A ritual is a set of actions performed to achieve a desired end. The ritual of morning walk improves blood circulation. The ritual of waking up early improves your grades in school. As evident, a ritual has an element of repetition, which leads to perfection. The more you do it, the easier it progressively becomes and the closer it takes you to the desired goal.
Progressive liberals have no problem with ritual. They have a problem with Hindu rituals. Hindu ritual is samskara, the impression left on your own unconscious mind. Ritual is anushthana, the practice of a sacred rite in the manner prescribed by the tradition. The longing for a communion with the divine is at the heart of devotion.
Ritual gives wings to that longing and fires up devotion. Ritual is the actualization of intent, the intent to reciprocate, serve and sacrifice for the unseen. The divine is unseen. The secular, given its obsession with positivism, has no patience for long-drawn cause and effect cycles. It dismisses the unseen for no other reason but greed; to make the most of what can be seen, to get ahead. It operates in small time-cycles, just like democracy, whose boundaries extend from one election to the next. Election – also a ritual.
Dharmic ritual operates in time cycles of Dharma. It is not instant noodles. It demands discipline and perseverance without any expectation of immediate results. Or sometimes even distant results. It goes against human nature and requires us to quell the rebellion of every single pore in the body that would rather spend that time doing something ‘productive’, something ‘scientific’, something that could be measured and quantified.
But with practice, a ritual becomes easy to execute and with ease, comes distraction, threatening the very intent that gave rise to the ritual in the first place. They call it empty ritual. Ritual purity are the rules of the shāstra that keep us invested in the ritual by allowing it to seep into our daily chores. The Hindu life is not divided between the secular and religious, sacred and profane, action and meaning. ‘All life is Yoga’.
Purity thus makes it easier to carry out the anushthana by making it harder. For purity is the shield that keeps temptation away. Recollection, remembrance, mindfulness if you will. There is no purity without ritual and there is no ritual without purity.
(This article has been compiled from the tweet thread posted by @infinitchy on July 26, 2023, with minor edits to improve readability and conform to HinduPost style guide)
