Your guest, your honour

The Upanishads, Manusmriti, Ramayana and Mahabharta provide answer to the questions, ‘Who is a guest?’ and ‘How should he be treated?’ The term for ‘guest’ in Sanskrit is ‘atithi’ — one who visits your place without prior notice.

The Upanishads, Manusmriti, Ramayana and Mahabharta provide answer to the questions, ‘Who is a guest?’ and ‘How should he be treated?’ The term for ‘guest’ in Sanskrit is ‘atithi’ — one who visits your place without prior notice.

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The Taittriya Upanishad, commands, “Do not turn away anyone who comes seeking your hospitality”.

It enjoins that the atithi be treated as god at par with one’s mother, ancestors and teacher.

This command is explained in the Mahabharta by Lord Krishna: “Finding an old person, a child, a tired traveller or a vulnerable one at the door, a householder should offer him worshipful hospitality, with the same exuberance in his heart, as he would to his own teacher”.

According to the Mahabharta, “The one who appears at the door at the proper time, even if he were an outcaste or such a one as partakes of the flesh of dog, deserves to be worshipped with the offering of food”. However, Manusmriti goes a step further. It does not make a distinction between appropriate and inappropriate time of the guest’s arrival. It commands that irrespective of the time of arrival, be it suppertime or otherwise, the needs of the guest must be attended to.

This deep concern for the guest in the Indian tradition is there because at the transcendental level, the host and the guest are identical. The host sees his own self in the guest.