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DHARMA IN PRACTICE
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by age to bear the severe strain of training required for the understanding and practising of religion, blankness of despair alone remains staring one in the face. Add to this the fact that the human birth is very difficult to obtain, so that he who wastes his opportunity now may have, for ages to come, to wander in the lower grades of life where the soul is generally too much over-burdened with karmic impurities to acquire the truth or to benefit thereby. He who delays in respect of the ascertainment and adoption of truth, therefore, is the greatest enemy of him
self.
It is also essential that our children should be imparted the truth and trained, in their very infancy, to a life of severe rigidity required by religion, for childhood is the age of impressionability, and the mind of infancy is like a green twig which may be bent as desired. The method which the ancients found most useful for the training of their children, aimed at (1) impressing the mind with the greater importance of obtaining spiritual emancipation over secular gain, and (2) the actual building up of character, so that by the time the pupil completed the course of study he became a perfect model of gentlemanliness and selfabnegation in the true sense of the words. He might be the son of a king or millionaire, but that made no difference to him; his conduct was always righteous and becoming, for the subjugation of lust and greed, the two principal causes of all evil tendencies and traits, left his mind ever pure and tranquil and bent on the realisation of the true Ideal of the soul. While with the teacher-118ually a man known as much for piety as learning-he was called upon to live in conformity with the strictest rules of the brahmacharya āśrama (conduct prescribed for a pupil)-serving the master, refraining from marriage and lustful thoughts, studying Scripture and the like. This course of early training always stood him in good stead in the midst of the trials and temptations of youth, enabling him to bring under his control such powerful enemies of the soul as pride, deceit, anger and other similar passions and emotions. As he grew up, he found himself called upon to practise those virtues of self-control, toleration, equanimity and love which, when perfected, mark the conduct of holy ascetics and saints. In due course he became the head of his family, relieving his elders of the duties of
