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| Friday, 6 February 2004 |
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Celebrating 'freedom' We celebrated our Independence anniversary a couple of days ago with the usual fanfare. Again as usual the press devoted many pages to an assessment of where we are today in respect of 1948, almost exclusively in terms of economic development parameters - the State of the Nation with regard to GNP, foreign exchange reserves, trade and commerce, health, education etc. etc. - all of them very valid for that dimension of human well-being. It is strange that we, avowedly committed to a religious/spiritual vision of total human development with the majority religion Buddhism given a special place in the constitution, evaluate our level of human development so mono-dimensionally. It is as if, even from a religious/spiritual point of view there is nothing more to growth than bread and butter. Even in this area of material well-being there is little we can be proud of; what of the other aspects such as the mental (psychological), moral and spiritual? Have even the religions made any attempts to evaluate themselves, separately and collectively, the present vis a vis the past against their stated objectives and goals? Are they reluctant to do so because of fears about what might be revealed by such an evaluation? With respect to freedom/independence, for example, all religions give priority to inner freedom over the outer, namely, our inner enslavements are more damaging than the outer; that independence from external constraints, be they local or foreign, political or social, is of lesser consequence than freedom from inner ones - of tanha, of loba, dosa, moha, or from the shackles of the world, the devil and the flesh. Going by all that is happening around us - blatant corruption, violence, child abuse, violation of human rights, consumerism, religious conflict - we seem to be in the thralls of loba, dosa and moha, in the nadir of moral/spiritual well-being. But a nary a word about this in the media or even in religious discourse. If political freedom has not brought us that inner freedom indispensable for true human development, what are we celebrating? our enslavement of mind, heart and spirit? |
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