A series
of short articles on the Bhagavad Gita for people living and working in our
volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous times filled with stress and fear.
This scripture born in a battlefield teaches us how to face our challenges,
live our life fully, achieve excellence in whatever we do and find happiness,
peace and contentment.
[Continued from
the previous post.]
One of the fascinating things about the Gita chapter we are about to
finish discussing is that Krishna says just a single sentence of five words
here: partha pashya etaan samavetaan kuroon – Arjuna, see these assembled
kurus. After that he remains totally silent, listening to Arjuna. As Arjuna
passes through various stages of confusion, frustration, depression, melancholy
and finally reaches the depths of his vishada, Krishna pays full attention to
him. He speaks again only after Arjuna has collapsed in his chariot abandoning
his bow and arrows at the end of the chapter and the next chapter begins. He
gives Arjuna space to say all he wants to say without interrupting once. And
after he has stopped speaking, Krishna provokes him to speak again, helping him
to expresses anything more that might be lurking in the depths of his mind. This
is like emptying a vessel and then pouring some water into it, shaking the vessel
well and emptying it again to clean out anything that might have been still be in it. As Krishna does so, Arjuna brings
out the rest of his pain and agony and confusion from his inner depths, thus
making his mind empty and receptive to Krishna’s teachings. That emptiness at
the end of pouring out all that is in your mind is a requirement to receive the
teachings of the Gita.
Very little of Gita can go into a crowded mind, which is the reason why
we too must practice some sadhana for emptying the mind along with the study of
the Gita, like a meditation. A few minutes of meditation every day and living
the whole day meditatively will take us a long way. Living the whole day
meditatively is not difficult because all you have to do is to focus completely
on whatever you are doing. Meditation is focusing your attention on a single
thing, whether it is your breath, abdominal movement, a mantra, a sound, an
image or anything else. In his classic The
Miracle of Mindfulness, Thich Nhat Hanh speaks of transforming everyday actions
like washing vessels into meditation by the simple practice of paying full
attention to them.
One of the most famous Zen stories is about a university professor who
went to meet a Zen master to learn Zen from him. While the professor began
introducing himself, the master ordered tea. A disciple brought tea and the
master began pouring the tea into a cup while the professor talked about the
researches he has done, the researches he is engaged in at the moment, his
future research plans and so on. Listening quietly without saying a word, the
Zen master kept pouring the tea into the cup which had by then become full and
had started spilling over. Suddenly the professor noticed this and said,
“Master, the cup is full. No more will go in!”
And the master stopped and said, “You are like this cup, professor. You are
so full of yourself that no Zen will go in now. Empty yourself and come back.”
Without emptying ourselves, we cannot receive wisdom. Wisdom is given
only to those who have become silent inside and not to those with crowded
minds. Krishna is allowing Arjuna to go on talking so that his mind becomes
empty and receptive to what he has to say.
O0O
There is another reason why Krishna listens to Arjuna attentively
without interrupting. The greatest thing anyone can do for a man who is in pain
and grief is to listen to him. Being heard is healing. Just the fact that someone is listening to us
attentively, the fact that someone feels what we have to say is important, will
have a positive effect on us, as anyone who has ever wanted to talk to someone
and has found someone to listen to him knows.
I remember my days as the principal of a large junior college. One day a
girl student in her teens came to me weeping, her whole body shaking, the power
of each sob sending violent tremors through her whole body. I seated her
conformably on a sofa in my chamber and gave her plenty of time to relax and
catch her breath. It was only after quite some time that she started sharing
her problem. It took me a long time to get the whole picture from her as she
shared her pain in words interspersed with periods of sobbing.
This young girl was extremely beautiful and very sweet. One of her plain
looking teachers could not tolerate her beauty or the fact that all the boys
liked her. So she began insulting her in class, finding fault with her for
everything, calling her an idiot for the smallest errors she made and also
saying things like she has no interest in studies but was interested only in drawing
boys to her, she was a trap and a danger to the boys and bad example to other
girls. The teacher went to the extent of calling the young girl a slut in the
classroom.
It took me more than an hour of more or less silent listening to put her
at ease and then to assure her she would be fine, nothing would happen to her. I
had instructed my secretary who sat just outside my chamber not to let anyone come
in so that I could listen to her uninterrupted, paying full attention. I can’t
say she was healed of her pain by the time she left my room, but she had
certainly become relaxed, with even a gentle smile appearing on her face as she
was thanked me and left.
Krishna listens with complete attention to whatever Arjuna has to say
because listening with complete attention is in itself healing.
By the way, listening with complete attention is also the greatest
compliment you can give anyone. We all need attention – that is one of the
greatest people truths.
O0O
The following passage is from Brenda Shoshanna’s beautiful book Zen Miracles: Finding Peace in an Insane
World, a book that I have used as a text in a course called Zen and the
Executive Mind that I taught for several years in one of the top business
schools of India, XLRI School of Business and Human Resources.
“A Zen student, Leila, went to
the beach for the weekend. After a hectic week she looked forward to peace, to
the smell of the ocean, to the sand dunes. There was a woman cleaning in the
guest house Leila was staying at. This woman, Frieda, sang very loud love songs
in Spanish as she swept the floors. In addition, she was noisy and clumsy.
“As usual, Leila woke up early in
the morning and wanted to do zazen. She tidied her room, and placed a cushion
on the floor to sit on. Just as she sat down on it she heard a bang against the
door. Frieda was sweeping outside and had knocked the door with her broom. She
was also singing loudly, “My heart’s breaking, breaking today.”
“Leila sat on the cushion,
listening to the shrill song. “What will I do without you?” Frieda kept
wailing. Finally, Leila got up, opened the door and called, “Frieda, can you be
a little more quiet?”
“Frieda didn’t fully understand
English and kept right on singing.
“Leila went back to sit down
again, but not only did the song get louder, the broom started banging her door
consistently. Finally, she got up from
the cushion wondering what was wrong with the woman. Negative thoughts started
to brew but thanks to years of zazen, she caught herself. “Stop it,” she said
to the dark mind that was forming. Leila realized that when we want to be apart
from something, it clings to us; when we want to be too close, it runs away.
“She opened the door and went out
of the room. The minute Frieda saw her, she flew over, standing no more than
two inches away. It seemed she had taken a great liking to Leila. Leila turned
to go outside in the street, and Frieda followed along. “Where are you going?” she said. “To the beach,” Leila said. Frieda grinned. “Me too. Going along.”
“As they walked down the dirt road to the ocean,
Frieda kept humming and Leila resisted, trying to shut her out. She started
concentrating on other things. Then the humming turned into loud singing again.
Leila focused on the delicious salt air and took deep gulps of it. The singing
got louder still. Whatever Leila did to block it out, it only got louder. Then,
suddenly Master Rinzai’s words came to her: “If we master each circumstance,
then whatever we do is the truth.” How
am I going to master this? she wondered.
They arrived at the beach with Frieda singing relentlessly.”
“When they got to the sand, Leila spread out a blanket
and sat down; Frieda planted herself right beside her again. As Leila watched
the waves of the ocean roll up on the shore, she suddenly stopped pushing
Frieda away, and fell into zazen. She stopped wanting things to be different.
She stopped wanting quiet time alone at the beach. This was the circumstance
she was in now, hearing Frieda sing over and over that her heart was breaking...”
As we shall see,
this incident Brenda Shoshanna shares is about listening, but it is about other
things too. It is about accepting things as they are, people as they are, life
as it is, and many more things. As a practitioner of Zen,
Leila is trying to
use every situation that life presents as an opportunity for practicing Zen.
Let’s continue with Shoshanna’s narration. Something beautiful happens
now.
“Frieda was swaying as she sang,
and Leila found herself swaying as well. As the two of them sat there swaying,
Frieda’s voice became softer. Leila turned and looked at Frieda. Tears were
pouring down her face.
“Frieda said, “You, my mamma.
Missing my mamma.” Leila finally understood that Frieda was missing her mother,
who was far away. She must have reminded Frieda of her mother. Frieda was sitting there crying and in a moment
Leila started crying as well. She was also missing her mother, who had died a
year ago. The two of them sat there crying on the blanket together until Leila
turned and gave Frieda a hug. Soon the crying subsided, the singing
subsided—they were simply sitting together, listening to the sound of the
waves.”
What a beautiful experience! Leila could have rejected Frieda, shouted
at her, instead she accepts her, listens to her attentively. A woman in great
pain and loneliness is consoled. The pain she had been storing inside her
suffocating her melts and comes out in the form of her tears and an amazing
relationship is formed between the two women who were strangers just a few
minutes ago!
Listening can do miracles. Paying attention to others can do miracles.
Unfortunately in today’s world no one has time to listen to others! All
of us are in such hurry and we all have so much to say! How can we listen to
others then?
O0O
I remember a sad story reported by newspapers several years ago.
As the parents were getting the little baby ready for school she was resisting
and saying she did not want to go. Well, that was nothing unusual, so they
continued. But as they put her foot in one of her shoes she started screaming
but they ignored that too. Just the daily drama taken to just another level,
they thought. They tied up the shoe laces after putting the other foot in the
other shoe and hurried her out as they heard the school bus coming.
The baby kept screaming in the bus and then continued crying aloud in
the school too for two more hours. It is only then one of the teachers noticed
blood was draining from her face and her body was slowly turning blue while the
child kept up with the screaming which had by now become weak. Soon the baby collapsed
in a swoon and the teacher loosened her uniform and removed her shoes. It was
then she saw it – there was a scorpion inside the child’s shoe, still alilve!
It was the scorpion bite that had made her scream in the first place and now
her foot was all swollen up and the poison had spread to other parts of her
body too. As I remember the news said
the poor baby died of the scorpion poisoning.
Just the other day I saw a sad You Tube video about a little child
fighting with her mother insisting that she did not want to go to school. The
mother asked her why and she said it was no fun, they didn’t allow her to play,
it was only study and study all the time, and you had to sit without moving and
do all the teacher asked you to do. The mother asked her if they don’t sing
songs in school, if they don’t dance and she said it was just abcd and numbers
and nothing else. The baby kept saying she did not want to go to school, wept,
begged her mother not to send her to school. As you watched the baby’s helpless
frustration, tears welled up in your eyes and you felt it difficult to breathe.
But I felt that was not how the mother saw it – I could hear her laughing at
what the baby was saying, as though she found it all amusing rather than
painful.
I know perhaps mothers today have no choice, such is what education has
become, particularly in India with such high premium placed on education and
with so many first and second generation learners. I remembered all those
lectures on Rousseau I gave to future teachers in a College of Education where
I taught for many years. Speaking about the right kind of education, Rousseau
said “education practices the art of delay,” meaning we must delay sending
children to schools as much as possible. The father of modern education also
said the best education is negative education, meaning we much give children as
little book education as possible, and instead send them back to nature for
natural education. Sadly all those ideas have been wiped away by the tides of
time and what we see today all around us is little babies going to school bent
under the weight of heavy backpacks. They look like mountain climbers with huge
trekking bags. Education should be pleasurable, said Rousseau, but that is not
exactly what we see when we look at our schools. Even then shouldn’t parents at
least give a sympathetic ear to children when they say they do not want to go
to school?
In his book Is the American Dream Killing You? Paul
Stiles speaks of how we have all become servants of an all-powerful entity
called Market and how that entity has made in the short span of just two
generations joint families disappear from the face of the earth. True, joint
families had their own problems, but they were wonderful places for children to
grow up in, with many generations living together, and several children of near
ages growing up together and there was always someone to listen to you when you
wanted to talk. Today instead of parents and grandparents, it is the paid
caregivers at the day care centers who look after you. More than Anything Else in the World is a powerful, award winning Brazilian
movie I once saw in a film festival. It talked about the loneliness of a little
girl growing up with her single mother who works nine to five in modern Rio de
Janeiro and the hell life has become for her and the mother.
Much of the insanity and violence in the world today is because no one
has time to listen to children in their most important years of growing up.
O0O
One of the greatest leadership skills is listening skill, some would
even say it is the greatest leadership skill. A story from third century China
tells us of King Ts’ao taking his son Prince Ta’i to Pan Ku, the best guru in
the country who lived near the Ming Li forest. The king requested Pan Ku to
give the prince the best possible education as the future ruler of the country.
When the king left, Pan Ku turned to the young boy and told him, “Go the
forest and build a small hut there for yourself. Live in that hut for a full
year listening to the sound of the forest. Come back to me after the year is
over.” The boy was completely confused by the order. He had expected to be
taught strategic leadership skills, people skills, planning skills, the vision
and mission of a king and all else he would need tomorrow as a ruler. Instead
he was being asked to go and live in the forest all alone listening to the
sound of the forest. But since there was no one he could complain to since his
father himself had left him with the guru, he quietly went and lived in the
forest as he was told to. He listened to all the sounds of the forest – the
rustle of leaves, the chirping of crickets, the buzzing of bees, the roar of
lions, the song of birds, the laughter of hyenas, the chattering of the monkeys...
He waited impatiently for the year to be over and then went back to the master.
“Did you listen to the sound of the forest?” asked the master and the
prince said, “Yes, master.” And when Pan Ku asked him what he had heard, he
started naming the different sounds he had heard. As the list grew, the guru’s
face began growing darker and darker and when he finished, the guru shouted,
“Back to the forest. Come back after one more year.”
The furious and frustrated young man went back to the forest and for a
while continued listening. But he had already spent an entire year listening
just to the sounds of the forest and there was nothing new to hear. Eventually
he gave up and spent his time just relaxing under trees, walking by streams and
lying in shades. He was no more trying to listen to forest sounds but had
surrendered to a forest dweller’s life, became part of the forest, no more
separate from it but one with it.
And then one day it happened. He heard something he had never heard
before. The sound of the grass growing, the sound of the trees drinking up
water with their roots, the sound of green leaves yellowing, green fruits
ripening, plants flowering, seasons changing. He had goose bumps all over,
great joy spurted from within him as water from an underground spring, and
bathed in this bliss he ran to the guru, without even waiting for the
completion of the year. The guru took one look at him and then hugged him,
telling him he had heard that he wanted him to hear, he had heard the sound of
the forest. Pan Ku sent him back to his father with his blessings, telling him
his education was complete, he would be a great king like his father.
What the boy had heard was the sound of silence – it is in silence that
the grass grows, it is in silence that fruits ripen, it is in silence that
seasons change. He was able to listen to the sound of silence because he
himself had grown silent inside by surrendering to life, accepting it without
resisting it, and by totally relaxing, letting go. And with the birth of that
inner silence, he had become capable of listening – for the first time in his
life. He could now listen not only to what was spoken, but also to the
unspoken. He could not only listen to sounds but also to silence. Intelligence
had been awakened in him, because the secret of intelligence is inner silence.
Sensitivity had been awakened in him, because the secret of sensitivity is
inner silence. Imagination had been awakened in him, because the secret of
imagination is inner silence. Love had been awakened in him, because only with
a silent mind can you really love others.
His education was now truly complete. Everything that he did will now
have the quality of excellence. When he touched things, they would sparkle.
When he spoke, people would run to fulfill his wishes. He would be surrounded
by an aura of tranquility and stillness. His energy would now be inexhaustible.
He would now be what Tibet called wang thang, a center of serene power. He
would see beauty in the most ordinary things. He would radiate love. He would
no more have to manipulate people because his least wish would be a command for
them.
That is what happens when you become silent inside.
Says Zen: To the mind that is still, the
whole universe surrenders.
O0O
Learning to listen is a great blessing on us. It is also a blessing on
others. When you give your attention to others, they are healed, made whole.
Doctors need to listen to their patients, says the latest discoveries in
medicine. It is as much the doctor who heals as the medicine.
Parents need to listen. Teachers need to listen. Husbands and wives need
to listen.
Leaders need to listen. It is
only then that they can understand the private hells within peoples and efficiently
motivate them; coach, mentor and guide them and build effective teams. It has
been said by experts that leadership is 80% listening and 20% talking –
probably the opposite of what is widely practiced.
Amazing is the power of loving attention. It transforms people. If you
have seen the movie Munnabhai MBBS, you know the instant transformation that
happens when Munna pays loving attention to Maksood Bhai, you know the secret
of Anand Bhai’s metamorphosis from a living dead man to the narrator of the
movie. Like love that transforms both the lover and the loved, attention paid to
others too transforms both them and you.
Krishna listens to Arjuna and encourages him to speak more and that
opens the door to wonderful teachings we call the Bhagavad Gita.
The Gita teaches us what exactly we are seeking and why we seek it. The
Gita helps us discover the meaning of life, shows us the only path worth
travelling for our own good and the good of the world. The Gita teaches us the
difference between shreyas and preyas. The Gita helps the river of our life to
flow towards the ocean as it should and not towards dreary deserts, to borrow
an expression from Gurudev Tagore. The Gita can make life what it is meant to
be – an utsava, a celebration, a festival,
Thus ends Chapter One of the Bhagavad Gita.
Shri krishnarpanam astu! Tavaiva vastu govinda tubhyam
eva samarpaye!
O0O
