Guidance and Orthodoxy

[Editorial]

Closely allied to the question raised in our last editorial whether the guide need be a realized man is the question whether he need be orthodox and legitimately appointed. There is such a widespread reaction against orthodoxy today that many will consider this question superfluous; however there are still many in the various religions who cling to formal orthodoxy. Moreover the influence of Guenon is still considerable among Western seekers. On the whole it is a profoundly beneficent influence. He probably did more than any other person to awaken Western intellectuals to their lost heritage by reminding them that here is a Goal and there are paths to the Goal. However he insisted that the path must be orthodox, no matter in what religion, and the guide duly authenticated. He illustrated this with an analogy to ordination. It is preferable in the Catholic Church for the priest who performs the sacraments to be a saintly man, but they are valid even if he is not, whereas, they would be invalid if performed by a more saintly man who was not an ordained priest. Throughout history, he insisted, the same rule has applied to the granting of initiation and guidance by a guru, and it still applies and always must.

Let us first state what is the orthodox pattern. A disciple receives initiation from a Guru and strives along his path, under his guidance, until he receives authorisation from him to act as a guru himself and carry on the spiritual transmission in the same initiatic order. It is better if he is a realized man, but he can give valid initiation and guidance even if he is not, while one who is not the duly appointed successor to a chain of gurus cannot even though he may be realized.

First the question of the validity of initiation given by a guru who is duly authorised but not a realized man. Of this there can be no doubt; only, as I pointed out in my last editorial, it will be of a low order of potency and there may be grave dangers attached to it.

What then of the realized man who is not the validly appointed successor to a chain of gurus? What is it that he lacks? According to the rigidly orthodox (and also on the analogy of Christian ordination of priests) what he lacks is affiliation with the Divine Source of the Grace which has flowed through the chain of gurus from its origin. But suppose he has realized his identity with that Divine Source? Suppose he is that Divine Source? The direct vertical descent of Grace will pass through him, and who then is to bother about the horizontal flow from past ages? Only those with small, legalistic minds.

There is a story about the Maharshi that comes to mind in this connection. Nagamma's telling of it is given on another page in this issue.

There certainly are laws regulating the flow of Divine Grace, but the Grace is more than the law. Or it might be more accurate to say that a commonly applicable law is overridden by an emergency law. That guidance comes only through regular channels may be the commonly applicable law; but Divine Providence will not therefore leave men without succour in their time of need. To deny this possibility of overriding the regular law would be to attempt to tie the hands of God.

What of the predicament of those who in our times seek an authorised and realized guru and do not find one? As they look around they perceive, not in one religion but all, an aridity in the channels where Grace once flowed. They hear strident voices proclaiming themselves gurus but will do well to remember Christ's prediction that there would be false Christs and false prophets to deceive, if it were possible, even the elect. Christ's saying that he who seeks will find is a universal law; but a law must have some technique, some means of action; what is this in an age when the former lifelines to those struggling in the turbulent waters of samsara have been withdrawn or have rotted and become unfit to bear the weight of a man? Willing to follow an authorised and realized guru in any religion, they look around and do not find one.

What adaptation has been made to the needs of the time? If ours is a time of emergency when a relaxation has come about in the formerly rigid laws of orthodoxy, the first persons to perceive this and react to it would naturally be the guides themselves; and it is noticeable that all the prominent gurus of India from the time of Sri Ramakrishna onwards have diverged from the orthodox pattern outlined above.

Sri Ramakrishna himself had not one guru but two, one tantric and the other advaitic. He did not seek them out and devote his life to their service; it was they who came to him and, after acting as more or less technical janitors to open the gates for him, became his devotees.

Although he experienced and proclaimed the efficacy of Christianity and Islam also as paths to the Goal, he did not himself have foreign disciples; but his successors did. Nor can this be described as an aberration of Vivekananda's, as some Western critics would like it to be; for one of the first to initiate foreigners was Sarada Devi, the wife of Ramakrishna, whom Vivekananda and all the others revered. She justified her action, so far as she troubled to do so at all, by referring to a dream of Sri Ramakrishna's in which he saw himself in a foreign town surrounded by white followers. In telling her about it he interpreted it to mean that he would have many followers in the West.

Next there is the enigmatic Sai Baba, who lived at the turn of the century.¹ He had both a Hindu and a Muslim guru. He lived in a mosque but had Hindu disciples as well as Muslim and allowed them to perform ritualistic worship of him in the mosque in complete contravention of Islamic orthodoxy. The initiation that he gave to Hindus and Muslims alike was invisible; as the Maharshi's was later to be, with no mantra, no laying on of hands.

Sri Aurobindo was brought up in England, and had a completely Western education. He returned to India at the age of twenty-one, knowing very little of his mother-country and not even speaking his mother-tongue, which was Bengali. He lost no time in learning Bengali and Sanskrit and flung himself into the struggle for independence with such zest that he soon became one of the leaders. During this phase of his life he had a yogic guru for a few weeks but did not follow up the training as it would have interfered with his political activities. After renouncing politics and settling down in Pondicherry he never met his guru again; nor did he take another. The guidance he later gave was quite different from the formalistic path of his guru; and it was given freely to Hindus and Westerners alike.
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1. For whom see an article in our issue of July 1964. See also The Incredible Sai Baba by Arthur Osborne, Orient Longmans, India, and Rider & Co., London.

Swami Sivananda was a successful medical practitioner until middle life, when he renounced the world and withdrew into a cave in the Himalayas. He had a guru for a short period but seems to have owed little to him. Certainly it was his own more flexible form of guidance, that he gave to the disciples who later flocked to him; and he also gave it to Westerners as well as Hindus.

Swami Ramdas, a very loveable saint,² was also middle-aged when he renounced the world. He had no guru in the ordinary sense of the word. He simply took permission to use the Ram mantra from his father in virtue of the right every Brahmin has to give initiation to his own son. He visited Ramana Maharshi and received a wonderful outpouring of Grace from him³ but did not become his disciple; he did not follow his path and never returned to him. On becoming a Swami he gave initiation and guidance freely to Hindu and Western disciples alike.

Ananda Mayi Ma, the Bengali woman saint who is still living at the time of writing, is said never to have had a guru. She is surrounded by an orthodox Brahmin entourage, but receives foreign disciples also and gives them instructions for their sadhana.

To crown all there is the case of the Maharshi himself. He attained Self-realization when still a schoolboy of sixteen by a single spontaneous act of Self-enquiry, with no human guru and no religious discipline.⁴ Later he gave his silent initiation to all who sought it earnestly and with understanding. He prescribed for them the path of Self-enquiry, free from religious forms - whatever the religion. Some Brahmins called him unorthodox. Those who understood said that he was orthodoxy itself; whatever be did was orthodox because he did it; he was higher than Manu, being the source from which Manu's authority derived. He was the Self from whom sanction and authority flow.

These are the best known but there have been and still are other guides also, less renowned but not necessarily less genuine. Two such are Swami Nityananda and Sri Sitaramdas Omkarnath, described in our issues of April and July, respectively, this year. It would require rare arrogance for anyone to proclaim that all these who speak with authority are wrong and it is blindness to hold that rigid formal orthodoxy is still necessary in spiritual guidance.
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2. For whom see an article in our issue of January, 1964.
3. Described in our issue of January 1965, pp. 12-13.
4. See Ramana Maharshi and the Path of Self Knowledge, pp. 18-19, by Arthur Osborne, Rider & Co., London.