GOD CREATED ALL

 GOD CREATED ALL

In the sixth stanza (quatrain) of his book The Ramayana , the Indian poet Tulsidas (1532-1623) asks “Why enumerate the faults and defects of the bad and the virtues of the good? --- both are a boundless and unfathomable ocean. Hence occasionally virtue is reckoned as vice, improperly and from want of discrimination. For God hath created both, but is the Veda that has distinguished one from the other. The heroic legends and Puranas also, no less than the Veda, recognize every kind of good and evil as kind of good and evil as creatures of the Creator. pain and pleasure; sin and religious merit; night and day; saint and sinner; high caste and low caste; demons and gods; great and small; ambrosia and life; poison and death; visible world and the invisible God; life and the lord of life; rich and poor; the beggar and king; Kashi and Magadha; the Ganges and the Karmanya; the desert of  Marwar and the rich plain of Malwa; the Brahman and the butcher; heaven and hell; sensual passion and asceticism; the Vedas and the Tantaras, and every variety of good and evil.” (English version by F.C.Growse, Fellow Calcutta University). 

           

It is a wonderful stanza poetically, philosophically and religiously. It describes the world as a manifestation of opposites, both negative positive, condemnable and commendable. Surprisingly, both are God’s creation, but with a purpose.  Choose either of the two and reap the reward accordingly.  Both lead to some action with the appropriate reward. One has the freedom to choose either of the two  but not without the test of one’s good or bad nature. In some cases, may be, it is God’s will that works but by and large it is one’s own choice and thus his responsibility which illustrates the proverb: As you sow, so shall you reap.

 

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27^th October 2022                                                                   G. R. Kanwal               

 

 

 

 

                                                HATRED

HATRED

Some of the synonyms of hatred are : dislike, hostility, ill-will, enmity, grudge, antipathy and antagonism.

            None of these traits is desirable to be cherished by any human being.

            Hatred is poisonous.  It kills the joy of him who hates and of him who is hated.

            Saints do not permit hatred.  They recommend love even towards those who hate you, if you have any quality which they dislike for any religious or secular reason.

            Someone rightly said hate no one; hate their vices, not themselves.

According to French novelist Balzac (1799-1850) hatred is the vice of narrow  souls; they feed it with all their littleness, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies.

            English divine F.W. Robertson (1816-53) permits the  hatred of vices like hypocrisy, intolerance, oppression and  injustice,

            What is really  disallowed by the right-minded thinkers are ugly traits which make human beings disagreeable characters.  They disallow the hatred of fellow human beings for any reason whatsoever.  Hate the sin, not the sinner is their motto, and that is O.K.

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24^th October 2022                                                                         G.R.Kanwal

 

 

 

 

RETURNING GOOD FOR EVIL

 

RETURNING GOOD FOR EVIL

            It is almost impossible for a non-Buddha to return good for evil. The  whole world  is full of  persons who persistently nourish a spirit of revenge. 

              Crime, as a  result of vindictiveness, prevails everywhere  survives not only for days but even months and years  among individuals, as well as groups  and  nations.

           To forgive and return good for evil, one has to be a Buddha. Lord Gautam Buddha (over five hundred years before Lord Christ) is said to have told a  disciple “If a man foolishly does me wrong, I will return to him the protection of my ungrudging love; the more evil comes from him, the more good shall go from me; the fragrance of goodness always comes to me, and the harmful air of evil goes to him.”

  According to him a wicked man who reproaches a virtuous one is like one who looks up and spits at heaven; the spittle soils not the heaven, but comes back and defiles his own person.

The slanderer is like one who flings dust at another when the wind is contrary; the dust returns on him who threw it.

The moral of the story is that: the virtuous man cannot be hurt: the misery comes back on the slanderer. 

So don’t be a slanderer,  be a virtuous man and return good for evil.

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19^th October 2022                                         G.R.kANWAL                                                                                                                                                  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE REALITY OF RELIGION

In his essay “The Reality of Religion, Rabindra Nath Tagore  said “I do not mean to advocate a common church for mankind,  a universal pattern to which every act of worship and aspiration must conform.’’  This view was in fact the substance of an address given at the Sri Ramakrishna Centenary Parliament of Religions, 1936 and  was later published in a book entitled: “Vedanta for Modern Man” with 60 other essays contributed  by renowned spiritualists like Aldous Huxley, Alan W. Watts, Gerald Heard, Swami Prabhavananda, Anne Hamilton, and others.

            

            Tagore said in his address: The arrogant spirit of sectarianism which so often used either active or passive, violent or subtle , methods of persecution on the least provocation or without any , has to be reminded of the fact that religion like poetry, is not a mere idea ----- it is expression. The self-expression of God is in the variedness of creation; and our attitude toward the infinite must  in its expression also must have a variedness of individuality, ceaseless and unending.   

         

According to Tagore when a religion develops the ambition of imposing its doctrine on all mankind, it degrades itself into a tyranny and becomes a form of imperialism.

This  is why, says Tagore, we find ruthless methods of autocracy in religious matters prevailing in most parts of the world, trampling flat the expansion of the spirit of man under its insensitive heels.

The most important part of the  address mentioned  above reads like this; The attempts to make the one religion which is their own,  dominate all time and space, comes naturally to men addicted to sectarianism.

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14^th October 2022                                                                   G.R.Kanwal

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THERE IS BUT ONE GOD

 

THERE IS BUT ONE GOD

I feel puzzled when some determined devotee of a religion tells me that there are many gods and one can choose any one of them for his regular worship. 

According to my observation it is not so; I ab convinced that  there is only one God, one Creator, one Supreme deity who rules over the whole world. Had there been many Gods, there would have been many skies, many moons, many  suns and  many globes. But it is not so.

Of the many prayers which I have come across, it is the Morning Prayer of Guru Nanak (1469-1538) known as Japji which confirms my belief in the Oneness of God. It is composed in Punjabi language and its English version reads as follows:   

There is but one God whose name is true, the Creator, devoid of fear and enmity, immortal, unborn, self-existent. The True One was in the beginning; the True One is now also, O Nanak; the True One also shall be.   

By thinking I cannot obtain a conception of Him, even if I think hundreds of thousands of times.

True is He, true is His name which is spoken with love. At the ambrosial hour of morning, we should meditate on His true name and Greatness. He cannot be described by words.  He is the single giver, the one single  Bestower on all living beings. To get from Him, what I want  I should not forget Him and utter His name with love.

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10^th October 2022                                                                   G.R.Kanwal

                                               

    

 

GANDHIJI  SAID :

I.                    I believe in the truth of all religions of the world. And since my youth upward, it has been a humble but persistent effort on my part to understand the truth of all the religions of the world, and adopt and assimilate in my own thought, word and deed all that I have found in the best of those religions. (Harijan, 16 Feb 1934).

 

II.         I should love all the men ---- not only in India but in the world ----belonging to the different faiths, to become better people by contact with one another, and if that happens, the world will be a much better place to live in than it is today. I plead for the broadest toleration and I am working to that end …I do not expect the India of my dream to develop one religion, i.e. to be wholly Hindu or wholly Christian, or wholly Mussalman, but I want it to be wholly tolerant with its religions working side by side with one another. (Young India,: December 22, 1927}.    

Note: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on 2^nd October 1869.  He is also  called Mahatma Gandhi and the father of the nation, for he used the unique method of non-violence to get India liberated from the British rule . Indiia became free on 15^th August 1947. Unfortunately, he was assassinated in New Delhi by an Indian on 30^th January  1948. Among the masses of India he is also remembered as BAPU.  

 

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2^nd October 2022                                                                                G.R.Kanwal