Acharya Mahaprajna
The Daily Rising Kashmir
Religious exterior is not important, truth is.
- Acharya Mahaprajna
Today we face a pointed question - that in spite of so much preaching and sermons from different religions the actual conduct is not changing at all. Man is the same, unchanged. Anuvrat revolution (a movement initiated by Acharya Tulsi in 1949) explored its reasons and preached that human conduct is most important from religious point of view, not the worship or performing of rituals.
The foremost is conduct; worship and rituals are secondary. Unfortunately, the harsh reality is that nowadays a prayer, worship and rituals have become primary and human conduct, behavior and character have been rendered secondary or ignored. Deliverance cannot be achieved by repeating any word in particular; it is achieved by directly experiencing the ultimate truth. Also there is no predetermined path. That is the reason that religious sermons appear ineffective, dull and insipid. Religion is not able to influence and transform the individual and society.
The second important subject is to authorize only the pious in behavior for conducting worship and performing rituals. People with good character feel uncomfortable in the company of bad characters. Will God not feel uncomfortable when worshipped by persons with polluted and perverse character!
In Jain tradition, there is a categorized list of sins. In that, eighteen kinds of sins have been explained. If man can live avoiding them then he can automatically solve and check most of the problem in his life. I am just explaining four sins out of those eighteen sins. These sins are quarrelling, blaming, backbiting and censuring. Yesterday somebody asked, "Is the definition of sin and sacredness eternal or impermanent?" Though the nature of sin and sacredness changes in the context of social values, it remains eternal in the context of attachment and hatred. Quarrelling is eternally sinful. Some people take interest in quarrelling. They are always inclined to indulge in squabbles and tussles, and never want to avoid them. A religious man should always avoid quarrels; this is his primary duty. He should never indulge in quarrels knowingly.
The second doctrine of awakening is to be free from the act of blaming others falsely. Without proper and complete knowledge, we should never blame each others. It is the greatest sin. It tantamount to murdering the person. Though death comes to all one day, whether naturally or unnaturally, timely or untimely and chapter of life is closed, but assassination of character is the greater death. An awakened person avoids it and never gets involved in it.
The third doctrine of the awakened life is commitment towards the truth. Today, materialism is at its height and it is expected that in the 21st century, man will not have to do any work; the machine will do everything. That will be totally a machine era. Even after attaining the machine era, if man still does not reform then people will prefer to have that old, less developed era and culture, because, in due course, the situation may worsen to the extent that is may not be reversible and reparable. That is why, it is essential that man should develop his commitment towards truth:
Compassion is an important principle of social change. It is one of the most authentic expressions of spirituality. Compassion involves standing together with all. Man should not torture any creature. In spite of so many doctors, hospitals and advanced system of medicines, we have many diseases. On critically analyzing with profound insight, you will observe that there is extreme cruelty behind the modernization and advancement of medical systems. In order to diagnose and find treatment for a disease, thousands of frogs and monkeys are killed in the wake of initial trials being done on them. The single, onerous purpose of the merciless killing of mice and monkeys is to keep man healthy. There is so much of cruelty at the background of health that obviously the number of diseases will increase. So the diseases are the outcome of the cruelties inflicted upon innocent frogs, monkeys and guinea pigs.