Vedic Literature | Ekamsat | Uddhava-Gita | Holy Association
3-7. In different ages, many beings with rajas and tamas predominating in them asuras, rakshasas, beasts, birds, gandharvas, apsaras, serpents, siddhas, charanas, guhyakas, vidyadharas, and among human beings unqualified persons like women, vaisyas, sudras and outcastes all have attained to My Being by the power of holy association alone.
Examples of these are Vitrasura, Prahlada, Vrishaparva, Mahabali, Banasura, Maya, Vibhishana, Sugriva, Hanuman, Jambavan, Gajendra, Jatayu, Dharmavyadha, Kubja, the Gopikas and the wives of the brahmana ritualists. None of these had studied the Vedas, or attended on Vedic teachers as students under them. They had not observed any spiritual discipline or austerity. By the power of holy association alone they attained to the Supreme Self.
8. By devotion alone, generated through holy contact, many an ignorant being the Gopikas, cows, trees, animals, serpents and the like attained to Me with ease.
9. Me, whom aspirants do not reach even by putting forth great effort by way of practising yoga, philosophical enquiry, charity, vows, austerity, sacrifices, Vedic study and formal renunciation, did they attain through holy contact.
10. After Akrura took Me and Balarama from Vraja to Mathura, these Gopikas, who entertained intense love and attachment to Me, were painfully distressed by separation from Me, and found nothing else in this world to give them solace.
11. Oh friend! Nights which they had passed like moments with Me, their most beloved one, when I had sported with them in Vrindavan, were later spent by them with the feeling that they were aeons.
12. The sages lose name and form while in samadhi, as do the rivers while merging in the ocean. Similarly, the intensely loving Gopikas lost in Me their separate existence, as also the awareness of their kith and kin whom one looks upon as ones own, lost even the consciousness of the very body with which one identifies oneself.
13. Those women who did not know My real nature as the Lord of all were actuated by passionate love, and looked upon Me as their lover. But still in their hundreds they attained to Me, the Parabrahman, by the sheer power of their holy association with Me.
14-15. Oh Uddhava! Therefore, abandoning reliance on the scriptural injunctions
and prohibitions, the ways of work and of renunciation, what you have learnt and
what you yet hope to learn, surrender your entire being, body, mind and soul to
Me the All-comprehending One, the Essence within all embodied beings. By that
shall you be free from all fear, through My grace.
Uddhava said:
16. Oh Supreme Yogi! Hearing Thy words, the doubts in my mind are not getting
cleared. On the other hand, I am getting more confounded.
Tantra preaches a kind of yoga, called Kundalini (serpent power), leading to spiritual perception and mystic visions. It is awakening the spiritual energy latent in human beings.
18. Through proper friction and the aid of wind, the heat latent in the space within the fire-stick comes out as sparks, and afterwards when the sacrificial offerings are poured into it, it becomes a flaming fire. In the same way the whole realm of sound forms an expression of Me.
19. Just like the generation of sound, the actions of the hands, feet, anus and sex organ, as also the modes assumed by the sense organs, mind, the three gunas and Prakrti are all My expressions.
20. Iswara, the Soul of all, was in the beginning un-manifest and without a second. He, the support of the three gunas of Prakrti and the source of the world-lotus, manifests as the many by the diversification of His power-aspect under the influence of Time, just as a seed becomes a plant or a tree with many branches when put in the soil suited for its germination.
21. Just as a cloth subsists in its spread-out threads, so the world, permeated by Him like the warp and woof of a cloth, subsists in Him only and has no being apart from Him. Existing through eternity, this world-tree of the nature of works has been yielding the flowers of worldly enjoyment and the fruits of liberation.
22. This world-tree has two seeds in the form of merits and demerits. It has numberless roots in the countless tendencies. It has three stems in the three gunas of Prakrti. It has five boughs in the five elements. It has five saps in the five kinds of sense perceptions. It has eleven branches in the ten senses of perception and action, and the mind. It has two birds nesting in it, Iswara and Jiva. It has three layers of bark in the three humours of vata, pitta and kapha. It extends up to the solar sphere.
23. The vultures of the countryside eat one kind of its fruits causing sorrow and suffering. These are the worldly-minded, prompted by greed and lured by sensuous enjoyment. There are the swans in the habitat of forest which eat another kind of its fruits that brings happiness. These are men of renunciation and discrimination who seek liberation. He who understands, through the instruction and blessings of his guru, that the one Paramatman has by virtue of His Yogamaya manifested Himself as the many in various aspects understands the true purport of the Veda.
24. Thus, through the one-pointed devotion developed by service to guru, the axe of knowledge is sharpened. Cut open with it the ego-sense, the prison house of the Jiva, without wavering, and attain to the Supreme Purusa. After that you can discard even that weapon even the practice of these disciplines, the mental mode of knowledge with which ignorance is overcome.