On Tuesday 02 Sep 2008 7:37:08 pm Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Tue, Sep 02, 2008 at 10:13:10AM +0530, ss wrote: > > Purity for the Hindu is internal purity. Get rid of shit and don't think > > about it > > Not to many of these working in waste management, eh?
Hinduism is too wily and too old to fall for this kind of logic. The "waste management" worker was relegated to a caste known as "Bhangi". Being Hindu, He would typically be taught right from the outset that his birth that his caste and his job, and he were all filthy. That was his karma. His birth in that caste and his life were all a result of actions in a past life that required him to live thorugh this life, enduring the filth so that his next life would be better. Theirony in this was that if he chose not to believe all this - there was absolutely nothing he could do about it . A society that believed all this would prevent him from doing much - a fact that reinforced the impresssion that "karma" was at work. With karma and many better lives to come, any Hindu tendency to innovate and make life and work easier for anyone was stifled and set aside. As an aside - the only non-Hindu source and a hugely entertaining one at that in which there is a reference to a series of lifetimes in which the same people met - in diferent forms fulfilling an ancient karmic need - including one in which the killer is born as a whale was in the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" shiv
