Beware: Culture and Tradition Are Not Your Best Friends
Acharya Prashant: If you’re with someone as a friend or a relative or a partner, would you feel okay if that person can fundamentally change any given day? To live, you require that which is not born out of influences, which is not a product of the human mind. Everything that is coming from the society is a product of the human mind, and it just keeps changing. If it keeps changing, then it will not be able to take you too far.
The purpose of spirituality is to give you the deepest inner assurance possible, the deepest rest and peace possible. And that you can get only if you have something, that is not man made, that is not a product of thought, that is not influenced or conditioned. And culture, values, tradition are not that. Not at all.
If you read about your culture or traditions, they are today in no way the same, as they were even just 50 years back. They have been changing. Note the word change. Whereas if you talk of the Upanishads, they take you to that which is unchangeable. The difference must be very clear. The difference is very stark. Culture is all the time changing, right? In fact, you get a new flick, a new release and you very well know that in its own little way, it changes culture, does it not?
This auditorium did not exist a hundred years back, but let’s say it did, would you be sitting here in these same clothes? So, things have changed, right? Look at the kind of food you eat today. Is it the same as what your grandparents used to eat? Your language, even your values? I’m pretty sure a few decades back we won’t have so many female participants here, right? What are you doing? Studying, engineering or business, education? What are you doing? The values of that time wanted you either to not to be educated at all or be educated only in housekeeping, right? So, things have changed.
Are you getting It?
I’m still to get over this. How are people able to relate the Upanishads or Gita to culture or tradition or values? There is just no relationship. In fact, the spiritual man, the man of Vedanta, the man of wisdom will have very little regard for culture, tradition, values, etc. If he has to value, he will value just that one that the Gita enjoins him to value. Does Krishna teach you to value a thousand things? Is that the philosophy, the message of the Gita that, value a thousand things? Value what your father told you? Value the kind of local customs, that are practiced in your region? Is that what the Upanishads or the Gita are telling you?
They’re telling you that you must value only the absolute truth. And beyond that, nothing is to be valued, right? And in this world, if something is to be accorded value it would be in proportion to the capacity of that thing to take you to the truth, right? If I am, for example, to value this occasion that value has to be proportionate to the intent and ability of this occasion to give us something higher, right? If this occasion fails to give us something higher, why must we value or respect this occasion? Must you? The value that you are according to this speaker has to be commensurate with the intent and ability of this speaker to give you something that is sublime, that has a timeless value. If only is this speaker able to do that, does he deserve some value, otherwise, he should be thrown out of this place.
That’s the message of the Gita. That’s what when Krishna says that you should leave all the Dharma behind and come only to me. What does he mean when he says that all the Dharma are to be left behind?
Mam Ekam Sharnam Vraj
What does that mean? That means, you know all these responsibilities and things of thought, thought and culture and tradition and value and whatnot and conditioning of a thousand kinds that you have given place to, in your mind just keep them aside. They don’t merit the kind of respect that you give them. Value just that one thing that I’m teaching you right now, that understanding is everything, right?
Blindly following this or that custom does not mean much. In fact, if you look at those who have been able to reform the society they were the ones who were deeply rooted in Vedanta. If you will go to the Indian renaissance of the last two centuries, two and a half centuries, look at the names you come across — Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Devendranath Tagore, D.K Karve, who are these people? Where were they coming from? Or Swami Dayananda Saraswati. Where were they coming from? Or Swami Vivekananda for that matter. Or Mahatma Gandhi, he too was a social reformer. Or if you want to take the entire spectrum then obviously you have to include Dr. Ambedkar, Savitribai Phule, Jyotiba Phule.
They were coming from their commitment to the Truth or were they committed to tradition and values and culture? I’m asking you, please tell me. If tradition, values and culture are to be accorded a great place, then we would never improve. Never. So, if people are going abroad and then refusing to read wisdom literature that’s when I’ll be alarmed. That’s when I’ll be alarmed. But if they go abroad and let their language be influenced or their choice of clothing, let the jury be still out. Obviously, I will not want somebody to turn a flesh eater just because he has left India and settled abroad.
But if you say that after settling abroad, you must behave and wear and speak exactly the same way as you used to do, when you were in Kanpur or Nagpur or Indore or Badaun or Hapur, that defies common sense. But if your commitment to the Truth starts wavering when you go abroad, then that indeed is a cause for concern. If the Gita was respectable to you as long as you are in India and once you land abroad, you shun the Gita, then I’ll be concerned. It’s the timeless Truth that matters.
Please understand. Everything else is anyway time dependent, is it not? Except the Truth, everything is time dependent. And that which is time dependent must obviously change with time. ‘Kalchakra.’ Only the Truth is Kalatit, Akal, Samayatit, as you put it. What’s the problem in letting the other things change? And if you don’t want to let things change, then let’s behave as we used to do in the last century, or in the 16th century, or in the 6th century.
Even the advocates of culture do not want us to go back to the 6th century. And if you think of it, the 6th and the 7th centuries were probably the last periods in history when India had a totally indigenous culture. Right? 8th and 9th century onwards, India started getting influenced from the Western contacts. In fact, I should not even say 8th and 9th century. Before the Arabs came, there were the Greeks, and the Greeks came 500, 700 years, a thousand years rather not thousand, 700 years before the Arabs. And then later on the Turks came.
So, if you want to have a pure culture, you will have to go to not to year 1800, but to 800. And even 800 will not be very pure. And all those who keep talking of culture and Indian values, the maximum that they want to revert to is 1800. My question to them is why 1800? Why not 1600, 1200? Why not the year 800, Christ era? And why not go back to the culture before Christ? How are you arbitrarily drawing a line and saying that you know, we must behave as we used to do in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries?
And even there, you want to behave as per your local custom and tradition. Typically, those who talk too much of the culture, talk of the North Indian culture. And they believe that North Indian culture is the culture of the entire country. So, look at what they are saying. They are talking of something very narrow in terms of regionality and also temporality in terms of time. They are saying, let’s go back just 100 years, not less than 100 years, not more than 100 years. And in terms of regionality, let’s limit ourselves to the Hindi belt.
What about the culture elsewhere? If you want to retain culture, then you must retain the culture that was found all across the subcontinent. And also, if you really want to retain the culture that existed in India in the 18th, 19th or 20th centuries, then a lot that you do today will have to be stopped.
From where has the trouser arrived? From where have the potato chips arrived? This was not happening even 200 years back. And I keep asking, chips come later, first of all comes the potato. From where has the potato arrived? Potato is not indigenous. Neither is the tomato.
If you want to limit yourself only to the things that belong exclusively to the subcontinent, then forget about chips and burgers and Pizzas and Manchurian balls. You will have to give up on tomato and potato as well. You use the kurta, for example, on all your religious occasions, don’t you? From where has the kurta come? Is the kurta really indigenous? If you talk of things that are exclusively to India; India, mind you, had very little tradition of any upper wear, neither for men nor for women, because we are a hot country. So, men used to wear next to nothing when it comes to the upper body. And women, too, used to wear very little. That’s the Indian culture.
Now tell me, from where has the ghoonghat come? But you talk of the ghoonghat as Indian culture. It is not. And you know from where the ghoonghat is coming. You know the tribes belonging to Arabia that used to practice parda. That was a cultural thing there. And when the cultural mixture took place, then that thing came to India as well, and you started using the ghoonghat. But today, if you locate a woman wearing a sari and practicing the ghoonghat, you will immediately say, “Oh! she’s a cultured woman,” but she’s not. The problem is that we don’t read, so we do not know. In the name of culture all that we know of is the stuff that we saw in our houses, till a few decades back. And we think that is Indian culture. But that’s a very illiterate kind of view of Indian culture. Just because your grandfather was doing something, how does it become Indian culture?
You know, what is culture? That which people practice is culture. That which people practice is culture. If a foreigner came to India just around, let’s say, 30 years back, he would say, “Chewing the beetle nut with supari and katha and tuna and spitting it out selectively on white walls is Indian culture.” Because that’s what everybody was doing in India, especially on the hospital walls. That’s how hygienic we were. Now, you’re not doing that, right? Why are you not doing that? Why are you defining your culture? Note the definition of culture. Culture is an everchanging entity, right? That which most people start practicing becomes the? That which most people start practicing becomes the culture.
You guys are little young. Those who have a few grey hair would remember the menace of the pan. You remember? Common buildings, government buildings, hospitals everywhere, just pan, pan and pan. How is that not culture? Please tell me. And do you want to retain that? Or do you rather want to improve? Please tell me. So, the great, good elements of culture must be retained. And how do you know what is good in your culture? That which leads to the Truth of the Upanishads and Gita is good. That which you are just blindly practicing is bad. It’s simple, is it not? It’s so straightforward.
