Passage 15

In English

When entered , as ’s ambassador, and spoke to , came to know of this and he ordered that be punished. This is quite contrary to the accepted code of conduct of a king. To kill an ambassador or to punish one who has come as a messenger on behalf of someone else is not the right code of conduct for a king of the country. tried to explain to this principle by which he should not punish one who has brought a message and tried to get released. , in fact, had so many other bad qualities and bad ideas in him, and he often undertook to do things which he should not have done. Many times, he made attempts to kill even . , the wife of , tried to teach that to kill a woman is very wrong, and that he was committing a great sin. The bad qualities that were in him made him take always the wrong path and subjected him to many difficulties. On one occasion went to her husband and asked him, “You know all the , and all the codes of right conduct. With all your wisdom, why is it that you are doing wrong things? What is the matter? How can you explain? What is the inner meaning of your behaviour? Not only this, you have all the capacity and you have all the strength to assume any form that you like. On the day when you brought to , you were in the form of a and you deceived her. Why are you taking all this trouble in order to win over the sacred ? If only you as sume the form of , then would be yours. Why did you not adopt that path?” Then replied that ’s form was a sacred and divine one. If he really took that form, how will he have bad qualities at all? This means knew very well that the qualities which one will have should be appropriate to his form. Because he had the form of a , the qualities of a were showing up. Today, people have a human form. They appear like human beings but behave like . There is some contradiction in this situation. Since we have taken the human form, sacred qualities which are appropriate to a human being should thrive within us. In words we may say that we are human beings, that we are devotees, that God in the form of is present in us, but to put these statements into practice has become very rare. The first thing we should do in this context is to correct our practice. Through our efforts, we can achieve any great thing. The kind of conduct which we accept and go through in our daily life will only be reflected by our life.