Once, Adi Sankara went to Benaras and prayed to Lord Viswanath there and asked specifically for three of his sins to be excused. The disciples who followed Sankaracharya were surprised and were wondering what those three sins for which he was seeking pardon were.
Sankaracharya then explained the first sin in the following words. He addressed the Lord and said that knowing fully well that the Lord is omnipresent and all powerful, he had undertaken the journey all the way to Benaras to have the Lord's Darsan as if the Lord was present only in Benaras. This, according to Sankaracharya, was the first sin. The significance of this is that his practice was contrary to what he already knew. His second sin was that after recognising the Lord as one whose glory cannot be described or as one whose infinite nature cannot be described in mere words, he had attempted to describe him in a string of words and thus had ignored what he had already known about the Lord. His third sin was that having recognised that the human body is the temple of the Lord and having recognised that the body is made of five destructible elements, he had not put this knowledge into practice. The Jiva that lives in the body is indestructible and if studied carefully, we come to the conclusion that one who resides in the body has no birth and has no death and has neither attachment nor detachment. He realised that the almighty is residing in him as the Atma and yet he undertook the long journey to get the Darsan of the almighty in a place external to his body. This was his third sin. Knowing that the Lord is in him, he has committed the sin of undertaking the journey to see the Lord. - taken from Swami's Summer Course Discourses in May 1974, Brindavan... Sai Ram -- --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "saimsg" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
