Guru Purnima -- The Full Moon of the Teacher

On the full moon of the month of Ashadha, usually in July, students across India touch the feet of their teachers, disciples gather at the ashrams of their gurus, and households offer flowers before a picture of whoever first taught them. The day is Guru Purnima, the full moon of the teacher.

Its other name explains its origin. It is also Vyasa Purnima, kept in honour of Veda Vyasa, whom tradition remembers as the sage who arranged the Vedas into four, composed the Mahabharata and, in many accounts, gave the Puranas their form. By tradition this full moon is his birthday. To honour Vyasa is to honour the source of most of what a Hindu teacher teaches; so on this day the seat from which a guru teaches is often called the vyasa-pitha, the seat of Vyasa.

The Upanishads assume that the highest knowledge cannot simply be read; it has to be received from someone who has it. That is the idea behind the guru. A popular traditional etymology, found in a late Upanishad, divides the word into gu, "darkness", and ru, "that which removes it" -- the guru is the one who dispels the darkness of ignorance. Grammarians derive it more plainly from guru, "heavy" or "weighty": the one whose words carry weight. Both say something true about what Hindus expect a teacher to be.

The Gita gives the method in one line. Arjuna is told to learn by bowing, by questioning and by serving -- not one of these, but all three together.

Who was the Vyasa being honoured? The Mahabharata tells his birth: he was the son of the sage Parashara and Satyavati, a fisherman's daughter, born on an island (dvipa) in the Yamuna and dark in complexion -- hence his full name, Krishna Dvaipayana, "the dark one born on the island". He is woven into the very story he tells: by the custom of niyoga he fathered Dhritarashtra, Pandu and Vidura, so the Kauravas and Pandavas are his grandchildren, and he appears at turning points of the war to counsel, console and, at the end, grieve. His son Shuka is the narrator of the Bhagavata Purana. Tradition counts Vyasa among the chiranjeevis, the immortals who remain in the world.

That is the figure behind the day: not a distant author but a teacher who arranged knowledge so that others could carry it, and who stayed close to the people in his story. Many traditions open teaching on Guru Purnima by reciting their guru-parampara, the line of teachers from Vyasa or Dakshinamurti down to the present guru -- a reminder that no teacher starts from nothing.

The traditional understanding of guru is wider than a single person. Parents are counted as the first teachers, and the scriptures describe Dakshinamurti, Shiva as the silent teacher seated under a banyan tree, and the avadhuta of the Bhagavata -- identified by tradition with Dattatreya -- who names twenty-four "gurus" he learnt from in nature, from the earth to a honeybee. Guru Purnima holds all of these: the day is less about one teacher than about the act of learning from anyone who knows more than we do -- and the gratitude that goes with it.