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Of Sudras also, the natural duty consists in servitude. Every man, engaged in his own duties, attains to perfection. Hear now how one obtains perfection by application to his duties. Better is one's own duty though performed faultily than another's duty well-performed.
Though the hymns are not anti-brahmanic they decidedly do not contemplate a life spent in orthodox observances and their reputed authors include several Śûdras, a king and a woman. After the poet-saints came the doctors and theologians.
Perhaps the lecturer thought himself liberal, for to men like him at the beginning of the century it would have been an offence to read the sacred texts with Sudras or Hindus of humble castes. According to strict Hindu rule, only brahmans can read the sacred books. For in all three spheres, social, political, and religious, the advent of the new age implied more or less of a conflict.
And wedded to avarice and wrath and ignorance and lust men will entertain animosities towards one another, desiring to take one another's lives. And Brahmanas and Kshatriyas and Vaisyas with their virtue contracted and divested of asceticism and truth will all be reduced to an equality with the Sudras.
Knowledge of Brahman may thus spring up in the mind of Sudras and the like, owing to instruction received from one of those men who have passed beyond all prohibition.
The former are allowed to receive instruction from the Vedas, which is not permitted to the Sudras. The Brahmans possess the privilege of teaching the Vedas, and were in former times in exclusive possession of all knowledge.
The white priests and the warriors, who had learned of Issa's discourse to the Sudras, resolved upon his death, and sent their servants to find the young teacher and slay him.
And, at the end of the Yuga, the Sudras will cease to wait upon and serve the Brahmanas. And in the asylums of great Rishis, and the teaching institutions of Brahmanas, and in places sacred to the gods and sacrificial compounds, and in sacred tanks, the earth will be disfigured with tombs and pillars containing bony relics and not graced with temples dedicated to the gods.
The Sudras or fourth class are bound to servile attendance on the higher classes, especially the Brahmans, but they may follow mechanical occupations and practical arts, as painting and writing, or become traders or husbandmen. Consequently they sometimes grow rich, and it will also sometimes happen that Brahmans become poor.
And in the Krita Yuga, the distinctive characteristics of Brahmanas, Kshatriyas, Vaisyas, and Sudras were natural and these ever stuck to their respective duties. And then Brahma was the sole refuge, and their manners and customs were naturally adapted to the attainment of Brahma and the objects of their knowledge was the sole Brahma, and all their acts also had reference to Brahma.
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