Brotherhood: Dharma Destiny and the American Dream Read online

  We will not know what it means to creep out of the self until we examine how we built it in the first place. I’ve asked many teachers what enlightenment is, and one of the best answers—certainly the most concise—is that in enlightenment you exchange the small ego for the cosmic ego. The higher self exists in everyone, waiting to emerge. What holds it back can be seen in my past as much as anyone’s. Walls have to be smashed, all the more because we built them ourselves. I bow to the Buddhists who say that there is no alternative to emptiness. But there’s another strain in India, going back centuries before the Buddha, which attests to the contrary: that life is infinite fullness, once you awaken to reality and drop the mask of illusion.

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  Blind for a Day

  Sanjiv

  Five-year-old Deepak and three-year-old Sanjiv outside their home in Pune, 1952.

  MY NAME IS SANJIV CHOPRA and I was born in September 1949, in the city of Pune, India. This was about a year after India had gained its independence from Great Britain. The entire world was recovering from the devastation of World War II, and it was a time of great change. I was the second child of Dr. Krishan and Pushpa Chopra and the younger brother of Deepak Chopra. Our father was a legendary physician and wanted to ensure that we received an excellent education. He never tried to influence Deepak or me into going into medicine. But when I was twelve years old, an incredible incident occurred that set me on my path.

  At the time, Deepak and I were living with our uncle and aunt while attending St. Columba’s School in Delhi. Our parents were more than three hundred miles away in Jammu. They were keen that we finish our high school education at this preeminent school run by Irish Christian Brothers.

  One Saturday afternoon I fell asleep while reading a book. I woke up less than an hour later to discover I was blind. I opened my eyes and the world was completely black. I blinked again and again, but still I could see nothing. I was twelve years old and utterly blind.

  Deepak was nearby, reading a book. I nudged him.

  “Deepak, I can’t see.”

  He waved his hand in front of my eyes, and when I didn’t respond, he started to cry. I remember him calling out to our aunt and uncle.

  “I have only one brother and he’s blind!”

  My uncle Rattan Chacha rushed me to the military hospital. Senior physicians, among them a respected ophthalmologist, examined me and were unable to determine the cause of my blindness. They suspected I was suffering from hysterical blindness, but that made no sense to me or my brother. Why would I suddenly, out of the blue, be experiencing hysteria? I was a good student, a talented athlete, and a happy kid.

  The physicians were able to locate my father, who was on a military field trip visiting a rural hospital. My father listened calmly and then started taking a detailed history. “Please tell me what has happened to Sanjiv in the last month. Has he been well? Has he had any illnesses? Has he incurred any injuries?”

  The doctors relayed these questions to me and my brother. I replied, “Just a small puncture wound to my thigh when I nicked it with the sharp end of a cricket wicket.”

  “What treatment did he receive?” my father asked. “Did he get stitches? Antibiotics? Did he get a tetanus shot?” They looked at my records and told him that I had indeed gotten stitches, an antibiotic, and a tetanus shot.

  “Was it tetanus toxoid or serum?” The serum, he was told. After a pause, my father said, “Sanjiv is having a rare, idiosyncratic reaction to the tetanus serum: retrobulbar neuritis. It’s affecting the nerve in the orbit of each eye. Start an intravenous at once and give him massive doses of corticosteroids.”

  The doctors followed these directions and within several hours my vision had returned. It was an incredibly scary experience. Had my father not correctly diagnosed this condition, I might well have remained blind for the rest of my life.

  Even as a young person, I was amazed at my father’s diagnostic skills. All the other doctors, even the specialists, had been stumped, while he, a cardiologist, had almost immediately zeroed in on a rare reaction and ordered the correct course of treatment. It was a moving and unforgettable experience. Prior to this incident, I had vaguely considered following my father’s footsteps into medicine, but that experience left an indelible mark. From then on there was not a shadow of doubt in my mind: I would become a physician. I wanted to help people. Although I made that decision when I was very young, I have never regretted it for a moment.

  Because my father was a well-respected physician, my family led a privileged existence in many ways. Every three years we moved around the country as my father’s military hospital assignments changed, but we were affluent and always lived in nice houses with plenty of servants, and Deepak and I always attended the best schools. We lived in Bombay, Jabalpur, Shillong, and Delhi. We traveled extensively throughout India on pilgrimages or sightseeing trips. The India in which I grew up was a vibrant, complex society finding its own identity as a newly independent nation in the post–World War II world. It was a place where cows roamed freely in the streets, sometimes valued more highly than people, while behind the high walls of opulent estates the wealthy lived charmed lives. What I remember most from my childhood were the sounds, the smells, the colorful chaos, and the daily contradictions.

  We grew up surrounded by the cacophony of endless traffic: buses and trucks and cars, bicycles, scooters, carts, and rickshaws, and somewhere in the distance, the railroad. One thing we did not often experience was silence; wherever we lived, the world was always rushing by directly outside my window. I remember being awakened very early many mornings by loud speakers blaring from the mosques reciting the Muslim prayers, or by the street merchants hawking their goods as they walked along: Alu lelo, kela lelo! Buy potatoes, buy bananas! The songs of the street vendors were the background music of our lives. And oddly, against that constant chatter, I also clearly remember the beautiful sounds of the birds singing during the day and the crickets chirping at night.

  By now I’ve traveled extensively throughout the world and, as a consequence of the world growing smaller, the easily identifiable smells of a society have become much less distinctive. There really does seem to be a McDonald’s on every corner, even in India, where they sell veggie burgers. But once, it was possible to know exactly where you were by smell alone. The spicy, pungent aromas of India are still very much alive in my memory. The fresh smell of rain soaking into dry parched earth is, to me, the scent of life itself. When we traveled by train, hawkers at each stop would come aboard selling Pakoras, Samosas, and fudge-like sweet Barfi. The aromas would fill the train compartment. Certainly one of the most memorable smells of my childhood was hot tea served in clay pots. One whiff and I’m back in India.

  Admittedly not all the smells were pleasant. There is a smell to poverty, and we knew that odor, too.

  The poverty around us was so much a part of our lives it was taken for granted. We barely even noticed it. When I asked my parents how it was possible that people could live and die in the streets, survive by begging and have nothing but rags to wear, they explained the concept of karma to me. Karma is an important aspect of the Indian culture, a part of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy; in a sense, karma is your path in life, and it is determined by your actions in previous lives. Hindus believe that a spirit has many lives and that after each death it is reincarnated in another form. Your actions in one life determine your status in the next. If I’m a good person in this life, then I’ll be rewarded in this or my next life; if I’m wicked, I’ll pay for it in this or my next life. This belief in karma is one of the reasons that the poor in India don’t seem to have much resentment against the wealthy; they accepted their poverty as their fate, in the sincere belief that they were paying for their past sins. But my parents also told me that your karma did not have to be your fate, that by working hard you can change your destiny.

  The belief in reincarnation has always been very common among most Indians. We had an amazing story of reincarnation in our own family, in fact. My mother had a brother named Shukra, who was four years older than she was; before he could even read or write, he could recite long passages from the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu scriptures. When my mother was born, her parents named her Suchinta. Her brother objected to this decision. He told them that the name Suchinta incorporated the word “chinta,” which means worry in Hindi and therefore had a negative connotation.

  “What should we call her then?” they asked him.

  “Pushpa,” he answered, Pushpa means beautiful flower. And so my mother was known by this name throughout her life.

  When my uncle was four and a half, he admonished his father for shooting a pigeon with a BB gun. “What harm did that innocent bird ever cause you?” he asked. “The harm you did will now return to you.” This from a child.

  The stories about this young boy have been passed down in our family. According to my mother’s oldest sister, Bare Bahenji, he would be eating a meal in the kitchen, pause suddenly, and dash outside to the front gate just in time to greet a wandering monk he had somehow sensed. Then he would invite the monk into the house and have a servant prepare him lunch.

  Before he reached his fifth birthday, my uncle went to Bare Bahenji and asked for sixteen rupees, then the equivalent of about two dollars.

  “Why do you need so much money?” she asked him.

  He needed it, he explained, to repay a debt to Daulat, a family servant whose name, ironically, means wealth. My uncle explained that he had incurred this debt in a previous life. He continued to pester Bare Bahenji until she relented. Daulat refused to accept the rupees until my grandparents insisted. A few days later Shukra told Bare Bahenji he would prefer to sleep on the floor. In India this is a common request m
ade by adults who believe they are going to die and want to be connected to the earth. Bare Bahenji was dismayed and disturbed and refused to make his bed on the floor. Instead, she made his regular bed, carefully tucked him in, and sang him a lullaby.

  The next morning the family found Shukra’s lifeless body on the floor. My uncle had accurately predicted his own death and wanted to repay the debt from a previous life to Daulat the servant before he passed away. For me it’s hard not to believe in reincarnation when all this occurred in my own family.

  Stories like this one are not unusual in India. The founder and chancellor of Banaras Hindu University, Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya, was a very learned man. He devoted his entire life to the university. On his deathbed he said, “Take me to the outskirts of Banaras.”

  They were puzzled. “Pandit Ji, you have given your whole life to Banaras. You’re now going to pass away and go to heaven. Why would you want us to take you outside Banaras?”

  Among Hindus, there is a widely held belief that if you die in Banaras you achieve Moksha, an end to the cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth.

  “My work on earth is not complete,” Pandit Ji said. “I do not want to achieve moksha. I must come back and finish my work.”

  India has always been a country where people—no matter how educated, sophisticated, or wealthy—accepted some element of mysticism, understood that some events in life couldn’t be easily explained. For example, there was a story several years ago that statues of Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu god who dispels all obstacles, were drinking milk. People were pouring milk over the statues and into a bowl at their bases as offerings late in the evening. By the morning the milk would be gone. I thought it was nonsensical, but there were many educated people who believed it. It actually turned out to have some scientific basis; the statues were made of a material that absorbed liquids and did soak up some of the milk.

  Unfortunately many people were taking milk their children needed and leaving it for the statue. I asked my mother if she believed the statues were drinking milk. My mother, an intelligent, sophisticated woman, said she did. Then I asked some of our other relatives, and several of them told me it was happening in their own temples. They had seen it!

  That was the tradition in which we grew up. There was more to life than what we could see in front of us.

  In the India of my childhood, we were exposed to a variety of religions and philosophies and taught to respect all of them. While we were Hindu, we had friends who were Muslim or Parsi and we went to school with Christians and Jews. For me the best part was that we had days off on all of the holidays. We were off for the Hindu festival of lights, Diwali; Easter; the Muslim holiday Eid. When Pope Pius XII died in 1958, we were living in Jabalpur attending St. Aloysius, a school that had classes from kindergarten through grade twelve. Our school was closed for three days. I was nine years of age and a six-year-old friend of ours stayed with us during those days off. We spent that time running around, playing cricket and games. It was a wonderful short vacation and we really didn’t want to go back to school. The night before classes resumed, we were lying in the dark when this young friend spoke up.

  “Sanjiv, can I ask you a question?”

  “Of course.”

  “What are the chances the new pope will die tomorrow?”

  We were raised as Hindus, which is as much a culture and a way of life as it is a religion. Unlike the major Western religions, there is no formal structure to our worship; we don’t have to go somewhere at a specific time to take part in a specific ceremony. We go to the temple when we want to. There isn’t even any accepted definition of what a Hindu is or any agreement on whether Hinduism is a religion, a culture, a philosophy, or a way of life. The chief justice of the Indian Supreme Court once said, “Unlike other religions in the world the Hindu religion does not claim any one prophet; it does not worship any one god; it does not subscribe to any one dogma; it does not believe in any one philosophic concept; it does not follow any one set of religious rites or performances; in fact, it does not appear to satisfy the narrow traditional features of any religion or creed. It may broadly be described as a way of life and nothing more.”

  We were raised in a rich tradition, a mythology filled with hundreds of gods and warriors and moral tales, taught to us from a very young age. During summer vacations our mother would read and sing verses from the two major scriptures, the Bhagavad Gita and the Ramayana, sometimes while playing a small, hand-pumped organ called the harmonium. Many of these stories were thrillers at heart, and as she read them or sung them we could visualize the wars, the chariots, the gods and demigods, the beautiful heroines and the courageous heroes. Usually she would stop reading at a cliff-hanger: Sita has been abducted by the Great Demon and an army is being assembled to rescue her. Deepak and I would ask her to explain the story she’d read and tell us how it applied to our lives. And, of course, like almost all educated young Indians, we read the comic books that retold these stories of gods and epic battles, monsters, myths, and legends. Our mythology was also our popular entertainment. There were hundreds of these comics, and every kid read them. We read about Buddha, Ravana the Demon King, Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, and Krishna. We read the Bhagavad Gita. We read the Mahabharata, the epic tale of India and Ganesha, the god who is the remover of all obstacles. Together with all this, we read everything from Superman and Archie to the writings of Gandhi and the works of Tolstoy.

  India is a nation in which the reality of daily life and the influence of mystical forces are commonly accepted as equally true. In addition to karma, many Indians also believe in the concept of Dharma. In Hinduism and Buddhism, dharma has various connotations, but generally it means cheerfully fulfilling your moral and ethical duty. Doing the right thing.

  In a village in the foothills of the Himalayas, there was one family that had refused the smallpox vaccine. The Indian government and World Health Organization had successfully vaccinated the rest of the population, but the head of this family, Mr. Laxman Singh, steadfastly refused. The Indian government decided for the good of the country that the Singhs had to be protected against this terrible disease, so they sent a medical team and law enforcement to their house.

  “Why won’t you be inoculated?” Laxman Singh was asked.

  “God ordains who will be diseased and who will be healthy,” he responded. “I don’t want this injection. If I have to get smallpox, I’ll get smallpox.”

  The team restrained him, forcibly pinning him to the ground. Singh fought them while screaming bloody murder, but they successfully inoculated him and then did the same to the rest of his family. When this was finally done, Laxman Singh calmly said, “Now please sit down in my hut.” He went to his plot, picked some vegetables, cleaned them, and served them to the medical team along with some fresh tea his wife had made.

  “What are you doing?” one team member asked. “We came into your house, violated your beliefs, and now you’re treating us as guests. Why?”

  “I believe it is my dharma to not get inoculated because God ordains who will be diseased and who will be healthy. You obviously believe it is your dharma to inoculate me. Now it is over and you are guests in my home. This is the least I can offer you.”

  This story is the best demonstration of dharma I have found. For me the word “dharma” incorporates the elements of duty, creed, and ethics. As a child I certainly never suspected that my dharma would bring me to America and Harvard Medical School, but I followed the path that was laid in front of me. My family’s roots in the Indian soil can be traced back centuries; planting new ones in another part of the world was never part of my plan. But the actions of fulfilling my dharma have brought me honors in my profession and in my life. As a result, I embrace both Eastern and Western traditions. I speak American slang with an Indian accent. I’ve spent my life in medicine, relying on the tools of science—experimentation, discovery, testing, and reproducible results—but being brought up in my culture also left me open to other possibilities, ones that might not be scientifically proven or easily understood. I am privileged to lecture annually to as many as fifty thousand medical professionals in the United States and around the world, and each time I do so I feel I am fulfilling my dharma.