Family and Nation

Author(s): Mahapragna Acharya, A P J Abdulkalam
Publisher: Harper Publications India

Page 98

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THE FAMILY AND THE NATION
traditions. For instance, the Ahimsa commandment in Jainism not to kill and not to harm does not arise from a feeling of compassion, but from the idea of keeping one's self undefiled by worldly greed and selfishness. It belongs originally to the ethic of becoming more perfect, not to the ethic of interpersonal action.
The nineteenth century saw the birth of some great sages and saints who were animated by a sense of the spiritual unity of the Universe and stood as exemplars of a way of life that reflects that sense. Among them were Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and Sri Ramana Maharishi. These great souls transformed the religious outlook of modern India in a healthy, positive way, and it can be said that as long as that influence is intact, the religious ethos of modern India will remain on the whole well-balanced.
TRAFFIC WITH THE PAST
The serenity and peace among the lamas living in monasteries high up in the mountains is in amazing contrast to the hurry and distraction of modern life. Their deep faith in the reality of eternal values and their earnest endeavour to live, individually and socially, in the light of that faith seems almost ideal. On the other side of the spectrum is the modern youth's understandable reluctance to accept doubtful authority or uncritically follow half-understood traditions.
How can we deny that religions have confounded eternal truth with temporal facts and have become a sort of traffic with the past. Serious thinkers who should know better are spending their time and energy in finding modern ideas in ancient texts or reading meanings into them which are not there. Unable to show the independent relevance of their own domain, men of religion have begun to turn tradition into a facet of modernity, to defend religion on the basis of the latest findings of science. We keep forgetting the untiring