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PDF format of this bookChapter 5: The Mystical and the Ritualistic Stage: Part 2
The Vaishnava Agama method of worship conceives the approach to God in five different ways, designating God as Para, Vyuha, Vibhava, Archa and Antaryami. In one sense, God is the unapproachable Absolute. This character of God keeps us away from Him, viewing the situation from one angle of vision, because there is nothing in the human being that can be compared with God's glory. Submission, saranagati—utter humiliation of one's own self in the presence of the mighty God—is one of the special emphases laid in the Vaishnava Shastras. 'Kainkaryam' is the word they generally use to represent their attitude towards the Almighty: servitude, the attitude of a humble servant.
This follows from the transcendence, the para-tattva of Bhagavan Narayana who, not merely being that unapproachable Creator, is also, due to his compassion, capable of coming down, especially as Krishna Avatara, so that we can worship him in a form. Herein the Vyuha concept arose—known as Vasudeva, Sankarshana, Pradyumna and Aniruddha—which has an exoteric meaning as well as an esoteric meaning. Esoterically, it is comparable to what we know in philosophical parlance as Brahman, Ishvara, Hiranyagarbha and Virat. But exoterically, Vasudeva is Sri Krishna, Sankarshana is his elder brother Balarama, Pradhyumna is Sri Krishna's son, and Aniruddha is his grandson. The entire family of Bhagavan Sri Krishna is brought together into a hierarchy of adoration.
A Vaishnava is a devotee of the Avataras of Vishnu, principally Rama and Krishna, and many a Vaishnava bhakta includes the Narasimha Avatara as a part of his adoration, due to an inner psychological admiration. A dualistic system of Vaishnava worship is the Madhva Sampradaya of the Udupi Mutt, which brings the Narasimha tattva together with the Vishnu tattva and combines these two aspects, perhaps with the intention of blending two faces of God: the fearsome and the benevolent.
According to the Vaishnava Agama, the attitude of the devotee towards God is a manifestation of five feelings: the feeling of relation between father and son, between master and servant, between friend and friend, between parent and child, and between lover and beloved. These five bhavas, or feelings, are supposed to be actually rising in an ascending order of closeness to God until, in the madhurya bhava—the unity of the soul of the devotee in the rasa, or the essence of God—he becomes ecstatically maddened. That is the only thing we can say: he becomes God-mad. Some of these illustrations of God-madness, and crying for God as a person who is raving in his conscious separation, can be seen in the Nalayira Divya Prabandham of the Alvar saints, the most important being the Thiruvaimozhi of Nammalvar. It is an ecstatic pouring. Words cannot adequately express the feeling of the devotee who pours himself into God. 'Pouring' is the word to be underlined. It is not the gauna bhakti of a ritualistic type—collecting flowers, waving lights and offering a formal presentation of gifts, etc., to God, as we do in temples. This excels. Ragatmika bhakti is superior to gauna bhakti, the secondary devotion, which requires external appurtenances for worship.
For instance, we feel we cannot worship God unless we have a place to sit and there is an idol in front of us. A little shrine must be there; some prasadam should be offered; a garland of flowers should be on the deity; incense sticks must be lit; light must be waved in front of the deity. If these items are not there, we feel that the worship cannot be done. This is an externalised—gauna—ritualistic type, a secondary type of devotion where we feel the need for something other than our own self in the worship of God.
Ragatmika bhakti is that inner attunement of the deepest essence in us. 'Raga', 'rasa', 'inner essence' are all feeble, apologetic terms to suggest what the devotee actually feels. Vaishnava devotees like Saint Tulsidas, Surdas and Mirabai had risen to this level of an ecstasy of raga, but it is only in some of the songs of the Alvars that we find ragatmika bhakti reaching its apex. These are poems expressing the outburst of the soul for the immediate entry of God into oneself. Not tomorrow, not the next moment; it is here, just now.
The Nalayira Divya Prabandham is written in the Tamil language, and the importance attached to these songs is such that it is called Dravida Vedam, the Veda of the southern countries, equal to the Veda Samhitas—Rigveda, Yajurveda or Samaveda. These great souls were Godmen, as I mentioned. God had entered them; they lived in God. They saw God, they could speak to God, and they had nothing else but God-power—power which automatically followed from their love of God, sometimes manifesting itself in queer behaviour.
There are stories of the odd behaviour of these Vaishnava saints, the Alvars, and also of the Nayanars, the Saiva saints. Their devotion sometimes goes to such extremes that it looks fantastic to us, but it is fantastic only to the limited approach of the human legalistic viewpoint. In the devotee's envisagement of God, there are no boundaries and no limitations. We cannot set a limit for the devotee's behaviour. “Thus far and no further”—we should not say that. Sometimes their behaviour, due to being inundated by God's presence, becomes so very incomprehensible that they may not look fit even to live in human society.
These Nayanars could go to Lord Siva in Kailasa, and come back. As we go to Delhi for some business or commitment of ours and then return, they could go to Kailasa, speak to Lord Siva and harangue before him, and return to their houses. And Siva came in any form whatsoever—sometimes in a visible form, sometimes in an intriguing form. The relationship between Lord Siva, the Supreme Being, and the Nayanar devotees was more intimate than the relationship we have among ourselves here. Any time the Nayanars could chat with God. They could go physically, and come back.
So was the case with the Alvars. They were not only filled with God inwardly, but also outwardly. It appears there was an Alvar who was caught up in a heavy rain and had to find a little shelter while it was pouring. Outside someone's house there was a small projection under which he was lying down, waiting for the rain to stop. While he was lying there, another Alvar came and asked, “Is there some space?”
The first Alvar said, “One can lie down, but two can sit. All right, let us sit.”
After some time a third came and asked, “Is there some space? It is raining.”
They said, “Well, two can sit but three can stand. Let us stand.”
A fourth one came and asked, “Is there space?”
They said, “There is no space.”
“I do not require space to exist,” said the fourth one, and he vanished from that place. Then the outpouring started, because only Narayana Himself could say, “I do not require space to exist.”
Throughout the history of the lives of these people, there were occasions galore for such outpourings. This is also the case with Mirabai and Surdas. They did not sit down and write poems; their poems were outbursts, automatic outpourings that manifested spontaneously, on various occasions, from the soul. There must be some stimuli from outside to evoke that particular sentiment; then immediately something comes out which specially, in a very, very poignant and significant manner, describes a new character of God.
Among these Nayanars to which I made reference, four of them are said to be the most important. They are known as the Samaya Acharyas—that is, the progenitors of a procedure or a mode of worship. These Samaya Acharyas, or the four great Nayanars, are Appar, Sundarar, Sambandar and Manickavachagar. These four great devotees are supposed to represent the methods of charya, kriya, yoga and jnana that I mentioned yesterday, with Manickavachagar representing jnana, the highest outpouring through wisdom, that is, the knowledge of God. An old Tamil saying is, “He who cannot be touched by the words of Thiruvasagam—which is the masterpiece and magnum opus of Manickavachagar—cannot be touched by any word uttered by anybody.” Thiruvasagam is a masterpiece of Tamil literature and spiritual outpouring of devotion.
These songs of the Nayanars, and the songs of the Alvars, constitute a twofold presentation before us of the highest peak that devotion can reach, transcending all limitations and gauna ritualistic modes of worship. They want nothing with which to worship God except God Himself. What do I want for worshipping God? I want myself and God. I do not want anything else. That is enough. And what is it that is going to be offered to God? Myself. And what is it that I am expecting from this offering? God Himself. Do I want anything from God? Nothing! What do I want? God only!
The gauna bhakti type of worship sometimes utilises God in order to fulfil certain longings. That is, in our adoration of God we have, more often than not, a subtle longing to obtain blessings of God in the form of varieties of comforts that we would like to have in this world. But ragatmika bhakti or sahaja bhakti, the final type which is madhurya rasa, wants nothing from God. This is because, as we know very well, to expect something from God, and not God Himself, is to utilise God as an instrument for the fulfilment of our desires—which are connected to something other than God Himself. We consider our object of longing as somehow superior to God Himself when we say, “God must give me this.” Otherwise, why would we ask for it? It is difficult for the soul to appreciate the greatness of God, especially because people are earth-bound, sense-bound, object-bound, instinct-bound, and desire-bound.
I was referring to certain esoteric systems and secret methods of worship through the Agama and Tantra. They become secret and difficult merely because of the fact that it is impossible for an ordinary human being to conceive this system of practice, because man is just what man is; he cannot be other than what he is. He is a bundle of apprehensions, prejudices, loves and hatreds, expectations, and all things connected with this earthly, mortal continuance of life. This mischievous desire that is at the root of the continuance of mortal existence through this body has to be cut and severed asunder. There should be nothing left, not even a trace of this kind of love for the body and the earthly existence, if we are to be initiated into this great esoteric doctrine of God wanting the soul of the devotee, and the soul wanting only God and nothing else.
The Agamas, as I mentioned, are mostly of three types—the Vaishnava, the Saiva and the Sakta. But there are also other Agamas, such as the Ganapatya, the Saura and the Kaumara. The Agamas, or systems of worship, instituted to adore Maha Ganapati, are known as the Ganapatya Agamas; those connected with the worship of Suryanarayana are called the Saura Agamas; and those connected with the worship of Skanda, or Kartikeya, are called the Kaumara Agamas. These are all inaccessible to ordinary academic approach. The Agama and Tantra method is not philosophical, logical or intellectual. Everything that boasts of human pride should be set aside when we approach God in the inner recesses of our heart, where the intellectual eminence of a person becomes just a husk, another form of ignorance which has to be shed, the earlier the better.
Varieties of methods are suggested for purifying the human soul in order that the soul may become fit to envisage or encounter God. Unless we have some quality of God in us, we will not be able to see God. “Devo bhutva devamaradhayet” is an old saying, which means that we have to become God in order that we may see God. Animals cannot visualise God, because similars attract each other and dissimilars repel each other. The attraction that the soul can have for God, or the attraction that God can have for us, is the pull of the similar in respect of the similar.
Is there in any one of us some quality which can be called a quality that is in God? Go deep into your own hearts. “Have I, in myself, some spark of quality which I can say is also the quality of God?” We will find there is nothing in us. We are topsy-turvy in every way, and are bound hand and foot by the pasa, the bonds, as we tie a beast. Pasa is a word used in Saiva Siddhanta. The pasa, or the bondage, the rope of Varuna described in the Veda Samhitas, is the inscrutable tie of three knots—called Brahma granthi, Vishnu granthi and Rudra granthi—with which the beast of the individual is tied to samsara, this earthly torturous existence. This pasa is to be loosened, and the dirt, which is known in Tamil as anava malam—the defect of the seed-like potentiality in the human individual that confines its consciousness to only its body—is opened up, and the dross therein is completely cleansed through these charya, kriya, yoga and jnana methods by a processional approach and a sequential ascent of the soul in the act of purification that is to be conducted gradually.
The Tantra Shastra, especially of the Sakta type, has various stages of self-purification, known as Vaishnavachara, Saivachara, Dakshinachara, Vamachara, Siddhantachara, and finally ending in Kaulachara, the perfection of the soul where it becomes identical in its character with God. The Vaishnavachara stage constitutes the ritualistic method. The earliest stage of religion is ritual, a kind of performance that is exteriorly manifested by gesticulations of offering, dancing, singing, chanting, etc., which is the gauna bhakti that I referred to; this categorisation of bhakti is called Vaishnavachara.
It becomes more and more inward and esoterically more sublime and deeper in the Saivachara. The Saivas have fewer scruples than the Vaishnavas. Vaishnavas are very orthodox people. We have only to see a Vaishnava in order to know what kind of a person he is—a very fanatic type. There was a venerable lady who was an utter, out-and-out, hundred-percent Vaishnava devotee, but due to her prarabdha she had to live in a room which was very close to a Siva temple. She somehow accommodated herself to it. She had to live there; no use of complaining. One day, a Vaishnava Iyengar came to see her. He was shocked: “You are staying here, near a Siva temple? Are you not ashamed that you are living near a Siva temple?” This is the fanaticism of Vaishnavas. A Vaishnava lady from Karnataka used to go to Badrinath. When asked if she would also visit Kedarnath, she covered her ears because Kedarnath is Siva's temple. This fanaticism is characteristic of the intense orthodoxy of the dualistic Vaishnava theology—partly in the Sri Vaishnava type, and much more in the dualistic Madhva type, who go to the extreme of orthodoxy. We have to see them in order to believe how extreme they are. But when we enter into the circle of Siva worship, the restrictions of the type of orthodoxy that is externally imposed on us by society or by ourselves get diminished. We become more and more informal, free and personalistic, rather than socialised in our worship. We become completely free in the Sakta modes of worship. Even the little restriction imposed on us by the Saiva methods goes.
As I mentioned, these are all intricate things, like the manufacture of an atom bomb. The procedures cannot be explained. We cannot understand what God actually requires of us unless we know how far we are from God in the qualities that constitute our individual personality and the qualities that we expect to see in God.
Omnipresent is God; we are in one place only. Omniscient is God; we are ignorant. Omnipotent is God; we are very feeble and weak in every way. God has no desires; we have only that, and nothing but that. God is immortal; we are subject to destruction. God has no external; for us, everybody is outside ourselves. There is no quality in us that can be compared with God's quality. By scrubbing off these limitations which are physical, social, legal, and even ethical in the socialistic sense, we become more and more personal in our nature. We do not go on describing ourselves in terms of what we are not.
“I am the son of so-and-so, father of so-and-so, working in such-and-such office,” etc., are descriptions of ourselves in terms of what we are not. But can you tell me what you are, dissociated from all these connections that you have with the world—with office, with work, and with family? You will find that it is very difficult to describe. You are always something in terms of something else. This is an alienated form of description of yourself—the ritualistic type of defining one's own self, I should say, which gradually gets weaned out in this methodological approach into the higher and higher levels of sadhana: Vaishnava, Saiva, Sakta, Ganapatya, Saura, Kaumara, or whatever we may call it.
What happens is that we become superhuman, unsocial—even appearing to be anti-social. Though they are not anti-social, the unsocial character and the purely personalistic approach of these people to the realities above the world sometimes make them look like people not wanted in this world. And their behaviour can sometimes be so anomalous, so totally different from the expectations of society, that they may not be able to live in this world at all. They may be burnt at the stake or crucified or impaled, which has happened in the case of many of Sufi saints, as we hear. They become unwanted in the world, and they want to be unwanted by the world because the more we are not wanted here, the more will we be wanted there.
But, we wish to be wanted very much here. We would like to be the rulers of this Earth—heads of the United Nations or kings of the whole world. The instinct of self-respect, self-adoration, is so very piercingly rooted in the recesses of our hearts that we could go for many days without food more easily than bear one word of insult, because insult exactly touches the point which we consider as being ourselves.
Saṃmānādbrāhmaṇo nityamudvijeta viṣādiva, amṛtasyeva cākāṅkṣedavamānasya sarvadā (N.P. 40) is a verse from the Narada Parivrajaka Upanishad. A Brahmana, that is to say, a highly advanced spiritual seeker, should ask for insult and detest praise. Wherever you are praised, run away from that place. Do not hear a word of any encomium or eulogy about your own self. When the ego is already fat enough, why do you want to plaster it further with more and more encomiums falsely poured on you? Those who praise you are actually treacherous people because they can cut your throat one day or the other. Therefore, lean not on the support of social wealth or self-recognition. Highly advanced spiritual seekers do not expect a weaning from society to take place by the historical process of automatic evolution; they deliberately invoke this condition on themselves by poverty, obedience and charity. These are the great points that are seen in advanced devotion, as totally distinguished from ordinary devotion.
I mentioned the five bhavas of the Vaishnavas. They are in ascending order, where you melt completely in the end. Devotion has to be a means of melting yourself into liquid before the ocean of God Almighty, and you cannot remain as an outside something—because if you are there, God is limited. Let the unlimitedness of God swallow you completely. May you be prepared for this kind of self-annihilation in the glory of God.
I also mentioned various Acharas which are worth studying by any serious student of spiritual practice. These Shastras, the Agamas and the Tantras—Vaishnava, Saiva, Sakta, Saura, Ganapatya, and Kaumara—are so very touching, so very enlightening, so very enrapturing in their method of approach and instruction that you will want nothing else afterwards. That is the reason why the whole text is kept as a guarded secret. Even a book like the Yoga Vasishtha, which comes under the Agama section, was secretively kept by Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj. He would not allow that book to be in the library. There was an abridged edition called the Laghu Yoga Vasishtha, translated into English by Narayanaswamy Iyengar, which Gurudev read many times and underlined sentences in red pencil, but he removed the book from the library, saying that it is not to be read by everyone. The Ashtavakra Gita was a favourite text of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, but if anybody came near, he would thrust it under the bed so that people may not know that it was there.
The Ashtavakra Gita, the Avadhuta Gita, the Yoga Vasishtha and the Tripura Rahasya are all Agama Shastras because they tell us something which nobody will tell us, and nobody is expected to tell us. That is the secret that Christ told on the mountaintop to a selected few. To others he spoke in parables, but he revealed the secret to his twelve disciples; it is called the Sermon on the Mount. Buddha said the same thing to his devotees: “I know much more than what I have told you, but this is not the time to tell you what it is.” And Sri Krishna said the same thing in the Bhagavadgita: “I know everything, Arjuna. You don't know anything. I shall tell you something in brief.”
So here, in this approach which is totally inward, totally spiritual, totally soul-filled, totally informal, totally non-ritualistic, totally unsocial, one seems to be a baby, as it were, born just now, with no cult or religion whatsoever, and not even sex consciousness. A little baby does not know to what gender it belongs. We become children before the majestic eye of God when we are cleansed completely of the biological, anthropological, and even human aspects. A baby has no such qualities at all; a baby is only a baby. We cannot describe it in any other way except that it is a baby, and we should not say anything else about it. We become like that. Pāṇḍityaṁ nirvidya bālyena tiṣṭhāset (B.U. 3.5.1) says the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: Shun all your learning and become a child—which is to say, not the first childhood of ignorance and crawling in a state of helplessness, but a second childhood that we are voluntarily assuming, the simplicity, the self-sufficiency, the goodness, the beauty and the utter minimum of existence, minus the ignorance and other limitations of a child.
Great saints and sages are like babies. They speak like babies, behave like babies; children they are. Verily they are children of God as a child is dear to everyone, whoever be the mother or father of that child. Would we be happy to see a little baby on the road with no one to look after it? We would not say, “It is somebody's child. Why should I bother?” We would be attracted to that little compound of existence which is called a child because of its simplicity, egolessness and perfection of presentation. Such a thing is the quality of a saint and sage. He becomes beautiful, grand, powerful, childlike. 'Godman' is the word to describe him.
This kind of achievement is the aim that is expected through worships that are wholly internal. In the beginning, it is an outward mode of worship through the Prabhu Samhita. It then goes to the Suhrit Samhita, as I mentioned. We want large quantities of substance to offer to God: huge temples, large bells, many books, and much chanting, etc. In the beginning all these things are necessary so that we may be roused into a religious mood of the presence of God. Gradually we feel no need for these things; we require ourselves only. We can be anywhere, and we will find God there.
These stages of religious development from scriptures like the Veda Samhita, the Smritis, the Itihasas, the Puranas and the Agamas constitute the whole gamut of religious development. The entire religion is here in what we have been discussing during these days. The original master-like, father-like concept of God, the friendly, more intimate relationship that one establishes with God, and a merger of feeling with God—these constitute the three stages of perfect religion.
While this is so, as history advanced and people became weaker and weaker, it was not easy for people to be truly religious in this sense. The opponents to religion denied God. They did not want any religion at all, and felt that the religious approach is somehow or other totally dissociated from social existence in the world. Philosophical counter-blasts and social oppositions arose at that time, which is the diluted form of religious development—I should say, at the end of it. When the Masters vanished from the Earth and the great saints and sages who could speak to God were no more available, and the Godmen vanished completely—when the very root of religion was threatened on account of socialisation, economisation, politicisation, etc., of the life of people in the world—it became necessary for those remaining in the field of religious practice to defend themselves. This defence started, both in the West and in the East, through philosophical arguments. In the West, the religion of Christ was defended by Saint Thomas Aquinas, and he is sometimes considered as the Western Sankaracharya. The great polemics that he discharged against all opposition to Christ's religion through his great works like the Summa Theologica, all which were written in the Latin language, were necessary for proving the existence of God. In the earlier stages, proof for the existence of God was not necessary. There was a spontaneous feeling that He must exist. Afterwards, it became a very great necessity in practical life and, finally, it was the reality in which we are sunk completely. Now it has become a great need for us to prove that God exists, which is a great travesty indeed; but that is the state of logical, metaphysical, and argumentative philosophy.
In India, the arguments of philosophy started with Buddhist metaphysicians like Nagarjuna and Vasubandhu, and Sankaracharya highlighted it. Sankaracharya was a master logician and philosopher who lived and died for the sake of proving that God is, and God only is. So is the case with Western argumentators. The philosophical systems of the West, as well as of the East, confining themselves to the work of establishing the truths of religion and spirituality, constitute the last phase of the development of religion. We shall speak a few words about this tomorrow.