LESSONS FROM THE WORLD                                                                      

                                               -Swamini Shraddhanand Saraswati

In the Bhagavat Purana we come across the narration of a popular story of a dialogue between a Yaadava King and an Avadhuta, a Sannyasi of the highest grade. Once the king came across such an avadhuta, whose name is not mentioned in the story but is thought to be none other than the great Dattatreya Avadhuta, who was the son of Rishi Atri.


Who is an Avadhuta?

The Vedic scriptures prescribe an ingenious life style for the fulfillment of life’s goals. The Vedic scheme of life is known as the varna-aashrama-vyavastha (the varnaashrama scheme). This scheme consists of two separate sections, one is the varna-scheme and the other is the aashrama-scheme. Of these two the varna-scheme is meant for the maintenance of social order and social progress. No individual is born isolated. Since every individual is a part of the society none can ignore social harmony and live happily. The varna-scheme takes care of the maintenance of social harmony. It is based on the classification of the society into various groups and each group is called a Varna. Thus we have four varnas called Brahmana, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra.

Besides the maintenance of social harmony through the Varna scheme, wherein each group does its assigned duties we also have a scheme to take care of personal harmony and personal progress as an individual. This is the Aashrama-scheme. Every individual’s life-style should be balanced so as to take care of both, the social harmony as well as individual progress. If this balance is lost sight of there can be no peace in life. The Vedic scheme is an ingenious scheme which takes care of a person as an individual and as a member of the society in which social harmony is taken care of by the aashrama-scheme. The scriptures talk about four stages of life, which everybody has to necessarily go through viz. the Brahmacharya, Ghruhastha, Vanaprastha and Sannyasa stages.

An Avadhuta is a sannyasi who has transcended all the Vedic injunctions prescribed by the Varnaashrama scheme. He is a gyani who is no longer bound by any of the rules and regulations laid down by the scheme. The Veda has released the Avadhuta from all disciplines because the Veda knows that the freedom given to him will not be harmful to the society because a gyani is incapable of doing any unrighteous act. Generally a gyani sannyasi who has given up all the Varnaashrama dharmas and is living outside the society is called an Avadhuta. In short the one who has made use of the Varnaashrama scheme to grow and has then grown out of the scheme through wisdom is called an Avadhuta.


(The rest of the story will be continued in the next post)