Living Bhagavad Gita 010: Hrishikesha

A series of short articles on the Bhagavad Gita for busy, stressed people living and working in these volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous times. This scripture born in a battlefield teaches us how to face our challenges, live our life fully and achieve excellence in whatever we do.

[Continued from the previous post]

Sanjaya said: O Bharata, thus told by Gudakesha, Hrishikesha took the magnificent chariot between the two armies and stopping it facing Bhishma and Drona and other kings said, “Arjuna, see the assembled Kurus.”

The word used by Sanjaya here for Krishna is Hrishikesha, a word that means master of the senses – hrishika means senses and isha means master. What exactly does mastery over the senses mean?

The Katha Upanishad using the metaphor of the chariot calls our senses the horses that draw the chariot that is our body because it is the senses that lead us out into the world – indriyaani hayaan ahuh, says this ancient Upanishad that belongs to the Krishna Yajur Veda. These horses can be disciplined and trained, or they can be wild. How we live our life will depend on whether they are wild or disciplined.

Wild horses yoked to our chariot lead us to disaster and so do uncontrolled senses. To live a life led by uncontrolled senses is to be a slave to our senses and to our body. Such people live for the body, as though we are nothing more than the body.

Swami Vivekananda once said: “You may be the greatest philosopher, but as long as you have the idea that you are the body, you are no better than the little worm crawling under your foot! No excuse for you! So much the worse for you that you know all the philosophies and at the same time think you are the body!”

Look at this picture of extreme sense indulgence from our contemporary life. The middle aged man is lying on a recliner with his hand on the naked shoulders of a young, beautiful woman next to him whose services he has hired for the day. In the room the TV is on in front of him and not far from him a music player is loudly playing some fast music. He is watching the TV and listening to the music at the same time, while his hand is moving gently over the skin of the hired woman, softly caressing her. Every now and then he takes a sip of vodka from the mug he holds in his other hand and in the gaps between the sips, the girl picks up potato chips from the bowl kept in front of him and places them in his mouth, giving him a kiss along with the chip.

This is considered to be the very acme of sensual enjoyment for a man. While this picture is from our times, life in the past, for those who could afford it, was no different, except that in place of the TV and the music player they had live performers singing and dancing in front of them and in place of the hired woman each had a harem of women surrounding them.

Life of sensuality hasn’t changed, except in superficial aspects. A slave to the senses five thousand years ago was the same as a slave to the senses today.

The Mahabharata tells us the story of Emperor Nahusha, an ancestor of the Kurus, who was invited to the heaven to become its ruler while Indra had to go into hiding for the sin of killing the asura Vritra. In the heaven however Nahusha who was the greatest ruler on earth, soon fell a prey to a life of the senses. Every moment awake he started spending in the pleasures of the senses, listening to heavenly music, watching heavenly dances, enjoying heavenly food and drinks and indulging in sex with the apsaras, until he fell asleep exhausted only to continue his life of pleasure the moment he woke up. One day he was in the Nandana Gardens surrounded by his coterie when he saw an incredibly beautiful celestial woman passing by. Asked who she was, he was told that she was Indrani, the wife of Indra. “If she is the wife of Indra and I am Indra now,” Nahusha asked shocking even his coterie, “why has she not yet come to my bed?”

Terrified, the chaste Indrani sought the advice of Brihaspati, the guru of the gods, and of Indra himself and as asked by them, told Nahusha she would receive him in her bed if he came to her in a palanquin carried by the saptarshis, the seven divine sages. They agreed to carry him to Indrani but in his impatience he kicked one of them, Agastya, on his shoulder, asking him to hasten, saying sarpa, sarpa, meaning hurry, hurry. The sage in turn cursed him and turned him into a sarpa, a snake.

Nahusha’s son Emperor Yayati too lived a life of sensuality and his name became a synonym for lust, so deeply did he sink into a life of the senses. But towards the end of his life he realized that a life of the senses cannot satisfy man and said: na jaatu kaamah kamaanaam upabhogena shaamyati; havishaa krishnavartmaiva bhooya eva abhivardhate – “Verily, desire can never be satisfied by indulgence. The more you indulge in them, the more demanding they grow just as fire grows when you offer havis into it.”

Both emperor Shantanu and his son Vichitraveerya destroy themselves through slavery to the pleasures of the senses. In a moment of frustration, Pandu calls his father Vichitraveerya a kamatma, meaning a man whose very soul is lust.

That is slavery to the senses.

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Today the world in general is living the philosophy of the setting sun, as the Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa calls it in his celebrated classic Shambhala: the Sacred Path of the Warrior. The philosophy of the setting sun says there is only one life, it begins at birth and ends with death, and the way to live is to enjoy all the pleasures you can while you are alive, just as you try to visit all the places you can when you are on a short conducted tour, crowding your schedule without wasting even one moment. This is the ancient Indian philosophy of the Charvakas too, who said:

yaavad jeevet sukham jeevet rnam krtvaa ghrtam pibet 

bhasmeebhootasya dehasya punar aagamanam kutah

“So long as you live, live merrily! Borrow and enjoy the best! Once the body is reduced to ashes, from where does it come back!”

Those who live for the senses seek the purpose of life in sense gratification, pursuing pleasure after pleasure, frequently several pleasures at the same time because you don’t have time enough to enjoy them all separately and you don’t want to miss any. Since such a life cannot give you any satisfaction or contentment, you end up filled with still more desire, longings, lust, anger, greed, delusion, pride and jealousy. Anxiety, hatred, depression, frustration, and disappointment become your very nature.

The Mahabharata speaks of Krishna as: 1. A great master of yoga, a yogeshwara; 2. An incarnation of the yogi Narayana, the friend of the yogi Nara; and 3. God incarnated in a human body. In whatever way you see him, he is someone who has realized that a life of sensuality does not give us lasting satisfaction.  He is no more a slave to the hungers and thirsts of the senses. Instead he is a master of the senses, someone who uses the senses as their master: a Hrishikesha.    

Mastery over the senses does not mean complete denial of the senses, suppressing them totally. The senses are very real, their needs are very real and we must give unto them what is theirs, taking care to see that they do not enslave us. A master driver of a car does not keep the break pressed down all the time, nor the accelerator. He steps on them when required, takes his foot off when required. Exactly like that you don’t suppress the senses all the time, but instead enjoys the pleasures they bring remaining their master. The world is prakriti and purusha dancing together and what an amazing dance it is! When we remain masters our ourselves and join this dance, life becomes a wonderful kreeda, an amazing leela.

What is criticized as disastrous is not sensual pleasures but slavery to them.  Krishna calls those who suppress the senses but think of sensual pleasures in their mind all the time hypocrites:

karmendriyaaṇi sanyamya ya aaste manasaa smaran
indriyaathaan vimooḍhaatmaa mithyaachaaraḥ sa uchyate BG 3.6

Those deluded fools who restrain the organs of action but continue to dwell on sense objects in the mind, hypocrites they are called.

Krishna is the most life assertive spiritual master known to man. He believes in living life in utsava bhava, in the spirit of festivity, celebrating every moment, enjoying everything we do, living life to the full, but as a master of the senses and not as their slave. He has no compulsions to wage a war with the senses, to suppress them, because they are always under his command, as disciplined horses yoked to a chariot are under the command of the master driver.

He is truly a Hrishikesha as Sanjaya refers to him. The way of life he teaches is neither of the denial of the world of pleasures nor of plunging blindly into sensual indulgence. His is the path of awakened living. As a master of yourself, as a master of your senses, as a master of your body, as a master of your mind. As a swami, and not as a dasa. And if you are a master, then samsara, the world of sense objects is not your enemy, they do not tempt you, do not enslave you, conquer you.

Ancient India talked of asidhara vrata and awakened masters practiced that path of the heroes. Asidhara means the edge of the sword and asidhara vrata is the vow of walking on the edge of the sword. It is living in the middle of all kinds of pleasures, enjoying them all and yet not being bound by them.

It is called the path of the heroes because it requires heroic courage and immense mastery over yourself to live it.

Greek mythology tells us the story of Odysseus and the sirens. Odysseus, the hero of the Odyssey, had to sail by the island of the sirens whose music was so hauntingly beautiful that no man who heard it could control himself. Men jumped into the rough sea trying to reach them and drowned. The island was surrounded by mountains of bones of men who had thus perished. Though warned of this danger by the sorceress Circe, Odysseus wanted to enjoy the music and yet not lose his life for it. So as they approached the island, he asked his sailors, who were also his friends, to tie him to the mast of the ship and not to release him whatever happened. He told them he would fight to get free, shout and yell at them, scream and threaten them, but if they loved him they should not release him until they were far away from the island. As for themselves, Odysseus asked them to fill their ears with bee wax so that the waves of the song of the sirens did not reach them.  

As the ship approached the island of the sirens, Odysseus tied to the mast started shouting and screaming and threatening them, shrieking and bawling at them, ordering them as the captain of the ship to untie his ropes. He was going insane!  But they loved their friend and captain and had more sense than to obey him. Soon they passed the islands and were away from the soul melting notes of the song of the sirens. It is only then that they released him. The story ends by telling us that Odysseus, also known as Ulysses, thus became the first man to listen to the song of the sirens and yet remain alive.

When India speaks of asidhara vrata, India asks us to do something even more difficult: Listen to the song of the sirens, expose yourselves to their temptation, and yet remain untempted, without the binding of the ropes, by retaining your mastery over yourselves. Of course, it is as difficult as walking on the edge of the sword, if not more.

Ancient India tells us of monks spending their chaturmasya, the rainy season retreat of four months, in the house of rich prostitutes who invited them and leaving at the end of the retreat with the prostitutes transformed into their monastic followers, bhikshunis.

But it is difficult indeed, almost impossible even for great masters, what to speak of ordinary people. In the Hindi movie Nishabd we have Vijay in his sixties, played by Amitabh Bachan, falling head over heels in love with the beautiful teenager Jiah, played by Jiah Khan, his daughter’s same age friend. The girl had come to his home to spend her school vacation with his daughter and he becomes obsessed with the temperamental, unpredictable, self-centered and at the same time irresistibly charming Lolita after spending a day alone with her in his sprawling tea estate among rows and rows of mountains of the High Ranges of Kerala. Reminded of who he is and who the young girl is, Vijay finally orders her to leave their home, but is never able to come out of his destructive infatuation with her that he considers true love. He contemplates suicide but does not do that only so that he can live with Jiah’s memory for some more time.        

In modern industry, business, politics and other walks of life, there are endless examples for people failing in their mastery over themselves and losing everything, ending up as a shame for themselves and everyone else, the most famous of which being that of an erstwhile American President. 

That is the reason why when the Mahabharata discusses leadership, which it does in great detail, one of the first thing it says is: atmaa jeyah sadaa raajnaa – a leader should always be a master of himself. Even if you have everything else, if you have no control over yourself, you will destroy yourself.

The best way to develop mastery over oneself is conscious living – mindful living, being aware of whatever you do. You could begin this with simple acts, like having a cup of coffee mindfully, and then slowly extend your mindfulness into everything you do, whether it is taking a walk, or whatever else.

We can also train ourselves in self mastery by following the 110% principle. The principle asks us to set targets for ourselves just outside our present limits, our comfort zone, and master it. Once the higher target is mastered, that becomes your comfort zone and you set a target just outside it. It is amazing what you can achieve using this principle.

Years ago when I used to teach a course called theatre in education, I tried an experiment based on this principle with my students using the game of ball bouncing as a challenge. Over time, my students were able to move from twenty bounces to a thousand and more bounces without dropping the ball or moving from their place.

A young lady I know was a chain smoker and it is through this principle that she quit smoking. She set a target for herself – she wouldn’t smoke for one hour. And the next target was not smoking for seventy-five minutes and then for ninety minutes and so on. Today she has quit smoking completely, and not only that, she has helped several others to quit smoking!

You can practice getting rid of other forms of addiction using this principle. You can practice mindfulness and self mastery itself using this principle. You can practice anger management using this principle. Endless are the possibilities. And every time you become a master of yourself, you become a Hrishikesha in your own right!

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Photo courtesy: Devender Malhotra

Thank you in advance for your questions and comments.

Ananda Bhairava and Saying Yes to Life

Reading a Darshan Diary of Osho Rajneesh last evening I came across the advice the master gave to one of his disciples who had just been initiated into sannyas. The man, apparently not an Indian, had been given a new name as is customary during such initiations: Anand Bhairava. Osho explained: the word anand means bliss and bhairava means God – so his new name means the God of Bliss.


He then explained to the new sannyasin that Bhairava is one of the names of Lord Shiva and Shiva is God who celebrates life, God who is life affirmative and not life negating. He is not against life, but for it. Osho asked his disciple to constantly remember not to deny anything, not to fight with anything, not to carry any condemnatory attitude.

“Love is affirmation,” said Osho. “When you say yes to life, you are loving, you are flowing. When you say no to life, you are stuck, frozen. That’s how people have become stuck – by saying no to many things. There are people who cannot say yes. No comes very easy to them. Their whole attitude is based on negativity. No helps the ego to be very strong; it is an ego-enhancer. The more you say yes, the less the ego can exist. And the less the ego, of course the more the bliss.”

Continuing his advice, Osho asked his newly initiated disciple to “start feeling more of a yes attitude. Even sometimes when you feel it is difficult to say yes, then too, try. And if you can manage to say yes, you will suddenly see a release of energy – as if one obstacle has been transcended, one negation has been dropped. You will feel more freedom with yes. So with the name Bhairava, remember it – become more of a yea-sayer and drop nay-saying. One day you will come to a point where you can say yes to all. That moment is of total release. One is free so nothing confines one, nothing holds one down… A person who says no all his life goes on crippling himself, goes on denying many parts of his being, disowning them, and becomes smaller and smaller and smaller. In the end a no-sayer simply remains a no – doors closed, all contact with life lost. That is actually what spiritual death is – a person just living inside a no. Spiritual life is living with yes – flying, flowing with yes. So Bhairava is the God of yes, affirmation, love, life. Remember it.”

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All advice from a master to a disciple is an individual thing – meant for that particular disciple for that particular occasion. We often generalize it and take it as an advice meant for all sadhakas for all times. And in doing so, we err. That is why it has been said that we should go personally to masters for their guidance and instruction. In this particular case, following the advice given above, Osho explains to the disciple concerned that he is asking him to follow the path of yes-saying because he has observed in him a lot of negativity. So this is Osho’s advice to a disciple with a lot of negativity in him.

But as teaching meant for all, where does Osho’s advice stand?

Let us begin by taking at a look at the Vedic religion of India. While the Vedic religion may not be the oldest form of Hinduism since Hinduism is older than the Vedas themselves, hoary though they are, and many of its variations still survive in the form of religious cults of ecstasy spread across many parts of our subcontinent, it definitely is the form of Hinduism for which authentic texts are available through which we can study and understand them.

Speaking of Vedic Hinduism, Dr Radha Kumud Mookherji, a scholar of Vedic culture and author of such books asThe Call of the Vedas, says: “The Vedas and especially the primordial work known as the Rig Veda, represent not merely the dawn of culture, but also its zenith. Indian thought is seen at its highest in the Rig Veda… On the one hand it is the first book of India and also of mankind. At the same time it shows the highest point of human wisdom.”

How does the Rig Veda see life? What is its attitude towards living?

In the words of Dr Mookherji, “The Vedas accept life in its fullness. The malaise caused by the loss of balance between the primary biological instincts [the body] and man’s active and contemplative faculties [the mind] is completely absent in them. There is no clash between flesh and spirit. There is no evidence of the tragedy of the divided soul and the anguish and misery that accompany it. Nor do we come across signs of repression or self-torture, accompanied by morbid sin-consciousness... Instead what we find is a sense of festivity, the celebration of life.”

To the Vedic people, life was a festival of joy – such joy in which one forgets oneself and becomes one with all existence and experiences existence itself as ecstasy. For, to exist is, said the sages of the Vedas, is to be joyous; existence is pure joy, ananda.

To the Vedic people, God was joy. “We worship with joyous hearts the joyous Deity, dear to all, effulgent, holy, purifying.” [RV VIII.43.31] The Vedic seers believed there is sacredness in all our joys and to be joyous is to be close to the Divine. They saw prayer not as repentance for sin, tapas not as penitence – to them worship was “the opening of the flood-gates of a joyous soul before the radiant glory of the Source of all joy.”

The Vedic people knew how to say yes to life. The oldest hymns of humanity composed by them celebrate love in all imaginable forms: familial love, love of the community, love of the rashtra, love of nature, love of the divinity manifest in nature, love of wisdom, love of poetry and dance, love of festivity, erotic love, all. And they saw sex not as a sinful act but as a celebration of life and as an offering to the gods, a holy yajna [sacrifice] performed at the altar of life for bringing new life into the world. “Hey Gautama,” says the Brihad Aranyaka Upanishad, part of the Shukla Yajur Veda, “woman is fire, ...her sexual organs the sacred place where offerings are made, ...and the spouts of joy that arise when you make offerings at that altar are the sparks of fire that arise when offerings are made into the sacred fire...and man is born from that offering” [Br.Up VI.II.13]

There is absolutely no life-denying here, no world-denying. Man is not a sinner born of sin, but a divine being born from a sacred offering made at a sacred altar.

Recently I was part of a group of professors offering a leadership training programme in one of India’s most respected training centres to a group of executives from all over the country. Soon after I started my session, one of the executives raised his hand and said the faculty before me had mentioned that Indian culture is a negative, life denying, world denying culture and requested me to respond to that comment. I patiently explained to the group how the comment was born of a lack of understanding of Indian culture and how the fact is just the opposite. I took time to explain how many of us are still conditioned by colonialist perceptions of India that said Indians, Indian culture and Indian religions are life-negative, less because our colonial masters really believed so and more because saying so and painting India in dark colours served their purpose of demoralising Indians and thus keeping us under slavery.

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I find the advice given by Osho to his disciple completely in sync with the perceptions of the Vedic seers.

Ages after the time of the Vedas, when the culture of the seers had gone into decline, something that happens to all cultures, we find in Krishna someone who tries to rejuvenate the wisdom of the seers. He lived his own great life in the spirit of the Vedic seers: in utsava bhava. We find the same message in innumerable Indian masters subsequent to him too, like Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, Meera, Sree Ramakrishna and so on, each of whom lived his or her life as a celebration, dancing in ecstasy, frequently getting into trances of pure bliss.

There is a small video of a short mohiniyattam performance by Sunanda Nair and team on You Tube in which they dance to the Sanskrit song nrityati nrityati sambashivo… In a way that song and that dance communicate the very essence of Indian culture: life is Shiva and Shakti dancing together in celebration. Life is a leela, it is a kreeda, a sport. Energy expressing itself in vibrant life, out of pure joy, in the exuberance of celebrating itself – that is what life is, said ancient India. It has no ultimate goal – even moksha, often considered as the ultimate goal, is no goal, for moksha is learning to live life free from bondage, free from the bondage of ignorance, awakening from ignorance, sambodhi. Today we live our life bound by ignorance – awakening from that ignorance so that life becomes free, the celebration it really is, that is sambodhi, that is moksha. India has repeatedly said throughout its history that life is suffering, duhkha, only so long as we are ignorant, bound, and the moment we free ourselves from ignorance, life becomes pure bliss.

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There is short prose poem in one of my favourite books, Nikos Kasantzakis’s Zorba the Greek: The Dialogue of the Buddha and the Shepherd. Let me quote the poem here:

The Shepherd: My meal is ready, I have milked my ewes. The door of my hut is bolted, my fire is alight. And you, sky, can rain as much as you please!

Buddha: I no longer need food or milk. The winds are my shelter, my fire is out. And you, sky, can rain as much as you please.

The Shepherd: I have oxen, I have cows. I have my father’s meadows and a bull who covers my cows. And you, sky, can rain as much as you please!

Buddha: I have neither oxen, nor cows, I have no meadows. I have nothing. I fear nothing. And you, sky, can rain as much as you please!

The Shepherd: I have a docile and faithful shepherdess. For years she has been my wife; I am happy when I play with her at night. And you, sky, you can rain as much as you please!

Buddha: I have a free and docile soul. For years I have trained it and I have taught it to play with me. And you, sky, can rain as much as you please!

These are two contrasting lifestyles, beautifully presented by the author Kazantzakis. But then there is a way of living very different from the two portrayed by this poem: the way of the truly wise man, enlightened living, the way of the living liberated, India’s highest ideal of life, the way the rishis of yore lived, the way Krishna lived, and I am sure the way the Buddha himself lived. Adi Shankara, India’s great mystic-philosopher, sings of it thrillingly in his short philosophical poem Jeevankukta-ananda-lahari, Waves of Bliss of the Living Liberated. Here are two of the eighteen verses of the song:

Kadáchit prásáde kvachidapi cha saudheshu dhaninám

Kadákále shaile kvachidapi cha kooleshu saritám

Kuteere dántánám munijanavaránám api vasan

Munir na vyámoham bhajati gurudeekshákshatatamáh (3)

Now he lives in palaces, now in the rich mansions of the wealthy. At times he resorts to the mountains, at others to the banks of running brooks. Sometimes he dwells in the huts of great ascetics whose wealth is their self-mastery….

Maune maunee gunini gunaván pandite panditashcha

Deene deenas sukhini sukhaván bhogini práptabhogah

Moorkhe moorkho yuvatishu yuvá vágmini praudhavágmee

Dhanyah ko’pi tribhuvanajayee yo’vadhoote’vadhootah [18]

A silent one among the silent ones, virtuous among the virtuous, a scholar amidst scholars, sufferer among the suffering, joyous amidst the joyful, a contented man in the company of the pleasure seeker because he has attained all pleasures, a fool in the company of fools, a youth when he is with young women, eloquent among men of eloquence….

This was the highest Indian ideal of living for India.

India wanted us to say yes to life – to life as it comes to us. If it is pleasure, welcome it. If it is pain, welcome. Welcome victories, welcome losses. Say yes to success, say yes to failures, to heat, to cold, to friends, to foes, to everything, just as Osho asked his new disciple to do.

India had its own name to this kind of life: nyasa, the word from which we get the word sannyasa. But then the sannyasa ancient India spoke of, the sannyasa Krishna speaks of in the Gita, is very different from sannyasa as we generally understand it.

Experiencing everything with awareness, with full consciousness; remaining a witness, alert witness, to all that is happening to us – not being carried away by them, but at the same time experiencing them intensely, that is what India called nyasa or sannyasa. Not running away from things, not denying life, but deep, detached involvement.

In Greek mythology Circe, daughter of Hecate the goddess of black magic and herself a great magician and enchantress, becomes the mother of Odysseus’s three sons. As Odysseus is about to embark upon a journey to the underworld, Circe warns him of the dangers on the way, which include the island of the sirens. The sirens were such tempting singers that when sailors on ships that passed by the islands heard their songs, they went crazy and jumped into the sea to swim to the islands, only to perish on the treacherous shores that surrounded them. Circe warned Odysseus about the danger and asked him to avoid exposure to their songs at all costs. But the more she told him about the grave dangers, the more fascinated he became, as any great hero would. As his ship approached the island, Odysseus asked his men to fill their ears with bee wax so that they could not hear the song of the sirens. As for himself, he had them tie him to the mast of the ship after warning them not to release him on any account, however much he struggled, cursed, threatened or fought.

The sailors were now deaf to the songs, but as the ship approached the islands and waves of the songs began to reach the ears of Odysseus, he, now crazy with desire, began to fight against his bindings and to threaten his soldiers asking them to release him. However the sailors followed his earlier instruction and did not obey him and slowly the ship passed the island, Odysseus all the while fighting, tearing at the ropes, cursing and threatening the sailors. It is said that Odysseus became the first man to remain alive after hearing the song of the sirens.

India wants us to listen to the song of the sirens – all the temptations that this feast of life brings us – without the aid of ropes and yet remain in complete self mastery. This self-mastery is called nyasa. India wants each one of us to conquer ourselves, to become a jina as Mahavira became, using the only weapon that it would allow us: in the words of the Gita, asanga-shastra, the sword of non-attachment. Only a man who can do this is a swami.

The heart of nyasa is awareness – what Zen masters call attention: attention to the present, attention to whatever you are doing, to whatever is happening in the now. Awareness that helps you experience the now intensely and at the same time detaches you from whatever is happening, makes you a witness of everything, an uninvolved witness, a bystander who watches what is going on.

Once a young man came to Zen master Ikkyu and asked him to explain to him as briefly as possible what Zen means. Master Ikkyu took a piece of paper and with a brush wrote on it one word and handed it over to the young man, who read it: Attention. With a puzzled look, the man requested Ikkyu: “Can you be a little more detailed. This is too short for me.” The master took the paper back and wrote something more on it again and gave it back to the man. He looked at it and saw written on the paper two words: Attention, attention. Rather impatient and irritated, the man handed the paper once more to Ikkyu and said, “Master, please. Make it clear to me, be more elaborate, please.” And this time when the master handed the paper back, the man saw written on it: Attention, attention, attention. ‘That’s it,” said the master. It cannot be made more elaborate.”

The essence of Zen is attention. And that precisely is the essence of nyasa too – being attentive, wide awake, fully conscious, mindful, fully aware of whatever is happening to you, whatever life brings to you. Precisely what Krishna teaches. Precisely what the Buddha taught.

We sometimes forget that the Buddha is first master of Zen and Buddha’s teachings are a reassertion of the best in ancient Indian wisdom rather than a rejection of it.

India taught saying yes to all life and consciously living it.

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However, there are grave dangers to this path. Such a path is not for everybody. It requires great alertness, great courage, great heroism. It is for this reason that this way of life is sometimes called asidhara vrata – the edge of the sword way, or the razor’s edge way. Because it is as difficult as walking on the edge of the razor. Kshurasya dhara nishita duratyaya, durgam pathas tat kavayo vadanti, as the Kathopanishad puts it – the wise speak of that path as the edge of the razor, sharp, difficult to traverse upon.

Damage is a 1992 British-French movie directed by Louis Malle, starring Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche. Rated R for strong sexuality and for its language, the movie centers around what happens when Dr Stephen Fleming, a responsible father, British parliamentarian and Minister for Environment, becomes sexually obsessed with his young son’s beautiful lover and fiancée Anna Barton. Such is his passion for his son’s fiancée that nothing can stop him. The movie shows how, on one occasion, maddened by lust for Anna, Stephen abandons a two-day European Parliament conference in Brussels and catches a train to reach Paris where she is spending a weekend with his son. Stephen telephones to her in her room where she is sleeping with the young man and calls her outside. They meet and have sex in the early hours of the day in broad daylight in front of the open doorway of a church while church bells toll in the background. Stephen loses all grip over himself, he does not anymore care for his beautiful wife or their son, does not care about how his passion can destroy him as an individual, destroy his family, destroy his public life. As can easily be imagined, such a relationship can end in nothing but tragedy.

Unless one is a sadhaka of the highest caliber, someone like Sthulibhadra the monk that Jain literature speaks of who is able to spend his four months in the house of a prostitute he was once in love with and yet does not lose his self-mastery, it is indeed dangerous to think of treading such a path. It is for this reason that most masters speak of the need for sadhakas to be careful of the snares on the path. Fall on this path is effortless – you miss one step, a moment without alertness and you fall. For the vast majority of people, the best thing would be to avoid that path. It is only for those who are ready for it – matured, alert, attentive, constantly aware, constantly in Zen.

Tantra is a path developed by India in which sadhakas are constantly pushed into paths filled with danger, with temptations, experiences in which it is easy to lose awareness, self-mastery and yet are asked to retain awareness and self mastery. Tantra is the highest path in which asidhara vrata is practiced by deliberating throwing oneself into the world of temptations.

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This path is not confined to Indian spiritual traditions alone. Acceptance of all that life brings is part of all religious and spiritual traditions. The very word Islam, for instance, means submission to the will of God, surrender, total acceptance of whatever is his will, of whatever life brings through his will. And the Lord’s Prayer in Christianity, the most common Christian prayer, says: Thy will be done – may whatever is your, God’s, will be done, not what is my will. That is acceptance of whatever life brings.

Throughout the Gita Krishna teaches Arjuna to accept the war and fight it with all his heart now that it has become inevitable – surrendering to God. And Krishna’s final teaching in the Gita is: sarvadharman parityajya, mam ekam sharanam vraja – drop everything else and surrender to me, accept me as your final refuge. Krishna is repeating here what he has taught earlier: prasada-buddhi, the attitude that whatever life brings is God’s grace, his prasada.

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