The Violence Hidden Behind Our Festivals
Questioner: I'm Shabnam Sheik. In India we worship women as goddesses, and we have festivals like Navratri, Kanjak, and Durga Pooja. And in the same country, we treat women as trash. We exploit them, we mistreat them, harass them, molest them. And the same happens with the cows. We worship cows and we call them Gau Mata. In many states like Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Gujarat, it's banned to eat beef, which seems all right. But India is also the third-largest beef exporter in the world.
So my question to you is, why do we Indians worship one thing and also exploit the same thing?
Acharya Prashant: Because we do not know what the word worship means.
Worship follows understanding. To worship something is to respect it in the deepest sense possible.
To worship something or somebody is to offer respect in the deepest sense possible. Right? If I do not understand this (pointing towards the handkerchief), On what basis can I respect this? If I do not understand this, will I have a basis to respect this? But not only do we respect, we even start worshiping. We worship what we do not understand. What value does such worship have?
You talked of Nav Durga. The foundational text there is the Durgā Saptashatī. It's a beautiful text. I have written a very long commentary on each and every verse there. It's available in two volumes, very nice. But go to people who celebrate festivals, be it Nav Durga or any festival — Ganesha Chaturthi, Holi, Diwali, any festival for that matter, Eid or Christmas or Easter. Go to them and ask them, do you know why you are celebrating this? Do they know why they celebrate? There would always be a philosophy behind the celebration. Have they cared to understand the philosophy?
The way Durga Puja is celebrated has very little to do with the Durgā Saptashatī. Durgā Saptashatī is a beautiful text containing great environmental philosophy, and not just environmental — philosophy of the self and the ego and the physical tendencies. Beautiful symbolism. But have we cared to read?
We become very excited when it comes to festivals. Holi means colors. Diwali means crackers. Eid means slaughtering the poor goat. Do we know the essence behind the festival? We don't. So we offer shallow respect. We offer hollow worship, superficial. Internally we remain violent even towards the objects we worship. So you may worship the cow or the woman, but internally you remain the beast. Externally you have convinced yourself you are a good, moral, pious person.
See, you are saying women are goddesses. See, you are saying the entire animal kingdom can be worshiped. In India we do that. There are so many animals, practically the entire animal kingdom we are supposed to look at with reverence. Even trees, even rivers, even mountains. But look at what we Indians have done to our rivers and trees and mountains. Though we attach divine value to them, don't we?
The Himalayas are supposed to be divine. Devbhoomi. What have we done to the Himalayas? You are seeing what is happening in the rains to the Himalayas. Rivers we call as our mothers. You know what we have done to the Ganga and to the Yamuna and to all other rivers. Because all this respect that we are offering is shallow.
Respect is real only when there is a philosophical grounding to it. But in our case there is only tradition. No philosophy.
Only tradition. Just tradition.
Your parents did this, you also do this. And if you say, no, I don't want to do this, they will say, were all your ancestors stupid? Maybe they were. I too will be an ancestor to somebody someday. And I know I am stupid. If I can be stupid, the ancestors can also be stupid. What's the big deal? Something doesn't become valid just because your ancestors have done it. And yes, the ancestors were stupid. For thousands of years they were thinking of the earth as flat. Yes, they were stupid. But we also know that means of knowledge were limited. So we would empathize with them.
We also know that evolution is a progressive journey. One can't leapfrog. Therefore we'll empathize with our ancestors. But empathy is one thing and submission is another. You cannot say all these things that your ancestors have been believing in hold any merit today. Drop it. Drop it without guilt. Are you getting it?
For you to be able to really worship the animals, the rivers, the mountains, the entire field of Prakriti, you must first of all have a very solid grounding in Sāṅkhya Yoga. That's where the relationship between Purush and Prakriti is explored. That's where you discover that Purush can be liberated of Prakriti only by understanding the Prakriti, not by exploiting it. Not by consuming it. Then you know the right relationship that you must have with Prakriti.
But if you know no philosophy and you are just celebrating Holi, Diwali, or Eid, or Christmas, that's dumb. Very dumb. And you call that as your great culture. No, I will have to sacrifice goats. Bloodshed is the name of religion. What kind of religion? No crackers are needed, even if that kills the air. What is this? AQI of 1,400. But I don't bother. I'm a religious man. What are you celebrating? Oh, Shri Ram's return to Ayodhya.
If you want to understand Shri Ram, go to the Yogavāsiṣṭhasāra. Read that. You can't even pronounce that rightly. That's where you find the philosophy of Shri Ram. But you don't want to read philosophy. You just want to lazily, clumsily, blindly not just let the tradition roll on, but roll on in even more distorted ways every successive generation. Believe me, the way we celebrate our festivals was not as distorted even five decades back. Every successive generation further distorts the festivals.
