Living Bhagavad Gita 024: The Miracle of Listening

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

[Continued from the previous post.]

One of the fascinating things about the Gita chapter we are about to finish discussing is that Krishna says just a single sentence of five words here: partha pashya etaan samavetaan kuroon – Arjuna, see these assembled kurus. After that he remains totally silent, listening to Arjuna. As Arjuna passes through various stages of confusion, frustration, depression, melancholy and finally reaches the depths of his vishada, Krishna pays full attention to him. He speaks again only after Arjuna has collapsed in his chariot abandoning his bow and arrows at the end of the chapter and the next chapter begins. He gives Arjuna space to say all he wants to say without interrupting once. And after he has stopped speaking, Krishna provokes him to speak again, helping him to expresses anything more that might be lurking in the depths of his mind. This is like emptying a vessel and then pouring some water into it, shaking the vessel well and emptying it again to clean out anything that might have been still  be in it. As Krishna does so, Arjuna brings out the rest of his pain and agony and confusion from his inner depths, thus making his mind empty and receptive to Krishna’s teachings. That emptiness at the end of pouring out all that is in your mind is a requirement to receive the teachings of the Gita.

Very little of Gita can go into a crowded mind, which is the reason why we too must practice some sadhana for emptying the mind along with the study of the Gita, like a meditation. A few minutes of meditation every day and living the whole day meditatively will take us a long way. Living the whole day meditatively is not difficult because all you have to do is to focus completely on whatever you are doing. Meditation is focusing your attention on a single thing, whether it is your breath, abdominal movement, a mantra, a sound, an image or anything else.  In his classic The Miracle of Mindfulness, Thich Nhat Hanh speaks of transforming everyday actions like washing vessels into meditation by the simple practice of paying full attention to them. 

One of the most famous Zen stories is about a university professor who went to meet a Zen master to learn Zen from him. While the professor began introducing himself, the master ordered tea. A disciple brought tea and the master began pouring the tea into a cup while the professor talked about the researches he has done, the researches he is engaged in at the moment, his future research plans and so on. Listening quietly without saying a word, the Zen master kept pouring the tea into the cup which had by then become full and had started spilling over. Suddenly the professor noticed this and said, “Master, the cup is full. No more will go in!”

And the master stopped and said, “You are like this cup, professor. You are so full of yourself that no Zen will go in now. Empty yourself and come back.”

Without emptying ourselves, we cannot receive wisdom. Wisdom is given only to those who have become silent inside and not to those with crowded minds. Krishna is allowing Arjuna to go on talking so that his mind becomes empty and receptive to what he has to say.

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There is another reason why Krishna listens to Arjuna attentively without interrupting. The greatest thing anyone can do for a man who is in pain and grief is to listen to him. Being heard is healing.  Just the fact that someone is listening to us attentively, the fact that someone feels what we have to say is important, will have a positive effect on us, as anyone who has ever wanted to talk to someone and has found someone to listen to him knows.

I remember my days as the principal of a large junior college. One day a girl student in her teens came to me weeping, her whole body shaking, the power of each sob sending violent tremors through her whole body. I seated her conformably on a sofa in my chamber and gave her plenty of time to relax and catch her breath. It was only after quite some time that she started sharing her problem. It took me a long time to get the whole picture from her as she shared her pain in words interspersed with periods of sobbing.

This young girl was extremely beautiful and very sweet. One of her plain looking teachers could not tolerate her beauty or the fact that all the boys liked her. So she began insulting her in class, finding fault with her for everything, calling her an idiot for the smallest errors she made and also saying things like she has no interest in studies but was interested only in drawing boys to her, she was a trap and a danger to the boys and bad example to other girls. The teacher went to the extent of calling the young girl a slut in the classroom.

It took me more than an hour of more or less silent listening to put her at ease and then to assure her she would be fine, nothing would happen to her. I had instructed my secretary who sat just outside my chamber not to let anyone come in so that I could listen to her uninterrupted, paying full attention. I can’t say she was healed of her pain by the time she left my room, but she had certainly become relaxed, with even a gentle smile appearing on her face as she was thanked me and left.

Krishna listens with complete attention to whatever Arjuna has to say because listening with complete attention is in itself healing.

By the way, listening with complete attention is also the greatest compliment you can give anyone. We all need attention – that is one of the greatest people truths.  

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The following passage is from Brenda Shoshanna’s beautiful book Zen Miracles: Finding Peace in an Insane World, a book that I have used as a text in a course called Zen and the Executive Mind that I taught for several years in one of the top business schools of India, XLRI School of Business and Human Resources.    

“A Zen student, Leila, went to the beach for the weekend. After a hectic week she looked forward to peace, to the smell of the ocean, to the sand dunes. There was a woman cleaning in the guest house Leila was staying at. This woman, Frieda, sang very loud love songs in Spanish as she swept the floors. In addition, she was noisy and clumsy.

“As usual, Leila woke up early in the morning and wanted to do zazen. She tidied her room, and placed a cushion on the floor to sit on. Just as she sat down on it she heard a bang against the door. Frieda was sweeping outside and had knocked the door with her broom. She was also singing loudly, “My heart’s breaking, breaking today.”

“Leila sat on the cushion, listening to the shrill song. “What will I do without you?” Frieda kept wailing. Finally, Leila got up, opened the door and called, “Frieda, can you be a little more quiet?”

“Frieda didn’t fully understand English and kept right on singing.

“Leila went back to sit down again, but not only did the song get louder, the broom started banging her door consistently.  Finally, she got up from the cushion wondering what was wrong with the woman. Negative thoughts started to brew but thanks to years of zazen, she caught herself. “Stop it,” she said to the dark mind that was forming. Leila realized that when we want to be apart from something, it clings to us; when we want to be too close, it runs away.

“She opened the door and went out of the room. The minute Frieda saw her, she flew over, standing no more than two inches away. It seemed she had taken a great liking to Leila. Leila turned to go outside in the street, and Frieda followed along.  “Where are you going?” she said. “To the beach,” Leila said. Frieda grinned. “Me too. Going along.”

“As they walked down the dirt road to the ocean, Frieda kept humming and Leila resisted, trying to shut her out. She started concentrating on other things. Then the humming turned into loud singing again. Leila focused on the delicious salt air and took deep gulps of it. The singing got louder still. Whatever Leila did to block it out, it only got louder. Then, suddenly Master Rinzai’s words came to her: “If we master each circumstance, then whatever we do is the truth.” How am I going to master this? she wondered.  They arrived at the beach with Frieda singing relentlessly.”

“When they got to the sand, Leila spread out a blanket and sat down; Frieda planted herself right beside her again. As Leila watched the waves of the ocean roll up on the shore, she suddenly stopped pushing Frieda away, and fell into zazen. She stopped wanting things to be different. She stopped wanting quiet time alone at the beach. This was the circumstance she was in now, hearing Frieda sing over and over that her heart was breaking...”

As we shall see, this incident Brenda Shoshanna shares is about listening, but it is about other things too. It is about accepting things as they are, people as they are, life as it is, and many more things. As a practitioner of Zen,

Leila is trying to use every situation that life presents as an opportunity for practicing Zen. Let’s continue with Shoshanna’s narration. Something beautiful happens now. 

“Frieda was swaying as she sang, and Leila found herself swaying as well. As the two of them sat there swaying, Frieda’s voice became softer. Leila turned and looked at Frieda. Tears were pouring down her face.

“Frieda said, “You, my mamma. Missing my mamma.” Leila finally understood that Frieda was missing her mother, who was far away. She must have reminded Frieda of her mother.  Frieda was sitting there crying and in a moment Leila started crying as well. She was also missing her mother, who had died a year ago. The two of them sat there crying on the blanket together until Leila turned and gave Frieda a hug. Soon the crying subsided, the singing subsided—they were simply sitting together, listening to the sound of the waves.”

What a beautiful experience! Leila could have rejected Frieda, shouted at her, instead she accepts her, listens to her attentively. A woman in great pain and loneliness is consoled. The pain she had been storing inside her suffocating her melts and comes out in the form of her tears and an amazing relationship is formed between the two women who were strangers just a few minutes ago!

Listening can do miracles. Paying attention to others can do miracles.

Unfortunately in today’s world no one has time to listen to others! All of us are in such hurry and we all have so much to say! How can we listen to others then?

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I remember a sad story reported by newspapers several years ago.

As the parents were getting the little baby ready for school she was resisting and saying she did not want to go. Well, that was nothing unusual, so they continued. But as they put her foot in one of her shoes she started screaming but they ignored that too. Just the daily drama taken to just another level, they thought. They tied up the shoe laces after putting the other foot in the other shoe and hurried her out as they heard the school bus coming.

The baby kept screaming in the bus and then continued crying aloud in the school too for two more hours. It is only then one of the teachers noticed blood was draining from her face and her body was slowly turning blue while the child kept up with the screaming which had by now become weak. Soon the baby collapsed in a swoon and the teacher loosened her uniform and removed her shoes. It was then she saw it – there was a scorpion inside the child’s shoe, still alilve! It was the scorpion bite that had made her scream in the first place and now her foot was all swollen up and the poison had spread to other parts of her body too.  As I remember the news said the poor baby died of the scorpion poisoning.

Just the other day I saw a sad You Tube video about a little child fighting with her mother insisting that she did not want to go to school. The mother asked her why and she said it was no fun, they didn’t allow her to play, it was only study and study all the time, and you had to sit without moving and do all the teacher asked you to do. The mother asked her if they don’t sing songs in school, if they don’t dance and she said it was just abcd and numbers and nothing else. The baby kept saying she did not want to go to school, wept, begged her mother not to send her to school. As you watched the baby’s helpless frustration, tears welled up in your eyes and you felt it difficult to breathe. But I felt that was not how the mother saw it – I could hear her laughing at what the baby was saying, as though she found it all amusing rather than painful.

I know perhaps mothers today have no choice, such is what education has become, particularly in India with such high premium placed on education and with so many first and second generation learners. I remembered all those lectures on Rousseau I gave to future teachers in a College of Education where I taught for many years. Speaking about the right kind of education, Rousseau said “education practices the art of delay,” meaning we must delay sending children to schools as much as possible. The father of modern education also said the best education is negative education, meaning we much give children as little book education as possible, and instead send them back to nature for natural education. Sadly all those ideas have been wiped away by the tides of time and what we see today all around us is little babies going to school bent under the weight of heavy backpacks. They look like mountain climbers with huge trekking bags. Education should be pleasurable, said Rousseau, but that is not exactly what we see when we look at our schools. Even then shouldn’t parents at least give a sympathetic ear to children when they say they do not want to go to school?

In his book Is the American Dream Killing You? Paul Stiles speaks of how we have all become servants of an all-powerful entity called Market and how that entity has made in the short span of just two generations joint families disappear from the face of the earth. True, joint families had their own problems, but they were wonderful places for children to grow up in, with many generations living together, and several children of near ages growing up together and there was always someone to listen to you when you wanted to talk. Today instead of parents and grandparents, it is the paid caregivers at the day care centers who look after you. More than Anything Else in the World is a powerful, award winning Brazilian movie I once saw in a film festival. It talked about the loneliness of a little girl growing up with her single mother who works nine to five in modern Rio de Janeiro and the hell life has become for her and the mother.

Much of the insanity and violence in the world today is because no one has time to listen to children in their most important years of growing up.  

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One of the greatest leadership skills is listening skill, some would even say it is the greatest leadership skill. A story from third century China tells us of King Ts’ao taking his son Prince Ta’i to Pan Ku, the best guru in the country who lived near the Ming Li forest. The king requested Pan Ku to give the prince the best possible education as the future ruler of the country.

When the king left, Pan Ku turned to the young boy and told him, “Go the forest and build a small hut there for yourself. Live in that hut for a full year listening to the sound of the forest. Come back to me after the year is over.” The boy was completely confused by the order. He had expected to be taught strategic leadership skills, people skills, planning skills, the vision and mission of a king and all else he would need tomorrow as a ruler. Instead he was being asked to go and live in the forest all alone listening to the sound of the forest. But since there was no one he could complain to since his father himself had left him with the guru, he quietly went and lived in the forest as he was told to. He listened to all the sounds of the forest – the rustle of leaves, the chirping of crickets, the buzzing of bees, the roar of lions, the song of birds, the laughter of hyenas, the chattering of the monkeys... He waited impatiently for the year to be over and then went back to the master.

“Did you listen to the sound of the forest?” asked the master and the prince said, “Yes, master.” And when Pan Ku asked him what he had heard, he started naming the different sounds he had heard. As the list grew, the guru’s face began growing darker and darker and when he finished, the guru shouted, “Back to the forest. Come back after one more year.”

The furious and frustrated young man went back to the forest and for a while continued listening. But he had already spent an entire year listening just to the sounds of the forest and there was nothing new to hear. Eventually he gave up and spent his time just relaxing under trees, walking by streams and lying in shades. He was no more trying to listen to forest sounds but had surrendered to a forest dweller’s life, became part of the forest, no more separate from it but one with it.

And then one day it happened. He heard something he had never heard before. The sound of the grass growing, the sound of the trees drinking up water with their roots, the sound of green leaves yellowing, green fruits ripening, plants flowering, seasons changing. He had goose bumps all over, great joy spurted from within him as water from an underground spring, and bathed in this bliss he ran to the guru, without even waiting for the completion of the year. The guru took one look at him and then hugged him, telling him he had heard that he wanted him to hear, he had heard the sound of the forest. Pan Ku sent him back to his father with his blessings, telling him his education was complete, he would be a great king like his father.

What the boy had heard was the sound of silence – it is in silence that the grass grows, it is in silence that fruits ripen, it is in silence that seasons change. He was able to listen to the sound of silence because he himself had grown silent inside by surrendering to life, accepting it without resisting it, and by totally relaxing, letting go. And with the birth of that inner silence, he had become capable of listening – for the first time in his life. He could now listen not only to what was spoken, but also to the unspoken. He could not only listen to sounds but also to silence. Intelligence had been awakened in him, because the secret of intelligence is inner silence. Sensitivity had been awakened in him, because the secret of sensitivity is inner silence. Imagination had been awakened in him, because the secret of imagination is inner silence. Love had been awakened in him, because only with a silent mind can you really love others.

His education was now truly complete. Everything that he did will now have the quality of excellence. When he touched things, they would sparkle. When he spoke, people would run to fulfill his wishes. He would be surrounded by an aura of tranquility and stillness. His energy would now be inexhaustible. He would now be what Tibet called wang thang, a center of serene power. He would see beauty in the most ordinary things. He would radiate love. He would no more have to manipulate people because his least wish would be a command for them.

That is what happens when you become silent inside.

Says Zen: To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.

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Learning to listen is a great blessing on us. It is also a blessing on others. When you give your attention to others, they are healed, made whole.

Doctors need to listen to their patients, says the latest discoveries in medicine. It is as much the doctor who heals as the medicine.

Parents need to listen. Teachers need to listen. Husbands and wives need to listen.

Leaders need to listen.  It is only then that they can understand the private hells within peoples and efficiently motivate them; coach, mentor and guide them and build effective teams. It has been said by experts that leadership is 80% listening and 20% talking – probably the opposite of what is widely practiced.  

Amazing is the power of loving attention. It transforms people. If you have seen the movie Munnabhai MBBS, you know the instant transformation that happens when Munna pays loving attention to Maksood Bhai, you know the secret of Anand Bhai’s metamorphosis from a living dead man to the narrator of the movie. Like love that transforms both the lover and the loved, attention paid to others too transforms both them and you. 

Krishna listens to Arjuna and encourages him to speak more and that opens the door to wonderful teachings we call the Bhagavad Gita.

The Gita teaches us what exactly we are seeking and why we seek it. The Gita helps us discover the meaning of life, shows us the only path worth travelling for our own good and the good of the world. The Gita teaches us the difference between shreyas and preyas. The Gita helps the river of our life to flow towards the ocean as it should and not towards dreary deserts, to borrow an expression from Gurudev Tagore. The Gita can make life what it is meant to be – an utsava, a celebration, a festival,

Thus ends Chapter One of the Bhagavad Gita.

Shri krishnarpanam astu! Tavaiva vastu govinda tubhyam eva samarpaye! 

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Living Bhagavad Gita 015: Cowards Worship Destiny

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.]

I see evil omens, Krishna. And I do not see any good in killing kinsmen in war. I have no desire for victory, Krishna, or for the kingdom or pleasures. What good is the kingdom, Krishna, or pleasures, or life itself? Those for whose sake we desire kingdoms, enjoyments and pleasures, they stand here before me staking their wealth and life in the war – teachers, fathers, sons, grandfathers, uncles, fathers-in-law, grandsons, brothers-in-law and other kinsmen. I do not want to kill them, Krishna, even if they kill me – no, not even for all the three worlds, what to speak of this land.  BG 1.31-35

Winners don’t quit and quitters don’t win, goes a popular saying. That may be true with regard to a particular venture, but in life that is not how things work. To win a war, sometimes you have to lose battles. People who never give up a single battle frequently end up by losing the war. However that may be, one sure way to lose, whether it is a battle or a war, or an argument or a negotiation, is to give up before it begins.

And that is exactly what Arjuna is doing here. The war conches have just been blown, Arjuna asks Krishna to take his chariot between the two armies so that he can see those assembled for the war. He takes a good look at them and straight away begins speaking of giving up the war.

Arjuna is a loser in no sense of the term. One of his names is Vijaya, meaning victory, and that name is absolutely appropriate for him. He is a consistent winner, has been so from his earliest days. He was only a little boy in Drona’s gurukula when he beat his own guru in a mean game the master was playing and won Drona’s heart.

This is how it happened. As in all other gurukulas, it was part of the education to do some menial work for the gurukula whoever you are. One of the errands the royal pupils of Drona had to do was to fetch water for the ashram every morning. For this work Drona gave small pots to all the students and a much larger pot to his son Ashwatthama who too studied along with the princes. Since his pot was bigger, Ashwatthama had to make fewer trips and finished fetching his share of water earlier than the other students. As soon as he did that, Drona started giving him lessons, and these lessons were more advanced than the lessons the others received.   Arjuna understood what was happening and with the help of the varuna astra started finishing his errand at the same time as Ashwatthama. Drona was left with no option but to give him too the lessons he gave his son.

The Mahabharata tells us that one day Drona gave an order to the gurukula cook never to serve a meal to Arjuna in the dark. The instruction was specifically about Arjuna and when we read it we are puzzled – why should the guru give his cook such an instruction?. But the mystery is solved as we are told the rest of the story. One day as the students were having their supper the wind blew out the lamps and Arjuna continued eating. Later that night, Drona was woken up from his sleep by the booming sound of the bow string being released. It was Arjuna practicing shooting in the dark! From eating in the dark, Arjuna had learnt that just as you can eat without seeing, you can also shoot without seeing.

That is Arjuna, the winner.

That night Drona moved by Arjuna’s commitment and dedication to dhanurvidya hugged his young disciple and promised that from now he would make sure that Arjuna became the best archer in the world!

Arjuna is not a loser in any sense of the term, but right now, standing between the two armies, he is behaving like a typical loser by giving up the war even before it begins. And one of the reasons he gives for giving up the war is that he is seeing evil omens.

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The Mahabharata does talk about omens and omens have a decisive role in some important incidents in the epic. Dhritarashtra frees Draupadi and the Pandava brothers staked and lost to Duryodhana in the dice game because, the epic narrator tell us, following the failed attempt to disrobe Draupadi in the royal hall ominous portents appear everywhere. But the epic is primarily a book for kshatriyas, for ambitious men of action, like most of us are today. It was written by Sage Vyasa keeping in mind primarily such men of action, the Kshatriyas, and is primarily about kshatriyas. And the Bhagavad Gita too is primarily for men of action, for leaders of men, as Krishna himself says in the opening verses of chapter four of the Gita.

Men of action believe in action, in the power of action to make things happen, in what is called purushartha in Sanskrit. They do not believe in giving up – and certainly not in giving up before the battle begins.

In the Shanti Parva of the epic, one of the questions the newly crowned King Yudhishthira asks grandsire Bhishma lying on the bed of arrows is what is more powerful: daiva or purushartha? As he always does, Bhishma gives a beautiful answer and then concludes his reply with three words: daivam kleebaa upaasate. These three words, I believe, sum up the spirit of the men and women of the epic. Translated literally, the three words mean: Eunuchs worship destiny. The word used by the epic that I have translated as destiny is daiva, which is not exactly destiny but for the time we can take it to mean destiny. And the word eunuch also does not mean a eunuch but is the Mahabharata word for a coward. These three words that sum up the spirit of the epic and of its men and women actually means: It is cowards that bend their knees before powers greater than themselves.

The men and women of the epic do not give any powers in the universe the authority to decide their destiny. They fight destiny and carve out their lives through that fight, just as men and women who decide the destiny of nations and organizations do today. No leader of a nation can today say that he leaves it all to destiny. Nor can the leader of a political party, a multinational corporation, a small industry or a department in an industry or a business house today can afford to say I leave it all to destiny. Which is one of the most important reasons why the Gita and the Mahabharata are so completely relevant to us today.  

Let us take the example of Karna. Abandoned at birth, he is a foundling brought up by a driver – albeit the driver of the king, his charioteer, a suta. In a world of kshatriyas, he grows up as an outsider, a non-kshatriya. He was not really a low caste man in the Mahabharata world as we commonly assume today because in social status the sutas stood just beneath the kshatriyas and above the vaishyas. But they were certainly not equal to the kshatriyas in that world and that lower caste status and social position were constant obstacles on Karna’s path. But through his competence and purushartha, his efforts, overcoming all kinds of obstacles, he becomes arguably the best warrior of the day. He becomes a king in his own right and ultimately the commander-in-chief of the entire Kaurava army. A powerful king like Shalya, the king of Madra and uncle of Nakula and Sahadeva, has to submit himself, albeit unwillingly, albeit after a flat refusal, to become his driver. The rules of the day said that Karna should live his life as a driver since he was a driver’s son, but he refuses to accept that role and rises to such a position that he commands an army of powerful kings and kshatriyas of the day. Karna’s is the story of the victory of purushartha over daiva, or destiny. This is what Bhishma means when he tells Yudhishthira daivam kleebaa upaasate, it is cowards who worship destiny.      

Let’s take another example from the epic, that of a woman this time, Empress Satyavati, the mother of Sage Vyasa, the greatest sage this land of sages has known, a man of ceaseless action himself. She was born the illegitimate daughter of a glorious king through what the epic ambiguously calls jimha, sin, in the context of a very confusing story that covers up more things than it reveals. When brought to her father after her birth along with her twin, a boy, the king rejects her because she was a girl and gives her back to the fisherman who had brought her to him, Dasharaja, and keeps the boy. She grows up as a fisher girl, her body exuding the foul smell of dry fish for miles around. This girl engaged by her loving father in ferrying people across the Yamuna eventually bargains with a scholar-sage and gets rid of her foul body smell before surrendering her body to him to give birth to the sage whose birthday we still celebrate all over the country five thousand years after his death as guru purnima, teacher’s day.  She marries the most powerful emperor of the day after taking from him a promise that after his death the crown would go to his first son born to her. She thus becomes the empress and gives birth to two sons one of whom becomes an emperor who inherits the crown from his father. Satyavati, brought up as a fisher girl, carves out for herself an unsurpassed destiny and presides over the fortunes of the vast land of Bharatavarsha as its most powerful woman. Crowned heads from all over the land bow before her. All this she achieves through her purushartha.

That is the spirit of the men and women of the Mahabharata.

You can of course argue that whatever happens is destiny, that they should use purushartha and achieve these things was their destiny. That is the kind of argument that silences all arguments, an argument against which no arguments are possible.  It is like asking if God is all powerful can he make a stone so heavy that he himself cannot lift it. In the language of logic, we call it a fallacy. 

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It is one of the most brilliant men of this age of heroic men of action, perhaps the most brilliant man of the age barring Krishna, who is now talking of abandoning the war just before it begins, at the very last possible moment, with the armies standing face to face in Kurukshetra.  As we saw, one of the arguments he gives is he is seeing evil omens around.

That statement about evil omens speaks of the failure of Arjuna’s will to act as clearly as the shivering of his body, the drying up of his mouth, the burning of his skin, the reeling of his mind and the slipping of the Gandiva from his hand speak of it. It is in moments of weakness that we turn to the adrishta, powers not known to us and over which we have no control. Omens fall in this category. It is in moments of weakness we start worrying about such things – when are strong from within, they have no power over us.

During an important battle, says a Zen story, a Japanese general decided to attack his powerful enemy. He was confident they would win, but his men were filled with doubt because their army was weak. They happened to pass a holy Buddhist shrine on their way and the army stopped there to pray and take a short rest. The general looked into the eyes of his soldiers and knew what they needed was confidence more than anything else and nothing he would say would give them that confidence. So he took out a coin from his wallet and said, "I shall now toss this coin. If it is heads, we shall win. And if it is tails, we shall lose. Destiny will now reveal itself."

He threw the coin into the air and all watched intently as it landed. It was heads. Instantly the soldiers felt energy coursing through their veins. Filled with confidence and enthusiasm, the attacked the enemy and won.

After the battle was over one of his lieutenants, laughing happily, told the general, "No one can change destiny, Sir."

"Quite right," was the general’s reply. And then he showed the lieutenant the coin. It had heads on both sides!

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It has been said that Arjuna was overcome by great pity – kripaya paraya aavishtah. But is kripa the real reason behind what is happening to him?

Behind everything we do, there is a real reason and a good reason. The real reason of course is just that – the real reason. And the good reason is the reason that is acceptable to the society, to other people. It is also the reason that is acceptable to ourselves, a reason that does not pose psychological threats to our egos. The pity that Arjuna feels is not the real reason behind his reactions, but the good reason. He would be tormented by guilt for the rest of his days and nights if he killed his guru and grandfather Bhishma and other kinsmen and he wants to avoid it. The kripa Arjuna feels is his route of escape from the conflict he is in.

Arjuna wants to win back his kingdom from Duryodhana who has usurped it, he wants to fight the war for Dharma that Krishna wants him to fight, but he does not want to lose his name and fame as a highly ethical person, as someone who will not do anything wrong. He does not want anyone to say that he killed his grandsire and his guru, or that he was responsible for their death.

Arjuna, like all of us and unlike Krishna, is very much a prisoner of his ego. He does not want to be blamed for going out of his maryadas, the ethical limits his society and its culture has set for him. He wants to remain a maryada purusha.

Krishna has no such compunctions. For the sake of dharma, if no other means are available, he does not mind occasionally stepping outside the Lakshman rekhas set by society. Thus in order to avoid the war and save innumerable human lives, he does not mind taking Karna away from everyone and in solitude trying to tempt him with power and with Draupadi. Krishna knows what he is doing is wrong, but he would go ahead and do that for the sake of the hundreds of thousands of lives he can save through it. As for the disgrace that would be his for doing it, well, that did not bother him. Krishna never cared for his name and fame. The only thing he ever cared for was for doing good to the people, as when he abandoned Mathura and took his people to Dwaraka safely away from Jarasandha, an action that gave him the name Ranchhod, a run way from war, a coward.

One of my favourite Kahlil Gibran stories is about a sheet of snow-white paper:

“Said a sheet of snow-white paper, "Pure was I created, and pure will I remain for ever. I would rather be burnt and turn to white ashes than suffer darkness to touch me or the unclean to come near me."

“The ink-bottle heard what the paper was saying, and it laughed in its dark heart; but it never dared to approach her. And the multicoloured pencils heard her also, and they too never came near her.

“And the snow-white sheet of paper did remain pure and chaste for ever. Pure and chaste -- and empty.”

Arjuna is now behaving like that sheet of snow-white paper.

The physical and mental symptoms Arjuna is speaking about are the symptoms of his reluctance to come out of social conventions – even for lokasangraha, for the common good.

Ethics is without a doubt one of man’s greatest strengths. But it should remain our strength and not become our weakness. It becomes our weakness when it limits us, binds us, prevents us from doing good to others, becomes shackles on our hands and legs. There are occasions that ask of us to go beyond ethics for the good of the world and on such occasions we should do good by going beyond ethics.

Speaking of ethics, the psychologist Abraham Maslow said that self-actualized individuals are ethical, but their ethics is not the ethics dictated by the society, by the masses, but born of their own enlightened mind. There come occasions in everyone’s life when he or she will have to rise to the level of enlightened ethics, where decisions will have to be taken as guided by the light in our heart.

That is why Krishna boldly declares in the Mahabharata satyaad jyeyo’nritam vachah: a lie is [sometimes] superior to the truth. A lie that saves is superior to the truth that kills, a lie that does good is superior to the truth that harms.

Doing good is more important than being right.

India makes a clear distinction between satyam and tathyam – truth and facts. The two are not the same, says India. And India defines satyam as whatever is of the highest good of the people: yal-lokahitam atyantam tat satyam,

Arjuna is now called upon to sacrifice his feelings of love and reverence to his guru and Grandfather Bhishma and others at the altar of dharma, the good of the world. It is a terrible thing to have to do that, but he has no choice. Deserting the war and surrendering Bharatavarsha to powers of adharma is not a choice. But that is what he will be doing if he abandons the war and goes away to become a monk who lives on alms.

Just as there are many forms of courage, there are many kinds of cowardliness too. The cowardliness to act because the action will be against the people you love and revere too is a form of cowardliness – ethical cowardliness. And no leader worth his name can afford to do that. If Arjuna refuses to act now because that action will be against Bhishma and Drona, he will then be no different from blind Dhritarashtra who refused to take actions against Duryodhana because he was his son and he loved him. There were a thousand occasions when Dhritarashtra should have acted against his son – beginning with the elaborately planned poisoning of Bhima at Pramanakoti done when Duryodhana was still a child. But Dhritarashtra acts against his son not once in his entire life, which is in fact what leads the Mahabharata war.

Not acting against corrupt people because they are one’s own people, swajana, is something we come across every day in politics and in organizational culture these days. Corruption is an asuri pravritti and all asuri pravrittis have to be acted against, particularly if you are in a leadership position. Failing to do so encourages and empowers asuri powers and that destroys the world.     

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The Mahabharata tells us an interesting story about Drona and Arjuna that happened years before the war when Arjuna still received lessons from Drona. One day Drona told Arjuna in the presence of his other disciples about a weapon called Brahmashira. The acharya said that the weapon had no equal in the world, it had the power of lightning and was capable of reducing the world to ashes instantly. Drona told Arjuna that he was going to give Brahmashira Astra to him but he would have to first promise that he would give him whatever he asked for as his gurudakshina for it. Arjuna touched Drona’s feet and made the promise. And after he did it, Drona gave Arjuna the astra and then asked for his gurudakshina. Arjuna then asked him what he wanted. Drona wanted him a promise from Arjuna: “You must fight with me when I fight with you.”

Perhaps Drona had the intuition that one day the two of them would stand face to face in the battlefield and when that happened Arjuna would refuse to fight his guru. It is this possibility that Drona wanted to avoid through the promise he took from his beloved disciple..   

Nine days after Krishna teaches the Gita to Arjuna in the battlefield, on the night after the ninth day of the war, Bhishma begs Arjuna to put an end to his life and suffering by killing him in battle the next day. Weeping he says that he is tired of fighting for the evil Duryodhana all his life and does not want to do it anymore. It is after this request for death that Arjuna mortally wounds him on the tenth day of the war and he falls in the battlefield pierced by a thousand arrows.

Sometimes killing is kindness too.

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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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Hands of Destiny: A Zen Story

A great Japanese warrior named Nobunaga decided to attack the enemy although he had only one tenth the number of men the opposition commanded.

He knew that he would win, but his soldiers were in doubt. On the way he stopped at a Shinto shrine and told his man, 'After I visit the shrine I will toss a coin. If heads come we will win; if tails come we will lose. Destiny holds us in her hand.'

Nobunaga entered the shrine and offered a silent prayer. He came forth and tossed a coin. Heads appeared. His soldiers were so eager to fight that they won their battle easily.

'No one can change the hand of destiny,' his attendant told him after the battle. ‘Indeed not,' said Nobunaga, showing a coin, which had been doubled, with heads facing either way.

[Courtesy: Paul Reps]

Leadership and the Gita: Leader Has the Beginner’s Mind

The opening scene of the Bhagavad Gita is immensely beautiful. Arjuna is in the battlefield and the armies are standing ready for battle. And as it frequently happens in the battlefield of life, he does not know what his best course of action is. And the more he thinks over it, the more he gets confused. Eventually he surrenders to Krishna and seeks his wisdom. He tells him: “My mind is confused about the right course of action. Please tell me what is better for me. I am your disciple, and I take refuge in you.” It is then that Krishna begins his teaching.

True learning begins only when we accept our ignorance.

We, particularly the leaders among us, often assume we have all the answers. We do not. Particularly in today’s fluid world of fast changing situations. In a world that was more or less stationary, it was possible that a leader had all the answers, or at least most of the answers. But certainly not in our world where the pace of change itself has become dizzyingly fast and situations rarely repeat themselves. Every situation is new and unique and readymade solutions do not work.

Speaking particularly of leadership in business and industry, this is the age of knowledge explosion and information overload, and a large section of the workforce that a leader leads consists of knowledge workers. To assume here that a leader has all the answers is not just stupid but suicidal.

A leader should not become like a pot kept upside down, which is what many leaders become. When that happens, the leader ceases to learn new things, and when he ceases to learn new things, he becomes redundant. This is how many leaders cease to be leaders. The leader needs to be like an open pot – kept open so that it can catch every drop of rain that comes in its direction.

The Japanese speak of the mind of such leaders as the beginner’s mind. The beginner’s mind is the complete contrast to the scholar’s mind. The beginner’s mind has a lot of empty space in it so that new knowledge can be received. It is a highly receptive mind. Whereas the scholar’s mind is full and overflowing. Nothing new can enter it.

One of the most beautiful stories illustrating the contrast between the beginner’s mind and the scholar’s mind is about a Zen master and a university professor. It is said that the professor wanted to learn the wisdom of Zen from Nanin, a Japanese Zen master during the Meiji Era [1868-1912] and came to meet him in his monastery. The professor was famous for his scholarship and well known to Nanin by reputation. The master received the professor and offered him a seat. The professor took the seat and then started explaining to the master of the different subjects he has studied, the researches he has done, the papers he has presented in international conferences, what he is doing now, what his plans are for the future and so on. As the professor went on and on, talking about his pet subject – himself and his intellectual attainments – the master listened silently. Fifteen minutes passed, half an hour passed, and yet the professor kept talking.

Nanin now ordered one of his disciples to bring tea. When the tea was brought, the master started pouring the tea into a cup. The professor was still speaking. The cup was soon full. The professor continued talking and the master kept pouring the tea into the full cup which began to overflow. It was then the professor’s eye fell on what was happening. “Master,” he pointed out politely, “the cup is full and no more will go in.”

And Nanin said, “And so is your mind. If you want to learn Zen, you need emptiness inside. First empty yourself and then come to me.”

When a leader becomes full of himself, full of his knowledge and opinions, full of his own ego, then he ceases to learn and becomes redundant.

The beginner’s mind is the mind that sees wonder everywhere, beauty everywhere, and precious lessons everywhere.

With receptivity, a leader can learn from anyone, including his own subordinates and workers. In their brilliant book A Passion for Excellence, Tom Peters and Nancy Austin say: “Bosses don’t have all the answers. The worker who does the job always knows more about it than his boss. But all that he knows can’t be used unless he is free to talk about it. Especially to you, his boss.” Unless the leader is open to learn and shows that he is open to learning, the worker does not reveal his thoughts, ideas and experiences to him and the leader loses the opportunity to learn from him.

Speaking of willingness to learn from anyone reminds me stories told about the great sage Dattatreya. Dattatreya is a master who was willing to learn from anyone and anything and all life became his teacher for him.

It is said that one day Avadhuta Dattatreya was crossing a large field when he saw a wedding procession moving across the field. As wedding processions in India go, there was much noise as it moved on – drummers played on their drums, pipers played their pipes, the sound of symbols filled the air. Many people were singing and dancing – the singers raised their voices loud enough to be heard above the drums, pipes and symbols. There was much celebration as the party moved on and Dattatreya watched it with interest. All on a sudden his eyes fell on a hunter on the other side of the field. The man’s attention was fully on his prey. Neither the singing and dancing, nor the drums, pipes or symbols had distracted him from his prey.

Dattatreya, says the beautiful story, went to the hunter and bowed in reverence before him. The Avadhuta told him in a voice full of emotion, “Oh master, you are my guru. I have learnt a great lesson from you today. When I meditate in future, I shall strive to have the same focus on my goal that you have just taught me.”

In the Bhagavata, answering a question from King Yadu, Dattatreya tells him: "I am a student of Mother Earth; I am a student of the waters of the ocean; I am a student of the air that blows; I am a student of the sun that shines; I am a student of the moon that is luminous in the sky; I am a student of the honey-bees that collect the pollen-nectar from various flowers; I am a student of the fish; I am a student of the vulture." He then explains that he learnt patience and steadiness from the earth; equanimity from the ocean which neither swells up as rivers empty themselves into it nor dries up because the sun evaporates its water; freedom from the air that is on the move constantly; non-attachment from the space; and so on.

There is no place where there are no lessons for us to learn. I was giving a training programme to a group of Tata Steel officers when I came across this poster in the training hall. It was titled Seven Secrets of Success in My Room and it said:

The roof taught me: Aim high.
The fan taught me: Be cool.
The clock taught me: Every minute counts.
The Mirror taught me: Reflect before you act.
The window taught me: Be open to the world.
The calendar taught me: Be up-to-date.
The door taught me: Push hard to achieve your goals.

In the Mahabharata, we see that the great hero Arjuna is a constant learner and so is Yudhishthira, whereas Duryodhana exhibits a closed mind on numerous occasions in his life, which leads to his failure as a leader. His own mother Gandhari, his father Dhritarashtra, his uncle Vidura, Sage Vyasa, Sage Maitreya, Krishna himself and numerous others try to show him the light, but he closes his eyes tightly against it. Apart from his learning in the early years, through out his life Yudhishthira never misses an opportunity to learn – whether it is from the sages who visit him in the jungle, Bhishma in the bed of arrows, or whoever else. He had an insatiable hunger for knowledge. Realizing that the reason why he lost everything in the dice game is his own ignorance of the game rather than cheating by Shakuni, he learns to play dice from Rajarshi Brihadashwa. [It is not well known that the Mahabharata describes the dice not as a game of mere chance, but as one involving quick, advanced arithmetical calculations.]

As for Arjuna, in his early days he is taught by Ashwatthama and Drona. During the twelve-year stay of the Pandavas in the forest, Arjuna starts out on a journey of learning that takes many years. He learns Brahmastra from Shiva, and is educated by Chitrasena in the abode of Indra. The epic also tells us that he was a student of his friend and cousin Krishna. Of course, the Bhagavad Gita is lessons in living and fighting given to Arjuna by Krishna.

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Indian culture talks of three kinds of learners. Those who are like the lotus leaf, those who are like the hot plate and those who are like the mother-of-pearl.

A drop of water falls on the lotus leaf but the lotus leaf remains untouched by the drop. It never becomes part of the leaf, the leaf never digests it, it does not make it part of itself.

Some learners are like this. What they learn they retain, but it is never digested, never made their own. They can repeat it, they can reproduce it, but it does not really benefit them in any way. It is as though they had never learnt at all.

A drop of water falls on the hot plate and the hot plate absorbs it in an instant. The drop disappears, but again the hot plate is not able to make use of it.

Some learners are like the hot plate. They absorb everything, the things they learn are digested, but nothing great happens out of it. In their case too, learning has not really been useful.

A grain of sand enters the mother-of-pearl. And what comes out, is a precious pearl. The mother-of-pearl covers the grain of sand with its own secretions and transforms the simple grain into the sparkling pearl.

The highest kind of learner is like the mother-of-pearl, says Indian culture. Whatever he learns, he transforms it into far more precious things.

This is how all of us should be. This is how great leaders are.

Robert Bruce has lost seven battles and is hiding in a cave when he sees a spider taking a jump to reach a projecting rock so that he can build his nest up to it. He jumps and fails once, he takes a second jump and fails, he takes a third jump and fails again. By now Bruce is all attention. The spider makes seven attempts and fails in all them – exactly as Bruce had done. He too had failed seven battled. Bruce now holds his breath and watches. And as he expected, he spider takes an eighth jump and this time he succeeds. It is said that an inspired Bruce came out of the cave, challenged his enemies an eighth time and this time he won. This is a leader learning a simple lesson from an insect and transforming it into a precious victory.

Here is Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari and HP interested in his and Steve Wozniak’s computer in their early days: “So we went to Atari and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we’ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we’ll come work for you.’ And they said, ‘No.’ So we then went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t need you. You haven’t got through college yet.’”

That’s what happens when you do not have the beginner’s mind. You miss golden opportunities.

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