on Narayana Guru in Ahimsa Conversations between M Dinankaran, Backwaters Collective and Rajni Bakshi
https://youtube.com/embed/giI2bzp7OAw?start=387&end=1473
Text:
6:36 Sree Narayana Guru
How would you locate the legacy of Sree Narayana Guru?
I come from a place called Vakala in Kerala which is actually the place where guru stayed most of his adult life. So can't escape the breezes flew in from the ashram.
Guru is actually very enigmatic personality for the modern historian, because he can be anything which you want him to be.
For the Advaitan he's a Advaita Practitioner of the most sophisticated variety. For the left, liberal crowd is a social reformer. His philosophy is just a footnote to his social reforming process. And for the poet, he's absolutely brilliant poet who wrote not in one language or two languages but three languages. So he can be a very kind of complex personality to define.
00:07:54
But about Gurus understanding of ahimsa on a surface level, I can say that he was a big promoter of Ahimsa, in fact, he has written poems working against any kind of killing, including killing for food. He was a man who Promoted vegetarianism.
And he said that it's if you don't kill an animal for food, nobody will be there to buy it for eating. So he he actually had appealed to the butcher to stop killing. In this current contemporary times, it can be misused for attacking the butchers, but he was a fundamentally a man who was who said that violence to any organic being including plants, hills and rocks and anything is basically a violence against oneself because he was in person who believed in the overpowering pervading entity called the self. So non-violence was very much part of his philosophy.
He was a very mild person who will never talk anything in a kind of an aggressive way. So he put in in soft way, let alone criticise.
Can you dwell a little more deeply on the all pervading self?
Expain briefly the Advaita of Shree Narayanan Guru t
Guru has written a poem a Medium sized poem in Malayalam, called Adwaitha Deepika. So he is defined what Advaita is in that.
And then his Darśana mālā Darshana Manga which is a book of hundred stanzas in Sanskrit also talks about the different manifestation of the Prakriti and the spirit and Atma. And how everything is like a garland, like a thread of a garland in which all reality is being strung on.
And he very clearly says that his is an experiential self. Guru's understanding of self was not as scholastic understanding of self. It was an experiential understanding of self.
You should remember that he had spent years in caves in a place called ‘marunthu vazhum malai’ http://maruthwamala.com/en/maruthwamala/ which is very close to tri- junction of the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal and the Arabain Sea.
And on top of the hill, he would sit in a cave and meditate, and he practiced his Tantrik practices. Tantrik in the sense of the rigorous Kundalini practices. Then he came out of it as a person who realized what the secrets of Existence is and he could have actually remained in that state and continued being a kind of a Munni a person who is a Sanyaasa. .
But he chose the other path - of coming back to the people and trying to help them out on the basis of the insights he received.
And he has very clearly written his experiences and many of the poems -- Not very ostensibly about it, but you can also decipher it when you read through it that this comes from his experience, not out of his reason.
He talks about how from the point of the ultimate realization you become one with a effulgence
and then you are transcending the time that you can see the past, the present and the future.
All these are: Aathmopadesha shathakam Very clearly that you become a photon yourself and then you move at the speed of the velocity of light. Then there is no past, no present, no future. Everything is visible to you. The time dilation concept, as you say in physics.
So these kinds of experiences he has had. Rationally, we cannot say whether he was really, when he went through it, but The consistency in which he has shown afterwards the consistency of his experiences is explained through his action and his literary work.shows that he has gone through some kind of an ephiphanic moment in his tapsya iinside that cave on top of a mountain.
So all this his work which has had a lot of ramification in the social sphere. The current care line is actually a kind of an after effect of the whole philosophical and sociological praxis he had indulged in.
He's basically a very consistent and absolutely he has never tried to impress anyone with this scholasticism, or its reasoning ability, or anything, but in spite of all that, everything comes through as a v uniform whole.
That is why it is so relevant even now.
Today we are sitting almost 100 years after he he passed away from the world yesterday and talking about it. There is a reason.
Q: the fascinating thing about Guru is that having innocence, had access to the completely esoteric realm, He chose to fight a battle deep inside the society. And it was a battle for the dignity of the so called lower caste. In what ways that also manifested a philosophy of nonviolence?
Actually, guru never knew that he was fighting a battle because he was not a man who was interested in creating bad books. On the other hand, he was equally sympathetic towards both the oppressed and the oppressor. He thought the opressor is as much part of the suffering system, as the oppressed is.
So people used to ask him -- when people come for such a great saint like you, you are being treated like an untouchable or something -- How do you react to that ? someone asked him
But He said, I feel pity for them. They don't know the whole scriptures on which they're basing their arguments. They all look at the whole human being as one single whole. There is absolutely no difference between one human from the other and there is no othering of the human. Every human is part of one whole self. So I feel pity for them. I dont feel any kind of rancer or anger, or, you know, resentment towards them. So you can see from the Guru's point of view, was not doing any battle. He was only opening up the kind of a morass, the crust which had been deposited over centuries over the society, and he sort of unraveled the truth to everyone, both the opressor and the oppressed. It so happened that the benefits were visible for the people who are at the bottom of the pyramid. But the benefits are there for the people who were oppressing too. They also got liberated because they became part of a more democratic, more, you know, equitable and more fraternal society. So he was not doing any battle. He was actually opening up the eyes of both the oppressor and the oppressed. .
At the same time, his decision to consecrate a Shiva idol Was revolutionary at that time.
Could you locate that In this logic? That ecomes as a follow up of my earlier argument that he didn't go there to open up the temples of the oppressor who were keeping 80% of the Hindu society away from the places of worship saying that they don't have the karmic balance to enter the temple.
Instead, he said, why do you want to go there ? I'll make better temples for you where you can pray. So this actually took the bottom out of the oppressor because then he knew that if 80% of the people start going to other temples , our temples will become irrelevant. So they opened up the temples, their own temples. So he used what he called gracious up-rooting. You can uproot a system without having resentment, without having anger. He called that
gracious up-rooting
This is a word taken from the great Japanese philosopher Gadjin M Nagao . He defines Prapancho Upachamam shivam, which is a phrase It's a phrase which is available in Nagarjuna's Vula Madhyamika Pratika. He uses this argument to say that Prapancho Upachamam shivam is gracious uprooting.
In fact, we all believe that Guru had done some kind of a gracious uprooting of the wrong , deeply crusted traditional systems of the society. That's all he did. He's a kind of a man who cleaned up the system. He's not a man who fought the system.
Q So how do you then locate this gracious uprooting In the kind of revolutionary energies which were unleashed upon the world in the 20-30 years after. Of course, Guru lived at the time of the Russian Revolution. But can you locate the many efforts to reform society through revolutionary change in this context.
Guru was a product of his time, though he didn't know English. He was very much aware of what's happening in the world because many of his disciples were high scholars of English. Many of them is to write books in English.
You should remember when you talk about this --, the parallel between Russian revolution and Guru being there , I have to take it back to the much more preliminary level. Guru was born in 1855. Some people say 1856, but I would like to believe he's was in 1855. In his teenage years, I think the American Civil War was almost over and American Civil War had changed the whole landscape, the whole commercial nature of you know the western coast. Because of the American Civil War, you know they've got a shortage of oil seeds in England, for their soap factories and they had alternative cultivations of different oilseeds and coconut became a commercial product. The coastal Kerala economy actually boomed because of the Civil American Civil War.
And the new bourgeoisie came out of it of this commercial cultivation of coconut and its other products, they had created a lot of new changes into the economic and social structure.
Guru was part of thisl Guru actually was influenced by all this. He was a very intelligent man.
He would have been very much aware of what's happening in the world. The static world of about 1000 years is suddenly changing. Then you have the new century, the 20th century electricity coming to cities..the railway coming in fact.
In some of his Bhakti poems he uses the word Rail and Jail and all English words.
Because he's such a such a aware. man, he knows that the world is changing.
And he must have been aware of The Russian Revolution.
00:20:13
And he would have been probably approving of it in a kind of a theoretical way. But would have been disapproving of the violence unleashed by the revolution.
00:20:25
And that's why he never had any time for these kinds of agitations. Even for Vaikom Satyagraha with Gandhiji promoted, he came over there to support it. He was indifferent about it. If it happens let it happen, but we don't need an agitation, we can have our temples. Why do we need an agitation for that? We can have separate temples, but once it happened he started encouraging them not to allow their moral to come down . All that he did.
About the Viacom satyagrah?
What was the issue and how did Gandhiji get involved and a little bit about the Gandhi-Guru dialogue.
Vaikom was a temple which never allowed low caste to enter . But they couldn't even walk on the streets, which was on the sides of the temple.
So they have to take a long circuitous route to go from one house to the other.
So, but if you become a Christian or something, if you convert yourself to Christianity your allowed because the British Empire will ensure that such rules will not be possible.
So this kind of inequality of access, Gandhi came to know through some of the people from Kerala and he said that you have to go for a Satyagraha. Go for a nonviolent struggle for that.
So that's how these people organized it and then it had all, even the leaders from the enlightened sections of the the upper castes, the lower caste. Everyone were part of it and it a long long kind of satyagraha.In fact the Akalis has come from Punjab to start a langar. https://www.thebetterindia.com/163240/vaikom-satyagraha-kerala-sabarimala-india-news/
The Malayalis started eating chapati is only after that.And it went on and on for a long time.
But I don't think it was a successful thing in the immediate sense, but it had created a lot of ripples both among the Oppressed and oppressors.
Q : And in this context, what was the dialogue? What was the nature of the issues? Because Gandhi Ji and Guru did meet? https://ullekhnp.com/2019/09/27/mahatma-gandhi-sree-narayana-guru/
Gandhi Ji came to work Vakala Ashram where Guru was there and they met and they were talking, and they're very interesting. Gandhiji started the conversation saying Does the Guru does the guru speak English. Guru just asked him back -Does the Mahatma speak Sanskrit.
So both of them were ignorant of the other language, so there it ended this conversation and then they started using the interpreters.
00:23:21
And Gandhi was quite skeptical about the the untenability of Varnashrama which Guru said that when the same cells provides in all human beings, you can't have enough different varnas. Everyone is one species- the human species. But Gandhi showed him the mango tree. Look her
The trees are very different. Aren't the Human beings also different that way.
So Guru said, why don't we just pluck a couple of them and start chewing each one of them and you see their essence is the same?
It seems this had a huge impact on Gandhi. This was in 1924 or 25 and in the 30s Gandhi had changed his whole concept of Varanashram.. went headlong into untouchability movements and other things.
It was two Great Souls meeting and having a discussion itself was something for a small town like Varkala.