A seamless learning experience

Mar 9, 2010, 12.00am IST
BINDU CHAWLA.


An important tradition in the gharanas of Hindustani music is the practice of taking permission from your earlier guru if you wish to move on to another guru during the period of learning.


In the case of Pandit Amarnath, his first guru had actually said to him, “Go to Ustad Amir Khan Saheb, i know what your soul is craving for, and for this, if need be, i will help and support you financially also.” For the great man knew the principles of continuity and connectivity in the guru tradition – what changed was the face and the form and the name. But what did not change was the principle of the Guru himself.


At the same time, however, the name and form of the guru are an important anchorage in the disciple’s journey to realisation of the Formless and Nameless – the ‘alakh’, from ‘a-lakshya’ or that which is without sign and symbol, that is, without form. For this reason, Pandit Amarnath would insist that disciples learn their art only from the musician whose music they loved the most. The music of the musician you carried in your heart was already your guru and learning from that musician or his music alone was your own real musical journey. No wonder he often refused disciples with many a ‘background’ when they came to him to learn, insisting that he always preferred to ‘write on a clean slate’, in terms of teaching.


And hence there is the need to take permission – a spiritual release – from those to whom you were bound, and indebted to, for the karmic debts of musical knowledge. This release could come spontaneously, and with immense love, but on the other hand, not. And if not, the karma could become an obstruction, creating long drawn out states of stasis in the spiritual journey. For which, then, the teachers of our parampara – our ancient spiritual tradition – suggested ‘seva’ or selfless service, service done with no thought to what it could yield at a personal or public level.


At the end of five years of learning, his first guru, B N Datta, whispered into Pandit Amarnath’s ear – “My only seva, or service, is that you teach music to everyone as i have taught you, without keeping away anything, giving in abundance, for this is how this vidya or knowledge is meant to be passed on.”


That dawn of recovery had symbolised for Pandit Amarnath the liberation before the Liberation. It was the third step in the process of sadhana, siddhi and samadhi, the ultimate release. It was a samadhi that took you beyond the name and form of the guru to the ‘guru-tattva’, the essence of the guru, which is God himself.


In the language of the abstract, the guru is the mirror that reflects as well as the transparent medium that enables looking and seeing, enriching experience. He is both formless and in form, the silence and the utterance, the absence and the presence, and both the shunya, nothing, as well as everything. In him, the disciple sees both what he wishes to be and what he is.


The idea, finally, is to connect – connect so well and so spontaneously that you, too, become the mirror, the formless, the silence, the shunya, and a transparency in which you are the sound of silence and the fullness of vacant and empty space.

(Today is the Barsi of Pandit Amarnath)