Theosophy - Gurus and Chelas by E.T.Sturdy and Annie Besant - Adyar Pamphlets No. 11
Adyar
Pamphlets No. 11
Gurus and Chelas
An Article by E.T Sturdy
And a Reply by Annie Besant
The Theosophist Office, Adyar. Madras. India
Reprinted January 1912
[Page 3] THE question of the relationship between the teacher and disciple in
eastern countries has occupied the minds of many western Theosophists.
This relationship will be better understood when it is explained that there is
no one system or attitude maintained, and that the position varies with
nearly every group of teachers and disciples.
The important questions which a disciple must solve are: (1) In regard to
such and such a man has he knowledge ? (2) Will he use it unselfishly ?
(3) Will there be a personal affinity between him and me ? Then in some
schools (4) Can I have such trust in him as to surrender myself entirely into
his hands and obey without any hesitation what I am told to do ? It is on
account of this latter question that western students have found difficulty in
understanding how a man could come into association with his guru.
On the other hand the
guru has questions to ask himself in regard to the chela (1) What[Page
4] is his motive ? (2) What is
his stage of knowledge ? (3) How will he use further knowledge ? (4) Is he
to be trusted ? The solution of these questions depends upon the development
of the guru and whether he can see beyond the evidence which is given to
the ordinary man, but even with the highest it is doubtful whether complete
certainty can be made.
The whole question then resolves itself into one of mutual knowledge and
trust in the most reasonable and philosophical schools the association
begins gradually. It commences by a disciple going to a teacher for advice
and instruction upon some point. It may be a small affair and even a
promise of secrecy is not taken from him. Then other philosophical doubts
arise and he finds answers and explanations which are satisfactory to him
in his guru. Meanwhile the life and character of the teacher come more and
more under the observation of the disciple and we will suppose he finds
these exemplary from his standpoint. He has so far found that the advice
and instruction given him have always been sound; thereby his confidence
has increased. His guru has never shown that he had any motive other
than a purely unselfish desire to benefit. By this his reverence and affection
have grown. He has not asked idly, he has been an earnest seeker; he has
tried to act by what[Page 5] he has been taught and what he has been able
to accept. The teacher too has observed the chela, has studied his
character and judged his trustworthiness. This process may have taken
months or years. It cannot be hurried by faith; each step has to be taken in
the light of knowledge, not in the dark. If we take vast precautions in the
entrusting of our mere self, how much more should a man discern and
proceed warily, where so great a matter as the guidance of his very life is
concerned.
At length the disciple
has reached a point where he asks a question not to be solved from texts.
Hitherto he has been helped in solving questions and doubts for which the
teachings of various scriptures sufficed. Now, by his own perseverance and
the guidance he has received he is brought face to face with a question which
comes under a different category. The guru has received this knowledge from his guru,
under the condition of handing it down to worthy disciples only, and even
then only under the same conditions under which he received it. He may or
may not, at first, permit his disciples so to communicate it in their turn.
After long experience they may do so. Hence arises the necessity of the first
promise. It is merely one of secrecy. The guru has judged of his disciple
and trusts him. He knows that long pledges are useless, for men will[Page
6] pledge themselves blindly
to anything in their hunger to gratify their curiosity, or to gain what they
suppose are valuable secrets for their own ends. The guru bases his
actions on his knowledge and experience. The chela does likewise with
such as he has. There is no mystery, no mere hypotheses, no straining of
faith. And so time goes on, and the respect and love of the chela grow as
he is able to see deeper and deeper into his guru's qualifications and
character. He receives instruction as difficulties occur in his growth. No
artificial pledges are needed. The conditions of holding such knowledge
are taught him; he accepts it under those conditions. He does not receive
it until he is judged fit. He knows when he fails that he brings upon himself
inevitable results or karmic punishment.
A man instinctively obeys him whom he has found always right and always
disinterested. His obedience springs from the very bottom of his heart. Any
pledge of obedience would be a false prop and a sacrilege. How can he
disobey him whom he has come so much to love and reverence ? Great
indeed must be the inducement before he does so and great indeed the
disaster.
It is not difficult to understand the enthusiasm and love of a man who has
beaten with weary brain and heart against the wall which[Page 7] bounds our
ordinary knowledge when he finds someone who gives him even a grain of
the knowledge which goes beyond. He needs no artificial props to keep
him to his faithfulness. And so, in his love and confidence, if he bursts into
expression some day of his ever-living devotion to every expressed wish of
his guru, it is because love has grown to that extent within him that words
come as a relief.
His guru accepts it, understanding how it has grown; he never asked for it.
It is love which has caused love to grow.
The
Eternal Ãtman is the true Initiator, the true Guru. Nothing must
eventually come between the aspirant and That. In his guru he must
worship That ; in himself That. His love and devotion must not fall into a
worship of form or feature or abode. His guru is to him an expression of
truth higher than himself. It is as that he worships him; but he distinguishes
between the vessel and its content.
And so progress, bounded and assured in every direction by acquired
knowledge, is made.
The association between guru and chela does not cease with death if both
are sufficiently advanced. If the chela is not sufficiently advanced, he may
unknowingly receive much from his guru, and may later learn to recognize
its source.[Page 8]
Between the relationship as described and the lowest forms of
fanatical devotion of the ignorant to those who know little, the gradations
are innumerable. It is no uncommon thing to hear a man talk of his guru as
if he were an omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent being, who could do
anything for the chela that he chose, who is always guiding and watching
over him at any time or anywhere. To this guru he has a pledge of absolute
obedience and devotion. He seeks instruction upon every little detail of life
which he carefully fulfils; or if he does not, he feels guilty of a sin, like the
devotee of a personal God. He in the first place became a chela with very
little previous knowledge of his guru. It was not in him then, or since, to
have much discrimination. He thought he saw a very great Yogi who would
lead him to Moksha, and he caught on at once. He may some day alter his
opinion, in which case he breaks his pledge and goes elsewhere.
These pledges of absolute obedience and surrender to the will of a guru
are fortunately rare. The chief condition is secrecy. All the rest is part of the
conditions of the knowledge given. Such, for instance, as continence,
abstinence, from certain foods, and so on, the breaking of which
conditions, once they are known, produce their own inevitable disasters.
Hence a man may[Page 9] receive knowledge from one man for a time and
afterward go to another, and so to a third, fourth, fifth, etc; but he should
remain under the tutelage of only one at a time, and where Yoga is being
practiced, this is especially necessary to prevent confusion, if for no other
reason. Of course, where a guru can continue or wishes to continue
teaching various things, the chela may never change; but the guru himself
may often refer his disciple to another guru.
In a country like India, where a large number of people are more or less
intently bent upon the search for gurus, the cases of deception are
constant and numerous; and cases frequently occur where the rascal
masquerading as a Yogi manages to obtain very considerable sums of
money from people whose credulity or whose greed for acquiring
knowledge outweighs their discrimination.
The belief in the possibility of Yoga and the capacity of man to rise by it to
the noblest and most sublime conditions is so innate in the Indian mind,
there is so much natural reverence in the people, that some centuries of
imposture, which grows yearly more brazen-faced, have done little to
decrease the reverence for the orange-red garment. This is also partly to
be accounted for by the undoubted fact that many men of blameless life
and great knowledge still continue to be[Page 10] found
in India, wandering as mendicants. It has become a custom for men to wander
far and wide, through cities, and in wild places, hunting for a guru to guide
and instruct them. Whether this was always so is much to be doubted. With
the decline of the search for true knowledge in India, those in whose custody
it is have withdrawn more and more from the outer life of the world, and the
difficulty in finding these custodians, no doubt, serves as a fair test to
prove the determination of the seeker, whether his motive be pure or selfish.
Others, remembering the failure of multitudes of those who wandered and sought,
make no such effort, believing either that the guru will find them when their
time has come or that there are no true Gurus, Yogîs, or Mahãtmas
now existing.
This
latter class is an increasing one, and its growth is no doubt, assisted
by the Agnostic influence of Western civilisation and also by a
consideration of the vast numbers of men of small learning, beggars and
idlers who are indifferently called Sannyãsi, Bairãgi, Swãmi, Yogi,
Mahãtmã, Paramhamsa, etc., as the speaker may consider fitting.
To hear a man say that he met several Mahãtmãs, at a fair or festival sounds
strange to Western Theosophists who have used that term in the original
sense to signify those who stand where humanity merges into[Page 11]
Deity. The meaning of the narrator was that he had met several men in
garb of ascetics who gave him a more or less favorable impression.
It will be seen from what has been said that chelaship, like every other wise
institution, must be founded upon knowledge, experience and judgment. If
these have to be exercised to the very highest degree where the chela
comes into direct communication with his guru, whose knowledge and
power, if he has any discrimination, will in time have become known to him,
how much more is it imperative upon him to be ever watchful and
discriminating in the case of those who, having little or no further
knowledge than himself, claim to teach through being in communication
with beings whose knowledge in regard to things here is, by the conception
we have of them, almost infallible. He can but fall back upon his own
reason and his own light as to how to act in any emergency that may arise;
he can take no directions from a source he does not know, through an
agency he sees little, or not at all, different from himself. He might as well
have remained under the dominion of a priest, as tread such treacherous
ground.
What infinite claims have been made to being in communication with God
and with superior beings ! Not by deliberate impostors, not by men[Page 12]
and women of impure or selfish lives; often quite the reverse of this.
Perhaps they did evil that good might come of it, leading their fellows upon
the path of virtue as they saw it, thinking that through the motive and
apparent result the means would be forgiven them. Dire illusion ! A
misrepresentation is only a bill drawn at a long date; it will mature after the
successes of having raised the wind have passed away. Truth cannot be
juggled with or put off. Who can know another's heart ? Who can know the
springs of action in another, when he has not yet been able to sound the
depths of good and evil within himself ?
Or
again, the claimant to mediatorship, either with a God, an Angelic Being
or a Mahãtmã ? for they are all the same as far as the recipient
of messages and directions is concerned, may be utterly or partially deceived
either by himself or by some masquerading intelligence external to himself.
The Christian who tells you how you will find Christ and the mediator who
tells you how you will find your Guru differ somewhat in their methods, but
both begin with if, and a long following list of ideal conditions; and therefore
as regards proof, so far, both are equal.
The aspirant to chelaship must be tested in the world in every manner.
Heavily indeed is[Page 13] he
punished for lack of discrimination and for credulity, or for accepting claims
and building on them without having probed these to the very bottom. Credulity
is punished almost as heavily apparently as lack of heart, and on nothing
than this latter can kãrmic
blows fall heavier. And this is just; for discrimination, straightforward
understanding of everything, as far as we can go, and then resisting the
temptation to go further and treat hypotheses as facts, or take statements
as such, however enticing, is the very root from which knowledge springs.
GURUS AND CHELAS
by Annie Besant
[In this reprint the Samskrt
terms for Teacher and Disciple are retained]
[Page
17] THE importance of the subject
taken up by Brother Sturdy in the August (1893) number of Lucifer may
well serve as excuse for a return to it, though from a somewhat different
standpoint. It should be the advantage of a Theosophical magazine that
different opinions can be put forward therein with perfect friendliness
and courtesy, so that readers may have the advantage of seeing different
sides of a subject, and may thus be enabled to form a more intelligent
judgment than can be reached by seeing but one set of dogmatic assertions.
The printing of an article with which the editor disagrees naturally implies
the right of reply thereto, and the free air of frank discussion is, I
think, healthier than the close atmosphere of unchallenged statement.
Bro. Sturdy very
properly states in the beginning of his article that there is no one system[Page
18] adopted by all groups of
teachers and disciples; and this is a point of some importance, for in the
West people are apt to imagine that all Occult Schools stand on the same
basis and employ the same methods. This is not so. In India there are many
Occult Schools, and the methods employed are as various as the teachers.
Students, eager to acquire knowledge and seeking liberation from the cycle
of re-births, go to one or to another, and very probably may guide
themselves in their choosing by some such process of questioning as that
described by Bro. Sturdy; there is no question here of spiritual insight;
it is a careful process of ratiocination. The key-note is struck in the
sentence:
"If
we take vast precautions in the entrusting of our mere self, how much
more should a man discern and proceed warily where so great a matter as
the guidance of his very life is concerned”.
But
the kind of precaution we take in selecting a trustee, or in choosing a
tutor for our son, has nought in common — and here comes the fundamental
difference between Bro. Sturdy and the large class both in the East and
West whose views I am endeavoring to represent — with the finding of
the Guru by the chela and the recognition by the latter of a relationship
thatalready exists. If chelaship means nothing[Page
19] more than the finding of
an intellectually advanced man, whose abilities and acquirements you
carefully investigate, in order that he may train you intellectually and
help you as a European professor helps his students, then I grant that the
method proposed is quite in keeping with the object; it is supremely rational
and cautious; every precaution is taken on both sides; the teacher
scrutinizes the pupil, the pupil scrutinizes the teacher, and if the result
be mutually satisfactory, the relation is entered into. The bond is on the
plane of intellect; the lower consciousness is the sole arbiter; and in this
world of illusion every precaution must be taken against deception on either
side.
But is this what is meant by the words Guru and chela ? Is the most sacred
and sublime of all human relationships nothing more than an intellectual
bond, entered into with questions that appear to make the initial stage one
of mutual suspicion, to be slowly removed by prolonged knowledge of each
other in the physical life ? Not so have I been taught, little as I know of
these high matters, and the process described by Bro. Sturdy is the
complete reversal of all that I have heard as to the methods of the school to
which I was introduced by H. P. Blavatsky. For in that school the
relationship between Guru and chela is a spiritual one, long[Page 20] before
it descends to the plane of the intellect, and the tie has grown so close
and strong ere the lower consciousness knows anything about it that when,
at last, the lower consciousness begins to realize it, all questioning’s
become a laughable impossibility. It is not a question of men wandering through
cities and in wild places, hunting for a guru to guide and instruct them.
The Guru and the chela
have been long working on the spiritual plane of consciousness, the Guru
directing, guiding, helping, the chela striving, learning, joyously submissive.
On that plane no places are known; the body, of the chela may be in any land.
On that plane no arguments are needed; as the spiritual vision strengthens,
the chela sees. He could as soon question his Guru's knowledge, unselfishness,
purity, as he could question the light of the sun; his life on the spiritual
plane is one of intense devotion to his Guru, to him the representative of
spiritual law, of compassion, of divinity. For many a long year his training
may proceed, and no gleam of what is passing may have reached the lower
consciousness meanwhile he is living in that lower consciousness a pure,
restrained, devoted life, aspiring ever towards his (to it) unknown Guru,
whom one day he hopes to find. Then dimly he begins to sense, in his
moments of highest meditation, a presence[Page
21] lofty and serene,
strong and calm, just and compassionate. This dim sensing
of something above him quickens his aspirations and stimulates his efforts.
The
lower consciousness, long purified, begins to respond more swiftly to the
impulses of the higher; the veil grows thinner between the lower and the
higher, and the dim sensing passes into perfect sight and hearing. More
and more the spiritual consciousness penetrates the intellectual, but it
comes as master, not as servant, to command, not to submit itself to investigation.
And it permeates the lower mind with its own knowledge, fills it with the
certainties of its own experience, floods it with the radiance of its own
light. Therefore, what the lower mind needs most to fit it for the reception
of its spiritual guest is devotion, the longing to rise, the passion to
yield itself in perfectest surrender. This done, it has done its part;
it has opened all the windows, and the light streams in. Where in all this
linked growth comes in the place for questioning’s of the Guru: "Has
He knowledge ? will He use it unselfishly ? can I trust Him ?" The chela
may doubt himself, but never his Guru; he may foolishly despair of himself,
but never of his Lord.
"But, then, you make
nothing of the intellect," I hear one say; " you open
the door to ignorance, to delusion, to superstition". The[Page
22] intellectual
has its place in the chela's life, but the intellect may no more aspire to
rule the Spirit or to lay down laws for its development, than the body may
aspire to rule the intellect. Let the chela study intellectually, that he may
be able to serve in the outer world, spreading the truths of Theosophy, removing
mental perplexities, solving intellectual problems, scattering the darkness
of ignorance. There let him be strong for intellectual conflict, a warrior
for the soul's emancipation, strenuous, clear, virile, insistent. But when
he enters the inner sanctuary and seeks the light of Spirit, he puts off his
intellectual armor, he lays aside his weapons, he clothes himself in trust
and devotion, he becomes in gentleness and submission as a little child.
Thus have the Wise Ones taught in every century; thus have Their
servants learned in every age; and thus I, though but the lowest of Their
servants in the outermost court of the Gentiles, thus I, with ignorance-dimmed
eyes, have seen.