Promises and Threats

One reason why the modern mind finds it difficult to appreciate our religious texts is sometimes the wild promises that are made in them. For instance, even in the case of a philosophical text like the Gita, we see promises that if you read one chapter you attain a celestial world after death; by reading two chapters you attain a higher world, and so on. If one merely reads the Gita but does not read the list of benefits it gives, all his/her reading is of no use, it says. If the prescribed daily meditation is not performed in time, one would fall in spiritual status. If one fails to do it for a period of one week one would go to hell. In the case of another text (the names of goddess Lalita), if you read the introduction and if you do not read the epilogue, one would go to hell. Such threats may totally alienate a person and make him/her give up doing it altogether.

Promises of different durations of heavenly stay are found in several of our prayers. A modern student would be amused to read that he would go to the moon, or to the sun by reading a text or go to hell if he failed to do it one day. It is amusing to listen to such statements made by religious speakers in the media. If you buy gold on a particular day in a year, you will be getting a shower of gold all through the year, one speaker says on TV. He found it in some obscure text and spread the mania. Sometime ago a guru said on TV that if a woman behaved in a particular way, she would be born as a dog in her next life. Feminists naturally rose in fury. Because of such statements many good practices may get rejected in a bunch. It is also natural to find them being ridiculed by our rationalists during the TV talks. Fortunately, our own texts tell us how to discount such statements and see the real intention. The science of interpretation of texts (mimamsa) is an elaborate system which is adopted by all branches of knowledge. The statements in the Vedas are also subject to examination by this school. When the Ramayana says that Rama ruled for eleven thousand years, a Vaishnava commentator Govindaraja quoted a line from mimamsa which said that in that context it had to be taken as days. This comes to about thirty years.

The exaggerated promises/threats in religious texts are called artha-vaada statements. The word artha means purpose, and vaada means saying. It is a statement which is made with a purpose. The purpose is to recommend an act of good behaviour or to discourage an act of bad behaviour. If it is said that a person would go to hell if he does not offer prayers to sun in the morning, the intention is that he should get up before sunrise and meditate on the Supreme Being manifesting in the form of sun. It is a drill to instill good practice. For that, a person would hold out a threat or a promise. The writers knew that the statements had to be taken at a discount. They called them guda-jihvika, literally meaning sweeteners, such as lollipops, given to kids to encourage them to go to school. The purpose is not to give a lollipop but to see that the kid studies and grows in life. Similarly, the purpose of artha-vaada is not to send a person to the moon or sun, but to initiate a person into knowledge of brahman.

In some meditations we must see the symbolism behind what is said. In our daily meditation on the Sun, it is said that the drops of water we offer to sun before sunrise go as arrows and drive away the demons who try to gobble the sun to stop sunrise. This looks absurd. But if we see the verses there, we see the symbolism. The demons are none other than our own laziness, projected outside as demons. Lay people, or the simple priests may take the promises or threats literally. It is for us to smile at them and see the purport, but it is not wise to throw the baby along with the bathwater.

(The writer is a former DGP, Andhra Pradesh)