On the Guru-Shishya Sambandha (Relationship between Guru & Shishya)
William James once wrote a famous
book on the ‘varieties of religious experience.’ Similarly, there are many varieties of the
‘guru experience.’ Nowadays there are gurus who are like
celebrities, who spearhead mass movements, control large and powerful
institutions, have avid followers ostensibly numbering in the millions. There are also largely inaccessible gurus,
who retreat from the world in remote caves and snowy peaks, who teach and
transmit only when they are sought out or are otherwise inspired. There are those who do not hold themselves
out as gurus or as spiritual savants at all, who are like plainclothes gurus,
with none of the outer accouterments of a swami or a sadhu but who are no less
enlightened or spiritually powerful.
My guru
is of this last variety. I met him over
ten years ago. He did not present
himself to me as a guru. We were working
on a project related to Hindu activism together. Within the span of a few conversations, I
knew he would have a deep impact on my life and that he would indeed change my
life forever. Soon after, I felt he was
my guru. He does not call himself my
guru or anyone’s guru—he is loath to use that term in describing himself. He does not want that kind of position or
authority, either in society or in anyone’s individual life. But he lets me (sometimes) call him my
guru. From that point, over ten years
ago, we began corresponding, conversing, meeting regularly and have sustained
this interaction over the years.
It is
difficult for me to characterize my relationship with my guru. He has never initiated me into a mantra. (He never got a mantra from his guru either,
who was amongst 20th century India’s most respected Mathadipatis as
one who has attained the highest realization).
He has never prescribed me a specific ritualistic practice or
regimen—although he has taken great pains to introduce me to others who, with
his approval and at his request, have provided me these instructions and
initiations. We do not spend much time
talking about abstract philosophy (mostly because I am not very interested in
abstract philosophy). Nor does he
narrate to me devotional stories from the Puranas or the like (mostly because
he is not interested in such things). He
does not urge me to go to temples or on pilgrimages or to do various pujas. (In fact, I try dragging him to temples and
on pilgrimages with limited success. He acknowledges
his gratitude for having done these pilgrimages and having these darshanas,
which otherwise he would never have done.
Disciples have as much to teach gurus as the other way around, he has
always said, a refrain that he picked up from a beloved old Swami, who as a
young man of 77, taught him Vedanta and so much else about the life spiritual.)
We talk of “shoes and ships and
sealing-wax, of cabbages and kings,” as my guru would say. With my guru, a seemingly casual conversation
about seemingly trivial things is often in fact a discourse of great spiritual
import. And this is how I have learned
that there is no real distinction between what is “spiritual” and what is
“mundane.” My guru will watch a sitcom
(even something trashy like Two and a Half Men, for which I have severely
reprimanded him on occasion) and get more epiphanies out of it than I would
from reading the Bhagavad Gita a dozen times.
This is a concrete manifestation of his seeing the divine in everything
and understanding that Vasudeva sarvam
iti (loosely, Vasudeva (or Iswara) is Everything).
A large part of my guru’s advice to
me has centered on ensuring that I do my best when it comes to my career. This used to puzzle me, because I did not see
how important my career was to my sadhana (spiritual practice). Now I better understand that he does not want
me to use spirituality as escapism, as a crutch, to avoid the “real world”, and
that to be successful in sadhana, I also have to be successful in navigating
the world of business and the politics of the workplace. Since I was born and raised in the US, he has
repeatedly told me, “Go to Vietnam and get the Congressional Medal of Honor,
then say ‘war is hell’. Otherwise, you
will have no credibility.” His refrain
always is that neither spiritual life nor secular life can be compartmentalized
into pieces that are sadhana / non-sadhana or spiritual / non-spiritual.
Whether or not we are talking about
sadhana or matters spiritual, my guru is always teaching and transmitting. The extent to which I can catch and absorb
these teachings and transmissions is based on my adhikara and receptiveness. The sun is always shining; it is up to the
plant to turn towards the sun and have that capacity to catch and hold the
rays. I often miss a lot. I know that, but the purpose of sadhana is to
increase my capacity to receive and absorb and to keep improving. It is only because of my guru’s blessings
that I am able to do my sadhana, to take small steps along the path of
spiritual growth. It is through his
grace that I have received the mantras, from diverse spiritual savants, that
are the foundation of my practice, the instructions on puja and worship that
form my daily routine of worship. It is
through his good wishes that I am able to build on this slowly over time.
Sometimes, when I say this, people
will think that I am dependent on my guru, that I am putting my life and
wellbeing solely in his hands. But it is
not like that. If my guru were not
there, someone else or something else would have been there to play the same
role. Gurus appear out of the void when
the student is ready, my guru has always maintained. For me, the source of everything is Sri
Krishna / Iswara. It is my karma that
manifests as the causes and conditions in my life, and it is Sri Krishna / Iswara’s
grace that provides me what I need when I need it. As Sri Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita 9.22,
“ananyas cintayanto mam / ye janah paryupasate / tesham nityabhiyuktanam
yoga-kshemam vahamyaham” (But those who always worship Me with exclusive devotion,
meditating on My transcendental form—to them I carry what they lack, and I
preserve what they have.)
I look upon my guru as a gift that
Sri Krishna has bestowed upon me. But
that does not in any way detract from the profound gratitude, reverence, and
great love I feel for my guru. I at once
feel a great love for my guru that is personal to him, that is attributable to
his being who he is, but also an understanding that whatever I receive from
him, whatever I see in him, whatever my relationship is with him, is very much
a manifestation of my own karmas and vrttis.
I am ultimately responsible for my own karma and the fruits thereof (the
good and the bad). I will always owe him
a great karmic debt that I can never hope to repay; I will always have deep
gratitude for his presence in my life; however, I am not beholden to him in the
sense of there being any strings attached or “dependent” on him as an
individual, as the word is conventionally understood. That I do not owe any debt or obligation,
express or implied, is something that he has taken great pains to emphasize
from the beginning of our interaction.
I received mantra initiation from two
Vaisnava acharyas. One is the
world-renowned Bhagwat Bhaskara Sri Krishna Chandra Shastri-ji, commonly referred
to as Thakurji, who was introduced and recommended to me by my guru, who has a
very warm relationship with Thakurji.
Thakurji gave me a beautiful way in which to think about the guru-shishya
relationship. He said, ‘the guru is the
one who puts your hand in Iswara’s hand’.
Therefore, the object of worship, the goal to be attained, is always
only Iswara, but there is a deep gratitude and reverence for the guru as the
one who brings you to Him / Her.
My guru, who is extremely clinical
and unemotional in attitude, told me once that, several years after his guru
had passed away, he visited his Samadhi-adhisthana / final resting place. While he was meditating there, a few tears spontaneously
rolled down his face. His friend /
fellow traveler / guru bhai, someone of exceptional spiritual attainment, happened
to be there. My guru asked him why he
was moved to tears since their guru, for him, represented an ideal to be
attained; he had no sentimental or emotional connection with him, though he
revered him. His friend, also a Vedantin
of exceptional attainment, smiled and told my guru that even a message needs a vessel
/ conveyer and the message can never be completely independent of the conveyor
or separated from the vessel in which it is delivered. In this way, my love for Sri Krishna is
inextricably bound up with my love for my guru; for, without one, I could never
have found the other.
In the ten years that I have known
my guru, several times he almost left me or I almost left him. These were times when my ego or emotional
negativity reared up and I was awash in tamas.
Shortly after I had met him, I had gone on a pilgrimage to Puri, and
when I was at the great Sri Jagannath temple there, I prayed to Sri Jagannath
to give me the strength and clarity so that I could always follow my guru, so
that he would never let go of my hand. I
believe it is that sankalpa (resolution, vow), that heartfelt prayer, that steadied
the boat so many times when I was on the verge of falling, that kept my relationship
with my guru intact.
But I know that I cannot take for
granted my relationship with my guru.
There was a time when I was adamant that he would have to be my guru for
life, that if he were not, it would mean I was somehow a total failure. Now I have grown up a little bit and know
that people come into one’s life for a reason, a season or a lifetime, and you
never quite know until the end which it is.
My guru has no selfish interest in me, there is nothing he wants from me
for himself—the day he feels he is no longer of any utility to me, I know he
would walk away from me. He has told me
this numberless times. That is his
nature. Or, the day that I think I have
understood (when I have not) is the day he would walk away. Or, the day something other than sadhana
becomes more important to me is the day he would walk away. Any day I tell him to leave, he would leave
immediately. It is not that he is
capricious or that he would not be there for me or that he would no longer wish
me well or care about me; it is his nature as an avadhuta—‘come if you can, stay if you will, leave if
you must’. This is the oft
repeated refrain of my guru, which he got from the Old Swami who was one of his
principal upagurus, for whom he has such immense love and respect.
I remember once I was with some
friends and one of my guru’s friends was visiting. My friends asked him if they could ever meet
his guru. He laughed and said that he
did not even know if he would ever meet his guru again, so how could he promise
anything to them. He was not perturbed
by this. Rather, he was grateful for
whatever time he had gotten with his guru and resigned to whatever ‘causes and
conditions’ would bring them together to meet again or keep them apart. This is an attitude borne of spiritual
maturity, in which one does not try to hold on to one’s guru, like the
proverbial bird which you let fly out of your hand, and if it is meant to be,
the bird will come back to you if and when the time is right.
That attitude of gratitude and
surrender is one to which I aspire, yet am still a long ways away from. I do not know whether my guru will be in my
life a month from now, a year from now, ten years from now. Yet, even if I never see him again, nothing
could ever lessen my gratitude or reverence for him and I know that whatever I
have achieved in my time with him will always stay with me, that his good
wishes and blessings will always be with me, that in one way or another, his
kavacha (protective shield) will always guard me. He has never asked anything of me; there have
never been any strings attached in what he has taught and shared with me; he
has never made me beholden to him or dependent on him. He has taken great pains to make sure I can
stand on my own—not only that, but he has taken great pains to make sure I keep
my individual personality, that my psyche does not become unduly influenced by
his, and that I am always my own person and true to myself. My spiritual path or way is significantly
different from his, and he has always been careful to keep me on my path.
There is a tendency to glorify,
idolize, make into a god one’s guru. My
guru has always warned me against that.
One of my favorite passages about the role of a guru is one that my guru
likes to quote, from a book that he urged me to read. It is a wonderful book (a must-read book for
any spiritual aspirant) called “The Way of the White Clouds,” a spiritual
travelogue and memoir by Lama Angarika Govinda (a German) about his initiation
into Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism:
On the day on which he (Domo Geshe Rimpoche) formally accepted me as his
Chela, he said:
'If you wish me to be your Guru, do not look upon my person as Guru,
because every human personality has its shortcomings, and so long as we are
engaged in observing the imperfections of others we deprive ourselves of the
opportunities of learning from them. Remember
every being carries within itself the spark of Buddhahood (bodhicitta), as long
as we concentrate on other people's faults we deprive ourselves of the light
that in various degrees shines out from our fellow-beings.
'When searching for a teacher, we surely should search for one who is
worthy of our trust, but once we have found him, we should accept whatever he
has to teach us as a gift of the Buddhas, and we should look upon the Guru not
as one who speaks with his own voice but as mouthpiece of the Buddha, to whom
alone all honour is due. Therefore if you bow down before the Guru, it is not
the mortal personality of the teacher that you worship, but the Buddha, who is
the eternal Guru who reveals his teaching through the mouth of your human teacher
who forms a living link in the chain of initiated teachers and pupils who have
transmitted the Dharma in an unbroken line from the times of Sakyamuni. Those who transmit to us the teachings of the
Buddha are the vessels of the Dharma, and as far as they master the Dharma and
have realised the Dharma within themselves, they are the embodiment of the
Dharma.’[1]
When I was a child and a teenager,
I kept reading in our Hindu scriptures and in texts by spiritual masters how
necessary a guru is for spiritual enlightenment. This made a deep impact on me. I remember telling my parents, “I need to
find a guru.” I fretted about how, as a
young girl in America, I would ever find a guru or be worthy of a guru, since I
had no real spiritual qualifications, only spiritual aspirations. I envisioned making a Himalayan odyssey to
remote mountains and glaciers to track down a guru. I was naïve then, but something in my
plaintive pleas that I needed a guru, must have had enough power, enough
persuasion, to move Iswara to bring my guru to me without me having to look for
him. This was how I realized that you
can never go hunting for a guru; the guru comes to you when you are ready in
the form that is appropriate for you. I
believed, simplistically, as a child that a guru is necessary simply because
the books told me so. I had faith in
those texts, and I think that faith is what helped bring my guru to me.
If I were asked today, is a guru
necessary, my answer would be somewhat different. I realize now that there are no categorical
answers or rules in Dharma, that there are cases of spontaneous enlightenment
or cases where having the wrong guru at the wrong time (if such a guru can be
called a guru) could do more harm than good.
I also think that there has been an unfortunate growth in the trend of
having “trophy gurus,” that as spirituality grows more fashionable, people pick
up gurus like accessories to gain more currency and status in the spiritual
world. Having a guru is not a metric of
spiritual success. When and how a guru
comes varies depending on the person’s spiritual path and psyche. Sometimes a guru comes at the end of a long
road of spiritual ripening, to give the final blessing, before the journey has
ended. In my case, on the other hand, I
needed a guru much earlier to steer me on the right course. It was my blessing that such a guru came to me
when I needed him.
With all those caveats, I would
still say that, in general, a guru is necessary at least for some part of the
spiritual path for most people. What a
guru gives you cannot be found in any book, in any ritual, in any temple, no
matter how sacred or powerful. A guru
understands you better than you understand yourself. He or she knows what you need when you need
it, often before you know it. He or she
knows when you need to do more sadhana and when you need to cut back, when the
quantum of japa / bhajan / puja is to be modified, when the type of sadhana
itself is to be altered. You can read
and memorize all the texts in the world, but it does not have the power of a
single moment when a guru addresses to you a particular shloka that is
necessary for you at that moment. That
carries the portent and energy that the guru intends for you and not just the surface
meaning embedded in the words themselves. It can be analogized as the difference between
knowing general health guidelines from a medical text and having a personal
doctor, between exercising and having a personal trainer, but those are
incomplete analogies because there is something more, something that is unique
to the guru relationship, and that is the principle of transmission. A guru is not a mere teacher or a coach; a
guru gives something of himself or herself to a shishya, his or her energy,
karma, the merits of his or her practice and so on, and this has a
transformative impact on the shishya.
Adi Sankara Bhagavadpada says in
Sarva Vedanta Siddhanta Sara Samgraha that on the spiritual path one may have
many spiritual counselors. All of them
are to be respected and considered one’s mentors. But the true guru is the one who opens one’s
eyes to Wisdom. He alone is the jnana
guru or the real guru. In Zen: Dawn in the West (which is another
must-read book for any spiritual aspirant), Roshi Philip Kapleau, a renowned Zen
master in America responds to a questioner who has asked how to be sure than an
enlightened roshi is the right teacher for him or her: “A roshi may be deeply enlightened, with many
followers, and yet be the wrong teacher for you. Why?
Because he fails to arouse in you feelings of confidence and devotion so
that you can willingly bow down before him and, childlike, receive his
teaching. You must be able to say with
conviction, “He is the teacher for me—the one I’ve been searching for!” And yet it is also true that the moment you
spontaneously cry out, “Oh help me! I
need help!” you open yourself to the teacher right for you.”
When it comes to spiritual transmission,
many people often think of Shaktipath (the transfer of Shakti (spiritual
energy) from guru to shishya). But that
is just one of many kinds of transmission.
A guru transmits to a receptive student not just energy, but his or her
samskaras (deep-seated tendencies, inclinations), vrttis (waves of thoughts /
feelings), ethos, and worldview. If I am
in a spiritually uplifted mood, and I speak, my words in essence would be those
of my guru, which are the words of his guru, and his guru’s guru and so
forth. The bottle may change over time
and across cultures, but the wine is always the same. This has always been the threnody of
spiritual practice of all the forest religions out of India.
It is this tradition of
transmission that connects not just the shishya to the guru but that forms a
lineage, a parampara of gurus and shishyas extending over centuries and
millennia, in fact for all time, that connects me to my guru’s gurus all the
way back to Adi Sankara and beyond to Adi Shiva / Iswara. There are thousands of sampradayas in our Sanatana
Dharma (the Eternal Faith); they are kept alive through the paramparas
(lineages) and the unbroken chain of transmission from gurus to shishyas. This living tradition, this heritage of
initiation and transmission, is perhaps more vital to the continuity and
survival of Sanatana Dharma than even its most canonical texts, because it is
in the guru that these texts come alive and have power.
What I fear is that as the world
becomes more modernized, more Westernized, more governed by mass communication,
we are under threat of losing the one-on-one guru-shishya tradition that is relatively
alien to the West but that has been the cornerstone of Eastern spiritual
traditions. There is nowadays,
especially in the West, an aversion to the idea of having a guru. Part of it is the primacy of individualism in
the West, the abhorrence of the idea of surrendering to or placing oneself at
the feet of another human being, an ethos that values the sense of being
independent and self-sufficient. Part of
it is a fear and distrust of relegating too much authority in any human being,
particularly religious figures, given the widespread abuse by priests in the
Catholic church in particular. This
cannot easily be glossed over, and it may be the case that as Hinduism develops
and grows in the West, the guru tradition will have less prominence and
importance than it has traditionally had in the East. If that is the case, I do feel something will
be irrevocably lost, something intrinsic and core to our Dharma. I cannot imagine what my spiritual life would
be without my guru, and I cannot imagine what our Dharma would be without the
system of initiation and transmission that is crystallized in the guru-shishya
parampara.
And so, on this Guru Purnima, I
want to honor and offer my prostrations to, not just my own guru, but to all
gurus—a guru is not a person but a relationship in which one gives of oneself
to another to remove their darkness (the literal meaning of “guru”), in which
the shishya surrenders himself or herself to the guru—in the hope and prayer
that the guru-shishya tradition is preserved and revitalized in the years,
decades and centuries to come. There may
be an infinite variety of guru-shishya relationships, but there is a common
principle, ethos and dynamic that underlies them all. This is what has tied together our Dharma for
so long.
And so today, I offer my
prostrations to my guru, to my guru’s gurus, to Adi Sankara, who is the adi
guru of my parampara, and to Veda Vyasa, who classified the Vedas, who is the
first guru for all Hindus, in whose special honor Guru Purnima is observed.
GURUR
BRAHMA, GURUR VISHNU,
GURUR
DEVO MAHESHWARAH
GURUR
SAAKSHAAT PARA-BRAHMA,
TASMAI
SHRI GURUVE NAMAH!
