ignorance of ignorance

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IGNORANCE OF IGNORANTS.

 

The article by sri sudharshan titled " is Ignorance is bliss?' is

thought provoking.This  has made be remeber swAmi piLLai lOkAchAryA's

sUthram in his great work - mumUkshuppadi 5.

The people of the World are submerged in this materialistic world and

have comletely forgotten themselves, the Lord, lost the sevices to

the Lord  and alas! do not even realise that they have lost such a

great thing.

 

"samsArihaL thangaLaiyum Eswaranaiyum maRandhu, Eswara

kainkaryathaiyum izhandhu, izhandhOm enRa izhavum inRikkEa

samsAramAhira perumkadalil vizhundhu..." mumUkshuppadi 5

 

The people of the world due to their complete entanglement in this

samsAram have completely forgotten the relationship with the Lord and

the service unto Him. Not only having so forgotten, they do not

realise or despair over the fact that they have so lost such a great

thing which is the very nature of the soul - Athma .

 

They are ignorant that they are ignorant. That is the ignorance of the ignorants.

vanamamalai padmanabhan

-

mksudarshan2002

; oppiliappan

Monday, September 29, 2003 7:59 PM

"Is Ignorance really Bliss?" - An Essay on VII.15 of theBhagavath-Gita

A few years ago there was a report in an Indian newspaper about how a

majority of candidates taking an All-India Civil Services examination

failed to give correct answers to questions like "Who was the author

of the Vishnu-Sahasranama?", "What is "ashva~mEdha-yagnya", "Name the

6 chapters of the Ramayana". I was once watching a Quiz-show on

popular TV. The brightest pair of students from a prestigious school

in New Delhi was competing and they had ready answers to posers like

"Who is the author of "Canterbury Tales" but were stumped when asked

"Who wrote the "vivEka-choodAmani"? It is general fact that amongst

the youth of India today, whether at home or abroad, there is little

awareness of nativity and roots ... or of religion, traditions,

customs, manners, history or literature.Sadly, the ignorance of adult

Indians exceeds even that of their young brethren. One day some years

ago I ventured to conduct my own version of a lunch-hour gallup poll

amongst a dozen collegues of mine at office (all highly educated,

wordly-wise and hailing from different parts of India). Seated around

a table in the cafeteria, I casually put to them a question, "What is

Vedanta?". Their answers were amazingly varied, beginning with the

rather rude "I don't know, I don't really care" to the vague and

uncomfortable, "I don't really know, but I guess it's the stuff

Vivekananda -- or Chinamayananda and the like -- deal with". The

polled responses revealed to me the varying degrees of ignorance

prevailing amongst modern-day ordinary Indians about Vedanta. Not one

came up with the simple, direct answer I was expecting viz.: "Vedanta

is Indian philosophy".                       ************Ever since I

did the poll, I have often found myself wondering why at the very

mention of the word "Vedanta", ordinary Indians today (like my

friendly office co-workers, for example), become embarrassed or

discomfited. Why do they respond with feelings that one can only

characterize as uneasy, lukewarm or callous --- feelings such as

apathy, disinterest, derison and ignorance? To me the answer seems to

be this: The average Indian today prefers to pursue the practical to

the virtual exclusion of the profound. "Philosophy bakes no bread; so

why waste time on it?" is the argument. I I have heard many close

friends and colleagues similarly saying to me, "Our religion,

philosophy, Vedanta, 'pUrANa' and all that... of what practical use

really are they to me in the present day? What relevance do they have

in the world we live in? A world plagued by terrorism, war,

job-losses, HIV and ozone-depletion? I find I'm better off just

concentrating on my work, profession or career. I'd rather put my

faith in the motto, "Work is Worship". As for religion, Vedanta and

all that... well, my mantra has always been: "Ignorance is bliss".The

oft-quoted mantra of "Ignorance is bliss" is a clever but specious

quip. It has raised the status of Ignorance to a modern

pseudo-virtue. Many Indians (especially "young and upwardly-mobile"

members of the SriVaishnava community) are quite fond of quoting it

to justify to themselves their general indifference to all things

religious or scriptural. But they actually do so rather unthinkingly.

What they believe is some kind of wise maxim is actually a statement

of sad and profound irony. They have no idea of its original source.

The line appears at the end of a poem by the English poet Thomas Gray

(1716-1771) titled "Ode on a distant prospect of Eton College":"Alas,

regardless of their doomThe little victims play!No sense have they of

ills to comeNor care beyond today: ....Yet ah! why should they know

their fate .....Thought would destroy their paradise...where

Ignorance is bliss,'Tis folly to be wise.The "Ode" by Thomas Gray is

a poem of great moral despair and it ends with those famous lines on

a deeply ironical note. It was written at a time when England was in

the throes of great economic and social turmoil caused by the advent

of the Industrial Revolution. The poet was reflecting upon the many

ills and injustices that were bedevilling his country but of which

his countrymen, the silent and thoughtless majority, seemed utterly

ignorant. The line "Where Ignorance is bliss, 'Tis folly to be wise"

actually was meant to describe the young but ignorant English masses

of those times. They had really "no sense of ills to come"; they

didn't seem to know "their fate". They busied themselves only with

the humdrum, day-to-day cares of personal life and livelihood. They

did not seem to "care beyond today", believing that any thought of

the Beyond would only "destroy their (petty, private) paradise". No

one who really knew the context or significance of Gray's famous line

would ever really wish to quote it to make a moral case for Ignorance.

                     ***********Vedanta is generally acclaimed to be

India's highest contribution to human thought and civilization. The

first Western philosopher to come across Vedantic literature (the

Upanishads) was the great Arthur Schopenhauer. After reading the

Upanishads he made a famous statement about it:"From every sentence

deep, original and sublime thoughts arise, and the whole is pervaded

by a high and holy and earnest spirit. In the whole world... there is

no study.. so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads.

They are destined sooner or later to become the faith of the people".

Schopenhauer's statement is to Vedanta what the astronaut, Neil

Armstrong's statement was to Man's historic landing on the Moon: "One

small step for man; a giant leap for mankind." It is therefore one of

the saddest stories of the times that India's Vedantic 'step', 

representing one of the most historic 'leaps' of human thought in the

history of mankind, did not, alas, become the "faith of the people" as

Sri.Schopenhauer had predicted. Not even 1 in a 1000 people in India

today -- not even those who might regard themselves as

"religious-minded" or "God-fearing" -- might be able to correctly

name, if asked, the 10 principal Upanishads! Vedanta does not anymore

cause (as once it did) Indian hearts to flutter, as proudly as the

glorious tri-colour. The average Indian, instead, finds far greater

reason to gloat that his great country today contributes to, say,

making some odd new suite of Microsoft-software run successfully in

America...Young India today represents the complete triumph of the

practical over the profound. And the general consequence: young India

prides itself on its roller-coaster romance with mundane-ness... a

romance in which Ignorance rules bliss as surely as the heart rules

the head.                        ***********(to be

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