In the previous episode, we started with the story of Yajnyavalkya and his scholarly wife Maitreyi. Though Yajnyavalkya wanted to part with all his wealth and give it to his two wives, one of them namely Maitreyi was not interested in wealth. She asked him a profound question.
“Can all riches in the world give me lasting peace?”
Maitreyi was more interested in lasting peace and not in any short term happiness.
Many of us acquire wealth for leading a comfortable life. But being a Brahmavadini, a person interested in the ultimate, Maitreyi was not for short term happiness. She wanted eternal happiness.
Yajnyavalkya replied that worldly riches cannot give lasting peace. They definitely give happiness for sometime but that happiness would not last for long.
Maitreyi had her eyes set on eternal peace and she was not interested in anything less. So she rejected the wealth offer and asked her husband to tell her that which would give her eternal happiness. She knew that her husband being a great sage. Knew about that. She was interested in only that and not his wealth. She said
“What do I do with the wealth that does not give me eternal peace? I am sure you know that which can lead one to eternal happiness. Please advise me on that”.
Yajnyavalkya was very much pleased with his wife’s choice. He took her through a step by step discourse that ultimately led to the answer. He said
“No one loves anyone for the sake of the other. Everyone loves for one’s own sake, whether it is wife, husband , son, daughter, religion, nation, God, scriptures and so on.
In the ultimate sense, whatever we do is in our own interest. We rarely do anything for the sake of others.
That being the case, we should first understand who is this ‘we’ for whose whose sake we keep doing everything.
This ‘we’ is not what is apparent. We need to know it more deeply. The only way to know is by listening to the people who know about it. Understand what we have listened to and finally meditate on it.
Only when you listen to the right person, understand what that person has said and meditate on it, do you realize what this ‘we’ is all about.”
Yajnyavalkya continued to describe the way one can know this ‘we’ which is quite different from what we normally assume and for whose sake we do everything in our endless hunt for happiness.
We normally assume that ‘we’ means an individual as represented by our physical body, our personality, our personal image about ourselves, and so on. Is that really ‘we’?
Yajnyavalkya says that
“What we assume as ‘we’ is only a form taken by the ultimate reality or the Brahma. We are not separate from that Brahma. In fact, everything – the beings, the worlds, etc. are all nothing but various forms taken by the Brahma itself. There is nothing else but the Brahma.
One who does not know this, he has not understood the reality”.
But how can the varieties of things we see all around us can be the same Brahma? Don’t these things look different? How does one infer that the essence of whatever that exists is nothing but the Brahma itself?
We will see that in the next episode.
A
story of Yajnyavalkya and Maitreyi from Brihadaranyaka Upanishad,
which is part of Yajur Veda. Upanishads are concluding parts of
ancient Indian Vedic scriptures believed to be at least 5000 years
old. The interpretation is by Dr.King (Copyright © 2019 Dr. King).
No comments:
Post a Comment