Adi Shankaracharya, Quiet Quitting and Bossism

The city of Mahishmati stood on the banks of the holy river Narmada. The city was considered the hub of Indian spirituality, and various systems such as Nyaya, Vaisheshika, and Mimamsa were thriving there. 

The house of Mandana Mishra and Bharati Devi was located in one of the most affluent areas of the town. They were scholars of a system called Purva Mimamsa, which focused on the ritualistic aspect of the Vedas. This system had evolved in response to Buddhism. Buddha had spoken of Dharma but not of God. He challenged the culture of ritualism spread throughout the subcontinent and preached the message of self-discovery and compassion. 

Mandana Mishra and Bharati Devi were ideal householders and followed the Purva Mimamsa teachings perfectly. Their house was big enough to host fifty people, and they fed hundreds of needy people every day. They created wealth and made a positive contribution to society. They had many children and grandchildren and lived an ideal life as described in the Purva Mimamsa philosophy. They conducted large-scale havans (fire rituals) as described in the Vedas, and the gods blessed them with prosperity and means to serve society. Mandana Mishra was a little disdainful of Sanyasis. He thought they burdened society, whereas he created wealth and served the community. 

Now that you have the background, imagine how he would have felt when his house help told him that a 25-year-old emancipated young boy had issued him a challenge. The boy sent the following message. 

Please summon your master and mistress. I challenge them to a debate that the way of the Sanyasi is superior to the way of the householder.”  

This was not an ordinary child. He was Adi Shankara – a prodigy who completed his Vedic education as a young child. When his Guru asked him who he was, he gave the following response. 

‘I am neither the earth nor water nor fire, nor air, nor sky, nor any other properties. I am not the senses and even the mind. I am Shiva, the divisionless essence of consciousness.’

After completing his studies, he had fantastic spiritual experiences in Varanasi. He wrote his commentaries on Gita, Upanishads, and Brahma Sutras. Hence, Mandana Mishra knew that this was no ordinary brahmin challenging him. He agreed to the debate and decided that his wife, Bharati Devi, would be the ideal judge. Take a moment to reflect on the purity of intent of the process. Both scholars felt comfortable choosing Mandana Mishra’s wife as a judge because they trusted her to be impartial. She put jasmine garlands around their necks because these sensitive flowers would wilt if either of the contestants lost their composure. 

They debated for 16 days. You can read about the debate or watch this beautiful video that inspired this article. 

Mandan Mishra’s confidence began to waver, and he began to glimpse at the joy you could receive by dedicating your life to the search for eternal truth. One of the final questions he asked Shankaracharya was about the relationship between soul and God, soul and spirit?” Shankaracharya shot back.

“They’re related in the same way that the sun and its reflection are related, there is only one sun that warms and lights up the entire world, but his reflection can be seen in ponds and lakes and streams and rivers. The soul and spirit are the same way, there is only one God who is reflected in all the souls”.

Mandana Mishra asked his final question. 

“Young monk. Then what about the life of a householder & virtue, has it all been a waste?”

Adi Shankara’s response melted him. 

“No, in fact, that is the cornerstone of life. It is through actions that we purify the heart. Actions are clarifying, your life as a householder, and having taken care of the needy and lived a virtuous life is what has purified your heart; a pure heart is ready to reflect the light of God. When the heart is pure, when the disciple is ready, the Guru will come.”

Shankara leaned forward, and Mandana Mishra perceived him as something far greater, no longer the young monk. Shankara asked him:

“Mandana Mishra, Acharya, Are you ready?” 

He knew what was being asked of him. His heart overflowed with joy that he had found his Guru, and he bowed to Shankaracharya. “Yes, Gurudeva. I am ready; accept me as your disciple”.  At that moment, Mandana Mishra’s garland wilted, and the flowers dropped to the floor. 

However, his wife, Bharati Devi, now renounced the role of the judge and started debating Shankaracharya. It was a stunning debate that lasted fifteen days before Bharati Devi delivered what she thought was the final blow. She asked him how the bliss you achieve as as Sanyasi was different from what any householder felt during procreation.

Shankaracharya was stumped. He had never been a householder, so he could not answer this question through direct experience. He was eight years old when he renounced the world and experienced divine bliss when he was ten. He requested a thirty-day interval to continue the debate. He then used yogic kriya to leave his body and inhabit the body of the king of a neighboring kingdom who had just died. He experienced all the pleasures and duties of a householder and transformed the kingdom in 30 days. Finally, he gave up the king’s body and returned to his own. His response to Bharati Devi conclusively ended the debate. He said the sensual pleasure one experiences or the joy of eating delectable food depends on an external agent. When the agent disappears, the pain and aches of life still bother you. The pleasure of divine bliss is a million times greater than the momentary pleasure of procreation. He asked her to be like a lotus leaf which does not get wet when it rains because the water slides off it. Bharati Devi surrendered to him and joined Mandana Mishra in accepting him as the Guru. 

Applying this Wisdom At Work

 We can learn many lessons from Adi Shankaracharya’s debate with Mandana Mishra. However, I would like to focus on his focus on answering every question through his direct experience. When Bharati Devi asked him about the joy of sensual experience, he did not quote any existing text to support his claims because he had not experienced it as his truth. His inhabiting the king’s body allowed him to have the direct experience without compromising his vow of Brahmacharya. The honesty of his answers finally convinced Mandana Mishra and Bharati Devi to accept him as their Guru. 

I recently listened to a fascinating podcast by Brene Brown, Adam Grant, and Simon Sinek. They were discussing workplace trends and narrowded down on Quiet Quitting. The Covid 19 Pandemic was a stark reminder to many people that there is more to life than work, and the Quiet Quitting movement meant different things to different people. Some used it to draw boundaries because work was consuming their whole life. Others used it to push back against a toxic workplace till they could find a better option. The fascinating insight they revealed was that quiet quitting was happening even within really good companies where people worked for amazing bosses. At this point, Simon makes a really remarkable observation. 

I just wanted to go back on something I said before that I found quiet quitting less judgmental or less than an accusation, and I’m realizing as we’re having this conversation I’m wrong, which is, quiet quitting is what we say employees do, but when senior management quiet quits, we call it, they’re finding balance. I’m hearing plenty of senior people who are working fewer hours, ending the day a little earlier, not rushing to get back to their emails. We compliment that behavior and say, “Oh, that person’s finding balance.” Still, if a junior person does it, we call it quiet quitting, and I realize there’s a judgment in it because maybe that junior person is also just trying to find balance.

I have seen so many situations in my life where the executives are entirely divorced from employees’ lives. They think an Employee Opinion Survey is enough to get the organization’s pulse. Hence, an engineering director does not think twice before asking teams to commit weekends to deliver a feature. A business leader sets ambitious goals to define the personal legacy and drives all his employees through the year without regard for their commitments to their lives and families. There was a recent article in New York Times about Bossism. 

Bossism is a belief that the people who build and run important tech companies have ceded too much power to the entitled, lazy, overly woke people who work for them and need to start clawing it back. In Mr. Ganz’s telling, Silicon Valley’s leading proponents of bossism — including Mr. Musk and the financiers Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel — are seizing an opportunity to tug the tech industry’s culture sharply to the right, taking leftist workers and worker-sympathizers down a peg while reinstating themselves and their fellow bosses to their rightful places atop the totem pole.

This worldview that everyone is woke and lazy is only possible when you are entirely divorced from the life of ordinary people and believe they exist merely as tools to increase your wealth or fulfill your grand vision. If any of these leaders could spend a few days just living the lives of ordinary people, we would live in a completely different world. 

Spiritual Lesson from This Story

Sometimes, articles take on a life of their own. I had a different lesson in mind when I started writing this. Then, I reached the point where Mandana Mishra was totally downcast. His arguments had been entirely destroyed by Shankaracharya, and he could feel deep within him that the young man within him was no ordinary monk. 

Shankaracharya also sees that Mandana Mishra, the scholar, is dead, and the disciple is finally ready to emerge. So he tells him that the Guru will appear when a disciple is ready. Then, he leans forward and whispers, “Mandana Mishra, Acharya, Are you ready?” 

This sublime passage of events is so poignant because it is the essence of a guru-disciple relationship. Actor and writer Ashutosh Rana speaks about the guru-disciple relationship in a beautiful interview. He says a disciple goes to a guru because he wants to make something out of himself. A guru wants to shatter the disciple because he can only be remade after the ego is shattered. Hence, it’s only when a disciple is ready to be shattered that a guru can make something out of him. 

My Guru, Om Swami, talks about the Guru Disciple bond in this beautiful video. 

Human tendency is to believe that everything has to be absolute. If you have something, then the other person should not have it. That is not how divine works. As soon as ego raises its hood, divinity disappears. As soon as you go back in a mode of surrender in humility, realization dawns. When an avataar comes, it can never be for one person. Sri Krishna says to Arjuna that please understand this very clearly that I have no personal favourites and I don’t hate anybody. I am with everybody, not just every human being but every living entity. 

The guru-disciple relationship is the most fulfilling one in the world. Dear reader, I pray that one day you experience the joy of this relationship.