“The Essence of Religion” (SB 2.9.21)

TRANSCRIPT:  Srimad-Bhagavatam, Canto 2, Chapter 9, Text 21. “The Essence of Religio.” Alachua – 1994-08-03 / (071)

[Text 21]:

I wish you good luck. O Brahmā, you may ask from Me, the giver of all benediction, all that you may desire. You may know that the ultimate benediction, as the result of all penances, is to see Me by realization.

Purport by Śrīla Prabhupāda:

The ultimate realization of the Supreme Truth is knowing and seeing face to face the Personality of Godhead. Realization of the impersonal Brahman and localized Paramātmā features of the Personality of Godhead is not ultimate realization. When one realizes the Supreme Lord, one does not struggle hard to perform such penances. The next stage of life is to discharge devotional service to the Lord just to satisfy Him. In other words, one who has realized and seen the Supreme Lord has attained all perfection because everything is included in that highest perfectional stage. The impersonalists and the pseudo mystics, however, cannot reach this state. 

So the translation:

I wish you good luck. O Brahmā, you may ask from Me, the giver of all benediction, all that you may desire. You may know that the ultimate benediction, as the result of all penances, is to see Me by realization.

So... we have... the conversation has taken place between Lord Brahmā and the Supreme Personality of Godhead. And Lord Viṣṇu, the Supreme Lord, is offering his benedictions to Brahmā. So Śrīla Prabhupāda points out in the purport that, actually, to have direct realization of the Supreme Lord on a personal level is the highest stage of self-realization. So in this world there are many different concepts of the goal of life. Many people, of course, are living on a platform of gross material existence. They’re concerned merely with maintaining and defending the material body and the different bodily relations, and they don't think of anything beyond that. Then there are those who concern themselves with religion in different forms. The Vedic scriptures provide a very systematic analysis of all the different types of religion that we can find within the world, and this is quite interesting. 

One objection people will often have to religious teachings is that they are sectarian, and it is just a matter of converting people from one faith into another. And they ask: what is the point in that? For example, Śrīla Prabhupāda was challenging in that way. He was told: Well, the Christians came and converted Hindus to Christianity, and Muslims have also converted various Hindus into Muslims. Now you're converting Christians and Muslims into Hindus, so what's the point in that? You just have all kinds of different sectarian opinions, and really one opinion is no better or worse than the others. Or perhaps some will say that they're all bad – we should get away from such things. Because ultimately they're just opinions and everyone has their scripture, everyone has their different religious teachings, their different prophets and sages and so forth. And they all contradict one another, so where is the truth? Each person belonging to a particular religious sect will say: Well, I have the truth and those other people don't have the truth. But then the other people will say the same thing about him. So then what is the solution? 

So it is interesting to see that the Vedic literature contains an analysis of all the different manifestations of religion that you have in this world. And you can see then how all of these different sectarian viewpoints fit together. So of course, this is a very elaborate subject matter about which many books could be written. But briefly you can see how, in the perspective of the Vedic literature, it is possible to understand all different manifestations of religion. 

[5:13] 

Now if there is another system of religion or philosophy on this planet to which it is also possible to do that, then that could be considered as possibly on the same platform as the Vedic literature or possibly even superior. But if there is, in fact, no other system of religion or philosophy on this planet which can encompass within itself all of the different philosophies, all of the different expressions, of religion and explain them and classify them in an intelligent and understandable fashion, then one would have to conclude that the Vedic system is actually superior to all the others. In other words, there is a criterion for deciding how to choose among all kinds of different conflicting doctrines and so forth. So of course, to establish this basic point, namely that the Vedic system can include all the other systems within itself and explain them, and that no other system in fact can do that with all other systems – that's something that can be pursued on various levels. You can give sort of a brief summary of the argument that can be made. Or you can go into extensive detail and ultimately to... well, the way it works is to convince some people you have to go into real detail, and there will be other people who you can’t convince anyway because their minds are made up… [unclear] ...different shades of opinion. 

But in any case, one can give a brief outline of the situation of different religions as explained by the Vedic literature. So in the Bhagavad-gītā, Kṛṣṇa explains that there is religion in the modes of goodness, passion, and ignorance; and under these different categories you see different manifestations. So that's one way of categorizing things – according to the modes of material nature. Then there are the basic categories of karma-kāṇḍa, jñāna-kāṇḍa, and upāsanā-kāṇḍa. So that's another way of categorizing. So actually, if you look at those categories you wind up with nine different divisions: as you multiply, you take each of the categories one type and divide it into three by the categories of the other type. So as far as goodness, passion, and ignorance is concerned, you can see, for example, that many manifestations of religion around the world are oriented towards the worship of ghosts and spirits. So this is described in the Bhagavad-gītā as religion in the mode of ignorance. And this goes on, it's very popular. 

There are many different categories of this, from what is called spiritualism in Western countries, the different kinds of shamanism and so forth in different societies around the world. Some ethnographers have made studies of shamanism, this is quite a popular topic, what's called cultural anthropology. And it's interesting to see that all over the world you have certain basic systems of belief involved with worship of ghosts and spirits and so forth. And these different systems are quite distinctive. You find the same patterns occurring in North America, South America, all across northern Asia from Siberia over into Lapland and so forth. So this is religion in the mode of ignorance. This type of religion, by the way, involves real phenomena. Mode of ignorance refers to the fact that it causes one to focus on qualities and psychological modes of activities which tend to bring one lower in the cycle of birth and death within the material world. But it doesn't mean that the things that the people are talking about are not real. In fact, if you look at these different categories of phenomena, you'll see that there's a lot of evidence that things really happen in these different mode-of-ignorance manifestations of religion. 

[10:11]  

Now an interesting development is that in modern American society you find a lot of talk, especially in recent years, about such things as out-of-body experiences and past-life memories and so on and so forth. Actually, if you look at this from a broader perspective, you can see that these people are approaching the platform of ignorance... of religion in the mode of ignorance, because all of the different manifestations that they're talking about are, for example, standard features of this broad category of religion that they call shamanism. For example, the shamans would typically travel out of their bodies and engage in different activities and then come back into their bodies. So nowadays you hear about people having out-of-body experiences, and this is considered in modern Western society to be a very controversial topic. As far as science is concerned, such things don't really exist. It must be some kind of delusion or hallucination. Of course, it's also interesting to note that no one really knows what “hallucination'' is. What is a hallucination anyway? How does that work? So you could say then that in modern society you have people approaching religion in the mode of ignorance. Actually, many New Age ideas of spirituality involve a gradual process in which people in modern society are approaching religion in the mode of ignorance. They haven't quite attained that platform yet, but heading in that direction. So the worship of the demigods would correspond to... well, pretty much, it depends on how they are worshiped: religion in the mode of passion or religion in the mode of goodness. Religion in the mode of pure goodness would be the worship of the Supreme Personality of Godhead. 

Now another factor, of course, is this division in karma-kāṇḍa, jñāna-kāṇḍa, upāsanā-kāṇḍa, and so forth. So many manifestations of religion that you have all over the world are related to material goals. And so that would basically be in the category of karma-kāṇḍa. So that's very well developed in the Vedic society; especially you have the worship of demigods for the purpose of gaining different material ends, and this is very standard. Well for example, typical forms of Christianity you have people also worshiping Jesus Christ or God as they conceive with Him in order to obtain different material goals. Then jñāna-kāṇḍa would be the religion of the philosophers. The basic idea of jñāna-kāṇḍa is through the transformation of one's consciousness, through the acquisition of knowledge, one wants to come to some higher stage of realization. And typically it is concluded that the ultimate stage of realization as conceived by the process of jñāna-kāṇḍa is something impersonal. It's actually natural using this process of obtaining knowledge to come to impersonal conclusions. So that's very elaborately developed in the course in Vedic literature and Vedic tradition. 

And of course, you have the age-old debate between the Māyāvādīs and Vaiṣṇavas in India. Of course in the West, most knowledge of Hinduism, especially in Western universities and also in what you broadly call popular Hindu movements in America – the New Age, which has large elements of Hinduism in it, and the different yoga groups and so forth – all of this is basically devoted to the impersonal philosophies that have arisen within India. There's relatively little knowledge of the Vaiṣṇava philosophy or personal theism and of the fact that over the millennium there have been ongoing debates between the Vaiṣṇavas and the impersonalists. Nor is it known that the Vaiṣṇavas have traditionally won these debates. It takes research to find that out.

[15:27]  

I'll mention interestingly enough as an aside – let's see, I forget the name of this particular scholar – there was a scholar who was writing... the standard Indological scholar of some reputable university, who was writing about the commentary on the Vedānta-sūtra by Rāmānuja. And he said that actually Rāmānuja’s commentary is superior to that of Śaṅkarācārya. From a scholarly viewpoint, he said that Rāmānuja actually addresses the issues involved in the Vedānta-sūtra in a more accurate way, a way that is more true to the actual texts of the Vedānta-sūtra than Śaṅkarācārya. So you have a scholar recognizing this fact. So in any case, this debate is not well-known, but you have this long-standing conflict between impersonalism and personal theism.

So if you look at other manifestations of religion, you'll also see the same themes being reflected. For example, if you look at Christianity you'll see that ultimately Christianity in its original form, and in its more popular forms, is based on a type of personal theism. God is conceived of as a person who personally created heaven and earth, who ordained things, who created with his word. Now what is the word of God? You would think if one speaks of the word of God, one must be thinking of some person who pronounces the word. Generally words are spoken by a person, that’s the indication. So the original concept pretty much in Christianity was that you have God as a person. God has his chosen people, he chastises them, and so on and so forth. But if you look at what you call philosophical Christianity, you'll find that God has become an impersonal principle and that ideas regarding God as a person are regarded as being somewhat naïve. This is the typical response of the impersonalist to the personal theist. They'll say the personal theist is intellectually not really there, he’s naive. So you see this going on in Christianity. In Islam also there are impersonalist sects, for example the Sufis are impersonalists. So the impersonalists attempt to either intellectualize about the ultimate absolute truth or they're prone to engage in some form of meditation in which they try to visualize some kind of light or something like that. So you see this all over the world also in different manifestations. 

Now the concept of a Supreme Person who is the original cause of all causes is also very widespread all over the world. If you look at the expanding propaganda coming from Christian sources you'll hear that monotheism really was first... came about in the Jewish tradition and then the Christians perfected it – this is what I was always taught. So the idea is that everyone who came in an earlier phase in history was polytheistic. These people were worshipers of many gods. And the fear that: well, primative people personified the forces of nature and created various ideas of different types of gods. So you have the god of storms, that would be Indra, and the god of wind, that would be Vāyu; there's the ocean god, that would be Varuṇa, and so on and so forth. So they worshiped many gods, but then a higher development in thought occurred in Israel, and they developed the idea of the One God. So this concept is propounded by the, you could say, the believers in Judeo-Christian tradition, who would say that actually these people were the first to realize that there really is just one god. 

[20:13]  

And then of course, there are the skeptics of Judeo-Christian tradition, who will say that: Well, actually these people originally believed in many gods, and at a certain point they went through a philosophical transformation and began talking about only one God. And you can still see signs of that in the Bible. For example, Elohim, one of the Hebrew words for God, is a plural form and actually that shows they were worshiping many gods. So these arguments are made. It is interesting to note, though, if you look around the world you'll find that belief in an original Supreme Person is very common. For example, if you go across, let's say, Northern Asia, look at the different Siberian tribes: Mongols, and Tartars, and [unclear], and so on and so forth. There are many of them. Practically all of them have a belief in a Supreme Person who's the original creator. Now if you go to darkest Africa, you’ll find the same thing is true. If you look at all the different tribes of Africa you'll find that most of them also believe in the original Supreme Creator. Now pretty soon people are going to start thinking: Hmm, maybe it's primitive to accept an Original Supreme Creator. If you go to Australia and look at the Aborigines you'll find that many of their tribes believe in an original personal creator. 

Now it's interesting to see what happens with these different groups. Very often you'll find that the Personal Creator is not worshiped. Instead you'll find that the Personal Creator generated at some point a hierarchy of different gods or demigods and very often those are worshiped preferentially by the different people. Sometimes they just don't pay much attention to the Personal Creator. In other cases, they have an explicit philosophy that says: Well, the Personal Creator is so far away from people of this earth that there's no point in worshiping Him. He doesn't care about us. He just created things from his point of extreme aloofness, set everything in motion, and then left it up to the secondary controllers, the demigods, to attend to everything. 

And then there are even some – I've heard of this with regard to some African tribes – who will say: Well, you shouldn't worship the Personal Creator for material ends; that would be offensive. So therefore they don't worship him. They figure we have material goals; it's offensive to worship the Original Personal Creator for material ends; so therefore, we don't worship Him. Many of these people explicitly worship ghosts and spirits because they think: Well, the kinds of goals we have can be satisfied by this kind of worship. And that's true, actually, because typically when they worship they want to do something like, you know, get revenge against somebody or get some money or cure some illness or, you know, get somebody to marry them or something of this nature. Especially desires for revenge can be more appropriately satisfied by approaching the ghosts and spirits and so forth. Even the demigods aren’t so much interested in those kinds of things.

So then of course there's the whole topic of bhakti. So the highest understanding that you have in the whole sphere of religion is that there is an original Personal Creator, and the purpose of our lives, the lives of all the different living beings, is to serve that Original Creator. So that concept also will be found in various forms in different cultures and societies around the world. For example, in Christianity you also find that. But one could argue, I think reasonably, that the highest development of the philosophy of bhakti is to be found in the Vedic literature, specifically in the Bhāgavatam and in the different traditions of Vaiṣṇavas, which are centered on the Bhāgavatam. I suspect that if someone did make an objective study of bhakti in its different manifestations around the world, one would be able to see that, number one, it does play a fundamental role all over the world in different religions. And I'm sure that Śrīla Prabhupāda also made the point that even to attain these various other goals of religion, bhakti is required in some form. So this would suggest that you should find it everywhere in some stage of its manifestation. I think objectively you would find this is true. But in its highest and purest form – I think also it could be objectively argued – that this is really to be found in the Vedic literature. 

[25:57] 

So anyway, these are some observations on how this whole picture can be... different manifestations of religion can be looked at as something that can be gradually developed. Actually, Śrīla Prabhupāda said that he wanted his men to head up the departments of religion in all of the different universities. It's one of the things that the devotees are supposed to do. So if that is done, then those devotees will have to confront all these different issues. But I suspect that that can be done in a very systematic way. So I'll stop there. Are there any questions or comments? Yeah?

Question:  You were referring to the original personal conceptions of the Judeo-Christian religions as opposed to the philosophical, intellectual understanding. In this regard, when I first went to Israel about 12 years ago, I was already more-or-less practicing Kṛṣṇa Consciousness, and I went with a tour in a mega-central area. And they took us to a synagogue thousands of years old, in the Jerico era. And on the floor of the synagogue there was a mosaic: What came to my mind is it looked like a Greek sun-god or something, I mean it was a figure, it looked like a sun-god of the Roman or Greek era. And if you ever go to synagogues today, what’s very striking is synagogues are mosques – there is no form of any sort, any sort, not even Rabbi’s, what to speak of God – there’s no form of any sort. Anyhow… so the tour guide seriously tried to convince us that this was a decoration – it had nothing to do with… and there was no worship of this form. We know that as Jews we don’t worship form, so what actually happened was that it was a very personal form of worship, when one philosopher, Moses Maimonides, he basically took the scriptures and made an interpretation based on Aristotle, who was just a heathen according to traditional Judaism, but he really like Aristotle. He made a whole impersonal interpretation; and he was completely rejected. So somehow or other he had a few followers, and then after 10 or 12 generations he became highly… well, it’s said “From Moses to Moses,” from the original Moses, then the next was Moses Maimonides, so that today, you can’t even question his impersonal interpretations, which are based on Aristotle. But if you look at what the synagogues looked like 2000 years ago, they are completely contrary to what they’re doing today. 

Answer:  That’s very interesting. It looks like he was the Śaṅkarācārya of Judaism, which also illustrates the basic point I was making that you can take the subject matter of the study in Kṛṣṇa Consciousness and from that perspective you can understand all kinds of things that are happening in history of religion in different parts of the world. Yeah?

Q:  I have a question about that analysis you presented in the beginning of the class. So if we take, say, the Vedic perspective, then we analyze all the other religions and say that we can put them in categories from that Vedic perspective. The question is: That analyzation can be done, and then these traditions are rejected, or found valuable? Because how others might perceive this analyzation might depend very much on whether we come to the conclusion “useless” or come to the conclusion “some value.” 

[30:36] 

A:  Well, the analysis… the question is what value judgments are coming along with this analysis? And of course there are value judgments, inevitably so. They don't have to necessarily be presented in the way that, well, antagonize people. One thing you observe in some religious traditions is exclusivism. And of course, this is one of the issues that causes many people to be very wary concerning religion. Of course, the most famous exclusive religion that we know of today would be Christianity in its various forms, because the idea is ”Our way is the truth and that's it. Everything else is false.” In fact to be explicit, “everything else is the work of the evil counterpart of God.” Actually I understand this really comes from Iranian dualism, called Mazdianism, the idea that there is a God of good and a God of evil. So anyway, so “our religion comes from the God of good and all the rest comes from the Evil One.” So inevitably one is forced to have a value judgment with respect to that approach to religion, then we have to say that that is a phenomenon that does arise based on different features of human nature. 

Now also if you look, say, at the worship of ghosts and spirits, if we say that's religion in the mode of ignorance, the very choice of words suggests that that is something that is not good. On the other hand, we don't say that it's entirely false. And when I was earlier saying in modern civilization we have people approaching religion in the mode of ignorance, it's actually a fact that they're making advancement as they make that approach. That shows that their position is not very elevated, but actually that's the fact. If you have people who are brought up thinking that there's no such thing as the soul, there's no life after death, we're simply an arrangement of chemicals that have evolved by natural processes and chance and so forth – if such people come to the conclusion that: well, maybe there is some kind of soul that does survive the death of the body, or can function separately from the body, then they're making advancement. But they're actually advancing to a level of understanding that is extremely traditional, like Eskimos, Australian aborigines, people in the Congo jungles – all of them understood that the soul exists. This was very standard all over the world, and still is actually, but it's in modern society that we have been able to escape from that understanding and come to the realization that we’re nothing but chemicals. 

So actually one can make advancement by coming up to the platform of religion in the mode of ignorance. So therefore we're not saying that all these different manifestations of religion are all bad. Our real perspective would be that these all represent different stages of consciousness with the conditioned spirit soul. And as long as the spirit soul is making progress upward in consciousness, that is good for that soul. But of course, ultimate upward progress does not become, let us say, secure, until one reaches the stage of realization of the Supreme Personality of Godhead in bhakti. When one has not yet attained that stage, one's realization can always be reversed; one can go back down the cycle of transmigration and so forth. So nonetheless though, different modes of religion do involve progress in consciousness with the different people who are engaged in them. And it's simply a fact and some people are going to be engaged in religion at certain levels. Our preaching is not going to change that because it's a matter of the consciousness of those people. At the same time we can provide a path toward higher understanding for all those people in the world who are ready to take advantage of it. Yeah?

[35:29]  

Q:  [unclear]

A:  No, even with the  out-of-body experiences, one thing... you see, I’m not speaking necessarily of people who are trying to become vegetarian and so forth. It is sattvic, for example, to become vegetarian on the basis of not being violent towards other forms of life. That's basically sattvic, right? Of course, Buddhism would be one of the famous religious and cultural movements which stresses not being violent to other forms of life. So that's an example indicating the platform at which that kind of philosophy is situated. But as far as out-of-body experiences are concerned, the concept that there is something which one could call the soul, which can exist outside of the body, and which could survive the death of the body – that kind of idea is becoming more widespread at the present time amongst many people who are not particularly inclined toward being vegetarian necessarily. A lot of people talk about out-of-body experiences who eat meat. 

I was recently in a conference where, for the purpose of preaching, I sat down at a big table full of people who were sawing at steaks, and all kinds of things like that, and they were talking about such things. But I also noticed what they were drinking… it contained what they call [unclear] yeast. Ethanol  unfortunately, not methanol. But these people are actually the ones I had in mind when I was saying they were coming up to religion in the mode of ignorance, and we shouldn't disparage only the tribal people also. The use of negative terminology, actually, should be avoided, and for that reason I wouldn't recommend saying to people: What you believe is religion in the mode of ignorance! That wouldn’t be good – that would make people angry. But as far as the classification is given in the Vedic literature, we could look at things objectively from that point of view. So it's actually a fact that if you look at all these different tribal peoples, people who traditionally worship ghosts and spirits and so forth, they all believe in the soul. They all believe that once they die they're going to go to some other place and so on and so forth, practically speaking. So you have people in modern society who are coming to that position. 

[39:51] 

Now another point I'd make, that could be of some interest, is that the people in modern society who come to that realization, they may do so in a more solid way than some of the people who traditionally have that understanding, in the sense that they had to fight their way to that understanding through different contrary philosophies and modes of thought. Therefore, once they arrive at that platform, it’s something much more solid; they have a much higher level of realization than people, say, in some traditional tribal society. In fact, if you look at the traditional tribal society, you'll see that as soon as they come in contact with modern scientific teaching, it just wipes out their traditional system of thought. And pretty soon you have a new generation who forgets the old ways entirely. So therefore in that sense, people who are coming to these realizations in modern society may do that at a higher platform because they had to fight for that kind of realization. Yeah?

Q:  Just a comment: we have to be a bit careful about our analyzation of different practices in the modes nature, because ultimately, Kṛṣṇa’s point in the Gita is that unless you follow śāstra, specifically the Vedas, it’s not really in the mode of goodness, because the demarcation point for the mode of goodness is to accept that kind of stricture on one’s life. Even if you accept other śāstric scriptures, there may be śāstras in these other modes. So obviously vegetarianism, as you pointed out, may be a step in that direction; then you analyse are there sexual restrictions, or this or that, you find that it may not be as goodness oriented just because they are sitting in the woods, as you like. 

A:  Well you see, the modes are always mixed, until you come to pure goodness. And so you can have an element of goodness come into somebody's life mixed in with passion and ignorance in various complex ways. And so it’s just like mixing the three primary colors and getting all kinds of different pictures… that's in color – the combinations are extremely complex. But my basic point was the Vedic literature does provide a framework for analyzing and understanding all of these things.  

Now the question of how you present that framework, of course, is another thing. One has to be diplomatic, of course, in presenting things to different people. It wouldn't be good to say, “You’re in the mode of ignorance!” Of course, [unclear]... Well, let’s see. One more question. Yeah?

Q:  …there is theoretically understanding that we are not this body, but the actual realization of that is a manifestation of the mode of goodness; it is not possible to realize this in another mode.

A:  Well, mode of goodness would correspond to truth and mode of ignorance corresponds to illusion. So then you can ask: Well, how can it be that somebody in the mode of ignorance knows anything that’s true? Well, the answer, of course, is that things are always mixed. As I was saying, these people who worship ghosts and spirits know that there are such things. But that's true. So that's some truth that they have. So that must be goodness, whereas mode of ignorance tends to be associated with dreams and illusions and so forth. Of course, you'll see these people are involved in different dreams and illusions to a large extent also. They may be approaching the spirits in order to gain some material goal, which a person on a higher platform of realization will see as utterly [unclear]... pursuit. But in general, any truth that one knows would be in mode of goodness, if it’s the actual truth.

Q:  …if one is actually Brahman realized, then these lower… are not important to him any more. So in a sense, it’s just theoretical. They have to understand that they’ve heard from authority… [unclear]...

A: What people are you referring to?

Q:  [unclear]

A:  Well, some people actually have experience indicating they're not gross body. You see, in realizing you're not the body, the first step is you realize you're not the gross body; then you can think of the subtle body. So that's an intermediate stage. There are many people who have actual realization that they’re not the gross body. In fact, I met some people who had heart attacks and had out-of-body experiences – they're convinced that they’re not the gross body. They think that's an established fact, they know. But they had no idea about the distinction between the soul and the subtle body. So that's another whole level of realization. Yeah, so… All glories to Śrīla Prabhupāda.