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Oh!, East is East, and West is West,
and never the twain shall meet
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at
God’s great Judgement Seat;
The above ideas of Rudyard Kipling, the first English writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, may have been shaped by his Judaeo-Christian beliefs. The idea of standing before God’s great Judgement Seat belongs to the West. The idea of standing before God for Judgement is not expressed in the East. In the Land of Bharat or the Land of Karma people believe in the inevitability of consequences for their own actions. Being a person of the East, the consequence for my own actions is not that of standing before God for Judgement. The Day of Judgement has no particular relevance to my belief in God. Man may act under the influence of material nature and he may act in the mode of goodness, the mode of passion, or the mode of ignorance. For all of his actions, both good and evil man must experience the Fruit of his own actions as per the Law of Karma.
Please join me to explore the idea of forgiveness at my Home Page of BhavanaJagat.
Dr. R. Rudra Narasimham, B.Sc., M.B.B.S.,
Kurnool Medical College, Kurnool, Andhra Pradesh, India,
M.B.B.S. Class of April, 1970.
Simon Cyrene-The Bearer of the Cross 