Hinduism: Many Paths, Many Births

Abstract

At the end of May, a swami from India invited me to his home and office about a hundred miles north of Los Angeles. In the course of our introductions, he shared that he has had 11 consecutive births as a sādhu, a Hindu monk. He went on to say that when he was a toddler, his parents were quite concerned because of his seeming inability to speak. However, a group of sādhus came to the house and told them not to worry. The reason their son would not speak is that in his immediate past birth, he had taken a vow of silence in the years leading to his death. That vow (mauna-vrata) had carried from one birth to the next. By the age of five, he began speaking, and, as promised, the group of monks returned to fetch him, training him in monastic life and in classical Sanskrit. The swami also explained that he remembers becoming a monk in north India in that immediate past life, and then settling in the south of India where he learned and performed the Vedic rituals in their most traditional form. With his fellow monks, he seeks to keep alive a tradition that has been nurtured for some 6,000 years, and he is currently using skills acquired in extended periods of international study to record Hindu insights and transmit them beyond the borders of India.