AVATAR 8

An aspect of the Avatar's personality is that he melts down in love for the fallen one, the lowly, the despised one for whom life has come to a grinding halt and who sees no ray of hope. For him who has thus suffered and endlessly suffered at the hands of the merciless elements of life, for whom the suffering has disenchanted him about the material sensory life fraught with desire and purified his vision unto submission to the Lord, the Avatar comes as the redeemer. The intense suffering and the consequent self-surrender to the Divine makes such a one the fittest recipient of the Avatar's grace and he becomes an illumined soul at the touch of the Master. Such a one is called 'kripaa-siddha' (the perfected one through divine grace).

In every Avatar Leela (the play of the Avatar) we see some such fallen one being rescued. In the Buddha Leela Amrapali and Angulimaal, in the Chaitanya Leela Jagai and Madhai and in the Ramakrishna Leela the redemption of Girish, Binodini and Kalipada are instances of the flow of divine mercy from the all-compassionate heart of the Avatar. Why is it that these fallen souls who led, so to say, utterly unspiritual lives were deemed fit to receive the grace while others, eminently more moral and ethically more sound, were by-passed, is a matter of conjecture and demands deep spiritual thinking.

In the first place let it be clearly understood that 'grace' by definition knows no law and is just the outflow of the pleasure of the Divine. Causal relations are difficult to establish in the matter of dispensation of divine grace and it seems that it is entirely arbitrary on the part of the Avatar as to who he showers his grace on. The only causal link here is that the redemption of the fallen one happens by the absorption of his past sins in a trice by a fleeting glance or touch or wish of the Avatar. As such, the Avatar has to bear the consequence of the sins absorbed and suffers on behalf of the redeemed one.

Swami Vivekananda, however, was of the opinion that even in divine grace there is an ultra-fine causal relation which eludes the ordinary vision. His unspelt line of logic, I hazard to say, is based on the fact that something macroscopic as Avatar grace on a terrestrial individual must necessarily have a deterministic basis, albeit a highly subtle one, for, to all intents and purposes, the act of grace does baffle reason save when seen in the light of the Avatar's overwhelming desire to redeem the sinner, the afflicted and the lowly. He is, thus, called 'Pateetpaavan' (the redeemer of the fallen one). In fact this element of the Avatar's personality is the singular feature which marks him out as the Divine Incarnation that he is with a mission to fulfil, the mission of redemption of the holy, the destruction of the evil-doers and the establishment of the Religion of the Age.

And redemption of the holy is grace, annihilation of evil is grace and establishment of religion is grace, too. Thus, the Avatar is the gracious one, the redeemer, the saviour of mankind, humanity's final friend, the ultimate refuge.