11-27-2004, 08:35 PM
Pathma,My being a Smartha has nothing to do with anything and there is nothing to apologize. I brought this up merely because you have raised the issue of smarthas numerous times. I am curious to know the reason for your prejudice against smarthas. I realized i was a smartha only when i was well into my 40's. If my parents did not tell me who i was, it was because they themselves had only a hazy notion of the same. Smarthas are impartial in their worship of deities, but i have always had a special affinity for the worship of Shiva. I was not brought up in a religious household. I was not taught the Sandhya and i learnt the Gayatri mantra by accident when i attended a Military school in Nasik in 1956. We have never observed caste differences in our family and there are a fair smattering of various castes represented in our extended family. It would never occur to me to treat a person differently merely based on his accident of birth. We were for all intents and purposes a secular household even by the convoluted definitons that are prevalent in India today.
In fact i consider myself to be a quintessential product of Macaulayism and the Nehruvian weltanschuung. I mention all this to say that my present belief system is based entirely on my own readings and not based on anything hereditary.
Pathma, for all the many travels you claim to have made in India, your view of India is that of a cartoonist. There are no shades of grey. There are evil and there are good people, and from your remarks i gather you have condemned large sections of the priestly class as fundamentally evil. India is a much more complex mosaic than you apparently realize. Everybody who is a Brahmana is not necessarily evil and everybody who is not is not necessarily a saint. It is a sad commentary on our times when we pronounce large classes of people as evil and then select the Iconic leader of a revered monastic order as a symbol of retribution for perceived wrongs done by the Brahmana.
As for the Karmic aspect of what is happening today, i firmly believe in free will and the ability to control ones destiny (sanchita karma and agami karma). It is only Praarabda Karma (natural catastrophies) that we cannot control. Everything else is within our control (1). So i refuse to accept that what is happening is preordained. What is happening is a tawdry drama being staged by a woman of easy virtue a woman who fits the word corrupt to a tee and who rose to her present position because of her skills in the bedroom more than anything else. for her to sit in judgement over a monk of the dasanami order is a perversion of justice and we will fight this injustice with every resource at our disposal .
(1) for a brief description of the different karmas pl. visit my website vepa.us and seek the page on Free will
In fact i consider myself to be a quintessential product of Macaulayism and the Nehruvian weltanschuung. I mention all this to say that my present belief system is based entirely on my own readings and not based on anything hereditary.
Pathma, for all the many travels you claim to have made in India, your view of India is that of a cartoonist. There are no shades of grey. There are evil and there are good people, and from your remarks i gather you have condemned large sections of the priestly class as fundamentally evil. India is a much more complex mosaic than you apparently realize. Everybody who is a Brahmana is not necessarily evil and everybody who is not is not necessarily a saint. It is a sad commentary on our times when we pronounce large classes of people as evil and then select the Iconic leader of a revered monastic order as a symbol of retribution for perceived wrongs done by the Brahmana.
As for the Karmic aspect of what is happening today, i firmly believe in free will and the ability to control ones destiny (sanchita karma and agami karma). It is only Praarabda Karma (natural catastrophies) that we cannot control. Everything else is within our control (1). So i refuse to accept that what is happening is preordained. What is happening is a tawdry drama being staged by a woman of easy virtue a woman who fits the word corrupt to a tee and who rose to her present position because of her skills in the bedroom more than anything else. for her to sit in judgement over a monk of the dasanami order is a perversion of justice and we will fight this injustice with every resource at our disposal .
(1) for a brief description of the different karmas pl. visit my website vepa.us and seek the page on Free will