Swami A. Parthasarathy

In the glorious past the human race lived a moral and ethical life. Through the passage of generations people have turned self-centred, selfish in their lives. Life today is all take, take and take. With no thought of giving. Humanity has lost its charitable disposition.

Charity does not mean indiscriminate dispensation of wealth. The present-day world comprises two types of human beings. The vast majority lack a charitable disposition. Those who claim to be so merely indulge in unintelligent charity. It is more based on emotion, however noble, than proper discretion. Which has resulted in breeding respectable beggars in the society. True charity emanates from sound judgement of the intellect rather than a weak emotion of the mind. In its purest form, charity has the distinction of benefiting the donee as well as the donor.

Victor Hugo in his novel Les Miserables highlights the benefaction that charity brings to a donee. In an exceptional charity of a priest to a convict. A convict had escaped from prison and sought shelter for a night. The priest obliged. Gave him supper and a bed to sleep. The convict silently accepted the good man’s hospitality. In the middle of the night he decamped with the silver plates of the house. The next morning he was brought in by the police who had caught him. The priest feigned surprise. And embarrassed the policeman, “Why did you harass him? I gifted the plates to him last night.” The policeman apologised and left. The convict was astounded. To crown it all, the priest picked up two solid silver candlestick stands from his desk and gave them to the convict with these resounding words of wisdom: Remember, life is to give, not to take. The convict took them and departed. Thence, he was transformed into a divine person. Living a life of service and sacrifice. Such would be the outcome of true charity.

Likewise, the donor is blessed with the effect of charity. Charity is a synonym for prosperity. So is sacrifice for success. Swami Rama Tirtha, an apostle of Truth, proclaims: The way to gain anything is to lose it. The more you run after wealth, the more it recedes. You crave for it, it eludes you. Leave it alone, it follows you. Work earnestly, dispassionately, the reward of work shall court you.

The phenomenon of colours illustrates this law of life. Light is constituted of seven vibgyoric colours. When an object is bathed in light the seven colours impinge upon it. An object appears blue when it actually gives away blue and takes in the other six. It appears in the colour it parts with. An object gains the colour it gives away! Learn this lesson from nature. You gain what you give away, what you sacrifice. Not what you take, aggrandise. Develop the spirit of dispassion, renunciation in life. You turn pure, divine. And when you aggrandise, amass wealth you turn impure, demonic. That is the law. Oliver Goldsmith, a celebrated poet and writer, puts forth this idea succinctly: Where wealth accumulates, men decay.

The trend of unintelligent charity has created oases of social services throughout the world. The wealthy who are burdened with riches or suffer from the guilt of aggrandisement find an emotional relief from parting with a portion of their wealth. Thus units of social service have spread all over.

Social service is indeed a noble trait. But these scattered units can in no way solve the problem of poverty and misery in the world. The masses must apprehend the underlying role of social service even before generating such sporadic units. Hence the world needs not just bouts of social service but a proper education and dissemination of social consciousness among people. That one should empathise, share and live in harmony with fellow beings. The idea of social consciousness needs to be introduced at the level of primary schools for children to grow with that concept. And gradually inculcated in families at home. With the dawn of social consciousness the mist of social services disappears. Every individual becomes a social worker.

Just imagine a country devoid of literacy barring a group of literates. The residual literates have to choose one of two options:

Each of them starts teaching the masses individually.

Or

Start schools for teachers’ training. And these teachers in turn produce more teachers.

The former method can provide only a limited satisfaction for educating a few pockets in the country. While the latter can gradually cover the entire country and solve the problem of illiteracy.

Similarly social workers and their social work can only create pockets of relief while the perennial problem of poverty and misery persists. The problem can be solved only through mass education and dissemination of social consciousness. Vedanta, the ancient philosophy of India, educates and inculcates this spirit of social consciousness in human beings. The Vedanta Academy is a unique institution which propagates this knowledge and develops the trait of social consciousness. A continuance of this invaluable education should gradually reach people the world over. There is enough wealth in the world for all of humanity to prosper. The wealthy have only to release what they do not use for the needs of the rest. In the words of Oliver Goldsmith: All the nakedness of the indigent world can be clad by the trimmings of the vain.