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I’d like to tell you story about Ekalavya. And Ekalavya was a tribal boy. And he wanted to learn archery from Dronacharya. Dronacharya was the Guru for both the Pandavas and the Kauravas. He was the primary instructor of the king’s children. How could a tribal boy learn from the king’s primary instructor? Impossible!

So what Ekalavya did was to make a murti of the Guru. And every day he would bow down to the murti and he would worship the murti and do puja to the image of the Guru. And then he would go off to practice. He wanted to be the best archer in the world. And in this way he became so proficient at his craft. He could shoot arrows so straight and so efficiently, so succinctly, he always hit the target.

And one day, the Guru found out about Ekalavya practicing in the forest and said, “Where did you learn all this knowledge of archery?” And Ekalavya said, “I learned from you, Gurudev.” And Dronacharya said, “What! I never accepted you as a disciple.” And Ekalavya said, “But I accepted you as my guru. And I became as proficient as I have become through your grace, through your knowledge, by using your techniques, your tactics, and your skills.”

And that’s an example of how disciples are responsible for making the Guru. It’s not for Gurus to make disciples. That’s a university. And people go to the university and pay a fee and take a class and they go home. And they may change their lives or they may not change their lives. But disciples make gurus. They say, there is an example I want to follow. I want to emulate that bhav in my life. I want be to able to worship with that efficiency. I wanted to sit the way she sits, I want to sing the way she sings, I want to worship the way she worships. I want to be like that. And that becomes a sishya. That’s what happens to a disciple who becomes sishya. They become the mirror, the reflection of the Guru.

Our objective is to become disciples. All of us! We are striving to become disciples. When we become perfect disciples of one guru they will take us to the next guru. And when we become the perfect disciple of this Guru, She will take us to the next Guru. Until we become one with the Guru of all the Gurus and that’s Lord Shiva. The rest of us are links in the chain that pulls us up, links towards becoming one with the Guru of all Gurus, Lord Shiva.