Is reading a spiritual exercise? Read on to find out

Engaging with books in a meaningful manner can be a life-altering experience, but it depends on what you read and how.

Philosophy is largely seen as an academic matter: people write theses and books, hold seminars and conferences. They discuss philosophical matters, but they are not expected to live their lives in a philosophical manner. French philosopher Pierre Hadot (1922-2010) challenged this notion and showed how ancient western philosophy was an attempt to answer the question of how we should live. He read ancient Greco-Roman classics and excavated several “spiritual exercises.”

Late in his life, his works started reaching a wider audience, leading to a sort of ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life’ movement - after the title of his most well-known book. There were proposals on similar lines, for example, ‘Literature as a Way of Life’. The list of spiritual exercises was also expanded on in the same vein, for example, ‘Reading as a Spiritual Exercise’. These two proposals in particular, however, have largely remained slogans – cute slogans that work more as a suggestion and less as a detailed programme.

Can reading, the preferred way to while away the time for a small but significant section of people, be a meaningful, enriching, soul-uplifting exercise? If yes, how?

Well, there are examples, from Saint Augustine to Mahatma Gandhi via Henry David Thoreau, of turning reading into a transformative experience. In essence, the idea is not much different from what in Indian philosophy would be called ‘Jnana Marga’, the Path of Wisdom, in which textual study is the crucial ingredient. In Advaita Vedanta, the seeker is advised to do Shravan, Manan and Nididhyasan. Shravan, or hearing in the oral cultures of old times, translates to reading for us. Manan is contemplation of what you have read. Nididhyasan is focused, concentrated reflection or meditation on the same. In other words, read but read slowly, digest it, reflect on it – not just for the information, but with a view to bring yourself in tune with the ultimate reality.

Many religious traditions around the world show a similar textual, scholastic bent, encapsulated in the advice: ‘Knowledge will set you free’. But, like Advaita Vedanta, they imply a prescribed set of scriptures rather than ‘reading’ in general.

‘Reading as a Spiritual Exercise’ is a slightly broader tent. While an airport thriller is unlikely to change anybody’s life, readers often look for – and find – a spark outside the holy canon. For Gandhi, Tolstoy’s essays and Ruskin’s ‘Unto This Last’ decidedly changed his life before ‘Bhagavad Gita’ took the central place in it.

What about literature? Jhumpa Lahiri has said she does not need self-help books; fiction is the source of all the self-help you need. Critic Merve Emre has described her reading of Nobel laureate Jon Fosse’s works as “the closest I have come to feeling the presence of God here on earth.” Fyodor Dostoevksy did not write the kind of non-fiction Gandhi would like to read, but generations of readers have found in ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ something that starts working deep inside and changes the way they look at people around them. An equal number of readers would testify that ‘Moby Dick’ does the same job with superior prose.

Reading can be a meditative experience when it is practised as a meditation, that is to say, with attention. ‘Attention’ is a keyword that is ripe to replace the cliche that ‘mindfulness’ has become. Attention is all that there is; the supreme spiritual quality. And if there is one thing that the narrative pull of epics and classics teaches, it has to be attention. With a philosophical flourish, a monk throws himself upon his meditation cushion; as Ishamel would have put it, I quietly take to ‘Moby Dick’.

Moreover, literature cultivates what philosopher Martha Nussbaum calls “sympathetic imagination” – a Buddhist would call it Karuna. Engrossed in a fictional situation, you come to care for people beyond your immediate circle. Reading Munshi Premchand’s stories can effectively enrich your moral universe in a way few religious texts can.

Slow reading, much advised by none other than Gandhi, can teach patience that the Buddhist would call Kshanti. Rereading, which actually is the only kind of reading according to Vladimir Nabokov, is akin to Manan and Nidishyasan.

But reading should also teach discernment, or Viveka, of what to read, how to read, and, most importantly, when to put the book aside. There is a danger of living life inside the scriptorium instead of out there in the world. Jorge Luis Borges, in a miniature short story, warned us against confusing the map for the territory. There is a smugness that comes with reading too much and living too little, of collecting ten different editions of ‘Ashtavakra Gita’ and not having put into practice even the first chapter. “Reading is at the threshold of spiritual life,” Marcel Proust, the ideal reader/writer in this domain, wrote, “it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it.”

Adi Shankaracharya, in Bhaja Govindam, is pithier: “Worship Govinda. Oh fool! Rules of Grammar will not save you at the time of your death.”

- Ends