The Sage Returns: Vinoba, 1951
Presented on: Thursday, September 8, 1983
Presented by: Roger Weir
Gandhi
Presentation 10 of 13
The Sage Returns: Vinoba, 1951
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, September 8, 1983
Transcript:
The date of September the 8th, 1983. This is the tenth lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on Gandhi. Tonight's lectures is entitled: The Sage Returns: Vinoba, 1951. Mr. Weir's lecture will begin in just a minute.
In the ancient times when there were still traditions of wisdom that were unbroken from primordial times. That is to say there was once upon a time a condition of man where wisdom was in an unbroken line of transmission from the beginnings. And man lived like a primordial forest without any idea that he was wise. He had the capacity to continue in that motion of completeness and wisdom uninterrupted until there came a series of circumstances that produced a break in that tradition. The break occurred with the development of agriculture. And with agriculture there came the rise of urban civilizations. And with that came the idea of empire. And in most areas of the world the steadfast wisdom of primordial understanding was broken. there have only been really two areas of the world to survive intact, the American Indian and the India Indian.
And so when we come to Gandhi we come to someone who learned the tradition after he had grown up. He came into possession of his understanding and wisdom as a man already grown. So for him it was a great difficulty to be the sage. It was for him a constant need to discipline himself. Remind himself every moment at least daily. And to go on fasts quite frequently just to keep himself, as the phrase of one writer in the West had it once upon a time, in tune with the infinite. But with Vinoba we come to a different kind of individual. And though he is a continuum, the continuum, of Gandhi. He is a totally different sort of individual. He was raised in a upper-class Brahmin family who had the old wisdom, the old rituals, the way of life handed on for thousands of years. If not tens of thousands of years.
For us to form some accurate template of perspective to hold up to what I will give to you for this final month on Vinoba. We need to understand just a handful of basics from the old primordial religion of man. That is to say the original spiritual perception of man was not witchcraft. It was not some kind of a magic. But it was a perception of the infinite within the container of the finite. And for this reason as I have given from time to time the development of ritual forms was to create a sense of durational presence wherein the divinity could be perceived by a direct wholesome intuition. And those who kept the ancient rituals kept it not as an office of glamour or glory for themselves but as an unbroken tie line going back to the mists of antiquity. Even we could almost say to the archaic durational intuition of man. There were three qualities that were necessary to be kept intact in this.
One of them was sacrifice, which the ancient Sanskrit word yachna. Yachna. Yachna as sacrifice sometimes is translated in modern English as mission. As in capital M mission. someone has a mission. That is to say that a sacrifice is a duty which one must undertake to its completion. That there is no question of doing it halfway or 95%. It must be done a hundred percent. It is a mission. But the correct understanding is that it is a sacrifice.
The second quality to be kept is the old word dan. In Buddhism. the first perfection, first parameter is dana. And what it means is gift. Or charity as a quality. Dan is the relinquishing from here outward. Recognizing that there is a continuity and a flow. There is a responsibility. The term dan as charity should be understood as a mother in the child. The mother gives the breast to the child to feed. It is a gift of life for that child. She expects nothing. She would be appalled to think that she would expect something from that baby. So Dan as charity is a gift, as the giving of the mother gives the milk to the child. Dan is the essential honesty of the sacrifice. So that those making the agia (?) must have the integrity of the mother feeding the child.
The third element is tapas. Tapas is really to be translated as austerity. Tapas though is best understood from our standpoint as a discipline. It is a discipline because in tapas one hones in progressively to an athletic quality of the psyche where the psychic powers and capacities become translucent and allow for the spirit to flow unhindered. Unhindered by the physical materiality but also unhindered by the psychic powers. So that man becomes transparent in his highest transcendent self through tapas.
And these disciplines, these austerities, produce the experience that one is a sacred chalice carrying nothing of one's own able to receive all of the other. So that the yajna has this quality of giving and with the tapas it is formed to a purity. A bell-like wholeness. So that when the sacrifice is given it rings true. It rings not to the ear but it rings to the sense of wholeness. So that when we see a yajna performed right it is real. The lack of this reality is what produces all of the neuroses of the world.
There is a need for us in our time to study. And as Vinoba says, "There are other things which are not so much false as shortcomings. One of these is that many of us neglect to study ideas. We do not go to the root of things with the result that our thinking remains superficial. This has been an old complaint. When I refer to it I am not speaking of pure academic study without relation to work. But there are certain ideas behind our work that are very deep. If we do not study them and fail to realize their profound content then the inspiration which keeps us working begins to pale and fall away. The best way for us briefly to hold a mental distinction in comparison is that notions of our own making are conceptions and we conceive this way. But that ideas are eternal and divine. And ideas come to us from the divine. So that there is a possibility of a congruence between our conception and the idea. In which case we have the enlightening understanding of having seen it true clear through."
What Vinoba is talking about is the profundity of ideas not of conceptions. And as long as we move on a superficial realm of appearances and images, we do not think at all. The world does not prefer to us as real at all. So in order to ensure the sense of reality. The timeless wisdom. Called in sanskrit the sthitaprajna. sthitaprajna is the steadfast wisdom. And the steadfast wisdom is a Samadhic state that does not change. It does not fluctuate. And in order to emphasize this Vinoba in his great book The Steadfast Wisdom gives us in one paragraph the essential kernel of holding together sacrifice yajna, dan gift and the tapas or austerity and discipline together into a workable focus. Only the steadfast wisdom holds those three together. And the old ancient image was of the charioteer with the three horses linked together. And is only the steadfast wisdom that keeps the trika together.
He says of it, "It is necessary for us to understand the meaning of the word Samadhi before we can understand what Krishna says in the Bhagavad-Gita. This is a word which gives rise to much confusion. The self oblivion of meditation is commonly thought to be Samadhi. But this is Dhyana Samadhi." As in meditation or concentration would be better. D-h-y-a-n-a. Dhyana Samadhi. "If to be in the condition called Samadhi means not to be aware of anything but what one is meditating upon, there would be no occasion for any of Arjuna's questions in the Bhagavad-Gita. He would not know. Nor could he learn. He asks how a person in this condition speaks and behaves. Several commentators have for this reason divided their study of one who has the steadfast wisdom into two parts. The first concerns itself with the conduct of a person in a state of Samadhi. And second with his conduct when not in a state of Samadhi. Though this is ingenious it is nonetheless mistaken. For it overlooks the fact that the steadfast wisdom described in this part of the Gita is a different kind of Samadhi. The Samadhi that rises and recedes is the Samadhi of meditation, Dhyana Samadhi. The Samadhi of the person of steadfast wisdom is different. It's a different quality being the Samadhi of realization."
And if one would wish to give a word it is jnana Samadhi. J-n-a-n-a. It neither Rises nor recedes. The quotation is no spell can bind one who has it. This was the ancient saying. The idea of course is that it wasn't just the spell of a sorcerer but that the net of illusion seen from this level of sophistication is always a spell. Someone who goes into a samadhi from meditation frees himself but falls back into it. But the one have steadfast wisdom never falls. Never wavers. It is different. in other words it is a stable not a fluctuating state. The samadhi of meditation, Dhyana Samadhi, is fluctuating. Though it may last four or five days even. The possibility of its receding is always present. Jnana Samadhi is not like this.
So now we moved to Vinoba who has this quality of thought. This refinement of approach. and indeed we come to one of the great minds of all time. His beginnings, he was born in 1895 September 11th. He was born into an upper-class Brahmin family. Not far outside of Bombay. And as a little boy he was precocious. His father was a very wealthy businessman and so they were a well-to-do family. There were four boys in the girl in the family. The mother was extremely learned in taking care of spiritual matters. And so the household was rather well integrated. But growing up in the early part of the 20th century it occurred to Vinoba, along with all of his classmates, that here they were rather well-off. Indeed they were inheritors of an ancient tradition. And yet they were being treated by the British as if they were Sammis. As if they were just colored people like all the rest of the Indians. And this of course wore ill with the upper-class Brahmins of urbane Bombay. And so Vinoba like his classmates began to seethe in resentment as adolescents at this treatment.
And so Vinoba wrote when he was 15 a little diatribe against the British. Against the injustices and so forth. And he said in his writings, "India the golden bird of the East are you as you were still called in the last century, poor plucked bird? Who has done this to you? We've become the shadow of ourselves. Our own malicious caricature which stares back at us with ghastly grimace. For we are in truth the same people that once raised mountainous temples. They are still standing. But one of us now? We are the same people that used to take a mountain and transform it into statues. But one of us now? We're the same people that once radiated such knowledge and self mastery that the whole of Asia if not the world freely accepted us as law. But what of us now? Sloth, fear, ignorance. They explain everything that we are. And what has done this to us? A century of slavery. We are slaves of it as too but where is our master to be found so that we may leap at his throat. The Englishman is here but as though he were not. Every time the Indian would get at him he finds only another Indian who smites him. We are therefore our own oppressors in the name of another. Like the man who turning round slaps his own face because of the mosquito has flown away. This is indeed something to make us howl with rage. And the more we shout we proclaim our distress and become ridiculous to ourselves. And in this hubble of shame and self ridicule we are patsys for the British to move us every way that our compulsions come out. and so they toy with this," he says.
Well the well-to-do family of course did not like this kind of attitude rising among the eldest of the children. So young Vinoba and the several of his schoolmates were sent to visit an old brahmin who had done a little work with Gandhi in Camperon. And Vinoba went there with his friends and they scoffed silently at this old man who sat there with four split pieces of bamboo and arranged around as a spinning wheel. And he was spinning on his homemade charkha. And the boys thought how foolish. What an idiot. And the man without stopping his spinning said that he had heard from Gandhi himself that the oppressors are not out there but in here. And when they are gone in here they will be gone out there also.
So mocking this Vinoba, of course, felt that perhaps there might be something in visiting Gandhi himself. So he went with a visit. probably because of his mother. Whose name was Rukmini Devi. She always encouraged Vinoba to consider that God is real everywhere all the time. And never not manifest. And that the beggar who comes to your door is God. Therefore one gives food not to the beggar but one gives yachna in perfect dan to the divine. who was there in the form of that beggar. Well he decided that if there were any chance at all for him learning the mystery in this that Gandhi was the only one that could help him. And so he left his home. never to see his mother again.
He looked for Gandhi who at that time was in the Sabarmati ashram on the banks of the Sabarmati River near Ahmedabad. North of Bombay by some several hundred miles. And there he came across Gandhi and he was spinning my charkha just like the old man he had just finished scoffing at. And so he came in and being a wealthy educated young man, brash they are when they come from Bombay. He said I want to help India. I don't want to waste time. And Gandhi without stopping spinning began to talk to him. And he said after this war it is possible. that's the first world war. After this war is possible the revolution may come upon them. The revolution preached by their socialists and sung by their poets. Dreamed of and waited for by the world's poor. Then wage-earning dictatorship the police Army's monies and the machines will disappear. Hardly. But consider my spinning wheel. a full turn of the wheel is called a revolution. The revolution of the stars is a revolution of light. The whole universe spins. It makes a revolution. We've computed in the late 20th century that our galaxy has spun nine times since its constellated itself out of the primordial mush. Nine times is not very old. A full turn of the wheel is called a revolution. A revolution in man's history should be justice and goodness. a full turn. And this of course was the ancient meaning of the turning of the wheel of the law. That the Buddha turned the Dharma chakra. That he turned it one full revolution so that the completeness of all that is is manifested in that turn. And because that turn is a primordial unity it gives its impress, its emanation, to the course of phenomenal time-space. so that in terms of time and space it comes to be eventually inevitably because it was done right once. So Gandhi is telling the other man and my spinning wheel here is making a revolution. Here. and it is inevitable if I do it right here that it turns all of the world in time one full turn. And everything will be changed.
He said those who want to mock me and my spinning wheel say you want to put the clock back. But no my friends I am the most advanced revolutionary of them all. And I need only let the clock go on for it will come back to this starting point of its own accord. Time and space curve themselves around. If we hold to a center line and keep the revolution whole just like keeping the ritual in its perfection. The yajna complete. The dan pure. The tapas integrity with the steadfast wisdom. It has already done. there is nothing that can change it.
And so the young Vinoba listening to them to talk this way, setting his pack down, setting him his ideas down, setting his anger and his young intellectual restlessness down to listen to the man on the kahdi spinning. He says a revolution is a return to the first principle to the eternal. Some men cling to the forms of the past and the memory of the dead and they live like the dead. Others hurl themselves into foolish novelties until they plung into the void. I go forward without losing my way. For I am always coming back to the most ancient traditions through a complete revolution. A total but natural reversal willed by God and coming at the appointed time.
And I think we've mentioned once that there is a pattern of moving this way and then moving this way. That creates a presence. And by going through this motion completely a yajna once done that way has the effectiveness of a mathematical equation uttered. It has the power of the word of creativity uttered. It gives its imprint to phenomenal time space because the appearance is always change in accord with the formuli uttered correctly.
Vinoba then decided that Gandhi was to be his guru. And he began to ask Gandhi what he should do. and Gandhi said you should learn to work. So Vinoba began to applying himself in his first lessons at work. And realizing that work for Gandhi was this yajna. It was the sacrifice. The doing of work was the yajna itself. and that one did the work not to acquire possessions but in order to produce that which could be given. So that the work and the gift were all one motion. And Vinoba trying to understand this was put into the kitchen to learn how to cook. And it was the perfect metaphor for him. Because making the food was work for him. He didn't know how to do it at first. and yet everything that he made had to be given. And then it was eaten and then it was part of the people. Where was it? So it was the perfect metaphor. And understanding this was the tapas. Understanding it not just to conceive of it but understanding that this was a primordial idea made manifest by his teacher in the most mundane of all areas, the kitchen. And the keeping of the integrity of that. The keeping of one sense of discipline to that was the tapas.
And so as one would expect he became a very good cook. Gandhi used to say why my son does everything you make taste so good. And as he did this of course because he was doing it with the yajna, with the the tapas, with the dan in mind, he began to experiment with what you could change and what you could leave out. And eventually of course he began to leave out all the spices, the condiments. Finally who would end up with a perfect Gandhian diet. The well peeled mango.
His next excursion was scavenging. Which in India means cleaning the toilets. Now it was one thing for Gandhi to clean the toilets, another thing for a high upper class Brahman to clean those toilets. But of course Vinoba seemed to brave not only the smells but the ridicule and became quite dedicated to this. And while he was doing this over and over again he one day was noticed by a co-worker that he took from his neck the sacred thread, which every high class Brahman is given and always wears. And he took it off and he committed it to the fire uttering the words, the ancient Sanskrit words, from the Vedas of the sacrifice to Shiva. So that he took the link of his living presence of his Brahman tradition going back thousands of years and sacrificed that to Shiva. Because Shiva also destroys as well as creates in the same motion. This creates and also destroys the unity of the space. So the same motion. so taking that sacred thread out. So then he replaced his Brahmans thread by learning to spin his own thread from the charkha. And then began making his own clothes. and Gandhi could see that his student was understanding very, very much so.
So he had then to apply himself, once he began to wake up to this, to the realization that what we talked about in the colloquial world is charged and filled with meaning if only we can get to it. that everything that we say is just filled with meaning. And that it is only the profound attentiveness to the daily simple reality that can teach us. Because that is where it is. Everything else is wrapped up into the illusion, into the superficialities. And so spinning for him became as Gandhi the primordial meditation, if we wish to say. But really it was a yajna. It was an ancient sacrifice.
So one day they were spinning together and Vinoba was humming and then he began chanting. And he was chanting in classical Sanskrit because he was alerted Brahman youth. And Gandhi said what are you singing my son? Is it not the Gita? Yes Bapuji it is the Gita. I love the music, said Gandhi, but the meaning escapes me for I do not know Sanskrit. Will you translate for me. And the master sat at the feet of the disciple, as the disciple had sat at the feet of the master. And Vinoba then freely translating into English his own impromptu translation of the Gita. When someone was noting down in a community of the alert there is always someone learning from what you are doing. And eventually when you realize that you do everything as openly and as well as you can because you don't know who is teaching who. And it may be you teaching yourself. And so the flow of gracefulness becomes a characteristic of the real ashram.
This was his impromptu translation. "Work maketh us to grow. Idleness to decay. The body which lackth work growth feeble and is undone. Far from binding two things here below the faithful soul there is a work which sanctifyth that which is wrought in freedom from all desire. Even so do thou work according to the will of heaven." And so he began like this. And then Gandhi was absolutely astounded at the beauty of the young boy, do we say. Young man. The young man's rendition.
And so after that Gandhi used to go to him whenever he needed to have some Sanskrit word translated. And then he found of course that Vinoba was extremely adept at many different languages. And also adept at mathematics. He once to claim to a disciple he said next to God I most dearly love mathematics. And he would always read these very high mathematical excursion of texts. And he probably was a great aficionado of Einstein. Like I don't doubt that one bit.
While he was doing this Gandhi became filled with admiration to the memory and the capacity of Vinoba. And he realized that Vinoba had not told his parents where he was. so he wrote the father a letter. And in the letter he said you have no need to have fears about your son Vinoba. He is with me. he has already attained a spiritual perfection to which I myself cannot lay claim in spite of so many years striving. to a visitor who asked once who is that young man he said, it is one of the ashrams pearls. One of those who have come not to be blessed but to bless. not to receive but to give. So in this Gandhi felt that Vinoba probably needed to have a little seasoning in the world. And so he said to him, I want you to go out into the world. I want you to spend a year just looking around. Whatever you do is your business. Wherever you go. but I want you to see the world. I don't want you to be coming from your sheltered home to the sheltered ashram and not have this connection. This freeform wild connection of the jungle that's out there. And so Vinoba said, very well I will be back in the year.
And so as he went out he was talked about. And this is..he says, "When he came back a year had flown by exactly. And after prayers at sunrise Vinoba bare headed, barefooted, stripped to the waist, with his little noise as the breeze. It was Monday Bapu's day of silence." One day out of every week Gandhi was silent. Usually on Monday's. So Vinoba came in, said nothing, went to the kitchen sat down began peeling potatoes. And so everybody sort of starting to take note of him. And at breakfast Bapu looking and there is Vinoba coming in to him. And so there was a bond established at that moment between Gandhi and Vinoba. Quite an unusual bond.
An event was quite interesting because it's like the turning of the wheel of the law. There's always an effect. And if its wholeness if it's done right it has an effect that occurs in time-space but after a little while. and as those events begin to take shape, they take shape exactly into the form of the wholeness of the pattern that was offered and sacrificed. The on articulate understanding of this is voodoo. That one can go through an action and produce the sympathetic reaction in the world. This is truly black magic and stupid. But the real motion is that a wholeness is created. And this wholeness then translates itself in terms of an emanation of a pattern of completion that seeks to find a way to express and manifest itself.
So this coming back after one year exactly, this punctuality, this coming back to Gandhi, set up the situation that matured in the following way. There was a very wealthy man Jamnalal Bhaji and he came into Gandhi's ashram a couple of months later. And he said to Gandhi, he said I have a trap for you. I hope you don't mind if I spring it on you. And Gandhi I think was eating something. and he said yes what is it? And he said don't you think that your ashram here exclusively in Ahmedabad might be a subtle egotistical motion on your part. And Gandhi say yes go on. The man said, well it would be better perhaps if there were more ashrams around India to take the honess off. The preciousness away from just this one place. And Gandhi probably smiling a little at him, yes. So Bhaji said, I have a place in the center of India. It's a bare plot of land. I'd like you to consider which one of your devotees is most advanced. the one that is the cream of the crop. I would like to build an ashram for that person. And make all of my wealth at his disposal. whatever he would like. I would like to do this. And so Gandhi finishing his swallowing said I have just the man for you. And he brought in Vinoba who is about 21 years old. And the rich probably corpulent industrialist absolutely stunned at this boy. Because Vinoba has the habit of never combing his hair. In fact Vinoba was always seeming to be reading or meditating. And he was very frail looking but very tall. And so he looked like the gangly intellectual of the 1930s. Jamnalal looking at Vinoba, then realizing that Gandhi was not playing with him decided that he would at least give it a try.
So they went to get onto the train and Vinoba would not get in the first-class cars. He went only third-class. So Bhaji had to go third-class and he was thinking to himself well this is in keeping. This is how it should be. And so he was sitting there he looked down and suddenly occurred to him as it went to a mature man of used to having power and authority were lit. He's riding with a child, a kid, who's just staring off into space. So he asked him..the way that someone would ask sort of to make sure if they knew what they were doing. He, he gave him a quotation called the sloka, two line quotation. From one of the ancient Vedas. And he asked Vinoba to explain this if he could to him. And so Vinoba without looking up, still looking straight ahead, began the most elegant Sanskrit to explain this. And after about a half an hour Jamnalal Bhaji realized that Gandhi had not only chosen for him the most apt student but it picked his guru for him. And so he had this metanoia, this change, right there in the third class on the train. Because he realized that Vinoba was extraordinarily dynamic and complete.
So when they got to the center of India at this area called Wardha. About six miles south of wardha gandhi eventually would establish his Ashram Seva Graham. But in Wardha itself they established a wonderful little ashram called Mahela. Mahela ashram. And in the Mahela ashram to start it off there were the eleven vows of the Sabarmati ashram. I'll just give you the list. Later on after the break I'll go into them a little bit.
The first vow was non-violence or as we have said ahmsa. We started off by saying non-violence, ahimsa. And now I put the words together so that we don't say nonviolence but we say something direct. Ahmsa. Ahmsa is direct. Ahimsa is the correct literal translation but it's something negative. Ah means not. Ahimsa means not violent. But ahmsa is what we've been talking about. The expression of Satyagrahas.
Remember the flow? The flow is that truth holding, the satya. The satyagraha flows. It flows and it becomes ahmsa. Its the same energy. It's a primal force. But it becomes ahmsa and comes into manifestation when it passes through this yajna. This sacrifice that has been perfected. That only the universal energy passing through this particular form becomes purified and has the power to germinate and manifest in reality. And that without that yajna nothing is created, nothing occurs.
So this is what is meant by saying in the beginning was the word but the word achieves forms through the light of sacrifice and creates life. And so it is just in this way then that the energy of the universe comes in the manifestation and creates. And man by making the forms, the prisms of his sacrifice allows for the universal energy to manifest and become. so that ahmsa then is not so much non-violence but it's the creative power of manifestation from truth.
Question from the room: Is the form here ahimsa?
The form here is named for our understanding, sarvodaya. It used to be called brahmacharya for Gandhi then it changed and became sarvodaya Sarvodaya; welfare of all. It means not only of 90% but all and it means of all life forms: the plants, the animals, the people, of all. Yeah. The final yajna is the universe perfected. What will come out of that will be the manifestation of the wholeness of the divine. so non-violence was the first vow and you can see how these vows are tremendously potent and powerful.
The second one was of course truthfulness. You can't have ahmsa without truthfulness. They are the same motion. You can say that the one is the origin of the other. But in trying to conceive that we turn it around and we make it topsy-turvy. You know the mind like the eye turns everything around. It turns it upside down. And we don't understand the aptness(?). We think that the unconscious is in us. and actually the unconscious is the world, nature. And we think that our consciousness then comes from deep in us but it's projected from out there. But the mind registers, but that consciousness is a flow and is not the content of the mind at all. And so that the truthfulness, the Satya, comes from its grounding in reality. So that ahmsa is the force of the real. so that truthfulness, the second vow is held to the first vow by a structural into...integrity.
And the third vow so as not to bore you, is honesty. Absolute honesty. It's not something you get on your tiptoes to reach. But absolute honesty is the veracity of letting truth sink in so that you are completely filled by it. And when you are completely filled by it it's resonance into ahmsa is natural and effortless. Effortless. The cup that is full of water one more drop will let it overflow naturally, effortlessly. One who is filled with absolute honesty truthfulness and ahmsa flow without any effort. There's also no conscious registering of it. It happens.
Fourth vow was chastity. The fifth was poverty. The sixth was manual work. Temperance, fearlessness, respect for every religion, independence in the matter of money, avoidance of caste distinctions. These worthy eleven.
And it's interesting because avoidance of money became for Vinoba one of the primordial images of what is wrong with the modern world. This exactly is what is wrong. and so towards the end of his life the last 30 or 40 years he would not look at money. And they would not use money at all. And this of course became a very sore point with many individuals. Because they would say how could you how can you live without money. And of course he would say, we we don't need money at all. We don't need any of this at all.
And in one of the conversations with Vinoba the following conversation was noted down. Someone had asked him, do you think that kahdi and the village industries can solve completely the problem of unemployment? Vinoba answered if not 100% then 95%. But only they can do it. Question, but how are we to sell khadi? Vinoba, why sell it? Khadi is made for using not for selling. The question, but the villager needs money to buy other things. Vinoba we must free him from money. Oil, flour, sugar, cloth boots, pots, ropes, everything he needs should be produced, exchanged and consumed in the village. The village crafts did not die of their own accord they were killed. Our cabinet sets up milling factories. Is not this the ruin of every families industry? You first bring about unemployment and then you ask me how to provide work. In Govind Nagar oil presses are worked by oxen and they were in general use. But ever since the government allowed mechanical ones to be set up the village presses have been idle. The question, we allowed them because they were they are perfect means of production. Vinoba, I don't want your perfection. I don't want the perfection of machines. First provide work for everybody and then introduce as many machines as you like. But you are thinking that without factories ours will remain a backward country. Such are your magnificent postulates and they're based on the wind.
And the wind is keeping the idea that you have to have money. That you have to have an exchange currency between human beings in order to have an economy. And then he would go in and he would start taking the words like an economic problem and he would say this is a contradiction in terms. Economic implies an order. That somebody has a plan. A problem means that there is not working. Therefore the problem arises. That it wasn't prepared for. So he would talk this way and he'd go into it. And pretty soon what would occur to you is the notion that what we are doing constantly is spinning around using conceptions like money to buy and sell our versions of reality. Our opinions about conditions. And never once letting the real settle in and occur to us. because when it does the tone that is produced is the old steadfast wisdom. And what it automatically looks to, like the cup flowing over, is to flow where the sacrifice where the yajna was made. Like a universal energy form it goes exactly to there. And if there is no there it doesn't manifest.
Well let's take a break. I'll be down earning my living on the street selling tapes and then we'll go to the library after the break.
I always have 15 times as much material as we can work in. So I'm sorry to truncate this, but there are copies of many of these shorter volumes in the PRS bookstore. Um, the Nobel and Gandhi is a case in point, I, I think it's only about three or $4. Many of the Nova books are $2 or, um, the copy printings are very small, 2000 copies, 3000 copies, chapter six. And this is, I do not desire a kingdom. The inherent strength of India's culture was made manifest in everyday practice by God and DDT. You transformed the workforce forearms freedom into workforce services, mankind. He gave politics, a religious and spiritual hue so that the movement for Swaraj became more than a political movement with millions taking part in it. Some of whom had no interest in politics back who himself was not interested in politics as such now, who, even though he had to grapple with political questions right up to the moment of his death, struggled for a wider sedan, the quest for truth.
And of course, this happens so often where politics becomes the order of complication of the day instead of the yoga. And it's difficult for those who were nearer to the rough and tumble world of innuendos of politics to see in someone like the Nova or Gandhi, anything, but a naive person did the same kind of jaded people who think of Emerson as being naive or who think of st. Francis of Assisi as being naive. None of these people are naive. It's rather like you're saying that you really don't like Beethoven's melodic line because it doesn't have any rock. It's totally inappropriate way of experiencing what is there and what is there. He has of an integrity that at least common courtesy towards being somewhat informed human beings would expect you to lend yourself a little bit to the situation as it really is.
The difficulty with Gandhi was that he was so public. And the difficulty with the Nova was that he was not public very much at all until he was 56 years of age. I think the best way to convey to you this situation, I'm going to give you a couple of paragraphs from Hallam Tennyson's book on India's walking Saint. They called the no, but the walking scene, Hallam Jennison was a grandson of the great poet. Alfred Lord Tennyson, probably cultivated Englishman. And he and his wife had gone to see Gandhi in India in 1946. And they were unable to catch Gandhi because he was in Calcutta and someone at the Siva Graham ashram said, Oh, you've got to go and see if the Nova he's, he's the number one disciple of Gundy. So they went in this hot weather, nine miles out to where I've been elbow and it took them forever to get out of here.
And they got there at eight 15 in the morning. And somebody said to them, well, we expected you earlier. You know, at six o'clock, then Nova goes into stuttering. We don't disturb him after that. So how on Thompson says, because of the inordinate time, eight, 15, we didn't get to see anybody except they got a glimpse of somebody far into this port, this arcade with a white cottage Shaw on the shoulders, dental council here, and stacks of books around him. So they wrote him off as people who are traveling in their expectations, in the imagery that their conceptions give them right off the very core of what is happening.
Eight years later, they visited the Nova again under different circumstances because of his position, how long tennis got a half an hour interview. So in 1954, he went to see Winova because everywhere he went in India, people were talking about him by that time. So he went into this tent and he says the loo the hot wind that blows from the Western desert and gathers Dustin temperature on the way blazing through the 10th as if it were a malevolent deity loose from the Gates of hell. After sitting down, I found myself continuously mopping my forehead to present my spectacles from misting over with sweat. The legend, watch me with a gentle smile and said, people have criticized me for coming to this part of Bihar for our annual Buden meeting. Buddha means land gift, land church, but what does the heat matter when the heart is cool?
And I noticed that, although he too was wearing spectacles, he does not need to mock his forehead. I noticed other things, however, scruffy and undistinguished, one's immediate impression, all the uncontrollable things about him, the things which were unconscious and came from inside had an extraordinary grace and style and repose. The back was straight bamboo, the gestures ritualistic yet at the same time, natural. And then for us, the wrinkles States, once you had disentangled it from the beard was completely ageless. It might've been that of a man of 30 or 80. It was an effort to pin it down to prosaic 58 through it. It shown the eyes of the young man, gray, green, and twinkling. As if in patients, your breakout is a mask becoming to a sink.
I had stopped noticing thing. My interview was to last year, only half an hour. I had the whole agenda to get through. I came to my last question. He says, invariably in 1954, the question that interviewer ask of great people was what about the hydrogen bomb? However, unexpected the stage might be. I awaited nonetheless, one of the stock in getting reply about the hydrogen. Instead, there was a noise halfway between the chuckle and a sucking of breath. And Winova said, I don't believe God gave us such weapons merely so we can just dry ourselves. And even if he did, then I wouldn't worry too much about it. It might be helpful in making way for a more successful substitute. My half hour was over, but it had been enough to convince me that the man has been talking to was self-mastered and utterly given over to God under those few square feet of canvas, faith and serenity, he could be, felt like a field of electric force.
I stumbled out into the Dustin glare, found a bench in the village street and sat down then sniffing the traditional street, smell of sweat. And suite-mates, I took a swig from buying vacuum, flask, chlorinated, water, lukewarm flies, and children at once warmed, as they do for nourishment. I smiled at both exhilarated and curiously. How then as I slowly screwed the cap onto the empty thermos flask, I knew that no human being has ever had on me. The effect is this man has this, the space of half an hour. And he felt that impressed with homeless. It wasn't an idea so much. It wasn't surely a conception and it wasn't a perception. There was something else, something more something for Tom had gotten through, not just the heat of the day or the circumstance of the man's personality had gotten through everything to impress him with the integrity that he was, that he no longer represented anything but that he presented all. And that this was the quality that made the nose on the leader. Not that he was a political leader, but he was the manifestor. He was the one in which truth for us had become manifest.
And it's something that one knows and is curious about because one didn't really want to know that hadn't guessed that that was possible and yet occurred. And so just cultivated Englishman had to go back. And this time he went back, not as an interviewer with questions in his mind, but he went back there as a human being who had been taught by something he hadn't even known existed home. Or if you like wholesome nets as a quality, as a quality, and this was what then Elba really was all about. And in banaba his actions, he was attempting to find a way of life that had this wholesomeness to it.
And so he was giving up the normal flesh and blood and bones of society giving up money. He was giving up machine. He was giving up political action party structure, all the elements that were thought to necessary to carry on life, especially in the 20th century, he had gone in a very curious way down to one of the most neglected areas of India in terms of Gandhian contact and development in the center of India, his hydroponic state, which was a princely state up until late 1948, even after independence. And then he's out of higher bond was one of the richest men in the world, always prided himself on having 300 wives that he ran that soar and hydroponic city itself is, uh, I am telling you one of those elegant lands that looked like Disneyland. If you could imagine Disneyland with a great mind with creams, spawn, Islamic architecture and beautiful reflecting pond, and all of it owned by one man, it's mine, [inaudible] what's. Mine is mine and what's yours is negotia.
So the knees and my tighter about had held on the government of India actually had the send forces in. And in fact, they cooperated the Congress party cooperated with the communist and they got our enforces to go in and the needs of higher God being assured he could keep his 300 wives decided not to fight too hard. So it had been sort of uncontacted and yet, because the Nissan was out of the way the Caviness had not put their guns down, they had hidden them and started them to undertake this program of taking over Hyder about steak. And it was in a great confusion in the poorest part of hydro bod state was an area known as telling Ghana very poor, very anxious filled with people who have the most fatal of all lures, the promise of instant redress that doesn't happen today. And so they found it hard to sleep that night because they should have better condition. So in this turmoil, they group that had formed after Gandhi had died two months after he had formed, they made a fellowship of the ring. They were going to call it the Satyagraha mountain dollar or the men dollar, the Satyagraha circle. But instead calling it that they called it the sarvodaya semis, the brotherhood of the welfare of all. It's just like in fairness, there really does happen to be a brotherhood of good mind, always somewhere.
So the [inaudible] had held a meeting or two annual meeting or two. And so they were going to hold this annual meeting and hydropower to highlight the fact that the Gandhian solution could go to the heart of the worst problem of the day. Well, the Nobel had said that he wasn't interested in committees didn't believe in it. He wasn't going to attend. So the shock, the gun, DNS, many prominent guns who by now had become position people, Christian, ready. He faced the same thing in Ohio. It all was just owned his own foundation. They, they get to where they have the ledgers and the authority. And what are you doing here on our terrain? No, this is art that, and it's worse when it's in a spiritual or metaphysical institution, because it's not only in bad taste in general motors, but it's absolutely out of place and other organizations, but they're creeping in. So the Nova didn't want to play. He doesn't play games and he's very, he was very good at picking out the very elements that are toys for people and laying them on the table of discussion and pointing them with great preciseness in his language. And then saying, is this what you want me to do?
So he wasn't going to go. So they finally said, well, we're going to have to cancel it. So he sat quietly by report this meeting for about 10 minutes and he looked up and then he said, I'll go. But what he meant was I will go not, I will go to a 10, but I will take whatever I am, because I don't know how to carry on since Gandhi's yet, we haven't done anything really effective. He had gone to Delhi for a few miles. He had given the annual, the prayer speeches in Delhi for awhile. And he could see that people were making him fit into the shoes of the math, nice pair of speeches, filling in. You've got a substitute. He couldn't do that. So he'd let that go. He let a dozen things go. And he was looking for something to manifest on the set. He had kept intact like Joe, his Satyagraha never let go of it, but there was no current, there was nothing manifesting. And so like a real timeless hermetic seeker, like a real Rishi, instead of having a plan in his mind, he took all that. He was and put it in motion and whatever would happen would happen. And so he began to go to higher bod by walking hundreds of miles.
He said, once that walking as the correct pace of thinking that the alternation of feet, it's just the right rhythm for thought and that long walks and by long walks, he means hundreds of miles. You purify your thoughts. There is a second wind that comes and mentally also only, instead of being reinforced by more conceptions, it gets tired of having conception. So it just, it and presents awareness. And then after awhile, you lose track of it because there's no way to calibrate the sense of awareness. And when that goes, then clarity seems to just occur. And so that's what he was doing and all the way he was walking to hide her body, he set for himself a tone, sort of like a pitch to get the music going in the right cake. And the tone was there must be some motion of manifestation of Oxo for SAR, for Daya. They must be some way to move something to do.
And when he got to hydro, Oregon state, he was in the telling Gunnar region. And there was a little village way out of the way, a European, uh, uh, named Alonza, who went there, said that there was no road there that you had to drive over shields really. And there were Palm trees and scrubs and lots of water, very few crops, and the villagers were impoverished, but in a colorful way, they have the beautiful, colorful turbans. And they, women had all of the bangles and jewels and everything. So they were poor, but they had lots of things. Winola used to say of six sets of Iranians that the women were varying the burdens of the husband's sin, all this wealth accumulated for nothing for shell.
So we got to this village and the brothers who were holding all the properties, one of them very pompous, kind of the largest sort of individual who was always proud of showing his workers' hand to people flailing and these, these big leathery shovels of hands and saying, well, I've worked so he could justify it to himself holding on his property and finally sitting with Winova the villagers, the untouchables, especially the, her region, some 40 families who were starving to death had asked her no, but to do something. And Sonoma had taken this problem in, and in the midst of all this flailing and camaraderie, you sat there and the host noticed that he was crying and this cup true, just penetrated through his very bad form to let us to even see a Rishi crime, but in your house. So he stopped the charade. He stopped all of the acting even to himself.
And in that moment, didn't know the looked up to him and said, I want land for the passage. I want you to give the land to me and I will hold it in trust that it was true. It was true. And the man gave a hundred acres. He didn't give it because he thought of it. He gave it the Don mode because the Nova had gotten through to him. He created the sacrificial moment and that man responded because it was the effortless right thing to do. And he took that a hundred acres slip had it notarized right away because the Nova was sure, went out to these four or 5,000 people I had gathered. And that was the beginning of the manifestation of onset in the form of land gift, mission, blue Dawn Yasmine. So volume I had about 15 years ago, his first little book published was called Fudan land gift mission, or really what it means is the sacrifice that allowed for this to happen.
And he says right here in the beginning, my dear fellow countrymen, I was touring Telangana during the summer of the last year. All the while I was thinking of the grave problem, confronting the people there at one place at the request of local heart regions to get some land for them. I asked the village people to donate sufficient land for them, the people as seated to my request and I received the first boom went down that day. This was on the 18th of April, 1951. This is how the idea of Boomi Dan yachtsman, that came to me. And I tried it during my Telangana tour. It gave encouraging results. Within a period of two months, I received about 12,000 acres of land, 12,000 acres.
Within a few years, he had received 4 million acres of land and become the largest technical landowner in the world. 4 million acres is like Connecticut and Rhode Island and several other parts of long Island. And he went on for 30 years. This is quite a story I had been trying to find some field for experiments with nonviolence, since gun DJ's death. I took part in the work of rehabilitating, the meal Muslims with this very idea was a good experience and encouraged me to go to in Ghana. I saw there the vision of sir, in the form of Butan yachtsman, that is to say he was not looking for an intellectual forum.
He was looking with his whole intact to find a congruence in activity that would allow him to manifest the homeless. So he was holding yes, offering the wholeness that he had in trust. And he was looking for somewhere to have that soul force, that energy take manifestation in order for it to take manifestation. There had to be a response from the others, from the physical world, they would make the challenge through their gift. And he would put in the wine renewal from his home and together coming together would make the event and the event thus made with that magic invol would become real in the sense that it would not only exist there for those people, but would resonate for everyone else that would come into contact with it.
And so he began walking, not only from telling God, but then he walked North to new, new Delhi. He walked all the way over to the historical land of the Buddha in Bihar and went around and book Gaya. And I have a lot of that story recounted, but I want to give you a hair, his description of sorrowful Daja and he writes this way. This is in a little book called cerebral diet it's principles and programs cost 40 cents. We've got a copy from the bookstore 40 cents. The servo diocese is like an ocean. The depth of which no one has yet found them, but it isn't ocean of nectar in which there is no fear of being drowned to death.
One can swim in it without any misgivings. It is vast in every direction. One may leap into it singly or in the company with others, keep on the surface or dive beneath and stay in it. As long as one pleases, the [inaudible] is free from organizational control. There is no extra authority. And this was the key. He said that all isms in our time are going to flow into this ocean because this ocean is not the product of a conception, but isn't an eternal idea that manifest naturally when the truth soul for us vibrates through a social structure and that, because they had seen this in actual fact time and time again in conditions that difference so radically that it was obvious finally, that it was a happening, not because of individual conditioning, but that it was a universal idea that it is true in a real way, in the eternal way that once man creates a social form of integrity and allow us soul force to flow through it, it will produce this ocean of brotherhood. This sorrowful diastema, which eventually is not composed of members, exclusive of others, but of all man mankind that's the whole notion of authority goes out the window. The whole notion of organization and bureaucratic terms is meaningless.
And because it's meaningless, then of course, everyone who earns a living or earn their sense of egotistic reality through their positions in this, through their participation in this would be against it naturally, naturally you would expect, he says, talking about the words, the meaning of the words down, the meanings of the word done used, and these yachts must be clearly understood. Don has so far met. One's giving something to the other as an act of petty or spending something for the sake of one's own good in the other world. However, Vinobaji is using it in a different sense. He tells us that Shen Kara Charia has defined Don as equitable distribution, equitable distribution. It means a distribution based on justice and equity, as one finds among the different members of a joint family.
It is this sense of equitable distribution that had Vinobaji employees that were done. Now, when you think of equitable distribution, if you're thinking of mankind as a whole family, then the equitable distribution can no longer be parceled out for this group or that group, but the entirety of the earth is for all. And so one of the great chats of the Nova was giant. You got victory to the world, not to someone's conception of it, not the world as an empire, not the world as an authoritarians structure, but the world as the whole natural theater for this family to manifest itself. So the equitable distribution, so that Don all of these words began to have a cosmic resonance in Vinoba's usage.
But in order for this to appear, understanding Vinoba time and time again, would go into the basic fundamental, for instance, how is wealth created? How is, how, how are things, how is this done? How did we come by? Well, it would be appropriate to consider first as to how wealth is created. It is wrong to regard gold or silver, silver money and metal and paper currency as well. There are only tokens as well. Wealth consists of only those things, which man can actually consume in one way or other while some among them are such without which men cannot even exist. Some are meant only for pleasure and luxury man, basic necessities are food, clothes and house without which he cannot live. Besides there are other things without which men can not get on very well. These now, how are these articles called wealth produced? They have not come by themselves.
You are, they dropped from the sky. None brings them with his girl. On the other hand, birth gives rise to some necessities whose fulfillment requires constant exertion and struggle. All these articles of use are products of the physical labor performed with the different materials found in nature. Thus, there are two main sources of wealth, natural material, and man's own physical labor. And again, these come together, these come together, some articles seem to be produced by machines, but these machines are in turn the product of physical labor as the operation of machines to require physical labor in some form or other. So what he's getting around to is that if our labor is considered in terms of a sacrificed AI, then whatever we're doing will carry that impress of homeless with it. That, yeah, that topic is we'll actually go into it. And that eventually more and more people doing this, creating, manifesting with that topless, with that done with that yet.
So that the steadfast wisdom will come back into manifestation, not in an idle, not in an idea in the mind, but in fact, in the so called wealth of things that are made and produced, and they will then have the reality, which will resonate, they will resonate. So he says, given this perception of, well of think, what can we do? The only thing we can do then is be trustees of this. Well, we can't own it. How can we own it? How can we own this dead guy? How can we own the topics that has been put in? We cannot so that the notion of trusteeship became paramount for his thought.
He says, we use a very small part of our wealth for our own benefit when you actually think of it. Most of it is employed for big industries, which cannot be run without large capital, which produces articles for mass consumption. All our enterprises provide employment to many people who would otherwise have domains of livelihoods, not square or rendering service to society in a way with our wealth. Yes, we allow for hoarding. It tends to bring this whole process to a standstill so that we need to have this notion of trusteeship. And in this, then there as a sharing called sampati, Don the sharing of wealth in the sense of sharing of land and like Fudan yachts, you know, there's some poppy down sharing ones. Well, one sixth of the income was the, um, was the code. And along with this, then there was a sharing of intellectual capacities.
All of these then began to have terms applied to them. And as, uh, the Nova went on in his work, there came finally an assessment about 1959, 1960 called servo Daya after Gundy. The very fine study that actually, uh, I think only had 3000 copies printed in it. And in the study, it occurred to people by the late fifties when the Buddha yashuna movement had created, uh, so many, uh, small villages, they were called Graham. Dan Graham is a village. The gift of whole villages was being made instead of just the land. The entire village was being given not so much by wealthy landowners, but by the people themselves, the community of say 500 people or 700 people or a thousand people would get together in the evenings. And they would talk this over through months. And then they would decide that the entire village would give themselves to this movement and that their village, then it would be considered a granddad.
I was village gap and that the entirety of the village then would be run in a way where has been Elvis said what you can produce you and what you can produce. Don't cover it so that they would take this village out of the economic structure, where they needed money, the economic structure, where they needed a Thorazine and out of the political structure where they needed something from the state or from the national government. And so of course, when they wouldn't ask for anything, uh, they would receive no attention. All of this would be written on, well, we'll see, as we go on, that has the number of grand. Dan began to rise into the tens of thousands, began to create a real problem for those in authority, because if they don't need your authority, what good is it? And if they don't need anything from you, how are you going to control them?
And if they're acting in truthfulness so that when you threaten them or talk to them or bake them, they educate you. You have trouble finding the right people to send to them, to convince them that they're doing wrong because the people don't come back. They stay in the villages, they weren't, they joined. So as he became successful, the Nobel became a problem for the government of India. And one of the real great heroic figures of 20th century India, a man named J a percussion Ryan who used to be a Marxist bomb throwing radical in the thirties. And he was also a very flamboyant character. He was sort of the Johnny, Weissmuller a real handsome devil. That's sort of a here. He wrote a forward to this. And then he said, revolutionary and pathfinding thinkers in history have usually been followed by near interpreters. Systematized analysts.
There have been rare exceptions. The Nova is such an exception in the case, had gone through the others. And I include myself among them have elaborated and elucidated and interpreted, particularly in terms of conditions and problems with independent India, another world since Gandhi, but the Nova has experimented and innovated thereby saving Gandhian thought from becoming Pontifical and I'll throw a Tatum and it preserves its creative, adventurous, its boldness. And in this boldness, the Novo began to actually manifest a new world order. And then the next three lectures will be able to take a closer look at that. And I think it might be of interesting, uh, of interest to you. Maybe I should save it for free. Next to me, I'll say if some of this for next week, where are they?
The problem with Vinoba was that he was extraordinarily intelligent. He had had enough time to learn all these languages. He could speak to everybody in their own language. He had read everything there was to read worthwhile. So when people began to argue with him, you know, they knew what they were talking about, but he knew all the different logical forms. And he was a master of mathematician. He was able to take what they would say and show how shallow their thought was. And not only that, how shallow their expression when he finished, usually people were reached, goes to this, almost the silence. And then he would smile at them and ask them to make a gift or something for the poor. So he becomes more and more a...
END OF RECORDING