| Discourses On Gita By Acharya Vinoba Bhave |
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| Discourses On Gita |
| THE TEACHING IN BRIEF : SELF-KNOWLEDGE AND EQUANIMITY |
| 5.
Our svadharma comes to us with such ease and naturalness that
we should cherish it without effort. But because of many kinds of
illusion, this does not happen; or else, it is performed with great
difficulty; or even if it is practiced, it gets corrupted with many
sorts of faults. There are many external forms assumed by the
illusion which strews with thorns the path of svadharma. Yet,
if we examine them, only one thing is at the bottom of it all,
namely, a restricted and shallow identification of oneself with the
body.
Myself, and those related to me through the body, set the limits of my expansion. Anyone outside this circle is to me a stranger or an enemy. This identification with the body builds a wall around me and cuts me off; and the odd thing about it is that I regard only the bodies as "me" and "mine". Falling into this double trap of identification of oneself and one's people with the body we start putting up all sorts of little walls. Almost everybody is busy doing this. Of these enclosures, one man's is larger, and another's smaller, but after all, every one of them is a wall. And it is no thicker than his skin. One man puts up an enclosure called
"attachment to family" and lives in it; another builds and
lives in an enclosure called "attachment to nation." One
wall divides Brahmans and Non-brahmans, another
divides Hindus and Muslims. In this way, not one or two, but many
such walls have been built. Wherever you turn, you see nothing but
walls. Even inside this jail of ours, we have political and
non-political prisoners, as if we could not live without these walls
within walls. But what is the result of this? Only one thing : the
germs of base thoughts multiply, and the health which is svadharma
is destroyed. |
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