Enquiry before Devotion || Acharya Prashant, with IIM Nagpur (2022)

Questioner (Q): Acharya ji, few days back, there was an event at our house. It was a small temple of Hanuman Ji that was installed in the room of a factory. And it was an elaborate ritual process; there was a Havan, it was followed by recitation of Sundarakand, and there was a decent-sized gathering of family members, and other business people. At that time, I thought, do they really believe in all that?

Acharya Prashant (AP): We require both enquiry and faith. I will explain with an analogy. You want to gather diamonds, you want to gather as many diamonds as you can, till you reach the biggest diamond of them all. And you’ve an entire field, full of all kinds of stones, in front of you. What do you do then? First thing is, you enquire, because there are so many stones, right? So, enquire which one is a diamond, and which one is precious. You reject a lot of things and then you keep one thing. And this one thing that you get, you want to secure it, you want to preserve it. You don’t want to lose it. You want to be in constant touch with it; you want to have it unquestioningly.

Now, these are the two things that you need in the spiritual process as well. Firstly, enquiry—‘what is it that I’m believing in? That which I’m placing so highly in my mind, does it really have value?’ And then, faith—once you have discovered that something has value, then you remain devoted to it. You remain devoted to it, because there are so many distractions, you don’t want to fall for them. You want to keep the unnecessary stuff at bay. So, you remain devoted to the one thing that you get through enquiry. That’s the relation between faith and enquiry, or devotion and enquiry. I’ll repeat my statement: you remain devoted to the one thing that you get through enquiry. You just don’t remain devoted to any random thing; you don’t remain devoted to something you don’t know of. So, enquiry comes before devotion; I want to preserve the diamond very securely, but I want to preserve only the diamond very securely, not any random stone. So, on one hand, as you said, the intention to be faithful is there in people, but merely that intention won’t suffice. Equally, you need to have the discretion and the enquiry to figure out what is it that you’re devoted to.