What difficulty is there in this?

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FROM " LIFE OF SAI BABA " BY NARASIMHA SWAMI

 

……“Next Das Ganu was anxious to render even a Sanskrit Upanishad, namely,

Isavasya Upanishad, into Marathi. This famous Upanishad consists of only 18

verses. It is full of great thoughts and has been considered by Mahatma Gandhi

to be peculiarly important. Mahatma Gandhi said that if the whole of Hindu

spiritual literature were gone leaving only this Isa Upanishad, the whole of

Hindu dharma could be reconstructed with this alone.

 

Though the Upanishad has received such high encomia, it is a very difficult and

tough Upanishad even for separation of sentences and phrases in it, and much

more for the interpretation of the same. Different writers have adopted widely

different courses. Taking even the very first verse, the punctuation varies.

Having so many difficulties in the way of his ambition, Das Ganu Maharaj went to

Baba. Baba said, ‘What difficulty is there in this?

 

You had better go, as usual, to Kaka Dixit’s bungalow in Ville Parle. And there

that (cooly girl) Malkarni, will give you the meaning’. People would laugh at a

great pandit like Das Ganu getting interpretation of an Upanishad from a cooly

girl. But all the same Das Ganu went to Kaka’s bungalow. He slept there. When he

woke up in the morning, he heard a girl (it must be the Malkarni mentioned by

Baba, he thought) singing songs in great joy. She was praising some orange

coloured silk sari, wondering at its fineness and the beauty of its borders, and

the floral embroidery on it. Then he just peeped to see who the songster was.

The songster had no sari. She wore a rag which was not silk, nor orange

coloured, had no borders and no embroidery.

 

He pitied the girl and got a friend to give her a sari-a small cheap sari. She

wore it just one day, and went about enjoying it. But the very following day,

she cast it aside, again wore her tatters and again began to sing joyously the

song about the orange coloured sari and its beauty. Then Das Ganu understood the

Upanishad. He found out that the girl’s happiness lay not in the external sari

which she had ‘thrown away’ (tena tyaktena, which means, that being thrown away)

but in herself.

 

And Isavasya Upanishad says the same thing. ‘All this world’, says the first

verse, ‘is covered by the Maya of Iswara. So enjoy bliss, not by having the

externals, but by rejecting the externals (Tenatyaktena)’. 'Tena Tyaktena' might

mean being content with what God gives you. The girl was happy as she was

contented. Thus Baba taught Isa Upanishad to Ganu through a cooly girl. Baba’s

ways of teaching were and are peculiar and different in the case of different

individuals.”……

 

http://www.heritageofshirdisai.org/newsletter/Vol50.htm