The Rain Was Never the Problem
Guru Purnima at Paduka Darshan, and the one question my Guru said we have been asking backwards for a very long time.
I have been home two days and I have not told anyone what happened.
The bag is still half unpacked in the corner of the bedroom. The kurta on top of it still carries the smell of the pandal, which is the smell of a few thousand people sitting still in paduka darshan listening to Swamiji speak.
Somebody asked me how it was. I said it was good. That was the entire answer I had.
Every other time I have come back from the ashram, I have come back with things to tell people. Something he said. Something that happened in the hall. The way the mornings were. This time there is nothing I want to say out loud, and the quiet is not a decision I have made.
I have felt for a long time that a darshan works the way a tangent works. The line touches the circle at exactly one point, one out of the innumerable points that make up the curve, and at the moment of contact nothing appears to happen. It does not enter. It does not stay. But the trajectory afterwards is not the trajectory before, and if you step to one side and look again from the side, you find that the circle was never a circle at all. It is a helix, moving forward. It has been moving the whole time, and each touch sets the pitch of the next turn. You cannot see this while you are on it. You see it much later, when the loop you are on is plainly not the loop you were on.
That is what a darshan has always done. Something is said, or nothing is said and something is felt, and it touches at one point, and the curve moves.
The programme was at Paduka Darshan, where Swamiji established the Sannyas Peeth on a mandate from his own Guru. It is not Ganga Darshan. Ganga Darshan is the main building of the Bihar School of Yoga, which Sri Swamiji founded in Munger in 1963, and it is what most people picture when they hear that somebody has gone to Munger. Paduka Darshan is the other place, and it is named after a pair of sandals.
The paduka is not a relic. It is a record of where the feet went. When a person puts his head down in front of his Guru’s sandals he is making a commitment about his own journey.
He is saying that he will walk that road, and that he will not settle for describing it accurately from a chair.
This tradition has been stubborn about that from the beginning. Knowledge is not the thing. Living it is the thing. And the walking has to be his own. In the guru shishya parampara nobody is asked to reproduce his Guru’s journey and present it as his own experience. He is asked to make one.
On the morning of the purnima, Swamiji put a question in front of that pandal and then took it away from us.
He said, many people ask, is the Guru perfect?
He said, that is the wrong question.
The right question is, are we ready to receive the light of the Guru?
Then came the image I have not been able to put down since. Grace is always falling, he said. The sun shines the same on everyone. The rain falls the same on everyone. But a pot whose mouth is covered stays empty in the middle of a downpour.
I have been walking around this house for two days looking at the lid.
And it is not a private matter, to be settled quietly between a man and his own practice. It is the question, and it belongs to every person who was sitting in that pandal.
Something else became visible while I was there, and I set it down without any pleasure. Swamiji has gone so far ahead that from any height at all, the distances between the rest of us stop being visible. Sannyasins, householders, people who came into the tradition four decades ago, people who arrived last year. Some are occupied with who travelled where with him, who sat closer, who was called by name, whose claim is older. Everybody is arranging his position in the congregation. From thirty thousand feet there is one man very far out in front, and a small huddle a long way behind him, and the huddle is busy with its own seating.
I was in the huddle. I am not describing other people.
Nothing about that view leaves a title standing. Seniority does not survive it either. What survives is the lid, and all of us are carrying one, at more or less the same height.
There is a detail about this festival that I had held as a fact for years and understood only this July.
Guru Purnima is Vyasa Purnima. The full moon of Ashadha belongs to Krishna Dvaipayana Vyasa, and it belongs to him because he is the one who divided the Veda. Before him it was one body. He cut it into four and gave each part to one disciple. Paila received the Rig, Vaishampayana the Yajur, Jaimini the Sama, Sumantu the Atharva.
Ask why a man would break something whole into four pieces and hand them out.
Not because the knowledge had grown. Because we had shrunk. Dwapara was closing, the human capacity to hold was thinning, and the vessel that had once carried the whole could now carry a quarter. The division of the Veda is not a story about learning expanding. It is the first recorded measurement of the lid.
Which is why the day we keep as the day of the Guru is, read honestly, a day about the disciple. Swamiji said as much on the first evening. Guru Purnima is the journey of a disciple.
And the four pieces, taken in the order they were handed out, are not a syllabus. They are seeing, hearing, doing, and living. Four walls of one pot.
The Rig is the seeing. Its rishis are not called authors. They are called drashta, the ones who saw. And in the tenth mandala, in the sukta on knowledge and speech, Brihaspati Angirasa sets down what happens to the rest of us.
उत त्वः पश्यन्न ददर्श वाचमुत त्वः शृण्वन्न शृणोत्येनाम् । उतो त्वस्मै तन्वं वि सस्रे जायेव पत्य उशती सुवासाः ॥
uta tvaḥ paśyan na dadarśa vācam, uta tvaḥ śṛṇvan na śṛṇoty enām uto tvasmai tanvaṃ vi sasre jāyeva patya uśatī suvāsāḥ
Rig Veda 10.71.4. One man looks at speech and does not see her. Another listens to her and does not hear her. And to a third she opens her own body, the way a wife well dressed and full of longing opens herself to her husband.
Four people in the same room. The same speech, entire, present. The difference is not in the ears.
I should be careful here about what I claim for myself. I have never felt intellectually brilliant. I do not reason my way through much. I mostly go by what I perceive of whatever is standing in front of me, and that sounds close to what the Rig means by seeing, and it is not the same thing. The verse does not say she gives herself to the observant. It says uśatī, full of longing, and the longing in that line runs both ways. Perception without wanting is only surveillance. I have done a great deal of accurate watching.
The other prayer from that Veda, the one every child in this tradition has heard, asks for exactly one thing. आ नो भद्राः क्रतवो यन्तु विश्वतः, let noble thoughts come to us from every side, unobstructed, unhindered. Rig Veda 1.89.1. Gotama Rahugana does not ask to be filled. He asks to be openable.
The Sama is the hearing. And here is the fact that undid me, one that any philologist will confirm with no devotion in it at all. The Sama Veda is almost entirely the Rig Veda. Of its verses, all but about seventy five are lifted word for word from what already existed. Its very first verse,
अग्न आ याहि वीतये गृणानो हव्यदातये । नि होता सत्सि बर्हिषि ॥
agna ā yāhi vītaye gṛṇāno havyadātaye, ni hotā satsi barhiṣi
is Rig Veda 6.16.10. Nothing was added. The words were set to melody, and by that alone they became a second Veda. In the Gita, when Krishna names what he is among the Vedas, he does not choose the older one. Vedānāṃ sāmavedo’smi. Among the Vedas I am the Sama. The sung one.
Sit with the size of that. The same syllables, the same rishis, the same meanings, and the difference between one Veda and another lies entirely in the manner of the receiving.
Nothing new was said to me this July. Not one teaching in those days was information I did not already have. The books are in this house. I have taken these same notes before, in this same handwriting, in older notebooks in the cupboard behind me. What was different is that this time it arrived as sound and not as content.
The Yajur is the doing. The Veda of the act, the ordered sequence, the offering placed with the hands. Its Taittiriya branch carries the oldest convocation address we have, the words a teacher gives a student on the day the student leaves.
सत्यं वद । धर्मं चर । स्वाध्यायान्मा प्रमदः ।
Speak the truth. Walk in dharma. Do not neglect your own study. Svādhyāya, one’s own, not the teacher’s. The instruction is barely three words long and it is the entire content of the paduka.
Then, a few lines later:
मातृदेवो भव । पितृदेवो भव । आचार्यदेवो भव ।
Taittiriya Upanishad 1.11.2. Be one for whom the mother is divine, the father is divine, the teacher is divine.
And before any of it is taught, teacher and student say the shanti together, in the plural, both asking for the same thing. Saha nāvavatu, saha nau bhunaktu, saha vīryaṃ karavāvahai. May we be protected together, nourished together, may we build strength together. Not a blessing handed down from a height. Two people under one roof, with the same request.
The Atharva is the living. The household Veda, concerned with sleep and fever and grain and the body as it actually is. And in its eleventh book, in the sukta on the brahmachari, there is the strangest and most exact description of this relationship in all of our literature.
आचार्य उपनयमानो ब्रह्मचारिणं कृणुते गर्भमन्तः । तं रात्रीस्तिस्र उदरे बिभर्ति तं जातं द्रष्टुमभिसंयन्ति देवाः ॥
Atharva Veda 11.5.3. The teacher, drawing the student to himself, makes of him an embryo within his own body. He carries him three nights in his belly. When the student is born, the gods gather to look at him.
I read that verse again after coming home. I did not go this time because I planned to. Something moved months ago and the travel was booked before I had decided anything, and I have been slightly awkward about saying that out loud until I read the sukta again. The tradition does not find it unusual. It treats the disciple as something being carried, on a timeline he is not managing, by someone who did not ask him.
The same Veda holds the Mundaka, and the Mundaka gives the practical instruction. तद्विज्ञानार्थं स गुरुमेवाभिगच्छेत् समित्पाणिः. Let him approach the Guru, samitpāṇiḥ, with the firewood in his own hands. Mundaka 1.2.12.
The fuel is not supplied. That has always been the arrangement. The Guru gives the fire.
On the second morning, at Sannyas Peeth, Swamiji spoke about who comes to a Guru and why, and it was uncomfortable in the way accurate things are.
Some come out of their own difficulty. Life is going badly and the Guru is expected to rearrange it. Others take his ideals into their own lives and want to serve society through them, and these carry the work forward, but they have their own examination waiting. From time to time the Guru will test them. And when he corrects such a person on a mistake, many of them fall into discouragement.
That falling is the test. Not the correction. What a person does in the four seconds after the correction is the test, and Swamiji called it the measure of inner maturity.
The only useful question in that moment, the one I wrote down in a smaller hand than usual, is not why he said it. It is which of my mental traits has just been exposed.
Then the third kind. The one who is simply focused, not diverted by everybody else’s understanding of what he is doing, moving toward identification with the Guru’s consciousness. He gave the example nobody in this lineage can hear casually. Sri Swamiji on his own Guru, Swami Sivananda, saying the identification had become total, that he could see him and speak with him.
And then the correction that rearranged the whole week for me.
Bhakti, he said, is not blind faith. It is sajag samarpan. Alert surrender. Surrender is not the loss of viveka. It is staying awake inside every action and every decision, and being surrendered within that wakefulness.
The connection is not made through buddhi, nor through manas, nor through ahamkara. Not by intellect, not by the emotional mind, and least of all by the ego that has done a lot of reading. It is made through bhakti, which is a purifying force and not a mood. Not sentiment. Not emotional attachment. Something that cleans the heart, widens the consciousness, and carries a sadhaka toward realisation.
He quoted the Narada Bhakti Sutra, where bhakti is parama prema rupa, the supreme form of love, and then he brought it down to the only place it can be verified. Bhakti is not confined to puja, japa, anushthana or going to the temple. If every thought, word and action is carried with awareness and surrender, the whole of life becomes upasana. And the measure is never how many times a man performs his worship. The measure is how much love, compassion, mercy, forgiveness and respect appear in his behaviour toward the people around him.
When jnana, karma and bhakti come together, he said, yoga arrives at its fullness.
He said the Guru does not change anyone. The Guru’s work is to wake what is already there. The seed already holds the tree. The Guru makes neither the seed nor the tree. He gives the soil, the water, the warmth, the light, and then he leaves the seed alone to do what a seed has always known how to do.
That image is not his invention, and he would be the first to say so. It is Uddalaka Aruni in the Chandogya, which belongs to the Sama, telling his son to bring the fruit of the banyan. Break it. What do you see? Small seeds, father. Break one. What do you see? Nothing at all. And Uddalaka says, that nothing you cannot see, from that this whole great tree stands. Tat tvam asi, Shvetaketo.
I have never felt that I built myself. What the seed teaching corrects is subtler than that. It is the assumption that something has to be added. Nothing is being added. The Guru is not filling anybody. He is arranging the conditions and then, and this is the part I keep returning to, he does not pull at the shoot.
He was specific about what worship is, and I would put this in front of anyone who thinks the festival is about garlands.
If your anger has reduced, that is worship of the Guru. If your selfishness has reduced, that is worship of the Guru. If your impulse to serve has grown, that is worship of the Guru. If your sadhana has become regular, that is worship of the Guru. If there is more happiness in your family because of you, that is worship of the Guru.
Large ceremonies are not required. The Guru is pleased when the disciple begins to walk on what he has already been told. The sandals again.
The signs of inner correction, in the order he gave them, are compassion, clear discrimination, confidence without pride, and the capacity to serve without being noticed. And every night, two questions before sleep. Was I more aware today. Did I strengthen one virtue.
Not, what did I achieve. Not, what did I feel. Two questions a person can answer honestly in the dark.
I will say one thing about my Guru and then leave it alone, because saying it twice would make it smaller.
For me, Swamiji is sakshat Shiva. Not a representative of, not a reminder of, not a symbol pointing toward. That is not a claim I am making about the universe, and it gives me no standing of any kind, least of all in the huddle. It is a description of what my eyes have seen at close range, and a man is permitted to report what he has seen.
And because he drew the line himself that same week, I will hold to it. This is not andhvishwas. The viveka has not been handed over anywhere. It has been put to work.
At the end he asked for a sankalpa. Small. Something a person can actually carry through a Tuesday.
Five minutes of japa every day. Some time in silence every day. One act of service with nothing coming back. One person made a little happier. A little better today than yesterday.
That is the dakshina. Not money, not ceremony, not an offering larger than the one made by the man sitting next to you. The greatest gift to the Guru is that you change, so that the life itself becomes an expression of gratitude to him.
Vastavik sambhavana se parichay, Guru. The Guru is the one who introduces you to what you are actually capable of.
Guru ek chetna hai. The Guru is a state of consciousness.
The programme closed with the shanti path. During the recitation each of us was given an angavastra as prasad. Mine is folded on the second shelf, still creased in the squares it came in, and I have not been able to put it anywhere sensible.
That is where I am. An unsorted bag, a folded cloth, and a house in which I have spoken less this week than in any week I can remember. What I notice is not peace, which is too large a word for a Friday morning in Delhi. It is that the commentary has stopped. The running assessment of whether I am doing well, whether the practice is working, whether anyone has noticed. That noise was the lid. I did not put it there deliberately and I cannot claim to have taken it off.
Somewhere in those four days the line came in and touched the curve at one point, the way it always does, and I did not feel it happen. I only know that I am quiet, and that the quiet is not mine.
The rain was never the problem.
It has been falling on this house the whole time.
Hari Om Tat Sat.