[Advaita-l] The role of Ahimsa in Moksha sadhana

Praveen bhatpraveen at gmail.com
Thu May 29 11:33:25 CDT 2008


praNAm all,

Hari Om, Sada-ji,

On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 5:49 PM, kuntimaddi sadananda
<kuntimaddisada at yahoo.com> wrote:
> There was once a devoted lady and she used to chant Kulashekara Alwar's Mukundamaala daily with full of devotion.  In that there is a statement (I am not sure where exactly it is) that says - Oh Lord! I surrender at your feet. In her chanting she learned to chant in away that gave the meaning -Oh! Lord please surrender at my feet - Of course, she did not mean that since in her mind she was surrendering to the Lord with full devotion, even though her chanting was meaning something opposite....

To my understanding, the most important part of the story that you
narrated is the devotion of woman in submitting to God's feet, which
is the meaning of the original chant. That is, the knew the meaning of
the chant, but made a mistake in chanting. So, even here, knowing the
meaning, be it as a summary, is quite important.

> Devotion covers the blunders that we commit that includes the ones we do during chanting.  In the end of puja, we ask for forgiveness for all the mistakes or errors that we commit and things we omit including the ones we make during puja – mantra lopa, kriya loopa etc.
>

OTOH, in Vedic sacrifices, making a mistake in svara also could be
disastrous depending on what the resultant meaning is. To this effect,
there's a story about the demon Vrtraasura being born after a
sacrifice, which was made intending for him to kill Indra; instead,
the error in svara resulted in the other way round, that is, he was
killed by Indra. Of course, this is not a good example to bring the
point out! :)

gurorarpaNamastu,
--praveen
/* Through what should one know That owing to which all this is known!
--Br.Up. 4.5.15 */



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