bhôg-yôg-rôg

There is this triad of words bhôg-yôg-rôg*.

Of these, the one in the middle becomes less unfamiliar to the ‘westerner’ as it is ’spelt’ as ‘yoga’. I hate this practice because in the effort to make the ‘o’ correctly sound as ‘ou’ as in rogue, the ‘a’ monkeys with the sound of ‘gu’ and makes it ‘ga’ as in Vôila!

Rôg (pronounced ‘rogue’) pertains to ill-health and here, it is not limited to the physical kind but to mental as well as emotional ill-health. On this, more another time.

Here, I wish to talk about Bhôg. It can mean an offering, usually of food, and relates to ‘consumption’. But in Sanskrit this word has a much wider scope than its English equivlents have.

For instance, Indreeya-bhôg (there is no hyphen) roughly means all that our five senses latch on to and receive.

Another distinction is that when they do so, with a higher intent in mind, the activity gets a different word Yajña. A simple illustration would explain this easily. If you are drinking and eating with the intent of quenching your thirst or appetite it is bhôg; when the arrow of intent points to something loftier (e.g. one’s spiritual evolution and development) then it is Yajña. (This word is now in a hopeless ritualistic situation in India).

In the current issue of the slim and affordable ‘Tatvadeep’ monthly that I subsribe to (its the only print material I pay for), Shäshtri Pändûranga Åthävalé has taken up ShlKrþñaGeetä, chapter 4 (29-32) and he explains that after your senses have been employed for a higher purpose, the Véda allow their use for self-pleasure or bhôg. He says, over time, when people forgot this ‘protocol’ and used their senses only for pleasuring themselves, dharimic-reactionaries rose to castigate this and said you are not allowed to do anything that pleasures your body because this can make your senses go wild. Shäshtri-ji cites the Bûddha, and the 24th Jain tirthankar, Mahäveer, as two the two famous reactionaries.; and he boldly says, “This is not Tatvajñäna (Essential Wisdom)
He adds that Bûddha and many other faiths, ask you not to get married. This is contrary to the Hindoo/Sanätana/Védic teachings.

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*For some ‘ancient’ reason, while writing them in the Roman script many people add an ‘a’ at the end of these and many other words. The practice may be a nod to the requirement that the last consonant needs a vowel so that you can voice it. When there are no specifying vowls all consonants are assumed to have the ‘u’ sound as in ‘but’. But if it is the last letter in a word most people tend to pronounce it as ‘u’ in ‘put’. While ‘a’ at the end tends to have the sound as in ‘far’ its use may have been seen as the lesser evil.