060 - Bhikshuka Upanishad

• Topic: The Four Types of Renunciates
• Interlocutors: None

Opening Notes

• Giving up attachment to food is a challenging endeavor. Perhaps this is why this text focuses primarily on food habits.
• Among those on the yogic path of spirituality, four types of seekers aspire for liberation alone. They are often compared to birds in the scriptures. As follows:

1. The Nest-Dweller

• Home-dwelling renunciates included revered sages like Gotama, Bharadvāja, Yājñavalkya, and Vasiṣṭha.
• Their food habits focused on moderate, non-indulgent eating, consisting of smaller portions rather than full meals.
• Eight small snack-like meals were the precise number.

2. Wandering Bird

• These were the mendicants on the move.
• They lived on alms, wore ochre robes, and carried signs of monkhood like a staff, a water pot, a tuft, and a sacred thread.
• As a rule, they avoided luxury foods even when offered.
• For alms, they went through up to eight villages. If no food was found within eight villages, they went without eating.

3. The Swan

• “Swan” symbolizes purity and spiritual discernment.
• Like the Wandering Bird renunciate, the Swans moved as well, but they followed an additional rule: they did not stay long in any place, no more than three months at the most.
• These renunciates practiced severe austerities. The most severe rule was their diet: they consumed only what was excretory, with no dependence on cultivated and cooked food.

4. Supreme Swan

• The Supreme Swan, called Paramahamsa, symbolized the highest state of renunciation. This included renunciates like Jaḍabharata, Dattātreya, Śuka, Vāmadeva, and Hārītaka.
• They transcended conditioning; unbound themselves from external codes of conduct or religious beliefs. Instead, they made renunciation an inner state of purity and goodness.

No rules bound a Supreme Swan, but they often set their own:

• They ate in moderation, at times only to survive. And some continued seeking alms under the eight-village rule.
• Many of them became so non-attached that they wore patched garments or went naked, if permitted by law.
• They often withdrew from worldly pursuits, focusing only on what was necessary.
• Some even lived away from civilization: under forest trees, on cremation grounds, in deserted enclosures, on riverbanks, in caves, etc.

Their inner state set a Supreme Swan apart. They:

• Did not differentiate people by caste or social class.
• Were firmly established in their own Inner Divine.
• Saw the same Divine in all.
• Remained inwardly absorbed in meditation.
• Transcended dualities: gain–loss, pure–impure, etc.
• Had minds that were purified.
• Ultimately, even transcended attachment to the body.