thus, the sacred cosmos, an immensely powerful reality, both transcends and includes man. The profane is the antonym of the sacred. The routines 1

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru: His Other Side

“…As was the case during the long decades of the freedom struggle, we are again in times when nationalism and patriotism have become a kind of war-cries. Books with eye brow-raising titles such as Nation First, 39 A New Idea of India, 40 and Battle of Belonging 41 have flooded the market. We may briefly consider where Nehru stands in this new situation of views and counterviews.…”