KARMA & SAMSARA AS THE COVER

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Drupadi 


.........Like picking up my brothers after school and paying off anything we owed for utilities or other household expenses.


All this time i'd gone along with everything simply because it was the responsinbelity of a the eldest child for the family. But every time we quarelled mother said that i deserved to be humiliated, that all that i was to repay the sins that i'd comitted in a past life."Of course we have to pay off the debt of our past karma, but that doesn't give you the right to put Raytina in the corner with the excuse that it's payback time, " said grandfather, coming to my defense.

 "Didn't you just say that karma always has to be repaid " replied mother...."


"Yes, but that's no reason to constantly humiliate her.Doesn't that kind of treatment just mean that we're pilling up new sins for ourselves ? Be patient, Raytina, someday your mother will regret treating you no better than a dog......."


I hurried out.I couldn't stand any longer listening to that conversation that was so full of wisdom, but phrased in tones of mutual accusation. The way i saw things what they were saying was about as useful as lighting the fires of war because you want to set the world on the part to justice. I follows from that you find yourselves ready to maim and kill in the name of God, as if you're now free from the circle of guilt. You may be free from sin, but doesn't violence always bring more violence in its wake ?

In the hundred of time i'd reborn, i'd seen all kinds o f violence that seemed never to come to an end. From the outbreak of the Bharata war, through the oppression of colonialims, the cruely that stemmed from the japanese occoupation and the war for independence of the 1940s, right through to the bloodshed spilled in the horrible civil conflict of 1965.But it seemed that wasn't enough, and now violence and cruelty still had reached no end, with bombs going off all over the place.


Violence now seemed to be snowballing. The longer it went on the more it seemed to press in from everyside. It was amazing to me that it seemed that no one was trying to bring things to ahalt, or at lest to spread light and warmth, so that the ice that had descended on us would begin to melt. I'm not sure when it was that it came to me, completely outside my concious throught, that history in fact moves along from one act of violence to another. And there was no sing anywhere that history was going to be free of violence any time soon. So is history in fact identical with violence ?


One day when i arrived home after work i could see that mother and father were very tense, on the point of an open quarell. It was the first time i'd seen that rather small man with his hands on his hips, taking a defiant attitude mother. Perhaps because granfather was there too, standing in the doorway of the houseyard, father had worked up the courage to say to mother that she seemed not to understand how fortunate she was to have a daugther like me.Me? Right away i understood that they were fighting about me.


" I Regret that ever let that girl grow within my womb," said mother.


" On the contrary, she was too noble for that womb of yours, that you surrendered so often to any man at all," countered father.


" What i should have done was to close tightly that gates to this world of samsara for that girl who is completely drenched in sin."


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