Jai Guru Deva – Respect and Gratitude for Learning Anything From Anything

Jai Guru Deva – Respect and Gratitude for Learning Anything From Anything

[00:45] Across the Universe

Jai Guru Deva. Thank you for listening to my podcast. I’m Thom Knoles. This is the Vedic Worldview.

So you heard me say it just now: Jai Guru Deva. And what does Jai Guru Deva mean? And the Americanized version of it is Jai Guru Dev, D-E-V. Properly spelled, it’s D-E-V-A, but that final A is somewhat elided. Elided is a grammatical term of art to say that it’s kind of slightly swallowed. Jai Guru Deva. Deva, Deva, Dev(a).

But it’s not quite like Dave like, “Hey, Dave.” You know, the nickname for David. “Hey, Dave. Jai Guru Dave.” It’s not Dave, it’s Dev(a). Dev(a). That’s a little bit in between D-E-V and D-A-V-E. Jai Guru Deva, Jai Guru Deva.

So what does it all mean? Why do meditators say this to each other? You go to India and you meet the king of the yogis, the master of all the masters, the preeminent one who is the head of my tradition and the indisputable master, the preeminent master of all Vedic knowledge. And what’s the first thing he says when he looks at you? “Jai Guru Deva.”

Where’s this coming from? All Indians know this term. You know all Indians: let’s count them, 1.4 billion people, use the word Jai Guru Deva, and they may not, of course the master of the masters knows, but the average person in India who says it may not even know a hundred percent exactly what it means or what its origins are.

So let’s dive into that right now.

The famous song Across the Universe, written and sung by John Lennon, in which he sings, Jai Guru Deva, he pronounces the final A, Jai Guru Deva in his song. It came as a result of his time spent with my master Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, where he learned to say that. It’s a song that describes some of his meditation experiences. Across the Universe.

[03:09] Same Same But Different

Jai. Jai is actually Jaya. J-A-Y-A is the closest we can use in Roman letters. Roman alphabet, by the way, for those of you who are not grammatically historic, Roman means the alphabet system that we use for English and most Latin languages, are Roman characters. These are the characters that were created by the speakers of Latin back in the times of Rome, more than 2000 years ago.

And so if you go to Rome and you see, engraved into a marble structure more than 2000 years old, some Latin, you can pronounce it, but unless you know Latin, you don’t know what it means. Latin is written in Roman characters. We use those Roman characters for our alphabet of 26 letters.

Sanskrit has up to, and I say up to, because it varies, but up to 54 characters in its script, in its alphabet in devanagari. Devanagari. Devanagari means the writing of the devas, the writing of the Gods. Devanagari. And we only have 26 characters in our Roman alphabet to try to take those Sanskrit words and create pronunciations out of them, so we have to kind of tear and strain a little bit our alphabet to make this thing work.

Jaya, J-A-Y-A is the closest we can get to, in the Roman characters. Jaya. And Jaya means victory, or it means glory to, or it means hail. In fact, the etymology, the language source of the English word hail, comes from Jaya in Sanskrit. That’s what its ultimate source is, hail.

Hail meaning glory to, or glorification of, or victory. Jaya. Jaya. And because in Sanskrit, in common speech in Sanskrit, any final soft A is generally elided, Jaya becomes Jay (Jai).

There’s also an accent involved. Anywhere north of Delhi, in India, you tend to hear Jaya or Jay (Jai). South of Delhi, in the more southern regions of India, you hear the southern accent of India, which is Jye. Jye or Jye-a. Jye-a Guru Deva, or Jye.

And so in the South we’ll often hear Jye Guru Deva, instead of Jay Guru Deva. Or even Jye-a. So Jye, Jay, Jaya—Jai.

[06:27] A Universal Salutation

Jai and then Guru. Ru, remover of, Gu, darkness. Someone who’s a darkness remover. A darkness remover. So what is darkness? It equates with ignorance because when you don’t have light, when you have darkness, there’s no connection between the Knower and the object of knowledge. And so you can run into the furniture and bang your knees and stub your toes.

Why? There’s no connection between Knower and Known. What is it that makes the connection between the Knower and the Known? Deva, Devata. Deva means the light. You turn on a light and what happens? You’ve made a connection between the Knower and the Known.

And so the word Deva in Sanskrit means a radiant one, a shining one, light. Deva is related to the Sanskrit word, dipa and deepa, and the word light is with reference to the divine. The word divine in English comes from the word Deva. Deva can also mean a celestial being a shining one, but it’s always with reference to light. Deva.

Jai Guru Deva. So a Guru is a remover of darkness by virtue of what? Deva, shining light to illuminate, to shed light upon. Deva. It also does have an implication of divine, someone that’s shining, someone who’s radiant, radiating life for all to enjoy. Jai Guru Deva. And then Jai Guru Deva with the elided A becomes Jai Guru Dev. Jai Guru Dev.

And it has become a universal salutation, a blessing, a statement of relief, a statement of hope.

Jai Guru Deva could be spoken hopefully. Jai Guru Deva could be spoken with great relief. Jai Guru Deva could be spoken as a salutation. Jai Guru Deva could be spoken as a blessing. And it is just a really lovely utterance to come out of the mouth.

[09:17] Withstanding the Test of Time

And in our tradition, going back thousands of years. Thousands. That word thousands rolls off the tongue easily. Let’s break it down. Slightly more than a thousand years ago, William the conqueror crossed the English channel and, with his Saxon forces, overwhelmed the Angles and Britain became an Anglo-Saxon country. The Norman invasion occurred. It was slightly more than a thousand years ago, 1066.

1000 years before that, plus 66, was the year that the rabbi from Nazareth, lived and walked and taught. The man after whom we number our years, whether we are a Christian nation or not, whether we are atheists or Muslims or Hindus or Chinese, we say this is 2025. 2025 since when? Since the time of the rabbi who lived in Nazareth and who had his radical and revolutionary teaching. So we number our years by that chap.

That’s only 2000. Let’s talk about multiple thousands. 3000, we’re back to the time of the pyramids. 4,000, we’re back to the time of the Babylonians. 5,000 were back to the time of the Mahabharata War in India, when the Bhagavad Gita was written. It goes on and on like that.

Go back another four or 5,000 years, and we have the first times that the understanding of the word Veda, V-E-D-A, Veda was around. The first time anybody uttered Jai Guru Deva was probably at least 4,000 years before Christ. At least. We have references to it since.

This is something that has been around. Empires have risen and empires have fallen. Great civilizations have come into being lived their entire life of hundreds or even thousands of years, and then gone into extinction and are now nothing but in history books, and yet Jai Guru Deva goes on.

Jai Guru Deva has survived the coming and going of entire civilizations, the coming and going of entire language groups, the coming and going of empires. Jai Guru Deva. And so it is a longer lasting phrase than anything like, “Gidday mate.” Or “Hi, how you going?” Or “Hi, how are you?”

[12:29] Respect and Gratitude for Learning Anything From Anything

It beats all of these with hands down, plus there’s an additional impact, and that’s the impact of the Sanskrit. Sanskrit is not the language of Nature. Sanskrit is a human language which emulates the language of Nature. 

When Nature intends something, it makes a sound. And a Rishi, a seer, is capable of hearing that sound of intent, and then using an onomatopoeia, meaning a word that sounds like the thing it’s describing, a Rishi is able to give expression in onomatopoetic language that turns out to be Sanskrit. 

So Sanskrit is the sound, the human-made sound that emulates Nature’s sounds.

Jai Guru Deva makes a sound, and what it does is it demonstrates gratitude to all things that have taught us. All things that have shed light on our ignorance. All things that have brought us into illumination compared with ignorance.

And there’s a full moon every year. The full moon that roughly falls in July of our Western calendar, which is called Guru Purnima. And every year we celebrate on Guru Purnima our great good fortune at having had teachers, and the teachers are not just the teachers who we enjoyed being our teachers. Any form or phenomenon that has shed light on our ignorance is worthy of saying Jai Guru Deva too.

Jai Guru Deva is an expression of gratitude for having learned anything from anything. Anything from anyone. So even if somebody has subjected us to a shock, but that shock taught us something, that’s also a guru to us. And so we’re grateful for having learned whatever it is that has made us learn. 

Anything that’s made us learn, we’re grateful to that on the night of Guru Purnima, the full moon night. That’s the night when meditators gather with their teacher of Vedic Meditation, a ceremony of gratitude is performed, and one of the most common phrases of that night is Jai Guru Deva.

So Jai Guru Deva, a beautiful thousands-of-year-old phrase showing respect and gratitude for having been a recipient of knowledge. And so there it is, Jai Guru Deva.