There's more to Tarun Sagar's nakedness than just nudity
I have visited Muni Tarun Sagar. Spent nearly an hour at his ashram. There were men and women present. It did not occur to me to think of the Muni as naked. I don’t think anyone present in the room did.
Nakedness is in one’s mind. Especially in the mind of those who are no more than bodies. You have to be a mindless person and only a bloated body teeming with prurience to see only nakedness in everything. Especially, not knowing what “nakedness” means.
That’s the problem. Not the sky-cladness of a Jain Muni.
I am convinced that cloth could be a greater embarrassment than nakedness. Cloth hides. Nakedness reveals.
But clothes are all-important for us; for what are we, without our clothes?
The poorer I am as a human being, the dearer needs to me my attire. If I can’t be a good specimen of humanity, I must at least be a well-clad tailor’s dummy.
Nakedness too can be a problem. Nakedness, paradoxically, can be a religious dress code, which denotes spiritual decay. Like the Emperor’s clothes, for example. Nakedness can be more fanciful than a million-rupee coat.
I don’t think Muni Tarun Sagar was invited to address the Haryana legislators as a visual delight. He was invited for who he is. (If I wander about naked, you won’t invite me, would you? You’d shut me up, as you should.)
At the point of inviting him, his dress-code was known to all concerned. The relevant question is if he was worth hearing.
I hear nothing about that!
This is nakedness of another sort. The nakedness of the mind. The nakedness of the soul. But this nakedness is different from the nakedness of Tarun Sagar’s body, which is as naked, maybe, as the sky is.
I may not believe in this tradition. In fact, I don’t. But I have no problem in respecting it. The eagerness to see a red herring in anything and everywhere betrays the nakedness of the soul.
What, after all, is nakedness from a spiritual perspective?
It is not a textile issue! Even if I drape myself in the thickest and most expensive attire, I could still be naked. That depends on your discernment. If you cannot see beyond appearances - which is what spiritual blindness means - then I am safe. But if you are, God help me!
Why should a Muni go around naked? Would he lose his spiritual sheen, if clothed?
Nakedness pertains to surface. Only the surface is naked. Depth has no nakedness. If you are mere surface, and there is no depth in you, you are naked; and there is nothing in the world, except willful blindness on the part of others, that can hide it. You can’t cover this nakedness with a textile shield.
This brings us to the heart of the matter. And to the answer why there is a link between spirituality and nakedness.
We conceded that the surface is the attire of depth. The matter can end there as far as inanimate things are concerned. But humans are not inanimate objects.
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| I don’t think Muni Tarun Sagar was invited to address the Haryana legislators as a visual delight. |
Life is dynamic. With respect to what is dynamic, the relationship between surface and depth becomes mysterious. The sea: does its surface cover, or clothe, the depth? Or, is the surface an invitation to the depth? The surface covers and reveals; never hides.
With human beings, it is even more mysterious. Is our body no more to who we are - the surface together with the depth of our being - than the surface is to an ocean?
Herein lies the light that we have lost sight of, a long time ago. And now is a good time to recall it.
Everything about us is a dialogue. Mutuality is the shaping principle of being human. If so - body is the surface; the soul, the depth. Is it only that the body covers the soul?
Even this “covering” is a problem? (Language is always a delicious problem) Should “covering” amount to “hiding”?
Never mind, let’s return to body and soul; for the Tarun Sagar controversy cannot be settled without working this one out.
“Reciprocity” or mutuality is the basic principle in the spiritual domain. Hence the teaching: “Treat others as you would like to be treated,” which is common to all spiritual traditions.
Given the principle of reciprocity, what is the soul to the body if the body is the soul’s attire?
The body too can have only one, universal attire. That is the soul. The divorce between body (surface) and soul (depth) - the rupture of reciprocity - deforms both. Depth become surface-like. And surface becomes mere appearance, which it was not.
This rupture makes us misunderstand “covering” as hiding. The body losing its intuitive touch with the soul: that is the burden of nakedness that wearies us all the way.
The surface, without the intimation of depth, is a domain of awkwardness. All our desperate and expensive efforts are to overcome this awkwardness. We mistake this as attempts to “impress” others. Imagine impressing anyone with clothes! It’s an insult.
The naked body of a spiritual person - one in whom the surface and depth are in dialogue - is valuable as a reminder of the grand divorce that plagues us inwardly. The familiar strategy is to cover it up. A better thing to do is to sort it out.
(Nakedness, by the way, is also a legislative problem. MLAs need to understand. So, inviting the Muni into their midst is a stroke of pure genius.)
Soul is the luminous dress of the body; just as the body is the opaque dress of the soul.
The body, lest we forget, is the “dress”, not the “shroud” of the soul. As Thomas Hardy famously said, “For a woman, her dress is her skin.” There is a touch of intimacy about it.
Sex is the physical means for transcending interpersonal nakedness. No human being is “naked” in a state of sexual union. Prurience knows only human beings are two-legged nakedness.
The light that separates sex from prurience is the soul.
Let’s not showcase our puritanical poverty by decrying nakedness. Let’s celebrate true nakedness, by clothing our bodies with the textile of the soul, with reverence for life as our fashion statement.