Shraddha (श्रद्धा)

This past weekend, a pastor at the Hope Lutheran Church in Santa Clara asked a bunch of us to do sermon-speech and my topic was Discipleship.

Discipleship (per John 13.34 - 35) - A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

After I read this commandment, I started to think what does Discipleship mean to me?

If I read, feel or hear that someone commands me to do something, would I do it?

But when I put Discipleship in context with the whole sentence, it means completely different. And this is when I started to compare this to a word I knew as a child - Shraddha.

Shradhha is a Sanskrit word, there is no direct translation of this word in English. Shradhha is an experience of devotion; an experience when you have established a trust based on an eternal truth, a truth that you have experienced. It’s what you experience towards your parents and grandparents as a small child, when their care and love is available to you no matter what you do, just because of who you are.

In Sanatana Dharma (Misnamed in the current world as Hindu Dharma), Shradha is established by seeking the absolute truth of life. Sanatana Dharma means Eternal Truth (or Universal Laws of life), and Shraddha in this eternal truth is established once you start seeking this knowledge through your experience of life. To explain this, i'll give a small example from the life we live daily.

When we go to temples, we see different forms of God - Vishnu (Male form), Lakshmi (Female form), Ganesh, Narasimha or Nandi (Formed as animal), Surya (Sun's Natural energy) or Siva (an empty space - Akash), or our fore-fathers. We observe different holidays, we celebrate different functions and we follow different rituals. But when we look deeply we see the similarity - we observe all these as life transitions, change happens, change in season, change in the nature around us, and change in life as it evolves from birth, adulthood, marriage, new home, old age and death.

We also experience different forms of worship being performed in the same community, on different occasions - Diwali with lights, Durgapuja or MahaSivaratri with mantras, conchs, bells, and Holi with colors - some rituals are observed during early morning, others during mid-day and yet others in the evening or in the darkness of the night - all different kinds engaging a different sense and dimension of our existence.

What it allows us, is to experience life through many different ways, using our senses, broadens our understanding of life and appreciate what/how another (person, animal, plant or mountains and oceans) may be experiencing life at this moment. This starts to connect you to the entire Universe, you start to feel being a small part in the life that's happening around you, and experience the love that the Universe showers us at every moment, as the day breaks, night falls and seasons change. 

This is Sanatana Dharma, the Universal Laws of life, The Eternal Truth. And Shradha is towards the love that you experience; the love you experience from the other humans, animals, plants and the ones you don’t see - like the sky, the ocean, the sun, the mountains and the entire existence.

Discipleship is only possible when there is devotion; and an established faith on an idea, a person or a thing. On the otherhand, Shradha is possible when you start to seek the ultimate truth in life and it increases as you explore more.