A Meditation on Eklavya

The Two Points of Doubtless Recognition and the Road to Enlightenment

(A break from films)

Eklavya's story is the tale of a low caste student wanting to learn archery from Dronacharya, or Drona - the greatest teacher alive. Drona only taught princes.

Eklavya's devotion was so great that he attained mastery at archery by practicing in secret in front of a clay image of Drona. Upon discovering this, the teacher's best pupil, Prince Arjun, grew jealous of Eklavya's skills.

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Even Drona realised that Eklavya's skills had surpassed Arjun's. Remembering his promise to make Arjun the world's finest archer, Drona demanded the thumb of Eklavya's right hand as a teacher's fee. Eklavya willingly gave it, and thus he was no longer a threat to the prince.

Eklavya's example is cited to illustrate the picture of the ideal student in the guru-student equation, even though his unflinching devotion cost him the very thing that he had struggled unimaginably for. The story reflects the strength of the foundation upon which the guru-shishya parampara was built.

Eklavya was an earnest student, the kind any teacher would want. His actions themselves lauded his chosen teacher beyond any words of praise. The first part of his story is the classic tale of the underdog clinching victory from the favourites. It spells out what it means to pursue perfection, its moral being that in the end, the race was between only you and your own shortcomings. Eklavya had nobody to guide him when his bow was aligned wrongly, or when his arrows were gripped incorrectly.

He made every mistake in the book, and he corrected each until there were no more mistakes left for him to make or correct. It did not take him a lifetime - he accomplished all this in his youth. He was no demigod either; he was a human being like us all, except that he was blessed with an extraordinary resilience. The second part of Eklavya's story turns the paradigm of the classic underdog tale on its head: The underdog surrenders top spot to the favourite by his own will, making the story more interesting than other stories. What follows is a philosophical investigation of what makes it interesting.

To begin with, it was not obsequiousness or self-belittlement that made Eklavya cut the thumb of his right hand for Dronacharya. This one action that made him immortal was prompted by a particular state of mind: The state of absolute doubtlessness, about his intent, and of course, in the belief that his progress was contingent on the blessings of his guru. Therein lie the complexities of this tale.

Eklavya's achievement in becoming a master archer with no teacher physically present was indeed miraculous. Yet, the Mahabharata was a time-space of magic, where there was no dearth of miracles. There, a single arrow that carrying he right incantation could slay a whole army, and gods walked side by side with man on this earth.

In such times, it would not be unbelievable if the great sage Drona had relayed his instruction, say, telepathically through his image to the relentless Eklavya. After all, that shouldn't have been a problem for a man who could make a chain out of blades of grass by having the tip of one pierce the end of the other from a distance. Perhaps his aura was potent enough to rub off archery instructions on someone who stood close enough.

Thinking in those terms would rob us of the richest things that Eklavya's parable has to offer.

Let us examine the state of mind that led Eklavya to his achievement. Imagine thinking of only one thing - that which you have to achieve - all the time. Imagine if even all your meals would be eaten thinking about the energy that the digested food will invest in your next move towards achieving your chosen goal.

Imagine not wincing through a toothache but persisting with whatever you have to do to achieve that goal. It's hard to imagine, because we are used to accommodating at least five thoughts in our minds while doing anything. But what if we managed? - to block off all thoughts about all else and pursue that one goal that would be death not to achieve. Would anything, save death, stop us from achieving it? We have no way of knowing how our potential would transform when our minds worked like that, unless we walk this path of absolute doubtlessness ourselves.

Eklavya knew what he wanted. He wanted to learn Archery - everything that there was to know about it. Arjun wanted a different thing: He wanted to be better at archery than everyone else. Arjun competed with all archers, while Eklavya's only competed with himself. One by one, he defeated all his shortcomings, and that achievement belittles Arjun's triumph at being unmatched in skill by any archer alive.

Eklavya attributed his achievements to Drona, who was never physically present while he practiced. The obvious question arises: What did Drona have to do with Eklavya's achievement? Couldn't Eklavya have shown all this faith in himself rather than in Drona and become the master archer that he became?

The answers would be apparent to anyone involved in an evolved practice like yoga or one of the ancient martial arts with a sincere commitment to it. Practices are undertaken for the sake of the benefits they bring, with a specific goal in mind.

Here, it is important to recognize that though our perseverance and motivational mechanisms lie within us, the goals themselves lie outside of us. If the gym was the road and fitness was the destination, then the version of our self that can do 10 push ups lies at the start of the road and the one that can do a 100 stands at its end. Similarly the novice archer Eklavya stood determined at the start of his practice to become Eklavya the master-archer who stood at the end of his practice.

Though these two Eklavyas were separate, the novice understood perfectly what it meant to possess mastery. It was a tacit, intuitive understanding. This was Eklavya's first doubtless recognition: Understanding what he set out to achieve. His intent was then embossed on his soul. Beyond that, Eklavya's was a metaphysical struggle: He used not the eyes of his body to proceed but the eyes of his soul. His soul knew what he sought, and thus, it affirmed each action towards it and negated each action away from it. The ultimate game of trial and error began.

The obvious question returns: Couldn't this process have eventually taken Eklavya the novice to his goal of mastery without Drona? For, what was Eklavya doing other than learning from his own mistakes over and over and over till no mistakes were left to make? Applying the cold clarity of logical deduction, if Eklavya had that epic-tonne of resilience within him, then yes, he could have achieved his goal by himself.

Again, thinking in those terms robs us of this story's most important lesson. To learn from Eklavya, we must keep him human rather than superhuman.

To understand his struggle, let us examine how we react to our own mistakes in our endeavours. We may pick ourselves up and walk again after making a mistake, but when error follows error that follows error, the clouds of doubt invariably add weight to our shoulders when we are down.

Now imagine Eklavya, well into his training, trying to perfect an advanced archery technique but missing his target again and again and again. If he was indeed human, somewhere, after perhaps the hundredth failure, the seed of self-doubt would have penetrated his consciousness and his faith would have wavered.

This is where Drona comes in. Firstly, it is important to see that Eklavya's was not a blind faith. He had gone to Drona for a reason: because Drona's achievements were widely known - Drona had guided many a novice to mastery and he was the personal tutor to the greatest of kshatriyas, the Pandavas. Thus, Drona strongly represented the possibility of achieving that which Eklavya longed to achieve. Having observed Drona teaching the Pandavas, he was satisfied that Drona knew the solutions to all the obstacles that lay in his path. This was Eklavya's second point of doubtless recognition: The recognition of his guru.

This choice is pivotal in rescuing Eklavya from the despair of failure. Like his goal and like the clay image that Eklavya practiced before, Drona as teacher existed outside of Eklavya. Obstacles could have shaken Eklavya's faith in himself, but they could never touch his faith in his guru. Whenever the weight of his struggles piled upon his shoulders, Eklavya meditated before Drona's image, which for him was the eternal proof of the possibility of attaining his goal. This gave him adequate fuel to persist till the problem at hand was overcome, forever keeping him on the path of progress.

The dialectic of this second recognition with the first is what formed the critical mass to fuel the engine of Eklavya's intent. The first gave Eklavya direction and the second affirmed each of his steps in that direction. His two-fold doubtless recognition strengthened him enough to persist, persit and persist - no holds barred - till he had achieved what he had set out for. The image of Drona, standing next to the image of his Self as the master archer had stood like a twin lighthouse to guide him through the darkness of the forest where he practiced.

Then comes the act of cutting the thumb itself. One may regard Eklavya a fool for sacrificing his life's achievement for a conniving, deceitful server of the caste hierarchy such as Drona. Two things must be kept in mind here. Firstly: In the course of his training, Eklavya had meditated upon Drona's image when faced with an obstacle, trusting the guru to eventually give him the solution.

In treating Drona thus, Eklavya actually made the best choice of teacher - he separated his guru from his corporeal frailties. During his training, he disregarded in the guru everything that was not guru. Jealousy, pettiness, partiality - all these things were inconsequential in Eklavya's equation of being and learning. As part of his second doubtless recognition, Eklavya had disregarded Drona the man and apotheosized Drona the guru: an unsurpassable tribute to the teacher.

Secondly, it is important to recognize that it was not Eklavya the novice who had offered his thumb, but Eklavya the master. That is to say that by the time of Dronacharya's asking, Eklavya had travelled a long arduous journey that would have taught him many things besides archery. Such is the nature of any sincere practice that the benefits that come along the way are unimaginable to the neophyte beginner. He would have understood that his 'goal', the end point of the practice was simply the engine that had sustained the practice itself.

His goal too would have evolved as he progressed. He would have realized that the purpose of the goal was to always keep itself on the horizon in order to be pursued. Thus, at the end of his practice, the goal that he had begun his practice with would have been less significant to him in light of the other gifts gained during the practice. These other achievements could be summarized collectively as 'enlightenment'.

The severed thumb that Eklavya presented to Drona was thanks for the journey rather than the destination. And we know that the destination was everything to Arjun. Arjun was in the game in order to be a player. Eklavya had gone beyond the game and the players into something larger.

The tragedy of this story lies in Drona's asking and not in Eklavya's giving.