Do not blame others

Our Indian culture is great. The rules it provides make everyone lead an ideal life. According to our shastras, it seems, a person who blames others (unnecessarily) gets half of the entire paapam of the person blamed and in addition gives away half of his entire punyam to the person blamed! So there a big loss for the person who blames and a big gain for the person blamed. The following is a small story showing how careful one needs to be while doing Dharma nirnayam and eventually blaming others.

Once a poor braahmana, with hunger, came to a person’s house and asked for bhiksha. The kind woman in the house took pity on him and immediately offered food. She asked the brahmana to sit under the shade of a huge tree in their house and she brought food for him. Before the braahmana cleaned himself, prayed to the God and started eating, a very unfortunate thing happened. There used to live a poisonous snake under the shelter of the tree and vidhi vashah it spilt its poison and it directly fell into the food the braahmana was going to eat. The braahmana unknowing that the food is poisoned, ate food and died.

Now, who needs to be blamed? Is it the woman who gave the food, or the snake or the owner or the braahmana himself. It seems that the person who decides and makes a decision that a particular individual is to be blamed will get the brahma-hatyaa-paatakam.

So did you notice how critical is a dharma-nirneta’s role. How many shastras should he have learnt before taking the seat of dharma-nirneta? How careful and unbiased should his thinking be? Imagine how great is Yamadharmaraaja to be able to do perfect justice for so many people for such huge amount of time. That is why He is called ‘Samavarti’. He has one of his legs in Shri-chandanam and the other in fire. Both are same for Him and thus very unbiased and impartial.

Morals in the story:
A lot of thinking needs to be done before putting blame on others.
A person should be highly knowledgeable and learned in order to be a dharma-nirneta. That is why it is customary in our Indian culture to always say “As far as i know, this is Dharma….” or “This is what I heard from my elders, hence …..”.

Message:
Atleast on hearing to this story, we hope all the govt. officials will be still more careful in performing their duties. The pathetic state of today’s nyaayasthaanas is well-known. The power given to a nyaayaadhikaari is immense. The story also shows how impartial, unbiased, honest and most importantly learned must the nyaayaadhikaris be… One may assume everything is going fine, but at sometime or the other one must experience the effects of his own karma.