pilgrims have been coming to India to seek for ages. Alexander the Great sent an ambassad-
or to India in the fourth century BC, with a request to find one of these famous Yogis and re-
turn with him to court. (The ambassador did report finding a Yogi, but couldn’t convince the
gentleman to travel.) In the first century AD, Apollonius of Tyrana, another Greek ambassad-
or, wrote of his journey through India: “I saw Indian Brahmans living upon the earth and yet
not on it, and fortified without fortifications, and possessing nothing, yet having the richness of
all men.” Gandhi himself always wanted to study with a Guru, but never, to his regret, had the
time or opportunity to find one. “I think there is a great deal of truth,” he wrote, “in the doctrine
that true knowledge is impossible without a Guru.”
A great Yogi is anyone who has achieved the permanent state of enlightened bliss. A
Guru is a great Yogi who can actually pass that state on to others. The word Guru is com-
posed of two Sanskrit syllables. The first means “darkness,” the second means “light.” Out of
the darkness and into the light. What passes from the master into the disciple is something
called mantravirya: “The potency of the enlightened consciousness.” You come to your Guru,
then, not only to receive lessons, as from any teacher, but to actually receive the Guru’s state
of grace.
Such transfers of grace can occur in even the most fleeting of encounters with a great be-
ing. I once went to see the great Vietnamese monk, poet and peacemaker Thich Nhat Hanh
speak in New York. It was a characteristically hectic weeknight in the city, and as the crowd
pushed and shoved its way into the auditorium, the very air in the place was whisked into a
nerve-racking urgency of everyone’s collective stress. Then the monk came on stage. He sat
in stillness for a good while before he began to speak, and the audience—you could feel it
happening, one row of high-strung New Yorkers at a time—became colonized by his stillness.
Soon, there was not a flutter in the place. In the space of maybe ten minutes, this small Viet-
namese man had drawn every single one of us into his silence. Or maybe it’s more accurate
to say that he drew us each into our own silence, into that peace which we each inherently
possessed, but had not yet discovered or claimed. His ability to bring forth this state in all of
us, merely by his presence in the room—this is divine power. And this is why you come to a
Guru: with the hope that the merits of your master will reveal to you your own hidden great-
ness.
The classical Indian sages wrote that there are three factors which indicate whether a soul
has been blessed with the highest and most auspicious luck in the universe:
- To have been born a human being, capable of conscious inquiry.
- To have been born with—or to have developed—a yearning to understand the nature of
the universe.