 |
| Different bees, different flowers, and the quiet continuity of receiving and seeking. A nineteenth-century natural-history illustration that echoes both the modern bumblebee experiment and Abhinavagupta's ancient metaphor. |
The Question I Keep Returning To
Some questions remain with us for years, not because we have never found an answer, but because life keeps revealing something that our earlier answers could not fully contain. For me, the relationship between spiritual tradition and personal understanding has been one of those questions. It is difficult to write about without touching something deeply personal. Behind the philosophical arguments are years of practice, teachers to whom I owe a great deal, experiences that have shaped my understanding, and the sometimes painful discovery that genuine gratitude does not always make agreement possible.
I have returned to this subject many times, approaching it from different directions. In Tradition and Insight, I explored the relationship between inherited wisdom and spontaneous realization. In The Traditionless One, I turned toward the freedom that cannot ultimately be confined within a religious identity or lineage. Later, in The House That Tradition Built, I considered how the structures that once supported our growth can sometimes become limitations, especially when gratitude quietly turns into dependence, or belonging begins to demand the surrender of personal judgment.
More recently, in The Akalpita Guru: Abhinavagupta on Lineage, False Teachers, and Spontaneous Realization, I returned to the primary texts with a somewhat different question. Abhinavagupta's willingness to acknowledge realization arising without ordinary human instruction, while also refusing to equate self-proclaimed independence with genuine knowledge, seemed particularly important. His position does not permit us to make either lineage or spontaneity into an absolute. The possibility of knowledge beyond conventional transmission remains open, but so does the value of receiving guidance even when understanding has already begun to arise independently.
Looking back at these reflections, I cannot describe them as a straight journey from confusion toward clarity. At different moments, I have leaned more strongly toward the necessity of tradition, and at others toward the freedom to move beyond it. Perhaps, in trying to correct one excess, I have occasionally moved too far in the opposite direction. I would not wish to disown those earlier thoughts, however. They arose from genuine questions, and I still recognize something valuable in each of them. What has changed is my willingness to leave certain tensions unresolved, rather than insisting that one principle must finally prevail over all the others.
There is also something that philosophical distinctions alone cannot quite express. When a teacher has opened an entirely new world to us, disagreement is not merely a question of deciding which interpretation is correct. There may be affection, reverence, memories, and a debt that cannot easily be measured. To recognize a limitation in someone's understanding does not erase what we have received from them. Yet neither does the depth of that debt oblige us to accept everything they have taught. I have found this much easier to formulate than to live. There have been disagreements that I carried quietly for years, not because I lacked reasons for them, but because acknowledging them felt almost like an act of disloyalty toward someone I continued to love and respect.
I have already written extensively about the value of tradition, the possibility of spontaneous realization, and the freedom of personal discernment. I do not wish to repeat those arguments here. But one aspect of this relationship has remained comparatively unexplored: how much of what we regard as our own independent understanding has itself been made possible by what we received from others?
Could it be that even our ability to question a teacher was partly cultivated through that teacher's guidance? That a tradition may transmit not only particular doctrines and practices, but also the capacities through which its own limitations eventually become visible? And if so, how might we acknowledge that inheritance without granting it an authority that it does not necessarily deserve?
I had been considering these questions when I came across an unexpected scientific experiment involving bumblebees. It offered no answers about spiritual realization, nor could it establish the truth of any religious teaching. Yet in its own modest way, it illuminated something about the relationship between discovery and inheritance that I had not sufficiently appreciated before.
The Bee That Could Not Discover the Way
In March 2024, a group of researchers led by Alice Bridges published a fascinating study in Nature. Their subjects were bumblebees, and the experiment appeared rather modest: the bees were presented with a small transparent puzzle box containing a sugar reward. To reach it, however, they had to perform two actions in a particular order. First, they needed to push aside a blue tab, which obstructed the movement of a second, red tab. Only after this could they move the red tab and uncover the sugar. The difficulty lay in the first movement. It offered no immediate reward and even required the bee to move away from the visible food.
The researchers first allowed three colonies to explore these boxes without assistance. Two colonies were given twelve days, and a third twenty-four, amounting to thirty-six and seventy-two hours of exposure to closed boxes respectively. The bees occasionally investigated the mechanisms, and one even managed to move the blue tab completely, but none learned to open the box. Their interest gradually diminished. Even the bees that would eventually serve as demonstrators could not be trained through the ordinary association between an action and its reward. The researchers had to introduce a temporary sugar reward beneath the blue tab and then carefully remove it through successive stages of training. Only then could the bees reliably perform the complete sequence.
What followed was the remarkable part. The trained bees were allowed to work alongside inexperienced companions, which could observe them opening the boxes and obtaining the sugar. Of fifteen observers, five subsequently learned to open the boxes themselves. They had never received a reward for moving the blue tab, nor had they undergone the gradual training that had been necessary for their demonstrators. They had acquired, through another bee's behaviour, a solution that extended individual exploration had failed to produce.
There are important limitations to this finding. The successful observers had predominantly watched demonstrators that opened the box through a continuous movement, almost squeezing their way between the two tabs. They may therefore have acquired a single motor routine rather than understood two causally connected actions. The demonstrators were not deliberately teaching, and their own skills had been established through human intervention. Nor does this experiment establish the existence of multigenerational cumulative culture among wild bumblebees. It reveals a capacity for social learning, not a miniature civilization of insects passing increasingly sophisticated discoveries across generations.
Yet something genuinely significant remains. A behaviour that the bees had failed to discover through prolonged exploration became accessible through contact with another individual that already possessed it. The observer did not need to reproduce the entire history of difficulties through which the demonstrator had acquired the skill. Something of that earlier struggle had become condensed into an action that another creature could follow.
I find this quietly beautiful. Not because the bees somehow understood the meaning of tradition, or because their behaviour proves anything about spiritual transmission. It does neither. But because it reminds me how easily we overlook the enormous distance between discovering a path and walking along one that someone else has already opened. What appears simple to the one who receives it may contain a history of effort, experimentation, and failures that remain almost entirely invisible.
And perhaps this is where the experiment touches something deeply human. We often speak of our understanding as though it belonged to us alone. Yet how much of what now seems obvious, even natural, would have remained beyond our reach had someone else not first shown us a possibility we did not know existed?
The Knowledge We Did Not Earn Alone
We inherit so much that eventually becomes almost indistinguishable from our own understanding. Language is perhaps the simplest example. We speak, think, and express our most intimate experiences through words that existed long before us. Yet we do not experience every sentence as something borrowed. It is genuinely ours, even though the means through which it became possible were given to us. Something similar happens with the ways we learn to recognize patterns, approach difficulties, and distinguish what is essential from what is secondary. We gradually make these capacities our own, and in doing so, we may forget how much we owe to those who helped us develop them.
In spiritual life, I think this inheritance can be particularly subtle. A teacher may give us a practice or introduce us to a scripture, but the deeper influence may be something that was never formulated as an instruction. We may learn a certain patience in approaching difficult questions, a sensitivity to distinctions we previously overlooked, or a willingness to examine experiences that we would once have accepted too quickly. Sometimes this happens through direct teaching. Sometimes through years of observation, conversation, or simply encountering another person's way of understanding the world.
And here I find myself facing a possibility that I had not sufficiently appreciated before: the very capacity through which we eventually disagree with a teacher may have been cultivated, at least in part, by that teacher.
Imagine someone who spends years studying a scripture under a respected guide. The teacher encourages careful reading, attention to context, and a refusal to settle for superficial explanations. Gradually, the student learns to approach the text with greater independence. Then, one day, a contradiction becomes apparent. Something in the teacher's interpretation no longer seems convincing. The student returns to the source, examines it patiently, and eventually arrives at a different conclusion.
What has happened here? Has the student betrayed the transmission, or has something within that transmission borne fruit?
Perhaps neither answer is sufficient in every case. But there is something moving in the thought that a teacher may help form an understanding that eventually exceeds, or even challenges, his own. The value of what was received does not disappear simply because the recipient can no longer agree with everything that accompanied it. Sometimes the most enduring gift is not a collection of conclusions, but the capacity to continue investigating when those conclusions no longer satisfy us.
Yet I would be reluctant to turn this into another universal principle. In my recent reflections on the Akalpita Guru, I returned to Abhinavagupta's recognition that genuine knowledge may arise without ordinary external instruction. Even such understanding may subsequently be strengthened or clarified through an encounter with another teacher. This reminds us that the origin of insight and the influences that help it unfold need not be identical. Not everything must be inherited, and not everything that is inherited must be accepted.
There is also a less comforting side to this reflection. Alongside genuine knowledge, we can inherit prejudices, fears, unquestioned assumptions, and habits of obedience. Some of these may become so deeply embedded in our understanding that we mistake them for our own spontaneous convictions. Even the feeling of recognizing something as true may have been shaped by years of conditioning. Sincerity alone cannot guarantee that our discernment is reliable, just as the antiquity of a lineage cannot guarantee the truth of what it preserves.
This is why acknowledging the influence of a teacher requires something more careful than either unquestioning gratitude or retrospective dismissal. The same relationship may have opened possibilities that were previously inaccessible to us while also transmitting assumptions that we eventually need to examine. To recognize the former does not oblige us to preserve the latter. But neither does discovering the latter erase the former.
I have come to think that our understanding cannot always be divided neatly into what belongs to us and what belongs to those who came before us. We may genuinely discover something for ourselves while remaining indebted to others for the means through which that discovery became possible. Our independence is no less real for having a history.
This leaves me with a question that is no longer merely intellectual. If someone has helped open a world that might otherwise have remained closed to me, what do I owe that person when I can no longer follow them in every direction? How can I acknowledge the depth of that gift without making agreement the measure of gratitude?
Gratitude Without Surrender
I do not think there is a simple answer to what we owe those who have helped shape our understanding. Such relationships cannot be reduced to an exchange in which a certain amount of knowledge is received and a corresponding debt is incurred. When someone has genuinely opened a new dimension of life to us, gratitude may remain long after our relationship with their teachings has changed. It may even deepen as we grow older and begin to appreciate how much we once received without fully understanding its value.
And yet, gratitude becomes something quite different when it is made conditional upon agreement. To honour a teacher cannot mean that we must forever see through that teacher's eyes. Nor should recognizing a profound contribution require us to defend conclusions that we can no longer honestly accept. There is something painful in this distinction, especially when affection and reverence are involved. We may wish that the truth, as we understand it, would always lead us toward those whom we love and respect. Sometimes it does not.
But I would also hesitate to romanticize disagreement. The discovery that we can question our teachers does not mean that every question represents a deeper understanding. We can misunderstand what was taught, overlook something important, or mistake our own preferences for insight. Sometimes a tradition preserves distinctions whose significance becomes apparent only after many years of practice. What initially appears to be an unnecessary restriction may have a purpose we have not yet understood. The willingness to question inherited authority must therefore be accompanied by an equally sincere willingness to question ourselves.
This may be one of the most demanding aspects of spiritual maturity: to remain open to correction without surrendering the responsibility of judgment. To listen carefully, especially when something challenges our convictions, while refusing to confuse respect with submission. To acknowledge that another person may understand something we do not, without assuming that this makes them incapable of error. Such a relationship asks more of us than either unquestioning obedience or easy rejection.
I have also become less convinced that spiritual freedom must necessarily culminate in leaving one's tradition behind. For some, departure may be necessary, particularly where honest questioning has become impossible. For others, remaining within a lineage may be entirely compatible with intellectual independence and genuine realization. A practice can continue to nourish someone who no longer accepts every interpretation historically attached to it. A teacher can remain beloved even when certain teachings can no longer be followed. There is no reason to impose a single story of maturation upon every spiritual life.
These questions have become increasingly personal to me. There are teachings that I continue to cherish, others that I have gradually come to understand differently, and some from which I have had to depart. I cannot pretend that every change has been easy, or that I have always approached it with perfect discernment. But I no longer feel that I must choose between denying the value of my inheritance and denying the conclusions to which my own understanding has led me.
The gift does not cease to have been a gift simply because our paths eventually diverge.
The Light We Received
After all these reflections, I find myself returning once more to Abhinavagupta. Not this time to his teachings about spontaneous realization, the qualifications of a guru, or the freedom of a disciple to seek knowledge elsewhere. Rather, to something much simpler and, to me, deeply moving: the way he speaks about what he himself received, and how that inheritance became part of his own understanding.
Near the beginning of the Tantrāloka, Abhinavagupta offers this tribute to his teacher Śambhunātha:
jayatāj jagaduddhṛtikṣamo 'sau
bhagavatyā saha śaṃbhunātha ekaḥ |
yadudīritaśāsanāṃśubhir me
prakaṭo 'yaṃ gahano 'pi śāstramārgaḥ ||
May Śambhunātha, together with the Goddess, be victorious—he who alone is capable of uplifting the world. Through the rays of his teaching, this path of scripture, though profound and difficult, became clear to me. (Tantrāloka 1.13)
There is something extraordinarily tender in this acknowledgment. Abhinavagupta, whose writings reveal such remarkable intellectual independence, does not hesitate to confess that something once difficult and obscure became clear through another person's guidance. He does not need to diminish his teacher in order to establish his own understanding. The light he received remains worthy of gratitude, even as it becomes the foundation for an immense intellectual and spiritual work of his own.
And yet, a little further into the same chapter, we encounter another verse that I find perhaps even more significant for the question I have been struggling with:
iti yaj jñeyasatattvaṃ
darśyate tac chivājñayā |
mayā svasaṃvitsattarka-
patiśāstratrikakramāt ||
Thus, by Śiva's command, I set forth the true nature of what is to be known, drawing upon my own awareness, sound reasoning, the scriptures of the Lord, and the Trika and Krama traditions. (Tantrāloka 1.106)
I would like to linger over this verse, because its formulation seems especially meaningful in the present context.
First comes svasaṃvit—one's own awareness, one's own direct understanding. Abhinavagupta does not disappear behind the authorities he has inherited. His own experience and recognition are present in the very foundations of what he is about to communicate.
Then comes sattarka—sound reasoning, careful discernment. This is especially important to me. Understanding is not merely the acceptance of something already formulated by another. There is a place for examining, distinguishing, and patiently arriving at clarity. In Abhinavagupta's philosophical world, this is not ordinary argumentation for its own sake, but reasoning capable of illuminating the truth.
And then come patiśāstra, the scriptures of the Lord, followed by Trika and Krama, the particular traditions whose teachings Abhinavagupta knew so intimately. His understanding does not arise in a vacuum. It stands within a vast world of revelation, practice, commentary, and transmission.
I would not read this sequence as a simple hierarchy in which personal experience automatically overrides scripture, nor would I wish to turn Abhinavagupta into a modern advocate of unrestricted individual opinion. His devotion to Śaiva revelation is unmistakable. But this makes the conjunction all the more meaningful. His own awareness, illuminating reasoning, and inherited teachings belong together within a single undertaking. None needs to disappear for the others to have their place.
And there is another passage, from the Parātrīṃśikāvivaraṇa, that brings this relationship into an even more concrete form.
While discussing the earlier commentary of Somānanda, the great predecessor in the Pratyabhijñā lineage, Abhinavagupta writes:
tadgranthinirdalanārtha evāyam
asmākaṃ tacchāsanapavitritānāṃ yatnaḥ |
This effort of ours, we who have been purified by his teaching, is precisely for the sake of cutting through its knots. (Parātrīṃśikāvivaraṇa, commentary on the opening verse)
I find the combination of these words remarkable.
Abhinavagupta describes himself as one purified by Somānanda's teaching. There is no embarrassment in acknowledging his indebtedness, no attempt to conceal the lineage from which his understanding has emerged. Somānanda was not his direct teacher, but belonged to the transmission that reached Abhinavagupta through Utpaladeva and Lakṣmaṇagupta. His reverence is therefore not simply a conventional gesture toward an ancient authority. It belongs to a living intellectual and spiritual inheritance.
And yet, what does he undertake to do with that inheritance?
To cut its knots.
A granthi, in this context, is a difficulty or obscurity in the exposition, a place where the meaning has not been made sufficiently clear. To cut through it is to distinguish, explain, and bring understanding where the earlier formulation remains difficult to penetrate. It is an exercise of viveka, discernment.
This does not necessarily mean that Abhinavagupta is accusing Somānanda of error. The task here is primarily one of clarification. But that distinction makes the example no less valuable. Even a deeply revered predecessor's exposition is something to be examined, opened, and made intelligible—not merely repeated because it came from an authoritative source.
What strikes me about this attitude is that it preserves two things that are so often separated. There is reverence, because something precious has genuinely been received. And there is intellectual courage, because reverence does not require one to remain silent before difficulties that demand understanding.
Abhinavagupta is not standing outside the tradition, looking back upon it with contempt. Nor is he standing beneath it in helpless admiration. He is working from within it, with gratitude and discernment together. The teaching is sufficiently precious that its difficulties deserve the most careful attention.
I have sometimes felt that genuine fidelity to a teacher required me to preserve his conclusions, even when my own study and experience began to lead elsewhere. At other moments, in trying to recover that freedom, I may have underestimated how much of my understanding had been shaped by the very people and traditions I was questioning. It is difficult to hold both truths together, particularly when the debt is not merely intellectual, but filled with affection and memories that remain precious.
I cannot claim that Abhinavagupta would have agreed with every conclusion I have reached. Indeed, there are questions on which I suspect he might have challenged me quite severely. And I would want to listen. I have no wish to turn his words into another authority summoned merely to confirm what I already believe.
But I find something genuinely helpful in the example he leaves us. A man can acknowledge the teacher whose words illuminated a difficult path, describe his own understanding through direct awareness and sound reasoning, and approach the writings of an honoured predecessor with the intention of cutting through their obscurities. These are not three contradictory attitudes. They can belong to the same life.
And that recognition brings me back to an image that has accompanied these reflections for a long time.
Coda — Two Bees
There is something almost amusing in finding myself returning once more to the image of a bee, which Abhinavagupta used so beautifully more than a thousand years ago.
The bee in the modern experiment discovers a possibility through another bee. Abhinavagupta's bee moves from flower to flower, seeking the fragrance it has not yet found. One reminds me of how much we may owe to those who came before us. The other reminds me that receiving something precious does not mean our journey must end where theirs did.
Of course, these are only images, and I would not ask them to carry more than they can. Yet together they express something that I have struggled for years to hold without sacrificing one side to the other.
I cannot pretend that I found my way alone. Too many people have illuminated parts of the path for me, and some of those gifts remain among the most precious things in my life. But neither can I pretend that gratitude absolves me of the responsibility to understand, to question, and sometimes to walk differently.
And so I return, with renewed affection, to the verse that inspired one of my earlier reflections, The Scent That Cannot Be Faked:
āmodārthī yathā bhṛṅgaḥ
puṣpāt puṣpāntaraṃ vrajet |
vijñānārthī tathā śiṣyo
guror gurvantaraṃ vrajet ||
Just as a bee seeking fragrance moves from one flower to another, so a disciple seeking knowledge may move from one teacher to another. (Tantrāloka 13.335)
But there is one final detail about this verse that I find particularly beautiful.
As Ben Williams observes in his study Like a Bee to Nectar: Abhinavagupta's Poetics of Religious Formation, Abhinavagupta did not compose this image from nothing. He adapted it from an earlier scripture of the Kubjikā tradition, the Ṣaṭsāhasrasaṃhitā (20.16cd–19ab). And remarkably, in its original setting, the image was followed by a rebuke of precisely this movement between teachers. The text questioned the need to seek another guru when it is ultimately Śiva alone who bestows grace.
Abhinavagupta receives the image, but places it within a different argument. In the Tantrāloka, it becomes part of his justification for learning from multiple teachers, for seeking fuller understanding where one's present instruction remains incomplete. He does not advocate abandoning every teacher at will; his reverence for the guru of complete insight remains profound. Yet he gives this inherited image a significance that stands in striking contrast to the warning that followed it in its earlier setting.
I find this wonderfully revealing.
Even here, in a verse about the freedom to learn from different teachers, Abhinavagupta is himself working with something inherited. He does not discard the earlier scripture, nor does he simply reproduce its surrounding argument. He receives its words, recognizes a possibility within them, and allows them to serve a different purpose in his own exposition.
And suddenly, the question with which I began this essay seems to have found an unexpected illustration in the history of the verse itself.
A teaching travels from one generation to another. Something is preserved, something is reconsidered, and something new becomes possible. The inheritance remains real, but its meaning is not exhausted by the form in which it was first received.
Perhaps this is why, after all these years, I find myself increasingly reluctant to speak of tradition and freedom as though one must finally defeat the other.
The bee need not forget the flowers that have nourished it. Nor must it cease seeking.
No comments:
Post a Comment