Living Bhagavad Gita 19: The Religion of the Upanishads

A series of short articles on the Bhagavad Gita for people living and working in our volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous times filled with stress and fear. This scripture born in a battlefield teaches us how to face our challenges, live our life fully, achieve excellence in whatever we do and find happiness, peace and contentment.

[Continued from the previous post.]

When families are destroyed, timeless family traditions are destroyed. And when that happens, families plunge into lawlessness. And with families plunging into lawlessness, women become corrupt. And when women become corrupt, Krishna, varna sankara results. Varna sankara [the intermixture of varnas] leads to hell both those who destroy the families and the families themselves. Deprived of the offerings of water and food, the spirits of the ancestors fall. By these evil deeds of those who destroy families, causing confusion of varnas, the eternal dharmas of families and castes are destroyed. BG 1.40-43  

The religion of the Upanishadsis very different from religion as we commonly know it. It is a religion that takes us straight to the very heartof spiritual seeking. They tell us what the only way worth living is. They show us the only way to end all bondage and achieve ultimate freedom. They show us the path to reach the goal all humanity is pursuing, consciously or unconsciously. And they do not beat about the bush when they do this.  

The Upanishads do not give much importance to rituals. The term Upanishads use for rituals is ishta. Ishta comes from the same root word from which ishti comes and as is well known, ishti means Vedic rituals like putrakameshti. The word ishtika, another word of common origin, means bricks and it is because all vedic sacrifices are performed in vedis or kundas [sacrificial pits] made of bricks that they are all called ishtis or ishtas.

They speak of rituals as the lowest form of religion. Some of them openly reject rituals altogether so that people climb to the true heights of spirituality without getting trapped in the lower world of the religion of the rituals.For instance, the Maitreyi Upanishad says “The real temple is the body wherein resides the living soul, jeeva, the one and only Shiva” The Upanishad arranges sadhanas in a hierarchical order and says the best spiritual practice is meditation on the truth [uttamaa tattvachintaiva], then comes the analysis of the scriptures as the mediocre way [madhyamam shaastra-chintanam] and the lowest is the preoccupation with mantras [adhamaa mantrachintaa cha – repetition of the mantras, mantrajapa]. But there is one thing that is worse than the lowest – endlessly roaming from one pilgrimage site to another [teertha-bhraanti adhamaa-adhamaa].

Let me talk of one more mantra from the precious Upanishad to make the spirit of the Upanishads clear before we move on.

paashaana-loha-mani-mrinmaya-vigraheshu

poojaapunar-janana-bhogakareemumukshoh

tasmaadyatihswahridaya-archanamevakuryaad

baahyaarchanampariharedaounar-bhavaaya

Worshipping idols of stone, metal, jewels, crystals and clay will lead the seeker only to repeated births in the world of bondage. For that reason, if he wants liberation, freedom from the cycle of births and deaths, the committed seeker should offer worship in his own heart and abandon external worship.     

What the Gita teaches is the religion of the Upanishads. The Bhagavad Gita is the essence of the Upanishads retold by Krishna for the modern man – of his day and of today. One of the dhyana shlokas of the Bhagavad Gita traditionally chanted before any study of the scripture begins says:

Sarvopanishado gaavah dogdhaa gopaala-nandanah

Paartho vatsah sudheer bhoktaa dugdham geetaamritam mahat

The Upanishads are all cows and Krishna is the milkman. Arjuna is the calf and intelligent men are those who get to drink the milk [of these cows]. And the milk itself is the supreme nectar called Gita.

So the Bhagavad Gita is the milk of the Upanishads.

A great modern teacher once said that religions begin with the profound spiritual experiences of great masters, but in the hands of their disciples, they are reduced to philosophy and over generations of these disciples they end up as mere rituals, by which time there is very little that is true religion or spirituality left in them.

But in spite of that, to the common man rituals mean much. In fact, for the vast majority of people, religion is nothing but rituals – the daily rituals you perform at home, the rituals performed in places of worship, the ones performed on special occasions like birth, marriage and death, rituals performed as part of religious festivals and so on. When Arjuna says the ancestral spirits [pitarah] shall fall from their worlds when varna sankara takes place because they then will not get the offerings of water and food offered to them through rituals [lubdha-pindodaka-kriyaah], he is referring to rituals like shraaddhas and so on. Let’s now take a look at this argument he forwards as a reason for abandoning his duty as a kshatriya and running away from the battle for dharma leaving power over people in the hands of those who believe in power for the sake of power and not for the good of people.

O0O

Nga Nyo and Ba Saing were two poor twenty years old friends who lived in a Burmese village called Chaungo who made a living by selling betel leaves. One day Ba Saing borrowed some rice from Nga Nyo but was bitten by a snake and died before he could return the rice. This happened sometime between 1270 and 1280 of the Burmese Era, corresponding to the beginning of 20^th century CE.

Sang was now reborn in Nyo’s house, perhaps because his dying thoughts were of the rice he had borrowed from his friend and not returned. He was born not as a human being though, but as a cockerel and Nyo trained it in cock fighting. The cock won its first three fights, but lost the fourth fight and in anger Nyo brutally dashed its head on the ground holding it by its legs. Carrying the dying cock home, he threw it down near a water pot, where his cow came and touched it gently by its lips.

The affection of the cow apparently touched the dying cock deeply. After his death as a cock, Saing was reborn as a calf to this cow. His tragedy doesn’t end here either. When the calf was a year or so old, Nyo sold it to four of his friends who butchered it and cut up the meat in preparation for a feast, which Nyo himself was to join. A clerk from the nearby town and his wife happened to pass by them at that time and the woman, looking at the calf being cut up, said she wouldn’t have slaughtered it so cruelly had it been their calf. “Even if it had died a natural death,” she added, “I wouldn't have the heart to eat its meat. I would just bury it."

The calf is now reborn as the child of this couple. He remains without speaking until the age of seven, perhaps because of the pain of his previous life experiences which he still remembers. One day his father tells him that it was his payday and he will bring some fresh clothes for him, but he must speak. That evening the father comes home from office with pretty clothes for his son. And for the first time in his life the child speaks. His first words were, “Pay back Nga Nyo’s measure of rice.”

When the father agrees he would do anything for him, pay back not just a measure of rice but a whole bag if necessary, the boy tells him in that case they should go to Nyo and settle the debt immediately.

Guided by their seven-year-old son at each step, the father reaches Nga Nyo’shome, carrying with him a bag of rice in a cart. Instantly recognizing Nga Nyo and delighted at seeing his old friend who is by now an elderly man, the boy asks him, "Hey Nga Nyo, don’t you remember me?" The elderly man is offended when he is thus addressed by his name by a mere childbut is pacified when the clerk explained that the child believes he is old friend of Nyo.

The boy then tells Nyo that he is actually his old friend Ba Saing. He recalls several of their experiences together when they betel sellers and explains how he had died by snake bite and had been reborn as a cockerel in his house. He recalls the cockfights and Nyo’s killing the cockerel in anger and his subsequent birth as a calf because of the kindness a cow had shown him. Saing then recalls to a by now silently weeping Nyo how he was butchered as a one year old heifer to be eaten in a feast by him and his friends. He recalls the compassionate words of his present mother to the dying heifer as a result of which he was born as their child, adding that he has come to repay the rice he had borrowed from him as Ba Saing.

As the Bhagavad Gita says, death is the individual leaving one body to move on to another – in the words of the Gita, like discarding old clothes and using fresh ones. It is something that happens to all of us – jaatasya hi dhruvo mrityuh. And just as death is certain to the living,it is equally certain that everyone who dies is reborn – dhruvam janma mritasya cha.

This cycle of birth, life and death, and again birth, life and death goes on and on endlessly. Because of what happens between death and rebirth, because of the trauma of the life in the womb [which the west does not accept as painful but considers the most blissful state] and the trauma of the process of the birth itself [which the west accepts], most of us do not remember our past lifetimes. It is only rare individuals who escape this vismarana, the erasing of the memory oftheir past existences, though people who remember their past existences in their childhood are not as rare as we would like to believe. For instance, lots of children in their moments of great fear, like during a nightmare, scream for their father or mother but fail to recognise them when they come running and continue screaming and looking for their mother or father as was portrayed frighteningly in the movie The Reincarnation of Audrey Rose. Even in the case of people who retain these memories, practically all of them lose those memories over time.  Nga Nyo seems to be a rare individual who retains these memories.

Speaking to Arjuna in the Gita, Krishna tells his friend that both of them have had numerous lives in the past and he remembers them all though Arjuna does not:

bahooni me vyateetaani janmaani tava cha arjuna

taany aham veda sarvaani na twam vettha parantapa BG 4.5

O0O

As we saw in the Burmese story above, after Ba Saing is killed by snakebite he is immediately reborn as Nga Nyo’s cockerel – there does not seem to have been much time gap.  And after the cockerel is killed by Ba Saing, it is soon reborn again as a calf – again without much time gap. And then after the calf is slaughtered, it is reborn as the son of the clerk while Ba Saing is still alive, though by now he has grown old. All the four life times of Ba Saing happen within a single life time of Nnga Nyo.

In the Mahabharata we have the story of Princess Amba of Kashi who kills herself in a ritual fire she ignited with the desire to be reborn as Bhishma’s killer. She is subsequently reborn as Drupada’s daughter Shikhandini while Bhishma is still alive.

The Padma Purana tells us that the washer man who criticises Rama for keeping in his house Sita who has lived in ‘Ravana’s house’ was in his previous life one of a pair of birds whom Sita in her childhood had separated from its mate. The bird kills itself after cursing that it would soon be reborn and will cause Sita’s separation from her husband in that life.    

The understanding of India’s epics and Puranas, as well that of other scriptures, is that rebirths happen is fairly quick succession and the bodiless state, the state between death and rebirth, is usually not long.

One of the books that talks most authentically about death and explains what happens in the moments of death and immediately afterwards is the very unusual book called The Tibetan Book of the Dead or Bardo Thodol, authored by Tibet’s great Yogi Padmasambhava about a thousand years ago and first translated into English in 1924 by W.Y. Evans Wentz and published with an introduction by Dr Carl Jung. It is a book based on the experiences of great yogis who die consciously, live in the post-death state consciously and then take birth consciously. The book discusses what happens to us immediately before death, during the moments of death and following death. It describes in great detail the experiences the bodiless individual undergoes during the first forty-eight days after death. Bardo Thodol stops with the forty-eighth day because practically all dead individuals find a new body to be reborn into by then. The book describes how the dead individual searches for an appropriate body and chooses one among the available ones according to his karmas – his driving psychological needs – and enters it to be reborn again.

O0O

Let’s now look at a case of reincarnation from the western world discussed by Rosemary Ellen Guiley in her Tales of Reincarnation – that of Gail Bartley, an attractive young woman who worked as an advertising professional in New York. Let me reproduce here part of an article of mine called Reincarnation, Transactional Analysis and Karma [available online] in which I discuss her case as narrated by Guiley.

“Soon after her marriage ended in divorce, she fell in love with Roger. As an advertising executive she had ample opportunities for meeting other attractive young men, she did not really like Roger, her mother took an instant dislike for him and a voice in Gail’s head kept screaming all the time, ‘Get away. He hates you. He is trying to destroy you!’ In spite of all these Gail felt irresistibly drawn toward Roger. And he abused her constantly, hurt her emotionally and did not hesitate to beat her up occasionally; once he even tried to choke her to death during one of the fairly frequent violent outbursts between them. The relationship had wrecked her personal life, drained her emotionally, destroyed her self-esteem. However, in spite of all this, Gail found herself unable to get away from the man – and she completely failed to understand her love-hate relationship with this man, as did the other people around her. 

“It was this riddle of her relationship with Roger that eventually sent her to a past life regressionist. Upon regression, reaching her first past life experience, Gail found herself standing in a bedroom with high ceilings. She was now a twenty-three year old woman called Joyce in the 1920s. The experience, completely new to Joyce, was strange and eerie: she was at once the woman Joyce and Gail, who was watching her. Gail experienced that Joyce was shaking with fear, fear caused by a man who was with her in the room, lying on their bed – and that man was none other than Joyce’ s husband and the man Gail knew as Roger.

“And then Gail experienced the man getting up from their bed and walking towards her. Joyce was now shaking in terror and Gail’s breathing changed as she watched it. She began to hyperventilate and the regressionist asked Gail what was happening and she told her the man was strangling her. Joyce fell on her knees at the violence of the attack and then collapsed on the ground as the man continued to throttle her. However, Joyce did not die. Before that could happen, the man released her throat and walked away, leaving her on the ground, struggling to breathe.

“In a later part of the regression, Gail once again felt Joyce’s terror. Joyce was in their room again, that same night, and she hears him approaching her, climbing the stairs leading to their room. As he comes near, she sees he has something in his hand, which he is hiding behind him. His eyes are cold and she breathes in the hatred that emanates from him.

‘He rips open her gown with the knife he was hiding behind him, and brutally stabs her with it. Gail feels choked, her breath escapes her and she realizes she is experiencing the last moments of her life as Joyce. Coming out her body and hovering in a corner of the room, Joyce watches what is happening. One of the things she witnesses is her husband’s utter shock at what he has done, his complete disbelief and intense remorse.

“Further regressions reveal a sad tale of revenge and guilt spanning across life times, centuries and continents. It all started in ancient Rome where Roger and Gail in a long ago lifetime lived as brothers. The two of them loved each other deeply and thoroughly enjoyed their life as Roman citizens. In her regression, Gail sees herself as the younger brother, a blond young man filled with raw energy and impatience to win a chariot race that is about to begin. The race begins and his chariot takes off like a storm, another chariot keeping abreast with him. And then the tragedy takes place. His chariot swerves violently, hits the other chariot, the man driving that chariot thrown off his balance and falls, his head hitting his own chariot wheel, causing an instant death. In the middle of his shock he realizes the saddest truth: the man killed by his mistake is none other than his beloved brother.

“This life follows a series of lifetimes revealed by the regression, in each the elder brother is violent and vengeful, and the younger brother, Gail of this lifetime, is his victim. In one of these, Gail is a boy of seventeen, George, who lived in the Old West of America with his ill tempered, hateful, domineering father and his mother who was terrified of him. On one occasion his father catches George with his girlfriend, a girl who had grown up with him as his playmate. The two were together in the barn and they were kissing and feeling each other. The father orders George back into the house and then rapes George’s girlfriend. One night the boy is asleep in his tent while camping out with his father in the wilderness. He wakes up hearing repeated dull thuds and realizes his father is digging something in the night. His father has been furious with him that evening about some small thing, maybe he hadn’t tied up the horses properly. Sudden realization comes: his father is digging a grave for him! And then the father hits him on the head with a shovel and he is dead and out of his body. He sees his father dragging his body to the pit he had dug and burying him in it.”

More regressions reveal more such lifetimes in each of which the elder brother who was killed in the accident is the violent aggressor and the younger brother his victim. They are born again and again, repeating their life pattern that is now more than two thousand years old. 

As this real life past life regression story too tells us, the dead does not live forever in some mysteriousdimension, but are born again and again, directed by their life scripts that India calls karmas. 

Dr Brian Weiss is today the most widely known authority on rebirth and past life regression in the western world who uses his knowledge and expertise for healing people from diseases which cannot be explained by causes in their current life. In his best seller books like Many LivesMany Masters and Through Time into Healing, he talks about people being born again and again and when regressed reliving their past lives. In his work too what we come across is every one of us being reborn after our death, as the Gita speaks of when it says jatasya hi dhruvo mrityuh dhruvam janma mritasya cha: Those who are born are certain to die and those who die are certain to be born again.

O0O

Even though the Upanishads reject ritualism and the path the Bhagavad Gita teaches is not of rituals but of the yogas of bhakti, karma, jnana and so on, rituals do have their own beauty if you practice them with the right vision. For instance, bali and tarpana are offered to the dead ancestors  in the rituals of shraaddha. Shraaddhas are offerings made out of shraddhra for ones ancestors – love and reverence for them. They are also expressions of our gratitude and indebtedness to them – we wouldn’t have been born but for them. In that sense they are beautiful. But what Arjuna means when he says that when varna sankara happens these ancestors will fall from their worlds is that these ancestors are not reborn on earth but live permanently in another world where they are sustained by the tarpana we offer to them and would fall from there if tarpana is not offered by their children.

As the Gita says, to quote again verse 2.27 quoted earlier, jatasya hi dhruvo mrityuh dhruvam janma mritasya cha: those who are born are bound to die and those who die are bound to be reborn. If the ancestors are already born on earth and living their lives here as new individuals, with new identities, in new families, with new parents, then sending offerings for them into some other world does not make sense, apart from the question how something physical offered here can reach them in their world.

Shraadha rituals are exactly what the name says – expressions of our love, reverence and indebtedness to the dead. As far as sustenance in post-death existences is considered, what sustains us there is our own karmas and not what others do.

So Arjuna’s argument that the war will cause varna sankara and that will ultimately make our ancestors fall from their worlds does not hold water. That is yet another argument he gives for running away from the unhappy challenge he has to face in the battlefield.   

O0O

Attachment and The Tibetan Book of the Dead

One of the books I purchased while I was in Kerala recently was the just published Complete Short Stories of M Mukundan, a huge, nearly one-thousand-page volume of 157 short stories. I bought the book on a day I visited three book fairs in Thrissur: one inside the Sahitya Akademi premises, a second one in the Paramekkavu Devaswam hall, and a third one at the Thekkinkadu Grounds. Three book fairs, all within walking distance of one another! And all three fairs were crowded with visitors. It is not for nothing that beautiful Thrissur is called the cultural capital of the very educated Kerala!

This morning I read the first story in Mukundan’s collection, a story called Maunam. This is one of the nine stories in this volume that have not appeared in any previous collection. I am not a systematic reader, and love reading without much plan, but it so happened that this time I picked up the first story to begin with.

Now that I think of it, I wonder if my choice was unconsciously influenced by the title Maunam, meaning silence. Silence is something I love boundlessly and have sought throughout my life. I have memories of seeking solitude and silence in the deserted primary school near my house after the school hours were over and during the vacations. I was a young boy then and I would climb over the wall or crawl under the gate and spend hours all alone there. Another place I frequented was the upper floor of the tall gopuram of the temple where few people ever went, and a couple of other lonely places. I do not remember any occasion when I was restless at these places – their serenity always enraptured me and I was always ready to surrender myself to it.

Maybe I was also influenced, again unconsciously, by the fact that I have soon to give a session on silence to a group of corporate executives coming from all over the country as part of a training programme in corporate communication.

Mukundan’s Maunam, of course, has nothing to do with corporate communication or the world of business. It is the story of an old man.
The first thing that fascinated me in the story was the age of the old man. One of the things that the author tells us about the old man is that he was not even willing to think about death, in spite of his age. Mukundan adds that several acquaintances of his, people of his age, were already dead and gone.

Guess how old the old man is? One would imagine him to be in his eighties, or at least in his late or mid seventies. Isn’t that the age we associate with death today? Isn’t that the age when old men and women today find the people they grew up with have left them one by one? Isn’t that the age today when they accept the inevitability of a death soon to come?

But the old man in the story is not in his eighties, or seventies, or even in his sixties! He is all of fifty-six years!

No, this is not an error on the part of Mukundan.

I do not know when Maunam was written, but it appears it was written a long time ago. Maybe, it is one of Mukundan’s early stories. I wish the publishers had given the date of the original publication of each story, as they have done in some other collections. Mukundan has been writing for a long time now – forty-five years. He was born in 1942 and his first story appeared when he was twenty-one. Maybe Maunam was written sometime in the sixties.

In the nineteen-sixties, a man of fifty-six was an old man. In several government services, people retired from their jobs at fifty-six, because the government considered after that age a man was not in full command of his faculties and could not work satisfactorily, he should go home and spend the rest of his life in ease and comfort! As a young boy I remember considering sixty an impossibly old age. A man attaining sixty years of age was an important event that needed to be celebrated and was celebrated then. I remember our family celebrating my father’s sixtieth birthday – his shashtipoorti. At sixty you were really, really old – at least in popular perception. Perhaps a comparison would be to something like what it is to be eighty years old today.

Reading Maunam made me look back at those old days and smile. For I myself used to be in awe of people who had crossed sixty.

How the times have changed!

O0O

Maunam is a story of death. The old man in the story, Narayanan Nambiar, dies towards the end of the story.

As his soul learns in the ICU of the town hospital that death is about to come, it realizes with a shock that it is about to lose the nest it has occupied for the last more than half a century. The soul flutters about frantically inside its cage of flesh and blood. It then runs about desperately among the billions of cells that form his five-foot-six body. The soul is now in a state of panic. Nambiar has a massive cardiac arrest and his soul clutches on to him desperately with its hundreds of invisible hands.

Nambiar dies. The soul, flung outside his body, flutters around him in dread. Its days of being in Nambiar’s body and experiencing his joys and sorrows, his angers and retaliations, his kindnesses and compassions are over. Now there is nothing left before it but the beginningless void.

The soul goes and perches on Nambiar’s dead body. It showers kisses on his cold chest and on his cheeks that had a day’s growth of hair.

Throughout the obsequies, the soul hovers around Nambiar’s body. Taking its seat on a ray of sunlight, it watches Nambiar’s body being reduced to ashes in the funeral pyre.

Weeks are over since Nambiar’s death, but his soul refuses to go away. It seeks refuge in his naphthalene-smelling clothes kept neatly folded in the almirah. It crawls about in silence among the other things associated with him – like his framed photograph on the wall, his ear-studs and ring kept in his wife Janu’s tin trunk.

One day the soul finds the clothes are no more there. It switches its perch on to the studs and the ring. Soon it finds the studs and ring too are gone. It then moves on to occupy the framed photo. Lying there it dreams of the scent and the warmth of the body that it has lost forever. It showers tender kisses on the neck, the cheeks and the head in the photograph.

A monsoon wind brings the photo crashing down from the wall. The glass shatters on the ground to a thousand shreds. The photograph, minus the glass, is picked up and put on the top rack of the almirah. There cockroaches feast on it and eventually all that is left of it is just a few white spots. The paper is now flung away and lies in the gutter. But still Nambiar’s soul refuses to leave it. Eventually the first rain of the next season carries that too away and it disappears forever.

There is nothing left now that belonged to Nambiar. Still, says the story, the soul refuses to move on. Instead, it haunts the men and women who carried Nambiar’s memories in their hearts.

O0O

I remember reading sometime back a very different short story by Madhavikkutty which too talks about the soul of a dead person hovering around, watching everything that happens and listening to the talks of family members. Years back the Hindi magazine Dharmayug had brought out a theme based special issue on incidents like this. Several books like Life after Life, Life after Death, and Tales of Reincarnation also talk about such experiences. Movies have been made on this and similar themes, one of the most famous ones in recent years being Dragonfly, which inspired the Hindi movie Saya.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a book I love deeply, published in English by Oxford University Press with an Introduction by Carl Jung, talks about what exactly happens when someone dies, what happens to the dead man’s mind and consciousness in those moments and in the moments following death, what happens to these a day later, two days later, three days later and so on. The book, based on the experience of yogis who were able to retain their memories through death and afterwards, speaks about the bardo state, which is the state of bodiless consciousness after death. It discusses the changes the mind and consciousness undergo from day to day, the experiences they have, and how the mind and consciousness seek, find and re-enter a new body. Most souls, the book tells us, are able to find a new body appropriate to their needs – appropriate to their psychological inclinations, their ambitions and aspirations, their compelling needs, the scripts they had written in their inner depths during their previous existences in human bodies, their karmas, vasanas and samskaras – within forty-eight days.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead is a training manual. Its purpose is to train the mind to retain consciousness in the moments of death and during the bardo state so that the dead individual can avoid some of the painful experiences in the post-death state and also wisely choose its next embodiment. Originally people in Tibet used to be taught the book when they were young and given training in retaining their consciousness in their moments of death. Later on as Tibetan culture degenerated, the book was reduced to one of rituals the significance of which few people understood.

The rituals performed in Hinduism at the moment of death are based on this understanding. They centre around destroying the body as early as possible, so that the mind and consciousness do not cling to it, and then urging the soul to move on, on its onward journey.

One of the dual functions of the shraddha ceremony too is this reminding the soul not to cling to its previous existence on earth and to move on, the other being telling the departed ones how dearly we still hold them in our hearts.

A sight that I used to enjoy watching in the Himalayas was logs floating down the rivers, like the Ganga. I used to stand by the river and watch as scores of them hurtled down at great speeds through the torrential Ganga. In the words of the brahmana Ashman to King Videha, the Mahabharata tells us human relationships are like the meeting of these logs in the sea. The logs are felled at different places in the Himalayas, they come down different rivers, and they reach the sea. Imagine, the epic tells us, two logs meeting in the sea and then, after a brief meeting, parting again. Human relationships are no more than this.

Yatha kashtham cha kashtham cha sameyatam mahodadhau
Sametya cha vyapeyatam tadvad bhootasamagamah.

When the Mahabharata tells us this, the epic is telling us what the shraddha ceremony tells the departed soul, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead teaches the living individual. And for the same reasons. It is not really true that our meetings with one another in this world are things over which we have no control, as the logs have no controls over what happens to them once they are cast into the river. The Upanishads tells us that who our father is, who our mother is, who our relations are, what the environment we are born into is, are all decided by us and not by chance or by an all powerful fate over which we have no control. The Tibetan Book of the Dead says the same thing in greater detail than the Upanishads do. [Incidentally, the Book of the Dead, written in Tibet some eight or nine hundred years before Freud, speaks of the Oedipus and Electra complexes!]

But it is important that the dead one forgets his earthly attachments and moves on instead of clinging to them, as the soul of Nambiar does in Mukundan’s story. It is for this reason that the Upanishads, the Mahabharata and the Tibetan Book of the Dead all speak of relationships as temporary and as things to be not to be taken in greater seriousness than they deserve. To underline this point, the Mahabharata tells us: Each one of us has had thousands of mothers and fathers, and hundreds of sons and wives in our past existences – who do they really belong to, and who do we belong to forever?

Matapitrsahasrani putradarashatani cha
Samsareshvanubhootani kasya te kasya va vayam?

In his masterpiece, The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran says:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the Archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Attachments tie us down and reduce the chances for spiritual growth and awakening by not allowing us to move on.

There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of stories in our spiritual traditions that speak of the harms of attachment. One of my favourite among these is the story of Jada Bharata that the Bhagavata tells us.

Bharata was the son of King Rishabha, who was a just and wise ruler. As was the ancient Indian tradition, towards the end of his life Rishabha relinquished his kingdom and powers in favour of his eldest son Bharata and retired from active life. He wandered all over the land, not caring for anything, not caring even for his body, in a god-intoxicated state. He had become an avadhoota and his outer life became that of the blind-deaf-dumb man who roams the world naked, like an idiot, like a ghost, like a madman.

Bharata ruled the kingdom for a long time as wisely and competently as his father and other ancestors did and then, following the tradition, decided to relinquish it in his turn. He divided his kingdom among his sons and then went to Pulahashrama to live the rest of his life in spirituality there. His only joy now was the joy born of his devotions and meditation – the highest joy possible to man. And in that joy he forgot everything, including himself.

And then tragedy struck one day. The great Bharata, the former king who had given up an entire kingdom, all its wealth, all his powers, his wives and children and his subjects who too were like children to him, and had retired to an ashram seeking oneness with the Whole, developed attachment to a baby deer in the jungle.

As was his habit, Bharata was sitting lost in bliss one day on the bank of the river Gandaki when he was brought back to the world by the terrible sound of a roar nearby. It was a mighty lion. Opening his eyes and looking around, he saw a doe lifting up its head from the water it had been drinking from the river. The doe turned its head back and looked behind it, its eyes wide with mortal dread. The next moment, with its head still turned backward, without even losing the time to turn the head around, it took a mighty leap into the river. It had to save itself and the baby in its womb! And then it happened. As it landed in the river, in its terror and the strain of the leap, the doe delivered its baby into the river. Frantically swimming it reached the other bank, where it fell down dead from the strain and shock.

The king in the ascetic Bharata was awakened in that instant. He too leapt up from his seat and rushed towards the river. The lion had already moved away. The mother doe lay dead on the other bank. The baby deer was floating down the river. Bharata jumped into the Gandaki and taking mighty strokes through the current, reached the infant deer fast floating downstream. He carried the newborn baby deer to the safety of the banks.

The king’s heart melted for the orphaned baby. He dried the baby’s wet body and started caring for it. Left to itself, the king knew it wouldn’t survive one single day in the jungle.

The king now started looking after the baby deer. The baby deer followed him wherever he went. At night it slept close to him, sharing his body’s warmth. On his walks Bharata’s eyes now looked for tender grass wherever he went. His thoughts were now constantly of the helpless, tender baby that fate had brought to him and left in his care. And soon, he started loving the baby deer as he had once loved his children.

Love, compassion and caring are among the noblest emotions a human being can feel. These are what make us human. And yet, Indian spiritual wisdom tells us, these should not lead one to attachment. Love, care, show compassion, but do it with detachment. Total commitment, but with detachment – that is the way to live wisely. Practice the human dharma, but be an asanga.

Unfortunately, this is as difficult as walking on the edge of a sword – on asidhara. But all attachments have to be cut firmly with the sword of detachment – asangashastrena drdhena chhitva, as the Gita puts it.

The ascetic Bharata failed. He soon grew attached to the baby deer that he had saved from the stream. He soon forgot what constantly occupied his mind earlier. The days of god-intoxication was now no more than a distant memory. His mind was now constantly occupied with the baby deer. Its needs, its wants, its comforts, its safety – these are what occupied his mind now. Asana-shayana-atana-sthana-ashanadishhu – while seated in his ashram, while lying down on his grass mat in the ashram, while wandering in the jungle, while eating, while drinking, awake, asleep, dreaming, his mind was constantly with the deer.

Remember Bharata was an old man. He had retired to the jungle as an old man and had been living there for years when the baby deer came into his life. One day he fell sick, and realized the end of his journey was close by. By then he had started living for the deer totally. As he lay awaiting his death, his final thoughts naturally were about his deer. What will happen to it? Who will look after it? Will it be safe in the fierce jungle?

The story tells us that because his mind was so preoccupied with the deer due to his attachment to it, in his next birth Bharata was born a deer. The ascetic’s attachment stood in the way of his spiritual progress and rather than taking him into a still advanced state of consciousness – into a higher birth – in his next life time, he was reduced to a deer.

Bharata’s journey does not end here, of course. But that does not concern us here.

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There are several beautiful Buddhist stories that tell us of rebirths in lower life forms due to attachments. One of my favourites among them is the story of Ba Saing from Burma, the present Myanmar. I have written about this elsewhere on this blog under the title Reincarnation: The Persistence of Memory. Another such story I love is from Sri Lanka, which talks of how a man was first reborn as a snake, then as a dog, and then as a calf, all due to attachment to his adulterous, murderer wife, all in her own house. Eventually he is reborn as her own son, though this time he is born with past life memory, which the Buddhists call jatissara nana, through which he is able to escape his attachment to her and free himself of her.

One of the central messages of the Gita is that we should be free from attachments while still being fully committed to our dharma. The birth of the Gita itself happened because Arjuna refused to fulfil his dharma, or found himself incapable of fulfilling his dharma of fighting the Mahabharata war, due of his attachment to his grandsire Bhishma and his guru Drona and other near and dear ones.

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