Passage 5

Tap any word for its meaning.

In plain words

Throw Out Bad Qualities and Cultivate Good Feelings

Students! Even if it is hard for you, even if it brings you some pain, make the effort a sacred life calls for. To find such a chance is great good fortune. Having come here without wasting such good fortune, I hope too that in this one month you will set firmly in your hearts the wholesome feelings your future needs, and then go back to your own places, share them again with your companions in the world, and shape our Bhārata as it ought to be. We must not try to hide the evil that is in us. While it stays inside, some day, at some moment, it will come out and bring us to ruin. Mandodarī too: after Rāvaṇa had died she fell upon his body, and the pain of ‘He is dead!’ did not make her grieve; but his life gone at the hands of monkeys? What a fate is this, what is the sin this man has done? She kept thinking about that sin. He was a great tapasvī, one who knew the Vedas, the Śāstras, the Itihāsas and the Purāṇas too, and knew them well; though he was such a great tapasvī, a mind-born son of Brahmā, a learned man, one who practised all the sayings of the Upaniṣads, for his life to go at the hands of these monkeys was a great disgrace; so Mandodarī grieved over this deeply, and at the very last she settled one thing in her heart. Whatever Śāstras, Itihāsas and Purāṇas, sacred gems, lay within him, still, deep at the bottom of his heart lay a wicked desire for the things of the senses, and because he was in a state where he could not restrain it, he carried out the abduction of Sītā by an impure path, and through that his life went at the hands of these monkeys; the cause of this, she decided, was bad qualities alone, and not the power of the tapas he had done. So set about throwing out, this very instant, the feelings that are in us, and filling yourselves with good feelings. This is a fine opportunity. Should you want such a sacred opportunity again, it will not come your way. Through some opportunity from past births such an opportunity has come to you; so make the effort to hold on to what has come.