October 2011 - Advaita Ashrama

32
636
dear to me. He who has no desire, who is pure,
who is dextrous, who is impartial, who is free
from fear, who has renounced every undertaking—he
who is (such) a devotee of mine is
dear to me (13–16).
The Bhagavata also presents two interesting instances
wherein we can find confirmation of the
nexus between morality and spirituality. The first
one is about Vedic ritual-bound brahmanas and
the other about Ranti Deva. In the first story some
brahmanas who were pure, honest, and dedicated
to scriptural study punctiliously performed rituals,
yet they were woefully lacking in spiritual
insight. As a result they did not help the cowherd
boys distraught with hunger and thirst. They even
failed to recognize the Lord.3 In the second moving
story King Ranti Deva, who together with
his family was starving due to a famine, obtained
some food to assuage their gnawing hunger. As he
was about to share the food with his family members,
a brahmana guest arrived and begged him for
food to appease his hunger. The king gladly gave
him a good portion of the food, seeing the Lord
in him. As he was about to divide the remaining
food among his family members, a labourer appeared
on the scene and appealed to the king for
food. Seeing again the Lord in him Ranti Deva
gave him some food. When he was about to apportion
the remaining little food among his family,
a hunter with a pack of dogs presented himself
before him and prayed for food for the dogs and
for himself. Ranti Deva’s spiritual insight was so
profound that he saw the hunter and the dogs as
manifestations of the Lord. He prostrated before
them and gladly offered them the remaining food.
Ranti Deva had now only some water to slake the
thirst. Presently, an outcaste turned up and begged
him for water to quench his thirst. Ranti Deva was
moved to great pity on hearing the heart-rending
appeal of the outcaste and uttered these sublime
words: ‘I do not pray to the Lord for the state
Prabuddha Bharata
in which I shall be endowed with the eightfold
powers, nor even for the state of liberation from
the cycle of birth and death. I desire only to abide
within all beings and undergo the sufferings that
accrue to them. By my taking over their sufferings,
they will be free from misery.’ 4 Ranti Deva was so
remarkably self- sacrificing that his love and concern
for distressed beings overcame the natural
love of his own life and the urge to save it at all
cost. Hardly had he offered the scanty amount of
water to the outcaste and his dogs when the brahmana,
the labourer, the hunter, and the outcaste
vanished and in their places appeared Brahma,
Vishnu, and Maheshwara.
In the first story the brahmanas engrossed
in rituals and swollen with self-conceit blithely
continued with their sacrifices without any concern
for the cowherd boys’ pangs of hunger and
thirst. In consequence the Lord eluded them.
But in the second story Ranti Deva, in whom the
ego was utterly absent, obtained divine grace. As
a corollary we can state that egoism is immoral
and non-egoism is moral. In the luminous words
of Sri Ramakrishna: ‘This maya, that is to say,
the ego, is like a cloud. The sun cannot be seen
on account of a thin patch of cloud; when that
disappears one sees the sun.’ 5
The pithy spiritual clue that Sri Ramakrishna
whispers in a state of samadhi, ‘Shiva jnane
jiva seva; serve the jiva with the knowledge it
is Shiva’, is promptly appropriated by Swami
Vivekananda, who works out its implications
and translates them into practice. The lofty message
encapsulated in that aphoristic assertion
is forcefully pressed into service to make Vedanta
practical and dynamic. This message of the
Master is raising an army of social servants with
uncommon vigour, steadiness, and genuineness
to their ideal. For it is only on the fertile soil of
spiritual consciousness that the sapling of moral
temper can have a vigorous growth.
PB October 2011