Living Bhagavad Gita 18_The Question of Varna Sankara

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  

We heard Arjuna arguing earlier that one’s own people should not be killed, however wicked they are, even if they are atatayis, the greatest of criminals. In fact, he calls the people against whom he is waging the war by the name atatayis and then says they should not still be killed because they are his swajana, his own people, and asks how one can achieve happiness after killing one’s own people. Perhaps he feels his argument to justify the decision he has already taken under his emotional hijack to abandon the war and run away from the battlefield preferring to become a monk is not strong enough. So here he is putting forward another argument. This time the argument is that the war will eventually lead to varna sankara, intermixing of varnas. This would happen because the death of the kshatriya men in the war would misbalance the man-woman ratio among kshatriyas, many kshatriya women would not find kshatriya men to marry and then they would either have relationships with non-kshatriya men or marry non-kshatriya men, leading to the birth of huge numbers of children whose varna would be indeterminate.

Let’s take a look at this argument that Arjuna gives now to justify his decision to abandon the war.  

The varna system is very different from what we speak of as the caste system today. The varnas are just four, brahmanas, kshatriyas, vaishyas and shudras, whereas casts are hundreds and hundreds. Every modern state in India has scores of different castes, counting major and minor ones.

The varna system is as old as the Vedas, which according to current understanding are some ten to twelve thousand years old. Modern scholars studying the age of the Vedas point out that the Taittiriya Samhita belonging to the Krishna Yajur Veda places the constellation Pleiades at the winter solstice, which correlates with astronomical events that took place around 8,500 BCE.  Dr. B.G. Siddharth of Birla Science Institute points out that the Taittiriya Brahmana refers to the Purva Bhadrapada star as rising due east – an event that occurred no later than 10,000 BCE, which makes the brahmana around 12000 years old. Since the Samhita parts of the Vedas are much older than the brahmana books, these are much older than 12000 years. And the Rig Veda in its Purusha Sukta speaks of the birth of the four varnas from the cosmic person, the Virat Purusha, or God.

However this system was very different from what we know as the varna system today. For the Rig Veda, the system was based not on birth, but on psycho-spiritual qualities of the individual called the gunas. They were a way of describing people by their nature and not by their birth.

The Bhagavad Gita speaks of the varna system in its fourth chapter where Krishna speaking as God says that the system of fourfold varnas was created by him based on the differences of gunas and karmas:

chaaturvarnyam mayaa srishtam guna-karma-vibhaagashah; tasya kartaaram api maam viddhyakartaaram avyayam BG 4.13

There is no mention of birth [jaati, janma] here. As the verse says, the system was based on gunas and karmas, psychological tendencies and professions followed, and not on birth.

Ancient India understood that all human beings are not the same, individuals differ from one another in their temperaments, longings, drives, aspirations, needs, talents, competencies and so on and based on these differences divided people into four broad categories, just as modern psychologist Carl Jung divided people into the three categories of extroverts, introverts and ambiverts and modern social psychology divides people into Type A and Type B.

People who loved calmness and serenity, who were highly intellectual and spiritual, contemplative and meditative, dominated by the need to understand themselves and the world around them, who sought the meaning of life, loved solitude and serenity and had strong, to use a term by Dr Abraham Maslow, transcendence needs, were given the name brahmanas. These were people who sought growth in their inner worlds, wanted to grow vertically, so to speak.  

People who were oriented towards power and leadership, who felt the need to take charge of others and to command and control them, were called kshatriyas. Their orientation was towards expansion on the horizontal plain, at the level where they were. They needed to conquer the world, were aggressive and territorially oriented, tended to give generously, were excited by danger and adventure and loved taking risks. They had tremendous energy, were steadfast and tenacious, frequently acted impulsively not caring for consequences, had strong belongingness and acceptance needs and were marked by raw courage and great strength of purpose. These were the movers and shakers of the society. 

   

And a third group were the wealth producers of the society whose basic interest was in producing more and more material wealth through all possible means such as agriculture, cattle rearing, business and commerce and so on. They were called vaishyas. They used their wealth to produce more wealth, and in a way it is they who sustained the society since no society can survive and grow without wealth.  

People who did not belong to any of these three categories belonged to the fourth group and were given the name shudras. The largest number of people in the society belonged to this group. They did not share the aspirations of the first three groups of people: they did not have the strong spiritual needs of the first group of people, the strong territorial and authority needs of the second group and were not driven by the wealth and possession needs of the third group. They were contented with their lives as they lived it every day and wanted to make sure that their tomorrows were taken care of.

Since this division was based on your gunas and karmas, on our drives, motives and aspirations and the professions we chose for ourselves based on these, it was a highly flexible and mobile system and anyone could move from any group to any other group as their gunas and karmas changed, as their nature and drives changed.

In the Vedic literature we find examples of people being treated as belonging to one varna or another on the basis of their gunas – their psychological nature. For instance the Chhandogya Upanishad belonging to the Sama Veda tells us the story of Satyakama, the son of a poor woman called Jabala who earned her living by doing odd jobs in different houses and was contented with her simple life. Jabala herself did not have any higher aspirations in life, but her son wanted to know the Truth, to become what the varna system of the day called a brahmana. The boy approached the famous guru of the day, Rishi Haridrumata Gautama who asked him what gotra lineage he belonged to. When he said he did not know, Rishi Gautama sent Satyakama back to his mother to find out, and she told him she herself did not know it, she worked in different houses and a man in one of those house should be his father. She told him, “Go and tell your guru that my name is Jabala and you are therefore Styakama Jabala.’

When the boy came and told his guru the exact words of his mother without any embarrassment or shame, repeating his desire to seek the Truth, Gauytama’s face beamed with pleasure and he told Satyakama that anyone who had the desire he had to learn and that kind of integrity and commitment to truth is a brahmana and therefore he was a brahmana. Stayakama Jabala becomes Gautama’s disciple and eventually one of the greatest Vedic rishis in his own right.

The purpose of this division into four categories was so that people could understand themselves and live their life in accordance with their essential nature and drives, follow professions they had maximum aptitude for so that individuals reached self-actualization and the society was assured of maximum benefit from each individual. It was an elitist system that provided lots of opportunities for the three ‘upper’ classes who were also given plenty of privileges. An important weakness of the system was that it did not take into consideration and provide for the needs of the vast majority of ‘average’ people who neither had the brahmanical orientation nor the kshatriya or vaishya orientation. The word shudra, a word of unknown etymology, for all we know did not have any negative connotations to begin with, and probably just meant an ordinary person, though eventually it came to be associated with a lot of social prejudices and became for all practical pruposes a word of abuse. 

     

However, soon the sons of the brahmanas started claiming they too were brahmanas, the sons kshatriyas that they too are kshatriyas and the sons of vaishyas that they are vaishyas too. The sons claimed for themselves too the privileges their fathers were given, whether they had the temperaments and competencies required or not, forgetting that the human being is not just the body born of his parents but much more than that, that each one of comes into this world with a rich collection of vasanas, sanskaras and karmas that we have acquired through the endless lifetimes we have lived. Over time the varna system that was based on gunas and karmas was reduced to one based exclusively on birth.

Thus in the Mahabharata we find Karna refused the privileges of a kshatriya because he was supposed to have been a non-kshatriya by  birth even though he had all the qualities of a kshatriya. We also find that Drona and his son Ashwatthama treated as brahmanas though by temperament and karma they were kshatriyas, particularly Ashwatthama. Vidura, being calm, serene, intellectual and spiritual, a great yogi filled with inner light and every inch a brahmana by guna and karma, was never given brahmanical privileges and was throughout his life treated as a shudra because he was the son of a shudra maid.

Once it fell from its original form and the original ideas died out, the varna system decayed further and eventually became a thoroughly dreadful thing and one of the worst human institutions ever. It bound and shackled with invisible chains the vast majority of people who fell into its all-powerful hands, refused them all human dignity, denied them all social mobility, condemned them to the dirtiest jobs society wanted to be done and then treated them as dirty for doing these jobs.

The battle against the caste system is old. The Buddha revolted against it two thousand six hundred years ago, enlightened men like Basaveshara, chief minister of the Kalachuri king of Karnataka and founder of the Lingayats revolted against it a thousand years ago. All the Sikh gurus and the Natha saints rejected it. In modern times Mahatma Gandhi and Dr Ambedkar fought against it, the constitution of India holds discrimination based on cast illegal, but in spite of all this, it is still very much with us, condemning to the peripheries of society some eighty percent of India’s population, denying them social dignity and in some cases even basic human dignity.

One of my students in a teacher-education college where I taught, a young lady who had already taught in a school for many years, once told me about a student in one of her classes. The student sat away in class from all other students, wouldn’t ask any questions and volunteer any answers, in the lunch break she wouldn’t join the other students but would go away to a distant corner and eat there all alone. In the games periods she wouldn’t join the other students but would stand under a tree quietly and watch other students playing. The young teacher took interest in this lonely, sad girl and eventually after much effort discovered that the girl was born into a cast that was considered untouchable and it was the fear of social rejection that kept her away from active school life.

Another student of mine in the same college was bright, one of the toppers of the college, beautiful, lighted up any place she went to, but came from a village where the entire community shared a common well. The villagers did not stop her from drawing up water from the well but every time she came and fetched water from the well, they came and washed up the walls of the well and its cemented surroundings and only then would they use the well.

One of my friends witnessed a sad and shocking scene in a village in Vaishali – the sacred land where the Buddha walked and taught, one of the oldest democracies in the world – just a few years ago while travelling by bus. A city-educated young man was pulled out of a bus and thoroughly beaten up with slippers for daring to sit next to another youth from his village in the bus – the beaten up young man belonged to one of the ‘lower castes’.

The Shatarudriya – One Hundred Prayers to Rudra – is one of the most beautiful prayers anywhere in the world, belonging to any religion, still ritually chanted everyday in millions of Hindu homes. The prayer, also known by such names as the Rudri Path, Rudradhyayi, Rudra Prashna and so on, is an ancient prayer from the Taittiriya Samhita of the Krishna Yajur Veda which sees divinity in everything and everyone. Among the prayers addressed to Rudra we find:

namo mahadbhyah kshullakebhyas cha vo namo...

“Salutations to you, O Lord! The great ones and the small ones alike you are! Salutations to you, O Lord! The carpenters and the chariot makers are none other than you! Salutations to you, O Lord! The potters who mold clay and make pots and the smiths who work in metals are none other than you! Salutations to you, O Lord! The fowlers who trap birds and fishermen who catch fish are none other than you! Salutations to you, O Lord! You are the bow and arrow makers, the hunters and the leaders of hounds. Salutations to you, O Lord! You the source of all things and you are the destroyer of all things too!” 

That is the spirit of the Vedas! To the Shatarudriya everything is divine and nothing pollutes And once the varna system began decaying and in its decayed form became the caste system based on jati, birth, it started seeing some people polluting and untouchable, whose very shadow falling on your shadow would pollute you!

When Arjuna says the war will lead to varna-sankara, intermingling of varnas, through corruption in women and the birth children of mixed varnas, he is not speaking of the varna system based on gunas and karmas. He is speaking of the highly corrupt system of classifying people based exclusively on birth and totally ignored competencies, drives, and other elements of human nature. He is speaking of the system that made the saintly Vidura a shudra for life, that denied the glorious Karna kshatriyahood, that called the vicious, monstrous Ashwatthama a brahmana in spite of the darkest deeds he did in the kalaratri of the Sauptika Parva of Mahabharata. He is speaking of a system that would soon become the highly corrupt caste system we have today and is one of the greatest evils in our society: a system that limits opportunities for social participation, social mobility, job opportunities, selection of life partners, etc. exclusively to what is decided by one’s birth, a system that reduces the vast majority of population to the lowest rungs of the society forever with no chance of escape.

The destruction of such a system is perhaps one of the prices that have to be paid for establishing dharma in the society and among its leaders.

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Even if we do not go to the profound depths of ancient Indian understanding of the gunas and what they teach us about human nature, human growth, human excellence and so on, which we will have plenty of opportunities to talk about during our discussions of the Gita later since the gunas are central to three of the eighteen chapters of the Gita, and confine our discussion at this stage to varnas as birth-based, Arjuna’s fears about varna-sankara still do not have a strong foundation. Just as varna purity – somewhat like racial purity – has its strengths, genetically speaking mixing of varnas too has several advantages. When we do not mix the genes, children inherit both the strengths and weaknesses our parents. Many genetic groups have become extinct just because they did not mix with other groups and many others have widespread defects because of inbreeding. Of course we are not discussing incest but that too is a form of inbreeding. There are several reasons why the incest taboo exists all over the world, but the most important of them is the fear of possible genetically inherited defects. On the whole, nature prefers mixing of genes rather than purity of genes. Basically, sex itself is nature’s way of making sure of genes being mixed to produce stronger and varied offspring.  

  

Arjuna cannot escape the call to the war for establishing dharma hiding behind the argument that varna-sankara will take place and that will be disastrous. That is another lame argument, like his earlier argument that felons should not be destroyed if they are one’s own people.

Arjuna has become temporarily blind to truth because of his attachment and refuses to see things as they are. The Gita will teach him to come out of this blindness and help him see things objectively, through eyes that are detached, and practice anasakti yoga which is one of the central teachings for the Gita.

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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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Radha and the Flow of Consciousness

The Upanishads are incredible, unsurpassed. In wisdom, in beauty and in clarity. When it comes to understanding the nature of the human being, they have never been surpassed. Speaking of them, C Rajagopalachari said, “The spacious imagination, the majestic sweep of thought, and the almost reckless spirit of exploration with which, urged by the compelling thirst for truth, the Upanishad teachers and pupils dig into the ‘open secret’ of the universe, make this most ancient of the world’s holy books still the most modern and the most satisfying.”

Kathopanishad is one of the most poetic of Upanishads. It is the Upanishad on which so much of the Bhagavad Gita is based, including its frame image of Krishna and Arjuna in the chariot. Several verses of the Gita have been borrowed from the Katha Upanishad, or adapted. Speaking of human consciousness, the teacher of the Katha Upanishad says:

parānchi khāni vyatrnat svayambhūh
tasmād parāng paśyati nāntarātman.
kaścid dhīrah pratyagātmānam aikshad
āvrttacakshur amrtatvam icchan. Kathopanishad 2.1

“The self-born one created the senses turned outward. For that reason, man looks outward, and sees not the self that is within. Rare is the brave one who, longing for immortality, shuts his eyes to what is without and sees the self within.”

We see only what is without, because that is how we are made. Seeing what is without is fine, because the world created by that same self-born one is so enchantingly beautiful. The sounds, the touches, the colours, the shapes, the tastes, they are all so beautiful, as are love, passion, ambition, the thrill of achieving, sharing and the million other things that form what we call life. And yet in the process of seeing what is without, we should not forget what is within. When we forget the within in our fascination with the without, we get entrapped in the without. And this the Upanishads call maya – delusion. Maya is not the world outside, but being trapped in it.

It is like, say the ancient masters in their exquisite language, the bee getting trapped in the lotus flower at sunset. It is fine to enjoy the honey within the lotus, and it is the bee’s enjoyment of the honey within it that makes the life of the lotus meaningful, but the bee does not belong to the lotus. Its world is not the small world defined by the petals of the lotus that close at sunset, but the vast, boundless world outside.

We do not belong to the small world we live in, but to the bhooma, the vast. The world of the sun and the moon, of thunder and lightning, of winds and rains, of mountains and rivers, of birth and death and what is beyond all this. When we surrender to this world, and limit ourselves, that’s maya.

For the Upanishad says, we are not the limited self we take ourselves to be, the power that runs the universe.

As the Taittiriya Upanishad puts it:

bhīshāsmād vātah pavate
bhīshodeti sūryah
bhīshāsmād agniścendraśca
mrtyur dhāvati pancama iti.

“I am the power fearing which the wind blows, the power fearing which the sun rises in the east, fire burns, and Indra rules over the gods. I am that power fearing which death, as the fifth, stalks the world.”

We have been trapped within the lotus, and, tragically, forgotten the vastness outside.

And the way to reclaim our real heritage, the vast, the boundless, is to turn our attention to the within. Turn our consciousness inward. Make our awareness flow not outward, but inward.

Radha is the name for consciousness that flows inward, for the river that flows towards its own source.

The word radha is the word dhara turned around. Dhara means a current, like a stream, like a brook, or a river. Radha means the consciousness that flows outward has now begun to flow inward.

Parānchi khāni vyatrnat svayambhūh – the self-born created the senses turned outward and our consciousness flows out into the world through them. But now it flows inward: toward the self within, toward the pratyagātmā, towards its own source.

Radha is the longing for Krishna, Krishna standing for consciousness, our inner self. Radha is the name for the most intense meditation which makes samadhi possible. Samadhi means merger with the inner self, merger with Krishna. Which is also what we mean when we use the word yoga in its original sense.

Yoga is not asanas. Asanas are practically the first step in yoga, the lowest, and samadhi its culmination, the highest stage.

In India we worship rivers. It is not because rivers are useful. India has never worshipped what is useful. Worshipping what is useful is the commercial attitude and that has nothing to do with religion. To us religion has never been a commercial thing. We worship what inspires awe, what helps us open our eyes and wake up into light.

The first river India worshipped was the Saraswati. The Saraswati was the river on the banks of which the Vedas were born, the Upanishads were born. When we worshipped the Saraswati, we were worshipping knowledge – knowledge of the highest kind, which in Sanskrit is called prajñā. Prajñā means consciousness. We called her Goddess Saraswati, the goddess of wisdom, of learning, of arts, of music, of the thousand forms of light.

And when the Saraswati dried up, the Ganga became the river on the banks of which the culture of light, the Vedic civilization, continued. To India, the Ganga then became the most sacred of rivers. Goddess Ganga. A dip in the Ganga washes away all our sins, said our culture. That is because the Ganga stood for knowledge and as the seers said, na hi jñānena sadrsham pavitram iha vidyate: there is nothing as sacred as knowledge in this world.

All the most sacred teerthas on the Ganga are where the Ganga takes a turn and flows northward. North is the direction from which the Ganga comes down. When she flows northward, she is flowing towards her own source.

Then Ganga becomes Radha, consciousness flowing towards its own source.

Those who study consciousness in the west, particularly those who study altered states of consciousness, say that man’s oldest adventure is this search. This search for his source. They say all religion is that search for the original consciousness, consciousness turned inward.

And they say that there is no culture in the world that does not seek consciousness turned inward. When the tribal dancers dance around the night fire to the beat of drums, they say they are seeking this altered state of consciousness – consciousness turned inward. When they use drugs and cacti and mushrooms that alter consciousness, they say they are seeking this inward turned consciousness. When people climb mountains and face death, they say they are seeking the same altered states of consciousness through danger and fear. And when man engages in sex, they say, they are seeking to turn their consciousness inward. The moment of orgasm provides to man the most easily accessible state in which his consciousness is no more flowing outward through his senses.

Every culture in the world has been worshipping Radha, though it may not know it. Worshipping her through drumbeats, through dance and music, through prayer, through fasting, through meditation, through fire-walking, through danger, through fear, through wonder, through drugs, through sex, through pain and self-torture.

Radha as a Goddess is new even to India. There is no Radha associated with Krishna in the Mahabharata, for instance. She is a later goddess.

But we have been worshipping her from the beginning of time.

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