________________
148
AMAR VANE
And you, another large group of clouds ! You neither thunder nor rain. Like half-dead worms you only creep about in the sky and waste yourselves. This is no life. Nobody knows when you come and when you go. The beauty of life is in meaningful and respectable expression of it. Obscure life is no life.
Four Kinds of Flowers
There are four kinds of flowers. The first kind of flower is the flower that has beauty but no fragrance. The second flower has fragrance, but no beauty. The third flower has neither beauty nor fragrance. The fourth flower is beautiful as well as fragrant.
Lord Mahavira exhorts man to be a flower of the fourth kind. He should be beautiful as well as fragrant. He should have the beauty of serenity and sobriety in his bearing. and the fragrance of truth, love and kindness within. So long as a man lives, he should scatter his. fragrance, and even after his death his fragrance should continue to sweeten the atmosphere of the world. This is the speciality of the flower of humanity. It may drop and die, but its fragrance lies for ever.
From the Mahavira-house
From the Mahavira-house in Delhi I see before me the Gandhi Park. A group of children has assembled there around a mango tree. A boy picks up a piece of stone and hurls it at the fruits. He waits for a while to see whether his stone would bring down a fruit or not. If the fruit falls to the ground, he grapples at it and puts it in
Jain Education International
For Private & Personal Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org