Bhagavad Gita and Asuri Sampada: “Who on Earth is my Equal?”

The Bhagavad Gita classifies people into two groups – those born with daivi sampada and those born with asuri sampada. Daivi sampada are positive virtues like fearlessness, purity of mind, and so on, twenty-nine of which the Gita lists. And then it moves on to the asuri sampada – negative qualities like pride, haughtiness, anger and so on, the list of which is small but which is discussed in greater details.

Krishna states here that people are born either with daivi sampada or with asuri sampada. Though Krishna does not expressly state this, since none of us is entirely positive or negative and all of us are grey, we must assume that he is speaking of our basic dispositions – some of us are basically disposed towards negativity and others towards positive virtues, just as in terms of modern psychology some of us are basically optimists and others are basically pessimists. Even the darkest people like Duryodhana in the Mahabharata, for instance, shows some good qualities and even the most positive ones, like Yudhishthira shows some negative qualities.

Krishna knows, as the whole east knows, that life does not begin at birth or conception – we all have had innumerable past lives and every time we take a new birth, we are born with our past gunas, karmas, vasanas and samskaras. We are all born with memories of our past lives lying buried just beneath the surface of our consciousness, becoming visible sometimes on their own and at other times when we peep beneath the surface, as during past life regression or deep meditation. It is these memories, gunas, karmas, vasanas and samskaras that make us daivi or asuri.

Describing people with asuri sampada, negative qualities, Krishna says each one of them thinks:

“I am the lord of all. I am a great bhogi who enjoys the best things in life. I am a siddha, a man of great power and achievements; balavan, a man of immense strength; sukhee, living a life of contentment and bliss. Of noble birth am I, master of heaps of wealth, famous everywhere. I conduct grand sacrificial rituals where wealth flows endlessly, I give in charity boundlessly, I revel in pleasures, I make merry, feast and celebrate.  Tell me, who on earth is my equal? Self-centered, willful, filled with all the insolence of wealth and bloated with the adulation they receive, arrogant, haughty, full of rage and lust, these people cling to their mighty egos, and lord it over everyone.”  BG Ch. 16

When I think of such people, a person who used to stay close to my house some years ago comes to my mind. Every word he spoke, every step he took, every breath of his, the way he sat and stood, the way he treated all except those who were his superiors, spoke of his boundless arrogance. The poor and the powerless were no better than worms that crawled in the gutter for him and he crushed them under his foot every chance he had. He owned a fairly big house in an affluent locality and walked as though he was the master of everything under the sun.

In his case it was money that made them so arrogant. Power can give us the same arrogance, fame can give us the same arrogance, victories can give us the same arrogance.

Most people get bloated up with pride even when their achievements are puny. The wisdom of ancient India understood that arrogance is unhealthy for us even when our achievements are big because they feed the ego and starve the soul. Healthy living requires that you feed your ego and starve the soul. That is wisdom in the truest sense of the term. 

Hell is the destiny of people with asuri sampada – hell not only for themselves, but for everyone around them too. One Hitler created hell for the six million Jews he killed in the concentration camps and the millions of soldiers and civilians killed in WW II. It is for this reason that their asuri sampada has to be destroyed and if that proves impossible, then they themselves have to destroyed, so that they could be saved from themselves and others could be saved from them.   

The Brahmavaivarta Purana tells us an amazing story of how a god of great achievements was taught humility and the asuri sampada in him was destroyed.

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The story begins with Indra slaying the mighty serpent dragon Vritra lying crouched on the high mountains in the shapeless shape of a massive cloud. Indra frees the waters Vritra had blocked making the world parch for want of water. With the monster’s death, the freed waters burst forth from the mountains joyously, nourishing the earth and quenching the thirst of all living creatures making them sing in delight and praise Indra as the mightiest hero ever. Much of the Rig Veda is the rapturous praises thus sung by the inspired poets of the ancient world. Here is one Vedic poet singing of Indra: 

I will declare the manly deeds of Indra,

the first that he achieved, the Thunder-wielder.
He slew the Dragon, then disclosed the waters,

and cleft the channels of the mountain torrents.
He slew the Dragon lying on the mountain:

his heavenly bolt of thunder Tvaṣṭar-fashioned.
Like lowing kine in rapid flow descending

the waters glided downward to the ocean

[From Rig Veda Mandala 1, Hymn XXXII. Griffith trans.] 

Indra killed the monster who had misappropriated what belonged to all and freed living water to benefit the plants and trees, the birds, beasts and humans, making mother earth throb with life once again. Earth turned green once again, birds soared up into the skies, animals roamed the jungles that sprang up everywhere and man was happy.  Clouds started raining from the skies again.

Indra destroyed the ninety-nine cities that belonged to Vritra, cities of repression and oppression. Saviour, savior, everyone called him. Truly, he had made life and light possible by destroying darkness and bondage. Now he wanted to rebuild the cities of the gods, cities of freedom and light, of joyfulness and celebration and a palace for himself.   

Indra instructed Vishwakarma to build the magnificent palace for himself. The palatial gardens should have streams running through it, Indra told him, and lakes teeming with waterfowl, divine trees everywhere, and everything else he could imagine. Vishwakarma was making great progress and as the first year neared its end and work was nearing completion, Indra started making frequent visits to see the work in progress. Which was fine with Vishwakarma, but every time he made a visit, he would ask the celestial architect to modify something or the other, micromanaging things and interfering the Vishwakarma’s work, making progress slow, putting him in unendurable stress, making sleep impossible to him, driving him nuts.

Indra had ceased to be the mighty hero and liberating leader he was earlier. Instead, with his own importance gone to his head, he had become an intolerable boss, always grumpy, always complaining, always looking for faults, insisting that his way alone was right, constantly insulting the intelligence and imagination of Vishwakarma in his attempt to show he was superior. It was possible that he was jealous of the miraculous powers of Vishwakarma as an architect. Frequently when a boss becomes jealous of his subordinate, he tries to ‘show him his place’ by trying to show he has better ideas about everything, even in subjects about which he has no knowledge. He refuses to see people as people, and instead sees them as his subordinates whom he can order about. And as an architect there was no equal to Vishwakarma who turned everything he touched into pure wonder, whose creations were beauty solidified. But Indra wanted him to do things Indra’s way. Life became hell for the celestial architect.

Vishwakarma just did not know what to do. He was the most creative architect, but, as it often happens, he did not know how to play games to outsmart his boss. That was not his area of expertise – he was a simple creative genius and not a politician. He decided to seek help and secretly went to Brahma, the Creator. Brahma listened to him patiently, assured him his troubles would soon come to an end and sent him back a relaxed man, or rather a relaxed god. 

Brahma informed Vishnu of the whole affair who instantly made a plan to solve the problem. Such things should not happen in the celestial world, Vishnu knew. Time had come for the lord of the gods to be shown his place.

India has always loved telling human stories in the name of the gods. Or let’s say, stories of gods as though they were human beings, subject to the same anger that men are subject to, the same jealousy and greed, the same intolerance and hostility, the same ignorance and narrow-mindedness, the same lust and illusions and delusions. These are teaching stories, stories told to teach men and women wisdom, to teach us that whoever we are, however powerful we are, we are all subject to the games the mind plays with us.

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It is a Purana that tells us this story – the Brahmavaivarta Purana. Indra in Vedic literature is different from Indra in the Puranas. In Vedic literature, Indra is the symbol of the enlightened mind, mind that has become still and empty, the yogic mind, the meditator’s mind, the free mind, the ‘mindless mind’, what Zen calls the no-mind, mushin, mind that is one with pure consciousness, mind that soars in the limitless skies of consciousness like Garutman, the eagle of the Vedas on whom Vishnu, the all-pervading being, travels. Whereas in the Puranas, he is the symbol of the ordinary human mind, the mind about which Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita complaints to Krishna: chanchalam hi manah krishna, pramaathi balavad drdham tasyaaham nigraham manye vayor iva sudushkaram – “The mind, Krishna, is restless, turbulent, strong and stubborn. I consider that it is as difficult to control as the wind itself.”

In the modern spiritual classic The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche speaks of the two completely different minds, or aspects of the mind: sem and rigpa. Sem, says Rinpoche, “is the mind that thinks, plots, desires, manipulates, that flares up in anger, that creates and indulges in waves of negative emotions and thoughts, that has to go on and on asserting, validating, and confirming its "existence" by fragmenting, conceptualizing, and solidifying experience. The ordinary mind is the ceaselessly shifting and shiftless prey of external influences, habitual tendencies, and conditioning. The masters liken sem to a candle flame in an open doorway, vulnerable to all the winds of circumstance.”

The higher mind, or the enlightened mind, the awakened mind, is the “primordial, pure, pristine awareness that is at once intelligent, cognizant, radiant, and always awake. It could be said to be the knowledge of knowledge itself.” The Vedic Indra stands for this mind, for rigpa.

The Indra of the Puranas, books written after the glorious age of the Vedas had come to an end and the worship and understanding of the Vedic gods had declined giving rise to the Pauranic gods in their place, is the symbol of sem, the ordinary mind. 

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Early next morning a radiant young brahmana traveler with brilliant eyes that spoke of his serene intelligence appeared at the gate of Indra. He was immediately received in great honour and given the traditional offerings of water, honey, milk and fruits made to brahmanas on arrival. Politely enquired of the purpose of his visit, the boy said he had heard of the great palace Indra was building and had come to see it. When the young boy spoke, his voice was rich, deep and soft. Indra’s hairs stood on their ends as he listened to the traveler.

“It is great that you are building this splendorous palace,” said the boy. “How long will it take for the work to be completed?” The boy paused and a gentle smile appeared on his lips as he added, “No other Indra of the past has completed a more magnificent palace.”

Indra too smiled at the comment. How conceited of the little boy to assume he has known the Indras before him and the palaces they had built! Was the boy mocking at him, ridiculing him? Or was he just being presumptuous? With the indulgent smile of an elder towards a child the lord of the gods asked him, making sure his voice remained polite, “Have you then known other Indras? Seen the palaces they built?” 

“Yes,” the boy replied calmly with no change in his serene voice. “I have seen numerous Indras and Vishwakarms and the many palaces they built.” There was no mockery in that steady voice, no boasting. “Vatsa,” said the boy addressing Indra as though the lord of the gods was no more than a toddler, “I have known your father, Maharshi Kashyapa, and his father, Maharshi Marichi. And I also know Brahma, whose son Marichi is, and, Lord of the Gods, I know Vishnu too, from whose naval lotus Brahma was born.”

“I have known the dissolution of universes. I have seen it happening again and again, and again and again new worlds coming into being form the cosmic waters of consciousness without end. I have seen that state in which all was one. How many times have I seen this happening? No one can count that.  Universe after universe is born endlessly and every one of them dissolves into the nothingness from which they come.  And right at this moment, King of the Gods, who can count the number of universes that exist simultaneously, each with its own Indras and Vishwakarmas. Who can count the grains of sand on the beaches of world?”  

      

Indra had grown completely silent listening to what the boy was saying. There was no doubt the wandering brahmana child was speaking the truth. There was the power of authenticity to every word he spoke. The bemused smile on the face of Indra had disappeared long ago. Without blinking his eyes, he was watching the miraculous being that had appeared before him that morning in the guise of a young pilgrim and wondering who it was. All arrogance had left him and his head that he haughtily held high was now bent in humility before the speaker whose words he was listening to holding his breath. He was about to ask him who he was when he noticed a procession of ants that had appeared in the royal chamber where they were seated. Indra saw the procession was almost as wide as the large hall itself and the ants were slowly moving towards them.

The young boy’s eyes too were on the ants now, watching them with curiosity and deep interest. All on a sudden the child burst out laughing – sparkling spontaneous, mirth filled, wondrous laughter the like of which Indra had never heard before. As the laughter died out, Indra got up from his seat, stood humbly before his guest, bowed deeply to him and asked, “Bhagavan, who are you? I have never met anyone like you and I never knew someone like you existed. Your brilliance surpasses that of a thousand suns simultaneously rising up, you look like a child but seem to be more ancient than time itself. Who are you, please tell me. And also tell me why you laughed at the parade of ants. You terrify me, though you exude nothing but love.”

“Let me tell you why I laughed, Lord of the Gods,” said the boy. “When I saw the parade of the ants I couldn’t control my laughter. But why the sight of the procession of the ants made me laugh is a secret that cannot be revealed to anyone who is not ready for it. It is the great secret of secrets, which very few even among great saints know. The axe of this secret destroys at a single stroke the mighty tree with its roots above and branches below, the tree that has existed from times without beginning, the tree that the wise speak of as eternal.”

The boy had become silent after he spoke these words, so silent as though he had never spoken at all. Indra fell at his feet and begged him to reveal the secret to him and the little boy knew that the lord of the gods is ready for the highest knowledge, the highest secret.

And in a long discourse the little boy who was none other than Vishnu himself told him the secret of karma which controls us from lifetime to lifetime, the result of our karmas which cannot be escaped even in a million lifetimes, and also how to free ourselves from the bondage of karma and become liberated. The little boy told him how every time we perform an action with the sense of I, we create a karma and these karmas accumulated become life scripts for future births and bind us. He also told Indra in great detail how to act without the I-sense, how to be the non-doer even when doing all kinds of actions. He taught Indra the secret of become asanga, unattached, to not only the results of one’s actions but also to the actions themselves. He taught Indra how to perform actions for the good of the world, as he had done when he had slain the snake monster Vritra and dedicate the results to the Divine.

The boy explained to Indra that each ant in the parade was once an Indra like him, from which Indra got visible proof, pratyaksha, that there had been endless number of Indras before him.  As Indras, the boy told him, prompted by their ego and arrogance, each one of them had asked the same question: Who in the universe is equal to me? This asuri sampada had led them to lower births and in their lower births too they had continued with asuri sampada until each of them had ended up an ant after countless lifetimes.

A little later an old wandering ascetic appeared on the scene wearing a deerskin as his loincloth, his hair matted, and taught Indra the same wisdom in different words. When the teaching was over and the ascetic disappeared on the spot, it became clear that he was none other than Lord Shiva. Following Shiva, the little boy too disappeared, revealing to Indra that he was none other than Lord Vishnu.

Indra now moved to the other extreme, like a pendulum, losing all interest in life, denying himself all joys, saying no to his wife, to all pleasures, to his responsibilities, saying no to life itself. A horrified Indrani, his queen, rushed to Brihaspati, the guru of the gods, who came and taught Indra how to balance between the extremes, how to remain in the world doing all that is expected of him, including his commitment to his wife and son and others, and yet remain free from karmas that bind us.

And yes, of course, he let Vishwakarma complete the palace without more micromanaging and constant squabbling. One other thing came to an end: he no more asked kon’yosti sadrisho mayaa, “Who on earth is my equal?” Every time the thought came to him, he remembered the parade of ants.

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One question that arises here is if a man with asuri qualities can become Indra, a position that according to Pauranic Indian tradition goes to the one who has done the highest number of powerful religious rites and asceticism. Well, as I said earlier, please keep in mind we are not discussing here the Vedic Indra, symbol of the enlightened mind, but the Pauranic Indra, who stands for the ordinary mind, sem. The ordinary mind can feel haughtiness, arrogance and pride in its achievements – success can go to the head of a man with such a mind. He can be proud of the rites themselves, of his asceticism, as it happened with Jajali. Second, though the Gita says we are all born either predominantly asuri or predominantly daivi, our qualities are subject to change from moment from moment. A man who is wicked now can become good later and vice verse.  

The Saptashloki  Durga says: jnaaninaam api chetaamsi devee bhagavatee his saa balaad aakrshya mohaaya mahaamayaa prayacchati. Even the minds of enlightened men, she, the Goddess, the Mahamaya, draws by force and leads to delusion.  

It is like moss on the surface of water, says the wisdom tradition of India. You clear it with your hands to drink the water and a moment later, it is back again, covering the surface. So you have to be constantly on the alert. The famous story of the great yogi Matsyendranath tells us of how he became infatuated with the queen of Sri Lanka long after his enlightenment and his disciple Gorakhnath had to go to him and awaken him by saying those words that have since become legendary: Jaag macchandar gorakh aayaa – Wake up, Matsyendra, Gorakh has come. 

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Pandora and Sandhya: Woman as a Curse, Woman as a Blessing

The study analyses the story of the birth of the first woman in Greek mythology and contrasts it with the story of the birth of the first woman in Indian Puranas, revealing the Indian perception of woman in contrast to the Ancient Greek and Western perception of woman. In the ancient Greek perception, woman appears as a curse on mankind, born out of the anger of the gods and their need to punish man, all-negative except that she can be the mother of his children; whereas in Indian stories, she is born of the calm, serene mind of the creator in meditation and is an expression of the sacred creativity inherent in the divine: all-beautiful, with not one thing negative about her.     

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Pandora is the first woman created according to ancient Greek myths and Sandhya, the first woman born according to ancient Indian myths. While there are a few similarities between the two, the contrasts between them are great. By comparing the stories of the first woman in these two cultures, we can arrive at how the two cultures perceived women – perceptions that influenced Indian and western attitudes towards women for millennnia and still continue to influence to some extent. True, one example from each culture is not enough for such a study, but then when it comes to the first woman, we cannot have many examples either.

Let’s begin with Pandora. There are variations in the story Greece tells us about her, as is true of all Greek stories, but according to Hesiod, one of the earliest Greek poets and Homer’s near contemporary, in whose work Theogony she first appears, Pandora’s story begins when the gods and human beings decide to have a sacrificial feast together at Mekone. Human beings until then were only male – anthrōpoi – there were no women, the first one was yet to be born, yet to be created. And these human beings lived in perfect harmony among themselves, perfect peace and perfect concord with gods and nature. Life was a symphony and man did not have to work – the earth yielded whatever he needed and more, without sweat and toil. There existed no old age, no disease, no suffering, no pain, and nothing unpleasant ever happened – as in the satya yuga of India!

Enter Prometheus, the titan who had immense love for men and wanted to do what is best for them. And when he heard about the feast, he slew an ox, as was common in ancient Greece, and divided the ox into two parts – one consisting of the most edible parts of the animal like its meat, muscles and fat and the other, just the bones. Prometheus is known for his cunning – he wrapped up the good parts and covered it with the innards of the ox, making it unappealing; and the bones he wrapped up and covered with fat, making it look appetizing.  He then offered the choice to Zeus – the god could choose for the gods whichever part he preferred. Zeus knew the cunning of Prometheus – generally considered a great asset by the ancient Greeks as by folk cultures all over the world. In spite of knowing the trap, he chose the wrapped up bones and as a punishment for the people for whose sake the titan wanted to cheat the gods, pronounced a curse on them: from then on, the earth would no more yield food on its own and men would have to sweat and toil to produce it. And even that yield would depend on the seasons, would be unpredictable and so on and so forth. He also decreed that in future, when a sacrifice is offered, gods would take the bones of the animal burnt at the altar – the smells carried upward by the smoke – and all the meat men can have for themselves. Still not content with what he had done, his fury at the cheating still not appeased, Zeus took away fire from the earth – men would no more be able to cook food, but would now have to eat it raw.

Titan Prometheus, with his cunning and his love for man, had an idea about this too. He wouldn’t allow Zeus to punish man so cruelly for what was essentially his mistake. So what he did was to hide a spark of fire in a reed and bring it to the earth. For which blessing, humanity called him their savior, the fire-bringer. They could now eat cooked food, work with metals, bake earthenware, do all kinds of things with fire and thus have civilization.  

That was again an act that would not go unpunished by Zeus – Prometheus was given, as a punishment for his transgression of trying to benefit man once again, the most awful punishment imaginable perhaps, a brutal torment that would have no end and would go on and on. He would be chained to a rock where a vulture would forever feed on his liver – the vulture would peck and pull out pieces of his liver and feed on it; and the liver would grow back overnight so that the vulture can feed on the immortal titan’s liver the next day again.

That was the punishment for Prometheus. But men whom he loved so much, for whose sake he did all this, wouldn’t be spared either. Their punishment would be worse than the earlier two: a new being would be sent into their midst, a new being called woman. And what would be woman’s job? To separate man from joy and happiness forever, to destroy his peace and serenity, to create discord among men, to drive them crazy – she would be the source of all their misery and yet they wouldn’t be able to live without her, for she promised them bliss, one look at her would fill them with intense pleasure; and also, she would be the mother of their children. An amazing creature that made them go dizzy, she would enter their homes, cunning, insidious, manipulative, treacherous, take over their hearts and make sure there was no peace there. She would create discord among them; would sow the seeds of jealousy, rivalry, disputes, conflict, dissonance, clashes, quarrels, discontent and greed. Her way would be seductive submissiveness. They wouldn’t be able to do without her, they would so pang for her that separation from her even for a moment would be hell for them. And with her in their homes and hearts – from where she would rule over them, dictate to them what to do and what not to do, play with them as though they were mere puppets, make them dance to her least wish and drive them insane, life would be hell again.

Zeus was not finished yet, so furious was he, he ordered the gods to bestow gifts upon her – all kinds of gifts: that is what Pandora means, pan meaning all, and dora meaning gift. These gifts were meant to punish man, turn the world evil, fill it with misery and agony and distance man forever from the gods and all that made life worth living. She would be beautiful beyond words, and for that reason men would crave her, and suffer endlessly for it. Man would no more be the simple man, but would be split into male and female, forever restless, forever seeking, forever crazy, forever driven to the unattainable, forever searching for the paradise lost.

The last gift given to Pandora as ordered by Zeus was from Hermes, the heavenly thief. He gave her his thieving nature, the desire to exploit others, to steal what belongs to others, to live like a parasite without producing any food on her own unlike men who sweated in the fields in the sun and the rain, and in heat and cold, to plough the earth and sow seeds to produce yield from the earth, while she stayed home.

Pandora brings with her all these “gifts” in a jar. Down on the earth she opens the lid of the jar and all the gifts given her by the gods to punish man escape and spread all over the world – all except hope, which sustains man in the middle of all the misery that life had become.

The vengeance of Zeus is complete now.

This then is the story of Pandora, the first woman created according to Greek mythology.

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Let us now take a look at the story of Sandhya, the first woman born of the Creator, Brahma according to Indian myths. As in the case of the Greek myth of Pandora, there are several versions of Sandhya’s story – in fact much more so – but for our discussion we shall follow the detailed Kalika Purana narration. The story is told in the opening chapters of the purana.

Brahma, the Creator [different from Brahman the Ultimate Reality, pure existence-consciousness-bliss], first created the Prajapatis such as Daksha and then the ten mind-born sons such as Marichi, Angira etc. Following the birth of the mind-born sons, manasa-putras, as Brahma sat in deep meditation, from his mind was born a woman of amazing beauty named Sandhya, Twilight. She was endowed with every desirable quality, says the Kailka Purana: sampūrna-guṇa-śālini. There was no equal to her in the world of gods or anywhere else, and she was without equal in the past, present or future. Her hair was enticing blue-black and she had large blue eyes that reminded you of blue lotuses. Those eyes were timid like those of a doe, moving constantly, and her eyebrows reached out towards her ears. Her nose resembled a sesame flower and was so incredibly beautiful that it made one feel as though it was the beauty of her forehead melting and flowing down in such a wonderful shape. Her face reminded you of a golden lotus; and her rich, lush red lower lip, the ripe bimba gourd. Her two full breasts, thrusting upward as though they were trying to reach her lovely chin [pīnottuṅgau, chibukaṃ yātuṃ udyatau iva], her thin waist, broad hips, heavy thighs, lovely feet, all made her temptingly, irresistibly alluring.

But of course, Kama, the god of desire and love, was yet to be born. So while Brahma, the prajapatis and the manasaputras were all curious to know who she was and what her function in the process of creation would be, none of them lusted for her – at least not for now.

And then, all of a sudden, without any warning, as they sat musing about Sandhya, there emerged from the mind of the Creator yet another being of great beauty – this time a male, of the complexion of gold dust, with a wide chest, long dark-blue hair, dancing eyes, young, tall, chest as wide as a door plank, shoulders like those of a rogue elephant. The Kalika Purana here pauses to give us a description of the perfection of male beauty and unless we are familiar with Indian mythology, we expect him to be the match for Sandhya – the perfect male and the perfect female.

As the prajapatis and the mind-born sons of Brahma look on, their curiosity awakened, the new being, from whom wafts a heady fragrance, looks at Brahma, bows to him and asks him what his function is, what he should do – remember the creation of the universe has just begun and is still in the initial stages. He requests Brahma to assign to him any work befitting him. The Creator does not say anything for a while – he is himself taken aback by the majesty of the awesome things that are happening. Then, mastering himself, overcoming the awe he is feeling, he speaks to this male being, giving him a bow and five flower arrows, telling him to continue the process of creation with the help of his superb body and the five arrows, bewitching men and women. Brahma assures him that neither the gods, nor the gandharvas or kinnaras, nor the yakshas, nagas, rakshasas, pishachas, asuras, daityas, vidyadharas or human beings will be able to resist him. Nor will birds, beasts, worms, fish, insects or anything else that breathes.

Well, he adds by way of concluding, why to say more, neither I, nor Vishnu or Shiva will be beyond your capacity to influence. None shall be impervious to you! Sneak into the hearts of all, unseen and unknown to them, become the cause of their happiness and continue the eternal process of creation.

Brahma then blesses him: May the hearts of living beings always be the target of your arrows! May you be the giver of joy and delight to all that breathe!

This mind-born son of the Creator is given the name Manmatha, for his capacity to churn the minds of people, and Kama, because he is the most charming and beautiful of all. He is also given a couple of other names for similar reasons – Madana, Kandarpa, etc. He is again blessed: his flower arrows will be more powerful than the weapons of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. He is given omnipresence – the entire universe will be his abode, there will be no place where he has no entry and all will be subject to him – all, including plants, bushes and grass, right up to Brahmaloka, and no one anywhere shall be equal to him. He is told that the daughter of Daksha, Rati, shall be his wife.

It is now that the story takes a turn. Kama muses over all the powers and blessings he has received, picks up his bow Unmadana shaped like the eyebrow of a beautiful woman and his five flower arrows and decides something very daring: He would test his powers on Brahma himself along with the others present there. He stretches the bow fully until it forms almost a circle and places the arrows on it. A sweet, fragrant wind starts bowing and, as he lets go and the flowers hit Brahma, the prajapatis and the ten mind-born sons of brahma, every one of them becomes erotically enchanted. Unable to take their eyes away from Sandhya, they keep looking at her and as they do so, powerful desire for her arises in their minds and fills their bodies with sexual craving – they all lust for her deeply, the lust engendering sexual reactions in their bodies and making them perspire.

Kama doesn’t spare Sandhya either – she too is hit by his arrows. And as Brahma looks at her his mind and body filled with lust for her, from her body are born the forty-nine sentiments [bhāvas] as well as haughty indifference, tempting talk, cajolery, coquettish gestures and other hāvas. Also born of her are the sixty-four arts.

Sandhya too, pierced by the arrows of kama, starts exhibiting feminine behaviours under sexual desire – sidelong glances, smiles, giggles, shyness, embarrassment, light tremor of the body, restive eyes, and so on. With those gestures, Sandhya’s desirability multiples and she becomes enticing beyond words. In the words of the Kalika Purana, she becomes irresistibly charming like a heavenly river filled with fine, golden ripples.

As Brahma looks at Sandhya, herself a victim of Kama and filled with sexual longing, expressing that longing in her looks, gestures, stance and glances, expressing it through her entire body, her sexually awake body is covered by perspiration.

Seeing his effect on Brahma, the prajapatis and the manasaputras as well as on Sandhya, Kama concludes: Yes, I am capable of performing the job the Creator has allotted to me.

It is at this moment that Shiva appears in the skies above them and looking at them laughs at them ridiculing them. “Brahma,” he asks, “how come you get sexually excited seeing your own daughter? Certainly very inappropriate for someone who follows the Vedic way! One should treat one’s daughter-in-law exactly as one treats one’s mother; and one should treat one’s daughter exactly as he treats his daughter-in-law – this is the Vedic way of life, expressed in words that came out of your own mouth. How is it that just because of Kama you have forgotten all that? What holds the world up together is firmness of the mind – and you have lost that firmness because of something as insignificant as Kama. And how have the great ascetics who spend all their time in meditation fallen and started lusting for a woman?  How has some silly guy like Kama, who has just got his work allotted to him by you, who has no sense of the right time and the right place, made you victims of his arrow? Shame! Shame on you all!”

Hearing these words of Shiva, Brahma becomes doubly ashamed and his body becomes covered with perspiration again, this time out of embarrassment. He masters himself and holds himself back, though a moment ago, filled with lust, he was about to grab Sandhya in his arms.

From Bramha’s perspiration, says the Kalika Purana, are born the pitarah/pitrs – the manes. And from the perspiration of Daksha, who has a hard time controlling his sexual arousal, is born Rati, the goddess of sexual love and beauty, the slim wasted, slender, irresistible goddess of the golden hue, whom he gives to Kama as his wife.

To end the story, Brahma becomes infuriated with Kama for making him lust for his own daughter and curses him that he would be burned to ashes by Shiva. Later, when Kama explains he was just testing the powers Brahma had said he has, and begs forgiveness, the Creator forgives him and tells him that he will regain his body when Shiva takes a wife.

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As far as the Kalika Purana is concerned, the story of Sandhya ends here. However, the Shiva Purana which tells exactly the same story of Sandhya, even using identical vocabulary, imageries and metaphors in its Rudra Samhita section, continues her story from here. The Purana tells us that after Shiva and Brahma leave the place, Sandhya muses over the incidents that have happened. Her own father was tempted by her, her brothers – the prajapatis and the mind-born sons of Brahma – too were tempted by her, shot by the arrows of Kama. Not only that, because of the arrows he had shot at her, she too had become erotically excited and had started behaving in sexually suggestive ways. True, Kama has reaped the fruits of his actions in the form of the curse he received from Brahma, but she too had committed the grave sin of lusting for her own father and her brothers. She decides to perform the expiatory rites prescribed by the Vedas for such a sin – ending one’s body by entering a sacrificial fire. She decides to do that, but before that she would do one thing for the good of the world. She had felt sexual feelings from the very moment of her birth – she was just born when all these things happened. Hence she would perform extreme penance so that no new born will have sexual feelings. Eroticism, sexuality, should come to all only on maturity. After achieving that goal, she would give up this body of hers that had tempted her father and brothers and in which she had felt sexual arousal for her father and brothers.

She realizes she is inspired to meditate and purify herself by the sight of Shiva that she had had as he appeared before them all. 

With these noble thoughts, Sandhya goes to the foot of the mountain Chandrabhaga in the Himalayas and prepares to meditate and do tapas there. Brahma sends his son Vasishtha to her so that he can instruct her in meditation and tapas, telling him that she considers the temptation she felt for them as her first death – the real death – and now she wants to make her death complete by abandoning her present body so that she can be reborn in a fresh, unstained body.  Brahma asks Vasishtha to assume a different body so that Sandhya would not embarrassed by his sight – she had sexually desired him earlier.

When Vasishtha sees her, Sandhya is sitting on the bank of the Himalayan lake Brihal-lolita, near Mt. Chandrabhaga. Seeing him, now appearing as an ascetic, Sandhya bows deeply to him and responding to his questions tells him she is Sandhya, she is blessed by his sight, and she has come there to perform tapas but does not know how to do it. Vasishtha asks her to meditate upon Shiva – focus her attention on him, worship him using a mantra he gives her. She does it for so long that her matter hair growing down from her head covers her entire body, leaving her face bare, making her look like a frost covered lotus in the words of Shiva Purana. When Shiva appears before her and offers her boons, she tells him her first boon would be that no one should have sexual feelings right from birth. She also requests that the man who would become her husband should be an intimate friend of hers and any man other than her husband who looks at her lustfully should become impotent. These boons are granted by a highly pleased Shiva who declares her free from all stains from her past. Eventually she burns her body in the sacrificial fire of Rishi Medhatithi and is reborn from it as Arundhati and marries Vasishtha.

Vasishtha and Arundhati have since then been the highest example for marital love and fidelity and the ideal couple in every imaginable way. A ritual that is still performed in Hindu marriages is called Arundhati darshana, seeing Arundhati: immediately after marriage, the newly married couple standing close to each other and holding hands takes a look at the early morning sky for a view of Arundhati, today seen as part of a constellation.

Thus Sandhya who begins as the embodiment of female splendour and is used by Kama to tempt her own father and brothers ends up as a symbol of not only beauty but also loyalty, unswerving fidelity, perfect love, total commitment and all other qualities that make married life worth living. She also enjoys the total love of her man – Vasishtha’s love for Arundhati is the most complete love a man can have for his woman. 

        

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As we can easily see, the two women have hardly anything common between them except that they are both young and beautiful and the first women created. One is created in anger and in order to punish man, for what was no fault of man, the creator’s heart full of vengeance and fury, whereas the other is born of meditative calmness, serenity, joyfulness, the festive feeling that is the result of meditation. Sandhya is also self-born, not intentionally created; she just emerges from the Creator’s heart, as all highest creation does, in what is called the flow state, in what China calls wu-wei and India calls akarma, the state of effortless efficiency in action with no actor/doer being present, actions originating from the highest dimension of existence, as a manifestation of the creativity that is inherent in pure existence-consciousness-bliss. She is born of egolessness, from the state of self-transcendence that meditation takes us to, as all that is best in existence is, unlike Pandora who is a creation of Zeus’ wounded ego. Since bliss is the source of Sandhya’s origin, her essence is blissfulness, what India calls ananda. There is absolutely not one thing negative about Sandhya.

Whereas except that she is beautiful, desirable and can become the mother of his children – a huge thing indeed, of course – there is not one thing positive about Pandora. The way Greek mythology describes it, the joy she promises is a trap. Her true promise is what she is born to do to man – fill his heart and home with hatred and jealousy, with competitiveness and rivalry with others, with anger and jealousy, with lust, grief and sorrow,  with fear, anxiety, discontent, greed, envy, cruelty, rage and the hundred other negative emotions. She would make man hate man, make man kill man for her sake, would transform what was heaven into hell. Pan-dora, all-gift, is not a gift at all, but a pestilential curse.   

Sandhya excites men sexually, fills their hearts and body with lust, even forbidden lust, but that is not her fault. It is because of Kama, the god of desire, love, lust – because of the arrows Kama shoots at men. And she is as much a victim of Kama as the men are. And when she has excited men with incestuous desire for her, she feels guilty about it, feels repugnance for herself, and deciding to atone for it, sets out immediately on a journey to purify herself through meditation and penance. In an act of atonement for what she considers her sin – even though we can see she has committed no sin – she wants to abandon the very body which tempted them, in which she herself felt desire for them. She then takes another birth, this time as the very embodiment of chastity, loyalty, conjugal devotion and what Krishna in the Gita calls dharma-aviruddha kāma, desire that does not go against dharma, righteousness, the common good.

She does another amazing thing. Before abandoning the body in which she feels she has sinned and done something repugnant, as the Shiva Purana which continues her story tells us, she would spend years praying to God, meditating upon Shiva, and when he appears, ask him as her first boon: that no newborn would feel the sexual urge, sexuality would awaken only years later, when the child has grown up.

I want to add one more thing here, a beautiful thing that her story tells us: the way to self-mastery, to mastery over unbridled sexuality as well as over everything else, is consciousness, what the western world today calls mindfulness. In fact that is the only path to self-mastery, which all of us need everywhere, at all times, the absence of which leads us to excesses and to horrible crimes, news about which the media fills us every morning as we sit down to watch the news on TV. Shiva in Indian culture stands for consciousness, awakened consciousness, pure consciousness – the chit/chid of sat-chid-ananda. It is his sight that awakens Brahma, the prajapatis and the mind-born sons of brahma from the darkness of blind lust. Again, it is his sight that awakens Sandhya. The antidote for Kama’s arrows is Shiva, consciousness, conscious living, awakened living, mindful living. The Shiva Sutra, a brilliant Kashmiri Sanskrit text tells: triṣu chaturthaṃ  tailavad āsechyaṃ, a sutra that asks us to bring in the fourth state, consciousness, into our other states – waking, dream, and sleep. This is the highest spiritual path and the only way worth living, and that is what Sandhya teaches us through her own practice.    

To conclude, Pandora is woman as a punishment to man, as a curse, created in anger, to destroy, whereas Sandhya is a result of meditativeness, an expression of God’s creativity, divine creativity, sacred creativeness, a manifestation of creative sacredness in female form. She is an expression of the beauty that is within God – sundaram – finding expression in feminine form. She performs tapas so that no one becomes a victim to the enormous powers of kama as she had become, so that kama will have power over us not until we are grown up and matured enough to understand and handle it. That is her parting blessing to the world before she ends her body which she feels has been polluted and is reborn as Arundhati. It is interesting to note that she does not curse kama, does not say no to sex, which would be the denial of life itself, denial of the flowering of new life, denial of one of the greatest joys of life, but only delays it until maturity.  

These two stories about the first woman speak of two completely different perceptions of woman: India speaks of her as irresistibly beautiful and essentially sacred, a blessing upon mankind. Whereas for ancient Greece she was a curse, a punishment, someone who sows the seeds of hell on earth.

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

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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Leadership Excellence and the Dancing God

Earlier this week when I introduced my course in Indian Philosophy for Leadership Excellence to a new batch of students at XLRI School of Business, I used a picture of the dancing Shiva in my Power Point presentation. One of the students asked me why I had used that picture in the presentation. I appreciated her question and told her that I had asked myself that question before deciding on the picture. I really had. It was after asking that question and some debating within my mind that I had chosen that picture.

Why did I choose that particular picture?

To me, as I explained to my student, the dancing Shiva symbolises the very essence of Indian culture and Indian thought. That image symbolises Indian philosophy, both of life and work, with amazing beauty and perfection. Few other symbols represent the core of Indian philosophy with the clarity with which this symbol represents it.

Everything in the dancing Shiva figure is symbolic, as in all other traditional representations of Shiva: his four hands, the objects he holds in each of them, his hair, his ornaments, the cloth he wears, the crescent moon, Ganga visible in the middle of his matted hair, the snakes, the third eye, the figure on which he dances, the frame of flames that surround him, the pedestal on which the idol is placed, the dance itself, all. And everything is profoundly meaningful. It has been said that the iconographic symbol of the dancing Shiva, called Nataraja, was developed in the 8th or 9th century in the Chola country in southern India. In all likelihood it was. But what I want to say is this: the dancing Shiva is a work of pure brilliance and the person who developed the icon, a creative genius of the highest calibre inspired by the deepest spiritual wisdom.

While, as I said, every aspect of the icon is symbolic, in this article I would like to talk about just one aspect of the image, or rather two: the prostrate figure on which Shiva dances and the dance itself.

The dwarfish figure on whom Shiva dances is known as the apasmara purusha. Purusha means man. Apasmara is usually understood as epilepsy, but the word also means absentmindedness or forgetfulness, which would be the meaning more appropriate here. He is the symbol of the primal self-forgetfulness which gives rise to the notion of a limited ego in the boundless self. He is also explained as illusion – the primal illusion that causes the limitless immortal self to appear as a limited one subject to births and deaths and all that happen in between.

If we do not want to go into all that complex philosophy, the apasmara purusha is the symbol of the ego that rises from self-forgetfulness and illusion. When Shiva dances on the ego, it is his dance as a master of the ego, the dance of ego-transcended. It is the dance of self-transcendence. And that is the traditional name for the dance: ananda tandava – the dance of ecstasy, which is the dance of self-transcendence.

When the ego is mastered, when it is transcended, life becomes a dance of ecstasy.

And we are born for this dance, says Indian philosophy.

There is a story I have told several times in different contexts, and I am going to tell that story again here. The story is taken from Richard Bach’s Illusions. For those who are not familiar with Bach, he is the celebrated author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, once a cult book for young people all over the world.

“Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river.
The current of the river swept silently over them all – young and old, rich and poor, good and evil, the current going its own way, knowing only its own crystal self.


Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to the twigs and rocks of the river bottom, for clinging was their way of life, and resisting the current what each had learned from birth.


But one creature said at last, “I am tired of clinging. Though I cannot see it with my eyes, I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom.”


The other creatures laughed and said, “Fool! Let go, and that current you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed across the rocks, and you will die quicker than boredom.”


But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go, and at once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks.


Yet in time, as the creature refused to cling again, the current lifted him free from the bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more.


And the creatures downstream, to whom he was a stranger, cried, “See a miracle! A creature like ourselves, yet he flies! See the Messiah, come to save us all!”


And the one carried in the current said, “I am no more Messiah than you. The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure.”


But they cried the more, “Saviour!” all the while clinging to the rocks, and when they looked again he was gone and they were left alone making legends of a Saviour.”

The ego makes us cling to the twigs and rocks at the river bottom. It is the ego that makes us cling to the small things of life. It is the ego that causes all the misery in our life. It is the ego that stands between our true nature and ourselves. Our true nature is ecstasy, ananda, and our life should be an ananda tandava, dance of ecstasy but the ego disconnects us from ananda and makes life a mixture of small joys and sorrows. Instead of experiencing ananda, we experience samsara, the constantly changing world of little pleasures and pains.

Shiva is the symbol of man who has conquered his ego and reclaimed his original nature – seen his original face, as the Zen masters would say; reclaimed the kingdom of heaven within ourselves, as Jesus would say. To conquer one’s ego is to see one’s original face, reclaim the kingdom of heaven within ourselves.

Then you float in the river of life, as the ‘messiah’ in the story floats.

When you conquer your ego, you dance. Life becomes a dance for you. And you sing. You sing as Vak Ambhrini, the ancient woman seer of the Rig Veda, perhaps the world’s oldest woman poet, sang, because you are one with the power that runs the universe:

aham rudrebhir vasubhiś carāmyaham ādityair uta viśvadevaih
aham mitrā varunobhā bibharmyaham indrāgnee aham aśvinobhā

I move the cosmic forces of vitality and wealth
The luminaries and all celestial powers
I sustain the cosmic sources of water and light
I am the centre of energy, light and life
Given by the sun, air, fire…

I am the mother, the restorer of wealth;
I know all that is worth knowing and expressing;
The divine powers function with my instructions;
I possess all domains;
My hymns are chanted in all places…


I breathe like the wind pervading all the regions;
I go beyond the heavens, beyond the limits of this vast earth.
I am invincible; none can defy me.

[Selected verses from the Vak Sukta of the Rig Veda, 10th Mandala. English rendering by Pt Satyakam Vidyalankar.]

One evening I was with my teacher on the lawns of a bungalow in a posh area in Chennai. There was our hostess and a few others with us. The master on a leisurely evening with a few devotees and disciples. The atmosphere was light. Then someone asked my teacher, “Swamiji, don’t you ever sing? Don’t you dance?” And Swamiji looked up into the star-filled sky and said, “Look! See the stars twinkling and the clouds floating gently by? That’s my dance.” He then asked us to be silent and when we did, we heard the wind moving among the trees. Swamiji said, “And that’s my song.”

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To me, the use of Shiva’s image in my first presentation was also an act of prayer. In the Indian tradition, we begin everything with a prayer.

Or rather prayerfulness.

For prayer in the true sense of the term is not asking for things. It is an act of surrender. It is an act of invoking the High into our hearts and our lives, into our actions. It is an act of eliminating me from my actions and bringing Him into it.

It is an act of transforming the accidental man into the essential man.

The accidental man is the one filled with uncertainty, with stress, with fears, with anguishes. He cringes, he clings. And fights to achieve goals he has set for himself. Fights against the whole world, fights against life, fights against existence itself. Fights against the river. Refuses to let go of himself, refuses to allow the current to carry him with it.

The essential man is the one who has let go of himself. Who has surrendered to life, to the river.

He becomes an instrument in the hands of Life. Or if you prefer that word, in the hands of God.

He becomes a mere nimitta – an instrument, in the hands of existence. As Krishna asked Arjuna to be when he said in the Gita: nimittamātram bhava savyasācin.

The wonderful example from Indian culture for a man who has become a mere instrument is Krishna himself. He is a man who has become totally empty – like his flute. Krishna’s flute is a symbol for Krishna himself. Like his flute, he is empty, a hollow reed. There is nothing of him in him. And since there is nothing of him in him, the bhooma, the Boundless, which we call God, flows through him, producing the intoxicating music that is Krishna’s life.

That is why we call Krishna an avatara – God incarnated.

Since there is nothing of him in him, he is all God.

The Buddha’s shunya, void. When you achieve that void within you, you become full. You are filled with the Boundless, the bhooma.

Kahlil Gibran says in his Jesus, Son of Man:

“Jesus the Nazarene was born and reared like ourselves; his mother and father were like our parents, and he was a man.

But the Christ, the Word, who was in the beginning, the Spirit who would have us live our fuller life, came unto Jesus and was with him.

And the Spirit was the versed hand of the Lord, and Jesus was the harp.

The Spirit was the psalm, and Jesus was the turn thereof.

And Jesus, the Man of Nazareth, was the host and the mouthpiece of the Christ, who walked with us in the sun and who called us his friends.”

Prayerfulness helps you empty you from yourself and achieve emptiness into which Christ can flow.

Into which Krishna can flow.

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None of us is capable of becoming empty altogether. Our limited self remains with us. And that self is our curse, as Mark R. Leary says in his book The Curse of the Self.

As Leary points out, in western culture and pop psychology there is much glorification of egotism. The west believes that assertion of the ego is the solution to most of our problems. “People are often urged to solve their problems and improve their lives by focusing on themselves, setting more egoistic goals, enhancing their self-esteem, and otherwise strengthening their sense of self. Although these strategies are sometimes useful, those who promote an egoistic approach to solving life’s problems fail to recognize that an excessive emphasis on self and ego is often part of the problem.”

The solution does not come through the assertion of the ego. It comes when we silence the ego, quieten it, lose it, transcend it.

When we transcend the ego, the higher flows through us.

What Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi speaks of as the flow state is the state in which the ego is temporarily silenced and transcended.

Speaking of Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi and the flow state, Leary says: “People often describe the flow experience by saying that they “lose themselves” in the activity. This characterization seems apt because they did indeed lose their self. Whether we say that shutting down the self helps to create flow or that flow quiets the self, people in a state of flow are not self-aware. Instead, they are focused singularly on the experience at hand, lost in concentration, and responding largely automatically.”

But through prayerfulness, and through surrender which is a basic requirement for prayerfulness, we quieten the ego, silence it, lose it, temporarily transcend it.

And when we do that, we open our doors to the higher so that the higher can flow through us.

The flow state is when the higher flows through us.

When we let the rigpa, the higher mind, flow through us, as the Tibetans would put it.

Shiva is the symbol of this self transcendence. Shiva is the symbol of flow at its highest possible level.

That’s why Shiva dances. Dances in ecstasy – the ananda tandava. When you transcend the ego, all work becomes an ananda tandava, dance of ecstasy. It does not matter what you do, your work can become an ananda tandava when you are able to let go of your smaller self – the apasmara purusha, our basic disease, what separates us from our essential wholeness, what makes us unwholesome.

The Mahabharata tells us of this beautifully. The Mahabharata war is raging like a roaring fire. Bhishma is at his terrifying best. Hundreds are falling dead every minute, cut down by the grandsire’s arrows. The bravest of soldiers are not able to stand his fury and are fleeing in every direction, their armours removed from their chests, their hair lose and flying in the wind. And describing the way

Bhishma is battling in those moments when his is at his very best, the epic tells us: nrtyanniva, as though dancing. It is as though Bhishma is dancing in the battle field.

That is flow. When you are in it, any work can become a dance, including battling and slaughtering enemies.

And flow happens when you suspend your ego, quieten it, transcend it.

Here is Daniel Goleman of Emotional Intelligence fame describing the flow state quoting a composer:

“You yourself are in an ecstatic state to such a point that you feel as though you almost don’t exist. I’ve experienced this time and again. My hand seems devoid of myself, and I have nothing to do with what is happening. I just sit there watching in a state of awe and wonderment. And it just flows out by itself.”

George Leonard, one of my favourite authors, speaks of moments of flow in the context of sports:

“Pressing up against the limits of physical exertion and mental acuity, leading us up to the edge of the precipice separating life from death, sports may open the door to infinite realms of perceptions and being. Having no tradition of mystical experience, no adequate mode of discourse on the subject, no preparatory rites, the athlete might refuse to enter. But the athletic experience is a powerful one, and it may thrust the athlete, in spite of fear and resistance, past the point of no return, into a place of awe and terror.

Michael Spino, a ranking long-distance runner, was training one rainy day along dirt and asphalt roads, and was being paced by a friend in a car. He planned to run six miles at top speed. After the first mile, he realized something extraordinary was happening; he had run the mile in four and a half minutes with no sense of pain or exertion whatever. He ran on, carried by a huge momentum. It was as if the wet roads, the oncoming cars, the honking horns did not exist. Gradually, his body lost all weight and resistance. He began to feel like a skeleton. He became the wind itself. Daydreams and fantasies disappeared. All that remained to remind him of his own existence was “a feeling of guilt for being able to do this.”

When the run ended, Spino was unable to talk, for he had lost a clear sense of who he was. It was impossible for him to decide if he were Mike Spino or “the one who had been running.” He sat down at the side of the road and wept. He had run the entire six miles on wet and muddy roads at a four-and-a-half-minute pace, close to the national record, and now he could not decide who he was.”

What Michael Spino experienced during the run is self-transcendence.

Moments of self-transcendence are moments of bliss.

According to Indian philosophy and spirituality, the purpose of everything we do is this self-transcendence. That is our ultimate motivation, our basic motivation. Ananda, happiness, is possible only when the self is transcended. All our actions are motivated by the desire for happiness. And Happiness is the experience of transcending the self, however transitory it is. And the intensity of happiness is proportionate to the extent to which we are able to silence the self, transcend it.

Truly speaking, all our joys are glimpses of self-transcendence. As the Upanishads say, etasyaiva anandasya mātrām upajīvanti sarve jantavah: whatever joy beings experience, it is all but a tiny part of this joy alone. When you transcend the self, you get in touch with the source of all happiness – our boundless self, which the Upanishads describe as sat-chit-ananda, existence-consciousness-bliss.

The essence of karma yoga is transforming work into a means for self-transcendence. This is the true meaning of spirituality at work. Spirituality at work does not mean love and sharing and understanding and acceptance and so on. Of course it also means those things. But that is not the true meaning of spirituality at work. Spirituality at work at its highest level means self-transcendence.

It is possible to transcend the self through work.

Prof. Charalampos Mainemelis of London Business School in his When the Muse Takes It All: A Model for the Experience of Timelessness [The Academy of Management Review, Vol. 26, Number 4, October 2001] talks at length of how it is possible to experience timelessness through work.

Studies by Csikzentmihalyi and LeFevre have shown that not only can we experience flow through work, but that “flow occurs more than three times as often in work as in leisure.” They found that flow happened in all three kinds of work they studied – managerial, clerical and blue collar. “Further,” says Prof. Mainemelis about their work, “the results show that employees experience flow in a variety of daily activities, such as writing reports, fixing equipment, doing assembly work, talking on the phone, and so forth.”

The experience of flow and timelessness is the experience of self-transcendence.

R. May, in The Courage to Create, writes: “Ex-stasis” – that is, literally to “stand out from,” to be freed from the usual split between subject and object which is a perceptual dichotomy to most human activity. Ecstasy is the accurate term for the intensity of consciousness that occurs in the creative act. But it is not to be thought of as a Bacchic “letting go”; it involves the total person….It is not, thus, irrational; it is, rather, superrational. It brings intellectual, volitional and emotional functions into play all together.”

What we experience when we are able to achieve the suspension of the self is ecstasy – ecstasy that makes us dance. May is right. When that happens, it “brings intellectual, volitional and emotional functions into play all together.”
Whenever the self is suspended, our actions achieve the quality of excellence.

Shiva is the symbol of man [which includes men and women] who has achieved self-transcendence. Then life becomes a dance, a festivity, a celebration, as it is meant to be. Then work becomes a dance, a festivity, a celebration, as it is meant to be.

We can taste infinity through life, through work. The image of Shiva teaches us this.

O0O

Incidentally, Shiva is both male and female. He is the Ardhanarishwara – God who is half male and half female. He is the male in us and the female in us merged together. When we try to live our lives exclusively from the male side, our life becomes meaningless. Similarly, when we try to live exclusively from the female side, our life becomes meaningless again. It is only when we live giving full expression to our maleness and our femaleness, that life becomes complete.

Which is as true about leadership, as it is about life. A true leader has to be both masculine and feminine.

The Chinese put it beautifully. They speak of the yin and the yang of leadership. And they say leadership becomes effective when we bring into it both the yin of leadership and the yang of leadership. The yin of leadership consists of the feminine qualities that make us a great leader, frequently referred to as the qualities of the heart, and the yang of leadership consists of the masculine qualities that contribute towards making us a great leader, frequently referred to as the qualities of the head.

The yin of leadership also refers to the inner qualities that make us a good leader and the yang of leadership, the outer qualities that make us a good leader.

The dancing Shiva is also a symbol for the harmony of the feminine and the masculine, the heart and the head, as well as the inner and the outer.

He is in fact a symbol for the union of all ‘opposites.’ He is the erotic ascetic, the angry god who is the gentlest of them all, the destroyer who is also the creator.

To be a complete leader, we have to unite the male and the female in us; our inner and outer, the head and the heart, reason and intuition, toughness and softness and all other opposites.

To me Shiva is not God to be worshipped from afar but a goal for each of us to strive to attain. Shiva is what we should try to become. For Shiva is what we are.

That is Indian philosophy at its highest. We are Shiva. Each one of us is Shiva himself – shivo’ham: I’m Shiva – full and complete. Not parts of him, for he is indivisible and has no parts.

And the only thing that separates us from our true nature as Shiva is our little self, our ego.

Ego is the sickness of the soul. Once you heal that disease, life blooms in all its beautiful rhythm and harmony for each one of us.

Shiva is the symbol of life lived in tune with that rhythm and harmony, of life lived as a dance.

O0O