Slow but steady: I

A famous Buddhist tale says that once a prince who was totally influenced by the teachings of the Buddha, came under the tutelage of this great master to advance spiritually. The other disciples were wondering how this prince was going to cope with the strict disciplines of this path. The Buddha, however was confident. This prince took up the hardest of (Tapas) spiritual disciplines, and was racing ahead of others. One day the Buddha said “I have heard that you play the sitar very well. Will you play for me?” The prince was delighted and started tuning his sitar by tightening the strings to play the correct notes. Once he was ready the Buddha said, “tighten them a bit more.” The disciple looked at the teacher as if saying “Sir, this is not your field.” But the Guru had said, so he tightened them a bit more. As he was about to begin, the master again said, “Tighten them a bit more”. The prince then said “Sir, if I do so, the notes would be faulty, and worse still, the strings may break”. The teacher then said, “This is what I wanted to tell you. Choose the middle path in your sadhana, don’t overdo or underperform, else you may not progress at all (loose strings) or you may fall (broken strings).”

Gurudev Swami Chinmayanandaji called this middle path “hasten slowly”. This is also what Plato called the “golden mean”. Gurudev once explained it to us through a beautiful description of the Ganges flowing to its source. He said that when mother Ganges starts from Gomukh and flows beautifully and gracefully towards its goal, she playfully jumps over small rocks and ripples over pebbles. If it’s a big boulder, she gently lifts her sari slightly and takes a leap, but if she meets a mountain on the way, she doesn’t stop there to fight with it to get out of her way, instead, she carefully changes course and with swaying dignity circles around it and moves on. The aim is to reach the goal, not to pick up quarrels with whatever crosses one’s path. Shri Nagarjuna calls this “the middle path”.