Introduction: What are your plans for your retirement?

The Vānaprastha Adventure, Installment 2

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I have a new book in the works—The Vanaprastha 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.

Hari Bhakti Dāsa began Kṛṣṇa consciousness in the 1970’s, when he joined ISKCON as a brahmacārī in Chicago. He distributed books, gave lots of classes, traveled the country, started three ISKCON temples, and got several dozen people started in Kṛṣṇa conscious life (some still ISKCON leaders today). For a while he served as the brahmacārī āśrama leader at ISKCON Boston. Later he married a serious devotee girl and took up work as a manager for his uncle’s construction business in Michigan. Now he’s 68, and he has a small but successful construction business of his own. He and his wife have two sons, both in their late thirties, both married, and several grandchildren. Hari Bhakti and his wife live an hour outside Detroit, and at home they worship their own small Deities and chant sixteen rounds every day. On most Sundays they come to Detroit for the temple program. For several years, though, Hari Bhakti has felt the business to be something of a burden—it makes money but not a heck of a lot, and it’s not fun. His health isn’t great either—high blood pressure, recurrent problems with his kidneys—and in general he finds he has a lot to grumble about. Overall, though, he’s tolerant and even-minded, and he steadily carries on.

Rāma Caraṇa Dāsa earned his BTech in electrical engineering from IIT Kanpur, where he came in touch with ISKCON through programs on campus. He took up devotional service seriously, lived in a flat for a year with other devotee students while finishing his degree, took initiation, and got married and moved to Mumbai, where he worked for ten years at a consultancy firm (and, while he was at it, earned his MBA). He and his wife moved to New York eighteen years ago when he was recruited as a project manager for Citibank, for whom he had done consulting for several years. Now, at 54, he lives in a spacious home in northern New Jersey, where he is a stalwart member of the ISKCON congregation. His wife works in the finance department of a biotech firm, makes sweets for the temple Deities, and teaches classes at the temple’s Sunday school. Their elder child, a daughter, got married three years ago. The younger child, a son, has finished his studies and has begun working as a chemical engineer in Houston. Rāma Caraṇa is thinking that when he hits his mid sixties (or maybe sooner?) he may retire from work, but he’s undecided, and he wonders what he’d do after that.

Socially speaking, these two devotees (illustrative composites of devotees I know) are both living in the second āśrama, the gṛhastha āśrama, the āśrama of family life. And both are eligible, and one might even say overdue, to move on to the third āśrama—that of vānaprastha, retired life.

But what is the vānaprastha āśrama? Why would one want to become a vānaprastha? What’s the point? Is becoming a vānaprastha something one really needs to do? Anyway, how would one do it? And if one were to become a vānaprastha, what would one do? How would Hari Bhakti Dāsa support himself? Why would Rāma Caraṇa Dāsa want to change course? And what about their wives? How would this affect them?

In ISKCON, vānaprastha has largely been the “unseen āśrama.” We see lots of gṛhasthas. We see some brahmacārīs. We have high-visibility sannyāsīs. But vānaprasthas? Given our demographics, we might now expect to see lots of them. But I know of only a few. So in ISKCON (although the numbers are slowly growing) we have only a few examples to look to.

But we now have quite a community of devotees for whom the vānaprastha āśrama is the natural next step. They’re older. They’ve done significant devotional service. And now they can ask themselves, “What’s next?”¹

The older we get, the fewer years we still have. Rāma Caraṇa, at 54, may seem to have many years left. For Hari Bhakti Dāsa, at 68, time may seem shorter. But as Śrīla Prabhupāda often pointed out, Parīkṣit Mahārāja knew he had seven days left, but we can’t be sure we have even seven minutes. But we know that time is running out for us as well. So the question is not only relevant but urgent: Before time runs out and my life is over, what should I do?

Our title —The Vānaprastha Adventure—indicates we’re going to do something new. We’re not just going to get up tomorrow morning, have a quick breakfast, straighten our tie, and go to work—or put on our “devotee clothes” and go to maṅgala-ārātrika. We’ll do something more ambitious, something even with an element of risk. In the Bhagavad-gītā (10.36) Kṛṣṇa mentions adventure as one of his vibhūtis, or splendors representing himself.² So the vānaprastha life is meant to be a Kṛṣṇa conscious adventure for advancement in spiritual life.

As this adventure begins, here are three things you can do:

1. As you listen to classes or page through Śrīla Prabhupāda’s books, notice the things Śrīla Prabhupāda says about retirement and vānaprastha life.
2. Consider what these mean to you.
3. Act to put your life always closer to your understandings.

Following Śrīla Prabhupāda, I mainly use male language. But retirement is for women too. And in the course of this book I’ll speak also about the role of women in retired life.

The idea of the vānaprastha āśrama can provide an enlightening model for nondevotees too. As of 2019, nearly three out of ten Americans were fifty-five or older. More than two out of ten (more than 73 million people) were over sixty.³ For these and other older people throughout the world, our message of “spiritual retirement” is crucially relevant. Who’s talking to these people? Who offers them any clear understanding of what they should do at this point in their lives?

Some older people take to a semi-nomadic way of life, moving about in motor homes. But where are they going? Some older people may indeed be wondering, “What am I supposed to do with the rest of my life?” And it’s our duty to show them. Old people shouldn’t spend the rest of their life just dwindling. They should seize the opportunity to free themselves from entanglements, develop thoughtfulness and introspection, chant Hare Kṛṣṇa, become Kṛṣṇa conscious, make spiritual progress, and share Kṛṣṇa consciousness with others.

So this knowledge and culture are relevant for us and relevant for them. But to be able to spread this message to others, first we must live it ourselves.

When Śrīla Prabhupāda started the Kṛṣṇa consciousness movement—and for several years after—he didn’t focus on varṇāśrama. He talked about it, certainly. He wrote about it. But in the summer of 1977, towards the end of his life, he famously said that he had completed only half of his mission. The other half was to establish varṇāśrama.⁴

Varṇāśrama is the system that organizes human society into four occupational divisions (brāhmaṇa, kṣatriya, vaiśya, and śūdra) and four spiritual divisions (brahmacārya, gṛhastha, vānaprastha, and sannyāsa). As the warp and woof of a cloth define what the cloth is, these two crosswise sets of four divisions form the fabric of human life. If we’re to follow the social system recommended in the Vedic literature, we’re going to be following varṇāśrama. As stated in the Viṣṇu Purāṇa (3.8.9):

varṇāśramācāra-vatā puruṣeṇa paraḥ pumān
viṣṇur ārādhyate panthā nānyat tat-toṣa-kāraṇam

“The Supreme Personality of Godhead, Lord Viṣṇu, is worshiped by the proper execution of prescribed duties in the system of varṇa and āśrama. There is no other way to satisfy the Lord.”

This is daiva-varṇāśrama—varṇāśrama directed towards deva, the Supreme Personality of Godhead. This is our system for organizing human society—and for organizing our own lives—for steady progress in devotional service. It’s a way to live our life so as to satisfy Viṣṇu, or Kṛṣṇa.

Now, varṇāśrama isn’t Kṛṣṇa consciousness. For Kṛṣṇa consciousness we just have to chant Hare Kṛṣṇa, hear and speak about Kṛṣṇa, remember Kṛṣṇa, and serve Kṛṣṇa. But varṇāśrama provides Kṛṣṇa consciousness a supportive environment.

We have to live in some sort of social setup, but the modern materialistic setup runs counter to Kṛṣṇa consciousness. It aims mainly at sense gratification, not at fostering consciousness of Kṛṣṇa. Perhaps social life in some communities may promote religious values. But spirituality is certainly not the prevailing atmosphere of places like America or Europe. And even India is increasingly moving along a Western materialistic course.

So varṇāśrama dharma is meant to help us, to provide a useful and healthy social context for our spiritual life, in contrast to a context mainly of passion and ignorance.

Śrīla Bhaktivinoda Thakura says that people not above the three modes must move through the various āśramas.⁵ And in the Bhāgavatam (11.20.9) Lord Kṛṣṇa says:

tāvat karmāṇi kurvīta na nirvidyeta yāvatā
mat kathā śravaṇādau vā śraddhā yāvan na jāyate

“As long as one is not yet detached from sense gratification and has not yet awakened one’s taste for devotional service by hearing and chanting about me, one should continue to perform the prescribed duties of the Vedic social system.”

For that matter, in the Bhagavad-gītā (3.25) Kṛṣṇa advises this same course of action even for those who are detached, so that they may set an example for others.

The āśrama system helps us live in tune with the biology of the human life cycle—and helps us develop Kṛṣṇa consciousness at every stage. As we move from childhood to youth to old age, changing bodies over the decades, at each stage we feel different, our thinking is different, we have different duties and responsibilities, different concerns – just by the nature of life. Time changes, and we change with it.

The āśrama system, therefore, covers the territory of our lives.

Early in life, when our minds are young and open but we don’t yet know where we’re going, we have the brahmacārī āśrama, meant for education and training, and especially meant to give our life a spiritual foundation and direction in Kṛṣṇa consciousness.

Then there’s family life. In youth, with its passions, a man may feel a need for a wife and family and home and career. And of course such a life, with work and bills, with saris and sex, with home and children, is very different from the life of a brahmacārī. But again it’s meant to be arranged in such a way as to be supportive for Kṛṣṇa consciousness.

Then, as we age, we see our children grow up and start having children of their own. Our faces wrinkle, our hair thins and greys, our bodies weaken, our passions and capability wane, as biology moves us towards the last phase of life. And now again we need an āśrama that will help us move forward in Kṛṣṇa consciousness, and this is the vānaprastha āśrama.

Finally, before our life is over, we may hope to leave behind what’s left of our attachments and fix ourselves in Kṛṣṇa consciousness in the āśrama of sannyāsa.

In this book I won’t say much about sannyāsa. Sannyāsa is something else again. Some men may take sannyāsa at a later stage, or some earlier, or some not at all. But that’s not our concern here. Here our concern is for people who have entered gṛhastha life, spent a good many years, and now might hope to see what comes next, in vānaprastha life. I might briefly touch upon topics concerning sannyāsa, just as I might touch upon the brahmacārī āśrama. But our focus in this book is on the third āśrama: vānaprastha.

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Notes:

1 Though I’ve written here of ISKCON, the same circumstances and the same questions appear in other devotional communities as well.

2 Jayo ‘smi vyavasāyo ‘smi: “I am victory and adventure.”

3 U.S. Census Bureau, “Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplement, 2019.”

4 Varṇāśrama-dharma, Chapter 4, citing an interview by Hare Kṛṣṇa Dāsī with Abhirāma Dāsa, February 18, 1996. In the same interview, Abhirāma Dāsa relates that Śrīla Prabhupāda, while talking to devotees about his imminent departure, said, “I have no lamentation” but then paused and said, “No, I have one lamentation.” A devotee asked, “Because you have not finished translating the Śrimad-Bhāgavatam?” Prabhupāda replied, “No, that I have not established varṇāśrama.”

5 I’ve heard this from a reliable devotee, but I don’t have the exact place to cite from Śrīla Bhaktivinoda Ṭhākura’s writings. If you know where it is, please help me out.

This is part of a draft

This is an excerpt from a new book I have in the works—The Vanaprastha 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.