Bhartruhari’s views on Providence

(28th Sept 2004)


Once a rodent gnawed its way into a wicker basket. A snake was kept in captivity in that basket. The snake was very weak because of long starvation. When the rodent entered the basket, the snake ate it up, and strengthened by the intake of food it crawled out the basket by the hole made by the rodent. After telling this story, the ancient Sanskrit poet Bhartruhari explains its significance for the human world. The rodent’s entry into the basket served as an indispensable cause for the snake’s liberation from captivity. These two actions performed by two apparently unconnected agents are dependent on each other on a broader scheme: the rodent had to make a hole for the liberation of the snake; it had to be eaten up in order to strengthen the starving snake. Providence, the poet explains, operates in this manner. The agents taking part in the whole operation may or may not be aware of the shrewd designs of Providence. From this story of mysterious connectivity and its interpretation one may infer that Bhartruhari is a fatalist, a believer in the ineluctably of Fate and futility of human endeavour. But he stretches his argument further. His understanding of Providence as a byproduct, hence an effect, is different from that of a traditional fatalist.
What we call Fate, he explains in the second half of his Niti Shatak, is nothing but the combined effect of the efforts undertaken by the individual doer during her long chain of births. A person, endowed as she is with free will, can always choose to act rightly or wrongly. If she chooses to act wrongly, she shapes her malignant Providence; on the other hand, if she chooses to act rightly, she shapes her benign Providence. Her malignant Providence will visit her in this life or in the lives to come, not only as external hazards and enemies, but also as her inherent weaknesses, latencies and ignorance. As a result, she will take such desperate steps to preserve herself as will consequently prove her undoing. Her benign Providence, likewise, will visit her in this life or in the lives to come in the form of a noble disposition, an unexpected good fortune or a stroke of good-luck, a genial attitude to life, etc. which will deliver her from a difficult situation or transform the heart of her enemies and turn them into friends. That benign Providence will protect her against all dangers and physical harms. It may so happen that her impromptu or carelessly taken decisions will turn out right decisions.
Bhartruhari logically concludes that there is no such thing as an almighty or capricious Fate that gives a person what it wants to give and holds back what it does not want to give. He advises people against making supplications to gods and goddesses for the redressal of their malignant fate and for the improvement of their existing good fortune. The Maker of mankind and the celestial beings have no power whatsoever to alter their supplicants’ Providence for better or for worse. He writes in the Niti Shatak verse No.96: We, earthlings offer our obeisance to the gods. But these gods themselves are under the tutelage of Providence who Himself is totally incapable of bestowing blessings on His supplicants, because He is bound by the efforts of the individual, that is to say, by the Law of Action. The power of Providence to fulfill our desires is restricted by what people deserve to get on the strength of their good or bad efforts. Therefore, the seer-poet observes, instead of genuflecting to supernatural beings to improve their present condition, people should try to improve themselves qualitatively by choosing the right course of action, by desisting from doing evil. Their good actions will make them happy, and their bad actions will cause miseries to them sooner or later.
Bhartruhari has attempted to resolve the perennial dispute between human freewill and fate by stating clearly that fate is merely an effect of human efforts; that each person is the maker of her own fate. She can change her fate the way she likes. People are awed and frightened by the workings of Fate and consider it the Causing Cause, because they do not remember their own actions or efforts, which have contributed to its formation. In their limited knowledge, they consider themselves as passive victims of Fate, whereas they are the masters of their Fate.
Bhartruhari’s concept of good action is rather simple. According to him, a person is good in so far as they love and help their fellow men. The highest virtue is being of service to mankind. Likewise, by yielding to the temptations of the world and of one’s senses, and by being unscrupulously possessive, a person drifts towards evil.
He lays emphasis on the qualitative change of a person’s inner personality. In order to change herself qualitatively, a person has to cultivate a healthy attitude of her separateness from her earthly transactions and sense-motivated temptations. He calls this attitude Vairagya or dispassion. Bhartruhari’s idea of Vairagya does not require an estrangement from the human world, nor is it defined as a tendency to run away from the society, but a continuous and inner awareness of one’s separateness from the grossly physical. Such a continuous awareness of separateness generates a healthy disinterestedness in various activities they are forced by circumstances to participate and enables the conscious doer to cope with the vicissitudes of life with relative easiness. As a result of that disinterestedness, a person does not get entangled in the world’s snares.
The world’s snares, Bhartruhari maintains, are highly deceptive. Most often they come to people masquerading as real blessings. It is true that people get these blessings, such as, material prosperity, noble birth, physical beauty, health and youth, because of their store of virtuous efforts. But interestingly, these very blessings turn out to be invisible snares set for them; they become the cause of their undoing. Vairagya or dispassion acts as an effective antidote to that kind of illusion. Unless people realize the fickleness of their fortune and cultivate dispassion or detachment, they become arrogant and vain and commit evil deeds.
(This writer’s verse translation of Bhartruhari’s Three Shataks: Sringar, Vairagya and Niti has just been published by Penman Publishers, New Delhi.)