Versatile Genius

The Yoga and the Vidyas

(By Dr. K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar)

(The writer is the senior-most authority on Indian writing in English. His record as the Vice-Chancellor of a major University, Vice-President of the Sahitya Academy, a constructive and creative critic, is unexcelled.)

Sri T. V. Kapali Sastry's sustained endeavours to reveal to the generality of aspirants the hidden 'lights' of our spiritual heritage—the veiled Truths of the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Gita, the Tantras—and, coming to our own times, the tremendous insights of Ramana Maharshi and the multi-dimentional Thought and integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo are set forth in several volumes in Sanskrit and English, Tamil and Telugu. For one who had begun learning Sanskrit from his father almost as a child, and read the Ramayana of Valmiki a dozen times before he was twelve, it was hardly surprising that Kapali Sastry acquired a mastery of the traditional disciplines (Tarka, Vyakarana, Mantra Sastra, Vedanta, Ayurveda, Jyotisha, etc.) by the time he entered his twenties. And his meeting the redoubtable Kavyakantha Ganapathi Muni in 1907, not only deepened, broadened and heightened his perceptions in Sanskrit learning in its varied ramifications, but also opened up great vistas in the ineluctable realms of the Spirit and brought him, in 1911, to the superlatively charged circle of the Maharshi's Light in Tiruvannamalai.

Sastry's phenomenal mastery of the Sanskrit medium thus explains itself, and his magnum opus, the Rig Veda Bhashya (Siddhanjana), his Umasahasra-Prabha, Ramana-Gita-Prakasa, his verse translation of the opening canto of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri and his biography of Ganapati Muni (Vasishtha Vaibhavam) and other writings doubtless constitute an impressive achievement. As for Tamil and Telugu, they were like the air he breathed. But how about his astonishing command over the resources of the English language? In his younger years he was a respected and highly successful Sanskrit teacher in Madras, and he may have gained some acquaintance with English literature as well, and also learnt to converse in English with ease. But the secret of his uncanny mastery of English lay elsewhere. While his links with Ganapati Muni and Ramana Maharshi had been forged already, Kapali Sastry happened—by the merest accident: but, then, is there room for 'chance' in our 'bootstrap' universe?—Sastry happened to pick up the inaugural August 1914 issue of Arya, edited by Aurobindo Ghose and issued from Pondicherry. And the opening sentences of the opening pragraph of the first article (the first chapter of The Life Divine) laid a spell upon Kapali Sastry:

"The earliest preoccupation of man in his awakened thoughts and as it seems his insatiable and ultimate preoccupation,—for it survives the longest periods of scepticism and returns after every banishment,—is also the highest which his thoughts can envisage. It manifests itself in the divination of Godhead, the impulse towards perfection, the search after Truth and unmixed Bliss, the sense of a secret Immortality...The earliest formula of Wisdom promises to be its last,—God, Light, Freedom, Immortality".

Surely a new music, with its connotative reverberations, its wide arches of comprehension, and its clear accents of experiential Wisdom. Sastry went on reading, and although he didn't perhaps quite 'understand' all he read, he nevertheless felt a strangely soothing stir of response in the deeper listening of his soul. He read on and on throughout the night, and "he repeated this entire reading" (in Madhav Pandit's words) "each night till the next Number arrived. And so he read, re-read and assimilated the Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo". And the feeling grew upon Sastry that "the Thought that was being propounded by the Seer was amazingly close to what was developing in himself" (Collected Works of T. V. Kapali Sastry, Vol. II (1979), P. 202). Where he had seen hazily as in the twilight hour, now the Truth blazed in all the radiance of the mid-day Sun. Reading the Arya day after day—laving in the living ambrosial waters of The Life Divine, The Secret of the Veda, Essays on the Gita, The Synthesis of Yoga and the rest—reading, recapitulating, losing himself in Sri Aurobindo's seductive prose rhythms and mighty spans of Thought, aye, this was a sadhana like no other, and (to quote Madhav Pandit again):

"No wonder when he (Sastry) began to write two decades later, his writings were distinguished by a stamp of authenticity and carried the Master's Teachings far and wide"¹⁵

The encounter in the pages of the Arya of August 1914 was duly to be followed by a meeting in April 1917, and another in 1923, and now Sastry's life found its purpose and direction, and he could write some years later to the 13-year old Madhav that Sri Aurobindo was "a very great person, in whom I found God thereby determining as it were the boy's destiny as well.¹⁶

When Sri Aurobindo went into a completer retirement on 24 November 1926 and the Mother took charge of the now formally organised Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Sastriar felt more and more drawn to Sri Aurobindo,—and to the Mother too, in whom he saw Sri Tripurasundari, his ishta devata since his boyhood days,—and he noted down in his Diary:

"21.2.1928. The Mother's Day.

"Between 10 and 11 a.m.: Pranam to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Tears before and after...

"31.12.1928:

"Night: a little before 12 below the Meditation Hall.

"Thus the last quarter of the last hour of the last day of the year, had me at the stair-case leading to the Mother's feet.

"1.1.1929:

"With the Mother, at Her feet:

"In the first minutes of the first hour of the first day of the year...Received chocolate from the Mother" ¹⁷

It was thus the Ashram of Sri Aurobindo that provided Kapali Sastry, in M. C. Subramaniam's words, "the atmosphere and the inspiration for an all-round enflowerment" (Collected Works, Vol. II, p. 209). Kapali's triple stances—discipleship to Ganapati Muni, devotion to the Maharshi, and ātma samarpana to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother—far from conflicting with one another, only coalesced into a single flame of aspiration and progressive realisation. And when he started writing, not just for private recordation, but now for publication, the style (whether in Sanskrit or English) was the man himself, and in the apt language of Madhav Pandit "the philosopher...rubs shoulders with the poet, the Yogin with the grammarian, the critic with the creator" (ibid., p. 202). And if the Sanskrit compositions carried perhaps something akin to the Kavyakantha's stamp, the English of the series of 'LIGHTS' volumes had the range and power, the opulence and organisation, the self-assurance and dialectical vigour of Sri Aurobindo's own richly cadenced and thought-laden marvels of "the other harmony". It is prose weighted with scholarship and consummate in its interior stitching, and although it is by no means a conscious imitation of Sri Aurobindo, it has the same innate dynamism and global sweep of comprehension.

For detailed consideration, let me confine myself to. Lights on the Upanishads. This collection of seven essays appeared in 1947, six of them having come out earlier serially in the mid-forties in the Advent Quarterly and one in the second Annual of Sri Aurobindo Circle, then published from Madras and Bombay respectively. The central preoccupation is with Yoga, and how particular Vidyas or Sadhanas—as taught in the Upanishads, notably the Chhandogya—can be a help to the aspirant. Yoga is neither magic nor mumbo jumbo. It involves an understanding of Nature and of human nature, and the practice of disciplines that might quicken or accelerate the evolutionary drive towards perfection, the movement from the human to the Divine. It is from an integral understanding, through an integral discipline or sadhana, that the desired integral siddhi is to be hoped and striven for, and attained in the fullness of time. Self-change no doubt is the indispensable first step, but in Sri Aurobindo's Yoga, self-change is but a means of bringing about world-change and terrestrial transformation. And, indeed, in our tantalisingly interpenetrating 'bootstrap', there can be no real change unless all can ultimately participate in the Yoga of transformation fulfilling the Infinite's promise to luminous Savitri:

All then shall change, a magic order come
Outtopping the mechanical universe. ||155.37||

Like Arjuna on the field of Kurukshetra, many a mute inglorious Nara feels paralysed at the very time there is an imperative call to action. It took Krishna the eighteen cantos of the Gita to expound the 'Gospel of Action' and make Arjuna play his destined role. Yes, action must not be sought to be evaded, but there should be no taint of preoccupation with the 'result' or any possible 'reward'. Action, yes, but without a sense of egoistic concern or pride. The 'I' has no autonomous status, being inextricably involved in Prakriti's web of criss-crossing movements and relationships. Action, yes, and when there is no taint of anxiety for result or reward, no confusion of arrogance of personal responsibility, when in fact the ego's ceiling crashes to the ground creating a vacuum, the Divine will leap into the vacant seat of the charioteer and the 'action' will divinely fulfil itself. It is all easily said, but not amenable to ready practice, and besides 'Nara' doesn't always have a visible Narayana to guide him infalliably to the goal. No wonder many a nameless 'Nara' feels continually confused and makes spasmodic movements hoping for the best.

Aside from the Gita's perennial admonitions, assurances and commandments, there are the several 'Vidyas' or 'Sadhanas'—a dozen of them, perhaps—that are imbedded in the Upanishads, notably the Chhandogya and the Brihadaranyaka. They are distantly paralleled, perhaps, by St. Ignatius Loyola's 'spiritual exercise that constitute the basic discipline of the Jesuit Order. The 'common reader' of the present time, whose knowledge is usually confined to feeble translations of the Sanskrit texts, is apt to miss these seminal Trees of life-renewal, being overwhelmed by the tropical richness of the many dialectical climbs of the incandescence of the grand Affirmations or Mahavakyas. Latter-day intellectual acrobatics have but led to "the ditches, to the trenches of philosophical warfare obscuring the abiding intuitions the master-keys to Jnana and Karma (Lights on the Upanishads, 1947, p. 160). It is just here that Kapali Sastriar steps in to tell us of "the practical side which is the soul of these Teachings" (p. 149). He has chosen deliberately four of his texts from the Chhandogya, and one each from the Brihadaranyaka and the Kathopanishad, although Sri Aurobindo seemed to have given rather greater importance to the Isa and the Taittiriya. "We have the advantage says Sastriar, "of studying parts of those texts not dealt with by Sri Aurobindo, thus enabling ourselves to appreciate them in the light of his Yoga and Philosophy in general" (Lights, pp. 150-1). This is, then, no exercise in derivative exegesis; it is more in the nature of finding corroborative evidence; in other words, it is a purposive extension of the Aurobindonian territory.

Five of the seven essays center round 'Vidyas' mentioned in the Chhandogya of the Brihadaranyaka: (1) Shandilya Vidya, (2) Prana Vidya, (3) Vaishvanara Vidya, (4) Madhu Vidya, and (5) Bhuma Vidya. It is remarkable how each of these essays is structured like a piece of music, and it is as though the constant refrain is:

In my beginning is my end,
And my end is a new beginning.

Extensive hard-headed scholarship is pressed into service, and the reader is taken step by step—as in Swami Aiyappan's Temple with its 18 steps of ascent—and when the exposition concludes, from Here to Infinity is seen as a full circle: and only the language of silence, the unstruck melody of fulfilment and peace remains.

First, then, Shandilya Vidya, insinuated in Chhandogya Upanishad (III.iv.I). Man being a creature of will, and will being father to accomplishment, "He should make the resolve: sa krautum kurvite". Man is a thinking animal, and it is upto him to look about himself, discriminate between preyas and sreyas, the transient and the undying, and so learn to hanker after the good, build the ground of faith, and with an unfaltering certitude resolve that he will effect the definitive passage from now to eternity, from corruption to incorruption, from the human to the Divine. It is said of a particular religious order that its members start with a resolve, and then strive their uttermost to make good what they have set their minds upon. Shandilya Vidya begins with the resounding all-sufficing māhavākya "Verily, all this is Brahman and sustained by its nectarean resonance, the sadhaka should resolve against the Nay and in favour of the Everlasting Yea, and the definitive mental act of resolution is itself half the victory:

"The sadhana, then, begins straight with man, the mental being (Manomayah Purushah), whose position lies midway between the two extremes, the pure self-existent conscious Being and the inert inconscient Matter of which the gross body is made...Man has to renounce nothing, as he has nothing to renounce, for the mind and life and body are in their own kinds parts of the Universal; the soul itself is a ray and form of the Supreme Being." (pp. 50,61).

Renouncing the prison-house of one's egoistic separativity and affirming identity with the Illimitable Permanent, already the aspirant is on his way to Realisation. The right resolve, and the auspicious start in the right direction: can the desired or willed Goal elude the seeker?

Next comes Prana Vidya. While to resolve aright is a wonderful beginning, the aspirant has also to purify the instruments, reject the fraudulent, chase away bleak despair and breathe into the worlds within and without the nectarean Life-Principle. It is a definitive seminal act, a peremptory summons to New Life. Here the text from the Upanishad is a challenging benediction: "If one were to tell this to a dried-up stump even, sure, branches would sprout, and foliage spring forth" (V.ii.3). So potent, so irresistible indeed is this Vidya that at its etheric touch, the sapless stump itself can leap into sudden life, and death will die, and life, life, life will affirm its reality and omnipotence.

Third in the series (in my ordering) is Vaishvanara Vidya, almost a continuation, expansion and universalisation of Prana Vidya. Again the text is from the Chhandogya:

"In all worlds, in all beings, in all selves, he eats the food" (V. xxiv.2).

Life, life, of course, but life is not life when it permits self-diminution or self-limitation. The sky is the limit, the infinitudes and the eternities are the limit. Life, life, now rendered electrically free, goes into action, and the whole universe becomes its field. For whatever terminal or 'beyond the beyond' one's consciousness may reach, it can but recognise itself, like the wanderer seeing his own reflection in the waters wherever he may adventure forth. The Purusha is not just the sum of the parts or limbs, he is the Spirit, the Self, in all things, what brings them into being and keeps them going. The microcosm is the macrocosm, the Universal Self is the Burning Fire in all things and everywhere. One must therefore 'eat' and live in the knowledge of the ONE FIRE multiplied endlessly and aglow in all creatures. Everyone, everything, is meant to house the Great Agni, the real Agnihotra. The One is the Many, the One enacts his own life in a million million situations and persons and creatures. This secret of secrets is taught by king Aswapathy Kaikeya to a group of five seekers led by Uddalaka Aruni. Sastriar cites appositely a supporting passage from the Mother's essay, 'The Supreme Discovery':

"The individual I and the universal I are one in each world, in each being, in each thing, in each atom is the Divine Presence, and it is man's mission to manifest it" (quoted in Lights, p. 68).

And Sastriar himself explains how Aswapathy teaches the truths of the Vaishvanara, the Universal Person:

"Anyone who so lives, lives also for other souls, for other beings around, for the rest of the whole universe...when he eats, he knows and feels that it is the awakened Fire of the Universal Person in him that eats...

"It is a sadhana that preserves the Vedic tradition of the Universal Godhead, the Divine Fire, awake in man as the Self of his self, vigilant, active, guiding him to universalise himself" (pp. 72, 81).

What next? If the Yogi can universalise himself in terms of the Vaishvanara Vidya, what then? The answer is, 'Madhu Vidya'! Madhu is honey, or anything sweet. The Madhu doctrine teaches that the infinite diversity in creation is the manifestation of a secret Delight, the exemplification of a hidden harmony. In this cosmic drama of Ceaseless creative ecstasy, everything and any part of it, the microcosm, is Honey to the Whole, and the Whole—the macrocosm—is Honey to every minuscule or atomic part of it. And because it is Honey, the secret Delight, that abides in the totality of creation and in every infinitesimal part of it, therefore the exultant cry Raso vai sah! all is existential Rasa, all is existential Madhu, all is existential Ananda. In the Upanishad (Brihadaranyaka, II. v), it is triumphantly and repeatedly affirmed that this earth is Honey, this water is Honey, this fire, air, Sun, space, Moon, this lightning, thunder, ether, Dharma, Satyam, this and these and all are Honey, Madhu, Honey—what else? There is also the significant linking up with the Aswins, the twin godheads of Light and Power, Consciousness and Force, knowledge and Will, and it is thanks to these powers that mankind has inherited in exhaustible Madhu. In Sastriar's words:

"...the twin Divine Powers...are the riders on the path, symbolic of Force, especially of life-energy and nervous force; they are seekers of honey, Madhu, Gods of enjoyment, physicians, who bring back youth to the old, health to the sick, wholeness to the maimed" (p. 132).

And finally, Bhuma Vidya. This figures as the first in Sastriar's book, and is based on yet another Chhandogya text:

"In the purity of nourishment, Ahara, lies the purity of the stuff of being, Sattwa; Sattwa being pure, the immediate remembrance becomes constant and fixed; by this remembrance (smriti), there is a release from all knots. To such a one, stainless, the Blessed Sanatkumara shows the shore beyond darkness; they call him Skanda, yea, they call him Skanda)" (VII. xxvi.2).

Like Vasishtha Ganapati Muni meeting the unknown Ramana in his Tiruvannamalai retreat and expressing his utter feeling of defeat at not attaining what he had set his mind on (although he had mastered all that had to be learnt and practised all the required disciplines), Narada too had once approached Sanatkumara with the desire to know THAT by which he could cross over to the 'other' Shore; and the Blessed Sanatkumara acceded to Narada's request, and concluded with the passage above cited. The key insight of this Vidya is that "however arduous the Vidya or spiritual discipline that one adopts and follows to a successful end, it cannot by itself bring the Realisation of the ultimate Truth" (Lights, p. 11). There is Grace the supreme Power, and Grace should not just be taken for granted. Tapah prabhavāt Devah prasādāscha! Sustained askesis or Sadhana, yes, but Divine Grace too! In Sastriar's words again:

"However high and arduous and assured the sadhana be,...however liberal, independent, self-willed and unaided by any source of strength and light the seeker be, however certain the result may seem, the result itself, the final goal, the cosummation comes from outside the bounded sphere of the personal self of the sadhaka, from the Deliverer, apparently as the fruit of the labour, or independently of it as a matter of Grace" (p. 19).

And this Grace of the Divine—the Grace of God or the Mother, of Sanatkumara, or Kumara, or Skanda—this Grace is the first and last mystery and benediction of the phenomenal Play.

And when the Goal has been reached, the Everest has been conquered, what next? Is the victorious sadhak, with his immersion in Infinity, to be lost to this "too too sullied" earth and its mass of purblind humanity still wriggling in the coils of their crass and abysmal ignorance? The Buddha stepped back from the brink of Nirvana, and patiently and for many long years played the redeemer-role of the Bodhisattwa. So too, in the Kathopanishad, when Yama offers three boons to young Nachiketas, first he asks for the freedom to get back recognisably alive to his angry—now mollified—father, Vajashravas. And explaining the real nature of the boon, Sastriar writes:

"...a capacity by which he can come back from the higher plane to the physical with the connection between this and the life beyond established..." (p. 95).

It is henceforth to be a two-way journeying for Nachiketas, this winner of immortality being enabled to return to the world of the as yet imperfect humanity to guide them too to win the New Life and help to create a new Heaven and a new Earth here, even here, "on his bank and shoal of time." For the liberated, the ripeness, the readiness, is all, and the way up and the way down are the same for him, for his personal preferences have been consumed in the white radiance of his deathlessness.

The second boon Nachiketas asks for is the knowledge of the Celestial Fire, or the triple power of consciousness that can loosen and finally snap the cords of mortality. For the third boon, of course, knowing the secret of Immortality, Nachiketas makes the firm choice, and is assured of the guerdon. Sreyas, not preyas: Eternity, not a time-bracket: and having won deathlessness here and now, he is ready and fit for the citizenship of all the worlds. One like Nachiketas who has won with faith, discrimination and determination the crown of immortality, as also the freedom to return to the world he has left behind to be able to effect its redemptive transformation, is the type of Yogin that flawed or imperfect Man really needs to be helped to make the decisive crossing of the sea of ignorance and reach the far shore of Next Future.

While the Vidyas have been mentioned in the preceding pages in a particular sequence (Shandilya. Prana, Vaishvanara, Madhu, Bhuma), it is not as though there is any traditional linkage or finality about the order. In the spiritual heavens, the centre is everywhere, the boundary nowhere. And anyone of the Vidyas somehow involves also the others, and you may begin anywhere, and perseverance, sincerity and above all Grace can see you safely through. The aspirant pilgrim, faced as he thinks he is by a choice of pathways, chooses one—or is chosen by it!—and wends his way to the goal:

"The Bhuma Vidya...aims at the realisation of Bhuma, the Plenum, the Infinite Self. The Prana Vidya starts with the Life-Principle—The Shandilya discipline starts with the soul as related to the instruments of life and mind...a most comprehensive vision that takes in a sweep all the complexities of the soul in its various aspects. The Universal Spirit, the Fire in each being and all... is the theme of Aswapathy in the Vaishvana.ra sadhana" (p. 155).

And all roads lead to the ultimate Reality, Atman, God, Brahman saguna or nirguna, existential Madhu or Ananda.

In the final chapter, Sastriar pointedly remarks that the several Vidyas, although identified and generally described, must remain for the reader no more than theoretical possibilities, for we haven't the living voice, the authoritative direction, of the Guru:

"...these Sadhanas, these methods of approach were transmitted by the Master to the disciple, and verbal instruction when necessary at all to accompany the initiation given was either not recorded or only briefly hinted at in these Scriptures. And this is so because the real sadhana begins with initiation and not with instruction...the Guru gives the method not the written word, not the spoken word even; but he gives the Word in silence which is a power..." (p. 156).

In Conclusion: Sastriar's Lights from the Upanishads—like his other 'Lights' volumes—is no book to be sampled or swallowed in a hurry, but demands close study and long pondering over the contents. Commenting on Sastriar's writing, A. R. Ponnuswami Iyer remarks:

"His learning...became part of the very texture of his mind, the nerves and sinews of this thought...behind every sentence of his writings stands a massive strength of reading and reflection".¹⁸

Naturally such writing calls for proportionate reflection and receptivity on the reader's part as well. Sastriar's brilliantly enlightening elucidations of the Vidyas carefully selected by him from the Upanishads and expounded in the wider background of the Vedas, have their own matchless value for beginner and scholar alike. But they are not meant to make the volume a 'Do-it-yourself Handbook' to the Yoga and the Vidyas. Nevertheless, Lights on the Upanishads is a classic in its own right, and our debt to Sastriar is immense for giving us a ticket-of-entry into these marvellous Vedic and Upanishadic realms of the Himayalas of aspiration, askesis and Realisation.

11 December 1985.