| Discourses On Gita By Acharya Vinoba Bhave |
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| Discourses On Gita |
| ACHIEVING THE GOAL - THE YOGA OF CONSTANCY |
| 10.
And when death comes, man takes stock of his life's accounts. The
stupid and lazy candidate dips his pen in the inkpot and takes it
out, but he cannot collect enough courage to blacken the paper. My
fellow, do you mean to start writing, or don't you? Surely, you
don't expect Saraswati to take the pen out of your hand and write
for you? Alas, the three-hours are over; and he folds and submits
the paper blank, or with a few lines scrawled on it. It does not
occur to him to try to understand the question and answer them. He
wastes his time looking this way and that. Our plight too is no
different.
Therefore, remembering that death is the crown of life, we should constantly practice the means by which we can make our last moments holy, pure and sweet. From now on we should think what we should do to impress on our minds the most noble and beautiful samskaras. But who worries about acquiring good samskaras? Instead of this, day and night, the training in bad ways goes on. We teach the tongue, the eyes and the ears to be greedy. We should give a far different training to the chitta, the mind and heart. We should steep and dye the chitta in good things. From the instant we discover an error, we should try and correct it. Once we know it is a mistake, how can we go on doing it? The moment we discover a mistake, we are reborn. Then begins for us a new childhood, a new dawn in life. Now we are truly awake. From now on we should examine our life day and night and walk warily. Else we shall slip, and fall into bad habits again. 11. Many years ago I went on a visit to my old grandmother. She complained, "Vinya, I remember nothing these days. I go to fetch the ghee pot, and then come back forgetting all about it." But she talked to me about some trouble about a jewel which occurred fifty years earlier. She could not remember what happened five minutes before, but something fifty years old was still fresh in her memory. How to account for this? She must have been talking about the jewel affair again and again to a great many people - and therefore it had become a part of her life. I said to myself, "Oh God, don't let my grandmother think of the jewel at the time of death!" |
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