After Chetan grew up, he’d hear about the feats of the yoga-practising rishis and sometimes wonder what the point of such a life was. What’s the difference between a life of yoga and death? Sometimes when he’d ask his grandfather such questions, Dada ji would tell him that the rishis and munis, once they’d attained complete mastery over their senses with yogic practices, would immerse their souls in the Supreme Soul, and although their outer eyes were closed during austerities, they opened their inner eyes. They learn the news of the entire world seated in their caves. After all, Sanjay, sitting in Hastinapur, told King Dhritarashtra the entire state of the war in Kurukshetra through the power of yoga alone. They don’t just attain complete knowledge of the past and present, but of the future as well. It was these same omniscient rishis who had provided the details of the events to occur during the Kali Yuga, and they went so far as to reveal how many centuries, years, months and days the Kali Yuga would last, and when the end of the world would come. Then Chetan would wonder why the rishis and munis didn’t become immortal like God once they subsumed their souls in the Supreme Soul and came to know every little detail about the past and the future; why didn’t they attain victory over death?
Sometimes Dada ji would answer this question by telling him that God had kept just this one thing in his control, and he’d add, quoting the Punjabi saying, ‘The cat taught the lion, and then the lion came to eat the cat.’ And he’d append his own commentary: ‘But the cat quickly climbed the tree.’ And he’d explain, ‘If God did not keep death in his own control, then wouldn’t man try to finish God off?’ And Dada would tell the story of Bhasma the demon, who pleased the god Shiva by performing severe austerities, and asked as a boon that he be given the power to reduce anyone to ashes by placing his hand on their head. When Shiva granted him the boon, he became determined to reduce Shiva himself to ashes. Shiva took a deep breath and ran. The demon chased him through all three worlds. Then he took refuge with the god Vishnu and told him of his distress. The god Vishnu assumed the guise of Mohini and bewitched the demon, tricking him into placing his hand on his own head, and thus the demon was himself reduced to ashes.
Chetan at once had all sorts of doubts after hearing this story: If God could deceive, then how was he an all-powerful God? He was a deceitful coward. And if Shiva was so powerful, then why didn’t he assume the guise of Mohini himself and reduce the demon to ash? Why had he gone running to Vishnu? But he knew what the result would be if he kept poking at Dada ji with his questions. One time he’d called Ram a sneak for covertly killing Bali, and got a slap for that. Dada would never put up with hearing anything said against the deities.
And sometimes, on the topic of the inability of rishis to become immortal, Dada ji would say, ‘Who knows how many immortal ascetics are sitting in the caves of the Himalayas right now, or have changed their appearance and are roaming this world! It’s written in the Mahabharata that Ashwatthama was immortal; he must certainly be roaming the earth even today in some form or other.’
*
Dada ji was the one who told him about Raja Yoga or the path of meditation, but Ma had told him about Karma Yoga, the path of action, about how God gives good results for good deeds, and bad for bad. Not only does one accrue the results of one’s actions in this lifetime, but one enjoys the fruit of the actions of this birth in the next lifetime as well. Those who are kings, rich and prosperous, enjoy themselves due to the merit of the good deeds of their previous birth; and those who are leprous and blemished, those who are born only to die, and those who die in an untimely manner after falling prey to accidents, have earned their deaths in this birth as the fruit of evil deeds in the previous one. And, Ma explained, this is why you should always do good deeds. Who knows what merits accrued through many lifetimes have forced the soul to undergo 84 lakh births before it reaches this human birth! Man must attempt to attain birth for his soul in a human womb yet again, and not get stuck in the 84-lakh cycle.
Chetan would ask her why, if God gives man life and then immediately kills him off, does he give him a human birth at all, why doesn’t he just give him some other kind of birth? ‘Beta,’ Ma would explain, ‘this is what we call deepest hell—where the soul rots forever in rivers of blood and pus. A baby lives in blood and pus in its mother’s belly anyway.’
‘But Ma, the soul is changeless and immortal,’ he’d say. ‘Fire can’t burn it nor water dissolve it. The senses find sorrow; when the senses sleep, then how will the soul find sorrow and how could blood and pus destroy it?’
This was his greatest doubt about Karma Yoga: How could man know whether an action he commits is new, and not just the result of some past action or karma? How can he know where the karma of previous births stops, and that of this life begins?
Ma was not able to give him any satisfying answers to these questions. Sometimes when his father would come home drunk and beat his mother, she’d say that she must have done evil deeds in a previous birth for which she was forced to endure hardships in this one. Chetan would ask, ‘Ma, will father reap the fruit of these evil deeds of his in the next birth?’ And Ma would cover his mouth with her hand because it was a sin for a son even to think bad thoughts about his father . . .
When he was older, he began going to hear Swami Satyadev’s stories at the annual meetings of the Arya Samaj at Adda Hoshiarpur, and started noticing two terms in particular: ‘disinterested action’ and moksha or ‘release’. Swami Satyadev’s stories would go on for seven days. He was fairly old, but he was quite strong physically—there was dignity to his face and lustre in his voice. People came from far off to hear his stories. Although the girls of the lower middle classes who were mostly shut up in their homes took advantage of this opportunity to show themselves off, and the boys went to see them (and Chetan was no exception), sometimes he’d really listen to what Swami ji was saying, and he’d hear how man cannot rise above the hardships of this world by struggle and austerities, but rather he can cut the bonds of the cycle of death and rebirth by dissolving his soul into the Supreme Soul, and enjoying Supreme Peace. Through both Gyana Yoga, or the path of knowledge, and Karma Yoga, man can free himself from the bonds of life and death. We only achieve this birth through the fruit of the good deeds of previous births. If man undertakes actions attached to desire, he will surely reap the fruits in this life or the next, but if his actions are free of desire, he will not only reap no fruit from this in the next life, but also, the collected karma of previous births will be destroyed and he will attain supreme moksha, or release, becoming free of the cycle of rebirth and hardship.
When he was very young, and the atmosphere in his home was particularly bad, he’d sometimes consider performing severe austerities like Dhruva, and when God was pleased with him, he’d ask for a boon; he’d ask God to fix his father. When he got older and listened to sermons in the sessions of the Arya Samaj about rising above joy and sorrow, he sometimes began to wonder how he could do this as well. But there was no opportunity for yogic practice in their home. And when he got even older, he laughed at such foolish notions. The world had started to look lovely to him, despite the debased atmosphere of his home. He would take one look at Kunti and dissolve into pleasant dreams for days—and then this whole problem of cutting through the cycle of births and attaining moksha started seeming useless to him . . . and he began to wonder why everyone doesn’t commit suicide if the world is so sorrowful and this birth in particular so difficult. Who has actually seen the cycle of rebirths? After all, one can’t make it through the sorrow of this birth in the blink of an eye. Man cannot understand why bad people are happy and good ones sad—this is what made man imagine the actions of the previous life. When one reaps the fruits of past-life actions in this birth, one would definitely have to be reborn again in order to enjoy the fruits of the actions of this birth. But man can break the evil cycle in this birth itself—just cut the chains of life and become free of its sorrows. In the next birth if God again wants to give sorrow, then do it again
. Around that same time he had read a couplet:
Your time for sorrow is now over, life, be happy
Whether or not the cage breaks, I will free you now
He liked this couplet so much that he had hummed it for several days.
His Dada ji always used to say that man will receive in the next birth whatever he was thinking of at the time of death. This is why they recite the Gita and the Ramayana at the bedside of dying men so that they will be focused on God and therefore gain release from the cycle of rebirth and attain moksha, and he told the story of Ajamil who was a great sinner, but when he was dying he called out to his eldest son whose name was Narayan, and just from that simple act, he attained moksha.
This story seemed entirely pointless to Chetan. If God is All-Perceiving, then surely he must know that this bastard is thinking not of me, but of his own son; why then did he free him? But he didn’t say this out loud for fear of his Dada’s curses. One day, when Dada ji was telling his younger brothers about attaining moksha by becoming free of the sorrows of this lifetime, Chetan had said, ‘Dada ji, if this life is full of hardship, then why doesn’t man end it? If he wishes never again to take birth as a human at the time of committing suicide, then he won’t get that birth. What’s the need for spending so many years in yogic practice and austerities when man can cut the bonds of existence in one minute?’ He’d said the same thing in the weekly meeting of the Arya Samaj. In both locations he got more or less the same answer: that suicide is a sin. God has given us this birth, and only God has the authority to take it away. Dada ji added that if man commits suicide, then he will enter the womb of a ghost—his soul will not be reborn, nor will it ‘attain God’; instead, it will wander about distressed.
But this gave rise to several more questions for Chetan:
How had God given us this birth? One’s birth is the fruit of previous births. Karma is committed by man, so why can’t he break the cycle?
And if God had given humans birth, then how is it not against his wishes to cut the bonds of the cycle of rebirth and attain moksha through Karma Yoga, or Bhakti Yoga (the spiritual path), and how is that not a sin?
And if God is All-Pervasive, All-Knowing and All-Powerful, then why had he created humans who commit evil deeds—why leave stars in the cosmos that have such an ill effect? And he’d recall Iqbal’s couplet:
Agar kaj-rau haĩ anjum, āsmān terā hai yā merā
Tujhe fikre-jahān kyõ ho, jahān terā hai yā merā
If the stars are crooked, is the sky yours or is it mine?
Why do you fret about the world, is it yours or is it mine?
Listening to the words of the Arya Samajis, the Sanatan Dharmis, Dada ji and Ma, he began to have doubts about the very existence of God. God was sometimes a cheater; sometimes a dissembler, sometimes a tyrant; he belonged to the poor, but he gave them endless trouble; he belonged to his devotees, but he gave them troubles as well, and tested them; he was all-powerful and pervasive, but he couldn’t run the world properly . . .
Sometimes he’d say all these things to Ma laughingly, and she’d have no response for him, and she’d tell him that he didn’t need to think about all this; his job was to attain knowledge, then enter into the householder stage of life and start a family; when he reached fifty years of age, he could do as he wished—he could consider knowledge and meditation, or enter the forest stage of life, or become a renunciant.
*
Chetan kept pondering all his doubts and the thoughts he’d had from childhood up to the present moment that had to do with creation and the Creator, and life, birth and death, and the cycle of rebirth and moksha, and of Raja Yoga and Karma Yoga. In the next room, a child who had quarrelled with someone or received a beating kept screaming ‘Bhaiya ji! Bhaiya ji! Brother! Brother!’ The child kept coming to the door and whining (Hunar Sahib managed to calm him down with great difficulty and send him back). In the room on the other side could be heard the sound of women quarrelling continuously, but Yogi Jalandhari Mull’s eyes remained shut; he was absorbed with supreme concentration in meditation. When he finally opened his eyes after about half an hour, Hunar Sahib got up again and touched his knees (although Yogi ji must have only been a year or so older than Hunar Sahib) and introduced Ranvir and Chetan to him. He knew Nishtar perfectly well, as they’d read poems together at the Congress meetings.
He greeted Chetan from where he sat, slightly meekly, politely, grinning from ear to ear. Then Hunar Sahib said with a smile, ‘I was just telling Chetan as we came up the stairs that if Yogi ji happens to be absorbed in meditation, you’ll see the wonder of his charisma—people sitting nearby are spontaneously influenced by his virtuous thoughts.’
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‘Ah!’ said Jalandhari Mull, quite pleased at Hunar Sahib’s remark about the silent influence of his meditation on people sitting nearby. His cheeks spread in a satisfied grin and his jet-black face shone. Then suddenly, he asked Hunar Sahib, ‘So what influence did they have on you?’
Chetan found this question exceptionally foolish, but Hunar Sahib replied, grinning back at him, ‘I kept thinking about those things you’d told me. I’ve rendered some verses of the Gita into straightforward Urdu poetry for practice.’
‘Great!’ Another gleam flashed in Yogi ji’s eyes.
‘The thing is,’ said Hunar Sahib, ‘the problems of the Upanishads are very complex; rendering them in simple poetry is like chewing on chickpeas made of iron, so I chose the second chapter of the Gita for practice. If you wish, shall I recite it?’
‘Yes, yes . . . certainly, certainly!’ Yogi ji assumed the half-lotus pose.
With great zeal, Hunar Sahib recited the same verses he’d already recited to Rudra Sena Arya, Harasaran’s father and Chacha Fakir Chand.
Yogi ji was very pleased. Chetan had thought he wouldn’t say anything else besides ‘Great,’ but he freely praised Hunar Sahib and gave a prophetic blessing, to the effect that the Almighty God would surely give him power to render the deep knowledge of the Upanishads into simple Urdu poetry, thus delivering the utmost worth to the people.
Then Chetan scooted forward.
‘Yogi ji, you were fairly prominent in the Congress movement,’ he said. ‘What happened to alienate you from service to the nation? I’ve heard you haven’t gone to any Congress meetings in years. Did you truly experience great hardships in jail?’
Chetan had apparently caused him some distress. But Yogi ji was not perturbed. ‘Jail is not your sister’s home, bhai,’ he answered carefully. ‘But it wasn’t as if I was given too much trouble by others. We didn’t get newspapers or political books to read in jail. By chance, I studied religious texts, and for the first time I got the sense that in this vast universe man’s existence isn’t equal to even one thousandth of a particle—who does man really think he is? Who knows how many worlds like ours there are in this cosmos, and in the boundless immensity of creation, who knows how many more cosmoses there might be? There are suns thousands of times larger than our sun, and stars millions of times greater than our earth. When the existence of our earth alone is like a particle in this vast creation, what is man’s existence really? And then, who knows how many times this earth has been settled and destroyed over the course of time, or how many times God has created it, and how many times destroyed it? How many golden ages have come and how many iron ages? And then, the pride of individuals, castes and nations—how false it all is! Why doesn’t man attempt to attain truth instead of running after that fallacy, and having attained it, why not maintain an ambition for moksha?’
‘Remarkable! How beautifully you’ve made clear the fallacy of man’s ego!’ praised Hunar Sahib.
Yogi ji continued, warming to his subject:
‘Truth, or the soul, or Brahma, or mankind—these things are referred to in the Upanishads by several names—are all different names for the same power, the same shakti, from which creation grew, and into which it will again be subsumed. Gaining this power, which spreads to every p
article of creation even if it is not visible, and attaining it, is the greatest pleasure. That Brahma is not only the creator of every particle of this creation, that he is not only the source of all consciousness, but he is also the source of the highest bliss. These perceivable objects of the world are finite forms of that power with no beginning—unseen and unending; so too, the joys of the world form an unbroken link with the true highest bliss. That wise man who plunges into the depths of his soul and finds it, attains not only Brahma, but also the highest bliss, which should be the goal of every wise man!’
‘Wah wah! Wonderful!’ praised Hunar Sahib. ‘You’ve expressed something so deep in such simple language!’
Yogi ji began to speak even more zealously, ‘Rishi Yagyavalkya had explained to his wife, Maitreyi, that the soul is the source of all joys, and that the result is that the thing most dear to man is self-respect. Man loves another man or a thing because he sees self-respect in it. The wife is not beloved because she is the wife; nor is the husband beloved because he’s the husband; nor is the son beloved because he is the son; nor wealth, because wealth is wealth: these are all beloved because they are “mine”! “I”—the soul—is bound to all of these. So then, instead of grabbing at these manifold forms of the soul, these manifold parts of joy, why doesn’t man know that source of joy without beginning, without end, that imperishable source; why doesn’t he grab hold of it and why doesn’t he find the highest joy on attaining it?
‘In order to understand the state of supreme peace,’ said Jalandhari Mull with even greater zeal, ‘imagine the sort of sleep that is devoid of dreams, in which man has no knowledge of the body, the senses, the mind, nor of external objects—of nothing—and he departs in this form, which is the wellspring of his consciousness. He attains supreme peace. He exists beyond joy and sorrow.’
In the City a Mirror Wandering Page 25