Pretentious or premature vanaprastha life - Jayadvaita Swami (original) (raw)

The Vānaprastha Adventure, Installment 7

Man leaving grief-stricken wife and kids. Not the way to become a vānaprastha.

While being keen to accept life in the vānaprastha order, we should avoid becoming pseudo vānaprasthas. One should not adopt the identity of a vānaprastha merely for false prestige. If one identifies oneself to others as a vānaprastha, one should adopt the consciousness of a vānaprastha and follow the duties of a vānaprastha. One should not merely call oneself a vānaprastha yet continue to immerse oneself in family affairs, social occasions, mundane entertainment, and mundane interests. In particular, one should not call oneself a vānaprastha while continuing to have sex. (One may be “moving towards” vānaprastha life or “aspiring for” it, but one is not yet there.)

Nor should a man serially flipflop between the āśramas of gṛhastha and vānaprastha by accepting a wife, splitting up with her, declaring himself a vānaprastha, marrying again, becoming a vānaprastha again. . . Better to be a dutiful gṛhastha and later accept the vānaprastha āśrama when one is ready to stick with it. Accepting the vānaprastha āśrama should be a one-way ticket. Once we become vānaprasthas, we should not look back.

Moreover, one should not prematurely become a vānaprastha merely to avoid responsibility. At a mature stage, to retire from family life is fitting. But a young man with family responsibilities should not give up family life in the name of the vānaprastha āśrama merely to avoid those responsibilities. In the Bhagavad-gītā (18.8) Kṛṣṇa says that giving up one’s prescribed duties merely because they are troublesome amounts to renunciation in the mode of passion and gives no good result. Again: One should be a Kṛṣṇa conscious, dutiful gṛhastha and later retire from family life.

This is part of a draft

This is an excerpt from a new book I have in the works—The Vānaprastha Adventure, a guide to retirement in spiritual life. While I’m working on it, I’ll be posting my draft here, in installments. I invite your comments, questions, and suggestions.

Jayadvaita Swami–editor, publisher, and teacher–is a disciple of His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Founder-Acharya of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness.