WHY DO WE AS HOUSEHOLDERS COWER BEFORE MONKS AND CANNOT STAND UP TO THEM IN CIVILISED DEBATE OVER CONTENTIOUS ISSUES?

WHY DO WE AS HOUSEHOLDERS COWER BEFORE MONKS AND CANNOT STAND UP TO THEM IN CIVILISED DEBATE OVER CONTENTIOUS ISSUES?

It is servile behaviour on the part of devotees to cower before a monk and accept his version of an episode as gospel truth while rejecting the same story told by a lay devotee earlier. Does the ochre robe allow special privilege to a person in the eyes of truth or is evidence the yardstick by which people ought to be guided in their inferences about the validity or otherwise of a statement? Does the court of law observe the status of a person when it delivers judgement or is it observant of the Constitution and its principles and laws in doing so? Does it behove devotees to be ever so biased in their judgement as to the veracity of whether Swami Nirmalananda (Tulsi Maharaj) was a direct disciple of Sri Ramakrishna or not and ought they to alter their professed stance suddenly just because a monk of the Order supposedly says that he was so? Does evidence count for nothing? Is spiritual authority everything in the establishment of temporal truth as well? Then ought the western world not still to abide by the geocentric theory of the universe propounded by Aristotle and upheld by the Christian Church? Copernicus then must remain a horrible heretic whose remains ought to be exhumed and delivered a delayed cremation by lighting the fire of the Inquisition once more.

Sri Ramakrishna, Sri Sarada Devi and Swami Vivekananda are great because they lived in truth transcendental their temporal lives and became one with the same. However, they were great not because they were inherently so --- for there is no way to know what their inherent status was beyond their self and mutual affirmations and beyond the affirmations of devotees based on their exclusively personal realisations which are but poor indices for objective evaluation and judgement thereof --- but because their lives coincided so beautifully with the supreme truth with which they became almost identified. Thus, while absolute truth is sacrosanct on account of it being transcendentally singular and, hence, inviolable, even divine incarnations cannot be held so on strictly logical grounds. Therefore, the integrity of monks notwithstanding and their affirmations thereby holding value, devotees must cultivate the objective spirit of unbiased judgement based on evidence and rational rigour in thinking rather than blind adherence to what monastics say.

This objective spirit was the crowning glory of our nation once when it spearheaded world civilisation with the grandest discovery till date, that of the Self (Atman / Brahman). The Vedas and the Upanishads are replete with rational references where doubts have been expressed about the possibility of even God knowing the destiny of phenomena. Not a voice was raised in objection to this line of thinking beyond civilised disputation of the rishis (perfected or near-perfected sages) regarding the matter. That the line did go into the Veda to survive till this day proves irrefutably the rational traditions of Aryavarta / Bharatvarsha / India and shames us in the face direct when we lose composure and cannot counter a monk in civilised debate but straightaway accept his word as inviolable truth. In so doing we not only belittle our own status as respectable individuals but also betray the rational traditions of the race.

...to be continued...

Written by Sugata Bose

 — with Swami Sampurnananda, Bhaskar Mukherjee, Susanta Mullick and Manoj Sivan.