Karma Yoga: Karma Yoga - Lesson IX (of XI )

By Bhikshu

Karma Yoga: Lesson IX

We have provided only for the Karma Yogi who is a man of the world and householder (Grihasta), but have not taken note of the Karma Yogi to whom the whole world is a home, who has no other country but the world to which he has devoted himself, to which he has decided to be a servant; what in ancient Hindu parlance is called (the life of a) Vanaprastha or recluse. This greater Karma Yogi recognises that the thousands of points of the confused, egotistical, proprietary, partisan, nationalist, life-wasting chaos of human life has to be changed into a coherent development of a kingdom that shall be a kingdom of God. The Karma Yogi has already learned that there can be no such thing as separate existence in the universe; he has understood that all existence is actually one and that one is not the fraction that he once called the "I"; the Karma Yogi has found a way of escape for that fraction of consciousness; he has known that fraction and other such fractions are illusions or delusions, but yet he understands that his own task is unaccomplished while there remains any fragment of consciousness thus unemancipated from illusion.

The modern world has progressed far; the optimism and refinement of the modern imagination has changed the attitude of thinkers towards ascetic practices and mortification so that people have begun again to ask as in the days of the Bhagavad Gita-religion, what need there is of torment of the violation of the outer nature if the inner dispositions are all right. The Karma Yogi who has mastered the lessons of the Bhagavad Gita and of Karma Yoga will look on pleasures and pains, abundance and privation as alike irrelevant and indifferent. He can engage in actions and experience joy without compunction of fear or enslavement or degradation. Our ultra optimistic attitude of today is that we may treat evil by the method of ignoring; man has only to close his eyes to the existence of pain and suffering in the universe outside of himself and he will be quit of it altogether and can sail through life happily on a healthy minded, bias-less basis. But this is a shallow dodge, a man evasion; pain and wrong and death must be fairly met and overcome in higher excitement or else their sting remains essentially unbroken. If one has ever taken the fact of the prevalence of death into his comprehension drowning, torture, entombment alive, wild beasts, worse men and hideous diseases he can with difficulty, it seems to us, continue his own career of worldly prosperity without suspecting that he may, all the while, not be really inside the game. This is what the Karma Yogi thinks and he voluntarily takes the great step-of the Vani, wanderer.

In heroism life's supreme mystery is hidden; we tolerate in the modern world no one who has no capacity for it whatever in any direction. On the other hand, whatever a man's frailties may otherwise be, if he be willing to risk death and still more if he risk it heroically in the service he has chosen, that fact consecrates him for ever; if he is able to fling away like a flower his life, caring nothing for it, we account him in the deepest way our born superior; the metaphysical mystery thus recognised by common sense that: he who attacks death that is the eater up of men meets best the secret of the universe, is the secret mystery of asceticism; the folly of the cross so inexplicable by the intellect has yet its indestructible vital meaning.

The world in which this law of vicarious suffering prevails is a far richer and nobler world than one wherein everyone would get his dessert of good or ill; such a world would not be a world in which there could be no sacrifice for another, no little children, no mother love, a world of independent adult individuals each standing up for himself or herself, a moral world without shade or dew where all life was legal because life could not bear another's burdens or hazard all things for another's sake. There can be no difficulty whatever in bringing home to intelligent men that vicarious suffering, the Purusha Medha of the Vedas, is a law of the nth dimension, a law beyond all laws, beyond time. We are all bearing the suffering of many past centuries and laying down our life for centuries yet to be, for are we not a composite of milliards of lives, lives that some of them have been from of old, others that yet are to be born, for whose sake we really live and die and are born? If we did not incarnate, and if we did not care to be born again and again, what of all these lesser beings, Bhootas, that are of us, that would not have been, but for us, that would not have been brought into being or much less have obtained experience?

The practical course of action for us as religious men, as Karma Yogis, would therefore not be to turn our backs on the ascetic impulse, but rather to discover some outlet for it of which the fruits in the way of privation and hardship might be objectively useful. The Karma Yogi has to cease from following his own path to perfection, and yet to find saner channels for the heroism that has been his inspiration. In the West, as regards the laity, athletics, militarism and individual and national enterprise and adventure have been pointed out as the via media. War and adventure assuredly keep all who engage in them from treating themselves too tenderly. Discomfort and annoyance, hunger and wet, pain and cold, squalor and filth cease to have any deterrent action whatever; death turns into a commonplace matter and its usual power to check our action vanishes. But in the East, these things have never been and neither hunger nor wet, discomfort nor annoyance daunt the ordinary householder; both for the East and West what is now wanted, say many, is the discovery in the social realm of the moral equivalent of war something heroic that will speak to one universally as war does and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself incompatible.

What then must be the life work of the Karma Yogi? It must be first of all the Preaching of the Good Law, it must be the dissemination of the Yogi Philosophy and its teachings that have made him a Karma Yogi. His second duty and joy must be to find out in all the great religions the great and good Law, to follow it out in details and to disseminate that knowledge to solace eager souls waiting for it. His third joy must be to preach the kingdom of God as he found it and as he found it not for himself but for all; his fourth joy should be in the reformation of the wandering beggar that is, alas, a disgrace to asceticism; to educate him, to regulate him, to use him wherever found in the world and bring him into the fold firstly of a great religion, if nothing better can be done and then teach him the good Law of "Do what thou wilt." A fifth joy for the Karma Yogi would be to render aid in the regulation of food supply to the masses, the work that the homes for the poor, the Salvation Army shelters, etc., are doing. A sixth, but this can be undertaken only by qualified men, would be medical relief to the poor; though what the Karma Yogi can do is to make medicos help the poor; and ways and means by the many, for salvaging civilisation, can be found in world experience that require no catalogue here.

Of course herein it is taken that the Karma Yogi in this stage has got beyond a home; he has not become yet God; to do that he must have become one who has not the wherewithal to find a place where he may lay down his weary head (Aniketah is the term for this stage of Karma Yogi in the Bhagavad Gita). The Karma Yogi finds the greater world his home, and all life his brethren; he is a forester of that great forest the world, Loka aranya. All the suggestions made for the forester's life, the Vanaprastha's asrama now cruelly forgotten or neglected, may be considered by the Karma Yogi; he may for instance be a householder in the forest but yet have nothing to do with legal positions, or he may have given up the service of fire and have gone forth naked, nagna, i.e. without the need of protection against chills or heat, out into the cold; recognising not at all the civil law, refusing all the rights that confused modern civilisation still allows to man, the Karma Yogi can, of course, devote himself to social service and remain a hermit in the world, but here he differs from the modern social service worker in the fact that he has deliberately turned his back on a house and home and that he combines social service with true religion, its study and teaching. The point is that the Karma Yogi continues to work ever more energetically just because he has attained, and makes his work thorough and exhaustive.

The model that the Karma Yogi, who has become a social worker, keeps before him is that of our father, the Sun. Before sunrise the Karma Yogi must have bathed and finished his ablutions and be ready to adore the Visible God, the Sun. And for the Adoration, any Rhythm, any simple prayer would suffice; in Hinduism the Sun in the early morn Sandhya (twilight) prayers is called Mitra, Friend. God is the Friend; all that the Karma Yogi meets are Friends, Companions in the great enterprise called life, illuminated, nay, even led, by the Sun that shineth on all alike. All may draw their warmth from him; to none is he partial; for he is the Friend. The Karma Yogi, too, may get the best out of humanity by seeking its friendliness, by the cheery word, by the kind thought, by solicitous care, by ignoring unkindness shown in return for kindness. The Karma Yogin can work out for himself how best he may utilise the Mitra aspect, the friendliness as a concrete practice, with or without its adjuncts of compassion, benevolence, charity and the like. The various ways in which God the friend was portrayed and adored are to be found in the Mithra cults of ancient Persia, to the literature on which we would refer our readers; so much of space would be taken up did we deal with any of the beauties of the teaching.

The sun is both food and raiment to the Karma Yogi in this stage; he may not take any cooked food at all; a fruit and nut diet must be his, for this course of life has to make him independent of all the artificialities of civilisation; he may exist on alms whatever is given him unasked, but he shall not keep by anything for the morrow, for that would make him dependent and fearful. Above all must the Karma Yogi be independent and fearless, regretless, in a sense unrepentant, for he does not need to waste any more thought on the past that he need not recall by vain repentance, and all artificiality, whether of fashion, convention or compunction, has to cease in the natural life of the Karma Yogi who renounces all other clubs than that of the Bohemians or Wanderers.

Just before the mid-day must the Karma Yogi again bathe and adore our father the Sun again, in some simple prayer as hereunder, a translation of a Rg verse rendered into modern language:

Isvara, Lord of Light! Make us all channels through which thou Pourest! Teach Us to know thine voice and effulgence in other hearts as in ours and inform us with thine radiance time without end, in eternal cycles!

And again must the Karma Yogin just before sunset bathe and adore the Sun, who is Varuna this time, Varuna the quaintness of the Rg Veda, Varuna the translated Ahura Mazda, Varuna the great coil (pasa), Varuna the harbinger of Night, the Night of rest, the night of dawn, the night when beauty shall retire to reappear in another divine garment of day, Varuna the ocean of joy, the refuge that is of the Mother, the sleep divine that cheers but does not kill.

The Karma Yogin has to bathe, to wash himself thoroughly, because he has been living the strenuous life all along every day, throughout the day; he must shed all that, always turning afresh to the beauty of nature dancing before him; the experiences in the violet, orange and ultra violet of the early morn are not the experiences of the "green" of mid-day; they are quite different from the red and red-violet of the evening, and each of the experiences has to be met by a fresh appreciation, a fresh dress of the mind, a cleanliness of the embodiment that has to be free from prejudice. And adoring the Sun shall the Karma Yogi offer his service in to the radiance of Truth, Satyai Jyotishi to which the sun has transferred on sunset his radiance. The radiance that had been was that of the Oversoul in man our Father the Sun. When he was hid where then had gone the radiance? Why, it was there still, but we can now see it as Truth what was the Sun's glory.

So utterly is the Sun's model to be followed that during the rainy season the Karma Yogi, if a Vanaprasta (monastic), was not to travel about at all; he was to stay for the four months minding the insect life that springs luxuriantly in the tropic during the rains, in one place, giving no worry whatever to householders whose bounden duty was long considered to be attention to guests, in India. Of course, all activity periods must be followed by rest periods, as Lent follows ordinary life periods; as the Ramzan period breaks the animal life of men. In modern life, therefore, the Karma Yogi may well devote some months of his year to recoupment, study and preparation for fresh activity. But always is the Sun to be his model; every recoupment, every night of the soul must make its conscious activity letter and clearer and turn on newer ideals and newer uses to be taken out of life for the sake of the people. "All for the people," shall ever be his motto, as has been repeatedly said.

This articles is from a series in eleven lesson in Karma Yoga, From "The Yoga Philosophy of Thought Use" and "The Yogin Doctrine of Work"

ÒThe kingdom of Thought is truly yours; you can select values, reject vanities, eliminate dross, live as the uncrowned and crowned Emperors have lived in the utmost independance, ordering for yourself Happiness, distributing the flowing surpluses thereof to all around you.Ó

Chicago, U.S.A., Yogi Publication Society, 1928

See - Yoga Lessons - for the other Yoga Lessons I - XI