400 Aptavani-2
tiger is in its den and you do pratikraman sitting in your home, then pratikraman is not very useful, but if you come face to face with a tiger that wants to eat you and you do pratikraman, it will truly give results. The tiger will become like a lamb at that very moment.
Pratikramans being done today are mainly dravya pratikraman; the act of pratikraman is effect i. e. unfolding of past karma. Dravya( effect) pratikraman means your‘ clothes’( the relative self), becomes clean but not the owner of the next life( the cause has not been washed). If Chandulal were to keep repeating,‘ Chandulal eat rice and lentils. Chandulal eat rice and lentils …’ does that mean Chandulal has eaten? No, nothing happens by simply speaking. Let me explain to you what dravya pratikraman is. Say Lord Mahavir bought a big bar of soap to clean his dirty clothes. He soaked the clothes first, and then he scrubbed them with the bar of soap and washed them in water. Now, how is the dirt on your clothes going to wash away by you simply reciting the process of how the Lord cleaned his clothes for one hour once a year? Allya! The Lord’ s stains and his process of washing were different and your stains and your process of washing are different. Now if you simply keep reciting the Lord’ s method, how are you going to be clean? Your plight is like that of a bull in an oil mill; no matter how much the bull walks, he remains in the same place in the oil mill. Your atikraman will be washed only if you do pratikraman the moment any atikraman occurs. How can you remember your atikraman if you do pratikraman once a year? The current time is so strange that people cannot even remember what they ate one hour ago, so how are they to remember their atikraman? Pratikraman has to be done on the spot, the instant the atikraman occurs. It needs to be‘ cash’; not pending as a balance.
If you spill tea on your clothes, you get up right away to wash off the stains and yet when your‘ self’ becomes stained,