A King’s Lust and the Birth of Vyasa’s Mother

Vyasabharata 1

naaraayaNam namaskRtya naram caiva narottamam
deviim sarasvatiim vyaasam tato jayam udiirayet

A verse in the first chapter of the Adi Parva of the Mahabharata speaks of three ancient traditions of reading the epic: one beginning at the beginning of the text as it exists today with the prayer narayanam namaskritya, another beginning with the Astika Parva and a third one, beginning with the story of King Uparichara Vasu, Vyasa’s grandfather.

When we begin at the beginning of the text as it exists today, we begin with how Ugrashrava Sauti, son of Lomaharshana, narrated the epic to the ascetics present at Shaunaka’s twelve-year long sacrifice at Naimisharanya. And when we begin with Astika Parva, we begin twelve chapters later, with the story of the ascetic Jaratkaru and the birth of Astika who stops the snake sacrifice of King Janamejaya at Hastinapura.

But when we begin with the story of Uparichara Vasu, we begin at the sixtieth chapter of the Adi Parva of the epic text as it exists today and the epic then starts with the family saga of its author, Sage Vyasa.

And what a story we get to begin with then! A story of lust that man fails to control, and the actions that uncontrolled lust leads man to and their consequences.

Which is actually the theme of the epic.

The Mahabharata is a tale of uncontrolled lusts – lust for land, lust for wealth, lust for power, lust for honour, lust for fame, lust for acceptance, lust for vengeance, lust for pleasure, and, above all, plain sexual lust. It is the story of lust in every imaginable form and the terrible consequences that uncontrolled lust leads to.

The Sanskrit word for lust is kama.

The Mahabharata does not criticize kama per se. Nor does Indian culture do so. What is criticized is uncontrolled kama, kama that controls us, kama that becomes our master, that makes us its slaves. The Vedic culture sees kama as the beginning of the universe. The brilliant Nasadiya Sukta of the Rig Veda, the Hymn of Creation, speaks of Kama as the first being to emerge, or the first essence to come into being and then becomes the cause of everything else coming into existence. The Taittiriya Upanishad speaks of the spark of desire entering the heart of the Unmanifest Being, which then creates out of itself everything else, abstract and concrete, real and illusory, moving and unmoving, all.

The Mahabharata itself speaks of Kama as the son of Dharma. Accordingly Kama, the son, should follow Dharma, should be guided by it. So long Kama follows Dharma, life is beautiful. And when Kama ignores Dharma, goes contrary to Dharma, violates Dharma, tragedy results. What is born of Dharma and hence noble, becomes dark and evil and destroys life.

It is for this reason that Krishna both praises Kama in the Gita and warns us against it. In one place he says Kama is himself – is God – so long as it does not violate Dharma. When it violates dharma, what is divine becomes demoniac: dharmaaviruddhe bhooteshu kamo’smi bharatarshabha – “I am kama that is not against dharma in beings.” In another place he takes its name as man’s worst enemy.

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Here is the story of king Uparichara Vasu, Sage Vyasa’s maternal grandfather, the first story told by Vyasa if we read the epic following the third tradition.

Vasu was a great king renowned for his competencies as a leader and for his royal virtues – generosity, charity, empathy, understanding, people skills, self-mastery, commitment to values, integrity, all. After ruling his kingdom for years, he decided to tread the path his ancestors had followed by going to the jungle and devoting the rest of his life to spirituality. He began performing tapas, powerful austerities. Such was his tapas that Indra, the lord of the heavens, became shaky. For anyone who climbed certain heights in ascetic practices became qualified to take over Indra’s throne.

The word Indra means the lord of the senses – indriyaaNaam raajaa. That is, the mind. Asceticism is a way of conquering the mind, mastering it, making it one’s slave, rather than living as its slave. And the mind resists this, sometimes directly, at other times through devious means. It does not want to be conquered, but loves to remain as the master. As hundreds of stories in Indian literature tell us, as innumerable stories from the life of ascetics from across the world and from all cultures tell us, the mind throws temptations on the path of the ascetic to waylay him, to distract him and to destroy him. Indian literature abounds in such stories: the Buddha is tempted by Mara, Sage Vishwamitra by Menaka, Sage Kandu by Pramlocha and so on.

In the case of Uparichara Vasu, it is not a woman, the most common temptation for a male ascetic, that Indra uses. This former king had in all probability had women aplenty in his inner apartments. Nor does he use power as a temptation – the bait thrown to Jesus by the Devil, another name for the mind. He takes a much more refined approach with Uparichara Vasu, sage Vyasa’s grandfather-to-be.

Indra comes down to meet him in the ashram where he is living a life of asceticism. He speaks to the rajarshi, the royal sage, of the nobility of his duty to the world.

Let there be no doubts. The Mahabharata is very specific about this: What Indra was concerned with is not the good of the world. What he wanted was for the royal sage to stop his austerities and go back to the world to live his life there. For, if he continued his austerities, the king would be a threat to his position as the lord of the gods.

Temptations could be of different kinds and at different levels. A man may be tempted from his higher goals by something as simple as sexuality. But some people require more than sex to distract them from their path. For some, it is power that tempts them; in the case of some others, it could be fame; it could even be something as refined and beautiful as kindness and compassion.

The Bhagavad Gita tells us that it is not only tamas and rajas that bind us, but even sattva binds us.

Indian tradition holds that even concern for the good of the world could be binding when it makes you forget the ultimate human goal, the parama-purushartha, which is spiritual freedom. It tells us through the story of Jada Bharata who devoted his life to look after a baby deer that even kindness and compassion could be bondages.

The Prashna Upanishad tells us there are two dimensions to spirituality – the higher and the lower, called Dakshinayana and Uttarayana, the southern and the northern paths.

Dakshinayana, or the lower dimension, consists of acts that are classified as ishta and poorta. Ishta consists of acts for the common good – like founding schools, hospitals, orphanages, charity homes and so on. In ancient India, it included planting trees on the wayside, digging wells for drinking water, digging ponds and lakes, establishing wayside inns where travelers could rest and spend the night free of charge, and so on. Poorta consists of acts of service to the individual – like giving a meal to the hungry, water to the thirsty, taking care of a sick or old man, adopting an orphaned child and so on. These are great in themselves, but should lead man to higher spirituality, to Uttarayana.

Uttarayana, the higher spirituality, consists of tapas, dhyana, samadhi etc – austerities, the practice of meditation, experiencing self-transcendence and so on. It is through these that man reaches spiritual awakening, bodhi.

What Indra did was to appeal to the innate nobility of Vasu to tempt him away from his spiritual path. As a king, Vasu was a great lover of dharma, the common good. He was totally committed to it. Now Indra uses this very commitment to dharma, one of the noblest qualities in any leader, to tempt Vasu from his spiritual goals.

Indra appears before Vasu accompanied by several other gods. He convinces Vasu that his highest duty is to the good of the world. The absence of someone like him as king is causing corruption in the world and he should go back to his life as king to uphold dharma and stop all corruptions. It is dharma that upholds the world and it is kings like him that uphold dharma.

Indra assures Vasu that there are no eternal worlds that he cannot attain by protecting dharma in the world. He also declares Vasu as his eternal friend, his sakha.

The lord of the gods calling you a sakha is indeed a great honour.

Indra has called others his friends too in the past. And usually this has lead to tragedy to the men whose friend Indra pretended to be. Indra declared himself a friend of his greatest enemy ever, Vritra, and it is with the help of that friendship that Indra betrayed and killed Vritra.

As we saw, Indra is the symbol of the mind. Several spiritual traditions hold that there is no good mind and bad mind – mind itself is bad. That in fact, there is nothing bad, other than the mind. What is good is the state of no-mind, the state in which you go beyond the mind. Zen is one such spiritual tradition that expressly speaks of the need to transcend the mind and reach the state of no-mind. Mind is ignorance, says Zen. Mind is bondage, says Zen. And no-mind is freedom, wisdom.

Indra has by now offered two temptations to the king: eternal worlds of pleasure in the future as a result of upholding dharma in the world as king and friendship with the lord of the gods. Now he offers Vasu more. He tells him to take the best part of the earth as his kingdom.

What is recommended is the land of Chedi. Indra describes Chedi as delightful, sacred, rich, abounding in animal wealth and crops, filled with precious stones and mineral wealth. He tells Vasu that the land of Chedi has an agreeable climate; is very fertile; the cities and towns devoted to virtue; the people are honest, contented, law abiding, truthful, kind even to animals so that if a bullock becomes weak they do not anymore yoke it to the plough or to the cart but is instead looked after until it becomes fat again; sons are devoted to their parents, all people follow their dharma.

Indra hasn’t finished his offerings. He promises him the power to know all that happens everywhere in the world. He gives him a garland of unfading lotuses which would make him invincible in battle, an airplane that can take him through the skies to anywhere he wants to go, or even help him remain in one place if he wished so.

Besides all this, Indra also gives Vasu a sacred bamboo pole, a yashti that could be used for religious rituals.

Vasu falls for the temptations. He accepts these gifts from Indra and chooses to go to Chedi to become its king. He looks after Chedi as a virtuous king, protecting dharma in the hope of attaining glory as a leader of men on earth and eternal worlds of pleasure after his death. In gratitude to Indra for the kindness showered on him, Vasu begins a celebration known as Indrotsava, the festival of Indra, in which planting the bamboo pole given by Indra marks the beginning of the festival.

Indra is worshipped in this festival as a divine swan, a hamsa. Which reminds us of the Greek Indra, Zeus, who is tempted by Leda and assumes the form of a swan to seduce her, an image repeatedly painted by European painters and sculpted by leading western sculptures.

It is this Indrotsava that celebrates on earth the glory of Indra that Krishna later stops and asks the men and women of Vrindavan instead to worship Mt Govardhan that protects them and offers food to their cattle.

Vasu now becomes attached to his airplane and spends much time in it, thus acquiring the name by which he will be known to all subsequent generations: Uparichara Vasu, Vasu-who-moves-in-the-skies.

That is the past history of Vasu. Let’s now move on to the day that most concerns us, the day on which he begets Sage Vyasa’s mother in an act that the Mahabharata describes as dhoomra – a word the dictionary explains as vice, wickedness, sin.

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Everything about the remaining part of Uparichara Vasu’s story is strange and mysterious. Perhaps because the things mentioned are so unacceptable, it is possible that the original story has altogether disappeared and we have to infer it from the hazy and puzzling details that are now available to us in the Sanskrit epic.

The first thing we are told is that a mountain once raped a river and two human children are born to the river. The name of the mountain is Kolahala and the name of the river is Shuktimati. We are also told that the mountain blocked the river and Uparichara Vasu kicked it with his foot, splitting the mountain and releasing the river.

Vasu’s act of releasing the river from the power of the mountain reminds us of Indra’s act of releasing the waters from the captivity of Vritra in still more ancient times.

Of the two children born to the river Shuktimati, one is male and the other female. The river offers the two children to Vasu and Vasu makes the male child, when the children grow up, his commander-in-chief and the female child his wife. Her name is Girikaa, meaning the child of a mountain.

It is possible that the king went to the mountain to release waters that were blocked by it, found there two abandoned children, twins, a male and a female and brought them home and when the children grew up, he made the girl his wife, and the male his commander-in chief. It is also possible that the children were born of a rape committed on a woman by someone on the mountain or the river bank.

Sexuality in ancient India was different in its gender implications than in the contemporary world. Within marriage, sex was considered a woman’s right, her privilege, something that she was entitled to from her man and not something the man ‘took’ from the woman. It was a man’s duty to go to his wife when she was in her ritu – the first sixteen days after her ritual bath following her monthly period – on prescribed days, avoiding proscribed days.

Girikaa had entered her ritu and sent a message to her husband, informing him she was ready and waiting, and asking him to go to her. Precisely at that time, says the epic, he received an order from his dead ancestors, his manes, that he should go on a hunting trip to the jungle.

Now, this is very strange! Because generally speaking the main interest of the dead ancestors is in continuing the family line – frequently their only interest. They should thus have prevented him from going on the hunting trip precisely at such a time. Instead, they order him to forget his wife who is ready and waiting, who has just sent him a message that she is ready and waiting, and go to the jungle to kill wild animals.

One way of looking at it is that the king faced an inner conflict. It is possible that the temptation to hunt and kill overpowered the king’s desire to go to his wife – at least for the time being. In the clash between the thrill of killing and the thrill of sex, the king chose the thrill of killing and ignored, suppressed, his desire for his wife.

He had taken a very wrong decision if we go by what follows!

It was spring, the season when the whole nature celebrates life. What Vasu found was a jungle in the festivity of spring. Trees and plants – ashokas, champas, mango trees, bakulas, punnagas, madhavis, sandalwoods, arjunas, all – were at their best, filled with flowers whose intoxicating fragrance filled the jungle. The mating calls of the cuckoo bird and honey-inebriated hums of the bumble bee added to the intoxication of the environment.

What the whole world was celebrating was what he had rejected to come to the jungle, and that too in spite of being requested by his wife.

Apart from being tempted by nature, it is possible that he also felt guilty about what he had done.

Ancient India said that a woman’s request for sex should never be ignored: arthinii strii anupekshaniiyaa.

The king’s mind went back to the beautiful mountain girl Girikaa who was pining for him at home in the palace.

His head was already light with nature’s intoxication. The visions of Girikaa whom he had rejected in spite of her express desire complicated matters further for the king. Losing mastery over himself, he sat down under an ashoka tree, the scent of fresh honey and the flowers going straight to his head.

According to the Mahabharata, it was now that he was tempted by vice and felt compelled to do a wicked deed, to commit a sin - dhoomra. Sex per se is not a sin in Indian culture. So it is some kind of ‘wrong’ sex that happened, which could be called wicked or sinful.

I would skip some details of what the Mahabharata tells us here and proceed to the end of this episode. In any case, what the Mahabharata tells us is so preposterous, so fantastic, that our minds will not accept it. It is possible that storytellers over thousands of years have given the present form to whatever was the original story.

The end of the episode is that a female fish in the Yamuna swallows the king’s seeds and becomes pregnant.

The fish, the story tells us, is a fallen apsara, a celestial dancer of incredible beauty, called Adrikaa. Due to a curse she received from Brahma, she had turned into a fish and was living in the river. Her curse was to last until she gave birth to two human children.

It is interesting that the apsara who has turned into a fish is called Adrikaa. Because Adrikaa means precisely what Girikaa means – a daughter of the hills.

The fish becomes pregnant. The pregnancy grows to maturity and reaches the tenth month. The fish is then caught by fishermen and cut open. Inside the fish, the fishermen find two children, a male and a female.

When the fish is cut open, it dies and the aprasa is released from her curse. She rises up into the skies and travelling on the path of the siddhas and charanas, reaches back her home, the land of the gods.

What exactly are we to make of this story?

One way to understand it is that the king, unable to keep in check his passion, had sex with a fisher girl called Adrikaa on the banks of the Yamuna and the children were the result of that brief encounter.

We have no clue as to whether Vasu took her by force or she voluntarily surrendered to his desire. From the way Vyasa’s mother, Adrikaa’s daughter growing up as the daughter of a fisherman, surrenders herself to the desire of Sage Parashara later, it is possible to assume that in those ancient days it was perhaps fairly common for men of the upper strata of society to have their way with women of the lower strata of society.

The chief of the fishermen takes the two children thus mysteriously found inside the fish to the king – to Uparichara Vasu himself. Customs in those days said that anything precious or unusual found or grown inside the kingdom should be offered to the king. The king keeps the male child and returns the female child to the chief of the fishermen, Dasharaja.

This is the second time that almost identical incidents are happening to Vasu. The first time he had found two children on the banks of the Shuktimati, a male and a female. He had made the male child the chief of his armies and the female child his wife, when they grew up. Now once again fishermen bring two children to him, who are, unknown to him, his own children. This time he keeps the male child and returns the female child to the fishermen.

The first set of children, we are clearly told, were born of a rape. From the circumstances the epic mentions, combined with the use of the word dhoomra, it is possible that these children too were born of a rape.

The male child, whom the king keeps, grows up to become the king of the Matsya country, also known as the land of the Viratas. It is here that the Pandavas would eventually spend their one year in hiding as per the conditions of the second dice game they lose. Following which, the Virata princess Uttara would marry Arjuna’s son Abhimanyu. King Janamejaya who listens to the Mahabharata story from Vaishampayana is the grandson of Uttara. The kingdom of the Bharatas thus ends up in the hands of an heir of Uparichara Vasu. Of course, Dhritarashtra, Pandu and Vidura are all have his blood in them – they are Vyasa’s sons and Vasu’s great grandsons.

But all that is later.

The female child returned by Vasu to Dasharaja with the instruction to bring her up as his daughter is named Kaali and Krishnaa for her complexion. Both Kaali and Krishnaa mean a dark girl. She gets the nick name Matsyagandhaa for the strong foul smell that emanated from her. Matsyagandhaa means a fish-smelling girl.

Krishnaa turns out to be a ravishing beauty. The epic tells us that she was so beautiful that she tempted even great siddhas. She begins to help her father in his work by taking people across the Yamuna in their ferry.

Children mature early among the poor and begin to work before they are out of their childhood.

One day her passenger in the ferry is the legendary sage Parashara. He sees her and is allured by her. He confesses to her his desire for her. She objects by saying other people are watching them on both sides of the river. The sage with his powers creates thick mist all around them and then, unable to keep his lust for her in check, takes her with her permission.

The child born was given the name Krishna Dwaipayana at birth. Krishna means dark or black. He was dark like his mother. Dwaipayana means born on an island. He was born on a small island in the Yamuna.

This Krishna Dwaipayana, later to be known as Vyasa, is the author of the Mahabharata.

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What we have here thus is a tale of lust. Sage Vyasa’s great grandmother Girikaa is the result of a rape, whose story is presented to us in the impossible form of the rape of a river by a mountain. Vyasa’s mother Satyavati is born when his grandfather, Uparichara Vasu fails to control his sexual lust and commits a heinous act. And Vyasa himself is born because a seer fails to control his passion for a beautiful fisher girl.

That is three successive generations. As we go into the story of the Mahabharata, we shall see that this theme of naked lust and the failure to control it runs through the generations to follow. Vyasa himself becomes subject to it once in his life and thus is born his son Shuka. Satyavati’s son, Vyasa’s half brother Vichitraveerya, would die because of his overindulgence in sex. Vyasa’s own son Pandu would die of his inability to master his sexual drive. And in the next generation several powerful men would lust for Draupadi, the most hauntingly beautiful woman in Indian lore, leading to disastrous consequences. Her own past life stories tell us of a lifetime as Nalayani in which she receives a curse from her husband because of her insatiable sexuality.

Did Indra foresee these things when he turned Uparichara Vasu away from tapas into the world? Did he foresee the Mahabharata war and the destruction of India that followed as a consequence?

The Mahabharata says the four ages are born as a consequence of man’s actions, particularly because of the actions of men in positions of power. It also says that towards the end of the Mahabharata story, the Age of Kali, the Dark Age, began.

Was Indra’s fear of Vasu’s asceticism the cause of the beginning of the Age of Kali?

Indian Wisdom considers personal leadership expressed in terms of self mastery as the foundation of all leadership – in fact, of all that is good. When Bhishma begins to teach Yudhishthira from his bed of arrows in the Shanti Parva, one of the first lessons he teaches is in self-mastery. What we find here is leaders of men failing in self mastery generation after generation, right up to the days of the Mahabharata war. Is it any more than a natural consequence then that the Age of Kali begins immediately after the Mahabharata war?

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On Love

As a young man, Siddhartha was in love with a young girl in the beautiful valley where he grew up. She was a pretty girl some two or three years younger to him, slender, fair and delicate. His love for her was his secret and he never told anyone of that love. Anyone, including her. It was a silent love, a kind of silent worship. Every evening as the oil lamps in the temple at the heart of the valley were lit, she would go to the temple, fresh from her evening bath, in fresh clothes, her long, dark, shining hair open and loose. Siddhartha loved everything about her. But what he loved more than anything else was the serenity that surrounded her. Her movement had a kind of stillness about it. It was as though she floated towards the temple rather than walked. The whole evening had a quality of stillness and she moved as though she was the very heart of that stillness.

Siddhartha waited for her under the peepal tree near the temple every evening. Usually there were other young men with him there – his friends. On those days she ignored him completely – as though the peepal tree and the boys under it did not exist. On the days when he was alone under the tree, she would look at him and give him a smile. A smile that that blossomed on her face and in her eyes like a flower blossoming on a young plant. The smile lit up her beautiful face. It was as though a lamp has been suddenly lit up in a tiny shrine, its light bathing everything in its glow.

They had known each other from their childhood.

Siddhartha loved the feeling her presence gave him. It made him light. He felt as though he could fly. His inner world was lit up by her presence. On days when he could not see her, his world would be different. On those days, his world was cloudy. Filled with clouds that did not bring any rain, but brought only gloom. A vague, nameless gloom that he could not put words to.

Years later Siddhartha would wonder. Was it with the young girl he was in love? Or was it the feeling that she gave him that he loved? Was he in love with her, or was it with the lightness that her presence gave her that he loved, her smile gave her, that the thought she loved him gave him?

Do we love the people we love because they give us such beautiful feelings, or do we get such beautiful feelings because we love them?

Perhaps both are true. Perhaps truth is not one, there are different truths. A poet’s truth and a philosopher’s truth. And many others. The poet’s truth tells us that we get beautiful feelings because we love. And the philosopher’s truth tells us that we love because that gives us beautiful feelings.

“I love you not for who you are, but for who I am when I am beside you,” says Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Perhaps this is only the philosopher’s truth. It is the philosopher in Marquez speaking. The thinker in Marquez. When he speaks as a poet, he would speak differently. When he speaks as a writer, he would speak differently.

Marquez is one of the most powerful writers on love ever. I have loved several of his books, including One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera and A Demon Called Love, in all three of which his love is more demoniacal, obsessive and compulsive than the tender love the poet sings of.

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Leadership: Turning Weaknesses into Strengths

The boy was young in years and he wanted to learn judo. Which was fine, except that as a child he had lost an arm in a car accident.

When he approached the old sensei, the Japanese judo master, the master expressed no hesitation in accepting him. The training began immediately and the boy made good progress – he was keen to learn and the drive and commitment needed were there in him in plenty.

However, his enthusiasm received a jolt when he realized that though he has been learning for more than three months, his master had taught him only a single move. He wanted to learn more. He wanted to learn everything that was there to learn in judo.

One day he decided to talk to his master. “Sensei,” he told the master. “When are you going to teach me more moves? Shouldn’t I be learning other moves?”

The master appreciated his eagerness to learn. He smiled at the boy and told him, “Son, this is the only move you would ever need to know.” The boy of course did not understand what that meant. But he trusted his master and continued to learn under him, mastering more and more thoroughly the one move he knew.

And then time came for the judo tournament. He boy wanted to participate and the master was delighted.

His first victory surprised the boy. The master’s reaction was an understanding smile. As though it was no more than expected. And then the boy won the second match. And then the third, though this time with some difficulty. The boy was now in the finals!

His opponent was a veteran. Powerfully built, he looked formidable. He was easily more than a match to the young boy.

As the match progressed, it was clear that the boy was overmatched. The referee was scared that he might be hurt. To avoid that possibility, he wanted to stop the match. But the old sensei asked the referee not to worry and to continue the match.

The veteran was now relaxed. He was sure nothing can stop him from winning. In his carelessness he made his first mistake. And that was enough for the boy. In a quick move, he pinned the powerfully built senior down. Try as he might, he stronger man could not free himself.

The boy won the match, surprising everyone, and more than anyone else, the boy himself. He was now the champion.

On his way back, he asked the sensei, “Master, how did I win the tournament?” And the master said, “One reason: you have mastered the one move you know more thoroughly than anyone else – and it is one of the most difficult throws in judo. And the other: the only known defense for that move is for the other player to grab you by your left arm.’

It was the left arm that the boy had lost in the childhood accident.

His weakness had become his greatest strength.

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And that is precisely what a great leader does. Great leaders convert their weakness into their strengths.

Gandhi, one of the greatest leaders modern times have seen, was great master in converting weaknesses into strengths. It was this ability of his that made him so difficult for the British empire to fight. His choice of non-violence as a weapon in his struggle for freedom was definitely because of his love for non-violence. But there is also a different side to it: his compulsions. He had no army, nor could he raise an army that could match that of the British. Brilliant leader that he was, he turned this weakness into his strength. His struggle would be non-violent, where no army was necessary.

The Mahabharata tells us that while Arjuna was at Indraloka learning advanced weapons and music there, the celestial dancer Urvashi, the apsara, fell in love with him. Besotted with him, she approached him, seeking his love. But he said he couldn’t have her as his lover since she had once been the wife of one of his ancestors, Pururava, and was for that reason his own ancestress. Urvashi argued such relationships counted only with mortals and since she was a celestial and an immortal, they did not apply to her. When Arjuna stuck to his stand, a furious Urvashi cursed him, turning him into a eunuch, a curse that was subsequently reduced to one year of his choice as a eunuch. And Arjuna chooses the year of his life incognito in Virata, which we was bound to live as per the terms of the dice game his brother had lost, for living as a eunuch. And his eunuchhood became his brilliant cover – for as per the terms, had he been discovered, he and his brothers and Draupadi would have had to go into another round of twelve years of forest life and a year of life in hiding in a city.

That is another example for turning a weakness into strength.

Dharma can sometimes be a weakness – especially in the eyes of one’s enemy. In the case of Yudhishthira, on the one side dharma was his strength and on the other it was his weakness too. Duryodhana uses Yudhishthira’s obsession with dharma against him when he invites him for the game of dice. As expected, Yudhishthira is not able to say no in spite knowing that there is treachery involved in the invitation and it is a trap. When Duryodhana is asked what would happen if Yudhishthira obtained back his kingdom after the 12-year exile and one year of life incognito, he says that he would invite Yudhishthira for yet another dice game and Yudhishthira wouldn’t be able to say no because of his dharma. We repeatedly see in the Mahabharata that Dharma is frequently a weakness in the hands of Yudhishthira. And Krishna brilliantly turns this weakness of Yudhishthira into such a strength that it achieves the impossible – eliminating from the war the Kaurava commander-in-chief Drona, a warrior who cannot be killed so long as he hold weapons in his hands, albeit through an act the ethicality of which we still question.

There was only one way the formidable Acharya could be dissuaded from battling in the war: to tell him that his son Ashwatthama has been killed. And if he was not dissuaded, the Acharya was capable of wiping out the whole Pandava army in a day – so furious was he on that day and so brilliantly was he fighting. And, to add to his strength, he had started using magical weapons too, breaking the convention that they could be used only against those who knew them.

Under Krishna’s inspiration, Bhima kills an elephant called Ashwatthama and shouts to the Acharya that Ashwatthama has been killed. The Acharya comes to Yudhishthira seeking confirmation and Krishna has already prepared him to lie and that is what he does. And it has the desired impact on the Acharya.

It is on Yudhishthira’s confirmation that Drona takes the decision to give up weapons, stop fighting and to end his life.

One may question the ethicality of Krishna’s act. Krishna himself admits that what he did was unethical but adds that there are times when unethical means have to be used against an unethical enemy – when no other alternatives are available. So long as this is done keeping the common good as the measuring rod, it is justifiable, says Krishna.

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Wise leadership means turning your weaknesses into your strengths.

US Steel once had an environmental problem in one of its factories. The coking operations the factory did, which were part of the process of making steel, produced a lot of residue which could pollute groundwater in the entire neighbourhood. The solutions available for the problem were all enormously expensive and could still not guarantee success. It took months for the company to arrive at a problem – but when it did, it was a brilliant solution and what was until then a liability became an asset to the company. The think tanks of the company realized that by mixing this waste in small quantities with the fuel for the furnaces, not only could the waste be got rid of, but it could also be used to produce energy. The wastage that until then was a weakness of the factory overnight became an asset to them.

I live in an industrial city. At one time the leading industry had to deal with the huge amounts of fly ash its operations produced. But now the same fly ash that was a pollutant earlier is used for producing cement, thus transforming a problem into profitable business.

The same company also had huge quantities of high quality heat resistant bricks used in its smelting shops. And then somebody suggested – pave the front yards of the tens of thousands of company houses in the city with these bricks. That would not only dispose of the bricks inexpensively, but would also keep the courtyards clean. The bricks soon were in high demand from employees of the company who occupied the houses and their gardens assumed new shapes with the bricks used to create pathways and patterns.

The backwaters and rivers of my home state in India, Kerala, was once deeply troubled by what was called African water plants that filled whole water surfaces. Numerous ways were tried to get rid of it, but all failed. And then the idea occurred: use it as a fertilizer. And today these plants are no more a menace to Kerala.

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When Alexander attacked India and had to face Puru, the Macedonian conqueror encountered a major challenge in the form of the huge war elephants of the Indian king. Alexander won the battle by using the enemy’s strength against himself, thus turning it into his weakness.

What Alexander did, when his army encountered the huge elephant division of Puru’s army consisting of two hundred trained war elephants, was to order his highly trained archers to kill the mahouts. Rather than focusing on the warriors on the elephants, the archers focused on the mahouts. In a short while the mahouts were killed. Next the archers aimed their arrows at the eyes of the elephants and succeeded in blinding them within minutes. Alexander’s javelin throwers stepped in now, taking the place of the archers. They were masters in throwing javelins with precise accuracy up to a distance of 40-50 meters. Their javelins were soon buried deep into the elephants. The elephants, blinded and without mahouts, screaming in pain sought escape by turning around and running back and in the process killing Puru’s soldiers in huge numbers. The elephants were one of the major strengths of Puru’s army and Alexander had succeeded in converting it into a major liability to Puru.

Just as a successful leader converts his weaknesses into his strengths, he converts the enemy’s strengths into his weaknesses too.

Coca-Cola’s strength in the American market was its reputation as the classic American soft drink, the favorite of generations. When Pepsi wanted to beat it, it used that very strength against Coca-Cola. Pepsi was marketed as the soft drink of the new generation – the Pepsi generation. America is obsessed with youth and the new – and Pepsi created the image that Coca-Cola is for the aged and the old whereas what the the choice of the youth was Pepsi. Yet another example for successful leadership turning the enemy’s strength into his weakness.

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As in so many other things, some of the greatest lessons in leadership could be learnt from flowing water. Speaking of the lessons that could be learnt from water, the Sun Tzu says: "Now an army may be likened to water, for just as flowing water avoids the heights and hastens to the lowlands, so an army avoids strength and strikes weakness."

Water is a master in the art of converting its weakness into strength.

One of the weaknesses of water is its lack of a rigid from. A rock, in comparison, has a rigid form and that is the strength of the rock. However, water transforms its formlessness itself into its strength. If a rock appears on its path towards the ocean, flowing water splits itself as it reaches the rock and reassembles itself once the rock is passed. If a mountain stands in the way of flowing water, water just changes its direction and moves on towards its goal, the sea. Also, water uses its absence of a rigid form to adapt to the different circumstances it finds itself in. Pour it into a glass, it assumes the shape of the glass, pour it into a cup, it assumes the shape of the cup and pour it into a jar, it assumes the shape of the jar.

While the rock might feel arrogant in its strength as a hard substance that does not adjust to situations, for water its fluidity and its absence of a rigid shape becomes its strength.

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In the Mahabharata there is this beautiful discussion of the way of the bamboo, which is weak in comparison to trees like the teak, and converts its weakness into strength.

According to this story narrated by Bhishma in response to a question from Yudhishthira about leadership, the ocean, master of the rivers, tells the rivers: “'O rivers, I see that all of you, with your full currents, bring away mighty trees of large trunks, tearing them off with their roots and branches. You do not, however, ever bring me a bamboo. Bamboos that grow on your banks have weak stems and are devoid of strength. Yet you do not wash them down. Is it that you refuse to wash them down through contempt, or are they of any use to you? Tell me why you do not wash down the bamboos or uproot them from the banks where they grow?”

It is the Ganga who responds to the ocean’s question. She tells the ocean that mighty trees are unyielding and resist the currents of the rivers and therefore they are uprooted and carried down the rivers. Whereas bamboos, and other canes, act differently. When the mighty currents come, they bend to them and after the currents have passed, they resume their original shapes. It is for this reason, says the Ganga, that rivers do not pull up bamboos and other canes from their banks and let them survive where they are. “Those plants, trees, and creepers that bend and rise before the force of wind and water have never to suffer discomfiture by being taken up by the roots,” concludes the river.

Nature nourishes those who know how to convert their weaknesses into strengths.

A beautiful passage in which the Mahabharata states the wisdom of the Tao ages before Laozi and other masters stated it in Dao De Jing and other works.

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No great leader can ignore the art of converting one’s weaknesses into one’s strengths and the enemy’s strengths into his weaknesses. Mastered well, this becomes one of his most effective weapons in the battlefield of leadership.

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Self-Remembering: The Awareness Technique for Awakening

Here is something beautiful from Osho’s commentary on the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, the Sanskrit classic on 112 meditation techniques in the form of questions from Devi and answers from Shiva.

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SHIVA TO DEVI:

“OH LOTUS-EYED ONE, SWEET OF TOUCH, WHEN SINGING, SEEING, TASTING, BE AWARE YOU ARE AND DISCOVER THE EVERLIVING.”

OSHO:

We are living, but we are not aware that we are or that we are living. There is no self-remembering.

You are eating or you are taking a bath or you are taking a walk: you are not aware that you are while walking. Everything is, only you are not. The trees, the houses, the traffic, everything is. You are aware of everything around you, but you are not aware of your own being – that you are. You may be aware of the whole world, but if you are not aware of yourself that awareness is false. Why?

Because your mind can reflect everything, but your mind cannot reflect you. If you are aware of yourself, then you have transcended the mind.

Your self-remembering cannot be reflected in your mind because you are behind the mind. It can reflect only things which are in front of it. You can just see others, but you cannot see yourself. Your eyes can see everyone, but your eyes cannot see themselves. If you want to see yourself you will need a mirror. Only in the mirror can you see yourself, but then you will have to stand in front of the mirror. If your mind is a mirror, it can reflect the whole world. It cannot reflect you because you cannot stand before it. You are always behind, hidden behind the mirror.

This technique says while doing anything – singing, seeing, tasting – be aware that you are and discover the ever-living, and discover within yourself the current, the energy, the life, the ever-living.

But we are not aware of ourselves.

Gurdjieff used self-remembering as a basic technique in the West. The self-remembering is derived from this sutra. The whole Gurdjieffian system is based on this one sutra. Remember yourself, whatsoever you are doing. It is very difficult. It looks very easy, but you will go on forgetting.

Even for three or four seconds you cannot remember yourself. You will have a feeling that you are remembering, and suddenly you will have moved to some other thought. Even with this thought that ‘Okay, I am remembering myself,” you will have missed, because this thought is not self-remembering.

In self-remembering there will be no thought; you will be completely empty. And self-remembering is not a mental process. It is not that you say, “Yes, I am.” Saying ‘Yes, I am,” you have missed. This is a mind thing, this is a mental process: “I am.”

Feel “I am,” not the words “I am.” Don’t verbalize, just feel that you are. Don’t think, FEEL!

Try it. It is difficult, but if you go on insisting it happens. While walking, remember you are, and have the feeling of your being, not of any thought, not of any idea. Just feel. I touch your hand or I put my hand on your head: don’t verbalize. Just feel the touch, and in that feeling feel not only the touch, but feel also the touched one. Then your consciousness becomes double-arrowed.

You are walking under trees: the trees are there, the breeze is there, the sun is rising. This is the world all around you; you are aware of it. Stand for a moment and suddenly remember that you are, but don’t verbalize. Just feel that you are. This nonverbal feeling, even if for only a single moment, will give you a glimpse – a glimpse which no LSD can give you, a glimpse which is of the real. For a single moment you are thrown back to the center of your being. You are behind the mirror; you have transcended the world of reflections; you are existential. And you can do it at any time. It doesn’t need any special place or any special time. And you cannot say, “I have no time.” When eating you can do it, when taking a bath you can do it, when moving or sitting you can do it – anytime. No matter what you are doing, you can suddenly remember yourself, and then try to continue that glimpse of your being.

It will be difficult. One moment you will feel it is there, the next moment you will have moved away.

Some thought will have entered, some reflection will have come to you, and you will have become involved in the reflection. But don’t be sad and don’t be disappointed. This is so because for lives together we have been concerned with the reflections. This has become a robot-like mechanism.

Instantly, automatically, we are thrown to the reflection. But if even for a single moment you have the glimpse, it is enough for the beginning. And why is it enough? Because you will never get two moments together. Only one moment is with you always. And if you can have the glimpse for a single moment, you can remain in it. Only effort is needed – a continuous effort is needed.

A single moment is given to you. You cannot have two moments together, so don’t worry about two moments. You will always get only one moment. And if you can be aware in one moment, you can be aware for your whole life. Now only effort is needed, and this can be done the whole day.

Whenever you remember, remember yourself.

“OH LOTUS-EYED ONE, SWEET OF TOUCH, WHEN SINGING, SEEING, TASTING, BE AWARE YOU ARE, AND DISCOVER THE EVER-LIVING:”

When the sutra says “Be aware you are”, what will you do? Will you remember that, “My name is Ram” or “Jesus” or something else? Will you remember that you belong to such and such a family, to such and such a religion and tradition? To such and such a country and caste and creed? Will you remember that you are a communist or a Hindu or a Christian? What will you remember?

The sutra says be aware you are; it simply says ‘You are”. No name is needed, no country is needed.

Let there be simple existence: you are! So don’t say to yourself who you are. Don’t answer that, “I am this and that.” Let there be simple existence, that you are.

But it becomes difficult because we never remember simple existence. We always remember something which is just a label, not existence itself. Whenever you think about yourself, you think about your name, religion, country, many things, but never the simple existence that you are.

You can practice this: relaxing in a chair or just sitting under a tree, forget everything and feel this “you-areness.” No Christian, no Hindu, no Buddhist, no Indian, no Englishman, no German – simply, you are. Have the feeling of it, and then it will be easy for you to remember what this sutra says: “BE AWARE YOU ARE, AND DISCOVER THE EVER-LIVING.” And the moment you are aware that you are, you are thrown into the current of the ever-living. The false is going to die; only the real will remain.

That is why we are so much afraid of death: because the unreal is going to die. The unreal cannot be forever, and we are attached to the unreal, identified with the unreal. You as a Hindu will have to die; you as Ram or Krishna will have to die; you as a communist, as an atheist, as a theist, will have to die; you as a name and form will have to die. And if you are attached to name and form, obviously the fear of death will come to you, but the real, the existential, the basic in you, is deathless. Once the forms and names are forgotten, once you have a look within to the nameless and the formless, you have moved into the eternal.

“BE AWARE YOU ARE AND DISCOVER THE EVER-LIVING”: This technique is one of the most helpful, and it has been used for millennia by many teachers, masters. Buddha used it, Mahavira used it, Jesus used it, and in modern times Gurdjieff used it. Among all the techniques, this is one of the most potential. Try it. It will take time; months will pass.

When Ouspensky was learning with Gurdjieff, for three months he had to make much effort, arduous effort, in order to have a glimpse of what self-remembering is. So continuously, for three months, Ouspensky lived in a secluded house just doing only one thing – self-remembering. Thirty persons started that experiment, and by the end of the first week twenty-seven had escaped; only three remained. The whole day they were trying to remember – not doing anything else, just remembering that “I am.”

Twenty-seven felt they were going crazy. They felt that now madness was just near, so they escaped. They never turned back; they never met Gurdjieff again.

Why? As we are, really, we are mad. Not remembering who we are, what we are, we are mad, but this madness is taken as sanity. Once you try to go back, once you try to contact the real, it will look like craziness, it will look like madness. Compared to what we are, it is just the reverse, the opposite.

If you feel that this is sanity, that will look like madness.

But three persisted. One of the three was P. D. Ouspensky. For three months they persisted. Only after the first month did they start having glimpses of simply being – of “I am.” After the second month, even the ”I” dropped, and they started having the glimpses of ”am-ness” – of just being, not even of ”I”, because ”I” is also a label. The pure being is not ”I” and ”thou”; it just is.

And by the third month even the feeling of ”am-ness” dissolved because that feeling of am-ness is still a word. Even that word dissolves. Then you are, and then you know what you are. Before that point comes you cannot ask, ‘Who am I?” Or you can go on asking continuously, “Who am I?”, just continuously inquiring, ”Who am I ? Who am I?”, and all the answers that will be provided by the mind will be found false, irrelevant. You go on asking, “Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?” and a point comes where you can no more ask the question. All the answers fall down, and then the question itself falls down and disappears. And when even the question, ‘Who am I?” disappears, you know who you are.

Gurdjieff tried from one corner: just try to remember you are. Raman Maharshi tried from another corner. He made it a meditation to ask, to inquire, “Who am I?” And don’t believe in any answers that the mind can supply. The mind will say, “What nonsense are you asking? You are this, you are that, you are a man, you are a woman, you are educated or uneducated, rich or poor.” The mind will supply answers, but go on asking. Don’t accept any answer because all the answers given by the mind are false. They are from the unreal part of you. They are coming from words, they are coming from scriptures, they are coming from conditioning, they are coming from society, they are coming from others. Go on asking. Let this arrow of “Who am I?” penetrate deeper and deeper. A moment will come when no answer will come.

That is the right moment. Now you are nearing the answer. When no answer comes, you are near the answer because mind is becoming silent – or you have gone far away from the mind. When there will be no answer and a vacuum will be created all around you, your questioning will look absurd.

Whom are you questioning? There is no one to answer you. Suddenly, even your questioning will stop. With the questioning, the last part of the mind has dissolved because this question was also of the mind. Those answers were of the mind and this question was also of the mind. Both have dissolved, so now YOU ARE.

Try this. There is every possibility, if you persist, that this technique can give you a glimpse of the real – and the real is ever-living.

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Courtesy: The Book of Secrets, Osho.

Parashurama: When Absolute Power Corrupts

This is a story we are all familiar with in India. For ages, every Indian child has grown up listening to it, usually from his mother or grandmother, or father or grandfather, and at times from a professional storyteller in a temple or on the village grounds – and the more recent generations from their Amar Chitra Kathas or the television serials.

In a display of valour and strength, Rama has broken Shiva’s bow that had been in the family of Janaka, thus winning Sita in marriage. The wedding is over and he is on his way back from Mithila, Sita’s place, to Ayodhya. The group returning consists of the sage Vasishtha, who is the royal guru of the Ikshwakus, a few other sages, Dasharatha himself, Rama and Sita as well as Rama’s three brothers and their brides. They are just out of Mithila when all on a sudden the sky begins to darken unexpectedly. Birds begin to shriek frightfully everywhere, some from the trees and some flying above the moving party, sending terror to the hearts of all – for they all know it is a dark omen. Confusing them further, they see deer crossing their path from the left – which is a good omen.

Soon there is no time left to analyse omens. For now the shrieks of the birds have become deafening and animals are running in a mad riot everywhere. The earth begins to shake. A storm begins and soon gathers speed and terrifying power. It pulls out mighty trees by their roots, with the ease of a mad elephant pulling up plants from the ground. The storm sends the trees whirling up into the sky and then hurls them down with stupefying force. The storm gathers dust from the earth and sends it up into the skies. The dust covers the sun and darkness envelops everything. No one is able to see anything. Under the impact of the storm, the whole army accompanying Dasharatha and all the servants and attendants with the party fall down unconscious. In the middle of it all, a few people are left standing: Sage Vasishtha and the other sages with him, Dasharatha, his four sons, the four new brides.

And then they see the cause of it all. Like a whirlwind, the dreaded ascetic-warrior Parashurama appears before them from nowhere. He is terrifying to look at. His eyes burn red and spit fire, his beard flows wildly in the wind, and his matted hair is tied up in a bun over his head.

Here is how Valmiki’s Ramayana describes him: “He was as unassailable as Mount Kailasa and as unbearable as the fire of annihilation. Blazing as he was with his effulgence, he was difficult to be seen by common people. With an axe resting on his right shoulder and a bow on his left, he held in his hand a spear that was like a bolt of lightning. Thus he resembled Shiva, the destroyer of the three cities of demons.”

The very name of Parashurama – Rama with the Battle Axe – is pure dread to every kshatriya. For this is the man who had went round the earth and wiped out every kshatriya in sight, not once, but twenty-one times. He needed vengeance and he needed justice. A kshatriya, a king – Kartaveerya Arjuna, also known as Arjuna with a Thousand Arms for his might – had, in his arrogance of power, desecrated his father’s ashram and he had killed him in a fierce battle that became a legend for all times to come. But the arrogant man’s sons sought vengeance for their father’s killing and finding a time when Parashurama’s father was alone in his ashram, had brutally killed him. It is then that Parashurama decides to wipe out kshatriyas from the earth – and wipe the earth clean of kshatriyas he does.

Power in itself is neither good nor evil. In the hands of the good, it becomes good, and in the hands of the bad, it becomes bad.

Power can turn you good, and power can turn you evil.

One of the ways power corrupts its possessor is by turning him arrogant. When the man who possesses power becomes arrogant, power becomes evil. And evil power has to be wiped out. If not, it will consume the earth itself. Rama with the Battle Axe made destroying such power his life mission. It is said that Rama’s righteous anger was calmed only when he filled five lakes in Kurukshetra – the Syamanta-panchaka – with the blood of kshatriyas and did tarpana to his manes with that blood.

Vasishtha quickly consults the other sages with him. Why has he come? Hasn’t his anger already been quenched a long time ago after he wiped out the warrior caste from the earth? Hasn’t he been meditating ever since on the Mahendra Mountains, living a hermit’s life?

Vasishtha and other sages take water in their sacred vessels – kamandalas – and approach the ascetic warrior who was standing blazing like the fire at the end of the world. They make the ritual offer of water to wash his hands and feet. Bowing down deeply to him, they try to appease him with soft words.

Parashurama accepts their offering of water but otherwise ignores them completely. Instead, he turns to young Rama.

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As I write these lines, words from the Malayalam Ramayana that I listened to as a child come to my mind. There Rama begins his speech with these words: njanozhinchunto raman ittribhuvanattinkal? His powerful words, spat out in fury and contempt, question the right of another Rama apart from him to exist in all the three worlds.

Parashurama is one of the seven immortals of Indian legends. This warrior who decimated kshatriyas is a brahmana by birth, born to practice serenity and meditation, to study and teach the Vedas, and to perform sacrificial rites.

The ascetic-warrior whose mission it was to wipe out arrogant power from the face of the earth had himself become arrogant power.

The fiery ascetic-warrior turns to Rama and asks him, in the words of the Valmiki Ramayana: “O Rama, son of Dasharatha, I have heard of your wonderful prowess. I have heard all about how you broke Lord Shiva’s bow. It is inconceivable that someone could have broken that bow. Hearing of that, I have come here, bringing another excellent bow. To this awesome bow which was given to me by my father Jamadagni, fix an arrow and draw it. Show me your strength. After seeing your strength in drawing the bow, I shall offer you a fight which will give credit to your valor.”

Parashurama’s words shake Dasharatha with dread. His dear son, his heartbeat, young Rama, is just about sixteen years of age – a mere boy, a child. And the man standing before him is dread itself – the one who went around the earth and wiped out kshatriyas from the earth twenty-one times. No warrior has ever existed equal to him in might. And now he was challenging his young son.

Dasharatha rushes to Parashurama and bowed deeply to him. He says: “O glorious brahmana, after giving up your anger against the warrior caste and becoming pacified, you should assure the safety of my juvenile sons. Born in the line of the Bhargavas, who are distinguished in erudition and asceticism, you put down your weapons, promising so to Indra. You then dedicated yourself to piety, giving the earth to Kashyapa. Going to the forest, you took up residence on Mount Mahendra. You have come here to totally destroy me, O great sage. If you kill Rama, we shall all be unable to live.”

Rama of the Battle Axe does not so much as look at Dasharatha. He does not think the old king deserves an answer. He has slaughtered a thousand kings like Dasharatha, and so many of them have fallen at his feet and begged him to spare the lives of their children. He hadn’t listened to a single one of them, nor had he spared the life of a single male kshatriya, however young he was.

Ignoring the begging Dasharatha, he says to young Rama: “Two divine bows honored by the whole world are superb, firm, strong, outstanding and well-made by Vishvakarma. The first is the bow given by the gods to Lord Shiva when he wanted to fight the demon Tripura, which has now been broken by you, O descendant of Kakutstha. The second unassailable bow was given by the foremost gods to Lord Vishnu. This is that bow of Vishnu, O Rama, which can destroy the enemy’s stronghold. It is in fact equal in strength to Shiva’s bow.”

Parashurama then tells Rama the history of the bow and explains to him how it came to his family and eventually to him. He then commands Rama, binding him to his vows as a warrior, “Take this excellent bow. Put an arrow to it and draw it. If you are able to do so, I shall thereafter engage you in battle.”

Rama, who was silent all this while, speaks for the first time. With his first words he pays his respects to the aged ascetic-warrior brahmana. He commends him on what he did to avenge his father’s brutal killing by arrogant men. And then, he tells Parashurama that to prove that he is not worthy of the contempt in which the ascetic holds him, he will accept the challenge and prove himself.

What Parashurama had done was ask Rama to accept an impossible challenge. No man living, other than Parashurama himself, was capable of handling the bow Vishnu which he was asking Rama to draw.

Rama swiftly grabs the bow and arrow from the old ascetic. And the next instant he stands ready to shoot, the bow fully drawn and the arrow in place.

Having done the impossible in a flash, Rama again turns to Parashurama and speaks to him. And there is anger in his voice as he speaks to the ascetic-warrior. Rama says: “You deserve my worship because you are a brahmana, and also because of your kinship with Vishvamitra. Therefore, I cannot shoot the deadly arrow at you, O Parashurama. I shall therefore take away either your ability to move swiftly everywhere, or the unequaled worlds which you have attained by dint of your austerities—this is what I intend to do. This transcendental arrow of Lord Vishnu, which can crush an enemy’s stronghold or smash the pride of an adversary by its power, never misses its target.”

A humbled Parashurama now speaks slowly in his deep voice. He needs his power to move about, he says, and asks Rama to destroy the worlds he has gained through his austerities.

Rama shoots the arrow and the arrow empowered with great spiritual power destroys all the worlds Parashurama had acquired through his tapas. The old ascetic bows down in humility to Rama and then circumambulates him in an action reserved to those whom you revere at the highest level. He bows down to Dasharatha and the other ascetics too and returns to Mount Mahendra, his abode, to engage in tapas again. As he departs, says the Ramayana, all directions were cleared of darkness.

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Through his victories, Parashurama had acquired absolute power. And absolute power can corrupt even the greatest of men. That is what had happened to Parashurama. His power went to his head, and he became what he had lived to destroy.

Every leader is in danger of being corrupted by power. Wisdom is to guard against this. For once power goes to your head, your doom is decided.

There is another lesson for all of us in this. Vengeance is tamasic. True, there are times when vengeance is right, and called for. But one has to guard oneself against the power of vengeance to turn one into those against whom one is taking vengeance.

Parashurama always had an element of tamas in him. Without that tamas, he would not have been able to carry out the order of his father to chop off the head of his mother – an order that all his four elder brothers had refused to obey. And then, seeking revenge for his father’s death, he kills not only the perpetrators of the crime, but all kshatriyas of the world. And not once, but twenty-one times. And fills five lakes with their blood. And filling five lakes with their blood, he offers a dark tarpana – a propitiatory rite – to his ancestors with that blood. That is deep, dark tamas indeed.

It is this tamasic power that the Ramayana describes graphically in terms of shrieking birds and running animals at the approach of Parashurama. The earth shakes, storms uproot mighty trees and hurl them about, dust storms arise and block the sun – all signs of the destructive power of sinister tamas.

Power and tamas – that is the most terrifying combination. That creates monsters. In modern times we have had this in leaders like Hitler and Stalin.

All of us, says the Gita, have an element of tamas in us. And we have to be on the guard against it. When we allow tamas to take over us, we destroy ourselves and harm everyone we come across. And the more powerful we are, the more will be our destructive power.

When Parashurama leaves Rama at the end of the story, humiliated and humbled, the power of darkness too ends. The sun is revealed again, and nature becomes calm again.

In Indian legends, Parashurama is a great warrior and a great ascetic. And what he destroys is arrogant power. Arrogant power needs to be destroyed. It was the great mission of his life. But after he completes that mission, the stories we hear of him all have an element of darkness in them – whether it is his attempt to battle with Bhishma, his disciple, seeking what he believed was justice for Amba, or in his cursing Karna, another disciple of his, for his kindness to him, for his devotion to him, for Karna’s enduring unendurable pain for his sake. True, the reason given is that Karna had told him a lie about who he was in order to learn from him since he would not have accepted Karna as a disciple otherwise.

Many leaders of men today have unlimited power with them. That power should be used for the good of the world – lokasangraha – says Indian culture. And on no account should we use it in arrogance and haughtiness to satisfy our ego. If we do, what will happen to us is what happened to Parashuurama: destruction of all the worlds we have acquired. That is apart from the harm we cause the world.

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The Mahabharata too tells us its own version of this story of the encounter between Rama and Parashurama. According to this telling, when Rama’s fame spread everywhere from Ayodhya, “impelled by curiosity” Parashurama takes his bow with which he had killed the kshatriyas and goes to Ayodhya to meet him there and to test for himself how great young Rama is. Dasharatha hearing of the arrival of the ascetic-warrior sends Rama to receive him at the outskirts of Ayodhya with all respect due to the great hero that he is. When Parashurama meets Rama, he offers his bow to him and asks him with a smile to string the bow. Rama accepts the challenge and eventually Parashurama’s pride is humbled.

This telling of the encounter differs in many significant details from Valmiki Ramayana’s telling. But here too, the essential message is the same: when power gives birth to arrogance, it is evil and ultimately it harms oneself, apart from harming others. In this telling also Parashurama loses all his powers and the great master who conquered the earth so many times, is reduced to nothing.

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Valmiki Ramayana translation courtesy: Robert Biggs

On Being Ordinary

For the last ten years of his life, the Shambhala tradition of Tibet was the main subject of teaching for the great Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa, which he taught in the United States under the name the Sacred Path of the Warrior. According to these teachings, one of the things that the sacred warrior of Shambhala practiced was the Path of the Four Dignities: meekness, perkiness, inscrutability, and outrageousness. Interestingly, the analogy for meekness in the tradition is the tiger!

It might come as a surprise to most of us that the tiger is used as the analogy for meekness. I do not think any of us would normally associate the tiger with meekness. The tiger to us is neither the symbol for meekness nor of gentleness. It is a ferocious animal, one of the greatest predators of the wild jungles, a creature that knows no pity or compassion. Besides, it looks more appropriate to associate the tiger with pride than with humility. How can such a bloodthirsty animal be the symbol of meekness?

The difficulty arises because the Shambhala tradition sees humility as something different from what we see as humility. The Shambhala tradition explains that to be meek is to be resting in a state of simplicity and being uncomplicated.

The tradition further explains that there are three aspects to meekness. The first stage is to be modest, never to be bloated by arrogance. In this sense, modesty means being exactly what you are, to be true and genuine, to be authentic, not to wear masks but to show your true face to the world. In this sense the tiger is really meek – he is authentically what he is and has no pretentions. He neither tries to show that he is more than what he is, nor less than what he is. Like the tiger, the warrior of the meek too, says the tradition, is simple and uncomplicated. He is what he is. He accepts what he is and is comfortable with himself, with his own being as it is.

The second aspect of meekness is unconscious confidence. Confidence born of what one truly is. It is not the confidence born of acquisitions or achievements, the position one occupies or anything like that. One is oneself and that gives him confidence. It is confidence born of inner strength arising from being true to what one is.

In Sanskrit, we have the word swadharma – meaning one’s own dharma, one’s own true nature, what makes one what one is. The swadharma of fire is heat, or to burn, and the swadharma of water is to flow, or to seek its own level. The tiger’s confidence is born of being true to his own dharma. And a human being who is true to his own dharma has this confidence. The warrior of the meek enjoys this confidence.

The third dimension of being meek is to be uplifted, which again comes from being true to one’s swadharma. The tiger in the Himalayan jungles enjoys this upliftedness and so does the Shambhala warrior walking on the path of the dignity of meekness.

At one time, before our social system deteriorated to what it is now, Indian culture tried to create this unconscious confidence and upliftedness in everyone in the society. The brahmana [the priest], was true to his swadharma and had the confidence and upliftedness born of it; the kshatriya [the warrior] was true to his swadharma and had the confidence and upliftedness born of it; just as the vaishya [the farmer and the businessman] and the shudra [the ordinary worker] too had their confidence and upliftedness born of living their own dharmas. Eventually however, feelings of inferiority and superiority took over and the brahmana started considering himself superior to all others, the kshatriya superior to the vaishya and the shudra, the vaishya to the shudra and the shudra started considering himself the lowest of all and therefore without any dignity.

In the original social system of India, the potter and wheelwright was as proud of his profession as the priest was of his and the warrior was of his. Similarly, the woman had the dignity of being a woman by virtue of being true to her swadharma and the man had his dignity of being a man by virtue of being true to his swadharma. Each had his or her own functions, each had his or her own role to play, but neither was superior or inferior. Eventually though, men started seeing themselves superior and looking down upon women and women started seeing themselves as inferior and looking up to men as superior, thus destroying a beautiful system.

Accepting what you are is the way to spirituality. Accepting your true nature is the way to spirituality. It is the way to inner strength, confidence and upliftedness. When you are happy with what you are, you are not on an ego trip. When you struggle to be superior to the other, you are on an ego trip and you lose contact with your swadharma. Then you are no more spiritual.

A spiritual person is contented with what he is: if he is powerful, he is contented with it. If he is powerless, he is contented with it. If he has social position, he is happy with it, if he has no social position, he is happy with that too. If he is special he has no quarrels with his specialness, if he is ordinary, he is contented with his ordinariness. And you are contented with whatever happens to you. Victory, failure, gain, loss, fame or infamy, it makes no difference to you.

Speaking of such a person, the Gita says:

samah śatrau ca mitre ca tathā mānāpamānayoh |
śītoshna-sukha-duhkheshu samah sanga-vivarjitah ||BhG_12.18||

“He is the same towards foe and friend, and so is he in respect and insult. He is the same in heat and cold, the same in sorrow and happiness. He is devoid of all attachments.”

A spiritual person does not want to be different from what he is. If he victorious and respected, it is fine with him. And if he is beaten and insulted, that is fine too.

Just as he willing to be tossed about and celebrated, he is willing to be ordinary too.

One of the highest examples ancient India gives us for spirituality is that of a butcher and another that of a prostitute.

The great modern saint Nisargadatta Maharaj continued to be an ordinary beedi seller in a tiny kiosk in Bombay even after climbing to highest peaks of spirituality possible, while students were coming to him from all the world. Kabir continued to weave cloth even when he had become the most respected teacher of the day. Pakkanar, the less widely known saint from Kerala was a pariah by birth and he continued his traditional profession of making baskets from bamboo even when he had had climbed great spiritual heights and his presence performed miracles.

Indian spiritual tradition also tells as the story of Sena Nai who continued his profession of a barber even after spiritual enlightenment and of Gora Kumhar, a potter, who continued to practice his profession even after he was recognized as the greatest saint of his age. And in our tradition we also have kings who were enlightened masters who continued to rule their kingdoms with all the pomp and show that came with it, Janaka being the highest example for this from olden times.

True humility is being what you are, accepting what you are. It is not being arrogant of about what you are nor is it acting humble about it. That is why the Shambhala example of the tiger is such an unsurpassed example for humility.

In his answer to a question by one of his disciples, Osho explains what true humility means. Here are some excerpts from his answer:

“I am not saying become humble, because the ego can even try that—it tries! It can become humble. It can pretend to be humble, but then look in the humble man’s eyes: he says “I am nobody,” but he is waiting for you to say “You are the greatest man.”

Somebody says, “I am the richest man in the world.” Somebody says, “I am the most powerful man in the world.” Somebody says, “I am the most humble man in the world.” Where is the difference?

“I am not saying become humble. Ego can become humble. I am talking about ego-loss. You have to see into the ego: its complexity, its subtle games. You have to become aware of all its games. One day when you have looked into all its games, it simply disappears. Just by looking into them, just a clarity, just an awareness, and it disappears. It disappears as darkness disappears when you bring light into the dark room. Just bring awareness.

“I am not saying practise humility, and I am not saying become a humble man. A really religious person is neither humble nor egoistic—he is simple. A humble person is very complex: he has practised humility. Anything practised is always complex, and anything practised is always false. Anything practised means simply a pseudo thing.”

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Accepting what you are, being what you are, is true humility. And that is what the Himalayan tiger in his prime moving heedlessly through the forest does. The Shambhala tradition clearly understood what humility really means and the games the ego plays in the name of humility.

In an advice to us, his students, Swami Dayanandaji once said: “When someone praises you, accept the praise if you feel you deserve it. And if you do not feel you deserve it, say no to the praise. That is humility. But if you feel you deserve it and yet you say, ‘Thank you, but I did nothing, I do not deserve it,’ then it is not humility, but hypocrisy.”

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Krishna: His Relevance Today

OSHO has spoken on practically every great spiritual tradition and master known to us and their teachings. The list of masters includes Krishna, Buddha, Mahavir, Zarathustra, Guru Nanak, Jesus, Kabir, Patanjali, Ashtavakra, Bodhidharma, Meera, Rabia, Dariya, Hakim Sanai, Chuang Tzu, Lao Tzu, Yakusan, Dionysius, Ta Hui, Atisha, Ko Hsuan, Rinzai, Nansen, Ma Tzu, Kyozan, Joshu, Hyakujo, Dogen, Heraclitus, Pythagoras . . . to name only a few. On each of these, he has given a series of talks and on some several series.

Given below is Osho’s answer to a question someone asked him about the relevance of Krishna for our times. Osho’s book Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy [Krishna Meri Drishti Mein in the Hindi original] begins with this question-answer.

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Q: WHAT ARE THE DISTINGUISHING VIRTUES OF KRISHNA THAT MAKE HIM RELEVANT TO OUR TIMES? WHAT IS HIS SIGNIFICANCE FOR US? PLEASE EXPLAIN.

Krishna is utterly incomparable, he is so unique. Firstly, his uniqueness lies in the fact that although Krishna happened in the ancient past he belongs to the future, is really of the future. Man has yet to grow to that height where he can be a contemporary of Krishna’s. He is still beyond man’s understanding; he continues to puzzle and battle us. Only in some future time will we be able to understand him and appreciate his virtues. And there are good reasons for it.

The most important reason is that Krishna is the sole great man in our whole history who reached the absolute height and depth of religion, and yet he is not at all serious and sad, not in tears. By and large, the chief characteristic of a religious person has been that he is somber, serious and sad-looking – like one vanquished in the battle of life, like a renegade from life. In the long line of such sages it is Krishna alone who comes dancing, singing and laughing.

Religions of the past were all life-denying and masochistic, extolling sorrow and suffering as great virtues. If you set aside Krishna’s vision of religion, then every religion of the past presented a sad and sorrowful face. A laughing religion, a religion that accepts life in its totality is yet to be born.

And it is good that the old religions are dead, along with them, that the old God, the God of our old concepts is dead too.

Every religion, up to now, has divided life into two parts, and while they accept one part they deny the other, Krishna alone accepts the whole of life. Acceptance of life in its totality has attained full fruition in Krishna. That is why India held him to be a perfect incarnation of God, while all other incarnations were assessed as imperfect and incomplete. Even Rama is described as an incomplete incarnation of God. But Krishna is the whole of God.

And there is a reason for saying so. The reason is that Krishna has accepted and absorbed everything that life is.

Albert Schweitzer made a significant remark in criticism of the Indian religion. He said that the religion of this country is life negative. This remark is correct to a large extent, if Krishna is left out.

But it is utterly wrong in the context of Krishna. If Schweitzer had tried to understand Krishna he would never have said so.

But it was unfortunate that we did not allow Krishna to influence our life in a broad way. He remains a lonely dancing island in the vast ocean of sorrow and misery that is our life. Or, we can say he is a small oasis of joyous dancing and celebration in the huge desert of sadness and negativity, of suppression and condemnation that we really are. Krishna could not influence the whole spectrum of our life, and for this we are alone to blame. Krishna is not in the least responsible for it. We were not that worthy, that deserving, to have him, to imbibe him, to absorb him.

Up to now, man’s mind has thought of and looked at life in fragments – and thought dialectically.

The religious man denies the body and accepts the soul. And what is worse, he creates a conflict, a dichotomy between the body and spirit. He denies this world, he accepts the other world, and thus creates a state of hostility between the two. Naturally our life is going to be sad and miserable if we deny the body, because all our life’s juice – its health and vitality, its sensitivities and beauty, all its music – has its source in the body. So a religion that denies and denounces the body is bound to be anemic and ill, it has to be lackluster. Such a religion is going to be as pale and lifeless as a dry leaf fallen from a tree. And the people who follow such a religion, who allow themselves to be influenced and conditioned by it, will be as anemic and prone to death as these leaves are.

Krishna alone accepts the body in its totality. And he accepts it not in any selected dimension but in all its dimensions. Apart from Krishna, Zarathustra is another. About him it is said he was born laughing. Every child enters this world crying. Only one child in all of history laughed at the time of his birth, and that was Zarathustra. And this is an index – an index of the fact that a happy and laughing humanity is yet to be born. And only a joyful and laughing humanity can accept Krishna.

Krishna has a great future. After Freud the world of religion is not going to be the same as it was before him. Freud stands as a watershed between the religions of the past and the religion of the future. With Freud a great revolution has taken place and man’s consciousness has achieved a breakthrough. We shall never be the same again after Freud. A new peak of consciousness has been touched and a new understanding, an altogether new perspective, a new vision of life has come into being. And it is essential to understand it rightly.

The old religions taught suppression as the way to God. Man was asked to suppress everything – his sex, his anger, his greed, his attachments – and then alone would he find his soul, would he attain to God. This war of man against himself has continued long enough. And in the history of thousands of years of this war, barely a handful of people, whose names can be counted on one’s fingers, can be said to have found God. So in a sense we lost this war, because down the centuries billions of people died without finding their souls, without meeting God.

Undoubtedly there must be some basic flaw, some fundamental mistake in the very foundation of these religions.

It is as if a gardener has planted fifty thousand trees and out of them only one tree flowers – and yet we accept his scripture on gardening on the plea that at least one tree has blossomed. But we fail to take into consideration that this single tree might have been an exception to the rule, that it might have blossomed not because of the gardener, but in spite of him. The rest of the fifty thousand trees, those that remained stunted and barren, are enough proof the gardener was not worth his salt.

If a Buddha, a Mahavira or a Christ attains to God in spite of these fragmentary and conflict-ridden religions, it is no testimony to the success of these religions as such. The success of religion, or let us say the success of the gardener, should be acclaimed only when all fifty thousand trees of his garden, with the exception of one or two, achieve flowering. Then the blame could be laid at the foot of the one tree for its failure to bloom. Then it could be said that this tree remained stunted and barren in spite of the gardener.

With Freud a new kind of awareness has dawned on man: that suppression is wrong, that suppression brings with it nothing but self-pity and anguish. If a man fights with himself he can only ruin and destroy himself. If I make my left hand fight with my right hand, neither is going to win, but in the end the contest will certainly destroy me. While my two hands fight with themselves, I and I alone will be destroyed in the process. That is how, through denial and suppression of his natural instincts and emotions, man became suicidal and killed himself.

Krishna alone seems to be relevant to the new awareness, to the new understanding that came to man in the wake of Freud and his findings. It is so because in the whole history of the old humanity Krishna alone is against repression.

He accepts life in all its facets, in all its climates and colors. He alone does not choose, he accepts life unconditionally. He does not shun love; being a man he does not run away from women. As one who has known and experienced God, he alone does not turn his face from war. He is full of love and compassion, and yet he has the courage to accept and fight a war. His heart is utterly non violent, yet he plunges into the fire and fury of violence when it becomes unavoidable. He accepts the nectar, and yet he is not afraid of poison.

In fact, one who knows the deathless should be free of the fear of death. And of what worth is that nectar which is afraid of death? One who knows the secret of non-violence should cease to fear violence. What kind of non-violence is it that is scared of violence? And how can the spirit, the soul, fear the body and run away from it? And what is the meaning of God if he cannot take the whole of this world in his embrace?

Krishna accepts the duality, the dialectics of life altogether and therefore transcends duality. What we call transcendence is not possible so long as you are in conflict, so long as you choose one part and reject the other. Transcendence is only possible when you choicelessly accept both parts together, when you accept the whole.

That is why Krishna has great significance for the future. And his significance will continue to grow with the passage of time. When the glow and the glamor of all other godmen and messiahs has dimmed, when the suppressive religions of the world have been consigned to the wastebasket of history, Krishna’s flame will be heading towards its peak, moving towards the pinnacle of its brilliance.

It will be so because, for the first time, man will be able to comprehend him, to understand him and to imbibe him. And it will be so because, for the first time, man will really deserve him and his blessings.

It is really arduous to understand Krishna. It is easy to understand that a man should run away from the world if he wants to find peace, but it is really difficult to accept that one can find peace in the thick of the marketplace. It is understandable that a man can attain to purity of mind if he breaks away from his attachments, but it is really difficult to realize that one can remain unattached and innocent in the very midst of relationships and attachments, that one can remain calm and still live at the very center of the cyclone. There is no difficulty in accepting that the flame of a candle will remain steady and still in a place well secluded from winds and storms, but how can you believe that a candle can keep burning steadily even in the midst of raging storms and hurricanes? So it is difficult even for those who are close to Krishna to understand him.

For the first time in his long history man has attempted a great and bold experiment through Krishna.

For the first time, through Krishna, man has tested, and tested fully his own strength and intelligence.

It has been tested and found that man can remain, like a lotus in water, untouched and unattached while living in the throes of relationship. It has been discovered that man can hold to his love and compassion even on the battlefield, that he can continue to love with his whole being while wielding a sword in his hand.

It is this paradox that makes Krishna difficult to understand. Therefore, people who have loved and worshipped him have done so by dividing him into parts, and they have worshipped his different fragments, those of their liking. No one has accepted and worshipped the whole of Krishna, no one has embraced him in his entirety. Poet Surdas sings superb hymns of praise to the Krishna of his childhood, Bal Krishna. Surdas’ Krishna never grows up, because there is a danger with a grown-up Krishna which Surdas cannot take. There is not much trouble with a boy Krishna flirting with the young women of his village, but it will be too much if a grown-up Krishna does the same.

Then it will be difficult to understand him.

After all, we can understand something on our own plane, on our own level. There is no way to understand something on a plane other than ours.

So for their adoration of Krishna, different people have chosen different facets of his life. Those who love the GEETA will simply ignore the BHAGWAD, because the Krishna of the GEETA is so different from the Krishna of the BHAGWAD Similarly, those who love the BHAGWAD will avoid getting involved with the GEETA. While the Krishna of the GEETA stands on a battlefield surrounded by violence and war, the Krishna of the BHAGWAD is dancing, singing and celebrating. There is seemingly no meeting-point whatsoever between the two.

There is perhaps no one like Krishna, no one who can accept and absorb in himself all the contradictions of life, all the seemingly great contradictions of life. Day and night, summer and winter, peace and war, love and violence, life and death – all walk hand in hand with him. That is why everyone who loves him has chosen a particular aspect of Krishna’s life that appealed to him and quietly dropped the rest.

Gandhi calls the GEETA his mother, and yet he cannot absorb it, because his creed of non-violence conflicts with the grim inevitability of war as seen in the GEETA. So Gandhi finds ways to rationalize the violence of the GEETA: he says the war of Mahabharat is only a metaphor, that it did not actually happen. This war, Gandhi says over and over again, represents the inner war between good and evil that goes on inside a man. The Kurushetra of the GEETA, according to Gandhi, is not a real battlefield located somewhere on this earth, nor is the Mahabharat an actual war. It is not that Krishna incites Arjuna to fight a real Mahabharat, Mahabharat only symbolizes the inner conflict and war of man, and so it is just a parable.

Gandhi has his own difficulty. The way Gandhi’s mind is, Arjuna will be much more in accord with him than Krishna. A great upsurge of non-violence has arisen in the mind of Arjuna, and he seems to be strongly protesting against war. He is prepared to run away from the battlefield and his arguments seem to be compelling and logical. He says it is no use fighting and killing one’s own family and relatives. For him, wealth, power and fame, won through so much violence and bloodshed, have no value whatsoever. He would rather be a beggar than a king, if kingship costs so much blood and tears. He calls war an evil and violence a sin and wants to shun it at all costs. Naturally Arjuna has a great appeal for Gandhi. How can he then understand Krishna?

Krishna very strongly urges Arjuna to drop his cowardice and fight like a true warrior. And his arguments in support of war are beautiful, rare and unique. Never before in history have such unique and superb arguments been advanced in favor of fighting, in support of war. Only a man of supreme non-violence could give such support to war.

Krishna tells Arjuna, “So long as you believe you can kill someone, you are not a man with a soul, you are not a religious man. So long as you think that one dies, you don’t know that which is within us, that which has never died and will never die. If you think you can kill someone you are under a great illusion, you are betraying your ignorance. The concept of killing and dying is materialistic; only a materialist can believe so. There is no dying, no death for one who really knows.” So Krishna exhorts Arjuna over and over again in the GEETA, “This is all play-acting; killing or dying is only a drama.”

In this context it is necessary to understand why we call the life of Rama a story, a biography, and not a play, not leela. It is because Rama is very serious. But we describe the life of Krishna as his leela, his play-acting, because Krishna is not serious at all. Rama is bounded, he is limited. He is bound, limited by his ideals and principles. Scriptures call him the greatest idealist: he is circumscribed by the rules of conduct and character. He will never step out of his limits; he will sacrifice everything for his principles, for his character.

Krishna’s life, on the other hand, accepts no limitations. It is not bound by any rules of conduct, it is unlimited and vast. Krishna is free, limitlessly free. There is no ground he cannot tread; no point where his steps can fear and falter, no limits he cannot transcend. And this freedom, this vastness of Krishna, stems from his experience of self-knowledge. It is the ultimate fruit of his enlightenment.

For this reason the question of violence has become meaningless in Krishna’s life. Now, violence is just not possible. And where violence is meaningless, non-violence loses its relevance too. Nonviolence has meaning only in relation to violence. The moment you accept that violence is possible, non-violence becomes relevant at once. In fact, both violence and non-violence are two sides of the same coin. And it is a materialistic coin. It is materialistic to think that one is violent or non-violent.

He is a materialist who believes he can kill someone, and he too is a materialist who thinks he is not going to kill anyone. One thing is common to them: they believe someone can be really killed.

Spirituality rejects both violence and non-violence. It accepts the immortality of the soul. And such spirituality turns even war into play.

Spirituality or religion accepts, and unreservedly accepts, all the dimensions of life. It accepts sex and attachment together, relationship and indulgence, love and devotion, yoga and meditation, and everything there is to life.

And the possibility of the understanding and acceptance of this philosophy of totality is growing every day – because now we have come to know a few truths we never knew in the past. Krishna, however, has undoubtedly known them.

For instance, we now know that the body and soul are not separate, that they are two poles of the same phenomenon. The visible part of the soul is known as the body, and the invisible part of the body is called the soul. God and the world are not two separate entities; there is absolutely no conflict between God and nature. Nature is the visible, the gross aspect of God, and God is the invisible, the subtle aspect of nature. There is no such point in the cosmos where nature ends and God begins. It is nature itself that, through a subtle process of its dissolution, turns into God, and it is God himself who, through a subtle process of his manifestation, turns into nature. Nature is manifest God, and God is unmanifest nature. And that is what advaita means, what the principle of one without a second means.

We can understand Krishna only if we clearly understand this concept of advaita, that only one is – one without a second. You can call him God or Brahman or what you like.

We also have to understand why Krishna is going to be increasingly significant for the future and how he is going to become closer and closer to man. It will be so, because the days when suppression and repression ruled the roost are gone. After a lengthy struggle and a long spell of inquiry and investigation we have learned that the forces we have been fighting are our own forces. In reality we are those forces, and it is utter madness to fight them. We have also learned we become prisoners of the forces we oppose and fight, and then it becomes impossible to free ourselves from them. And now we also know that we can never transform them if we treat them as inimical forces, if we resist and repress them.

For instance, if someone fights with sex, he will never attain to brahmacharya, to celibacy in his life. There is only one way to celibacy and that is through the transformation of the sex energy itself. So we don’t have to fight with the energy of sex; on the contrary, we should understand it and cooperate with it. We need to make friends with sex rather than make an enemy of it, as we have been doing for so long. The truth is, we can only change our friends; the question of changing those we treat as enemies simply does not arise. There is no way to even understand our enemies; it is just impossible. To understand something it is essential to be friendly with it.

Let us clearly understand that what we think to be the lowest is the other pole of the highest. The peak of a mountain and the valley around its base are not two separate things, they are part and parcel of the same phenomenon. The deep valley has been caused by the rising mountain, and in the same way the mountain has been possible because of the valley, one cannot be without the other. Or can it? Linguistically the mountain and the valley are two, but existentially they are two poles of the same thing.

Nietzsche has a very significant maxim. He says a tree that longs to reach the heights of heaven must sink its roots to the bottom of the earth. A tree that is afraid to do so should abandon its longing to reach the heavens. Really, the higher a tree the deeper its roots go. If you want to ascend to the skies you will have to descend into the abyss as well. Height and depth are not different things, they are two dimensions of the same thing. And their proportions are always the same.

Man’s mind has always wanted to choose between the seeming opposites. He wants to preserve heaven and do away with hell. He wants to have peace and escape tension. He desires to protect good and destroy evil. He longs to accept light and deny darkness. He craves to cling to pleasure and to shun pain. His mind has always divided existence into two parts and chosen one part against the other. And from choice arises duality, which brings conflict and pain.

Krishna symbolizes acceptance of the opposites together. And he alone can be whole who accepts the contradictions together. One who chooses will always be incomplete, less than the whole, because the part he chooses will continue to delude him and the part he denies will continue to pursue and haunt him. He can never be rid of what he rejects and represses. The mind of the man who rejects and represses sex becomes increasingly sexual. So a culture, a religion that teaches suppression of sex ends up creating nothing but sexuality; it becomes obsessed with sex.

Up to now we have stubbornly denied the Krishna who accepts sex; we accept him only in fragments.

But now it will be quite possible to accept him totally, because we are beginning to understand that it is the energy of sex itself that is transformed into the highest kind of celibacy, into brahmacharya through the process of its upward journey to the sahasrar, to the ultimate center in the head. We are beginning to learn that nothing in life has to be denied its place and given up, that we have to accept and live life in its totality. And he who lives wholly attains to life’s wholeness. And he alone is holy who is whole.

Therefore I say that Krishna has immense significance for our future. And that future, when Krishna’s image will shine in all its brilliance, is increasingly close. And whenever a laughing, singing and dancing religion comes into being it will certainly have Krishna’s stone in its foundation.

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From a talk given by Osho on 20 July at CCI Chambers, Bombay.

Note: In the painting above, we find Krishna in one of his leelas. He is enjoying the cowherd girls dressing him up as a woman – probably as Radha.