Collected Works/Volume 32/Speech On The Shraddha Day (1st July 1925)

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SPEECH ON THE “SHRADDHA” DAY OF C. R. DAS

CALCUTTA,

July 1, 1925

I speak often in the Ashram, but then it is before my own people; they understand and bear with me. Moreover, as occasion arises, I quote something from the Gita, and even then the talk would not be called a religious discourse. To me religion means living in the way prescribed by religion. A discourse may be in place occasionally,but not every religious man can give one. It is true, though, thatanyone who gives such discourses should himself be a man of dedicated religious life.

The Gita is for me a perennial guide to conduct. From it I seek support for all my actions and, if, in a particular case, I do not find the needed support, I would refrain from the proposed action or at any rate feel uncertain about it. So, when despite my embarrassment I accepted the invitation to speak, I decided to say something about the meaning of birth and death. Every time I have suffered the loss of a relative or friend, I sought consolation in the Gita; and the one thing it teaches is that death is nothing to be mourned. If ever I have shed tears, it has been through weakness, it was in spite of myself. When I think how I was shocked at the news of Deshbandhu’s death and how tears welled up in my eyes, I ascribe all that to my weakness. Let us look in the Gita today for some comfort

I have often stated that the Gita is a great allegory. I simply cannot think that the battle it describes was an actual battle between two armies, and this belief of mine was confirmed when I read the Mahabharata in jail. The Mahabharata itself seems to me to be a great treatise on dharma. It contains historical incidents, but it is not history. When, for instance, we read about sarpasatra^[1], can we rest in its literal meaning ? We should, then, have to swallow enough superstitions to choke us to death. The poet himself has warned us so emphatically, that he is not a historian. The Gita, then, describes the conflict within us; it is true that for this purpose it has used some historical incidents, but the aim behind them is to kindle a light in our hearts and impel us to examine them with its help. When you reach the concluding part of Chapter II, it becomes impossible even to suspect that the poem describes a historical battle. I seems strange that Arjuna should want to know the marks of a man firmly established in spiritual vision and that the Lord should explain them to a person all set for a battle.

But what I want to do is to explain to you the meaning of death.If you believe with me that the Gita is an allegory, you will also be able to understand the meaning of death as explained in it :

What is non-Being is never known to have been, and what is Being is never known not to have been. Of both these the secret has been seen by the seers of the truth.^[2]

This verse contains the whole meaning. Verse after verse states that the body is asat. Asat does not mean maya^[3]; to say that the body is asat does not mean that it never came into existence at all; the statement simply mean that it is transitory, perishable, that it is subjectto change. And yet, we live our life as if it would last for ever. We worship it, we cling to it—all this is contrary to the teaching of Hinduism. If Hinduism has asserted anything in the clearest possible terms, it is that the body and all that we behold is asat. But there are probably no other people who fear death and cry and grieve over it as much as we do. In the Mahabharata, in fact, it is stated that lamentation after someone’s death gives pain to the departed soul, and the Gita, too, was composed to remove the fear of death. Man’s body wears out through continuous activity and death releases it from suffering. The more I think about the ceaselessly active life of Deshbandhu, the more I feel that he is alive today. While he lived in the body, he was not fully alive, but he is so today. In our selfishness, we believed that his body was all that mattered, whereas the Gita teaches—and I understand the truth of this more clearly as days pass—that all worry about a perishable thing is meaningless, is so much waste of time.

Non-Being simply does not exist, and Being never ceases to exist. Shakespeare was wrong when he said that the evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.1 The good and the true alone live for ever. The world remembers only those who did some good while they lived in it. It readily forgets that which was false and evil, and preserves only what is good. Take the example of Ramachandra. Personally, I believe him to be an incarnation of God, but I do not believe that he was guilty of no error while he lived in the body. Today, however, we regard him as perfect. Krishna, too, we regard as the plenary incarnation of Godhead. Among the millions of Hindus, you will not find today a single person who will see error in anything which Rama or Krishna did. This fact, too, reveals the meaning of the verse “What is non-Being is never known to have been”. The world has preserved only what was imperishable in them,and no one knows anything about the perishable elements—their errors, if they committed any. We want to follow Deshbandhu’sexample. Is it his life in the body which we should follow as an example? Was it his body we adored? If that was so, would his dear,dear son light the fire which consumed it?

And so, in that verse, the Gita declares in the most emphatic language that we should follow truth in our lives and keep away from the unreal and the false, from deception. Very often our words do notexpress the truth, they become a form of deception. Anger is a form of untruth, desire, attachment, pride; all these are forms of untruth. We have to perform the satra of all these snakes. A living snake harms only the body, but these snakes infect every fibre in our being andthreaten to harm even the atman. This, however, is never harmed. It never dies. If we know what is meant by sat, we shall also understand the real meaning of birth and death. The chemists say that when a candle burns nothing is destroyed; similarly, when the body dies and is consumed by fire, nothing is destroyed. Birth and death are two conditions of the same reality. It is wholly because of our selfishness that we lament the death of our dear one. When on that day I saw th crowds on the cremation-ground and observed no sigh of grief on their faces, for a moment I felt irritated, angry because they seemed to lack sense and did not even understand the gravity of the hour. But a little later I realized that it was they who were right. They had come there not with any selfish motive but merely to honour a noble life, to bear testimony to Deshbandhu’s services and express their admiration for the supreme achievement of his life. Their joy had more truth and meaning in it than our grief. All admiration to the revered Basanti Devi, whom I did not even recognize when I first met her [after Deshbandhu’s death], because she shed no tears before me. However, even one’s face should not be touched with grief, one should have no feeling of sadness or gloom. Only if we have such a faith can it be said that we have understood the transitoriness of the body. It is not to the body that one is married. In marriage, two souls come together not to seek bodily pleasure but to strive for their own growth and refinement. When the body of one partner disappears, the union becomes all the closer. We have assembled today, therefore, not to shed tears. Let us, rather, think of Deshbandhu’s virtues, the substance of his which will never die, and take them into our own lives.