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Musings on
immortality MY esteemed mother, although a semi-literate middle class woman had a knack of using proverbs in her routine conversation, as best as she could. A veritable store house of these proverbs, she would extract them at will and exploit them to authenticate her point of view. One of her most pet aphorisms of which she took advantage, of, more often, was — Maran mool te jeevan labh, which meant: Death is the reality and life is only a profit. I never took it so seriously during my childhood, but as student of Sanskrit which was, of course, my primary educational stage, I learnt that the appropriate term to identify man was martya the etymology of which stood as "maran dharma" i.e. — to die is man’s characteristic — his basic nature. The other day when I pondered
over this idea, I was reminded of our latest Nobel Laureate who was christened
by his ancestor Rabindranath Tagore, another Nobel Laureate, as "Amartya
Sen". Tagore was a seer and he must have visualised that the budding sprout
was tomorrow’s oak. Martya will turn into Amartya, which means
to become immortal. Whatever the seers say becomes a gospel truth.
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Take the case of Taj Mahal. It was a great event when Shah Jahan constructed Taj Mahal as a memorial to his darling queen Mumtaj Mahal. It was such a unique experiment of art and beauty of those times that it could easily find its place in the pages of history. The Taj Mahal has been attracting the imagination of poets, thinkers and many others alike. Rabindranath Tagore’s comment that it was a tear on the cheeks of time spoke volumes about its perpetuity. It was a big surprise for Sumitranandan Pant, a great Hindi poet to find death being worshipped and eternalised on such a large and liberal scale. Immortality — mokshya or salvation as it is termed in Hindu scriptures has been an incessant quest of man since times immemorial. The ancient sages used to meditate and practise religious austerities throughout their life to attain that blissful stage that is believed to be the perfection of human life. It is difficult to measure in words, the peace, sublimity, happiness and joy that moksha or salvation provides. One stays with God or to be more precise, one is immersed in God. According to the Srimadbhagavadgita, mukti or deliverance is for ever. Some sages, for instance, Swami Dayanand Saraswati treats salvation as a temporary stay with god. Salvation, no doubt, is like roses, roses all the way but sometimes, although it is rare, you could be bruised by thorns also. The story of King Bhartrihari could be cited in this connection. As ill-luck would have it, the fruit of immortality slipped out of his hands and he had to swallow the bitter pills of deceit and treachery. Being humiliated by his immoral and debauched queen, he had to abdicate his kingdom and embrace monkhood. No doubt, he did earn immortality in the end by sheer dint of his divine poetry but not because of his role as a king. If we peep into the past roughly prior
to Kaliyuga, there was no dearth of sages, kings and warriors who
attained salvation. Salvation was not so an uphill task as it is now.
Vishwamitra, who subjected king Harishchandra to untold miseries in Satyayuga
was still there in Treta-yuga when he taught the science of
archery to Rama and Lakshmana. You can find Narada running about with
his lute in all ages. Bheeshma, the great hero of Mahabharata
kept death at an arm’s length for a period of six months and breathed
his last at will. The seven sages, it is said, are still alive. It is
also true that no one has seen any of them till today. It is perhaps
like the myth that Subhas Chandra Bose and Bhindranwale are alive and
would appear at the proper time to give their admirers a pleasant
surprise. |
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