[Advaita-l] moxa

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

As Praveen mentioned in his response, I think you misunderstand.

> Date: Sat, 7 Jun 2008 14:37:49 -0700
> From: krismanian at gmail.com
> To: advaita-l at lists.advaita-vedanta.org
> Subject: Re: [Advaita-l] moxa
> 
> Vidyasankar said:
> > A man's raised
> >conscience can always work on his own desires, rather
> >than standing in judgment over Sastra.
> This sort of tendency to discourage any one to question/judge bad practices
> advocated in the sastra is the reason for the down fall of humanity. That

Bad practices are creations of man. There is no limit to the imagination and
ingenuity of the human mind, leading to all sorts of practices, good and bad.
The SAstra-s exist to guide humans towards good practices. If in every
generation, people keep questioning SAstra based on their consciences, we
will pretty soon be left with no SAstra at all. The downfall of humanity is not
because of SAstra; it is in spite of SAstra.

If you think this is a hard conservative stance that is out of tune with present
social/religious/political needs, please remember that our SAstra is unique in
giving you a choice - 

yAny asmAkaM sucaritAni | tAni tvayopAsyAni | no itarANi |

The SAstra itself allows that at a personal level, you have to judge what is good
(sucarita) and what is other (itara) than good. I would much rather defend such
a SAstra and the need to respect it than encourage well-meaning but ultimately
misguided judgments of it. After all, we are not talking of all kinds of SAstra-s
that exist in this world. We are talking only of our vedAntic SAstra and its
related Vedic karma SAstra.

> >We live in a society where tons of meat are processed
> >every day, on an industrial scale, for human consumption.
> >Is animal sacrifice sanctioned by the Vedas really that
> >big a problem for anybody?
> Why do you have to defend a bad thing with another bad thing? Who  said the
> other thing is ok? The discussion is about Vedas, sastras.

No, I am not defending one bad thing using another. I am providing a contrast.
All I am saying is, it is easy to start criticizing some Vedic practice that hardly
anyone even practices today. You are also probably not aware of the very
important mImAMsA rule of substitution that allows the sacrificer to substitute
one sacrificial offering for another, based on the internal logic of the particular
sacrifice.

Meanwhile, all of us merrily partake of the global economy in which mass scale
animal slaughter is a very important part. Even as we are having this discussion,
the cost of food is a rising concern throughout the world. What should one's
conscience focus on, in terms of priorities?

Regards,
Vidyasankar
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