Shree Jagannath: Lord of the Universe

Lord Jagannath is the Lord of the Universe. He is Param Brahman, the Supreme Godhead, from which all Gods and Goddesses emanate. He is both the God unmanifest as well as the God manifest. He is both Nirgun Brahman (God without attributes. God as avang-manasa-gochara, beyond the reach of senses or mind) of Shankara and Sagun Brahman (God with attributes, the personified Brahman, such as Rama or Krishna) of Ramanuja. This multitudinous character of Jagannath reminds me of this great Vedic wisdom:

ॐ पूर्णमदः पूर्णमिदं पूर्णात्पुर्णमुदच्यते

पूर्णस्य पूर्णमादाय पूर्णमेवावशिष्यते ॥

ॐ शान्तिः शान्तिः शान्तिः ॥

It literally means: “That is full. This is full. The full is taken out of the full. Take out the full from the full, the full remains. Om, peace, peace, peace.”

Lord Jagannath is both the ‘full’ and the parts that are also ‘full’, which are taken out of the ‘full’. Let us meditate on this. By creating the universe and all the elements in it, the Lord does not limit Him or lose His ‘full’ness. This brings another element. As the whole world is Lord's creation out of Himself, the whole world and its elements partake His consciousness. Applying this logic further, we are all divine as we are created by the Supreme Lord.

Then the question arises - if we are all parts of God, then why there is so much violence? Why there is so much chaos in the world? Why cannot we see and consider another individual as we consider ourselves? The answer is Avidya- Ignorance. We consider our separate selves as the sole reality. We cannot see all – ourselves and other selves – as creations of God. We cannot see the other integrated reality, the Lord, who is our Creator. Because of our ignorance, we think our separate selves as the sole reality. As dust particles cover a mirror and hides our view of ourselves, a thick miasma of ignorance veils us from our integrated and truer reality. Shankara took this aspect of ignorance and our indulgence in it seriously and declared the world is Maya, illusion. Shankara has a sound argument here. So far we consider ourselves absolute truth and ignore the divine truth, we are in illusion. But once we recognize that we are truth, but relative or empirical truth, the ignorance and illusion vanish, we become truly liberated.

Tulsidas believed that the Lord Jagannath is Lord Rama. At the first sight of Lord Jagannath, Tulsidas fell into a dilemma. How could Jagannath be not beautiful as Rama? How could this Lord be incomplete – no feet, no complete hands, no ears? Grief-stricken, he returned from the temple, thinking – no, Lord Jagannath cannot be Lord Rama. He had a vision. It was so powerful and compelling, he rushed to the temple and saw in place of Lord Jagannath was standing Lord Rama. He wrote in Ramcharitmanas:

बिनु पद चलइ सुनइ बिनु काना।

कर बिनु कर्म करइ बिधि नाना ।।…

He goes everywhere without legs.

He hears everything without ears.

He does everything without hands…

While Tulsidas’s vision of Lord Jagannath as Lord Rama can be characterized as his experience of the Lord as Sagun Brahman, his poem, quoted above, alludes to his experience of the Lord as Nirgun Brahman. Lord Jagannath is Lord Rama, but He is not confined to the image of Lord Rama as He is Nirgun Brahman. To a devotee like Tulsidas, He is amenable as a personified God, Lord Rama, but for a Jnana Yogi like Shankara, He is Nirgun Brahman - beyond the reach of human senses and conception, including the conception of a particular God.

Lord Jagannath is not confined to a particular people or a particular place. He is not the God of a particular state or a country. He is above the narrow confines of religion, nationality, creed, color, language, economic status or any man made divisions. Muslim Salabega was his devotee, as also poor Dasia Bauri. Guru Nanak went to Puri to see the Lord. Contemporary research suggests that Jesus Christ had visited Puri to receive light from the Lord.

Lord Jagannath is the only Lord who comes out of the temple every year so that all His devotees receive His grace. It has a deeper significance. Before the Supreme God all are equal. There is no discrimination on the basis of man-made divisions.

More the Jagannath culture spreads more the good for the world. The more this culture spreads, the more the people across the world come to know the Lord’s universal significance. I pray that the Rath Yatra in Tampa is a step in this direction.

Jai Jagannath !

(This article is part of the Tampa Rath Yatra Journal, July 2018.)

Dying the 'Religion' Way?

Last month more than 100 people died in a stampede in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. The dead when alive were devotees. They went to the Ratangarh temple on the occasion of the Durga Puja, one of the important Hindu festivals. The dead mostly included women, children and old men. 30 children died. Seven years ago stampede had taken place in the same place, but no lessons were drawn.

It does not need any hard evidence to point out that most of the people who died were poor. For thousands of devotees, there were only one sub-inspector and nine constables to maintain law and order. The top officials of the district were busy in elections, or were simply careless. Had the Chief Minister of the state, forget Chief Minister, had a senior bureaucrat of the state been visiting the temple, the law and order could have been better maintained, perhaps the stampede could have been avoided. Perhaps religious festivals should be graced by the so called elite people so that lives of the poor people could be saved!! 

I am particularly sad for the children who died. Perhaps they could have preferred to play in their house yards than visiting temples where most of them could little understand what is going on. These children died, and with them a portion of future India is lost. The tradition of visiting temples on religious occasions might be a good thing as it might bring solace to mind and heart, but if stampede and death would be the consequence then I would prefer to worship my God in my house than visiting to a temple and get killed. I remember reading news that one family who went to a religious place to celebrate the birthday of their only son lost all lives in a road accident on return. Perhaps we need better roads, better law and order, and better discipline before visiting temples and offering prayers. 

The excessive reliance on tradition may not be always helpful. There needs to be a distinction between superstition and tradition. As I interpret theology, God does not demand that one must go to temple to reach Him. There is God in human being and when the human being realizes God in him and identifies him with Him, then there is realization of God and liberation, for that it is not necessary to go to temple. Swami Vivekananda, one of the great religious and social reformers of India, argued that it is better to play football than to read Gita. He was at remorse at the poverty of India, the malnutrition affecting her children. He argued, with which I agree, that without a healthy body and mind, an individual can not be true follower of God. An emaciated body will devote most time thinking about food than God. And a corrupt mind can never lead us to God even if we sit and stand 24/7 before the statue of God in the most famous temple. 

Marx is right when he argued religion is the opium of the masses. It teaches subservience and fatalism. I know that this is a negative aspect of religion. In its positive aspect, religion has many utilities both for peace of mind and for spiritual progress. Let me talk about this negative dimension. Fatalism induces in the recalcitrant a sense of apathy towards affairs of life as he believes that the God will do everything for him. This enabled the colonial powers to easily dominate the God-believing people as fatalism induces in them the belief that it is what God wants. I read somewhere that when Abdali attacked India, he had an easy run in some places in killing people as many of them under the spell of the Bhakti movement did not counter the attack. If that is religion, then I would better disavow it. 

A religion devoid of courage, vigor, devoid of life and dynamism, devoid of progress and adaptation, is no religion as such but a dying creed. At least that is not Hinduism. Perhaps decay has gripped the religion. Particularly in the context of Hindu religion, there are no stalwarts in the image of Shankara or Ramanuja or Swami Vivekananda or Sri Aurobindo who can guide the practitioners of the religion. Now-a-days in India we have a lot of talk about religion, but not for internal illumination but external embellishment. It is no surprise that the so called God-men and God-women are morally corrupt. External preaching without internal purity has almost created a miasma over the true tenets of the religion. The old ritual persists but the spirit has seemed to evaporate.

I am not at all amused with the death of the innocent on the bridge over the Sindh river last month. Though the religion occasion coincided with my birthday, I felt helpless as on such an occasion I heard people dying. Goddess Durga, whose temple the pilgrims thronged must have not desired such a scene. Though it would be both futile and irrational to study the mind of the Goddess, but if we apply the human reasoning it would be appropriate to say that the Goddess, whom we worship as mother, must not rejoice at the death of her children.

The basic tenet of Hindu religion is perhaps best captured by the 15th century Gujarati philosopher, Narsinh Mehta, who sang, ‘the devotee is he who understands and cares for other’s pain’ (Vaishnava Jana to tene kahiye jo pir parai jaane re). If service is one pillar, then sacrifice is certainly the other. But service and sacrifice demand courage and preparedness. A person who is filled with vices can neither perform service nor sacrifice. And the vices can be individual as well as collective. When a religion is gripped by the vices with majority of the practitioners believing that religion is just a ritual, and nothing more, then there is no end to perdition not after this life but in this life.

Some people believe that if a person dies on an auspicious religion occasion, then he directly goes to heaven. Perhaps this belief persists in other religions. I strongly disapprove such a belief. Such a belief justifies all kinds of death on these occasions, including the stampede that took place in Madhya Pradesh last month. I would rather let the people stay at home and pray from there rather than letting them to become victims of a poorly organized festival, irresponsible administration, and deadly rumors.