Six Talks

IV

MORE OF YAJNAVALKYA

Last time I told you the story of the great Rishi Yajnavalkya. But that was about the later Yajnavalkya when he had become a full-fledged rishi, a guru with an Ashram and disciples. Today I will tell you something of the earlier Yajnavalkya, the beginning of his rishihood, the start of his spiritual life. You know the structure of the old Indian society, it consisted of four castes, varnas, and four stages, asramas. I shall speak of the asramas now. Each individual person had to follow a definite course of life through developing stages. First of all, naturally, when you are a baby, in your early childhood, you belong to the family and remain with your parents. As soon as you grow up and the time for your education arrives, you are initiated into a stage called brahmacarya; you may generally call it as the stage of self-discipline, you go to a guru and pursue your studies through a disciplined life, something like the life of the children who are here like you. In those days a student's life did not mean merely studies, that is to say, reading and writing, book-knowledge, but as here a very active life. The physical education in the old time asramas in certain ways was even more complete than what is given here, for it included the art of warfare also, combatives like serious archery and

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many other items of physical training. When you have terminated this discipline or brahmacarya, when you have become an accomplished young man you are allowed to return to the world, and take to the worldly life, enrich yourself with all experiences of that life, that is to say, you marry and become a family man. It is the second stage called garhasthya. Next when you have fully enjoyed or fulfilled the duty of the worldly life, you pass on to the next stage that is called the vanaprastha. That is the hermit life, the beginning of the true spiritual life. Finally at the end of the vanaprastha, you pass still beyond and adopt the life of the sannyasi, abandoning everything, concentrating wholly on the Supreme Truth and merging into it.

Now our Yajnavalkya in the normal course of things has passed through the stage of brahmacarya, he has also pursued the stage of domestic life and is now at the end of it. He thinks the time has now come to him to take to spiritual life and enter into vanaprastha. He had married and had two wives. So one day he called the first wife, Katyayani, and said to her: "Katyayani, I am now leaving this life and entering the spiritual life. You have given me comfort and happiness. I am thankful to you for that. Whatever I have, my possessions, movable and immovable, I have divided into two. This is your portion." Katyayani accepted the decision without a murmur. She answered: "Since you are my lord and husband, as you ask me so I shall do." Then Yajnavalkya went to his

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second wife, Maitreyee; to Maitreyee too he said the same thing as he had said to Katyayani: "Maitreyee, I am leaving this life, I am taking to the spiritual life. I have given to Katyayani her share of my possessions. This is your share." But Maitreyee answered: "Wherever you go, I will follow you, I will also give up the world and its life." Yajnavalkya said: "No, Maitreyee, it is a very hard, very difficult life, particularly for a woman. Follow the life to which you have been accustomed. Enjoy freely the possessions I leave you." Then Maitreyee uttered those famous words which you must have heard and which have been ringing through the centuries down to us also, even today:

"All these possessions, will they give me immortality?" Yajnavalkya answered: "No, Maitreyee, that they will not give you, it is quite another matter." Maitreyee answered — uttering a mantra as it were — "What am I to do with that which does not give me immortality?" So Yajnavalkya had to accept her and allow her to accompany him. Now Yajnavalkya gives his first lesson of spiritual life to Maitreyee: "Maitreyee, you love me, so you are coming with me. But do you know the real truth of the matter? The real truth is that you do not love me, but you love the soul that is in you, which is also in me: you love your own self in me. Therefore you love me. And I love you, I love you not for your sake but for the sake of the self in you which is the self in me. All love is like that. A husband loves his wife, the wife loves her husband, the brother loves his brother or sister, a sister loves her sister

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or brother, it is not for the sake of the person or the relation but for the sake of the self— one's own self which is in everybody. That is the first lesson which you have to learn. Forget the outer person, your own person or another's person, find the self that is in you and everybody else. That is the basis of the spiritual life."

I told you there were four stages of life for an individual in the ancient Indian society. You complete one stage and then proceed to the next, and then to the next and so on. But they also say that you need not go through the stages gradually, step by step in this way, you can skip one or two stages in your stride if you have the capacity to do so; if you want the spiritual life when you are young, even when you have not gone through the worldly life, even then you can jump over, take a leap into the life of the sannyasin. It is said the day you feel detached from your worldly home, then forthwith you may take to the life of the ascetic. It depends upon the urge in you, the insistence of the truth in you. A large freedom was given to all who really wanted a spiritual life.

I have said that Yajnavalkya had two wives. You did not ask me why: for to us moderns such a thing is not only immoral but inconvenient; it is however another story, a long story. In those days, those far-off early days of mankind, thousands and thousands, millions perhaps, of years ago, it was the law, the social custom and it became a duty, to have more than one wife and the relation too between man and woman was much freer and more

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loose. That was because, as you know, man started his earthly life at a certain stage of creation; before that stage there was no man, there were only animals. The earth was filled with animals, only animals, wild animals, ferocious animals, insects, worms, all kinds of ugly and dangerous creatures. Man came long, long after; he is almost a recent appearance. It was a mysterious, indeed a miraculous happening, how all of a sudden, out of or in the midst of animals there appeared a new creature, quite a different type of animal. Still in whatever way it happened, they were not many in number. The first creation of man must have been a very limited operation, limited in space, limited in number. Perhaps they sprouted up like mushrooms here and there, a hundred here, another hundred there, or perhaps a few thousands — few and far between. So man led a dangerous and precarious life. All around him these animals, some too big, some too small to be tackled withstood against him, and Nature also was as wild and as much against him. So for self-preservation and survival they needed to be numerous, to increase in number as much as possible. It is exactly what is needed in war; the larger the number of troops, the greater the chance of winning the war. So the impulse in man, in the social aggregate was to have more men, increase the number, to strengthen the extent and volume of the force to be able to fight successfully against the enemy. So a necessity became a religious duty to multiply, to procreate and redouble the race. In later days, even when the necessity

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was not so imperative, even then the habit and custom continued. To beget children was a praise-worthy thing, the more the number the greater the merit. Women who had numerous children were considered favourites of the gods. King Dasharatha had, it appears, a thousand wives, King Dhritarashtra had more than a hundred, Vashishtha had a hundred sons and King Sagar a thousand. Draupadi had five husbands and she was considered the ideal chaste woman.

In the modern age we have gone to the other extreme, we have tided over the danger of under-population. At the present day it is over-population that threatens the existence of mankind. Now we are anxious, we are racking our brains, trying to find out all kinds of means and ways to restrict and control any increase in population.

I said, in the early days the need to marry in any way — a very free choice was given in the matter of the way of marriage — and to procreate was a social duty: but note it is not for individual pleasure. Today we have discarded all notion of that kind of action as superstition, a form of tyranny. We are for freedom of the individual. Whatever we do we must do for our personal gain, our personal pleasure. But in those days that was not the ideal nor the custom. Even when you marry, you marry not for the sake of personal enjoyment but for the sake of the society, to give birth to healthy and useful children, to increase the number of able-bodied members of your society. Service for society, not personal pleasure was the aim.

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Yajnavalkya lifted that ideal on to a still higher level — you exist not for your own sake of course — own means the personal ego individual — but for the sake of your soul, the greater self.

In this connection I am reminded of what Sri Aurobindo said when he was taking leave of his students at Calcutta in his farewell address before starting his public political activity: he said, "When I come back to you again, I hope to see some of you become great, great not for your own sake but for your country, to make your country great. I hope to see some of you become rich, rich not for yourself but to make your country rich": that is the ideal ideal, not individual satisfaction, exclusively personal accomplishment or achievement, one must work in view of the welfare of all, a global well-being. The goal is not one's own little self, but the Great Self in all. This is of course, in the secular way in the secular field. But here also the appeal, it must be observed, is not to the social life as a mere machine of which individuals are dead helpless parts and units meant to serve as obedient instruments in the production of useful goods. The appeal on the contrary is to the soul, the free inner individual, choosing its destiny but with a view to collaborating and uniting with others in the realisation of a global truth.

In the spiritual sphere also Sri Aurobindo gives us the same ideal and outlook. In the early days spiritual realisation was sought for personal salvation, a complete renunciation of the world, absolute freedom from this transient

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unhappy world—anityam asukham lokam imam. The individual person leaves his individual existence upon earth and retires and merges into the Infinite Brahman. But here in Sri Aurobindo's Revelation we are taught that the individual realisation and spiritual attainment is not to dissolve oneself into the nameless formless Beyond but to maintain it, preserve it in a pure divine form, for the sake of the sorrowful ignorant world. The knowledge, the power, the delight that the individual gains — not as something merely individual but as the result of one's identity with the universal — are at the service of earth and humanity so that these may be transformed and share in the same realisation. One becomes spiritually free and Complete and enters into all so that all may be transformed into a new divine reality.

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