Sri Sri Ravi Runs Away!
sulochanosho
by D R V Acharya
First, this is a long article and second I am not a follower of Osho
Rajneesh. But I have admired his works and I stop my admiration
when the symptoms of megalomania becomes evident in his teachings. I
like religious, secular and spiritual leaders who have a strong sense
of humanism, individuality and service and I felt Rajneesh although he
had a strong empathetic social consciousness he never did any
practical welfare work for the betterment of society. Rajneesh inspite
of his deep insights into the human condition took refuge in his
private solipsistic worldview. He was an Ivory tower philosopher
albeit an intelligent and colorful one. I have loved reading
especially his discourses on the diverse mystical traditions of the
world. I also admire his talent of public speaking and his irreverence
to religious and political authority. Osho had the guts to critically
examine hallowed and respected ideas and people. On many
occasions he exhibited sound reasoning and conveyed extraordinary
insights into the human condition.
I recently happened to bump across a website about an Islamic speaker
Dr. Zakir Naik and his talks on the concept of God in different
religions. Zakir Naik also had a dialogue with the popular self help
guru Sri Sri Ravishankar. Although it was termed a dialogue, it turned
out to be more of a debate with Zakir Naik pronouncing his typical
clichéd Islamic rhetoric with a full fledged debunking of polytheists
and idol worshippers. Zakir Naik also picked on Sri Sri Ravishankar
for publishing a book on comparitive Islam and Hinduism. This book
had Sri Sri Ravishankar comparing some Islamic ideas and concepts and
claiming that it originated from Hindu culture. Sri Sri Ravishankar
not anticipating the confrontation tried to play it down and looked
like he wanted to rush back to the cave in his Ashram. He also was
openly apologetic about the publication of this book and tried to
escape from the awkward situation by claiming that this book was
printed in a hurry and it was written with an intent of bringing the
two religious communities closer in the context of a Muslim-Hindu
riot. He also pledged that he would not allow printing of further
copies of the book.
Sri Sri Ravishankar is not generally known for his discursive thinking
and intellect and his big strength is his emotional appeal to people
based on personal charisma and the excellent PR machinery of his
organization. Many a times he has goofed up on public platforms. I had
once attended a seminar on 'Science and Conciousness' in the Indian
Institute of Science and evidenced first hand Sri Sri Ravishankar
talking utterly irrelevant things. The other eminent speakers on the
podium like the Nobel Laureate Charles Townes (inventor of the laser
and maser), the great mathematician Roger Penrose and Zoologist Jane
Goodall were visibly disturbed by his lack of erudition and grasp of
what was being talked about. Sri Sri Ravishankar was also rubbished on
stage by the renowned artist and film script writer Javed Akthar. On
another occassion Sri Sri wrote an article in a national newspaper
comparing Marxism with the teachings of the Bhagwad Gita. He was again
rubbished by a lot of readers for his utter lack of understanding of
the 'Dialectical Materialism' (he was not aware and never even
mentioned anything about this in the article) of Marx or the Vedantic
teachings of Bhagvad Gita. He was just content in stating simplistic
homilies.
Coming back to the the 'Concept of God' dialogue, Sri Sri Ravishankar
completely misjudged the tenor of the whole programme. The audience
were predominantly Muslim and were asking well orchestrated and pre-
determined questions which I thought came from the medieval missionary
polemic against Hinduism. It took sometime for me to realize that at
this age and time there are still majority of the people who do
fervently believe in such religious jingoism.
Zakir Naik is well versed in the art of rhetoric and he is quite
capable of mesmerizing his Islamic and other unthinking audiences into
deception with confusing, illogical and fallacious arguments. Herd
instinct is clearly evident in his followers. He makes up for his lack
of critical thinking, scientific and rational sense by parroting and
quoting by memory verses from religious books and scriptures by their
chapter, page, verse and line numbers. This is taken as a sign of
scholarship by his flock. He usually receives standing ovation from
the muslim audience whenever he indulges in these theatrics.
My amusement in this debate became more acute when the debater Zakir
Naik put poor Osho Rajneesh to the popular Islamic litmus test, Surah
Ikhlas or the touchstone of islamic theology. Of course Rajneesh had
no defenders in there so it was an one sided debate with the final
judgement of fallibility on Osho pronounced by Zakir Naik. Sri Sri
Ravishankar was also pologetic about Rajneesh and he appealed to the
audience not to judge other holy men like himself using Rajneesh as
the yard stick.
In this article I am trying to defend Rajneesh and eastern traditions
against the polemics of the Islamic theologicians. My intention of
writing this article is because it is clear to me that the worldview
and the value system espoused by Osho Rajneesh is far advanced and
higher as compared to the value system of the old religions in general
and Islam in specific. Rajneesh beleived in peace, love, celebration,
individuality, freedom of speech and enquiry. He encouraged people to
challange archaich values and traditions. His overall value system is
quite secular and rational as compared to the narrow parochial values
espoused in religions like Islam. Our scholar Zakir Naik begins his
diatribe against Osho Rajneesh with the tone of abhhorance to the
Indian godmen and pronounces his judgement before explaining the
targeted person's point of view. Picking Rajneesh is kind of very
funny because Rajneesh believed in what can be called a Vedantic or
quasi pantheistic God. He borderlined on atheism many times.
Rajneesh's god as can be evidenced from his voluminous discources is
akin to Spinoza's god. Osho's God is not the Allah or a personal God
at all, and his system provides no reason for the revelatory status of
the Bible or Quran or of any religion, for that matter. Osho
identifies his concept of God with Nature and like Spinoza he employed
a reductionistic scientism while retaining some traditional eastern
terminology. Zakir Naik claims himself to be a student of Compartive
religion but it is plainly obvious that his knowledge of the Eastern
religions is
very very superficial and about Osho, he believes what he wants to
believe rather than what the Oshoietes or Hindus or Buddhists or
Taoists or Jains believe. Also to put things in perspective, although
Rajneesh's worldview is quite similar to Hindu, Buddhist & Taoist
worldview he never claimed to be a Hindu either by birth or by
conviction. He was born a Jain and remained an eclectic. So to pick on
him in a debate on the concept of God in Hinduism and Islam is in the
first place wrong.
The Islamic religion like Christianity and Judaism is based on man's
blind and obedient response to a divine revelation in the form of a
book, the Quran. Quran is a medeival text inspired by the arabic god
Allah to his last and final messenger Muhhamad. The god of Islam is in
principle similar to a Monarch who creates and rules the world with a
set of laws. The concept of God in islam is of a God who is apart from
the universe and who is a skillful maker of the world. This God stands
apart from the world and like a medieval monarch rules the incidents
of the world and judges you on the judgement day based on the code of
conduct as created in the holy book. You are sent to either Heaven or
Hell based on your submission to the will of Allah and the adherence
to the code of conduct as depicted in the Quran. Allah in Islam has no
form or can never be depicted. However Allah is depicted through
similes and metaphors like Allah is Akbar, ie great or Allah is Rahman
or compassionate. The not so subtle Islamic theologicians fail to
grasp that even metaphors and similies are depictions in a way.
Idolatory is very much existent in Islam although in a veiled format.
Islam is replete with symbols which are held sacrosanct and any
blasphemy to those symbols are not treated kindly by the Muslim
diaspora around the world. It is sacrilegious in Islam to picturize or
idolize God but the attachment to symbols is quite evident in Islam
and it is
much more than what is present in the so called condemned pagan
idolatarous religions. For example the Islamic prayer is only in
Arabic it cant be localized in any other languages. All muslims bow
their heads towards mecca for their prayer. Allah is an extremely
localized god. So to compare a localized god with localized rituals to
the concept of vedantic Brahman which has no name, form and which
permeates all existence is like as they say comparing chalk with
cheese. The islamic scholars are morbidly against idolatory in other
religions but the mote in their own eye they seeth not.
Among the different schools of Hinduism, Zakir Naik picked up Vedanta.
But his understanding of Vedanta is totally flawed as he just picks
those verses from the Upanishads and Baghwath Gita which depict the
(so called) monotheistic principle of Brahman. What is the concept of
god according to Vedanta. The Upanishads talk of Brahman as Sat-Chit-
Ananda which is truth-consciousness and bliss. The Brahman is both
Unmanifest and Manifest as Brahman or God has to be inclusive of
everything. It is both Nirguna and Saguna. It has qualities and no
qualities. There is a dialectical process of reasoning which is
employed to express the inexpressible quality of Brahman or God.
Essentially Brahman is the substratum of all that exists and being the
substratum it is also different from all that exists. There is a
trancendent quality of Brahman which is in some way similar to the
monotheistic God. But the Upanishads are unequivocal in their claim
that language fails to describe Brahman which is infinite (Anantha)
and therefore it is depicted by dialectic syllogism like 'It is far
and it is near, it is the lowest and it is the highest'. There are
many extremely poetic verses in the
vedantic literature which talks about the dialectic 'qualities' of
Brahman.
Zakir Naik states that "The major difference between the Hindus and
the Muslims is the apostrophe 's'. The Hindu says, "everything is
GOD". The Muslim says, "everything is God's", GOD with an Apostrophe
's'. If we can solve the difference of the Apostrophe 's', the Hindus
and the Muslims will be united."
Well Zakir Naik got it all wrong. The difference between Hinduism
(Vedanta) and Islam is that the Hindu believes that everything is
'God as well as everything is God's' and Islam believes that
everything is just God's and from this reasoning we can deduce that in
Islam Allah as separate from the world and Allah as a being lives
probably somewhere up in the sky or another dimension. It is a sky god
religion. If the God is separate from the world then Allah has to
have a separate location and hence it becomes very physical and
materialistic. The nearest point of convergence between Hinduism and
Islam can be acheived by equating the qualities of Allah to Nirguna /
Nirvikalpa Brahman and that is only after sanitizing the Allah concept
of all the localized Arabic mumbo jumbo. However Brahman is much more
than a trancendent and monthiestic sky god as it is both Nirguna and
Saguna. It is without qualities as well as it has qualities. Because a
god if he(or she or it) is worth being called a god has to be all
encompassing.
Now coming to the fact of Rajneesh calling himself Baghwan or God.
Osho Rajneesh has clarified many times that he is not the God who
created this world. 'No not me' he mentioned jokingly once. "I didnt
create this world with all the strife and suffering. I would have
created a better place had I been God". Surely Rajneesh never equated
himself to the Allah, the medeival monarch like god. It would be good
if Zakir Naik and his cohorts read some of the works of Osho (I have
provided a link to a well know osho site in the end for all the
readers) and then try to counter him in arguements. Also he might do
well to study Upanishadic texts in proper context rather than just
using polemics and picking up verses which suit the rigid montheistic
beleif system.
One key thing that most Islamists forget when criticising Hinduism and
eastern traditions is that in the eastern tradition the spiritual path
is individualistic and not based on a single holy book or frozen canon
or teachings of a prophet. Hindu traditions are unlike the 'collective
salvation deal' espoused by the Abrahamic religions. Many of the
evangelists and mullahs are in the habit of ridiculing some cultural
symbols and personalities of the hindu religion. Unlike the
Monotheistic religions which are history centric i.e history is all
important for man's access to god, the eastern traditions have many
incarnations, perennial access to truth and it is independent of
history. The intent of the upanishadic religion or dharma is not just
following a book but living as per the natural laws of life. A book
however sacred or profound cannot capture truth because truth is a
unitary moment which has to be discovered and rediscovered from moment
to moment. So it is very silly from the perspective of Vedanta that
God chooses some messenger like Muhamad or Jesus or
Abraham or Noah and reveals to him some revelation and some dose of
good social conduct and disappears into oblivion for eternity. Why is
Allah so limited that he needs to communicate to only one person and
the rest of humanity just need to follow all these codified
injunctions. The message of the Upanishads is that God or Brahman
cannot be captured in words much less in books. The semetic religious
cannon can be aptly described as a set of few rules, universalized and
canonized forever. However the dharma in the eastern traditions allows
for an individualistic context based interpretation.
Unlike the essential belief of one male supreme being of the
monotheistic semetic religions like Islam, the eastern relegious
traditions have a different paradigm of looking at this rigid
structure of beleif. There are some eastern traditional lineages which
demand a priori beleif in a supreme being and this supreme being can
be either a male or female or both or neither. There are traditions
which beleive in the impersonal nature of ultimate reality and it
allows multiple representations and multiple access to the one supreme
lord. 'As many people so many paths' remarked the famous sage of
Dakshineshwar, Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. This flexibility has been
considered and ridiculed as a weakness by many of the monotheistic
preachers, however this is the inherent strength of the Hindu
tradition. This showcases the inherent liberal and catholic(in the
sense of all encompassing) views of the eastern religious paradigm.
Monotheism has been rightly stated as My-Theism by several secular
critiques of religion.
Some thoughts by Osho on brahman and god - "Brahman has nothing to do
with the Christian or muslim idea of God. Brahman
means godliness, the divineness that pervades the whole existence... the
whole, the holiness of the whole.". In his own words Osho claimed that
he is God based on the following "Samadhi begins with subjective
awareness and culminates in realization of our divine self, the all
permeating godliness - within and without. This is the state in which
the 'Rishis' in the east declared 'Aham Brahmasmi', the state in which
sufi mystic Mansur declared 'Ana'l Haq', the state in which Jesus
says, 'I and my Father are one'. This state is called 'Sambodhi',
enlightenment, divine realization"
Our 'scholar of comparative religion' Zakir Naik accuses Rajneesh of
proclaiming himself the God in the Semetic / abrahamic / Islamic
religious sense. We can clearly understand why Al Hilaj Mansur was
beheaded for claiming divinity. If these scholars of comparitive
religions can make up a good study of Rajneesh then hopefully they can
come up with some wise arguments than just picking him up on some
silly semantics. This is the problem with Muslim scholars, they are
just too caught in words, symbols, obedience and adherence to arcane
medieval texts that make their minds so closeted. But still they have
the nerve or rather the foolhardiness to proclaim that Islam is a
scientific religion.
If you are a scholar of comparitive religion or philosophy the first
pre requisite is to understand the paradigms, models and cultural
symbols of that particular religion or school of thought. Without this
understanding the interpretation of a particular religion will remain
parochial and not true to the spirit.
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Access this and more at:
http://drvasu.wordpress.com/2007/10/25/concept-of-god-osho-islam-zakir-naik-and-the-acid-test/