nature. For him everything in nature was “alive and inter-related”. It is said that “like a child he regarded
the birds as his little sisters, the wind and the sun as his brothers, and the earth as the living mother of
them all”.31 But by and large it was believed that man was God’s best and most favoured creation and, as
everything in nature was meant for him, he had the right to exploit it for his own comfort.
That indiscriminate exploitation of natural resources has started polluting the rivers and the seas, glaciers
have started melting, the ozone layer in the atmosphere is being depleted and the world has started
experiencing a global warming that signals danger for man’s life on this earth. Environmentalists all over
the world have started realizing that man’s future lies in his living in harmony with nature and that his
hostile confrontation with and his indiscriminate exploitation of nature will result in his own ruin.. Arne
Naess, a Norwegian philosopher, evolved the concept of “deep ecology” which is often known as
ecophilosophy or ecosophy and in the name of Gaia, the Greek goddess of the earth, ecologists started a
theory called the Gaia theory advocating the protection and preservation of nature. Conventional wisdom
saw the earth as a dead planet made of inanimate rocks, oceans, and atmosphere, and merely inhabited by
life with human being as the unquestionable master of the animals, plants and inanimate nature around
him, whereas the Gaia theory saw man, animals, plants and inanimate nature as mutually supporting
organs of a self-regulating system.
Sri Sri Thakur’s vision of religion is just the opposite of the exploitative attitude of the reckless
profiteering industrialists of today. For Sri Sri Thakur both man and nature are integral parts of existence,
the relationship between them being the relationship of interconnectedness, interdependence and
interwovenness. Realizing that man and nature are and ought to be mutually supportive is in Sri Sri
Thakur’s view an integral part of the spiritual culture of becoming.
He who sees everything
in Him, the Self
and He in everything
in sense and essence,
is a sage.
Magna Dicta, p.106.
Nature for him has, among other things, a curative value for the sick and the suffering. He wanted his
followers, housewives in particular, to so train themselves that they can make a creative and curative use
of the medicinal properties of plants.32
A very different set of attitudes, very different from the typical exploitative attitude towards nature
emerged in the writings of some of the leading Romantic poets in Britain during the nineteenth century.
These attitudes are important not only for students of British literature but also for a historical
understanding of how the human history has been unfolding itself in different currents and cross currents
of ideas and attitudes from time to time. We can find Byron’s attitude to nature in the following lines:
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
31 173 Henry Thomas& Dana Lee Thomas, Living Biographies of Great Religious Leaders. Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan,
1988. p.109.
32 Naree Neeti
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and Music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more.
As is evident from these lines, Byron valued nature more than man, solitude more than society, and
experience and emotion more than intellect and thought. For Sri Sri Thakur, it is not a question of loving
nature more than man or a matter of loving man more than nature. The job of religion is to “uphold our
being with a run towards becoming” and, therefore, man has to make such a wise use of nature that it can
prove to be an enduring elixir for his being and can facilitate his becoming.
Wordsworth, the then poet laureate of Britain, is another internationally known personality, very wellknown
for his attitude towards nature. His attitude towards nature changed slightly from time to time. His
attitude at an important stage of his career can, however, be seen in the following lines:
The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love
That had no need of civilizing thought.
Phrases like “haunted me like a passion” and “that had no need of civilizing thought” make it clear that
Wordsworth’s love for nature, as expressed in these lines was a haunting passion and not a source of
serenity or equanimity of mind, not a source of a blessed peace that transcends all understanding. Nothing
that becomes a passion and manifests itself as an obsessive “appetite” did ever have a place in Sri Sri
Thakur’s vision of religion.
Keats was another great lover and admirer of nature during that period. He loved the beautiful sights and
sounds of nature for their own sake and his love of nature had its roots deep in his sensuous apprehension
of life. Sri Sri Thakur’s vision of nature is part of his vision of harmony, a harmony that manifests itself
not only in the inner harmony of thoughts and emotions but also in the harmony with the environment
outside.
The best way of understanding Sri Sri Thakur’s vision of nature will be to understand it as a creative
assimilation and a highly energetic expression of the main current of saints, hermits, and seers in the long
spiritual tradition of India. The present prophet, Sri Sri Thakur said, is only an “enlivening emblem of
the past and fulfillment thereof” 33 and so one’s love for the present had to be interlinked with an
admiration for the past. A brief survey of the long spiritual tradition regarding the attitude to nature that he
embodies will therefore be relevant here. The underlying philosophy of what is now known as deep
ecology has been part of the Indian ethos since time immemorial. In a metaphorical language charged
with poetic vigour, the Rig Veda (1.6.3), for example, says:
By the first touch of His hand rivers throb and ripple. When He smiles, the
sun shines, the moon glimmers, the stars twinkle, the flowers bloom. By the
first rays of the rising sun, the universe is stirred; the shining gold is
sprinkled on the smiling buds of roses; the fragrant air is filled with sweet
melodies of singing birds, the dawn is the dream of God's creative fancy.
33 Message, 2.118.
This attitude of nature worship in India manifested itself in three forms: (i) in its love for inanimate
objects like mountains, rivers, and seas, (ii) its love for plants, and (iii) its love for animals. A brief
mention of each one of these three will be in order here.
In Mundaka Upanisad, the primordial power of the universe has been described in terms of inanimate
objects and it has been said that fire is his head, his eyes are the moon and the sun; the regions of space
are his ears, the wind is his breath, his heart is the entire universe and the earth is his footstool. Parvati,
Lord Shiva’s wife, was the daughter of the Himalayas and Sita, Rama’s consort, came out of the earth
when her father was ploughing the land. In the Gita, Krishna identifies himself with the inanimate objects
in the world and says that, of the waters he is the ocean; of the rivers, he is the Ganges; and of the
mountains, he is the Himalaya. Love for mountains, rivers, and seas has been such an integral part of the
eternal Indian psyche that even an internationally renowned botanist like Jagadish Chandra Bose, (1858-
1937) in his sagely philosophical essay Bhagirathir Utsha Sandhane, expressed his desire to explore how
the Ganges flows down from the "matted locks of Shiva", and even Jawaharlal Nehru, who was known for
his modernism, expressed the desire that after his death his ashes should be cast into the Ganges at
Allahabad.
The Indian spiritual tradition is also known for its love for and its association with inanimate nature.
Buddha, for example, was born in a sacred grove full of sal trees and he found enlightenment under the
shade of a peepal tree, botanically known as ficus religiosa. Aegle marmelos, the bilva tree, is considered
sacred for Hindus and its leaves and fruits are considered sacred offerings to Lord Shiva. The tulsi plant
is regarded as the abode of Krishna, a Hindu household is considered incomplete if it doesn't have a tulsi
plant in the courtyard, and no offering to any god in the system of Hindu worship is considered all right
until it is sanctified by tulsi leaves. The paste of sandal wood is used for making a mark on the forehead of
devotees as indicative of purity and sublimity. In the Gita, Krishna says that, of the trees all over the
world, he is the peepal tree. The offering of a leaf, a flower or a fruit, if it is done with devotion, is as
acceptable to him, he says, as any other valuable offering. Mango leaves are used as festoons during
religious ceremonies and auspicious events. The lotus is a sacred flower and was imagined in ancient
India to be the favourite seat of Saraswati, the goddess of learning, and the banana plant and leaves are
used for ornamentation on sacred occasions. The Varah Purana says, "One who plants one peepal tree, one
neem tree, ten flowering plants or creepers, two pomegranates, two oranges and five mangoes, never goes
to hell." In the Charak Sanhita, destruction of forests is taken as destruction of the state, and reforestation
an act of rebuilding the state and advancing its welfare.
For a typical person in the West, the cow is nothing better than a walking heap of burgers; in India, the
cow is believed to be like a mother. Lord Krishna was a cowherd, and the bull is depicted as the vehicle of
Lord Shiva. Snakes are a symbol of healing and primal energy. Lord Vishnu reclines on the serpent
Ananta eternally and Shiva has serpents coiled around his neck. In Indian mythology, Ganesha is believed
to be using the bandiquet, Goddess Durga, the lion and Vishnu, a garuda, a bird as his means of transport.
Lord Krishna always wore a peacock feather in his crown. Ganesha, the son of Shiva, is a combination of
elephant and man. Yudhishthira is said to have refused to enter heaven without his dog. In the Gita,
Krishna identifies himself with various forms of animal life. In 10.28, he says, for example, that of the
serpents, he is Vasuki and in 10.30 he says that, of the birds, he is the Garuda. He says (19.30) that, of
wild animals, he is the lion; of the horses, he is the legendary horse called Uchchaishravas; of the
elephants,
elephants, he is the legendary elephant called Airavat; and, of the cows, he is the legendary cow called
Kamdhenu, which granted all the wishes of its supplicants. In the Yoga system of exercises meant for
rejuvenating the body, the mind and the spirit, there is a clear tendency towards imitating animals. The
exercise in which one is advised to adopt the typical posture of a peacock, the exercise in which one is
advised to adopt the posture of a serpent, and, similarly, the exercise in which one is advised to produce a
resonance produced by the bee are some of the examples of the tendency to go closer to nature and to
emulate the typical postures of some of the animals.
Sri Sri Thakur’s love for inanimate nature can be seen in his love for the river Padma during the
early stages of his life in Pabna, now in Bangla Desh, and the long hours he spent on its bank watching the
river flowing with its characteristic melody and the rhythmic movement of its waves. When he decided to
leave Pabna before India’s partition, he decided to move to Deoghar, a place known for its beautiful hills
and forests all around. One of his desires during his stay in Deoghar was that the river Ganges should
somehow be brought to Deoghar by connecting it with the local small river Darba. His love for plants is
evident from the compassion that he felt for the bel tree that was overturned by a storm. When he saw that
bel tree uprooted and overturned by the storm, he felt pained and was visibly moved by the scene and
said, “Many sentiments are associated with this bel tree. . . . It was planted by my great grandmother”.34
His love for plants is also evident from the long hours he spent under the shade of the jamun (blackberry)
tree in Deoghar. Buddha got enlightenment under the peepal tree in South Bihar and hundreds and
hundreds of Sr Sri Thakur’s followers felt inspired, exalted and elevated by the wisdom that came out of
this Buddha in Deoghar, a place not far away from Gautam Buddha’s place of enlightenment. He had an
extraordinary sense of affinity, a sense of spiritual identity with the world of plants. Only a prophetic
personality of his stature could have had the experience conveyed in the following lines:
Many a time even now I have a feeling that it is myself that has become a
certain tree.35
Those who are familiar with his biography know that once when the driver of a horse-carriage whipped
the horses in that carriage, he (Sri Sri Thakur) became restless with pain and on examination it was found
that though the actual victims of the whipping were the horses, marks of the whip had appeared on his
back.
In Sri Sri Thakur’s vision of life, we find a living synthesis of this long Indian tradition of a loving
sympathy with nature. Nature for Sri Sri Thakur is part of man’s environment which he should
nurture and nourish and also derive healthy nourishment from. For Sri Sri Thakur, nature can be a
source of elevation and exaltation to man if man “abides” by her. The relationship between man
and nature should be, not a relationship of hostility and confrontation, but a loving relationship of
togetherness and mutual support.
Do abide by nature
34 Discourses (Questions and answers) Vol.1 compiled by Prafulla Kumar Das. p. 83.
35 Ibid. p.29.
with every nurture
that exalts your life and growth -
she too will nurture you
with affection and cares;
know thou Providence
as master of nature
and seek Him
in her bosom.
Message, 5.5.
Buddha was of the view that we should utilize nature in the same way as a bee collects pollen from the
flower, neither polluting its beauty nor depleting its fragrance. Just as the bee manufactures honey out of
pollen, so man should be able to find happiness and fulfillment in life without harming the natural world
in which he lives. Like Buddha, Sri Sri Thakur said that a healthy spiritual culture needed not an attitude
of hostility and confrontation but an attitude of mutual support and fulfillment. The Buddhist tradition of
ethics denounces a wasteful use of nature and says:
A man shakes the branch of a wood-apple tree and all the fruits, ripe as well
as unripe, fall. The man would collect only what he wants and walk away
leaving the rest to rot. Such a wasteful attitude is certainly deplored in
Buddhism as not only anti-social but criminal.36
Like Pythagoras, Leonardo Da Vinci, Tolstoy, and Einstein, Sri Sri Thakur was a staunch supporter of
vegetarianism, his vegetarianism being an inevitable manifestation of his benevolent and compassionate
attitude towards nature.
Take not others’ flesh,
as you desire not others
to devour your own.
Message,. 8.305.
In Sri Sri Thakur’s vision of life, vegetarianism is not only a matter of compassion, a matter of
sentimentality or a matter of metaphysics but also a pragmatic matter of man’s own life and growth.
Vegetarian food causes no damage to man’s natural habitat and is also good for his health.
Vegetable diet
makes up existential glow,
36 The Buddhist Attitude Towards Nature by Lily de Silva. Access to Insight edition © 2005
the birds as his little sisters, the wind and the sun as his brothers, and the earth as the living mother of
them all”.31 But by and large it was believed that man was God’s best and most favoured creation and, as
everything in nature was meant for him, he had the right to exploit it for his own comfort.
That indiscriminate exploitation of natural resources has started polluting the rivers and the seas, glaciers
have started melting, the ozone layer in the atmosphere is being depleted and the world has started
experiencing a global warming that signals danger for man’s life on this earth. Environmentalists all over
the world have started realizing that man’s future lies in his living in harmony with nature and that his
hostile confrontation with and his indiscriminate exploitation of nature will result in his own ruin.. Arne
Naess, a Norwegian philosopher, evolved the concept of “deep ecology” which is often known as
ecophilosophy or ecosophy and in the name of Gaia, the Greek goddess of the earth, ecologists started a
theory called the Gaia theory advocating the protection and preservation of nature. Conventional wisdom
saw the earth as a dead planet made of inanimate rocks, oceans, and atmosphere, and merely inhabited by
life with human being as the unquestionable master of the animals, plants and inanimate nature around
him, whereas the Gaia theory saw man, animals, plants and inanimate nature as mutually supporting
organs of a self-regulating system.
Sri Sri Thakur’s vision of religion is just the opposite of the exploitative attitude of the reckless
profiteering industrialists of today. For Sri Sri Thakur both man and nature are integral parts of existence,
the relationship between them being the relationship of interconnectedness, interdependence and
interwovenness. Realizing that man and nature are and ought to be mutually supportive is in Sri Sri
Thakur’s view an integral part of the spiritual culture of becoming.
He who sees everything
in Him, the Self
and He in everything
in sense and essence,
is a sage.
Magna Dicta, p.106.
Nature for him has, among other things, a curative value for the sick and the suffering. He wanted his
followers, housewives in particular, to so train themselves that they can make a creative and curative use
of the medicinal properties of plants.32
A very different set of attitudes, very different from the typical exploitative attitude towards nature
emerged in the writings of some of the leading Romantic poets in Britain during the nineteenth century.
These attitudes are important not only for students of British literature but also for a historical
understanding of how the human history has been unfolding itself in different currents and cross currents
of ideas and attitudes from time to time. We can find Byron’s attitude to nature in the following lines:
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
31 173 Henry Thomas& Dana Lee Thomas, Living Biographies of Great Religious Leaders. Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan,
1988. p.109.
32 Naree Neeti
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and Music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more.
As is evident from these lines, Byron valued nature more than man, solitude more than society, and
experience and emotion more than intellect and thought. For Sri Sri Thakur, it is not a question of loving
nature more than man or a matter of loving man more than nature. The job of religion is to “uphold our
being with a run towards becoming” and, therefore, man has to make such a wise use of nature that it can
prove to be an enduring elixir for his being and can facilitate his becoming.
Wordsworth, the then poet laureate of Britain, is another internationally known personality, very wellknown
for his attitude towards nature. His attitude towards nature changed slightly from time to time. His
attitude at an important stage of his career can, however, be seen in the following lines:
The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love
That had no need of civilizing thought.
Phrases like “haunted me like a passion” and “that had no need of civilizing thought” make it clear that
Wordsworth’s love for nature, as expressed in these lines was a haunting passion and not a source of
serenity or equanimity of mind, not a source of a blessed peace that transcends all understanding. Nothing
that becomes a passion and manifests itself as an obsessive “appetite” did ever have a place in Sri Sri
Thakur’s vision of religion.
Keats was another great lover and admirer of nature during that period. He loved the beautiful sights and
sounds of nature for their own sake and his love of nature had its roots deep in his sensuous apprehension
of life. Sri Sri Thakur’s vision of nature is part of his vision of harmony, a harmony that manifests itself
not only in the inner harmony of thoughts and emotions but also in the harmony with the environment
outside.
The best way of understanding Sri Sri Thakur’s vision of nature will be to understand it as a creative
assimilation and a highly energetic expression of the main current of saints, hermits, and seers in the long
spiritual tradition of India. The present prophet, Sri Sri Thakur said, is only an “enlivening emblem of
the past and fulfillment thereof” 33 and so one’s love for the present had to be interlinked with an
admiration for the past. A brief survey of the long spiritual tradition regarding the attitude to nature that he
embodies will therefore be relevant here. The underlying philosophy of what is now known as deep
ecology has been part of the Indian ethos since time immemorial. In a metaphorical language charged
with poetic vigour, the Rig Veda (1.6.3), for example, says:
By the first touch of His hand rivers throb and ripple. When He smiles, the
sun shines, the moon glimmers, the stars twinkle, the flowers bloom. By the
first rays of the rising sun, the universe is stirred; the shining gold is
sprinkled on the smiling buds of roses; the fragrant air is filled with sweet
melodies of singing birds, the dawn is the dream of God's creative fancy.
33 Message, 2.118.
This attitude of nature worship in India manifested itself in three forms: (i) in its love for inanimate
objects like mountains, rivers, and seas, (ii) its love for plants, and (iii) its love for animals. A brief
mention of each one of these three will be in order here.
In Mundaka Upanisad, the primordial power of the universe has been described in terms of inanimate
objects and it has been said that fire is his head, his eyes are the moon and the sun; the regions of space
are his ears, the wind is his breath, his heart is the entire universe and the earth is his footstool. Parvati,
Lord Shiva’s wife, was the daughter of the Himalayas and Sita, Rama’s consort, came out of the earth
when her father was ploughing the land. In the Gita, Krishna identifies himself with the inanimate objects
in the world and says that, of the waters he is the ocean; of the rivers, he is the Ganges; and of the
mountains, he is the Himalaya. Love for mountains, rivers, and seas has been such an integral part of the
eternal Indian psyche that even an internationally renowned botanist like Jagadish Chandra Bose, (1858-
1937) in his sagely philosophical essay Bhagirathir Utsha Sandhane, expressed his desire to explore how
the Ganges flows down from the "matted locks of Shiva", and even Jawaharlal Nehru, who was known for
his modernism, expressed the desire that after his death his ashes should be cast into the Ganges at
Allahabad.
The Indian spiritual tradition is also known for its love for and its association with inanimate nature.
Buddha, for example, was born in a sacred grove full of sal trees and he found enlightenment under the
shade of a peepal tree, botanically known as ficus religiosa. Aegle marmelos, the bilva tree, is considered
sacred for Hindus and its leaves and fruits are considered sacred offerings to Lord Shiva. The tulsi plant
is regarded as the abode of Krishna, a Hindu household is considered incomplete if it doesn't have a tulsi
plant in the courtyard, and no offering to any god in the system of Hindu worship is considered all right
until it is sanctified by tulsi leaves. The paste of sandal wood is used for making a mark on the forehead of
devotees as indicative of purity and sublimity. In the Gita, Krishna says that, of the trees all over the
world, he is the peepal tree. The offering of a leaf, a flower or a fruit, if it is done with devotion, is as
acceptable to him, he says, as any other valuable offering. Mango leaves are used as festoons during
religious ceremonies and auspicious events. The lotus is a sacred flower and was imagined in ancient
India to be the favourite seat of Saraswati, the goddess of learning, and the banana plant and leaves are
used for ornamentation on sacred occasions. The Varah Purana says, "One who plants one peepal tree, one
neem tree, ten flowering plants or creepers, two pomegranates, two oranges and five mangoes, never goes
to hell." In the Charak Sanhita, destruction of forests is taken as destruction of the state, and reforestation
an act of rebuilding the state and advancing its welfare.
For a typical person in the West, the cow is nothing better than a walking heap of burgers; in India, the
cow is believed to be like a mother. Lord Krishna was a cowherd, and the bull is depicted as the vehicle of
Lord Shiva. Snakes are a symbol of healing and primal energy. Lord Vishnu reclines on the serpent
Ananta eternally and Shiva has serpents coiled around his neck. In Indian mythology, Ganesha is believed
to be using the bandiquet, Goddess Durga, the lion and Vishnu, a garuda, a bird as his means of transport.
Lord Krishna always wore a peacock feather in his crown. Ganesha, the son of Shiva, is a combination of
elephant and man. Yudhishthira is said to have refused to enter heaven without his dog. In the Gita,
Krishna identifies himself with various forms of animal life. In 10.28, he says, for example, that of the
serpents, he is Vasuki and in 10.30 he says that, of the birds, he is the Garuda. He says (19.30) that, of
wild animals, he is the lion; of the horses, he is the legendary horse called Uchchaishravas; of the
elephants,
elephants, he is the legendary elephant called Airavat; and, of the cows, he is the legendary cow called
Kamdhenu, which granted all the wishes of its supplicants. In the Yoga system of exercises meant for
rejuvenating the body, the mind and the spirit, there is a clear tendency towards imitating animals. The
exercise in which one is advised to adopt the typical posture of a peacock, the exercise in which one is
advised to adopt the posture of a serpent, and, similarly, the exercise in which one is advised to produce a
resonance produced by the bee are some of the examples of the tendency to go closer to nature and to
emulate the typical postures of some of the animals.
Sri Sri Thakur’s love for inanimate nature can be seen in his love for the river Padma during the
early stages of his life in Pabna, now in Bangla Desh, and the long hours he spent on its bank watching the
river flowing with its characteristic melody and the rhythmic movement of its waves. When he decided to
leave Pabna before India’s partition, he decided to move to Deoghar, a place known for its beautiful hills
and forests all around. One of his desires during his stay in Deoghar was that the river Ganges should
somehow be brought to Deoghar by connecting it with the local small river Darba. His love for plants is
evident from the compassion that he felt for the bel tree that was overturned by a storm. When he saw that
bel tree uprooted and overturned by the storm, he felt pained and was visibly moved by the scene and
said, “Many sentiments are associated with this bel tree. . . . It was planted by my great grandmother”.34
His love for plants is also evident from the long hours he spent under the shade of the jamun (blackberry)
tree in Deoghar. Buddha got enlightenment under the peepal tree in South Bihar and hundreds and
hundreds of Sr Sri Thakur’s followers felt inspired, exalted and elevated by the wisdom that came out of
this Buddha in Deoghar, a place not far away from Gautam Buddha’s place of enlightenment. He had an
extraordinary sense of affinity, a sense of spiritual identity with the world of plants. Only a prophetic
personality of his stature could have had the experience conveyed in the following lines:
Many a time even now I have a feeling that it is myself that has become a
certain tree.35
Those who are familiar with his biography know that once when the driver of a horse-carriage whipped
the horses in that carriage, he (Sri Sri Thakur) became restless with pain and on examination it was found
that though the actual victims of the whipping were the horses, marks of the whip had appeared on his
back.
In Sri Sri Thakur’s vision of life, we find a living synthesis of this long Indian tradition of a loving
sympathy with nature. Nature for Sri Sri Thakur is part of man’s environment which he should
nurture and nourish and also derive healthy nourishment from. For Sri Sri Thakur, nature can be a
source of elevation and exaltation to man if man “abides” by her. The relationship between man
and nature should be, not a relationship of hostility and confrontation, but a loving relationship of
togetherness and mutual support.
Do abide by nature
34 Discourses (Questions and answers) Vol.1 compiled by Prafulla Kumar Das. p. 83.
35 Ibid. p.29.
with every nurture
that exalts your life and growth -
she too will nurture you
with affection and cares;
know thou Providence
as master of nature
and seek Him
in her bosom.
Message, 5.5.
Buddha was of the view that we should utilize nature in the same way as a bee collects pollen from the
flower, neither polluting its beauty nor depleting its fragrance. Just as the bee manufactures honey out of
pollen, so man should be able to find happiness and fulfillment in life without harming the natural world
in which he lives. Like Buddha, Sri Sri Thakur said that a healthy spiritual culture needed not an attitude
of hostility and confrontation but an attitude of mutual support and fulfillment. The Buddhist tradition of
ethics denounces a wasteful use of nature and says:
A man shakes the branch of a wood-apple tree and all the fruits, ripe as well
as unripe, fall. The man would collect only what he wants and walk away
leaving the rest to rot. Such a wasteful attitude is certainly deplored in
Buddhism as not only anti-social but criminal.36
Like Pythagoras, Leonardo Da Vinci, Tolstoy, and Einstein, Sri Sri Thakur was a staunch supporter of
vegetarianism, his vegetarianism being an inevitable manifestation of his benevolent and compassionate
attitude towards nature.
Take not others’ flesh,
as you desire not others
to devour your own.
Message,. 8.305.
In Sri Sri Thakur’s vision of life, vegetarianism is not only a matter of compassion, a matter of
sentimentality or a matter of metaphysics but also a pragmatic matter of man’s own life and growth.
Vegetarian food causes no damage to man’s natural habitat and is also good for his health.
Vegetable diet
makes up existential glow,
36 The Buddhist Attitude Towards Nature by Lily de Silva. Access to Insight edition © 2005
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