Passage 6

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In plain words

You must enter into karma and become a hero of karma. We must hold love of country to be greater than love of religion. Today the two eyes students need, just these two, are these: National character, Individual character. The spirit of nationhood and personal character. Man today makes a fight for his Rights alone. That is, he wrangles only on the ground that he must get this job, that he holds this authority; but nowhere is a citta to be seen that recognises its responsibilities. All the universities of today have turned into factories that turn out graduates. This much alone does not make education. Developing Viveka in this education, we must try, out of love for our country, to do service in society. If he has no love that says, “This is my motherland,” he is truly not a man at all. “Jananī janmabhūmiś ca”: so we must hold the mother who bore us and this motherland, the two of them, as our two eyes.

This is my motherland, this is my mother tongue: the one who cannot say this, beating his breast, though he lives, is a corpse.

So they said. So love for one's motherland is essential for every person. Losing such love, people cherish a fondness for foreign lands all the more. We need not hate anything. But to cherish one's own country is very necessary. For the people of any country, to delight in that country of theirs, to long for it, to trust in it, is right Dharma. But instead, to forget one's own country, to trust in a foreign country and lose one's humanness: this is not the mark of true education.

In today's system of education we must develop an education that brings into balance, in full measure, the many kinds of wealth, moral, physical, of Dharma, spiritual and scientific. We must try to recognise the unity in diversity. Never once have we set ourselves to achieve such a principle with real effort. Students! It is of no use your merely taking a degree. Along with this degree you must develop general knowledge, commonsense. Between the learning we have studied and saṃskāra there is a great difference. Saṃskāra without learning, or learning without saṃskāra, is of no use. This learning and saṃskāra are like negative and positive. Only through the oneness of the two does humanness attain divinity.

In the Taittirīya Upaniṣad: Mātṛdevo bhava, pitṛdevo bhava, ācāryadevo bhava, atithidevo bhava.