Nature: Anchor of the purest thoughts

Nature plays a vital role in the life of a human being and the obvious truth that the man has to realise is that he is a part of the nature and that his happiness depends in the way that he establishes a firm bond with it.

Scriptures, arguably the foremost human documents, of all religions describe the way that the primitive man understood his relationship with nature.

According to the Hindu thought, as it is reflected in the Vedas and Upanishads, there is no separation between the divine and the world of nature as they are the two aspects of the same reality.

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During the present times of colossal environmental pollution, it is important to remember references to nature in ancient scriptures and what the great Indian Classics taught us

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They assert that the cosmic reality is one like the ocean, nature or the manifest world is like the waves on the surface of the sea and Brahman is like the depths of the sea.

The Vedic seers wanted to live in harmony with the environment to fulfill their wish of enjoying longevity besides the spiritual enlightenment.

The Bible makes reference to man’s primaeval duty of achieving the harmony with nature.

The holy Quran also observes that God created man as his vicegerent (Khalīfa) on earth, making the earth a dwelling-place for man, and ensured that man’s needs could be provided by the earth.

The man has the right to use the earth and with this right comes the responsibility of manifesting the qualities of the Creator, Mercy and Justice.

In the Indian epics, the ‘Ramayana’ and ‘Mahabharata’ and ‘Bhagavatha’; nature almost becomes the most important character and those who had right and judicious relationship with the nature prospered and eulogised in all of them.

Kalidasa describes the way that the trees, animals and birds retain their own shapes yet unite with the man in a pleasing relationship in ‘Shakumthalam’.

The poet relates that Shakuntala carries out her daily task of love towards the trees, her brothers and the creepers, her sisters. She becomes a part of nature effortlessly.

Dushyantha thus describes her:

“Lips as red as tender leaves,
Like young branches her two arms,
Form infused with blooming youth
Like a flower that tempts the heart.”

When Shakunthala leaves the hermitage for her husband’s palace, her foster father, Kanva, tells the trees:

“O assembled trees of the hermitage,
She who never quenched her thirst,
Had she not watered you first,
She who loved to dress, yet never,
Your beloved leaves would severe,
She who would rejoice as soon,
As your flowers had come to bloom,
With her lord, she goes to dwell,
All of you bid her farewell.”

Describing the part played by nature in the life of Shakunthala, Rabindranath Tagore says,

“The poet without disturbing the external beauty and composure of the world has kept its inner force unifying, strong and active in the midst of silence.

Even external nature, in the forest scenes, participates all through in the functions of the mind. ”

As an ardent student of classical Sanskrit literature, Tagore imbibed the same realisation and asserted the same in many of his works.

In, ‘Hidden Treasure’ he relates the story of a greedy man who searches for a treasure hidden in a labyrinthine cave.

But he realises that the sun rays, pure water and serene breezes are comparatively wealthier than gold and diamonds after being lost the way out and getting imprisoned in that cave.

He presents the true relationship between the man and nature in his play, ‘Muktha Dhara’.

‘Muktha Dhara’, written in 1922, an allegory of the contemporary times when India was ruled by England, deals with many relevant issues like industrialisation, racial hatred and slavish educational system.

But Tagore asserts that the most important of all those themes is the psychological relationship between the man and nature.

Tagore believes that there is a close relationship between the mind of a man and nature and they act and react upon each other and the fact that he gets the yielding of nature asserts that he belongs to it.

Abhijit, the young prince in ‘Muktha Dhara’ is a foundling picked up by the king from the banks of the river when he was being lulled up by its waves.

Thus ‘Muktha Dhara’ is almost his mother and he realises that he can’t live peacefully when the river is dammed up and its free flow of waters is restricted.

He declares, “Somewhere or the other in the external world, God writes for us the secret mystery of each man’s spirit. ‘Muktha Dhara’ is his word to me, bearing the secret of my inner being.

When her feet were bound up in the iron fetters I was startled out of a dream.” Tagore implies that every person should vitalise his bondage with nature by realising his psychological relationship with something or the other in nature.

Then the man would take up the sacred responsibility of destroying the barriers and restoring harmony between himself and nature.

In his poem ‘Dry Salvages’ TS Eliot says:

“I do not know much about gods, but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god - sullen, untamed and intractable…”

In ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’, Mark Twain complains that the frontiers have become uncongenial to live as the contemporary man has replaced the river god with the money god and finally Huckleberry Finn rejects the people and goes back to the river Mississippi.

William Golding, the Nobel laureate, in his novel ‘Lord of the Flies’ points out that religion is nothing but the understanding of nature by being a harmonious part of it.

But everything that happens all around in the world today proves that we lost the way in the middle and “we are here as on a darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, /Where ignorant armies clash by night.”(Mathew Arnold-The Dover Beach).

By:Madhurantakam Narendra
(The writer is a bilingual short story writer,novelist and poet, writing in both Telugu and English)