Krishn Kutashtami – A Better Way to Celebrate Janmashtami

– Prof. Bal Ram Singh

Birth of a child is celebrated throughout the world with fanfare and gaiety, although it is less clear when the tradition of birthday celebrations ushered. It seems it was not there during the Ramayana and Mahabharata time at least, as, while there are ample descriptions of the celebrations at the time of the birth of Ram, and all the tribulations that the parents of Krishn had to encounter at the time of his birth, there are no stories of the annual pampering that goes into celebrating of children’s birthdays these days. By the way, the figurative contrast of day and night in the observance of the birthday celebrations of Ram and Krishn couldn’t be more glaring, which was even literally true, and is celebrated accordingly.

Nevertheless, the traditions of Ram Navami and Krishn Janmashtami celebrations are in place since seemingly prehistoric times. These celebrations traditionally though involve fasting rather than feasting, and are considered as sober moments of reflection and reminders. The fasting is taken up by both men and women, although there is a propensity of women participation in such things. Evidently, the fasting is to recreate the labor pain of great mothers of Ram and Krishn had to go through in their births, as if to remind us all that the day actually belongs to them (the mothers). Therefore, it is suggested in some circles that it is, in fact, the mothers’ day that each child should celebrate on his or her birthday, as it is literally the birth of the mother with the birth of a child. As the child has done or accomplished little at the time of birth, it makes hardly any sense to pamper a child with such celebrations, other than to remind them of their indebtedness to their parents, particularly mothers.

The reason for celebrating the birthday of Ram and Krishn, and that too only after their departure from this loka, is in recognition of their enormous, immense, and colossal work in service of people to reestablish dharma on the earth for public good. Interestingly and expectedly, all such work were done by them as adults. So, why do we still celebrate their Janmashtami or Ram Navami, rather than their accomplishments days? Or, why not include visuals of their adult lives in the decorations and rituals to remind us of their actual deeds? In case of Ram, Dussehra is celebrated to recognize it in that sense, but why no such day for Shri Krishn? Well, there are some days like Govardhan puja and Narak Chaturdashi during Diwali time which are related to Shri Krishn. However, the greatest event of his lifetime, the Mahabharata, and his role as a literal and metaphorical charioteer of that war remains unremembered, and consequently uncelebrated.

In Mahabharata war, Krishn was bound by his word to not take up arms in the war, and that couldn’t be just an accident. His most often repeated lines from Gita are –

यदा यदा हि धर्मस्य ग्लानिर्भवति भारत |

अभ्युत्थानमधर्मस्य तदात्मानं सृजाम्यहम् ||4. 7||

yadā yadā hi dharmasya glānir bhavati bhārata

abhyutthānam adharmasya tadātmānaṁ sṛijāmyaham

Its meaning is that whenever there is depletion of dharma, and when adharma raises itself, aham (I) creates the ataman (self) in such a way so the adharma is countered. The way it manifests itself depends on the condition of the situation.

The greatest contribution of Krishn in Mahabharata was not that he gave Gita gyan to Arjuna, although it was critical and continues to be useful to all conceptually, and remains the finest description of relationship of self, karma, and yoga. The greatest contribution of Krishn was what he did himself, which was conditioned on not taking up the arms. With arms one fights, but Krishn was not interested in fighting as much as in defeating the enemies of dharma. Consequently, he resorted to kutastha niti (kutaniti in short) which is generally and wrongly defined as diplomacy (negotiation by certified person having a diploma). He himself expounds on kutastha as narrated in chapter 6 of Bhagvadgita.

ज्ञानविज्ञानतृप्तात्मा कूटस्थो विजितेन्द्रिय: |

युक्त इत्युच्यते योगी समलोष्टाश्मकाञ्चन: || 6.8||

jñāna-vijñāna-tṛiptātmā kūṭa-stho vijitendriyaḥ

yukta ityuchyate yogī sama-loṣhṭāśhma-kāñchanaḥ

Swami Muktananda translates it as follows – The yogis who are satisfied by knowledge and discrimination, and have conquered their senses, remain undisturbed in all circumstances. They see everything—dirt, stones, and gold—as the same. Kutashtha is the state of brahm or parmatma which remains unchanged under any and all circumstances. In yogic practice it can be attained through realization, and is considered to be located at the bhrumadhya in body, the seat of the agya chakra.

Sri Krishn was not just a yogi but Yogeshwar, and thus a master of the kutastha state, and thus the Kutaniti. His overt Kutaniti started at his meeting with Karna, who was one of very few persons with ability to defeat Arjuna. The others were Pitamah Bhishm and Barbareek, the son of Ghatotkacha, both of who also were defeated via Krishn Kutaniti.

(Source of Image : http://ritsin.com/shri-krishna-masterstrokes.html/)

Coincidentally, the meeting between Krishn and Karna also happened on Ashtami, but the Ashtami of the Shuklapaksha on Margashirsha (Agahan) month, after his shantiduta mission to Hastinapur. It was then Krishn told Karna the mystery of latter’s birth from Kunti that made the enemy side of the Pandavas substantially weak. He used similar Kutaniti tactics to remove Barbareek before the war, and Pitamah Bhishm during the war, ensuring the defeat of Duryodhana and Kauravas. Victory in a battle depends on the weakness of the enemy as much as on the strength of one’s own side. If the enemy is strong, weakness is created for the victory, and Shri Krishn knew this more than anyone else through his Kutashtha gyan, and used it abundantly to ensure the victory of dharma that was on the side of Pandavas.

Since Shri Krishn initiated this strategy on Ashtami tithi, I suggest we label it as Krishn Kutashtami, so that those who consider him as the demonstrator of the dharma victory may remind themselves of its value.

Indians, in general, and Hindus in particular, need to acquire this trait of their ideal to deal with modern situations of adharma, be it Taliban in Afghanistan or haters of Hindutva in US university campuses, the two issues currently in the news. It seems the Hindu community in both cases is doing little to weaken the enemy. Those making arguments that Taliban killings of Muslims in Afghanistan are actually weakening themselves, are not fully aware of the rules and consequences of battles and wars. Talibans and Jihadis killing innocent civilians to terrorize them into submission, are dominating with their version of Islam (Sunni, Wahabi, Deobandi, etc.) eliminating any voice of sanity within the community. Humanity is being violated which is adharma (abhyutthānam adharmasya), that calls for the tadatmanam srijamyaham. However, Hindus and their nationalist government is fairly quiet, while their cowardice intellectuals make a narrative out of it. India’s history is the witness of such behavior when those hardened by their war experience have invaded India, and enslaved. You don’t make case for a new world order by hiding behind excuses while real people (actually your own people historically) are being violated right in your neighborhood. This is sure way of others complying with the diktats of jihadis for fear of being punished in the same way, strengthening the enemies.

Similarly, the Hindu groups against the planned conference on Dismantling Global Hindutva that claimed sponsorship of 40 universities in the United States gave free credit to the organizers by assuming the universities really sponsored that conference, a fake claim of its organizers. Universities in the United States almost never sponsor conferences, let alone this controversial one. There are funding organizations that sometimes include some federal agencies as sponsors, but more frequently some faculty members join conference, as organizers or participants using their university affiliations.  Rather than calling the bluff of the enemies of Hindutva, many in the Hindu community started fighting universities, at least some of whom will support the rights of their faculty members for academic freedom. Thus, rather than weakening enemy forces the Hindu community action provides them (enemies) some semblance of support, which makes it look like their win.

Kutastha niti (aka Kutaniti) is more critical to learn from Shri Krishn in place of makhanchor, handiphor, and other baby babbles. These show the focus on the wrong state of Krishn contribution, and certainly misplaced work of celebrations of such a towering personality as Shri Krishn. A celebration of Kutashtha Ashstami may mend the Hindu lethargy from action in the service of humanity, be it Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, Sarve Bhavantu Sukhinah, or Dharmo Rakshati Rakshitah!

 It is critical to ponder over the question – what will Krishn do today to deal with problems in the world?

– Prof. Bal Ram Singh, School of Indic Studies, Institute of Advanced Sciences, Dartmouth, MA, USA

A New Narrative of Ayodhya as the Nanihal of Humanity

Ayodhya Nanihal Series. I

– Prof. Bal Ram Singh

It is my intention to narrate the best possible way that I understand the origin of our ancestry. The point I mean by our ancestry today is my own family, which comes from a village near Ayodhya and their ancestors. The first thing to discuss about this is that we are from the Avadh kshetra, which is somewhere from around Kanpur, perhaps a little bit west of Kanpur up until Banaras, Gorakhpur, Deoria. So, there are a number of districts, I think a total of over twenty-six districts, which are known as Avadh kshetra. They were at one time the Kaushal Pradesh, which at some time, it had been the seat of the Aryabrata.

In British as well as Muslim ruler’s time or Mughal times, it used to be known as Avadh Province or area. There used to be actually a Navab of Avadh, who ruled at one time a large part of India also. To understand the value of Avadh kshetra in the history of humanity we may have to just to go to the beginning of this area, there is a story of this area that connects us to the world. How did this all start?

There is the Western point of view in which the world stated with Adam and Eve who are the origin of the humanity. The humans are supposed to come from Adam and Eve as described in Genesis of the Old Testament of Bible. And, so even today, whenever they find in their Research, especially in archaeological research, any kind of human skeleton, they date them. When they consider the skeleton to be normally the oldest one as a male, they name as Adam, and if it is a female as Eve. In some form scientists have located both of them, although there was a research paper recently to show that it seems the male and female progenitors of humans were not exactly in the same place. But that’s just the current research, and future research could change all that.

Currently, they have located oldest humans somewhere in Africa. Adam and Eve both have been located in Africa. From the Old Testament of the Bible in which the Adam and Eve are considered the origin of humanity, there is also the story of Noah’s Ark, who are the later descendants of Adam and Eve. They are the surviving race, which apparently is the origin of humanity today. In Arabic world, actually, the Muslim world or Islamic world also uses the same story of them and they call it Adam and Houva, the Houva being the mother. Adam is the same as Adam in Bible, and the word ‘Admi’, at least in the Indian subcontinent, I believe comes from the same story.

From the Indian perspective there is no Adam and Eve, obviously, although different rulers of India that included the Muslim rulers and British rulers tended to superimpose their story of origin of human beings on Indian narrative as well. One example of that is that the bridge between India and Sri Lanka, which is now named as Ram-Setu, because it is supposed to have been built to go to Sri Lanka during the Ram-Ravan yuddha (war). Officially for a long time it was known as Adams Bridge because they perhaps thought that all this structure represents Adam, either very sincerely thinking that Adam was the original man, thus it must be named after him, or they must have played some kind of mockery of the Indian culture and they wanted to appropriate the culture anyway. That is just only one instance where Adam’s bridge has been used, as a place in the Indian context, and was mostly done by the British.

Source of Image: https://www.thefactresearch.com/ram-setu-bridge-history/

However, what is the story of the Indian cosmology? How do the Hindus look at the origin of humanity? They have a story of Manu and Satarupa. According to them, this Manu is the origin of humanity, so one can just imagine how much impact that can have on rest of the world. Interestingly, the word ‘man’ comes from Manu. ‘Human’ word comes from Manu. ‘Woman’ word also related to the man, Thus Adam is not actually used in the Western world to refer to a man, even though they linguistically use that origin as Manu.

So, who was Manu? There are epochs of Manu, each of being 306,720,000 years, and are referred to as Manvantaras that consists of 71 yuga cycle. There is a total of 14 Manvantaras in a day of Bramhā, the creative force, with the current Manvantara being the 7th of 14. Calculations of times in yugas vary and are subject to interpretations. However, currently 14 Manvantaras make one Kalpa, and that follows a pralaya time of equal length. When these are computed, the Kalpa comes out to be 4.32 billion years, remarkably close to the current age of Earth calculated geologically and astronomically. This contrasts with the 4,004 years of the age of Earth mentioned according to some interpretation of the Bible (Bression, 2013).

Manu and Satarupa are thus the origin of the humanity which could meet the scientific criteria of at least the length of time. The current Manu, also known as Vaivasvata was the apparently a king of Dravida or southern India, and was rescued by the Matsyavatar of Viṣṇu during the apocalyptic flood or deluge. This flood story is similar to Noah’s Ark story of Genesis in the Old Testament of the Bible.

Vaivasvata Manu is supposed to have established Aryabrata at the bank of Saryu river, and his son Ikshavāku, the progenitor of the Suryavansha, established his capital in Ayodhyā. After renunciation of the kingdom, Manu and Satarupa are stated to have performed tapasya at Naimisāraṇya, a place between Lucknow and Kanpur within the Avadh region, and received the darśan of Bhagvān Viṣṇu, who granted their wish to become their son as Rām when they were to be born as Dasharatha and Kaushalya. Thus, the origin of the humanity as Manu-Satarupa, and later as Ikshavāku was in fact Ayodhya, about 2 billion years ago. That timeframe for human existence does not exactly match with the current view of human evolution of about 2 million years, which, however, is certainly older than about 6,000 years believed by the people of the Book (meaning Bible). An opinion similar my view outlined here was expressed by the Nobel laureate Francis Crick (1995). He writes:

“Most of the religious beliefs we have today originated in a time when the earth, while a small place by our standards, was then thought of a being very large, even though its exact extent was unknown. …It was not implausible to believe the earth was less than ten thousand years old. The stars seemed far away, fixed perhaps in the spherical firmament, but that the universe extended as far as it does – more than 10 billion light years – was almost inconceivable. (An exception has to be made here for certain eastern religions, such as Hinduism, that take pleasure in inflating times and distances for the sheer joy of it)”  

Although Crick makes fun of Hinduism for the inflation of time, that timeframe is, in general, closer to the scientific estimate of the time on Earth. Interestingly, a human geographic project of National Geographic Society (see the map below) and other population genetics studies (Oppenheimer, 2012) have shown that human population initially migrated from Africa to the Indian Subcontinent, and then everywhere else from that route, making India as the main source of human migration some 60,000 years ago, which may in fact have cultural consequences. This may indeed supplement the Manu story of human origin, and use of the word ‘man’ referring to the Homo sapiens, may be one of such consequences. India, particularly, Ayodhyā, where Vaivasvata Manu established Aryavrata at first at the bank of Saryu river, thus becomes the nanihal (maternal grandmother’s place) of the entire humanity, after Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa.

It will be fascinating to explore this line of novel narrative that combines cosmology and genetics in its support. Further analysis of linguistics, art, music, rituals, and philosophical connections need to be explored and examined. For example, the word ‘Adammay’ have been derived from Adi Manu, or progenitor Manu.

References

Bression, D. (2013) October 23, 4004 B.C.: Happy Birthday Earth! October 23 is (in)famous as supposed earth’s birthday – this date is mentioned in many textbooks retelling the life of Irish Archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656).  Scientific American October, 2013.

Crick, F. (1995) Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul,  Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.

Oppenheimer, S. (2012) Out-of-Africa, the peopling of continents and islands: Tracing uniparental gene trees across the map. Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B Biological Sciences 367(1590):770-84

– Prof. Bal Ram Singh, School of Indic Studies, Institute of Advanced Sciences, Dartmouth, MA, USA