The Fanatical Worshiper of Shiva

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Posted by: " Bhakta Dhruva " bhakta_dhruva

 

The Fanatical Worshiper of Shiva

 

There is an old story of a man who was a worshiper of Shiva.

 

There are sects in our country who worship God as Shiva, and others who worship

Him as Vishnu.

 

This man was a great worshiper of Shiva, and to that he added a tremendous

hatred for all worshipers of Vishnu, and would not hear the name of Vishnu

pronounced.

 

There are a great number of worshipers of Vishnu in India, and he could not

avoid hearing the name. So he bored two holes in his ears, and tied two little

bells on to them, and whenever a man mentioned the name of Vishnu, he moved his

head, and rang the bells and that prevented his hearing the noise.

 

But Shiva told him in a dream, " What a fool you are! I am Vishnu, and I am

Shiva; they are not different, only in name; there are not two Gods " .

 

But this man said, " I don't care I will have nothing to do with this Vishnu

business " .

 

He had a little statue of Shiva, and made it very nice, built an altar for it.

One day he bought some beautiful incense and went home to light some of the

incense for his God. While the fumes of his incense were rising in the air he

found that the image was divided into two : one half remained Shiva, and the

other half was Vishnu.

 

Then the man jumped up and put his finger under the nostril of Vishnu so that

not a particle of the smell could get there.

 

Then Shiva became disgusted, and the man became a demon. He is the father of all

fanatics, the " bell-eared " demon. He is respected by the boys of India, and they

worship him. It is a very peculiar kind of worship. They make a clay image, and

worship him with all sorts of horrible smelling flowers. There are some flowers

in the forests in India which have a most pestilential smell. They worship him

with these, and then take big sticks and beat the image. He is the father of all

fanatics, who hate all other gods except their own.

 

This is the only danger in this Nishta Bhakti, becoming this fanatical demon.

The world gets full of them. It is very easy to hate; the generality of mankind

get so weak that in order to love one they must hate another; they must take the

energy out of one point in order to put it into another. A man loves one woman,

and then loves another, and to love the other, he has to hate the first. So with

women. This characteristic is in every part of our nature, and so in our

religion.

 

The ordinary, undeveloped weak brain of mankind cannot love one without hating

another. This very [characteristic] becomes fanaticism in religion. Loving their

own ideal is synonymous with hating every other idea. This should be avoided,

and at the same time the other danger should be avoided. We must not fritter

away all our energies. Religion becomes a nothing with us; just hearing

lectures. These are the two dangers.

 

-Swami Vivekananda

(From Bhakti Yoga)