“Life Is a Dream”
Five old men, the village elders, had come to listen to the young stranger. But only one was actually listening. Two others nodded off in the sun, another was counting his money, and the fourth had smoked too much ganja that morning and was no longer present on earth. They were squatting in the courtyard of the local Shiva temple, but no priests had emerged.
“You come from the south?” asked the head elder, the one who was paying attention. “They have temples there. respectable ones,” he added.
“I wasn’t driven out,” said the stranger. He waited for a question that wasn’t pointless. His accent already told that he was from the south. He wore the saffron robes of a monk and the marks of a Brahmin—those with the highest spiritual knowledge.
The elder who was counting his money stopped for a moment. “We grow our own beggars here. We don’t need any more.”
The elder stupefied on ganja found his tongue. “Don’t tell him where I live.” His chin fell back on his chest.
The stranger sighed. Monks fell under the law of hospitality, which was sacred. But people whined about it, except in the backwaters, where superstition lingered stronger than in the towns. In both places an unwelcome monk could be kicked from the door.
“I won’t trouble anyone for food,” he murmured.
He didn’t absolutely need the approval of the five elders, known as the panchayat, but he believed in showing respect. Besides, he would be stirring up trouble soon enough. There were always five elders in every village he came to, just as there was always a grove of five trees on the outskirts of town. Five is a holy number. Every child was taught that; no one questioned it.
Shankara felt the time crawl by. “I’ve been on the road for four days. I survived a bandit attack to get here. I only want to speak to your priests, and then I’ll be gone.”
“Bandit attack? Why didn’t they kill you?” asked the head elder.
“They seemed interested in God, so we wound up talking.” The monk gave a brief answer, not mentioning that the bandits had bowed to him and touched his feet before they let him go.
The head elder rocked on his heels. It was the hottest part of the day, and for a while the monkeys quit squabbling with the parrots overhead in the trees. The air was sultry and heavy, but the clouds on the horizon meant it would take weeks before a proper monsoon moved in for the season. The wandering monk wore his begging bowl on his shaved head as protection from the sun.
“Your father blessed this pilgrimage of yours?” asked the money-counting elder.
“My father is dead. But my mother blessed me before I left. She had to,” said the stranger. Again he didn’t expand his answer. In fact, a tale circulated around his leaving. When he was bathing in the pool near his house in the village of kaladi, a crocodile had seized him by the foot. The other Brahmin boys screamed and jumped out of the water. His mother ran to the bank of the pool, expecting her son to already be dead, but instead he was calmly waiting for her, the crocodile still attached.
“I must die to this life,” he told her. “I know what my new life should be, and even this savage creature knows. If you bless me, he will let me go.” The boy, who was only seven, spoke very precociously.
After that, his mother had no choice. The wandering monk was eight when he turned his back on kaladi and took to the roads, which was astonishing, even in a land where highway robbers were interested in God. If he hadn’t found refuge with gurus on the way, the boy could easily have been snatched and killed.
Years passed. It was impossible to guess his age now. Fifteen, sixteen? He looked young, but his name was well traveled. Stories about the young Shankara had reached everyone in India.
“I really do need to talk to a priest,” Shankara repeated.
The truth was known but unspoken. The panchayat had assembled to greet him the moment he set foot in the village. The local priests hoped he would be bored to death by some old men. With any luck he would move on and not confront the priests. In eight years of wandering, in all parts of India, the stories were that Shankara had a devastating effect in debates. Wherever he went, God toppled, the god that paid priests’ salaries, that is.
The last village he had stopped in was like all the rest. The chief priest, born to a specific sect in the worship of Devi, the Divine Mother, sat down to argue with supreme confidence. He had ruled village life for decades and begun to believe in his own invincibility. Novel ideas didn’t frighten him, any more than a new summer crop of mosquitoes. He had tufts of gray hair on his head, with smaller patches on his chin and sprouting from his ears.
“You say that the world is an illusion?” he asked.
“It doesn’t matter that I say it. The sacred Vedas declare it,” Shankara replied.
“But you claim direct knowledge. You came here to dispel illusions, didn’t you? So make the world disappear.”
“All right,” Shankara nodded. “Wait until this evening when you fall asleep. The world will disappear, as it does every night.”
The invincible priest didn’t smile, although he had to admit it was a clever answer. He said, “Something harder. You declare that all things, big and small, exist as in a dream.”
“Yes. Just as a man wakes up from a dream to see the light of day, so he should wake up from the dream of this existence if he wants to see the light of God.” They were both comfortable using the word “God,” since it was understood, after many centuries, that each of the many images worshiped in thousands of temples all wore a face of the same divine presence.
“In dreams, anything can happen,” remarked the invincible priest. “So if this life is a dream, you must grant that anything can happen here.”
“I do. Nothing is impossible for one who knows God,” Shankara replied.
“Ah. The maharajah has a palace so huge that a horse would collapse before galloping from one end to the other. In my dreams I can have such a palace. Can I have one when I’m awake?”
“I can exceed your wish. Strip off your clothes on the coldest night of the year. Stand naked outdoors for an hour. When you run back into your warm house, it will be better than any maharajah’s palace.”
The priest allowed himself a smile, which was important. Shankara could always crush his opponents and wander to the next village down the Ganges, but he was determined to leave good-will behind him. He didn’t want his opponents to resent it when they lost the debate. Far better if the priests became pillars of a new belief.
The invincible priest wasn’t there yet. “I can call on a servant to run into the jungle and bring back a cobra. If I laid a poisonous snake in your lap, would that be an illusion too?”
“I bow to you,” Shankara replied. “You know the scriptures well. For isn’t it written thus: ‘To believe in this world is like a man who stumbles in the dark upon a coiled rope. Unable to see clearly, he cries “Snake! Snake!” until the whole village is aroused. Now everyone runs around in fear until one man brings a torch and says, “See here, it is only a rope.” That is how Maya, the goddess of illusion, works.’”
“But it doesn’t prove that cobras aren’t real, unless every snake is the same as a rope,” said the invincible priest, certain that he was pouncing on a point.
Shankara replied, “I was proving that only the man who brings a light knows what is real and what isn’t.” He smiled. “Anyone who reads the scriptures grasps the point, doesn’t he?”
The invincible priest squirmed. The wanderer had perfected the technique of making his opponent accept the truth by citing texts that every Brahmin supposedly knew by heart. Isn’t that how they kept control over simple devotees, with holy words no one else could read? As he flattered the Brahmins, Shankara subtly turned the same words around. They discovered that, like a cobra’s sting, the sting of his mind was fatal.
It seems ordained that those who bring light into the world become shrouded with legends. Shankara was walking through a village one day when a gang of boys started running after him throwing marigolds in his path. He asked them why.
“We want you to step on one,” an older boy replied, although even he was quite shy.
“Step on one?”
“You are a sidha, a master of supernatural powers. If you step on a flower, we can sell it to heal the sick.”
“Who told you such a thing?” Shankara demanded.
The boys were confused and intimidated, but between them they told a tale they had heard about the sidha standing before them.
Shankara had taken a master by the name of Govinda, who lived in a cave by the sacred river Narmada. As was the custom, the disciple waited on the master, acting as his personal servant. Every morning Shankara would leave food before the mouth of the cave for his master’s breakfast. One day, however, the river overflowed its banks, threatening Govinda’s cave and the surrounding countryside.
Shankara prayed for guidance, after which he rushed to the cave and placed his small clay water pot in front. Immediately the pot swallowed up the flood, until God ordered the Narmada to return to its banks, for the flood had actually been a test of the young sidha’s powers.
The boys’ eyes were shining as they retold the tale. Instead of scolding them, he obligingly stepped on a few marigolds, reminding himself to return when the boys had grown into men, so that he could give them something more useful than legends—although it isn’t recorded that he ever contradicted the tale.
When he arrived in a new place, asking to debate the most learned men, the Brahmins usually made the mistake of underestimating him at first. He was thin as a reed, for one thing, and when you’re peddling wisdom, it’s better to be fat as well as old. If someone pointed this out, Shankara would say that he didn’t win by sitting on his opponents, only by persuading them. Of what? He shrugged. The truth.
“Isn’t it arrogant for a stranger to come here and claim to know the truth?” his opponents argued.
“Ignorance is more arrogant,” Shankara replied. “It claims to blind all men and erase what is real from their minds.” He lowered his eyes. “Not that such a thing has happened here.”
On this day Shankara and the five elders had been meeting for an hour. Shankara heard his stomach rumble. The one who kept questioning him was stubborn. He never ran out of questions, and each one grew more trivial. The wandering monk couldn’t hide his impatience any longer.
“How much?” he asked.
“What?”
“How much were you paid to waste my time? Before you pretend to be outraged, I’ll say one thing. I’m not here to destroy your faith.”
The head village elder had worn a tolerant expression up until this moment; it vanished. “They say you topple God. We can’t permit that.”
“I see, so God needs you to protect him? I’m impressed. I’ve now met someone more powerful than God himself.”
The words were meant to sting, and they did. The head elder rose and gestured to the others. “I’m not so impressed,” he said. “I’ve met someone who thinks God is deaf and blind. But you’re wrong. He hears profanity, and he punishes it.”
Shankara stood up and moved in on the old man. “Is that why I’m stuck talking to you, because God is punishing me?”
The old man’s face reddened, but Shankara didn’t wait for a spluttering reply. He raised his arms and addressed the empty courtyard. “I was told to come here. This is a marketplace, they told me. The peddlers of faith set up their stalls here. So where are you, peddlers? Come, sell me some faith if you think I have none.”
From inside the temple there was no answer to his challenge, only the faint buzz of chanting. The priests were obligated to perform rituals almost without pause as long as the sun was up and several times during the night.
“Have it your way,” Shankara shouted. “When I get to the next village, I will bring the news that this is the home where ignorance loves to dwell. It has made its devotees too frightened to talk to me.”
A sharp ear would have detected a change in the buzzing that issued from the sacred chamber inside the temple; now it was more like wasps than prayers. After a moment a priest appeared at the door. He held the implements of ritual in his hand—smoking incense, a bowl of water, some marigolds—as if he could barely spare a moment.
“Don’t scold me,” Shankara addressed him. “The rumors about me are wrong. I’m not here to topple God. My words won’t crack the temple walls.”
“Like all words, yours will vanish into thin air,” said the priest, who was twice the age of the intruder, with a brow as heavy as his scowl.
“Some words penetrate the heart,” said Shankara, more mildly.
In a child’s tale he would have had to slay the demons that blocked his way, but Shankara wielded a secret weapon. He charmed people, even when they thought that they should resist him. The priest’s scowl didn’t melt yet, much less his heart. But he didn’t call a servant with a switch either.
“We are both Brahmins,” said Shankara. “I come from a family that gave alms every day and performed the rites of puja, propitiating Shiva as you do. I respect our way of life, which was dictated by God. I respect you.”
The priest gave a slight nod.
“As I look at you, I think you are the wisest man in this village,” said Shankara. “If so, please sit and debate with me. If not, send the man who is considered by everyone to be wiser than you.”
He knew that he had caught the priest in a trap, his own vanity.
“If you respect me as a Brahmin,” the priest said, hesitating unless he stepped farther into the trap, “then you see that I am busy doing my duty right now.” He brandished the ritual implements. “Why should I interrupt holy work for idle arguments?”
“Because you need to see for yourself if God speaks through me. That’s what you’ve heard, isn’t it? That my words are divine.”
The priest lost his composure. “Outrageous!”
“Why?” said Shankara. “Isn’t it held that the first words came from God? Are not words the agent of reason? Therefore, if I speak to you with sound reasons, aren’t they from God? Otherwise, we would have to say that I speak for the demons.”
“Always a possibility,” interjected the head village elder. It was a lot of trouble to cleanse a holy place after a demon infested it.
Shankara smiled. “Even then, since all things are made of God, even the demons have divine nature once you pierce their disguise. So come, sit. Either you will hear the voice of God or you will have your chance to defeat a demon, and a very thin, poor one at that. He would be grateful for a chapati and a cup of fresh water.”
In the eight years since he left home, Shankara had repeated this scene hundreds of times, ever since his own guru, on the banks of the sacred Narmada river, had sent him on his mission.
This priest was craftier than most. “It would take too long for me to tell you how I serve God,” he said. “But there is a villager, a householder, who lives a life of perfect devotion. I taught him every lesson. Go to his house, and if his devotion crumbles before your arguments, return to me.”
The priest gave a flick of the wrist, which sent a servant to fetch bread and water for the intruding stranger. Personally, the priest had no use for wandering monks: half of them were crazy and the other half criminals in disguise. But Brahmin to Brahmin, he couldn’t refuse hospitality.
After the priest went back inside, the village elders relaxed, pleased with this outcome. They watched Shankara eat, which he only did after the required blessings.
“Your priest is clever,” said Shankara, “which he mistakes for being wise.”
“Why do you insult someone who offers you food?” exclaimed the head elder.
“Am I insulting him? I thought he insulted me, because he portrays me as someone who is willing to attack a devout man’s faith. If he keeps his faith, I must walk away as the loser in the debate,” replied Shankara.
The elders smiled, since they saw very well what the priest’s tactics were.
“How will I find this householder of perfect devotion?” Shankara asked.
“His name is Mandana Mishra. You’ll have no trouble finding where he lives. He keeps six parrots caged at the gate to his house. They argue philosophy all day and make quite a noise.”
As Shankara was sent on his way, he could hear the snickers of the panchayat behind him. He continued down the road until he spied the caged parrots, who squawked a warning when he approached. If they had philosophical things to say, they kept them to them-selves. On the porch of the house a man was performing ritual offerings. Shankara knelt beside him, bowing with his forehead to the floor. Mandana Mishra sprinkled water to the four points of the compass, muttering a prayer. It took several minutes before he acknowledged that anyone was there.
“Apologies for interrupting your devotions,” murmured Shankara.
“There is no sin,” replied Mandana smoothly. “A guest at the door is God. We are taught that this is more important than daily prayers.”
He showed Shankara into the house and ordered his wife to bring refreshments, which she did silently. One look around told the story. Mandana Mishra surrounded himself with images of the gods. The altar for puja was lit with a dozen ghee lamps; the air was heavy with the mixed smell of incense, burnt butter, and ashes. When Shankara explained why he was there, Mandana beamed. He was thrilled to be offered as an example of perfect devotion.
Shankara said, “We cannot debate without a referee. We could send for the high priest, but I want the severest referee possible. Would you agree to let it be your wife?”
The couple stared at each other, startled.
Shankara went on. “In a household like this, where God means everything, the wife must be as wise as the husband. If she says that he has been defeated, no one can dispute her. The last thing a wife would want is to see her husband lose.”
The couple agreed, and Shankara sat cross-legged on the floor opposite his opponent; Mandana’s wife, Ubhaya, sat to one side .
“Words are empty unless something valuable is at stake,” said Shankara. “What shall we wager?”
Mandana smiled. “We are both too poor to wager much. I can offer a handful of rice, but you have nothing.”
“We have both given up any hope of riches,” Shankara agreed. “But we own something more precious. Let’s wager our path to God. If you win, I will stay here and become a householder, following your lead in every ritual and prayer. If I win, you will follow me and become sanyasi, a wandering monk.”
Husband and wife hesitated a long moment, but in the end the wager was accepted. Shankara was courteously allowed to set the topic of the first debate; he chose faith.
“I was sent here to test your faith,” he began. “But I don’t need to, for I see that your faith is like a cart with no wheels. It would be pitiful to challenge it.” He saw the offended look on Mandana Mishra’s pious face. “I’m being kind to tell you this. A cart is only good if it can take you to market or haul in your crops. Faith is the same. It is meant to carry you to God. But if you bow down and perform empty rituals all day without finding God, you might as well bow down to a broken-down cart.”
Mandana raised his hand. “The scriptures command us to show our faith through these rituals you dismiss, and the scriptures come from God. Are you saying that God can be untrue?”
“Why do the scriptures command you to pray?” asked Shankara.
“It is not for me to question that.”
“Because it would show a lack of faith,” said Shankara, finishing Mandana’s thought for him. “This is false reasoning, for, like a dog chasing its tail, you say that one must have faith in faith. Give me a reason why.”
“God is beyond reasoning,” declared Mandana.
“If that were true, then any jumble of words could be called scripture. Nonsense would be divine if all that is needed is lack of reason. Madmen would be better than priests.”
“This is just trickery,” Mandana shot back. “Scripture cannot be denied.”
“Oh, so the dog has found a second tail to chase. Now scripture is right because it is scripture. If that were true, then I could slip lies into the holy books of the Veda and they would turn true simply because of where I put them.”
Mandana’s wife became alarmed, sensing that her husband was on shaky ground. “Tell him from your heart why we all need faith,” she urged.
Mandana nodded meekly. “You are right, my dear. A faith that doesn’t come from the heart is no faith at all.” He gazed benignly at Shankara. “Faith is the duty of every man, because we are put here to lead a good life in God’s eyes. You can’t persuade me not to be good. Faith is my bargain with God. If I obey his word, then when I die I will be liberated. The cycle of birth and rebirth will end, and with that, all suffering ends.”
“So faith will make you immortal and bring you into the presence of God?” said Shankara. “It sounds ridiculous. A murderer could practice piety, and by your argument, when he dies he only has to cry, ‘God, I believed in you. Liberate me, for what is one sin when I have so much faith?’”
“A murderer?” said Mandana. “You can’t equate such a sin with the life of a good man.”
“So being a good man means being without sin? If you are without sin, my dear opponent, don’t bother with faith. You are God already,” Shankara replied. “Ask yourself, why is this life full of suffering? Because men are ignorant of the truth. How does it serve God to have the faith of ignorant men? If you needed a house to be built, would you say, ‘Send me only those workers who have never built a house?’ It’s the last thing God wants.”
Mandana shook his head. “You can’t equate faith with ignorance. There are wise men who have faith. I imagine that you are one of them, or have you lost your faith by becoming so wise?”
Shankara looked pleased; he wasn’t debating a dolt. “The faith of the wise is different from the faith of the ignorant,” he said.
“Then grant me that mine is the faith of the wise,” Mandana shot back.
“I can’t.”
“Why not? Can you set eyes on me and instantly see whether I am wise or not?”
“I don’t need to. I will prove your ignorance to you. Let’s say you met a man who is selling amalaki fruit. You pay him, but instead of putting your fruit in a sack, he takes a scoop of air and, pretending it’s fruit, puts it into the sack. When you protest that he is handing you air, he says, ‘Have faith. There is amalaki in that sack.’ What would you say to that?”
“You know what I would say.”
“I do. You’d say he was a cheat. So is the faith of the ignorant a cheat. They pay for it. They eat it and say that it’s sweet. But what nourishment is there? None. How much suffering do they avoid? Very little. On the other hand, the faith of the wise is pure sweetness and nourishes the soul. How? By taking you where faith is meant to go. Faith is another word for hope. We have faith that God is real, because it is our dearest hope. I may hope for a child to be born to me, but until the child is born, hope flutters on the windowsill like a candle. It signals to God, but is not the same as reaching God.
“What does it take to actually reach God? Two things, knowledge and experience. The scriptures give us knowledge. We are told how to worship, how to perform our duties in leading a good life. More than this, we learn how to go inward to find the spark, the essence of God that is inside us. It is our source. Such knowledge, though, is only half the path. The other half is experience. What good does it serve you to know that a rose has a beautiful scent when you have never smelled one?
“Mandana Mishra, your house is full of hope for God, as an empty vase is full of hope for roses. Yet you can have the experience, and then your hope will be fulfilled. God wants to be felt, seen, touched. He is lonely sitting apart from us. In finding God you find your own essence. Life exists for no other reason. know that God is your self. At that moment you will awaken to eternity.”
This exchange was only the beginning. For twelve days the villagers didn’t lay eyes on Mandana and his wife. They peered in at their window to see if the wandering monk had done something terrible to the most devout man in the village. All anyone could see, whether by the light of day or candles at night, was the two debaters sitting facing each other on the floor.
As dawn rose on the thirteenth day, Ubhaya began to weep. All three of them were exhausted. Mandana had run out of arguments and resorted to repeating himself, mumbling feebly with heavily lidded eyes as sleep overtook him.
“It’s no use,” said Ubhaya mournfully. She was ready to declare Shankara the winner, even though it meant seeing her husband leave to become a sanyasi.
Before she could render judgment, however, Shankara raised his hand. “There is no victory unless I defeat your husband, but according to scripture, the wife is half of the husband. So let me debate you before you tell me I’ve won.”
Ubhaya was astonished, but she grasped at this straw. Everything that Mandana Mishra knew about God she also knew, but she had more wits about her.
“Does God want a man to have a worse life for believing in him?” she began.
“No. God is our own nature. He can only want the best for each person,” Shankara replied.
“If that’s true, how is it the best for my husband to become a monk? As a householder he gives alms, while a monk begs for them. A householder keeps the sacred fire burning; a monk shivers in the rain. On the road Mandana would face all kinds of dangers. You barely escaped death yourself, or so you say,” declared Ubhaya.
“You speak of danger to his body. It’s not the body that finds God or loses him,” said Shankara.
“I know my husband. He is meek. He will crawl from village to village in fear. Who can find God when he is constantly afraid?”
“Fear can be an incentive too. When you realize that fear is born of duality, you long to go where fear is banished,” said Shankara. He was reciting a holy verse that Ubhaya would know. “You are a devout woman; your husband is humble before God. Yet look inside. Aren’t you afraid that you may take one wrong step and then God will crush you?”
“Are you deliberately frightening me?” she asked.
“No. It isn’t by being more afraid that anyone conquers fear,” said Shankara.
When Ubhaya looked away without reply, Shankara went on. “The world is divided because we are divided inside. In everyone the same thing is happening. Good wars against evil, light against dark. How can anyone find peace in such a state?”
“I was at peace before you came to our door,” said Ubhaya.
“It was the peace of one who is sleeping. A prisoner who is about to be beheaded in the morning can find the same peace if he manages to fall asleep.”
“But if the world is created out of good and evil, that can’t be called an illusion,” argued Ubhaya. “It’s the will of God, who made the world that way.”
“You are speaking what most people believe,” Shankara conceded. “But reality is slippery. A baby cries with rage if his mother takes away her breast. That is his idea of evil. A little boy playing in the fields will hate another little boy who throws a rock at him. That is his idea of evil. A Buddhist monk will wait by the side of the road holding out his begging bowl, and a passing Hindu will spit on him. That is his idea of evil.”
“Yet for all of them, evil is real,” said Ubhaya.
“Are you so sure? Experience whirls around our heads like a swarm of flies. But there can be flies in a dream too. They are just as pesky; if they bite, it hurts and we see blood. But when you wake from the dream, your skin is untouched, and you know that the swarm of flies was an illusion. It took place in your mind.”
Shankara swatted at the air, which always had a fly or two buzzing around because of the sweet smell of offered fruit. “What makes these flies real? Your senses, because you see them and hear them buzzing. But they would be like flies in a dream if you woke up. That’s the only difference. You know how to wake up from your dreams at night, but you haven’t learned yet how to wake up from this world. You asked me if God wants the best for us. He does, and the best is to wake up completely.”
Ubhaya, who was genuinely devout, felt moved. But her panic over losing her husband was stronger.
“If Mandana follows you, will you become his guru?” she asked.
Shankara nodded.
“And a guru knows everything necessary to remove darkness?”
Shankara nodded again.
“But you are sorely lacking,” said Ubhaya, raising her voice, “because you know nothing of how men and women live together.”
It was the first time Shankara was taken aback. “I know they love one another, and God has shown me infinite love.”
“Men and women also lie together. What do you know of that? If you want to steal Mandana from my bed, how do you know that you haven’t deprived him of great bliss? And for what, a promise that you can lead the way to a higher world? You think it’s higher because a woman has never shown you any differently.”
It was a brazen speech. Shankara blushed and lowered his eyes. “I swore to be celibate. Whatever you are offering, it’s impossible for me to accept.”
Ubhaya laughed softly. “You say that it takes experience to realize God. Yet when this experience comes near, you run away. If you are so easily routed, why should my husband trust his life to you?” Ubhaya was an honest woman, but she could barely keep herself from stroking Shankara’s cheek if it meant that she might win.
He backed away, saying, “God wouldn’t deny me anything, and if this experience is missing, the fault is mine. Give me eight days.”
Ubhaya’s heart leapt with hope. “You intend to learn the art of loving a woman in eight days? All right, but if you experience bliss, you must admit defeat.” She stopped, knowing that Shankara had set a trap for himself. If he slept with a woman, he would be breaking his vows as a monk. It would be a sin for Mandana to follow him, no matter how clever his arguments were.
Instead of getting up to leave, Shankara said, “I will sit here and not move. No matter what happens, see to the welfare of my body. keep it warm. Protect it from harm, and pour water into my mouth when it gets dry.”
Although they were startled, Mandana and his wife agreed. For the next eight days Shankara sat with his eyes closed. He didn’t respond to sounds, and when his mouth was opened to pour water into it, he remained as motionless as a corpse. Finally, on the eighth day, he stirred.
“I am ready,” he said, opening his eyes.
“For what?” asked Ubhaya, suspecting a trick. “If you imagined the delights of the bed, that is more of an illusion than anything.”
He shook his head. “I begged God to experience the love between a man and a woman without breaking my vows. You saw my body in this room, but I wasn’t here. I was taken to the palace where the maharajah enjoys his many wives. For eight days I was inside his body. He is a vigorous lover, and his wives are skilled in every art. I have returned with all the experience you mocked me for not having.”
Ubhaya felt the ground give beneath her. “If that’s true, then you experienced tender, all-consuming bliss. In the throes of love, nothing else matters. If God wants the best for us, name something better than this.”
Shankara replied, “After he made love, the maharajah was exhausted and his spirits dulled. He was listless, like a man without a mind. His bliss sharply came to an end. I won’t speak of the other problems of the bed, the jealousy among his wives, the fear that he would one day lose his powers, the suspicion that women didn’t really love him but put on a show. But God offers bliss that is unending. It neither comes nor goes. Where I shall take Mandana, the fruits of divine love will make him forget the bedroom forever.”
Suddenly Ubhaya wailed and threw herself at Shankara’s feet. “I can’t bear to lose him! Why would God give my husband eternal bliss only to throw me into the greatest pain?”
Shankara replied gently. “The pain is not from losing your husband; it is from losing yourself. In this world the path of pleasure leads everyone to run after their desires. You have been fortunate. You could have been pursued by a man who wound up beating you or betraying you with another. Wisdom looks beyond today’s happiness. Tomorrow Mandana’s love could turn to indifference or even hate. Emotions are fickle. He could wither and fall sick; you might die in abject poverty. knowing this, wisdom rescues us. It restores us to our true self, and with that, fear is banished. For as long as you are subject to pain, fear is your ruler.”
Ubhaya bowed her head and let her husband go. They wept when they parted, and he looked back many times before she saw his figure disappear in the distance. It was the custom for a sanyasi to take on a new name when he renounced his old life. Mandana took the name of Suresvara. Wherever Shankara went, he followed; the years melted away and then there was a great shock. The master died at a cruelly young age, only thirty-two. They were staying in a village that barely appears on the map. Shankara felt feverish; the next morning he didn’t wake up.
By this time there were many disciples, and a crowd followed the body to the ghat where it was burned to ashes. Suresvara saw to it that the ashes were scattered over the river with a hundred floating lamps surrounding them, like stars gathering to mourn the sun after it goes out. The disciples scattered to the four winds. Shankara had foreseen this. He established four great centers where wisdom would be preserved until the end of time.
When young monks were presented to Suresvara, who became eminent as a guardian of truth, they was looked upon kindly, but with a little pity. It would take a lifetime to absorb the teachings of Shankara. To keep up their courage, Suresvara told a simple story.
“I was walking with Master when we came upon a filthy man in the road, an untouchable, and I rushed ahead, shouting, ‘Get out of the way! A Brahmin is coming.’ Not for anything would I have Master’s body be tainted by contact with an untouchable.
“But Master raised his hand and said, ‘Who is supposed to step aside? If it is this man’s body, you know that the body is unreal. If it is his true self, which is infinite, how can he move anywhere? He already fills all of creation.’ And with that, Master fell to the ground and bowed before the untouchable.”
Suresvara recounted this incident, because he remembered how he wept when it happened and how shocked he was at the same time, as shocked as the newcomers were when they heard the story. Untouchables were still despised; that was a rigid custom, the way society was set up. Wisdom would have to wait.
When Suresvara grew old, he lay on his deathbed and regretted only one thing, the fate of his wife, Ubhaya. His own life had reached eternal bliss; he had no fear of not being liberated. Yet this one hurt pinched at his soul. He breathed his last. The room where he lay vanished, the four walls melting like smoke. He found himself in the high Himalayas, alone, with snowflakes pelting his face.
In the distance a small speck appeared, and after a while Suresvara saw that it was someone on foot, walking in his direction. In a few moments a hooded traveler approached him. He removed his hood, but it wasn’t a man. It was Ubhaya, looking exactly as she did the day they were married.
Suresvara quaked and sobbed, “Can you forgive me?”
“What was best was best,” she replied.
“But not for you,” cried Suresvara.
“Shall I throw off my cloak and show you what I was reduced to?” she asked. He nodded, afraid to see her ravaged body and the rags she must be wearing.
In the driving storm Ubhaya dropped her coarse wool cloak, but she wasn’t dressed in rags. Her body was pure light, more blinding than the white snow that swirled around her. She was revealed as no mortal woman, but the goddess Saraswati. Suresvara reached to touch her hem, and at that instant they both disappeared. Bliss melted into bliss. He had used his life for the one thing that matters most. The high peaks looked on and rejoiced.
Revealing the Vision
In the East, God didn’t evolve as he did in the West. There is no punishing Yahweh, no biblical prophets, no redeeming Christ. Without those three ingredients, God’s nature could follow entirely different lines. It is only by accident that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are three, and so is the Indian conception of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. But the fact that three gods are responsible for creating, maintaining, and destroying the universe scandalized Westerners when they first encountered India, for the same reason that they were scandalized in China, Japan, and other parts of Asia. “The gods” meant paganism; the benighted souls of Asia needed to be converted to “God,” the one and only.
The charge of paganism is still leveled at the East, but with a twist. With enough force, you can conquer a country and make conversion to God mandatory, upon penalty of death. But in Asia people shrugged off the difference between God and the gods. They had been taught that material life was maya, an illusion of the senses. It hardly mattered if the illusion contained one God or many gods. When the scales fell away from their eyes, people would see the luminous reality that lies behind the veil of appearances. As their life mission, the great sages of India, China, and Japan gave directions for how to escape the bondage of illusion, which brought pain and suffering with it. If Christ taught that this vale of tears ended in heaven, Shankara taught that suffering ended with enlightenment. Since both paths eventually lead into the light, would Jesus and Shankara have seriously disagreed if they had faced each other in a debate?
That would have been purely hypothetical question for Westerners arriving in India three hundred years ago. Most paid no attention to Eastern spirituality, since it was all dismissed as paganism. But when it was examined, the teaching that life is a dream seemed like dubious metaphysics or else poetic license taken to extremes. There are times when all of us feel as if we are walking through a dream. Some of these are happy times—as for a bride on her wedding day—others are tragic—as for survivors in the aftermath of an earthquake. A trancelike moment could easily be a slipup in the brain or a lapse of focus. But twelve centuries ago, Shankara declared that our entire life is spent not understanding reality. What we take to be real is a walking dream, one from which we must awake.
Shankara was not trying to make people feel that their lives were worthless, though. He held that once awake, having freed ourselves from illusion, we could master reality. His arguments were so powerful that he conquered all comers in debates that ranged the entire length and breadth of India.
This is a topic that shouldn’t be restricted to antique debating contests or the sometimes bloody religious conflicts between East and West. Practical things are at stake—life and death, in fact. In one place Shankara writes, “People grow old and die, because they see other people grow old and die.” Outrageous? Not if life is created from awareness like a dream, for when you encounter any bad event in a dream, it vanishes as soon as you wake up. In a dream, if you contract cancer, you could be just as frightened as if you were awake. But if it comes naturally to dismiss dream cancer as an illusion, why are we trapped in waking cancer?
The modern South Indian guru Nisargadatta Maharaj was confronted with this dilemma once when a student asked him how to overcome the fear of death. This student was in great fear of mortality and urgently wanted an answer.
“Your problem,” Nisargadatta replied, “is that you think you were born. Whatever is born must die, and this knowledge gives rise to fear. But why do you accept that you were born? Because your parents told you so, and you believed them, just as they believed their parents. Look inside. Try to imagine nonexistence. You cannot, hard as you try. That’s because reality lies beyond birth and death. realize this truth, and your fear of death will be no more.”
The logic is impeccable and suspicious at the same time. What makes it suspicious can be stated quite simply. If you spend a day at the beach, soaking up the sun, idly watching other people, and occasionally cooling off in the sea, everything seems real; the hours pass and events occur. If you did the same thing in a dream, a day at the beach might take only a few moments as measured by brain activity. Once you woke up, you would realize that your day at the beach was an illusion because it all happened inside your consciousness.
Shankara is saying that your “real” day at the beach also takes place in consciousness. Physically, this fact is undeniable. All experience is mediated by the brain. You cannot see, smell, hear, touch, or taste anything without the appropriate brain activity. If you view a rainbow, your visual cortex is at work whether the rainbow is seemingly “in here” as part of a dream or “out there” as part of the real world. We cannot prove that the rainbow “out there” exists on its own. Shankara says that it doesn’t. To him, all external things are experiences in consciousness, and the ultimate consciousness, the beginning and end of everything, is a universal, absolute consciousness we can call God.
It might seem that Shankara is reducing everything to the subjective. Actually, he is raising awareness above crude facts. Experience is far richer than the data that science uses to explain things. In a court of law you cannot objectively prove that chocolate is delicious or why you feel that the woman you love is the most beautiful in the world. Yet that hardly matters. Only consciousness can explain consciousness. What we experience is real for us, uniquely and mysteriously. To someone with agoraphobia, a fear of open spaces, it doesn’t matter that open spaces are harmless or that going outside is a pleasure for most people. To the phobic person, anxiety is anxiety. Shankara is saying that consciousness is self-sufficient. It creates the world, as a sleeper creates a dream. The problem is that we have forgotten that we are such powerful creators. Shankara invites us to remember again.
We could veer into a long discussion about science here, because science depends entirely upon objective facts. Subjectivity is considered unreliable, wayward, and far too personal. But after all the arguing, we only wind up in Shankara’s clutches, because modern science has deposed the physical world entirely, which is his main point. Quantum physics has reduced the physical world to an illusion. Atoms, the building blocks of the material universe, are not solid, tiny objects. They are a whirl of energy that is invisible and has no physical properties like weight or solidity. In turn, this energy winks in and out of existence, returning to the void that is the origin of the cosmos thousands of times a second. In the void there is no time or space, no matter or energy. There is only the potential for those things—so what is potential?
To Shankara, along with the ancient Vedic sages in his spiritual tradition, the creative potential that gives rise to everything in creation can’t be physical. This includes the creative potential in everyday life. Let’s say that you discover that your four-year-old child is a musical prodigy or an extraordinary math whiz. As the days go by, his or her potential unfolds step by step, and you witness the flowering of a talent that began as a mysterious, invisible seed. When potential unfolds, it’s not like a bag of sugar that you steadily empty into a bowl. The more sugar in the bag, the more you can pour out. But there is nothing physical stored in the great amount giving rise to more and more creativity. Instead, an invisible potential (such as musicality or a knack for numbers) finds a way to emerge into the physical world.
God has done the same thing. According to Shankara, the only God that could exist is not a person, even a vast, superhuman person, but something invisible and yet alive, a kind of infinite potential that can create, govern, control, and bring to fruition everything that exists. This God cannot be limited; therefore, he cannot be described. Not that “he” or “she” or even “it” is correct. No single quality can define God, who like the air we breathe is mixed into every cell without being detectable. Imagine that you hand a yellow tulip to someone who has no knowledge of genetics, and you say, “What makes this flower yellow isn’t yellow. What makes it soft, shiny, and pliable has none of those qualities. It doesn’t sprout in spring or grow from a bulb.” The claim sounds preposterous until you understand the path that leads from a gene to a flower. In Shankara’s world, all paths lead from God, and all are in consciousness.
To name this all-pervasive source, the Indian spiritual tradition uses several suggestive labels. Brahman is the most all-inclusive, since it means “all that exists,” derived from the root word for “big.” To get at the impersonal mystery of God, the term tat, or “that,” is used. When someone becomes enlightened, three great realizations are involved, like three stages of waking up in the morning. The first is “I am that.” I am not a self bound by a body and trapped in the brief space between birth and death. I am made of the same essence as God. What is that essence? It can’t be put into words. It is “that.” This is a highly personal experience, as all epiphanies are. But Shankara isn’t bothered by the subjectivity of such an astonishing revelation. To stub your toe on a rock is just as personal, just as subjective, and just as much a product of consciousness.
The second awakening occurs when the divine is seen in someone else. “I am that” expands into “You are that.” This widening continues until the whole world is consumed, leading to the third awakening, “All of this is that.” Once the entire world is experienced as divine, one enters the state of unity consciousness. There is nothing that is not yourself, in its pure essence.
Shankara was established in unity consciousness; that is his claim to enlightenment. Can such a state be faked? Are there judges who can validate that it exists? Skeptics pose such questions because they don’t accept the first premise of the Indian spiritual tradition, which is that consciousness is all. By accepting materialism instead—the doctrine that all things and events have physical causes—we can agree on all kinds of things. rocks are solid. Fire burns. Pleasure is different from pain. You and I have a stake in such a world, so we don’t question it. Shankara declares that you must stop having a stake in the world, and when you do, you will be set free. rid of fear and worry, totally at home in the world, you become a child of the universe, liberated into a state of complete openness with whatever comes your way.
But what if you are the martyred Giordano Bruno, the Italian friar killed by civil authorities in 1600 after the roman Inquisition found him guilty of heresy, and what comes your way is seven years of torture before you are burned at the stake? Dreams can turn into nightmares, after all. What is the true way to escape? Bruno could not, for all his brilliance and insight. There are two answers to this predicament. You can either wake up from this dream called life or you can master it. Here we touch on the human face of God. God forces nothing and expects nothing. Captivated by illusion, or maya, people have devised an angry, punishing, judgmental deity. You can devote a lifetime—or countless centuries—to pleasing such a God and end up emptyhanded. You can spend the same lifetime defying God and still not escape life’s pain.
But if God is pure potential, things change radically. Potential is infinitely flexible. A God of potentiality doesn’t need to be obeyed, feared, or placated. He exists to unfold anything and everything. Our agonies arise because we do not realize the divine potential in ourselves, which can alter our fate. If you realize this fact, you may seek only to wake up from the horrors of the dream. In that case, your goal will be to return to the light, where total peace and complete absence of pain exist.
Or you could decide to fulfill your divine potential here and now. In that case, God becomes much more human. He embodies all love, all creativity, all the good possibilities in life. With this realization, you don’t seek to return to the light. Instead, you master the dream, a poetic way of saying that you expand your consciousness. Expansion is how false boundaries are dissolved. Psychologists recognize a kind of ultrarealistic dream state, known as lucid dreaming, that cannot be distinguished from being awake. While having a lucid dream, you are there, fully, with all five senses operating. Then comes the first hint of waking up. Perhaps you are immersed in a jungle adventure running from a tiger. You feel its hot breath on your neck when suddenly the faintest notion occurs: this is just a dream. At the same time, you know that no one made the dream but yourself, which is why it holds no danger.
Shankara describes a permanent state that is very similar, in which you fully participate n the world, but you faintly know that you are dreaming. This state of so-called witnessing is the Vedic version of what Jesus names as being in the world, but not of it. It’s a very desirable state, because you become creative instead of passive. Poised on that edge before you wake up from your jungle adventure, you know that the dream belongs to you. Suddenly you are an author. Some lucid dreamers can even reenter their dream, willing themselves not to wake up. They can do this because they are, after all, the authors of their dream.
In the same way, you are the author of your life. It may seem that all kinds of outside factors hem you in and deny your authorship: disease, aging, the forces of nature, social rules and strictures, and ultimately death. But Shankara asks a simple question that explodes these external limitations: Has anything that ever happened in a dream actually hurt you? When you wake up, the whole dream is gone. Tigers, lions, angels, demons, pursuing enemies, and voluptuous lovers. All share the same unreality.
Mastering the dream is good news and bad news at the same time. The good news is that you are the true author of your life, with the capacity to make anything happen. To arrive at mastery takes time. There are cautionary tales, like the reckless, unfortunate Giordano Bruno, who saw the light, but did not escape the dream. Shankara outlines how to undergo the process of mastery, using all the tools of Yoga. These tools are all about consciousness. They teach you how to use your mind instead of allowing your mind to use you.
The bad news? It’s not the prospect of failure. Once the process of awakening begins, it is unstoppable, even if you have to cross into new lifetimes to reach your goal. The bad news is that mastering the dream isn’t like being Midas. You won’t turn everything you touch into gold. The lure of riches, endless pleasure, power, and even saintliness starts to fade once you know that it’s all a dream. Unity consciousness is the ultimate mastery known to the world’s spiritual traditions, but it cannot be described in worldly terms. When the two domains of reality, “in here” and “out there,” finally merge, a new existence dawns. It is indescribable before you reach it, which is why there’s another saying that Shankara’s tradition insists upon: “Those who know It speak of it not; those who speak of It know it not.”
Making God disappear from the physical world is either a sign of progress, because it removes the self-centered belief that the deity must look and act like a human being, or it is a scandal, just as it was to the first Westerners, because you just can’t wipe God away like that. He will notice, and his reaction won’t be pleasant. What is liberation in the East remains heresy to many in the West. The only certainty is that God had more faces to show. Matters were not settled yet by any means.