Tag Archives: Morality

Selections from Rajaji’s Mahabharata

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

One of my many purchases on a recent trip to India was a copy of Chakravarti Rajagopalachari’s English translation of the Mahabharata.  Rajaji (1878-1972) was an important Indian statesman, but he spent a bit of his active life on literature and religion rather than politics.  His Mahabharata is ~450 pages long, which can hardly include [...]

Filed in Morality, Personal Development, Scriptures, Stories | Also tagged , , , , , | Comments (1)

Living Morally Without Universal Morality

Saturday, January 9, 2010

A lot of the discussion on Swadharma focuses on how to be sure that we’re doing the right thing: How do we live a moral life?  So we decide that we want to live morally for various reasons, but how do we decide that what we do actually is moral?  If your definition of moral [...]

Filed in Morality | Also tagged , | Comments (6)

Is Vegetarianism Flawed?

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Eating food for survival and Ahimsa pose a deep conflict that has not yet been resolved, and which needs to be resolved. “Harm,” “unnecessary killing,” and “number of senses” are fundamentally imperfect moral measurements. They can never be quantified perfectly. However, there do exist perfect moral measurements for eating. One of them is this principle of “symbiosism” that I introduce in this article: Make sure that the living organism does not die! (And make sure you are treat it well while it is alive, to foster a respectful and symbiotic relationship with the organism). This principle can be adopted very quickly by making small, but nonetheless morally significant, changes to vegetarian and vegan diets.

Filed in Morality, Question of the Week | Also tagged , , | Comments (0)