In plain words
“Sir! If only that sleep had come to me, how comfortable I would have been! It is only because sleep would not come that I had to suffer listening to this speech,” he said. By this word the man understood at once that his speech was dreadful. Jokes like these help us to come to know, through ourselves, the faults that are in us. He gave a reaction to an action. So to make fun of others does not mean to attack them directly. That is very wrong. So we must decide well how we are to use the tongue. It is through the tongue that our humanness earns a divine honour. The second instrument is the tongue.
Trikaraṇa śuddhi
The third is Manas. You know this Manas. ‘Cañcalaṃ hi manaḥ kṛṣṇa pramāthi balavaddṛḍham.’ This Manas is very fickle. It is stubborn. It is dangerous. This Manas must be set on the right path. When does that happen? When we set our hands and our speech on the right path, Manas too naturally comes to the right state. So to purify these three, Manas, speech and hands, is trikaraṇa śuddhi. To make the hands sacred is Karma Yoga. To put speech to good use is Bhakti Yoga. To shape our Manas so that it follows these two is Jñāna Yoga. This is the form of the three yogas. This is trikaraṇa śuddhi. Why must we purify these three? Why must we make them sacred? You can take a small example here.
The whole world is made up of the five elements: earth, water, fire, air and space. The very five elements that pervade the whole universe have taken on our body. So, to make these five elements sacred, we must enter on sacred activities. How this is so holds a great secret.