Midnight Musings - Samsara

                                     

It is confusing. Hard to understand. Sometimes it feels like a tragedy waiting to unfold.

Adi Shankaracharya, in Bhaja Govindam, calls this world "iha saṁsāre bahu dustāre" , this samsara is exceedingly difficult to cross. Perhaps not because the path is hidden, but because the wrong path often looks indistinguishable from the right one. Adharma rarely arrives announcing itself. Sometimes it comes dressed as duty. Sometimes as loyalty. Sometimes as gratitude. And sometimes, it comes dressed as dharma itself.

Duryodhana's dilemma was one thing. Karna's was another. Duryodhana gave Karna what the world had denied him. Honor, friendship, recognition, and a kingdom. Out of gratitude and loyalty, Karna stood by him until the very end. Was Karna standing on the side of dharma? The Mahabharata refuses to offer an easy answer.

Vibhishana faced a similar dilemma. Ravana was his brother, his king, and his own blood. Yet when the moment came, he walked away and sought refuge at Rama's feet. It may have appeared as betrayal. Yet dharma stood with Vibhishana.

Perhaps that is why samsara is so difficult to navigate. The choice is rarely between good and evil. More often, it is between two things that both appear right, until time reveals which one was rooted in dharma.

And from what I understand If dharma is an afterthought, you were never aligned in the first place.

ūrdhva-mūlam adhaḥ-śākham
aśvatthaṁ prāhur avyayam
chandāṁsi yasya parṇāni
yas taṁ veda sa veda-vit

I have always loved this shloka from the Bhagavad Gita. It describes samsara as an inverted aśvattha tree, with its roots above and branches below.

Perhaps what draws me to it is not the imagery itself, but the confusion it captures. A banyan tree grows in such a way that, after a while, it becomes difficult to tell where it truly began. Branches become roots, roots resemble trunks, and what was once secondary starts looking original. Standing beneath it, one can easily lose sight of the source.

Sometimes the mind feels much the same. After years of conditioning, expectations, loyalties, fears, ambitions, and borrowed beliefs, it becomes difficult to know what is truly ours and what was planted there by the world around us. What is the root, and what is merely a branch?

Some of these impressions seem to arrive with us. Others are handed to us by parents, teachers, friends, and society. Like wet clay, the mind takes shape while it is still soft. Once the fire has done its work, the vessel may crack or break, but reshaping it into something entirely different becomes difficult. Perhaps that is why it is often hard to tell what is our nature, and what is merely conditioning that has stayed long enough to feel like one. After a while, conditioning no longer feels like conditioning. It feels like us.

This tangle of borrowed beliefs extends to our deepest emotions, and perhaps that is why love confuses us too. We inherit ideas of love long before we experience it ourselves. Some from stories. Some from songs. Some from watching the people around us. Truth be told, it confuses me as well. A few years ago, I even tried to describe it without using the word itself. I failed, of course. The closest I could get was calling it a whirlpool into oneness.

Looking back, I am not sure I understand it any better today. There is a line from Veturi's Manasa Gelupu song that has stayed with me for years:

దేవుడైనా రాముడైనది ప్రేమ కోసం కదా

Most people hear the love of Rama for Sita. But every time I hear it, I find myself thinking of something else.

I think of an Ishwara who takes birth as Rama, enters samsara, and bears all its joys and sorrows so that dharma may stand. Not out of necessity, but out of love for His devotees and all those who seek refuge in Him.

Perhaps that too is love. 

Not the love that seeks refuge, but the love that becomes refuge in the midst of samsara.