Hajarimalmuni Smruti Granth

Author(s): Shobhachad Bharilla
Publisher: Hajarimalmuni Smruti Granth Prakashan Samiti Byavar

Page 1022

a
14 :
€
"This is the divine state, O Partha; having attained thereto, one is not again bewildered;
fixed in that state at the hour of death one can attain to the bliss of God." (2:72) Gandhi had an unshakable belief in God, a belief he held throughout his life. If we analyze his utterances about his theistic ideas, we reach the conclusion that his notion of, and faith in, God was partly borrowed from the Bhagavadgita, though his ethics based on this kind of metaphysics was his own interpretation. While defining God, Gandhi wrote:
"To me God is Truth and Love; God is ethics and morality; God is fearlessness. God is the source of Light and Life and yet He is above and beyond all these. God is conscience. He is even the atheism of the atheist. For in His boundless love God permits the atheist to live. He is the searcher of hearts. He transcends speech and reason...He is a personal God to those who need His personal presence. He is embodied to those who need His touch. He is the purest essence. He simply is to those who have faith.
He is all things to all men. He is in us and yet above and beyond us". In the Gita Truth and fearlessness are inseparable—the very purpose of the Gita was to shatter Arjuna's illusions about the nature of reality and thus enable him to act righteously, without doubt or fear. God in the Gita is clearly the source of life (3:10; 10:20) and yet transcends life as we know it-the realm of Prakriti, in which multiplicity and tension among the gunas prevail. Of God 'the searcher of hearts' and 'the source of Light', Krishna, speaking as the Cosmic Person, says: "IO Arjuna, am the self seated in the hearts of all creatures.. of the lights (I am) the radiant sun; of the stars I am the moon". (10:20-21) As the disagreement among scholars testifies, the God of the Gita can be all things to all men. The Gita ultimately accords no essential difference, or superiority in status, between the indescribable, eternal, unitive Brahman, and the Lord who takes a human form to guide all that exists in the realm of differentiation. From a purely scholastic point of view, the concept of a personal God is incompatible with the second sophisticated metaphysics. Similarly, the scholar cannot reconcile the role alloted to the ritualistic and liturgical Vedas (though indeed it is a small role), or the presence of three "separate" paths to God in the Gita. But the iconoclastic spirit is foreign to Hinduism, for the sage knows that if the God search is sincere, no expression of this search is without some value and no guideposts without some function. In addition, the reality of the Divine does not lend itself to direct verbal communication. For these reasons Krishna says: "Let no one who knows the whole unsettle the minds of the ignorant who know only a part." (3:29) Though the metaphysics of the Gita is not pure Monism, it certainly holds the unchanging, unitive Self to be the source of all existence. It is noteworthy that Gandhi made an attempt to define God in his own way by adhering to a more pluralistic view of reality, saying: "I talk of God as I believe Him to be, creative as well as non-creative. This is the result of my acceptance of the doctrine of the manyness of reality...He is one and yet many. Of the immanence of God he would say:
"There is an indefinable mysterious Power that pervades everything. I feel it, though I do not see it. It is this unseen Power which makes itself felt and yet defies all proof, because it is so unlike all that I perceive through my senses. It transcends the senses... I dimly perceive that while everything around me is ever changing, ever dying, there is
1IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII! IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII..
S IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII.... .
www. brary.org
Jain Edi