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Metaphysics, Ethics and Spiritual Development
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essary nourishment for spiritual life and attain spiritual welfare, if he makes sincere efforts to satisfy his ‘hunger'.
True religion or the path of purification and spiritual welfare is good conduct. To understand rightly that unfailing means of spiritual welfare is right knowledge. To have unflinching faith in that means is right faith. And to employ that means into practice is good conduct. Thus right faith, right knowledge and right conduct—all the three have good conduct for their object. [When it is said that the object of right conduct is goo conduct, it means that good conduct is the object of practice and observance.) Thus we should have faith in good conduct, we should know as to what constitutes good conduct, and we should practise good conduct in accordance with our faith and knowledge.
In his Yogaśāstra (Vrtti on iv. 109) Acārya Hemacandra states that faith means desire for religion.' Religion is nothing but path of duty and righteousness. So desire for religion ultimately means desire to follow that path. Faith or samyagdarśana, being desire-for-religion having this sense alone, can never be confined to a particular religious sect alone.
We should know that the fruit of religion is not other-worldly alone. In other words, it is not that the results of the practice of religion are not gained in the present birth but in the future births alone. Even a wise man who has faith neither in soul nor in life after death (i.e., rebirth), or who has doubts about them, follows the path of religion, that is, the path of justice and righteousness with pleasure and delight. Why? It is because he is convinced that if man follows the path of friendliness and justice, his present life will be happy and peaceful and his life after death, if at all it exists, will also be full of happiness on account of the influence of the continuously flowing wholesome stream of the present life. He firmly believes that love breeds love, goodness breeds goodness. The understanding that the practice of religion gives its fruit to practiser in this very birth is not only right but necessary also. If a man leads godly life here, then only he will be born as a god in his next birth. It is wholly on account of his leading beastly or hellishly evil life that he is born as a beast or an infernal being in the next birth. And if he develops humane qualities in the present life, he will be born again as a human being. It is natural that a man performing actions befitting hellish life goes to hell after death; and if he performs acts that fit in with the life of an animal
1. sraddha dharmābhilāşah /
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