Of Attitudes to Arachnids And Indic Education: What Spiders Can Teach Us About Reality

In his lecture, ‘Science and sensibility’ delivered in 1998, Richard Dawkins criticised an event meant for popularising science, where one of the ‘best prizes’ for science went to ‘a book about insects and other so-called ‘ugly bugs’.’ Dawkins rightly pointed out that ‘such language is not best calculated to arouse the poetic sense of wonder’. He took even more offence at the ‘antics of the chair of the judges,’ who he said ‘incited the audience to join her in repeated choruses of audible grimaces at the contemplation of the horrible ‘ugly bugs’.’ ‘That kind of vulgarity demeans the wonder of science, and risks ‘turning off’ the very people best qualified to appreciate it and inspire others: real poets and true scholars of literature.’ the biologist concluded.

Now compare the above event with the following passage:

The above is a passage from an article written by Sister Nivedita (Margaret Noble, 1867-1911), the Irish disciple of Swami Vivekananda. Titled ‘Hints on Practical Education’, it talks about kindergarten education. Despite her implementing such novel ways of teaching nature to children, even those who pay lip service to her ideals tend not to promulgate her methods in their educational institutions. Rather, India as a whole teaches their kindergarten kids English rhymes about how ‘little Miss Muffet’ was ‘frightened away’ by the spider. This is not only a wrong approach to nature but also stereotypes gender behaviour.

Spiders are wonderful results of evolution. The oldest fossil record of spiders comes from 380 million years ago. Spiders are not insects as commonly believed, though both are invertebrates. Insects have three pairs of legs and have their body divided into three well defined parts, head, thorax and abdomen. Spiders have four pairs of legs and the body part is divided into two compartments, cephalothorax and abdomen. In evolutionary timescale insects appeared later. Then, for the next 340 million years, insects and spiders have been intertwined in the dance of evolution.

Insects evolved flight. Spiders evolved into spinners of aerial webs, catching the insects in flight in these webs. Webs themselves diversified. Apart from the orb webs which have come to be associated dominantly with spider webs, there are tube webs and ladder webs. They also evolved a variety of venoms.

Venoms are chains of proteins. They are made of what are called peptide chains. A peptide is a chain of amino-acids, which in turn are the building blocks of proteins. Scientists estimate that a typical spider venom is actually a chain consisting of 250 peptides. The number of species of spiders inhabiting our planet is a staggering 44,500. So, this means that there is a rich variety of more than 10 million bio-active peptides which we can get from spiders. How beneficial this can be for both medicine and agriculture is obvious.

Teachings of a ‘Spider Woman’

Eminent zoologist, Dr Vijayalakshmi of Centre for Indian Knowledge Systems (CIKS), Chennai, has been researching on spiders and has also written a book on them. In her circles, she is known as the ‘spider woman’. CIKS literature explains the need for studying spiders in an Indian context:

And studying spiders can be very productively integrated with the school curriculum. Rahul Alvares, a student who decided to spend one year outside school after his 10th standard examination, visited CIKS and stayed there. CIKS was then housed in a one-storey building. Dr. Vijayalakshmi and her husband had converted their garage into the ‘spider room’. Here are three sample diary entries from Rahul Alvares about what he learnt in CIKS during his stay.

This is exactly what Sister Nivedita would have envisioned. Such an education is not capital-intensive. It is only care-intensive and intelligence-intensive. The teacher should love the subject and the curriculum should be flexible for the local variety while rigorous in imparting scientific methodology.

In the West, educationists are also using spider webs for teaching children mathematics and also to make them learn how to observe nature. Children are asked to observe the different web architectures and also to ‘spin’ their own webs as activity. Note that such an activity needs no capital intensive infrastructure and it can stimulate the skills of observation, mathematical talents and artistic capabilities in the students.

It is not just science. The spiders can also become tools to ignite in the young generation some fundamental questions in philosophy. Indian literature, with its linguistic diversity, retains spider as one of the common factors in some of the most profound poetic expressions and with a remarkable consistency through ages at that.

Web-spinner versus Watch-maker

In Indian context, the process of spiders weaving and eating their own webs has been a time-honoured symbol for the ultimate mystery. So, the spider spinning the web from its own being and then eating its own web became the symbol of a primordial organic process that human consciousness felt when it viewed the universe with awe and wonder. In Mundaka, Brihadaranyaka and Svetasvatara Upanishads the emergence, sustenance and dissolution of the universe is likened to the process of spider creating her web from herself and consuming it again. All the three analogies that Mundaka Upanishad mentions are organic processes: the spider and the web, the emergence of herbs from the earth and the growth of hair out of the human body. Out of these three, It is the spider and her web which gets repeated. In the Shrimad Bhagavata, Shiva, as Rudra, is extolled as 'the undivided Brahman beyond Shiva and Shakti' who, also 'like a spider with its web, playfully create, maintain and destroy the universe in the forms of Shiva and Shakti' (IV.6.42-3) Devi Bhagvata also uses the spider analogy for the Goddess: 'As the web comes out of a spider and sparks come out of fire, so this whole Universe comes out of that Goddess.' (4.19.10).

According to Indologist R C Zaehner, the analogy of the spider is also implicit in Bhagavad Gita. He also brings out a fundamental difference between the creator-God of Christianity and Islam and the impersonal-process Godhead of Indic Darshanas:

Tamil poetic-philosophical treatise Thirumanthiram (dated varied between 6th and 7th century CE) also uses the spider simile. Here, the centrality of the cognitive principle with relation to the sense organs and the experiences is likened to the centrality of the spider in the web as well as the dynamic relation the spider has to the web (verse 2170). Siddhanta would further consider the individual cognitive principle as having the dual nature as to collapse into phenomenal universe or expand into universal consciousness through the experiences of the phenomenal universe. Hence, Saivites consider the Shiva as the metacognitive principle in the cognitive core in the dance of individual life. (Pandit Ramanatha Pillai, 1957).

In 12th century, the Veerashaiva movement in Karnataka movement was taking shape. Oblivious to the fact that eight hundred and odd years later some of his followers would ignorantly position themselves as non-Hindus cut off from the Vedic tradition, Channabasavanna incorporated the Upanishadic spider into the worldview of Veerashaiva path through his vachanas:

From where did the spider bring the thread

To weave a web around?

No spinning-wheel, no cotton ball.

Just as the spider sports and departs,

Shrouding himself in the self-spun yarn,

Which he finally swallows himself,

Merging into Himself the cosmos

Created by Himself for His own sport,

Lord Kudala Channasagna

Became one with the absolute.

(Source)

The famous Kambar, one of the greatest poets of Tamil language, who lived in the 13th century, reinforced the spider imagery too.

You are that One the Highest Being

Imminent in and transcendent to

all life forms and universes varied

Ingesting, emanating,

measuring and speciating

the spider weaving its orb

through delicate threads

emanating from the Self

beginning from the days yore to this day

Holding, Sustaining all existence.

When Jawaharlal Nehru spoke of India’s ‘cultural unity amidst diversity… held together by strong but invisible threads’, one wonders if he ever thought of the strands of spider web becoming part of those ‘invisible threads’, uniting the heartbeats of Upanishadic seers to Basavanna , Kambar and beyond.

And this is not a faith-based invocation to a deity –definitely not a personal deity. The cosmic vision which the lines of melodious poetry of Kambar and Vachanas of Channabasavanna unveil, is Vedantic. David Chalmers can perhaps empathise with it. This poem which can be set to melodious tunes for a Tamil child can fill the child with wonder and questions, not faith. After all, the process-Godhead here is no personal God but the God of Spinoza.

Unlike the failed analogy of the watchmaker to explain the creation, the spider-spinning and consuming its own web provides a deeper analogy. And it correlates not only with Vedanta but also in a way with the philosophical school of panpsychism, which has reemerged as one of the major frameworks in the consciousness research. Professor Ellen Goldberg in an insightful paper points out the possibilities:

It will not take much to see that the passage is aimed at Western academia. What about Indian academia?

It should be remembered again that panpsychism need not necessarily be right. Nor emergence nor autopoiesis. Nevertheless they all can be gateways through which we can enter, explore and experience reality. It is essential that the young minds get fascinated by these worldviews in a way they can relate to. We, Indians, have in this a unique advantage which our curriculums have criminally ignored. We have a cultural heritage which provides tools, to introduce our children to some of the profoundest mysteries through poetry, traditional metaphors, analogies and similes in a way they can relate to.

So a spider in your backyard awaits to awaken the scientist, philosopher and poet in your child. But is your school curriculum equipped to trigger the needed wonder and questions in your child which can later make her blossom into a Darwin, Einstein, Kambar, Jane Goodall, Rachel Carson, Vijaya Lakshmi, Bharathi, Nivedita or Sri Aurobindo? As an Indian, each and every one of us has a right to demand such a curriculum, which when put in place, will be unique and be a model to world education and which will make India the light of the nations that it was.

Or we can continue to produce nice pious little Miss Muffets who will always scream and scat before the marvels of the universe.