KARMA AND KAMA – IT’S ALL A GAME

The Spiritual Meaning and Purpose of Snakes and Ladders

Bro. Colin Frankland

1 – A ‘modern’ 20th century British board.

Being a gentleman of, shall we say, a ‘certain age’, I clearly remember with
fondness a game from my childhood called Snakes and Ladders. Perhaps you
do too. The object of the game was quite simple – with a roll of the dice I
would try to scale the ladders with my counter in an effort to get to the
endmost square on the board. Fine if you can, but standing in your way were
some horrid snakes. Landing on a snake meant having to go back down the
board. For me, as a young kid in the early 1960’s, it was all simple – I loved
landing on the ladders and hated landing on the snakes. Being a game of
chance, cheating was difficult, sadly, but to me and probably everyone else
who played it, going up a ladder was nothing other than the result of a lucky
roll of the dice and sliding down a snake was also nothing much more than
tough luck. A fun yet sometimes frustrating way of passing an hour or so on a
rainy day, nothing more than that.

Little did I know at the time, and to be honest for many, many years to come,
that innocent game had a hidden meaning based upon personal conduct,
morality, and life itself…
First introduced to Britain during the years of the Raj, the origins of the game
go back to ancient India and was known as Moksha Patamu. Over the
centuries, Moksha Patamu evolved into different versions spanning different
faiths and philosophies, including Hindu, Jain and Muslim thinking. All versions
of this ancient game however have a central theme – good and evil, heaven
and earth, Karma and Moksha. Karma, the ‘ups and downs’ of this temporal
world that we all experience each day, the reward and punishment for our
actions in life, and Moksha, the blissful higher state of being after breaking free
from samsara, or the cycle of worldly birth and death. In effect, Moksha is the
highest and last square on the Snakes and Ladders board. Not only do you win
the board game, but you also figuratively achieve spiritual freedom from the
bonds of the karmic cycle. Like all spiritual paths and journeys, including our
own as esoterically-minded Freemasons, the way is fraught with those pesky
serpents, or the black dog, or just the mundane world we have to endure
sometimes. Moksha Patam was a teaching aid that served to contrast
karma and kama, or destiny and desire.

2 - Gyan Chaupar - a Jain version of the game.

The ladder by which we hopefully ascend to the winning square on the board,
or Moksha, is of course familiar to us in Freemasonry as the symbolic ladder of
the Tracing Board and serves us with more or less the same meaning –
attainment. It alludes to spiritual growth through study and practice, the duty
and calling of every Mason. There are no serpents on our Tracing Boards to my
knowledge, but regretfully of course not everyone makes it to the top of the
ladder. In the Western esoteric tradition we also see the representation of
attainment to Moksha as the centre of the labyrinth. Like the ancient Moksha
Patamu game of snakes and ladders, the labyrinths of the cathedrals and the
ladder depicted on the Tracing Board are a way, a path, a journey towards
spiritual perfection.

So, how did Gyan Chaupar, the ancient Hindu version of the game work as a
spiritual teaching tool for moral instruction without using books?

Essentially, the heads of the snakes on squares 24, 44 and 55 of the Gyan
Chaupar board – which had a total of 72 boxes – were representative of the
vices of bad company, false belief, and ego. Landing on these snake head
vices would instruct the player in the Hindu karmic principle of cause and
effect. The corresponding effects of the vices I have just mentioned are, in
order, lust, illusion and vanity.

Now we have looked at the evil vices of the Gyan Chaupar board, let us now
turn our attention to its heavenly virtues. We find these at square number 10,
which is the Heavenly plane; square 28, which is the plane of Truth; and square
number 46 which represents the plane of Happiness. In this old Hindu version
of the game the goal of every player was to reach square 68, or the plane of
Shiva, not square 72 as you might imagine. Perhaps overshooting square 68
into the subsequent squares allowed for the possibility of a good, old-
fashioned karmic dressing down!

Thank you, Brethren, for your kind attention.

References:
Parth Shastri, Times of India, 26 Sept 2013.
Madhuboni Banerjee, MPL, 5 Sep5 2022.
Bhavani Sundaram, OS.ME, 7 April 2022.