inner traditions

Devi Purana: Krishna’s Death and Sati by the Pandavas

2011-04-24T06:05:00.000-07:00

The Mahabharata stories of the death of Krishna and the end of the Pandavas are well known. Krishna dies when he is shot by a hunter while he was lying in yoga in the jungle wishing to end his life. Some while after this, the Pandavas undertake a long pilgrimage which eventually leads them to the Himalayas and beyond, where they meet with their ends – Draupadi and the four younger Pandavas fall down on the way and die, and Yudhishthira is taken to heaven while he is still in his body after he passes a test by Dharma to encounter yet another test in the other world.

The end of Krishna, the Pandava brothers and Draupadi in the Devi Purana is very different from this.

Before we go into how the Devi Purana tells this story, a few words about the Purana itself. Devi Purana, also known as Mahabhagavata Purana, occupies a place of importance among the eighteen Upapuranas. It is called Devi Purana because its central theme is the glory of the Goddess. The Purana describes the transformation of the Primal Goddess into all the other gods and goddesses and explains the whole universe as her sport – śaktikrīdā jagat sarvam. Everything comes into being from her, everything exists in her and everything goes back unto her. The Taittiriya Upanishad speaks of Brahman as that from which everything comes into being, in which everything exists and unto which everything goes back – yato vā imāni bhutāni jāyante, yena jātāni jivanti, yat prayantyabhisamviśanti. The Goddess puts this in the Devi Purana as: “All this is me Me alone and nothing exists other than Me.” It is with the grace of the Goddess that Brahma creates the universe, Vishnu protects it and Shiva annihilates it in each circle of creation.

The comparatively small Purana consists of around four thousand five hundred verses divided into eighty-one chapters.

To the Devi Purana, Krishna is Kali incarnated as a male; and Radha, Shiva incarnated as a woman.

The Purana tells us that one day Shiva was sporting with his wife Parvati in the solitude of the Himalayas. The Lord of Lords was drinking in the amazing beauty of Parvati’s body with his eyes when a curious idea enters his mind. Birth as a woman is indeed wonderful, he thinks: nārījanma atiśobhanam.

With great tenderness he touches the face of his beloved. Then, addressing her with great love and reverence, he tells her: “Supreme Goddess, with your kindness, all my desires have been fulfilled. There are no more desires in my heart – except this one desire. Please fulfil this desire of mine too, Parameshani, if you are really pleased with me.”

Devi asks Shiva to tell her what his desire is and promises she will fulfil it. And Shiva tells her that she should take birth as a male somewhere on earth and he shall be born in a female body. She should become his husband and he, her wife; and they would love each other as they love now.

The Goddess promises to do so. She will take birth as a man in the house of Vasudeva in order to please him – she will be born as Krishna, she tells him.

Shiva is pleased. He tells Devi that he will take birth as Radha, the daughter of Vrishabhanu, and becoming as dear to her as her very life, he shall sport with her. He also tells her that his eight murtis shall be born as eight other women – Rukmini, Satyabhama and so on – and become his wives.

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Unlike in the Mahabharata, Krishna is not killed by Jara in the Devi Purana. Instead when he completes his missions on earth, one of which is to reduce the burden of wicked men on Earth, Brahma appears before him and asks him to reassume his original form and protect the gods. Krishna tells him that is precisely what he intends to do.

Krishna is the king of Dwaraka in the Devi Purana, unlike in the Mahabharata where he never becomes king. Following his conversation with Brahma, King Krishna tells his ministers that he does not intend to live on earth any more but will soon go to heaven. He asks them to send messengers to Hastinapura. They should go there and inform the Pandavas about his decision to ascend to heaven as suggested by Brahma.

When the Pandavas receive the message, they grieve over the news and decide to end their lives too to accompany Krishna to heaven through anumarana. Anumarana is a common Sanskrit word, which means wilful self-killing following another’s death. It is the ritual death we now call sati. Having made up their minds to follow Krishna in death, the Pandavas and Draupadi, and several other women, reach Dwaraka. Large quantities of other people too reach Krishna’s capital with the desire to do anumarana hearing of his decision to ascend to heaven.

When Krishna sees the Pandavas, his eyes fill up with tears. He entrusts the people of Dwaraka to them, telling them that since he is going to heaven, they should look after his people. Tears well up in the eyes of the Pandavas too at these words of Krishna. One after the other, beginning with Yudhishthira, they all inform Krishna that they too are going to give up their bodies and do his anugamana – follow him on his path.

In the Devi Purana, Draupadi is born of a part of Krishna-Kali – she is his/her amśaja. When the Pandava brothers express their desire to leave the earth and go with Krishna into the other world, Krishna turns to Draupadi and smilingly asks her if she would stay back on earth or would prefer to go to heaven with him.

“I am born of a part of you,” Draupadi tells Krishna, “and you are the supreme Kalika, the Primal One. I’ll follow you [merging back into you] as water merges back into water.”

aham tavāmśa-sambutā tvamādyā kālikā parā
aham tvām anuyāsyāmi jale jalamiva kṣaṇāt. – Devi Purana 58.28

A weeping Balarama tells Krishna to take all the Vrishni kings too with him since none of them would live on the earth without Krishna.

Krishna distributes his wealth among Brahmins and goes out of Dwaraka. The entire Vrishni clan follows him and as do the Pandavas along with their women and ministers. By the time they reach the sea, people from numerous other kingdoms too reach there. Nandi appears before them in a bejewelled chariot driven by lions. Brahma too appears in the skies along with the gods, bringing along thousands of chariots. At the sight of Krishna, the gods sing and dance in the skies, playing celestial drums and other musical instruments, creating a spirit of festivity and celebration all around.

In the middle of this great celebration, right before the eyes of Brahma and the gods, as the Pandavas and other people watch, Krishna changes into Kali. Kali boards the chariot drawn by lions and the next instant the chariot starts to move in the direction of Kailasa.

Draupadi touches the water of the sea before her and the next instant she merges back into Kali.

Yudhishthira boards a chariot which takes him to heaven.

Arjuna is an incarnation of Vishnu in the Devi Purana. Like Draupadi, he touches the seawater before him and abandons his body. Balarama too does the same. They are transformed back into the four-armed Vishnu bearing a conch, the discus, a mace and a lotus in his hands – for, like Arjuna, Balarama too is the incarnation of a part of Vishnu. Vishnu mounts his vehicle Garuda and is taken to Vaikuntha. Bhima and the other men there too abandon their bodies and are taken to heaven. Following this, Rukmini and the other seven queens of Krishna change themselves into Bhairava Shiva.

The Purana does not say anything special about Radha, so we will have to assume that she too changes back to Shiva as Krishna’s other wives do.

There is an interesting verse at the end of the chapter that narrates these incidents, a verse that is like a footnote. The verse says that in a later kalpa, Vishnu, with the blessings of Shiva, will be born as Krishna in his poornamsha [completeness] and he will reduce the burden of the earth like this through his sports [lila]. Which suggests that this is the story of an earlier kalpa.

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The most interesting change in the Devi Purana rendering of the Mahabharata and Bhagavata story is that both Krishna and Draupadi are incarnations of Kali and that Radha and Krishna’s eight other wives are incarnations of Shiva and the gender switch this involves.

The tantric tradition too tells the same story about the birth of Radha and Krishna, the central difference being that the idea of gender switch and incarnation occurs to both Kali and Shiva simultaneously. Here it is in the moments of sexual climax that the thought occurs to them. United with Kali, Shiva wonders what the orgasmic experience he is undergoing is like for Kali, the feminine; and Kali wonders what the experience she is undergoing at the moment is like for Shiva, the masculine. Each one desires to know through personal experience what an orgasm is like to the other gender. It is this curiosity that suggests to both of them the idea of transgender incarnations.

Among the numerous other changes the Devi Purana telling of the story introduces is in the nature of Krishna’s end. In the Mahabharata, Krishna dies a lonely death. The epic tells us how disappointed he became with the Yadavas and their infights. At one stage, Krishna is so frustrated that he seeks the advice of Narada in dealing with the Yadavas. He tells the celestial sage that their cruel speech torments his heart every day. It is as though he is like an arani which is rubbed against another to produce fire. Speaking of Ahuka and Akrura and their inability to get along with each other, for instance, Krishna rhetorically asks Narada, “What can be more painful than having both Ahuka and Akrura on your side? And what can be more painful than not having both Ahuka and Ajrura on your side.”

syātām yasyāhukākrurau kim nu duhkhataram tatah
yasya chāpi na tau syātām kim nu duhkhataram tatah.

Calling himself totally helpless, Krishna compares himself to the mother of two brothers who are gambling against each other. She cannot pray for the victory of either one of them, because that would be the loss of the other, so she prays for both. When Gandhari curses Krishna and says that his people would soon come to an end, Krishna accepts the curse and says that he in fact is endeavouring to bring about their end – meaning, they deserve to be finished off, so evil have they become. And that is precisely what he does. The Mausala Parva paints graphically Krishna’s dejection with the Yadavas and his loneliness in the last moments of his life. For a long time he wanders about in the jungle all alone before he enters yoga and is killed by Jara the hunter who mistakes him for a deer.

In contrast, Krishna’s death in the Devi Purana is a glorious affair. When the time comes, Brahma, the Creator, comes to him to tell him that he has completed his missions on earth and time has come for him to get back to his world and assume his original form, as Kali. He announces his decision to end his life to his ministers and has them send ministers to Hastinapura. All the Pandavas decide to do anumarana with him, as do an endless mass of other men and women from his own kingdom and from other kingdoms. When the time is ready, he goes to the seacoast and there a celestial chariot drawn by lions – Kali’s chariot – arrives to take him to his world. Right before the eyes of the hordes of celestials and humans, he transforms himself into Kali and boards the chariot that speeds away towards Kailasa. And the mass of people assembled there accompany him into the other world – including Draupadi, his wives and the five Pandavas.

The Uttara Kanda of the Ramayana tells us of the death of Rama, which too is a very public affair, attended to by masses of people from Ayodhya who all enter the waters of the Sarayu following Rama and accompany him in his final journey into the other world. The story that Devi Purana tells us about Krishna’s death is akin to this.

Yet another major change the Devi Purana makes is in the death of the Pandavas. Yudhishthira’s ascend to heaven is not sasharira – with his earthly body – nor is it a lonely affair in a desert beyond the Himalayas, but a glorious one in the sight of a huge assembly of men and women, including his brothers and all the gods in heaven, on the banks of the sea in Dwaraka. Nor do the other Pandavas die lonely deaths. Arjuna is transformed into Vishnu and ascends to heaven on the back of Garuda. Draupadi merges back into Kali, whose partial incarnation she is.

Part of the differences could be explained by the devotional nature of the Devi Purana compared to the dialectical nature of the Mahabharata. Devi Purana is about bhakti and salvation through the grace of the Goddess. Whereas the Mahabharata is about living life in tune with dharma, as Vyasa himself states in his Bharata Savitri. The only life worth living, according the Mahabharata, is life lived in harmony with dharma. The only society that is worth living in is the one in which dharma reigns supreme. The purpose of Krishna’s birth in the Mahabharata is establishment of dharma and teaching the world the path of dharma which they can follow. As the Gita verses put it beautifully, he creates himself whenever dharma declines and adharma prospers and his mission is the destruction of adharma and reestablishment of dharma:

yadā yadā hi dharmasya glānirbhavati bhārata
abhyutthānam adharmasya tadātmānam sṛjāmyaham
paritrāṇāya sādhunām vināśāya ca dushkṛtām
dharmasamsthāpanārthāya sambhavāmi yuge yuge.

Whenever dharma declines and adharma prospers, Oh Bharata, then I create myself. In order to protect the good and destroy the evil, and to establish dharma, I am born age after age.

In the Devi Bhagavata too, that definitely is one of the missions of the Goddess who incarnates as Krishna. But there are also other missions to her Krishna incarnation. One of them is showing the world her glory so that man turns to her – salvation comes not exactly through dharmic living, though that too is essential, but through devotion. Yet another purpose of the incarnation is pure sport – lila, krida – sport for the sake of sporting, for the sake of pleasure. The best word to describe that is rāsa. The model of life set before man is not struggling to achieve goals, or even virtuous living, but the celebration of life, life in tune with the divine, which, when lived rightly becomes a long rāsa. In lila, in krida, there are no goals to be achieved – there is only one thing to be done: celebrating life, living life as a sport, which is achieved when man gives up his individual will and individual goals, and surrenders to the will and goals of the divine. Kali takes birth as Krishna and Shiva as Radha and eight other women to sport and celebrate life in yet another form.

The Pandavas end their life at the ascent of Krishna-Kali because it is his/her presence in their lives that makes their lives meaningful and without him/her, their lives are empty.

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Arjuna Becomes a Woman: A Transgender Tale from Padma Purana

2011-03-19T04:09:00.000-07:00

The story of Arjuna cursed to spend time as a hermaphrodite is well known. That happens when the apsara Urvashi approaches him desiring sex and Arjuna politely refuses, telling her she is like a mother to him because in one of her lifetimes on earth she was the wife of Pururava, his ancestor. He sticks to his stand even when she tells him those are human rules and they are not applicable to apsaras. A furious Urvashi curses him that he will spend time as a eunuch among women. It is using this curse that Arjuna lives one year in the antahpura of Virata during his life incognito following the dice game.

This story however is different. Here it is not a hermaphoridite that Arjuna becomes, but a beautiful woman called Arjunī and Arjuniyā. The fascinating tale, pregnant with profound mystic teachings, is told by the Padma Purana in its Patala Khanda.

I would like to tell the story with a warning at the beginning: it is a mystic tale told at the mystic level and trying to understand it at the human level will lead to all kinds of misinterpretations – particularly the kind that readers with some knowledge of Freudian psychology are prone to make about eastern wisdom clothed in mystical veils.

Before we go into the story, a few words about the Padma Purana that tells us this story. The Padma Purana is an amazing treasure house of traditional Indian lore and spiritual wisdom. It is the third largest book in Sanskrit literature – after the Mahabharata with its one hundred thousand verses and the Skanda Purana with eighty-four thousand verses. The Padma Purana has fifty-five thousand verses. Traditional Indian scholarship has held that this is a work by Veda Vyasa, as are all other Puranas. Modern scholarship, however, sees this as a much later work. This latter view is probably closer to the truth than the traditional view.

The story we are about to hear begins with Arjuna, seated under a tree on the bank of the Yamuna, expressing a desire to his friend Krishna. He wants to know secrets even Shiva and Brahma do not know. How many gopis are there? What categories do they belong to? What are their names? Where do they live? What do they do? What is their age? How do they dress? And where does Krishna revel with them in seclusion? These are some of the things that Arjuna wants to know.

As usual, Krishna responds more to the real problem that Arjuna’s questions reveal than to the questions themselves. Krishna tells him that place, those women dear to him and his sports with them are impossible to be seen by men even if they are dear to him as his very life [api prāṅasamānānām satyam pumsām agocarah [Padma 5.74.13]. And if he tells them to him, he will be restless to see them. It is not possible even for Brahma to see them. “So give up your keenness to know these things,” Krishna tells Arjuna.

These words pain Arjuna and he falls at Krishna’s feet. Krishna smiles and lifts him up lovingly with both hands. “What is the point in my telling you of those things that you shall see directly?” Krishna asks him with great love. He then instructs Partha to worship with great devotion Goddess Tripurasundari, from whom the entire universe has sprung, in whom the universe remains and unto whom it will merge back. He should surrender to her and make his request to her. Krishna tells Arjuna he cannot give him those experiences except through her.

Arjuna then goes to Mother Tripurasundari. The tantric Goddess is seated on her divine seat in a grove where trees bearing the most wonderful fruits and flowers abound. He hears birds constantly singing the sweetest songs in weather that is always wonderful. The incredibly beautiful Goddess is in her eternal early youth and is surrounded by other Goddesses such as Anima and Mahima. Arjuna pays obeisance to her and introduces himself.

The Goddess sends Arjuna along with another Goddess to her lake called Kulakunda and asks him to take a ritual bath there and come back fast.

The name Kulakunda is rich in tantric significance. Goddess Tripurasundari herself is sometimes called Kulasundari. The tantric word kaula [Kaul] comes from kula. Throughout the rest of the story, there are references to tantric yoga. The Yamuna is, for instance, explained by the Purana as the sushumna nadi [kālindīyam suṣumnākhyā paramāmrtavāhinī – Padma 5.75.11]. A bath in the kulakunda could be understood as performing powerful sadhanas in the tradition of tantric yoga.

Partha does what Tripurasundari asks. When he comes back the Goddess gives him detailed instructions about performing the bālā vidyā that gives immediate results. The vidyā involves, among other things, performing certain poojas, homas and chanting a mantra a hundred thousand times. Arjuna does all this and a pleased Mother Goddess appears before him with a smile on her face. She points out a mansion to him and asks him to enter that mansion. Arjuna prostrates before her repeatedly, his whole being filled with great ecstasy. Following her instruction and guided by a sakhi of the Goddess, Arjuna enters the mansion and finds himself in Vrindavana, the world beyond Goloka, where everything is perfect and the eternal rāsa of the gopis and Krishna goes on.

Such is the ecstasy of love that overpowers Arjuna at the sight of the supreme, secret abode of the essence of perfect love [paramam guhyam pūrṅa-prema-rasātmakam] that he falls down in a faint. The sakhi of Goddess Tripurasundari who is still with him raises him up with her hands and speaks to him. With great difficulty, Arjuna manages to regain mastery over himself.

Arjuna now finds it difficult to hold himself back – such is his eagerness to see the vision he is seeking. He asks the sakhi what more tapas he has to do now and she leads him by hand towards the south and asks him to enter the large body of water they find before themselves, it is very auspicious to bathe there. This is the Southern Lake. After bathing there, the sakhi tells him, he should go to the Eastern Lake, where his desire will be fulfilled.

The sakhi of the goddess disappears while Arjuna takes a dip in the Southern Lake. When he comes out of the water, he is no more Arjuna, but very young woman of indescribable beauty. Her slender limbs shine as though they are made of rays of pure gold, her face is like the winter moon, her curly hair is golden and her eyes dark. Each part of hers is breathtaking in its beauty, the perfection of every one of which the purana describes here at length. She is sarva-lakṣaṅa-sampannā and sarva-alankara-bhūṣitā [endowed with every auspicious sign and wearing all ornaments and articles of makeup]. When Arjuna emerges from the lake and looks at himself, it is this amazing young woman he sees. And he has no memories of the past – they have all been wiped clean from his mind.

As the young woman stands there not knowing what to do, a voice speaking softly from the skies asks her to proceed to the Eastern Lake along the path she sees before her and assures her there she will meet her sakhis and her desire will be fulfilled. This is the Eastern Lake Goddess Tripurasundari;s sakhi had spoken of earlier.

As the young woman who was until recently Arjuna stands on the bank of the Eastern Lake, she hears the sound of anklets approaching her.

Before proceeding further with the narration, I want to observe that the poetry here is superb and the inspired poet climbs to great heights of creativity in giving words to his imagination. The sounds we hear as he narrates the story send raptures through us, so amazing are they. Here are two lines describing the sound of the anklets Arjuna, transformed into a young woman, hears, which I will make no attempt to render into English, for that would be impossible.

tatrāntare kvaṇat-kānci-manju-manjīra-ranjitam
kiṇkiṇīnām jhaṇatkāram śuśrāvotkarṇasampute

The beauty of language here reminds us of Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda.

Arjuna now finds himself in a world bathed in boundless beauty.

Also, it is possible that along with becoming a woman, in his new advanced spiritual state, Arjuna’s sensitivity too has become intensified a hundred times and the smallest thing for him now is endowed with indescribable beauty.

This is a common occurrence in the course of spiritual journey. Spirituality awakens the senses and the mind and we see even ordinary things endowed with incredible beauty. It is as though our doors of perception, to use Huxley’s term, have for the first time been opened. A small touch sends ecstasies through us, a small sound makes raptures course within us. In Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, the boy Siddhartha passes through an experience of awakening and this is how Hesse describes the world he sees around him:

“He looked around, as if he was seeing the world for the first time. Beautiful was the world, colourful was the world, strange and mysterious was the world! Here was blue, here was yellow, here was green, the sky and the river flowed, the forest and the mountains were rigid, all of it was beautiful, all of it was mysterious and magical, and in its midst was he, Siddhartha, the awakening one, on the path to himself. All of this, all this yellow and blue, river and forest, entered Siddhartha for the first time through the eyes.”

He is looking at the same river and the same forest, the same river and the same mountains that he has seen so many times in the past, but they are no more the same because his doors of perception are clean and fresh now.

Tibetans call this drala, the great beauty of ordinary things. The most ordinary things are endowed with incredible beauty; all we need are eyes to see. When the mind is awakened, when the senses are cleansed, then we see breathtaking beauty in a pebble, in a broken twig, in a drop of water, in everything.

Arjuna is now passing through the stages that great meditators pass through. Meditation fills you with overflowing love, along with awakening sensitivity. As a great master puts it, “If you meditate, sooner or later you will come upon love. If you meditate deeply, sooner or later you will start feeling a tremendous love arising in you that you have never known before – a new quality to your being, a new door opening.” [Osho: The Psychology of the Esoteric]

What the young woman hears is the sound of a bunch of beautiful women approaching and there is only one word to describe them – āścarya, wonderful, amazing. Their youth is āścarya, their makeup and ornaments are āścarya, their shapes are āścarya a, their speech is āścarya... I counted: the poet uses the word āścarya ten times here within a short space, and when he needs a change, he uses adbhuta and citra, which too mean more or less the same.

The awakening of wonder has taken place in Arjuna.

The woman Arjuna has been transformed into is standing coyly, her head bent, scratching the earth at her feet with her toes. The girls approach her, amazed at the sight of her there, and one of them, Priyamudā, asks her who she is and where she has come from.

When Arjunī – the female Arjuna – speaks, her voice is intoxicating. She tells the young women she has no idea who she is, whose daughter she is, whose wife she is, why she has come there – no idea of anything. All she remembers is coming for a bath in the lake to the south of this place and standing there having bathed. And then of an amazing voice from the skies speaking to her and guiding her to this place. “I was told not to worry, my sakhis would be here and they would fulfil my desire. I know nothing more than this,” she tells them.

When Arjuni asks Priyamudā who they are, she introduces them as gopis and the beloveds of Krishna. They are the Śrutis, the great sages and cowherd girls, all born as women, to enjoy the bliss that is Krishna. They have interesting names: Rasālayā, Rasavallarī, Rasavāpikā, Anangasenā, Anangamālinī, Anangakusumā, Madayantī, Lalitā, Lalitayauvanā, Madanamanjarī, Ratikalā, Ratilolā, Ratotsukā, Ratisarvasvā, Kāmakalā, Kāmadāyinī, to mention just a few – names that remind us of the names in works like the Kathasaritsagara. Priyamudā tells Arjunī they will be all friends now and sport together. They give her a ritual bath in the Eastern Lake and initiating her into more rituals and meditations, give her a mantra of Radha along with the bijamantras of Varuna and Vahni and their vidhis [ways of practicing these].

Arjuni performs the rituals and meditations and Goddess Radha appears before him in all her brilliant glory making the whole universe shine with her effulgence. The goddess tells her:

matsakhīnām vacah satyam tena tvam me priyā sakhī
samuttiṣtha samāgaccha kāmam te sādhayāmyaham

The words of my sakhis are true,
You are now a sakhi dear to me.
Get up, come near,
I shall fulfil the desire in your heart.

Goosebumps appear all over Arjunī’s body at these words of Radha. Her entire body grows tender and tears of bliss start coursing down from her eyes. Intoxicated by love, shaken by it, she falls at the feet of the Goddess. Ordered by Radha, Goddess Priyamvadā, one of Radha’s sakhis, herself flushed by the order of the Goddess, picks up Arjunī and leads her by hand to the Goddess.

Arjunī is given another ritual bath in the Northern Lake and Goddess Radha now gives her a Krishna mantra with the vidhis and meditations. Radha also asks Priyamvadā and her friends to look after Arjunī until her rituals and meditations are over. Giving these instructions, Radha goes back to Krishna.

Arjunī now worships Krishna following the detailed instructions given to her, at the end of which Krishna is pleased and asks Radha to quickly bring Arjunī to him. Radha sends one of her sakhis, Śāradā, to fetch Arjunī to Krishna. Arjunī comes before Krishna and such is her ecstasy, perspiration breaks out all over her body, and she is overpowered by powerful waves of bliss.

In the yogic parlance, this breaking out of perspiration and being overpowered by bliss are occurrences immediately preceding the highest spiritual experience.

Arjunī looks around the amazing world she sees herself in now. There are kamadhenus wandering about everywhere, all trees are full of flowers, there is a beautiful breeze blowing all the time, the bumble bees are intoxicated with honey, birds sing on shrubs and trees and everything is perfect beyond the wildest imagination. Under a kalpataru standing in all its glory is the jewelled throne of Krishna.

She looks at Krishna and sees the very embodiment of beauty, love and bliss, his intoxicating smile inflaming hearts, his dark body glowing, a peacock feather in his hair. He is wearing a floral garland around which humming bees hover, the Kaustubha and the Śrīvatsa add to his boundless glory. He wins easily over a hundred million Kamadeva’s in beauty and is surrounded by every object that adds to the headiness of the rāsa. A smiling Radha is on his left, worshipping him.

As the beautiful Arjunī looks at Krishna, she is overcome with powerful longing for him. Krishna, the glorious lord, the great master of yoga, the mahāyogeśwara who indwells every heart and knows everything, the lord of Vaikunṭha, the world where nothing but bliss exists, takes Arjunī by her hand and leads her to the solitude of the forest of revelry. There Arjunī discovers the joy that passeth all understanding, the bliss that is easily available to every gopi of Vrindavan but evades great ascetics, the bliss seeking which they long for birth as cowherd girls, the ecstasy thirsting for which the shrutis themselves take birth on the banks of the Yamuna as daughters of cowherds – the joy of union with Krishna, the self of the universe, whose nature is sat-chid-ananda, existence-consciousness-bliss.

Arjunī understands through her personal experience the bliss that Krishna is, a knowledge that is denied, according to the Padma Purana, to the great Gods themselves.

A smile lingers on Arjunī ’s face as she comes back from the pleasure forest with Krishna’s arm on her shoulder. She is exhausted by the experience. Preparatory to the experience, she had done powerful mystical sadhanas after taking baths in the Southern, Eastern and Northern Lakes. Krishna now calls Sharada and asks the Goddess to take Arjunī for a bath in the Western Lake. Arjuni takes a dip in the mystic waters and emerges from it as Arjuna.

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This is clearly no ordinary story of gender transformation, but a mystic tale, told in the highest mystic language. Arjuna’s desire to know the bliss that the cowherd girls experience is the longing of a man who has come to the doors of the highest experience but has been denied entrance into its sacred portals. Arjuna, lifelong friend of Krishna, for whom Krishna says he would tear out his flesh and give it if necessary, is yet not one with Krishna. Nara, born of the blood from Narayana’s right arm, is yet different from Narayana and not one with him. Whereas the gopis of Vrindavan have lost themselves in Krishna, are one with him, do not exist as different from him. They have become Krishna’s atma, Krishna has become their atma.

The Upanishads repeatedly tell us there is only one thing that separates us from God, from the bliss that God is, from the boundless ecstasy that we are – our mind, our ego, our will, all of which are, in the final analysis, the same. So long as we have an ego, we have a will as different from the universal will. So long as we have a will, we have an ego that separates us from the universal being. And so long as we have a will and an ego, we have a mind too, and conversely, so long as we have a mind, we have an ego and a will. When we achieve the state Zen calls the no-mind, then there is no ego and no will. Then the universal self becomes our self and the universal will becomes our will. This is the state of self-transcendence, the goal of all spirituality.

And the easiest way to achieve it is through bhakti, devotion, which Narada discusses as parama-prema-rūpā – of the nature of supreme love – in his Bhakti Sutras and Shandilya explains as parānuraktir-īshware in his Bhakti Sutras.

Arjuna’s ego stands in the way of attaining that bhakti. So long as the ego is there, the long as his individual will is there, so long as surrender is not total and complete, that bhakti is not possible.

And what stands blocking such surrender is Arjuna’s masculinity. The masculine cannot surrender. The masculine has a need to be in control. The masculine has the need to assert its will, its individuality, its ego. To surrender, one needs the qualities that are traditionally described as feminine in spiritual literature.

Several traditions hold that the highest spiritual experience is possible only for the female and not for the male. That is to say, so long as we have the male qualities of territoriality, aggression and power seeking, we cannot have the highest spiritual experience. For that experience to be available to us, we need to have the feminine qualities: surrender, acceptance, emptiness, receptivity.

Arjuna, the great archer, can be a friend of Krishna, but he cannot lose himself in Krishna. He will always be there as a separate individual. But the gopis can effortlessly lose themselves in Krishna, be completely empty of themselves and have the highest bliss that losing makes possible. It is for this reason that Arjuna has to transform himself into a woman to experience the true nature of Krishna, to become one with him.

There is a very significant sentence that Krishna tells Arjuna at the beginning of the story. When Arjuna seeks to know what even Brahma and Shiva have not known, Krishna says:

tat sthānam vallabhās tā me
vihāras tādrśo mama
api prāṇasamānānām
satyam pumsām agocarah
[Padma 5.70.7]

I would like to translate this statement as: “That dimension of mine, those darlings and those revelries of mine are truly beyond the perceptions of men, even if they are as dear to me as my life’s breath.”

Pumsām agocarah – men cannot see it. Men just cannot see those, even if those men are as dear to Krishna as his life.

To be able to see them, you have to become a woman. To become a woman, in the spiritual sense, is to be receptive, to be empty, to be open, not to resist, not to have an individual will and, instead, surrender to the universal will, float with it. All the sadhanas Arjuna does, beginning with the first ones under the guidance of Goddess Tripurasundari, are for his transformation into the receptive, the empty, the open being – transformation from the male into the female, gender transformation in the truest sense, in the deepest sense, in the spiritual sense. Once we achieve that receptivity, that emptiness, that openness of being, there is nothing standing between that experience and us. Then that is the only experience possible. Then we are that experience.

Arjuna has never had the kind of bhakti the gopis had for Krishna. What we see through this story is Arjuna’s journey into the world of such bhakti. Into Vrindavana, which is the land of such bhakti. Into Vrindavana, where only one male exists during the rāsalīlā – Krishna – and all others are female – the gopis. Into Vrindavana where, as the Padma Purana says at the beginning of this story, the rāsalīlā goes on eternally.

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Spiritual bliss is frequently expressed in terms of erotic love, in the language of sexual union. Tantra does it all the time, as does Taoism which speaks of the union of the yin and the yang. Bhakti does it frequently, as in the case of Jayadeva and innumerable other Indian poets. The Sufis do that all the time. Christian mystics have done it. And so have mystics from numerous other traditions. And that is precisely what the Padma Purana is doing here. To read the story as anything else would be a great error and the sign of the sickness much of humanity is suffering from today.

Which does not mean mystic stories should not be told. They should be told, and sometimes the only language open to mystics to tell those stories is the language of erotic love. After all, they are trying to communicate the incommunicable, about which the Upanishads say ‘yato vāco nivartante, aprāpya manasā saha’ – that from which words return, unattained, along with the mind. Even the erotic language fails, but it can at times give us a glimpse of the beyond. It is what Indian culture calls the śākhācandra nyāya – like pointing out the moon as what we see beyond the branch of a tree. It has nothing to do with the tree or its branch, but it helps.

The sakhi sampradaya that existed in India for a long time was an attempt to put what thid story says into practice at a large scale. Sri Ramakrishna, the greatest mystic the world has seen in recent times, practiced it for a while and had powerful experiences from the practice.

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Immediately following the tale of Arjuna, the Padma Purana tells another tale of gender transformation leading to the highest spiritual experience, using Narada as the central character. In this story, Muni Narada has a desire to understand the mystery of Vrindavana, the eternal abode of Krishna that cannot be seen by the fleshy eyes, which is beyond the understanding of even the great Gods. He approaches his father Brahma and expresses his desire and Brahma takes him to Vishnu. Vishnu asks Brahma to take Muni Narada to Lake Amrita for a bath in its waters. When Narada comes out of the water, he finds he is an amazingly beautiful young woman, the very embodiment of every female perfection [sarvalakṣaṇa-sampannā].

Looking up, he finds other equally beautiful women in front of him. When they see her, they approach her and ask her who she is and where she has come from. The young woman expresses her ignorance of it all – she has no idea. It all appears like a dream to her. The leader of the group of damsels then introduces the place to her as Vrindavana, the place dear to Krishna. She introduces herself as Goddess Lalita, who is beyond the turīya state [turīyātītā] and is without parts [niṣkalā].

Turīya is the state behind and beyond all other states of consciousness.

Lalita asks the young woman to follow her, along with the other women. Lalita now gives her the fourteen-syllable mantra of Krishna, a mantra that qualifies her entry into Krishna’s presence.

The woman Narada has become is now taken to the presence of Krishna, who is described here as pure existence-conscience-bliss [kevalam saccidānandah]. Narada’s desire is fulfilled now – the woman experiences union with pure existence-conscience-bliss. Later, after she has spent a whole year in Vrindavana, the land that is beyond ordinary perception, Krishna asks Radha to take her to Lake Amrita again for a bath. After a bath there, Narada regains his original gender.

Once again what we find in the story is the need to be spiritually female in order to experience the highest. Narada with all his love and devotion is not able to experience the highest truth, sat-chid-ananda, which is his own true nature, until he is transformed into a woman.

In Krishna’s world, there are no men. In the language of devotional mysticism, men stand for beings with ego and will, and women stand for surrender and openness. It is in that surrender and openness that the highest flowers.

We have to be empty of ourselves for the highest to take over us. The feminine represents that emptiness. When we achieve it, our true self takes over us.

Krishna is described by the Padma Purana as our true self and our eternal beloved.

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Note: All translations from Sanskrit are by the author.

Uttara Ramayana: How Jaimini Tells It – Part 2

2011-03-15T03:16:00.000-07:00

[An analysis of how Jaiminiya Ashwamedha Parva differs from Valmiki Ramayana in telling the Uttara Katha of Rama. Continued from part 1.]

As we proceed further, the changes Jaimini introduces become more fascinating.

When Valmiki sees Sita who is wailing aloud in the hair-raisingly terrible jungle filled with fearsome animals, Jaimini tells us, he approaches her and asks her who she is, whose daughter and whose wife she is and why she has come to the uninhabited jungle. She introduces herself as Janaka’s daughter, Dasharatha’s daughter-in-law and Rama’s wife. She also tells him she has been abandoned by Rama for reasons she does not know. Valmiki consoles her telling her not to worry and introduces himself. He then takes her with him to his ashram and Sita goes with him quietly.

Valmiki

In Valmiki Ramayana these scenes are different. While Jaimini’s Valmiki has to ask her who she is, in the Ramayana, Valmiki knows everything about her without asking. In fact, he consoles her by addressing her as Janaka’s daughter, Dasharatha’s daughter-in-law, and Rama’s wife and tells her not to worry, the ashram is like a home to her. He tells her he knows everything about her with the power of his asceticism, knows why she has been abandoned, and knows she is pure.

Later, Valmiki Ramayana tells us in what is perhaps a later interpolation that Sita gives birth to the twins the same night as Shatrughna reaches the Ashram on his way to slay Lavanasura. Hearing of the birth of Sita’s children, Shatrughna goes and meets Sita and speaks of the grace of God. Next morning he leaves the ashram. It is twelve years later that Shatrughna comes back to Ayodhya and this time again he pays a visit to the Ashram and listens to the Ramayana composed by Valmiki. We are not told who sings it, but we are told that both the text and the narration is so realistic and powerful that Shatrughna faints while listening to it because of the emotions it awakens in him. The soldiers with Shatrughna pass through the same emotions.

One surprising thing here is that Shatrughna does not enquire about Sita or her children – there is no mention of them. It is this that first makes us wonder if the chapter in which we are told that Sita gave birth to the twins on the night Shatrughna reaches Valmiki Ashram is not a later interpolation. Otherwise it is impossible that Shatrughna does not ask any question about Sita and her children. Also, there is another thing suggests this chapter might be an interpolation. In the chapter describing the birth of the twins and Shatrughna visiting Sita and them, we are told this happened around midnight – other ashramites come and tell Valmiki about the birth at midnight. But the next chapter begins by saying that as night appeared, Shatrughna asked Chyavana about Lavana. The narration here is chronological and it is impossible that after the midnight events of such importance are mentioned, you suddenly start talking about be beginning of the night and a conversation like this. It is also indicated that the conversation with Chyavana went on the whole morning. Shatrughna does not say a word to Rama when he meets him in Ayodhya about meeting Sita in the ashram, either on his way to Lavana or on his way back.

Soon Rama performs the ashwamedha in Naimisharanya. It is done so that Rama is freed from the sin of brahmahatya, which he had accrued by slaying Ravana, a brahmana. And it is from here that we find some of the most amazing changes Jaimini introduces in telling the Uttara Rama Katha. He adds some dramatically powerful scenes to the story and drops other equally, if not more, powerful scenes.

The Ashwamedha begins in Naimisharanya on the banks of the Gomati, with a golden statue of Sita taking the place of Sita. While the Ashwamedha is in progress, Valmiki arrives there accompanied by his disciples Kusha and Lava. Valmiki orders Kusha and Lava to go around the whole place, singing the Ramayana – at the hermitages of the rishis, the dwellings of the brahmanas, royal palaces, highways and byways, everywhere. If Rama asks them to sing the Ramayana in front of him, Valmiki tells his disciples, they must do so to the best of their ability. “If Rama asks you whose sons you are, tell him you are disciples of Valmiki,” the sage instructs them.

As expected, Rama hears their singing and is fascinated. He invites them into the assembly and asks them to sing it there. At the end of the day, by which time they have chanted twenty cantos, they are offered a reward and but they refuse it, as Valmiki had instructed them, saying that they do not need money since they live in the forest. To Rama’s enquiry about the author of the poem, they say it is composed by Valmiki and consists of twenty-four thousand verses. It is arranged that on subsequent days the singing of Ramayana will continue in between the Ashwamedha.

It is through the song [Ramayana] that they sing, that Rama learns Kusha and Lava are Sita’s sons. He sends messengers to Valmiki, telling him that if Sita is pure and if there is no sin in her, with the sage’s permission she should take an oath to that effect in the assembly the next morning. The messengers go to the sage and give Rama’s message to him and he tells them to inform the king that Sita will do as desired by Rama because to a woman, her husband is her God. A pleased Rama sends out messages to the sages, brahmanas, kings and all others to be present in the assembly in Naimisharanya the next morning.

The next morning Rama himself goes and invites the great sages present in Naimisharanya and everyone else available to the assembly to witness Sita taking the oath of purity.

What follows is one of the most powerful scenes in world literature, modern and ancient. Maybe there are other scenes equal to it in power and emotional intensity, but none surpasses it. And one of the most amazing things about it is that, it is achieved with a minimum use of words and devoting very little space

While the assembly and invited guests are waiting, Valmiki walks in, followed by Sita quietly walking behind him. Her eyes are overflowing with tears, her palms are joined as in prayer, and her heart is on Rama. The Ramayana sees it as the beautiful picture of Shruti following Brahma. Great sorrow rises up in the assembly at her sight and people give expression that their grief.

Addressing Rama, the great sage says, “Oh son of Dasharatha, here is Sita, pious and practicing religious vows. Because of censure, you had abandoned her near my ashram. To you who fear the censure of the world, she will give proof [of her purity]; permit her to do so. These two are Sita’s children, born twins. These are your children – I vouch for the truth of it.”

“I am the tenth son of Pracheta, of scion of the Raghus. I do not remember ever speaking a word of untruth and I tell you, these are your children. I have done ages of tapas, and if Sita is evil, let me know attain the results of that tapas. I have not once in my entire life committed a sin in thoughts, words or actions. And let good results of that not come to me only if Sita is sinless. Every element that forms Sita is pure and so is her mind. I meditated upon this and saw the truth of it before I accepted her on the banks of the river in the forest. She is pure in conduct; she is sinless; to her, her husband is God. And now she shall give the proof of it to you who fear the censure of the world.”

A sage does not take oaths lightly. The greatest sage of the age vouches for Sita’s purity in the name of everything sacred to him. He speaks words I am sure he has never uttered in the past, but for her sake he speaks them.

Rama assures the sage he knows Sita is pure – she has proved it before the gods themselves. And he knows the twins are his sons. But, says he, the censure of the world is powerful and for that reason he will accept her when she proves it again there, in the assembly. And he asks the sage’s forgiveness for saying this.

The Ramayana says all the gods in heaven appeared there to witness Sita taking the oath of purity.

All this while, Sita has been standing behind Rama silently, her hands folded, her face cast down. As a sacred breeze starts blowing through the assembly, Sita, dressed in ochre, steps forward. She does not look at Rama once, though she hasn’t seen him after that evening in Ashoka Vatika years ago. She does not look at the men in the assembly. She does not look at Valmiki. Her eyes remain on the ground at her feet.

And then her soft spoken words ring out in the silent assembly. “If I have not once thought of a man other than Rama in my mind, then, Mother Earth, open up for me. If I have always worshipped Rama by thoughts, words and actions, then, Mother Earth, open up for me. I know no man other than Rama – if these my words are true, Mother Earth, open up for me.”

There is no begging for acceptance here. There is no hesitation. There are no more any longings in her heart. She wants to rest now – rest in the lap of Mother Earth.

Her words stun the assembly. They stun the sages and brahmanas. They stun the ministers and common men. They stun Rama.

With unbelieving eyes they see the earth splits open before them. From the opening rises up a divine throne adorned with divine ornaments, borne on the head of powerful serpents. On the throne is seated Goddess Earth. The Goddess stretches out her arms and speaks words of welcome to her daughter. She seats Sita beside her and the throne descends into the earth.

The heavens and the gods shower flowers upon Sita. The sky and the earth are filled with the sounds of approval. And in the middle of all that, while a stunned audience watches, Sita disappears into the earth.

She gives proof of her purity in a way no one will ever again question.

Rama will no more have to worry about the censure of the world because of her.

Jaimini

That is how Sita’s story ends in Valmiki Ramayana.

In Jaimini’s story, there is no mention of Shatrughna reaching Valmiki Ashram on the night Kusha and Lava are born. The children are of course taught the Ramayana by Valmiki, but it is as warriors that they grow up in the ashram and it is as warriors that we see them in the story. Valmiki gives them two bows and his friend Rishi Raibhya gives them two quivers that never go empty. Other sages give them all kinds of weapons empowered by mantras.

In Valmiki Ramayana we do not hear about the wanderings of the sacrificial horse. But in Jaimini, this is described in great detail. The most significant part of the ashwamedha story begins when the sacrificial horse, guarded by an army headed by Shatrughna, reaches Valmiki Ashram.

The sage is away at Patala, invited there by Varuna for a sacrifice. It is Lava who sees the sacrificial horse and captures it. He is challenged by the note tied to its forehead, which says, among other things, that Rama is the only true hero in the world and his mother Kausalya, the sole mother of a true hero. This infuriates Lava who asks: “Is our mother barren then? Hasn’t she given birth to an unsurpassed hero?”

It is refreshing to note here that Jaimini uses highly colloquial language much of the time in his telling. Lava’s speech here is charmingly colloquial.

A fierce battle follows, in which Lava proves himself an amazingly skilled warrior who is no less than Shatrughna in the battlefield. Eventually Shatrughna uses a sacred, infallible arrow. Though Lava breaks the arrow in two, he is wounded by one half of the arrow and faints. Shatrughna had been feeling great compassion for Lava throughout for two reason – for one thing, he is no more than a child, and another, he resembles child Rama in every way. He gathers the wounded, fainted Lava in his arms and carries him to his chariot.

Sita hears from ashram children that Lava has been wounded in the battlefield by some great warrior and wails at the news. It is then that Kusha who was away in the forest returns. She sends him to the battlefield. in the battle that follows, Kusha kills Shatrughna’s commander-in-chief and his bother. Shatrughna faints at the fierceness of Kusha’s attack. The rest of the soldiers run away to Ayodhya to give Rama the news.

By the time Lakshmana, sent by Rama, reaches the battlefield with a fierce army, Lava regains consciousness and joins the battle. Together, the two boys rout Lakshmana’s army. Kusha kills Lakshmana’s commander-in-chief Kalajit and renders Lakshmana unconscious, in battles described in at length by Jaimini in passages that remind us of the Mahabharata battle scenes.

Rama cannot go to the battlefield, since he has taken diksha for the sacrifice. Bharata now volunteers to go. But before he does so, he has a few interesting words to say to Rama.

He tells Rama not to grieve about Lakshmana – what has happened to him is exactly what he wanted to happen. He had no desire to live ever since he took Sita and left her in the jungle. In fact, he did not want to come back to Ayodhya after that but did so only to give Rama the news. But in spite of all that, Rama showed no kindness either to Sita or to Lakshmana. He has ever since been courting death. Lakshmana has voluntarily chosen death along with his brother Shatrughna. Lakshmana has finally freed himself from sin and now it is his turn to do so – he too is a sinner. In fact, he says, he had thought of killing himself when Rama abandoned Sita, but he did not want to do it in Ayodhya. Today his desire to end his life will be fulfilled and Rama should permit him by letting him go to the battle.

The strong guilt the brothers feel about Rama’s abandoning Sita is an additional feature of Jaimini Bharata. They see Rama’s action totally unwarranted and unjustified and their guilt about it is so strong, all three of them want to kill themselves. Though Jaimini does not expressly say it, they feel they too are responsible since they did not stop Rama from doing it.

In the battle with Kusha that follows, Angada, Nala, Jambavan, and Bharata fall into deathlike unconsciousness, seeing which Hanuman attacks Kusha and he too is becomes unconscious in Kusha’s counter attack. When Rama in Ayodhya is informed of this, he too reaches the battlefield, accompanied by Sugriva. Initially Rama refuses to fight with Kusha and Lava, seeing they are mere children, but they force him and Sugriva and a fierce battle ensues between the two sides in which the children become victorious and Rama and Sugriva become unconscious, wounded by their arrows.

Kusha and Lava have an idea now. They will tie up Hanuman and Jambavan and present them to Sita, who, they believe, will be entertained by them. Hanuman and Jambavan come out of their swoon by then, but they pretend to be still unconscious. When Sita seem them, she asks her sons to take them back into the battlefield and release them, fearing their death if they saw her.

Having described the valour of Lava and Kusha and the battle scenes in great detail, Jaimini now, with almost shocking abruptness, ends Rama’s Uttara Katha, which he calls Kusha-Lava-Upakhyana.

As Sita and her sons are talking, Valmiki reaches back from Patala. The children tell their guru all that has happened. He straight away goes to the battlefield, sprinkles empowered water on all and brings back all from death and unconsciousness. “These are your children,” he tells Rama. “Please accept them. And if you consider Sita innocent, please take her too with you.”

An amazed Rama gets up and goes back to Ayodhya to continue his sacrifice. While the sacrifice is in progress, Valmiki reaches there with Sita and her sons. Rama completes the sacrifice with them beside him and they all live ‘happily ever after’, their lives filled with love.

As an afterword to his story, Jaimini adds that Valmiki did not describe the tale of the battle between the father and his sons because he did not want the world to drown in an ocean of sorrow.

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Jaimini’s telling of the Kusha-Lava-Upakhyana caught the imagination of India. Ever since he told it, it became an integral part of the Uttara Ramayana story. I remember watching scenes of the battles of Kusha and Lava with their uncles and with Hanuman. I watched them holding my breath as a child in second and third rate reproductions of them in movies. Five decades later, I can still recall the scenes with vivid intensity, in spite of the movies being of very poor quality; such is the power of Jaimini’s narration.

It is interesting to consider why Jaimini gives so much importance to these battle scenes which do not exist in Valmiki Ramayana.

Perhaps Jaimini was writing for a different audience than Valmiki [and Vyasa] did. There are several strong indications that Jaimini’s is a much later composition than the Adi Kavi’s and Vyasa’s. For instance, in both Valmiki and Vyasa, all messages are sent verbally, suggesting the absence of writing at the time of the composition of their works. Whereas in Jaimini we clearly see that writing exists. The ashwamedha horse carries a written message, probably on a plaque, on its forehead, which people read. In the story of Chadrahasa, the girl Vishaya changes the word visha [poison] in a written message to vishaya [her name]. [A very interesting episode! Chandrahasa who was supposed to be given visha on arrival is given Vishaya instead.] The social milieu and the customs described are very different too. Perhaps Jaimini’s audience relished the details of the ashwamedha – both in the case of Rama Ashwamedha and Yudhishthira Ashwamedha – more than the audience of Valmiki and Vyasa did. Perhaps he was writing in, and for, a medieval India that was torn by constant wars.

Also, perhaps poetic and literary conventions had undergone great changes and people expected happy endings to stories. In the case of Jaimini, he very obviously had in mind a happy ending for the Ramayana, even if it forces him to drop one of the most powerful scenes in the Ramayana and in world literature. He therefore drops the dramatically awesome scene of Sita’s rejection of Rama and entering the earth. Instead, he makes Sita tamely go with Valmiki to Rama and live with him ‘happily ever after’.

I do not see the Uttara Kanda of Valmiki Ramayana as a later composition than Jaiminiya Ashwamedha Parva. To me, it has to be that Jaimini chose to omit Sita’s entering the earth, a story he was familiar with.

But it must be said that while Jaimini’s ending of the story comes as a big disappointment, his war scenes in the Kusha-Lava-Upakhyana are thrilling. He transforms two young boys who are really just talented singers in the Valmiki Ramayana into awesome warriors who defeat between themselves such a mighty line of warriors as Shatrughna, Lakshmana, Bharata and Rama, apart from Hanuman, Jambavan, Sugriva, Angada, Nala and numerous others, each a legend in his own right as a warrior.

While in the earlier part of his telling of the Uttara Rama Katha, Jaimini focus on pathos and succeeds in moving us to great depths of karuna, in the later part of the story what he wants is to thrill us with veera rasa – with the valour of his heroes – and he succeeds admirably in it too.

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Osho on Krishna and Egoism

2011-03-11T21:59:00.000-08:00

Here is something beautiful from Osho on Krishna’s words in the Gita about his being the best in everything.

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QUESTIONER: KRISHNA, IN CHAPTER TEN OF THE GEETA DESCRIBES HIMSELF TO BE THE GANGES AMONG THE RIVERS, THE SPRING AMONG THE SEASONS, THE LION AMONG THE BEASTS, THE GARUDA OR EAGLE AMONG THE BIRDS, THE AIRAVAT AMONG THE ELEPHANTS, THE KAMDHENU AMONG THE COWS, VASUKI AMONG THE SNAKES, AND SO ON. DOES IT MEAN THAT HE IS TRYING TO DECLARE HIMSELF TO BE THE BEST AND THE GREATEST IN ALL CREATION? DOES IT ALSO MEAN THAT HE REFUSES TO REPRESENT ALL THAT IS LOWLY AND BASE? WHY DOES HE EXCLUDE THE MEANEST OF US ALL? AND WHERE DOES THE MEANEST BELONG?

It is a significant question. And there are two beautiful aspects to it.

Firstly, Krishna declares himself to be the best among all things – of all the seasons he is the spring, of all the cows he is the Kamdhenu, of all the elephants he is the Airavat. And secondly – and this is more significant – he finds his peers even among the lowliest of creatures like cows and horses.

Both things should be taken together. While he declares himself to be the best among different classes of creatures, he does not distinguish between one class and another. Even when he claims to be the Airavat among elephants, he remains nonetheless an elephant. Even when he claims to be the best among the cows he remains a cow. Similarly he is quite at home among snakes and reptiles. He does not exclude the meanest categories as you think. He chooses to be the best even among the meanest creatures of this universe. And there is a reason. But why does he declare himself to be the best and the greatest among us all?

On the surface it seems to us to be an egoistic declaration, because we are so much involved with our egos that everything we see appears egoistic. But if we go deep into it we will know what a great message is enshrined in Krishna’s declaration. When he says that he is the Airavat among the elephants, he means to say every elephant is destined to be an Airavat, and if one fails to be Airavat he fails to actualize his best and highest potential. Similarly every season has the potential to grow into a spring, and if one fails to attain to the highest in its nature, it fails its nature. And if a cow fails to be the kamdhenu, it means she has gone astray from her nature. In all these declarations, Krishna says only one thing: that he is the culmination, the perfection of nature in everything. Whoever and whatever attains to the sublime reflects godliness. This is the central message of this declaration.

Please understand its deeper significance.

It is not that an elephant who does not become the Airavat is not a Krishna, he too is a Krishna, but a backward Krishna; he has failed to be the Airavat which is his potential. Krishna says he reflects the innate potentiality of each being come to its completion, that each being can grow into Krishnahood, god-hood. Krishna symbolizes the actualized form at its best, the highest of each one’s possibility.

Every being, everything is capable of attaining to Krishna-hood. And if one fails to realize himself fully, it simply means that he has betrayed his innate nature, he has deviated from it. There is not even a trace of egoism in Krishna’s declaration. This is his way of saying that one cannot attain to godliness unless he becomes like the lion among animals, like the spring among the seasons, like the Ganges among the rivers. One comes to God only when one attains to one’s own fullest flowering, not otherwise.

By way of these illustrations Krishna persuades Arjuna that if he flowers to the maximum as a warrior which is his innate nature – he will become a Krishna in his own right. Had Krishna been born two thousand years later he would have said, “I am Arjuna among the warriors.”

When Krishna declares his being, he is not claiming greatness. To claim greatness he need not compare himself with beasts and birds, snakes and reptiles. Claims to greatness can be made directly, but Krishna really does not claim any greatness for himself. He Is speaking about a law of growth, a universal law which is that when you draw out the best in you, when you actualize your highest potential you become God.

One of the Sanskrit names of God Is Ishwar, which is derived from aishwarya, meaning affluence.

It means when you attain to the peak of affluence as a being, you become God. But we never pay attention to this aspect of godliness, which is affluence in every respect. So to be the lion among the animals, the kamdhenu among the cows, and the spring among the seasons is to attain to godliness, to God. When there is no difference whatsoever between your potentiality and actuality, you become God. When the highest possibility of your life is actualized you attain to Godhood.

If there is a distance between your potential and actual states of being, it means you are yet on the way to your destiny. And godliness is everybody’s destiny; it is really everyone’s birthright. When that which is hidden in you becomes manifest, you are God. Right now you are part hidden and part manifest, you are on the way to flowering. You have yet to burst into a full spring, you have yet to become God. If Krishna happens to visit our garden here and says that he is the most blossomed one among all the flowers of this garden, what does he mean by it? He means to say that other flowers have the potential to achieve this flowering, and they are on the way to it.

It is right that Krishna does not relate himself with flowers yet hidden in their buds or in their seeds.

He connects himself only with those that have fully flowered. And there is a reason for it. He is speaking to Arjuna who is depressed and confused, and he is not only trying to revive him but also to inspire him to blossom fully as a warrior, to actualize his potential as a warrior. Then alone, Krishna says, can he attain to God, to the utmost peak.

Here Krishna is having to play a double role. Because Arjuna is his friend, he cannot be too hard with him. He has to speak as a friend but all the time he is aware that he has to help Arjuna come to the same flowering of being which he embodies in himself. Therefore, from time to time he gives glimpses of his own flowering, of his own fullness, so that these glimpses gently seep into Arjuna’s awareness.

Krishna will be of no use to Arjuna if he remains only his friend, but if he reveals his godliness indiscriminately, Arjuna may be so frightened that he runs away. So all the time he has to strike a balance between the two roles he is playing. While he continues to be Arjuna’s friend he also declares his godliness from time to time. Whenever he finds Arjuna is relaxed, he declares his godliness. And when Arjuna is assailed with doubt and confusion he returns to his friendly approach.

His task is very delicate, and very few Buddhas have had to deal with such a situation as Krishna faces in the war of the Mahabharata.

Buddha does not have to deal with such a delicate situation. He knows his people clearly; he knows who is who and what they want. His people have come to sit at his feet to learn truth from him, so communication with them is easy and straight. Mahavira too, has no such difficulties with his listeners. Krishna’s difficulty with Arjuna is real, he has to play a double role.

It is really difficult to teach a friend, to be his teacher. It is difficult even to be an advisor to an intimate friend. If you try he will say, “Shut up, don’t show off your wisdom.” Arjuna can say to Krishna, “Keep your sage advices to yourself, I know how much you know, since we grew up together from childhood.” Arjuna can run away in such a situation. So Krishna on the one hand placates him with phrases like “O great warrior,” and on the other he tells him ”You are an ignoramus, you don’t know the reality.”

If you bear in mind this aspect of the GEETA, you will have no difficulty understanding it.

0o0

From: Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy, by Osho

Uttara Ramayana: How Jaimini Tells It

2011-03-07T08:20:00.000-08:00

In an earlier article of mine available online [Retelling the Ramayana: How Padma Purana Does It], I discussed how differently the author of Padma Purana tells the story of Rama from how Valmiki does it. Reading the Jaiminiya Ashwamedha Parva recently, I was fascinated by the changes its author makes when he tells the Uttara Ramayana story.

The context is of the narration of the Ashwamedha battle between Arjuna and his son Babhruvahana. While describing the battle to Janamejaya, the author-narrator Jaimini compares it to the similar battle between Rama and his son Kusha. This prompts Janamejaya to ask for the details of the battle between Rama and Kusha and Jaimini responds by narrating the story at length, devoting twelve of the total sixty-eight chapters of the book to it.

Jaimini
After returning from his fourteen year exile, says Jaimini, Rama begins ruling Ayodhya. Years pass and yet Sita does not conceive – the duration mentioned by Jaimini is ten thousand years, whatever he means by it. Eventually she conceives and completes four months of pregnancy. It is when she is in the fifth month that Rama has a terrible dream. In his dream Rama sees that Lakshmana has abandoned Sita on the banks of the Ganga and she is weeping there like an orphaned child. Next morning he informs Vasishtha of his dream and requests the sage to fix a date for the pumsavana ritual, so that the pregnancy is completed without any trouble. Vasishtha fixes a date in the next fortnight. Accordingly Rama gives orders to Lakshmana to invite Sita’s father Janaka and sages like Vishwamitra for the ceremony. They arrive and the pumsavana is royally performed. Following the ritual, Janaka hands over his kingdom to Rama and retires to the forest for devoting his whole life for spiritual practices.

It is one night following this while Rama and Sita are in bed that Rama asks his wife about her daurhrida [dohada – the pregnant woman’s wish]. Sita tells him that by his grace she has no desires, all her desires are fulfilled, but there is one thing she is keen to do: visit the ashrams of ascetics on the banks of the Ganga.

Rama spontaneously bursts out laughing at this – a thing we cannot imagine Valmiki’s Rama doing. Laughing aloud he asks her if fourteen years of life in the jungle hasn’t satisfied her. He then promises her that she shall visit the banks of the Ganga the very next morning.

We can see clearly here that Jaimini is already taking an independent road in telling the Uttara Katha of Rama. Things are quite different in the Valmiki Ramayana. In the older telling of the story by the Adikavi, the prophetic dream Rama sees about Sita being abandoned in the forest is missing, and so is the pumsavana ritual. Naturally, Janaka does not come to Ayodhya to attend it nor does he hand over Mithila to Rama to rule over and retire to the forest for tapas. Rama asks Sita about her dohada not when they are in bed together, but in entirely different circumstances.

Valmiki
In Valmiki’s version, following his return from the exile and coronation as king, we find Rama and Sita in each other’s company in an atmosphere of love in the Ashoka Gardens on the palace grounds, a place filled with all kinds of beautiful trees. There are ponds in the garden, filled with acquatic flowers and abounding in chakravakas, swans, cranes, storks and all other kinds of birds that flock around water. Seated on a couch in the Ashoka Vanika, Rama lovingly gives Sita with his own hand a beverage called madhu-maireyaka to drink, just as Indra gives Shachi drinks. Servants bring varieties of meat and fruits. Naga women, Kinnaris and Apsaras, all pretty, all adepts at dance, all well adorned, dance around Rama, very close to him. The dancing women are inebriated and Rama enjoys their dances thoroughly. Seated with Sita, Rama looks as though Vasishtha is sitting with Arundhati.

Valmiki then tells us that Rama used to spend the first half of his days attending to his religious and royal duties and the second half, in the company of Sita like this for a long time, until winter passes. [The commentator Govindaraja explains a statement of the Advikavi here to mean that two winters thus passed after the coronation.] It is then that one day he notices signs of pregnancy on Sita. He is delighted and asks her what her dohada is – a pregnant woman’s desires should be fulfilled; what desire of hers can he fulfill? Sita smiles and tells him of her desire to visit the sacred tapovanas of the great sages on the banks of the Ganga and to sit at their feet. She wants to spend at least one night in the holy groves where these ascetics practice tapas. Rama happily promises that her desire will be fulfilled the very next day.

It is interesting to take a look at some of the changes introduced by Jaimini in his narration. Both Valmiki and Jaimini are portraying Rama’s great love and care for Sita. Valmiki speaks of their evenings together when Rama gives her drinks, meat is served and beautiful inebriated women dance around the couple. This is characteristic of Valmiki who is not shy of speaking of such things. Speaking of the scene of Ravana’s antahpura, for instance, the sage-poet unabashedly paints the picture of a post-orgasmic scene there, where few things are left to the imagination. Similarly in the Aranya Kanda he speaks of Rama giving a piece of cooked meat to Sita and asking her to try it, telling her it is good to eat, it is tasty and it is well-roasted – idam medhyam, idam swādu, nishṭaptam idam agninā. Sage Bharadwaj too offers the soldiers of Bharata passing through his ashram both meat and drinks, along with other kinds of food and drinks. However, by the time of Jaimini perhaps these things had become unacceptable in the case of holy men and women like Rama and Sita, and the poet omits these details. There is no meat eating mentioned in this context, no intoxicating drinks, and no dance. He chooses other incidents to portray their intimacy. For instance, Rama’s spontaneous laughter at Sita’s desire to visit the forest again. That is a very intimate action. Rama also has the precognitive dream of Sita being abandoned – the kind of dream a loving person deeply concerned with another is likely to have. His interpretation of it is that something evil is going to happen to her pregnancy and he does what he thinks is appropriate – conducting a Vedic ritual to safeguard the pregnancy and Sita.

Jaimini
Following the promise he makes to Sita that she shall visit the ashram the next day, later that night, Jaimini tells us, Rama receives his spies and listens to the reports of each separately. The reports are all good. When Rama presses them, though, one of them admits that he has heard something negative too. The wife of a washerman had left her husband and gone away to her father’s place where she stayed for four days. The father then realizes that it is wrong for him to keep his married daughter at home for such a long period and, accompanied by his brothers, he takes her back to her husband. The furious washerman shouts at them, “Do you think I am Rama? He can accept back Sita who stayed in the house of the Rakshasas, but I will not.”

Rama sends the spy away and starts reflecting on his words. He ponders over what he should do. How can he abandon Sita whose purity has been proved by fire? No, he cannot, just as an educated brahmana cannot give up good conduct. Or maybe he should give her up, like brahmanas in the Kali age who give up the Vedas. By the morning, he makes up his mind to abandon Sita.

Early next morning his brothers meet Rama. Rama tells him all that happened in the night and informs them of his decision to abandon Sita out of fear for the censure of the world - lokabhaya.

The brothers are shocked. It is Bharata who speaks first. He reminds Rama of Sita’s purity which she has proved by entering fire. He also reminds Rama of Dasharatha’s words on that occasion. Dasharatha had appeared in the skies and told Rama not only that Sit is pure but also that she is capable of purifying others by her presence. In fact, Dasharatha had said then, he should not have been admitted into heaven because he had died grieving for his son, but it was because of his daughter-in-law Sita’s purity that he was admitted into the heaven. Bharata reminds Rama that the gods too had vouched for Sita’s purity.

Rama admits that it is all true; Sita’s purity is beyond doubt. But what is he to do with this evil talk that is going on? How can he put an end to it? For a king, there is nothing worse than ill fame and nothing more desirable than kirti, yashas – righteous fame. One should give up those who cause ill fame – be it a son, a brother, or a wife.

Here Rama quotes a few examples from the past, of people who had made great sacrifices for the sake of righteous fame. One of them is the highly anachronistic example of Karna ‘long ago’ giving away his armour and ear rings to Indra.

tathaiva kavacam karno vāsavāya dadau purā - Jaimini 27.23

Lakshmana has difficulty in controlling his anger now. Waving his arms in fury, he tells Rama that his action is like giving up one’s own mother, like saving a cow from mlecchas and then abandoning it saying it has been touched by mlecchas and has hence become impure.

Shatrughna is equally furious at what Rama has said. He tells Rama he should carry out what he says and kill himself – that will make him immortal. And Sita is such, and her love for Rama is such, that she will bring him back from death. But, he asks Rama, how will he bring a dead Sita back to life? He implies that Rama is not capable of doing that, his love for her is not so powerful.

Rama’s only response is to say that his fear for ill-fame is such that if necessary he will give up himself and them, his brothers, what to speak of Sita.

Finding Rama bent on giving up Sita, Bharata and Shatrugha do not wish to stay with him anymore and go to their own palaces. Lakshmana however is not able to do so, seeing Rama’s grief. Rama tells him either to chop off his, Rama’s, head or to carry out his order and abandon Sita in the jungle. “I touch your feet and beg you,” Rama tells Lakshmana. “Abandon Sita on the bank of the river in the jungle. That sin will come to me.”

These words of Rama shames Lakshmana. He remembers the injunction of the scriptures that one should always obey the orders of one’s elders. He remembers how Parashurama had cut off his mother’s head obeying the orders of his father Jamadagni. He orders his driver to get his chariot ready and goes by it to Sita’s house, his head hung heavy in pain.

Here Jaimini adds something beautiful: the horse collapses on the way and has to be brutally whipped to get up and proceed.

Seeing him bowing to her in her palace, Sita is delighted. He praises Rama’s generosity: he is fulfilling what she had asked for in the night, though she had said it in a light mood. She tells Lakshmana she will take gifts for the sages and their wives. Her words torment Lakshmana, but he remembers his duty to Rama and silently responds by saying all right, his head bent, tears flowing from his eyes.

Sita takes leave of Kausalya as well as Kaikeyi and Sumitra and happily boards the chariot. With a choked voice Lakshmana orders the charioteer to drive fast.

Valmiki
In Valmiki’s Ramayana, it is not from his spies that Rama hears of the evil talk about Sita, but from his friends. As usual he was sitting with his friends in his chamber that night listening to all kinds of humorous stories told by them. After a while he asks Bhadra, a friend, to tell him what the citizens are saying about him and his family. Initially Bhadra tells him of the wonderful things they say, but when Rama insists he tells him of what they are saying about Sita – or more precisely, about his continuing to keep Sita as his wife. “What joy can Rama’s heart have from enjoying Sita who was forcibly taken into his lap by Ravana? Ravana had taken her with him to Lanka and kept her there in his Ashoka Gardens. Why does he not reject her? Now we too will have to tolerate such behaviour from our wives.” Such is the talk going on in the towns and in all the villages, Bhadra tells Rama. Rama asks his other friends if this is true, and they all admit it is so.

So in Valmiki’s version, it is not just one washerman who talks maliciously of Sita, but there is wide talk of that nature in all towns and villages. As I point out in my article on the Padma Purana version of the Ramayana, there the author goes further and gives a reason for that washerman. In his previous lifetime, he was a parrot and Sita had separated him and his wife, and caged her. The female parrot had killed herself in the cage when Sita refused to release her, and the male parrot had jumped into the Ganga and killed himself, cursing Sita that she too will later be separated from her husband. Thus to the Padma Purana it is Sita’s past karma haunting her now. We all have to pay the price of what we do, whoever we are. Karma is inviolable.

To continue the story as Valmiki tells it, after dismissing his friends, Rama sends for his brothers in the night itself. When they come, he talks to them about how nothing is more important than one’s good name and how nothing in the world is worse than ill fame. He asks Lakshmana to take Sita and leave her in the jungle beyond the Ganga near the ashrams and tells his brothers if anyone spoke against his decision, he would treat him as his enemy forever.

Valmiki’s Rama does not allow his brothers to speak a word against him. He gives them no choice. Jaimini’s Rama is equally determined about abandoning Sita, but he at least listens to his brothers’ angry talk. Jaimini’s Rama shames Lakshmana into obedience by saying that he is requesting his younger brother by touching his feet. The emotional force used by Jaimini’s Rama is different too – he asks Lakshmana to chop his head off, if he will not obey him. Valmiki’s Rama appears more hard-hearted when he says whoever speaks a word against his decision will become his enemy forever.

Valmiki’s Lakshmana goes to Sita the next morning with his chariot to take her and abandon her. But he lies to Sita – he specifically tells her he is taking her to the hermitages of the ascetics on the orders of Rama, as desired by her. She picks up gifts for the sages and happily starts her journey.

Jaimini
Let’s now go back to Jaimini.

As the chariot proceeds, Sita sees evil omens everywhere. A female jackal comes before Sita and begins howling piteously. Flocks of deer are seen running helter-skelter in large numbers. And Sita’s right eye begins to flutter continuously. Sita suspects bad things – but not for herself. She prays for the good of Rama, so that no harm comes to him.

When the chariot reaches the Ganga, the river that destroys sins is in a spate. Lakshmana gets down from the chariot and takes her across the river by a ferry. On the other side, both Sita and Lakshmana take a bath in the Ganga and then proceed on foot into deeper jungles. Jaimini paints a dark picture of the terrifying jungle here – there are sharp thorns everywhere, there are ancient trees on which are perched crows which are being eaten by snakes that hiss constantly. The place is filled with cheetahs, bison, wild boars and black scorpions with raised tails. Tigers wait still looking for opportunities to pounce upon does. Wild cats are digging mice out of their holes.

Fear makes Sita’s hairs stand on their ends. “I do not see any ashrams here, Lakshmana; nor do I see any sages or their wives,” she tells her devar. “There are no ashram children running about either. I do not see smoke rising up from agnihotras. What I see instead is smoke rising from wild fires burning forest grass and trees. Instead of the sound of Vedic mantras, I hear the wild cries of forest birds.”

Such is Sita’s innocence that she puts the blame for it all on herself. Perhaps this is her punishment for turning away from Rama by desiring to visit the ashrams. She is indeed an ugly woman who does not deserve to see the sacred ashrams. The auspicious ashram sounds and sights are not for her.

Tears streaming down from his eyes, Lakshmana tells Sita that the ashrams are still far away. He then informs her how she has been abandoned by Rama out of fear for the censure of the world – loka-apavada-bhaya.

Sita hears those words and collapses on the ground like a star falling from the skies. It was as though she has been bitten by a deadly snake. Lakshmana fans her with the end of his cloth and she comes to and sitting up, asks Lakshmana, “Once you had left me alone in Janasthana and went away. How will you again leave me in this terrible forest and go away?”

She tells Lakshmana how he is the dearest of her devars, brothers-in-law, and recalls one by one his acts of love and devotion to her. She does not blame Rama for abandoning her for no fault of hers – it must be her karma from a past life time. She asks Lakshmana to hurry back, or else Rama might get angry with him for being late. As for her, the god who protected her in the womb and protected her in Lanka will protect her in the forest too. She gives messages of love and devotion to her mothers-in-law to Lakshmana.

Sita has only one complaint against Rama – he should not have entrusted the tender hearted Lakshmana with the work of abandoning her in the jungle. He should have asked someone like the hard hearted Sugriva, slayer of his own brother, or Vibhishana who turned against his own brother, to do that job. She gives her blessings to Lakshmana and asks him to leave her and go back. Lakshmana goes round her in reverence and praying to the forest gods and goddesses to protect her, begins walking away and finds his legs are refusing to carry him away from Sita. Sita looks on at the disappearing Lakshmana and hopes perhaps he would return. When she finds that he does not, she swoons again.

The Jaiminiya Ashwamedha Parva turns eloquent here in describing the sympathy of the forest for Sita. It describes how swans give up lotus stalks and start wailing in their harsh voices. The does and their babies give up feeding on grass and raising their heads stall still watching Sita lying in a swoon. Peacocks give up their dances and run towards her. Birds stop searching for food and instead spread their wings and protect Sita lying on the forest floor. Water fowls sprinkle water on her with their wings. The chamaris fan her with their chamara-like hairy tails. The wind takes a dip in the Ganga and then gathering the flowers lying around, showers them on Sita in an act of worship.

Sita wakes up taking Rama’s name. Because of contorting in pain as she lay in swoon, her hair is open now and like the rest of her body, it is covered in dust. Her first impulse is to end her life, but that would be the great sin of bhroonahatya – killing an embryo in the womb. Not knowing what else to do, she runs first in one direction, then in another, falling every now and then in her agony and loneliness. Her feet start to bleed from running in the thorn-filled and rough forest floor and from falling down repeatedly.

It is in this state that Sage Valmiki finds her in the jungle while he is roaming there along with his disciples looking for wood appropriate for a sacrificial pillar.

Valmiki
Jaimini differs from Valmiki in where Sita is left. In Valmiki Ramayana, Rama’s instructions are to leave Sita at some lonely place near Valmiki Ashram and that is precisely what Lakshmana does. In fact it is possible that from where Sita was left the ashram was visible and Sita was visible from the ashram too. For, Lakshmana says to Sita when they reach there:

āśramānteṣu ca mayā tyaktavyā tvam bhaviṣyasi
rājnah śāsanam ājnāya tava evam kila daurhṛdam
tadetajjāhnavī tīre brahmaṛṣīṇām tapovanam
puṇyam ca ramaṇīyam ca mā viṣādam kṛthāh śubhe

“Obeying the order of the king and as per your pregnancy wish, I am to abandon you near the ashram. Here is the sacred and beautiful tapovana of the brahmarshis on the banks of the Ganga. Do not grieve.”

Jaimini changes this and there is no indication that it is near the ashram that she is left. In fact, there are all kinds of contrary indications. Sita complains that she does not see any ashrams there, nor any sages nor their wives. She speaks of seeing no ashram children running about, seeing no smoke rising up from agnihotras. All she sees is smoke rising from wild fires burning forest grass and trees. Instead of Vedic mantras, she points out, all she hears is the wild cries of forest birds.

Jaimini’s forest is also not the gentle forest near ashrams – what we find everywhere is sharp thorns, ancient trees on which are perched crows who are being hunted by hissing snakes, and the forest floor filled with cheetahs, bison, wild boars, black scorpions with raised tails, tigers waiting to pounce upon does, cats digging mice out of their holes.

In Valmiki she is so close to the ashram the young ashram children see and hear her cries and inform the sage of her. Sita here has no consolation of being anywhere near ashrams. And she runs about madly in intolerable agony, first running in one direction and then in another. It is in this state that Valmiki who is looking for wood for making a sacrificial post finds her in Jaimini.

Also, in Jaimini, it is the fear of bhroonahatya – the sin of killing the children in her womb – that prevents Sita from killing herself. In Valmiki it is the fear that with it Rama’s ancient royal line will come to an end.

Summing Up
Summing up the differences so far, Jaimini in spite of being a lover of Rama, is quite critical of his action of abandoning Sita. He makes Rama himself compare his action to that of the brahmanas of Kaliyuga giving up the Vedas – when the brahmanas who are supposed to live for protecting the Vedas give them up, it is always for unholy purposes, for selfish ends. Jaimini does not see Rama’s fear of lokapavada – the censure of the world – as anything noble. Like so many of us today, he perhaps feels Rama took the easy way out. Instead of standing by Sita and fighting for her like a hero and making the people of Ayodhya realize their error, he chose to get rid of her so that he can be in their good books. He definitely was not setting up a good example before the world, just as a brahmana who gives up the Vedas is not, whatever his reason.

Jaimini makes Sita say that the god who protected her in the womb and in Lanka will protect her in the forest too.

yo garbhe rakṣitā devo yo vai lankādhivāsinīm
mām sa vai rakṣitā cādya na duhkham kartumarhasi.

These are the words of a woman who has been given up by the very man who is supposed to protect her. In fact, it is he who has thrown her into the middle of dangers. These words remind us of Draupadi, wagered and lost by Yudhishthira and thus made a slave, turning to God in the form of Krishna for protection, when they fail her.

In one of the most eloquent expressions of kindness and compassion the world has seen, Jesus from the cross asks God to forgive his tormentors and crucifiers. Valmiki’s Sita does the same, a few thousand years before Jesus. And Sita does not ask Rama just to forgive those who have been cruel to her, but going beyond it, to actively love them.

Valmiki’s Sita thus asks Rama to love the people of Ayodhya who have sent her to the jungle; and not love them with the common love of a king for his subjects, but as Rama loves his brothers – he loves no one more than he loves his brothers, not even her. This is loving your enemies in the truest sense of the term. She asks Rama to love her tormentors, her crucifiers, with all his heart.

And when she does not kill herself by jumping into the Ganga, it is because she does not want Rama’s line to come to an end with her.

Valmiki’s Sita is almost superhuman in her compassion and kindness. But Jaimini brings her down to the earth, without reducing her in any way. She is so tormented by her fear and agony – it is not near the ashram that she has been abandoned, but in a terrifying jungle with scorpions and snakes and cheetahs and wild boars all around her – that she has no thoughts for the citizens of Ayodhya. And we can understand Sita if she refuses to kill herself out of the fear for bhroonahatya rather than out of the fear of loss that it will cause Rama. She is just being human there. Perhaps the thought that when she kills herself Rama will lose something does not occur to her at that moment.

~*~

To be continued...

Zen, Learning and Enlightenment

2011-02-23T03:39:00.000-08:00

I was staying in Uttar Kashi then, in Tapovan Kuti, originally a tiny one-room cottage that belonged to my grand teacher Swami Tapovanamji, later enlarged and developed by his disciple and my guru Swami Chinmayanandaji into a large ashram with scores of rooms with modern comforts. This is in Ujeili, on the lower slopes of Varanavat Mountain, facing Har Parbat across the Ganga in the east and the famous Valakhilya Mountains some distance away in the south east. It is a beautiful place, the whole area this side of the Ganga filled with ashrams.

I used to watch every day a serious looking young monk on the terrace of a nearby ashram. He would walk up and down on the terrace the whole day, with an open book in hand, and from the constant movement of his lips it was clear he was repeating and learning by heart the book. Eventually one day I asked him what the book was and he showed it to me. It was a commentary on the Brahma Sutras. On top of each page was the text of the Sutras, below it in a different font and size the vyakhya, and below that the tika in yet another font and size and still below the tippani. And what the young monk was doing was learning by heart the entire text – the sutras, the vyakhya, the tika, the tippani, all. During our conversation he told me his dream was to become a mahamandaleshwar – that is the head of large division of spiritual organizations, below the position of the Shankaracharya.

I do not know what later became of the young monk – this was in the late nineteen seventies and I never met or heard of him after that. But recently when I read the story Zen master Kyogen, this incident came to my mind. Kyogen was also a scholar of great learning and his story tells us that his very learning stood in the way of his achieving the goal of spirituality – enlightenment.

One day Isan, who was his friend from their days with their master Hyakujo, asked him, “Tell me, Kyogen, when you were with our master in his monastery, you were very brilliant. You used to answer a single question in ten different ways. Now answer this question: What is your real self? The self that existed before you came out of your mother’s womb, before you knew east from west?”

It is said that this question puzzled Kyogen completely. He searched for the right answer in his mind and came up with answer after answer, but every time Isan rejected it. Eventually Kyogen was reduced to saying, “I fail. Explain it to me.” And Isan said, “The answer I know is my answer. It will be of no use to you. Find your own answer.”
But of course Kyogen did not know how to find his own answer – that was his problem. The only thing he knew was to find answers from books – of which he had a huge collection. Once again he went through all his books, searching for the answer to Isan’s question. He found none. No book answered that question – at least, they did not answer it satisfactorily. Eventually he told himself, “A hundred pictures of rice cakes are not going to fill a single hungry stomach.” The story tells us that as this realization dawned, Kyogen gathered his books and destroyed them all.

The pursuit of the scholar was no more for him. It hadn’t taken him anywhere. He left his friend Isan, said goodbye to all monasteries and teachers, and became a grave keeper.

One day he was sweeping the grounds of the grave when something very ordinary happened. A stone that he had swept away went and struck a bamboo.

Kyogen stood speechless. He forgot himself. He forgot all his learning. He forgot the whole world. And then his stillness was broken by a burst of spontaneous laughter arising from him. He laughed as he had never laughed before in his entire life.

Kyogen had attained enlightenment. He had attained what all his books had not helped him attain, what he has been searching all his life. He was now a Buddha in his own right.

Kyogen performed a ritual of purification and then returned to his old friend Isan. He lighted incense before him and paid homage to him. “Great master,” Kyogen said addressing Isan, “thank you! You have been kinder to me than my own parents. Had you given to me the answer when I begged you to, I would have never attained it. I would have never reached where I stand today.”

It is customary for Zen masters to write a poem in celebration of their enlightenment. Here is the poem composed by Kyogen:

One stroke and all is gone.
No need of stratagem or cure.
Each and every action
Manifests the ancient way.
My spirit is never downcast,
I leave no tracks behind me,
Enlightenment is beyond speech,
Beyond gesture.
Those who are emancipated
Call it the unsurpassed.

In the Chhandogya Upanishad, Narada, the great scholar approaches Sanatkumara and asks him to teach him. In response, Sanatkumara asks Narada to tell him all that he already knows. Here is Narada’s response:

"Bhagavan, I know the Rig Veda, the Yajur Veda, the Sama Veda, the Atharva as the fourth Veda, the epics and ancient lore as the fifth, grammar which is the Veda of the Vedas, the rules of sacrifices, the science of numbers, the science of portents, the science of time, logic, ethics, etymology, the science of pronunciation, ceremonials, prosody, etc., the science of elemental spirits, the science of weapons, astronomy, the science of serpents and the fine arts. All this I know, venerable Sir.

"But, Bhagavan, with all this I know only words; I do not know the Self. I have heard from men like you that he who knows the Self overcomes sorrow. I am afflicted with sorrow. Please help me, Bhagavan, to cross over to the other side of sorrow."

Narada has learnt all that could be learnt – every branch of knowledge that existed in his days. And yet he is far from that knowledge which ends all sorrow, which takes you to the other side of sorrow, into enlightenment and bliss.

The highest knowledge can only be attained beyond words. It is attained in a world where no words exist, no language exists, where only silence exists – silence and stillness. Kyogen reaches that world when the stone strikes the bamboo. Chiyono, another Zen master, attains it when the old pail in which she was carrying water breaks, leaving no water and no moon in it. Tokusan attains enlightenment when his master suddenly blows out a burning candle.

The stories may be different, but in all cases enlightenment happens in silence and stillness, when we are ready for it. All preparations, all sadhanas, are to make us ready for it.

***

Soma: Scandalous Sex Life of the Founding Father

2011-01-01T22:33:00.000-08:00

Vyasabharata 3

In the Adi Parva of the Mahabharata, responding to a question from Janamejaya, Vaishampayana tells him stories of his royal ancestors, the lunar dynasty of kings. In some texts of the epic, this happens before the story of Shakuntala and in others, following her story.

The lunar dynasty produced numerous magnificent kings who for all times to come became beacon lights for India. They carved out paths which all coming generations of rulers aspired to follow. In spite of this, lust remained a running theme in the tale of the dynasty from the beginning till the end. Here is the story of the moon god [known variously as Soma, Chandra, Chandrama, Shashi, Indu and so on] from whom the lunar dynasty gets its name.

Soma’s story too is a story of lust. Besides, we probably have here the world’s first tales of adultery.

The Mahabharata does not tell us much about Soma, the founding father of the lunar dynasty to which the Bharatas belong. For this reason, we have to combine what it says with what other texts have to say about him.

The myth about the birth of the moon god, Soma, is perhaps the most beautiful birth story in world mythology. And the story is uniquely Indian – no other culture in the world could have produced a story like this.

The story tells us of Sage Atri being asked by Brahma to engage in creation. Atri wanted to acquire the power needed for this and with that intention, started a powerful form of tapas called anuttara.

The name means the highest tapas, beyond which there is no other tapas.

Sage Atri was purity itself and such was his commitment to the tapas that he soon reached the highest peaks of spirituality, and the Ultimate Reality, the Brahman, appeared reflected in the still lake of his mind. As the pure ecstasy of the experience possessed him, tears of supreme joy started flowing from his eyes: the bliss that passes understanding, born of self-realization. And, as those tears began flowing down his cheeks, the story tells us, the guardians of the eight directions transformed themselves into exquisite women and drank up those tears. They were in love with those tears and wanted to conceive children out of Atri’s ecstasy.

The women became pregnant but found themselves incapable of enduring the powerful fetuses in their wombs and pushed them out of their wombs. Brahma, the Creator, gathered the fetuses and joined them to form a single magnificent child who instantly grew into a youth. This was Soma, the moon god. The Creator endowed him with every imaginable weapon and thus empowering him, took him to his world, the Brahmaloka, where the brahmarshis requested him to make the youth their lord. The luster of the youth grew steadily as sages, gods, gandharvas and apsaras sang the Sama hymns in his praise.

Prajapati Daksha gave twenty-seven of his daughters in marriage to Soma.

Later Soma, himself born of tapas, entered a long period of tapas. His chosen deity was Vishnu. Vishnu was pleased with the tapas and appeared before him and asked him to seek a boon from him. “I want to perform a Rajasuya sacrifice in the heavens,” said Soma. “When I do that bless me that all the great Gods like Brahma should be present in the sacrifice. And I want the trident-wielding Shiva to stand guard at the gate of the sacrificial place.”

The moon god had acquired so much power that at his desire the great Gods had to be at his beck and call.

The Rajasuya began. Every celestial attended the sacrifice: the gods, Vasus, Maruts, Brahma, Vishnu, Arti, Bhrigu, all. As desired by Soma, Shiva himself stood guard to the sacrifice. And when the Rajasuya ended, Soma gave the three worlds as dakshina to the priests who officiated in the sacrifice.

The sacrifice ended with the avabhrita ritual bath. As Soma stood up, glowing in indescribable glory after the ritual bath, the goddesses present there could not contain themselves. Nine of them fell in love with him instantly. Not only did they fall in love with him, great passion for him raged in their hearts. Blazing lust screamed out from every part of the goddesses’ body, seeking immediate fulfillment. While the gods, the sages and other guests stood watching aghast, these nine goddesses threw themselves at him openly: Vishnu’s wife Lakshmi, Kardama’s wife Sinivali, Vibhavasu’s wife Dyuti, Dhata’s wife Pushti, the sun god’s wife Prabha, Havishman’s wife Kuku, Jayanta’s wife Kirti, Kashyapa’s wife Anshumali, and Nanda’s wife Dhriti. These goddesses abandoned their husbands and openly sought pleasure from Soma. And he pleasured them all as no one else could pleasure a woman. The god’s were infuriated and wanted to curse Soma for this audacious sin, but found themselves powerless to do anything against him. The Rajasuya had made him all powerful and rendered everyone else powerless before him.

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Some say it was when Tara saw Soma as he stood in all his glory after the ritual bath that concluded the Rajasuya that she became infatuated with him, like the nine goddesses. The Devi Bhagavata Purana, which tells us this story in detail, has a different story to say.

Before we go into that story, the word ‘tara’ means a star, and in mythology all over the world the moon and the stars are closely linked together. In our own mythology, the moon god is wedded to the twenty-seven daughters of Daksha, who are all stars: the twenty-sever stars of astrology – Ashwati, Bharani, Kartika, Rohini and so on. Tara’s infatuation with the moon god is thus supported by the logic of mythology. Tara’s husband Brihaspati is the planet Jupiter, who pales in comparison with the lustrous glory of the moon in the night sky.

According to the Devi Bhagavata, one day Tara went to the house of Soma. Tara was beautiful beyond words, a lusty woman at the peak of her youth, intoxicated with youthful passions. Soma saw the irresistible Tara and instantly desired her. And Tara too took one look at Soma and straight away fell in love with him. Carried away by the stormy passion they felt, they neither could, nor wanted to, resist the fiery longing they felt for each other and had sex. Following which, Tara decided to stay on in Soma’s house, rather than go back to her husband Brihaspati.

Soma is a god and Brihaspati is the guru of the gods. According to Indian culture, the relation between Soma and Tara is that of a disciple and his gurupatni – his guru’s wife. Indian culture speaks of an erotic relation between the two as the worst possible sin, a mahapataka. And it is this dreaded sin that the two were indulging in without any compunctions.

Brihaspati waited for a few days for Tara to come back. When she did not, he sent one of his disciples to Soma’s house. But drunk with the love of Soma, Tara refused to go back to Brihaspati. Days passed and Brihaspati once again sent a disciple, asking Tara to go back to him and Tara did exactly what she had done earlier – she again refused to go back to Brihaspati. This happened again and again and eventually Brihaspati decided to go on his own and take Tara back.

Brihaspati was in a fury when he reached Soma’s residence. Addressing the moon god, he said angrily: “What have you done, you fool? I am your guru and Tara is your gurupatni. You can protect her, revere her, but you cannot have any other relationship with her. What have you been doing keeping her in your house? Were you protecting her or were you having sex with her? Don’t you know that for you to have sex with her is to commit one of the gravest sins in the world? You are not fit to live among the gods. Give my wife back to me and let me take her back to where she belongs – my home. Do as I say before I lay a curse upon you.”

Soma laughed haughtily at the enraged words of the guru. He began by attacking Brihaspati for losing his self mastery. “It is only those brahmanas who have full mastery over their emotions that deserve honour. You seem to have no mastery over yourself and for that reason you cannot curse me either. The curse of a man without mastery over himself will have no effect.”

“As for Tara,” Soma continued, “she is here on her own. I haven’t kept her a prisoner here. And she is enjoying herself. When she has had enough of enjoyment, she will come back to you and you can have her back. Let her stay here so long as she wants to. What harm can it do? ”

Soma reminded Brihaspati quoting the scriptures that a woman never becomes impure from adultery. She is purified month after month when she has her period.

Brihaspati saw he had no options but to go back. But at home he was tormented by longing [smara-aaturah] for Tara. Soon he was back at Soma’s place. This time, however, the watchmen who stood guard at the gate did not even let Brihaspati go in.

Brihaspati waited long, but Soma did not appear. The furious guru could no more contain his anger and shouted aloud from the gate: “You wretch! You vilest of gods! No one is more depraved than you are. Tara is your gurupatni. She is like your mother! You have forcibly kept her a prisoner in your house and you have been living in sin with her! Give her back to me this instant or I shall reduce you to ashes.”

Soma now came out and spoke to Brihaspati with a smile on his face. He said, “Why do you talk such nonsense! Your beautiful wife is here because you cannot give her the satisfaction she seeks. And in any case, she is too beautiful for you. She is endowed with every imaginable feminine perfection. Such a jewel of a woman is not fit for a beggar like you. Why don’t you take some ugly woman for a wife – she would be fit for you. It has been ordained that exquisite women should have handsome husbands. And the kamashastras [books on the erotic science] too say that beautiful women should have for their husbands men who are equal to them in beauty, youth and prowess. You seem to be totally ignorant of the Kamashastra! Now go away. I have no intension of giving her back to you. And let me tell you, your curse will have no effect on me, for you are in the grips of lust.”

Insulted, humiliated, furious, Brihaspati went straight to Indra, his chief disciple and the lord of the gods and told him what happened. Indra took matters into his own hands and sent a messenger to Soma explaining to him the evil nature of his relationship with Tara and asking him to give her back to Brihaspati. Indra reminded him of the twenty-eight wives he already had [according to some counts Daksha had given twenty seven of his daughters to the moon god as his wives, and according to some others, twenty-eight.]. He reminded him of the celestial courtesans like Urvashi and Menaka. He could have them for his pleasure if he so wished, said Indra – but this relationship with his gurupatni was certainly a shame for any man, and particularly so for a man whose father was a sage like Atri.

Soma told him that the whole notion that a man can own a woman is wrong. Tara had gone to him on her own and she was happy with him, just as he was happy with her. Tara hated Brihaspati and she wouldn’t go back to him on her own. No power in the world was going to separate her from him against her will.

The moon god did not forget to remind Indra of his own adultery and the adultery of Brihaspati, which he stated as one of the reasons why Tara hated her husband.

This was a challenge to the power of Indra and the gods in general. Soma, who was so haughty about his power, had to be taught a lesson through power. There was only one solution now: a war against Soma. With all the gods on one side and Soma on the other.

Acharya Shukra, the guru of the asuras, heard of the problem in the celestial world. He took Soma’s side and offered him assistance if there was a war – his own and that of the asuras.

The armies gathered, ready for war.

Brahma, however, decided to interfere at the last moment. Brahma was Sage Atri’s father and hence Soma’s grandfather. Soma finally listened to Brahma and agreed to send Tara back to Brihaspati. Tara was given no choice in the matter. She certainly was not happy about this, but she had no alternative and reluctantly went back to her husband. Brihaspati was delighted that he got his wife back. Taking her with him, he went home.

The story does not end here.

Tara was pregnant when she went back. When the child was born, Brihaspati became very happy and made arrangements to celebrate the birth and perform the rituals. But Soma would have none of it. He laid claim to the child, telling it was born of him. This time it was Brihaspati’s turn to refuse, saying the child was his and it resembled him.

Once again the celestial world was hot with anger and the gods and asuras assembled ready for war. This time too, it was Brahma who interfered. He asked Tara to tell the truth: Whose son was it? And Tara coyly whispered that it was Soma’s and, embarrassed, hurried back to her inner apartments.

The war was avoided once again.

Soma named his son Budha and it is with Soma that the child grew up.

Soma is the first king of the lunar dynasty and Budha, the second. Budha’s son Pururava is one of the greatest legends in the lunar dynasty filled with legendary kings. His life with the apsara Urvashi has fascinated our culture for ages and inspired numerous works of literature, from the most ancient times right up to our own times.

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One of the puzzling things in the stories of the moon god is his strong association with sexual desire. It is not puzzling in the sense that this is a rare connection found only in Indian mythology – on the contrary, this is a near-universal connection and hence, in that sense, not puzzling at all. It is puzzling because he is born of the tears of a sage’s ecstasy of self-realization.

But then, Indian culture has associated sexuality with sacredness right from the beginning. We have looked upon [sexual] desire, kama, as the very source of life. The Nasadiya Sukta of the Rig Veda, the Sacred Hymn of Creation, speaks of kama as the first born and the origin of everything born subsequently: “There arose Primal Desire in the beginning, the seed of the mind, the first born.” [Kamastadagre samavartadhi manaso retah prathamam yad aseet.] Krishna too speaks of kama as sacred – as himself, as God – so long as it is not against dharma. [dharmaviruddho bhuteshu kamo’smi bharatarshabha. Gita 7.11] But when that sexuality takes you over, possesses your mind, enslaves you, then it is bad.

In the case of the moon god, what we find is his becoming a slave to his sexuality and because of this sexual slavery, practicing precisely the opposite of the kind of kama that Krishna calls sacred. In spite of all the arguments he gives, in both the stories above we find him a slave to his sexuality. In the first case, there is only one reason why he would respond to the open, public demand of the nine goddesses – his own sexual desire for them, originating as much from his maleness as from his sense of power and sense of arrogant superiority over the other gods. In the second case again, we find him not a master, but a slave to not just sex, but to one of the worst forms of sexuality that Indian culture speaks of: his sexual partner is a woman he should look upon as his own mother. He not only has sex with her, but has an ongoing sexual relationship that lasts for quite some time. And there is no attempt on his part to hide that relationship– he openly declares it, flouts all sexual morality when he says any woman can choose any man she likes as her sexual partner and contemptuously tells Brihaspati that the reason why his wife left him is because he, Brihaspati, is not an adept in the sexual arts and cannot give satisfaction to his wife.

Perhaps what we find here is the mind at play. The moon is the deity of the mind in both Vedic literature and subsequent Indian philosophy. And the mind is a slave to passions. The reasons Some gives, when he chooses to give reasons, are not the true reasons, but the ‘good’ reasons. At least in the case of the affair with Tara, the Devi Bhagavata makes the true reason very clear: the first thing that the Devi Bhagavata tells us of this affair is that at the first sight of the beautiful Tara, Soma became kamaaturah – tormented by lust for her.

Perhaps the contradiction in Soma’s obsession with sex and the story of his birth from the tears of a sage’s spiritual ecstasy could be resolved if we remember that when Atri attained self-realization, he was doing tapas to empower himself for creation.

In any case, a legacy of the moon god thus is one of powerful sexual longing – amoral or immoral – and this becomes the legacy of a vast number of kings in the lunar dynasty. King after king falls because he becomes a victim to unbridled sexuality.

0o0

A third story we have about Soma is about his obsessive passion for one of his wives, which makes him neglect his other wives. According to this story, which the Mahabharata itself tells us, Daksha gave twenty-seven of his daughters in marriage to Soma. They were all beautiful, but the most beautiful of them all was Rohini. Soma is besotted with her and in his obsession with her, totally ignores his remaining wives. They go to their father and complain to him about it. Daksha instructs Soma to mend his ways and behave equally towards all his wives, but his infatuation with Rohini is such that he continues to ignore them. His wives once again go to their father and Daksha again reminds Soma of the need to be with his other wives. This time too Soma ignores the advice. It is after Daksha’s daughters went to their father a third time that Daksha curses Soma. The story tells us how Daksha’s curse brought the dreaded disease rajayakshma [tuberculosis, the wasting disease] upon him. A repentant Soma was later asked to go and bathe in the sacred waters of Prabhasa and this bath changed his yakshma into the current monthly waxing and waning we see the moon passing through.

Indian literature tells human stories in the name of the gods. What we read here are some such stories. It is also possible that the episodes are speaking of cosmic astronomical events which the Puranas narrate in human/celestial terms. Tara and Soma as well as Tara and Rohini are astrologically linked; and Soma and the goddesses could also be so linked.

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Arabian Nights, Ananda Mimamsa and Happiness

2010-12-31T06:45:00.000-08:00

I know an executive whose income runs into several lakhs per month and yet rarely have I seen him smiling.

In contrast, one of the happiest faces I have seen is that of my milkman Ketan. It may be peak winter, as it is now, or it may be raining torrentially as it was a couple of months ago – but he invariably greets me with a cheery good morning as he comes to deliver milk packets every day without fail. In the rainy season he wears a rain coat and goes from house to house to deliver the milk, stopping his bicycle in front of each house and getting down to walk to the front door. His clothes will be drenched in spite of the raincoat and inside the clothes, his body will be drenched. In winter, he would be shivering inside the old windcheater he wears. But that does not reduce his smile or the cheerfulness in his voice.

I made a social visit to a doctor sometime last year. We were friends, sort of. He is on the staff of a large hospital as a fulltime senior doctor, and saw patients at home before he went to the hospital in the morning – private practice. When he came home for lunch, he again saw patients. In the evening when he came back from the hospital, there were more patients waiting for him at home – he spent two or three more hours seeing them then.

When I visited the doctor on that day, he had finished his consultancies for the day and was somewhat relaxed. His wife brought us tea and we talked over the tea. Or rather, he talked and we listened – his wife, my wife and I. And he talked for more than an hour and a half, until I said we had to go, it was getting late, and he reluctantly stopped.

What the doctor talked about for an hour and half was about how his lot was worse than that of a rickshawwalla. Literally. The bitter doctor bickered about how the riskshawwalla makes more money in terms of the investments he has made. Looking back later we found it difficult to believe this, but he had earnestly and sincerely argued for full ninety minutes that he earned less in terms of his investments compared to a rickshaw puller. He spoke of the years he had spent as a student working hard so that he can join medicine, of the years he had spent as a medical student, of the years he had spent as intern, of the years he had spent as a fresh doctor; he spoke of the hours he had to study during each of these years and of the hardships he had to put up with, of the nights of sleep he lost in the process, and of the money he had invested at each stage. What did a rickshaw puller invest, he asked me rhetorically. Wasn’t the rickshawwalla making more money than he was?

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I have always loved the Arabian Nights, right from my childhood days when I read stories of Sindbad, Alladin, Hatim Tai, Harun al Rashid, and of course of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. [Once, some thirty years ago, I took a group of, mostly, executives from two of India’s leading corporate houses for a fifteen-day study and meditation camp in the Himalayas. The executives were all older than me, I was the youngest. I remember the group in a moment of fun naming me Ali Baba and themselves the forty thieves – they were forty in number. I enjoyed it.] I have with me different versions of the Nights and I love picking up a volume and reading a story randomly every now and then.

Yesterday I came across a volume of Powys Mathers’ translation of the Nights in a used books shop and purchased it – I have a particular affection for this translation, done from the literal and complete version of Dr JC Mardrus’ original French translation of the Nights. Later, in the evening, I began reading the volume. One of the stories I read was The Tale of The Two Lives of Sultan Mahmud. This is how the story, told by Scheherazade starting on the eight-hundred and nineteenth night, begins:

“It is related, O auspicious King, that Sultan Mahmud, who was one of the wisest and most glorious of the Egyptian rulers, used often to sit alone in his palace, weighted down by a causeless sadness and beholding the world black before his eyes. At these times, life was tasteless to him and without significance; yes, even though Allah had given him, without stint, health and youth, power and glory, and for his capital, the most delicious city of the earth, where his eyes might ever be rejoiced by flowers, serene skies and women gilded like the waters of the Nile. These gifts were forgotten during the hours of royal sadness and Mahmud envied the lot of drudges bent over the furrow, and travellers lost in the waterless desert.”

One day the sultan was sitting alone, lost in his own dark world. His was more deeply dejected than usual. His inner world was bleak and the world outside looked to him blacker than ever. He refused to eat and drink, or to attend to his duties as king. There was only one thing he desired: that dark object of desire for all men lost in bottomless melancholy – death.

It was then his chief wazir came to him, informing that someone was waiting to meet him – a very old man. “If I may judge by his words,” said the wazir, “he is the greatest sage, the wisest doctor, and the most extraordinary magician who has ever lived among the sons of men.” The sultan silently agreed to meet him.

The withered old man who entered did not kiss the ground in front of the sultan or bow down deeply, as was the custom. Instead he announced in a voice that reflected nothing but authority that he has come to make him, the sultan, conscious of the gifts which Allah had showered upon him. He then took the sultan by hand and dragged him roughly towards one of the four windows of the chamber in which they were. “Open!” he commanded pointing at the window. Obediently Sultan Mahmud opened the window. “Look!” the old man commanded again.

“Sultan Mahmud put his head out of the window and beheld a vast army of riders pouring down upon him from the mountain citadel, and waving naked swords. The first lines had already come to the palace foot and were climbing the walls with a clamour of war and death. Mahmud understood that his troops had mutinied, and came to kill him. He changed colour and cried: ‘There is no God save Allah! This is the hour of my destiny!’”

The old man immediately shut the window and opened it again in a single movement. The army had disappeared now. The whole palace stood enveloped in peace, as did the city around it with its four hundred minarets.

Without giving Sultan Mahmud time to recover, the old man then took him to the second window. What the sultan saw when he opened it and looked out made him recoil in horror. “The four hundred minarets of the mosques, the domes of the palace, the thousand fair terraces stretching as far as the eye could reach, were all one flaming fire, fanned by cries of terror, and belching up black smoke to hide the sun. A savage wind whooped on the flames towards the palace, until the fair building was only cut off from that red ocean by the fresh green of the gardens.” But when the old man shut the window and opened it again, the fire had disappeared and everything stood bathed in serenity everywhere.

Again the old man rushed the sultan to the third window through which he saw a furious Nile rushing towards the city to swallow it up. The waves were so tall that the tallest terraces were already under water and the river was rushing towards the palace in a violent rage. The flood had disappeared when the old man closed the window and opened it again.

What Sultan Mahmud saw through the fourth window to which the old man had dragged him without giving him time to relax was not the green fields that were there, carpeted with roses and sweet basil, narcissus and jasmine, thickets of orange trees. There were no sweet singing birds there that usually filled the whole place with their wonderful music. Instead, Mahmud saw “a red and white desert of terror burned by an inexorable sun; among its aching rocks laired starving jackals and hyenas; vile snakes sped swiftly to and fro upon it.” The sight disappeared and the green reappeared, teeming in flowers and fruits and singing birds as the old man closed and opened the window once again.

Mahmud was now utterly confused and terrified. He was no more sure whether he was awake or asleep, sane or insane. But the old man gave him no time to relax and collect himself. Instead he dragged the sultan to a small fountain that was in the chamber and commanded “Look!” pointing at the water at the base of the fountain. As Mahmud bent down to look into it, two old hands with unbelievable power forced his head under the water.

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Sultan Mahmud now found himself shipwrecked at the foot a mountain that overlooked the sea. He still wore his royal clothes and his crown. At some distance were a group of rough looking people. They were looking at him and making rude gestures. He walked towards the group and announced: “I am Sultan Mahmud. Depart!”

The people laughed at him all the more. The chief of the group came to him and removed his clothes and picked up his crown. He threw the whole lot the sea, and told him, ‘Dress sensibly.” He forced the sultan to wear the coarse farmer’s clothes they were wearing. “Come and work with us,” he told Mahmud, “for in our country those who do not work must starve.”

“I do not know how to work,’ Sultan Mahmud objected. ‘But you can be an ass,’ retorted the man. ‘Anyone can be an ass.”

They dumped all their tools on him and he staggered along behind them, carrying their spades, harrows, pickaxes and rakes. When he reached the village, he was shut into an old stable and given an onion and some stale bread to eat. By the morning, he found that he had turned into an ass – but with all his human memories intact.

In the morning he was taken out for ploughing the field. He refused to budge from his place and they beat him brutally. He brayed in intolerable humiliation and agony. For braying was the only thing he could do now – he was a donkey and had no human speech. Finding him stubborn and useless, the farmers sold him to a miller.

The miller blindfolded him and tied him to the mill, forcing him to turn the mill for hours at a stretch without a break. The miller mercilessly used his goad and stick on him, apart from the constant shower of curses and kicks. His food was a daily ration of beans along with a bucket of water and his only rest was the time he took to eat the beans and drink the water. The former sultan now kept treading along from dawn to dusk turning around the mill, walking in his own dung and urine all the time.

It was five years later that an accident saved from the miller – one day the roof of the mill collapsed on his head. Sultan Mahmud found himself a human being once again.

He now found himself a stranger in an unknown city where an old man spoke kindly to him. The old man enquired if he would be staying in that city for long, adding that he would be welcome there since he was young, strong and handsome. “I would stay in any place where they did not feed me beans,” replied Mahmud.

The old man assured him that he does not have to worry on that account – he would be eating the best food possible every day of his life. “Now,” he continued, “go and stand outside the hammam at the corner of this street and ask every woman as she comes out if she is married or single. When one tells you she is single, you will become her husband instantly, for that is the law of our land. But be very careful not to omit a single woman from your questioning, or you will find yourself in grave trouble; for that is also the law our land.”

The first female Mahmud saw coming out of the hammam was a pretty girl of thirteen. “This would console me for all my troubles,” he thought. He asked her his question and the girl informed him she had already married a year ago.

The next woman to come out of the hammam was an ugly old hag. Mahmud shivered as he saw her – he had never seen a woman half as monstrous as she was. “I would rather die of hunger or become an ass again than marry this venerable ruin,” he thought. But the old man who had befriended him had talked of the consequences of leaving out any woman who came out of the public bath. He asked his question, and, to his relief, the woman told him she was married.

The next woman to come out was infinitely older and uglier than this one. Mahmud had never seen anything – anything at all – as disgusting as this one was. But he had to ask his question – he had no choice. “Are you married or single?” he asked her in a voice quaking with terror at the prospect of having to marry her. And pat came her reply, “Single, O eye of my eye.”

“I am an ass, good aunt, I am an ass! Look at my ears, look at my tail! Nice old women do not marry asses,” he told her in a begging voice. But she had already fallen in love with him. She was taking steps towards him, her mouth poised for a kiss, her harms spread out to gather him in them. Her hands were now holding his head in them and she was bringing her mouth to his.

Mahmud shook his head in violent disgust. He was finding it difficult to breathe. He fought for air, fought for his life with all his might and with a final frenzied struggle, pulled his head back.

He found he had pulled his head out of the fountain and was struggling to breathe again. He looked around. He was in his palace. His wazir was standing on his right and the old man was on his left. There was one of his favourite slave girls standing in front of him, holding out to him on a gold salver a cup of sherbet that he had commanded a few moments before the wazir had come to him to inform him of the old man wanting to meet him.

Relief flooded him. He was a king. He was not shipwrecked, he was not an ass, he was not the husband of that disgusting old, old woman. Of what a pleasure it was to be a sultan, what a privilege! Sultan Mahmud wanted to shout, he wanted to sing, he wanted to dance for joy.

But the old man had begun speaking to him. “Peace be with you, Sultan Mahmud! I am here to make you conscious of the gifts that Allah has showered upon you.” With that he disappeared, leaving no trace behind, as though he had never existed at all.

Sultan Mahmud fell to his knees, weeping; he banished sorrow from his heart, and being happy, began a life that spread happiness about him.

0o0

The Taittiriya Upanishad has something incredibly beautiful to say about happiness, ananda, which is the ultimate object of search of all beings. It speaks about it in a small section called the Ananda Mimamsa – an enquiry into happiness, a study of happiness.
The Mimamsa asks us to imagine a young man. He is young, he is noble, he is educated, firm in body and strong, and he is the master of the entire earth with all its wealth. Let’s call the highest joy such a man is capable of experiencing a single unit of human happiness, says the Mimamsa.

Multiply that happiness a hundred times, continues the Mimamsa, and that is one unit of happiness of the gandharvas of earth. And a hundred times the happiness of the gandharvas on earth is one unit of the happiness of the celestial gandharvas. And a hundred times the joy of celestial gandharvas is one unit of happiness of the manes and a hundred times that is one unit of happiness of the gods in the transient heavens and a hundred times that, one unit of happiness of the sacrificial gods.

And a hundred times that happiness, says the Upanishad, is the happiness of the gods; and a hundred times that, the happiness of Indra. A hundred times that is one unit of bliss of Brihaspati; and a hundred units of that, one unit of the bliss of Prajapati. The happiness of Prajapati, multiplied one hundred times, is one measure of the bliss of Brahma.

As the Upanishad makes this count, it tells us at each stage: and that is also the bliss of a man versed in wisdom and free from desires. That is, the young man, cultured, educated, healthy, owning the entire earth with all its wealth experiences no more happiness than the man versed in wisdom and is free from desires. Indra experiences no more happiness than the man versed in wisdom and is free from desires. Nor does Brihaspati, Prajapati or Brahma experience any more happiness than the man versed in wisdom and is free from desires.

The highest happiness belongs to a man versed in wisdom and is free from desires. A man who has learnt to accept things as they are and surrender to them. A man who is not a victim to the fires of insatiable desire.

As the cheery smile and happy greeting of my milkman shows, one can be happy in the most ordinary circumstances too.

And as the instance of the executive who makes several lakhs every month shows, and as the instance of my doctor friend who feels he is less fortunate than the rikshaw puller shows, one need not necessarily be happy in the middle of riches.

A sultan can be unhappy too, until he learns to count his good fortunes.

Happiness comes from being contented and accepting. Where there is no contentment or acceptance, there is no happiness.

Years ago a Christian nun who was then my student gifted to me a copy of the Bible. Giving the book to me she wrote on the front page, quoting the Bible itself: “Happy the man who finds wisdom.”

Wisdom is finding contentment. Wisdom is finding acceptance. Wisdom is counting one’s blessings.

It is not the rich man that finds happiness. It is not the powerful man that finds happiness. It is not the famous man that finds happiness.

It is only the wise man that finds happiness.

Happiness is finding contentment. Happiness is finding acceptance. Happiness is counting one’s blessings.

0o0

I know an executive whose income runs into several lakhs per month and yet rarely have I seen him smiling.

In contrast, one of the happiest faces I have seen is that of my milkman Ketan. It may be peak winter, as it is now, or it may be raining torrentially as it was a couple of months ago – but he invariably greets me with a cheery good morning as he comes to deliver milk packets every day without fail. In the rainy season he wears a rain coat and goes from house to house to deliver the milk, stopping his bicycle in front of each house and getting down to walk to the front door. His clothes will be drenched in spite of the raincoat and inside the clothes, his body will be drenched. In winter, he would be shivering inside the old windcheater he wears. But that does not reduce his smile or the cheerfulness in his voice.

I made a social visit to a doctor sometime last year. We were friends, sort of. He is on the staff of a large hospital as a fulltime senior doctor, and saw patients at home before he went to the hospital in the morning – private practice. When he came home for lunch, he again saw patients. In the evening when he came back from the hospital, there were more patients waiting for him at home – he spent two or three more hours seeing them then.

When I visited the doctor on that day, he had finished his consultancies for the day and was somewhat relaxed. His wife brought us tea and we talked over the tea. Or rather, he talked and we listened – his wife, my wife and I. And he talked for more than an hour and a half, until I said we had to go, it was getting late, and he reluctantly stopped.

What the doctor talked about for an hour and half was about how his lot was worse than that of a rickshawwalla. Literally. The bitter doctor bickered about how the riskshawwalla makes more money in terms of the investments he has made. Looking back later we found it difficult to believe this, but he had earnestly and sincerely argued for full ninety minutes that he earned less in terms of his investments compared to a rickshaw puller. He spoke of the years he had spent as a student working hard so that he can join medicine, of the years he had spent as a medical student, of the years he had spent as intern, of the years he had spent as a fresh doctor; he spoke of the hours he had to study during each of these years and of the hardships he had to put up with, of the nights of sleep he lost in the process, and of the money he had invested at each stage. What did a rickshaw puller invest, he asked me rhetorically. Wasn’t the rickshawwalla making more money than he was?

0o0

I have always loved the Arabian Nights, right from my childhood days when I read stories of Sindbad, Alladin, Hatim Tai, Harun al Rashid, and of course of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. [Once, some thirty years ago, I took a group of, mostly, executives from two of India’s leading corporate houses for a fifteen-day study and meditation camp in the Himalayas. The executives were all older than me, I was the youngest. I remember the group in a moment of fun naming me Ali Baba and themselves the forty thieves – they were forty in number. I enjoyed it.] I have with me different versions of the Nights and I love picking up a volume and reading a story randomly every now and then.

Yesterday I came across a volume of Powys Mathers’ translation of the Nights in a used books shop and purchased it – I have a particular affection for this translation, done from the literal and complete version of Dr JC Mardrus’ original French translation of the Nights. Later, in the evening, I began reading the volume. One of the stories I read was The Tale of The Two Lives of Sultan Mahmud. This is how the story, told by Scheherazade starting on the eight-hundred and nineteenth night, begins:

“It is related, O auspicious King, that Sultan Mahmud, who was one of the wisest and most glorious of the Egyptian rulers, used often to sit alone in his palace, weighted down by a causeless sadness and beholding the world black before his eyes. At these times, life was tasteless to him and without significance; yes, even though Allah had given him, without stint, health and youth, power and glory, and for his capital, the most delicious city of the earth, where his eyes might ever be rejoiced by flowers, serene skies and women gilded like the waters of the Nile. These gifts were forgotten during the hours of royal sadness and Mahmud envied the lot of drudges bent over the furrow, and travellers lost in the waterless desert.”

One day the sultan was sitting alone, lost in his own dark world. His was more deeply dejected than usual. His inner world was bleak and the world outside looked to him blacker than ever. He refused to eat and drink, or to attend to his duties as king. There was only one thing he desired: that dark object of desire for all men lost in bottomless melancholy – death.

It was then his chief wazir came to him, informing that someone was waiting to meet him – a very old man. “If I may judge by his words,” said the wazir, “he is the greatest sage, the wisest doctor, and the most extraordinary magician who has ever lived among the sons of men.” The sultan silently agreed to meet him.

The withered old man who entered did not kiss the ground in front of the sultan or bow down deeply, as was the custom. Instead he announced in a voice that reflected nothing but authority that he has come to make him, the sultan, conscious of the gifts which Allah had showered upon him. He then took the sultan by hand and dragged him roughly towards one of the four windows of the chamber in which they were. “Open!” he commanded pointing at the window. Obediently Sultan Mahmud opened the window. “Look!” the old man commanded again.

“Sultan Mahmud put his head out of the window and beheld a vast army of riders pouring down upon him from the mountain citadel, and waving naked swords. The first lines had already come to the palace foot and were climbing the walls with a clamour of war and death. Mahmud understood that his troops had mutinied, and came to kill him. He changed colour and cried: ‘There is no God save Allah! This is the hour of my destiny!’”

The old man immediately shut the window and opened it again in a single movement. The army had disappeared now. The whole palace stood enveloped in peace, as did the city around it with its four hundred minarets.

Without giving Sultan Mahmud time to recover, the old man then took him to the second window. What the sultan saw when he opened it and looked out made him recoil in horror. “The four hundred minarets of the mosques, the domes of the palace, the thousand fair terraces stretching as far as the eye could reach, were all one flaming fire, fanned by cries of terror, and belching up black smoke to hide the sun. A savage wind whooped on the flames towards the palace, until the fair building was only cut off from that red ocean by the fresh green of the gardens.” But when the old man shut the window and opened it again, the fire had disappeared and everything stood bathed in serenity everywhere.

Again the old man rushed the sultan to the third window through which he saw a furious Nile rushing towards the city to swallow it up. The waves were so tall that the tallest terraces were already under water and the river was rushing towards the palace in a violent rage. The flood had disappeared when the old man closed the window and opened it again.

What Sultan Mahmud saw through the fourth window to which the old man had dragged him without giving him time to relax was not the green fields that were there, carpeted with roses and sweet basil, narcissus and jasmine, thickets of orange trees. There were no sweet singing birds there that usually filled the whole place with their wonderful music. Instead, Mahmud saw “a red and white desert of terror burned by an inexorable sun; among its aching rocks laired starving jackals and hyenas; vile snakes sped swiftly to and fro upon it.” The sight disappeared and the green reappeared, teeming in flowers and fruits and singing birds as the old man closed and opened the window once again.

Mahmud was now utterly confused and terrified. He was no more sure whether he was awake or asleep, sane or insane. But the old man gave him no time to relax and collect himself. Instead he dragged the sultan to a small fountain that was in the chamber and commanded “Look!” pointing at the water at the base of the fountain. As Mahmud bent down to look into it, two old hands with unbelievable power forced his head under the water.

0o0

Sultan Mahmud now found himself shipwrecked at the foot a mountain that overlooked the sea. He still wore his royal clothes and his crown. At some distance were a group of rough looking people. They were looking at him and making rude gestures. He walked towards the group and announced: “I am Sultan Mahmud. Depart!”

The people laughed at him all the more. The chief of the group came to him and removed his clothes and picked up his crown. He threw the whole lot the sea, and told him, ‘Dress sensibly.” He forced the sultan to wear the coarse farmer’s clothes they were wearing. “Come and work with us,” he told Mahmud, “for in our country those who do not work must starve.”

“I do not know how to work,’ Sultan Mahmud objected. ‘But you can be an ass,’ retorted the man. ‘Anyone can be an ass.”

They dumped all their tools on him and he staggered along behind them, carrying their spades, harrows, pickaxes and rakes. When he reached the village, he was shut into an old stable and given an onion and some stale bread to eat. By the morning, he found that he had turned into an ass – but with all his human memories intact.

In the morning he was taken out for ploughing the field. He refused to budge from his place and they beat him brutally. He brayed in intolerable humiliation and agony. For braying was the only thing he could do now – he was a donkey and had no human speech. Finding him stubborn and useless, the farmers sold him to a miller.

The miller blindfolded him and tied him to the mill, forcing him to turn the mill for hours at a stretch without a break. The miller mercilessly used his goad and stick on him, apart from the constant shower of curses and kicks. His food was a daily ration of beans along with a bucket of water and his only rest was the time he took to eat the beans and drink the water. The former sultan now kept treading along from dawn to dusk turning around the mill, walking in his own dung and urine all the time.

It was five years later that an accident saved from the miller – one day the roof of the mill collapsed on his head. Sultan Mahmud found himself a human being once again.

He now found himself a stranger in an unknown city where an old man spoke kindly to him. The old man enquired if he would be staying in that city for long, adding that he would be welcome there since he was young, strong and handsome. “I would stay in any place where they did not feed me beans,” replied Mahmud.

The old man assured him that he does not have to worry on that account – he would be eating the best food possible every day of his life. “Now,” he continued, “go and stand outside the hammam at the corner of this street and ask every woman as she comes out if she is married or single. When one tells you she is single, you will become her husband instantly, for that is the law of our land. But be very careful not to omit a single woman from your questioning, or you will find yourself in grave trouble; for that is also the law our land.”

The first female Mahmud saw coming out of the hammam was a pretty girl of thirteen. “This would console me for all my troubles,” he thought. He asked her his question and the girl informed him she had already married a year ago.

The next woman to come out of the hammam was an ugly old hag. Mahmud shivered as he saw her – he had never seen a woman half as monstrous as she was. “I would rather die of hunger or become an ass again than marry this venerable ruin,” he thought. But the old man who had befriended him had talked of the consequences of leaving out any woman who came out of the public bath. He asked his question, and, to his relief, the woman told him she was married.

The next woman to come out was infinitely older and uglier than this one. Mahmud had never seen anything – anything at all – as disgusting as this one was. But he had to ask his question – he had no choice. “Are you married or single?” he asked her in a voice quaking with terror at the prospect of having to marry her. And pat came her reply, “Single, O eye of my eye.”

“I am an ass, good aunt, I am an ass! Look at my ears, look at my tail! Nice old women do not marry asses,” he told her in a begging voice. But she had already fallen in love with him. She was taking steps towards him, her mouth poised for a kiss, her harms spread out to gather him in them. Her hands were now holding his head in them and she was bringing her mouth to his.

Mahmud shook his head in violent disgust. He was finding it difficult to breathe. He fought for air, fought for his life with all his might and with a final frenzied struggle, pulled his head back.

He found he had pulled his head out of the fountain and was struggling to breathe again. He looked around. He was in his palace. His wazir was standing on his right and the old man was on his left. There was one of his favourite slave girls standing in front of him, holding out to him on a gold salver a cup of sherbet that he had commanded a few moments before the wazir had come to him to inform him of the old man wanting to meet him.

Relief flooded him. He was a king. He was not shipwrecked, he was not an ass, he was not the husband of that disgusting old, old woman. Of what a pleasure it was to be a sultan, what a privilege! Sultan Mahmud wanted to shout, he wanted to sing, he wanted to dance for joy.

But the old man had begun speaking to him. “Peace be with you, Sultan Mahmud! I am here to make you conscious of the gifts that Allah has showered upon you.” With that he disappeared, leaving no trace behind, as though he had never existed at all.

Sultan Mahmud fell to his knees, weeping; he banished sorrow from his heart, and being happy, began a life that spread happiness about him.

0o0

The Taittiriya Upanishad has something incredibly beautiful to say about bliss, ananda, which is the ultimate object of search of all beings, in a small section called the Ananda Mimamsa – an enquiry into happiness, a study of happiness. The mimamsa asks us to imagine a young man. He is young, he is noble, he is educated, firm in body and strong, and he owns the entire earth with all its wealth. The Upanishad then says let’s call the highest joy such a man is capable of experiencing a single unit of human happiness. Multiply that happiness a hundred times, and that is one unit of happiness of the gandharvas of earth. And a hundred times the happiness of the gandharvas on earth is one unit of the happiness of the celestial gandharvas. And a hundred times the joy of celestial gandharvas is one unit of happiness of the manes and a hundred times that is one unit of happiness of the gods in the temporary heavens and a hundred times that, one unit of happiness of the sacrificial gods; and a hundred times that happiness, says the Upanishad, is the happiness of the gods; and a hundred times that, the happiness of Indra.

A hundred times that, continues the Upanishad, is one unit of bliss of Brihaspati; and a hundred units of that, one unit of the bliss of Prajapati. The happiness of Prajapati, multiplied one hundred times, is one measure of the bliss of Brahma.

As the Upanishad makes this count, it tells us at each stage: and that is also the bliss of a man versed in wisdom and free from desires. That is, the young man, cultured, educated, healthy, owning the entire earth with all its wealth experiences no more happiness than the man versed in wisdom and is free from desires. Indra experiences no more happiness than the man versed in wisdom and is free from desires. Nor does Brihaspati, Prajapati or Brahma experience any more happiness than the man versed in wisdom and is free from desires.

The highest happiness belongs to a man versed in wisdom and is free from desires.

As the cheery smile and happy greeting of my milkman shows, one can be happy in the most ordinary circumstances too.

And as the instance of the executive who makes several lakhs every month shows, and as the instance of my doctor friend who feels he is less fortunate than the rikshaw puller shows, one need not necessarily be happy in the middle of riches.

A sultan can be unhappy too, until he learns to count his good fortunes.

Happiness comes from being contented and accepting. Where there is no contentment or acceptance, there is no happiness.

Years ago a Christian nun who was then my student gifted to me a copy of the Bible. Giving the book to me she wrote on the front page, quoting the Bible itself: “Happy the man who finds wisdom.”

Wisdom is finding contentment. Wisdom is finding acceptance. Wisdom is counting one’s blessings.

It is not the rich man that finds happiness. It is not the powerful man that finds happiness. It is not the famous man that finds happiness.

It is only the wise man that finds happiness.

Happiness is finding contentment. Happiness is finding acceptance. Happiness is counting one’s blessings.

0o0

The Moth and the Candle: A Sufi Fable

2010-12-30T07:59:00.000-08:00

“One night the moths gathered together, tormented by the desire to unite themselves with the candle. All of them said: ‘We must find one who can give us some news of that for which we seek so earnestly.’

“One of the moths went to a candle afar off and saw within the light of a candle. He came back and told the others what he had seen, and began to describe the candle as intelligently as he was able to do. But the wise moth, who was chief of their assembly, observed: ‘He has no real information to give us of the candle.’

“Another moth visited the candle. He passed close to the light and drew near to it. With his wings, he touched the flames of that which he desired; the heat of the candle drove him back and he was vanquished. He also returned, and revealed something of the mystery, in explaining a little of what union with the candle meant, but the wise moth said to him: ‘Thine explanation is of no more real worth than that of thy comrade.’

“A third moth rose up, intoxicated with love, to hurl himself violently into the flame of the candle. He threw himself forward and stretched out his antennae toward the flame. As he entered completely into its embrace, his members became red like the flame itself. When the wise moth saw from afar that the candle had identified the moth with itself, and had given to it its own light, he said: ‘This moth has accomplished his desire; but he alone comprehends that to which he has attained. None others knows it, and that is all.’” [Attar’s Fables]

0o0
One of the truths the beautiful fable tells us is that there is no way of knowing the Ultimate Truth, except through experiencing it by becoming one with it, no way of knowing God except through experiencing him by becoming one with him . Those who want to experience God must be willing to lose themselves in God. God cannot be known from the outside. He cannot be experienced so long as you are there as different from him. And when you cease to be, when you lose yourself in him, when you become one with him, then and then alone you know him.

Sri Ramakrishna, the great mystic, used to speak of a salt doll that goes to measure the depth of the ocean. But when the doll enters the ocean, it becomes one with the ocean. There is no more any measuring then, there is only a becoming – becoming one with the ocean.

It is this experience of the salt doll becoming one with the ocean that sages from all over the world give voice to in ecstatic words.

Here is Vak Ambhrini, the eloquent poet sage of the Rig Veda giving voice to her experience of becoming one with the Ocean. She says:

“ I move with the Rudras and with the Vasus, I wander with the Adityas and the Vishwadevas. I hold aloft both Mitra and Varuna, and also Indra and Agni and the twin Ashvins.

“I uphold Soma the exuberant; I uphold Tvasta, Pushan, and Bhaga. I endow with wealth the offerer of oblation, the worshipper and the pious presser of the Soma.

“I am the ruling Queen, the amasser of treasures, full of wisdom, first of those who are worthy of worship. That me the Gods have installed in all places, with many homes for me to enter and dwell in.

“Through me alone all eat the food that helps them see, breathe and hear the spoken word. He is not aware of me, yet he dwells in me alone. Listen, you who know! For, the words I speak to you deserve your trust.

It is I who announces the tidings that the gods and men alike rejoice to hear. The man I love, I make mighty in strength. I make him a priest, a sage, or a learned scholar, as I please.

“I bend the bow for Rudra that his arrow may slay the hater of the words of sacred wisdom. I rouse the people, and make them strive. I have entered the Earth and Heaven, filling everything.

“I give birth to the creator in the heavens atop the world and my own origin is deep in the ocean, in the cosmic waters. From there I permeate all existing worlds, and even touch yonder heavens with my forehead.

“It is my breath that blows as the mighty wind, while I hold together all the worlds.
Beyond the heavens and above the earth I tower, such am I in my might and splendour”.

Yoga is the path to lose yourself so that you can be one with him and know him. Devotion is the path to lose yourself so that you can be one with him and know him. And meditation is the path to lose yourself so that you can be one with him and know him. This losing yourself and knowing him by becoming one with him is also known is jnana, as in jnana-yoga. This is the knowledge that wisdom books from across the world declare as the only knowledge worth knowing.

0o0

And another thing that the fable tells us is that there is no way of communicating that experience. To communicate, you must exist as a separate individual. And so long as you exist as a separate individual, you really have nothing to communicate.

Mind is like the moth that goes near it, but cannot experience it. That is why the Upanishads say: yato vacho nivartante aprapya manasa saha – the Ultimate Truth is that from which words return, having not attained, along with the mind.

In fact, the mind is the obstacle in attaining it. It is the mind that stands in the way of our experiencing it. And that is why Zen says there is only one thing to be attained: no-mind. When you attain the no-mind, everything else is already attained.

In the Chhandogya Upanishad, when young Shvetaketu’s father asks him if he had learnt that by which one hears what cannot be heard, by which one perceives what cannot be perceived, by which one knows what cannot be known, it is this knowledge he was talking about.

Just as the mind is the obstacle in knowing the Truth, so too are words obstacles. For it cannot be communicated through words either.

Actually, it cannot be communicated at all. But if there is a means of communicating it, then it is silence. Silence is the nearest means through which communication is possible. And that is why the Sufi sage poet Jalaluddin Rumi rued: “I wonder why I ever thought to use language.”

Silence can communicate it – perhaps. Dance can communicate it – perhaps. Singing can communicate it – perhaps. But certainly not words, not language, not reason, not the intellect.

It is gunge ka gur, sugar in the mouth of the dumb one, as we say in Hindi. When it comes to communicating it, the eyes are without words and words are without eyes – nain bin gira, gir bin naina. Those who have seen it do not speak, and those who speak of it have not seen it, goes a saying in Tamil: kandavar mindatillai, mindavar kandatillai.

The old story of ten blind men and the elephant tells us that each experienced the elephant differently since each felt with his hands a different part of the elephant. The one who felt its leg felt that the elephant is like a pillar. The one who felt its tail felt it is like a broom. The one who felt its stomach felt it is like a rock. And the one who felt its ears felt it is like the winnow. In their case, none of them knows the elephant as it is, but at the same time, everyone of them has some partial knowledge of it. But in the case of God, no partial knowledge is possible. God has no parts, no limbs, no qualities, and therefore the only way to know him is the way the moth experienced the flame in Attar’s fable.

It is for this reason that all theology is wrong and all philosophy is wrong. Because theologies and philosophies are products of the human mind and the mind can never reach it.

A mystic once compared the wisdom of those who have experienced it, like the seers of the Upanishads and mystics from other cultures, and the wisdom of philosophers and theologians. Theologians and philosophers are like a man fast asleep, he said. He has covered himself from feet to head with a thick blanket so that no light can disturb him. And all the windows of his room are closed. And from within his thick blanket, in the room with all the windows closed, fast sleep, he is trying to theorize about the morning. Whereas the seer is awake. He has thrown the blanket off. He has gone to the window and opened it. And he is looking out through it at the rising sun. He can see the glory that is the east. He can see the birds and beasts waking up. He can feel the morning breeze and smell its fragrance. He can see the trees awakening and the plants swinging in the breeze. He can see people going about their different jobs. He can hear the laughter of the children awake and at play.

The arguments of the philosopher and the theologian are like the arguments of the sleeping man. And what the seer is trying to do is to wake us up, so that we will throw the blanket off, get up and go to the window, open it and look out. He is not interested in logic or arguments, nor is he interested in constructing systems of thought. He may use logic, he may use arguments, he may use any other tool available to him, but he is not interested in any of those. His only interest is in waking you up. He has experienced the morning, and he wants you to experience it.

It is in this sense that the wisdom of the east begins with experience and ends in experience – begins with the seer’s experience and ends in our experience.

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Nalayani: the Past Life of Draupadi

2010-12-08T05:07:00.000-08:00

[Translated from the original Sanskrit]

[The Kumbhakonam Edition of the Mahabharata gives us several details that are not available in the KM Ganguli translation of the epic or in the Gita Press edition. The following is one such instance. I believe there is no other English translation of this available at the moment. The passage below constitutes Chapter 212 and 213 of the Adi Parva of the epic in the Kumbhakonam Edition, 1906. In the narrative sequence, these chapters come after Arjuna has won Draupadi, and immediately before all the five Pandava brothers wed her.]

Vyasa Said: Oh king, do not grieve over your daughter becoming wife to all five Pandavas. Her mother had earlier prayed that Draupadi should become the wife of five men. Yaja and Upayaja, constantly engaged in dharma, made it possible through their tapas that she should have five husbands and that is how Draupadi was attained by the five Pandavas as their wife.

It is now time for your whole family to celebrate. For in the whole world there is no one superior to you and you are now invincible – no one in the whole world has the power to defeat you. Let me explain further how she attained five husbands. Listen to me, your heart free from sorrow.

In another lifetime, your daughter was called Nalayani, a woman of impeccable virtue. She served her husband Maudgalya, an old leper, with great devotion. The man was mere bones and skin, bitter by nature, lustful, jealous and prone to quick rages. He stank terribly – his body emitted every foul smell. Advanced in age, his skin was wrinkled, his whole body crooked. His head had grown bald and his skin and nails had begun to wear off. Nalayani served her husband who practiced severe penances; she lived by eating his left over food.

Then one day, while he was eating, his thumb fell off into the food. Without the least hesitation, Nalayani removed it from the food and ate the leftover food. The man, who had the power to do as he wished, was pleased with this. He asked her to ask for a boon.

“I am not old or evil-tempered, nor jealous or hot tempered,” he told her. “My body does not smell, nor am I short in height or lust-filled. My blessings on you, beloved. Now tell me how I can delight you and where you wish to live and enjoy. I shall do all that you wish, tell me whatever is in your mind.”
When he repeatedly asked her to ask for a boon, she asked for one.

Maudgalya was a man of pure actions and he was now pleased with her. He had the power to give boons and he gave all one wished. So Nalayani of blameless beauty told her husband: “O lord, unthinkable are your powers. May you attain great fame in the world by dividing yourself into five and pleasuring me in all those five forms! And after that I want you to become one again and continue to pleasure me.”

“Let it be so!” the great seer Maudgalya of surpassing spiritual power told Nalayani of beautiful hair and alluring smile. He then turned himself into five and pleasured her in those five forms in every imaginable way.

He then spent time in the ashrams of sages worshipped by them, moving from one ashram to the other, assuming any form he desired. He went to the world of the gods and there moved among the celestial sages taking her with him. He lived as a guest in the palace of Indra, worshipped by Shachi, his food the ambrosia of the gods.

Desiring to enjoy pleasures with Nalayani, also known as Mahendrasena, he, the great lord, boarded the divine chariot of the sun god and moved around with her. He then went to Mt Meru and started living on the mountain. He dived into the celestial Ganga with her. He lived in the rays of the moon as the never-ceasing wind does.

When the great sage took on the shape of a mountain range, because of his ascetic power she became a great river in the middle of the mountains. When the sage transformed himself into a sal tree full of flowers, she attained the form of a creeper and wound herself around him. Every time he assumed a body, she traveled with her husband assuming a similar body. And so living, her love for him and his love for her increased in equal measure. The great sage continuously reveled with her using his yogic powers and she, as Divine Will would have it, gave him pleasures in turn.

All this time, she remained the sage’s single wife, like Arundhati to Vasishtha and Sita to Rama, and like them entirely devoted to her husband. In this respect, she became nobler than Damayanti’s mother. Her mind became totally engrossed in the great brahmana Maudgalya, as though her soul itself had merged with him, and it never wavered from him.

This, oh great king, is the truth and for that reason, never think of it in other ways. It is this Nalayani who is born as your daughter Krishnaa from the sacrificial pit, as some divine plan would have it.

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Drupada said: Great brahmana, best knower of all scriptures, tell me the reason why the auspicious Nalayani took birth in my sacrifice.

Vyasa said: Listen to me, King, of how Lord Rudra gave her a boon and why the glorious one was born in your house. Let me tell you more of Krishnaa’s former life story.

Famous by the name Indrasena, the noble Nalayani travelled around with her husband Maudgalya, no worries in her mind. For Maudgalya, those years of reveling with her passed like moments. And then one day, after years of enjoying them, the sage lost interest in pleasures. Desiring the highest dharma, his mind was now turned towards brahma-yoga. The great sage, now keen on austerities, abandoned her.

Abandoned by him, oh great king, Nalayani fell to the earth. As she fell, addressing Maudgalya, she said: “Do not abandon me, great sage. I have been enjoying pleasures as my heart desired, and I am still not satisfied with the enjoyment.”

And Maudgalya told her: “You speak to me without any compunction about things that should not be spoken of. And you are causing obstacles on my path of tapas. So listen to what I say. You shall be born on the earth as a princess and will attain great repute. You shall be the daughter of the noble-hearted king of Panchala. You shall then have five renowned men for your husbands. With those handsome men, you shall long enjoy the pleasures of sex.

Vaishampayana said: Cursed thus, the glorious Nalayani became miserable and went to a forest. Still discontented with the enjoyment of pleasures, she worshipped the Lord of the Gods through tapas. She gave up hopes and expectations, fasted with only the air as her food, and following the diurnal course of the sun, began practicing the tapas of the five fires – with the burning sun above her and four burning fires surrounding her. Rudra, the Lord of Beasts, the Great Monarch of all the worlds, the Great God, was pleased with her severe penance and gave her a boon. “You will be reborn again and in that birth you shall be a lustrous woman; and you shall have five renowned men for your husbands. They will all have bodies like that of Indra and in valour too they shall be like Indra. And there you shall achieve for the gods their great work.”

Hearing this, the woman said: “I requested you for one husband. Why have you given me these five husbands? A woman shall have one man. How can a woman belong to many men?”

And the Great Lord said: “You told me five times, repeatedly, to give you a husband. Noble woman, you shall have five husbands and you shall find happiness with all of them.”

The woman replied: “It has been decided long ago that it is the dharma of a woman to have only one husband, whereas it is the dharma of a man, as practiced by many, to have several wives. This is the dharma for women that the sages decided in the past. And it has also been said that a single woman would be the partner of man in religious rituals. And we also see in the world that a woman has a single husband, just as she has a single virginhood – once ended, it never comes back. The smritis allow a second husband to a woman for the purpose of conceiving through niyoga in an exigency. If she goes to a third woman, that is considered a sin and when she has a fourth man, she falls and becomes a prostitute. This is the path of dharma and for that reason I cannot accept many husbands. That is something not seen practiced in the world and how could I be absolved from the sin of corruption if that happens?”

The Great Lord said: “In the past women lived a free life sexually and were considered pure after their monthly periods. It was not just once that you asked me [for a husband]. But having many husbands shall not be against dharma for you.”

The woman replied: “If I am to have many husbands, and if I desire sex [rati] with them all, I request you to grant me that I shall remain a virgin after my unions with each of my husbands. In the past I attained spiritual merit [siddhi] through service to my husband. I also attained desire for sexual pleasures through that service. Grant me that I attain both in my coming birth too.”

The Great Lord said: “Listen to me, auspicious woman. Rati [sexual pleasure/the goddess of sexual pleasure] and Siddhi [spiritual progress/the goddess of spiritual progress] do not enjoy each other’s company. In your next birth too, endowed with great beauty and good fortune, enjoying with your five husbands after regaining your virginity repeatedly, you shall attain great glory. Go now and you will see a man standing in the waters of the Ganga. Woman of beautiful smile, bring him, the lord of the gods, to me.”

When the Great Lord, Rudra, the lord that has become everything, spoke thus, she went round him in reverence and walked towards the Ganga, the river of great merit that flows in the three worlds.

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Translation by Satya Chaitanya

Need: Where Do We Draw the Lakshman Rekha

2010-11-07T00:28:00.000-07:00

Following a class presentation by students in a course in Leadership Excellence that I teach at XLRI School of Business and Human Resources, we were discussing some aspects of the presentation in my previous class when a student raised a very significant question: When do we say enough when it comes to needs? Where do we draw the line? In other words, when does need become greed? Is there a Lakshman Rekha to needs within which we are safe and happy, crossing which we suffer?

There is a story by Leo Tolstoy that comes to mind when I think of this question. It is a beautiful story – one which James Joyce described in a letter to his daughter as the most beautiful story ever written by man. Joyce must have been in a particularly impressionable mood when he read the story and wrote that line, but the story is without a doubt powerful.

The story is about a farmer called Pahom. He was a small farmer in a Russian village, unhappy about his lot. When he heard that a lady who lived close to his village was selling her estate, Pahom becomes interested. At the news that one of his neighbours, another poor farmer like himself, was buying some of it, Pahom becomes restless. "Other people are buying," he tells his wife, "and we must also buy some of it. Life is becoming impossible without our own land." So they put their heads together and consider how they could buy part of land. Eventually they sell a colt they had, half of their honey bees, and hires out one of their sons as a labourer, taking his wages in advance and borrow some. He is thus able to manage half the purchase money and bought forty acres of land, on condition that the remainder would be paid in two years.

Pahom had his own land now and everything is fine. With borrowed seeds he sows the land. The harvest is good. Rather than paying back the remaining money in two years, he is able to do it in one year.

Pahom is well contented and everything works beautifully until one day he hears that many people are moving away from the village to other places. His initial reaction is to realize what a good opportunity that would be for him: he could buy their land at cheap prices and make his land bigger.

Before this could be done, however, one day a stranger comes to his home as a guest – a peasant who was passing through his village. Over dinner they sit and talk and from him Pahom learns that he is from beyond the Volga and many people from Pahom’s village have settled there. “The land is so good,” the peasant tells Pahom, “the rye sown on it grows as high as a horse, and so thick that five cuts of a sickle made a sheaf.” One peasant, he says, “had brought nothing with him but his bare hands, and now he has six horses and two cows of his own.”

Pahom’s heart leaps in delight at what he had hears. This is where he would go. He does not want to rot the rest of his life in his small village.

He goes to the place beyond the Volga to find out. The news turns out to be true. They have formed a farmer’s commune there and each farmer who joins the commune is given twenty-five acres of fertile communal land for his use. Besides, anyone who had money could buy as much freehold land as he wanted dirt cheap.

Pahom sells everything he had and reaches the commune across the Volga. He is given five shares of communal land, against his own name and that of his sons – one hundred and twenty-five acres in all

However, he soon gets used to his one hundred and twenty-five acres and begins to think that he does not have enough. The land he is farming was communal land and he wants to own land – his own freehold land. His mind constantly dwells on that thought now. And then he hears of an opportunity to buy a huge piece of land – thirteen hundred acres – being sold cheap. He begins negotiations to buy it and almost finalizes the deal for fifteen hundred roubles when a passing dealer happens to stop at Pahom’s. From his conversations with the dealer, Pahom learns of the far away land of the Bashkirs where recently the dealer has bought thirteen thousand acres for a mere one thousand roubles.

In fact, the land is free, he learns. All one has to do is to make friends with the chief of the Bashkirs by giving him some gifts – like a dressing gown, a packet of tea, some wine, maybe a few carpets and so on. The land is near a river and the soil, virgin.

Pahom forgets all about the deal he had almost made and reaches the land of the Bashkirs taking the gifts with him.

The Bashkirs are very simple people who live a life of ease and comfort without possessions in their vast land which gives them all they need without any toil. The chief is pleased with the gifts and offers him all the land he needed. “Choose whatever piece of land you like and it will be yours,” he tells him.

But Pahom is cautious. "How can I take as much as I like?" he thinks. "I must get a deed to make it secure, or else they may say, 'It is yours,' and afterwards may take it away again."

The chief agrees to make over to him the land he chooses through legal documents. The price would be one thousand roubles for all the land he can measure out in a single day.

Pahom is surprised. "But in a day you can get round a large tract of land," he says. The chief laughs. "It will all be yours!" he says. "But there is one condition: If you don't return on the same day to the spot whence you started, your money is lost."

That night Pahom does not sleep, except for managing to doze off for a few minutes before dawn. He is up before the sun rises and goes and calls the Bashkirs. He does not want to lose any time. A minute lost is a piece of land lost.

They all ascend a hillock and the chief points out the land all around and tells Pahom. "See," he says, "all this, as far as your eye can reach, is ours. You may have any part of it you like."

What Pahom sees all around him is virgin soil, flat as the palm of a man’s hand, black and fertile, lush green with breast high grass. His eyes glisten.

Placing his cap on the ground, the chief says: "This will be the mark. Start from here, and return here again. All the land you go round shall be yours."

Pahom tekes out his money and puts it in the cap. He turns to the east, stretches himself, and waits impatiently. He would start the moment he sees the first ray of the rising sun.

Pahom digs a hole and places pieces of turf one on another to make it more visible after the first thousand yards. After another thousand yards, he digs another hole and piles up some surf there too. He has covered a large distance before he sits down for breakfast. He however decides to go another three miles more in the same direction before he changes the direction.

He can hardly see the hillock he had started from when he feels he should change direction again. But there is a beautiful damp hollow of land which he does not want to leave out. He proceeds in the same direction to cover that.

When he finishes that he finds that the sun has started going down a long time ago. In fact it was approaching the western horizon when Pahom realizes there is no time to measure out a rectangular piece of land. He will have to be contented with a triangle. He will walk back straight to the hillock now. He hurriedly digs a hole and turns straight towards the hillock.

He is now walking with difficulty. Walking the whole day in the heat, digging holes and piling turf has drained every ounce of energy in him.

The sun was now fast sinking lower and lower. Pahom is possessed by feverish anxiety, making even breathing hard.

The lower side of the sun has now touched the horizon. Pahom looks at the hillock. He is still far from his goal. He begins running, removing his clothes, flinging away his cap, to become lighter. He runs like a possessed man.

A terrible fear suddenly overpowers him. Perhaps he will not be able to reach back the chief’s cap that marks the spot from where he had begun!

The sun has almost disappeared from the sky when he is close to the cap. The last ray of the sun fades away as Pahom tales a final exhausted leap and collapses on the ground, reaching out for the cap with his hands.

That is the last movement he will ever make.

It takes all of six feet of land to bury him in.

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‘Alam’ in Sanskrit means enough. ‘An-alam’ is not-enough. A person for whom things are never enough is called ‘Anala’. Conventionally this is one of the names for fire because fire never feels it is enough. The more you feed it, the more hungry it grows.

But the word anala could be used for many other things. Including our needs, including our desires.

Indian wisdom says:

na jaatu kaamah kaamaanaam upabhogena shaamyati.
havishaa krishnavartmeva bhooya eva abhivardhate.

“Never indeed is desire quenched by the enjoyment of desired objects. It grows more and more, as fire does the more you make offerings into it.”

Endless need, boundless desire, is called greed. Desire that knows no bounds.

Wisdom is recognizing where to draw the line between need and greed. And in the story of Pahom, what we find is genuine need gradually metamorphosing into greed. And once his need becomes greed, it preys upon Pahom himself.

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I found the story of Julian Mantle, the lawyer in Robin Sharma’s The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari fascinating.

Julian was the very image of a successful man by today’s standards. Tough and hard-driving, he was “willing to work eighteen-hour days for the success he believed was his destiny.”

Julian had everything one needs to succeed in today’s world. Apart from toughness, hard drive and the willingness to work endless hours, he had brilliance, fearlessness, tact, aggression, dreams of greatness, theatrics . . . everything. As years passed, his cases kept getting bigger and bigger, he pushed himself harder and harder, his prestige grew to greater and greater heights, and money poured in. Such was his obsession with work that he now slept even less – for he felt guilty whenever he was not working on a file.

“As expected, Julian became enormously successful. He achieved everything most people could ever want: a stellar professional reputation with an income in seven figures, a spectacular mansion in a neighborhood favored by celebrities, a private jet, a summer home on a tropical island and his prized possession – a shiny red Ferrari parked in the center of his driveway.

Things never seemed to slow down. There was always another blockbuster case on the horizon that was bigger than the last. No amount of preparation was ever enough for Julian. What would happen if the judge brought up this question or that question, God forbid? What would happen if our research was less than perfect?”

Eventually, Julian’s marriage failed and he stopped speaking to his father. He had begun paying the price of his success

“It showed, emotionally, physically – and spiritually. At fifty-three years of age, Julian looked as if he was in his late seventies. His face was a mass of wrinkles, a less than glorious tribute to his “take no prisoners” approach to life in general and the tremendous stress of his out-of-balance lifestyle in particular. He had lost his sense of humor and never seemed to laugh anymore. Julian’s once enthusiastic nature had been replaced by a deathly somberness. Personally, I think that his life had lost all sense of purpose.

Perhaps the saddest thing was that he had also lost his focus in the courtroom. Where he would once dazzle all those present with an eloquent and airtight closing argument, he now droned on for hours. Where once he would react gracefully to the objections of opposing counsel, he now displayed a biting sarcasm that severely tested the patience of judges.

And then it happened. This massive heart attack that brought the brilliant Julian Mantle back down to earth and reconnected him to his mortality. Right in the middle of courtroom number seven on a Monday morning, the same courtroom where we had won the Mother of All Murder Trials.”

What Robin Sharma tells us is the story of a man taken over greed. In Julian Mantle’s case, it is no more a need to succeed, but greed for success. He has crossed the Lakshman Rekha like Pahom, and now his greed preys upon himself.

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How do we recognize this Lakshman Rekha between need and greed? I think every one of us knows the answer in his heart, though many of us are not alert to that knowledge. In Pahom’s case, to begin with owning a piece of land is an absolutely genuine need for him. It has got a purpose – he is a farmer and as a farmer he needs land. But over time, his need for land becomes an end in itself. It is no more land for the sake of farming, but land for the sake of land. Now it is greed. The same is true in the case of Julian Mantle too. The need to excel, to succeed in one’s chosen profession is an absolutely genuine need. But over time this need takes over the man – when that happens it is no more a need, but greed that preys upon the heart that is its home.

The way to recognize this Lakshman Rekha is through self-awareness. And the danger lies in our self-forgetfulness.

Western culture puts it beautifully when it speaks of man selling his soul to the devil in exchange for one thing or the other. In the story of Dr Faustus, we have this concept immortalized by Ben Johnson. It is again the same story we come across in the recent movie Shortcut to Success.

Selling his soul to the devil is becoming a slave to the mind, for the devil is the human mind itself.

As the Upanishads say, the mind is beautiful so long as we are its master. And when we become its slave, it becomes an ugly monster.

Humanity today has sold its soul to the devil. We have become slaves to our mind. And what we see around us is the consequences of it: ecological imbalances, unsustainable models of consumption, our mineral resources running out, oil resources running out, the greenhouse effect that has started sinking our islands . . . And great dissatisfaction in the middle of affluence. Interestingly, in the movie Shortcut to Success, the lead character suffers precisely from this tragedy: in the middle of success beyond his wildest imagination, all joy disappears from his life.

Feverish greed is found more than anywhere else in our corporate world today. This world thrives on greed. And to question that greed is to commit a sacrilege. For, ‘Greed Is Good.” Maybe, Greed is God.

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Shakuntala: Flaming Indian Womanhood

2010-11-01T05:01:00.000-07:00

Vyasabharata 2

Shakuntala stands for all that is beautiful in Indian womanhood. She would risk her honour as a woman for the love of a man, and yet she would not take one harsh word that goes against her dignity from that man. She has the softness of the softest flower and yet she is as fierce as fire itself. She is strength that knows how to bend. She is the courage to trust. She is silence that knows how to be eloquent when the need arises.

In the Mahabharata her story is told by Vaishampayana in response to a question by King Janamejaya about his remote ancestors.

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When we first meet Shakuntala in the epic, she is the gracious ashram hostess who receives the honoured visitor Dushyanta who has just entered Sage Kanva’s ashram. The king was on a hunting trip and had reached the banks of the Malini where numerous ashrams were situated. The most famous among them was that of Sage Kanva and it was to pay his respects to Kanva that Dushyanta had gone to the ashram.

Dushyanta is surprised to see the beautiful young maiden in the ashram. Her beauty takes his breath away. Desire for her is instantly born in him. And he tells the young woman in front of him it is not the habit of his heart to desire for the undesirable and had she been a daughter of Kanva and hence a brahmana maiden, he would not have desired her. He introduces himself and asks her to tell him who she is.

Shakuntala informs him that she is the sage’s adopted daughter and he is the only father she has known all her life. She was born to the sage Vishwamitra and the apsara Menaka. The sage was doing tapas when Indra asked the celestial dancer to go and tempt him and she was the result. She was abandoned at birth by both her parents and found by Sage Kanva. She was given the name Shakuntala because the sage had found her lovingly cared for by peacocks.

Shakunta in Sanskrit means a peacock. Shakuntala is short for shakunta-laalitaa, lovingly-cared-for-by-peacocks.

By the time she finishes her story, his desire for her breaks all bounds. He wants her, and he wants her now.

“So it is the royal blood of Vishwamitra that flows through you and for that reason you are a princess and a kshatriya woman. Marry me, be my queen and live in royal comforts in my palace. You will have all the ornaments you desire, all the diamonds and jewels, finest clothes and anything else you wish for. I give you my kingdom itself.”

The king presses hard. Passion for her has destroyed all his sense.

Shakuntala asks the king to wait until her father comes back. He has gone out to the jungle to collect fruits and should be back in a short while.

But Dushyanta wouldn’t wait. Desire for her is tormenting him. He asks her to marry him by the gandharva rites, in which a man and a woman in love give themselves to each other, without waiting for the approval of parents and elders, without mantras, without priests, without rituals.

Again Shakuntala says they should wait. It is only a short while, until the sage is back, which would be any time now. But the king persists and succeeds in overcoming her objections. He grants her the one thing she desires – that her son should inherit his kingdom.

The wedding is consummated immediately.

Rather than wait for Kanva to come back, to see whom was why he had originally come to the ashram, Dushyanta decides to depart immediately, telling Shakuntala his men would soon come to escort her to his palace.

The king does not keep his promise. Shakuntala waits for Dushyanta’s people to come and take her to his palace. They do not come. She gives birth to her child in the ashram and names him Sarvadamana, All-Subduer. Still no one comes from Dushyanta. Eventually, when her son is twelve years old, Kanva, her father, reminds her it is time for her to hand over her son to his father and to let him grow up in the palace where he belongs, learning the ways of kings. Shakuntala takes her son with her and reaches Dushyanta’s court.

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Dushyanta refuses to acknowledge that he had ever met Shakuntala or had any relations with her. He refuses to acknowledge the adolescent she has brought along as his son. He calls Shakuntala a whore and the mother of a bastard child born of shameless lust.

He shows no respect even for the ashram clothes she is wearing.

At his words, Shakuntala becomes an enraged snake. This is the man she had chosen for herself thirteen years ago. This is the man to whom she had surrendered her heart and her body. This is the man who had begotten a child in her and left, promising to send his people to fetch her and then forgotten all about it. And now he is insulting her in the middle of an assembly, in the presence of his ministers and noblemen – insulting her in such crude, merciless words.

The young woman who grew up in an ashram does not know what fear is. She does not know what treachery is, what weakness is. She has received the best possible upbringing: in an atmosphere of love, kindness, truth and fearlessness. She does not care she is standing in the court of an all-powerful monarch. She does not care his ministers and nobles are listening to her. A moment ago she was embarrassed about coming to him like this and shy. But now she lashes out at him, in the only language she knows: the language of truth. “You know me well, great king,” she tells him, “and yet you shamelessly say you do not, showing total lack of culture.”

She reminds him that culture demands that a wife who comes to her husband’s place for the first time needs to be honoured, she needs to be offered worship. “You err by not worshipping me as I stand here,” asserts Shakuntala, demanding from her man the obeisance that is every woman’s right by Indian culture. “I deserve to be worshipped. And you do not offer me worship that is my due.”

Shakuntala’s power comes from her knowledge of her position, her rights. Our ancient culture held women at the highest level. Our women did not grow up internalizing a self image that told her that she was the creation of a lesser God. She was the creation of the same God, maybe even a greater God. She was not a source of sin for man, but of dharma, virtue.

It is thrilling to see this powerful self-image in woman after epic Indian woman. Practically all our epic women, be it Gandhari, Kunti, Draupadi, or Sita share the same self-image: that of an equal to her man. There is no feeling in her that she is the ‘second sex’. If anything, she is the first sex. Gandhari never once in her life cringes before her husband Dhritarashtra. Kunti never once feels she is inferior to Pandu. Draupadi knows she is in every way equal to her husbands. And Sita says she will walk not in Rama’s footsteps, but ahead of him, so that she can crush the thorns on his path with her feet and make his journey easier for him – agratah te gamishyaami, mRdnantii kuzakaNTakaan.

This amazing self-perception of power is not born of arrogance or haughtiness, but of her culturally given status.

We see this same status of women in their husband’s home spoken of by the Vedas too. The standard Vedic blessing for a new bride was:

samraajnii zvazure bhava
samraajnii zvazvraam bhava
nanandari samraajnii bhava
samraajnii adhi devRSu. [RV 10.85.46] [AV 14.144]

Be thou an empress to your father-in-law.
An empress be thou to your mother-in-law.
Be thou an empress to your husband’s sister.
An empress be thou to his younger brother.

Shakuntala tells Dushyanta that he needs to worship her for she is his wife come home for the first time.

Perhaps the position of Indian women was at its best in the Vedic times. Since those ancient days, it has been a more or less steady decline for women. Today the respect given to a new bride is mostly ritualistic. She is still worshipped as she enters her husband’s home, though not by her husband but by his family, but her actual position in a traditional Indian home is far from what it was in the Vedic days.

Shakuntala tells Dushyanta that a wife is not a man’s plaything – she is an equal half of his being, his best friend in the journey of life, the root of his dharma, artha and kama [virtue, wealth and pleasures]. And for a man who wants to cross the ocean of samsara and reach moksha, she is his most powerful ship.

She reminds him that woman is the eternal sacred ground where man is reborn as his own son.

aatmano janmanah kSetram
punyam raamaah sanaatanam.

Shakuntala tells Dushyanta that she has not come to him for his charity – she does not need any of it. What she demands is justice – what is hers by right. In fact, she herself does not need even that. She is perfectly willing to go back to the ashram from where she has come – she will always be welcome there. She does not care for the comforts of the palace – such things do not tempt her. She needs just one thing: that his child be acknowledged as his. And she warns him of dire consequences if he ignored her.

Still Dushyanta does not acknowledge her or her son. Instead, he insults her father, the sage Vishwamitra, calling him wanton; and insults her mother, the apsara Menaka, calling her a whore. And she herself is speaking like a common whore, he tells her: pumscaliiva prabhaaSase.

He does not stop there. He calls all women liars.

Before answering him this time she apologizes, for she says what she is going to say is going to hurt him. And then she tells him the difference between a fool and a wise man is that the fool chooses evil where the wise man chooses the good.

“Truth,” she tells him, “is superior to a thousand ashwamedha sacrifices; the study of all the Vedas, bathing in every sacred teertha in the world – nay, even these are not equal to the sixteenth part of the truth.”

It is that truth that Dushyanta was rejecting in rejecting her and her son.

Shakuntala shows her culture by apologizing for calling him a fool in spite of Dushyanta’s use of such unpardonable words as a whore for her and her mother, and a wanton for her father.

As she turns around to leave, she tells Dushyanta her son does not need his kingdom. She did not bring him to Dushyanta in the hope of her son inheriting his kingdom. No, he does not require it. For, her son will rule over all the earth bounded by the oceans even without his help.

Rte’pi tvayi duSyanta zailaraaja-avatamsikaam
caturantaam imaam urviim putro me paalayiSyati.

Gods and celestial sages interfere here on Shakuntala’s behalf. They appear and testify that she is indeed Dushyanta’s wife and Sarvadamana is his son and suggest that he should now be renamed Bharata.

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When the gods and celestial sages declare that Sarvadamana is indeed Dushyanta’s son, the king accepts him and says that he has never for a moment doubted it, nor had he ever forgotten Shakuntala. Had he accepted Shakuntala and her son straight away, the royal officers and common people would have had doubts about the legitimacy of his relationship with them – there would always have remained an amount of suspicion in their minds. For his marriage to Shakuntala was known only to the two of them. Now that the gods and celestial sages have declared her his wife and Sarvadamana his son, he is the happiest man.

Is Dushyanta speaking the truth? Or is it that he has no choice but to accept them since the gods and sages have made their declaration?

The answer lies not in Dushyanta’s words but in his acts since meeting Shakuntala for the first time in the ashram.

The moment Dushyanta sees her, he is smitten by her and desires her. After asking her who she is and finding that she is of royal blood, he straight away expresses his desire for her and asks her to marry him. He offers her everything that comes to his mind that might interest a woman according to his understanding of women – precious ornaments, beautiful clothes, jewels, and even his own kingdom.

Shakuntala tells him to wait a short while since her father would be back any moment – it is only to gather fruits that he has gone, he should wait until he comes back and ask for her from him.

Shakuntala was a woman any man could fall in love with instantly. She was desirable in every imaginable way as far as a man is concerned. But I want to make a distinction here between love and lust. If it was love for her that Dushyanta felt, he could have, and would have, waited until Kanva came back in a few minutes or at the latest in an hour or so. But no, he wouldn’t wait, in spite of being repeatedly requested by Shakuntala. Eventually she agrees to his proposal, after making him promise that the son born to them would inherit his kingdom. They enter into a gandharva marriage and the marriage is immediately consummated.

Dushyanta leaves the ashram straight away. He does not wait until Kanva comes back. Had he been an honorable man, had his intentions been honorable, he should have waited for him to come back at least now, told the sage what had happened and then left. Instead, he chooses to leave the ashram in a desperate hurry, promising to Shakuntala that his people would soon come to the ashram to fetch her to her new home, his palace.

There is no pressing business waiting for him, no emergency. He is on a vacation – on a leisurely hunting trip, accompanied by his ministers and a huge army. He has received no message informing him he is needed at the capital.

His ministers are just outside the ashram. He does not tell any of them what happened in the ashram. He does not tell them he has married a beautiful maiden he met in the ashram. They do not know a thing about what happened until the gods and celestial sages reveal it to them in Dushyanta’s court thirteen years later.

Let’s assume Dushyanta did not have other wives. But there must have been lots of other relatives living with him in the palace. The rest of his family. His mother Rathantari is certainly there, to whom he later introduces her, after the gods have spoken. His four younger brothers are in all probability living there with him – Shoora, Bheema, Prapoorva and Vasu. He does not speak a word about Shakuntala to any of them.

And he does not send anyone to fetch Shakuntala as he promises. There would have been no ill fame in sending for her. The beautiful daughter of Sage Vishwamitra – a former king – and the apsara Menaka, brought up in the ashram of Sage Kanva, would have been more than acceptable to people as their queen.

Shakuntala will have to come to the court on her own when her son is twelve years old.

Please remember that there is no curse involved here that makes the king forget her. That is a later addition by Kalidasa to make the king’s behavior acceptable.

I believe that the king accepted her because he had no other choice after the gods and the celestial sages made their declaration. And but for that, he would not have accepted them.

He says that he made her wait for twelve years, made her suffer all those years, humiliated her so brutally in the court in the presence of the nobles and ministers present there, in front of her own twelve-year-old son, all because she could honorably be accepted as his queen.

I find it hard to believe.

And even if it were so, did he have the right to make her suffer so much?

Krishna says in the Gita: yad yad aacarati zreSThah, tat tad eva itaro janah; sa yat pramaaNam kurute, lokah tad anuvartate – Whatever a great man does, other people also do; whatever he considers the ideal, the rest of the world follows.

Wasn’t Dushyanta setting up a very dark precedence when he left it to the gods and celestial sages to come and speak on behalf of Shakuntala? What would have happened if they had not? What happens when a mere mortal woman, an ordinary woman, is thus accused by her man?

In Valmiki Ramayana, Rama too makes Sita suffer agonies before he accepts her back at the end of the war with Ravana. He insults her, humiliates her publicly and rejects her. And there too the god of fire appears and vouches for her purity and then Rama says he did what he did so that she could be accepted back as his wife without dishonor.

Indian women are still asked to enter burning fire and dip their hands in boiling oil to prove their purity.

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The women who people our epics are shaktis: each one of them is endowed with power, sure of herself, sure of the choices she makes, sure in her speech, protective, passionate, loving, giving, hungry for life, filled with adventurousness, a fearless wanderer in life’s vast fields.

She inherits her soul from our Vedic women: Independent, assertive, strong winners, who took responsibility for themselves. Authentic women who participated in all fields of life as men’s equals. They debated on the meaning of life with the best of philosophers. They explored the mysteries of existence just as the men of their times did. They composed poems, sacred and mundane, poems of the soul and of the flesh, singing of spiritual ecstasy and sexual longing, that survive to this day.

The changes Kalidasa makes in Shakuntala tells us much about the changes that took place in women’s status, her role in a man’s life and societal and familial expectations from her by the time we leave behind epic times and reach what modern historians call the golden period of Indian history. Vyasa’s Shakuntala is strong. She is shakti, bold and fearless. In the case of Kalidasa’s Shakuntala, her strength lies in her weakness, in her helplessness. She is an abala: an infantilized woman whose strength is her capacity to invoke protectiveness in us.

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One last thing. I puzzled long over why Shakuntala gave herself to Dushyanta without waiting for her father to do that honour as her culture expected her to. My answer is – a foundling’s insecurity. She was abandoned at birth and, though a royal child, had to grow up in an ashram. True, she was loved by her foster father, adored by all in the ashram, but when she would give birth to a son, she wanted him grow up in the palace, as the son of a princess should.

Dushyanta was the answer to this deeply felt need. The man she fell in love with at first sight. And she responded to that need.

And when she comes to Dushyanta thirteen years later, it is for the sake of her son. The Mahabharata makes it very clear that she wanted nothing for herself.

Our insecurities make us do strange things.

Sita displays the same insecurity of the foundling several times in her life.

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A King’s Lust and the Birth of Vyasa’s Mother

2010-10-20T08:31:00.000-07:00

Vyasabharata 1

naaraayaNam namaskRtya naram caiva narottamam
deviim sarasvatiim vyaasam tato jayam udiirayet

A verse in the first chapter of the Adi Parva of the Mahabharata speaks of three ancient traditions of reading the epic: one beginning at the beginning of the text as it exists today with the prayer narayanam namaskritya, another beginning with the Astika Parva and a third one, beginning with the story of King Uparichara Vasu, Vyasa’s grandfather.

When we begin at the beginning of the text as it exists today, we begin with how Ugrashrava Sauti, son of Lomaharshana, narrated the epic to the ascetics present at Shaunaka’s twelve-year long sacrifice at Naimisharanya. And when we begin with Astika Parva, we begin twelve chapters later, with the story of the ascetic Jaratkaru and the birth of Astika who stops the snake sacrifice of King Janamejaya at Hastinapura.

But when we begin with the story of Uparichara Vasu, we begin at the sixtieth chapter of the Adi Parva of the epic text as it exists today and the epic then starts with the family saga of its author, Sage Vyasa.

And what a story we get to begin with then! A story of lust that man fails to control, and the actions that uncontrolled lust leads man to and their consequences.

Which is actually the theme of the epic.

The Mahabharata is a tale of uncontrolled lusts – lust for land, lust for wealth, lust for power, lust for honour, lust for fame, lust for acceptance, lust for vengeance, lust for pleasure, and, above all, plain sexual lust. It is the story of lust in every imaginable form and the terrible consequences that uncontrolled lust leads to.

The Sanskrit word for lust is kama.

The Mahabharata does not criticize kama per se. Nor does Indian culture do so. What is criticized is uncontrolled kama, kama that controls us, kama that becomes our master, that makes us its slaves. The Vedic culture sees kama as the beginning of the universe. The brilliant Nasadiya Sukta of the Rig Veda, the Hymn of Creation, speaks of Kama as the first being to emerge, or the first essence to come into being and then becomes the cause of everything else coming into existence. The Taittiriya Upanishad speaks of the spark of desire entering the heart of the Unmanifest Being, which then creates out of itself everything else, abstract and concrete, real and illusory, moving and unmoving, all.

The Mahabharata itself speaks of Kama as the son of Dharma. Accordingly Kama, the son, should follow Dharma, should be guided by it. So long Kama follows Dharma, life is beautiful. And when Kama ignores Dharma, goes contrary to Dharma, violates Dharma, tragedy results. What is born of Dharma and hence noble, becomes dark and evil and destroys life.

It is for this reason that Krishna both praises Kama in the Gita and warns us against it. In one place he says Kama is himself – is God – so long as it does not violate Dharma. When it violates dharma, what is divine becomes demoniac: dharmaaviruddhe bhooteshu kamo’smi bharatarshabha – “I am kama that is not against dharma in beings.” In another place he takes its name as man’s worst enemy.

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Here is the story of king Uparichara Vasu, Sage Vyasa’s maternal grandfather, the first story told by Vyasa if we read the epic following the third tradition.

Vasu was a great king renowned for his competencies as a leader and for his royal virtues – generosity, charity, empathy, understanding, people skills, self-mastery, commitment to values, integrity, all. After ruling his kingdom for years, he decided to tread the path his ancestors had followed by going to the jungle and devoting the rest of his life to spirituality. He began performing tapas, powerful austerities. Such was his tapas that Indra, the lord of the heavens, became shaky. For anyone who climbed certain heights in ascetic practices became qualified to take over Indra’s throne.

The word Indra means the lord of the senses – indriyaaNaam raajaa. That is, the mind. Asceticism is a way of conquering the mind, mastering it, making it one’s slave, rather than living as its slave. And the mind resists this, sometimes directly, at other times through devious means. It does not want to be conquered, but loves to remain as the master. As hundreds of stories in Indian literature tell us, as innumerable stories from the life of ascetics from across the world and from all cultures tell us, the mind throws temptations on the path of the ascetic to waylay him, to distract him and to destroy him. Indian literature abounds in such stories: the Buddha is tempted by Mara, Sage Vishwamitra by Menaka, Sage Kandu by Pramlocha and so on.

In the case of Uparichara Vasu, it is not a woman, the most common temptation for a male ascetic, that Indra uses. This former king had in all probability had women aplenty in his inner apartments. Nor does he use power as a temptation – the bait thrown to Jesus by the Devil, another name for the mind. He takes a much more refined approach with Uparichara Vasu, sage Vyasa’s grandfather-to-be.

Indra comes down to meet him in the ashram where he is living a life of asceticism. He speaks to the rajarshi, the royal sage, of the nobility of his duty to the world.

Let there be no doubts. The Mahabharata is very specific about this: What Indra was concerned with is not the good of the world. What he wanted was for the royal sage to stop his austerities and go back to the world to live his life there. For, if he continued his austerities, the king would be a threat to his position as the lord of the gods.

Temptations could be of different kinds and at different levels. A man may be tempted from his higher goals by something as simple as sexuality. But some people require more than sex to distract them from their path. For some, it is power that tempts them; in the case of some others, it could be fame; it could even be something as refined and beautiful as kindness and compassion.

The Bhagavad Gita tells us that it is not only tamas and rajas that bind us, but even sattva binds us.

Indian tradition holds that even concern for the good of the world could be binding when it makes you forget the ultimate human goal, the parama-purushartha, which is spiritual freedom. It tells us through the story of Jada Bharata who devoted his life to look after a baby deer that even kindness and compassion could be bondages.

The Prashna Upanishad tells us there are two dimensions to spirituality – the higher and the lower, called Dakshinayana and Uttarayana, the southern and the northern paths.

Dakshinayana, or the lower dimension, consists of acts that are classified as ishta and poorta. Ishta consists of acts for the common good – like founding schools, hospitals, orphanages, charity homes and so on. In ancient India, it included planting trees on the wayside, digging wells for drinking water, digging ponds and lakes, establishing wayside inns where travelers could rest and spend the night free of charge, and so on. Poorta consists of acts of service to the individual – like giving a meal to the hungry, water to the thirsty, taking care of a sick or old man, adopting an orphaned child and so on. These are great in themselves, but should lead man to higher spirituality, to Uttarayana.

Uttarayana, the higher spirituality, consists of tapas, dhyana, samadhi etc – austerities, the practice of meditation, experiencing self-transcendence and so on. It is through these that man reaches spiritual awakening, bodhi.

What Indra did was to appeal to the innate nobility of Vasu to tempt him away from his spiritual path. As a king, Vasu was a great lover of dharma, the common good. He was totally committed to it. Now Indra uses this very commitment to dharma, one of the noblest qualities in any leader, to tempt Vasu from his spiritual goals.

Indra appears before Vasu accompanied by several other gods. He convinces Vasu that his highest duty is to the good of the world. The absence of someone like him as king is causing corruption in the world and he should go back to his life as king to uphold dharma and stop all corruptions. It is dharma that upholds the world and it is kings like him that uphold dharma.

Indra assures Vasu that there are no eternal worlds that he cannot attain by protecting dharma in the world. He also declares Vasu as his eternal friend, his sakha.

The lord of the gods calling you a sakha is indeed a great honour.

Indra has called others his friends too in the past. And usually this has lead to tragedy to the men whose friend Indra pretended to be. Indra declared himself a friend of his greatest enemy ever, Vritra, and it is with the help of that friendship that Indra betrayed and killed Vritra.

As we saw, Indra is the symbol of the mind. Several spiritual traditions hold that there is no good mind and bad mind – mind itself is bad. That in fact, there is nothing bad, other than the mind. What is good is the state of no-mind, the state in which you go beyond the mind. Zen is one such spiritual tradition that expressly speaks of the need to transcend the mind and reach the state of no-mind. Mind is ignorance, says Zen. Mind is bondage, says Zen. And no-mind is freedom, wisdom.

Indra has by now offered two temptations to the king: eternal worlds of pleasure in the future as a result of upholding dharma in the world as king and friendship with the lord of the gods. Now he offers Vasu more. He tells him to take the best part of the earth as his kingdom.

What is recommended is the land of Chedi. Indra describes Chedi as delightful, sacred, rich, abounding in animal wealth and crops, filled with precious stones and mineral wealth. He tells Vasu that the land of Chedi has an agreeable climate; is very fertile; the cities and towns devoted to virtue; the people are honest, contented, law abiding, truthful, kind even to animals so that if a bullock becomes weak they do not anymore yoke it to the plough or to the cart but is instead looked after until it becomes fat again; sons are devoted to their parents, all people follow their dharma.

Indra hasn’t finished his offerings. He promises him the power to know all that happens everywhere in the world. He gives him a garland of unfading lotuses which would make him invincible in battle, an airplane that can take him through the skies to anywhere he wants to go, or even help him remain in one place if he wished so.

Besides all this, Indra also gives Vasu a sacred bamboo pole, a yashti that could be used for religious rituals.

Vasu falls for the temptations. He accepts these gifts from Indra and chooses to go to Chedi to become its king. He looks after Chedi as a virtuous king, protecting dharma in the hope of attaining glory as a leader of men on earth and eternal worlds of pleasure after his death. In gratitude to Indra for the kindness showered on him, Vasu begins a celebration known as Indrotsava, the festival of Indra, in which planting the bamboo pole given by Indra marks the beginning of the festival.

Indra is worshipped in this festival as a divine swan, a hamsa. Which reminds us of the Greek Indra, Zeus, who is tempted by Leda and assumes the form of a swan to seduce her, an image repeatedly painted by European painters and sculpted by leading western sculptures.

It is this Indrotsava that celebrates on earth the glory of Indra that Krishna later stops and asks the men and women of Vrindavan instead to worship Mt Govardhan that protects them and offers food to their cattle.

Vasu now becomes attached to his airplane and spends much time in it, thus acquiring the name by which he will be known to all subsequent generations: Uparichara Vasu, Vasu-who-moves-in-the-skies.

That is the past history of Vasu. Let’s now move on to the day that most concerns us, the day on which he begets Sage Vyasa’s mother in an act that the Mahabharata describes as dhoomra – a word the dictionary explains as vice, wickedness, sin.

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Everything about the remaining part of Uparichara Vasu’s story is strange and mysterious. Perhaps because the things mentioned are so unacceptable, it is possible that the original story has altogether disappeared and we have to infer it from the hazy and puzzling details that are now available to us in the Sanskrit epic.

The first thing we are told is that a mountain once raped a river and two human children are born to the river. The name of the mountain is Kolahala and the name of the river is Shuktimati. We are also told that the mountain blocked the river and Uparichara Vasu kicked it with his foot, splitting the mountain and releasing the river.

Vasu’s act of releasing the river from the power of the mountain reminds us of Indra’s act of releasing the waters from the captivity of Vritra in still more ancient times.

Of the two children born to the river Shuktimati, one is male and the other female. The river offers the two children to Vasu and Vasu makes the male child, when the children grow up, his commander-in-chief and the female child his wife. Her name is Girikaa, meaning the child of a mountain.

It is possible that the king went to the mountain to release waters that were blocked by it, found there two abandoned children, twins, a male and a female and brought them home and when the children grew up, he made the girl his wife, and the male his commander-in chief. It is also possible that the children were born of a rape committed on a woman by someone on the mountain or the river bank.

Sexuality in ancient India was different in its gender implications than in the contemporary world. Within marriage, sex was considered a woman’s right, her privilege, something that she was entitled to from her man and not something the man ‘took’ from the woman. It was a man’s duty to go to his wife when she was in her ritu – the first sixteen days after her ritual bath following her monthly period – on prescribed days, avoiding proscribed days.

Girikaa had entered her ritu and sent a message to her husband, informing him she was ready and waiting, and asking him to go to her. Precisely at that time, says the epic, he received an order from his dead ancestors, his manes, that he should go on a hunting trip to the jungle.

Now, this is very strange! Because generally speaking the main interest of the dead ancestors is in continuing the family line – frequently their only interest. They should thus have prevented him from going on the hunting trip precisely at such a time. Instead, they order him to forget his wife who is ready and waiting, who has just sent him a message that she is ready and waiting, and go to the jungle to kill wild animals.

One way of looking at it is that the king faced an inner conflict. It is possible that the temptation to hunt and kill overpowered the king’s desire to go to his wife – at least for the time being. In the clash between the thrill of killing and the thrill of sex, the king chose the thrill of killing and ignored, suppressed, his desire for his wife.

He had taken a very wrong decision if we go by what follows!

It was spring, the season when the whole nature celebrates life. What Vasu found was a jungle in the festivity of spring. Trees and plants – ashokas, champas, mango trees, bakulas, punnagas, madhavis, sandalwoods, arjunas, all – were at their best, filled with flowers whose intoxicating fragrance filled the jungle. The mating calls of the cuckoo bird and honey-inebriated hums of the bumble bee added to the intoxication of the environment.

What the whole world was celebrating was what he had rejected to come to the jungle, and that too in spite of being requested by his wife.

Apart from being tempted by nature, it is possible that he also felt guilty about what he had done.

Ancient India said that a woman’s request for sex should never be ignored: arthinii strii anupekshaniiyaa.

The king’s mind went back to the beautiful mountain girl Girikaa who was pining for him at home in the palace.

His head was already light with nature’s intoxication. The visions of Girikaa whom he had rejected in spite of her express desire complicated matters further for the king. Losing mastery over himself, he sat down under an ashoka tree, the scent of fresh honey and the flowers going straight to his head.

According to the Mahabharata, it was now that he was tempted by vice and felt compelled to do a wicked deed, to commit a sin - dhoomra. Sex per se is not a sin in Indian culture. So it is some kind of ‘wrong’ sex that happened, which could be called wicked or sinful.

I would skip some details of what the Mahabharata tells us here and proceed to the end of this episode. In any case, what the Mahabharata tells us is so preposterous, so fantastic, that our minds will not accept it. It is possible that storytellers over thousands of years have given the present form to whatever was the original story.

The end of the episode is that a female fish in the Yamuna swallows the king’s seeds and becomes pregnant.

The fish, the story tells us, is a fallen apsara, a celestial dancer of incredible beauty, called Adrikaa. Due to a curse she received from Brahma, she had turned into a fish and was living in the river. Her curse was to last until she gave birth to two human children.

It is interesting that the apsara who has turned into a fish is called Adrikaa. Because Adrikaa means precisely what Girikaa means – a daughter of the hills.

The fish becomes pregnant. The pregnancy grows to maturity and reaches the tenth month. The fish is then caught by fishermen and cut open. Inside the fish, the fishermen find two children, a male and a female.

When the fish is cut open, it dies and the aprasa is released from her curse. She rises up into the skies and travelling on the path of the siddhas and charanas, reaches back her home, the land of the gods.

What exactly are we to make of this story?

One way to understand it is that the king, unable to keep in check his passion, had sex with a fisher girl called Adrikaa on the banks of the Yamuna and the children were the result of that brief encounter.

We have no clue as to whether Vasu took her by force or she voluntarily surrendered to his desire. From the way Vyasa’s mother, Adrikaa’s daughter growing up as the daughter of a fisherman, surrenders herself to the desire of Sage Parashara later, it is possible to assume that in those ancient days it was perhaps fairly common for men of the upper strata of society to have their way with women of the lower strata of society.

The chief of the fishermen takes the two children thus mysteriously found inside the fish to the king – to Uparichara Vasu himself. Customs in those days said that anything precious or unusual found or grown inside the kingdom should be offered to the king. The king keeps the male child and returns the female child to the chief of the fishermen, Dasharaja.

This is the second time that almost identical incidents are happening to Vasu. The first time he had found two children on the banks of the Shuktimati, a male and a female. He had made the male child the chief of his armies and the female child his wife, when they grew up. Now once again fishermen bring two children to him, who are, unknown to him, his own children. This time he keeps the male child and returns the female child to the fishermen.

The first set of children, we are clearly told, were born of a rape. From the circumstances the epic mentions, combined with the use of the word dhoomra, it is possible that these children too were born of a rape.

The male child, whom the king keeps, grows up to become the king of the Matsya country, also known as the land of the Viratas. It is here that the Pandavas would eventually spend their one year in hiding as per the conditions of the second dice game they lose. Following which, the Virata princess Uttara would marry Arjuna’s son Abhimanyu. King Janamejaya who listens to the Mahabharata story from Vaishampayana is the grandson of Uttara. The kingdom of the Bharatas thus ends up in the hands of an heir of Uparichara Vasu. Of course, Dhritarashtra, Pandu and Vidura are all have his blood in them – they are Vyasa’s sons and Vasu’s great grandsons.

But all that is later.

The female child returned by Vasu to Dasharaja with the instruction to bring her up as his daughter is named Kaali and Krishnaa for her complexion. Both Kaali and Krishnaa mean a dark girl. She gets the nick name Matsyagandhaa for the strong foul smell that emanated from her. Matsyagandhaa means a fish-smelling girl.

Krishnaa turns out to be a ravishing beauty. The epic tells us that she was so beautiful that she tempted even great siddhas. She begins to help her father in his work by taking people across the Yamuna in their ferry.

Children mature early among the poor and begin to work before they are out of their childhood.

One day her passenger in the ferry is the legendary sage Parashara. He sees her and is allured by her. He confesses to her his desire for her. She objects by saying other people are watching them on both sides of the river. The sage with his powers creates thick mist all around them and then, unable to keep his lust for her in check, takes her with her permission.

The child born was given the name Krishna Dwaipayana at birth. Krishna means dark or black. He was dark like his mother. Dwaipayana means born on an island. He was born on a small island in the Yamuna.

This Krishna Dwaipayana, later to be known as Vyasa, is the author of the Mahabharata.

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What we have here thus is a tale of lust. Sage Vyasa’s great grandmother Girikaa is the result of a rape, whose story is presented to us in the impossible form of the rape of a river by a mountain. Vyasa’s mother Satyavati is born when his grandfather, Uparichara Vasu fails to control his sexual lust and commits a heinous act. And Vyasa himself is born because a seer fails to control his passion for a beautiful fisher girl.

That is three successive generations. As we go into the story of the Mahabharata, we shall see that this theme of naked lust and the failure to control it runs through the generations to follow. Vyasa himself becomes subject to it once in his life and thus is born his son Shuka. Satyavati’s son, Vyasa’s half brother Vichitraveerya, would die because of his overindulgence in sex. Vyasa’s own son Pandu would die of his inability to master his sexual drive. And in the next generation several powerful men would lust for Draupadi, the most hauntingly beautiful woman in Indian lore, leading to disastrous consequences. Her own past life stories tell us of a lifetime as Nalayani in which she receives a curse from her husband because of her insatiable sexuality.

Did Indra foresee these things when he turned Uparichara Vasu away from tapas into the world? Did he foresee the Mahabharata war and the destruction of India that followed as a consequence?

The Mahabharata says the four ages are born as a consequence of man’s actions, particularly because of the actions of men in positions of power. It also says that towards the end of the Mahabharata story, the Age of Kali, the Dark Age, began.

Was Indra’s fear of Vasu’s asceticism the cause of the beginning of the Age of Kali?

Indian Wisdom considers personal leadership expressed in terms of self mastery as the foundation of all leadership – in fact, of all that is good. When Bhishma begins to teach Yudhishthira from his bed of arrows in the Shanti Parva, one of the first lessons he teaches is in self-mastery. What we find here is leaders of men failing in self mastery generation after generation, right up to the days of the Mahabharata war. Is it any more than a natural consequence then that the Age of Kali begins immediately after the Mahabharata war?

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On Love

2010-10-11T01:25:00.000-07:00

As a young man, Siddhartha was in love with a young girl in the beautiful valley where he grew up. She was a pretty girl some two or three years younger to him, slender, fair and delicate. His love for her was his secret and he never told anyone of that love. Anyone, including her. It was a silent love, a kind of silent worship. Every evening as the oil lamps in the temple at the heart of the valley were lit, she would go to the temple, fresh from her evening bath, in fresh clothes, her long, dark, shining hair open and loose. Siddhartha loved everything about her. But what he loved more than anything else was the serenity that surrounded her. Her movement had a kind of stillness about it. It was as though she floated towards the temple rather than walked. The whole evening had a quality of stillness and she moved as though she was the very heart of that stillness.

Siddhartha waited for her under the peepal tree near the temple every evening. Usually there were other young men with him there – his friends. On those days she ignored him completely – as though the peepal tree and the boys under it did not exist. On the days when he was alone under the tree, she would look at him and give him a smile. A smile that that blossomed on her face and in her eyes like a flower blossoming on a young plant. The smile lit up her beautiful face. It was as though a lamp has been suddenly lit up in a tiny shrine, its light bathing everything in its glow.

They had known each other from their childhood.

Siddhartha loved the feeling her presence gave him. It made him light. He felt as though he could fly. His inner world was lit up by her presence. On days when he could not see her, his world would be different. On those days, his world was cloudy. Filled with clouds that did not bring any rain, but brought only gloom. A vague, nameless gloom that he could not put words to.

Years later Siddhartha would wonder. Was it with the young girl he was in love? Or was it the feeling that she gave him that he loved? Was he in love with her, or was it with the lightness that her presence gave her that he loved, her smile gave her, that the thought she loved him gave him?

Do we love the people we love because they give us such beautiful feelings, or do we get such beautiful feelings because we love them?

Perhaps both are true. Perhaps truth is not one, there are different truths. A poet’s truth and a philosopher’s truth. And many others. The poet’s truth tells us that we get beautiful feelings because we love. And the philosopher’s truth tells us that we love because that gives us beautiful feelings.

“I love you not for who you are, but for who I am when I am beside you,” says Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Perhaps this is only the philosopher’s truth. It is the philosopher in Marquez speaking. The thinker in Marquez. When he speaks as a poet, he would speak differently. When he speaks as a writer, he would speak differently.

Marquez is one of the most powerful writers on love ever. I have loved several of his books, including One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera and A Demon Called Love, in all three of which his love is more demoniacal, obsessive and compulsive than the tender love the poet sings of.

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Leadership: Turning Weaknesses into Strengths

2010-10-11T01:17:00.000-07:00

The boy was young in years and he wanted to learn judo. Which was fine, except that as a child he had lost an arm in a car accident.

When he approached the old sensei, the Japanese judo master, the master expressed no hesitation in accepting him. The training began immediately and the boy made good progress – he was keen to learn and the drive and commitment needed were there in him in plenty.

However, his enthusiasm received a jolt when he realized that though he has been learning for more than three months, his master had taught him only a single move. He wanted to learn more. He wanted to learn everything that was there to learn in judo.

One day he decided to talk to his master. “Sensei,” he told the master. “When are you going to teach me more moves? Shouldn’t I be learning other moves?”

The master appreciated his eagerness to learn. He smiled at the boy and told him, “Son, this is the only move you would ever need to know.” The boy of course did not understand what that meant. But he trusted his master and continued to learn under him, mastering more and more thoroughly the one move he knew.

And then time came for the judo tournament. He boy wanted to participate and the master was delighted.

His first victory surprised the boy. The master’s reaction was an understanding smile. As though it was no more than expected. And then the boy won the second match. And then the third, though this time with some difficulty. The boy was now in the finals!

His opponent was a veteran. Powerfully built, he looked formidable. He was easily more than a match to the young boy.

As the match progressed, it was clear that the boy was overmatched. The referee was scared that he might be hurt. To avoid that possibility, he wanted to stop the match. But the old sensei asked the referee not to worry and to continue the match.

The veteran was now relaxed. He was sure nothing can stop him from winning. In his carelessness he made his first mistake. And that was enough for the boy. In a quick move, he pinned the powerfully built senior down. Try as he might, he stronger man could not free himself.

The boy won the match, surprising everyone, and more than anyone else, the boy himself. He was now the champion.

On his way back, he asked the sensei, “Master, how did I win the tournament?” And the master said, “One reason: you have mastered the one move you know more thoroughly than anyone else – and it is one of the most difficult throws in judo. And the other: the only known defense for that move is for the other player to grab you by your left arm.’

It was the left arm that the boy had lost in the childhood accident.

His weakness had become his greatest strength.

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And that is precisely what a great leader does. Great leaders convert their weakness into their strengths.

Gandhi, one of the greatest leaders modern times have seen, was great master in converting weaknesses into strengths. It was this ability of his that made him so difficult for the British empire to fight. His choice of non-violence as a weapon in his struggle for freedom was definitely because of his love for non-violence. But there is also a different side to it: his compulsions. He had no army, nor could he raise an army that could match that of the British. Brilliant leader that he was, he turned this weakness into his strength. His struggle would be non-violent, where no army was necessary.

The Mahabharata tells us that while Arjuna was at Indraloka learning advanced weapons and music there, the celestial dancer Urvashi, the apsara, fell in love with him. Besotted with him, she approached him, seeking his love. But he said he couldn’t have her as his lover since she had once been the wife of one of his ancestors, Pururava, and was for that reason his own ancestress. Urvashi argued such relationships counted only with mortals and since she was a celestial and an immortal, they did not apply to her. When Arjuna stuck to his stand, a furious Urvashi cursed him, turning him into a eunuch, a curse that was subsequently reduced to one year of his choice as a eunuch. And Arjuna chooses the year of his life incognito in Virata, which we was bound to live as per the terms of the dice game his brother had lost, for living as a eunuch. And his eunuchhood became his brilliant cover – for as per the terms, had he been discovered, he and his brothers and Draupadi would have had to go into another round of twelve years of forest life and a year of life in hiding in a city.

That is another example for turning a weakness into strength.

Dharma can sometimes be a weakness – especially in the eyes of one’s enemy. In the case of Yudhishthira, on the one side dharma was his strength and on the other it was his weakness too. Duryodhana uses Yudhishthira’s obsession with dharma against him when he invites him for the game of dice. As expected, Yudhishthira is not able to say no in spite knowing that there is treachery involved in the invitation and it is a trap. When Duryodhana is asked what would happen if Yudhishthira obtained back his kingdom after the 12-year exile and one year of life incognito, he says that he would invite Yudhishthira for yet another dice game and Yudhishthira wouldn’t be able to say no because of his dharma. We repeatedly see in the Mahabharata that Dharma is frequently a weakness in the hands of Yudhishthira. And Krishna brilliantly turns this weakness of Yudhishthira into such a strength that it achieves the impossible – eliminating from the war the Kaurava commander-in-chief Drona, a warrior who cannot be killed so long as he hold weapons in his hands, albeit through an act the ethicality of which we still question.

There was only one way the formidable Acharya could be dissuaded from battling in the war: to tell him that his son Ashwatthama has been killed. And if he was not dissuaded, the Acharya was capable of wiping out the whole Pandava army in a day – so furious was he on that day and so brilliantly was he fighting. And, to add to his strength, he had started using magical weapons too, breaking the convention that they could be used only against those who knew them.

Under Krishna’s inspiration, Bhima kills an elephant called Ashwatthama and shouts to the Acharya that Ashwatthama has been killed. The Acharya comes to Yudhishthira seeking confirmation and Krishna has already prepared him to lie and that is what he does. And it has the desired impact on the Acharya.

It is on Yudhishthira’s confirmation that Drona takes the decision to give up weapons, stop fighting and to end his life.

One may question the ethicality of Krishna’s act. Krishna himself admits that what he did was unethical but adds that there are times when unethical means have to be used against an unethical enemy – when no other alternatives are available. So long as this is done keeping the common good as the measuring rod, it is justifiable, says Krishna.

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Wise leadership means turning your weaknesses into your strengths.

US Steel once had an environmental problem in one of its factories. The coking operations the factory did, which were part of the process of making steel, produced a lot of residue which could pollute groundwater in the entire neighbourhood. The solutions available for the problem were all enormously expensive and could still not guarantee success. It took months for the company to arrive at a problem – but when it did, it was a brilliant solution and what was until then a liability became an asset to the company. The think tanks of the company realized that by mixing this waste in small quantities with the fuel for the furnaces, not only could the waste be got rid of, but it could also be used to produce energy. The wastage that until then was a weakness of the factory overnight became an asset to them.

I live in an industrial city. At one time the leading industry had to deal with the huge amounts of fly ash its operations produced. But now the same fly ash that was a pollutant earlier is used for producing cement, thus transforming a problem into profitable business.

The same company also had huge quantities of high quality heat resistant bricks used in its smelting shops. And then somebody suggested – pave the front yards of the tens of thousands of company houses in the city with these bricks. That would not only dispose of the bricks inexpensively, but would also keep the courtyards clean. The bricks soon were in high demand from employees of the company who occupied the houses and their gardens assumed new shapes with the bricks used to create pathways and patterns.

The backwaters and rivers of my home state in India, Kerala, was once deeply troubled by what was called African water plants that filled whole water surfaces. Numerous ways were tried to get rid of it, but all failed. And then the idea occurred: use it as a fertilizer. And today these plants are no more a menace to Kerala.

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When Alexander attacked India and had to face Puru, the Macedonian conqueror encountered a major challenge in the form of the huge war elephants of the Indian king. Alexander won the battle by using the enemy’s strength against himself, thus turning it into his weakness.

What Alexander did, when his army encountered the huge elephant division of Puru’s army consisting of two hundred trained war elephants, was to order his highly trained archers to kill the mahouts. Rather than focusing on the warriors on the elephants, the archers focused on the mahouts. In a short while the mahouts were killed. Next the archers aimed their arrows at the eyes of the elephants and succeeded in blinding them within minutes. Alexander’s javelin throwers stepped in now, taking the place of the archers. They were masters in throwing javelins with precise accuracy up to a distance of 40-50 meters. Their javelins were soon buried deep into the elephants. The elephants, blinded and without mahouts, screaming in pain sought escape by turning around and running back and in the process killing Puru’s soldiers in huge numbers. The elephants were one of the major strengths of Puru’s army and Alexander had succeeded in converting it into a major liability to Puru.

Just as a successful leader converts his weaknesses into his strengths, he converts the enemy’s strengths into his weaknesses too.

Coca-Cola’s strength in the American market was its reputation as the classic American soft drink, the favorite of generations. When Pepsi wanted to beat it, it used that very strength against Coca-Cola. Pepsi was marketed as the soft drink of the new generation – the Pepsi generation. America is obsessed with youth and the new – and Pepsi created the image that Coca-Cola is for the aged and the old whereas what the the choice of the youth was Pepsi. Yet another example for successful leadership turning the enemy’s strength into his weakness.

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As in so many other things, some of the greatest lessons in leadership could be learnt from flowing water. Speaking of the lessons that could be learnt from water, the Sun Tzu says: "Now an army may be likened to water, for just as flowing water avoids the heights and hastens to the lowlands, so an army avoids strength and strikes weakness."

Water is a master in the art of converting its weakness into strength.

One of the weaknesses of water is its lack of a rigid from. A rock, in comparison, has a rigid form and that is the strength of the rock. However, water transforms its formlessness itself into its strength. If a rock appears on its path towards the ocean, flowing water splits itself as it reaches the rock and reassembles itself once the rock is passed. If a mountain stands in the way of flowing water, water just changes its direction and moves on towards its goal, the sea. Also, water uses its absence of a rigid form to adapt to the different circumstances it finds itself in. Pour it into a glass, it assumes the shape of the glass, pour it into a cup, it assumes the shape of the cup and pour it into a jar, it assumes the shape of the jar.

While the rock might feel arrogant in its strength as a hard substance that does not adjust to situations, for water its fluidity and its absence of a rigid shape becomes its strength.

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In the Mahabharata there is this beautiful discussion of the way of the bamboo, which is weak in comparison to trees like the teak, and converts its weakness into strength.

According to this story narrated by Bhishma in response to a question from Yudhishthira about leadership, the ocean, master of the rivers, tells the rivers: “'O rivers, I see that all of you, with your full currents, bring away mighty trees of large trunks, tearing them off with their roots and branches. You do not, however, ever bring me a bamboo. Bamboos that grow on your banks have weak stems and are devoid of strength. Yet you do not wash them down. Is it that you refuse to wash them down through contempt, or are they of any use to you? Tell me why you do not wash down the bamboos or uproot them from the banks where they grow?”

It is the Ganga who responds to the ocean’s question. She tells the ocean that mighty trees are unyielding and resist the currents of the rivers and therefore they are uprooted and carried down the rivers. Whereas bamboos, and other canes, act differently. When the mighty currents come, they bend to them and after the currents have passed, they resume their original shapes. It is for this reason, says the Ganga, that rivers do not pull up bamboos and other canes from their banks and let them survive where they are. “Those plants, trees, and creepers that bend and rise before the force of wind and water have never to suffer discomfiture by being taken up by the roots,” concludes the river.

Nature nourishes those who know how to convert their weaknesses into strengths.

A beautiful passage in which the Mahabharata states the wisdom of the Tao ages before Laozi and other masters stated it in Dao De Jing and other works.

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No great leader can ignore the art of converting one’s weaknesses into one’s strengths and the enemy’s strengths into his weaknesses. Mastered well, this becomes one of his most effective weapons in the battlefield of leadership.

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Self-Remembering: The Awareness Technique for Awakening

2010-10-11T01:12:00.000-07:00

Here is something beautiful from Osho’s commentary on the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, the Sanskrit classic on 112 meditation techniques in the form of questions from Devi and answers from Shiva.

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SHIVA TO DEVI:

“OH LOTUS-EYED ONE, SWEET OF TOUCH, WHEN SINGING, SEEING, TASTING, BE AWARE YOU ARE AND DISCOVER THE EVERLIVING.”

OSHO:

We are living, but we are not aware that we are or that we are living. There is no self-remembering.

You are eating or you are taking a bath or you are taking a walk: you are not aware that you are while walking. Everything is, only you are not. The trees, the houses, the traffic, everything is. You are aware of everything around you, but you are not aware of your own being – that you are. You may be aware of the whole world, but if you are not aware of yourself that awareness is false. Why?

Because your mind can reflect everything, but your mind cannot reflect you. If you are aware of yourself, then you have transcended the mind.

Your self-remembering cannot be reflected in your mind because you are behind the mind. It can reflect only things which are in front of it. You can just see others, but you cannot see yourself. Your eyes can see everyone, but your eyes cannot see themselves. If you want to see yourself you will need a mirror. Only in the mirror can you see yourself, but then you will have to stand in front of the mirror. If your mind is a mirror, it can reflect the whole world. It cannot reflect you because you cannot stand before it. You are always behind, hidden behind the mirror.

This technique says while doing anything – singing, seeing, tasting – be aware that you are and discover the ever-living, and discover within yourself the current, the energy, the life, the ever-living.

But we are not aware of ourselves.

Gurdjieff used self-remembering as a basic technique in the West. The self-remembering is derived from this sutra. The whole Gurdjieffian system is based on this one sutra. Remember yourself, whatsoever you are doing. It is very difficult. It looks very easy, but you will go on forgetting.

Even for three or four seconds you cannot remember yourself. You will have a feeling that you are remembering, and suddenly you will have moved to some other thought. Even with this thought that ‘Okay, I am remembering myself,” you will have missed, because this thought is not self-remembering.

In self-remembering there will be no thought; you will be completely empty. And self-remembering is not a mental process. It is not that you say, “Yes, I am.” Saying ‘Yes, I am,” you have missed. This is a mind thing, this is a mental process: “I am.”

Feel “I am,” not the words “I am.” Don’t verbalize, just feel that you are. Don’t think, FEEL!

Try it. It is difficult, but if you go on insisting it happens. While walking, remember you are, and have the feeling of your being, not of any thought, not of any idea. Just feel. I touch your hand or I put my hand on your head: don’t verbalize. Just feel the touch, and in that feeling feel not only the touch, but feel also the touched one. Then your consciousness becomes double-arrowed.

You are walking under trees: the trees are there, the breeze is there, the sun is rising. This is the world all around you; you are aware of it. Stand for a moment and suddenly remember that you are, but don’t verbalize. Just feel that you are. This nonverbal feeling, even if for only a single moment, will give you a glimpse – a glimpse which no LSD can give you, a glimpse which is of the real. For a single moment you are thrown back to the center of your being. You are behind the mirror; you have transcended the world of reflections; you are existential. And you can do it at any time. It doesn’t need any special place or any special time. And you cannot say, “I have no time.” When eating you can do it, when taking a bath you can do it, when moving or sitting you can do it – anytime. No matter what you are doing, you can suddenly remember yourself, and then try to continue that glimpse of your being.

It will be difficult. One moment you will feel it is there, the next moment you will have moved away.

Some thought will have entered, some reflection will have come to you, and you will have become involved in the reflection. But don’t be sad and don’t be disappointed. This is so because for lives together we have been concerned with the reflections. This has become a robot-like mechanism.

Instantly, automatically, we are thrown to the reflection. But if even for a single moment you have the glimpse, it is enough for the beginning. And why is it enough? Because you will never get two moments together. Only one moment is with you always. And if you can have the glimpse for a single moment, you can remain in it. Only effort is needed – a continuous effort is needed.

A single moment is given to you. You cannot have two moments together, so don’t worry about two moments. You will always get only one moment. And if you can be aware in one moment, you can be aware for your whole life. Now only effort is needed, and this can be done the whole day.

Whenever you remember, remember yourself.

“OH LOTUS-EYED ONE, SWEET OF TOUCH, WHEN SINGING, SEEING, TASTING, BE AWARE YOU ARE, AND DISCOVER THE EVER-LIVING:”

When the sutra says “Be aware you are”, what will you do? Will you remember that, “My name is Ram” or “Jesus” or something else? Will you remember that you belong to such and such a family, to such and such a religion and tradition? To such and such a country and caste and creed? Will you remember that you are a communist or a Hindu or a Christian? What will you remember?

The sutra says be aware you are; it simply says ‘You are”. No name is needed, no country is needed.

Let there be simple existence: you are! So don’t say to yourself who you are. Don’t answer that, “I am this and that.” Let there be simple existence, that you are.

But it becomes difficult because we never remember simple existence. We always remember something which is just a label, not existence itself. Whenever you think about yourself, you think about your name, religion, country, many things, but never the simple existence that you are.

You can practice this: relaxing in a chair or just sitting under a tree, forget everything and feel this “you-areness.” No Christian, no Hindu, no Buddhist, no Indian, no Englishman, no German – simply, you are. Have the feeling of it, and then it will be easy for you to remember what this sutra says: “BE AWARE YOU ARE, AND DISCOVER THE EVER-LIVING.” And the moment you are aware that you are, you are thrown into the current of the ever-living. The false is going to die; only the real will remain.

That is why we are so much afraid of death: because the unreal is going to die. The unreal cannot be forever, and we are attached to the unreal, identified with the unreal. You as a Hindu will have to die; you as Ram or Krishna will have to die; you as a communist, as an atheist, as a theist, will have to die; you as a name and form will have to die. And if you are attached to name and form, obviously the fear of death will come to you, but the real, the existential, the basic in you, is deathless. Once the forms and names are forgotten, once you have a look within to the nameless and the formless, you have moved into the eternal.

“BE AWARE YOU ARE AND DISCOVER THE EVER-LIVING”: This technique is one of the most helpful, and it has been used for millennia by many teachers, masters. Buddha used it, Mahavira used it, Jesus used it, and in modern times Gurdjieff used it. Among all the techniques, this is one of the most potential. Try it. It will take time; months will pass.

When Ouspensky was learning with Gurdjieff, for three months he had to make much effort, arduous effort, in order to have a glimpse of what self-remembering is. So continuously, for three months, Ouspensky lived in a secluded house just doing only one thing – self-remembering. Thirty persons started that experiment, and by the end of the first week twenty-seven had escaped; only three remained. The whole day they were trying to remember – not doing anything else, just remembering that “I am.”

Twenty-seven felt they were going crazy. They felt that now madness was just near, so they escaped. They never turned back; they never met Gurdjieff again.

Why? As we are, really, we are mad. Not remembering who we are, what we are, we are mad, but this madness is taken as sanity. Once you try to go back, once you try to contact the real, it will look like craziness, it will look like madness. Compared to what we are, it is just the reverse, the opposite.

If you feel that this is sanity, that will look like madness.

But three persisted. One of the three was P. D. Ouspensky. For three months they persisted. Only after the first month did they start having glimpses of simply being – of “I am.” After the second month, even the ”I” dropped, and they started having the glimpses of ”am-ness” – of just being, not even of ”I”, because ”I” is also a label. The pure being is not ”I” and ”thou”; it just is.

And by the third month even the feeling of ”am-ness” dissolved because that feeling of am-ness is still a word. Even that word dissolves. Then you are, and then you know what you are. Before that point comes you cannot ask, ‘Who am I?” Or you can go on asking continuously, “Who am I?”, just continuously inquiring, ”Who am I ? Who am I?”, and all the answers that will be provided by the mind will be found false, irrelevant. You go on asking, “Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?” and a point comes where you can no more ask the question. All the answers fall down, and then the question itself falls down and disappears. And when even the question, ‘Who am I?” disappears, you know who you are.

Gurdjieff tried from one corner: just try to remember you are. Raman Maharshi tried from another corner. He made it a meditation to ask, to inquire, “Who am I?” And don’t believe in any answers that the mind can supply. The mind will say, “What nonsense are you asking? You are this, you are that, you are a man, you are a woman, you are educated or uneducated, rich or poor.” The mind will supply answers, but go on asking. Don’t accept any answer because all the answers given by the mind are false. They are from the unreal part of you. They are coming from words, they are coming from scriptures, they are coming from conditioning, they are coming from society, they are coming from others. Go on asking. Let this arrow of “Who am I?” penetrate deeper and deeper. A moment will come when no answer will come.

That is the right moment. Now you are nearing the answer. When no answer comes, you are near the answer because mind is becoming silent – or you have gone far away from the mind. When there will be no answer and a vacuum will be created all around you, your questioning will look absurd.

Whom are you questioning? There is no one to answer you. Suddenly, even your questioning will stop. With the questioning, the last part of the mind has dissolved because this question was also of the mind. Those answers were of the mind and this question was also of the mind. Both have dissolved, so now YOU ARE.

Try this. There is every possibility, if you persist, that this technique can give you a glimpse of the real – and the real is ever-living.

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Courtesy: The Book of Secrets, Osho.

Parashurama: When Absolute Power Corrupts

2010-08-23T06:39:00.000-07:00

This is a story we are all familiar with in India. For ages, every Indian child has grown up listening to it, usually from his mother or grandmother, or father or grandfather, and at times from a professional storyteller in a temple or on the village grounds – and the more recent generations from their Amar Chitra Kathas or the television serials.

In a display of valour and strength, Rama has broken Shiva’s bow that had been in the family of Janaka, thus winning Sita in marriage. The wedding is over and he is on his way back from Mithila, Sita’s place, to Ayodhya. The group returning consists of the sage Vasishtha, who is the royal guru of the Ikshwakus, a few other sages, Dasharatha himself, Rama and Sita as well as Rama’s three brothers and their brides. They are just out of Mithila when all on a sudden the sky begins to darken unexpectedly. Birds begin to shriek frightfully everywhere, some from the trees and some flying above the moving party, sending terror to the hearts of all – for they all know it is a dark omen. Confusing them further, they see deer crossing their path from the left – which is a good omen.

Soon there is no time left to analyse omens. For now the shrieks of the birds have become deafening and animals are running in a mad riot everywhere. The earth begins to shake. A storm begins and soon gathers speed and terrifying power. It pulls out mighty trees by their roots, with the ease of a mad elephant pulling up plants from the ground. The storm sends the trees whirling up into the sky and then hurls them down with stupefying force. The storm gathers dust from the earth and sends it up into the skies. The dust covers the sun and darkness envelops everything. No one is able to see anything. Under the impact of the storm, the whole army accompanying Dasharatha and all the servants and attendants with the party fall down unconscious. In the middle of it all, a few people are left standing: Sage Vasishtha and the other sages with him, Dasharatha, his four sons, the four new brides.

And then they see the cause of it all. Like a whirlwind, the dreaded ascetic-warrior Parashurama appears before them from nowhere. He is terrifying to look at. His eyes burn red and spit fire, his beard flows wildly in the wind, and his matted hair is tied up in a bun over his head.

Here is how Valmiki’s Ramayana describes him: “He was as unassailable as Mount Kailasa and as unbearable as the fire of annihilation. Blazing as he was with his effulgence, he was difficult to be seen by common people. With an axe resting on his right shoulder and a bow on his left, he held in his hand a spear that was like a bolt of lightning. Thus he resembled Shiva, the destroyer of the three cities of demons.”

The very name of Parashurama – Rama with the Battle Axe – is pure dread to every kshatriya. For this is the man who had went round the earth and wiped out every kshatriya in sight, not once, but twenty-one times. He needed vengeance and he needed justice. A kshatriya, a king – Kartaveerya Arjuna, also known as Arjuna with a Thousand Arms for his might – had, in his arrogance of power, desecrated his father’s ashram and he had killed him in a fierce battle that became a legend for all times to come. But the arrogant man’s sons sought vengeance for their father’s killing and finding a time when Parashurama’s father was alone in his ashram, had brutally killed him. It is then that Parashurama decides to wipe out kshatriyas from the earth – and wipe the earth clean of kshatriyas he does.

Power in itself is neither good nor evil. In the hands of the good, it becomes good, and in the hands of the bad, it becomes bad.

Power can turn you good, and power can turn you evil.

One of the ways power corrupts its possessor is by turning him arrogant. When the man who possesses power becomes arrogant, power becomes evil. And evil power has to be wiped out. If not, it will consume the earth itself. Rama with the Battle Axe made destroying such power his life mission. It is said that Rama’s righteous anger was calmed only when he filled five lakes in Kurukshetra – the Syamanta-panchaka – with the blood of kshatriyas and did tarpana to his manes with that blood.

Vasishtha quickly consults the other sages with him. Why has he come? Hasn’t his anger already been quenched a long time ago after he wiped out the warrior caste from the earth? Hasn’t he been meditating ever since on the Mahendra Mountains, living a hermit’s life?

Vasishtha and other sages take water in their sacred vessels – kamandalas – and approach the ascetic warrior who was standing blazing like the fire at the end of the world. They make the ritual offer of water to wash his hands and feet. Bowing down deeply to him, they try to appease him with soft words.

Parashurama accepts their offering of water but otherwise ignores them completely. Instead, he turns to young Rama.

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As I write these lines, words from the Malayalam Ramayana that I listened to as a child come to my mind. There Rama begins his speech with these words: njanozhinchunto raman ittribhuvanattinkal? His powerful words, spat out in fury and contempt, question the right of another Rama apart from him to exist in all the three worlds.

Parashurama is one of the seven immortals of Indian legends. This warrior who decimated kshatriyas is a brahmana by birth, born to practice serenity and meditation, to study and teach the Vedas, and to perform sacrificial rites.

The ascetic-warrior whose mission it was to wipe out arrogant power from the face of the earth had himself become arrogant power.

The fiery ascetic-warrior turns to Rama and asks him, in the words of the Valmiki Ramayana: “O Rama, son of Dasharatha, I have heard of your wonderful prowess. I have heard all about how you broke Lord Shiva’s bow. It is inconceivable that someone could have broken that bow. Hearing of that, I have come here, bringing another excellent bow. To this awesome bow which was given to me by my father Jamadagni, fix an arrow and draw it. Show me your strength. After seeing your strength in drawing the bow, I shall offer you a fight which will give credit to your valor.”

Parashurama’s words shake Dasharatha with dread. His dear son, his heartbeat, young Rama, is just about sixteen years of age – a mere boy, a child. And the man standing before him is dread itself – the one who went around the earth and wiped out kshatriyas from the earth twenty-one times. No warrior has ever existed equal to him in might. And now he was challenging his young son.

Dasharatha rushes to Parashurama and bowed deeply to him. He says: “O glorious brahmana, after giving up your anger against the warrior caste and becoming pacified, you should assure the safety of my juvenile sons. Born in the line of the Bhargavas, who are distinguished in erudition and asceticism, you put down your weapons, promising so to Indra. You then dedicated yourself to piety, giving the earth to Kashyapa. Going to the forest, you took up residence on Mount Mahendra. You have come here to totally destroy me, O great sage. If you kill Rama, we shall all be unable to live.”

Rama of the Battle Axe does not so much as look at Dasharatha. He does not think the old king deserves an answer. He has slaughtered a thousand kings like Dasharatha, and so many of them have fallen at his feet and begged him to spare the lives of their children. He hadn’t listened to a single one of them, nor had he spared the life of a single male kshatriya, however young he was.

Ignoring the begging Dasharatha, he says to young Rama: “Two divine bows honored by the whole world are superb, firm, strong, outstanding and well-made by Vishvakarma. The first is the bow given by the gods to Lord Shiva when he wanted to fight the demon Tripura, which has now been broken by you, O descendant of Kakutstha. The second unassailable bow was given by the foremost gods to Lord Vishnu. This is that bow of Vishnu, O Rama, which can destroy the enemy’s stronghold. It is in fact equal in strength to Shiva’s bow.”

Parashurama then tells Rama the history of the bow and explains to him how it came to his family and eventually to him. He then commands Rama, binding him to his vows as a warrior, “Take this excellent bow. Put an arrow to it and draw it. If you are able to do so, I shall thereafter engage you in battle.”

Rama, who was silent all this while, speaks for the first time. With his first words he pays his respects to the aged ascetic-warrior brahmana. He commends him on what he did to avenge his father’s brutal killing by arrogant men. And then, he tells Parashurama that to prove that he is not worthy of the contempt in which the ascetic holds him, he will accept the challenge and prove himself.

What Parashurama had done was ask Rama to accept an impossible challenge. No man living, other than Parashurama himself, was capable of handling the bow Vishnu which he was asking Rama to draw.

Rama swiftly grabs the bow and arrow from the old ascetic. And the next instant he stands ready to shoot, the bow fully drawn and the arrow in place.

Having done the impossible in a flash, Rama again turns to Parashurama and speaks to him. And there is anger in his voice as he speaks to the ascetic-warrior. Rama says: “You deserve my worship because you are a brahmana, and also because of your kinship with Vishvamitra. Therefore, I cannot shoot the deadly arrow at you, O Parashurama. I shall therefore take away either your ability to move swiftly everywhere, or the unequaled worlds which you have attained by dint of your austerities—this is what I intend to do. This transcendental arrow of Lord Vishnu, which can crush an enemy’s stronghold or smash the pride of an adversary by its power, never misses its target.”

A humbled Parashurama now speaks slowly in his deep voice. He needs his power to move about, he says, and asks Rama to destroy the worlds he has gained through his austerities.

Rama shoots the arrow and the arrow empowered with great spiritual power destroys all the worlds Parashurama had acquired through his tapas. The old ascetic bows down in humility to Rama and then circumambulates him in an action reserved to those whom you revere at the highest level. He bows down to Dasharatha and the other ascetics too and returns to Mount Mahendra, his abode, to engage in tapas again. As he departs, says the Ramayana, all directions were cleared of darkness.

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Through his victories, Parashurama had acquired absolute power. And absolute power can corrupt even the greatest of men. That is what had happened to Parashurama. His power went to his head, and he became what he had lived to destroy.

Every leader is in danger of being corrupted by power. Wisdom is to guard against this. For once power goes to your head, your doom is decided.

There is another lesson for all of us in this. Vengeance is tamasic. True, there are times when vengeance is right, and called for. But one has to guard oneself against the power of vengeance to turn one into those against whom one is taking vengeance.

Parashurama always had an element of tamas in him. Without that tamas, he would not have been able to carry out the order of his father to chop off the head of his mother – an order that all his four elder brothers had refused to obey. And then, seeking revenge for his father’s death, he kills not only the perpetrators of the crime, but all kshatriyas of the world. And not once, but twenty-one times. And fills five lakes with their blood. And filling five lakes with their blood, he offers a dark tarpana – a propitiatory rite – to his ancestors with that blood. That is deep, dark tamas indeed.

It is this tamasic power that the Ramayana describes graphically in terms of shrieking birds and running animals at the approach of Parashurama. The earth shakes, storms uproot mighty trees and hurl them about, dust storms arise and block the sun – all signs of the destructive power of sinister tamas.

Power and tamas – that is the most terrifying combination. That creates monsters. In modern times we have had this in leaders like Hitler and Stalin.

All of us, says the Gita, have an element of tamas in us. And we have to be on the guard against it. When we allow tamas to take over us, we destroy ourselves and harm everyone we come across. And the more powerful we are, the more will be our destructive power.

When Parashurama leaves Rama at the end of the story, humiliated and humbled, the power of darkness too ends. The sun is revealed again, and nature becomes calm again.

In Indian legends, Parashurama is a great warrior and a great ascetic. And what he destroys is arrogant power. Arrogant power needs to be destroyed. It was the great mission of his life. But after he completes that mission, the stories we hear of him all have an element of darkness in them – whether it is his attempt to battle with Bhishma, his disciple, seeking what he believed was justice for Amba, or in his cursing Karna, another disciple of his, for his kindness to him, for his devotion to him, for Karna’s enduring unendurable pain for his sake. True, the reason given is that Karna had told him a lie about who he was in order to learn from him since he would not have accepted Karna as a disciple otherwise.

Many leaders of men today have unlimited power with them. That power should be used for the good of the world – lokasangraha – says Indian culture. And on no account should we use it in arrogance and haughtiness to satisfy our ego. If we do, what will happen to us is what happened to Parashuurama: destruction of all the worlds we have acquired. That is apart from the harm we cause the world.

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The Mahabharata too tells us its own version of this story of the encounter between Rama and Parashurama. According to this telling, when Rama’s fame spread everywhere from Ayodhya, “impelled by curiosity” Parashurama takes his bow with which he had killed the kshatriyas and goes to Ayodhya to meet him there and to test for himself how great young Rama is. Dasharatha hearing of the arrival of the ascetic-warrior sends Rama to receive him at the outskirts of Ayodhya with all respect due to the great hero that he is. When Parashurama meets Rama, he offers his bow to him and asks him with a smile to string the bow. Rama accepts the challenge and eventually Parashurama’s pride is humbled.

This telling of the encounter differs in many significant details from Valmiki Ramayana’s telling. But here too, the essential message is the same: when power gives birth to arrogance, it is evil and ultimately it harms oneself, apart from harming others. In this telling also Parashurama loses all his powers and the great master who conquered the earth so many times, is reduced to nothing.

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Valmiki Ramayana translation courtesy: Robert Biggs

On Being Ordinary

2010-08-09T04:41:00.000-07:00

For the last ten years of his life, the Shambhala tradition of Tibet was the main subject of teaching for the great Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa, which he taught in the United States under the name the Sacred Path of the Warrior. According to these teachings, one of the things that the sacred warrior of Shambhala practiced was the Path of the Four Dignities: meekness, perkiness, inscrutability, and outrageousness. Interestingly, the analogy for meekness in the tradition is the tiger!

It might come as a surprise to most of us that the tiger is used as the analogy for meekness. I do not think any of us would normally associate the tiger with meekness. The tiger to us is neither the symbol for meekness nor of gentleness. It is a ferocious animal, one of the greatest predators of the wild jungles, a creature that knows no pity or compassion. Besides, it looks more appropriate to associate the tiger with pride than with humility. How can such a bloodthirsty animal be the symbol of meekness?

The difficulty arises because the Shambhala tradition sees humility as something different from what we see as humility. The Shambhala tradition explains that to be meek is to be resting in a state of simplicity and being uncomplicated.

The tradition further explains that there are three aspects to meekness. The first stage is to be modest, never to be bloated by arrogance. In this sense, modesty means being exactly what you are, to be true and genuine, to be authentic, not to wear masks but to show your true face to the world. In this sense the tiger is really meek – he is authentically what he is and has no pretentions. He neither tries to show that he is more than what he is, nor less than what he is. Like the tiger, the warrior of the meek too, says the tradition, is simple and uncomplicated. He is what he is. He accepts what he is and is comfortable with himself, with his own being as it is.

The second aspect of meekness is unconscious confidence. Confidence born of what one truly is. It is not the confidence born of acquisitions or achievements, the position one occupies or anything like that. One is oneself and that gives him confidence. It is confidence born of inner strength arising from being true to what one is.

In Sanskrit, we have the word swadharma – meaning one’s own dharma, one’s own true nature, what makes one what one is. The swadharma of fire is heat, or to burn, and the swadharma of water is to flow, or to seek its own level. The tiger’s confidence is born of being true to his own dharma. And a human being who is true to his own dharma has this confidence. The warrior of the meek enjoys this confidence.

The third dimension of being meek is to be uplifted, which again comes from being true to one’s swadharma. The tiger in the Himalayan jungles enjoys this upliftedness and so does the Shambhala warrior walking on the path of the dignity of meekness.

At one time, before our social system deteriorated to what it is now, Indian culture tried to create this unconscious confidence and upliftedness in everyone in the society. The brahmana [the priest], was true to his swadharma and had the confidence and upliftedness born of it; the kshatriya [the warrior] was true to his swadharma and had the confidence and upliftedness born of it; just as the vaishya [the farmer and the businessman] and the shudra [the ordinary worker] too had their confidence and upliftedness born of living their own dharmas. Eventually however, feelings of inferiority and superiority took over and the brahmana started considering himself superior to all others, the kshatriya superior to the vaishya and the shudra, the vaishya to the shudra and the shudra started considering himself the lowest of all and therefore without any dignity.

In the original social system of India, the potter and wheelwright was as proud of his profession as the priest was of his and the warrior was of his. Similarly, the woman had the dignity of being a woman by virtue of being true to her swadharma and the man had his dignity of being a man by virtue of being true to his swadharma. Each had his or her own functions, each had his or her own role to play, but neither was superior or inferior. Eventually though, men started seeing themselves superior and looking down upon women and women started seeing themselves as inferior and looking up to men as superior, thus destroying a beautiful system.

Accepting what you are is the way to spirituality. Accepting your true nature is the way to spirituality. It is the way to inner strength, confidence and upliftedness. When you are happy with what you are, you are not on an ego trip. When you struggle to be superior to the other, you are on an ego trip and you lose contact with your swadharma. Then you are no more spiritual.

A spiritual person is contented with what he is: if he is powerful, he is contented with it. If he is powerless, he is contented with it. If he has social position, he is happy with it, if he has no social position, he is happy with that too. If he is special he has no quarrels with his specialness, if he is ordinary, he is contented with his ordinariness. And you are contented with whatever happens to you. Victory, failure, gain, loss, fame or infamy, it makes no difference to you.

Speaking of such a person, the Gita says:

samah śatrau ca mitre ca tathā mānāpamānayoh |
śītoshna-sukha-duhkheshu samah sanga-vivarjitah ||BhG_12.18||

“He is the same towards foe and friend, and so is he in respect and insult. He is the same in heat and cold, the same in sorrow and happiness. He is devoid of all attachments.”

A spiritual person does not want to be different from what he is. If he victorious and respected, it is fine with him. And if he is beaten and insulted, that is fine too.

Just as he willing to be tossed about and celebrated, he is willing to be ordinary too.

One of the highest examples ancient India gives us for spirituality is that of a butcher and another that of a prostitute.

The great modern saint Nisargadatta Maharaj continued to be an ordinary beedi seller in a tiny kiosk in Bombay even after climbing to highest peaks of spirituality possible, while students were coming to him from all the world. Kabir continued to weave cloth even when he had become the most respected teacher of the day. Pakkanar, the less widely known saint from Kerala was a pariah by birth and he continued his traditional profession of making baskets from bamboo even when he had had climbed great spiritual heights and his presence performed miracles.

Indian spiritual tradition also tells as the story of Sena Nai who continued his profession of a barber even after spiritual enlightenment and of Gora Kumhar, a potter, who continued to practice his profession even after he was recognized as the greatest saint of his age. And in our tradition we also have kings who were enlightened masters who continued to rule their kingdoms with all the pomp and show that came with it, Janaka being the highest example for this from olden times.

True humility is being what you are, accepting what you are. It is not being arrogant of about what you are nor is it acting humble about it. That is why the Shambhala example of the tiger is such an unsurpassed example for humility.

In his answer to a question by one of his disciples, Osho explains what true humility means. Here are some excerpts from his answer:

“I am not saying become humble, because the ego can even try that—it tries! It can become humble. It can pretend to be humble, but then look in the humble man’s eyes: he says “I am nobody,” but he is waiting for you to say “You are the greatest man.”

Somebody says, “I am the richest man in the world.” Somebody says, “I am the most powerful man in the world.” Somebody says, “I am the most humble man in the world.” Where is the difference?

“I am not saying become humble. Ego can become humble. I am talking about ego-loss. You have to see into the ego: its complexity, its subtle games. You have to become aware of all its games. One day when you have looked into all its games, it simply disappears. Just by looking into them, just a clarity, just an awareness, and it disappears. It disappears as darkness disappears when you bring light into the dark room. Just bring awareness.

“I am not saying practise humility, and I am not saying become a humble man. A really religious person is neither humble nor egoistic—he is simple. A humble person is very complex: he has practised humility. Anything practised is always complex, and anything practised is always false. Anything practised means simply a pseudo thing.”

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Accepting what you are, being what you are, is true humility. And that is what the Himalayan tiger in his prime moving heedlessly through the forest does. The Shambhala tradition clearly understood what humility really means and the games the ego plays in the name of humility.

In an advice to us, his students, Swami Dayanandaji once said: “When someone praises you, accept the praise if you feel you deserve it. And if you do not feel you deserve it, say no to the praise. That is humility. But if you feel you deserve it and yet you say, ‘Thank you, but I did nothing, I do not deserve it,’ then it is not humility, but hypocrisy.”

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Krishna: His Relevance Today

2010-07-31T02:53:00.000-07:00

OSHO has spoken on practically every great spiritual tradition and master known to us and their teachings. The list of masters includes Krishna, Buddha, Mahavir, Zarathustra, Guru Nanak, Jesus, Kabir, Patanjali, Ashtavakra, Bodhidharma, Meera, Rabia, Dariya, Hakim Sanai, Chuang Tzu, Lao Tzu, Yakusan, Dionysius, Ta Hui, Atisha, Ko Hsuan, Rinzai, Nansen, Ma Tzu, Kyozan, Joshu, Hyakujo, Dogen, Heraclitus, Pythagoras . . . to name only a few. On each of these, he has given a series of talks and on some several series.

Given below is Osho’s answer to a question someone asked him about the relevance of Krishna for our times. Osho’s book Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy [Krishna Meri Drishti Mein in the Hindi original] begins with this question-answer.

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Q: WHAT ARE THE DISTINGUISHING VIRTUES OF KRISHNA THAT MAKE HIM RELEVANT TO OUR TIMES? WHAT IS HIS SIGNIFICANCE FOR US? PLEASE EXPLAIN.

Krishna is utterly incomparable, he is so unique. Firstly, his uniqueness lies in the fact that although Krishna happened in the ancient past he belongs to the future, is really of the future. Man has yet to grow to that height where he can be a contemporary of Krishna’s. He is still beyond man’s understanding; he continues to puzzle and battle us. Only in some future time will we be able to understand him and appreciate his virtues. And there are good reasons for it.

The most important reason is that Krishna is the sole great man in our whole history who reached the absolute height and depth of religion, and yet he is not at all serious and sad, not in tears. By and large, the chief characteristic of a religious person has been that he is somber, serious and sad-looking – like one vanquished in the battle of life, like a renegade from life. In the long line of such sages it is Krishna alone who comes dancing, singing and laughing.

Religions of the past were all life-denying and masochistic, extolling sorrow and suffering as great virtues. If you set aside Krishna’s vision of religion, then every religion of the past presented a sad and sorrowful face. A laughing religion, a religion that accepts life in its totality is yet to be born.

And it is good that the old religions are dead, along with them, that the old God, the God of our old concepts is dead too.

Every religion, up to now, has divided life into two parts, and while they accept one part they deny the other, Krishna alone accepts the whole of life. Acceptance of life in its totality has attained full fruition in Krishna. That is why India held him to be a perfect incarnation of God, while all other incarnations were assessed as imperfect and incomplete. Even Rama is described as an incomplete incarnation of God. But Krishna is the whole of God.

And there is a reason for saying so. The reason is that Krishna has accepted and absorbed everything that life is.

Albert Schweitzer made a significant remark in criticism of the Indian religion. He said that the religion of this country is life negative. This remark is correct to a large extent, if Krishna is left out.

But it is utterly wrong in the context of Krishna. If Schweitzer had tried to understand Krishna he would never have said so.

But it was unfortunate that we did not allow Krishna to influence our life in a broad way. He remains a lonely dancing island in the vast ocean of sorrow and misery that is our life. Or, we can say he is a small oasis of joyous dancing and celebration in the huge desert of sadness and negativity, of suppression and condemnation that we really are. Krishna could not influence the whole spectrum of our life, and for this we are alone to blame. Krishna is not in the least responsible for it. We were not that worthy, that deserving, to have him, to imbibe him, to absorb him.

Up to now, man’s mind has thought of and looked at life in fragments – and thought dialectically.

The religious man denies the body and accepts the soul. And what is worse, he creates a conflict, a dichotomy between the body and spirit. He denies this world, he accepts the other world, and thus creates a state of hostility between the two. Naturally our life is going to be sad and miserable if we deny the body, because all our life’s juice – its health and vitality, its sensitivities and beauty, all its music – has its source in the body. So a religion that denies and denounces the body is bound to be anemic and ill, it has to be lackluster. Such a religion is going to be as pale and lifeless as a dry leaf fallen from a tree. And the people who follow such a religion, who allow themselves to be influenced and conditioned by it, will be as anemic and prone to death as these leaves are.

Krishna alone accepts the body in its totality. And he accepts it not in any selected dimension but in all its dimensions. Apart from Krishna, Zarathustra is another. About him it is said he was born laughing. Every child enters this world crying. Only one child in all of history laughed at the time of his birth, and that was Zarathustra. And this is an index – an index of the fact that a happy and laughing humanity is yet to be born. And only a joyful and laughing humanity can accept Krishna.

Krishna has a great future. After Freud the world of religion is not going to be the same as it was before him. Freud stands as a watershed between the religions of the past and the religion of the future. With Freud a great revolution has taken place and man’s consciousness has achieved a breakthrough. We shall never be the same again after Freud. A new peak of consciousness has been touched and a new understanding, an altogether new perspective, a new vision of life has come into being. And it is essential to understand it rightly.

The old religions taught suppression as the way to God. Man was asked to suppress everything – his sex, his anger, his greed, his attachments – and then alone would he find his soul, would he attain to God. This war of man against himself has continued long enough. And in the history of thousands of years of this war, barely a handful of people, whose names can be counted on one’s fingers, can be said to have found God. So in a sense we lost this war, because down the centuries billions of people died without finding their souls, without meeting God.

Undoubtedly there must be some basic flaw, some fundamental mistake in the very foundation of these religions.

It is as if a gardener has planted fifty thousand trees and out of them only one tree flowers – and yet we accept his scripture on gardening on the plea that at least one tree has blossomed. But we fail to take into consideration that this single tree might have been an exception to the rule, that it might have blossomed not because of the gardener, but in spite of him. The rest of the fifty thousand trees, those that remained stunted and barren, are enough proof the gardener was not worth his salt.

If a Buddha, a Mahavira or a Christ attains to God in spite of these fragmentary and conflict-ridden religions, it is no testimony to the success of these religions as such. The success of religion, or let us say the success of the gardener, should be acclaimed only when all fifty thousand trees of his garden, with the exception of one or two, achieve flowering. Then the blame could be laid at the foot of the one tree for its failure to bloom. Then it could be said that this tree remained stunted and barren in spite of the gardener.

With Freud a new kind of awareness has dawned on man: that suppression is wrong, that suppression brings with it nothing but self-pity and anguish. If a man fights with himself he can only ruin and destroy himself. If I make my left hand fight with my right hand, neither is going to win, but in the end the contest will certainly destroy me. While my two hands fight with themselves, I and I alone will be destroyed in the process. That is how, through denial and suppression of his natural instincts and emotions, man became suicidal and killed himself.

Krishna alone seems to be relevant to the new awareness, to the new understanding that came to man in the wake of Freud and his findings. It is so because in the whole history of the old humanity Krishna alone is against repression.

He accepts life in all its facets, in all its climates and colors. He alone does not choose, he accepts life unconditionally. He does not shun love; being a man he does not run away from women. As one who has known and experienced God, he alone does not turn his face from war. He is full of love and compassion, and yet he has the courage to accept and fight a war. His heart is utterly non violent, yet he plunges into the fire and fury of violence when it becomes unavoidable. He accepts the nectar, and yet he is not afraid of poison.

In fact, one who knows the deathless should be free of the fear of death. And of what worth is that nectar which is afraid of death? One who knows the secret of non-violence should cease to fear violence. What kind of non-violence is it that is scared of violence? And how can the spirit, the soul, fear the body and run away from it? And what is the meaning of God if he cannot take the whole of this world in his embrace?

Krishna accepts the duality, the dialectics of life altogether and therefore transcends duality. What we call transcendence is not possible so long as you are in conflict, so long as you choose one part and reject the other. Transcendence is only possible when you choicelessly accept both parts together, when you accept the whole.

That is why Krishna has great significance for the future. And his significance will continue to grow with the passage of time. When the glow and the glamor of all other godmen and messiahs has dimmed, when the suppressive religions of the world have been consigned to the wastebasket of history, Krishna’s flame will be heading towards its peak, moving towards the pinnacle of its brilliance.

It will be so because, for the first time, man will be able to comprehend him, to understand him and to imbibe him. And it will be so because, for the first time, man will really deserve him and his blessings.

It is really arduous to understand Krishna. It is easy to understand that a man should run away from the world if he wants to find peace, but it is really difficult to accept that one can find peace in the thick of the marketplace. It is understandable that a man can attain to purity of mind if he breaks away from his attachments, but it is really difficult to realize that one can remain unattached and innocent in the very midst of relationships and attachments, that one can remain calm and still live at the very center of the cyclone. There is no difficulty in accepting that the flame of a candle will remain steady and still in a place well secluded from winds and storms, but how can you believe that a candle can keep burning steadily even in the midst of raging storms and hurricanes? So it is difficult even for those who are close to Krishna to understand him.

For the first time in his long history man has attempted a great and bold experiment through Krishna.

For the first time, through Krishna, man has tested, and tested fully his own strength and intelligence.

It has been tested and found that man can remain, like a lotus in water, untouched and unattached while living in the throes of relationship. It has been discovered that man can hold to his love and compassion even on the battlefield, that he can continue to love with his whole being while wielding a sword in his hand.

It is this paradox that makes Krishna difficult to understand. Therefore, people who have loved and worshipped him have done so by dividing him into parts, and they have worshipped his different fragments, those of their liking. No one has accepted and worshipped the whole of Krishna, no one has embraced him in his entirety. Poet Surdas sings superb hymns of praise to the Krishna of his childhood, Bal Krishna. Surdas’ Krishna never grows up, because there is a danger with a grown-up Krishna which Surdas cannot take. There is not much trouble with a boy Krishna flirting with the young women of his village, but it will be too much if a grown-up Krishna does the same.

Then it will be difficult to understand him.

After all, we can understand something on our own plane, on our own level. There is no way to understand something on a plane other than ours.

So for their adoration of Krishna, different people have chosen different facets of his life. Those who love the GEETA will simply ignore the BHAGWAD, because the Krishna of the GEETA is so different from the Krishna of the BHAGWAD Similarly, those who love the BHAGWAD will avoid getting involved with the GEETA. While the Krishna of the GEETA stands on a battlefield surrounded by violence and war, the Krishna of the BHAGWAD is dancing, singing and celebrating. There is seemingly no meeting-point whatsoever between the two.

There is perhaps no one like Krishna, no one who can accept and absorb in himself all the contradictions of life, all the seemingly great contradictions of life. Day and night, summer and winter, peace and war, love and violence, life and death – all walk hand in hand with him. That is why everyone who loves him has chosen a particular aspect of Krishna’s life that appealed to him and quietly dropped the rest.

Gandhi calls the GEETA his mother, and yet he cannot absorb it, because his creed of non-violence conflicts with the grim inevitability of war as seen in the GEETA. So Gandhi finds ways to rationalize the violence of the GEETA: he says the war of Mahabharat is only a metaphor, that it did not actually happen. This war, Gandhi says over and over again, represents the inner war between good and evil that goes on inside a man. The Kurushetra of the GEETA, according to Gandhi, is not a real battlefield located somewhere on this earth, nor is the Mahabharat an actual war. It is not that Krishna incites Arjuna to fight a real Mahabharat, Mahabharat only symbolizes the inner conflict and war of man, and so it is just a parable.

Gandhi has his own difficulty. The way Gandhi’s mind is, Arjuna will be much more in accord with him than Krishna. A great upsurge of non-violence has arisen in the mind of Arjuna, and he seems to be strongly protesting against war. He is prepared to run away from the battlefield and his arguments seem to be compelling and logical. He says it is no use fighting and killing one’s own family and relatives. For him, wealth, power and fame, won through so much violence and bloodshed, have no value whatsoever. He would rather be a beggar than a king, if kingship costs so much blood and tears. He calls war an evil and violence a sin and wants to shun it at all costs. Naturally Arjuna has a great appeal for Gandhi. How can he then understand Krishna?

Krishna very strongly urges Arjuna to drop his cowardice and fight like a true warrior. And his arguments in support of war are beautiful, rare and unique. Never before in history have such unique and superb arguments been advanced in favor of fighting, in support of war. Only a man of supreme non-violence could give such support to war.

Krishna tells Arjuna, “So long as you believe you can kill someone, you are not a man with a soul, you are not a religious man. So long as you think that one dies, you don’t know that which is within us, that which has never died and will never die. If you think you can kill someone you are under a great illusion, you are betraying your ignorance. The concept of killing and dying is materialistic; only a materialist can believe so. There is no dying, no death for one who really knows.” So Krishna exhorts Arjuna over and over again in the GEETA, “This is all play-acting; killing or dying is only a drama.”

In this context it is necessary to understand why we call the life of Rama a story, a biography, and not a play, not leela. It is because Rama is very serious. But we describe the life of Krishna as his leela, his play-acting, because Krishna is not serious at all. Rama is bounded, he is limited. He is bound, limited by his ideals and principles. Scriptures call him the greatest idealist: he is circumscribed by the rules of conduct and character. He will never step out of his limits; he will sacrifice everything for his principles, for his character.

Krishna’s life, on the other hand, accepts no limitations. It is not bound by any rules of conduct, it is unlimited and vast. Krishna is free, limitlessly free. There is no ground he cannot tread; no point where his steps can fear and falter, no limits he cannot transcend. And this freedom, this vastness of Krishna, stems from his experience of self-knowledge. It is the ultimate fruit of his enlightenment.

For this reason the question of violence has become meaningless in Krishna’s life. Now, violence is just not possible. And where violence is meaningless, non-violence loses its relevance too. Nonviolence has meaning only in relation to violence. The moment you accept that violence is possible, non-violence becomes relevant at once. In fact, both violence and non-violence are two sides of the same coin. And it is a materialistic coin. It is materialistic to think that one is violent or non-violent.

He is a materialist who believes he can kill someone, and he too is a materialist who thinks he is not going to kill anyone. One thing is common to them: they believe someone can be really killed.

Spirituality rejects both violence and non-violence. It accepts the immortality of the soul. And such spirituality turns even war into play.

Spirituality or religion accepts, and unreservedly accepts, all the dimensions of life. It accepts sex and attachment together, relationship and indulgence, love and devotion, yoga and meditation, and everything there is to life.

And the possibility of the understanding and acceptance of this philosophy of totality is growing every day – because now we have come to know a few truths we never knew in the past. Krishna, however, has undoubtedly known them.

For instance, we now know that the body and soul are not separate, that they are two poles of the same phenomenon. The visible part of the soul is known as the body, and the invisible part of the body is called the soul. God and the world are not two separate entities; there is absolutely no conflict between God and nature. Nature is the visible, the gross aspect of God, and God is the invisible, the subtle aspect of nature. There is no such point in the cosmos where nature ends and God begins. It is nature itself that, through a subtle process of its dissolution, turns into God, and it is God himself who, through a subtle process of his manifestation, turns into nature. Nature is manifest God, and God is unmanifest nature. And that is what advaita means, what the principle of one without a second means.

We can understand Krishna only if we clearly understand this concept of advaita, that only one is – one without a second. You can call him God or Brahman or what you like.

We also have to understand why Krishna is going to be increasingly significant for the future and how he is going to become closer and closer to man. It will be so, because the days when suppression and repression ruled the roost are gone. After a lengthy struggle and a long spell of inquiry and investigation we have learned that the forces we have been fighting are our own forces. In reality we are those forces, and it is utter madness to fight them. We have also learned we become prisoners of the forces we oppose and fight, and then it becomes impossible to free ourselves from them. And now we also know that we can never transform them if we treat them as inimical forces, if we resist and repress them.

For instance, if someone fights with sex, he will never attain to brahmacharya, to celibacy in his life. There is only one way to celibacy and that is through the transformation of the sex energy itself. So we don’t have to fight with the energy of sex; on the contrary, we should understand it and cooperate with it. We need to make friends with sex rather than make an enemy of it, as we have been doing for so long. The truth is, we can only change our friends; the question of changing those we treat as enemies simply does not arise. There is no way to even understand our enemies; it is just impossible. To understand something it is essential to be friendly with it.

Let us clearly understand that what we think to be the lowest is the other pole of the highest. The peak of a mountain and the valley around its base are not two separate things, they are part and parcel of the same phenomenon. The deep valley has been caused by the rising mountain, and in the same way the mountain has been possible because of the valley, one cannot be without the other. Or can it? Linguistically the mountain and the valley are two, but existentially they are two poles of the same thing.

Nietzsche has a very significant maxim. He says a tree that longs to reach the heights of heaven must sink its roots to the bottom of the earth. A tree that is afraid to do so should abandon its longing to reach the heavens. Really, the higher a tree the deeper its roots go. If you want to ascend to the skies you will have to descend into the abyss as well. Height and depth are not different things, they are two dimensions of the same thing. And their proportions are always the same.

Man’s mind has always wanted to choose between the seeming opposites. He wants to preserve heaven and do away with hell. He wants to have peace and escape tension. He desires to protect good and destroy evil. He longs to accept light and deny darkness. He craves to cling to pleasure and to shun pain. His mind has always divided existence into two parts and chosen one part against the other. And from choice arises duality, which brings conflict and pain.

Krishna symbolizes acceptance of the opposites together. And he alone can be whole who accepts the contradictions together. One who chooses will always be incomplete, less than the whole, because the part he chooses will continue to delude him and the part he denies will continue to pursue and haunt him. He can never be rid of what he rejects and represses. The mind of the man who rejects and represses sex becomes increasingly sexual. So a culture, a religion that teaches suppression of sex ends up creating nothing but sexuality; it becomes obsessed with sex.

Up to now we have stubbornly denied the Krishna who accepts sex; we accept him only in fragments.

But now it will be quite possible to accept him totally, because we are beginning to understand that it is the energy of sex itself that is transformed into the highest kind of celibacy, into brahmacharya through the process of its upward journey to the sahasrar, to the ultimate center in the head. We are beginning to learn that nothing in life has to be denied its place and given up, that we have to accept and live life in its totality. And he who lives wholly attains to life’s wholeness. And he alone is holy who is whole.

Therefore I say that Krishna has immense significance for our future. And that future, when Krishna’s image will shine in all its brilliance, is increasingly close. And whenever a laughing, singing and dancing religion comes into being it will certainly have Krishna’s stone in its foundation.

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From a talk given by Osho on 20 July at CCI Chambers, Bombay.

Note: In the painting above, we find Krishna in one of his leelas. He is enjoying the cowherd girls dressing him up as a woman – probably as Radha.

Mahabharata: Leadership, Integrity and Courage

2010-07-28T22:40:00.000-07:00

There is no integrity without courage. And there is no leadership without integrity.

Hearing that the Pandavas have lost their kingdom and everything else they possessed and are now living in the forest, Krishna rushes to the jungle to meet them there,along with several other Vrishnis. Apart from Krishna and the Vrishnis, several Bhoja, Andhaka, Chedi and Panchala leaders, including Draupadi’s brother Dhrishtadyumna also reach there. Addressing the Pandavas in that anger and sorrow filled atmosphere, Krishna speaks these fiery words: “The earth shall drink the blood of Duryodhana, Karna, Dusshasana and the wicked Shakuni! Slaying them and their followers and royal allies in battle, we shall install Yudhishthira the just on the throne! The wicked deserve to be slain! Verily, this is eternal dharma.”

As at all other times in his life, Krishna has no confusion about what his dharma is and what he should do. And he has no fear in speaking out his mind. He is a man who has never known fear – certainly not the kind of fear that numbs a man into inactivity, silences his words and forces him into meek submission.

The Mahabharata tells us that as he spoke these words, Krishna got into such a rage that it looked like he would consume the whole earth in the fire of his anger and Arjuna had to pacify him. But it was not to pacify Krishna that the fire-born Draupadi wanted. Shivering in humiliation and anger, she spoke to the only man she called her friend. “O Krishna,” she said,“ how could one like me, the wife of Kunti’s sons, the sister of Dhrishtadyumna, and your friend, be dragged to the assembly! Alas, during my monthly period, stained with blood, with but a single cloth on, trembling all over, and weeping, I was dragged to the court of the Kurus! Beholding me, stained with blood in the presence of those kings in the assembly, the wicked sons of Dhritarashtra laughed at me! O slayer of Madhu, while the sons of Pandu and the Panchalas and the Vrishnis lived, they dared express the desire of using me as their slave! Oh, fie on the might of Bhimasena! Fie on the Gandiva of Arjuna! For, O Janardana, they both suffered me to be thus disgraced by small men!”

Draupadi then in a long speech recounts one by one all the dark deeds of Duryodhana and his men against the Pandavas, beginning with the attempt to poison Bhima while they were still children. As she wailed aloud recalling her grief before Krishna, the epic tells us, Panchali’s “tears washed her large, graceful breasts crowned with auspicious marks.” Wiping her eyes and sighing frequently she concludes angrily in a choked voice, 'Husbands, or sons, or friends, or brothers, or father, have I none! Nor have I thee, O thou slayer of Madhu, [na eva me patayah santi na putraa madhusuudana; na bhraataro na ca pitaa na eva tvam na ca baandhavaah] for ye all, beholding me treated so cruelly by inferior foes, sit still unmoved! My grief at Karna's ridicule is incapable of being assuaged! I deserve to be protected by you, Krishna, for four reasons: we are related, you respect me, we are friends and you have the power to.”

When she stops, Krishna speaks, promising vengeance and justice to her. “Fair Draupadi,” he says, “the wives of those with whom you are angry shall weep even as you do, beholding their husbands dead on the ground, weltering in blood and their bodies covered with the arrows of Arjuna! Weep not, Draupadi! I promise you: you shall be a queen once again! The heavens might fall, the Himalayas might split, the earth might be rent, the waters of the ocean might dry up, but my words shall never be futile!”

Having spoken these words and pacified his friend Draupadi, Krishna explains to the Pandavas and their friends and relatives assembled there why he failed to save Draupadi and them in their moment of humiliation.

Addressing Yudhishthira, he says: “O lord of earth, if I had been present at Dwaraka, then, this evil would not have befallen thee! And coming to the gambling-match, even if uninvited by Dhritarashtra or Duryodhana, or by the other Kauravas, I would have prevented the game from taking place. I would have done this by showing its many evils, summoning to my aid Bhishma and Drona and Kripa and Bahlika! And, O foremost of kings, if he had rejected my gentle counsels offered as medicine, then I would have compelled him by force! And, if those who wait at his court, professing to be his friends but are in reality his foes, had supported him, then I would have slain them all, along with those gamblers, there present! It is owing to my absence from the Anartta country at that time, O Yudhishthira, that you fell into such distress begotten by dice! O you best of Kurus, O son of Pandu, on arriving at Dwaraka I learnt from Yuyudhana all about your calamity! And, O foremost of kings, directly on hearing it, I came here with a heart sorely agitated by grief to see you and your brothers!”

[Later answering the question why he was away from Dwaraka, Krishna explains he was busy fighting a battle with the king of Saubha and that is what prevented him from helping them in time.]

So this is what Krishna says: The dice game was evil. Had he known about the dice game, he would have come to Hastinapura – uninvited, if necessary. And he would have pleaded with Dhritarashtra, the king, to stop it. He would have taken the help of Bhishma, Drona, Kripa and Bahlika to plead to Dhritarashtra. And if Dhritarashtra hadn’t listened to him, he would have used force. If it came to that, he would have killed everyone who stood in his way.

Krishna’s words are bold and fearless. There is no equivocation here, no hesitation, no ambiguity. Evil has to be stopped and if force, if violence, has to be used for stopping evil, he would do that.

The ancient Indian ideal, represented by the Vedic Indra [not the Pauranic Indra] is active resistance to evil. Krishna is a reincarnation of that ideal. Try peaceful means, risk your very life for achieving justice through peaceful means, and nothing else works, take up weapons to destroy evil.

Krishna shows here the highest ideals in integrity and courage as a leader of men. And it is this courage and integrity that makes him a true leader. And I have not the least doubt: Krishna would have acted exactly as he spoke. He would have gone there and negotiated with Dhritarashtra and his sons. And if they hadn’t listened to them, he would have taken up weapons and finished them all off. We are talking not only of the greatest leader of the time, but also of the greatest warrior of the age: None, not Bhishma, not Drona, not Arjuna, not Karna was an equal to Krishna in battle – a fact that we often overlook.

Speaking of leadership, contemporary author DM Wolfe says in his Six Dimensions of Leadership that one of the hallmarks of great leadership is great courage and integrity, a statement that all modern leadership studies agree with. Without courage and integrity, no leadership is possible.

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Now let’s take a look at what actually happened in the royal hall of Hastinapura where the dice game took place and where Draupadi was humiliated as no women in Indian culture has been before or since.

The dice hall of the Mahabharata. The dice game between the Pandavas and the Kauravas is about to begin. While on the Pandava side Yudhishthira himself is playing, on the other side it is Duryodhana’s uncle Shakuni that plays for him. The Mahabharata tells us repeatedly that it is a deceitful game that is being played – it is not however clear whether the game of dice itself is deceitful or the way this game is being played is deceitful. There is also the possibility that what is wrong is an expert like Shakuni playing against a novice like Yudhishthira – as in battles, in dice too the times expected you to play with your equals. The Mahabharata suggests all three possibilities. Besides, the epic gives no details of how exactly the game was played – all we know is that Yudhishthira stakes his possessions one after the other and every time Shakuni takes up the dices in hand and then cries out, “Jitam.” Just that one word jitam, meaning ‘Won!’

tato jagraaha zakunis taan akSaan akSatattvavit
jitam ity eva zakuni yudhiSThiram abhaaSata

Then [after Yudhishthira had made the stakes] Shakuni, skilled in dice, picked up the dices [and then] told Yudhishthira, “Won!”

The first stake of Yudhishthira is an excellent wealth of pearls of great value, procured from the ocean by churning it (of old), so beautiful and decked with pure gold. He loses it. Then he stakes several jars each full of a thousand Nishkas, inexhaustible gold, and much silver and other minerals and loses them. The next stake is his chariot, which he says is equal to a thousand chariots. He loses that too. After that he stakes and loses one after the other a hundred thousand serving-girls; thousands of serving men; one thousand musty elephants with golden girdles, decked with ornaments; one thousand chariots, along with their drivers and warriors attached to each, a large number of chosen horses, ten thousand chariots and carts drawn by draught animals; sixty-thousand chosen warriors; then four hundred jewels of great value.

Yudhishthira is now like one possessed – and such indeed is the dice game. He is wagering one by one everything he has like a mad man. A great disaster is unfolding in the hall. Dhritarashtra of course approves of what is going on. He is in fact delighted at it. Since he cannot see by himself, he keeps asking, “Have I won it? Have I won it?” But Bhishma is watching it. So are Drona and Kripa, Ashwatthama and Bahlika and the large number of assembled kings and princes. All of them disapprove of it, but no one shows the courage to speak out against it.

In the entire Kaurava assembly, there is only one person who shows integrity and the courage to speak against it. No, it is not grandsire Bhishma, it is not guru Drona or Kripa, it is not Aswatthama, it is not Bahlika, it is certainly not Dhritarashtra who is supposed to have the interests of his younger brother’s children in his heart. It is none of the assembled kings. It is Vidura. But no one supports him and Duryodhana shouts at him and silences him.

The game continues. Shakuni asks Yudhishthira if there is anything else left with him. This is what Yudhishthira says, “O Shakuni, I know that I have untold wealth. But why is it that you ask me of my wealth? Let tens of thousands and millions and millions and tens of millions and hundreds of millions and tens of billions and hundreds of billions and trillions and tens of trillions and hundreds of trillions and tens of quadrillions and hundreds of quadrillions and even more wealth be staked by thee. I have as much. With that wealth, O king, I will play with thee."

This is not a sane man speaking. He has obviously lost all self-mastery over himself. He has lost touch with reality.

The next moment we hear Shakuni announcing, “Won!”

Yudhishthira then stakes “immeasurable kine and horses and milch cows with calves and goats and sheep” and loses them. Then he wagers his city, his country, the land and the wealth of all dwelling therein except of the Brahmanas. Next comes the turn of the ornaments his brothers are wearing. And then it is his brothers themselves. First Nakula, then Sahadeva, then Arjuna, and then Bhima. And finally, he stakes himself.

Then the unbelievable happens. Yudhishthira does what not even a common street gambler does. He wagers his wife, his queen, the proud Draupadi, whose praises he sings in ecstatic words before he stakes her.

Of course she too is lost. For the first time the assembly speaks. “Shame, shame!” they cry out in horror.

Duryodhana commands Vidura to go to the women’s apartments whether Draupadi is and bring her to the assembly – she is now his slave, he announces. Vidura does not move from his place. He shows the courage to openly defy Duryodhana’s power. Not only does he defy Duryodhana’s order, he shouts at Duryodhana, calling him a wretch who is behaving like a dog. This at a moment that Duryodhana considers the moment of his greatest victory. And publicly in Duryodhana’s own assembly, amidst his friends who are intoxicated with their evil victory.

But he is the only one who shows the courage to do so. Bhishma sits perspiring but silent, Drona sits perspiring but silent, and so do all the other elders. Not one of them shows the courage to speak up in the presence of the power-intoxicated Duryodhana.

There is nothing that Duryodhana can do against the fearless Vidura. He turns to an attendant, the pratikamin, to go and fetch Draupadi. Draupadi refuses to come and instead, asks Yudhishthira a question through the pratikamin: “Did he stake her after he lost himself or before that? Implying, if it was after he had lost himself, then he had no right to do so and she was not a slave.

The pratikamin comes back and asks the question. Duryodhana commands him to go back and tell her to come to the assembly and ask her question herself. Again Draupadi refuses to come. Instead, she asks the pratikamin to go back to the assembly and put the question to the elders in the assembly.

Not one of the elders in the assembly has one word to say in response to Draupadi’s question. Duryodhana commands the pratikamin to go back a third time and bring Draupadi to assembly. Instead of obeying him, the pratikamin turns to the assembly and asks Draupadi’s question again.

Such is the horror unfolding in the assembly that even an ordinary officer of the court gathers the courage to defy Duryodhana. True, it is partly also because he does not have the courage to face Draupadi a third time. But he does defy Duryodhana before whom he has no power.

But none of the powerful kshatriyas present in the assembly has the courage to speak up for Draupadi! Not even Bhishma and Drona!

Now Duryodhana sends his brother Dusshasana to bring Draupadi by force to the assembly. She begs Dusshasana to let her go, she is having her monthly period and according to custom wearing a single piece of cloth, she is not in a position to come before into the assembly. Dusshasana does not relent. Seeing that Draupadi turns around and runs towards where the Kuru women are. Dusshasana now catches hold of her by her hair and drags her into the assembly. Part of the cloth she is wearing slips away from her in their struggle and in that condition she is dragged all the way from her apartment to the dice hall.

A weeping, wailing, shaking Draupadi, with part of her cloth slipped away from her, is brought into the assembly in the dice hall. Dusshasana calls her a slave and Duryodhana, Karna and Shakuni applaud him. But still none present in the assembly has the courage to speak a word against Duryodhana or the evil that is unfolding before their eyes. Not one of them takes a step to put an end to the shameful horror.

Draupadi again asks her question: is she a slave or not? Now Bhishma speaks for the first time. This is what he says: “O blessed one, morality is subtle. I am therefore unable to duly decide this point that thou hast put, beholding that on the one hand one that hath no wealth cannot stake the wealth belonging to others, while on the other hand wives are always under the orders and at the disposal of their lords.”

Bhishma is right. He knows with certainly that Draupadi has now become enslaved to Duryodhana. In fact, Yudhishthira did not even have to wager her. She had become Duryodhana’s slave the moment Yudhishthira became Duryodhana’s slave. By the rules of the day in India, as over practically the entire world, a wife was a husband’s property and when he became a slave, she too became a slave. Besides, a slave had no property rights and whatever was his, belonged to his master, including his wife and children. In not directly saying Draupadi was not a slave, in equivocating, Bhishma was actually being kind to Draupadi.

But that was not the issue. The real issue was not whether Draupadi was technically a slave or not. The issue was what was happening in the Kaurava assembly. The issue was of a woman being publicly humiliated in an assembly as kshatriyas, whoever she was. And the kshatriya code all over the world said a woman begging for protection deserved to be protected even at the risk of one’s own life. It was this basic kshatriya code that everyone in the assembly failed to live up to. And in this case, that woman was the eldest daughter-in-law of the house, a princess by birth, a queen sanctified by the rajasooya sacrifice, a woman who had committed no crime, no sin.

Why did Bhishma fail to see this truth? Why did Drona, Kripa, Ashwtthama, Bahlika and others fail to see the truth?

And why did the Pandava brothers themselves fail to see this truth? True, they had become slaves. But aren’t there things even a slave can, and should, protest against? Couldn’t the slave Arjuna’s Gandiva still have spelled terror for the wicked? Couldn’t the slave Bhima’s muscles still have terrified the wicked?

Becoming a slave is one thing. Accepting slavery is another thing. There are slaves who meekly submit to slavery. And there are slaves who fight for justice even in slavery, who stand with their heads held high even in slavery.

I see this as a sign of the disease that had infected the entire kshatriya class of the day. Rather than standing up for justice, they had learnt to bend their knees before insolent might.

There is a beautiful prayer by Rabindranath Tagore that I love. A line in the prayer says: “Give me the strength never to . . . bend my knees before insolent might.”

What was on display for all to see was insolent might. Pure and shameless insolent might. And the kshatriyas there bent their knees before it.

There is a popular belief that both Krishna and Draupadi were born to destroy the kshatriya race of the day. If it is true, it should be because this is what had become of the kshatriyas of the day. Kshatriyas are meant to be leaders of men and leaders of men require courage and integrity. And the men in that assembly lacked courage and integrity.

Imagine Krishna being present in that assembly. What would he have done? Would he have sat there silently like Bhishma, Drona, Kripa, Bahlika and other elders, perspiring and helpless? Or would he have invoked his Sudarshana?

Krishna himself answers the question in the Vana Parva of the epic when he meets the Pandavas and Draupadi in the jungle. If nothing else worked, he would have turned the assembly into a river of blood. He would have killed off every single person there who stood with evil.

Which is what makes Krishna the supreme leader of the age. He fought against the insolent might of Kamsa while he was still a boy. As an adult he would destroy adharma wherever he found it, be it in the mighty Jarasandha, in the powerful Kalayavana, in the cunning Paundraka Vasudeva, or anywhere else.

Leadership means integrity and courage to act. Without integrity and courage to act there can be no leadership.

The day these leaders of men failed to speak up for justice was one of the most shameful days for Hastinapura. Barring Vidura, and Vikarna who would later speak up, everyone else there proved not to be a leader.

Darker things would happen in the assembly on that day. But no leader would emerge in the dice hall. The men assembled there lacked the courage that a leader requires. And without courage, no other virtue is a virtue.

C.S. Lewis put it beautifully: “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.”

There was no virtue among the kshatriyas in the dice hall on that day because there was no courage.

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India and the Scientific Revolution

2010-07-26T21:54:00.000-07:00

An article by David Gray, PhD

1. Math and Ethnocentrism

The study of mathematics in the West has long been characterized by a certain ethnocentric bias, a bias which most often manifests not in explicit racism, but in a tendency toward undermining or eliding the real contributions made by non-Western civilizations. The debt owed by the West to other civilizations, and to India in particular, go back to the earliest epoch of the "Western" scientific tradition, the age of the classical Greeks, and continued up until the dawn of the modern era, the renaissance, when Europe was awakening from its dark ages. This awakening was in part made possible by the rediscovery of mathematics and other sciences and technologies through the medium of the Arabs, who transmitted to Europe both their own lost heritage as well as the advanced mathematical traditions formulated in India.

George Ghevarughese Joseph, in an important article entitled "Foundations of Eurocentrism in Mathematics," argued that "the standard treatment of the history of non-European mathematics is a product of historiographical bias (conscious or otherwise) in the selection and interpretation of facts, which, as a consequence, results in ignoring, devaluing or distorting contributions arising outside European mathematical traditions." (1987:14)

Due to the legacy of colonialism, the exploitation of which was ideologically justified through a doctrine of racial superiority, the contributions of non-European civilizations were often ignored, or, as Joseph argued, even distorted, in that they were often misattributed as European, i.e. Greek, contributions, and when their contributions were so great as to resist such treatment, they were typically devalued, considered inferior or irrelevant to Western mathematical traditions.

This tendency has not only led to the devaluation of non-Western mathematical traditions, but has distorted the history of Western mathematics as well. In so far as the contributions from non-Western civilizations are ignored, there is the problem of accounting for the development of mathematics purely within the Western cultural framework. This has led, as Sabetai Unguru has argued, toward a tendency to read more advanced mathematical concepts into the relatively simplistic geometrical formulations of Greek mathematicians such as Euclid, despite the fact that the Greeks lacked not only mathematic notation, but even the place-value system of enumeration, without which advanced mathematical calculation is impossible. Such ethnocentric revisionist history resulted in the attribution of more advanced algebraic concepts, which were actually introduced to Europe over a millennium later by the Arabs, to the Greeks. And while the contributions of the Greeks to mathematics was quite significant, the tendency of some math historians to jump from the Greeks to renaissance Europe results not only in an ethnocentric history, but an inadequate history as well, one which fails to take into account the full history of the development of modern mathematics, which is by no means a purely European development.

2. Vedic Altars and the "Pythagorean theorem"

A perfect example of this sort of misattribution involves the so-called Pythagorean theorem, the well-known theorem which was attributed to Pythagoras who lived around 500 BCE, but which was first proven in Greek sources in Euclid's Geometry, written centuries later. Despite the scarcity of evidence backing this attribution, it is not often questioned, perhaps due to the mantra-like frequency with which it is repeated. However, Seidenberg, in his 1978 article, shows that the thesis that Greece was the origin of geometric algebra was incorrect, "for geometric algebra existed in India before the classical period in Greece." (1978:323) It is now generally understood that the so-called "Pythagorean theorem" was understood in ancient India, and was in fact proved in Baudhayana's Shulba Sutra, a text dated to circa 600 BCE. (1978:323).

Knowledge of mathematics, and geometry in particular, was necessary for the precise construction of the complex Vedic altars, and mathematics was thus one of the topics covered in the brahmanas. This knowledge was further elaborated in the kalpa sutras, which gave more detailed instructions concerning Vedic ritual. Several of these treat the topic of altar construction. The oldest and most complete of these is the previously mentioned Shulba Sutra of Baudhaayana. As this text was composed about a century before Pythagoras, the theory that the Greeks were the source of Geometric algebra is untenable, while the hypothesis that India was have been a source for Greek geometry, transmitted via the Persians who traded both with the Greeks and the Indians, looks increasingly plausible. On the other hand, it is quite possible that both the Greeks and the Indians developed geometry. Seidenberg has argued, in fact, that both seem to have developed geometry out of the practical problems involving their construction of elaborate sacrificial altars. (See Seidenberg 1962 and 1983)

3. Zero and the Place Value System

Far more important to the development of modern mathematics than either Greek or Indian geometry was the development of the place value system of enumeration, the base ten system of calculation which uses nine numerals and zero to represent numbers ranging from the most minuscule decimal to the most inconceivably large power of ten. This system of enumeration was not developed by the Greeks, whose largest unit of enumeration was the myriad (10,000) or in China, where 10,000 was also the largest unit of enumeration until recent times. Nor was it developed by the Arabs, despite the fact that this numeral system is commonly called the Arabic numerals in Europe, where this system was first introduced by the Arabs in the thirteenth century.

Rather, this system was invented in India, where it evidently was of quite ancient origin. The Yajurveda Samhitaa, one of the Vedic texts predating Euclid and the Greek mathematicians by at least a millennium, lists names for each of the units of ten up to 10 to the twelfth power (paraardha). (Subbarayappa 1970:49) Later Buddhist and Jain authors extended this list as high as the fifty-third power, far exceeding their Greek contemporaries, who lacking a system of enumeration were unable to develop abstract mathematical concepts.

The place value system of enumeration is in fact built into the Sanskrit language, where each power of ten is given a distinct name. Not only are the units ten, hundred and thousand (daza, zata, sahasra) named as in English, but also ten thousand, hundred thousand, ten million, hundred million (ayuta, lakSa, koti, vyarbuda), and so forth up to the fifty-third power, providing distinct names where English makes use of auxillary bases such as thousand, million, etc.

By giving each power of ten an individual name, the Sanskrit system gave no special importance to any number. Thus the Sanskrit system is obviously superior to that of the Arabs (for whom the thousand was the limit), or the Greeks and Chinese (whose limit was ten thousand) and even to our own system (where the names thousand, million etc. continue to act as auxillary bases). Instead of naming the numbers in groups of three, four or eight orders of units, the Indians, from a very early date, expressed them taking the powers of ten and the names of the first nine units individually. In other words, to express a given number, one only had to place the name indicating the order of units between the name of the order of units immediately below it and the one immediately above it. That is exactly what is required in order to gain a precise idea of the place-value system, the rule being presented in a natural way and thus appearing self-explanatory. To put it plainly, the Sanskrit numeral system contained the very key to the discovery of the place-value system. (2000:429)

As Ifrah has shown at length, there is little doubt that our place-value numeral system developed in India (2000:399-409), and this system is embedded in the Sanskrit language, several aspects of which make it a very logical language, well suited to scientific and mathematical reasoning. Nor did this system exhaust Indian ingenuity; as van Nooten has shown, Pingala, who lived circa the first century BCE, developed a system of binary enumeration convertible to decimal numerals, described in his Chandahzaastra. His system is quite similar to that of Leibniz, who lived roughly fourteen hundred years later. (See Van Nooten)

India is also the locus of another closely related and equally important mathematical discovery, the numeral zero. The oldest known text to use zero is a Jain text entitled the Lokavibhaaga, which has been definitely dated to Monday 25 August 458 CE. (Ifrah 2000:417-1 9) This concept, combined by the place-value system of enumeration, became the basis for a classical era renaissance in Indian mathematics.

The Indian numeral system and its place value, decimal system of enumeration came to the attention of the Arabs in the seventh or eighth century, and served as the basis for the well known advancement in Arab mathematics, represented by figures such as al-Khwarizmi. It reached Europe in the twelfth century when Adelard of Bath translated al-Khwarizmi's works into Latin. (Subbarayappa 1970:49) But the Europeans were at first resistant to this system, being attached to the far less logical roman numeral system, but their eventual adoption of this system led to the scientific revolution that began to sweep Europe beginning in the thirteenth century.

4. Luminaries of Classical Indian Mathematics

Aryabhata
The world did not have to wait for the Europeans to awake from their long intellectual slumber to see the development of advanced mathematical techniques. India achieved its own scientific renaissance of sorts during its classical era, beginning roughly one thousand years before the European Renaissance. Probably the most celebrated Indian mathematicians belonging to this period was Aaryabhat.a, who was born in 476 CE.

In 499, when he was only 23 years old, Aaryabhat.a wrote his Aaryabhat.iya, a text covering both astronomy and mathematics. With regard to the former, the text is notable for its awareness of the relativity of motion. (See Kak p. 16) This awareness led to the astonishing suggestion that it is the Earth that rotates the Sun. He argued for the diurnal rotation of the earth, as an alternate theory to the rotation of the fixed stars and sun around the earth (Pingree 1981:18). He made this suggestion approximately one thousand years before Copernicus, evidently independently, reached the same conclusion.

With regard to mathematics, one of Aaryabhat.a's greatest contributions was the calculation of sine tables, which no doubt was of great use for his astronomical calculations. In developing a way to calculate the sine of curves, rather than the cruder method of calculating chords devised by the Greeks, he thus went beyond geometry and contributed to the development of trigonometry, a development which did not occur in Europe until roughly one thousand years later, when the Europeans translated Indian influenced Arab mathematical texts.

Aaryabhat.a's mathematics was far ranging, as the topics he covered include geometry, algebra, trigonometry. He also developed methods of solving quadratic and indeterminate equations using fractions. He calculated pi to four decimal places, i.e., 3.1416. (Pingree 1981:57) In addition, Aaryabhat.a "invented a unique method of recording numbers which required perfect understanding of zero and the place-value system." (Ifrah 2000:419)

Given the astounding range of advanced mathematical concepts and techniques covered in this fifth century text, it should be of no surprise that it became extremely well known in India, judging by the large numbers of commentaries written upon it. It was studied by the Arabs in the eighth century following their conquest of Sind, and translated into Arabic, whence it influenced the development of both Arabic and European mathematical traditions.

Brahmagupta
Born in 598 CE in Rajastan in Western India, Brahmagupta founded an influential school of mathematics which rivaled Aaryabhat.a's. His best known work is the Brahmasphuta Siddhanta, written in 628 CE, in which he developed a solution for a certain type of second order indeterminate equation. This text was translated into Arabic in the eighth century, and became very influential in Arab mathematics. (See Kak p. 16)

Mahavira
Mahaaviira was a Jain mathematician who lived in the ninth century, who wrote on a wide range of mathematical topics. These include the mathematics of zero, squares, cubes, square-roots, cube-roots, and the series extending beyond these. He also wrote on plane and solid geometry, as well as problems relating to the casting of shadows. (Pingree 1981:60)

Bhaskara
Bhaskara was one of the many outstanding mathematicians hailing from South India. Born in 1114 CE in Karnataka, he composed a four-part text entitled the Siddhanta Shiromani. Included in this compilation is the Biijagan.ita, which became the standard algebra textbook in Sanskrit. It contains descriptions of advanced mathematical techniques involving both positive and negative integers as well as zero, irrational numbers. It treats at length the "pulverizer" (kut.t.akaara) method of solving indeterminate equations with continued fractions, as well as the so-called "Pell's equation (vargaprakr.ti) dealing with indeterminate equations of the second degree. He also wrote on the solution to numerous kinds of linear and quadratic equations, including those involving multiple unknowns, and equations involving the product of different unknowns. (Pingree 1981, p. 64)

In short, he wrote a highly sophisticated mathematical text that proceeded by several centuries the development of such techniques in Europe, although it would be better to term this a rediscovery, since much of the Renaissance advances of mathematics in Europe was based upon the discovery of Arab mathematical texts, which were in turn highly influenced by these Indian traditions.

Madhava
The Kerala region of South India was home to a very important school of mathematics. The best known member of this school Madhava (c. 1444-1545), who lived in Sangamagraama in Kerala. Primarily an astronomer, he made history in mathematics with his writings on trigonometry. He calculated the sine, cosine and arctangent of the circle, developing the world's first consistent system of trigonometry. (See Hayashi 1997:784-786) He also correctly calculated the value of pi to eleven decimal places. (Pingree 1981:490)

This is by no means a complete list of influential Indian mathematicians or Indian contributions to mathematics, but rather a survey of the highlights of what is, judged by any fair, unbiased standard, an illustrious tradition, important both for its own internal elegance as well as its influence on the history of European mathematical traditions. The classical Indian mathematical renaissance was an important precursor to the European renaissance, and to ignore this fact is to fail to grasp the history of latter, a history which was truly multicultural, deriving its inspiration from a variety of cultural roots.

There are in fact, as Frits Staal has suggested in his important (1995) article, "The Sanskrit of Science", profound similarities between the social contexts of classical India and renaissance Europe. In both cases, important revolutions in scientific thought occurred in complex, hierarchical societies in which certain elite groups were granted freedom from manual labor, and thus the opportunity to dedicate themselves to intellectual pursuits. In the case of classical India, these groups included certain brahmins as well as the Buddhist and Jain monks, while in renaissance Europe they included both the monks as well as their secular derivatives, the university scholars.

Why, one might ask, did Europe's take over thousand years to attain the level of abstract mathematics achieved by Indians such as Aaryabhat.a? The answer appears to be that Europeans were trapped in the relatively simplistic and concrete geometrical mathematics developed by the Greeks. It was not until they had, via the Arabs, received, assimilated and accepted the place-value system of enumeration developed in India that they were able to free their minds from the concrete and develop more abstract systems of thought. This development thus triggered the scientific and information technology revolutions which swept Europe and, later, the world. The role played by India in the development is no mere footnote, easily and inconsequentially swept under the rug of Eurocentric bias. To do so is to distort history, and to deny India one of its greatest contributions to world civilization.

Works Cited

Hayashi, Takao. 1997. "Number Theory in India". In Helaine Selin, ed. Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 784-786.

Ifrah, Georges. 2000. The Universal History of Numbers: From Prehistory to the Invention of the Computer. David Bellos, E. F. Harding, Sophie Wood and Ian Monk, trans. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Joseph, George Ghevarughese. 1987. "Foundations of Eurocentrism in Mathematics". In Race & Class 28.3, pp. 13-28.

Kak, Subhash. "An Overview of Ancient Indian Science". In T. R. N. Rao and Subhash Kak, eds. Computing Science in Ancient India, pp. 6-21.

van Nooten, B. "Binary Numbers in Indian Antiquity". In T. R. N. Rao and Subhash Kak, eds. Computing Science in Ancient India, pp. 21-39.

Pingree, David. Jyotih.zaastra: Astral and Mathematical Literature, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1981, p. 4.

Seidenberg, A. 1962. "The Ritual Origin of Geometry". In Archive for History of Exact Sciences 1, pp. 488-527.

______. 1978. "The Origin of Mathematics". In Archive for History of Exact Sciences 18.4, pp. 301-42.

______. 1983. "The Geometry of Vedic Rituals". In Frits Staal, ed. Agni: The Vedic Ritual of the Fire Altar. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1986, vol. 2, pp. 95-126.

Unguru, Sabetai. 1975. "On the Need to Rewrite the History of Greek Mathematics". In Archive for History of Exact Sciences 15.1, pp. 67-114.

Staal, Frits. 1995. "The Sanskrit of Science". In Journal of Indian Philosophy 23, pp. 73-127.

Subbarayappa, B. V. 1970. "India's Contributions to the History of Science". In Lokesh Chandra, et al., eds. India's Contribution to World Thought and Culture. Madras: Vivekananda Rock Memorial Committee, pp. 47-66.

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Courtesy: http://www.infinityfoundation.com

From The Tao of Leadership by John Heider

2010-07-26T21:44:00.000-07:00

Flexible or Rigid

At birth, a person is flexible and flowing. At death, a person becomes rigid and blocked. Consider the lives of plants and trees: during their time of greatest growth, they are relatively tender and pliant. But when they are full grown or begin to die, they become tough and brittle.

The tree which has grown up and become rigid is cut into lumber.

The rigid group leader may be able to lead repetitious and structural exercises but can’t cope with lively group process.

Whatever is flexible and flowing will tend to grow. Whatever is rigid and blocked will atrophy and die.

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Hands of Destiny: A Zen Story

2010-07-25T10:25:00.000-07:00

A great Japanese warrior named Nobunaga decided to attack the enemy although he had only one tenth the number of men the opposition commanded.

He knew that he would win, but his soldiers were in doubt. On the way he stopped at a Shinto shrine and told his man, 'After I visit the shrine I will toss a coin. If heads come we will win; if tails come we will lose. Destiny holds us in her hand.'

Nobunaga entered the shrine and offered a silent prayer. He came forth and tossed a coin. Heads appeared. His soldiers were so eager to fight that they won their battle easily.

'No one can change the hand of destiny,' his attendant told him after the battle. ‘Indeed not,' said Nobunaga, showing a coin, which had been doubled, with heads facing either way.

[Courtesy: Paul Reps]

Osho’s Enlightenment, Part 5

2010-07-25T10:22:00.000-07:00

I walked towards the nearest garden. It was a totally new walk, as if gravitation had disappeared. I was walking, or I was running, or I was simply flying; it was difficult to decide. There was no gravitation, I was feeling weightless—as if some energy was taking me. I was in the hands of some other energy.

For the first time I was not alone, for the first time I was no more an individual, for the first time the drop has come and fallen into the ocean. Now the whole ocean was mine, I was the ocean. There was no limitation. A tremendous power arose as if I could do anything whatsoever. I was not there, only the power was there.

I reached to the garden where I used to go every day. The garden was closed, closed for the night. It was too late, it was almost one o’clock in the night. The gardeners were fast asleep. I had to enter the garden like a thief, I had to climb the gate. But something was pulling me towards the garden. It was not within my capacity to prevent myself. I was just floating.

That’s what I mean when I say again and again ‘float with the river, don’t push the river’. I was relaxed, I was in a let-go. I was not there. It was there, call it God—God was there.

I would like to call it It, because god is too human a word, and has become too dirty by too much use, has become too polluted by so many people. Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans, priests and politicians—they all have corrupted the beauty of the word. So let me call it It. It was there and I was just carried away…carried by a tidal wave.

The moment I entered the garden everything became luminous, it was all over the place—the benediction, the blessedness. I could see the trees for the first time—their green, their life, their very sap running. The whole garden was asleep, the trees were asleep. But I could see the whole garden alive, even the small grass leaves were so beautiful.

I looked around. One tree was tremendously luminous—the maulshree tree. It attracted me, it pulled me towards itself. I had not chosen it, god himself has chosen it. I went to the tree, I sat under the tree. As I sat there things started settling. The whole universe became a benediction.

It is difficult to say how long I was in that state. When I went back home it was four o’clock in the morning, so I must have been there by clock time at least three hours—but it was infinity. It had nothing to do with clock time. It was timeless.
Those three hours became the whole eternity, endless eternity. There was no time, there was no passage of time; it was the virgin reality—uncorrupted, untouchable, unmeasurable.

And that day something happened that has continued—not as a continuity—but it has still continued as an undercurrent. Not as a permanency—each moment it has been happening again and again. It has been a miracle each moment.

That night…and since that night I have never been in the body. I am hovering around it. I became tremendously powerful and at the same time very fragile. I became very strong, but that strength is not the strength of a Mohammed Ali. That strength is not the strength of a rock, that strength is the strength of a rose flower—so fragile in its strength…so fragile, so sensitive, so delicate.

The rock will be there, the flower can go any moment, but still the flower is stronger than the rock because it is more alive. Or, the strength of a dewdrop on a leaf of grass just shining; in the morning sun—so beautiful, so precious, and yet can slip any moment. So incomparable in its grace, but a small breeze can come and the dewdrop can slip and be lost forever.

Buddhas have a strength which is not of this world. Their strength is totally of love…Like a rose flower or a dewdrop. Their strength is very fragile, vulnerable. Their strength is the strength of life not of death. Their power is not of that which kills; their power is of that which creates. Their power is not of violence, aggression; their power is that of compassion.

But I have never been in the body again, I am just hovering around the body. And that’s why I say it has been a tremendous miracle. Each moment I am surprised I am still here, I should not be. I should have left any moment, still I am here. Every morning I open my eyes and I say, ‘So, again I am still here?’ Because it seems almost impossible. The miracle has been a continuity.

Just the other day somebody asked a question—‘Osho, you are getting so fragile and delicate and so sensitive to the smells of hair oils and shampoos that it seems we will not be able to see you unless we all go bald.’ By the way, nothing is wrong with being bald—bald is beautiful. Just as ‘black is beautiful’, so ‘bald is beautiful’. But that is true and you have to be careful about it.

I am fragile, delicate and sensitive. That is my strength. If you throw a rock at a flower nothing will happen to the rock, the flower will be gone. But still you cannot say that the rock is more powerful than the flower. The flower will be gone because the flower was alive. And the rock—nothing will happen to it because it is dead. The flower will be gone because the flower has no strength to destroy. The flower will simply disappear and give way to the rock. The rock has a power to destroy because the rock is dead.

Remember, since that day I have never been in the body really; just a delicate thread joins me with the body. And I am continuously surprised that somehow the whole must be willing me to be here, because I am no more here with my own strength, I am no more here on my own. It must be the will of the whole to keep me here, to allow me to linger a little more on this shore. Maybe the whole wants to share something with you through me.

Since that day the world is unreal. Another world has been revealed. When I say the world is unreal I don’t mean that these trees are unreal. These trees are absolutely real—but the way you see these trees is unreal. These trees are not unreal in themselves—they exist in God, they exist in absolute reality—but the way you see them you never see them; you are seeing something else, a mirage.

You create your own dream around you and unless you become awake you will continue to dream. The world is unreal because the world that you know is the world of your dreams. When dreams drop and you simply encounter the world that is there, then the real world.

There are not two things, God and the world. God is the world if you have eyes, clear eyes, without any dreams, without any dust of the dreams, without any haze of sleep; if you have clear eyes, clarity, perceptiveness, there is only God.

Then somewhere God is a green tree, and somewhere else God is a shining star, and somewhere else God is a cuckoo, and somewhere else God is a flower, and somewhere else a child and somewhere else a river—then only God is. The moment you start seeing, only God is.

But right now whatsoever you see is not the truth, it is a projected lie. That is the meaning of a mirage. And once you see, even for a single split moment, if you can see, if you can allow yourself to see, you will find immense benediction present all over, everywhere—in the clouds, in the sun, on the earth.

This is a beautiful world. But I am not talking about your world, I am talking about my world. Your world is very ugly, your world is your world created by a self, your world is a projected world. You are using the real world as a screen and projecting your own ideas on it.

When I say the world is real, the world is tremendously beautiful, the world is luminous with infinity, the world is light and delight, it is a celebration, I mean my world—or your world if you drop your dreams.

When you drop your dreams you see the same world as any Buddha has ever seen. When you dream you dream privately. Have you watched it?—that dreams are private. You cannot share them even with your beloved. You cannot invite your wife to your dream—or your husband, or your friend. You cannot say, ‘Now, please come tonight in my dream. I would like to see the dream together.’ It is not possible. Dream is a private thing, hence it is illusory, it has no objective reality.

God is a universal thing. Once you come out of your private dreams, it is there. It has been always there. Once your eyes are clear, a sudden illumination—suddenly you are overflooded with beauty, grandeur and grace. That is the goal, that is the destiny.

Let me repeat. Without effort you will never reach it, with effort nobody has ever reached it. You will need great effort, and only then there comes a moment when effort becomes futile. But it becomes futile only when you have come to the very peak of it, never before it. When you have come to the very pinnacle of your effort—all that you can do you have done—then suddenly there is no need to do anything any more. You drop the effort.

But nobody can drop it in the middle, it can be dropped only at the extreme end. So go to the extreme end if you want to drop it. Hence I go on insisting: make as much effort as you can, put your whole energy and total heart in it, so that one day you can see—now effort is not going to lead me anywhere. And that day it will not be you who will drop the effort, it drops on its own accord. And when it drops on its own accord, meditation happens.

Meditation is not a result of your efforts, meditation is a happening. When your efforts drop, suddenly meditation is there…the benediction of it, the blessedness of it, the glory of it. It is there like a presence…luminous, surrounding you and surrounding everything. It fills the whole earth and the whole sky.

That meditation cannot be created by human effort. Human effort is too limited.

That blessedness is so infinite. You cannot manipulate it. It can happen only when you are in a tremendous surrender. When you are not there only then it can happen. When you are a no-self—no desire, not going anywhere—when you are just herenow, not doing anything in particular, just being, it happens. And it comes in waves and the waves become tidal. It comes like a storm, and takes you away into a totally new reality.

But first you have to do all that you can do, and then you have to learn non-doing. The doing of the non-doing is the greatest doing, and the effort of effortlessness is the greatest effort.

Your meditation that you create by chanting a mantra or by sitting quiet and still and forcing yourself, is a very mediocre meditation. It is created by you, it cannot be bigger than you. It is homemade, and the maker is always bigger than the made. You have made it by sitting, forcing in a yoga posture, chanting ‘rama, rama, rama’ or anything—‘blah, blah, blah’—anything. You have forced the mind to become still.

It is a forced stillness. It is not that quiet that comes when you are not there. It is not that silence which comes when you are almost non-existential. It is not that beautitude which descends on you like a dove.

It is said when Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist in the Jordan River, god descended in him, or the holy ghost descended in him like a dove. Yes, that is exactly so. When you are not there peace descends in you…fluttering like a dove…reaches in your heart and abides there and abides there forever.

You are your undoing, you are the barrier. Meditation is when the meditator is not. When the mind ceases with all its activities—seeing that they are futile—then the unknown penetrates you, overwhelms you.

The mind must cease for God to be. Knowledge must cease for knowing to be. You must disappear, you must give way. You must become empty, then only you can be full.

That night I became empty and became full. I became non-existential and became existence. That night I died and was reborn. But the one that was reborn has nothing to do with that which died, it is a discontinuous thing. On the surface it looks continuous but it is discontinuous. The one who died, died totally; nothing of him has remained.

Believe me, nothing of him has remained, not even a shadow. It died totally, utterly. It is not that I am just a modified rup, transformed, modified form, transformed form of the old. No, there has been no continuity. That day of March twenty-first, the person who had lived for many many lives, for millennia, simply died. Another being, absolutely new, not connected at all with the old, started to exist.

Religion just gives you a total death. Maybe that’s why the whole day previous to that happening I was feeling some urgency like death, as if I am going to die—and I really died. I have known many other deaths but they were nothing compared to it, they were partial deaths.

Sometimes the body died, sometimes a part of the mind died, sometimes a part of the ego died, but as far as the person was concerned, it remained. Renovated many times, decorated many times, changed a little bit here and there, but it remained, the continuity remained.

That night the death was total. It was a date with death and god simultaneously. [trans211]

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Courtesy: www.oshoworld.com

Osho’s Enlightenment, Part 4

2010-07-25T10:19:00.000-07:00

I am reminded of the fateful day of twenty-first March, 1953. For many lives I had been working—working upon myself, struggling, doing whatsoever can be done—and nothing was happening.

Now I understand why nothing was happening. The very effort was the barrier, the very ladder was preventing, the very urge to seek was the obstacle. Not that one can reach without seeking. Seeking is needed, but then comes a point when seeking has to be dropped. The boat is needed to cross the river but then comes a moment when you have to get out of the boat and forget all about it and leave it behind. Effort is needed, without effort nothing is possible. And also only with effort, nothing is possible.

Just before twenty-first March, 1953, seven days before, I stopped working on myself. A moment comes when you see the whole futility of effort. You have done all that you can do and nothing is happening. You have done all that is humanly possible. Then what else can you do? In sheer helplessness one drops all search.

And the day the search stopped, the day I was not seeking for something, the day I was not expecting something to happen, it started happening. A new energy arose—out of nowhere. It was not coming from any source. It was coming from nowhere and everywhere. It was in the trees and in the rocks and the sky and the sun and the air—it was everywhere. And I was seeking so hard, and I was thinking it is very far away. And it was so near and so close.

Just because I was seeking I had become incapable of seeing the near. Seeking is always for the far, seeking is always for the distant—and it was not distant. I had become far-sighted, I had lost the near-sightedness. The eyes had become focussed on the far away, the horizon, and they had lost the quality to see that which is just close, surrounding you.

The day effort ceased, I also ceased. Because you cannot exist without effort, and you cannot exist without desire, and you cannot exist without striving.

The phenomenon of the ego, of the self, is not a thing, it is a process. It is not a substance sitting there inside you; you have to create it each moment. It is like pedalling bicycle. If you pedal it goes on and on, if you don’t pedal it stops. It may go a little because of the past momentum, but the moment you stop pedalling, in fact the bicycle starts stopping. It has no more energy, no more power to go anywhere. It is going to fall and collapse.

The ego exists because we go on pedalling desire, because we go on striving to get something, because we go on jumping ahead of ourselves. That is the very phenomenon of the ego—the jump ahead of yourself, the jump in the future, the jump in the tomorrow. The jump in the non-existential creates the ego. Because it comes out of the non-existential it is like a mirage. It consists only of desire and nothing else. It consists only of thirst and nothing else.

The ego is not in the present, it is in the future. If you are in the future, then ego seems to be very substantial. If you are in the present the ego is a mirage, it starts disappearing.

The day I stopped seeking…and it is not right to say that I stopped seeking, better will be to say the day seeking stopped. Let me repeat it: the better way to say it is the day the seeking stopped. Because if I stop it then I am there again. Now stopping becomes my effort, now stopping becomes my desire, and desire goes on existing in a very subtle way.

You cannot stop desire; you can only understand it. In the very understanding is the stopping of it. Remember, nobody can stop desiring, and the reality happens only when desire stops.

So this is the dilemma. What to do? Desire is there and Buddhas go on saying desire has to be stopped, and they go on saying in the next breath that you cannot stop desire. So what to do? You put people in a dilemma. They are in desire, certainly. You say it has to be stopped—okay. And then you say it cannot be stopped. Then what is to be done?

The desire has to be understood. You can understand it, you can just see the futility of it. A direct perception is needed, an immediate penetration is needed. Look into desire, just see what it is, and you will see the falsity of it, and you will see it is non-existential. And desire drops and something drops simultaneously within you.

Desire and the ego exist in cooperation, they coordinate. The ego cannot exist without desire, the desire cannot exist without the ego. Desire is projected ego, ego is introjected desire. They are together, two aspects of one phenomenon.

The day desiring stopped, I felt very hopeless and helpless. No hope because no future. Nothing to hope because all hoping has proved futile, it leads nowhere. You go in rounds. It goes on dangling in front of you, it goes on creating new mirages, it goes on calling you, ‘Come on, run fast, you will reach.’ But howsoever fast you run you never reach.

That’s why Buddha calls it a mirage. It is like the horizon that you see around the earth. It appears but it is not there. If you go it goes on running from you. The faster you run, the faster it moves away. The slower you go, the slower it moves away. But one thing is certain—the distance between you and the horizon remains absolutely the same. Not even a single inch can you reduce the distance between you and the horizon.

You cannot reduce the distance between you and your hope. Hope is horizon. You try to bridge yourself with the horizon, with the hope, with a projected desire. The desire is a bridge, a dream bridge—because the horizon exists not, so you cannot make a bridge towards it, you can only dream about the bridge. You cannot be joined with the non-existential.

The day the desire stopped, the day I looked and realized into it, it simply was futile. I was helpless and hopeless. But that very moment something started happening. The same started happening for which for many lives I was working and it was not happening.

In your hopelessness is the only hope, and in your desirelessness is your only fulfillment, and in your tremendous helplessness suddenly the whole existence starts helping you.

It is waiting. When it sees that you are working on your own, it does not interfere. It waits. It can wait infinitely because there is no hurry for it. It is eternity. The moment you are not on your own, the moment you drop, the moment you disappear, the whole existence rushes towards you, enters you. And for the first time things start happening.

Seven days I lived in a very hopeless and helpless state, but at the same time something was arising. When I say hopeless I don’t mean what you mean by the word hopeless. I simply mean there was no hope in me. Hope was absent. I am not saying that I was hopeless and sad. I was happy in fact, I was very tranquil, calm and collected and centered. Hopeless, but in a totally new meaning. There was no hope, so how could there be hopelessness. Both had disappeared.

The hopelessness was absolute and total. Hope had disappeared and with it its counterpart, hopelessness, had also disappeared. It was a totally new experience—of being without hope. It was not a negative state. I have to use words—but it was not a negative state. It was absolutely positive. It was not just absence, a presence was felt. Something was overflowing in me, overflooding me.

And when I say I was helpless, I don’t mean the word in the dictionary-sense. I simply say I was selfless. That’s what I mean when I say helpless. I have recognized the fact that I am not, so I cannot depend on myself, so I cannot stand on my own ground—there was no ground underneath. I was in an abyss . . . bottomless abyss. But there was no fear because there was nothing to protect. There was no fear because there was nobody to be afraid.

Those seven days were of tremendous transformation, total transformation. And the last day the presence of a totally new energy, a new light and new delight, became so intense that it was almost unbearable—as if I was exploding, as if I was going mad with blissfulness. The new generation in the West has the right word for it—I was blissed out, stoned.

It was impossible to make any sense out of it, what was happening. It was a very non-sense world—difficult to figure it out, difficult to manage in categories, difficult to use words, languages, explanations. All scriptures appeared dead and all the words that have been used for this experience looked very pale, anaemic. This was so alive. It was like a tidal wave of bliss.

The whole day was strange, stunning, and it was a shattering experience. The past was disappearing, as if it had never belonged to me, as if I had read about it somewhere, as if I had dreamed about it, as if it was somebody else’s story I have heard and somebody told it to me. I was becoming loose from my past, I was being uprooted from my history, I was losing my autobiography. I was becoming a non-being, what Buddha calls anatta. Boundaries were disappearing, distinctions were disappearing.

Mind was disappearing; it was millions of miles away. It was difficult to catch hold of it, it was rushing farther and farther away, and there was no urge to keep it close. I was simply indifferent about it all. It was okay. There was no urge to remain continuous with the past.

By the evening it became so difficult to bear it—it was hurting, it was painful. It was like when a woman goes into labour when a child is to be born, and the woman suffers tremendous pain—the birth pangs.

I used to go to sleep in those days near about twelve or one in the night, but that day it was impossible to remain awake. My eyes were closing, it was difficult to keep them open. Something was very imminent, something was going to happen. It was difficult to say what it was—maybe it is going to be my death—but there was no fear. I was ready for it. Those seven days had been so beautiful that I was ready to die, nothing more was needed. They had been so tremendously blissful, I was so contented, that if death was coming, it was welcome.

But something was going to happen—something like death, something very drastic, something which will be either a death or a new birth, a crucifixion or a resurrection—but something of tremendous import was around just by the corner. And it was impossible to keep my eyes open. I was drugged.

I went to sleep near about eight. It was not like sleep. Now I can understand what Patanjali means when he says that sleep and samadhi are similar. Only with one difference—that in samadhi you are fully awake and asleep also. Asleep and awake together, the whole body relaxed, every cell of the body totally relaxed, all functioning relaxed, and yet a light of awareness burns within you…clear, smokeless. You remain alert and yet relaxed, loose but fully awake. The body is in the deepest sleep possible and your consciousness is at its peak. The peak of consciousness and the valley of the body meet.

I went to sleep. It was a very strange sleep. The body was asleep, I was awake. It was so strange—as if one was torn apart into two directions, two dimensions; as if the polarity has become completely focused, as if I was both the polarities together…the positive and negative were meeting, sleep and awareness were meeting, death and life were meeting. That is the moment when you can say ‘the creator and the creation meet.’

It was weird. For the first time it shocks you to the very roots, it shakes your foundations. You can never be the same after that experience; it brings a new vision to your life, a new quality.

Near about twelve my eyes suddenly opened—I had not opened them. The sleep was broken by something else. I felt a great presence around me in the room. It was a very small room. I felt a throbbing life all around me, a great vibration—almost like a hurricane, a great storm of light, joy, ecstasy. I was drowning in it.

It was so tremendously real that everything became unreal. The walls of the room became unreal, the house became unreal, my own body became unreal. Everything was unreal because now there was for the first time reality.

That’s why when Buddha and Shankara say the world is maya, a mirage, it is difficult for us to understand. Because we know only this world, we don’t have any comparison. This is the only reality we know. What are these people talking about—this is maya, illusion? This is the only reality. Unless you come to know the really real, their words cannot be understood, their words remain theoretical. They look like hypotheses. Maybe this man is propounding a philosophy—‘The world is unreal’.

When Berkley in the West said that the world is unreal, he was walking with one of his friends, a very logical man; the friend was almost a skeptic. He took a stone from the road and hit Berkley’s feet hard. Berkley screamed, blood rushed out, and the skeptic said, ‘Now, the world is unreal? You say the world is unreal?—then why did you scream? This stone is unreal?—then why did you scream? Then why are you holding your leg and why are you showing so much pain and anguish on your face. Stop this? It is all unreal.

Now this type of man cannot understand what Buddha means when he says the world is a mirage. He does not mean that you can pass through the wall. He is not saying this—that you can eat stones and it will make no difference whether you eat bread or stones. He is not saying that.

He is saying that there is a reality. Once you come to know it, this so-called reality simply pales out, simply becomes unreal. With a higher reality in vision the comparison arises, not otherwise.

In the dream; the dream is real. You dream every night. Dream is one of the greatest activities that you go on doing. If you live sixty years, twenty years you will sleep and almost ten years you will dream. Ten years in a life—nothing else do you do so much. Ten years of continuous dreaming—just think about it. And every night…. And every morning you say it was unreal, and again in the night when you dream, dream becomes real.

In a dream it is so difficult to remember that this is a dream. But in the morning it is so easy. What happens? You are the same person. In the dream there is only one reality. How to compare? How to say it is unreal? Compared to what? It is the only reality. Everything is as unreal as everything else so there is no comparison. In the morning when you open your eyes another reality is there. Now you can say it was all unreal.

Compared to this reality, dream becomes unreal.

There is an awakening—compared to that reality of that awakening, this whole reality becomes unreal.

That night for the first time I understood the meaning of the word maya. Not that I had not known the word before, not that I was not aware of the meaning of the word. As you are aware, I was also aware of the meaning—but I had never understood it before. How can you understand without experience?

That night another reality opened its door, another dimension became available. Suddenly it was there, the other reality, the separate reality, the really real, or whatsoever you want to call it—call it god, call it truth, call it dhamma, call it tao, or whatsoever you will. It was nameless. But it was there—so opaque, so transparent, and yet so solid one could have touched it. It was almost suffocating me in that room. It was too much and I was not yet capable of absorbing it.

A deep urge arose in me to rush out of the room, to go under the sky—it was suffocating me. It was too much! It will kill me! If I had remained a few moments more, it would have suffocated me—it looked like that.

I rushed out of the room, came out in the street. A great urge was there just to be under the sky with the stars, with the trees, with the earth…to be with nature. And immediately as I came out, the feeling of being suffocated disappeared. It was too small a place for such a big phenomenon. Even the sky is a small place for that big phenomenon. It is bigger than the sky. Even the sky is not the limit for it. But then I felt more at ease.

0o0

To be continued…5

Courtesy: www.oshoworld.com

Osho’s Enlightenment, Part 3

2010-07-25T10:16:00.000-07:00

I tell you from my own experience that there is no easier path than merging with one’s own self. The only thing one has to do is stop seeking for the support of anything on the surface of the mind. By catching hold of thoughts you cannot drown and because of their support you remain on the surface.

We are in the habit of catching hold of thoughts. As soon as one thought passes on we catch hold of another—but we never enter the gap between two successive thoughts. This gap itself is the channel to drowning in the depths. Do not move in thoughts—go deep down between them in the gaps.

How can this be done? It can be done by awareness, by observing the stream of thoughts. Just as a man standing on the side of a road watches the people passing by, you should observe your thoughts. They are simply pedestrians, passing by on the road of the mind within you. Just watch them. Don’t form judgment about any of them. If you can observe them with detachment, the fist that has been gripping them opens automatically and you will find yourself standing, not in thoughts, but in the interval, in the gap between them. But the gap has no foundation so it isn’t possible just to stand there. Simply by being there you drown.

And this drowning itself is the real support because it is through this that you reach the being you really are. One who seeks support in the realm of thoughts is really suspended in the air without support—but he who throws away all crutches attains the support of his own self. [pway07]
0o0

A meditator has to remember not to struggle with the thoughts. If you want to win, don’t fight. That is a simple rule of thumb. If you want to win, simply don’t fight. The thoughts will be coming as usual. You just watch, hiding behind your blanket; let them come and go. Just don’t get involved with them.

The whole question is of not getting involved in any way—appreciation or condemnation, any judgment, bad or good. Don’t say anything, just remain absolutely aloof and allow the mind to move in its routine way. If you can manage…and this has been managed by thousands of buddhas, so there is not a problem. And when I say this can be managed, I am saying it on my own authority. I don’t have any other authority.

I have fought and have tortured myself with fighting and I have known the whole split that creates a constant misery and tension. Finally seeing the point that victory is impossible, I simply dropped out of the fight. I allowed the thoughts to move as they want; I am no longer interested.

And this is a miracle, that if you are not interested, thoughts start coming less. When you are utterly uninterested, they stop coming. And a state of no-thought, without any fight, is the greatest peace one has ever known. This is what we are calling the empty heart of the Buddha. [empti03]

0o0
This mind is amazing. It comes to be experienced like an onion. One day, seeing an onion, I was reminded of this resemblance. I was peeling the onion; I went on peeling layer after layer, and finally nothing remained of it. First thick rough layers, then soft smooth layers, and then nothing.

Thus is the mind also. You go on peeling off, first gross layers, then subtle layers, and then remains an emptiness. Thoughts, passions and ego, and then nothing at all, just emptiness. It is the uncovering of this emptiness that I call meditation. This emptiness is our true self. That which ultimately remains is the self-form. Call it the self, call it the no-self, words do not mean anything. Where there is no thought, passion, or ego, is that which is.

Hume has said, “Whenever I dive into myself I do not meet any ‘I’ there. I come across either some thought or some passion or some memory, but never across myself.” This is right—but Hume turns back from the layers only, and that is the mistake. Had he gone a little deeper he would have reached the place where there is nothing to come across, and that is the true self. Where there remains nothing to come across is that which I am. Everything is based in that emptiness. But if somebody turns back from the very surface, no acquaintance with it takes place.

On the surface is the world, at the center is the self. On the surface is everything, at the center is nothingness, the void. [sdwisd03]

0o0

I remember the days when my mind was in darkness, when nothing was clear inside me at all. One thing in particular I recall about those days was that I did not feel love for anyone, I did not even love myself.

But when I came to the experience of meditation, I felt as though a million dormant springs of love had suddenly begun to bubble up in me. This love was not focused, not directed to anyone in particular, it was just a flow, fluid and forceful. It flowed from me as light streams from a lamp, as fragrance pours from flowers. In the wonderful moment of my awakening I realized that love was the real manifestation of my nature, of man’s nature.

Love has no direction; it is not aimed at anyone. Love is a manifestation of the soul, of one’s self.

Before this experience happened to me I believed love meant being attached to someone. Now I realize that love and attachment are two completely different things. Attachment is the absence of love. Attachment is the opposite of hatred, and hatred it can easily become. They are a pair, attachment and hatred. They are mutually interchangeable.

The opposite of hatred is not love. Not at all. And love is quite different from attachment too. Love is a completely new dimension. It is the absence of both attachment and hatred, yet it is not negative. Love is the positive existence of some higher power. This power, this energy, flows from the self towards all things—not because it is attracted by them, but because love is emitted by the self. Because love is the perfume of the self. [long06]

0o0

To be continued…4

Courtesy: www.oshoworld.com

Osho’s Enlightenment, Part 2

2010-07-25T10:12:00.000-07:00

For ten years I used to run eight miles every morning and eight miles every evening—from I947 to I957. It was a regular thing. And I came to experience many, many things through running. At sixteen miles per day I would have encircled the world seven times in those ten years. After you run the second or third mile a moment comes when things start flowing and you are no longer in the head, you become your body, you are the body. You start functioning as an alive being—as trees function, as animals function. You become a tiger or a peacock or a wolf. You forget all head. The university is forgotten, the degrees are forgotten, you don’t know a thing, you simply are.

In fact, by and by, after three or four miles, you cannot conceive of yourself as a head. Totality arises. Plato is forgotten, Freud has disappeared, all divisions disappear—because they were on the surface—and deep down your unity starts asserting itself.

Running against the wind in the early morning when things are fresh and the whole existence is in a new joy, is bathed in a new delight of the new day, and everything is fresh and young, the past has disappeared, everything has come out of deep rest in the night, everything is innocent, primitive—suddenly even the runner disappears. There is only running. There is no body running, there is only running. And by and by you see that a dance arises with the wind, with the sky, with the sun rays coming, with the trees, with the earth. You are dancing. You start feeling the pulse of the Universe. [parad107]

0o0

Let me tell you an incredible experience I had. It has just occurred to me; I have never told it before. About seventeen or eighteen years ago I used to meditate until late at night sitting in the top of a tree.

I have often felt the body has a greater influence over you if you meditate sitting on the ground. The body is made of earth, and the forces of the body work very powerfully if one meditates sitting on the ground. All this talk of the yogis moving up to the higher elevations—to the mountains, to the Himalayas—is not without reason; it’s very scientific. The greater the distance between the body and the earth, the lesser the pull of the earthly element on the body.

So I used to meditate every night sitting in a tree.

One night…I don’t know when I became immersed in deep meditation, and I don’t know at what point my body fell from the tree, but when it did, I looked with a start to see what had happened.

I was still in the tree, but the body had fallen below. It’s difficult to say how I felt at that time. I was still sitting in the tree and the body was below. Only a single silver cord connected me with the navel of my body—a very shiny silver cord. What would happen next was beyond my comprehension. How would I return to my body?

I don’t know how long this state lasted, but it was an exceptional experience. For the first time I saw my body from outside, and from that very day on the body ceased to exist. Since then I am finished with death, because I came to see another body different from this one—I came to experience the subtle body. It’s difficult to say how long this experience lasted.

With the breaking of dawn, two women from the nearby village passed, carrying milk pots on their heads. As they approached the tree they saw my body lying there. They came and sat next to the body. I was watching all this from above. It seems the women took the body to be dead. They placed their hands on my head, and in a moment, as if by a powerful force of attraction, I came back into the body and my eyes opened.

At that point I experienced something else too. I felt that a woman can create a chemical change in a man’s body, and so can a man in a woman’s body. I also wondered how the touch of that woman caused my return to the body.

Subsequently, I had many more experiences of this kind. They explained why the tantrikas of India, who experimented extensively with samadhi and death, had linked themselves with women too.

During intensive experiences of samadhi, man’s luminous body, his subtle body, cannot return without a woman’s help if it has come out of the physical body. Similarly, a woman’s luminous, subtle body, cannot be brought back without a man’s assistance. As the male and female bodies connect, an electrical circuit is completed and the consciousness that has gone out returns swiftly to the body.

Following this event, I consistently had the same kind of experience about six times in six months. And in those six months I felt I had lost at least ten years off my life. If I were to live up to seventy, now I can only live up to sixty. I went through some strange experiences in six months—even the hair on my chest turned white. I couldn’t comprehend what was happening.

It occurred to me, however, that the connection between this body and that body had ruptured, had been interrupted, that the adjustment, the harmony that had existed between the two, had broken down. What also occurred to me was that the reason for Shankaracharya dying at the age of thirty-three and Vivekananda dying at the age of thirty-six was something else. It becomes difficult to live once the connection between the two bodies breaks abruptly. This explained why Ramakrishna was besieged with illnesses and Ramana died of cancer. The cause was not physical; rather, the breaking of the adjustment between their physical and subtle bodies was responsible for it.

It is generally believed that yogis are healthy people, but the truth is completely the opposite. The truth is, yogis have always been ill, and have died at early ages. The sole reason for this is that the necessary adjustment between the two bodies becomes interrupted. Once the subtle body comes out of the physical body it never re-enters fully and the adjustment is never completely restored. But then it is not needed. There is no reason for it; it has no meaning.

With the use of will power, simply with will power, the energy can be drawn inside—just the thought, the feeling, “I want to turn in, I want to go back in, I want to return within, I want to come back in.” Were you to have such an intense longing, such a powerful emotion; if your whole being were to fill with a passionate, intense desire to return to your center; if your entire body were to pulsate with this feeling, someday it can happen—you will instantly return to your core and, for the first time, see your body from within.

When yoga talks about thousands of arteries and veins, it is not from the point of view of physiology. Yogis have nothing to do with physiology. These have been known from within; hence, when one looks today one wonders where these arteries and veins are. Where are the seven chakras, the centers within the body that yoga talks about? They are nowhere in the body. We can’t find them because we are looking at the body from outside.

There is one other way to observe the body—from within, through the inner physiology. That’s a subtle physiology. The nerves, veins and centers of the body known through that inner physiology are all totally different. You won’t find them anywhere in this physical body. These centers are the contact fields between this body and the inner soul, the meeting points for both.

The biggest meeting point is the navel. You may have noticed, if you suddenly get into an accident driving a car, the navel will be the first to feel the impact. The navel will become disordered at once, because here the contact field between the body and the soul is the deepest of all. Seeing death, this center will be the first to become disturbed. As soon as death appears, the navel will be disrupted in relation to the body’s center. There is an internal arrangement of the body which has resulted from the contact between this body and the inner body. The chakras are their contact fields.

So obviously, to know the body from within is to know a totally different kind of world altogether, a world we know absolutely nothing about. Medical science knows nothing about it, and won’t for some time. Once you experience that the body is separate from you, you are finished with death. You come to know there is no death. And then you can actually come out of the body and look at it yourself from outside.

Questions relating to life and death are not matters of philosophical or metaphysical thought. Those who think about these things never accomplish anything. What I am talking about is an existential approach. It can be known that “I am life;” it can be known that “I am not going to die.” One can live this experience, one can enter into it. [now08]

0o0

I used to ask myself, “Who am I?” It is impossible to count how many days and nights I passed in this query. The intellect gave answers heard from others, or born of conditioning. All of them were borrowed, lifeless. They brought no contentment. They resonated a little at the surface, and then disappeared. The inner being was not touched by them. No echo of them was heard in the depths. There were many answers to the question, but none was correct. And I was untouched by them. They could not rise to the level of the question.

Then I saw that the question came from the center but the replies touched only the periphery. The question was mine, but the answers came from outside; the question arose from my innermost being, the replies were imposed from outside. This insight became a revolution. A new dimension was revealed.

The responses of the intellect were meaningless. They had no relevance to the problem. An illusion had shattered. And what a relief it was!

It seemed as if a closed door had been flung open, filling the darkness with light. The intellect had been providing the answers—that was the mistake. Because of these false answers, the real answer could not arise. Some truth was struggling to surface. In the depths of consciousness some seed was seeking the way to break open the ground in order to reach the light. Intellect was the obstruction.

When this was made plain, the answers began to subside. Knowledge acquired from outside began to evaporate. The question went ever deeper. I did not do anything, only kept on watching.

Something novel was happening. I was speechless. What was there to do? I was, at the most, simply a witness. The reactions of the periphery were fading, perishing, becoming nonexistent. The center now began to resonate more fully.

”Who am I?” My entire being was throbbing with this thirst.

What a violent storm it was! Every breath quaked and trembled in it.

”Who am I?” - like an arrow, the question pierced through everything and moved within.

I remember—what an acute thirst it was! My very life had turned into thirst.

Everything was burning. And like a flame of fire the question stood forth, “Who am I?”

The surprise was that the intellect was completely silent. The incessant flow of thoughts had stopped. What had happened? The periphery was absolutely still. There were no thoughts, no conditionings of the past.

Only I was there—and there was the question too. No, no— I myself was the question.

And then the explosion. In a moment, everything was transformed. The question had dropped. The answer had come from some unknown dimension.

Truth is attained through a sudden explosion, not gradually.

It cannot be compelled to appear. It comes.

Emptiness is the solution, not words. Becoming answerless is the answer.

Someone asked yesterday—and someone or the other asks every day—“What is the answer?”

I say, “If I mention it, it is meaningless. Its meaning lies in realizing it oneself.” [sdwisd01]

0o0

To be continued…3

Courtesy: www.oshoworld.com

Osho’s Enlightenment, Part 1

2010-07-25T10:08:00.000-07:00

Buddha says, ‘Fortunate is the man who has found a Master.’

I myself was not as fortunate as you are: I was working without a Master. I searched and I could not find one. It was not that I had not searched, I had searched long enough, but I could not find one. It is very rare to find a Master, rare to find a being who has become a non-being, rare to find a presence who is almost an absence, rare to find a man who Is simply a door to the divine, an open door to the divine which will not hinder you, through which you can pass. It is very difficult .

The Sikhs call their temple the gurudwara, the door of the Master. That is exactly what the Master is—the door. Jesus says again and again, ‘I am the gate, I am the way, I am the truth. Come follow me, pass through me. And unless you pass through me you will not be able to reach.’

Yes, sometimes it happens that a person has to work without a Master. If the Master is not available then one has to work without a Master, but then the journey is very hazardous.

For one year I was in the state…. For one year it was almost impossible to know what was happening. For one year continuously it was even difficult to keep myself alive. Just to keep myself alive was a very difficult thing—because all appetite disappeared. Days would pass and I would not feel any hunger, days would pass and I would not feel any thirst. I had to force myself to eat, force myself to drink. The body was so non-existential that I had to hurt myself to feel that I was still in the body. I had to knock my head against the wall to feel whether my head was still there or not. Only when it hurt would I be a little in the body.

Every morning and every evening I would run for five to eight miles. People used to think that I was mad. Why was I running so much? Sixteen miles a day! It was just to feel myself, to feel that I still was, not to lose contact with myself—just to wait until my eyes became attuned to the new that was happening.

And I had to keep myself close to myself. I would not talk to anybody because everything had become so inconsistent that even to formulate one sentence was difficult. In the middle of the sentence I would forget what I was saying in the middle of the way I would forget where I was going. Then I would have to come back. I would read a book—I would read fifty pages—and then suddenly I would remember, ‘What am I reading? I don’t remember at all.’

My situation was such:

The door of the psychiatrist’s office burst open and a man rushed in.

’Doctor!’ he cried. ‘You’ve got to help me. I’m sure I’m losing my mind. I can’t remember anything—what happened a year ago, or even what happened yesterday. I must be going crazy!’

‘Hmmmmmmm,’ pondered the headshrinker. ‘Just when did you first become aware of this problem?’

The man looked puzzled, ‘What problem?’

This was my situation! Even to complete a full sentence was difficult. I had to keep myself shut in my room. I made it a point not to talk, not to say anything, because to say anything was to say that I was mad.

For one year it persisted. I would simply lie on the floor and look at the ceiling and count from one to a hundred then back from a hundred to one. Just to remain capable of counting was at least something. Again and again I would forget. It took one year for me to gain a focus again, to have a perspective.

It happened. It was a miracle. But it was difficult. There was nobody to support me, there was nobody to say where I was going and what was happening. In fact, everybody was against it my teachers, my friends, my well-wishers. All were against it. But they could not do anything, they could only condemn, they could only ask what I was doing.
I was not doing anything! Now it was beyond me; it was happening. I had done something, unknowingly I had knocked at the door, now the door had opened. I had been meditating for many years, just sitting silently doing nothing, and by and by I started getting into that space, that heartspace, where you are and you are not doing anything, you are simply there, a presence, a watcher.

You are not even a watcher because you are not watching—you are just a presence. Words are not adequate because whatsoever word is used it seems as if it is being done. No, I was not doing it. I was simply lying, sitting, walking—deep down there was no doer. I had lost all ambition; there was no desire to be anybody, no desire to reach anywhere—not even God, not even nirvana. The Buddha-disease had completely disappeared. I was simply thrown to myself.

It was an emptiness and emptiness drives one crazy. But emptiness is the only door to God. That means that only those who are ready to go mad ever attain, nobody else. [tao209]

0o0

I have been looking for the door to enlightenment as long as I remember—from my very childhood. I must have carried that idea from my past life, because I don’t remember a single day in my childhood in this life that I was not looking for it.

And as far as my craziness is concerned, naturally I was thought crazy by everybody. I never played with any children. I never could find any way to communicate with the children of my own age. To me they looked stupid, doing all kinds of idiotic things. I never joined any football team, volleyball team, hockey team. Of course, they all thought me crazy. And as far as I was concerned, as I grew I started looking at the whole world as crazy.

In the last year, when I was twenty-one, it was a time of nervous breakdown and breakthrough. Naturally, those who loved me, my family, my friends, my professors, could understand a little bit what was going on in me—why I was so different from other children, why I would go on sitting for hours with closed eyes, why I sat by the bank of the river and went on looking at the sky for hours, sometimes for the whole night. Naturally, the people who could not understand such things—and I did not expect them to understand—thought me mad.

In my own home I had become almost absent….

By and by they stopped asking me anything, and slowly, slowly they started feeling as if I were not there. And I loved it, the way I had become a nothingness, a nobody, an absence. That one year was tremendous. I was surrounded with nothingness, emptiness. I had lost all contact with the world. If they reminded me to take a bath, I would go on taking the bath for hours. Then they had to knock on the door: “Now come out of the bathroom. You have taken enough bath for one month. Just come out.” If they reminded me to eat, I ate; otherwise, days would pass and I would not eat. Not that I was fasting—I had no idea about eating or fasting. My whole concern was to go deeper and deeper into myself. And the door was so magnetic, the pull was so immense—like what physicists now call black holes.

They say there are black holes in existence. If a star comes by chance to a black hole it is pulled into the black hole; there is no way to resist that pull, and to go into the black hole is to go into destruction. We don’t know what happens on the other side. My idea, for which some physicist has to find evidence, is that the black hole on this side is a white hole on the other side. The hole cannot be just one side; it is a tunnel.

I have experienced it in myself. Perhaps on a bigger scale the same happens in the universe. The star dies; as far as we can see, it disappears. But every moment new stars are being born. From where? Where is their womb? It is simple arithmetic that the black hole was just a womb—the old disappeared into it and the new is born. This I have experienced in myself—I am not a physicist. That one year of tremendous pull made me farther and farther away from people, so much so that I would not recognize my own mother, I might not recognize my own father; so far that there were times I forgot my own name. I tried hard, but there was no way to find what my name used to be.

Naturally, to everybody that one year I was mad. But to me that madness became meditation, and the peak of that madness opened the door. I passed through it. I am now beyond enlightenment—on the other side of the door. [last120]

0o0

I was taken to a vaidya, to a physician. In fact, I was taken to many doctors and to many physicians but only one ayurvedic vaidya told my father, “He is not ill. Don’t waste your time.” Of course, they were dragging me from one place to another. And many people would give me medicines and I would tell my father, “Why are you worried? I am perfectly okay.” But nobody would believe what I was saying. They would say, “You keep quiet. You just take the medicine. What is wrong in it?” So I used to take all sorts of medicines.

There was only one vaidya who was a man of insight—his name was Pundit Bhaghirath Prasad…. That old man has gone but he was a rare man of insight. He looked at me and he said, “He is not ill.” And he started crying and said, “I have been searching for this state myself. He is fortunate. In this life I have missed this state. Don’t take him to anybody. He is reaching home.” And he cried tears of happiness.

He was a seeker. He had been searching all over the country from this end to that. His whole life was a search and enquiry. He had some idea of what it was about. He became my protector—my protector against the doctors and other physicians. He said to my father, “You leave it to me. I will take care.” He never gave me any medicine. When my father insisted, he just gave me sugar pills and told me, “These are sugar pills. Just to console them you can take them. They will not harm, they will not help. In fact, there is no help possible.” [tao209]

0o0

In my university days, and people thought that I was crazy. Suddenly I would stop, and then I would remain in that spot for half an hour, an hour, unless I started enjoying walking again. My professors were so afraid that when there were examinations they would put me in a car and take me to the university hall. They would leave me at the door and wait there: had I reached to my desk or not? If I was taking my bath and suddenly I realized that I was not enjoying it, I would stop. What is the point then? If I was eating and I recognized suddenly that I was not enjoying, then I would stop….

And, by and by, it became a key. I suddenly recognized that whenever you are enjoying something, you are centered. Enjoyment is just the sound of being centered. Whenever you are not enjoying something, you are off-center. Then don’t force it; there is no need. If people think you crazy, let them think you crazy. Within a few days you will, by your own experience, find how you were missing yourself. You were doing a thousand and one things which you never enjoyed, and still you were doing them because you were taught to. You were just fulfilling your duties. [trans404]

0o0

I used to go for a morning walk, and I used to pass a beautiful house every day—that was my route. And one day, when I was coming back, the sun was just shining on my face; I was perspiring—I had gone for four, five miles, and just…I could not move from that place. I must have been eighteen or seventeen.

Something happened between the sun and the beautiful morning, that I simply forgot that I have to go home. I simply forgot that I am. I was simply standing there.

But the man who owned the house, he has been watching me for almost a year—that I come and go by the side of the house; today, what has happened? I am simply frozen. But frozen in such ecstasy!

He came and shook me, and it was like coming down from a very far away place, rushing into my body. He said, “What has happened?”

I said, “That’s what I was going to ask you. Something certainly happened, and something that I would like to happen forever. I was not. You unnecessarily got worried, shook me, and brought me back. I had moved into some space which was absolutely new to me—and it was pure isness.”

Anything can do, it seems that just your preparedness, knowingly or unknowingly, your closeness to the point where the phenomenon can be triggered…. But this kind of experience is not within your power. It happens to you like lightning. [trans12]

0o0

To be continued…2

Courtesy: www.oshoworld.com