The Onam Festival

Onam, a festival of Kerala State, is marked by games, sports, literary contests, dance, and drama. On this occasion, all family members, wherever they are scattered, come together at the family shrine for prayer, thankfulness, and dedication. During Onam, residents of the state, amid great rejoicing, welcome back its ancient ruler, the Emperor Bali, who makes his annual one-day visit to his former dominion then.

For years, Kerala devotees have derived great joy by celebrating the festival at Prasanthi Nilayam, which for them is their “home” with Baba, whom they have accepted as guide, guardian, and God. In 1974, thousands of devotees from Kerala came to be with Baba. The program concluded with Baba delivering this divine discourse.

Tulsidas [16th-century Hindu saint] said in his Ramcharitmanas [Ramayana] that he composed the great epic on the story of Raghunath [name for Rama, an avatar of the sustainer deity, Vishnu] for his own happiness and joy. He engaged himself in that self-imposed task not to please any patron or even Rama but to please himself. He derived great joy while writing the story and when it was finished. The joy was the urge that moved him.

In fact, all that a man does is ultimately traceable to this urge—the urge to earn self-satisfaction. A man builds a house, writes a book, enters a job, and executes a plan—all because of the joy he gets from doing so. The cuckoo coos sweetly, and derives joy from that, far more than those who happen to listen. The rose blooms on the plant because of an inner urge, not an outer prompting. The father fondles his baby and receives thereby more joy than he ever gives. The various disciplines undergone by spiritual aspirants, monks, ascetics, and those on the march along the path of self-knowledge are all adopted, and adhered to, because they give you joy and fulfill an inner need.

You celebrate this day as the day when Emperor Bali was both humiliated and blessed by God in the form of Vamana [dwarf avatar of Vishnu]. “Emperor of the Three Worlds,” Bali called himself, for he had more power than anyone else. He was saturated with egotism. While he was busy with a sacrifice, God came to him in the form and guise of a Brahmin boy and asked for a gift of just three foot-measures of land. Bali told him that he could ask for infinitely more riches and lands, but the boy insisted on only that tiny gift. Bali’s preceptor warned him about the identity and good faith of the strange mendicant; he mentioned that he might be God Himself. This made Bali happier, for if it were true, he was so mighty that even God came to his door as a mendicant. Such was the measure of his conceit.

But when Vamana drew Himself up to cosmic proportions and measured the entire Earth with one foot and the vast expanse of space with another foot, Bali was humbled. He offered his own head as the third foot-measure and let himself be trod down into the netherworld. This day is when Vamana incarnated to teach the lesson that pride meets with doom. Once the ego was thus suppressed, Bali became cleansed and God blessed him with various boons. He assured him that He would ever be his guardian. He permitted him every year, on Onam, to come up into the world and see for himself his empire and receive the homage of his people.

So this is the festival of Vamana’s advent as well as of Bali’s transformation. This day also extols the merit of gifts, renunciation, and charity, however little, to anyone, for all are images of God. Renunciation, sacrifice, is at the very basis of bliss, of grace, of immortality. “Not by intellect, not by progeny, not by riches, but by renunciation alone can the bliss of immortality be attained,” say the Vedas. Onam instills this message in those who observe the festival with an eye on its inner significance.

Kerala has contributed a great deal to the preservation of Vedic culture and Sanskrit learning. Keralites have a name for faith and dedication. Witness the age-old privilege the Nambudiris of Kerala enjoy as priests of the great Vaishnava shrine thousands of miles away from their land—namely, Badrinath in the Himalayas.

Of course, wherever faith and dedication to God is evident, forces that tend to ridicule it and diminish its strength are also found. Where belief in God is, there disbelief in God, too, will raise its head. But disbelief in God or some supreme will can be only a pose, assumed for the sake of personal aggrandizement or advertisement. It cannot stand the light of reason or of experience: Even the so-called atheists have love in their hearts, honor truth while dealing with society, and live on the basis of some eternal basic principles of justice. So they are believers in being, awareness, bliss.

While faced with disappointment, distress, defeat, defamation, and other calamities against which the atheist has no such shield, you have the duty to stand witness in your lives to the courage, joy, strength, generosity, and humility that true spirituality and faith can impart to man. Gold gains in value when it is melted in the crucible. A piece of diamond, when it is cut into a many-faceted gem, is thereby rendered more brilliant and more costly. The dull stone is not sought after by all.

Prahlada, the grandfather of Emperor Bali, was subjected to torture by his irate father, but that only added to his luster. Bali himself shone all the brighter for the punishment he received from the compassionate Lord. This is the lesson you have to garner today. Every obstacle is a step that leads you to the divine bliss that can never be destroyed or taken away.

There is another duty that you owe to yourselves, which you have to recognize today. The world is the playground of man and God, man transforming himself into God, and God transforming Himself into man, playing their roles in unison. You know full well that God has come in human form for re-establishing righteousness in the world, for feeding the roots of faith in God, and for interpreting God to man. You have to be assured that it is natural for man, too, to raise himself up through spiritual discipline, moral elevation, expansion of love, and other means to become God. But man is unaware of this high destiny. He misinterprets his skills and strength and is so absent-minded that he slides down the scale into a monster or a monkey.

Of course, many struggle with these downward-dragging tendencies and endeavor to elevate themselves; these people most often grope in the dark and are badly led.

Two truths must be accepted by every such pilgrim or devotee: (1) Devotion has to be full, free, and comprehensive. (2) Divinity must be conceived as full, free, and comprehensive. On the other hand, devotion today is almost always only part-time. That is to say, when disease, defeat, and disappointments assail you, you turn to God and pray for His grace, but when you are happy, prosperous, healthy, and in good shape, you ignore God and claim that your good fortune is all due to your own abilities and achievements. God is ignored in sunshine; He is wanted only when there is night. Devotion must persist and flourish, unaffected by time, place, or circumstance.

God, too, has to be experienced in His fullness, and the bliss of that experience made your permanent possession. Kasturi recited that poem, which was sweet to the ear and full of Sanskrit words. But words seldom come out of actual experience. It is impossible to experience God and also talk about him. Words like sarvajna and sarvavyapti—meaning that “He knows all,” “He is everywhere”—are used by people, since elders and saints have used them from ancient times. It is impossible for anyone to have the fullest and the most comprehensive experience of these qualities of the Divine.

The Bhagavad-Gita [The Song of God] speaks of God as immovable as well as movable, which strikes you as impossible. God appears to move, to act, to bless, to save, to test, but He is basically unconcerned with such actions. Look at a tree. The branches, leaves, and so forth might be moving with the wind, but the trunk is steady and unmoved. God exists but appears as nonexistent. The body moves, the reason moves, the mind moves, but the soul is unaffected; it is steady, firm, and unchangeable. The lake is unmoved, but its surface is tickled into wavelets by every passing breeze.

The colorless unmoved curtain or screen is unaffected by the pictures of fires, factions, floods, and glaciers that appear upon it in a realistic manner. When the pictures are seen, the screen is unseen; when the screen is seen, the pictures are unseen. But without the screen (God), the pictures have no meaning; they carry no message, and they tell no story. They impart no bliss.

You may carry a matchbox in your pocket with no danger of fire emanating, though the components are there in that box. So, too, there are the components of divinity in you—only, it is not patent, not expressed. Take a stick and strike its head against the chemical coating given on one side of the box, and suddenly, in a rush, you get the flame of fire. So, too, take the individual and strike him on the Divine Principle immanent in the universe, make him aware of it, so to say, and he, too, manifests the divinity latent in him.

The tree is the individual; the forest is God. The one apart from the many is the individual. The many and the manifold is God. Kasturi standing alone, apart, is vyashti; when he goes and sits among you, the thousands who have come here for Onam, he merges in the samashti. Samashti is God; vyashti is the individual soul.

Prahlada’s grandson Bali, whom you honor today, extolled the Lord standing before Him as master of the entire cosmos, as “arch-thief among thieves,” for God steals the most precious possession of man, even when its owner is awake. He steals the heart. I disappointed you; I even requested you not to come so far away from your homes for this festival, but yet your hearts had been stolen by Me, and so you could not stay away.

Onam is the day when you Keralites feast on the banana; when you eat a banana, you first have to remove the skin. So, too, when you desire to eat a mango or a lime fruit, the sweet substance has to be reached after removal of the bitter skin. For Bali to be received and accepted by God, the bitter cover of egoism and power mania had to be removed. Ignorance, illusion, pride—all are the components of the skin.

Onams come and Onams go, but people are no nearer the goal, because though Onam is given a hearty sendoff, generosity, renunciation, love, and the spirit of service are not given an equally hearty welcome. You have to take this as the Onam message—strive to manifest, cultivate, and express love and to suppress pride and egoism so that you can win the grace of God.

Source: Sanathana Sarathi, October 1974