Religion and Social Values :23.

3: The Reason for Birth and Death : 2.



This ignorance defeats all complacency that we may have in respect of our achievements of any freedom in this world. It is like the beautiful body of an emperor that has lost its soul no longer has any significance. It is no more a prince, it is no more a king or an emperor; it is nothing whatsoever because its appearance has been deprived of the essence of what it was constituted to be.


Likewise, our formal freedoms, which are what we are after in our elections, in our business and in our general attitude in society, all these attitudes of ours are infected by a secret anguish which gnaws into us—that is, death. Yama taught the great mystery of life to the aspiring student Nachiketas. Yama teaches the mysteries. Death is the best teacher. No one can tell us what the world is made of except the phenomenon of death, because it reveals the inner mystery behind the outward form of the physical and social world. Freedom from this untoward event—death, which goes together with birth, and birth, which goes with death—is alone real freedom. When a person is subjected to such harassment in the form of this imprisonment and punishment in the form of the cycle of transmigration, where comes freedom in this world?


But man aspires for freedom only. He does not bother about birth and death. The fact that we are after a positive attainment of ultimate freedom, infinite and eternal in its nature, irrespective of the impending difficulty of birth and death, demonstrates that we are finally destined for this freedom. We are bound in a way—perhaps bound in every way here; yet, this is not the final word in the history of man.


In the Mahabharata, towards the end, there is the narrative that Yudhishthira bodily went to the celestial realm, with a dog behind him. He was eager to see his brothers and his queen rejoicing in the glory of paradise. Narada and some other sentinels were with him, slowly directing him. He was eagerly awaiting the vision of this glory of paradise where his brothers and queen were all seated as emperors. He could not see anything. He was being led from darkness to darkness, from lesser darkness to greater darkness, from a comfortably expressible atmosphere of breathing even normal oxygen to a stinking, rotten abyss. After some time he had to close his nose because there was stink from all sides. There was no light. It was all darkness—stink and darkness.

To be continued  ...