The Mystics of India

India has rightly been called the land of mystics. No other civilization produced as many philosophers and hermits as India did. No wonder the amazement of Osho that the Indian air and soil has been sanctified by the numerous saints and holy men, and that brings him back to India wherever he is. Swami Vivekanand too had similar views.

So let’s see some of the mystics in India who’ve had a far reaching influence on the thought pattern of humanity and were in no small measure responsible for altering the landscape of nations and people.

The Buddha — The first mystic who comes to mind is Siddhartha Gautama Buddha, known widely as Gautama Buddha, The Enlightened One. Buddha has been single handedly responsible for changing the thought pattern of people and instilled in them the spirit of discriminative thinking and questioning extant beliefs and commonly held wisdom.

His influence was such that his philosophy shook the very foundations of the entrenched ethos and forced religious authorities to make alterations and changes in the set up of their religion. In fact Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, messiah of the Dalits and the downtrodden in Indian who initiated mass conversion of his fellow brethren to Buddhism states in the book “Who were the Shudhras: How they came to be the fourth Varna in the Indo-Aryan Society”  that the history of India is largely a conflict between the Brahminists and Buddhists, class vs. mass,  equality vs. inequality.

Such is the force of his thought current that even today it doesn’t fail to create tremors in the religo-social sphere.

Mahavira — The second mystic which comes to mind immediately after Buddha is his contemporary Mahavira. The stress on ascetism, altruism and respect for the dignity of life at all levels is unparrelled. In fact it is said that no other philosophy supersedes Jainism (the religion he founded, some say he was the main tirthankar in succession) when it comes to ahimsa (or non-violence).

The Jain community no doubt has prospered and achieved success on an unprecedented scale in vast measure of the renunciation of pleasures and non-violence. Though small in numbers, the Jain community is a force to reckon with and influential enough to make its presence felt in almost all quarters of life.

Swami Vivekananda — In contemporary India, there seem to be no more compassionate a person as Swami Vivekananda. He popularized Hinduism and Vendanta particularly in the western world.

His compassion in the form of cosmic speech still rings in the ears of humanity uttered way back in 1893 at the World Parliament of Religions, where he was invited as the representative of Hinduism. “Brothers & Sisters of America….”, the sheer passion for universal brotherhood embodied in his speech received repeated standing ovation and spells of uninterrupted applause. His speech was not mere words but a manisfestation of his actions to relieve suffering of the masses, particulaly downtrodden and discriminated.

What endears one most to Swami Vivekananda is his sheer simplicity, sincerity and purity of heart and soul, which differentiates him from all other mystics.

No wonder, after Buddha, it is Narendra Nath Datta, popularly known as Swami Vivekananda, who is the most beloved child of Mother India.

Osho Rajneesh — Popularly know as Osho, had a flair of originality and the spirit of questioning the very basis of prevalent beliefs and views of the world. Many dubbed his theory as being immoral and harmful to society and  clubbed him as a cynic who could find no good in the world, others accused him of unsettling the very edifice of  tradition and culture by advocating a radical way of life incomprehensible to the mind.

That was his very intention — to rattle and unsettle the mind, because according to him, only when a mind is disturbed and bewildered, can it be closer to reality and a fertile ground for realization of ultimate truth; or in the words of zen masters in ‘no mind’ state.

His deep insights in the subject of sex is such that it has been never addressed before, therefore one only need to go through his works  to understand sexuality to a greater and fuller extent. The sharpness of his mind manifested in the bluntness of his speech is the hallmark of this mystic.

Furthermore, the depth of his knowledge and versatility in the meditative art can be gauged by the sheer number of books written by any individual and his oration of highest degree — from the 100 meanings of the four letter word to the views on past masters of religion and philosophy  (You just have to watch his videos on Youtube to believe)

People still wonder in bewilderment whether he was an originalist or a destructionist.

It would be unjust to just boil down to four mystics in a land pervaded my mysticism. But it’s a good beginning, nevertheless, and long way to go before we cover, or rather uncover, many more in our quest to imbue ourselves with spiritual richness.