Shreyas, Preyas and Gregory Roberts' Shantaram

I have just begun reading Gregory David Robert’s recent classic and international bestseller Shantaram.

The Kathopanishad speaks of the twin concepts of shreyas and preyas – shreyas as lasting good and preyas as immediate satisfaction. For the Upanishad, shreyas is the road less travelled and preyas, the widely travelled road. Fools, says the teacher of the Upanishad, choose the path of preyas and wise ones, shreyas.

The Upanishad, of course, is speaking of shreyas and preyas in the ultimate sense, in the spiritual sense. But the concepts are applicable to all situations in life. For instance, since I teach a course in organizational leadership in one of India’s top business schools, I frequently talk about how an organization can go wrong by focusing on immediate satisfaction and forgetting long term good and how it can benefit from never losing sight of shreyas even when occupied with preyas. Reading Shantaram, I came across a beautiful passage, in which the author speaks about shreyas and preyas,, though the terms themselves are unknown to David for all I know.

On arrival in Bombay, Lindsay, the narrator and central character of the book, meets two Canadian tourists during their bus journey from the airport. Guided by a local guide, they take a room in an inexpensive hotel. It is a room with three beds that they share in order to save money. Later, in their room, one of the Canadians says:

““We could’a beat that manager down on the price of this room. It’s costin’ us six bucks for the day. We could’a beat him down to four. It’s not a lotta money, but it’s the way they do things here. You gotta beat these guys down, and barter for everything… You gotta beat ‘em down, man. If you don’t learn that, if you don’t start thinkin’ like that, they’re gonna fuck you over, these people. The Indians in the cities are real mercenary, man. It’s a great country, don’t get me wrong. That’s why we come back here. But they’re different than us. They’re ... hell, they just expect it, that’s all. You gotta beat ‘em down.””
In response, the author reflects:

“He was right about the price of the room, of course. We could’ve saved a dollar or two per day. And haggling is the economical thing to do. Most of the time, it’s the shrewd and amiable way to conduct your business in India.

“But he was wrong, too. The manager, Anand, and I became good friends, in the years that followed. The fact that I trusted him on sight and didn’t haggle, on that first day, that I didn’t try to make a buck out of him, that I worked on an instinct that respected him and was prepared to like him, endeared me to him.

“He told me so, more than once. He knew, as we did, that six of our dollars wasn’t an extravagant price for three foreign men to pay. The owners of the hotel received four dollars per day per room. That was their base line. The dollar or two above that minimum was all Anand and his staff of three room boys shared as their daily wage. The little victories haggled from him by foreign tourists cost Anand his daily bread, and cost them the chance to know him as a friend.”

I believe that is a beautiful lesson in shreyas vs preyas. You save a dollar, but you lose a friend.

I loved Gregory Roberts' final comment on this episode.

“The simple and astonishing truth about India and Indian people is that when you go there, and deal with them, your heart always guides you more wisely than your head. There’s nowhere else in the world where that’s quite so true.”

The problem with most of us is that we believe it is our head we should trust and not our heart; it is our head that is wiser, and smarter, than our heart. The head may be smarter than the heart, but it is rarely wiser than it and whenever there is a conflict, I have learnt that it is our heart that we should be guided by, rather than our head.

Incidentally, speaking from the standpoint of evolution, that part of our brain which we usually refer to as our heart, the seat of our impulses, instincts, feelings, emotions and so on, is much older than what we call our head. Our ‘head’ is the neo-cortex, the last part of our brain to evolve. Our ‘heart’ is situated in our mammalian brain, which is much older than the neo-cortex, and much wiser.

O0O

There is another important lesson for all of us who are willing to learn from life, and literature which is a mirror to life, here. A lesson in how we generate trust in people, a lesson in transforming our world.

An old, old Greek tale tells us that Aesop, of the Fables, was standing with his friends at the gates of Athens one day when a traveler from another city reached there. Seeing Aesop and his friends, the traveler greeted them and spoke to them. “Tell me,” said the traveler, “What kind of people live in Athens? Good people you can trust, or…” Aesop looked at the man for a moment or two and then said, “The worst kind! All rogues and criminals.” The man listened to the answer and moved on towards the city, since he had business there which could not be avoided.

Not five minutes had passed when another traveler reached the gates and asked the same question. Again Aesop looked at the man for a moment or so and said, “The best kind! You will find them the most wonderful people in the world.” With a happy smile, the man walked towards the city.

To one man Aesop had said that the people of Athens were the worst kind and to another he had said they were the most beautiful people in the world. And the two answers were given within five minutes of each other. Puzzled, one of his friends asked Aesop why he had done so.

And he said, “The people of our city are neither good nor bad. They are like people everywhere – a mixture of good and bad. But because of his negative disposition, to the first man they would be bad, and again, because of his disposition, to the second man, they would be wonderful people.”

Gregory Roberts observes in Shantaram:

“The fact that I trusted him on sight and didn’t haggle, on that first day, that I didn’t try to make a buck out of him, that I worked on an instinct that respected him and was prepared to like him, endeared me to him.”

Our world is created by us. It is we who make our world what it is to us. It is we who decide whether the world is trustworthy or not. We can transform the world into a wonderful place, or we can make it hell, depending on how we deal with it.

O0O

Gita, Ramana Maharshi and the Essential Man

In a passage very dear to my heart in A Sudden Clash of Thunder, Osho says: “All private goals are against the goal of the universe itself. All private goals are against the goal of the Whole. All private goals are neurotic. The essential man comes to know, to feel, that ‘I am not separate from the Whole and there is no need to seek and search for any destiny on my own. Things are happening, the world is moving – call it God – He is doing things. They are happening of their own accord. There is no need for me to make any struggle, any effort; there is no need for me to fight for anything. I can relax and be.’”

“This realization makes a man for the first time a little alert about his sleepiness, and then he starts moving more and more towards consciousness. When things are no longer important, only consciousness becomes important. When things are no longer significant, a new search, a new door opens. Then you are not rushing towards the without: you start slipping into the within. The kingdom of God is within. And once you drop identifying with things, suddenly you are no longer fighting—there is no point. You start moving with the river of existence.”

Osho then speaks of how you suddenly see everything is happening as it should once you start moving inward, how you see life is perfect and there is no way to improve upon it. “Then celebration starts,” he says. “When life is felt as perfect, when you suddenly see the tremendous beatitude, the tremendous glory surrounding you; when you suddenly see that you have always been at home—there was nowhere else to go; when you suddenly feel in your innermost core of being that you are with God and God is with you, that you are floating with the Whole, you don’t have a private destiny... the destiny of the Whole is your destiny also, so wherever this existence is moving, you are also moving. You don’t have any private goals.”

Earlier this morning I was going through Be As You Are, edited by David Godman. Be As You Are is a collection of the teachings of my param guru [teacher’s teacher] Sri Ramana Maharshi. Here answering a question about complete surrender, Maharshi says: “Complete surrender does require that you have no desire of your own. You must be satisfied with whatever God gives you and that means having no desires of your own.” Explaining surrender further, Maharshi says that surrender is complete only when you reach the stage `Thou art all' and `Thy will be done.'

According the Ramana Maharshi, the state of complete surrender is not different from jnana, spiritual knowledge born of self-realization, and the distinction between jnana and surrender is only illusory. For instance, speaking of the common feeling most people have that surrender is easier than jnana, Maharshi says: “Surrender appears easy because people imagine that once they say with their lips `I surrender' and put their burdens on their Lord, they can be free and do what they like. But the fact is that you can have no likes or dislikes after your surrender; your will should become completely non-existent, the Lord's will taking its place. The death of the ego in this way brings about a state which is not different from jnana. So by whatever path you may go, you must come to jnana or oneness.”

A question that naturally arises here is: Doesn’t renouncing all private goals make you ineffective in the world?

When Ramana Maharshi speaks of surrender and Osho speaks of the essential man, they are echoing what the Bhagavad Gita says. The Gita speaks of the spiritual man as a sarvarambha-parityagi, one who has renounced all beginnings. The concept of sarvarambha-parityagi is difficult to understand in the beginning, especially in today’s world when we are taught that one of the basic characters of an effective person is initiative. Doesn’t renouncing all beginnings make us men of zero initiative? Consequently, doesn’t that make us totally ineffective, since our effectiveness is directly proportionate to our initiative? And yet, that is what the Gita says: a spiritual man is a sarvarambha-parityagi, a renouncer of all beginnings.

I have always held that to understand the Gita properly, we should try to understand it along with understanding Krishna. That is, allow Krishna’s life to explain the Gita to us. What Krishna teaches us through the Gita is what he lived in his life. Krishna’s life is the greatest and the best commentary on the Gita.

And when we look at Krishna’s life, what we find is a man who is tirelessly active in the world. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a man more active than Krishna. To achieve his mission of establishing dharma in the world, we find Krishna constantly active, now negotiating for peace, now fighting a battle for dharma, now destroying an evil ruler who has been standing in the way of dharma. Now we find him killing his uncle Kamsa, the wicked ruler of Mathura, now getting Kala Yavana and Jarasandha killed, now fighting a battle with Salva the evil king of Saubha, now at Hastinapura trying to avoid the Mahabharata war and when the war becomes inevitable, aiding the Pandavas in the battle for dharma. True he takes a vow of not taking up weapons in the battle, but it is not as a passive driver of Arjuna’s chariot we find him as in the Mahabharata war, but as a very active individual, guiding not only Arjuna’s actions and but of the entire Pandava army. He is there with the Pandavas when Duryodhana hiding in a lake has to be located, challenged and killed; he is there when Dhritarawshtra tries to crush Bhishma in his arms; he is there when Ashwatthama has to be pursued; he is there when Gandhari wants to curse the Pandavas – and everywhere he is active. How do we then explain the meaning of the word sarvarambha-parityagi, one who has given up all beginnings, all initiative?

Speaking of Jesus in his beautiful book Jesus, the Son of Man, Kahlil Gibran says: “Jesus the Nazarene was born and reared like ourselves; his mother and father were like our parents, and he was a man. But the Christ, the Word, who was in the beginning, the Spirit who would have us live our fuller life, came unto Jesus and was with him. And the Spirit was the versed hand of the Lord, and Jesus was the harp. The Spirit was the psalm, and Jesus was the turn thereof. And Jesus, the Man of Nazareth, was the host and the mouthpiece of the Christ, who walked with us in the sun and who called us his friends.”

A sarvarambha-parityagi is like Jesus. He is like Krishna. Sarvarambha-parityagis become so empty of themselves, that they become vessels for the High. The music of the High flows through them as their music. Jesus becomes the mouthpiece of the Christ, the Word, who was in the beginning. Krishna becomes the avarata of God.

When you become a sarvarambha-parityagi, you become like Krishna’s flute.

Krishna’s flute does produce music. It produces the most enchanting music, which maddens with its beauty everyone who listens to it. The gopis of Vrindavan go crazy listening to it and, leaving their homes, go to dance with him on the banks of the Yamuna at midnight on moon-filled nights.

And yet that music is not of the flute. That music does not belong to the flute. That music is Krishna’s. The flute is just the emptiness – the hollowness – through which Krishna’s music can flow.

The sarvarambha-parityagi is exactly like that. He is active. Jesus was tirelessly active all his years on the earth. And so were Krishna and other great masters. But, as Krishna tells Arjuna in the Gita, he has nothing to achieve for himself in all the three words for there is nothing that he has not achieved: na me pārthāsti kartavyam trishu lokeshu kincana; nānavāptam avāptavyam vartaiva ca karmaNi ||BhG 3.22|| He becomes a vessel for the High, a vehicle for the High, a tool for the High. He is active, he performs actions, but those are not actions originating in him, but from the High. As for himself, as for actions originating from him, he has given them all up, along with his ego, his I-ness.

To ask again the question that was asked earlier: Doesn’t renouncing all private goals make you ineffective in the world?

The people who have given up private goals and become essential men are some of the most effective people the world has seen: Krishna, Jesus, Buddha, Mohammad – the list is long.

Their way is the way of the essential man.

O0O

A Wailing Womb, A Weeping Heart

It was another beautiful morning in the village. The sun had come up in the eastern sky and the village was now bright with a gentle glow. The cold hadn’t cleared fully, though Holi was over and people had stopped taking bath in warmed water. The bakul trees swayed gently in the soft breeze, as though in some light trance born of an intoxication of which only they knew the secret. Or maybe they were in some sweet dream of a near future when the sacred feet of a dark child would take steps under them, sending unspeakable ecstasies into their grateful hearts. Small herds of cows stood idly here and there, soaking the warmth of the early morning sun. Goats nibbled at tufts of grass growing here and there. Something told you that deep within, far beneath the serenity and beauty of it all, the morning hid some deep sorrow. Maybe, it was the distant hills that told you of it with their stoic silence: they seemed to be so still.

There were already a group of men under the banyan tree, some sitting and others standing in various poses. Their talk was whispered, as though they were afraid someone might overhear. And they were talking of what they always talked about these days – Kamsa and his wickedness. “The time for the incarnation has come,” one of them said. “True, it is impossible to tolerate Kamsa anymore,” added another. The others nodded their heads vigorously, fear making them look left and right with frightened eyes even as they did so.

It was time for me to go to fetch water from the Yamuna. This was the part of the day’s chores that we women enjoyed best. It was our own time, with no men around. The walk to the Yamuna took no more than fifteen minutes, and fifteen minutes to walk back. But we were never back before an hour – and it was certainly not filling water in the pots that we spent the remaining half hour. That was time when we shared among ourselves everything that women always shared. This part of the day made the rest of the day meaningful – just as sleep made the day meaningful. It put everything in its place. It cleansed us – of the worries, the pains, anger, disappointments of the day gone by. It was as though when we came back from this daily chore all that was sad and mournful that had been in us earlier was washed clean of us. Giving place to hope, to longings, to desires and yearnings, to all that made life beautiful. Making us feel as though we were born fresh. No woman in the village missed this part of the day if she could.

I called out to Sita, Durga, Uma and others of my neighborhood and we all took our pots in hand and started walking. From a few houses away we could hear Gauri calling the women of her neighborhood. Usually there were some twenty women in the group as we went to the Yamuna. I looked forward to this part of the day. I enjoyed the walk as much as I enjoyed the company and the talk, especially in weather as pleasant as this. It was a pleasure to lose myself to the music of anklets and bangles and the sounds of happy chatting as twenty of us walked together.

A cloud of disappointment floated into my mind when I thought that I would miss the walk soon – my pregnancy was fast advancing. But then, that disappointment was nothing compared to the joy of what was coming – this would be our first child. A thrill passed through me at the very thought – nothing, nothing in the world, is as thrilling to a woman as the birth of her first child. Marriage makes a girl a woman, true, but it is her first child that makes her truly appreciate what it means to be a woman.

Nanda wanted a girl. But I told him it was going to be a boy, for that is what I wanted. “A mother’s wish is always more important than a father’s,” I told him and he laughed.

Nanda always laughed. And I imagined him laughing with our child soon. He was a very cute child, our son – seemed to be made of butter. As I suckled him, a joy that I had never experienced seemed to fill me. An image floated into my mind: that of Nanda playing with him in our courtyard. He was chasing Nanda all over the courtyard, his laughter sounding like a hundred temple bells ringing all together. Then I was chasing him with a tiny stick in my hand, and he turned around and looked at me, smiling, and then continued to run. I threw the stick down and called him into my hands. He turned around and ran back, and jumped into my hands, laughing.

Peels of laughter.

Women’s laughter.

It was my friends. They were teasing me. They were looking at me with eyes full of mirth, trying hard to control their laughter and failing miserably. There was no need for words – they knew where I was lost and I knew they knew it.

O0O

Yamuna was still flowing in her sleep and I felt bad about waking her up. There was such calm about the way she flowed. That was another reason why I loved the Yamuna. She was always so serene, as though nothing could upset her. As though she had surrendered to existence and accepted whatever life brought to her. The eternal journey had its ups and downs, but nothing affected her rhythm. She flowed on in a tranquility that was amazing. Oftentimes I have just come here, either alone or with just a single friend, to sit quietly on her banks and allow her serenity to flow into me. I loved it.

We had already washed our hands and feet and then entering the Yamuna filled our pots when I suddenly heard a wail from across the river.

Looking up, I saw a woman standing alone on the other bank. It was she who was wailing.

I had never heard a woman wailing like that, so deep, so tortured, was her sorrow. It did not seem to be coming from her heart, but from some part of her far deeper than her heart, maybe her soul itself. The cry of a woman’s unutterable anguish. Anguish so terrible it was as though not one, but a hundred, a thousand, maybe a million women were wailing. As though every female soul on earth was wailing at once.

The sorrow in every woman’s heart, past and present, came out in that woman’s wail.

And then I heard the trees around her wailing with her. I heard the kadambas, the mangoes, banyans, peepals, jamuns, all wailing with her. The bamboos in every thicket began to wail with her. Then I heard the ashokas, the mandaras, jabas, kaminis, champas on the banks of the Yamuna wailing with her. Now the distant hills joined her tortured soul’s wail. And from nearby I suddenly heard the Yamuna herself wailing. The wind was wailing. All earth and the sky were wailing.

When I looked into the eyes of my friends, there were tears in them. They stood motionless in the weeping Yamuna, tears running down their cheeks.

It was the lament of life I heard coming out from that woman across the river. All existence wailing.

Perhaps this was how Sita wailed when Rama abandoned her in the jungle, I thought.

I left my pot on the ground and walked towards the woman, wading across the Yamuna. As the waters of the Yamuna touched me, I felt shaken as I had never been shaken.

Across the river I held the woman to my breasts for a long, long time, until her wails became silent sobs that shook me with their agony. Then I led her to a large stone under a kadamba tree.

I asked her of her sorrow.

It took her a long time to be able to speak.

And then she told me of Kamsa. She told me of the first child of hers whom Kamsa held by its feet and dashed against a rock, scattering its brains all over. And of her second child. And of her third child. And of her fourth child. And of her fifth child. And of her sixth child… Each of whom Kamsa had held by its feet and dashed against a rock, their white brains mixed with red infant blood scattering all over the empty courtyard where he had done it.

Then she told her about her seventh child whom she had lost before he was born.
And then she was unable to continue. She just sat there, the woman who had given birth again and again and had witnessed the heads of her infants being dashed against rocks by her brother.

Her hands lay over her swollen stomach, protectively. They shook in terror, in unspeakable sorrow.

My body trembled as my heart’s weeping became unbearable.

I made her stand up. I stood before her. I took her hands from her stomach and placed them against my own swollen stomach.

And I told her: Your child shall live. Mine shall die for his sake.

Devaki looked at me with disbelieving eyes. With horror-filled eyes. With eyes that held more sorrow than before. A thousand times more sorrow. And bottomless horror.

I took her by her hand and led her into the waters of Mother Yamuna. There, standing knee deep in Yamuna’s dark, sacred waters, I pledged solemnly: Devaki, your eighth child shall live. My child shall die for his sake.

Walking back across the river with unwavering steps, I no more felt the pressure of water against my legs. Looking down I saw the waters of the Yamuna had parted and given me way.

I walked on wet sand over which the Yamuna had flowed until a moment ago. Flowed ceaselessly for a hundred thousand years.

Now she had parted to give me way.

Surging waters waited on both sides as I walked along the path she had made for me.

From the riverbanks, I heard the music of numberless birds that had suddenly begun to sing in a sweet chorus.

Heaven showered a slight drizzle on me.

The child in my womb moved.

I heard a voice calling me Mother.

The voice had come from the middle of the river.

Looking up, I saw the Mother of the Universe looking at me.

The smile in her eyes was beautiful beyond words.

Note: The story retold here comes from a traditional Bhojpuri song.

Understanding Mahabharata: The Riddle of Pandu 4

In the Mahabharata, and in fewer details in the Ramayana, we have the story of Kalmashapada. Kalmashapada was an ancestor of Rama who had received a curse from his guru Vasishtha which transformed him into a Rakshasa. While living his accursed life as a Rakshasa, Kalmashapada meets a Brahman youth and his young wife in a forest. The couple were in the jungle making love and they had not yet completed their act when they saw the Rakshasa and ran away. Kalmashapada caught the brahmana, and the brahmani begged him not to eat him up. She told him of how she was in her ritu, how desperate they were for a child, how they hadn’t finished their mating act and therefore he should spare her husband. Kalmashapada did not heed her and went ahead and ate up the Brahmin youth. Angirasi, the brahmani, wept bitter tears – and so deep was her pain that as each drop of her tears fell on the ground, it became a blazing fire and burnt up the place.

The brahmani then cursed Kalmashapada. He had interrupted her and her husband making love and killed her husband. He would not be able to make love to his wife any more – if he ever made love to his wife during her ritu, the period sanctioned for lovemaking, he would die. Almost the identical curse as Pandu received and for almost identical reasons. It is this curse that made it impossible for Kalmashapada to have sex with his wife Madayanti and forced him to offer her to the sage Vasishtha for niyoga.

Like Kalmashapada, Pandu too carried a curse on him. His impotence was the result of that curse – but that curse was not given by Kimdama. Pandu was cursed long before he killed the deer. His curse was a result of his very restrictive upbringing concerning sex, his negative attitudes toward sex, the traumatic sexual experience of his mother the trauma of which he had internalized, unconscious feelings of sexual hostility, fear, guilt.

Do insights from psychology or psychopathology explain why Pandu killed the deer engaged in coitus? They do. Annals of criminology are full of crimes committed by men who have negative attitudes towards sex, have deep unconscious feelings of sexual hostility and guilt, have been forced to suppress or repress sex for one reason or other, have an unsatisfactory sexual life, whose natural sexual longings have remained unfulfilled. Lust killings, sex murder – these are terms used for acts like what Pandu did, though crime literature mostly talks about acts committed against humans.

Perhaps these insights would also explain his fury in the battlefields that made Pandu ‘reduce his enemies to ashes”, though this could be a very natural thing to do for a kshatriya and a prince in those days. But it is a fact that Pandu derived pleasure from killing – he devoted in entire life after the world conquest to hunting, which is something few other kings have done, if any.

O0O

Why did Pandu choose Arjuna’s birthday to take Madri into the quietude of the jungle and to make love to her there, meeting his death in the process? Why did he choose the precise moment when priests were chanting sacred incantations invoking divine blessings on Arjuna, the precise moment when brahmanas were being served a feast? Was Arjuna’s birthday no occasion for celebration for Pandu? Was he registering his protest against the celebration, and against Arjuna and Kunti, by walking away from the feast of which he was the host and hence shouldn’t have left? If so, what was he protesting against? The questions we had asked earlier.

For those who are not fully conversant with the Mahabharata, the epic says it was the uttara phalguna day on which Arjuna had completed fourteen years when the Brahmins were chanting mantras and a feast was being offered celebrating the birthday when Pandu took the beautiful Madri away into the jungle. When he should have been with his family, when he as the host had an important role to play and should have been receiving the Brahmins and joining them in the rituals and the feast, Pandu quietly slipped out of the place taking his younger wife with him. Kunti failed to notice this because she was busy serving the meals to the brahmanas.

Ancient Indian tradition forbade sex during the daytime.

The epic tells us he did so because he was overpowered by sex – kamamohita. He certainly could have been. But there is also another side to it – the day and time he chose speaks of other possibilities. He must have been frustrated. It is possible that in spite of his urging Kunti and later Madri to give him sons through niyoga, he really hated the niyogas and felt little affection for them. The niyogas must definitely have been humiliating for him, as being forced to offer his wife to other men for begetting children would be to any man. Yet he did it for the sake of his afterworlds, so that his ancestors did not blame him of not paying back the debt to the manes, pitr-rna, and maybe perhaps because the eldest of them could inherit the throne. But it is also possible that more than his desire for children it was his wives’ desire for them that impelled him, though the Mahabharata does not say so. Women’s longing for children is usually stronger than men’s – for while for man children are a need, for women it is the fulfillment of their being women. It is possible that in spite of what the epic tells us and contrary to what we are told by it, it was Kunti who was desperate for children rather than Pandu and it was she who persuaded him to allow her to have children by other men. Pandu could have resented this deeply, though he could not say no to the strong-willed Kunti, and later to Madri when she sought permission to walk on the path shown by Kunti.

That his children are not his children is not something that many men would be able to tolerate. So Pandu rejects the birthday celebrations, rejects the birthday child, rejects the mother of the birthday child, and goes to the jungle taking his ‘softer’ other wife to the jungle with him exactly when Brahmins are being served at home. And on that day, for the first time in his life, in the passion given by his bitterness and loneliness, his frustration and fury, he succeeds in making love to her there, surrounded by nature in estrus. His success must have surprised even him, filled him with unspeakable thrill, uncontrollable rapture. One moment he is deep in the abysses of bitterness and fury, and the next he is in the heavenly heights of the thrill of his first successful lovemaking. From those heights to which he had soared for the first time in his life, he plunges straight into his death.

There was years of bitterness in him. Suppressed day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, until Arjuna has completed fourteen years. And then, as the birthday celebration is going on, violence possesses him, and the explosion takes place.
Pandu is one of the most tragic figures in Indian literature. His is the tale of innocence punished for the crimes of others. He carries a curse with him – the burden of the knowledge of the story of his birth, of his lineage, which makes his life hell. Pandu’s life eloquently portrays how our life is not all in our hands, how so many factors beyond our control give it direction, something we are loath to admit today. Our past has a strong say in making us what we are, in making our life what it is – and that past includes our parents’ past too. We carry on our shoulders the burden, and the honor, of their actions.

Just as our children will do those of ours.

In the spiritual interpretation of the Mahabharata, Vyasa’s four sons are embodiments of the four purusharthas – goals of human life. Shuka is the embodiment of the paramapurushartha, of moksha, liberation; Vidura of dharma, righteousness; and Dhritarashtra of artha, wealth and possessiveness. Pandu, this interpretation tells us, is the embodiment of kama, desire. He is lust embodied.

Impotent kama, perhaps.

Or maybe perhaps Vyasa wants to tell us that kama is always impotent in the ultimate analysis, in spite of the fact all creation springs from it.

Impotent kama, insatiable kama. Kama that can never give us ultimate contentment.

Na jAtu kAmah kAmAnAm upabhogena shAmyate,
havishA krishnavartmeva bhooya evAbhivardhate.

Never indeed is kama satiated by the enjoyment of desired objects; instead, like fire when offerings are made into it, it keeps flaring up.

Until impotent desire consumes the desirer himself.

O0O

Understanding Mahabharata: The Riddle of Pandu 3

A possible answer is: for the same reasons as turned him impotent.

There is every reason to believe that Pandu’s impotence was psychological. Pandu was physically fit. He was a mighty warrior who was a terror to his enemies. Except for the paleness of his skin, there is no mention of any physical deficiency in him. And his death comes while engaged in an act of sex with his wife. All these point at his impotence having been psychological and not physical.

Are there then psychological reasons that could have caused impotence in Pandu?
Literature on the psychopathology of impotence tells us that while impotence may have physical causes in males over forty, it is almost always of psychological origin in males under forty; that psychopathological impotence may be associated with a very restrictive upbringing concerning sex, negative attitudes toward sex, negative or traumatic sexual experiences and other deep-seated causal factors such as unconscious feelings of hostility, fear, inadequacy, or guilt.

Could Pandu’s impotence have risen from any of these sources? To answer that question we will have to look into Pandu’s past – particularly into his early years as a child when he was most impressionable and into the years when he was an adolescent and his sexuality was blossoming. Unfortunately the Mahabharata gives us no details of these years and for that reason all that we can do is conjuncture about them.

As we all know, Pandu was the son born to Vyasa and Ambalika through the custom of niyoga. His mother had become a widow at the death of Prince Vichitraveerya. When he met with his early death due, according to the epic, to overindulgence in sex with his two wives, Ambika and Ambalika, he had produced no offspring. The illustrious line of the Kuru-Bharatas was now without a man qualified to sit on the throne on which such legendary kings as Manu, Puroorava, Nahusha, Yayati, Dushyanta, Bharata, Hastin, Ajameedha, Kuru, and Shantanu had sat, without a head to wear their proud crown.
Devavrata Bheeshma was there, of course, but he had taken the vow not to sit on the throne though he would stand by it. The Kurus were desperately in need of a prince.
It was Bheeshma whom Satyavati approached first – she must have felt that now that her father’s greed had come to naught and Bheeshma’s vows had been rendered meaningless by mighty time, he should take the reigns of the kingdom into his own hands to which they had originally belonged. Bheeshma refused – vows were vows and he would not break them, come what may. Perhaps it was the bitterness in him speaking, perhaps this is what had become of him because of that bitterness or maybe he had become really Bheeshma – the aura around his vows had imprisoned him in its awesome glare. Whatever the reason, Bheeshma decided his vow and himself were greater than the desperate need of the Kuru-Bharata empire and refused both to marry and beget children and to perform niyoga in Vichitraveerya’s ‘fields’ and produce offspring. Eventually Vyasa had to be called in and this other half-brother of Vichitra had to do the niyoga in spite of his reluctance.

The niyoga was not a happy incident for Pandu’s mother Ambalika just as it was not for her sister Ambika, Dhritarashtra’s mother, either. While in the case of Ambika she did not know it was the sage who would be performing the niyoga, in the case of Ambalika, she in all probability knew it would be the sage who would be coming to her. But in spite of that knowledge, when the sage entered her room and approached her bed, she was horrified and turned pale.

The act of conceiving Pandu was an act of indescribable horror and repugnance to his mother. So great was the repugnance and horror the sisters felt that they refused to undergo the torture a second time and when forced, sent a maid in their place. And after conceiving and giving birth to Pandu, Ambalika, like her sister after conceiving and giving birth to Dhritarashtra, withdrew into a shell from which she never came out.

It is unlikely that Pandu grew up without hearing palace rumors about his birth. In a place packed with maids and slaves as the palace of Hastinapura was, it is impossible that this did not happen to a child who had no father and was totally neglected by his mother. It should not surprise us if he had heard, or at least overheard, what happened in some graphic details. The incident involves niyoga, it involves sex between a young widowed princess and a sage and such stuff is ideal for gossip.

How a young sensitive mind would react to such talk he hears is impossible to predict and Pandu was definitely a very sensitive child and later a very sensitive man. In Pandu’s case it appears that the result was an unconscious horror of sex, for what he heard about his own mother. The images that the gossip he heard generated must have been played repeatedly over and over again in his mind, rendering him eventually psychologically impotent. It is not impossible that every time he approached one of his wives, the image of his mother, of the horrible experience she was subjected to, images of his mother’s horror and aversion at the moment of his conception, all rushed into his mind.

From the picture of him that the Mahabharata presents to us, Pandu appears to have been a man capable of great love, at least to begin with. As a child he must have loved his mother deeply, as is shown by his act of offering at her feet part of the wealth he had brought from the conquest. Listening to all those stories from palace gossip, stories that could have been very confusing to a child, he must have felt like countless other children that sex was something horrid that men did to women. It wouldn’t be surprising if he had felt he too had a share in subjecting his mother to that horrid act – partly because he was a male and partook of the crime of all males towards women and partly because his mother had to undergo it all for his sake, so that he could be born. The result would have been guilt – powerful guilt.

I wonder what Bheeshma’s effect on the child and adolescent Pandu could have been with regard to his sexual development. The Mahabharata tells us that it was Bheeshma who mostly brought him up. Here was a man who had become a legend in his own lifetime – more for denying sex to himself than for other things, though there certainly were other great achievements to his credit. The whole world looked up at him with awe. He had said no to women once and then, even when begged to break his vow, stuck to his vow. The Mahabharata does not tell us what his relations with Satyavati were – when Shantanu saw her and fell hopelessly in love with her, Devavrata had already been officially appointed the crown prince and what she had done was to snatch away from his head that crown of yuvaraja.

The Mahabharata does not tell us if he hated her for this, if he hated all women because of this. It is possible that he did, considering how adamantly he stuck to his vow of having nothing to do with women, though he was always perfectly gentlemanly and chivalrous in his behavior towards them. Perhaps his forcing Gandhari to marry his blind nephew Dhritarashtra and his capturing by force and bringing to Hastinapura the three Kashi princesses from their swayamvara hall speak of his contempt for women, though these actions were not very rare in his days. The vow that he would never fight a woman too speaks of his dislike and contempt for women.

Also relevant to our discussion is Bheeshma’s attitude towards women in general as expressed in a chapter in the Anushasana Parva [Ch 38], though it is possible that this discussion does not really represent Bheeshma’s views on women at all and is a philosophical discussion added later to the epic in his name. At the opening of this chapter, Yudhishthira tells Bheeshma that women are the root of all evil and it has been said that they are mean-minded. He then asks Bheeshma to tell him about the nature of women. In answer, Bheeshma quotes the answer the Apsara Panchachooda had given Narada who had asked her the same question. What follows is a downright condemnation of women. We are told that even pretty women with husbands, born in noble families, do not remain within bounds. Once they get an opportunity to meet outsiders, they do not bother even for husbands who are famous, rich and endowed with unparalleled handsomeness, even when these husbands do everything to please them. Women can give themselves to the greatest sinners, without feeling any shame about it. There is no man woman wouldn’t give themselves to – his age, his other conditions, nothing matters to them; all that is needed is that he be a male. He may be a deformed dwarf, it does not matter; he may be nauseatingly repulsive, that does not matter. All that matters to women is that he is male. And if men are not available to satisfy their lust, women will have no hesitation to seek sexual pleasure from other women. For, women are just never satiated sexually; with them it is as fire is never satiated with wood, the ocean is never satiated with rivers, death by consuming mortals.

Panchachooda has words to say about the nature of women which I am reluctant to quote here – so blunt and crude is she in her description of the evil that women are. Death, fierce storms, the evil world underground, massive all consuming conflagrations, the sharp edges of weapons, poison, fierce snakes – weigh all these against just woman on the other side and woman would be no less than all these terrors put together, says Panchachooda in words that Bheeshma approves of and quotes to Yudhishthira answering his question.

Years of almost single-handed upbringing by Bheeshma who held such views on women, upbringing by the man from whom a fishermaid had snatched away the throne of the crown prince of an empire that was already his because his father in his old age had contemptuously fallen in love with her, by the man who for the sake of his father’s lust for her had to take the terrible vow of life-long continence, by the man who had the very vicious and distasteful experience with Amba that eventually forced him to engage his own guru in a fierce battle, couldn’t have but left its marks on the tender soul of the growing child Pandu.

And if all this is not enough, consider the two references to his lineage Pandu makes immediately after killing the deer in coitus and feeling guilty about it: He says he is the son of the kamatma Vichitraveerya, the prince whose soul itself was lust, born to him in his kshetra, ‘field’, begotten by Vyasa.

What is the legacy of Vichitraveerya that Pandu considers himself an heir to? Lust. Lust that brought death. Lust in which Eros and Thanatos met. The adolescent Vichitra was so enamored by the two beautiful princesses whom his half-brother had brought for him that he spent his days and nights in a single passion – making love to them, which eventually lead to his death. Vichitra also brought with him the legacy of an old emperor’s lust for a young maid – Shantanu’s lust for the fishermaid Satyavati. And Satyavati herself is a product of lust. King Uparichara had gone to the jungle on a hunting trip rejecting his wife’s invitation to him to go to bed with her. She had made her desire known to him through a message she had sent him informing him she had just had her ritual bath after her monthly periods and was eagerly waiting for him in their bedchamber. In the jungle the king was unable to control his lust – all around him nature stood bathed in all her estrous glory, the mating calls of birds filled the air around him thick with the scent of passion. Satyavati was the child born to that king who had lost control over himself, born to an apsara living as a fish in the Yamuna according to the Mahabharata – in all probability a fishergirl who satisfied the king’s lust of the moment.

This is a legacy of lust – straight and unmixed with anything else. The other lineage he speaks of is perhaps more confusing. Vichitra’s biological father is Vyasa – born of sage Parashara’s lust for the fish-smelling Kali-Satyavati, lust that was unwilling to wait even so long as it takes for Kali and the sage to cross the river. Their union took place in the boat itself, right in the middle of the river. Vyasa brings in his blood the irrepressible lust of Parashara and of Uparichara Vasu. But at the same time, Vyasa is an ascetic too – a man who had his sexuality under control, though he too had slipped once, thus begetting his son Shuka. Pandu’s Vyasa lineage is thus both of lust and asceticism.

A very restrictive upbringing concerning sex, negative attitudes toward sex, negative or traumatic sexual experiences, though at second-hand, other deep-seated factors such as unconscious feelings of hostility, fear, and guilt… Pandu seems to have had his share of all these elements that cause psychopathological impotence – and a rich share of them at that.

To be continued…

Understanding Mahabharata: The Riddle of Pandu 2

The second marriage should have been after some time and there should have been an important reason behind it. It was not a love marriage but an arranged one, a political alliance does not seem to have been a necessity, which leaves us one other strong possibility. The marriage had failed to produce what the Kuru-Bharata family needed more urgently than anything else: an heir to Pandu, in case anything happened to the young king. The Kunti-Pandu marriage had failed to produce offspring, which would be the case if Pandu had been impotent from the beginning. Bheeshma, who had no idea that Kunti was already a mother before her marriage, must have assumed this could be because of some fault with her – the woman is the first suspect in such cases and getting a second wife is the easiest solution for the man, particularly for a king. He might not even have considered the possibility that Pandu was impotent. And Pandu might not have revealed it himself, nor Kunti. So Bheeshma goes ahead and gets Madri as a second wife for Pandu.

It also explains why Pandu left on a world conquest thirty nights after his wedding with Madri. The Mahabharata tells us it is exactly after thirty nights that he left on the conquest – and the words used are not thirty days, but thirty nights: the nights of a whole month. It must have been a terrible whole month for an impotent Pandu. He had now two gorgeous wives, each as beautiful as a goddess, and yet there was nothing he could do in their beds since he was impotent. A bitter, frustrated, furious Pandu gathers up his army and leaves on a world conquest. He had failed to prove his manhood in his bed, but he had to prove it somewhere, and now he could prove it in the battlefield. Pandu was savage in the battlefield, as we should expect him to be, the Mahabharata tells us. He does not just win battles, but ‘burns his rivals to ashes.’ He then comes back victorious bringing with him enormous wealth.

We all have a need to compensate for our failures. I remember an incident from my own life – I was young then, twenty-one. One day two of my friends swam across the Ganga in Rishikesh at a spot where the river is at its most dangerous, the current swiftest. They were not professional swimmers but young monks. And they swam across the Ganga without any kind of protection whatsoever. On a whim, they just decided to do it. And when I wanted to do what they had done, they told me not to, they had just narrowly escaped with their lives. And not only that, they warned me they would break off their friendship with me if I attempted it – they were afraid for my life. Eventually I decided to do something on my own – as an act of compensation. One night I walked into a lonely cremation ground, and spent an entire night all alone there. I hadn’t informed any one of this, not even my two friends. There was no human being in sight as I walked into the cremation ground. My only company was the silent mountains and the eternal song of the Ganga nearby, which made the eerie silence of the night even deeper, and the cold Himalayan wind whistling in my ears. The cremation ground had no keeper, no attendant. Remains of small fires burnt in one or two places. I had to prove me to myself and that is what I did.

Coming back to the Mahabharata, the epic uses a very unusual expression to describe the triumphant Pandu on his return to Hastinapura: punar-mudita-vāhanah. On this return journey to Hastinapura, ‘his vehicles were happy – once again’. That is to say Pandu was once again happy and even his vehicles, his horses, his elephants, all, reflected his happiness. The words ‘once again’ are significant: they speak of previous unhappiness. It was not a happy Pandu that had left on the conquest, but an unhappy one. Unhappy because he had failed to prove himself a man in his royal bed chamber. Happy because he had now proved himself a man in the battlefield. The bitterness, the frustration, the fury in him has been exhausted – at least for the time being.
Incidentally, I love the expression punar-mudita-vāhanah – what a beautiful way to describe the situation!

What happened next is also explained by the fact that he was impotent from the beginning. Pandu does not add the conquered wealth to the treasury of the Kuru-Bharatas, as we would expect him to have done. Instead he distributes it all among Bheeshma, Satyavati, Ambika, Ambalika, Vidura, his friends and so on. It is as though he wanted them all to see the amount of wealth he had won, the glory he had attained – and certify how much of a man he was. The wealth is so much that we are told Dhritarashtra later performed a hundred ashwamedha sacrifices with it.
Now he does one of the strangest things ever. Following the urging of his wives, he decides to leave the kingdom and go to the jungle with them, to live his life there engaged in hunting! Pandu is the ruler of Hastinapura, the long-awaited ruler, he has just taken over the reigns of the kingdom in his hands, he has proved himself to be competent as a king by successfully waging battles in a conquest of the directions, and immediately after that he decides to leave the kingdom behind and go and live in the jungle with his wives. And he has no motivation like what Ashoka later would feel post the Kalinga war.

His mother, among others, who, to bring him into this world so that the Kuru line would not come to an end and will have a legitimate ruler, had to submit herself to the abomination of a niyoga which she found repulsive and shrank away from with all her being, must have been shocked by Pandu’s decision.

Why did Pandu do something like that? A strong possibility that comes to mind is that he did not want Bheeshma to bring him yet another wife. He had no answer to the accusing glances of his mother and grandmother, and the man who had brought him up like a son – his uncle Bheeshma. Maybe others too questioned him, some in words and some by other means, enquiring when the baby princes were coming. As it happens in every family. He had no answer to them. He must have discussed this with his wives, from whom he could not have hidden the facts of the matter. They in their wisdom and understanding advised him to leave everything and go to the jungle and live with them there. No one would torment him there.

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If Pandu had been impotent all along, then it is not because of the curse of the sage that he was forced to have his children begotten by other men. Is the story of the curse by the sage then not real? Did nothing like that ever take place? Is the story an attempt to cover up Pandu’s impotence from the beginning, to find an ‘acceptable’ reason for it?
Well, the entire story need not be a lie. But it looks like part of it is definitely a lie: the part that says that it is the curse of the sage who had changed himself into a deer that made it impossible for Pandu to have sexual relations with his wives. That part may be a later addition to the story of what Pandu actually did to the deer couple. What could have happened is that Pandu saw a male and a female deer in coitus in the jungle and shot them dead. Just that much.

But then why would, as we asked earlier, a cultured man like Pandu, a scion of the noble Bharata dynasty, do such a thing as that?

To be continued…
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Understanding Mahabharata: The Riddle of Pandu

I once saw a male and a female deer united in coitus. I can still vividly recall the scene from decades ago because the details are indelibly etched in my mind – so radiant was the sight. There was the deer park, with a tall fence of wire mesh around it, surrounded by large trees in verdant green. In the distance was a hillock and nearby, a large lake with branches of ancient trees bending into it under which I often sat with a book in my hand as the sun serenely journeyed towards the ocean in the western sky. The mating deer couple stood there, the front legs of the male over the doe, their bodies united. The female was absolutely still, not a muscle moved in her body, her eyes did not blink; and in those eyes, in her entire body you could see total surrender, surrender to the act that was going on, surrender to life, surrender to existence. She was no more she then, she had lost her individuality, her identity as an individual animal, and had become one with her Mother, with Mother Nature; she had ceased to exist as separate from her. It looked as though she was in some deep trance, a trance that had filled her being with the bliss of surrender to the total. The movement of life all around the united couple, the quiet, unhurried movement of the other deer in the park as they nibbled small grass here and there, the gentle swinging of the trees in the soft breeze, all seemed to add to the stillness in which the doe stood.

The Mahabharata tells us Pandu saw exactly this same sight when he was out hunting one day. The next moment he took out five sharp arrows, golden and shining, with beautiful feathers attached to them, and shot the male and the female. The male, who was a sage who had changed himself into a deer, the epic tells us, cursed Pandu in his moments of death that Pandu would meet with his death when he made love to his wife because he had killed him while he was engaged in coitus.

Pandu had seen the deer couple was engaged in sex – the Mahabharata makes it very clear. He killed them seeing with his eyes that they were making love. Kimdama, the sage who had transformed himself into the deer, tells Pandu what he had done was unthinkable – not even men totally devoid of all intelligence, men who were constantly engaged in sin, men who had no control over their lusts and anger, would do what he had done. Killing a male and a female while they were engaged in coitus is truly unheard of. How could a king of the Bharatas, a royal family so rooted in righteousness, do such a thing?

The question Kimdama asked Pandu puzzled me for a long, long time. In my attempt to understand Pandu and the nature of his action, I read repeatedly all that the Mahabharata tells us about Pandu. And the deeper I delved into his life and his personality, the more puzzled I became. Everything about Pandu seemed to be a riddle.
For instance, why would a young prince after spending thirty nights with his new wife and with an earlier wife, leave them and go on a world conquest in which he ruthlessly, to use the words of the Mahabharata, reduces ‘his rival kings to ashes’? Why would that young prince, the long awaited occupant of the throne of the Kuru-Bharatas, adored by all, immediately after completing a world conquest, at the height of his glory, leave everything behind and go to the forest taking his two wives with him to make hunting his full time occupation? The Mahabharata tells us that his wives advised him to do so. Why would two young wives of a lustrous young king ask him to leave behind his kingdom and all its comforts as well as the challenge and responsibility of ruling it and go and live in the forest, spending his time hunting?

And there were other riddles.

Pandu had to ask his wives to beget children for him with the help of other men through the ancient custom of niyoga. Why exactly did he have to do that? Was it because of the curse of Kimdama? Or had Pandu been impotent all along? How exactly did he die? And the day he chose to die: the fourteenth birthday of his son Arjuna. And the time: It is while mantras were being chanted by a group of brahmanas and Kunti was serving a feast to other brahmanas that Pandu leads Madri away into the quietude of the jungle where he later makes love to her and meets with his death.

Why did he do that? Was Arjuna’s birthday no occasion for celebration for Pandu? Was he registering his protest against the celebration, and against Arjuna and Kunti, by walking away from the feast of which he was the host and hence shouldn’t have left? If so, what was he protesting against?

My first clue came from a verse in the epic. As Pandu lay dead after engaging in sex with his younger wife Madri, Kunti who comes rushing to the scene blames her for their husband’s death. And then she says: “Blessed are you, Madri, and more fortunate than I am. For, you were able to see the face of the king in raptures.” (DhanyA tvam asi bAhleeki matto bhAgyatarA tathA, drshtavatyasi yad vaktram prahrshtasya maheepateh – Adi 124.21). Kunti was referring to the ecstasy of a sexual climax that still lingered on the dead Pandu’s face – an expression Kunti was familiar with on other men’s faces, on the faces of the four different men who had fathered her children, but was never lucky to see on the face of Pandu, her husband.

The Mahabharata takes care to tell us that a smile lingered on Pandu’s face even in his death.

Kunti had never once in her life seen Pandu’s face lost in the throes of sexual ecstasy. She had never once seen on his face that post-coital smile of contentment that was there in his death.

And yet nothing in the Mahabharata tells us that Pandu had rejected her sexually. From all we know, he was deeply in love with her from the day she chose him for a husband to the last day of his life. So if this first wife of his, this beautiful woman he had obtained for himself in a swayamvara and had brought home proudly, the woman he had lived with in regal comforts in Hastinapura and in the loneliness of jungles and mountains, the woman who was his constant companion all through his lonely, tortured life, hadn’t once seen his face in that condition in all their life together, and that in spite of Pandu being desperate for children, then the conclusion is clear and inevitable: Pandu was impotent all through his married life.

That explains a lot of things about Pandu. For instance, it explains why Bheeshma was in a hurry to get a second wife for him. The Mahabharata does not tell us how long it was before Bheeshma went and got Madri for Pandu as a second wife, paying a bride price to her brother Shalya as the Madra-Bahleeka custom demanded. It just tells us a word that means ‘then’ or ‘afterwards’ in the beginning verse of a new chapter – this ‘then’ could be immediately after the Kunti-Pandu marriage, it could be sometime later too. Getting young Pandu a second wife as soon as he had obtained for himself one wife does not make sense, unless it was meant to be an urgent political alliance, which it does not look like. Besides, Bheeshma would have been very, very reluctant to offer his nephew two young beautiful wives at the same time – he had done it with Pandu’s father Vichitraveerya and the consequences were disastrous.

Vichitra had become so obsessed with his two pretty queens that he spent his entire time in sex with them and eventually died of the dreaded royal disease of the day, rajayakshma, all the royal physicians from the kingdom and abroad failing to save his life. It is this death that had made necessary the hated niyogas which produced Dhritarashtra, Pandu and Vidura. It is extremely unlikely that a once scalded Bheeshma would want to repeat his experience so soon again.

To be continued…
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