Vinit Doshi's Comments on Recollections of Late Acharya Sushil Muni

Vinit Doshi's Comments on Recollections of 

Late Acharya Sushil Muni (Guruji)

My recollection of Sushil Muni is based on the experiences of an American teen growing up in midwestern Detroit in the 1970’s and 80’s, a middle child of highly devout and traditional parents. I came to appreciate the principles of Jainism as I learned through Pathshala and from my parents.

In my teen years, however, disillusionment came in search of me.

• I grew weary of the conflicting direction between what we learned at Pathshala and did at Derasar vs. how we lived our real lives.
• I was frustrated by having to sit through hours of boring bhavnas of which I did not understand a word.
• I grew disillusioned at society’s material expectation to pursue wealth, beauty, professional status, and social standing versus the lofty notions of spiritual detachment and non-materialism I was taught.
• I grew cynical at the conflict between letting go of ego yet seeing the constant spectacle of gheeboli in every major religious celebration.
• I grew disheartened by my father asking me to apply pesticides to our lawn but objecting to eating root vegetables.
• I became discouraged as I made connections between our society’s incessant economic drive for growth, its inevitable impact on the environment, and the apathy of a Jain community that cared only for grades, college, status, and money.

My trip to India made my Impression of Jainism even Worse.

• The hypocrisy of organized religion was even more magnified there.
• People seemed to practice rituals for the sake of rituals, and they criticized me for circling my Aarti thali in the wrong direction, mispronouncing dharmic words, and for questioning ‘why’ instead of just believing on faith.
• I witnessed discriminatory class distinctions reinforced by religion and culture, with Jains either acquiescing or even taking part.
• I could not reconcile how the same highly respected people known for fasting and daily samayiks for the upliftment of their souls could also be emotionally and verbally abusive towards others.
• I witnessed religious elders zealously justifying the disgraceful shaming of women as untouchable during their menstrual cycles.
• At Palitana, I met Sadhus who justified wearing silk as the ONLY garments appropriate for doing puja, insisting that it would create the right bhavna and that cotton clothing could not do the same, as if the bhav resided in the clothing.

After I returned to the US, I started to feel that there was no correlation between the outward religiousness of a person and his or her true spirituality. 
All this frustration led me to reject all forms of organized religion, including Jain dharma.

• I became a proud atheist in my youth, routinely mocking religious Jains and making a hobby of pointing out uncomfortable inconsistencies.
• I reveled in my doomsday vision of the future, now endorsed by Mahavir Bhagwan’s own prognosis for a future of intensifying suffering in the current and coming time cycles.
• I vowed at the time that I would never bring children into this world.

Then I had the opportunity to meet Guruji Sushil Muni one day at Jain summer camp in Michigan. We did morning yoga exercises, chanted Om, listened to lectures, and did many other activities.

At one point, I found a moment of privacy when Guruji was sitting alone in a meadow.

For an exalted leader of his stature, I found him surprisingly approachable. With his eyes full of compassion, and a smile creating an aura of trust and openness.

I gathered the courage speak with him about my beliefs and frustrations. He listened with great perceptiveness, and in turn, he answered my doubts with a single very powerful idea. I don’t recall his exact words, but I felt that he acknowledged what I felt and validated my experiences and observations.

Then he conveyed an idea through an elegantly simple and beautiful analogy that

“the truth of a message should not be confused by the inadequacy of the messenger”.

The postman is merely a means of delivering the letter. Even the letter itself is just a piece of paper with words on it. But the truth of the message in the letter is distinct from the one who nominally delivers it. Then he asked me to examine:

What is the root of my doubts – the messenger or the message?

What happened at this moment is not an exaggeration for the purposes of telling a dramatic story or for glorifying Guruji. Those that have experienced something similar will know the truth of this.

What happened is that he challenged me to differentiate – between the messenger and the message? 

It so happened in that moment, sitting in front of Guruji, that the cumulative years of confusion, anger, resentment, and misunderstanding gave way to a sudden clarity. The seeds of my convictions in Jain truths had never been completely extinguished, only suppressed, waiting for the right time to bloom again in more favorable circumstances.

Never once did Guruji tell me what I had to believe. Guruji’s words and bhavna awakened a new life in me and ignited a relentless conviction to seek the truth, while looking past the limitations of the human messengers. I sought the truth of Jain dharma ever since.

Some ideas and themes have resonated most profoundly with me include:

-       Atma – gaining the conviction that my body is borrowed for me as a temporary vehicle, but I do not belong to the body, and that I am distinct.

-       Ahimsa – going beyond the simple vegetarian diet to understand that true Ahimsa involves a much greater scope of minimizing violence in all forms.

-       Anekantwad – recognizing the limitations of my own perception and appreciating the importance of understanding other viewpoints.

-       Karma – accepting that there is cause and effect interaction mechanism between atma and karma in everyday life and living the life accordingly.

-       Raag and Dvesh – recognizing the destructive effects of attachment and aversion and learning to observe and let go.

How many lives I may have lived having missed the path entirely? How many times I’ve crossed it without knowing or understanding, or walked the path for some time but without conviction? How often I have traveled the path for some time but then gotten lost again? Infinitely many times. And yet in this life, Guruji helped me find the path that I am on today.

For this, I am forever grateful to Guruji.

Jai Jinendra

Vinit Doshi

August 10^th, 2019 
at Siddhachalam NJ USA