What difficulty is there in this? Baba

[Guest guest]

……“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.”……