In English
Most men spend the lifetime allotted to them or earned by them in the partaking of rich but harmful food and drink and indulge in glamorous but more harmful pastimes. What a pathetic waste of precious stuff!. Though belonging to the animal genus, man has much more than his fellow-beings in physical, mental and moral equipment. He has memory, language, conscience, reverence, awe, wonder and an inexplicable sense of discontent, the precursor of detachment. He has the glorious chance of visualising his identity with the Mystery that is manifested as this Universe; but he is so sunk in ignorance that he behaves as though he is an animal like the rest and wallows in grief and vice. It is as if fire has forgotten its capacity to burn or water its nature to wet; man has forgotten his nature to reach out into Godhood, his capacity to seek and secure the Truth of the Universe of which he is a part, his capacity, to train himself by virtue, justice, love and sympathy to escape from the particular to the Universal. He can attain the consummation and climax of merging with the unchanging that is behind all this change. It was , whose memory is enshrined in this Festival of , who held before erring man this destiny and this discipline, in the various texts that bear his name. collated the Vedhic texts and composed the stringing together in epigrammatic form the essential teachings of and . He also placed humanity under a deep debt of gratitude by elaborating the moral and spiritual lessons of and in the magnificent poetic philosophical epic, , and in the sweet - saturated collections of divine stories called . Each of these can by itself effect the liberation of man, provided he imbibes the lessons and practises them. While the may be helpful only to a limited number of intellectual seekers, the and the are for the common man, the unlearned seeker. They serve equally well and as quickly as the other texts, if not quicker. The may be taken as a Note while the epics and like the and the are 100 which mean the same thing, for the is equal to 100 .