1. NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

Dear Bhagavatas,
We continue our article on Karma, Janna and Dharma being the second of the three part excerpts from "Hinduism Rediscovered".

Dasoham
Anbil Ramaswamy

2. Excerpts from Chapter 11 of "Hinduism Rediscovered"
on Karma, Janma and Dharma

1.4. UDASINA, ANUMANTA AND PRERITA
1.4.1 UDASINA ( Indifferent)
God does not want to interfere with man's free will. In the first stage, He adopts an attitude of Udaasina (indifference). No child would relish an undue interference in its activities by its parents. So also, God keeps himself away, even though he is all the time watching how we behave, whether we play our part well or ill.

Imagine a silver screen on which is projected a battle scene. All the fierce fighting, the bloodshed, slaughters, guns roaring and spitting forth fire all are depicted on the screen so realistically that we sometimes slip over the edge of our seats in sheer involvement with the happenings on the screen. But, the screen itself is unaffected, unperturbed and remains a constant and silent witness to all the turmoil. It is not in the least involved except for providing a base for the enactment of the entire battle scene. So also, God is an Eye witness, but a silent one, of our own battles of life.

To cite another analogy, just as a lamp which lights the room is a silent witness to all the happenings in the room and does not get involved, God is a silent witness to all the happenings in the world and does not get involved.

1.4.2 ANUMANTHA (Permitting)
In the second stage, he adopts the attitude of 'Anumantha' (i.e.) he permits or tolerates. Let us, for example, take the case of discipline on the road. The roads have been laid and maintained, the lanes demarcated, the driving rules of the road published for your guidance, the driving license is issued after a strict oral and / or a practical test. Road signs and warnings displayed at appropriate places. To keep driving on the lanes, or keeping up the speed limits prescribed cannot be construed as undue interference in your freedom. Driving on the left side of the road (as in USA) cannot be called arbitrary denial of your freedom to drive as you like. All these are meant to enforce a certain discipline for your safety only.

The police does not interfere nor can in all cases of transgressions. On the assumption that motorists are law abiding, the law enforcing authorities may take a Udaasina or indifferent attitude in the first instance. They may even allow you to exceed the speed limits by say not more than 10 miles per hour over the maximum prescribed. This can be likened to the 'Anumanta' or permission aspect of God's attitude in the second stage.

Mr.ARTHUR ROBSON asks
"What would you do if you notice an unhatched chicken trying to peck its way out of its egg? To remove the egg shell would result in premature exposure and the chicken would be so much the weaker. No; let it peck its own way out of the shell, as the mother hen lets do, while she chuckles encouragement.. The same applies to a man trying to break his way in his evolution to be left to work his way unassisted - whether for good or for bad"4.
It is not known whether there are any rewards provided for a record of safe driving - other than the reward of not losing your limb or life in an accident! Maybe, the insurance company might charge you less on your next premium!.

1.4.3. PRERITA (Inducing)
But, if you exceed the limits and the cops catch you, they give a warning, then a ticket and the penalty increases with every offense repeated. These are only disincentives provided to discipline you. This can be compared to the Prerita attitude of God. When you show a genuine longing to tread the moral codes of conduct laid down in the Sastric injunctions, God is pleased and provides encouragement and incentives for you to progress on spiritual lines.

Lives of great souls like Meera, Kabir, Nanak, Tulsidas and a myriad Bhaktas bear ample testimony to the way God provided them with more and more opportunities to become evolved and finally reach Godhead.

Contrarily, when someone shows an adamant tendency in disregarding the codes of conduct and indulges in actions prohibited by ethical and moral standards, the only way they would learn their lesson would be by experiencing the consequences of their actions, if not in this life itself - at least in future lives.

Where instruction fails to reform Experience succeeds in disciplining.

When one is too much wicked, too much egoistic and too much obstinate - as for example in the case of Hitler and other dictators, God encourages them to go on with their victories which at last turn out to be 'phyrric' and they meet with their deserved doom. God invests in human beings a free will and instructs them to use it to behave like human beings on their own and only when Adharma (evil) increases beyond limits, he intervenes to set things right and put back humans on the right track.

That is why the unscrupulous, the fakes, the frauds and the con-men seem to flourish where honest folk seem to flounder. They are encouraged to go on indulging in their evil ways until ultimately they meet with a disaster that would really devastate them. This again provides them one more opportunity to introspect and correct themselves or in the alternative suffer the consequences and perish.

Why do good people suffer? And why bad people prosper? These are questions which are very frequently being asked. We do not delve deep and see only one side of the picture. If you look at the complete picture, you will understand that after all your life is not all that unhappy and those of the bad guy all that full of felicity. They or their heirs have to pay the price for their misdemeanors sooner or later. For the fault of a Louis XIV a Louis XVI was punished. The ultimate punishment meted out to a bad person will be infinitely greater than the passing clouds of suffering of an upright person. If you are good and your well laid plans fail, it means that the divine power that directs you is giving a warning signal that there is some deficiency in your plan that is likely to land you in trouble. And, when your plans succeed, it means the divine power has bestowed its seal of approval for your plan to succeed.

The great poet KANNADASAN Sang :
If all that you desire come to pass, you will never realize that there is a superior power guiding you. If you go on brooding over what has happened to your detriment - there will be no peace of mind"5.

So, do your duty. As Winston Churchill put it -"Have faith in God, but keep your powder dry" or as the Burmese (now Myanmar) Prime Minister, Aung San observed -
"Hope for the best but Be prepared for the worst".

As for 'faith in God' - we do have it so long as we desire specific good and we do pray for specific results. As we are all human, it is natural for us to seek what we need. This is an acknowledgment of our own incapacity to fulfill our needs all by ourselves and reveals our humility and trust in God's capacity to fulfill them.

God dispenses his blessings only commensurate with our merits and if our sincerity is really deep, absolute, unconditional and unflinching like that of DRAUPADI or GAJENDRA, certainly He will deem it an extenuating circumstance and even waive or overlook our ineligibility stemming from our deficiencies. But, if we approach prayer solely as a means for the satisfaction of our every need on every occasion, then we would become disappointed. This is because God knows what is ultimately good for us and however he answers our prayers it would be for that ultimate good.

It is one thing to beg God for benefits; it is another to love for its own sake. When you see a beautiful natural scenery, you love it; you enjoy it. You don't expect any pecuniary benefits out of it. When you see the smile of an innocent baby, you forget everything else and you are enraptured by its bewitching smiles and pranks. No monetary expectations intervene. Your love of God should also be like this. You should feel that you cannot live without loving God.

"With the development of the notion of Karma, the attainment of the individual loka was seen to depend not on the performance of the sacrifice, but on individual moral responsibility. Thus, however complex the system of lokas may appear to be in Indian cosmology or whether mythically presented for the edification of the masses or philosophically analyzed for the sophisticated, the conclusion reached seems to be that man makes his own Loka- either a heaven or hell - 6

"The earth is a kind of 'soul school' where man has to graduate himself to become qualified for salvation or become a 'drop out' to be condemned to future lives on earth again and again until he works his way up finally" 6.

Each individual is wholly responsible for his present condition and will have exactly the future he is now creating. Most people are unwilling to admit this. They prefer to locate the source of their difficulties outside themselves. They want excuses, someone to blame that they may be exonerated. This says Hinduism is simply immature. Everyone gets exactly what he deserves.

As we have made our beds and so must we lie on them. Those who have made their bed are like the proverbial caterpillar which while coming to the end of a blade of grass draws itself together before leaping on to the next, their souls leave their bodies and take to others in the process of evolution.

"Every act, every thought is weighed in the invisible but universal balance scales of justice. The day of judgment is not in some remote future, but here and now and none can escape it. Divine laws cannot be evaded. They are not so much imposed from without as wrought into our natures. Sin is not so much a defiance of God as a denial of soul, not so much a violation of law as a betrayal of self. We carry with us the whole of our past. It is our ineffaceable record which time cannot blur nor death erase"7.

The judge who presides over the law of Karma is ALWAYS WITHIN the individual NEVER WITHOUT and dispenses justice whereby virtue is made to bring its own rewards and vice its own retribution.

Melanippe of Euripedes puts it picturesquely thus: " Dream you that man's misdeeds fly up to Heaven? And then, some hand inscribes the record of them upon God's tablets? And, God reading them deals the world justice? Not at all.. The vault of Heaven could not find room to write the crimes of earth nor God himself avail to punish them. Justice is here on earth, if only you had the eyes to see! "

1.5. GOD'S WILL AND MAN'S FREE WILL
The interrelationship of "Gods will" and "man's free will" may be summed up as follows :

• I may do what I like; but whether I can do at all depends on God's will.
• I may live as I choose ; but whether I live at all depends on God's will.
• I may breath any air pure or polluted; but whether I breath at all is decided by God's will
• I may see hear, smell, feel or taste as I like (of course, subject to mundane limitations and societal restrictions); but whether I am enabled to see, hear, smell , feel or taste is beyond my control. It is in God's control.
• The 'may' is within my power and free will 'whether I can at all' is in the power and will of God.

According to St. Bernard " Grace is necessary for salvation; Freewill equally so. But grace in order to give salvation; freewill in order to receive it. Therefore, we should not attribute part of the good work to grace and part to freewill; It is performed in its entirety by the common and inseparable action of both; entirely by grace, entirely by freewill but springing from the first in the second"

Some scholars think that the idea of a future life depended on previous behavior must have developed from a long period of keenly observing plants, trees and fields. Hinduism believes that land gives 'birth' repeatedly if healthy seeds are sown and tended. They saw that plants do not really die; the death of a plant is a process by which it renews itself in the spring. In a sense, each life of a plant ends in a death in order to be reborn. A plant's regrowth is determined by the healthy or unhealthy conditions of former births. Scholars believe that Hinduism felt the same to be true of all living beings.

Suppose, you give a goldsmith some amount of gold for making a chain. Someone else gives some gold for making a ring. The goldsmith cannot be blamed of partiality when he delivers the chain to you and the ring to the other person. He delivers to the respective customers whatever they had desired. Though God has powers to do anything he likes, He does dispense the end products exactly as desired by the individual creatures as expressed through their 'Karma'.

If one realizes this truth, one would not curse God as being partial or without eyes or without mercy. Lord Krishna says

"Works do not cling to me. In me there is no desire for fruits whoever understands me as such, he is not bound by Karma"8.

In the mundane world itself, we are subject to so many restrictions, forces and curbs on our actions. Let us see why a person does not normally go astray. Quite a few are intrinsically averse to it due to their Vasanas. But, a large majority of us do not indulge in immoral activities firstly, because of the innate fear generated by our conscience; secondly, the feeling of shame should we be caught red handed by a disapproving peer group where we would like to maintain our prestige;, thirdly, the fear of punishment on detection by the police, courts or other law enforcing authorities and last but not the least due to the fear of contracting diseases say for example - in the case of AIDS. Even people given to beastly habits in the matter of food and sex are now returning to the mainstream of disciplined life and are inclined to "preserving family values" not because of any real change of heart but because of the irony that it needed such a dreadful scourge as AIDS to correct them.

SECTION 2 : PUNARJANMA (REINCARNATION)
We saw that 'Prarabda' karma is only a fragmentary fraction of the Himalayan load of 'Sanchitha Karma', to experience the effects of which - the soul inherits at the commencement of the current life. The balance of Sanchita karma is formidable that it could take innumerable lives for the soul to pay off the karmic price for all the actions by experiencing the cosmic requital of karma. This is based on the assumption that the soul does not accumulate any further 'Agami Karma' in the current and subsequent lives. And, only when there is no balance of Karma whatsoever that the soul could secure deliverance from the cycle of births and deaths.

This takes us to the 'Reincarnation theory' which is inextricably interlinked with the 'Karma theory' "The reincarnationist, grounded as he is in the karmic principle, is only extending the scene, knowing as he does that man has a much longer history than the date on his birth - certificate; He has also a longer future than the date that is to be on his death certificate A future which be can make or mar"9

"The process by which a soul passes through a sequence of bodies is known as 'Reincarnation' or transmigration of the soul. In Sanskrit, 'Samsara' - a word which means 'flow through'. The word is derived from the roots 'Sam' - Together and 'Sru' to flow. Perpetual bondage to the universal flow - a continuum of all Karman.

It is said that a man's life is like a bead on a necklace whose other beads represent past and future life spans.

A lifetime is one 'en-via' (i.e.) a passage. We can neither seek nor do we need to be afraid of its end. The immortal soul will don an appropriate body. SAMSARA is then a 'half way house', ' home away from home'., a ' transit camp' from one station to another in the journey of life"10.

The Upanishads declare that those who are of holy conduct here will enter a holy womb either of a Brahmin, Kshatriya or Vaisya. But, those who have a despicable conduct here will enter a despicable womb say of a dog or a pig or an outcast.

"A person's 'karma' is the principal factor in determining his happiness or unhappiness in life. A man reaps at that age, whether in infancy, youth, or old age at which he had sowed it in his previous birth"-11

Some are precocious or born geniuses. Why? It is the carry over of the 'Vasanas' and unfinished 'Sadhanas' (accomplishments) in their previous lives.

"The psychiatrist traces the reaction of psychological inputs within a single life. Karma theory probes deeper, in fact all of the previous lives and the unbroken chain reaction of Karma"12. Desires trigger the will, Will prompts the deeds, Deeds lead to habits, Habits mold the Character, Character decides the Destiny.

The extent of each individual's life, his happiness or otherwise in this life will be measured exactly by what he has wanted in the past; Similarly, his present aspirations and behaviors would determine his future state. Every act of his has its equal and opposite reaction on himself.

Rig Veda X.16.3, Satapata Brahmana I.5.3.4 and X.3.3.8 mention the dispersal of the members of the human body at death - the eye to the Sun, breath to the wind, speech to fire, mind to moon, ear to quarters, body to earth, soul to ether, hair to plants and trees, blood and seed to waters.

Brihadaranyaka Upanishad III.2.13 says that while on this subject, a disciple asked Yagnavalkya as to what remains of the individual. He took the disciple apart and discussed with him the secret of works. He revealed that a man indeed becomes good by good works and evil by evil works. In other words, our works ( karmas) incarnate our characters.

"Each thought and deed delivers an unseen chisel blow toward the sculpturing of his destiny"13.

Together these theories constitute an explanation of the inexplicable. Without these, many of us would have shared the same lack of peace of mind which the people of developed countries are experiencing. They have every thing except peace of mind. As they try to rationalize the anomalies of life, they ultimately turn to India to find valid explanations which they condemned earlier as senseless superstition. These theories of Karma and Punarjanma provided Hindus with a reason for human differences or mental abilities, that it must be a result of their deeds in this life or a past life. Karma and Samsara also encourage Hindus to act ethically because if they do not, they only will suffer for their poor actions.

Why are some born great or rich, why some become great or rich and why for some others greatness and riches are thrust on them? Why some are born meek, weak or poor and continue to languish?

A lady went to a maternity ward to observe the births of children and found different babies born differently. If God is merciful all babies would have been born alike in health and comforts. This itself shows that they had several lives before and they were born so differently now because of the differences in the past-karma of each one of them.

To blame 'karma' is like blaming science and technology for the violence and terrorism that rock the world today. If we do not understand the Karma theory, it is because only when the outcome of our choice is happy do we claim credit for the causative actions; when the consequences are otherwise, we tend to deny any association with the causative factors and seek 'alibi' for escaping responsibility for the wrong action.

We have heard people saying that if they had the opportunities like their model personality, they would have become as great as that model personality. But, this is not true. The greatness of the said model personality must have grown by his repeatedly doing through innumerable lives the things he has been specializing. The 'talents' or 'gifts' come from one's having so specialized over so many lives that in due course of time he starts reaping the fruits of such specialized talents Cases of birth- marks corresponding to death wounds in previous lives and very often, cases of phobias and philias are carry over from previous lives. (To continue)