The Beauty of Sharing

The democratisation of Karma, that is the acceptance, pluralism and the place of importance of every karma that is to be performed, shows the fact that nishkama karma is never meant for the spiritually affluent few, but it is meant for one and all. Everyone, back from a butcher to the king, has to take part in the process of nishkama karma. Since it is meant for one and all, it is a universal form of performance of Karma and it believes that everyone in society has to perform his or her karma in the nishkama manner. As we have already explained, nishkama does not mean that karma without result but karma with utmost result, but the only difference is that such results are not meant for the individual alone but for the whole universe. Nishkama karma in this sense believes in the sharing of both karma and result. Unfortunately what happens now is that the present day world order never believes in sharing. Instead of sharing wealth, power etc. the present day world order believes in accumulation and keeping it for oneself. This tendency can be termed as kama. Kama literally means that the accumulation and concentration of power wealth etc. for oneself and oneself alone. Every Asura, that means the villain characters in the Indian systems of thought. Asuras are human beings having certain specific qualities which are harmful to the society. That is why in modern terminology they can be termed as the villains. The villain, whether it is Ravana or Duryodhana, whoever he may be, they believe that everything including the world must be is reserved for them. So they try to accumulate and preserve it for themselves. They are doing meticulous wonderful karma. Take for example the case of Ravana. He was very handsome, very strong with immense potentiality and he had the capacity to implement whatever he thinks to be fit to himself. In a sense he was performing in a meticulous manner. But that performance is kama performance because, the karma and its result are meant for he himself; there was no sharing at all. So what I am telling is that nishkama karma specifically believes in sharing of karma and result. The present day market economy is only one of the reincarnated forms of Ravana, because it demands everyone to make money, to accumulate money and to keep it for oneself. It never demands that you have to share whatever you have with the rest. Whenever and wherever we lose the capacity to share whatever we have, we are losing the capacity to maintain the nishkama karma. Nishkama karma in this sense can never be confined to the actions of any sort that can be performed by a gifted few, that is why in the beginning of this session I told you that nishkama karma is meant for one and all applicable to both the king and the butcher. Whenever the butcher performs his karma in a nishkama manner that activity can never be treated as a sinful activity and whenever the king rules the country for the benefit of he himself alone, such an activity can never be treated as an ideal one or a nishkama one. If the king wants to peform nishkama karma he wants to perform his duties for the benefit of one and all; that one and all includes not only the humans but also the non-humans. The very word eco-politics, coined some 100 years back, can be seen within the limits of the nuances of nishkama karma. So, what is meant here is that a person who performs nishkama karma has to think not of oneself but of the universe as a whole. So his commitment to the non-biotic elements of the world also should be taken as an act to be adjudged morally. In this sense, the nishkama karma concept of morality can never be treated as anthropocentric alone; it believes that human beings have got commitment not to the other human beings alone but to the whole universe. Therefore the classic definition that has been given by the western philosophical thoughts, especially the Greek philosophical thought that ethics is a normative science these voluntary actions of human beings living in society is absolutely unacceptable to the concept of nishkama karma, because it believes that human duties should be committed to the non-human elements also. That means that we have to share whatever we have with the rest of the creations of nature. It is in this sense that Mahatma Gandhi once defined cow as the silent creation of God. All silent creations, whether it is movable or immovable, everything belongs within the purview of nishkama karma. Therefore we have to think of a very simple fact that the present day economic system simply negates the performance of nishkama karma.