Dharma & The Power of Human Scale
To smell the elusive fragrance of Dharma is to get a glimpse of the immensity of Human Scale.
Hello Friends,
Namaskar! Welcome to the third edition of my newsletter: Dharma and Dharmasankata: Infrequent Meditations to Discover the Best You Can Be Using Indic Wisdom. To learn more about this newsletter, what it is, what it is not, you can read more here.
To join this pilgrimage that is offered in the spirit of gift economy to understand the essence of Indic wisdom, along with a small community of seekers, please click below.
One day, when Sage Narada came with a mango fruit to Kailash, the abode of Shiva, the family was celebrating the naughty mischiefs of their little children Ganesh and Murugan (Karthikeya, as he is more known outside South India). When Lord Shiva saw that Narada had brought one mango, he knew that Naradian controversy - which always troubles but wisens in the end upon deep reflection - was ready to brew.
“This is the golden fruit of wisdom and whoever eats this mango will be granted eternal knowledge and wisdom”.
With a glint of smile, Narada continued.
“There is a condition to eating this fruit. It has to be eaten by only one person.”
Shiva knew what he was getting into, and laid down a simple but fair condition:
“Whoever among his sons first comes around the world once shall win the fruit.”
Lord Kartikeya, with a sprightly spring in his step, beamed at the sight of the mango and jumped onto his beloved peacock and vanished.
Ganesha stood in deep contemplation and when his inner light shone, he walked his way towards his parents and bowed before them.
“You are my universe. You define my world. I shall circumambulate you.”
Narada smiled and Lord Shiva handed over the fruit to Lord Ganesha.
There are a million ways to read a story. Who knows which way is right? All I can do is share how I am reading it, and hope that through the arduous act of listening, you discover something precious, and we could, perhaps, chat about it.
When I first heard this story as a child, it was presented to me as a parable of obedience. Do you want to know who won the fruit? Yes, it was the child who bowed to his parents.
It took me several years until I became a parent to get in touch with the wisdom this story had been patiently pregnant with.
What does Ganesha mean when he says that “You are my Universe. You define my world”? At one level, you could read it as a metaphor and dismiss the story in a flash.
At another level, one that requires tremendous patience you rightfully earn as a parent, you could perhaps choose to read it as a literal statement that is now getting supported by various pieces of evidence that tell us how the child’s universe is constrained (but not limited) by the mind-body envelope of the parents.
Research in child psychology today talks of how the child’s mother tongue shapes and constrains the range of aural sounds [phonetic units, to be precise] the child gets acclimatized to.
Jeremy Lent writes a good summary of Ms.Kuhl's research.
“By twelve months, the infant has learned to ignore phonetic units that don't exist in her native language and can no longer discriminate their phonetic contrasts.”
Excerpt From: Jeremy Lent. “The Patterning Instinct”. See also Patricia K. Kuhl, “Early Language Acquisition: Cracking the Speech Code"
Beyond scientific evidence, and there are plenty that can buttress this argument, at a more personal level, the relevance of Ganesha’s actions hits you like a ton of bricks when you experience what it is to be a parent.
Parenting business is a strange thing, especially when you are unsure whether a parent is a noun (Are you a parent when you become a parent?)or a verb (Are you parenting when you are being a parent ?).
Thankfully, my yoga practice has helped me so far to see through what I am doing as a parent, and in doing what I am doing, what am I really doing.
When you practice Yoga, you start to notice how your subconscious field becomes the bio bubble that wraps your child either in comfort or in agony, depending on the contents of your subconscious field.
At first blush, this realization scares you. “Oh Goodness, what all my son is going to pick up from me”. It takes a while to make peace with it and see parenting for what it is - a live project of c̶h̶i̶l̶d̶ self-development.
Until the child develops his theory of the mind at the age of seven, the child absorbs everything - massive datasets that carry the parents’ fundamental beliefs, values, and biases that they downloaded from their parents in their childhood.
Magical Child by Joseph Chilton Pearce is a great introduction on this. It fundamentally transformed my parenting journey. I strongly recommend reading this book.
It’s only when we discover this insight inside our bones, we get in touch with the wisdom of Ganesha’s actions. And when that happens, we could perhaps sense a fascinating trait of Indian thought: The Power of Human scale.
If there is one mental model that sums up my love and fascination to delve into the rabbit hole of Indic wisdom, it has to be the concept of “Human Scale”. If I ever write a book on understanding the essence of Indic wisdom, it would be titled, “The Power of Human Scale”. There is so much to talk about it if you start to understand it from the lens of scale.
To kick start this central topic in this newsletter, let us start from a simple place that sets the ground for deeper discussion.
If you’ve paid deep attention to Indian thought, you would observe its fractal nature. What works at the scale of the universe is also true at the scale of the individual. When you study Chakras at a more experiential level, this understanding becomes available in the here and the now.
Krishnamurti states the immensity of human scale in stark terms, “You are the World”
What do we mean by that? And what does it have to do with understanding the essence of Dharma?
To address these knotted questions, we need to enter the world of Mahabharata.
When I kickstarted this newsletter project, I defined Dharma based on my Yoga Mentor’s commentary on Mahabharata.
Actions that either regenerate that which has fallen, reinstate that which is falling or replenish that which is standing is Dharmic action. An action that simultaneously enlivens me, you and our context is Dharmic.
How did we collectively arrive at this definition?
As Chaturvedi Badrinath writes,
It was in the Mahabharata, demonstrably for the first time in human history, that the foundations of sane living, individual and social, were laid securely – in the form of dharma.
To understand what this statement means, we need to undertake a brief pilgrimage of the history of the meaning of Dharma across different darshanas of Indic thought.
You could translate darshanas as philosophy. However, it doesn’t come close. The essence of its meaning is ‘direct vision’. And we are, in a sense, talking about radical empericism,a philosophy that is not divorced from practical life.
Editor's Note: This section borrows heavily from my reading of Chaturvedi Badrinath’s “The Mahabharta: An Inquiry in the Human Condition and my dialogues and discussions with Yoga mentor Raghu Ananthanarayanan
To talk of Dharma is no ordinary endeavor and truth be told I feel terribly underprepared for it. It doesn’t help that I have been educated in English and conditioned to interpret my reality through concepts that are alien to the existential rhythms of my being.
Dharma is no religion for Indian thought never entertained the idea of religion in the first place.
The corollary of this point is obvious. Hinduism is no religion, for it neither has a concept of religion nor has it ever called itself "Hinduism".
When you talk about a word that is so evocative like Dharma, it brings forth a whole range of associations that you can be pretty sure no two people are talking about the same thing, when they talk about Dharma.
The challenge is further multiplied when one realizes that Dharma is neither a concept nor entertains presuppositions. Indian thought has always preferred attributes of things over definitions of things.
The reasons are obvious. When you define, you know that no definition is perfect. Everything is arbitrary. Attributes, on the other hand,show the thing they allude to, and can manifest them as well.
And so, we can get a whiff of “Dharma” only through its attributes (lakshanas)
If all of this is true, how does one then enter the world of Dharma?
One likely way to navigate through this maze is to see how the meaning of Dharma has evolved over different six darshanas of Indic thought.
Adit Gupta, who has also begun exploring the deep reservoir of Indic wisdom, has given a good overview of the six darshanas here.
From what I have learned from my Yoga mentor, I would put together a different way of classification.
I will present this classification I have learned from my mentor and the evolution of Dharma in the next edition. We will continue our exploration in the coming weeks. Feel free to share your evocations and questions. I will try my best to respond to them, based on my limited understanding.