IGNORANCE OF IGNORANTS.
The article by sri sudharshan titled " is Ignorance
is bliss?' is thought provoking.This has made be remeber swAmi piLLai
lOkAchAryA's sUthram in his great work - mumUkshuppadi 5.
The people of the World are submerged in this
materialistic world and have comletely forgotten themselves, the Lord, lost the
sevices to the Lord and alas! do not even realise that they have lost such
a great thing.
"samsArihaL thangaLaiyum Eswaranaiyum
maRandhu, Eswara kainkaryathaiyum izhandhu, izhandhOm enRa izhavum inRikkEa
samsAramAhira perumkadalil vizhundhu..." mumUkshuppadi
5
The people of the world due to their complete
entanglement in this samsAram have completely forgotten the relationship with
the Lord and the service unto Him. Not only having so forgotten, they do not
realise or despair over the fact that they have so lost such a great thing which
is the very nature of the soul - Athma .
They are ignorant that they are ignorant. That is
the ignorance of the ignorants.
vanamamalai padmanabhan
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, September 29, 2003 7:59
PM
Subject: [Oppiliappan] "Is Ignorance
really Bliss?" - An Essay on VII.15 of theBhagavath-Gita
A few years ago there was a report in an Indian newspaper
about how a majority of candidates taking an All-India Civil Services
examination failed to give correct answers to questions like "Who was the
author of the Vishnu-Sahasranama?", "What is "ashva~mEdha-yagnya", "Name
the 6 chapters of the Ramayana".
I was once watching a Quiz-show
on popular TV. The brightest pair of students from a prestigious school in
New Delhi was competing and they had ready answers to posers like "Who is
the author of "Canterbury Tales" but were stumped when asked "Who wrote
the "vivEka-choodAmani"?
It is general fact that amongst the youth
of India today, whether at home or abroad, there is little awareness of
nativity and roots ... or of religion, traditions, customs, manners,
history or literature.
Sadly, the ignorance of adult Indians exceeds
even that of their young brethren. One day some years ago I ventured to
conduct my own version of a lunch-hour gallup poll amongst a dozen
collegues of mine at office (all highly educated, wordly-wise and hailing
from different parts of India). Seated around a table in the cafeteria, I
casually put to them a question, "What is Vedanta?". Their answers
were amazingly varied, beginning with the rather rude "I don't know, I
don't really care" to the vague and uncomfortable, "I don't really know,
but I guess it's the stuff Vivekananda -- or Chinamayananda and the like
-- deal with". The polled responses revealed to me the varying degrees of
ignorance prevailing amongst modern-day ordinary Indians about Vedanta.
Not one came up with the simple, direct answer I was expecting viz.:
"Vedanta is Indian philosophy".
************
Ever since I did the poll, I have often found myself
wondering why at the very mention of the word "Vedanta", ordinary Indians
today (like my friendly office co-workers, for example), become
embarrassed or discomfited. Why do they respond with feelings that one can
only characterize as uneasy, lukewarm or callous --- feelings such as
apathy, disinterest, derison and ignorance? To me the answer seems to
be this:
The average Indian today prefers to pursue the practical
to the virtual exclusion of the profound. "Philosophy bakes no bread; so
why waste time on it?" is the argument. I I have heard many close friends
and colleagues similarly saying to me, "Our religion, philosophy,
Vedanta, 'pUrANa' and all that... of what practical use really are
they to me in the present day? What relevance do they have in the
world we live in? A world plagued by terrorism, war, job-losses, HIV
and ozone-depletion? I find I'm better off just concentrating on my
work, profession or career. I'd rather put my faith in the motto,
"Work is Worship". As for religion, Vedanta and all that... well, my
mantra has always been: "Ignorance is bliss".
The oft-quoted mantra of
"Ignorance is bliss" is a clever but specious quip. It has raised the
status of Ignorance to a modern pseudo-virtue. Many Indians (especially
"young and upwardly-mobile" members of the SriVaishnava community) are
quite fond of quoting it to justify to themselves their general
indifference to all things religious or scriptural. But they actually do
so rather unthinkingly. What they believe is some kind of wise maxim is
actually a statement of sad and profound irony. They have no idea of its
original source. The line appears at the end of a poem by the English poet
Thomas Gray (1716-1771) titled "Ode on a distant prospect of Eton
College":
"Alas, regardless of their doom The little victims
play! No sense have they of ills to come Nor care beyond today:
....
Yet ah! why should they know their fate ..... Thought would
destroy their paradise... where Ignorance is bliss, 'Tis folly to be
wise.
The "Ode" by Thomas Gray is a poem of great moral despair and it
ends with those famous lines on a deeply ironical note. It was written at
a time when England was in the throes of great economic and social
turmoil caused by the advent of the Industrial Revolution. The poet
was reflecting upon the many ills and injustices that were bedevilling
his country but of which his countrymen, the silent and thoughtless
majority, seemed utterly ignorant. The line "Where Ignorance is bliss,
'Tis folly to be wise" actually was meant to describe the young but
ignorant English masses of those times. They had really "no sense of ills
to come"; they didn't seem to know "their fate". They busied themselves
only with the humdrum, day- to-day cares of personal life and livelihood.
They did not seem to "care beyond today", believing that any thought of
the Beyond would only "destroy their (petty, private) paradise".
No one who really knew the context or significance of Gray's famous
line would ever really wish to quote it to make a moral case for
Ignorance.
***********
Vedanta is generally acclaimed to be India's highest
contribution to human thought and civilization. The first Western
philosopher to come across Vedantic literature (the Upanishads) was the
great Arthur Schopenhauer. After reading the Upanishads he made a famous
statement about it:
"From every sentence deep, original and sublime
thoughts arise, and the whole is pervaded by a high and holy and earnest
spirit. In the whole world... there is no study.. so beneficial and so
elevating as that of the Upanishads. They are destined sooner or later to
become the faith of the people".
Schopenhauer's statement is to
Vedanta what the astronaut, Neil Armstrong's statement was to Man's
historic landing on the Moon: "One small step for man; a giant leap for
mankind." It is therefore one of the saddest stories of the times that
India's Vedantic 'step', representing one of the most historic
'leaps' of human thought in the history of mankind, did not, alas, become
the "faith of the people" as Sri.Schopenhauer had predicted. Not even 1 in
a 1000 people in India today -- not even those who might regard themselves
as "religious-minded" or "God-fearing" -- might be able to correctly
name, if asked, the 10 principal Upanishads! Vedanta does not anymore
cause (as once it did) Indian hearts to flutter, as proudly as the
glorious tri-colour. The average Indian, instead, finds far greater
reason to gloat that his great country today contributes to, say,
making some odd new suite of Microsoft-software run successfully in
America...
Young India today represents the complete triumph of the
practical over the profound. And the general consequence: young India
prides itself on its roller-coaster romance with mundane-ness... a romance
in which Ignorance rules bliss as surely as the heart rules the head.
***********
(to be
continued)
dAsan, Sudarshan
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