Confronting Life's Fragility With Ancient Wisdom

A poignant meme is presently doing the rounds on social media about the uncertainty of life: that you go on a holiday and get massacred, you go on a honeymoon and get murdered, you fly out on a trip abroad, and your plane crashes; you mind your own business in your hostel when the sky literally falls on your head as a doomed plane.

- RENUKA NARAYANAN

This deeply disturbing pattern prompted me to reexamine the inner history of Hindu thought and its attempts to grasp the riddle of existence—its uncertainties and the frequently brutal outcome.

I found that Hindu thought is actually a practical game plan for life, providing perspective on the chaos. I hear it first in the Rig Veda, when the Hindus were still not nagarik or settled urban people but wandered the plains with their herds of cattle, frequently clashing over pasturage. So severe were these clashes that the encounters of two clans became a euphemism for battle, a sangram.

So, you find the Vedas saying a curious thing, "Ekam sat, viprahbahudavadanti," which I interpret as the practical message, "The facts are the facts, and smart people get it." On the ground, it means, "If everybody has to share the same space, they'll have to work it out."

This is a first in conflict resolution for the project of communal life with maximum damage control. It's a survival directive from the earliest Hindu worldview that internal strife absolutely has to be managed because nobody is going anywhere. Here they are, and here they stay. Hence this official statement: "Live and let live for the greater good."

We hear this point reiterated in many ways in the sixteen principal Upanishads that follow the Vedas. The Upanishads inquire, reflect, debate and theorize about this existential issue. And they continue to expand the concept of Ekam Sat.