Eighty Four Postures of Hatha Yoga

It is believed that Hatha yoga was created by the God Shiva and he initially taught 84,000 postures. But there are no records of these 84,000 postures in any of the scriptures. These 84,000 postures are supposed to correspond to the 84,000 life forms which  human beings have to pass through to attain final enlightenment. However there is a wide spread belief that out of the 84,000 postures there are 84 which were distilled by Shiva. These 84 exercises covers and exercises all aspects of the human being. Of course you would need to have a lot of time everyday to practise all of them. Maybe about 2 -3 hours.

The two main sources of Hatha yoga are Swatmarama’s Hatha yoga pradipika and Gheranda Samhita. The hatha yoga pradipika mentions about 13 postures, apart from that it describes the Shat Karmas the six purification exercises, about 8 varieties of pranayama, bandhas and mudras. It is still unclear where and when this ‘84 posture’ legend came about. In modern times there have been many hatha yogis like Swami Syamananda, Shri Yogendra of the yoga institure of Santa cruz in mumbai, Dhirendra Brahmachari, Krishnamacahrya and his lineage, Sivanada and his lineage and many others who have interpreted the 84 postures in their own way. Bishnu Gosh the brother of paramahamsa yogananda and the Guru of the popular yoga teacher Bikram Choudhari also popularised the 84 postures of Hatha Yoga. Following is a list of the 84 postures in the order in which it is performed from the lineage of Bishnu Gosh. He used to teach a pure form of Hatha yoga and was not into much of innovation for which teachers like B.K.S. Iyengar, Pattabhi Jois and others are  famous for. Bikram Chowdhari picked up 26 postures out of there 84 and created his own patented system with other paraphernalia like the hot room and so on. Bikram Choudhri also teaches this 84 posture series in his teacher training. Following are the 84 postures in the classical hatha yoga tradtion. I am giving only the sanskrit names of these postures. In future I will post more details on each of these postures, provided I have time from my busy schedule.

1 Virabhadrasana
2 Suryanamaskara
3 Parshvachandrasana
4 Ardhachandrasana
5 Padhahastasana
6 Trikonasana
7 Dandayamanavibhaktipadajanusirasana
8 Utkatasana
9 Garudasana
10 Dandayamanajanusirasana
11 Dandayamanadhanurasana
12 Tuladandasana
13 Vibhaktipadahasthatuladandasana
14 Dandamaya Bhibhaktipada paschimotasana
15 Tadasana
16 Padangustasana
17 Vamanasana
18 Khagasana
19 Bakasana
20 Angusthasana
21 Pranasana
22 Sukhasana
23 Samasana
24 Sidhasana
25 Bhadrasana
26 Swasthikasana
27 Ardhapadmasana
28 Padmasana
29 Uthithapadmasana
30 Baddhapadmasana
31 Tulangulasana
32 Garbhasana
33 Matsyasana
34 Makarasana
35 Parvathasana
36 Kukutasana
37 Shavasana
38 Pavanmukthasana
39 Bhujangasana
40 Shalabhasana
41 Purnashalabhasana
42 Dhanurasana
43 Suptavajrasana
44 Ardhakurmasana
45 Ushtrasana
46 Sashakasana
47 Janusirasana
48 Paschimotasana
49 Vibhaktipadapaschimotasana
50 Mandukasana
51 Uthithapaschimotasana
52 Purnavibhaktipadajanusirasana
53 ekapadarajakapottasana
54 Dandayamana purnajanusirasana
55 Natarajasana
56 Akaranadhanurasana
57 Chatushkonasana
58 Gomukhasana
59 Ardhamatsyendrasana
60 Ekapadagokilasana
61 Eka pada sirasana
62 Dvipada sirasana
63 Uthithakurmasana
64 Kurmasana
65 Yoganidrasana
66 Omkarasana
67 Samkatasana
68 Purnabhujangasana
69 Purnadhanurasana
70 Purnaustrasana
71 Urdhvadhanurasana
72 Eka Pada viparitha dandasana
73 Mayurasana
74 Badha Mayurasana
75 Ekapadamayurasana
76 ekahasthamayurasana
77 Halasana
78 Sarvangasana
79 Urdhvasarvangasana
80 Sirasashana
81 Urdhvashirasasana
82 Vyagrasana
83 Vyagravrickshasana
84 Hastasana
 

Practical Dependent Origination by Bhikku Buddhadasa

“Karma is not an ever – enduring chain; it is a chain that can be broken at any time. What was done yesterday can be undone today; there’s no permanent continuance of anything. Continuance can and must be dissipated through the understanding of its process. So when you SEE this process, when you are really aware of it without opposition, without a sense of temptation, without resistance, without justifying or judging it then you will discover that the mind is capable of receiving the new and that the new is never a sensation therefore it can never be recognized, re-experienced. It is a state of being in which creativeness comes without invitation, without memory and that is reality.”  J Krishnamurthi 

During my visit to Thailand in September of this year I came across the works of Bhikku Buddhadasa. I had somehow missed him out all these years. I was aware of the Thai forest Buddhist traditions of Ajahn Chan and his disciples like Ajahn Sumedho. They were the contemplatives and the Meditators. Buddhadasa was a philosopher and reformer. He wanted to clean up Buddhism from all the ritualistic and non essential elements. He was an innovative interpreter of the Buddhist scriptures and had influenced the social revolutionaries in the overthrow of absolute monarchy in Thailand. 

While browsing through the Buddhist books in Jomtien beach in Pattaya, I found some books of Buddhadasa and one which really caught my attention was the reinterpretation of paticcasammupada or Dependent origination. I picked this book which was titled ‘Practical Dependent Origination’ and upon reading it I could see that Buddhadasa had been heavily influenced by Marxism as well as the Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurthi as his explanation of dependent origination is quite similar to the way Krishnamurthi explained it. Of course there are no references to either of these in the books. I am also open to the idea that Buddhadasa reasoned his new interpretation of dependent origination all by himself but it seems a bit likely considering his association with the political and social movements of his time that he might have borrowed some ideas. But what finally matters is the intent. 

Dependent origination is one of the key aspects of the teaching of the Buddha and according to this doctrine there is nothing which is absolutely singular. A thing is nothing more than the coming together of all its causes, and no thing has a single cause. No phenomenon is independent and it depends on many causes for its existence. When applied to concepts we can deduce that no concept is primitive and basic and every concept is derived from other concepts. Every concept has meaning only within the framework of a specific context of other concepts. There are no primal ideas or axioms present through which we can derive other concepts. When applied to activities and causes of incidents in human lives there is no incident which exists without it being influenced by other dependent causes.

This doctrine is also very strongly associated with the concept of karma and rebirth in Buddhism. Buddhadasa argues that the culprit for this association is primarily the 4th century Sri Lankan Theravada Buddhist Scholar, Buddhagosha and his seminal work Visshudhimagga. In the Vishuddhi magga, Buddhaghosa has explained the doctrine of dependent origination based on the idea of three connected lifetimes (past, present, and future). According to his idea, ignorance and action in the past gave birth to the present and the consequences of past actions are thus experienced in the present. The activities of the present influences the future even spanning across many life times. 

Buddhadasa Bhikkhu cuts across the doctrine of rebirth and strongly focuses the doctrine of dependent origination to the present moment to provide an explanation for the cause and cessation of suffering right in the present moment itself. Buddhadasa argues that If the causes of suffering exist in the previous life, as Buddhaghosa said, then freeing oneself from suffering in this life is impossible because the cause of suffering is inaccessible.

Buddhadasa’s teachings to put it very grossly is similar to the modern new age teaching of ‘Living in the moment’. And since there is no empirical evidence for rebirth, Buddhadasa finds it very difficult to accept the teachings of Vishuddhimagga. He goes back to the tripitaka pali canon and picks up teachings of the no-self to attack Buddhagosha’s teachings of rebirth in Vishuddhimagga. Buddhadasa also claims that the doctrine of rebirth was introduced much later by the Brahmins scholars like Buddhagosha into Buddhism. 

Bhikku Buddhadasa towards the end of his life embraced a world view which rejected belief in any religion as he mentioned that those who have penetrated to the highest understanding have no use for any religion. He also has given a series of lectures on the practice of Anapanasati or mindfulness of breath meditation and his explanations are quite innovative.Buddhadasa was indeed a courageous monk and people who would like to understand religion on an empirical and rational basis can find an excellent source in his teachings.

Ramesh Balsekar – The Vedantist

This was in December 2004. I was told by some of my friends that Ramesh Balsekar was in town in Bangalore. I vaguely remembered him as a translator of Nisargadutta Maharaj and he had become a guru in his own right after the death of Nisargadutta Maharaj. Prior to his coming to Nisargadutta Maharaj, he was a well placed executive in a leading Bank.

Since many of my friends were going to meet him, I decided that there is no harm in checking out. Balsekar was staying in the outskirts of Bangalore in a farm house owned by his daughter. He was giving his three series talks to people and this was the second day. He has a series of three talks which in a structured way introduces his teaching.

The farm house was very tastefully designed and it had an ethnic yet modern look to it. There were many people who had gathered to listen to the discourse. Ramesh Balsekar was an old man in his eighties. He was pretty healthy for his age. He came and sat down and since the hall was almost full I happened to get a seat just behind him to the side as all the ones in front of him were occupied.

Balsekar began his one hour lecture and I could sense he had an excellent command over english and his teaching is a kind of advaita vedanta with strong emphasis on fatalism.  He starts his teaching by stating the concept of an  ultimate source from which all creation arises. He also mentioned that this ultimate source or God is just a concept and this construct is required to understand his further positions. It was pretty intresting to hear from someone considered as a religious enlightened man in the vedanta tradition talk openly about god as a concept.  Once creation has arisen from this one single source then the universe operates in a predetermined fashion based on the divine and natural laws. This one single source is pure conciousness which is incapable of choosing or doing. We human beings do not have any free will and we have a false belief that we are in control of things and situations. And that is our misery. The fact is everything is predetermined including the idea we have about the fact that we have a free will. 

The main gist of his teaching is life is happening and there is no doer. We have the false identity that we are the body and we are actors and this identity prevents us from seeing our actual identity which is unconditioned conciousness.

There was a question answer session after the talk and one person asked a question related to Ramana Maharishi’s self enquiry. Balsekar has a knack of tackling questions by answering them and bringing it to his basic premises. I also asked him a question regarding Genetic engineering. I  dont remember what that question was or why I asked that question.   I just asked it at the spur of the moment. Balsekar gave a long answer to the question and in a sense at the end I even forgot the question. He was also continously turning sideways and staring at me during his answers. All in all I felt good being with Balasekar.

After the discourse was over some of the people came and fell at his feet. There was also a wide spread of lunch which was served, complete with deserts and ice creams. There were some books of Balsekar which were on display and I picked up one which was titled ‘Peace and Harmony in daily living’. I also happened to strike a conversation with the son in law and daughter of Balsekar and she even mentioned to me that I can go and meet him in person in the room where he was resting. I went into his room and was not sure what to talk and just exchanged some pleasantries with him. I asked him for an autograph in the book I had just purchased and he readily obliged.

Balsekar’s teaching is very simple and he does not recommend any spiritual exercises other than  understanding of the fact that we are not ‘doer’s’ but all thing happens by itself. The intent of this understanding according to Balsekar is that it will annihilate feeling of guilt, shame, pride and arrogance which is associated with the sense of personal doership. And as a result of this understanding one experiences a sense of freedom, peace and harmony.

U G Krishnamurthi – The Global Vagabond

Yesterday one of my friends sent me some photographs of UG and the people around him during his last visit to Bangalore in early 2006. This was his last visit to India. There were many of us who used to go to Chandrashekar’s house to see UG almost every day during his stay in Bangalore. For many of us UG had been a great influence during our formative years. His debunking of the holy business was quite convincing. He atleast made me get over some of the spiritual baggage and helped me see the other side of these well revered teachers, traditions and philosophies. There were some interesting experiences during my practice of meditation so I cannot completely agree with UG that awareness is just a response to a stimulus and a function of the brain.

I first came to know about UG when I read his book ‘Mystique of enlightenment’ in 1989 and as a teenager I was overawed by the way he demolished all the hallowed traditions and gurus. UG did have a strong impact on me. I was also surprised to know that this raging sage lived very close to the place where I used to stay. I met UG for the first time in 1990 in Chandrashekar’s house, Poornakutee in Basavanagudi, Bangalore. I was struck by his words at that time. Some of  UG’s words which hit me during this encounter were:

“Truth is just a logically ascertained premise. Why the hell do you want to go after searching for something which does not exist”

“Tell me something about thought which you have not heard from others. What is there is just about thought and not thought. “ and so on. UG did exorcise the ghost of JK out of a lot of people.

I used to frequent Chandrashekar’s house quite often when UG was around at that time. In between I lost touch with UG and the gang when I left for England for three years. I again started visiting UG during his annual journeys to Bangalore from 2000. I cannot say we were followers of UG but we had a good respect for him and I did not believe like many people around him that being around an ‘enlightened’ man would help speed their process by burning Karma. But it was nice to be around UG during this time.

During the last few years it was quite evident that UG had become senile. He used to repeat the same things over and again. The stories of his life and his funny remarks about various personalities, the anecdotes about theosophists, talking everlastingly about JK and he was becoming exceedingly repetitive. For me it was good fun and entertainment being around UG. Of all the phases of his life this was the funniest part of UG. I used to rush to Chandrashekar’s house after finishing my work and used to hang out for  this ‘free entertainment’. Well I had nothing better to do during my free time and also we had formed interesting associations in the group.

The old man UG talking about fucking, bitches, the money maxims and his physical pranks with Lewis all these were extremely funny and entertaining. Being around UG was almost like being in the speaker’s corner in London except that there is only one speaker here.UG’s words were becoming more and more illogical and incoherent than ever before but his senses were still very sharp. He could read without glasses and his hearing was very sharp. But I felt his mind (which he called a myth) had gone cuckoo. He used to brag about his great acheivements and also used to quote about his greatness by referring to some internet blogs and fringe writings.

He was also quite okay being hero worshipped and there were many people who used to sing songs which were composed in kannada, Telgu and English idolizing and praising him. There were some very funny songs as well. There were songs by Lewis Brawley which were created in the beatles tune of ‘Yellow Submarine’  and the christmas carols. It was called jalasamadhi and if I remember right it went something like this ‘Ramathirtha saw the light and it gave him such a fright and he went into jala samadhi jala samadhi and so on’. There was another song which was something like ‘Jingle bells UG tells JK was a fake; All that we are intrested are his sexcapades. We were dunderheads to listen to all that crap. Choiceless Awareness and all that poppy cock’.

I have practiced many yogas and meditations, I haven’t stopped practicing these even after coming to know UG since the last seventeen years. Many of these have helped me understand a great many things. They have created many interesting situations for me and when existential conflicts have arisen they have helped me face it and try to find ways and means to come out of it. So in a way I don’t understand UG and his obsession with these spiritual things don’t deliver the goods stuff. They do deliver to some extent maybe not take us to the enlightenment or calamity of UG. I have never followed any guru but have been with many of them, have been close to many popular ones as well. I have seen a lot of dirt in these Gurus when I have examined them in close quarters. I know for a fact that majority of them are all too human and have achieved their great spiritual status through good branding and image building and some by the virtue of the tradition they belong to.

I came to know about the death of UG a day after he died. A friend of mine sent an SMS informing about UG’s death. We all were awaiting for this news as we were quite sure that the last days of UG was very near. He had cancelled his annual trip to India and I was told by Mahima Patel (a politician from Karnataka and the son of former Karnataka Chief Minister J.H.Patel) that UG had fractured his leg and had become immobile. Two weeks before UG’s death I was holidaying in Coorg with my Wife and I happened to meet Sudha Chandrashekar and her husband who were visiting the Tibetian centre in Bylekuppe. She told us that she had been to K. Chandrashekar’s house just before Chandrashekar and his wife Suguna left for Italy to meet UG for the last time. She also mentioned that the previous day the well known sage from puttur, Ajja had died. The next couple of days I went to stay in Mysore at my uncle, the kannada publisher D.V.K Murthy’s house. I saw a news Item in ‘Star of Mysore’ that UG is unwell. The editor of ‘Star of Mysore’ ,  Ganapathi was an acquaintance of UG. 

A few weeks after UG’s death I left to California on work and was staying very close to Carmel where UG used to frequent whenever he visited America. During this trip I used to think of our college days when we used to meet UG and he used to tell all the young men and women to get out of this filthy spiritual shit land (India) and go to America and make a lot of money. Well UG belonged to the pre globalization and privatization era and he had this impression that America was still the land of milk and honey. Now there is this time where the Indians in America were investing back into India and planning to settle back in India.

All in all I have a lot of fond memories of UG. Whenever any of the members of our UG gang meet we talk about and recall these memories.

Carl Sagan on Astrology

Excerpt from the ‘Cosmos’ by Carl Sagan  

“As ages passed, people learned from their ancestors. The more accurately you knew the position and movements of the Sun and Moon and stars, the more reliably you could predict when to hunt, when to sow and reap, when to gather the tribes. As precision of measurement improved, records had to be kept, so astronomy encouraged observation and mathematics and the development of writing.

But then, much later, another rather curious idea arose, an assault by mysticism and superstition into what had been largely an empirical science. The Sun and stars controlled the seasons, food, warmth. The Moon controlled the tides, the life cycles of many animals,and perhaps the human menstrual* period – of central importance for a passionate species devoted to having children. There was another kind of object in the sky, the wandering or vagabond stars called planets. Our nomadic ancestors must have felt an affinity for the planets. Not counting the Sun and the Moon, you could see only five of them. They moved against the background of more distant stars. If you followed their apparent motion over many months, they would leave one constellation, enter another, occasionally even do a kind of slow loop-the-loop in the sky. Everything else in the sky had some real effect on human life. What must the influence of the planets be?
 

In contemporary Western society, buying a magazine on astrology – at a newsstand,say – is easy; it is much harder to find one on astronomy. Virtually every newspaper in America has a daily column on astrology; there are hardly any that have even a weekly column on astronomy. There are ten times more astrologers in the United States than astronomers. At parties, when I meet people who do not know I am a scientist, I am sometimes asked, ‘Are you a Gemini?’ (chances of success, one in twelve), or ‘What sign are you?’ Much more rarely am I asked, ‘Have you heard that gold is made in supernova explosions?’ or ‘When do you think Congress will approve a Mars Rover?’ Astrology contends that which constellation the planets are in at the moment of your birth profoundly influences your future.

A few thousand years ago, the idea developed that the motions of the planets determined the fates of kings, dynasties, empires. Astrologers studied the motions of the planets and asked themselves what had happened the last time that, say, Venus was rising in the Constellation of the Goat; perhaps something similar would happen this time as well. It was a subtle and risky business. Astrologers came to be employed only by the State. In many countries it was a capital offense for anyone but the official astrologer to read the portents in the skies: a good way to overthrow a regime was to predict its downfall. Chinese court astrologers who made inaccurate predictions were executed. Others simply doctored the records so that afterwards they were in perfect conformity with events. Astrology developed into a strange combination of observations, mathematics and careful record-keeping with fuzzy thinking and pious fraud.

But if the planets could determine the destinies of nations, how could they avoid influencing what will happen to me tomorrow? The notion of a personal astrology developed in Alexandrian Egypt and spread through the Greek and Roman worlds about 2,000 years ago. We today can recognize the antiquity of astrology in words such as disaster, which is Greek for ‘bad star,’ influenza, Italian for (astral) ‘influence’; mazeltov, Hebrew – and, ultimately, Babylonian – for ‘good constellation,’ or the Yiddish word shlamazel, applied to someone plagued by relentless ill-fortune, which again traces to the Babylonian astronomical lexicon. According to Pliny, there were Romans considered sideratio, ‘planetstruck.’ Planets were widely thought to be a direct cause of death. 

 John Graunt compiled the mortality statistics in the City of London in 1632.  Among the terrible losses from infant and childhood diseases and such exotic illnesses as ‘the rising of the lights’ and ‘the King’s evil,’ we find that, of 9,535 deaths, 13 people succumbed to ‘planet,’ more than died of cancer. I wonder what the symptoms were. And personal astrology is with us still: consider two different newspaper astrology columns published in the same city on the same day. For example, we can examine the New York Post and the New York Daily News on September 21, 1979. Suppose you are a Libra – that is, born between September 23 and October 22. According to the astrologer for the Post, ‘a compromise will help ease tension’; useful, perhaps, but somewhat vague. According to the Daily News’s astrologer, you must ‘demand more of yourself,’ an admonition that is also vague but also different. These ‘predictions’ are not predictions; rather they are pieces of advice – they tell what to do, not what will happen. Deliberately, they are phrased so generally that they could apply to anyone. And they display major mutual inconsistencies. Why are they published as unapologetically as sports statistics and stock market reports?

Astrology can be tested by the lives of twins. There are many cases in which one twin is killed in childhood, in a riding accident, say, or is struck by lightning, while the other lives to a prosperous old age. Each was born in precisely the same place and within minutes of the other. Exactly the same planets were rising at their births. If astrology were valid, how could two such twins have such profoundly different fates? It also turns out that astrologers cannot even agree among themselves on what a given horoscope means. In careful tests, they are unable to predict the character and future of people they knew nothing about except their time and place of birth.

Modern popular astrology runs directly back to Claudius Ptolemaeus, whom we call Ptolemy, although he was unrelated to the kings of the same name. He worked in the Library of Alexandria in the second century. All that arcane business about planets
ascendant in this or that solar or lunar ‘house’ or the ‘Age of Aquarius’ comes from Ptolemy, who codified the Babylonian astrological tradition. Here is a typical horoscope from Ptolemy’s time, written in Greek on papyrus, for a little girl born in the year 150: ‘The birth of Philoe. The 10th year of Antoninus Caesar the lord, Phamenoth 15 to 16, first hour of the night. Sun in Pisces, Jupiter and Mercury in Aries, Saturn in Cancer, Mars in Leo, Venus and the Moon in Aquarius, horoscopus Capricorn.’ The method of enumerating the months and the years has changed much more over the intervening centuries than have the astrological niceties. A typical excerpt from Ptolemy’s astrological book, the Tetrabiblos,reads: ‘Saturn, if he is in the orient, makes his subjects in appearance dark-skinned, robust,black-haired, curly-haired, hairy-chested, with eyes of moderate size, of middling stature,and in temperament having an excess of the moist and cold.’ Ptolemy believed not only that behavior patterns were influenced by the planet’s and the stars but also that questions of stature, complexion, national character and even congenital physical abnormalities were determined by the stars. On this point modern astrologers seem to have adopted a more cautious position.

But modern astrologers have forgotten about the precession of the equinoxes, which Ptolemy understood. They ignore atmospheric refraction, about which Ptolemy wrote. They pay almost no attention to all the moons and planets, asteroids and comets, quasars and pulsars, exploding galaxies, symbiotic stars, cataclysmic variables and X-ray sources that have been discovered since Ptolemy’s time. Astronomy is a science – the study of the universe as it is. Astrology is a pseudoscience – a claim, in the absence of good evidence, that the other planets affect our everyday lives. In Ptolemy’s time the distinction between astronomy and astrology was not clear. Today it is.”

Swara Yoga – Qualities associated with the Nadis

By direct observation Swara yogis discovered the link between breath in the two nostrils and the efficient performance of specific activities. Following is a list of qualities associated with the nostrils:

Swara Yoga – Three aspects of Breath 

Right Nostril	Left Nostril	Both Nostrils
Exhalation	Inhalation	Natural Pause
Bahir Kumbhaka	Antar Kumbhaka	Kevala Kumbhaka
Apana	Prana	Samana
Pingala	Ida	Sushumna
Warm	Cold	Nuetral
Dark Forthnight	Bright Forthnight	Middle of forthnights
Awareness of External world	Awareness of mental world	Awareness of Causal World
Sun	Moon	I Conciousness
Mooladhara	Swadhistana	Manipura
Time	Space	Union of Two
Four stages of jagrat	Four stages of swapna	Fours stages of sushupti
Left Brain	Right Brain	Whole brain
Manas and Ahamkara	Chitta and memory	Discriminative faculty of mind

  Swara Yoga – Important aspects of the five elements 

Element	Finger width	Taste	Colour	Angle from Nostril
Earth	12	Sweet	Yellow	Middle
Water	16	Astringent	White	Downwards
Fire	4	Bitter	Red	Upwards
Air	8	Sour	Smoky Blue	Slanting
Ether	Inside the nostril	Pungent	Black, Many colours	Diffused

Left Nostril	Right Nostril
Days: Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday	Sunday, Tuesday, Saturday
Cycles: Ascending moon cycle	Descending Moon Cycle
Directions to be avoided for travel: East and North	West and south
Influential Levels: Ahead, Left and above	Influentials Levels: ** Behind, right and below
Nature: Magnetic, feminine, lunar, alkaline	Nature: Electrical, Masculine, Solar, acidic
Suitable for: Peaceful activities	Suitable for: Difficult activities
Duration: One to two hours	Duration: one to two hours
Connected with: Right Hemisphere of the brain. Left side of the body	Connected with: Left hemisphere of the brain and right side of the body
Dominant: Morning following the new moon night	Dominant: Morning following full moon night
Sanskrit Name: IDA	PINGALA
Body Chemistry: Mucus Dominated	Bile Dominated
Stable business requiring no movement	Unstable business, requiring movement
Long term activities	Temporary activities or jobs that can be done quickly
Collecting food grains and necessities of life	Studying or teaching martial arts
Beginning of study (School education)	Studying hard skills and destructive sciences
Playing musical instruments	Writing manuscripts
Singing	Practice of the shastras
Learning to Dance	Practice of tantra, yantra and mantra
Construction of hermitage, temple	Destruction of country
Planting, Gardening	Chopping wood and lighting fire
Building wells, swimming, pools and ponds	Cutting gems and jews, sculpting and carpentry
Giving charity and lending money	Accepting charity, borrowing
Marriage: birth of baby	Prostitution, sexual indulgence (male only)
Purchasing clothes, ornaments and land	Selling cattle
Performing rituals for pacification, appeasement and attaining worldly pleasure	Commiting crimes, corrupt practices
Frendship, meeting relatives	Eradicating, poisoning or subduing enemies
Making efforts to establish peace	Hunting, killing, holding a sword
Preparing divine medicine or chemicals	Practising medicine
Treatment of diseases, theraphy	Fighting, dueling, wrestling, boxing
Worshipping guru	Seeing a king, meeting and addressing officials
Entering a new house, village, town, country	Driving a vehicle
Thinking abt relatives ill health	Having a discussion or debate
Being initiated into a spiritual order, practicisn disciplines	Climbing a mountain
Addressing one’s master	Invoking and mastering evil spirits, pacifying poison
Service	Ordering, giving commands
Performing auspicious acts	Gambling
Starting a new colony, order or community	Swimming across torrential rivers
Opening a bank account	Worshipping evil spirits, mastering mantras for power, vigor and bravery
Knowledge of past, present and future	Knowledge of unseen or unheard off things
Curing fever	Purification by vomiting, enema, yogic kriyas
Applying sandal wood paste to the forehead	Using drugs and poison
Taking a new vow	Drinking liquor
Drinking non alcoholic beverages	Eating and defecating
urinating	Bathing
Meditating	Captivating members of opposite sex (Male)
	Expressing anger
	Producing works of illumination
	Working with accounts, ledgers etc

  

Concept of God: Osho, Islam, Zakir Naik and the Acid Test

First, this is a long article and second I am not a follower of Osho Rajneesh. But I have admired his works and I stop my admiration when the symptoms of greed and materialism becomes evident in his teachings. I like religious, secular and spiritual leaders who have a strong sense of humanism, individuality and service and I felt Rajneesh although he had a strong empathetic social consciousness he never did any practical welfare work for the betterment of society. Rajneesh despite his deep insights into the human condition became a victim of greed and  got cut off from the world by his solipsistic tendencies. He eventually became an Ivory tower philosopher albeit an intelligent and colorful one.  I have loved reading especially his discourses on the diverse mystical traditions of the world. I also admire his talent of public speaking and his irreverence to religious and political authority. Osho had the guts to critically examine hallowed and respected ideas and people. On most occasions in his public life he exhibited sound reasoning and conveyed extraordinary insights into the human condition.

I recently happened to bump across a website about an Islamic speaker Dr. Zakir Naik and his talks on the concept of God in different religions. Zakir Naik also had a dialogue with the popular self help guru Sri Sri Ravishankar. Although it was termed a dialogue, it turned out to be more of a debate with Zakir Naik pronouncing his typical clichéd  Islamic rhetoric with a full fledged debunking of polytheists and idol worshippers. Zakir Naik also picked on Sri Sri Ravishankar for publishing a book on comparative Islam and Hinduism. This book had Sri Sri Ravishankar comparing some Islamic ideas and concepts and claiming that it originated from Hindu culture. Sri Sri Ravishankar not anticipating the confrontation tried to play it down and looked like he wanted to rush back to the cave in his Ashram. He also was openly apologetic about the publication of this book and tried to escape from the awkward situation by claiming that this book was printed in a hurry and it was written with an intent of bringing the two religious communities closer in the context of a Muslim-Hindu riot. He also pledged that he would not allow printing of further copies of the book.

 Sri Sri Ravishankar is not generally known for his discursive thinking and intellect and his big strength is his emotional appeal to people based on personal charisma and the excellent PR machinery of his organization. Many a times he has goofed up on public platforms. I had once attended a seminar on ‘Science and Conciousness’  in the Indian Institute of Science and evidenced first hand Sri Sri Ravishankar talking utterly irrelevant things. The other eminent speakers on the podium like the Nobel Laureate Charles Townes (inventor of the laser and maser), the mathematician Roger Penrose and Zoologist Jane Goodall were visibly disturbed by his lack of erudition and grasp of what was being talked about. Sri Sri Ravishankar was also rubbished on stage by the renowned artist and film script writer Javed Akthar. On another occassion Sri Sri wrote an article in a national newspaper comparing Marxism with the teachings of the Bhagwad Gita. He was again rubbished by a lot of readers for his utter lack of understanding of the  ‘Dialectical Materialism’ of Marx (he was not aware and never even mentioned anything about this in the article) or the Vedantic teachings of Bhagvad Gita. He was just content in stating simplistic homilies.

Coming back to the the ‘Concept of God’ dialogue, Sri Sri Ravishankar completely misjudged the tenor of the whole programme. The audience were predominantly Muslim and were asking well orchestrated and pre-determined questions which I thought came from the medieval missionary polemic against Hinduism. It took sometime for me to realize that at this age and time there are still majority of the people who do fervently believe in such religious jingoism.Sri Sri Ravishankar’s soft stand and unwillingness to debate and confront put him in an awkward position in the programme.

 Zakir Naik is  well versed in the art of islamic rhetoric and he is quite capable of mesmerizing his Muslim and other unthinking audiences into deception with confusing, illogical and fallacious arguments. Herd instinct is clearly evident in his followers. He makes up for his lack of critical thinking, scientific and rational sense by parroting and quoting by memory verses from religious books and scriptures by their chapter, page, verse and line numbers. This is taken as a sign of scholarship by his flock. He usually receives standing ovation from the Muslim audience whenever he indulges in these theatrics.

My amusement in this debate became more acute when the debater Zakir Naik put poor Osho Rajneesh  to the Islamic litmus test, Surah Ikhlas or the touchstone of islamic theology. This Quranic verse or Sura mentions that God is without equal, without origin, without end, and unlike anything else that exists. This is the definition of Allah in the Quran and every other concept of God is weighed against this to create a semantic game to establish that this concept of god is the supreme most. Rajneesh had no defenders in there so it was an one sided debate with the final judgement of fallibility on Osho pronounced by Zakir Naik. Sri Sri Ravishankar was also apologetic about Rajneesh and he appealed to the audience not to judge other holy men like himself using Rajneesh as the yard stick.

In this article I am trying to defend Rajneesh and eastern traditions against the polemics of the Islamic theologians. My intention of writing this article is because it is clear to me that the worldview and the value system espoused by Osho Rajneesh is far advanced and higher as compared to the value system of the old religions in general and Islam in specific. Rajneesh believed in peace, love, celebration, individuality, freedom of speech and enquiry. He encouraged people to challenge archaic values and traditions. His overall value system is quite humanistic, secular and rational  as compared to the narrow parochial values espoused in religions like Islam. 

Our scholar Zakir Naik begins his diatribe against Osho Rajneesh with the tone of abhorrence to the Indian godmen and pronounces his judgement before explaining the targeted person’s point of view. Picking Rajneesh is kind of very funny because Rajneesh believed in what can be called a Vedantic or quasi pantheistic God. He borderlined on atheism many times. Rajneesh’s god as can be evidenced from his voluminous discourses is akin to Spinoza’s god to some extent. Osho’s God is not the Allah or a personal God at all, and his system provides no reason for the revelatory status of the Bible or Quran or Vedas or of any religion for that matter. Osho identifies his concept of God with Nature and like Spinoza he employed a reductionist scientism while retaining some traditional eastern terminology. Zakir Naik claims himself to be a student of comparative religion but it  is plainly obvious that his knowledge of the Eastern religions is very very superficial and about Osho, he believes what he wants to believe rather than what the  Oshoietes or Hindus or Buddhists or Taoists or Jains believe. Also to put things in perspective, although Rajneesh’s worldview is quite similar to Hindu, Buddhist & Taoist worldview he never claimed to be a Hindu either by birth or by conviction. He was born a Jain and remained an eclectic. So to pick on him in a debate on the concept of God in Hinduism and Islam is in the first place wrong. Zakir Naik’s claim that the followers of Osho Rajneesh called him almighty god shows his profound ignorance of Osho Rajneesh, his followers and his teaching and also his ignorance of the concept of god in eastern traditions.
 
The Islamic religion like Christianity and Judaism is based on man’s blind and obedient response to a divine revelation in the form of a book, the Quran. Quran is a medieval text inspired by the arabic god Allah to his last and final messenger Muhammad. The god of Islam is in principle similar to a Monarch who creates and rules the world with a set of laws. The concept of God in Islam is of a God who is apart from the universe and who is a skillful maker of the world. This God stands apart from the world and like a medieval monarch rules the incidents of the world and judges you on the judgement day based on the code of conduct as created in the holy book. You are sent to either heaven or hell based on your submission to the will of Allah and the adherence to the code of conduct as depicted in the Quran. Allah in Islam has no form or can never be depicted. However Allah is depicted through similes and metaphors like Allah is Akbar, ie great or Allah is Rahman or compassionate. The not so subtle Islamic theologians fail to grasp that even ‘figures’ of speech are depictions and are a form of idolatry. Idolatry is very much existent in Islam although in a veiled format. Islam is replete with symbols which are held sacrosanct and any blasphemy to those symbols are not treated kindly by the Muslim diaspora around the world. It is sacrilegious in Islam to picturize or idolize God but the attachment to symbols is quite evident in Islam and it is much more than what is present in the so called condemned pagan idolatrous religions. For example the Islamic prayer is only in Arabic it cant be localized in any other languages. All muslims bow their heads towards mecca for their prayer. Allah is an extremely localized god. So to compare a localized god with localized rituals to the concept of Vedantic Brahman which has no name, form and which permeates all existence is like as they say comparing chalk with cheese. The Islamic scholars are morbidly against idolatry in other religions but the mote in their own eye they seeth not.

Zakir Naik’s claim that Muslims are the culmination of Vedantic teachings of non idolatry is ridiculous to say the least. The intent of the Vedantic assertion about the sadhaka or the person on the vedantic path leaving behind all the idols and symbols means  the sacrifice and trancendence of all those constructs of thought like symbols, idols and ideologies to realize the unconditioned consciousness, the eternal which can never be limited by thought which is just memory and the past. In the early part of the previous century people witnessed an enlightened person Baghwan Ramana Maharishi  who had no need for any rituals, images, symbols or holy texts and he abided all the time in his true nature which is pure consciousness. When Vedantists talk about the culmination or the embodiment of their tradition they refer to a person like Ramana Maharishi. I wonder what the Muslim practice of non-idolatry has got to do with this state. This clearly shows that self proclaimed scholars like Zakir Naik have absolutely no clue about what Vedanta is all about.  His understanding of Vedanta is totally flawed and he is content in just picking up those verses from the Upanishads and Bhagwad Gita which depict the (so called) monotheistic principle of Brahman and which is in some ways similar to the concept of Allah. There is a huge difference between the Monism (even dualism or qualified monism) of the Vedanta to the monotheistic belief in a Sky God like Allah. Monism is the acknowledgement of oneness of the universal principle of consciousness or Brahman.  

What is the concept of god according to Vedanta. The Upanishads talk of Brahman as Sat-Chit-Ananda which is truth-consciousness-bliss. The Brahman is both unmanifest and manifest  as Brahman or God has to be inclusive of everything. It is both Nirguna and Saguna. It has qualities and no qualities. There is a dialectical process of reasoning which is employed to express the inexpressible quality of Brahman or God. Essentially Brahman is the substratum of all that exists and being the substratum it is also different from all that exists. There is a trancendent quality of Brahman which is in some way similar to the monotheistic God. But the Upanishads are unequivocal in their claim that language fails to describe Brahman which is infinite (Anantha) and therefore it is depicted by dialectic reasoning like ‘It is far and it is near, it is the lowest and it is the highest’.  There are many extremely poetic verses in the Vedantic texts which describe the dialectic ‘qualities’ of Brahman.
 
Zakir Naik states that  “The major difference between the Hindus and the Muslims is the apostrophe ‘s’. The Hindu says, “everything is GOD”. The Muslim says, “everything is God’s”, GOD with an Apostrophe ‘s’. If we can solve the difference of the Apostrophe ‘s’, the Hindus and the Muslims will be united.” Well Zakir Naik got it all wrong. The difference between Hinduism and Islam is that the Hindu believes that everything is ‘God as well as everything is God’s’ and Islam believes that everything is just God’s. The nearest point of convergence between Hinduism and Islam can be achieved by equating the qualities of Allah to Nirguna / Nirvikalpa Brahman and that is only after sanitizing the Allah concept of all the localized Arabic mumbo jumbo. However Brahman is much more than a transcendent and monotheistic sky god as it is both Nirguna and Saguna. It is without qualities as well as it has qualities. Because a god if he(or she or it) is worth being called a god has to be all encompassing. From the literal interpretation of Quran we can deduce that in Islam, Allah is separate from the world and Allah as a being lives probably somewhere up in the sky or another dimension. It is a sky god religion.  If the God is separate from the world then Allah has to have a separate location and hence it becomes physical and materialistic with space-time coordinates . It is important to understand that the Islamic god is not Omnipresent and this god or Allah exists at some specific location which is distinct from the world created by Allah. In the vedic paradigm this is considered as nonsense as the universe has no beggining and end  and God if he or she or it is worth being called a god has to be omnipresent and not localized at some corner of the universe from where this god directs all the actions of the world.

The idolatory in Hinduism is a symbolic representation of the divinity of the whole universe itself and in its essential form this brings about a reverence to the whole of this wonderful acausal creation. The  Vedanta as also the Jain and Buddhist scriptures clearly mention that the world is acausal and it has always existed. To point to the origin of the universe at a specific time in history either through a God creating the universe or through some big bang is a logical fallacy as we would end up with the question as to what existed prior to this creation. How can something come out of nothing. Most of the eastern religions have deduced that the world has always existed in some form or the other. This appeals to logical and scientific sense than the stories of Genesis or the Islamic creation myth. Hence we find that the eastern religions hold a great attraction to the scientific and metaphysical philosophers of the west.

Now coming to the fact of Rajneesh calling himself Baghwan or God. Osho Rajneesh has clarified many times that he is not the God who created this world. ‘No not me’ he mentioned jokingly once. “I didn’t create this world with all the strife and suffering. I would have created a better place had I been God”. Surely Rajneesh never equated himself to the Allah, the medieval monarch like god. It would be good if Zakir Naik and his cohorts read some of the works of Osho (I have provided a link to a well know Osho site in the end for all the readers) and then try to counter him in arguments. Also he might do well to study Upanishadic texts in proper context rather than just using polemics and picking up verses which suit the rigid monotheistic belief system.

One key thing that most Islamists forget when criticising Hinduism and eastern traditions is that in the eastern tradition the spiritual path is individualistic and not based on a single holy book or frozen canon or teachings of a prophet. Hindu traditions are unlike the ‘collective salvation deal’ espoused by the Abrahamic religions. This individualistic approach although a great step in religious and cultural evolution of humanity has politically weakened Hinduism and it has become an easy target to the devious designs of islamists and christian evangelist missionaries, who are hell bent on bringing down a greater tradition to their crude level of understanding of religion.  

Many of the evangelists and mullahs are in the habit of ridiculing some cultural symbols and personalities of the Hindu religion. Unlike the Monotheistic religions which are history centric i.e history is all important for man’s access to god, the eastern traditions have many incarnations, perennial access to truth and it is independent of history. That is the reason why Hindus call their religion ‘Sanatana Dharma’, eternal religion. To confine the advent of religion to a single prophet or set of prophets receiving revealation at a specific point of history is to limit the omnipotence of the divine. The intent of the Upanishadic religion or dharma  is not just following a book but living as per the natural laws of life. A book however sacred or profound cannot capture truth because truth is a unitary moment which has to be discovered and rediscovered from moment to moment. So it is very silly from the perspective of Vedanta that God chooses some messenger like Muhamad or Jesus or Abraham or Noah and reveals to him some revelation and some dose of good social conduct and disappears into oblivion for eternity. Why is Allah so limited that he needs to communicate to only one person and the rest of humanity just need to follow all these codified injunctions. The message of the Upanishads is that God or Brahman cannot be captured in words much less in books. The semetic religious cannon can be aptly described as a set of few rules, universalized and canonized forever. However the dharma in the eastern traditions allows for an individualistic context based interpretation. 

The Dharmic value system is evolutionary and changes with the changing times exept for certain universal absolutes which are eternal. Hence in the Hindu tradition you have two classes of scriptures, the Shruthi and the Smrithi. Shruthi is the inspired part and are universal in their appeal and application. Smrithi, means that which comes from memory and it comprises of the social rules of conduct and other mundane aspects of human existence. Shruthi is changeless and smrithi is something which needs to be revisted and adapted to changing times and circumstances. Shruthi is somewhat akin to the categorical imperative of Immanuel Kant and Smrithi is similar to the hypothetical imperative. The essential problem with Islam is the mixture of Shruthi and Smrithi in Quran. Hence you find many recommended practices in Quran which were relevant during the time and context of 7th century arabia and which does not make any sense in a multicultural, cosmopolitan, secular and humanistic world. Zakir Naik’s claim that Quran is the greatest book on Art of Living is a ridiculous claim to majority of the people living by humanistic and democratic values. Sri Sri Ravishankar’s  ‘Art of Living’ is similar to many modern day Hindu movements and it is an adaptation of yogic principles of health, vedantic theology, value system of modern humanistic psychology and the practices of the human potential movement. Osho Rajneesh contributed a great deal in the evolution of the Human Potential Movement. Islam with its frozen in time approach comes nowhere close to any of these systems in terms of content and quality.

Unlike the essential belief of one supreme being of the monotheistic semetic religions like Islam, the eastern religious traditions have a different paradigm of looking at this rigid structure of belief. There are some eastern traditional lineages which demand a priori belief in a supreme being and this supreme being can be either a male or female or both or neither. There are traditions which believe in the impersonal nature of ultimate reality and it allows multiple representations and multiple access to the one supreme lord. ‘As many people so many paths’ remarked the famous sage of Dakshineshwar, Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. This flexibility has been considered and ridiculed as a weakness by many of the monotheistic preachers, however this is the inherent strength of the Hindu tradition. This showcases the inherent liberal and catholic(in the sense of all encompassing) views of the eastern religious paradigm.  Monotheism has been rightly stated as My-Theism by several secular critiques of religion like Professor Richard Dawkins.

Some thoughts by Osho on brahman and god -  “Brahman has nothing to do with the Christian or muslim idea of God. Brahman means godliness, the divineness that pervades the whole existence… the whole, the holiness of the whole.”. In his own words Osho claimed that he is God based on the following “Samadhi begins with subjective awareness and culminates in realization of our divine self, the all permeating godliness – within and without. This is the state in which the ‘Rishis’ in the east declared ‘Aham Brahmasmi’, the state in which sufi mystic Mansur declared ‘Ana’l Haq’, the state in which Jesus says, ‘I and my Father are one’. This state is called ‘Sambodhi’, enlightenment, divine realization”. When the tombstone of Osho has the message “Osho Never Born and Never Died”, it is a mention to the immortal and unconditioned Consciousness – the Self of all or ‘Brahman’. It is not the physical body of Osho as the physical body is perishable and what is not perishable is consciousness the substratum of all that exists. This Consciousness has no origin and no end, it has no ‘adi’ and ‘antya’. When Osho or eastern mystics affirm that they are God, they mean that everything else is as well God and the individual bodies are like waves in the ocean and the self, which is unconditioned awareness is the ocean itself.

Our ‘scholar of comparative religion’ Zakir Naik accuses Rajneesh of proclaiming himself the God in the Semetic / abrahamic / Islamic religious sense. If these scholars of comparative religions can make up a good study of Rajneesh then hopefully they can come up with some wise arguments than just picking him up on some silly semantics. This is the problem with Muslim scholars, they are just too caught in words, symbols, obedience and adherence to arcane medieval texts that make their minds so closeted. But still they have the nerve or rather the foolhardiness to proclaim that Islam is a scientific religion.

If you are a scholar of  comparative religion or philosophy the first pre-requisite is to understand the paradigms, models and cultural symbols of that particular religion or school of thought. Without this understanding the interpretation of a particular religion will remain parochial and not true to the spirit. Finally I would like to request all the readers to consider and reflect on two of the greatest sentences from Rig Veda, the oldest known religious scripture in the world – “Truth is one but wise men describe it in many ways” and “Let noble thoughts come to us from all sides”. Let’s not limit the noble thoughts to come from a book or a few more books.

You can read Osho’s books online from the following sites:

http://www.oshoworld.com
http://www.osho.com

Some intresting links to hindu and vedanta sites:

http://www.advaita-vedanta.org/avhp/ad_faq.html
http://www.vedanta.org
http://www.ramana-maharshi.org
http://www.geocities.com/advaitavedant/- This link was created by my friend and has lots of texts on advaitha vedanata.

Dhirendra Brahmachari and his book Yoga Sukshma Vyayama

I collect a lot of books on yoga among other things. I do practice some yoga sequences everyday and it is the same sequence I practice since many years. However I have a habit of collecting yoga books and this is quite an obsession. Dhirendra brahmachari was a popular and controversial yoga teacher in India. One of his famous yoga books was the Yoga Sukshma Vyayama. This was a very popular book and it has been out of print for many years now. This book presents a set of simple yogic toning exercises for the whole body with emphasis on breath and focus on the chakras. I think I first heard of this book in Richard Hittleman’s book ‘Yoga Self Taught’. Ever since I wanted to get my hand on this book but failed. But thanks to the internet, I could locate the brahmachari’s book on the suksha vyayama in a government of india website.  This system of exercises is a complete set and was highly popularised by Brahmachari.

I have added the book in my site and you can download this rare book in the form of a word document. Click the following link: Download Dhirendra Brahmachari’s Book – Sukshma Vyayama

Controversy was the second name of Dhirendra Brahmachari. He was mentioned in the press during his hey days as the Rasputin of India. He was a charishmatic yoga teacher who befriended the Nehru-Gandhi Family. He was also the personal tutor of Indira Gandhi. It was rumored that he had an affair with Indira gandhi, which might be quite possible as he was a handsome healthy man. He had an open access to Indira Gandhi’s house when she was the prime minister of india and many of the sychophants around Indira were quite jealous of Brahmachari’s proximity to Indira Gandhi.

The Brahmachari also was the first person to teach yoga on Indian Television, Doordarshan. I remember as a kid watching a program of Dhirendra Brahmachari on DD. Ironically this yogi was running an arms factory in Jammu. He owned his own personal aircraft and was into major money laundering. Being a yogi is no gaurantee of virtue. He died in controversial circumstances in an aircrash in the early nineties. Just like his student Indira Gandhi and her sons he had an untimely death.

Kushwanth Singh has mentioned a lot of incidents of his encounter with dhirendra brahmachari. Kushwanth singh devotes an entire chapter in his book ‘God and Godmen of India’ for Dhirendra Brahmachari.  He also has some good things to say about Brahmachari. He mentions that Dhirendra brahmachari was one among the few people who in the 20 years of his association with him showed no signs of ageing in all those 20 years. He looked very young even at 70 and had no grey hair or wrinkles. Apart from that Kushwanth Singh also mentions about the Brahmachari’s trip to Russia. He was asked by the communist government in USSR (the then undivided russia)  to teach the astronauts yoga. There is a photograph of Brahmachari in Russia where he stands in the freezing cold and is just wearing a Dhoti and a thin cotton cloth to cover his upper part. Kushwanth Singh also mentions with glee (how he likes to catch the holy cows unarmed) how the brahmachari ate one whole pastry in Indira Gandhi’s house. He made some concessions to himself on that day to eat some un-yogic food. He also talks about his meetings with the yogi and the way the yogi used to check about the correct working of his solar plexus.

Brahmachari influenced many people to take up yoga and lot of those well meaning people were put off by the kind of controversial image he had. Osho Rajneesh mentions in one of his talks on his observations on the TV yoga programme of Brahmachari. Osho mentions with glee that Brahmachari was exhorting his yoga students especially a young teenage girl on the benefits of Mula Bandha (Anus lock or squeezing the muscles of the anus). The young girl was feeling a lot of discomfort on TV.

Yogi Bhajan another controversial and popular yogi claimed that he studied under Dhirendra Brahmachari. Indeed Brahmachari built a very strong propoganda for the practice of yoga. Many people benefitted from his yoga institute in Delhi and Jammu. However his popularity as a yoga teacher was overshadowed by his corrupt life. His yoga  institutes were taken over by the government after his demise.  

S L Bhyrappa’s Avarana

“Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history. What we call its history is but the history of successive intruders, who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society.”   Karl Marx 
 

S.L. Bhrappa’s latest novel ‘Avarana’ has become a bestseller. I came to know about this novel about a month ago from a Kannada website and picked a copy from the Oxford Bookshop. This book is racy reading and I could finish reading  the book in two days. I had been to the Bangalore Book Fair yesterday and I could see that Bhyrappa’s book is selling like hot cakes in the Kannada book stalls. Since its first publication in February of this year, this book has already undergone twelve reprints . This has registered record sales in the history of Kannada literature. I think the criticisms from U. R. Ananthamurthy, G.K. Govind Rao, Girish Karnad and other leftists have added to the popularity of the book. U.R. Ananthamurthy even went to the extent of proclaiming that Bhyrappa is not a novelist but just a debator. Other writer groups wanted to ban this novel on the grounds that this novel would disturb communal harmony. Vehement criticisms and personal attacks are always counter-productive to the original intent of the critic. Rushdie’s book became popular beyond all expectation after Ayatollah Kohmeni proclaimed the most famous mother of all fatwas on Satanic Verses. Rushdie himself became popular and from a fringe writer he became a mainstream one. But Bhyrappa was the most popular writer in Kannada even prior to ‘Avarana’. His novels like ‘Dhatu’, ‘Parva’, ‘Nayi Neralu’ have made a mark with the reading public. With this new novel Bhyrappa has reached the heights of popularity which no  Kannada writer has enjoyed till date.

I do feel Bhyrappa has done his homework very well on Muslim and Mughal history albiet largely from Hindutva sources and he allows some of his characters to explicitly speak against Islam. Avarna essentially means ‘Mask’ or ‘Covering’ and Bhyrappa employs this title to depict the strategy of eminent Marxist historians and intellectuals who downplay the achievement and virtues of Hindus and up the ante of Muslim achievements and egalitarianism. Bhyrappa’s reference authors are a who’s who list of Hindutva and anti Islamic writers like Sita Ram Goel, Arun Shourie, Anwar Sheik, Ibn Warraq, David Frawley and Naipaul. There are references to non-hindutva authors like Alberuni, Will Durant and a long laundry list of books by  scholars and historians of Islamic culture.

In one of his interviews Bhyrappa explained the reason for the title of this book, he had a choice between two popular ideas frequently referred in Vedanta / Buddhism, ‘Avarana’ and “Vikshepa’. ‘Avarana’ means the mask and ‘Vikshepa’ means distortion of reality like confusing a rope for a snake. Vikshepa probably would have been a better title for the novel.

I also feel that Bhryrappa has to a little extent copied the plot and strategy for the novel from the ‘Da Vinci Code’. There are many similarities in the framework of these two novels but many more differences as well. Basically there is a reinterpretation of popular history but unlike the ‘Da Vinci Code’ the reinterpretation is not so drastic. Aurangzeb is well known as a tyrant in most of the history books we study and also the razing down of temples by Muslim invaders is also well known from many sources. So Avarana is more fact than fiction as compared to the ‘Da Vinci Code’.Bhyrappa wants to attack a certain segment of left historians who try to falsify the claims that Muslims were involved in any major scale temple destruction. He also tries to destroy other sterotypes of intolerance of the Hindhu community created by the leftist, dalit, muslim and missionary scholars.

The storyline of the novel is about an inter-religious love marriage between Lakshmi and Amir. Lakshmi and Amir are students in a film institute in Pune and they align themselves with leftist / marxist ideology with a fine dressing of Hindu bashing as is common in these groups. In this school Hinduism is all about caste and superstitious practices and there is no merit to Indian history prior to the mughal rule. The marriage between lakshmi and amir is encouraged by Professor Shastri who convinces Lakshmi to marry Amir to show the world that archaic values in traditional marriages do not hold good. He also convinces her that Islam is an egalatarian religion and is more progressive than her own Hindu faith. Lakshmi comes from the Gowda caste and her father does not approve of her marriage and he ends his relationship with her. Lakshmi gets married by converting to Islam and with her new name Razia she is introduced into the actual family life of the muslims as a convert.

The stranglehold of the Muslim community leaders on Amir’s family is depicted by Bhyrappa in a true to life form. I have witnessed so many such events in many of my Muslim Friend’s families and I even know an exact incident as depicted in Avarana on how the community leaders forced the sharia on the newly married-converted hindu woman in a muslim household. It is not so easy to be a liberal Muslim and it is almost an oxymoron.

Lakshmi and her Husband meanwhile shift to another house and the couple get on with their work of directing movies on the leftist and so called progressive themes. They become well known  through the media and Lakshmi becomes a stereotyped role model  of the intellectual feminist who loses no time in abusing Hinduism, its customs and social evils. During this time she visits the ruins of Hampi and gets too see first hand the large scale destruction of idols in the Hampi ruins. She and her husband are  commisioned to direct a Movie about Hampi which tries to portray that the Temple destruction was due to the infighting among the hindus between the Shaivaites and Vaishnavaites and not due to the invasion by the Muslim Bahamani rulers.

During this period, after about twenty eight years of her marriage Lakshmi comes to know that her long estranged father is no more. She goes back to her ancestral home in the village and finds that her Father has been researching on Islam for the last few decades ever since her marriage. Her father, who was a staunch Gandhian earlier and who believed in the equality of all religions, had changed his mind towards the end of his life as a result of his research. Her father’s single-minded devotion in this study leaves a deep impression on Lakshmi. Upon reading the notes prepared by her father and his book collection, she decides to write a story on the mughal rule during the time of Aurangzeb.  Lakshmi’s story also forms a ’story within a story’ in the novel. The chapters in the novel alternates between the actual story of Lakshmi and her life and her novel on the mughal rule in Aurangzeb’s reign.

Lakshmi’s  story is about a young Hindu prince who is captured by Aurngzeb’s army during the invasion on a small Hindu kingdom by the mighty Mughal army. All the Hindu kingdom’s men of  the royal family and the army generals die fighting, The women commit ‘Jouhar’, a practice where the women jump into the blazing fire to avoid the humiliation and rape that would follow them after capture. The captured people are converted to Islam and sold as slaves and the young Hindu prince is also one of the persons who gets captured before he can commit suicide. The seventeen year old prince resigns to his fate and starts his life as a slave in Delhi for the noblemen of Aurganzeb’s court. Since the prince is good looking he is sexually abused by his owners and treated as a homosexual slave. 

After a couple of years of this humiliation he is sold to a new owner who castrates him and turns him into a  eunuch. As a eunuch he is sold to one of the Harems where he serves the wives of Moghul ministers and he finally graduates to serving Aurngzeb’s own personal Harem. Here it is noteworthy that Bhyrappa has done  substantial research in depicting the lives of eunuchs in the Mughal Harems. After many years the prince turned slave turned castrated eunuch discovers that his wife, the young princess is still alive and is living in a harem as a slave of a Mughal officer. Apparently she had escaped from the Jouhar and subsequently captured by the moghul rulers and sold as a slave in the markets in Delhi. Apart from the child she had with the prince she also has a couple of other children from her slavemaster. After the accidental meeting with his wife, the eunuch slave prince who now is a muslim and who adheres to the islamic practices by doing the Salah five times per day begins to retrospect on his life.

In order to strenghten his faith in Islam (the converts desire to prove he is more loyal than the king) the Hindu Prince turned eunuch goes all the way to Banaras to witness the destruction of the Vishwanath temple by Aurangzeb’s army. During this visit he  encounters a sanyasi  on the banks of the Ganga river with whom he talks about the theology of both the religions and he is quite surprised to know some eminent aspects of the Hindu relegion and culture. All these impressions leave a mark in his mind and he decides to escape from the Moghul kingdom and join the ranks of the Maratha ruler Shivaji, also called ‘the mountain rat’ by the Moghuls. Shivaji’s story is also depicted in the novel, especially his confrontation with Aurangzeb and his generals and his dramatic escape from the prison of Aurangzeb. Shivaji provides hope to the enslaved Hindus who are entrapped with the might of Islamic rules and strictures like the ‘Jezzia Tax’. The story of the Hindu prince ends here.

Lakshmi spends about five years researching her father’s book collection and writing this novel. Also her son who is now working in Saudi Arabia as an engineer visits her home and she is shocked to discover that he is converted into radical Islam of the Wahabbi school. The progressive views of his mother has no impression on him. He has contempt for the leftist progressive ideology his parents subscribe to and much more contempt towards the pagan Hindu religion from his matriarchial side. However he is also disturbed by the fact that during the time when his mother was writing the book in the village his father Amir has remarried a twenty five year old woman, a woman much younger in age than his own son.

In this novel Lakshmi’s father and her community come out as more liberal and open to change and they are more accepting of modern values as compared to her muslim husband Amir’s household. 

Towards the last part of the novel. Lakshmi is invited to a seminar on inter religious dialogue and history in Delhi.  After being away from the social scene for five years she attends this Seminar which is chaired by Professor Shastri. As usual the seminar starts with the doublespeak of the marxist intellectuals. At some point in the seminar Lakshmi becomes enraged and starts her debate on indian history much to the discomfort of the handpicked invitees of this seminar. Her points of view are completely ignored in the seminar media broadcasts and Lakshmi returns to her village. Later there  is a decision taken by the government to ban her Novel and also arrest her on the grounds of disturbing communal harmony. Her husband, who has now started admiring her confidence and conviction  comes to her rescue. Amir helps lakshmi to escape from the clutches of the police warrant and he takes her back to Bangalore where she decides to write the list of the reference authors who have formed the basis for her Novel. This is the laundry list of authors on Islam which Bhyrappa lists in the novel. And Lakshmi makes it clear that if they have to ban this Novel, then they would have to ban all the reference novels she has used in her novel. Bhyrappa has devised a clever ploy within the novel to deflate any attempts to ban his own novel.

The depiction of professor Shastri, the socialist professor has stirred quite a controversy. Some say Shastri resembles U.R. Ananthamurthy and that was the reason why URA came out so strongly against this novel.  Shastri is the Oxford educated indian intellectual with his typical marxist attire and beard. He is born a brahmin and rejects his culture and is very vocal about this. He is highly intellectual, informed and is also very manipulative. He uses his influence to get  awards from the government and get his continous stream of foreign lecture tours sanctioned. He is married to a British catholic woman and he is not able to influence his catholic wife to his marxist secular ideology. He is also not able to influence his daughter who is close to her mother and who like her mother subscribes to the  roman catholic beleifs of sin and eternal damnation.  Professor Shastri’s son also owns  an international software firm in bangalore and lives with his punjabi wife.  His son secures many favours from the government through his father’s influence and wants to build the next Infosys. His punjabi wife is a devout hindu who celebrates the hindu rituals and festivals like Karwa Chaut, Diwali and she visits the tirupathi temple quite often. Shastri’s ideology of atheism does not have any influence even on his own family.

There have been innumerable novels and movies maligning the bad practices of Hindus. Mainly brahmins, others are all considered progressive by virtue of their birth. We have had samskaras, phaniyamma and many many more such novels and movies which have become so sedate and boring now.  The whole genre of kannada literature called ‘Bandaya Sahitya’ targetted the Hindu community in general and Brahmin’s in particular.  But when the same artistic license is employed against the Muslim community all hell breaks loose. If we just analyze the community of Hindus and Muslims now, how many brahmin widows shave their head. Where are those arcane practices of Brahmins which are so stereotyed upon the community. Where is the practice of Untouchability in urban settings. Hinduism has had several reform movements from basavanna, bhakti movements, Raja Ram mohan roy and many others wheras reformist movements are very hard to find in religions like Islam which have all their rules cannonized forever. In a way ‘Avarana’ brings about that much needed balance. Overall I feel that Avarana has come at an appropriate time and apart from the issues it has addressed it has primarily increased the readership of Kannada books.  So hats off to S.L.Bhrappa.

Swara Yoga – Swami Muktibodananda

This book from Bihar School of Yoga is based on Shiva Swarodaya, an Agama scripture. Like all the tantras in this genre the shiva swarodaya is a dialogue between shiva and parvathi. The swaras are rhythms, the solar and lunar rhythms corresponding to the Right and Left Nostril breathing. The book describes the two aspects of these energies and how it relates to our functioning and behaviour in the world. This is no other-worldly text. There are practical observations and lessons that can be learnt through the knowledge of the swaras. The five tatwas (elements) – earth, water, fire, air and ether are also introduced. There are different yantras (pictures) and mantras for each of the elements and there is an exposition of the nadis and chakras.

The book has three sections. In the first section the author talks about the theory of swara yoga introducing the lunar and solar swaras, chakras, tatwas, the link between the phases of the moon and the swaras. The second section talks about the different practices like observing the swara according to the phases of the moon, chaya sadhana, tatwa sadhana and others. The last section is a translation of the sanskrit text shiva swarodaya with the text both in devanagari as well as the english transaltion.

This is an amazing work and the author has to be commended for bringing this rare scripture and science to light. It is clearly evident that there is a great amount of scholarship and practice involved behind the publication of this book. This book is a must read for any one intrested in learning the subtle secrets of our existence.