In the Mahabharata, Vidura explained to Dhritarastra, “Destiny determines the consequences of our actions, not our actions themselves.” This means that we are not like programmed robots that have no free will, or no choice. Our past karma does determine what will happen in our life, but it does not determine how we will react to it.
Destiny is something like a weather forecast on a journey. A weather forecast can tell us whether our journey from one place to another is going to be snowy or sunny. But it does not determine what we do during the journey.
With respect to destiny, there are two schools of thought karmavada and daivavada. Karmavada means to think, “By my karma I will be successful. If I work hard enough and smart enough, then I will become the next Bill Gates. By my sweat and muscles, I will succeed.” But if you look at the reality of life, so many people work hard and not all of them are successful. Therefore karmavada, the idea that everything depends on my actions, brings frustration and the people who follow this doctrine tend to develop an inferiority complex because in reality it is not our action alone that determines results.
On the other hand, daivavada means to think “everything is determined by destiny, what can I do?” Dhritarastra was trying to use daivavada to justify his inaction when Duryodhana was doing atrocities on the Pandavas. Vidura told him, “Stop your son Duryodhana from waging war against the Pandavas. Let him accept Krishna’s peace proposal.” Dhritarastra replied, “No, if it is a will of destiny, then who am I, a tiny mortal, to stop the will of almighty destiny?” Vidura reminded him, “You have your duty; you have the freedom to choose to do your duty or not. So you should try to stop your son to the best of your capacity.”
Many western thinkers and westernized Indians misunderstand the Vedic philosophy. They think that the Vedic philosophy is fatalistic because everything is predestined, and thus this notion preempts any purposeful activity. But actually, Indians were never lazy. The world’s biggest poem is the epic Mahabharata, which has 110,000 verses. This is seven times bigger than the world’s next two biggest poems the Illiad and Odyssey combined together. Could lazy people have composed such a massive masterpiece? Literature, architecture, art, and even science and mathematics had reached great heights in Vedic times. All this cannot be the products of lazy people. Thus, Vedic philosophy is not daivavadi.
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