23 Dec 2010
[Surya asked Swami ‘Some people are asking about the necessity of the preacher (Guru) since we can meditate upon God directly as Buddhists practice it’.]
Swami replied: People use the word ‘Meditation’ without knowing its exact concept. The word meditation means the intensified interest upon God. The interest on any item is generated by the knowledge of details of that item. Therefore, the knowledge of God alone generates the meditation. Knowledge cannot be obtained from scriptures directly without proper preacher. You cannot obtain the correct knowledge from books without going to the class room in which the teacher explains the knowledge present in the text book in a proper way. You cannot straightaway read the textbook and obtain correct knowledge without the classroom and teacher. The knowledge also covers the other two aspects apart from the goal, which is God. The other two aspects are the concept about yourself and the concept about the correct path to please God. The knowledge becomes complete only when all the three aspects are correctly explained. Meditation is not the concept about the path to please God. It only means your interest about the details of the goal. After receiving the details about God, you will be interested in God. When this interest becomes very strong, it is called as meditation.
Buddha is an incarnation of God and does not require meditation. He behaved like an ordinary human being to show how a human being should be deeply interested about God. The word meditation also indicates the process of effort to know the unknowable God. After spending a long time to know God, Buddha declared that God is unimaginable and the declaration was done through silence. Therefore, the silence about God means that God is unimaginable according to Buddha. Even before doing the long meditation under the huge tree, Buddha knows that God is unimaginable because He was the human incarnation of God. Then, what was the purpose of His dramatic meditation? He enacted the process of meditation to give a message to every human being that one should meditate upon God for a long time to realize finally that God is unimaginable. In this context, the process of meditation means the deep analysis about God. Unless there is intensified interest on God, one will not think so deeply about God. Hence, even in this context, the word meditation means only intensified interest. Buddhism indicates the surrender to contemporary human incarnation through the first statement ‘Buddham sharanam…’. The contemporary human incarnation is the only way to catch the unimaginable God.
Buddhists misunderstood Buddha by taking His silence for negation. The silence of Buddha about God was misunderstood and Buddhists felt that Buddha indicated the absence of God through silence. When you have concluded that God does not exist at all, then, what is the object of your meditation? If you say that the self is the object, there is no benefit in taking interest about yourself since you are always interested in yourself.
Your interest on yourself is natural and spontaneous and there is no need of any effort for it. By such meditation, you are not going to be blessed by yourself. Yourself is a part of the creation and is not the creator, who is beyond the creation. The Veda says that one bird on the tree is eating the substance of the tree and other bird is shining without eating it (Dvaa suparnaa…). This is the context of human incarnation in which it is said that the human body is the tree, one bird is the individual soul and the other bird is the unimaginable God. The human bird is a part of the creation. The soul is eating the substance of the human body or creation. This means that the creation, human body and the soul are made of the same common component, which is the inert cosmic energy. Since space is energy, the soul, human body and creation have spatial dimensions. The unimaginable God is not eating and this means that the unimaginable God is beyond energy or space. Therefore, there is no use when the soul, which is a part of cosmic energy, meditates upon itself or even upon the entire infinite cosmic energy, which is this entire creation. There will be use if the soul meditates upon the creator, who is beyond the cosmic energy. But, you may say that meditation upon unimaginable God is impossible. We agree to this point and the solution is to meditate upon the contemporary human incarnation with which you can directly interact. Otherwise, you can meditate upon any item of the creation as a representative model of the unimaginable God, but you cannot directly interact with God through this way.
The Practical Side of Interest is Sacrifice
Shankara advised meditation upon self, which means the deep analysis about self. The human being is under the illusion that the human body consisting of matter and energy is self. Shankara removed the concept of matter and concluded that self is only a bit of cosmic energy in essence. In fact, since matter and space are also different forms of cosmic energy, the self becomes a part of continuous ocean of cosmic energy only. In such situation, the self cannot be isolated and hence, the finite itself becomes the infinite ocean of cosmic energy. The word Brahman used by Shankara denotes only this continuous infinite cosmic energy. This cosmic energy is the source, controller and dissolver of the entire creation consisting of various materialized forms. This picture concludes that all the materialized forms are unreal in absolute sense and removes all the worldly bonds and the subsequent grief. The word Brahman in the philosophy of Shankara never means the unimaginable God, who cannot be indicated by any word. Shankara clearly told that absolute unimaginable God indicated by the word Parabrahma can be expressed through silence only (Maunavyaakhyaa…). The word Parabrahma means that which is beyond Brahman. Therefore, the word Brahman in the philosophy of Shankara clearly stands for the essence of the creation, which is cosmic energy only. The final use of this meditation is to know that you are this infinite cosmic energy (Brahman) and live without any worldly tension. Shankara was also a human incarnation and never opposed Buddha. He opposed the Buddhists only, who misunderstood Buddha and became atheists. According to Shankara, meditation always means the critical analysis about the self to get salvation from the worldly tensions. Due to the eccentric ego of the then atheists, Shankara did not go beyond this since the atheists would not accept God beyond themselves. This limitation is not due to limited knowledge of Shankara, but is due to the then existing situation of the psychology of the surrounding society. Even Buddha kept silent about God because the society dealt by Him consisted of Purvamimamsakas, who were strong atheists. Buddha told that everything including the self is only relatively real (Shunyam). This is correct because the self is a part of the cosmic energy or creation, which is relatively real with respect to the absolute unimaginable God. Buddha stopped at this point because the atheists cannot realize the existence of unimaginable God indicated through His silence. The point of Buddha is that if God is non-existent, the entire creation including yourself is non-existent. Shankara wanted to establish the existence of God. For this purpose, He made the infinite cosmic energy as God. He brought out the identity of yourself with the continuous cosmic energy and made yourself God. Since you will not negate the existence of yourself, you will accept the existence of God, who is yourself. Both Buddha and Shankara kept silent about the absolute unimaginable God. The same philosophy was dealt by them in different angles in different situations.
Meditation either means the analysis of an object to know its real nature or the attraction towards an item by remembering it again and again. All this is theoretical phase. The practical side and the proof of real meditation is the sacrifice of everything for the sake of it and continuous service to it. Practical meditation alone brings you the fruit. Meditation about self may give you salvation from the worldly tension. But, meditation about God brings you the eternal grace and eternal protection from God. Salvation can never be permanent and you may be bonded again. But, the grace of God is always permanent. You can aspire salvation as temporary relief so that you can concentrate upon the meditation of God. Salvation from the worldly bonds based on self meditation is always temporary and by the grace of God alone it becomes permanent.
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