Jo Bole To Hari Katha #6

Sahajanand! First thing: the seers never left; they cannot leave. If there is night, there will be stars in the sky. If there is earth, somewhere flowers will bloom. If human consciousness is present, the ṛṣi cannot vanish. Somewhere a spring will burst forth, somewhere a song will arise, somewhere a flute will play.

Man is not so barren that the lineage of seers could ever end. It has never ended. But the one who wrote the Nirukta was not a seer—he was a linguist, a grammarian. His allegiance is to logic, not to poetry; to thought, not to meditation. And people justify their allegiance by a thousand clever devices.

Nirukta is not a scripture of religion. It is a science of language, and language as a science rests on logic. Grammar is mathematics. Therefore the mathematician will not wish for seers to exist; for the mathematician, the greatest threat is from the seer.

A mathematician would want logic to be supreme—logic itself to be the ṛṣi. But how can logic be a ṛṣi?

What is the meaning of logic? It is the process of human thinking. But has Truth ever been known by thinking? That which you do not know—how will you think it, how will you conceive it? Thought only circles within the perimeter of the known, while Truth is the Unknown; not only unknown but unknowable.

Science divides existence into two categories; religion into three. Science says: the world can be divided into the known and the unknown, and nothing more. What is known today was unknown yesterday; what is unknown today will be known tomorrow. The boundary of the unknown shrinks daily, the boundary of the known expands daily—this is scientific progress. The day the unknown becomes zero and all is known, science will have reached its Everest.

Religion says there is a third category: the unknowable—that which, no matter how much you know, remains ever beyond. You can go on knowing, yet something remains ungrasped. There is no claim you can ever make: “I have known it.” That unknowable has been called God. He will never be “known.” There will always be knowers, tasters, singers of His song; whoever catches even a drop becomes golden. Let a single note of His fall upon a man, and he becomes ṛṣi. But to touch the ocean is not to possess it; even if you dive into it, it is still vast. We are but drops.

What remains even after knowing and knowing—that is religion’s mysticism. Beware: science’s division is dangerous, for it implies that one day everything will be known. Then what will you do? Beyond that, only self-destruction remains. The more knowledgeable mankind becomes, the more suicides increase. The more “educated” a country, the more self-destructive it becomes. Why? Because life then loses mystery. If nothing remains to be known, then why live tomorrow? Just to repeat the same again and again? Repetition breeds boredom.

Søren Kierkegaard said man’s greatest problem is boredom. Why? Because what is known becomes boring. Husbands are bored of wives; wives are bored of husbands—why? Known, mapped, all too familiar. Why do people switch religions? Hindus become Christians, Christians become Hindus: bored with repeating the Gita; the Bible feels a little new. Bored with the Bible; the Gita feels a little new. Mind demands change: new house, job, wife, clothes, fashion—anything to fend off boredom. But these changes merely cover it; they do not cure it.

Religion alone has the alchemy to end boredom forever. No one ever saw Buddha bored; no one ever saw Mahavira tired or dull.

Your so-called religious people are not religious. For them religion itself is a bore. That’s why you find people sleeping in temples and discourses. What is there to know? At Ramleela, people doze; they’ve seen it all a thousand times.

Let me tell you a village tale. The school took the children nightly to the Ramleela—religious education! The inspector arrived. The teacher, eager to impress, asked the inspector to question the children about Ramleela. So the inspector asked, “Children, who broke Shiva’s bow?” One boy shot up his hand—an utter dunce, never raised his hand before! The teacher panicked. The inspector said, “Yes, son?” The boy said, “I don’t know who broke it; I just want to say first that I didn’t! Wherever anything breaks—at home, outside, school—I’m always blamed. I don’t know who did this one.” The inspector was stunned. The teacher jumped in, “Don’t believe him, sir—he must have broken it! See that gulmohar branch—he broke it. That windowpane—he broke it. The arm of my chair—he broke it. Looks innocent, but he’s a devil. I know him inside out. He broke Shiva’s bow!” The inspector was bewildered. The headmaster said, “Don’t worry. Boys break things. If Shiva’s bow is broken, we’ll have it repaired! Why fret?” The inspector fled to the municipal office. The chairman reassured him, “We’ll hire a carpenter. Things break; we fix them. Why sweat so much?” Everyone watches Ramleela—but as the saying goes, they watch all night and in the morning ask, “Who was Sita to Rama?” They sleep through it; too many times creates boredom.

Once, at a Ramleela, Hanuman went to burn Lanka but set Ayodhya aflame instead. The whole audience woke up! Rama shouted, “Hanuman, you remained a monkey! Who told you to burn Ayodhya?” Hanuman, angry, said, “Listen clearly. I’ve got a better-paid job at another Ramleela. I’m not afraid of you. I’ve burned it—do what you like. I’m bored of burning Lanka every night!” He was the village strongman; who could stop him? With great difficulty they dropped the curtain and coaxed him home.

The mind seeks the new. By science’s reckoning the “new” won’t last long—soon it will all be known. Hence the West’s deep ennui; life seems meaningless. The East lags, so its sadness is less—for now. It will come. I am not against science. I want science taught. But it is an illusion to let science take religion’s place.

Religion’s third category—the unknowable—must be preserved: that there is something mysterious, and such that however much we know, we still cannot say. We will know and become dumb—like sugar in a dumb man’s mouth: the taste is there, but words cannot carry it. Whatever we say will be wrong.

Lao Tzu said: Don’t ask me of Truth—for whatever I say becomes false the moment it is said. Truth is vast; words are small.

Nirukta is not based on religious realization. It is language and grammar—a mathematics—an extension of logic. Hence, by that apocryphal tale, Nirukta is saying: seers are no longer needed; their time is past.

Indians also have a dishonest way of saying things—never straight, they drag in the gods needlessly. Here if you speak straight, people feel poisoned; so we speak roundabout so that no one can tell what is being said, and even if they do, it can bear many meanings.

And what would the gods know? Are gods above the seers? No. None is higher than a ṛṣi.

Ours is the only culture that has two words for poet: kavi and ṛṣi. No other language has that second word, because that other form of poetry never descended there. Kavi and ṛṣi—understand the distinction.

A kavi is one in whose life a window opens once in a while—one ray, a flash; then darkness again. He himself doesn’t know why or how. If he sits to “make” poetry, he only rhymes. Rhyming anyone can do. Now there’s “free verse”—even rhyme is unnecessary; any fool becomes “poet.” Hence so many poets; the audience brings rotten tomatoes and eggs!

The true kavi is one to whom, without effort, like a mystery, a ray enters through some pore. He holds it in words, gives it tune—makes it a song.

When Coleridge died, forty thousand unfinished poems were found in his house. Friends asked, “Why not finish them?” He said, “How can I? A poem descends: a few lines come, then no more. If I add, the poem dies. I must wait.” He was an honest poet.

Tagore, translating Gitanjali into English, showed it to C. F. Andrews. Andrews corrected four linguistic errors; Tagore accepted. Later, at a European gathering, Yeats stood up: “Exquisite! It will win the Nobel. But there are four mistakes.” The same four places Andrews had “corrected.” Yeats said, “Your original words, though wrong in grammar, were right in poetry; Andrews’ are linguistically right but poetically dead. Poetry is above language; when it can be said in prose, we write prose. Verse is for what cannot fit into prose. The poet needs some freedom—to bend words, give them new resonance.”

Yeats told Tagore to restore his words. That is why the Vedas are called apauruṣeya—impersonal. We wrote, but we were only scribes; the Creator was God. He sang; we set it down. All true poetry is apauruṣeya—it comes from an unknown realm, trembles your being; if you can transmit that tremor, poetry is born.

But poetry is accidental; you are not its master. Tagore sometimes wrote for days, doors locked, no food or bath, lest the stream be broken—so delicate, like a spider’s web.

Above poetry is another realm—the realm of ṛca, the seer’s utterance. A ṛṣi is one in whose life poetry is no longer accidental; his very style is poetry. His walking is poetry; his silence is poetry. Sit near him, and your heart’s veena begins to sing. Read a poem and then go meet the poet—you will often be disillusioned. The poem is sublime; the poet may be ordinary, full of anger, jealousy, ego, intrigue.

A poet is like a man walking in darkness: a car passes, dazzling his eyes for a moment; when it’s gone, the darkness seems even darker. The poet soars for a moment, then falls below the common ditch. Hence the shabby lives of many poets.

A ṛṣi has learned to walk only on the peaks—moving from summit to summit; for him, heights are level ground.

A poet has no sadhana, no yoga, no meditation, no prayer; he is like you. Some past merit perhaps opens a window. He neither knows how it opens nor closes. A ṛṣi holds the key. He knows how to open the door; he has refined himself, attuned inner sky with outer sky. No separation remains—nonduality.

Through a poet, God sometimes speaks; through a ṛṣi, there is no “through”—he is one with God. The poet is a medium; the ṛṣi is Godlike.

So I do not accept that there came a day when seers began to leave this world. They have not left, I say from experience.

Since the Nirukta was written, how many seers have appeared! Buddha, Mahavira, Gorakh, Kabir, Nanak, Farid, Dadu—in India. Outside, Jesus, Muhammad—was there anyone greater than Muhammad? What ricas the Qur’an contains—what cadence, what song! Even if you don’t understand it, if someone sings it, you will sway. Wine need not be explained; drink and you’ll know. The very word Qur’an means “to recite, to chant.” When it first descended, Muhammad trembled: a voice from the sky: “Recite! Sing!” He said, “I am unlettered; how can I sing?” The voice said, “Forget scriptures; scholars rarely sing. Birds sing. You sing—without hesitation.” Terrified, he returned home and said to his wife, “Cover me; I’m shivering.” He said words I love: “Either I’ve gone mad—or I have become a poet.” If he had been born in India, he would have said, “Either I’ve gone mad—or I have become a ṛṣi.” Arabic had no word for ṛṣi.

Revelations continued for years; what Muslims call ayat, we call ricas. Muhammad is a seer.

Therefore I cannot accept, however much Nirukta says it, that seers were departing. After Nirukta came Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu—astonishing beings whose every word contains the kingdom of heaven. Nanak lived only five centuries ago; his words are song. Sadly, Nanak fell into the hands of soldiers instead of sannyasins; swords began to flash where once only the ektara of Mardana played. His language itself became Gurumukhi—“from the Guru’s mouth.” Pure Hindi is angular; Punjabi has sweetness. Ask a seer, not a grammarian: language is the singer’s freedom.

Mahavira did not speak Sanskrit—too rigid—he spoke Prakrit; Buddha spoke Pali. New languages were born around their songs.

Seers have continued and will continue. The very statement “when the seers began to leave” is wrong. And seers have no “tradition.” They have uniqueness. Have you seen a second Buddha? For 2,500 years, millions tried—copied clothes, posture, diet—but imitation never becomes the real. Once, a Jain monk I knew was practicing nudity in stages—naked in his room, then with a towel at the door, then gradually the street! I told him, “By practice you’ll only qualify for the circus. Mahavira’s nakedness was a childlike leap, an innocence—no rehearsal.”

Jains made five steps: chaste householder, then further renunciations, then muni, then nude—ladder-climbing. But a child’s nakedness and practiced nakedness are different. Mahavira’s was an explosion.

In every religion there is the urge to freeze: Jains fixed the line at the 24th Tirthankara; Sikhs, after the tenth Guru, declared the Granth as Guru; Muslims fixed it at Muhammad; Christians at Jesus. When a Swami Satyabhakta once declared himself the 25th Tirthankara, Jains expelled him. I told him, “Why 25th? Declare yourself the first—why stand in a queue! Each seer is the first and only.”

Science has tradition; religion does not. Without Newton, no Einstein. Science builds link by link. But in religion, even if Krishna had not been, Buddha would still have been; he knew himself. Jesus knew nothing of Krishna yet became Christ; Lao Tzu knew nothing of Patanjali, Patanjali nothing of Zarathustra. In religion, each is atomic, original. Thus, no “tradition”—so how can it end?

Yet some are mad enough to make language and grammar everything. When Swami Ram returned from America, he thought: in materialist America my words were drunk like nectar; in Kashi it will be even more. In his very first talk, a pandit stood up: “Stop! Do you know Sanskrit?” He did not. The pandits laughed: “First learn Sanskrit, then speak of Brahman!” Swami Ram was so shocked he left the rostrum, shed his ochre that day, went up to the Himalayas and never came down. What have language and Brahman to do with each other? Buddha and Mahavira did not speak Sanskrit; Jesus and Zarathustra had no Sanskrit. Brahman is a matter of feeling, not of tongue.

You can be a seer. Hear my proclamation: you can be a seer. The seed is within you. Give your energy a chance—to become meditation, to become prayer. Let the seed sprout; you too will flower. Songs will arise in you; a voice will whisper, “Sing.” Verses will flow from you.

But that Nirukta aphorism is cunning: “When the seers began to leave… the gods gave humans Reason as a seer.” The mathematician lives by logic, so he declares logic your ṛṣi. Nothing more absurd. The birth of the seer is beyond logic. Only when you go beyond logic does God descend. Logic will never replace religion. Logic is child’s play. Logic is like a prostitute—how can it be a seer? It belongs to whoever pays it.

When I was a student at Sagar University, its founder, Sir Hari Singh Gaur, a great lawyer, once told me a story after I said, “Lawyers and prostitutes are alike.” He was angry, then thoughtful. He recalled arguing in the Privy Council for the Jaipur king; drunk from the night before, he forgot which side he was on and argued brilliantly against his own client. During recess his assistant told him. He returned and said to the judge, “So far I have presented what my learned opponent will say; now I will refute it.” And he won the case. He laughed and said to me, “Perhaps you are right. This too is a prostitute’s work.” Logic has no loyalty. The same logic can make you theist or atheist. That’s why true religiosity never rests on logic. If your belief rests on logic, you are not a believer—you can be toppled by a counter-argument. Hence scriptures warn: “Do not listen to nonbelievers,” “Do not enter others’ temples”—out of fear. There are even tales like Ghantakarna who stuffed bells in his ears so he wouldn’t hear Krishna’s name! Such “faith” is fear-ridden, propped up by arguments, with doubt suppressed beneath favored logic.

A religious person has no argument—he has experience. Not belief, but shraddha. Belief is adopted on the support of arguments; shraddha is the trust born of seeing, tasting, being.

The Nirukta’s saying—“the gods gave Reason to stand in the place of the seer”—is fundamentally false. Can logic be a seer? Will poetry arise out of logic? Impossible. One must be free of doubt, of argument, even of belief; free of all mental constructs—fall into the void, into thoughtlessness, choice-lessness. There, what logic? In that choiceless emptiness, the meeting with the Whole happens. Become thoughtless and the Whole descends—you become a seer; whatever you speak is ṛca, wherever you sit becomes a tirtha, wherever you walk, a temple sprouts; wherever your ecstasy showers—there is Kaba, there is Kashi.

Only the distracted go to Kashi and Kaba. Those with even a taste of God find Him within. Certainly, not on the prop of logic.

Once, Bengal’s great logician Keshab Chandra Sen went to defeat the unlettered Ramakrishna. He argued and argued. Ramakrishna kept leaping up, hugging him: “Wonderful! What delight!” Keshab was baffled. “I speak against God and scripture—you embrace me!” Ramakrishna said, “You delight me. If any doubt remained in me about God, you have removed it.” “How?” “Seeing you. Where such brilliance can arise in a man, the source must be supremely radiant. Flowers prove the fragrance in the earth.” Keshab fell at his feet: “You have shut my mouth without ‘defeating’ me.” Ramakrishna is religious; Vivekananda remained essentially a logician. People like Vivekananda because they live by logic; Ramakrishna’s words are beyond reason.

Religion is beyond logic. Now to the second question, related to this and helpful to understand further.

H. L. Jogan! You must have thought you were asking a great philosophical question. This is not a philosophical question; it’s very childish. These are the sorts of things little children say.

Even if someone told you, “This is how the world came to be,” you would ask, “But why did it happen that way? Why not some other way?” If someone said, “God created the world,” would that solve it? You would ask, “Why did he create it? For what purpose? Does God want to cause people suffering and pain? Why did he create it?”

And the religious gurus say one must be liberated from the world, free of the ocean of becoming—so is God himself irreligious, that he creates the world? God creates the world, and the mahatmas teach that we must be free of it! Who is telling the truth? Should we listen to the mahatmas or accept what God has done?

And then, what was God doing all that time before? He hadn’t created the world, and then one day suddenly he made it! On a sudden whim—what happened? What caused the whim? Did he get high on bhang? And where did the bhang come from?

Question upon question will keep arising. Nothing will be solved this way. These are children’s games; there is no philosophy in them at all. But many people take such talk to be philosophical speculation! It’s the babble of the wise-fool. Don’t get into it.

“Whose cow and calf are these?” a policeman asked the villagers.
“We don’t know whose cow, sir, but I can tell you whose calf it is,” a boy said.
“Whose?”
“The cow’s! I don’t know whose the cow is!”

There was a theft in a village. Many people searched and investigated. The police inspector came; this and that happened; no trace of the thief. Finally the villagers said, “In our village lives Lal Bujhakkad; he can figure out anything! Whatever no one can fathom—Lal Bujhakkad fathoms it instantly. Why, once an elephant passed through the village at night. The villagers had never seen an elephant; in the morning there were huge footprints. Great worry spread: whose footprints are these? If the feet are so big, how big must the animal be!”

Then Lal Bujhakkad came up with a solution. He said, “Nothing to panic about. A deer jumped by with a millstone tied to its leg. Plain as day: those are millstone marks. And since it leapt, it must have been a deer. A deer, with a millstone tied to its leg, leapt past!”

Case closed—Lal Bujhakkad solved it! Why ask here and there? Ask Lal Bujhakkad!

The inspector said, “All right, let’s see. Maybe he’ll say something!”
Lal Bujhakkad said, “I can tell you, but I won’t say it in front of everyone, because I don’t want trouble. I’ll tell you—and then tomorrow I’ll be in danger! I’m a simple man; I don’t want a fuss. I’ll whisper it in your ear, in private. And swear you won’t tell anyone.”
The inspector agreed, swore he wouldn’t tell. “But do tell me, brother!”
He took the inspector aside into the forest outside the village. “Tell me now,” said the inspector. “There’s no one here. Not even birds or animals to listen!”
Then he whispered in his ear, “I’m absolutely certain—don’t repeat it: some thief committed the theft!”

Don’t get into this kind of nonsense. These are little children’s questions.

A teacher asked, “Rajesh, tell me, why does a crane stand on one leg?”
Rajesh said, “Sir, he knows if he lifts the other leg, he’ll fall!”

Seth Chandulal went to a holy man visiting the village. He asked, “Mahatmaji, is it true that every person must die?”
The mahatma said, “Yes, that is certain. Who has escaped death? Everyone must die. All are mortal.”
Chandulal scratched his head and said, “I’m thinking: who will carry to the cremation ground the person who dies last?”

See how the human mind raises such “difficult” questions! This is indeed something!

One friend said to another, “Did anyone reply to your matrimonial ad—you know, the one that said: ‘A handsome, gentle, earning young man seeks a ray of light in his life’?”
The other said, “Yes, one reply came—from the electricity department!”

This sort of question…!

You ask, “How did the event of the origin of this world take place?”
One thing I can say for sure: I did not break Shiva’s bow!
I didn’t create this world! Let me step aside right away; otherwise people will start putting all kinds of blame on me—someone will say, “It’s his doing! He must have caused the disturbance!”

So, H. L. Jogan, this much I can say as firmly as anything: I had absolutely nothing to do with it. Not even a distant relation to its making. I have no eagerness for its arising, nor eagerness for its dissolution. When it wasn’t, I had no difficulty. When it won’t be, I’ll have no difficulty. As it is, I have no problem at all. I’m perfectly at ease. If it remains, fine; if it doesn’t, fine.

What worries are you getting into! And do you think that if you come to know these things your ignorance will disappear? If you “know” such things, it will only prove that you are a thoroughgoing ignoramus. These are not things to be known.

Whenever the Buddha came to a village, he would first send word that there were eleven questions no one should ask him. One of them was, “Who created the world?” Don’t ask. Because these are fools’ questions—and the Buddha does not answer them.

My grandfather used to ask me often—and others too. But when he asked me, he stopped asking. He would ask, “What is greater: brains or the buffalo?”
Now who can answer that! One day he asked me. I said, “The buffalo.”
He said, “Why?”
I said, “Because the buffalo doesn’t ask this question! This itch runs only in your ‘brains.’ The buffalo is utterly in the state of a paramahansa! I have stood beside many buffaloes for hours. No buffalo asks, ‘Which is greater: brains or buffalo?’ The buffalo knows: we are greater. Why ask!”

After that he didn’t ask. Then I would prod him: “Go on, ask—brains or buffalo?”
He would say, “You be quiet!”

He wouldn’t take me anywhere. He was always off to satsangs, visiting mahatmas. Whenever he went, I’d be ready, “I’ll come too!”
He’d say, “No, I’m not taking you. You’ll say something topsy-turvy!”

I said, “You people say topsy-turvy things! I speak plainly. You ask, ‘Which is greater: brains or the buffalo?’ and I give a straight answer: ‘The buffalo’—and you think I’m speaking nonsense! Let me come, I’ll have a look at your mahatma as well.”

Once he took me—just once. We went to meet a mahatma. The mahatma must have been around thirty. I was perhaps fifteen at most. And my grandfather must have been at least sixty. The mahatma said to him, “Come, child, sit!” I said, “All right!”

My grandfather said to me, “If you want to ask something, ask first; otherwise there will be trouble—then I’ll ask!”
I said to the mahatma, “Child, give me an answer!”
The mahatma was very offended. “You call me ‘child’!”
I said, “You call my sixty-year-old grandfather ‘child,’ you scoundrel! You’re thirty, I’m fifteen—so how am I wrong in arithmetic? You’re not just a child, you’re a super-child!”
My grandfather immediately sent me out: “You go home, brother! And never come with me again!”

What kind of questions are you asking! “Who created the creation?” Even if you come to know, what will you do with it? Do you plan to create another one? Was one not enough for you?

Know only this: How will your ignorance be dispelled? It won’t be dispelled by knowing such things. Light the lamp of meditation—ignorance disappears. All this information will not remove your ignorance; it will only increase it. You’ll become a pundit. A pundit is a great ignoramus.

Sinners may even reach God; pundits never do.

That’s all for today.