How We Learned Together

These are the weeks in April when I celebrate my teacher’s birthday, remember his teaching, rejoice in his life, and grieve his passing.  I’ve tried over the years to describe what it was like learning with him.  Today I was reviewing some very old notebooks, more like log books of times spent in India with Appa.  This transcribed passage is from my 22 year old self, dated April 1978:

There is nothing to prove, nothing even on offer.  It is simply here.  If you want *it* you will have to notice it and its value.  If you want it you will have to understand how to get it.  If you expect anything from the teacher other than what he does  you have not yet understood the opportunity.  There is nothing  for sale though he may make the opportunity appear.  If you don’t understand  all of the terms under which all of this happens that too is not going to be explained.  You are going to have to figure out what you want and then figure out how it is being offered because it is not being offered.  it is simply being done.

We might think when people do something or make something that their work will also somehow be on offer.  The work might be for sale or for hire, or it might even be for free because that too can appear to be the offer.

We want to know the terms, the cost, the effort and time it will take: we want to know if the offering is something worth it to us.   It only seems normal: we want to know what we might be getting and getting into, and likely have all sorts of questions about the offering and the offer.

When I encountered my teacher it seemed to me at first that what he had chosen to do with his life and what he accomplished was somehow on offer.  He had studied, he had credentials, experience, and a long history of engagement with his work.  What would I have to say to receive or do to acquire that ?

He never once asked for terms nor did he set conditions or a price, not even after I gathered the courage to ask him to teach me about his work.

 

He wasn’t offering something of great value for “free.”  Every moment of life is one less moment we have to live and from mere respect for time we should consider seriously questions of value.  He did not put a price on his time or his work but did make himself available.  How do you pay for someone’s true experience or repay a debt that seems beyond any measurable compensation?

 

It’s not wrong or wrong-headed to consider monetary value on value received.  In fact, it seems to me wrong to think that we would not somehow try to make compensation, offer some kind of remuneration.  If none is suggested, none asked for, that doesn’t mean the work is “free” any more than we are freed from the notion of just rewards or offerings.  Things of value can have a price no matter who decides it.  If we are not prepared or willing or can’t pay that price then that is merely another life circumstance.

 

When I started my journey all I knew is that my curiosities had somehow brought me to a complex body of images and suggestions, into words and ideas where one thing had led to another.  There was history, a subject and in fact many subjects, there was learning and clearly a process of acquiring skills and understandings.

 

Any of these endeavors would take time and involve remaining a person in the world with responsibilities and ordinary costs of living.  None of those matters were ever going to simply disappear---that is not my good fortune.  But what relationship we can we create between what we long to learn, who we want to be, and making a living in a world that promises us none?

I didn’t have a plan or a goal because I didn’t even know what it was that I had found.  I felt confident that what appeared seemed only the very tip of an iceberg and that the iceberg was unfathomably vast and genuinely beyond my abilities to fathom.  The subject involved complex ideas, implied arguments and materials that even at the surface level appeared exotic, unfamiliar, and labyrinthine.  I had no idea if these pursuits really were worth the time and whatever efforts they might entail.

 

I remember as a kid having heard in school that Albert Einstein had important theories.  So, I went to the library to get my hands on his work, copies of the original documents.  How better to learn?  Of course what I found was so utterly beyond my comprehension that I had to reconsider, well, everything  I thought I was trying to do.  Things worth doing are not only likely hard to learn but may well leave us wondering how even to start.  It wasn’t only what Einstein apparently knew, I couldn’t fathom what he was doing much less how he learned it.  Of course, he went to school, he had teachers, he applied himself.  This too seemed to be on offer if one has the curiosity, the aptitude, the commitment to the work.

But with respect to my teacher’s work, that can only partially be learned from things on offer because of the simple and practical fact that he worked as a University professor.  If I enrolled in his classes he was contracted and obliged to offer precisely what was expected.  I soon learned that his professional offerings were only fragments of what he had done but not what he could do, much less what he was doing.  What he offered as a “professional” was only a fragment of who he was and what might be learned.

 

What my teacher might teach if only I knew how to learn was never for sale and never went “on sale.”  What you might learn or receive from him was somehow available if you first understood those facts.

 

“It isn’t that what we might do together is intellectual or “spiritual” that matters about the work.  Nothing should cause us to believe our work is different from any other endeavor.  I might be making pottery or building furniture.  What would it matter?  What there is to do in life and how we choose to do, that may not have anything to do with one’s job.   One is somehow curious and interested in the work or not.  What is “produced” might be sold and those sales may provide a living.  One’s work as one’s artistry, can do many of the same things as any job and there is nothing wrong with having a job, making offerings or sales.  Some of the skills I have learned help provide my living.  Of course, people must find ways to sustain themselves.  But if someone wants to learn what I have learned there is no need for me to make an offer, though it might be available to learn.  My job, my profession, that is only a portion of myself, as it is for anyone.  Why should I want something from you that you have not asked of me?”

 

My teacher never said “this is what I do, this is who I am, would you like to learn this.”  He didn’t even imply as much.  He never spoke about the value of his work in his own experience, much less how others might benefit from it.  He expressed no attitude regarding accomplishment or objectives; there was no suggestion of profit, advancement, or gain.

When I asked him why he did his work he said it had come to him first as something curious, that it had somehow called to him and turned into a way of life.   He was now just doing his work.
Is it important?  Perhaps not to the world, he said.
Is it valuable?  So long as we try to avoid particular harm to the world then we should be free to live as we choose.
You don’t sell your work?  I make a living from work I do.  

 

 

What I eventually came to realize is that I would have to learn how to ask for what was never being offered until I could ask for it.  At that point, the “offering” was commensurate to commitment and a process of learning how to ask the next question, about what seemed to be the next thing in the learning process.

 

 

Among my first lucky stumblings I came upon a quotation that said three-fourths of everything remains hidden, unknown, or unseen.  There were few clues to explain further the value or the purpose of the pursuit.  I had curiosity, even romance and mystery but that I realized was all of my own making---the clues uncovered expressed no particular interest in creating any interest.  There was no pitch, no seduction, no vending, no deal to be made, no demands, and nothing to market.  This situation was never less true so the very idea of something being on offer was actually never the case.  There was no interest expressed in eliciting my interest or anyone else’s.

 

If my teacher’s work were completely private, if no one had ever noticed or asked, I am confident that it would have made little difference to him.  If no one came along to carry forward his traditions of learning---what he knew was clearly passed through a process of learning---he wasn’t going to be concerned.  He felt no need to carry forward, spread, or advance any agenda.

He wasn’t doing his work so that others would profit from it though, he conceded when pressed, they might well find it meaningful and worthwhile.  After all, he did and that suggested others’ too might find it worthwhile.  That may sound selfish or self-preoccupied because there is no expressed motive of altruism or service to community but neither did he ask or expect benefit, reward, or acclaim.  If there was inspiration, influence, or an evocative muse, none was deliberate, none was being implied.  Once we engaged together in learning there were no obligations, no incentives, nothing expected.

 

So what happened was this: I found a person I had reason to believe knew something about matters of real curiosity to me.  I went to ask him a bit about what he knew and if he would teach me.  He respectfully listened, gave me his time, and at the end of our first “interview” he said that he would be here, at his desk, in this place tomorrow at certain hours.  Could I come to see him?  His affirmation was in his smile.  He wasn’t cold, haughty, or indifferent but neither was he particularly more inviting.  He was being himself, doing his work, and I could come or not.  This arrangement, as it were, was never made more complex or conditional.

 

It soon became clear that our relationship was entire, meaning that so long as I “showed up” he too would “show up” with all of his gifts and abilities.  I would ask for things and then be assigned tasks that would be in pursuit of those requests.  He never graded or evaluated.  Each day he would express or suggest things that were clearly in furtherance of my curiosities and the queries I was able to make. I was never praised or cajoled, never admonished or approved.  We simply continued our process day after day.  I never asked for “input” nor did I receive any assessments or valuations.  I was learning how to learn when there was nothing being offered or sold, no bargain, no requirements, no obligations. 

 

I once asked him, while living in his house, what we would do if I did not come that day to learn together.  He said, “I hope we would at least have lunch” and he laughed a little.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Liberated from Liberation

Live long and prosper. I went to India hungry for an awakening that would relieve me of the burdens of everyday existence. Despite falling in love with Hesse's percipient critique of the Buddha in his parallel voice as Siddhartha, I still wanted the some supernal conclusion. I did not fathom yet the Ferryman's river because I wanted something more, something that would save me from the world and from myself.

As a complement and very much an alternative to the Buddhists, I had come across the great Sankara. Here, in the nearly impenetrable prose of formal Sanskrit argument, was what I thought the cathartic release.

Sankara shamelessly told us that this vale of tears is the result of a cosmic malaise, a false super imposition of mistaken identities---like a rope for a snake, called adhyasa---and the result of our individuated ignorance made apparently manifest by karma, also a construct of mis- identifications, which shrouds us in falsity. When I met Appa, barely 20 years old, I came prepared with a thorough, memorized to the last run on sentence, appeal to Sankara's catursutri (the "four sutra'') that opens his commentary on the Brahmasutra. I didn't think myself clever or certain. Far from it. I wanted to meet someone who would make the advaitin argument come alive, someone who had lived the meaning of Sankara's exposition. I wanted the One so that I could put an end to the falsity of Many.

In our first meeting, or maybe our second, I said as much to Dr. Sundaramoorthy, who in typical form sat quietly and listened to the pedantic musings of a twenty year old seeker. My heart was in it and my head was wrapped around the best translations of the original text (in those days, Thibaut, Swami Gambirananda, and these are still in my opinion quite competent and accurate efforts.) Oneness promised that our original state was free of the limitations and conditions of our mortal coil. Oneness promised that we didn't need heaven anymore than we needed consolation or care for our otherwise certain sufferings. I wanted that. Appa agreed to explain at any length Sankara's ideas and how his incontrovertible claim of "direct experience" (anubhava) would deliver its promised aim. I would be delivered from the world, I thought. And he made good. I had barely any Sanskrit but Appa, patiently, deliberately, in sentence by sentence exegesis pulled the text apart. He was charitable to its argument, serious in taking Sankara seriously, and he was generous to consider both the argument and my puerile line of questions. Over about a month of daily meetings, not long after we met, Appa provided more than a perspicacious scholarly rendering of Sankara's meanings, he spoke with heart about what this revered philosopher wanted from life. When we concluded, I thought to myself, this man has realized Sankara's Oneness and if only I could be as rich in soul, I too could come to such a liberation. Then in subsequent weeks Appa just as meticulously, just as soulfully began to unravel the great one's case. As he sorted it out I first paused---could he mean to be saying that the Oneness promise was itself the problem? Not the solution but the problem precisely because it is expresses the hope that life could be about something other than this vale of tears? And what did Oneness tell us of life's small joys? Of our loves and relationships of care and concern when Sankara insisted, without compromise, that the awakened realized life was nothing like the taunting, dangerous, problematic twists and turns of embodied existence? Appa wasn't about to discredit the great Non-dualist. But neither was he going to conceal his own alternative vision, a vision that could not be more diametrically opposed to the Liberationists---and by that he meant all of those who insisted everyday is but bondage and that liberation is liberation from those experiences. Whatever the promise of freedom-to, our freedom-from was to be complete, at least in their view. Appa, over the course of the next month, did something I could not have even imagined. He liberated me from liberation. Life, he suggested, with all its outrage and capricious misfortune, with lila we love and lila that dismantles every claim to relief, leaves us to revel not in a certain absolutism, a liberation. Oneness poses no ultimate answer and raises no important questions. Rather we are invited to sustain ourselves in the face of an unrelenting world in which every illumination not only reveals more in the shadows but creates more too.

Alas, the more brightly we burn, the more shadow we cast. Whatever else comes through the veils of awakening, we are as mortal beings meant to live in the mortal world for all that life might present. Appa had redefined yoga as a pursuit of gratitude for the life we have received. He wasn't saying we should be grateful for the hurt or the suffering as such, only that we who dare to love will be chastened by all that love entails.

Should we care for each other, should we love even more deeply then surely will come face to face with grief---and should we be blessed to live long and to prosper some too, we will have to learn how to live with ourselves when grief becomes love's brightest illumination. I have been lucky to love as Appa describes. It is how I still love him. It is how I have come to love so many who I will never see again in this life, whose absence I feel in every breath, whose presence I sustain in heart and memory but who I miss desperately. Sometimes I have to reach into the pain of loss more deeply, not to find a deeper joy but to recognize that the pain is how love's alchemy will change us again. I'm sure you too have a long list of those losses---the people who have meant so much and, well, the regrets, disappointments, failures, and lapses that you know are yours. Whatever else is true, you know what you have done.

To live with ourselves is the hardest thing we do when we dare to consider these shadows real. We may not see them, for they are too hidden, and we may not learn from them because that is never easy. But to engage a life lived, that is what we call yoga, for all that a life can bring and all that we do and have done. The array of emotions we feel and the deeds we do to offer up better, such efforts are never easy. We have to face what we cannot control and there's no take backs, no do overs: we can look back but never go back, and the path is forward. That path does not lead to some liberation that frees us and neither does it offer any final repose, at least if you ask me. There's no heaven, no God to forgive you, no judgments but those we render upon ourselves and are rendered. You may say that we should not judge but rather merely receive, accept, repent. But that too is its own judgment of what a life could be. We're never not judging when we are still in our wits, no matter how we might hope that others don't judge too harshly or that some Almighty might do for us what we cannot. Like anyone hoping mercy, I likely wish for better than I deserve. But perhaps it is enough to let the anxiety and vulnerability to these very mortal truths inform what next I choose. When anxiety creates value we have arrived at something more human than just fear or pain. We can make better choices because that vulnerability speaks to possibilities. Appa taught that to be human comes with no promises of joy or liberation. But it does come with the power to make promises to bring others some morsel of joy if you are willing to bind yourself more deeply to their care. Alas, Sundaramoorthy relieved me of the burdens of liberation and instead invited me to perils of bondage, bondage to love that invests as much in joy as it does in grief. He invited us to think about being grateful for this brief, strange reality of being alive. So instead of sending me on a journey to meditate on soporific indifference or in pursuit of metaphysical relief, he asked me if I would like to continue to sit nearby and to carry on this conversation about being just human. Just being human was enough he said to make us wonder at all that life might entail. Shall we take to heart what happens when we decide to care about those we have lost and those we will leave to forge ahead? Look first to gratitude if you can, if you have been so fortunate and privileged to make your way, and then ask yourself what you want to create---not because you are some divine being of unlimited possibilities but rather because you are not, because you have learned that your limitations, like your human condition, is the blessing from which all goodness will emerge.

I bet Jonathan the tortoise knows a thing or two about living long and loving all he can.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/01/31/oldest-animal-tortoise-jonathan-/

New Year's 2022 and The Turning Towards Grace

 Saturday, January 1, 2022

 

Aho’Rajanaka! Bho! Bho! Sukhiya Zālā!

 

Warm New Year’s greetings from far too warm Bristol.   Here’s to laughter aplenty and time well-spent, health and time to do what you love most with those who make all the difference a difference can make.  I want to thank you because you came in 2021 to make learning and contemplation a joy together.  You brought grace and that’s something we should talk about more.  With all we have endured, you made the effort and we’re all the better for it.  For my part, I know you’ve kept me sane (well, you know, relatively speaking), centered and committed, and determined to make this crazy world sumthin’ good.  Let’s carry on.  First a few invitations, then on to a tumult of grace, a veritable donnybrook, brouhaha, rumpus---Grace should come like a cete of badgers, a sedge of bitterns, an obstinacy of buffalo, a quiver of cobras, a flamboyance of flamingos, and a business of ferrets. 

On New Year’s we get to collect and recollect, start anew, and consider what it means to find joy in rearranging the disorder that makes life both sweet and, well, not less complicated.  We don’t ever really start over because we’re always in the middle of things.  But finding out how to keep moving and find a moment’s peace is our human condition.  Celebrating our feeling human is the very soul of Rajanaka teaching.

And celebrating that kind of “turning towards” is “keeping things to rights” or pradaksina.  When you use pra- as a prefix to a Sanskrit word it often means forward, towards and sometimes it can mean apart, distinctive, even falling apart.  The word dakshina gestures gratitude, and often as a gift or even a monetary offering.  Put this together as pradakshina and we are charged simultaneously to keep moving forward and towards even as we deconstruct and put things to rights.

If that sounds paradoxical I’d bet you’re not surprised.  Life invites us to step into what’s possible and to receive what’s true with or without our consent---and then create, innovate, and rearrange to refresh the next breath.  

As you would expect, the cultural “rules” of dakshina in India can be complex.  For example, in temples offering dakshina to the priests is considered requisite, a virtual nitya karma, while the effort to make an offering to one’s own teacher may not be made without acknowledged “permission.”  The priest must be paid---it’s only fair and right---but the teacher is charged to decide if, when, and what dakshina is offered. Why the seeming incongruity?

I think it’s because we recognize deep in our hearts that the most important experiences in life cannot be paid back---grace more artlessly defined: you don’t earn it, you may not “deserve” it, and you sure can’t pay it back.  Dakshina is a way of saying that the best things in life are not free but come freely.  And just how to we express gratitude for such blessings? 

 

In Zen it is said “to surpass the teacher is to repay the debt.” That charge is riven with irony and accompanied by the deep humility that we feel when we know in our hearts that we have been graced and that it seems impossible ever to surpass our teachers, much less repay our debts.  I know I feel that way about Appa---everyday I am in wonder at his generosity of time and energy and heart---and so many others with whom I have been blessed to study.  Many of those teachers are simply the things all around us, like the pup who loves me without conditions (and maybe there are treats too) or the spider that weaves and waits, from whose patience I learn a new respect; some teachers are only in books or dreams or perhaps even in the unconscious.  So again we should ask, how might we express gratitude for all the grace that has come?

Pradakshina.  We can continue to step forward, take it all apart, put it all back together, turn with the heart opening to the center and expanding to our boundaries.  Shall we try together?  Shall we do this again and again?  I look forward to seeing you whenever you can make it in 2022.  

sapremakulasmaranam, with loving affection of the community of the heart,

Douglas

 

 

More About Tradition & Transmission, More About Rajanaka Learning & History

In last Saturday's Conversation (31 October 2021) I was asked what about Rajanaka had changed or what had I evolved since Appa offered up his understandings. What innovations or interests had I brought?  I will write more about those matters with greater specificity soon.  This is a wonderful query about our learning and what Rajanaka means. 

 

There is indeed quite a bit of information that I’ve uncovered since Appa and I studied together.  I try to make clear where the research has gone and how it turned up.  One of the interesting features of these traditions is how material is withheld and how reluctant folks can be to part with it.

 

Some of you know about the old Sabanayaka Diksitar priest who I would visit in Chidambaram and a few of you made the journey to his house to meet him.  Ananda Kuncitapada Diksitar was the nephew of Rajaratna Diksitar, the priest who took in Appa’s mother and the whole of his family, took them in off the streets when they had nowhere else to go, when they had been cast aside from their lives in the village a some six years or so after Appa's father passed.  

Poverty and familial controversies had left them homeless.  Literally on the verge of beggary, Rajaratna Diksitar took in a widow and her children.  Our Appa never forgot that act of generosity and the goodness it brought.  It was undoubtedly as important a moment in his life as any that would shape his character.

 

Appa was raised in Rajaratna’s house, adopted officially into his family (he and his wife Tangamma were childless), and so began the story of his relationship to scholarship, to the great Natarajar Temple, and to the worlds of Rajanaka.  Appa was only six or seven when they moved into the Rajaratna’s home.  Down the street lived Rajaratna’s sister, married of course to another Diksitar, and Ananda Kuncitapada was their son---he became our family’s principal contact inside the Temple after Rajaratna passed in the 1980s.  He was about ten years younger than Appa.  Ananda Kuncitapada knew his time was coming---he passed in 2015, as I recall--- and he asked me to spend time with him.

 

With all of our pilgrimage pals safely on their own, I returned for five or six long conversations into the evening and the very early mornings.  It was then he gave me a stack of texts, with explicit instructions about how to treat them, and told me things that I know he’d not told me or Appa earlier.  I was curious if these stories, particularly involving important characters in Rajanaka lore like Ayyappa, Tillai Kali (and Her temple forms), Panchamukha Anjaneya Hanuman, and others, were things he’d learned since those conversations we had together in the 1990s or if he had simply not told us.  I never asked him about this but I suspect that he knew most of it all along and was working out the rest over the years---a combination of both withholding and his “new” learning. 

 

These subjects involve deeply private, personally important matters and in the worlds of Tantra there are differences between secrecy and privacy.  Secret matters are concealed usually to prevent the “unqualified” from access to information deemed potentially “dangerous.”  In truth, that danger can be social opprobrium, embarrassment, or any number of other issues that involve how “powerful” ideas or actions may be restricted.  Sometimes restriction itself is a form of power but the “sacred” is, as we know, often a defined as permission and prohibition.  To control access is to manage power and the sacred is power when one has the keys to open and close doors.

 

Privacy differs from secrecy inasmuch as it involves more personal feelings.  Rather than traditionally stated restrictions it may feel inappropriate to discuss one’s own experiences.  Why?  Certainly humility and the sanctity of the heart are in the mix but who knows exactly why people keep their own confidences?  There is also an old convention that matters not asked for may not necessarily be revealed.  One gets the information one is capable of asking for (cf., Gita 2.70ff) while at the same time it can feel awkward, rude, or graceless even to ask.  How can you learn if you can't ask?  How does one know what to ask for if information is withheld?   If this situation sounds “contradictory” or at the very least complicated, you wouldn’t be wrong but that wouldn’t change matters.

 

Appa was particularly used to my stumbling, sometimes coarse lines of questioning, and yet he genuinely invited me to ask any question, every question---not just the ones apparently permitted.  I might still have to work hard for those questions and his insights.  It could be difficult to know where a line of inquiry was going but as usual, little by little, again and again the task was to stay on the trail, to be persistent, to have the courage to speak up.

He may not offer everything all at once.  He may tell me to wait.  He may offer bits and pieces to see how much more he would reveal or over a course of time.  It can be complicated talking to a person of his depth and erudition even if he trusts you, loves you, and wants you to have what you ask for.  You learn to follow his clues and leads, use indirectness when it seems the better way to get around, and don’t give up if he deflects or says “another time.”

 

It was important to know when to poke and when to pause in any line of questioning and I wasn’t always so adroit or skilled.  With Ananda Kuncitapada or other members of Appa’s Rajanaka Mandali (i.e., the circle of conversants) the situation was more delicate.  As much family history and trust we shared over the years, as deep as our affections ran, there were still matters of privacy to consider.  I think no matters of secrecy were at last ever concealed from me---there was nothing in texts or practices that I asked to learn that was withheld, no esoterica left unexplained or concealed---but I feel just as confident that Ananda Kuncitapada kept much in his heart that was his own musings and experiences.  As far as we both knew, there were no others left to share in these studies or who knew these stories or who were curious to make these lines of inquiry.  

 

How much was transmission passed along?  How much was culled from research?  How much had been uncovered over decades of contemplation and critical analysis?  I asked myself these questions whenever I spoke to any members of the Rajanaka Mandali.  One thing is clear: they all agreed that transmission was far less important and vital to the processes of learning than tradition.  There were transmitted texts and practices that could be imitated and understood---this kind of learning could take time but it was only a matter of diligence and understanding what anyone interested and committed could be taught.

But it was their understanding that transmission is not the core of a spiritual life but merely a process of access and information,  To reach that center of one's own experience demands a commitment to tradition.

I have written about the difference between transmission and tradition before.  It is a matter, I think, that translates across many kinds of learning when we consider matters of provenance and the processes of personalizing what one has received.

 

Let’s go back for a moment to the citation from one of Japan’s National Treasures, the late potter in the Bizan-style, Kaneshige Michiaki (1934-1995).  He put this difference between transmission and tradition this way,

 

Tradition is sometimes confused with transmission. Copying Momoyama pieces is transmission. Producing contemporary pieces incorporating Momoyama period techniques is tradition. Tradition consists of retaining transmitted forms and techniques in one's mind when producing a contemporary piece. Tradition is always changing. A mere copy of an old piece has not changed; it is nearly the same as its prototype of four hundred years ago. Tradition consists of creating something new with what one has inherited.

This take us to the second feature of our recent conversation about how things Rajanaka have “changed” over the years, particularly with me.  But truth to tell, Rajanaka is something of an outlier inasmuch as “innovation” or what Michiaki calls “something new” is often construed as deviation, alteration, or even departure.  Transmission is typically regarded in Tantric traditions as the direct imprimatur of one’s lineage.  The suggestion is that truth is recursive, a perfect (re-)iteration of what is past.

 

Appa regarded any such transmission as religious palaver, not something we could take seriously on the basis of the merits of learning.  In other words, we can’t inherit our learning---or our character, our commitment, or achievements-- but for the ways we must make them all our own through hard work.  No tapas, no claim to tradition.  And as for transmission, that too is tradition insofar as whatever was passed along must be made relevant to context and times.

 

Rajanaka is a tradition with many currents.  We can identify those currents and contents relatively easily.  It takes up the south Indian worlds of gods, Vedic and Tantric lore, embracing the enormity of Hindu cultural creativities in literature and the arts and sciences.  But above all Rajanaka is not merely what we learn it is how we learn.

Rajanaka is learning to learn.  Put another way, it is learning to be educated, not merely to learn.  We are always emulating what we admire or regard, adopting from nd reflecting on others.  But what we are in the business of becoming is ourselves and living with that complexity of self, indeed creating more complexity and more selves of depth, consideration, and care: that is the business of Rajanaka.  When once I asked Appa what is the greatest human possibility he said, “To appreciate more deeply our shared humanity, to savor our own, to feel empathy for others.”

 

 

Transmission and Tradition A Note about Rajanaka Values

Before the Gita Session yesterday I got on a bit of jag about how the claims to perfection and accomplishment (siddha/siddhi) and “realization” are a positive detriment to learning.  Let us leave aside for the moment that the yoga traditions (Hindu, Buddhist, etc.) assertion that certain individuals are more than merely empowered, gifted, skilled examples of a shared humanity----that this is dehumanizing, that it sets apart these persons and not only deprives them of their humanity but in effect tells the rest of us how we are inferior (or not yet them).  

 

The refutation of the ersatz-divination of human beings, which is actually at the heart of all bondage/liberation traditions, makes Rajanaka an outlier, heresy, perhaps even beyond the pale.  Appa was adamant that we should honor even revere accomplishments hard won but that all this comes at great cost---personal, emotional costs---that casts real shadows.  The more brightly we burn the more shadow we cast.

Attainments or capabilities however worthy are anything but perfection: we’re going to need the unwanted, complex shadows and flaws that come with them in order to learn; we’re going to need grief to love; we're going to need to admit our unfinished, incomplete, even unwholesome selves if we are ever pry more deeply into the pursuit of betterment.  And anyways there’s no getting around it: we’re just human.  And that’s enough.  

 

You’ve heard that before around here, I’m sure.

 

The further point I want to be clear is that we when we substitute veneration and charisma for accomplishment and the difficult tasks of learning we conflate and confuse important issues.  The once-serious Shankara tradition rooted in the discourse of argument and gnostic awareness is now little more than an emblem of that past and a devotional movement.  Don’t mistake me if participating in a community of loving souls does your heart good, who would object?  But projecting on a guru supernormal abilities much less moral superiority is a prescription for self-delusion, bypass, and an invitation to corruption; it effectively discourages our own hard work, the trial and error, the worthy experiments that may fail.

 

The notion that any such superiority is a birthright (cf., Abhinavagupta’s claims about being conceived in a Tantric ritual) or a transmission of  lineage inheritance is the stuff of religion or, as we in the reality-based world might say, nonsense.  But in fact it’s worse.  It’s an invitation to diminish one’s worth, abdicate the responsibilities of a shared humanity, and resign from the demanding ardor that might actually contribute to a wiser, more compassionate human experience. 

We cannot replicate another’s experience and there is no state or ideal, no Buddha, no Siddha, no savior or supernormal beingwh o we can copy.  Transmission is copying, it’s getting what they got, or so we're told.  We’re not faithful reproductions of the past. Rather, we’re each a furtherance of what has come before with no guarantees of better or success but by self-application and luck.

 

Ardor (tapas) mustn’t be for the sake of transcending or extricating us from our limited, conditional reality but because hard work might just allow us  to live a little better with ourselves and each other. As for "attainment," well, there's always more and our failures are as important as our successes.

 

 

We all wish there was a way out, something more that relieves us of our human sorrows and the existential truths of ordinary limitations.   But alas Rajanaka offers something that I think is far better than a transmission that falsely claims power and authority beyond the human condition.  Rajanaka is, in fact, not a transmission at all.   It is a tradition.  And,  yes, it comes not only from our own hard work but from an inheritance of learning that has been taught and passed from teachers to students.

 

To finish this last point we can get some help from the late Japanese potter Kaneshige Michiaki (1934-1995), a master of the Bizen-ware style:

 

Tradition is sometimes confused with transmission. Copying Momoyama pieces is transmission. Producing contemporary pieces incorporating Momoyama period techniques is tradition. Tradition consists of retaining transmitted forms and techniques in one's mind when producing a contemporary piece. Tradition is always changing. A mere copy of an old piece has not changed; it is nearly the same as its prototype of four hundred years ago. Tradition consists of creating something new with what one has inherited.  

 

This means that Rajanaka is yours as are all the traditions you inherit.  We are not seeking to replicate, to reproduce an enlightenment, or to receive a transmission so that we can somehow have what “the great ones” achieved.  Instead we are invited to the more challenging task of creating something new from our inheritances, something that might make our teachers proud.   “To surpass the teacher is to repay the debt.”  We may believe that we never quite arrive at such greatness but that, of course, is not the point.  Make tradition.  Make the living promise to do the worthy ardor. 

Tandava as the Calm Inside the Storm

 June 1, 2021

Aho’Rajanaka,

I hope this finds you well coming through the Memorial Day weekend, both with a renewed sense of some normalcy with family and friends and just some time to refresh.  I spent much of the weekend reading and preparing for our Session on Natarajar tomorrow, which will be more storytelling and myth than has been.  There's so much more and tomorrow will take you through some of the essentials of the mythology and imagery with clarity and care.  More about that in a moment.

When I really take a break I read things like some folks eat comfort food.  I have comfort reading and my list is actually kinda’ short---Mahabharata, the Iliad, Tolkien, and Patrick O’Brian.  I drop in on Rilke, Dickenson, Keats, and the Bard too.  Actually, there are a lot of things that bring me comfort when I’m especially tired of thinking about “now how am I going to describe or explain that.”  I’m thinking of you when I think about putting things to words whereas my pure comfort reading invites me merely soak in the familiarity, like a plate of momma's pasta: I let Tolkien or O’Brian do all the work and I just enjoy listening, whether reading or actually listening.  But when I think about what most draws me to my versions of “comfort” in any of these works it is that all of them have one or another kind of tandava that comes from the heart of Rudra and Kali.  Lemme ‘splain some.

Tandava is the dance of possession, it’s when you gotta’ move and that your movement, inside and out, physically and emotionally, when the whole of your being is wholly involved, thoroughly engaged.  Tandava is samadhi without the chill.  You see we associate the word samadhi with calm and equanimity, and in the Patanjali-sense of yoga with the idea of release, attenuation of movement, with nirodha or ceasing.  But we Rajanaka as the children of the non-binary Natarajar think of samadhi as calm rage, as a fury of deeply focused passion and care and intense concentration, at once deliberate and spontaneous, something that is calculated but wholly uncontained by the purity of its being “born together” (sahaja) with no second thought required.

Tandava is Rajanaka’s reinterpretation of samadhi, not as the relinquishment of passion or feeling but rather a mind not released from thought, a whole person making the deepest connection with all that we can feel and think.   We arrive at equanimity because there is so much attention paid (hence the place where consciousness (-dhi in Sanskrit) is in same-ness (sama-, thus samadhi).  The ancient Rudra is blood red with passion and howling at the moon but as calm as Alec Guinness as George Smiley or Obi-Wan Kenobi.  Kali Ma, well, she’s the momma who never loses her cool even as the blood drips and the demons piss with fear.  You get the picture.  But in both we see the proto-tandava, the elemental passion and thought, the care directed towards being as cool as Toshiro Mifune doing his samurai schtick and as furious as the unexpected tsunami, tha afternoon in Tokyo when a really ticked off Gozilla decides to make an appearance.  Unleashed calm may seem paradoxical but that is precisely the point.

Now Frodo and Sam are running towards the fire.  O’Brian’s Aubrey reminds us dozens of times “there is not a moment to lose.”  Achilles may be taking his time to enter the fray---and it does take the death of Patroclus to get bring him to his turning point and who has ever had more patience with the nihilists than the heroic Yudhisthira of the Pandava?  But in every case there’s that tandava thing: an inexorable calling from the heart to bring into motion the intentions and actions that must be engaged now, because there is a past and the need for a better future.  What is calculated is spontaneous, what is chosen is made to look effortless but that is because virtuosity is making something difficult look easy.   Worthwhile things are hard things and the “trick” is no trick at all, it is to make it all appear seamless even when flawed, decisive because doubt is now another empowerment, anxiety isn’t under control but neither is it controlling: the dance goes on and you have to decide whether you’re in or sitting it out.

Now sitting it out isn’t rest or taking a break or recovery---sitting it out is abdication, apathetic, inattentive, or passive and that is the unwholesome opposite of tandava.  We need to become as persevering and diligent in the power of rest as we are engaged in the fight.  Learning to rest may well be harder even than rising to the occasion of the activity because rest is work.  Yup, think about it.  If rest isn’t a critical aspect of our work then we have reduced rest to procrastinating, to the languid and indifferent.  Now all of those things happen to everyone too so let’s not get too high minded here: the best of us indulge the shadow of rest less than perfectly.  It’s only human to make these ordinary “mistakes” and it’s the job of yoga not to punish or merely admonish ourselves for making them but rather to figure out how to live in greater salubrity.  Living with yourself is life’s most challenging privilege.

In today’s NY Times there’s an interesting piece called “How to Take a Break.”  I can’t say I endorse or agree to all of the proposals in this article but it does raise the important issue, which is that we humans need time to rest and need to make rest a part of our lives as important as any work.  As I’ve already said, I don’t think of rest as the opposite of work but rather both active and restful time as integrated into a life of purpose and meaning.  Just how you do this for yourself is crucial.  It too is tandava, as the Rajanaka call it.  

I’ve had some rest this week and my focus and passion has improved over the last two days.  I mean I can notice the effects of an efficacious “downtime,” even if that’s nothing more than a power nap.  Oh and here’s the link to the Times bit: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/29/business/dealbook/quality-work-breaks.html?action=click&module=Editors%20Picks&pgtype=Homepage

TOMORROW, we resume the Wednesday Course on Natarajar, Tillai Koothan, the Dancer of the Amaurosis Forest.  We’ll be talking more about tandava of course and about the structure of the mythology and storytelling tradition that brings us more deeply into the yoga, the engagement we need with our hearts, our bodies and minds.  I warmly invite you to come.  We’re going to tell great stories, the kind that matter, the kind that change your life.  

Saprema, with affection, 

Douglas

ps you can find that ^^^course now archived on rajanaka.com.

Why There Are No Ethics Nor Ethical Theory in the Yogasutra

It is a misreading to conclude that the Patanjali Yogasutra has, in fact, any interest in directing a moral life. The text uses modalities of behavior, intention, and directives to action for the purpose of creating a method that prepares the aspirant for the achievement of samadhi and/or nirodha.

The purpose of yamas and niyaman as such is not to lead us back into the world in order to lead an ethical life---certainly there is not value added project associated with such a life except as it facilitates the further processes of introversion and excision _from_ the world. Thus, there is no morality as such in Patanjali's yoga and what is proposed has to do with furthering the relinquishment of karmas and the extrication of one from the world. To be moral would be to commit TO the world and I challenge anyone who reads YS to show me how this text commits us to a further engagement with the limited and conditioned world. It's purpose is precisely the opposite. To wit, to prepare us and create a circumstance of experience----be that physical, mental, or emotional---for furthering our introversion for the purposes of arriving at a state that renders us immune to mental trauma caused by change. This is the so-called citta-vrtti-nirodha.

The idea is to attenuate and then cease little by little any and all such involvements with the world. There is no such commitment to deepening commitments of action in the world---that would only cause further karmic malaise and thus further implicate bondage. Morality is merely prepatory or heuristic on a path that entails further disinvolvments If we are to compare, this is why Krsna in the Gita does have a buy in to the moral order insofar as he is admonishing his pal Arjuna to get back to the fight, win the war, and get on with it in a society that has standards and principles and even values.  One can argue that that admonishment is also not moral as such but legalist. We are enjoined to align our intentions with behaviors that are enjoined and commanded by virtue of social rules, or Dharma. We aren't being asked to be good. We're being asked to act in certain ways and that our intentions about such acts inform and have consequences about those actions. The actions themselves that are enjoined might be construed to be moral but that is not the reason they are to be enjoined nor would it matter. The fact is that they are commanded as such, that they are social expectations of the law to be met. That they are deemed good is epiphenomenal once again: their goodness is not their point, their execution in totality is the point. But just what the natural world of karma has to do with the ethical remains a more open argument because it begs the question, just how does the natural world reward or punish any action on the basis of intention or value?

Here we can argue tha the Gita is influenced by Buddhists and others who claim that moral intention has natural effects. But where is the evidence that Krsna thinks this? Where is the evidence that this is more than just a claim about how the world works? There is none, as far as I can tell. The ethical as such is of no mind to the world of power. The answer I think is that there are no morals as such but there are rules and expectations. If you want to think those come from intentions, it wouldn't change a thing. Our cultural lives are anything but immune from the implications of our beliefs or actions expressed and our lives in the natural world are deeply if not wholly culturally affected (when it is not determined).

What I mean is that culture will reward and punish us for our ethics, be they intentions, words, beliefs, or actions and that means we as natural beings with bodies will be deeply influenced and affected. What culture can do to us will influence our physical an and emotional well-being as creatures.

Is that ethics as such? I think not precisely because what is at stake is not goodness but a sense of physical and mental health that is required to undertake the further practices enjoined as yoga. That yoga---to say it again---does not invite us to live ethically in the world but to intend and act in ways that relieve us of the burdens of being in the world. I think that what we call ethical certainly influences our lives because human beings depend upon and are formulated culturally and socially. Thus, our actions or intentions have implications of outcome and consequence whether or not we mean it but apparently particularly when we mean it. Krsna in the Gita wants out of the morality business as quickly as he can make that happen so that he can resume the regular order of a powerful but amoral universe.  Yogasutra never was in the morality business, not even a little, not for any reason that has to do with the agendas of yoga.

The only exception to this argument I can muster is that if we are unethical this gets in the way of the projects of introversion and reidentification with immortal (always immune) Self. Thus we entangle ourselves in even worse karmas when we violate moral dicta but otherwise the issue is not to become moral but to stop acting in the world in ways that implicate further karma at all. Let's put it more plainly, Yogasutra gives no fucks for the moral dimensions of a given behavior or intention except insofar as it creates some, more, or any consequences that would interfere with the project of yoga, which has to do with disentangling with the world. There is no bodhisattva doctrine of saving others; there is no call to compassion or empathy.

How would any of that lead to eliminating false identification with the temporal? How would any commitment to entangling oneself in moral choices make it clearer that one is not merely the conditional, material reality but the ever perfectly free disentangled by nature Spirit that is Purusa? The strategies of yoga purported by the Yogasutra are, at best, influenced by Jains and Buddhists insofar as they all agree to espousing relief, extrication, DISINTEREST in acting or reentering the world.  There is no concomitant commitment in YS to saving others from their karma or claiming that ethical behaviors are for ethical purposes. One acts to relieve karma, not to do good as such Just what is the world for but leaving it? Until you grasp this agenda of the YS you do not understand its most basic interpretation (according to Vyasabhasya). Some later interpretations espouse moral action as karma relieving but is this the same as making a commitment to some kind of social good or personal conscience?

I fail to see how that would matter if one's goal is not to stay in the world to do good but rather to arrive at a sublime state of exemption. Once you get that that is the ACTUAL agenda then all further questions of ethical actions are, at best, epiphenomenal or irrelevant.  I hope this makes it clearer that there is no ethical theory nor are their ethical injunctions made in the teachings of Yogasutra.