How scriptural stories reflect a more expansive form of rationality – Sudyumna pastime analysis 1

[Srimad Bhagavatam 9.1.1 – 8 on Thursday, March 11th, 2021 at Bhakti Center New York]

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This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna, so, let us look at this chapter over here, so, we read the first six verses, verse nine out of them, first six verses talk about Parishad Maharaj’s questions, where he is asking about why he was with Manu’s dynasty, and then, he describes to some extent the dynasty, and then he goes into a particular incident, which is the title of this chapter, that incident is that Manu performed a sacrifice for having a male progeny, but that sacrifice yields a female, and we will discuss this, so, why that happened, but when he, this happens, Manu is disappointed, and he is disturbed, he asks Vasishtha Muni, what went wrong? Vasishtha Muni said, okay, do not worry, I will fix it, and what he does is, he fixes it, and the child who is a girl, Ila, she becomes a princess, a princess becomes a prince, Sudhyumna, and then, Sudhyumna goes to a forest, and he lives as a prince, a powerful prince, but somehow, he goes to a forest, and there, because of some pronunciation that Lord Shiva has made long ago, he becomes a woman, his gender changes, and he becomes a female, and in order to become a female, he actually unites with Buddha, the son of Somadeva, and then he has a child through them, that child is Pururava, and then after that, the last part is Sudhyumna becomes, so again Vasishtha sees this has happened, so Vasishtha prays, and Vasishtha says, okay, what can be done? He again prays to Lord Shiva, and Shiva says, one month as a male, and one month as a female, and like that, Sudhyumna lives throughout his life, and then at the end, Sudhyumna renounces the world, and attains spiritual perfection.
So, at one level, we think, what kind of story is this, and what is this doing in the Bhagavatam? So, we’ll discuss these issues, but let’s look first at the point of Vamshavali. Vamshavali is one of the things that are discussed in the scriptures, that generally the Puranas have some lakshanas, that these are, every book has to have, cover certain subjects, in order to be considered a book in that subject. So, for example, if there’s a book on geography, and that book doesn’t contain any maps, say, what kind of book is this? How is it a book on geography? The book is on history, and it has no dates.
Okay, is it really a book on history? So, certain books have to have certain characteristics. So, traditionally, the Puranas are expected to have some characteristics, and one of those characteristics is Vamshavali. Vamshavali is description of the dynasties.
So, in this case, there’s a description of the Swayambhuva Manu dynasty. In fact, if we were going to the overall history of the Bhagavatam, we’ll see that from the third canto onwards, the Bhagavatam narrative is overall going along the Vamshavali. It starts with third canto, the seventh canto is the description of the first Manu, Swayambhuva Manu, and then in the eighth canto, there’s a fast forward description of the subsequent seven Manus, and then Swayambhuva Manu is described from the eighth canto onwards.
And further Swayambhuva Manu descendants, now what happened, that further sequence goes on in the ninth canto and the tenth canto also. Harishchandra Maharaj says I’ll be describing in much detail. So, ninth, tenth, eleventh, and even twelfth cantos are the serial descriptions of the Swayambhuva Manu, the current Manu.
So, why all this description of the dynasties? So, basically, it’s not just a description of ordinary characters. It’s a description of those characters who sought to grow spiritually and what challenges they faced, how they succeeded, how they didn’t succeed. The idea is, so we learn from other experiences so that we don’t have to repeat their negative experiences.
So, we can learn from the positives and we don’t repeat the negatives. Today, if we want to use technology, we don’t reinvent the wheel. What has been invented, learned in the past, we build on that.
So, that applies not only to technological knowledge, it can apply also to ethical and spiritual knowledge. So, we learn from the past. That’s the idea why the Bhagavatam discusses dynasties.
And specifically, the Bhagavatam has this understanding that there is motion of time. So, time itself moves from the past to the present to the future. And there is motion of the soul through time.
We are all living beings and we are moving through time. Now, are we moving with time? Yes, in one sense we are moving with time. But the point is that time is cyclic.
Time just moves round and round and round. Morning, afternoon, evening, night, morning, afternoon, evening, night. Then we have weeks, Mondays, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday.
We have 12 months, we have physically whatever way we want to look at the food cyclically. That’s the Vedic understanding. Although the modern understanding derived from the Judeo-Christian ethos is that it is linear.
But all motion of time within nature is cyclic. There is no linear movement of time. Now, what is important here is that many people influenced by the Christian ethos think that the movement of time as cyclic will lead to stasis.
People will just, okay, just time is moving around and around and people will become frozen. There will be no progress. They say it is a linear motion of time which inspires progress.
Well, okay, what the Bhagavatam understanding is time is cyclic, but the soul’s movement is not necessarily cyclic. The soul’s journey is spiral. Spiral means the soul can move to higher consciousness or move to lower consciousness.
So every day, in one sense, we go through the same time motions. It’s morning, afternoon, evening, night. But how we act, what choices we make, that shapes our consciousness, whether our consciousness goes up or whether it goes down, that depends on us.
So time is cyclic. So the motion of time is cyclic. Our motion through time is spiral.
So here you can see illustration. Time moves cyclically, time moves in a circle basically, as a circularly or cyclically, goes through various cycles, but the soul can move spirally up or down. So the Bhagavatam is teaching us values by which the soul can move up.
The soul can evolve in consciousness ultimately toward devotional consciousness, toward Krishna consciousness. So that’s what is being taught over here. And what we learn from the Bhagavatam is essentially how we can go beyond the movement of time in this world to the transcendental level.
So how do we do that? By two things. First is, by learning from the Bhagavatam, we learn to value that which we, things we frequently devalue. Even in the normal course of our life, our spirituality, our bhakti, we say, okay, this is to be done, I can do it later also.
We tend to devalue it. So we only learn to value that by studying scriptures like the Bhagavatam. And simultaneously, we learn to value, we often, we may learn to devalue things which are otherwise overvalued in modern societies.
For example, material progress is overvalued. So material accomplishments, material success, that is often overvalued in contemporary society. So the Bhagavatam teaches us how everything material is temporary.
How everything material is temporary, possessions are temporary, positions are temporary, our achievements are temporary. Nothing remains in future, not even our names will remain. So we often overvalue these things.
The Bhagavatam says don’t value these things so much. And we easily understand this thing. Okay, if a little spiritual, we understand that, okay, I shouldn’t value too much money or possessions.
But the Bhagavatam message goes deeper. And it says here, there’s one thing which we often think of as foundational to our identity. And that is not central to our identity.
And that’s what this story reveals. And what is that? That is our gender. So the story here describes, I’ll summarise the story briefly.
But the whole point of the story is that among the many temporary things in this world, even our gender is also temporary. So the fluidity of gender over time is illustrated in the story. So basically, there are four transformations that happen.
Manu wants a female child, whereas Manu wants a male child. And they’re performing a sacrifice. While the sacrifice is being performed, he urges the priest, no, no, I want a female child.
And then the priest chants the mantra differently. And he chants the mantra differently. Then the result of that is, instead of a male child, a female child is born.
And when this happens, Manu is upset. He asks Vashishtha, you are an expert in performing sacrifices. And I provided you all the ingredients necessary for performing the sacrifice properly.
What went wrong? So Vashishtha has a mystical vision and sees what is happening. Oh, I know what mistake happened. The priest got distracted by the queen, but he doesn’t blame the queen.
He says, I will fix it. And he performs further, he performs further sacrifices, he performs a ritual. And basically by invoking divine powers and using his own mystical powers, he converts this female child into a male.
He becomes Sudhyumna. When he becomes Sudhyumna, he becomes a very powerful chivalrous prince. And he’s all set to then become the king after Manu.
He’s gone to the forest once while having some fun with his friends. And he enters into a particular forest and suddenly he finds that he’s become a female. And he looks around and he sees all his male associates with whom he had been going out, they’re all been changed into females.
In fact, he finds that even his horse, horse gender has changed. So Parikshit Maharaj says, hey, wait, wait, wait, what’s this? How did this happen? How could this have happened? And then there was a backflash. So in that backflash, he says that it is described that in that forest, that forest was dear to Lord Shiva.
So once Shiva and Parvati were engaged in intimate activity, and at that time some sages came over there. And when the sages saw what was happening, they knew that they wanted to give Shiva and Parvati their privacy. So they left.
But still Parvati felt very embarrassed. And seeing her embarrassment, Shiva made a proclamation that nobody who can embarrass you will enter into this forest. He said that if any male enters into the forest, that male will change into a female.
And that pronouncement of Lord Shiva had acted. So Shiva didn’t know anything about this. And he just was going through the forest.
And he entered into that area and he became a female. And not only became a female, he became a very attractive, enticing female. And it seems what is described over here is that he not only became, initially he was taken aback, he was shocked, what happened? How did this happen? But not just his biology changed, but also his psychology changed.
And then there was a powerful the son of the Soma, son of Soma, so Sharda Devi, he was there around the world. And he was also going through the forest and he saw this beautiful damsel. And he became captivated by her.
And she also became captivated by her. So that was where the transformation was, biological and psychological. And then they eventually united and they had a child, 9th Canto as well as the 11th Canto.
So after his femininity, he had a child and that feminine aspects of his desires are fulfilled to some extent. Then Sudhyumna came slightly out of the spell and he remembered his guru Vashishtha. And when he remembered his guru Vashishtha, Vashishtha also remembered him and Vashishtha understood what his plight was.
So Vashishtha prayed to Lord Shiva, performed some sacrifices and he said, please, he is in a, he is in a difficult situation, help him. So Shiva said that, okay, I will bring him back to me, but he will be one month male and one month female. So that is the state in which he lived throughout his life.
So basically the Bhagavatam shows that among the many things about our identity that we may consider bedrock truths. So he says, even our gender is not necessarily a bedrock truth. It is changeable with time.
So what’s the point of such stories? So gender is not central to our identity. Now, nowadays there’s the feminist movement. Now, just a couple of days ago, the old woman’s day was there and there was a highlighting of how women have been deprived of opportunity, their discrimination.
And yes, if there are some social wrongs, they need to be corrected. But the point is we don’t have to identify ourselves as by our gender more than by our spirituality. So the idea is gender is changeable by many means.
So one is as it is described over here by curse or by blessing, it can be changed. Another is that the gender can be changed by transmigration. A soul who has a male body in this life may well get a female body in the next life and vice versa.
And increasingly in today’s world, gender may also be changed by technology. So there are gender change surgeries which are being done with increasing frequency and often gender change is associated with increasing assertiveness, even vehemence in today’s world. So gender dysphoria seems to be a gender dysphoria is a situation where people seem to they feel that I belong to a different gender.
A person with a man thinks I’m a female and a female thinks I’m a male. So we’ll discuss that also in due course. So this is these are two extremes.
Now, we see the materialistic material world. What is the relationship between sexuality and identity? That sexuality alone defines our identity. That is the materialistic conception of life.
Because for many materialistic people, not everyone, for many of them, as Krishna talks about in the 16th chapter, the divine and demoniac nature, he says that such people think that fulfilling their sensual desires is the purpose of life. So there’s sexuality defines their identity. The other extreme is to say that sexuality has nothing to do with our identity.
That the sexuality doesn’t matter at all. Only the spirituality matters. Well, that in principle true.
In practise, there are new culture in the Vedic culture, it’s understood that we are all spiritual beings. But at the same time, there are certain, there are certain norms that are associated with gender and gender interactions. So when you say, okay, I don’t see the body, I see only the soul.
Well, it’s not easy, even for very spiritually evolved people to actually transcend the body identity. And we have to function being aware of our gender. That’s why there is some amount of gender distancing, not just in spiritual society, but even in general civilised societies.
So the balance understanding would be not that gender defines our identity or gender has nothing to do with our identity. It is one component of our identity. At the level of the soul, it’s true.
Yes. So we could say these two extremes are like, if I think I am the body, and the gender alone defines my identity. If I think I am the soul, the gender has nothing to do with my identity.
However, we are souls in particular bodies right now. And because of that, we have to consider our bodily identity. Also, I need to consider a spiritual identity consider means while we interact with people, we have to consider, okay, how, what is the appropriate way of interacting with a particular person.
So identity is sexuality is one part of our identity. So in today’s session, I will talk about two things. Overall, in this, as I said, I’ll take an overview of the chapter.
I’ll be talking about two things. First, I’ll talk about this whole story which seems quite bizarre, that somebody enters in somebody by sacrifice changes their gender or enters into the forest and changes their gender. And then, so I’ll talk about the mechanism of how material nature and things within it can be changed, whether that is rational or irrational, that will be the focus of today’s discussion.
And tomorrow, I will be discussing in detail about the whole idea of the, the gender change, almost we can say craze that has gripped some sections of modern society, modern or postmodern society today, what would be the Vedic take on people who feel that they’re in the they’re in a body of a wrong gender and want to change it? What is the Vedic understanding on that? We’ll discuss tomorrow. So now sometimes the question comes up, are some things destiny? So was it that Sudhyumna had to go through the situation or the soul who came in that body? It is quite disorienting to have a gender changing like that. Because for functioning in the world, we need some, some truths, not necessarily eternal truth, but some functional truths.
So was it destiny that he first was born a female, then became a male and again, a female? Well, it’s very difficult to know in advance, whether something is reversible or irreversible. So we see that he made efforts to, his father made efforts to change the gender first, and he made effort, then his this is the priest or preceptor made the efforts. But eventually, he ended up in a state of constant transition.
So whether what is happening is reversible or irreversible, whether it is assigned, and in that sense, it’s irreversible or irreversible. This is very difficult to know. Now we make efforts and then we decide whether it’s possible to change it or not.
And on top of that is another point is even if something is reversible, the effort required to reverse something may exceed the cost of the change condition. So I’m in condition A and I want to condition B. I want to go back to condition A, but sometimes the effort required might be huge. So is it worth it? Some people may decide that, okay, they have a particular, particular physical limitation.
It’s a limitation in some way, but it’s not a huge limitation. If I try to remove that limitation that requires, let me take my whole life and my whole, my all my savings and all my money, do I really need to do it? But there are, in often in life, we don’t get perfect solutions. We often have to make trade-offs.
So this thing of solutions and trade-offs will also be discussed in tomorrow’s session more. But let’s look at this point over here. When material nature is to be transformed, in fact, what society calls as progress is in many ways transforming material nature.
So what do we mean by that? Let’s say nature is extremely cold. So then we transform material nature. How do we do that? We may have, we may have warm clothes.
So we are transforming, we are not transforming nature, but we are transforming the process on us. Nothing else. So material nature can be changed broadly in three ways.
One is raw human effort. Raw human effort means we just mechanically make efforts to change things with our physical repetition of things. So someplace, say the water floods regularly.
And what do we do? Whenever the water floods, then we try to dry the water from there, dry the water away from it, dry the area. That’s a raw human effort. Then there could be technologically-aided human effort.
Say, for example, if the water floods a particular area, a dam might be constructed, some kind of elevating wall might be constructed. That’s technologically-aided human effort. And there could be religiously-aided human effort.
That means in the past, people would perform rituals, they would perform some sacrifices, some rites. And by that, they would try to transform material nature. Now in this case, the transformation of material nature we are referring to is transforming on gender.
But this principle that nature is transformed, is to be transformed, this applies everywhere. If there is drought in a particular place, what might we do? Okay, sometimes in some parts of the world, people have to walk several miles to just get some water. And that’s huge effort, it’s exhausting.
So maybe create a pipeline, create a medication system. That’s one way to do it. Another is perform some sacrifices to invoke the rain god, and thereby get some rains.
So various efforts have been tried out. In today’s world, we would, most people consider this a raw human effort as too primitive. And religiously-aided, the idea that religion can aid human effort in transforming material nature, that is considered pre-scientific, irrational, and superstitious.
And so the most of human effort progress is focused on technologically-aided human effort. So in general, when today’s people talk about progress, they talk about what are the ways to progress, they say basically it’s politics, economics, and technology. And have the right political arrangement, have the right economic system, and have the right technology.
You get these three things right, politics, economics, and technology. And people think society will progress. And yeah, at some levels, it might happen.
But does it improve simply the material commodities people have? Does it actually improve the quality of their consciousness? Not really. So but let’s look at religiously-aided human effort. Which is more or less downplayed or delayed, downplayed or even derided in today’s society.
So in this case, there was religious effort to say change, to have a child of a particular gender, and then to try to change the gender of that child. And then various curses and various pronouncements let you change your gender. So how does religious transformation happen? Is it magical? Well, actually, in principle, there’s no more magical than technological transformation.
In science or in science fiction, and that is Arthur C. Clarke was a prominent science fiction author. So he had three laws. They’re called Clarke’s laws.
And actually, there are three laws, but only the third law is very well known. And his third law was any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. So what he meant by that was that if technology brings up, sorry, if technology brings about certain change, then for, for when the technology is sufficiently advanced, the change seems magical.
And that’s true in some ways. The corollary of this law said that if a technology can’t be distinguished from, is distinguishable from magic, then it is not technology. It is not sufficiently advanced.
That means for a particular generation, advanced technology is how did this say, for example, 30, 40 years ago, not in 30, no, 20 years ago, if the device we said, we could take and call anyone in any part of the world just by clicking a few, but that the person in the other form of an anti almost the antipode of the world, that would be considered difficult. It’s not impossible. Certainly 50 or 100 years ago, that would have been considered impossible, but it’s happening.
So today we don’t consider magical. Why? Because this technology has become to some extent widespread and commonplace. So the magic lies primarily in the mystery.
In the mystery means as long as you don’t know the mechanism by which it happens, how did this happen? You don’t know the mechanism, we consider it mystery. But once you understand the mechanism, then you realise actually it’s not mystery. So that’s what, once the, how does this work? Okay, these are the steps.
Now, how the internet works, most people may not understand the technicalities of it, but they understand it sufficiently to not consider it like a big mystery or a big magic. Okay, it happens. So if you consider the magic is in the mysteries, as I said, mediaeval people wouldn’t understand digital currency.
How do you go to a shop and just swap some card and you can buy a hundred items from there? What are you paying them? They would understand digital currency. And similarly, we moderns may not understand mantra technology. We may not understand the science of say fire sacrifices by which technology is used in a different sense.
So now is it irrational? How can a sacrifice change things like this? It’s not exactly irrational. It’s a more expansive definition of rationality. Why a more expansive definition? Because it considers factors beyond what are considered in modern science.
So it’s considering, as I said, force and factors beyond what we presently consider. So in rituals, there is rationality. Now if you consider rationality in terms of, okay, cause this, this cause produces this effect.
So that’s what we see in this whole ritual performance also. So Manu performs a particular ritual, expecting a particular effect, a particular result. He says, I perform this ritual to have a child.
But then what happens? He doesn’t have a child. He doesn’t have a male child. He has a female child.
Hey, why did this cause not produce that effect? So he asks that question. And then, then after that, the sage involved, he gives an answer. That variable result, it is another pertinent but unconsidered cause.
Oh, the priest was influenced. And the priest chanted a mantra. Okay, that was the cause.
So isn’t this rationality? If you consider rationality, what do we mean by it literally? It means that there is a reasonable correlation or connection and causal connection, connection between causes and effects. So magic means you take out a hat and find a rabbit over there. That doesn’t make sense.
What is the cause of the connection here? But when we there is a reasonable cause of a connection, that’s what we call rationality. So here also, there is a cause effect connection being depicted. But the fact is that there are factors beyond what you would consider normal rationality.
So this is a difference between modern rationality and Vedic rationality. So modern rationality, it is reduced to gross physical particles and impersonal forces. So physical particles are atoms or fundamental particles.
And impersonal forces means gravity and electromagnetic force, nuclear strong force, nuclear weak force, forces like that. So only these forces and particles interact, and their interaction describes the phenomena in the universe. That’s modern rationality.
That’s Vedic rationality. It acknowledges that these are gross physical mechanisms are there. But beyond that, there are conscious agents and principles that govern changes in consciousness and their consequences.
This refers to the conscious agents refers to the soul and principles that govern changes in consciousness and their consequences refers to the modes and the principle of karma. So this is a more expansive conception of rationality. Now with this more expansive conception of rationality, what happens over here is that the whole phenomena of gender change that is described in the story becomes a little clearer.
And what is done in this case is how to deal with gender issues, the two principles which will be the broad theme of tomorrow’s class that deal appropriately with social convention and focus resourcefully on spiritual elevation. That a king traditionally was expected to be a male. So the citizens were not very satisfied when their to be king was a female.
So then they arranged that gender was changed. So deal appropriately social convention, but Sudhyumna or Ila, whatever her name was, as it varied from month to month, she didn’t get he or she didn’t get obsessed with the gender. Okay, this is the way I am right now, focus resourcefully on spiritual elevation.
So that is what is required. So specifically how the gender change happens, that is that can seem to be a magical mechanism for us. But the principle is the Bhagavatam says, okay, it happens, there’s no, it doesn’t make a big brouhaha about the mechanism by which it happens.
And it doesn’t make a brouhaha about the fact that it happens also. Okay, it happened, doesn’t matter. But focus on spiritual growth.
And that is a success of Sudhyumna. That although he had what you could call a very traumatising life, where his gender kept changing for him, and it must have been disorienting for him. But he didn’t let his gender change disorient him, he focused on spiritual growth, he ultimately achieved perfection.
So how that principle we can apply in our lives, I’ll discuss in tomorrow’s session. I quickly summarise what we discussed today. And we can have one question or comment.
So I focused broadly today on two distinct sections or themes. First was the Bhagavatam, why is it, why is it containing Vamshavali in the description of dynasties? Because we can learn from past experiences so that we don’t have to repeat negative past experiences and we can build on positive past experiences. Just as we use technology from the technological products from the past, we can also use ethical, moral and spiritual products from the past.
Then the Bhagavatam focusses on stories which help us to know what is of true value. So what is the true value can be seen. Okay, I’ll just quickly repeat this while I’m repeating, just go back to summary.
Yeah. So I basically divided the chapter. In my presentation chapter, I’m dividing it into sections.
The first section was the first six verses. The Bhagavatam tells us the story so that we can learn what is of real value. So time moves cyclically round and round, but the soul can evolve spirally to higher consciousness.
And the progression is not in the moment of time, but it is a movement of the soul through time to higher consciousness. And to move towards higher consciousness means what? To align our values with actual reality. So material things we tend to overvalue, we learn to devalue them.
And our spirituality often we don’t value so much. So we need to value it. So say that it’s easy to understand that wealth and positions and powers, these are materials that shouldn’t be valued too much.
But to understand that even our gender is not a part of the core of who we are. And we shouldn’t. And that is what this chapter is providing us.
So if we identify with our body, then our gender may become our defining identity. If you identify only as a soul, you may think the gender doesn’t matter at all. Gender is not a part of my identity.
But while functioning in the world, when we are embodied souls, when our soul is embodied as having a body of a particular gender, the gender has to be considered. So that’s why it’s one part of our identity. So that was the first part.
And that is an oral lesson from this. And then seven to 42, the verses talk primarily about how the gender of Sudhyumna will change multiple times. And in that connection, we discussed mainly the concept of how gender change may happen in two ways.
One is recursive benediction, second is transmigration, and third is through technology. So we discussed the principle of how human beings try to change material nature, either by raw human effort, technologically aided human effort, or by religiously aided human effort. And we might today consider religiously aided human effort as just pre-scientific imagination or superstition.
It seems too magical or miraculous. But even technology is magical, as long as one doesn’t know the mechanism. So once the mechanism is understood, then it doesn’t seem magical, it seems rational.
So depending on when we are and where we are coming from, say, mediaeval people would find today’s technology magical. And similarly, we might find the Vedic technology magical. So is this whole a magical superstitious story? No, there is a rationality here also.
But it’s a more expansive form of rationality. They consider causes and effects, they consider factors beyond what we consider. So you see rationality in the sense that a particular cause is expected to produce a particular effect, a sacrifice is expected to produce a return.
But why doesn’t? Questions are asked. And how are those questions answered? By explaining other factors, what other factors came into play. That’s actually the essence of rationality.
The difference in Vedic and modern rationality is modern rationality reduces reality to the interaction of fundamental part of fundamental particles and impersonal forces. Whereas Vedic rationality considers conscious agents and the principles that govern consciousness exchanges and the attendant consequences. So with this, so we discussed in this session about how the mechanism of gender change is not mystical, it’s intelligible.
But the principle of gender change, now how to deal with this, which is an increasing issue for gender dysphoria and gender issues are becoming increasing how to deal with that. The two principles I’ll discuss in the next session that now we understand social convention and act appropriately and we focus on spiritual elevation. Thank you very much.
Hare Krishna. Hare Krishna.