Ākāśāt Patitaṃ: Many Forms, One Reality
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| Adi Shankara: The image that's stayed with me forever |
Sanskrit and shlokas have always fascinated me. The sheer vastness of Sanskrit literature is humbling. There are enough verses, texts, commentaries and traditions to occupy many lifetimes, and still leave one feeling that one has barely scratched the surface.
But I didn't think much about any of this when I was growing up.
I would recite shlokas in the morning and evening without fail. They were simply part of life. The words were there, the rituals were there, the temples were there—but much of it happened in the background.
I was busy with academics. There was no time for Sanskrit or Vedanta.
At least, that is what I used to tell myself.
Of course, time was never really the problem. I could spend five days watching a Test match from morning to evening and somehow consider that perfectly legitimate use of my time! The truth was simpler: Sanskrit and Vedanta had not yet become priorities.
Growing up in Malleswaram, however, had an advantage that I probably appreciated only much later. The atmosphere was soaked in bhakti. You didn't necessarily have to seek it. Temples, shlokas, pujas, festivals, music and conversations about the Divine simply surrounded you.
Something was being planted without my knowing it.
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| Adi Shankara at Kalady |
Adi Shankaracharya
As a child, I remember watching G. V. Iyer's remarkable Sanskrit language film Adi Shankaracharya. I must have been ten or eleven.
I understood very little of its philosophy.
I already knew some of the stories of Shankara from the elders, so naturally I waited for the parts I recognized—the crocodile catching the young Shankara's leg, for example, and his asking his mother for permission to take sanyasa.
But what remained with me most strongly was something else: the music.
The film had an extraordinary simplicity. The Sanskrit verses, the devotional music, the unhurried scenes and the almost austere presentation created an atmosphere that was difficult for a child to explain but equally difficult to forget.
Something about it drew me toward Vedanta.
I even decided that I would go to the nearby Kanchi Mutt in the mornings and learn Rudram and other Vedic mantras.
I didn't go.
But strangely, the desire never completely disappeared. Somewhere within me was the conviction that I would return to it someday. Several decades later, I did.
I have watched Adi Shankaracharya several times since childhood, and the experience has changed each time. The film didn't change. I did.
And that is perhaps why one particular verse has become so meaningful to me.
A Shloka I Had Heard for Years
After my Upanayanam, I began performing Sandhyavandanam. Among the verses I recited was this beautiful shloka:
सर्वदेवनमस्कारः केशवं प्रति गच्छति ॥
sarva-deva-namaskāraḥ keśavaṃ prati gacchati ||
Its meaning is deceptively simple:
I had heard this verse countless times.
It also forms part of the musical landscape of G. V. Iyer's film. As a child, I heard the sounds without really understanding the words. Later, I recited the words without fully contemplating their meaning.
Only much later, as I began studying Sanskrit and Vedanta, did the pieces come together.
Ākāśāt — from the sky.
Patitam toyam — the water that has fallen.
Sāgaram — the ocean.
Sarva-deva-namaskāraḥ — salutations to all the deities.
And suddenly this verse that had accompanied me for decades was no longer merely something to be recited.
It was saying something profound.
Many Forms, One Reality
This is one of the things I find extraordinarily beautiful about Advaita Vedanta.
Adi Shankara, the great teacher associated above all with non-duality, did not therefore dismiss devotion.
Quite the opposite.
The tradition associated with Shankara contains magnificent hymns addressed to Shiva, Vishnu, Devi, Subrahmanya and many other manifestations of the Divine. Temples, puja, mantra, upāsanā and bhakti were not regarded as contradictions to the recognition of non-duality.
There is a profound insight here.
Advaita does not require us to begin by pretending that we already experience non-duality.
I look around and see multiplicity. I experience myself as an individual. I experience joy and sorrow, attachment and fear. I pray. I seek help. I stand before a deity and instinctively see something greater than myself.
Vedanta begins with the human being where he actually stands.
Bhakti turns the mind toward Ishvara. Karma Yoga loosens our insistence that everything must happen according to our desires. Upāsanā disciplines and steadies the mind. And eventually, Vedantic inquiry asks the most radical question of all:
The journey that appears to begin with the individual worshipping the Divine ultimately leads to the recognition that the separation between the seeker and the sought was never absolute.
The rivers appear different.
The ocean is one.
"God Is Everywhere"
Sometimes people say, "Why should I go to a temple? God is everywhere."
From the standpoint of Advaita, the statement is difficult to dispute.
But there is another question worth asking:
It is easy to say that Brahman is everywhere. It is quite another thing to live with that understanding every moment of one's life.
Until then, perhaps there is wisdom in going to the temple.
There is wisdom in standing before a murti, folding one's hands and surrendering, even temporarily, the idea that the individual ego is at the center of existence.
If a tradition culminating in the declaration of absolute non-duality could still make such enormous room for bhakti, perhaps devotion is not something we need to outgrow quite so quickly.
Perhaps the temple, the mantra, the shloka and the form of the deity are not obstacles to understanding the formless.
Perhaps they are preparing us to recognize it.
And that brings me back to the verse I had been hearing since childhood:
सर्वदेवनमस्कारः केशवं प्रति गच्छति ॥
The child in Malleswaram heard the music.
The young man recited the shloka.
It took me several decades to begin understanding what the words were pointing toward.
Maybe that is one of the great beauties of our tradition.
Sometimes the teaching enters our lives long before we are ready to understand it.
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