Glimpses of Dayananda (Part-11)

*🌺THE BRAHMACHARI🌺*
[Glimpses of Dayananda (Part-11)]
✍🏻Author - Pandit Chamupati M.A.
*Presentation - 🌺 ‘Avatsāra’*

Like several other Sanskrit terms, the connotation of which is peculiar to Sanskrit Literature alone, the word brahmachari defies all efforts at translation. English expositors of the Veda have construed it as 'Vedic Student'. The translation is apt as far as it goes, but it is translation of only a part of the meaning of the term. In the sense of a student, the use of the term is too narrow to express what is understood by the original word brahmachari. A householder, a married man or woman is termed even in the Smritis a Brahmachari or Brahmacharini provided he or she observes continence, the principal rule of Brahmacharya. It is possible to bring out in one word or phrase even this or that phase of brahmacharya. The whole connotation of the word brahmacharya can be expressed by no other single word or phrase in any other language.

As a student we have seen Dayananda roaming through the forests. He ended his scholastic career in the Pathshala of Guru Virajananda, and though to the end of his life he was a student of the Veda, it was not his study of the Veda alone that marks him out as a brahmachari par excellence. The face of the Arya Samajist glows as the idea crosses his heart that his Guru was a bala brahmachari. What does he mean when he so thinks and so glows? Does he mean that the Great Apostle remained celibrate throughout his life--he did not marry? Dayananda has laid great stress on the duty of marriage from which he exempted only rare individuals like himself whose life was wedded to some all-absorbing Duty service of humanity. Their affections they cannot share with any other being or thing. Nor is every servant of humanity necessarily a brahmachari, though it is only proper that he should be one. Brahmacharya in this sense, too, is of the mind, of speech and of the action. The three co-ordinated-immaculate purity of the mind, immaculate purity of the speech, and immaculate purity of action constitute together what is called Brahmacharya. Brahmacharya so construed conveys that chastity of one's conception of woman, which translates itself-in action, into heroic gallantry such as was practised by knights of old, in speech, into courtesy towards the gentler sex; and in thought, into reverence and adoration of womanhood. From of old an idea of divinity has been associated with the idea of womanhood. To paraphrase in terms an oft-quoted phrase of the Bible, a brahmachari is one who lives and moves and has his being in brahma or divinity. And in this sense we shall speak of Dayananda as a brahmachari with all the exquisite association going with the word.

Now, as a rule, it is the unmarried that are rude to women. Celibacy has an association with it of contempt of women, especially of on married women. Mary has perforce to be made a virgin just in order to deserve the adoration of a Christian world. As women would have it, humanity conceives sin at its birth. The fall of Adam is supposed to repeat every time a human child passes through the womb of a mother. To a Christian, marriage is an animal necessity. To an Arya, it is a sacred duty, a sacrament on earth attended and participated in by the Gods those days! All depends on the attitude that a religion evinces to this glorious relation between the sexes.

Dayananda did not marry, but did he on that account despise 'married state'? Did he, being celibate, evince a disgust of tenderliness? He could not adore woman as a wife, but to him was open still another. a higher vista for the contemplation of the divinity inshrined in her. He had been a son and, for that, a fondled son. He could not, when grown up, forget the lavish affection of his too fond mother, which alone had reared him up into a sweet, a lovely child, one a little wayward too, inspite of the harsh, punctilious religiosity of his father. As in his youth he went about in the wide world, world both of men and women, he came across many maidens and many damsels, and in each of them he recognised nothing less than a replica of his own mother-a mother in whose lap he-had lain in childhood.

Once, when he was a student studying with the eyeless sage Virajananda, he went out, as was his wont, to the bank of the Jamuna for his bath and prayers. He sat immersed in dhyana. As he opened his eyes and was preparing to rise, he felt the touch of a female head bent low at his feet. He at once felt that the incident had been a reversal of a brahmachari's conduct and that some expiration was necessary. He ought to have bowed before a women as a son rather than have received her homage as her lord. For three days and nights he kept away from the Guru's hermitage. Near by the bank of the river, there lay a ruined building. There he sat, meditating over Brahma without food, without rest. And when after this self-torture he returned to his Guru, at last, and told him the story of his self-imposed penalty, the latter was literally in ecstacies over the immaculate chastity of his pupil.

Later on, when his fame as a reformer had spread throughout the country, and his views had become a household topic among even people on the streets he once went out while in Mewar for a morning ramble. In his company were pandits of the orthodox camp. On the way all were wonder struck when, all of a sudden, as the party passed in front of a raised platform on which grew a 'sacred tree', the head of the Swami bent as in salutation. To his sanatanist friends it was enough to give occasion for a secret glee-aye, and for an immediate taunt! One of them broke out: “Inscrutable verily be the ways of gods denounce them, decry them, they will exact the homage due to them even from the most heretic of them.” Dayananda bore the mock silently and when the Pandit had done with his raillery, tearfully he pointed with a finger to a small knot of children playing under the tree. “Look there that littlest representation of Mother. I was ador her. The Matri-Shakti before whom all should bow." The solemnity that marked the posture, the movements, the words, the tone, the expression on the Sages face struck the whole party dumb.

The climax was reached some time later when, at Mathura, a party of ruffians, set to it by an opponent of the Swami, egged on an prostitute to get into his hut. She-found him in a trance, a halo of sanctity surrounded his face something mystic played round it. The very atmosphere of the place at once changed the foul woman's heart. As the Swami woke up from his trance, he found a stranger, and that a female, sitting before him, with her heap of ornaments piled in front of her and shedding tears. “Whither, my Mother?" was the hurried, though calm, query of the Sage... The whole event has been treated of in another chapter, to which the reader is referred.. Not the fact of her conversion but the attitude of the reformer towards one who, being fallen herself, had come with a set purpose to bring about his fall too, is what strikes us in our present glimpse of the Yogi. The incident stands out as an instance of the power of innate chastity. Well may the Arya Samaj glow with pride that over its head there shines the undimmed lustre of the brilliant Bala-brahmachari whose very sight transformed the fallen and the low.

There were occasions when women sought privacy with him, and he in response denied them that privilege. That he did first to save his character, his reputation among the masses. On sexual matters especially the Indian mind is most touchy, and most prone to doubt. Nor is it safe to encourage free intercourse between strangers of the opposite sex. The Shastras prohibit privacy even between sisters and brothers, fathers and daughters. For Dayananda it was essential to set a sound example before his followers. To him whole woman-kind were Madonnas, yet to others they were not, and, as an acharya, he had in his outward conduct to play ideally the part of those others.

Dayananda was conscious of the handicap that his sex laid on him in accomplishment of his mission to reform whole Humanity. To his own personality only half mankind could have access. It was the dearest dream of his heart that one from the tender sex itself should supplement his propaganda, by carrying on similar propaganda work among females. To this end he undertook to teach Ramabai, a woman-pandit. Under proper safe guards he consented to give her lessons in shastric lore. The letters that passed between the two have been preserved. They are brimful of affection and reverences, and every word in them breathes the burning desire of the Sage that a woman rishi might rise from among the women folk of the day and promulgate as did rishikas in days of yore the sacred Vedic lore among her sisters. Woman to him appeared to be spirituality incarnate. It was a part of his programme to restore the maternal sex to its pristine pedestal of Motherly Glory, of Divinity according to the Vedas. In his heart the sex already occupied that pedestal and this, in essence, was his bala-brahmacharya.

✍🏻Author - Pandit Chamupati M.A.
*Presentation - 🌺 ‘Avatsāra’*

॥ ओ३म् ॥