Art and Photography > What Others Say About Adi Da's Art > Rajesh Shukla

The Ancient Walk-About Way of Adi Da Samraj

by Rajesh Shukla

Rajesh Shukla is an art critic and the author of several books, including Contemporizing Buddha, Hindu Tantra Yoga, and Concerning The Spiritual In Art: An Indian Modern Art Perspective. He received his B.A in Fine Art and Philosophy from Allahabad University in 1993. He took Sanyasa for two years, and studied the six systems of Indian philosophy, focusing specially on Vedanta from the Sankaracharya of Puri, Swami Nischalananda Saraswati. He was the winner of the Lalit Kala Academy Scholarship Award for art criticism in 2005. He is currently working on a book, Buddhist Tantra Yoga. He lives and works in Delhi, India.

This article first appeared on TheEnlightenedWorld.org, an online art and culture magazine of India created by Rajesh Shukla in 2007.

Adi Da Samraj is a distinctive spiritual teacher, philosopher, and artist. His divine teachings are a light to humanity. He is not an orthodox teacher who leads people through sheer superstition; rather he is one who awakens. He is a contemporary Buddha; in him the Divine manifests in its uttermost glory. In his individuality, one finds manifestation of spiritual, philosophical, literary, and artistic genius. When he asserts that he is the One, that divine guru who awakens, then he speaks the ultimate, the truth of Vedanta. His writings throw light on his wisdom and the truth he inaugurates. In the very beginning of the essay, “I Am The One Who Would Awaken You”, Adi Da proclaims the truth that is also known in Vedanta:

The world itself is not Truth — nor is life, nor psyche and body, nor death, nor experience. No event is, in and of itself, Truth. Everything that arises is an appearance to Consciousness Itself, a modification of the Divine Conscious Light That Is Always Already the Case.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj, from “I Am The One Who Would Awaken You”
in The Ancient Walk-About Way


An Artwork By Adi Da Samraj

In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the sage, Yagyavalkya, communicates the same truth to Maitreyee: Vacha rambhano vikaro namdheyam — of which the intended meaning is: "All this manifestation of form and name is of truth only". Adi Da identifies truth with consciousness that is always awake and is said to be the seer of everything, every happening, whether it is happening outwardly or inwardly. "There is One Who is Wide Awake while He Appears in the dream", he says. Recall once again the Brihdaranyaka Upanishad Yagyavalkya, King Janaka’s discourse on truth:

(In the dream state), after enjoying himself and roaming, and merely seeing (the result of) good and evil (in the dream), he stays in the state of profound sleep, and comes back in the inverse order to his former condition, the dream state. He is untouched by whatever he sees in that state, for this infinite being is unattached.

This consciousness that is absolute, wide awake and already the case is He. This is what is called realization in the sense of absolute ‘I’. Uddalaka taught this to Svetaketo: ‘thou art that’ means that absolute consciousness which is wide awake, albeit awareness ‘itself’ is ‘thou’.

In his teachings, Adi Da employs two methods. First, with his sharp philosophical truth, he removes superstitions, beliefs, and false ideas. Second, he convinces one to embrace reality itself, leaving behind childish notions of God that are based on the principle of dependence. He writes:

Traditional Spirituality, in the forms in which it is most commonly proposed or presumed, is a characteristically adolescent creation that represents an attempted balance between the extremes. It is not a life of mere (or simple) absorption in the mysterious enclosure of existence. It is a life of strategic absorption. It raises the relatively non-strategic and unconscious life of childhood dependence to the level of a fully strategic conscious life of achieved dependence (or absorption). Its goal is not merely psychological re-union, but total psychic release into some (imagined or felt) ‘Home’ of being.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj
from “Moving Beyond Childish and Adolescent Approaches to Life and Truth”
in Religion and Reality

Adi Da does not propose being in an “imaginary” home, or a historical one sought by many western philosophers. His concept of ‘ousia’, the house of being, is not any imaginary category, but rather is the already existent, unborn, given truth. This is the very truth in which we are living, in which we are being born and to which we can be restored.

Adi Da writes:

Real (Acausal) God — or the Transcendental, Inherently Spiritual, Inherently egoless, and Self-Evidently Divine Reality (Prior to conditional self, conditional world, and the ego-bound conventions of religion and non-religions) — Is the One and Only Truth of Reality Itself, and the One and Only Way of Right Life and Perfect Realization.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj
from “God as the ‘Creator’, God as ‘Good’, and God As the Real”
in Religion and Reality

The way to realize this truth is the way of Adi Da, since in him the absolute is manifesting in its uttermost glory. He teaches how to transcend the views or ideas that are by and large formed and based on beliefs. One’s belief in and about God is based on imaginary notions. Therefore, the first step towards truth realization is getting rid of all the hitherto notions of God-Ideas. Adi Da says that, “true religion requires the utter transcending of all views”. He is very clear in his approach to religion and it is very much akin to Vedanta. His sole philosophy of the spiritual is in the likeness of Vedanta, but by proclaiming himself an Avatar who has come on this earth to liberate beings, he offers another way of self-realization.


An Artwork By Adi Da Samraj

Adi Da shatters false intellectualization and philosophies. By teaching devotion to the Realizer he reveals that love is the highest and most far reaching Divine principle. It is this Divine principle that humanity is forgetting. Regarding this, Buddha said that the fragrance of faith goes beyond all since it carries with it not earthly but Divine intelligence. Adi Da Samraj’s world is full of mystery. He is not only a spiritual teacher but a distinguished artist too. I have never known (or even read about) any other artist who unites philosophy and art. His works of art are not simply visuals but are, rather, truth statements — because of this truth, the visuals appear.

In Adi Da's art, spiritualization takes place because philosophy and art "converse". This is contrary to Picasso, who did not believe in philosophy. As far as modern art is concerned, only Kandinsky believed in the philosophy of art. He criticized Picasso, saying, “He shrinks from no innovation, and if color seems likely to balk him in his search for a pure artistic form, he threw it overboard and paints a picture in brown and white; and the problem of purely artistic form is the problem of his life.” Because Picasso did not believe in the spiritual, he worked from reason. Therefore, one rarely finds visual purity in his work. In contrast, Adi Da is very close to Kandinsky. He too believes in the Kandinskian theory of purity of color:

The colors should be pure colors, not colors that are the product of mixing a particular color with colors other than itself. A pure color is a vibration. This can be measured on a spectral graph.

Adi Da Samraj
in Mei-Ling Israel, The World As Light:
An Introduction to the Art of Adi Da Samraj

As both a distinguished artist and philosopher, Adi Da asserts in his book, Transcendental Realism, that to create spiritual art, one must transcend “all perceptual and conceptual means themselves, through the Tacit Self-Recognition of the Intrinsically Self-Evident ‘Non-chaos’ (or the Always Prior Self-Unity, Indivisibility, Indestructibility, and Inherent Egolessness) of Reality Itself.”

Adi Da is the one and only artist whose art is beyond idiom. In idiom, the artist often encloses himself by repetition; he neither finds the truth content of art nor the language of art itself. In idiom, the artist dies. Regarding idiom, Derrida, the great philosopher and grammatologist of art, says:

Those who have faith in idiom supposedly say only one thing, properly speaking, and say it in linking form and meaning too strictly to lend itself to translation, thus mystifying an art work on the basis of falsely created "form-meaning" dialectics. An artist who has enclosed himself in idiom and style falsifies the truth of art by saying, "See the form I have created and search for the meaning in it" that he himself does not know.

Derrida summarizes by saying that, “Form fascinates when one no longer has the force to understand force from within itself. To understand force from within itself is to create.” This rejects the idiom- and style-centric trends of art that are, by and large, prevalent the world over.

Adi Da is postmodern in this sense, because he knows the very locus from where things appear. Images are things, and they appear on the surface, carrying multiple messages of the locus. In this sense, Adi Da does not express, rather he creates. The way He creates his art is very intricate because of the demand from the truth content of the image; it searches its own body, its own form to appear. Perhaps this is why, for each and every ‘truth content’, Adi Da has a different language. When creating, he must be very sensitive to the creative process, because the image he is making will change the participant's ‘point of view’. Hence his images appear ‘as it is’ — an expression of Reality Itself.

Return to "What Others Say About Adi Da's Art"

Quotations from and/or photographs of Avatar Adi Da Samraj used by permission of the copyright owner:
© Copyrighted materials used with the permission of The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam Pty Ltd, as trustee for The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam. All rights reserved. None of these materials may be disseminated or otherwise used for any non-personal purpose without the prior agreement of the copyright owner. ADIDAM is a trademark of The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam Pty Ltd, as Trustee for the Avataric Samrajya of Adidam.

Technical problems with our site? Let our webmaster know.