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Flushing out the ‘inner terrorist’

Photo: S. Mahinsha

Wise words: Geshe Lama Thubten Gurung of Kopan Monastery inaugurating the Pre-Parliament Summit of the Parliament of the World’s Religions, in Thiruvananthapuram on Sunday. Rodney Moag and Swami Sandeep Chaitanya are seen.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Love and compassion will help destroy the “inner terrorist” of each person and this purging of negativity from individuals is the only lasting solution to hatred, bigotry and terrorism, Geshe Lama Thubten Gurung of the Kopan Monastry (Nepal) has said.

He was speaking after inaugurating the Pre-Parliament Summit of the Parliament of the World’s Religions to be held at Melbourne, Australia, in 2009. The summit was organised here on Sunday by the School of Bhagavad Gita.

“Rules and regulations can bring only an outer peace, that too temporarily. If there is hatred and the feeling of revenge inside man’s mind, it is bound to come out some time and then outer peace will disappear. Real peace has to come from a person’s mind,” he said.

Citing the cases of the Dalai Lama and Mahatma Gandhi, he said that politics and religion complement each other if both are kept pure.

“For peace and prosperity it is very important to have uncorrupted politics and religion. Politics and religion can go together. Politics by itself is not dirty. It is gets dirty only when it is corrupted. If a person uses his religion to gain fame and power he is not a religious person. Those who say they do not have any religion or are above religion but practise love and compassion are the truly religious,” he said.

The true practise of religious principles can bring value to politics. Good intentions alone won’t suffice. One needs the appropriate wisdom too. People should realise that helping others is helping oneself and that harming others is harming oneself. The best place that one can plant the seed of change is within oneself, he added.

In his speech social activist and thinker Asghar Ali Engineer said he did not subscribe to the view that religion was responsible for all the hatred and bigotry in the world. There is an urgent need to understand the motivating forces behind religion and politics today and not be misled by labels such as Hindu, Muslim or Buddhist.

For instance it was Mohammed Ali Jinnah — educated in the West, a modernist, one who did not know much about Islam — who propounded the two-nation theory and succeeded in dividing India.

On the other hand Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, a scholar of Islam, a truly religious person, refuted the two-nation theory and had no problem accepting the leadership of Gandhiji. Likewise Veer Savarkar never imbibed the spirit of Hinduism. On the other hand Gandhiji was out and out a spiritual person and his emphasis was on truth and non-violence.

Terrorism today has little basis on religion. It is the response of a section of Muslim youth, mistaken youth, who are not able to overcome their hatred of the capitalist greed for Arabian oil.

There will be no world peace so long as this plunder is going on. “Terror is a political response to a political situation, a wrong response, though,” Dr. Engineer said. If all religions unite, there will be no misuse of religion by politicians, he added.

A major attraction was Rodney F. Moag former Associate Professor of South Asian Languages in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. Dr. Moag sent the audience into raptures by beginning his speech in near-perfect Malayalam. Through his ‘Song of Light,’ the academic who overcame his blindness to gain fame as a musician reminded the audience that when one rain drop falls into the river, the river is no longer the same. The ‘Pickin Singin Professor’ also sang a song about his mother in which the refrain was ‘Mama never complained.’

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