There is no sin or good deed.
There is absolutely no reference to the concept of sin or a good deed in The Vedas. There is just the law of Karma. Though such divisions do come in the texts written much later, that is, the Puranas, the underlying theme is still the same.
It is impossible to define what is a sin and what is not. There will always be grey areas.
Killing is a sin, but warriors who kill on the battlefield go to heaven. Confusing? A lie spoken to save Dharma, is better than 100 truths. Ironical?
It is not the action, but the underlying intention and context that defines us to define it as good or bad. The Law of Karma states that every action you do, it's effects will come back to you.
Hence, there is only action and intention, no concept of good or bad in Hinduism.
When we understand clearly the law of cause and sequence, or of action and reaction, we cease to blame God, or any other extra-cosmic creator of evil.
There is absolutely no reference to the concept of sin or a good deed in The Vedas. There is just the law of Karma. Though such divisions do come in the texts written much later, that is, the Puranas, the underlying theme is still the same.
It is impossible to define what is a sin and what is not. There will always be grey areas.
Killing is a sin, but warriors who kill on the battlefield go to heaven. Confusing? A lie spoken to save Dharma, is better than 100 truths. Ironical?
It is not the action, but the underlying intention and context that defines us to define it as good or bad. The Law of Karma states that every action you do, it's effects will come back to you.
Hence, there is only action and intention, no concept of good or bad in Hinduism.
When we understand clearly the law of cause and sequence, or of action and reaction, we cease to blame God, or any other extra-cosmic creator of evil.
Then we do not say that evil has been interpolated from without. If we know that all the forces of nature, both physical and mental, are but so many expressions of one eternal Energy or Divine will, which is far beyond the relative good and evil, then we do not see good and evil in the universe. On the contrary, we find everywhere the expression of that Divine will. The nature of an effect must be the same as that of a cause, because effect is nothing but the manifested state of the cause, and if the cause of the universe be one eternal, divine Energy, then the universe, as a whole, can be neither good nor evil.
We can throw aside the narrow and limited (looking) glass of our relative standard, through which now looking at the events of life and put on our mental eye the (looking)) glass of divine energy, or universal will, then we no longer see good and evil, or virtue and vice, or reward and punishment. But we see the expression of one law of causation everywhere. Then we do not blame our parents, or the Satan, or God, or anybody, but understand that all our misery is but the result of our own acts which we did in this life or in a past incarnation. If we understand that as electricity is neither positive nor negative, but appears as positive or negative when manifested through a magnet, we apprehend that the laws of nature only appear to us as good or evil when they express themselves through the gigantic magnet of the phenomenal universe. If we realise that the eternal Energy, or the Divine will, appears as good or evil only as related to our minds and lives then we can say, as the great sages in India said:
“God does not create good or evil, nor does He take the virtue or sin of anybody. He does not punish the wicked or reward the virtuous. Our intelligence being covered, as it were, with the cloud of ignorance and relativity, deluded as we are, we imagine, on account of our imperfect understanding, that God creates good and evil, that His creation is good or evil, that He punishes or rewards.”
It is through our ignorance of truth that we do not recognise the Divinity that pervades the universe, standing high above the reach of our conception of good and evil.
“God does not create good or evil, nor does He take the virtue or sin of anybody. He does not punish the wicked or reward the virtuous. Our intelligence being covered, as it were, with the cloud of ignorance and relativity, deluded as we are, we imagine, on account of our imperfect understanding, that God creates good and evil, that His creation is good or evil, that He punishes or rewards.”
It is through our ignorance of truth that we do not recognise the Divinity that pervades the universe, standing high above the reach of our conception of good and evil.
However, let us strive to see the Divinity, by going behind the phenomenal appearance of good and evil. Let us go to the eternal source of all the phenomena. Let us first reach the highest plane of spiritual oneness, and standing on that Divine will, let us understand that good and evil are two aspects of one eternal substance which is neither good nor evil, but is the Absolute or the Brahman. Then and then alone, we shall transcend good and evil and enjoy the eternal Bliss in this life. It should be remembered that relativity created by the categories of time and space is nescience (ajnana or ignorance) and when we dispel the darkness of nescience, the ever shining light of the Atman, or the Brahman, is manifested. The light of the Brahman is self-revealing (svayam-prakasha) and it exists within us and within the phenomena all the time
there is no word that means creation out of nothing. The word, they use, literally means Projection and not creation, answering to the modern idea of evolution. Unlike the Western people of the present day, they had nothing to learn, as they had slowly and gradually discovered the true cause of good and evil, and afterwards explained their mutual relation as clearly as possible. They said that good and evil are relative terms, one of which cannot exist without the other. What we call good depends upon the existence of what we call evil, and evil exists only in relation to good. Being interdependent terms they cannot be separated. In trying to separate them and to make each stand by itself as independent of the other, we not only destroy their relative and interdependent nature, but also destroy the terms themselves. The moment we try to separate good from evil, we find this to be true. Evil cannot exist alone. If we try to make evil stand by itself as entirely separate from good, we can no longer recognize it as evil. Consequently, according to the Vedanta philosophers, the difference between good and evil is not one of kind, but of degree, like the difference between light and darkness.
Again the same thing can appear as good and evil under different circumstances. That which appears as good in one case, may appear as evil if the conditions change and the results be different. The same fire may be called a giver of life and comfort and a bestower of happiness and a producer of good, when it saves the life of a half-frozen man, or when it gives us warmth in the coldest days of winter, or when it cooks our food and guides our feet. But it will be called the producer of evil and a curse of God when it destroys life, or inflicts injury on man or on his property. Still the nature of fire is to burn, and this nature does not change. The Great London fire destroyed many lives, brought ruin and destruction to many families, but at the same time it destroyed the germs of a plague that could have done more evil. So it was both good and evil at the same time. The same force of gravitation is called good when it attracts atoms and molecules of our bodies and keeps together the atoms of our clothes, gives shapes to our houses, bodies, and this earth where we are now living, but it is the producer of evil when it kills a man who falls from the roof of a house.
