For the Love of Yoga with Nish the Fish What Did Rama, Krishna, Buddha, Jesus and Ramakrishna All Have In Common?
While every person and every place is invariably God according to our Non-Dual View, certain places and certain people are particularly strong manifestations of God. Everything is the same in type but different in degree. For example, while every part of the cow is indeed a cow, it is really only from the udder that milk flows. As such, the Avatāra is like the udder and the entire Universe the cow. The Avatāra, Divine Incarnation, is a unique nodal point of Reality through which the very highest can be accessed. In short: the avatāra is the strongest manifestation of God in immanence, in nature.
But what makes an Avatāra(a Divine Incarnation) and Avatāra?
In Hinduism, the idea of the Incarnation is very ancient. We find it in the Bhagavad Gita (Chapter IV, verse VII) and also in texts like the Bhāgavatam dated between ~1000b.ce to 600bce.
The claim is that while various forms of gods and goddesses are each of them emanations or aspects of the One God capital G, the one Divine Reality, the Avatar is a specially concentrated manifestation of that Reality that exists in historicity as an actual person. The gods and goddesses like Kālī, Shiva, Vishnu etc. are all entirely Divine but the Avatāra uniquely is also mortal and like any mortal suffers mortality: birth, old age, sickness, dying etc.
Unique to the Avatāra Doctrine is the idea that God can be a person and a person can be God which when you think about it is a startling challenging idea! Swami Vivekananda could never quite accept Sri Ramakrishna as an Avatāra until the latter's dying breath in 1886. Because for any thinking person, this claim is ludicrously challenging! It is one of the deepest mysteries of spiritual life. It takes a special kind of subtle insight, or a special kind of grace to have some semblance of an understanding of this mystery.
But it is my conviction that anybody who is sincerely attracted to spirituality will also be attracted to the avatāra because they will feel in them (in their lives and teaching) intuitively the strongest dose of spirituality. But notice how I am using the plural! According to the Hindu view, there is not just one Avatāra. In Christianity, the idea is that there is just one Divine Incarnation who came in the form of Jesus and that's that. But in Hinduism, we understand that to teach a particularly stubborn student, you often have to give the teaching over and over in different ways. Repetition is at the heart of all learning! And so the thing about the Avatāra is that She comes again and again each time teaching the same message in slightly different ways.
In this talk, I wanted to tease out some of the similarities in that message between various Avatāras. Also I wanted to continue last week's theme of the emphasis on renunciation and sincerity that we find are at the heart of all genuine spiritual life and also on the warning against affect and pretense in spiritual life. One thing we find about all these avatāras is that they were genuine, simple and willing to give direct answers to sincere questions without any affect or pretense! And because they were free, they did it all for free!
From freedom unto freedom a gift of freedom is made!
May
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