CHAPTER EIGHT

SCRIPTURES AND SCHOLARSHIP

1.   "The Vedas give conflicting accounts of Cosmogony. Do not these impair the credibility of the Vedas?"
Bhagavan: "The essential aim of the Vedas is to teach us the nature of the imperishable Atman ^[?] and show us that we are That. As you are satisfied with this aim and teaching you should treat the rest as Arthavada, auxiliary expositions, made for the ignorant who seek to trace the genesis of things."
Talk 30

Note: Human society stands at different psychical levels, each of which requires instructions comprehensible to itself. The
Vedas give these instructions, but reserve their best to the seeker of the Highest, to whom they reveal the science of
Brahman, the absolute Self. This science alone should concern us, because it is the science of our own being, of the eternal Truth. Bhagavan advises us to desist from indulging in extraneous matters, such as the stories of Creation,
Dissolution, etc. Such stories in the Vedas speak to the fiction and speculation lovers.

2.   "The Scriptures are useful to indicate the existence of the Higher Power (the Self), and the way to gain it.
Their essence is that much only. When that is assimilated the rest is useless. We read so much. Do we remember all we read? The essential soaks in the mind and the rest is forgotten. So it is with the Sastras."
Talk 62

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Note: By mentioning memory Bhagavan draws attention to the behaviour of our consciousness in automatically sifting in its highly organised machinery the grain from the chaff, the essential from the unessential, throwing the latter into the limbo, much as a student does when he endeavours to retain the most important parts of his studies, and allows the rest to fall through the sieve of his memory. We have to do the same with regard to what we read in the Scriptures.
We must choose what has a direct bearing on the eternal
Truth and completely wink at the rest. Judicious study of the Srutis bears the greatest fruit, and this is done only through the guidance of a Master, who is the very embodiment of the Srutis and the soul of the Sastras.

3.   "The ultimate Truth is so simple. It is nothing more than being in the pristine state. That is all that need be said. "But people will not be content with simplicity; they want complexity. Because they want something elaborate, attractive and puzzling, so many religions have come into existence. Each of them is so complex and each creed in each religion has its own adherents and antagonists. "For example, an ordinary Christian will not be satisfied unless he is told that God is somewhere in the far-off
Heavens, not to be reached by us unaided. Christ alone knew Him and Christ alone can guide us. Worship Christ and be saved. If told the simple truth — `The Kingdom of Heaven is within you' — he is not satisfied and will read complex and far-fetched meanings in such statements. Mature mind alone can grasp the simple truth in all its nakedness."
Talk 96

Note: Bhagavan is very frank in this text. Not that he wants to attack the established religions, or single out any one of them as the most superstitious and irrational; but, as the
teacher of the Absolute, he has to be consistent when appeals are made to his views on the variety of movements that go about in the name of God, the "wisdom" of God, the "truth" of God, and what not, although he is always guarded in his answers, in order not to give offence to the hypersensitive, who is apt to catch fire at the least mention of his religion or "spiritual" institution.

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The part that religion should play in the life of an individual, Bhagavan opines, should merely be to show him the truth about himself; not to entertain him with glamorous cosmogony and cosmology, or to frighten him with superstitious inventions, which do more harm than good to his approach to the reality. Bhagavan does not ignore either the ethical side of religion or the well-known fact that not all men are prepared for the Highest Truth. But when the questioner is a seeker of the Highest, he has to be shown nothing less than the Highest, before which an ethical teaching appears as pale as moonlight at midday.

The complexity of which Bhagavan speaks is, no doubt, very strangling, because it obscures the Real; yet there are millions, laymen as well as clergymen, who are always ready to shed the last drop of their blood to defend every syllable of it. Is this complexity — superstitions, accretions, irrelevancies — useful to them? It looks as if it is, at their own level, till they outgrow it. The adhikari ^[?] immediately lays his fingers on it, refutes it outright, and opens himself to the healthy teachings of the Path of the Supreme. The lesser adhikaris, although they free themselves from many superstitions, get caught by the "elaborate, attractive and puzzling" — probably siddhis, — because they have not yet completely transcended the lower gunas, and thus spend a lifetime of wasted efforts. To the Master, Truth is as self- evident as the look of "a gooseberry in the palm of one's
hand", for it is nothing but one's "pristine nature", to which the sadhaka drives direct and which he eventually never fails to attain.

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4.   "The author of Vritti Prabhakara claims to have studied 350,000 books before writing this book. Vichara Sagara is full of logic and technical terms. But what is the use?
Can these ponderous volumes serve any real purpose?
Can they give Realisation of the Self? Yet there are people who read them and then seek sages for the sole purpose of seeing if these can meet their questions. To read these volumes, to discover new doubts and to solve them is a source of delight to them. Knowing this to be sheer waste of time, the sages do not encourage such people.
Encourage them once and there will be no end. "Only the Enquiry into the Self can be of use. "Those familiar with logic and with large books like Vritti Prabhakara
, Vichara Sagara and Sutra Bhashya cannot relish small works like Truth Revealed, dealing only with the Self and pointedly too; because they have accumulated vasanas.
Only those whose minds are less muddy, and are pure, can relish small but purposeful works."
Talk 332

Note: Ponderous are the books scholars read, and even more ponderous the scholars feel themselves to be. They accumulate vasanas, the peculiar scholastic vasanas, which inflate as they grow, with which sometimes they pester even sages. "Knowing this to be sheer waste of time, the sages do not encourage such people" is, no doubt, autobiographical.

This teaches us the futility of the established logic or of the tiresomely voluminous pseudo spiritual books to guide us on the practical path to the Absolute. Ponderous tomes leave their marks on the mind, and too many marks are bound to conflict with and blur the vision of the Real. What is more, being biased by the massiveness of their "scientific"

approach, the scholars become incapable of appreciating the modest, though the best and most pointed approach to truth, when they meet it. They do not even condescend to give it a glance — it is too simple and couched in too few words, and too feebly analytical to be worthy of their consideration. They drop it like hot cake. "Truth Revealed" is the translation of a booklet written by Bhagavan himself, consisting of only forty verses, and deal exclusively with the Truth and the way to it, in the simplest style possible. It contains the whole teaching of Advaita philosophy in a nutshell. Some of these scholars sniff at it, because it contains neither critical arguments nor pompous quotations and phraseology and is certainly very poor in bulk.

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Bhagavan warns us against the lures and traps of scholarship. What is the use, he asks? Does it bring in Self- realisation? Certainly it does not, and cannot. This warning is especially timely in this age which is so excessively prolific in philosophical production with its great appeal to the modern mind.

5.   "Divya chakshush (eye sight) is necessary to see the glory of
God. Can we not see the glory as the splendour of a million suns?"
Bhagavan: "Oh I see: you want to see the splendour of a million suns. Can you see even that of one sun? Divine light means self-luminosity, self-knowledge. Otherwise who is to bestow a divine eye, and who is to see? Again people read in books that `hearing, reflection and one- pointedness' are necessary. They think that they must pass through savikalpa and nirvikalpa samadhi before attaining Realisation. Hence all these questions. Why should they wander in that maze? What do they gain in the end? Only cessation of the trouble of seeking. They will find that the Self is eternal and self-evident. Then why not get repose in the Self even this moment?

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"The simple man is satisfied with japa or with worship, but the trouble is for the bookworms. Well, well, they also will get on."
Talk 336

Note: The first line shatters the description in books of
the Supreme Consciousness as blazing light, or a visual splendour comparable to a million suns. This is an utterly misleading description; for it is nothing of the kind. The light of the Self is the pure knowledge with which we cognise everything, including the Self itself, which in no way stands comparison with any physical radiance. Speaking of divine visions does not mean a special physical or spiritual eye, or the eye of the "clairvoyant", with which someone endows us.
According to Bhagavan "Divine sight means self-luminosity", self-knowledge, "the eye of wisdom," or jnana; for the Self alone is divine and nothing else. It is called radiant because it is vividly experienced in samadhi, free from the obscuring clouds of thoughts and emotions. It is self-luminous because it is self-evident, that is, it knows itself and does not depend on an external knowledge to be known — itself being pure knowledge.

Bhagavan brushes aside book-knowledge as of no use for Self-realisation on special grounds. We learn all the details about the stages on the path from books, or even from the
Guru himself, in the hope that by following them we may in the end rest from the stress and strain of a long quest.
Bhagavan says, strictly speaking, all this is unnecessary, because the rest we seek is, like the goal itself, even now available to us. We have, if we are alert enough, only to open the eye of our intuition to perceive it; for it is our very self, the very seeker himself, from which at no time he is separated. Books will be useful only if the seeker is unable to perceive himself by himself. Cases are known of very
unsophisticated seekers who have scarcely ever read a book in their life and who have nevertheless reached the goal quickly by merely adhering to their peculiar form of sadhana.
There are, on the other hand, thousands who have read books without number and who have not, for that reason, advanced an inch spiritually.

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As for the books themselves, Bhagavan does not criticise them indiscriminately; for he himself has written some, and has the highest respect for some famous works and their great Acharya authors. Besides, study and reflections sharpen and polish the intellect and are thus very essential in this marga. What he criticises are those works, which, while professing to teach truth, do not retain its purity throughout, and sometimes mislead by false comparisons, exaggerations and useless arguments, as we have seen him doing in the previous texts. The books of the "bookworms", namely, of the wrangling and brain-racking argumentative type, are utterly useless for the purpose of the Supreme
Quest. Yet in the end Bhagavan holds a hope even for the "bookworms" — "Well, well, they also will get on."