A poignant meme is presently doing the rounds on social media about the uncertainty of life: that you go on a holiday and get massacred, you go on a honeymoon and get murdered, you fly out on a trip abroad, and your plane crashes, you mind your own business in your hostel when the sky literally falls on your head as a doomed plane.
This deeply disturbing pattern prompted me to reexamine the inner history of Hindu thought and its attempts to grasp the riddle of existence—its uncertainties and the frequently brutal outcome.
I found that Hindu thought is actually a practical game plan for life, providing perspective on the chaos. I hear it first in the Rig Veda, when the Hindus were still not nagarik or settled urban people but wandered the plains with their herds of cattle, frequently clashing over pasturage. So severe were these clashes that the encounters of two clans became a euphemism for battle, a sangram.
So, you find the Vedas saying a curious thing, “Ekam sat, viprahbahudavadanti,” which I interpret as the practical message, “The facts are the facts, and smart people get it.” On the ground, it means, “If everybody has to share the same space, they’ll have to work it out.”
This is a first in conflict resolution for the project of communal life with maximum damage control. It’s a survival directive from the earliest Hindu worldview that internal strife absolutely has to be managed because nobody is going anywhere. Here they are, and here they stay. Hence this official statement: “Live and let live for the greater good.”
We hear this point reiterated in many ways in the sixteen principal Upanishads that follow the Vedas. The Upanishads inquire, reflect, debate and theorise about this existential issue. And they continue to expand the concept of Ekam Sat.
Sat literally means “What is” or what exists. Its fundamental aspect, they say, is a ‘Superself ’ or ‘God’, an intangible spirit. Amazingly, it contains every physical form and pervades every physical form. It’s an essence so subtle that mere words fail to express it.
However, the Upanishads don’t mean to give up without trying, for the concept is too mind-blowing. So, they settle for comparisons that everyone can understand: that the Superself is “Pushpa madhyeyathagandham, payomadhyeyathaghrtam, tilamadhyeyathatailam,” or “As scent in a flower, as ghee in milk, as oil in a sesame seed.” Further, “Om purnamadahpurnamidam, purnatpurnamudachyate, purnasyapurnamadayapurnamevavashishyate.” It means, “The Superself that contains everything is the whole. Everything that comes from it is a whole in itself, and yet it’s a part of the bigger whole.”
This is our first theory of a cosmos or universe that includes Earth and everything in it, as well as the galaxy comprising the sun, moon, stars, and planets. So, if it all belongs to the Superself, the Isha, what’s everybody fighting about? “Don’t be greedy,” says the opening verse of the Isha Upanishad; “Ishavaasyamidamsarvamyatkinchajagatyamjagat, tenatyaktenabhunjitha ma gridhah, kasyasviddhanam,” or “Everything moving or unmoving within the universe is controlled and owned by the One. So, we should accept only the stuff we need and not covet anything else, knowing to Whom they belong.”
The other aspect of sat, they say, is that human beings link the larger world outside and the inner world of thoughts and feelings. What connects human beings and to the rest of the creation is an inner spark, the “light within the heart”.
Having that sorted nicely, with a Superself that encompasses everything and an inner spark connecting us and to the Superself, they want to know more.
Whoosh! We hit the Bhagavad Gita. See, the Upanishads are reportage. Their authors “intuited” or “heard” things and said, “These are the thoughts that came to us and others; and these are the questions asked and the answers that came to us.”
However, in the Bhagavad Gita, they make the big leap. They want to hear the Superself speak directly to them. It’s the philosophical parallel of what happens after the Industrial Revolution, after people are done making cars, trains and planes, and think, “Right, let’s build a spaceship.”
And so, they envision a semi-celestial warrior and make him ask on their behalf because nobody will listen otherwise. They set up Arjuna in the middle of two huge armies on the brink of war in the ultimate sangram. They make him stick his neck out and say, “Kathamvidyaamahamyogim” (How may I know Thee, Lord?) Bhagavad Gita 10:17. You know the live-and-let-live answers to that, especially the bit with cult status, Chapter 16 in the Bhagavad Gita about “divine and demoniac natures”.
But the work never stops because these amazing ideas are not exactly put into practice, and things sink to the bottom of the sea. It takes the Bhakti Movement to haul it up, scrape off the barnacles and reassert the core values of the Upanishads about the Supersoul and our interconnectivity as human beings. And then we have the colonial age, and paradoxically, it also helps the work because the Upanishads come right back as the Constitution—as the modern Upanishad, the old-new life plan.
In sum, given how suddenly we may die, we have no real mental refuge but the kindly arms of Sarasvati, the perspective that thought provides on how to live.
Renuka Narayanan is senior journalist
(Views are personal)
(shebaba09@gmail.com)