Mother India

Our sublimest delusion is that India is backward. This predicates, of course, that we are progressive. If backwardness and progress depend on the rate at which one can gobble up vanities perhaps India does not need our aid.....India's devotion to being good rather than being clever comes nearer the heart of a true civilization. Cleverness dies on the tongue like a social pleasantry, goodness echoes round the universe in an un extinguishable reality. We in the West are too busy to see that science without soul is like words without meaning. India's greatness is in her humility; her weakness is her strength. She is both wiser and more effective than the West, for she does not declare that reform is not a new shirt on Sunday morning but a clean heart at the Throne of Grace. Justice without spirit of justice is as much of an achievement as a river without its water. She is grave and old and stupendous. Her accents are for the calm and gracious. Her temples are laden with symbolism....and internal beauties. It is true, that India is royal...India has been royal at heart from her very foundations of her memory.


India indeed has a preciousness which a materialistic age is in danger of missing. Some day the fragrance of her thought will win the hearts of men. This grim chase after our own tails which marks the present age cannot continue for ever. The future contains a new human urge towards the real beauty and holiness of life. When it comes India will be searched by loving eyes and defended by knightly hands.

W. J. Grant


India is a vast network of sacred places. The entire country is a sacred land. The sacrality of the land of India, is what, still today, gives a sense of unity to this country of so many religions, cultures, races and factions.
 
Roger Housden 

Perhaps in return for conquest, arrogance and spoliation, India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of the mature mind, the quiet content of the unacquisitive soul, the calm of the understanding spirit, and a unifying, a pacifying love for all living things.

Will Durant

When a religious method recommends itself as 'scientific',it can be certain of its public in the West. Yoga fulfills this expectation. Quite apart from the charm of the new and the fascination of the half-understood, there is good cause for Yoga to have many adherents. It offers the possibility of controllable experience and thus satisfies the scientific need for 'facts'; and, besides this, by reason of its breadth and depth, its venerable age, its doctrine and method which include every phase of life, it promises undreamed of possibilities.

Carl Gustav Jung



In India I found a race of mortals living upon the Earth. but not adhering to it. Inhabiting cities, but not being fixed to them, possessing everything but possessed by nothing.

Apollonius Tyanaeus

A nation's culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people.

Gandhi

As your food is, so is your mind...

A nice story from the life of Buddha, which shows the degree of impact food can have on our mental and psychological structure, and the thoughts that food can evoke in our subtle mind.

…It was along this self-same road that the Maha-karunika had walked two thousand five hundred years ago… (Maha-karunika – the greatly compassionate one; one of the epithets of the Buddha.) If so, he would have appeared to be a perfectly ordinary monk  like so many other who then wandered along the roads in India; and like them too, he probably stooped from time before a village doorway to utter his usual formula: “Biksham dehi”, (Alms, alms!), holding out his bowl or perhaps, quite simply, his hands. At night, doubtless, he slept under a tree, fearless of the tigers, which roamed these plains.  After all, what could he possibly fear after having lived so many years in the forest of Uruvela, full, as he tells us, of hair-raising horrors for anyone who was not a Samyami (one who has attained complete self-mastery). For six years in this forest he had taken upon himself the most painful austerities; but at last in a flash of illumination he had understood that it was a mistake to mortify the flesh, deliberately to afflict one’s self. Enlightenment would be reached no sooner along such a path than along that of indulgence in wordly pleasures.

His mind was ripe now and no doubt he knew intuitively that with one supreme effort he could attain illumination.And so he started out in search of a suitable spot, a solitary place with beneficent influence, where he could give himself up entirely to his meditations.

A wandering monk, begging for his food, seeking a Tapasya-Sthan (a favourable place for spiritual discipline) – it was a common place thing at the time and indeed is still so, in India today. Nevertheless the physical beauty of this son of a King, with his athletic carriage and his countenance so noble and so pure, must surely have drawn attention. Perhaps they came to him with offering, prostrating themselves before him and asking his blessing.

 It must have been the people of Gaya, already a centre of pilgrimage at the time, who told him about the solitary spot, not far out of the town, towards which he took his way. Other ascetics, no doubt, had also found a dwelling place there………… there was shade and water and a village not for away…….“The people are simple, pure and charitable to monks”.

 It was only rarely that the monk Gautama tarried in human habitations. His favourite dwelling-place was the foot of a tree-one of those grand giants so often seen in India. It was at the foot of a tree that he had been born, it was there that he had his great revelation, and it was there too, that at the end of his life, he left his physical body and entered into Paranirvana.

 Buddha-Gaya, at that time must have been a tiny little village, perhaps only a few isolated farmsteads surrounded by fields. It is scorching hot in summer on the Indian plains. A tree with luxuriant branches providing ample shade from the rays of the implacable sun became the monk’s dwelling place. It was an Ashwata (ficus religious), a sacred tree. Perhaps even, the Deva (spirit) of the tree had welcomed the noble ascetic and had entreated him to come and to shelter in its shade.

 One day in the month of Vaishak (around May) a young woman by the name of Sujata came to prostrate her–self before the monk  and, with great devotion, laid an offering before him.It was no ordinary offering, but an offering of payasam made only to gods and under special circumstances. From rice of the very best quality; every grains had been handpicked and then boiled for some hours in cow’s milk until all the liquid had evaporated. Then the mixture had been sweetened, perhaps with honey; spices, almonds, pistachios and raisins had been added to make an offering fit for the gods. Gautama asked the young woman the reason for this unexpected gift. Sujata was married, rich and fortunate, but there was one thing lacking to her perfect happiness. She had a desperate desire to have a son.

It was not proper for monks to converse with women, especially with women who are young and beautiful. Nevertheless, Siddhartha seems to have prolonged this conversation for in the course of it he made a strange discovery. He had always believed that the world was a scene of universal misery, and that all living creatures groaned under the intolerable burden of the “three kinds of suffering”. ( The three kinds of suffering: (1) Adhibhautika: suffering caused caused living creatures (wild animals, men etc.) (2) Adhidavika: suffering caused by natural phenomena (earthquakes, floods etc.) (3) Adhyatmika: suffering growing out of our bodies or minds (illness, worry etc.).

 Yet here before him was a young woman who was happy, who wished both to live and to give life. It was strange indeed.

 The Buddhist chronicles tell us that this meal of rice boiled in milk had a most extraordinary affect on the man who was later to become the enlightened one. It was as if an intense flame was lit within him, permeating all his being and granting him no respite. One longing alone possessed him entirely, the longing to achieve the great Enlightenment, immediately, without further delay. Sitting under the tree he pronounced the words now become famous:

“My skin, my sinews and my bones may wither; my flesh and my blood may dry up within me; but I shall not quit my seat in this spot until I have achieved perfect Enlightenment”.

 But what was it exactly that happened? How could this perfectly simple food have had such an extraordinary effect? The Hindu sages teach that not only does the food we eat have a powerful effect on our minds, but that the mental structure is in fact, constituted of the most rarified part of the nourishment we ingest. “As your food is, so is your mind”, is a popular Hindu saying. Now, the payasam offered by Sujata, being a from of nourishment that was highly satvika (Pure), the mental reaction it provoked was correspondingly so…

Religion : An Enemy of Progressive Human Culture?

Before the publication of his widely acclaimed book, "The Journey Home", Radhanath Swami talked with writer Joshua Greene at length about what prompted him to write the book and also the circumstances around which he took a daring trip to India in the 1960s. The interview also touched around the aspect of religion and renunciation - and reveal answers which are enlightening and broad. Some Excerpts from the interview.

Joshua Greene : Why do so many people seem to regard religion as the enemy of progressive human culture?

Radhanath Swami: There is a Sanskrit word saragrahi, which means one who seeks the essence in every situation. If we have an honest and sincere desire to grow in our character, in our devotion, our enlightenment, then we will always find the way to do so.

For those teachers who are honest and pure and true in what they teach and how they live, we can gain great inspiration and great knowledge and wisdom. But when we see there is hypocrisy or contradiction between what a person teaches and the real purpose of the message, there is also much to learn from that: to learn what we should be on guard against, to see how even religious leaders fall into pitfalls, the same essential as for all of us in different ways, and how we should be on guard and careful to protect ourselves from those pitfalls. We can learn and acquire great wisdom from properly applying spiritual truths to the mistakes of others, both today and throughout history. And those lessons are essential.

Q: You chose to become a renunciant. Do you recommend the path of renunciation?

 Radhanath Swami: Real spiritual life is not necessarily about changing our position in society. It is about transforming our hearts. One can be in business, in education, a mother or father, a farmer, a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, a politician. One can even be a swami. But when we overcome selfishness and learn the beauty and art of selflessness—seva or selfless service—spirituality is meant to transform arrogance into humility, greed into generosity, vengeance into forgiveness, hate into love, criticism into appreciation, hopeless into hopefulness—it is meant to transform us into becoming instruments of the inner peace that is in our heart with God.

That is real journey home. The journey of transformation, of understanding that there is a power beyond our own, the power of God that can enthuse us, inspire us and empower us to be real instruments of change.

...To be continued....

Survival International's Amazing Cartoon on Tribal Development

Survival International is an international organization working for tribal people around the world, and help them protect their way of living,their lives, lands and help them determine their future for themselves and above all protect them from "modern" development, which in many ways divorces from their own culture and makes them unhappy.
Recently they released a cartoon book on tribal "development" which shows how multinationals and "civilized","modernized" businessmen, and so-called good samaritians, in the name of development and raising income levels of these "un-civilized","poor" tribals - ultimately only ruin their own sustainable ways of living and end up filling their own pockets.. Amazing Cartoon. In one of the pages, a economist(I guess he was economist!) remarks that "We tried income-generating activities...but some people seem satisfied with less than half a dollar a day!" - Talk of per capita income!
The cartoon book can be found here.

Chandragupta on Freedom - 340 B.C.

An extract from the T.V serial "Chanakya" - After freeing the republics of Artat and Malaya(now in Present day Pakistan) in 340 B.C - Chandragupta talks to the heads of the republics on the topic of freedom. Why do people want to be free? What actually is freedom? Is it merely the independence of the individual from societal controls and rules? Or is freedom more to do what with the ideas of living? The video is extremely insightful and  anyone who understands it will see how "Modern" India is still in bondage...

Bhisma's Wisdom

Generations in India have adored the epic figure, Bhisma, of the Mahabharata for his mighty deeds as well as his glorious qualities.Though renouncing the fulfillment of earthly love, he is renowned for his steady adhering to all the noble principles of life.
Bhisma's terrible vow of celibacy won him the name, which striked terror in the hearts of the enemies of Hastinapur. True to his vow, and as a warrior and upholder of the Kshatriya Dharma - he is as hard as ice. But he is also a sage, much known for his wisdom and upheld in great esteem by the Pandavas. As the most glorious and longest living mortal of his time, Bhisma is respected by everyone. However, it was tragic that Bhisma's vow of defending the prevailing King of Hastinapur forced him to fight against his own grandsons, the Pandavas, whom he had held in his hands as babies and showered love and affection. The intensity and ferocity with which Bhisma fought was only blunted and stopped by another of his vow: not fighting against women. In the end, Arjuna had to use this vow to stop his beloved grand sire's ferocious fight.
This particular dialogue between Bhisma and Yudhisthira begins, at the end of 18 day long Mahabharata war, with Bhisma laying on a bed of arrows. Krishna asks Bhisma to share all his timeless wisdom with Yudhisthira, to which he readily agreed. In the epic, this section is one of the voluminous one, with Bhisma teachings convering every expanse of human life. Here, it is presented in condensed form. Credit to Graham Bond.


 Bowing to his beloved Grand Sire, Yudhisthira began
"Please tell me, O son of Ganga, all that which you wish me to know
Honor us with the rich wisdom of all your long years, before you depart.
Can I question you on matters close to my heart?"
Bhisma nodded.

On Attaining the Highest Good
Yudhisthira began " Oh Grand sire, how can one attain the highest good?"
Bhisma replied, "One who practices universal compassion, and
Who controls lust, anger, greed attains to the highest success,
And the highest good of the human life."

The one who regards all creatures as part of his own self,
And practicses the divine virtue of universal compassion,
Leaving aside the vindictive rod of chastisement,
And subjugates his anger, will succeed to attain happiness.

On the Best Friendship
"O Sire", Yudhisthira asked, "Please tell me who is truly one's friend"
Bhisma replied,"One is born alone, O King, and one dies alone
One crosses alone through the difficulties provided to us to learn by.
No-one can really share the joy or misery destiny brings forth to us.

After one dies, one's body is abandoned by relatives and friends.
Only righteousness remains to comfort the soul.
So it is Plain that only righteousness is the only friend.
And that righteousness should be sought by all.

Between the righteous, friendship springs up, even though they
only exchange seven words or walk seven steps.
But friendship with the unrighteous is like sleeping with a snake.
One is inflicted with the poison of unrighteousness goes to hell.

On the Transmigration of the Soul
King Yudhisthira asked, "Is the Soul destroyed by death?",
Bhisma replied,"The moon, on the fifteenth day of the dark fortnight,
cannot be seen, however can you say that it has been destroyed?
The conscious soul is eternal, experiencing time and space.

When liberated from the body, it cannot be seen.
But like waxing moon, it obtains a new body and manifests once again.
Governed by the consequences of the many actions it has performed,
it takes up a body suitable to reap the fruits of those actions.

On seeing the Self
Yudhisthira replied, "So how can one obtain the eye to see the soul"
Bhishma answered, "If the soul is freed from the anxieties of desire,worry and fear
Then the soul can be seen through the eyes of understanding awakened by grace.
Like an image in a reflecting in a still pond, the Self reveals to himself to oneself.

Only a snake can see the legs that carry another snake,
One with a inner vision can see the energy of the subtle worlds.
True happiness comes in the contemplation of the spiritual realm,
And the Self reveals himself to the unperturbed soul of unwavering intent.

Blessed are those who cultivate a still mind and restrain their senses,
Through grace and practice, one obtains the eye which can see the inner Self.
Bhisma then paused, and then turned within to savour the experience he had just described,
And Yudhisthira watched in amazement.

Indian Farmer's Tryst with Harvard

Indian Kisan in a Harvard Classroom, giving tidbits on the reasons behind this success.
The entire article can be found here.

One noteoworthy point that comes out in the article is - one of the farmer was asked why big industrial houses in India such as Tata, Birla, Reliance, etc, were not doing such schemes for farmers. He said He can't answer this... yeh tau sahi sawal aap galat admi se pooch rahey hei (It's the right question but asked of the wrong man)!