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PROBLEM OF AVIDYA
[CH.
adharma (demerit) accrue from this pravṛtti. Now this pravṛtti quâ dharma and adharma together with the dosas produce the feelings of pleasure and pain as well as their conditions such as the body, senseorgans, sense-objects and consciousness. These products are repeatedly accepted as well as rejected and the process has no end till the soul is emancipated. The worldly life (loka) is carried on by the current of this ceaseless process of acceptance and rejection. Mithyājñāna (wrong assessment of values), dosa (defects), pravṛtti (volitional activity), janma (birth) and duḥkha (suffering) are the recurring links of the chain of worldly life (samsara).2
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Thus the primal and most fundamental condition of the worldly career punctuated by birth and death in unbroken succession is delusion or perverted belief which accepts the evil for the good and rejects the good for the evil masquerading as good. Under the influence of this overpowering passion the soul identifies itself with the psycho-physical organism and the external environment and develops love and hatred, sympathy and antipathy, desire and aversion for whatever is found to be conducive or otherwise to the temporary well-being of its embodied existence. The body may be gross or subtle according as its material varies, but the result is the same viz. its limitation to the little environment in which it is placed. The besetting sin of worldly career is that the self does not distinguish itself from the body and thus develops an inordinate love for what is pleasant and useful to the body and antipathy for what is harmful and unpleasant. The embodied existence necessarily generates a possessive impulse and goads the soul to acquire the good things of the earth. This love of property eventually leads to faction and feud when a competitor arrives to contest the claim. These worldly activities which absorb all the interest of the person produce in their turn merit and demerit according as the activities are good or bad. Disinterested service of fellow creatures generates religious merit and the opposite course of action produces religious demerit. These again necessitate the fresh birth in a new body and environment which are calculated to produce the consequences of the moral values acquired in the past lives. But as this fresh life again is also the occasion for the acquisition of fresh merit and demerit, it invariably leads to another birth. Birth means enjoyment and suffering, growth and decay, and lastly death which is nothing but the dissolution of the physical body. So the worldly career necessarily entails suffering and pain. It may be disputed whether the balance of happiness is greater than unhappiness. But Indian philosophers have unanimously condemned worldly career, because it is not
one of
1 See NS, I. 1. 20 with Bhasya.
2 Cf. ta ime mithyajñānādayo duḥkhanta dharma avicchedenai 'va pravarta. mānāḥ saṁsära iti-Bhāṣya, NS, I. 1. 2.
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