Janmashtami: The idol, the Gita, and the mirror

The images arrive every year, each a little more elaborate than the last. A tiny Krishna is given admission to a school, with a printed interview by the principal. The same infant deity is taken for a heartbeat check. He is dressed, perfumed, laid in a little bed, fed, rocked to sleep, addressed as mera laala. Somewhere else a human tower climbs fifty, sixty, a hundred feet, so that one young man can risk his neck to break a pot of curd and earn, it is said, some merit.

A temple priest brought all this to me recently. Not a skeptic, but a man who installs idols for a living, who has given years to thakur-seva. He had begun to see something in his own hands that he could no longer stop seeing, and he asked a plain question: can service of this kind, offered to the symbol, ever help in aatm-vigalan, in the melting away of the ego? Or has the deity himself been turned into one more object of craving?

That question is the whole festival. The festival carries two Krishnas. One is the fashioned Krishna: the butter-thief on his swing, dancing among the gopis, easy to remember because he asks nothing of you. The other is the Krishna of the Gita, dangerous, asking for everything. Janmashtami remembers the first and forgets the second. Why? Because remembering the second costs something, and the whole art of the ego is to avoid that cost.

Notice why the first Krishna wins so easily. The book that carries Ram, the Ramcharitmanas, is no confection; it is a chronicle of hardship, of exile, separation, renunciation, and almost nobody wants that today. But the Bhagavat Puran asks not much of your discernment; you sit, and the sweetness of the story pours over you. People have taken to dancing in his name and to little else. The miraculous image built around him is the very thing that took the Gita away, because once Krishna is made into Kanha and laddu-gopal, the author of the Gita becomes nearly impossible to see in him. Stories and Krishna cannot run together. Stories rise from the ego; Krishna means dissolution of the ego.

The Idol as Mirror

All of spirituality is for the ego, and the ego is a master of self-deception. Were it honest with itself, no method would be needed at all; your own honesty would be enough. You would have seen, sitting at home, where the attachment is, where the deceit hides, where the clinging holds on. No scripture would be required. Not even the Gita, because the Gita too is only here to show you to yourself. But that honesty is exactly what the ego lacks. Left to itself, it awards itself a hundred out of a hundred. Something outside is needed, then: a benchmark, an assessor, a mirror, precisely because a mirror held inside the ego shows only what the ego wants to see.

This is why a teacher is needed, why a scripture is needed. The idol stands in the same line. It is neither good nor bad. Everything turns on who you are and what you intend. A scripture in the wrong hands becomes a trophy for display; a guru chosen by a dishonest seeker becomes an accomplice in his own inflation. The idol is no different. And here the ego's oldest instinct shows itself, self-preservation. It does not want to change. It takes whatever it is handed, idol included, and turns it into one more way of staying exactly as it is.

What, then, was the idol for? To be a mirror. You stand before Krishna, before Buddha, before Ram, and something in you is meant to feel small. Here is one born in the same clay you were born in, who went so far; and here you are, unable to move an inch even when it is spelt out for you. A prince who let go of his kingdom, wandered fourteen years, won a city of gold and walked away from that too. And here is a man who cannot give up half a gram of silver. But you do not go to feel that. You go to hand him a certificate, to tell him he is great. He has no use for your medals. He stands there so that, through him, you might catch sight of yourself, and a heat might rise in which your smallness begins to melt. In this the idol is helpless. What can the poor thing do? Krishna is not doing this work. You are, or you are refusing to.

The mirror is not there only to shame; it is there to challenge. Look at what Ram had. The mightiest power of the age stood against him, and he came with almost nothing: a band of forest-dwellers, no treasury, no great weapons, and he walked through it anyway. So ask why you keep pleading that your circumstances are against you. People will boast that this temple has the tallest idol, that one has an idol of gold, and so on. That is counting jewellery. You were meant to count yourself.

The idol can be wasted as easily as it can be used. You can lose yourself in how beautiful it is and never once look at yourself. You can make the idol the object, an excuse for not turning inward. Ask of your own visits: did one belief crack? The method is negation from start to finish; even Ram, Tulsidas reminds you, the Vedas can describe only by neti-neti, not this, not this. Leave as you came, having laughed, offered a sweet, asked for a favour, and nothing broke. Nothing was worship.

When the saints attacked idol-worship, this is what they meant. Kabir Saheb said: paathar pooje hari mile to main poojoon pahaad, ta se to chaki bhali pees khaay sansaar, if worshipping stone could deliver God, I would worship a whole mountain; better the grinding-stone, which at least feeds the world it grinds. Read it slowly. No contempt for the idol lives in it. The contempt is for the ego that polishes a stone and will not look at its own unpolished state. Those who rejected the idol were never against the idol. They were against the ego that eats everything: guru, scripture, idol, truth itself.

Murt does not mean stone. Murt is the manifested, the present, the observable, whatever has form. A place of worship is murt. So is the direction you face in prayer, the book in your hands, the word you speak, the thought you think. The whole world is murt. The very traditions that forbid idols and call them a crime still deal in the murt at every step. How could it be otherwise? You live among objects and nothing else. Tell me, then, how you will escape the idol when everything is an idol.

Someone will break a dahi-handi for the merit in it, and I do not know what that merit is; why would anyone set curd just to break his own ego? The festival is one more object in the same hands. Whatever a man already wants, he makes the festival his excuse for wanting it, and the day asked for none of it. The craving is yours; the festival only lends it a name. Turn any such question the right way, and it comes back to the one who asked it.

Krishna's Own Form

If the world is murt, the question is never whether to use the object but which object, and toward what. Worship, rightly understood, asks one thing: give the highest its place. Surrender to the highest within your reach. You may say this highest is not the absolute, only the tallest object among objects. True. But the mobile tower on your own ground is not the satellite either. It is merely taller than you, and through it you are joined to what lies far past your reach. A difference of degree, at some point, becomes a difference of dimension. The nearest rung is what carries you past all rungs.

A tradition can forbid the idol outright and still give its people five emblems to keep and a turban to bind, telling them to wear these and learn from them, not to worship them. That is the whole of it: a method, not a destination. Make the method the destination, and it dies, and the one making it so is always the ego, announcing that it has already arrived and so nothing needs to be changed.

Krishna's own object, the form he gave himself, is the Gita. The Krishna with form is a printed copy of the Gita; the formless Krishna is its meaning. Clutch the copy, refuse the meaning, and you hold paper. Idols differ. One sculptor's Krishna is not another's. The Gita does not differ; it is one, and it is His own. Krishna stands less in front of the eyes than behind them. He is not a thing to be seen and garlanded, and the painted idol before you holds no power of its own. Krishna is bodh, an awakening. Krishna is Truth. Stand before His idol, and if the Gita does not rise in you, the idol has been misused. He is not there for you to grow soft and pour your household feelings over Him. The Gita will not tell you how to run a household. It only says that once the light is lit inside you, the rest you will handle yourself. Its one task is to end the darkness within. The temple may blaze with lamps; if nothing lights in you, the worship went nowhere.

Who is this Krishna of the Gita? One who has no account to settle before or after, neither held by the past nor besieged by what is to come. His life is contradiction upon contradiction, because advaita means exactly that, all opposites held together. With Krishna there is no maryada. Bring Ram home and you may rest easy; bring Krishna and there is no saying what he will do. Krishna is dangerous. And if living dangerously is beyond you, then living is beyond you.

Krishna is not for the weak. The Gita is for those with some fire still in them; for the ones already gone to dust and ash, there are the sweets. That is all that separates the sweet-shop from the battlefield. At the sweet-shop you are asked what you would like to eat, and the fat confectioner is waiting with his tray. The battlefield keeps no confectioners. Arrows fall, blood runs, warriors roar, and the one thing asked of you is to put your own pride, your attachment, your intoxication to the sword. Arjuna is called mighty-armed. Becoming that costs a great deal of pain. Peda (sweet) is cheap. Peeda (pain) is the price of the Gita.

His is a life lived to the full, and that is the hardest teaching in it. You want to drop your attachments, but you do not see that an attachment holds only because you are set against its opposite. You cling to pleasure because you fear pain. Stop fearing the pain and the clinging loosens on its own. The single rule for not clinging is to push nothing away. Live completely and you can die completely. When such a one goes, he goes whole, leaving no residue, no mark behind. That wholeness, not any sweetness, is what Krishna's life is.

Now feel where prem enters, because the word is badly used here. Some half-formed mind, with no idea what the word means, says, "Radha and Krishna loved too, so." That is not prem. That is the ego's convenience. What passes for love of the bal-gopal is often just the senses being indulged, the indulgence blessed with a holy name. Prem is the melting of the ego, its surrender to truth, its pull toward its own highest possibility. And it is here, only here, that the form earns its worth. Goswami Tulsidas puts it in one line: agun, arup, alakh, aj joi, bhagat prem bas sagun so hoi, the one without attribute, without form, unseen and unborn, becomes, for the devotee's love, the one with form. The formless takes form so that a melting ego may find, in this very world, something to melt against. Such an object can be worthy enough that a saint sets the guru ahead of god himself, for god is formless and far, while the guru stands here, helping.

Amir Khusro says it another way: apni chhavi banaay ke jo main pi ke paas gayi, jo chhavi dekhi pi ki so apni bhool gayi, I went to the beloved got up in my own image, and seeing his, forgot my own. That seeing is not humiliation; it is an invitation to rise and become the same. And prem does not end at washing the beloved's feet. In prem the two become one, which is all that yoga means; the one who wants to avoid becoming one keeps himself busy washing feet.

Let the intent curdle, and the same devotion turns. The tongue's craving and its cruelty get draped over Krishna too. "Krishna ate butter," it is said, and with that one line the eye slides away from the modern dairy, where a calf's milk is stolen, and a dumb animal is worked to ruin so the taste can go on. To give that cruelty the name of the one who is an ocean of compassion is the deepest insult truth can take. The ego has spared nothing in dishonouring the great ones, turning them into raw material for its own mind.

Your Own Birth

How, then, is Janmashtami to be kept? Every festival comes to say one thing: stop, change, see that you are bound. But what happens? You like kheer all year, so on Janmashtami you feed Krishna kheer; new clothes, dancing, a midnight tableau, and the announcement, "look, he is born." The finer way is the other one. Keep it not as Krishna's birthday but as your own. Krishna is never born, because he never died. It is you who needs a birth, having never been born.

Look, then, not toward Krishna but toward yourself. This is no call to go reforming your household or the world; handle yourself, and society sets itself right as you do. No social reformers are being made here; your work is with you. Walk into my own room and you will find more than twenty idols, nearly all of them gifts, Ram and Krishna and Shiv, Buddha, Mahavir, Guru Nanak, Guru Gobind Singh, Kabir Saheb, each set with care in its place. They watch you and you watch them. Whether they are decorative pieces or mirrors is a matter of intent, and the intent is yours, not theirs. The saints kept saying this because they watched people use the world's objects to hide from what sits within. Sant Dadu Dayal said: jin kankar paathar seviya, so apna mool ganvaay; alakh dev antar base, kyon dooji jagah jaay, those who served pebble and stone lost their own root, for the unseen god lives within, so why go elsewhere? Guru Nanak, watching a stone being consecrated, said the thing you install is not the truth: thaapiya na jaay keeta na hoi, what is real is neither set up nor made. Kabir Saheb set the whole door of return in a couplet: moko kahaan dhoondhe re bande, main to tere paas mein; na main mandir na main masjid, na kaabe kailash mein, why look for me outside, I am next to you, not in temple, not in mosque, not in Kaaba or Kailash. None of them was breaking idols. Each was pointing at the one who hides behind them.

Carried to its end, this is not a comfortable idea. The idol is a marker of your own highest possibility, and it should reach you not as comfort but as challenge, as rebellion, as fire. If it can be reached at all, why am I here? If it can be lived, why do I live as I do? The idol is not there to leave you feeling pleasant; whether the mind is pleased or shaken is beside the point. Something should break. Whether it breaks, no one can decide for you, not even Krishna. The light rising in you is your own sovereign matter. In that sense, the ego is sovereign, and you alone will settle what your relationship with the idol will be.

This is where the couplet, the Gita's own word carried into plain speech, belongs:

Vo baahar nahin janmenge kaheen, aas ye avaruddh karo.
Hari bheetar hi prakatenge abhi, yadi svayam se tum yuddh karo.

He will not be born anywhere outside; block that hope. The Lord appears within, and now, if only you will do battle with yourself. The battlefield was never Kurukshetra alone. Decide once that you will live in the truth, and a strength rises of its own; that strength is what the name Krishna points to. Do not outsource your life and your burdens to the idol. He carried his own and asked no one else to carry them. Whatever strength you needed to save yourself was given long ago; nothing is being withheld that a prayer might release. You did not go there to gain. You went to lose, to shed, to let the fortress of your convictions fall: that life is only helplessness, that greed has the last word in everyone, that fear is a wall no one crosses. Stand before Krishna, and he is pulling down every one of them.

The trouble, looked at squarely, is not that you are bound. It is that you are asleep, and dreaming. The idol, the scripture, the guru, the temple, each has a single task: to be a mirror in which the sleeper might, for one moment, see the sleep. Trust the idol later. First become someone who can stand on his own. No hour is fixed for this waking, and no lateness is possible in it. The turn is here now, as it always has been.

Acharya Prashant is a philosopher and author whose work centres on self-inquiry and its application to contemporary life; Views presented are personal.