Bhavana Bodh

Author(s): Shrimad Rajchandra
Publisher: Shrimad Rajchandra Ashram

Page 10

BHAVANA BODH
Might and valour may raise a man very high and so he may naturally desire to gain them but therein is shown the danger of defeat by an enemy. Beauty and lustrous body infatuates its enjoyer and therefore women having them are always afraid of their enjoyers or molesters. The labyrinth of scriptural matters woven as intricate webs, is open to controversies. The joy of any worldly happiness is open to the fear of being censured by wicked persons. A living body, extremely loved by its possessor, is one day liable to die and so it is a source of fear of impending death. Thus all accompaniments and accomplishments of living beings, though mind absorbing, are shortlived and fraught with fears. Discriminatively thinking, where there is fear, there is unalloyed sorrow and misery and where there is sorrow and misery there is absence of real happiness and where there is absence of real happiness, that thing or place or acquisition deserves contempt and abandonment.
It is not that only Bhartruhari alone has said it. From the very beginning of this world, according to changing times, persons without number, higher than Bhartruhari, equal to Bhartruhari and lower than Bhartruhari in acquisitions, have become philosophers. There is no period of time or part of Aryadesh wherein philosophers have not lived and all of them have unanimously said that worldly pleasures are shortlived and bound to result in sorrow, misery and fear and this they have declared as a result of their unfathomable spiritual insight and philosophical discriminative disclosure. What great souls such as Vyas, Valmiki, Shankara, Gautam, Patanjali, Kapil and Prince Shuddhodana in their teachings cryptically and generally advised the world to follow can be summed up to some extent as under:
"O PEOPLE OF THE WORLD, THE SEA OF SANSARA OR WORLDLY EXISTENCE IS UNENDING AND SHORELESS OR UNFATHOMABLE; TRY WITH ALL YOUR MIGHT TO KNOW ITS REAL NATURE AND TO LIBERATE YOURSELVES FROM IT !!"
Their aim in giving the above advice was to free every living being from sorrow and suffering. As compared with all other great teachers' advices, the highly acceptable and worthy of following is the teaching of all-knowing Mahavir who repeatedly states in all his