Two Birds on the Tree of the World

This site takes its name from the famous mantra of the Muṇḍakopaniṣat:

dvā suparṇā sayujā sakhāyā samānaṃ vṛkṣaṃ pariṣasvajāte
tayor anyaḥ pippalaṃ svādvattyanaśnannanyo abhicākaśīti

Two birds, inseparable friends, are perched on the same tree.
One of them eats the tree’s sweet fruit; the other, not eating, looks ever on.

This verse touch on one of the core problems of Indian thought: the relationship between pravṛtti, the path of worldly happiness, and nivṛtti, the path of ultimate happiness. This problem is as relevant now as it was for the ancients. Here I will try to explain why.

pravṛtti and nivṛtti

We can understand what is meant by pravṛtti and nivṛtti by exploring the mantra above. This exploration is just my point of view, but it is informed by the traditional stances.

The first bird symbolizes pravṛtti. Taking itself as a being that lives and dies, it flutters from experience to experience, savoring the sweet fruits of pleasure and shunning the bitter fruits of pain and disappointment. It delights in food, sex, beauty, money, glory, reputation, friends, family, children, adventure, conquest, discovery, and everything else the world offers. In short, the first bird models how almost all of us live.

The second bird symbolizes nivṛtti. It is self-luminous awareness, the light by which the world manifests as conscious experience. Still and serene, it is blissful in both pleasure and pain, and it pervades all experience without being affected by it. We may take this metaphysically, but it is also pointing to something utterly concrete: the nature of your experience right now. The word abhicākaśīti can here mean either “looks ever on” or “shines ever forth.”

Although these two birds are quite different, they are still sayujā sakhāyā, inseparable friends. This curious phrase is why I have thought of this verse thousands of times since I first heard it. But I will return to this phrase in due time. For now, let us continue to the next verse and flesh out these ideas of pravṛtti and nivṛtti:

samāne vṛkṣe puruṣo nimagno 'nīśayā śocati muhyamānaḥ
juṣṭam yadā paśyaty anyam īśam asya mahimānam iti vītaśokaḥ

In this very tree the first is entangled, and in its thrall it helplessly grieves.
but when it sees the glory of the venerated second, the Sovereign, its grief vanishes.

Entangled in the world, we chase the objects we desire and shun the objects we dislike. But objects don’t last, nor are they fully within our control. We therefore face a vexing problem: we cannot hold on to what we have. Our loved ones will die or leave us. Our experiences will end and fade into memory. Everything we have could collapse at any moment. One day, the Universe itself will end. But even so, we are enthralled by the world and its objects and endlessly cycle through joy and sorrow, grasping what cannot be grasped. This is called saṃsāra, which literally means “going on and on.” No matter how long we follow pravṛtti, we stay stuck in saṃsāra.

If we catch on to saṃsāra’s pattern and tire of it, we may turn inward and follow the path of nivṛtti. Turning away from all objects in the world through meditation, study, and surrender, we find that anything we take ourselves to be — a body, a mind, a way of thinking, a sense of self — is an object like any other, constantly changing and liable to birth and death. But there is one thing that does not change: awareness itself, the unseen subject that illuminates the world and its objects. Firm in the knowledge that we are awareness itself, we are free from identifying with the world’s objects and find lasting bliss untouched by sorrow. This is mokṣa, or liberation.

The problem

The problem is that pravṛtti and nivṛtti point in completely opposite directions and entail very different commitments. How and if these two can be reconciled is not obvious, and different traditions have offered their own solutions.

On one end of the spectrum of views is what I call “strong nivṛtti,” From this view, pravṛtti is ignorant, delusional, an abode of sorrow and misery that cannot possibly deliver. Birth is a disaster, worldly life is endless bondage, and the only way out is self-knowledge through renunciation, introversion, and withdrawal. This is the view of hard monasticism.

While this view is typified by monastics, in practice monastics depend on householders for their material support, and so there is a mutual arrangement: householders support and venerate the monastics, and monastics guide the ignorant householders. Here pravṛtti is given its place but is in an inferior position; there is a sense that a more capable and intelligent person would naturally be a monastic.

On the other end of the spectrum is the “strong pravṛtti” view. From this view, nivṛtti is naive and self-serving. The monastic’s commitments to renunciation and nonviolence are possible only because they depend on the householder, whose opposite commitments — to worldly life and the violence inherent in maintaining society — guarantee the monastic’s material conditions. Where the monastic sees the householder’s commitments as ignorant and inferior, the householder sees the monastic’s commitments as hypocritical. Texts like the Pañcatantra go further and deride monastics as frauds still entangled with worldly concerns, cowards too weak to handle householder life, and fools whose high-minded advice gets everyone killed. The text praises and advocates an attitude of boldness, daring, and a commitment to the world and its affairs.

While this view is typified by hard materialists, I think it is a matter of time before a person notices the basic problems of saṃsāra and seeks some stability among the world’s constant change. This is the gateway to nivṛtti, and so we’re back to the root problem.

One solution to this problem is the notion of varṇāśramadharma, where different modes are appropriate to different people at different times. In the traditional scheme, sannyāsa, the renunciation of the world that signals full commitment to nivṛtti, is the fourth and last stage of life, after all worldly desires and obligations have been fulfilled. But while this is a social compromise, it doesn’t address the root issue: if nivṛtti is superior to pravṛtti, why not go straight for nivṛtti?

It is within this context that the Bhagavad Gītā offers a synthesis view of “inner nivṛtti, outer pravṛtti.” Inside, one is free and not bound by the world’s movement; outside, one engages in action to avoid making problems for everyone else. Here “action” is understood as the conventional action associated with a person’s class, clan, and occupation according to the standards of the time.

But while the Gītā offers a compelling synthesis, it is not the final statement on the matter. In Adi Shankara’s understanding, pravṛtti is simply preparation for nivṛtti: outer engagement with the world refines a person’s character and readies them for renunciation and monasticism. To Swami Vivekananda and the other modernizers of the colonial period, nivṛtti is instead the source of socially engaged pravṛtti. The view of the modernizers has strong Christian influences that I will not explore here, but I also understand why they found these influences appealing. This leads us to today. For many modern Indians, pravṛtti follows the enlightened Western model, and the value the Indian traditions offer us today is fundamentally in terms of nivṛtti.

Questions

I sense some dissonance in this matter, and I have started this site to untangle what I can. I offer no answers yet, only a storm of questions:

• Why are the Indian traditions of pravṛtti so invisible today, except as a source of shame and embarrassment to modern Indians? Why have educated Indians ceded all of this territory to the West? How might the pravṛtti traditions speak on their own terms? To what extent can or should we live by them today? Or, are they best left entirely in the past? To what extent is our anti-intellectualism on these matters a defense mechanism?

• Relatedly, why is the modern understanding of nivṛtti so dominated by monastics and celibates? Adi Shankara, Ramanuja, Madhvacharya, Swaminarayan, Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Narayana Guru, Ramana Maharshi, Yogananda, Prabhupada — if we accept the synthesis offered by the Gītā, why do we not see nivṛtti exemplified by people active in the world and in family life?

• The ancient sages and even the gods are depicted with partners and families. Shiva and Shakti are so tightly bound that in some portrayals they share the same body. The Upanishads themselves contain rituals for having children and other worldly affairs. The whole of the saṃhitā, the oldest part of the Veda, deals with ritual and action. Even Krishna delights in līlā, the spontaneous play of divinity. Is all this concern with pravṛtti mere condescension to worldly realities? Or is the view of pravṛtti and nivṛtti that animates this behavior entirely different from what we have received?

• What is the role of the tantra traditions in finding an answer here? To what extent is spaṇḍa, the creative ecstasy of the divine, an expression of nivṛtti in pravṛtti?

• What are the Western influences on how we understand the Indian traditions today? If we see with Western lenses, how might we find these lenses, and how might we see instead? If our mix of Western and Indian lenses is incoherent, how might we re-approach the problems we face today? Is seeing in this way even possible, or desirable?

• Likewise, to what extent are Indian problems universal, as opposed to artifacts of either Indian experience or our jumble of Indian and Western lenses?

• To what extent are Western problems universal, as opposed to artifacts of Western experience? If these problems are particular to the West, how might the West be made aware of them?

• Are any of these questions misconceived? What answers are there already?

Inseparable friends

Despite all of these problems and questions, the two birds of the mantra are sayujā sakhāyā, inseparable friends. My own feeling is that this friendship is more than a turn of phrase and hints at an answer to some of these questions. But feeling is not enough; thought and argument are necessary. And so this site begins.