Every man should take up his own ideal and endeavour to accomplish it. That
is a surer way of progress than taking up other men's ideals, which he can never
hope to accomplish. For instance, we take a child and at once give him the task
of walking twenty miles. Either the little one dies, or one in a thousand crawls
the twenty miles, to reach the end exhausted and half-dead. That is like what
we generally try to do with the world. All the men and women, in any society,
are not of the same mind, capacity, or of the same power to do things; they
must have different ideals, and we have no right to sneer at any ideal. Let every
one do the best he can for realising his own ideal. Nor is it right that I should be
judged by your standard or you by mine. The apple tree should not be judged
by the standard of the oak, nor the oak by that of the apple. To judge the apple
tree you must take the apple standard, and for the oak, its own standard.
Unity in variety is the plan of creation. However men and women may vary
individually, there is unity in the background. The different individual
characters and classes of men and women are natural variations in creation.
Hence, we ought not to judge them by the same standard or put the same ideal
before them. Such a course creates only an unnatural struggle, and the result is
that man begins to hate himself and is hindered from becoming religious and
good. Our duty is to encourage every one in his struggle to live up to his own
highest ideal, and strive at the same time to make the ideal as near as possible
to the truth.
In the Hindu system of morality we find that this fact has been recognised from
very ancient times; and in their scriptures and books on ethics different rules
are laid down for the different classes of men — the householder, the
Sannyâsin (the man who has renounced the world), and the student.
The life of every individual, according to the Hindu scriptures, has its peculiar
duties apart from what belongs in common to universal humanity. The Hindu
begins life as a student; then he marries and becomes a householder; in old age
he retires; and lastly he gives up the world and becomes a Sannyasin. To each
of these stages of life certain duties are attached. No one of these stages is
intrinsically superior to another. The life of the married man is quite as great as
that of the celibate who has devoted himself to religious work. The scavenger
in the street is quite as great and glorious as the king on his throne. Take him
off his throne, make him do the work of the scavenger, and see how he fares.
Take up the scavenger and see how he will rule. It is useless to say that the man
who lives out of the world is a greater man than he who lives in the world; it is
much more difficult to live in the world and worship God than to give it up and
live a free and easy life. The four stages of life in India have in later times been
reduced to two — that of the householder and of the monk. The householder
marries and carries on his duties as a citizen, and the duty of the other is to
devote his energies wholly to religion, to preach and to worship God. I shall
read to you a few passages from the Mahâ-Nirvâna-Tantra, which treats of this
subject, and you will see that it is a very difficult task for a man to be a
householder, and perform all his duties perfectly:
The householder should be devoted to God; the knowledge of God should be his goal of life.
Yet he must work constantly, perform all his duties; he must give up the fruits of his actions to
God.
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