A Deeper Understanding of Ahimsa

My new article from Beliefnet

Twice a week, as part of our outreach of Hindu culture from our monastery in the East Village, myself and a few other monks teach classes on the art of vegetarian cuisine at Columbia University and New York University.  We also try to share some of the essential tenets of the vegetarian/vegan life from some of the great traditional sources of the Vedas, such as the Bhagavad-Gita. We mix in with this knowledge a wide breath of moral, economic, and environmental reasons to support the vegetarian/vegan ideal

We do this with an eye to perhaps convince our friends to try to experience the values and benefits of a vegetarian diet, and for those already on the path, to show them the depth of their commitment and the potential for real change that comes by not eating our fair animal comrades.

My own journey into vegetarianism began with a lot of doubt and a little help from my friends. I was once of those students receiving delicious Indian vegetarian fare from Hindu monks at the University of Michigan, but having come from a different culinary background, the food they offered simply bewildered me.  Over time, my monk friends won me over to their heartfelt offerings as they explained more of the culture behind it, and I also just came to realize the food was really, really good.

As I began to explore a commitment to vegetarianism, I had the good fortune of being surrounded by friends who were already engaged as vegetarians and vegans.  I was also in a progressive college community where there were plenty of restaurants and groceries which catered to the vegetarian lifestyle.  As I moved on into the lifestyle of a Hindu monk, I started to learn how to cook, which helped me to further appreciate the colorful, savoury, and rich depth of the vegetarian cuisine of India and of the rest of the world.

So it is with an immense sense of gratitude from my own end that I now am able to return the favor to all those who guided me towards the vegetarian ideal, by teaching its art and depth of knowledge to some of Manhattan's brightest.  At the foundation of our presentation is a unique understanding of the value of ahimsa, or non-violence, as presented in the Gita.  Going beyond the foundation of not causing any physical, mental, or psychological harm to any living creature, the deeper understanding of ahimsa lies in the understanding of the progressive, enlightened transmigration of the soul through the process of reincarnation.

The Vedas describe a progressive evolution of the soul through different microbial, plant, and animal forms to the human form of life, which is considered an ideal body for spiritual realization.  The soul naturally progresses, by instinct and divine guidance, through increasingly complex forms of life before coming to the human stage.  Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, in his translation of the Gita, explains what happens when that progression is stopped by acts of violence:

"Real ahiḿsā means not checking anyone's progressive life. The animals are also making progress in their evolutionary life by transmigrating from one category of animal life to another. If a particular animal is killed, then his progress is checked. If an animal is staying in a particular body for so many days or so many years and is untimely killed, then he has to come back again in that form of life to complete the remaining days in order to be promoted to another species of life. So their progress should not be checked simply to satisfy one's palate. This is called ahiḿsā."

By living a vegetarian lifestyle, we not only refrain from harming our animal friends physically, but also spiritually. Naturally the question arises about plant life, and the potential harm that might be caused to them for the needs of our own body.  Of course, we know that some fruits and vegetables fall right from the plant or tree, causing no harm in and of itself.  For the other forms of plant life who do give their life for our sustenance, the Hindu tradition tells us that we should prepare and cook these gifts as an offering to God in love and devotion.  If done in this mood, God blesses the offering, insuring that the fruits, grains, and vegetables used in the offering continue their spiritual progression.

With our cooking classes, our hope is that our friends there can understand that our offering of vegetarian food has benefits that go beyond the taste buds.  We know that the way to a person's heart is through their stomach, and hopefully we can also help them understand that the way to knowledge and respect of the soul also comes through the food that they eat.

Chris Fici is a writer/teacher/monk in the bhakti-yoga tradition. He has been practicing at the Bhaktivedanta Ashram at the Bhakti Center in New York City since 2009.  After receiving a degree in film studies at the University of Michigan, Chris began his exploration and study of the bhakti tradition. He currently teaches classes on the culture and art of vegetarian cooking, as well as the living philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, at New York University and Columbia University.

Why Suffering And Spirituality Go Hand-In-Hand

 The latest from my good friend and fellow monk Gadadhar Pandit Dasa at the Huffington Post

It's quite natural for those of faith to turn towards God during difficult times. Even if one has a regular spiritual practice, their practice can increase and improve during times of difficulty. After the events of September 11 for example, churches in New York City had some of their largest attendance in quite some time. Why is it that a lot of us have to come to a point of utter hopelessness and desperation before we call out to God? Why is it that even if one doesn't have faith, one may make a last ditch effort to call out to God as well?

When life is treating us good and all is going well, we often don't feel a need for God in our lives. Our material acquisitions -- money, property, friends and family -- become our crutch. As long as we have these things in place, we feel comfortable and don't have a strong need for a spiritual practice.

However, when these things start to fade, we feel a sense of fear and panic come over us.

As a society, we have become so dependent on material things for our happiness that our lives would become completely disrupted without them. When things are on shaky ground, we pray to God to protect what we have. We reach out to God and expect Him to keep things as they are or fix them and make everything all right. God becomes our plumber who's supposed to fix things when they go wrong. This need-based spirituality is all right, but it's a bit superficial.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna (God) lists four basic types of people that turn towards Him. Number one on the list is the "distressed." In case you're wondering, the other three are those that need money, the philosophically inquisitive, and the wise or those who don't want anything from God, except a loving relationship. In the Gita Krishna explains that He welcomes all four types that approach Him, but the one who approaches Him without material motivation is the most dear.

We can tend to use spirituality like medicine or a hospital. We utilize it only when things aren't going right or when we're suffering financially, emotionally or relationally. Our pain and suffering, however, can be a path to transcending this selfish conception of spirituality into something more. It can make us ask the questions we normally wouldn't ask, and can lead us to bigger and broader questions, such "what's really the purpose of life?" and "how can we avoid suffering?"

Unless one starts to ask these questions, one can never truly understand the purpose of life. Even if one does understand philosophically that there's a higher purpose to life, without some suffering, one may not feel the impetus to implement some spiritual practice into their life.

Suffering doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. It can help us grow and mature in ways we can't even imagine. It can give us realizations about life which otherwise would be difficult to acquire. I'm not suggesting we go out and look for suffering. Rest assured, it will find its way into our life.

There's a beautiful verse in the Gita, chapter 2 verse 14:

"...the nonpermanent appearance of happiness and distress, and their disappearance in due course, are like the appearance and disappearance of winter and summer seasons...and one must learn to tolerate them without being disturbed."

Difficulties teach us patience, tolerance, acceptance, and ultimately that we're not in complete control of our lives. We can do everything perfectly and things might still not go our way. Some of the greatest teachers within Hinduism demonstrated by their own example that our soul can experience the greatest spiritual growth during challenging times, and they also demonstrated that we can actually thank God for the difficulty.
While undergoing a difficulty one may not be able to fully understand how this is supposed to be beneficial. However, as Steve Jobs said in his commencement speech, you can only connect the dots looking back.


The Vedic texts explain that the soul is a part and parcel of the Supreme. It is qualitatively one but quantitatively different from God, like a spark of fire which has similar qualities to the larger fire, but is insignificant in size compared to the actual fire. Because the soul has this eternal connection to God, it has a natural tendency to reach out to God during difficult times. These opportunities provide the soul, which is stuck in a material body, to again reach out to God and rekindle that relationship.

The help will definitely come, but not always in the ways we expect it to. If the soul can remain faithful even if it appears that God isn't sending the help one is asking for, the soul's union with God is almost guaranteed even within this life.

Follow Gadadhara Pandit Dasa on Twitter: www.twitter.com/nycpandit

The Strange Art of Relationships

Five years ago I began my life as a monk at a Hindu/Vedic temple in the hills of West Virginia. It was the time of my life in which I burst out of the bubble of my previous life, as a middle-class, suburban young man/student from Michigan, into a whole new culture, into the world of responsibility, and the exhilarating and nerve-racking adventure of adult life, with a deeply spiritual twist. Soon after, I experienced the shock of my life.

I began to see that some people in our community, despite them all being deeply sincere spiritual seekers in their own way, were having an incredible time maintaining any semblance of a healthy relationship. In fact, their relationships, despite of, or perhaps because of so much personal history, didn't exist on any kind of healthy level, and that this reality was having a negative permeating effect on the community as a whole.

It was a certain smashing of my own naivete, and for the last five years I have been processing this revelation. I have found the strange art of relationships, both in my own life and in my continued observations of others, to be perhaps the most difficult aspect of any community to grasp, and to keep vibrant and whole. This difficulty is enhanced because without healthy relationships, no community can exist, let alone prosper and grow.

My heart calls me to process my initial sense of shock, and the resultant dislocation and disillusionment that comes from it, if I am going to understand my role as a loving servant of my monastic community here in New York, and of God. Talking today with my friend Charlie, the saintly and wise sage of Boston, we both were appreciating the necessity of this processing.

He said it begins with understanding that perfect and peaceful relationships, without any strife, are a utopian ideal best left aside. What really needs to be done is to appreciate the real growth that can be found in finding the proper perspective, based in a deep patience and selfless love in the midst of the inevitable quarrel and hypocrisy which comes to us in our dealings with each other.

The holy books of the Vedas describe our times indeed as the “age of quarrel and hypocrisy.” Yet the intensity of our time can compel us to truly understand our sacred duty towards each other in the art of the relationship. The Vedic scriptures also describe one who is a madhyama-adhikari, or one who has loving relationships with fellow spiritual seekers, compassion for those who are striving to seek and who need guidance, and who is able to avoid the negative effects of envious or proud people.

This level of consciousness is a transcendent level to raw selfishness, in which one can be in actual contact with one's conscience, the presence of the Divine within guiding us through the winds of our relations.

In his commentary to the classic Vedic text the Bhagavata Purana, renowned Vedic scholar and pioneer Swami Prabhupada expands upon this point:

"God has given advanced consciousness to the human being. Therefore he can feel the suffering and happiness of other living beings. The human being bereft of his conscience, however, is prone to cause suffering for other living beings."1

Recently I have been trying to drag my own conscience up from the dank and grungy space where I have left it. During the recent month of Kartik in our tradition, a time of extended and concentrated introspection and prayer (similar to the times of Lenten or Ramadan, for example), I attempted a meditation to focus on how much I criticize others, either verbally or mentally.

The first and most fundamental realization I gained from this meditation is that my critical facility runs on automatic overdrive. I realized that most of the time, I don't even notice the voice in my head, which also often finds its way into verbal expression, whining, moaning, cajoling, and chastising others for not living up to some standard that I myself don't even live up to.

This is a disease, a mentality which rots to the core any semblance of being able to meaningfully relate to others in a holistic and spiritual way. The experience of this meditation was, and continues to be, a cold shock to my system, yet I am grateful for it. It has heightened my awareness of my surroundings.

For example, in our monastery, we have a small yellow poster taped to the wall near the door. It is the “Four Principles of Community Building” by a renowned and beloved contemporary Vedic scholar and teacher Bhakti Tirtha Swami. I, probably like most others in this monastery, in our sometimes mad rush to do our duties and stay ahead of the clatter of our own minds and the streets of New York City where we live, never really notice this humble yet wonderful document.

Taking the time to consider it now, BT Swami's paeans to the hope we can share together strike a few essential chords to the processing of our conflicts.
Take a gander..

1. Treat each person with care as if the success or failure of your own spiritual life depends on this. Do not take into concern how they treat you. The manner in which you treat people is the same way you are treating your spiritual teachers and God.
2. Anytime there is a problem in a relationship, you should first see it as your own fault. Even if others are to blame, you will only add to the problem by considering them to be at fault.
3. You should treat every person with whom you come in contact with the same care as the person you love the most.
4. As we associate with others in our spiritual communities, we should do so in a mood that these are the people I am living with and they would probably also be the people that I leave this body with.

Wow, impossible, I say...

But that is perhaps just my naivete again, mixed with that rancid spice of cynicism. If we look at these principles with an objective lens, a hopeful lens, a courageous and open-hearted lens, we find essential spiritual technologies which can shatter the pride and envy which stand like barbed-wire tip walls between all of us and the healthy, dynamic relationships we desperately need.

These principles will allow us to firmly regain hold of our conscience, or our relationship of communication with the presence of God within us. We need to hear His voice within our heart, if we are to hear how our own voice communicates with others, and how we can also listen properly to what others want to communicate with us.

Otherwise, the dysfunction of our miscommunication robs us of the opportunity to find our voice in His voice. It leaves us mired in the complex state of fear which prevents us from knowing each other, trusting each other, and loving each other in the light of God.

No progress here comes without serious contemplation. Let us step back and really think about the conflicts in our life, and what we need to do to transcend them and allow them to help make our relationships grow. I hope to write an addendum to this piece soon, concentrating more on Bhakti Tirtha Swami's principles, and also some meditations on the need for some conflict, and the need to acknowledge gratitude, as markers towards understanding this strange art of the relationship.

I pray you may find some personal meditations of your own through this offering.

1  A.C Vedanta Swami Prabhupada, Srimad-Bhagavatam (Bhagavat Purana)-Fifth Canto, Chapter 26 (Summary), Bhaktivedanta Book Trust

The Space of Faith

In the style of Mertonian homage, a simple meditation on thoughts, ideas, and realizations from our discussion of "Thoughts in Solitude" by Thomas Merton at our recent meeting of the Bhakti Center Book Club

We find a great, if unhealthy, solace in simply remaining in the role of the observer, yet the practical demands of this world, and the practical orders of the great teachers who carry us forward, demand that we transcend the restraints of the observer.  They demand we come down from the clouds of our head-space into the ground of our heart-space.

In this ground of our heart, we come to understand the deeper truth of solitude, found in the acceptance, understanding, and communion with everyone else's solitude.  We cannot accept how alone we are, how much pain we feel, how much joy we are capable of, and the presence of the Divine in our own heart until we can gradually see all these things in the heart of everyone else.  The feeling of liberation we receive upon this revelation transcends all the fear and hesitation that ruins our ability to fully communicate with each other.

Having this revelation, we fully understand the meaning of solitude and silence in our own being, because the reality of who we are becomes incredibly clear, reflected with such illumination from the hearts of everyone else.

The pillars of greed, lust, envy, and all the other fantasies of the selfish heart has made our civilization barren practically to its core.  Yet this is all a projection and reflection of the more imposing desert we face within our own heart, which is the source of all the anxiety we face in our individual and collective lives. This imposition from within has created the tangle of contradictions which we rage against, or which we die quietly but so painfully from.

The first instinct upon facing our contradictions is to run away as fast as we can, to dive into the spirits of our comforts.  The experience of our actual consciousness is so painful, so nauseating, so disorienting, that most of us (myself especially) are still stuck in the energy of that initial instinct to flee, unable to go any further on the walk through the desert of the heart.

We are stuck once again on the observation deck, attempting to re-strategize for the next assault, but we are missing one great tool, one great weapon, which is found in the silence of our own heart.  It is the space of our faith, where we understand that God is always carrying us and always protecting us, especially in the greatest tribulations and purification.  In this space, feeling the warm embrace of our Beloved holding us close, we gain the proper perspective.

The great sage of solitude, Thomas Merton, explains this perspective:

"Contradictions have always existed in the soul of man.  But it is only when we prefer analysis to silence that they become a constant and insolvable problem.  We are not meant to resolve all contradictions, but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison"

Thoughts in Solitude

The closest space in our heart, closer still even than the spaces of our stored bitterness, is this silent space where God lives with us, and where we can communicate with Him in prayer, meditation, study, and also properly and divinely guided action.  In this space, the heart becomes big and the mind becomes clear.  Love and truth begin to come together, for love is what the heart wants and truth is what the mind wants. We move closer to no longer being a victim to the pendulum swings between our contradictions.

Humility is the essential cloth we must wear to enter into this space of faith. Beginning with the fundamental level of our language, we must learn to speak to each other in a tone which renounces the aggressive and competitive spirit ingrained into our conditioning, turning instead towards a tone which offers a substance and meaning based on our common values of divinity.

This is a task which requires a great deal of attention and sacrifice, for our natural humility in all of its expressions is buried under the layers of our disconnection from each other, from God, and from ourselves. One of the reasons for this is that humility itself brings its own paradoxes into our consciousness.  For example, humility is something we know that we need, and we desperately desire its presence, but when we know we have it in our grasp, it is that very recognition which causes us to lose it.

Humility is not necessarily we are meant to enjoy, yet there is a certain and sure pleasure which comes in the genuinely humble moment.  It is when we turn the simple glory of that moment into an inauthentic construct of pride that we lose control of what has been given to us.  To be vigilant in our humility actually means to be vigilant against the pride within us.

Another paradox of the humble cloth is that it is best represented in the most obvious action, rather than a passive tolerance or non-violence.  By the most obvious action I mean, in the spiritual context, the most selfless and most needed action to be done, considering the time, place, and circumstance. This action remains clothed in humility when it does not reinforce our "hero construct", or the self-obsession of our prideful mind.  

This action, even if done with force, with tough love, with power and confidence, can only help and never harm, because it is centered on the true balance between the mind and the heart, between Love and Truth.

If we can absorb these concepts through our intelligence into our heart, and if we pray for courage and guidance from our teachers and friends, our spiritual life truly opens into the solitary spaces of our inner life, into our space of faith, with the silence of our embrace with God against the raging of our mind/body and of our society's endless noise brigades.

We finally receive what we have always wanted, an embrace that will always stay with us and not be like the empty gestures which has left our heart crusted with grief.  We will be alone, but united. Silent, but dancing to the ecstatic rhythms of the Lord's steps, and our struggle will be renewed and strengthened.

ISKCON Loses 26 2nd Avenue

From my good friend and fellow community member Yadunath Das

Did you just experience the same sinking feeling in your heart upon reading this headline that I did upon writing it?

A few months back, I wrote you all asking for monthly financial support to help keep Prabhupada’s 1st western temple up, running and under ISKCON care. My reasoning was that this temple is of global concern and surely the worldwide ISKCON community has a stake in whether or not its bills can be paid.

I may have been wrong.

Since posting my plea (titled “Seeking Matchless Gifts”), only one devotee has stepped forward to make a monthly donation (I thank you again, prabhu). I know when I read a worthy solicitation like this I often think that many others will come save the day, so the small donation that I would be able to give will probably be rendered moot. Please know that that is not the case. And as for the above headline, it is not true.

Yet.

It’s a distinct possibility, though. Once again, I reach out to you—Prabhupada’s disciples, grand-disciples and followers—to save this historic place for the legions of future followers who will marvel at being able to actually visit the exact spot where Prabhupada started his movement; the “small storefront” that they read about in the Prabhupada-Lilamrita; the place where it all began.

A lot of people are talking about HH Mukunda Maharaja’s new book, Miracle on 2nd Avenue. Well, another miracle is needed now, 45 years later—one that preserves a big part of ISKCON’s heritage, and you can be a part of it. Our total expenses are under $2,000 a month. Won’t you please consider becoming a regular monthly sponsor to save 26 2nd Avenue?

Please contact me at yadunath@bhakticenter.org or go to krishnanyc.com/giving.html to create a secure subscription via PayPal. All donations are tax deductible.

Yours in the service of ISKCON,
Yadunath das
Treasurer, 26 2nd Avenue