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