by Sudhir Kakar
Looking at Ramakrishna’s sexuality in relation to his mystical experience in terms of oral, anal, and phallic stages of development or of identifications with mother, father and so on, as in classical analytic discourse, is then to forget that this discourse itself may be based on the life of the male element. Our psychology has still little to say of the distilled female element, the primary femininity, at the heart of emotional mysticism. The pure female element, in both men and women, continues to testify to the category of mystery as a basic dimension in which we all, and especially the mystic, live. As analysts, however, we cannot look at mystery as something eternally beyond human comprehension, but as a phenomenon to which we repeatedly return to increase our understanding. As our perspectives change, our earlier views do not get replaced but are subsumed in an ever-widening set of meanings.
2
The Guru as Healer
The contemporary images of the Indian guru, the sacred centre of Hindu religious and philosophical traditions, are many. He is that stately figure in spotless white or saffron robes, with flowing locks and beard, to all appearances the younger brother of a brown Jehovah. To be approached in awe and reverence, he is someone who makes possible the disciple’s fateful encounter with the mystery lying at the heart of human life. He is also the Rasputin look-alike, with piercing yet warm eyes, hypnotic and seductive at once, a promiser of secret ecstasies and radical transformations of consciousness and life. The guru is also the venerable guardian of ancient, esoteric traditions, benevolently watchful over the disciple’s experiences in faith, gently facilitating his sense of identity and self. He can also be (to use the imagery of Pupul Jayakar, the biographer of the Indian sage Jiddu Krishnamurti), ‘the silent, straight-backed stranger, the mendicant who stands waiting at the doorways of home and mind, holding an invitation to otherness,’ evoking ‘passionate longings, anguish and a reaching out physically and inwardly to that which is unattainable.’1
In the above snapshots we find little trace of the old polarity which characterized the guru image. This polarity consisted of the worldly, orthodox teacher guru at one end representing relative, empirical knowledge, and the otherworldly, mystic guru at the other pole who was the representative of esoteric, existential knowledge. In Hindu terms, the dominant image of the guru seems to have decisively shifted toward the moksha (liberation) gum rather than the dharma (virtue) guru, toward the bhakti (devotional) gum rather than the jnana (knowledge) guru or, in tantric terms, toward the diksha (initiation) gum who initiated the novice into methods of salvation rather than the shiksha (teaching) guru who taught the scriptures and explained the meaning and purpose of life.2
This was, of course, not always the case. In Vedic times (1500-500 B.C.) when man’s encounter with the sacred mysteries took place through ritual, the guru was more a guide to their correct performance and an instructor in religious duties. A teacher deserving respect and a measure of obedience, he was not yet a mysterious figure of awe and the venerated incarnation of divinity.
In the later Upanishadic era (800-500 B.C.), the polar shift begins in earnest as the person of the guru starts to replace Vedic rituals as the path to spiritual liberation. He now changes from a knower and dweller in Brahman to being the only conduit to Brahman. Yet the Upanishadic gum is still recognizably human—a teacher of acute intellect, astute and compassionate, demanding from the disciple the exercise of his reason rather than exercises in submission and blind obedience. When, in the seventh-century A.D., the great Shankara, in his project of reviving the ancient Brahminical tradition, seeks to resurrect the Upanishadic guru, he sees in him a teacher who ‘is calm, tranquil, childlike, silent and free from distracting motivations. Although learned he should be as a child, parading neither wisdom, nor learning, nor virtue itself…. He is a reservoir of mercy who teaches out of compassion to the multitude, he is sympathetic to the conditions of the student and is able to act with empathy towards him.’3 In the disciple’s spiritual quest, Shankara’s guru places reason on par with scriptural authority and constantly exhorts the student to test and verify the teachings through his own experience. Every student needs to discover anew for himself or herself what is already known, a spiritual patrimony which has to be earned each time for it to become truly one’s own. Here, the ideal of the Hindu guru was not too far removed from the Buddhist master who, too, constructed near-experience situations to illustrate a teaching and who saw the master-disciple relationship as one of perfect equality in self-realization, with radical insight as its goal. The relationship between the guru and disciple was of intimacy, not of merger. Both the guru and disciple were separate individuals, and potential equals, though striving for ever-greater closeness.
From the seventh-century onwards, the swing away from the teacher image of the guru received its greatest momentum with the rise of the bhakti cults in both North and South India. Devotional surrender on the part of the disciple, with such features as ritualistic service to the guru, the worship of his feet, bodily prostration and other forms of veneration, and divine grace (prasada) on the part of the guru, mark the guru-disciple relationship. ‘Guru and Govind [i.e., Lord Krishna] stand before me,’ says the 15th-century poet-saint Kabir, and asks, ‘Whose feet should I touch?’ The answer is, ‘The guru gets the offering. He shows the way to Govind.’4 The operative word is now love rather than understanding. To quote Kabir again:
Reading book after book, the whole world died
And none ever became learned
He who can decipher just a syllable of ‘love’
is the true learned man (pandit)5
With the spread of tantric cults around 1000 A.D., the guru not only shows the way to the Lord, but is the Lord. ‘There is no higher god than guru,’ tantric texts tell us, ‘No higher truth than the guru.’ ‘The guru is father, the guru is mother, the guru is the God Shiva. When Shiva is angry, the guru is the Saviour. But when the guru is angry, there is no one who can save you.’6 The guru is now an extraordinary figure of divine mystery and power, greater than the scriptures and the gods, and all that the disciple requires to realize his own godlike nature, his extraordinary identity as Lawrence Babb puts it, is to merge his substantial and spiritual being with that of the guru.7 The ambiguities of thought and the agonizings of reason can be safely sidestepped since the way is no longer through a complete and wilful surrender—the offering of tana, mana, and dhana (body, mind, and wealth) in the well-known phrase of North Indian devotionalism. The responsibility for the disciple’s inner transformation is no longer that of the disciple but of the guru. ‘One single word of the guru gives liberation,’ says a tantric text. ‘All the sciences are masquerades. Only the knowledge flowing out of the guru’s mouth is living. All other kinds of knowledge are powerless and causes of sufferings.’8
The combined forces of the bhakti and tantra pushed toward an ever-increasing deification of the guru, a massive idealization of his mystery and power. The 13th-century Marathi saint Jnaneshvara writes of the guru:
As for his powers,
He surpasses even the greatness of Shiva,
With his help,
The soul attains the state of Brahman;
But if he is indifferent,
Brahman has no more worth than a blade of grass.9
Complementary to the movement of the guru from man to god is the shift in the disciple from man to child. The favoured, the ideal disciple is pure of heart, malleable of character, and a natural renouncer of all adult categories, especially of rational inquiry and of the sexual gift. These images of the guru and disciple and their ideal relationship pervades the Hindu psyche to a substantial extent even today. ‘Guru is Brahma, guru is Vishnu, guru is Maheshwara,’ is a verse not only familiar to most Hindus but one that evokes complex cultural longings, that resonates with what is felt to be the best part of their selves and of the Hindu tradition.
Let me not give the impression that the triumphant procession of the liberation salvation guru in Hindu tradition
has gone completely unchallenged. In traditional texts there are at least two instances questioning the need for a guru, admittedly an insignificant number compared to hundreds of tales, parables, and pronouncements extolling him. The first one is from the Uddhavagita in the sixth-century text of Bhagvata Purana where Dattareya, on asked to account for his self-possession and equanimity, lists elements of nature, the river, certain animals, and even a prostitute (from whom he learned autonomy from the sensual world) as his 24 gurus. The parable of Dattareya ends with the exhortation, ‘Learn, above all, from the rhythms of your own body.’ The second incident is an episode from the Yogavasistha, a text composed between the ninth and 12th-centuries in Kashmir, wherein Princess Cudala, setting out on her inner journey of self-exploration, deliberately eschews all gurus and external authorities, and reaches her goal through a seven-stage self-analysis.
In more recent times, beginning in the 19th-century, there have been reformers who have sought to revive Vedic rituals and Upanishadic religion. They would at the most sanction the teacher guru, such as the socially engaged intellectual swami of the Ramakrishna Mission or of the 19th-century reformist movement, Arya Samaj. There have been also reluctant gurus, such as Krishnamurti, who vehemently denied the need for a guru and in fact saw in him the chief obstacle to spiritual liberation. For him and some modern educated Indians the guru institution as it exists today is a focus of all the anti-intellectual and authoritarian tendencies in Hindu society.10 Yet for the great mass of Hindus, the mystical, charismatic, divine guru image continues to be a beacon of their inner worlds. The all-pervasiveness of this image is due to more complex reasons than the mere victory of irrationality over reason, servility over autonomy, or of a contemporary dark age over an earlier golden era.
What I am suggesting here is that the shift from the teacher to the master image is inevitable given the fact that perhaps a major, if not the most significant, role of the guru is that of a healer of emotional suffering and its somatic manifestations. This psychotherapeutic function, insufficiently acknowledged, is clearly visible in well-known modern gurus whose fame depends on their reported healing capabilities, rather than deriving from any mastery of traditional scriptures, philosophical knowledge, of even great spiritual attainments. Of course, in cases of international gurus, the healing is tailored to culture-specific needs. In India there will be more miracles and magical healing, while in the West there will be a greater use of psycho-religious methods and techniques which are not unfamiliar to a psycho-therapeutically informed population.11
The importance of the healing guru comes through clearly in all available accounts. Ramakrishna’s disciple-biographer writes:
The spiritual teacher has been described in the Guru-Gita and other books as the ‘physician of the world-disease.’ We did not at all understand that so much hidden meaning was there in it before we had the blessing of meeting the master. We had no notion of the fact that the guru was indeed the physician of mental diseases and could diagnose at first sight the modifications of the human mind due to influence of spiritual emotions.12
Perhaps the most vivid recent account of the therapeutic encounter between a guru and a disciple is contained in Pupul Jayakar’s moving description of her first one-to-one meeting with Krishnamurti. The narration could very well also have been of an initial interview with a good analyst. In her early 30s, outwardly active and successful, yet with intimations of something seriously wrong with her life, Jayakar is apprehensive and tries to prepare for the meeting. She begins the interview by talking of the fullness of her life and work, her concern for the underprivileged, her interest in art, her desire to enter politics. As the first flow of words peters out, Jayakar gradually falls silent.
I looked up and saw he was gazing at me; there was a questioning in his eyes and a deep probing. After a pause he said, ‘I have noticed you at the discussions. When you are in repose, there is a great sadness on your face.’
I forgot what I had intended to say, forgot everything but the sorrow within me. I had refused to allow the pain to come through. So deep was it buried that it rarely impinged on my conscious mind. I was horrified of the idea that others would show me pity and sympathy, and had covered up my sorrow with layers of aggression. I had never spoken of this to anyone—not even to myself had I acknowledged my loneliness; but before this silent stranger all masks were swept away. I looked into his eyes and it was my own face I saw reflected. Like a torrent long held in check, the words came.13
Jayakar talks of her childhood, of a sensitive lonely girl, ‘dark of complexion in a family where everyone was fair, unnoticed, a girl when I should have been a boy.’ She talks of her pregnancies, in one case the baby dying in the womb, in other the birth of a deformed child, a girl who dies in childhood. She tells Krishnamurti of the racking pain of her beloved father’s death and the tearing, unendurable agony she feels as she talks. ‘In his presence the past, hidden in the darkness of the long forgotten, found form and awakened. He was as a mirror that reflected. There was an absence of personality, of the evaluator, to weigh and distort. I kept trying to keep back something of my past but he would not let me. He said, “I can see if you want me to.” And so the words which for years had been destroying me were said.’14
Krishnamurti is one of the most ‘intellectual’ of modern gurus, with a following chiefly among the most modern and highly educated sections of Indian society. It is nonetheless the news of his ‘miracle’ cures—deafness in one instance, an acute depression in another—which spreads like wildfire through the ashrams all over the country. Crowds of potential disciples gather at his talks, striving to touch his hand, to share in his benediction. ‘These incidents and the vastness of his silent presence impressed people tremendously,’ Jayakar writes somewhat ruefully. ‘The teaching, though they all agreed it was grounded in a total nonduality, appeared too distant and too unattainable.’15
In my own work with gurus and disciples, I found that many of the latter shared a common pattern in their lives that had led them to a search for the gum and to initiation in his cult.16 Almost invariably the individual had gone through one or more experiences that had severely mauled his sense of self-worth, if not shattered it completely. In contrast to the rest of us, who must also deal with the painful feelings aroused by temporary depletions in self-esteem, it seems that those who went to gurus grappled with these feelings for a much longer time, sometimes for many years, without being able to change them appreciably. Unable to rid themselves of the feelings of ‘I have lost everything and the world is empty,’ or ‘I have lost everything because I do not deserve anything,’ they had been on the lookout for someone, somewhere, to restore the lost sense of self-worth and to counteract their hidden image of a failing, depleted self—a search nonetheless desperate for its being mostly unconscious. This ‘someone’ eventually turned out to be the particular guru to whom the seekers were led by events—such as his vision—which in retrospect seemed miraculous. The conviction and the sense of a miracle having taken place, though projected to the circumstances that led to the individual’s initiation into the cult, actually derived from the ‘miraculous’ ending of a persistent and painful internal state, the disappearance of the black depressive cloud that had seemed to be a permanent feature of the individual’s life. Perhaps a vignette from a life history will illustrate this pattern more concretely.
Harnam was the youngest of four sons of a peasant family from a North Indian village who had tilled their own land for many generations. As the ‘baby’ of the family, Harnam had been much indulged during his childhood, especially by his mother. She had died when he was 18, and ever since her death, he said, a peculiar udasinta (sadness) had taken possession of his soul. Though he had all the comforts at home, enough to eat and drink, and an abundant measure of affection from his father and elder brothers, the udasinta had persisted. For 15 long years, he said, his soul remained restless, yearning for an unattainable peace. His thoughts often dwelt upon death, of wh
ich he developed an exaggerated fear, and he was subject to crippling headaches that confined him to the darkness of his room for long periods. Then, suddenly he had a vision in a dream of the guru (he had seen his photograph earlier), who told him to come to his ashram to take initiation into the cult. He had done so; his sadness had disappeared as did his fear and headaches, and he felt the loving omnipresence of the guru as a protection against their return.
Besides cultural encouragement and individual needs, I believe there are some shared developmental experiences of many upper caste Hindu men which contribute to the intensification of the fantasy of guru as healer. In an earlier work, I have described the male child’s experience of ‘second birth,’ a more or less sudden loss of a relationship of symbiotic intimacy with the mother in late childhood and an entry into the more businesslike relationships of the world of men.17 Two of the consequences of the ‘second birth’ in the identity development of Hindu men are first, an unconscious tendency to ‘submit’ to an idealized omnipotent figure, both in the inner world of fantasy and in the outside world of making a living, and second the lifelong search for someone, a charismatic leader or a guru, who will povide mentorship and a guiding worldview, thereby restoring intimacy and authority to individual life. I would interpret the same phenomena more explicitly in terms of self psychology. Since I believe some of the concepts of self psychology to be of value in illuminating the healing process in the guru-disciple relationship, these concepts may first need a brief elucidation.