Gyaneshwari -Sant Gyaneshwar
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Chapter-17
Three Kinds of Faith
5. Men who undertake severe austerities, not prescribed by the scriptures, out of ostentation and egotism, overpowered by passion and attachment, Then there are those, who are utterly wanting in the study of scriptures and are not prepared to permit those proficient in the scriptures, to cross even the boundary of their town. They mock at their elders, who offer worship and prayer to God and clap the hands in derision at the discourses given by learned men. They follow the austerities, practiced by the heretics being full of conceit of their greatness and intoxicated with their riches (91-95). They draw out flesh and blood from their own bodies and those of others, by means of a woodbill and fill up sacrificial posts to the brim. Then they pour these in the burning sacrificial fires and offer them as oblations to minor deities. They sacrifice child-victims to them, in fulfillment of the vows taken by them and observe fasts for seven days at a time, perversely to propitiate minor deities in boons from them. O wise one, in this way they sow the seeds of self-torment and torture of others in the fields, in the form of their hearts possessed of the tamasic quality and reap the crop. The state of the demoniacal persons is like that of a cripple, who finds himself in the sea without arms to swim across or a boat in which to cross it (96-100), or like a patient who being cross with the doctor, kicks the medicine and suffers the agonies of his disease or like a person who scoops out his eyes in a quarrel and becomes confined to his house. This is because, they abandon the path, prescribed by the scriptures and wander about aimlessly in the jungle, in the form of infatuation. They act as directed by desire, get into the clutches of wrath and belabour others, and what is more, they bury me (who abides in their hearts) in a pit, in the form of misery.
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