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Chapter 18
CONCLUSION: RENUNCIATION OF THE FRUIT OF ACTIONS LEADS TO THE GRACE OF THE LORD
103. The Right Way To Extricate Oneself From Activity
9. There is a story about a man, who thought that his house was filthy and inauspicious and therefore left and went to another village. He found filth in that village too and therefore went to a forest. There, as he sat under a mango tree, a bird’s droppings fell on his head. Disgusted, he cursed the forest and went and stood in a river. There he found big fish eating up the small ones, and that heightened his disgust. Convinced that the whole of creation was abominable, and there was no way out except through death, he came out of the water and kindled a fire to end his life. A gentleman who was passing by enquired, “Brother, why do you want to end your life?” The man replied, “Because the world is an abominable place; it stinks.” The gentleman said, “But imagine how it would stink when your flesh begins to burn! How awful the stench is when even a single hair burns! What would happen when your whole body gets burnt? We live nearby. How would we bear it? Where could we go?” The man was bewildered and exclaimed, “One cannot live in this world, nor can one die! What is one to do then?” 10. The moral is that if you go on condemning everything as abominable and try to escape from it, you simply cannot carry on. If you try to avoid a small flawed act, an act with a bigger flaw will become inescapable. The nature of karma is such that it cannot be got rid of by outward renunciation only. If a man tries to fight the karma that has come to his lot in the natural course, if he tries to swim against the current, he is bound to get exhausted in the end and be swept off by the current. His interest lies in acting in tune with the current of swadharma. Then the coatings on the mind will peel off gradually and the mind will go on getting increasingly purified. Activities will wither away of themselves even though actions will continue to be done. Karma will remain, but activity will disappear. |
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