audārya [generosity, magnanimity, benevolence, compassion, nobility]
In Western society we learn that generosity is a virtue. We consider it praiseworthy to give: to give gifts, to give food, or to give money. And yet, what are we giving when we give these material things?
What is it we have that can be given? We enter this material world with nothing, and we leave it with nothing. We have nothing and therefore we have nothing to give.
This is because to ‘have’ anything at all means to live in the knowledge that we will will one day not have it, and that we once in the past did not have it. To have is to understanding that having is temporary. Paradoxically, to have is to not have. How can we give what we don’t have?
To have a book, to have bicycle, to have a large and crooked nose, is to experience what is disappearing at every moment, what fades away, what rusts and decays. In other words it is the experience of not having.
This insight is the first step in soul-consciousness. Self-realisation means understanding the difference between what we have and what we are.
What are we then?
What we are is what we have always been, what we always will be, what is eternal, unchanging. The name of what we are is: soul.
As souls, we have nothing. On the other hand, as souls, we are everything. We have nothing to give except our soul. How do we give that? In our material consciousness this kind of giving is nearly unthinkable. How do we give what we don’t have? And even more puzzling, what does it mean to give what we are?
The answer is nearly as mysterious as the question. To give what we are is to realise our divinity. How do we do this?
Mercifully we have a model, a teacher, a guru. It is Caitanya Mahāprabhu, who through his appearance in the Age of Kali, displayed spiritual generosity, loving that can only be conceived and fully received from the place of the soul.
It is Rūpa Gosvāmi who named this spiritual generosity audārya. In Bhakti-rasāmṛta-sindhu he calls it ’the willingness to offer to another person even one’s soul’ (BRS 2.1.269).
Audārya is generosity of the soul. It means wanting to give one’s soul to another, to give one’s divinty to the other souls of the world, to give what we are when we are fully ourselves to what others are when they are fully themselves.
This is the meaning of the life of Caitanya Mahāprabhu
Pure giving is not giving something. It’s not giving a mango to my sister, nor giving some money to a friend, not even giving time to my family. Caitanya Mahāprabhu did not give any thing. Instead he showed that the highest form of the divine is giving itself, the act of giving.
When audārya is there, we don’t give a thing. We give our selves, our souls. We give the thing that gives, the thing from which giving flows. We give the giver: our soul, the place from which all giving flows.
It is this willingness to give our selves, the want the desire to give ourselves that Rūpa Gosvāmi calls audārya.
Audārya is in this sense two moods in one. Both of them are difficult for us to grasp in our material consciousness. It is, first, to be able to give ourselves, and, second, to also be filled with the desire to give of ourselves.
This double state of being is the very nature of Caitanya Mahāprabhu.
First, because Caitanya Mahāprabhu has nothing, but rather is everything. For God who is pure soul, there are no possessions. There are no things to give or take, to buy or sell, there is only what one is, and that is the pure soul of God. Caitanya Mahāprabhu has nothing to give but himself.
Second, because Caitanya Mahāprabhu is this desire to give. The name of this desire is Rādhārānī. She is the internal, pleasure-giving energy of God (hlādinī śaktiḥ).
In other words, Audārya is made of two brilliant qualities: pure soul and spontaneous desire to give.
This is why Caitanya Mahāprabhu is the embodiment of audārya: the perfect self-present soul (sat), self-aware (cit) soul, that knows nothing but the desire to give the gift-that-is-not-a-gift : spiritual pleasure (ananda).
As Ananta dāsa Bābājī explains in his commentary to Rādhā-rāsā-sudhānidi (Verse 131) Rādhā is the highest expression of generosity:
Śrīmatī is love personified, so if She gives Herself away to Her devotees, She gives them the highest prema ! Śrīman Mahāprabhu accepted Her mood and complexion and distributed that highest love of God to everyone, without considering who is a friend and who is an enemy. He gave prema even to dull and inert creatures like trees and vines. Who can be more generous? (RRS 131)
Audārya is the form we take when we are fully in siddha-svarūpa, when we are fully our spiritual selves, when there is nothing left to give except giving itself.