Right Understanding To Help Others Right Understanding To Help Others | 页面 41

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Right Understanding to Help Others
Seeing God in Parents and Serving Them
Serving one’s parents is one’s moral duty (dharma;
religion), regardless of what that relationship may be. The more
a person practices this, the happier he will be. Serving the elderly
will give you happiness. If you give happiness to your parents,
you too will receive happiness. Those who make their parents
happy will never be unhappy.
I met a man I once knew in a spiritual community (ashram)
and asked him what he was doing there. He told me that he had
been living there for the past ten years. I told him that his parents
were seriously ill and were living in extreme poverty. He told me
that he could not do anything because helping his parents would
mean forsaking his dharma (religion). How can you call this a
dharma? Dharma is to embrace your parents and your family.
Your worldly interaction should be ideal. How can the worldly
interaction that forsakes one’s relationship with his parents and
his duty (dharma) be called a dharma (religion)? Do you have
parents?
Questioner: I have a mother.
Dadashri: From now on, take good care of her. You will
not get the benefit of such an opportunity again. If a man tells
me that he is very unhappy, I would tell him to take good care
of his parents so that worldly miseries do not affect him. He may
not become wealthy, but at least he will not have to suffer any
pain (dukh). Then later, he is free to practice religion.
I, too, served my mother; I was twenty years old and was
able to take care of her. The only service I did for my father
was to carry his body on my shoulders at his funeral. It was then
that I came to the realization that I must have had so many fathers
in the past lives! Goodness! There must have been so many such
fathers in my previous lives. What can we do about that? The
least a person can do is take care of the one before him. Those
who are not here are gone, but as long as your parents are living