The following is one of the chapters of my e-book, Coping with Suffering.
Your suffering is your choice to a great extent in Hinduism. Your karma
determines what comes your way. Karma is the principle that governs the
unfolding of events in your life. Your karma depends on the integrity with
which you lived your previous lives. It is not a punishment because unlike in
the Abrahamic religions there is no punitive God sitting in any heaven meting
out retribution to people. Karma is the unfolding of the moral law that drives
the whole universe. As Dr S Radhakrishnan put it, “The working of karma is
wholly dispassionate, just, neither cruel nor merciful.” It is not about
cruelty or mercy. It is the natural consequence of what you do. If you eat
salt, you will drink water. Quite as simple as that.
There is no escape from it because it is part of the
eternal law of the universe which is applicable to everything and everybody in
the universe without any discrimination. The high and the low, the mighty and
the weak, the animate and the inanimate, all are subject to the eternal law one
way or another.
God is the eternal law. We may even say that the
eternal law is god. Brahman (God) is the infinite reality, the all-encompassing
existence. Your ultimate deliverance is a merger of your being into that
infinity. For that you need to achieve purity by liberating yourself from your
ego. Only the pure self can dissolve into the infinite reality.
The infinite reality pervades everything. Nothing
exists outside that. But evil is not a part of that pure reality. Evil belongs
to the impure, imperfect material reality. Concepts like good and evil, bliss
and suffering, are not applicable to the infinite reality which is beyond all
such limited and limiting notions.
Evil and suffering are our creations, in short.
Our anger, greed, delusion, etc bring much suffering to ourselves as well as
others. Other people, beasts, reptiles and so on can cause suffering to us.
There is also a kind of suffering caused by forces beyond us like natural
disasters.
There is no material life without some evil and
suffering. That is precisely why our ultimate goal is to liberate ourselves
from this existence and merge into the infinite reality which is beyond all
sensations and feelings, beyond any possibility of suffering.
Krishna of the Bhagavat Gita advises us to live without
attachment to anything here on earth if we wish to escape the cycles of birth,
death and rebirth, the cycles generated by our karma. Attachment is a desire
for things you don’t have and a clinging to things you do have. This attachment
is the primary stumbling block to achieving moksha, liberation. This attachment brings unnecessary suffering
to human beings.
You have to rise above the joys and sorrows
brought by this attachment. As Krishna tells Arjuna on the battlefield of
Kurukshetra, “You must learn to endure fleeting things – they come and go! When
these cannot torment a man, when suffering and joy are equal for him and he has
courage, he is fit for immortality.”
It is the nonchalance of the ascetic that Krishna
is asking Arjuna to acquire. It is not the listlessness of the weary person. It
is not the apathy of the unconcerned. It is an enlightened state of mind which
shows you the illusory nature of the things to which you feel unwarranted
attachment. It reveals to you how like a moth you are flying into a flame that
will scorch your wings when you have the option to fly higher into the pure and
blissful light of divinity.
How do you do that? How do you reach that higher
realms and attain eternal deliverance?
Follow your dharma, Krishna would say. “Be intent
on action, not on the fruit of the action; avoid attraction to the fruits and
attachment to inaction! Perform actions, firm in discipline, relinquishing
attachments. Be impartial to failure and success.”
Do your duty with full integrity. That is the
ultimate mantra for deliverance. Hinduism offers at least four distinct paths
for attaining that level of integrity. Devotion [bhakti] is one such path which
is a purely spiritual path involving prayer and meditation. You can pursue the path
of ethical action [karma] if you prefer that. Krishna’s Arjuna obviously was
being advised to do that.
There is the path of knowledge for the
intellectually oriented souls. Real knowledge reveals the impermanence and
ineffectuality of earthly things and thus frees the seeker from the bondage of
ignorance. Ignorance is what ties you down to the illusory realities here on
earth.
For the mystically oriented ones, there is the
path of asceticism. Abandon the world altogether though you are still in it.
There are thousands of ascetics living in the ethereal peaks and caves of the
Himalayas seeking deliverance through renunciation. This is an extreme path and
it entails much suffering. You endure hunger and cold and whatever comes your
way in the hostile environment of the elevated hills. You have to live as if
you don’t have a body. But you do have a body which endures the onslaught of
what normal people perceive as reality: hunger and thirst, climate and wild
animals, breathlessness and insomnia.
Suffering has a vital role in Hinduism, in other
words. This world is not your real place. You belong elsewhere. Here you are
trapped in the midst of illusions. The ordinary souls go through life taking
those illusions as realities. The ascetics transcend the illusions by embracing
suffering in various ways. To have a physical body and yet to live as if there
isn’t one is certainly not an easy task. But that is just what the ascetic
does.
Hinduism is not a monolithic religion like
Christianity or Judaism. There are diverse schools with significantly different
teachings. We have looked at some elements which are fairly common to those
teachings. One thing is obvious: suffering has its due place in Hinduism too.
It descends on you one way or the other. Some even choose it voluntarily. There
is no escape anyway.
Though Hinduism shares something of
Christianity’s aversion to the body, the two religions have little else in
common. There is no judgemental God in Hinduism peering at whatever the people
are doing and keeping accounts so that the final judgement day will be some
gigantic firework show. The ultimate reality of Hinduism, Brahman, is not going
to issue any verdict. You are your own master in a way. You decide your destiny
with your own actions. That is karma. You reap the results of what you do.
Hinduism offers more cause for optimism than
Christianity and its predecessor, Judaism. In the words of Dr S Radhakrishnan,
“If we miss the right path, we are not doomed to an eternity of suffering.
There are other existences by which we can grow into the knowledge of the
Infinite Spirit with the complete assurance that we will ultimately arrive
there.”
Hinduism leaves us with enough optimism and
reasons to smile.
Coping with Suffering is available at Amazon.
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