Hare Krishna!
om ajnana-timirandhasya jnananjana-salakaya
caksur unmilitam yena tasmai sri-gurave namah
I offer my respectful obeisance unto my spiritual master, who has opened my eyes, which were blinded by the darkness of ignorance, with the torchlight of knowledge.
As you all know ISKCON is not in the business of running schools per se. The only reason we are doing so is to inculcate the core values of the vedic conclusions amongst school children. Of course the word “values” can connote various understandings. For us the Bhagavad Gita is the template for determining the values.
In the beginning of the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna demolishes an apparently lucid and clear argument that Arjuna forwards promoting non-violence as the highest dharma. Lord Krishna demonstrates that merely being non-violent is not a necessary condition for being always right nor is it the highest dharma but everything needs to be seen or analyzed in a valid context.
The basic facts of life as explained by Lord Krishna are:
- There is a distinction between body and soul.
- We must first know who we actually are.
- We must acknowledge the existence of a creator by our pure common sense
- And that the creator is the best person to guide us, as to how we go about in our life since he created us and the universe we live in.
Lord Krishna further explains how we are all actually suffering in this world, much as we all may not want to admit it.
If we perceive the reality of all these facts, we can then actually be taught how to come out of this suffering of birth, death, old age and disease by the path of real yoga- Harinaam Sankirtan, the congregational chanting of the holy name. Values will then follow automatically. Truthfulness, compassion, kindness, tolerance, cleanliness, mercifulness, simplicity etc are all then the by-products of this chanting process
It is our humble endeavour, to introduce to our children, in a gradual and systematic manner these vedic truths and practices. This is how our school is unique, when we portray our school as a ‘School with a difference’
Kapila Deva Das
School Rector
ISKCON Juhu Temple - Vice President