THE HOLY GITA
CHAPTER THREE
KARMA YOGA OR THE YOGA OF ACTION OR THE METHOD OF ACTION
VERSE NUMBER 32
Text in Transliteration:
ye tv etad abhyasooyanto naa ‘nutisthanti me matam
sarvajnaana vimadhaams taan viddhi nastaan acetasah
Text in English:
But those who carp at my teaching and act not thereon,
deluded in all knowledge and devoid of discrimination, know them to be ruined.
COMMENTARY BY SWAMI CHIDBHAVANANDA:
Fire hurts the one who mishandles it and it cooks food for
another who utilizes it properly. Losers are they who do not know of this law
of nature. Moral and spiritual laws are not different from the laws of nature. Those
who avail themselves of these laws progress and prosper, while those others who
defy and break them come to grief and debasement.
SRI RAMAKRISHNA AS QUATED BY SWAMI CHIDBHAVANANDA:
Cats claws and teeth are benevelont to its kitten and
malevelont to the rat. Similarly “maya”, the power of the Lord, is beneficial
to His devotees and harmful to the malefactors.
COMMENTARY BY SWAMI SIVANANDA:
The pig-headed people who are obstinate, who find fault with
the teachings of the Lord and who do not practise them are certainly doomed to
destruction. They are incorrigible and sensless persons indeed.
Comments by the blogger:
This is not to castigate those who do not follow the Lord’s
teachings but carp at him, but to put the fear of God in them and rein them.
The very nature of the embodied or the soul is emancipation
or self realization. But by carping at the Lord’s teachings brings in its wake
indescribable problems to the embodied, in the sense it almost indefinitely postpones
the chance of self realization. For, those disbelivers and who carp at the Lord’s
teaching may be compared to take to walking towards the goal of emancipation,
while the believer’s voyage toward realization may be compared to the speed of
a rocket! Because the Lord loves us so much that it HURTS HIM and makes HIM use
words and epithets like “ doomed to destruction”.
In Hinduism there is no room for permanent damnation. On the
other hand, the scheme of the Universe presupposes that there should be
thousands of re-births a soul must suffer by coming here time and time again
embodied in ever new bodies. Even the Agnostic religion like the Buddhism
accepts the concept of re-births.
The lord loves us so much that he castigates us, takes a
stick and beat us with by saying such things like “permanent destruction or
damnation”.
On the contrary, it is the Lord’s word that people follow
HIM from all paths. And every being from the ant to man is in search of that
permanent and cloyless satchit maha Ananda. So it would be contradiction in
terms even to allude to permanent damnation. Still the Lord uses for obvious
reasons.
HE wants us to come to HIM using a minimal number of
re-births.
And the carping fools certainly manufacture “almost” endless
re-births; re-birth presupposes non-realisation of our self which pains the
Lord who earns for us.
This is how this kind of slokas must be understood. We must
go for the larger context, keeping in mind the scheme of the Universe which is
here only to act as a school to make us gain knowledge in gradation.
Books like Geeta are not for weak-minded and the doubting
Thomases. We must be strong in our faith, and that unflinching faith alone
matters in the ultimate analysis.
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