The Gift The Teacher Likes

At the end of the course of study, the teacher of the Taittirīya Upaniṣad gives the departing student a parting address. It is a set of plain instructions. Speak the truth. Do what is right. Do not be negligent about your recitation. Look after your parents and your guests. And then:

ācāryāya priyaṃ dhanam āhṛtya prajātantuṃ mā vyavacchetsīḥ

Having brought the teacher wealth that pleases him, do not cut the thread of continuity.

The word is priyam, pleasing. Not costly, not large. The Upaniṣad does not say what the gift is. The student has to work out what the teacher actually likes.

The verses at our graduations

At Veda Studies graduations, Eddie Stern of the Broome Street Ganesha Temple has been chanting these convocation verses for our students.

These verses were composed for students finishing their Vedic study. They are chanted now, unchanged, over students finishing a course. The anuvāka hands the student work. It marks the point where supervision ends and practice begins.

What a teacher likes

I learnt this from my Guru, Sri M.S. Sreenivasan, over several years, mostly by watching what pleased him. What pleases a teacher is practice that has gone on long enough to show.

This is not a demand for perfect recitation. The same anuvāka does not mention error anywhere. It prohibits pramāda, negligence, five times over. Svādhyāyapravacanābhyāṃ na pramaditavyam.

Devotion to a teacher, praise, criticism, affection for the community: all of this is beautiful. But I measure my own work by whether the community practices and develops an orientation to prayerful living.

Why practice is given so much weight

The tradition places recitation under obligation from several directions at once. It does not rely on your enjoying it alone.

The Taittirīya Saṃhitā says a man is born owing three debts, and that the debt to the ṛṣi-s is discharged by study. Recitation is also brahmayajña, one of the five daily yajña-s. And here in the Upaniṣad it is a gift to the teacher. Debt, duty and gift. All three require the same act: sitting down with the text.

This kept the texts intact. It also works on the practitioner. Recitation steadies the mind, and a steady mind sees more clearly and reacts less, which is what the teaching asks of us.

Sādhana is one of three instruments the tradition gives for working with karma. Dāna and sevā are the others, and they operate on the same principle: something you take up and keep doing, which works on you while you do it.

The gift to the teacher works as a device. You begin practising because you were told to. At some point the practice is no longer for the teacher. It is how you live, and it is the means you have of working with your karma.

Gurupūrṇimā, and a plural

Today is the full moon of Āṣāḍha, also called Vyāsa pūrṇimā, after Vyāsa, who arranged the Vedas. On this day we honour the teaching tradition, not one teacher.

Our invocation says this. We chant śrī gurubhyo namaḥ at the start of every class. Gurubhyaḥ is the dative plural: salutations to the gurus, not to a guru. The plural is deliberate, and it is intelligent. A teaching tradition outlasts every teacher in it, and what we salute is the line, most of whose names we might not know.

The Guru Stotram says the same: na guroradhikaṃ tattvaṃ … tattvajñānāt paraṃ nāsti. There is nothing higher than the knowledge of what is. The knowledge comes before the person carrying it.

Coming into transformative teaching is a matter of karma: a teacher who transmits in a way you can be receptive, a tradition that has stayed intact, the time and the means to study. That is what we acknowledge today.

Dakṣiṇāmūrti

Śiva as teacher is shown as a young man seated under a banyan, surrounded by aged disciples, teaching in silence. Gurostu maunaṃ vyākhyānaṃ śiṣyāstu chinnasaṃśayāḥ. The teacher’s exposition is silence, and the disciples’ doubts are cut.

Silence here is not mystique, and Dakṣiṇāmūrti is not a teacher who declines to speak. The mūrti is itself a statement about what teaching is. Śiva takes this form in order to show it: a young (timeless) teacher before aged disciples, the hand held in cin-mudrā, the exposition given in silence. The form is the teaching.

The stotram ends by prescribing work rather than devotion: śravaṇāt, tadartha mananāt, dhyānāt, saṅkīrtanāt. Hearing it, reflecting on its meaning, meditating on it, and reciting it. A hymn of praise closes by handing you a practice.

A practice for today

I am re-posting the practice I shared for Gurupūrṇimā in 2022, the Dakṣiṇāmūrti mūla mantra. Let us know if you will practice in the comments below.