Search Results

Death was created by Brahma. Greed, anger, talking ill of others, envy, jealousy, ill-will, confusion of perception, shamelessness, and wounding words spoken to each other—these devour the bodies of those who are embodied. Everybody wants to live and fears death. In this essay Badrinath says how both the Mahabharata and Jaina thought make us aware of, in concrete terms, how to live, so that we can be free of the fear of death.

Badrinath writes in this essay that while in the West, pain and suffering were cultivated as the conscious means to self-experience and maximum feeling, in a considerable part of Indian thought, pain was sought for the very opposite reason—to gain freedom from experience and feelings. A definite fear of happiness runs through a great part of Indian thought, for happiness is perceived as transitory. What is transitory is perceived as of little value, for it is productive eventually of pain. The state of sam-nyasa is not a state of withdrawal or renunciation but a state of knowing the true place of human attributes in their natural unity.

What, or who, governs the mind? Badrinath says that the mind, given its innate power of self-observation and self-criticism, sifts various layers one deeper than the other, of perceptions wrapped in ignorance. Faculty of the mind brings knowledge, which comes from human endeavour, to which the Yoga-vasishtha attaches greatest importance. But because knowledge is a product of the mind, there seems to be a circular reasoning involved here. Besides, if everything is ‘a web of thought’, then what is called knowledge is also in that web. Sage Vasishtha himself raised these questions, and later demonstrated that, in actual truth, the process of knowledge is a process of ‘overcoming ignorance by ignorance’.

The Yoga-vasishtha goes into the causes both of well-being and ill-being, of health (svastha) and of illness (a-svastha). In this essay Badrinath raises the great concern of mental and physical health because human well-being is threatened in various degrees. He states how the modern system of medicine has separated the mind from the body. Thus, health is seen as something that is entirely physical, and not connected to the mind. Not every illness or disease is created by the disturbed mind. Those that are, can be cured only by the self-reflecting mind. But there are others which can be cured by proper medical treatment. Badrinath says how no medical system of ancient India thought health to be merely the absence of disease. The Sanskrit word for health is sva-astha, ‘a state of being centred in one’s self’. Similarly, the word for illness is a-svastha, a state of being displaced from the centre of one’s being. And both, like everything else in Dharmic thought, are relational terms.

In this essay Badrinath mentions that the question of determinism versus free will has remained throughout history a central question of human life everywhere. In Indian thought, it was viewed from six different angles. Karma had held the individual so completely responsible for what he made of himself that the burden of it seemed far too much to bear alone. In the domain of karma there is neither grace nor reprieve. One is alone with one’s acts and their inevitable fruition.