Re:About the lord's compassion

From the Bhakti List Archives

• October 27, 2000


Dear Bhagavatha,
                you wrote :-
Dear friends,
     I am struggling with a philosophical question
which I am sure
many of you would have asked yourself. So I request
you to share
your thoughts about this.

     firstly, does nArAyaNA have the capacity to bring
his leelA-
vibhUti to a close and give mOksham to every jiva? The
answer to
this question seems to be "yes", since everything is
supported
and controlled by him.

     Then why, being a compassionate lord, does he not
do this? Is
it not obvious that every jIva will enjoy mOksha more
than the ups
and downs of samsara? 

     One way to answer this is to appeal to the fact
that samSAra is
beginningless. But still the fact remains that at any
point of time,
the lord chooses to let the play of samsAra continue.
Does this mean
that his desire for propagating this play  somehow
overrides his 
compassion?

-Kasturi

The answer :-

              Sri Kasturi the above question is a good
one.
     First of all,Lord Sriman Narayana is not only all
powerful,but also bhaktha vatsala and sharanagatha
vatsala.He is ever ready to free the jiva from
prakriti and grant him moksha,but alas,the Jiva
himself is not ready for it.Instead of enjoying the
eternal and Infinite life,which the lord can give
us,we,because of
our strange and peculiar attachment to prakriti are
adament in enjoying finite or perishable life,when our
true nature is infinite.If eternal life is granted to
us by the Lord,when we have not asked for it,then it
looses its value,because we are not in a fit position
to enjoy the same.
This we can observe in our very world,that one can
enjoy some object when one has taste for it and a gift
of that object by some other person (say one's friend)
will be fruitful because such a gift will be rightly
utilized and enjoyed.

I draw your attention to Dhruva's story where after
the Lord grants Dhruva the boon of becoming a king and
disappears from his sight,Dhruva laments over his
foolishness of asking Lord vishnu to grant him the
fitness of sitting over his father's lap and becoming
a king,which is a finite event,when he could have
asked for eternal life from Mahavishnu who had
appeared before him.We,in a way are like Dhruva(in his
childhood days)asking for finite things of life from
our lord when he can grant us moksha if asked for. 

The entire creation(leela vibhuti)is done by the Lord
in the hope of getting atleast one muktha atma(Recall
the slokha in Gita chapter 7,"After many births,the
gnani resorts to me thinking that vasudeva is
all").So,
Moksha is a cosmic event and a glimpse of the same can
be seen in the vaikuntha gadya of
Sri.Ramanujaacharya,in the way in which a muktha atma
is escorted right from the Brahma nadi upto vaikuntha.

The Lord has designed the Leela vibhuti for the baddha
jivas in such a way that they enjoy the prakriti
according to their inherent vasanas in infinite ways
and come to a point wherein they understand the
futility of a life led in relation to prakriti and
gradually mature to become a atma gnani first and
finally a Brahma gnani.

So,In short,both the leela vibhuti and nitya vibhuti
are gifts of the Lord to his amsas,the jivas,wherein
the former is meant for Brahmanizing the adament and
rebillious baddha jiva and the latter for the
enjoyment of the jivas in their true nature.

Hope the above answer satisfies you.

Sri Krishnaarpanamasthu.
Suresh B.N.   

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