ABSTRACT
Social scientists often miss the ‘la longue durée ’ of Indian cultural history because of their orientation to modern social science methods. The myth or mythical narrative exhibits the unquestioned presuppositions with which and through which a community understands itself. Sometimes myth is understood literally or dogmatically, but sometimes, perhaps more often, many ancient peoples fully appreciate myth as a symbolic portrayal or an imaginative projection of the way the world is for them. Along the same lines, the boundary between what is human and what is divine in an Indic environment is much more porous than the usual contemporary understanding of the human and divine, again, at least in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions. The distinction is faulty mainly because it cuts across almost any conceptualization of time, whether ancient or modern, eastern or western. It is a distinction based on a metaphor and can be used in all sorts of ambiguous ways.
