Book Title: Law of Karma
Author(s): Nirmala Jha
Publisher: Capital Pubishing House Delhi

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Page 76
________________ 66 Law of Karma certainly. It cannot be a blind law, for no blind law can govern the conduct of living beings, That Law then which governs all life is God. The Law and the Law-giver are one. We should not deny Law or the Law-giver, because we know so little about It or Him. Just as our denial of the existence of an earthly power will avail us nothing, so our denial of God and His Law does not make any difference with the believer of God. Moreover, just as an acceptance of earthly rules makes the journey of life easier in the same way acceptance of divine authority makes life's journey easier. Gandhiji believes in a personal God. Though, he at times, speaks like a Sankarite that God has no personality, yet his denial of personality is based on the assumption that personality means the form of a human being. God is not a person. To affirm that he descends to earth every now and then in the form of a human being is a partial truth which inerely signifies that such a person lives near to God. There are divergent views about the exact meaning of personality among the Western thinkers also. If personality includes self-consciousness plus will, Gandhiji may be said to believe in the personality of God. He holds God as the Omniscient, Omnipotent, Creator and just Governor of the world. Therefore, it will be reasonable to think that Gandhiji was a theist-a Vaishnava rather than an Advaitist. In the course of an article in his paper “Young India", he replies to a friend's question : I am an Advaitist and yet I can support dvaitisni (dualism). The world is changing every moment, ard is therefore unreal, it has no permanent existence. But though it is constantly changing. it has a something about it which persists and it is therefore to that extent real. I have therefore no objection to calling it real and unreal, and thus being called an Anekāntavādi or Syūdavidj. But my Syādvāda is not the Syādvāda of the learned, it is peculiarly of my own.5 God, for Gandhiji, was an all-pervasive Reality, immanent in man and also in the world, which he regarded as His

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