Sanjay Shukla

It was twenty-five years ago, in Varanasi.

I had run away from Hyderabad, weighed down by debts, confusion and questions. A friend, worried that I might lose myself, took me to meet a sadhu. He said, half-joking and half-serious, “Maybe this man can make you see sense and send you back.”

The meeting happened in an old house by the Ganga, its verandah open to the afternoon sun. The light filtered through peepal leaves, and a brass fan creaked slowly above. The air was thick with the smell of incense and river breeze. From somewhere not too far away, the temple bells chimed, as if Varanasi itself was keeping rhythm with our conversation.

The sadhu sat before me, calm, unhurried, a simple dhoti draped over his lean frame. My friend slipped into the background while I sat awkwardly and restlessness. I still remember how hesitant I felt: half-defensive, half-curious.

“So,” the sadhu asked, his voice gentle, “why are you here?”

I mumbled something about searching for spirituality. That word sounded grand in my head, and I expected it to impress him. But he smiled, as if he had been waiting for that very word.

“Beta (my son),” he said, “There is no such word in Bharat. Our sages never used it. We had only Dharma.”

I looked at him, puzzled. “Everywhere I had read or heard, India was called a land of spirituality.” I said

“That is what tourists and ashram brochures say,” he replied with a glint in his eyes. “ But our ancestors did not escape life in the name of the divine. They never separated life into spiritual and material. That division came from Europe. There, the Church became spiritual, the King became material, and science was branded the enemy of God. When Galileo looked through his telescope, he was dragged to trial.”

“Here, our sages looked at the stars, calculated eclipses, stitched wounds, and debated existence itself. They needed no permission from God to seek truth, because for them, truth itself was sacred” he added.

I found myself leaning in, caught by the clarity in his words. He spoke of Aryabhata, Sushruta, Kapila, men who were both seekers and scientists, whose search was guided not by commandments but by Dharma, the natural law of cause and effect.

“What about God then?” I asked.

He laughed lightly. “Some scriptures said yes, some said no, some said maybe. Belief was optional. What mattered was Dharma. Can you imagine preaching atheist philosophy inside a church? You would be chased out. Here, it was debated openly.”

I asked about rituals, temples, and Gods. He explained how life’s milestones – birth, marriage, even death – were family duties, never temple decrees. Temples, he said, were never headquarters of God’s bureaucracy. They were places for devotion, art and community. Even Artha (wealth) and Kama (desire) were not sins, but goals of life to be pursued alongside Dharma and Moksha. “Why should joy carry guilt?” he asked. “Why should prosperity be shameful?”

The temple bells rang again, softer now, as if underscoring his words.

“In your world,” he said, “spirituality means escaping life to find God. In ours, Dharma means holding life itself as sacred, seeing God in every drop of it.”

“Dharma is not about renouncing,” he said. “It is about embracing. To live as a son, a friend, a worker, a seeker – fully, honestly – that is Dharma. When you love your duties, when you perform them with care, they cease to be burdens. They become worship. Joy comes not from fleeing life, but from being present in it.”

I sat silent.  I realized in that moment how much I had misunderstood. I had thought the divine lay hidden behind the clouds, accessible only by withdrawal. He showed me instead that the divine was already here—in rivers, in mothers, in friends who pull you back when you drift too far, even in the restless heart of a runaway.

That sentence struck me like lightning. I sat silent. The Ganga moved quietly beyond the verandah. A soft breeze carried the sound of children laughing nearby. I realized in that moment how much I had misunderstood.

I had come to Varanasi as a runaway, carrying questions that had no answers. I left that verandah carrying something far greater: the realization that I didn’t have to escape the world to find the divine.

The divine was already here: in the soil, the river, the people, even in the restless heart of a runaway.

I left that house changed. I had come to Varanasi to escape, but the sadhu’s words sent me back – not as a defeat, but as a return. A return to my duties, to my roles, to the simple truth that life itself was sacred.

That day, Varanasi gave me not just peace, but a truth I have never forgotten: India never needed the word spirituality. It always had Dharma. Dharma was enough! Dharma did not ask me to flee my responsibilities in search of God. It asked me to discover God in fulfilling them.