The Root of Dharma Is Kindness

To that Devi Shakti, present in every class of creature in the world in the forms of kindness and grace, our salutations, salutations, salutations.

“Kindness is the root of dharma, O Lord Kudalasangama.” (Basavanna)

When you all look inward, what is inside you is the form of that power. Kindness and gratitude: this wonderful power is inside you in the form of daya. It is a fine word. Kindness too is a fine word. So are humility, gentleness, empathy and sympathy.

It means understanding and coming to know our capacity to sense the sorrows and joys of ordinary people.

Religion and spirituality do not mean attacking and abusing others, shouting at them or fighting them. They mean gaining sympathy (compassion, fellow feeling) and empathy (feeling with another).

Example: when celebrating a festival of the gods, people shout, scream and yell, play loud bands, and without thinking about the trouble it causes others they make a racket and create a riot.

Why trouble others with such noise? There is no kindness, no daya in it.

Thinking we are all religious, people quarrel, fight and cause trouble without humility. There is not the slightest kindness there. They trouble ordinary people in society. Humility is absent from the start. Above all, the form of kindness is missing in such people, and it takes on strange forms.

Example: breaking the idols of gods, making trouble at places of worship, fighting, and beyond that shooting with bombs, missiles and guns. With swords, knives and many other means, in organised religious places, without capacity, without devotion, people parade in perverse ways in the name of religion. What else can be done but leave them to it?

“You reap what you sow, great one. Salutations to Time.”

Apart from such slaughter and violence, what else can they do?

There is no sympathy, no empathy, no compassion, no kindness.

The Devi sutra says that the form of the Devi’s power is kindness, compassion, daya. The worship of the Devi means a heightened sensitivity.

So within us, in our inner self, we must keep protecting and tending this power of kindness continuously. In the same way we must protect and tend humility.

Not looking only at ourselves, not becoming selfish, we must look at society and at everyone unconditionally. Not only people, but animals, cattle, birds, our society, our town, our country and the whole world: we must see them in the form of kindness.

Kindness does not put itself on display. With sensitivity and humility, kindness flows like water.

Grace flows. It does not need to be shown.

It is interconnected in everyone’s life. From within, this power of kindness, of grace, rises as an inner inspiration. Interconnected and interdependent, all of it, through the form of the one Devi’s power, spreads everywhere in one consciousness.

When we, as intellectuals, understand the whole situation conveniently, we can experience this. Then everyone enters, with love, trust and compassion, by the grace of the Adi Shakti, into the form of kindness.

So in every religion and in every human being, the Adi Shakti in the form of kindness is what matters most.

Then people understand everyone’s sorrows, joys and hardships. This is daya rupena samsthita.