During my very first trip to India in 1985, I heard the same Bollywood film song blaring from
little shops lining the roads, in restaurants where I ate, and on busses that ferried me up
into the Himalayas. The song was from an immensely popular Hindi movie, ram teri ganga maili, O God,
your sacred river, the Ganga or Ganges, has become filthy. This heartbreaking movie deals with two
different kinds of pollution contaminating the river. First, untreated industrial waste produced
by factories owned by greedy businessmen. And second, pollution from sins which have been washed
away from those who bathe in the river. Bathing in the holy Ganga is widely believed to remove
the bad karma accrued due to immoral or adharmic deeds. But, how can a mere bath remove sins?
For believers, bathing in the Ganga is a powerful ritual. Immersion in its waters
is a profoundly prayerful act that invokes God s grace and nullifies the bad karma of sinful
deeds. This strongly-held belief is based in part on well-known mythological stories that depict
the river s divine origin and the many blessings bestowed on saints and sinners who bathed in its
waters. The river s purifying power is also based on important symbolism found in Hindu scriptures.
Let s look at that symbolism. First of all, we have to recall that Hinduism does not attribute
sinful deeds to the power of evil, like the Biblical traditions do. There is no evil power,
no devil or Satanic being that impels people to sin. Instead, the root cause of sinful behavior
is said to be ignorance, specifically, ignorance of one s own divinity and the divinity of others.
Swami Vivekananda famously said, Ignorance is the mother of all the evil and misery we see. Let
men be pure and spiritually strong and educated, then alone will misery cease in the world. Those
who recognize their innate divinity, as well as the divinity of others, commit no sinful deeds.
Knowledge of the divine nature of all beings puts an end to sinful behavior
by destroying the ignorance that causes it. A passage from the Bhagavad Gita says,
na hi jnanena sadrisham pavitram iha vidyate, There is nothing as purifying as knowledge.
Spiritual knowledge can metaphorically wash away our sins by destroying the underlying
ignorance. For this reason, the purifying waters of the Ganga represents the spiritual
knowledge that removes sinful behavior. This sacred river is therefore a symbol for
the Jnana Ganga, the river of jnana, spiritual knowledge. Just as the river Ganga flows down
from the Himalayas and provides life-giving water to all who live on the vast plains of North India,
so too, the spiritual knowledge of the Jnana Ganga flows down through the ages,
from the ancient rishis, the wise sages, to bless all of us living in modern times.
The source of the river Ganga is found high in the Himalayas, at the base of the broad Gangotri
glacier, where a smallv stream emerges at Gaumukh, about 10 miles beyond the town of Gangotri. Here,
the stream is called the Bhagirathi river. It tumbles down steep valleys,
through the picturesque village of Harsil, and past the holy town of Uttarkashi,
until it pours into the Tehri dam reservoir. It emerges from the reservoir and reaches Devaprayag,
where it merges with waters from the Alakananda and Mandakini rivers, which flow down from other
glaciers to the East. Only after this confluence does the river become known as the Ganga.
Just as the river Ganga is born from the confluence of several tributaries, so too,
the Jnana Ganga is born of the confluence of teachings from various lineages of rishis.
Those rishis passed their wisdom on to their children and students,
who in turn passed it on to their children and students, and so on. In this way, the spiritual
wisdom of the Jnana Ganga continues to flow even today, streaming forth from modern generations
of teachers in India and around the world. From Devaprayag, the river Ganga flows West
into the holy town of Rishikesh, where I lived for a while, and then down to Hardwar,
the aptly name gateway to God, at the very edge of the mighty Himalayas. From Hardwar,
the Ganga travels another 1500 miles, across the fertile plains of North India,
before finally pouring into the Bay of Bengal. As the river winds its way across the plains,
it s joined by hundreds of other rivers that drain all the rainwater from the entire Gangetic
valley. The little stream that emerged from the Himalayas eventually becomes a broad waterway.
Before we discuss the problem of pollution, there s another issue to be addressed. While all this
water is a blessing for thirsty people, animals, and plants, it has a very different implication
for the symbolic Jnana Ganga. When the little stream from the Himalayas mixes with vast amounts
of water from rivers downstream, the Himalayan waters become exceedingly diluted. This represents
the dilution of spiritual wisdom that has occurred when the teachings of the ancient rishis became
intermixed with the vast store of human knowledge that has developed over the centuries. A google
search of the word spiritual returns more than 500 million results. How can we possibly discern
the original teachings of the sages, lost within this immense body of -- knowledge that includes
hundreds or even thousands of different teaching traditions and techniques for meditation, yoga,
and self-inquiry? Each of these techniques have some value and have helped many practitioners.
But, if you want to follow the original teachings of the ancient rishis, you have to somehow locate
them amongst all these competing systems, in what is sarcastically referred to as
the spiritual supermarket. Now, we turn to the issue of pollution. Not only
do WE face challenges in the so-called spiritual supermarket, but the jnana ganga ITSELF has faced
grave challenges during its three-thousand year long journey. When any journey is undertaken,
unexpected problems are bound to happen, like when you get wrong directions or miss a plane.
The heroine of the Bollywood movie is an innocent village girl, aptly named Ganga, who undertakes a
journey from Gangotri to Calcutta, following the route of the sacred river. Along the way,
she is tragically humiliated, degraded and defiled at the hands of immoral and greedy people. Her
defilement corresponds to the pollution suffered by the river Ganga from countless sources of
human and industrial waste as IT travels from Gangotri to Calcutta. Sadly, much of the river
is too polluted to safely drink or bathe in. The appalling contamination of this sacred river is
a national tragedy which is being addressed but continues to be a dreadful problem.
The defilement of the Ganga s sacred waters represents a kind of spiritual pollution or
corruption that has tainted the flow of wisdom passed down by the jnana ganga. Just as drinking
polluted water can make you sick, imbibing spiritual teachings that have been corrupted
can lead to great confusion and frustration. The fact is, the teachings of the rishis have
been subjected to innumerable misinterpretations through the ages. Some misinterpretations are
due to a lack of traditional scholarship. I m shocked by the great number of Sanskrit works
have been translated into English recently by authors who haven t mastered the complexities
of Sanskrit language. Other authors and teachers lack the years of traditional scriptural study
needed to correctly interpret the teachings of the rishis. Still other misinterpretations are
committed by those who twist and adapt the ancient teachings to fit in with their own personal,
preconceived notions. For all these reasons, much of what is taught today suffers from various kinds
of distortions and errors which contaminate the wisdom of the jnana ganga.
Then, how can we gain access to the original, pristine teachings of the rishis? Well,
if you traveled to the source of the river Ganga at Gangotri, you d find that its
waters are absolutely pure, untainted by all the pollution downstream. In the same way,
if you seek out the source of the jnana ganga, you ll find it absolutely untainted by any kind
of misinterpretation. That source is the original Sanskrit scriptures that record the revelations
of the ancient rishis. When those scriptures are interpreted and imparted by a traditionally
trained teacher who knows Sanskrit properly, as a student, you can figuratively bathe in the
immaculate waters of the jnana ganga. Fortunately, the Jnana Ganga has been sustained and perpetuated
by an unbroken lineage of teachers who continue to impart the unadulterated,
distilled teachings of the ancient rishis. But, just as effort is required to reach the source of
the river Ganga, effort is also required to find a teacher who belongs to that unbroken lineage,
a guru who can lead you to discover what the ancient rishis discovered.