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With their senses and minds under complete control, and ever devoted to Yoga, these eight ascetics, with concentrated souls, are fully conversant with the Past, the Present and the Future, and are devoted to the religion of Truth.
Then, during the moral epoch of mankind, they sacrificed to their God the strongest instincts they possessed, their "nature"; THIS festal joy shines in the cruel glances of ascetics and "anti-natural" fanatics. Finally, what still remained to be sacrificed?
Do thou now hear of the sacred tirthas, and rivers and mountains and holy spots in the other three quarters!" "Dhaumya continued, 'Listen, O Bharata, I shall now narrate to thee in detail according to my knowledge, the sacred tirthas of the south. In that quarter lieth the sacred and auspicious river Godavari, full of water abounding in groves and frequented by ascetics.
It was a society in which there were many ascetics whole schools of thought contemptuous of sensual pleasure but a society distinguished from the Christian particularly in this, that at bottom it believed man to be sufficient to himself and all belief to be mere opinions. Here was the great antithesis between the Church and her surroundings. It is an antithesis which has been revived today.
The monastic system had been founded by Antony, an illiterate youth, in the year 305, by the establishment on Mount Cobyim, near the Red Sea, of a colony of ascetics, who renounced all the business and pleasures in life as the price of eternal happiness. A long series of hermits, monks, and anachorets propagated the system and, patronised by Athanasius, it spread to all parts of the world.
In food, drink and pleasures, the Nambutiris are almost ascetics: their rectitude, punctiliousness and dignity still command exaggerated respect. But they seem unproductive and petrified, even in such matters as literature and scholarship, and their inability to adapt themselves to changing conditions threatens them with impoverishment and deterioration.
And the idea soon found an able exponent: a certain M. K. Gandhi, who had long possessed a reputation for personal sanctity and thus inspired the Hindu masses with that peculiar religious fervour which certain types of Indian ascetics have always known how to arouse.
The Pandavas then reached the sacred retreat of Dhritarashtra which abounded with herds of deer and which was adorned with plantain plants. Many ascetics of rigid vows, filled with curiosity, came there for beholding the Pandavas who had arrived at the retreat. The king, with tears in his eyes, asked them, saying, "Where has my eldest sire, the perpetuator of Kuru's race, gone?"
Ye are competent to relieve all the worlds! Hearing these words of theirs, those ascetics praised the great river.
Do thou now hear of the sacred tirthas, and rivers and mountains and holy spots in the other three quarters!" "Dhaumya continued, 'Listen, O Bharata, I shall now narrate to thee in detail according to my knowledge, the sacred tirthas of the south. In that quarter lieth the sacred and auspicious river Godavari, full of water abounding in groves and frequented by ascetics.
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