Vows, Dharma & Stormaganza

From RuPaUl to Patañjali

Put an Ashtangi on a forty-hour journey from Mysuru to Sarasota with a Lufthansa entertainment library and in-flight entertainment becomes svādhyāya.

Somewhere in the sky between Bengaluru, Frankfurt, and Newark, returning to the USA after more than a year of living and working in India, I found myself drawn, among the many, many movies available, to three I probably would not otherwise have encountered: Bhool Chuk Maaf, a comedy about a Hindu man trapped in a time loop after forgetting his vow to Lord Śiva; Midwinter Break, a drama about an Irish Catholic woman reckoning with her marriage and a promise she made to God decades earlier; and Stop! That! Train!, a queer camp comedy in which a fabulous cast of drag queens tries to save a runaway train from disaster, starring RuPaul as Madame President.

A Hindu vow. A Catholic vow. And a runaway train. Naturally, they all lead back to the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali.

The Loop

In Bhool Chuk Maaf, Ranjan desperately needs a government job so his girlfriend’s father will let them marry. He bargains with Lord Śiva: give me the job and I’ll do a good deed. The job comes. He forgets his vow to Lord Śiva. Suddenly he is stuck reliving the same day before his marriage over and over again. Groundhog Day by way of Varanasi.

Ranjan spends much of the movie trying to discover which good deed will release him from the loop so he can fulfill his vow, let time move forward, and marry his bride to be. Eventually he learns that the government job he received in the Irrigation Department was corruptly taken from Hamid, a Muslim man who had actually earned it and genuinely wanted the work because his village suffered from water scarcity. In one iteration of the day, Hamid takes his own life out of despair for not getting the job. In another, Ranjan manages to save him and try to plead him to look for another job. Even saving Hamid’s life is not the good deed that sets Ranjan free. The next morning, he wakes up in the loop again.

It turns out the problem was never that Ranjan hadn’t done enough good. The problem is that he was trying to repair the consequences of an injustice while keeping its reward. He wanted Hamid to live and he wanted Hamid’s job. He wanted to fulfill his vow and retain the very thing whose acquisition had created the moral problem in the first place. Only when he relinquishes what was never rightfully his does tomorrow finally come.

The question changes from What good thing haven’t I done yet? to What am I unwilling to relinquish?

That one hooked me.

What Do We Owe?

Then came Midwinter Break. Decades earlier, during the Troubles in Belfast, a younger, heavily pregnant Stella is caught in gunfire and shot in the abdomen. Lying bleeding on the pavement, terrified that her unborn child will die, she begs God to spare her child and promises in return to devote her life to God. The bullet miraculously passes through her and the child survives, grows up, and eventually has a child of his own. Yet Stella, now a grandmother, still fears her debt to God has not been settled.

Her husband isn’t religious and doesn’t believe divine intervention saved their child. But in a heartwarming moment, he tells her that she has been his divine intervention, the miracle of his life, that somehow, in this brief and transitory existence, they found one another to travel through it together.

What do we owe the divine, or another person for that matter, when something we desperately long for is graciously given to us? And what about what we receive that we never asked for?

Ranjan asks Śiva for a job. Stella asks God to spare her child. Both make promises in return. But what happens when we never made the bargain at all?

My own vows arose differently. I hadn’t explicitly asked for the circumstances that gave birth to them. When my best friend Kemdi became catastrophically ill, she asked me to record her recovery and help tell her story. She died before we could finish the documentary, but I continued to feel bound to what we had begun. Had I asked for my friend to get sick and die? Later, through Jhaptal, more than a hundred Indian classical musicians gave me their time, music, stories, and trust. No one asked me to make a vow. But I felt I had received something I was responsible for transmitting. And yet, I was sexually assaulted while staying in an ashram in Mumbai to make the movie.

Life happened. People entrusted themselves to me, and somewhere along the way I turned that trust into promises of my own. Yet I needed to heal, too.

Perhaps this is another way vows enter our lives. Not Give me this and I’ll give you that, but: Something has been entrusted to me. I won’t forget it.

And there is a harder question underneath that one: Does everything life hands us create an obligation in return? Some things arrive without our asking. Some without our consent. Must everything we suffer be redeemed, transformed into meaning, or made useful?

Vrata

The Sanskrit word “vrata” is richer than our casual English “promise.” It can mean a vow, an observance, a chosen discipline, a commitment that begins to organize how one lives. Perhaps a vrata transforms experience into responsibility: This happened. Something was entrusted to me. I will not live as though it didn’t.

Kemdi wanted to turn her suffering into something that could help others suffer less. At the time, I was moving in Buddhist circles and had become inspired by the bodhisattva vow, the cherished Mahāyāna commitment to seek awakening for the liberation of all sentient beings. Alongside it was this intoxicating idea that our suffering could have meaning, that what we endure might somehow become a path toward freedom for self and other. The Irish Catholic in me recognized Christ in this too: suffering transformed into salvation.

I was in my twenties, spiritually ravenous, and studying to become a filmmaker. Maybe you can see where this was going. I wanted filmmaking to save my friend’s life and, while it was at it, to save humanity. A modest career objective.

After she died, the work became tangled in grief, family conflict, and questions of ownership. Twenty years later, I am still working on the damn thing. It has changed into a written form, and I have changed with it. Which is precisely the problem this essay is reckoning with: when does devotion become debt?

Jhaptal carried another kind of trust. Musicians gave me their time, words, and music; some of them are no longer alive. I felt responsible for transmitting what they had given me. But while staying in an ashram in Mumbai to work on the documentary, I was violently attacked and sexually assaulted by an unknown trespasser. There was no justice. Finishing a documentary became considerably less urgent than learning how to simply inhabit my own body and mind again.

The films had to wait. I had to wait.

Even so, through all these years I have wanted to fulfill these promises: Finish telling Kemdi’s story. Finish making Jhaptal. Finish what you started before you begin another life-sized creative thing.

There is a difference between what happened, what was entrusted to us, what we promised in response, and everything subsequently added to the promise.

My Financial Groundhog Day

And here Bhool Chuk Maaf pokes me again.

I have spent much of my adult life choosing according to meaning, and I don’t regret that. It has made me wealthy in teachers, music, yoga, friendship, travel, languages, study, art, and encounters I could never have engineered otherwise. I genuinely feel wealthy.

Except, rather inconveniently, in money.

Financially, I have found myself returning to the beginning often enough to recognize my own Groundhog Day. Somewhere beneath my choices has been an almost devotional proposition: If I remain faithful enough to meaningful work, eventually it will take care of me.

Maybe that is something I need to relinquish.

Dhana Lakṣmī, material wealth, need not be the embarrassing, vulgar cousin of spiritual abundance. Money can be shelter, agency, healthcare, generosity, mobility, time, and the material support that lets dharma continue. Perhaps it does not magically arrive because I pursued meaning correctly. Perhaps it, too, needs cultivation.

So I am opening to a different proposition: If I learn to take care of myself financially, perhaps I can remain faithful to meaningful work without hoping it will take care of me in return.

Meaning nourishes my spirit. Money nourishes my life. I have to cultivate both.

Jhaptal does not have to make me financially secure for those twenty years to have mattered. Kemdi’s story does not have to vindicate the choices I made because I vow to tell it. Financial security does not have to arrive as God’s eventual reward for choosing meaning over money. Maybe building a materially sustainable life is not a betrayal of meaning. Maybe it gives me somewhere solid enough from which to communicate what things mean.

Enter the Drag Queens

And thank God, and Lufthansa, for Stop! That! Train!

After two films about vows, God, debt, and moral responsibility, I got drag queens on a runaway luxury train with ridiculous passengers and RuPaul as Madame President, “tell it to me straight and tell it to me gay,” catastrophe, camp. The world has gone completely bonkers and we’re all still dancing.

Which brings me, naturally, to another Yoga Sūtra challenge: asmitā.

Patañjali names asmitā as one of the five kleśas, the afflictions that generate suffering. Often translated as “egoism” or “I-am-ness,” asmitā is a confusion of identity. We identify with our limited ego, our roles, histories, bodies, achievements, failures, and all the things we can say I am about. This causes us suffering because they are impermanent, because we mistake them for something more fundamental.

Drag and acting and yoga are not all the same thing, but they all delight in making identity visible as performance. An actor consciously inhabits a character. Drag takes the signs of gender and persona and turns the volume way up. Yoga asks, in another register: Which of the characters I perform have I forgotten are characters? I don’t want to collapse these traditions into one another, but I do enjoy their association.

The filmmaker. The faithful friend. The witness. The person who finishes what she promised. These may all be noble identities. But if I cannot imagine being free without first satisfying their demands, perhaps even “the one who owes” has become an identity.

More importantly, Stop! That! Train! interrupted my tendency to make everything deep and “spiritual”. I can spend a tremendous amount of time asking: What does this mean? What is my dharma? How do I serve the divine?

But occasionally this is all a runaway train, and maybe you just need to stop the fucking train.

Pay the bill. Earn the money. Take care of the body. Edit the scene. Make dinner. Laugh. Wear something outrageous. Hold a hand at the airport. Call somebody you love. Perhaps none of that is separate from devotion and dharma and all the deep things.

So Which Train Do I Stop?

For nearly twenty years, finish what you started has sounded like an ethical imperative. Perhaps it still is. But tucked underneath has been an unspoken ultimatum:

Finish what you started, or you can’t really have a creative career.

I have lived enormously. I have studied and taught yoga, traveled, written and published, worked on films, learned languages, built programs, loved people and been loved by them. But my creative career has remained strangely provisional. I never stopped creating, yet the unfinished work stayed first in line: finish Kemdi. Finish Jhaptal. Honor what was entrusted to you. Then make the next big thing.

Maybe that is my Groundhog Day. Not that I haven't finished, but that I keep believing finishing will release me to what I really deserve.

And suddenly the runaway train comes barreling back into the story. Kemdi isn't the train. Jhaptal isn't the train. Even wanting to finish them isn't the train.

The runaway train is the thought that I cannot fully proceed until I do.

Which brings me, via RuPaul, back to Patañjali.

Yoga Sūtra I.2:

yogaś citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ

Yoga is nirodhaḥ, the stilling or cessation of the vṛttis, the movements and patternings of citta. Patañjali doesn't say stop the work, stop caring, stop creating. It is the pattern that must stop running away with us.

Perhaps aparigraha, non-grasping, asks me to loosen my hold not on Kemdi or Jhaptal, but on the bargain I attached to their completion: When these are finished, something will be settled. I will be released. I will have permission to proceed.

What if completion cannot do that? What if the work can simply become work again? Kemdi’s story can become a book. Jhaptal can become a series. Another film can exist beside them, and so can another book, a play, a livelihood, a love affair, something I haven't imagined yet.

The creative life doesn't need to stop. The runaway train does.

And Patañjali tells us what follows:

tadā draṣṭuḥ svarūpe ’vasthānam

Then the seer abides in its own nature.

mahāvratam

So back to vrata, the vow, the commitments around which we consciously come together.

In Yoga Sūtra II.30, Patañjali gives the five yamas: ahiṃsā, non-harming; satya, truthfulness; asteya, non-stealing; brahmacarya, wise restraint; and aparigraha, non-grasping. The next sūtra explains that these yamas are to be practiced beyond limitations of circumstance (caste/class, place, and time) as the mahāvratam, the great vow of yoga.

That vow doesn't depend on finishing a project, living in a certain city, being financially rich or poor, succeeding or failing. It asks something much more immediate:

How am I practicing yoga here and now?

Can I refrain from harm (ahiṃsā)? Tell the truth (satya)? Respect what is and isn't mine (asteya)? Use my energy wisely (brahmacarya)? Release what I am grasping (aparigraha)?

Maybe that's enough of a vow to organize a life around.

And this is why I keep returning to Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras, not as an ancient text to master and put neatly back on a shelf, but as something to bring into an actual life and see what happens.

It is also exactly what we do in the Online Patañjali Yoga Sūtra Study Circle: take these terse, potent teachings and ask what they have to do with the lives we're actually living, with love, money, work, identity, suffering, ambition, attachment, and, yes, our own runaway trains.

Interested in joining the next round of the Online Patañjali Yoga Sūtra Study Circle?

Visit aquamarine.yoga/sutra-study to learn more and register today. Let’s Stop! That! Train! Now.