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beauty and perfection; it takes to ugliness and deformity. That path is to be abandoned; not to be sought and followed. Just as a person aspiring for health might consider mere prevention of disease as health, similarly is this mistake. Health is not merely the non-existence of sickness; it is also the awakening of the power of life; it is the awakening and realization of the sleeping and basic powers of life. Even a dead person can be saved from sickness; but he cannot be given health. By escaping diseases one can keep himself alive; but it is different to find health and life.
It is very useful to remember this science of keeping good health in relation to religion. A monk was a guest in a monastery. A welcome function was arranged in his honour. The head of the monastery, during the course of his introduction to it and its residents, said: "We do not commit violence. We do not use intoxicants. We do not gather wealth." In the same tone he mentioned several other things which the monks would not do. That guest kept listening to all those for a long time and in the end he asked: "I have understood what you do not do; now kindly tell me what you do?"
Surely, I also want to ask the same thing. I also want to remind you about this very valuable difference between 'not doing' and 'doing.'
Whoever has understood non-violence, or from that point of view the religion, in the language of 'not doing' has fallen into a very basic mistake. What Schweitzer called prohibitions in life, becomes his daily routine. His relations with the objects of life are completely broken. He loses the ladder for attainment and becomes busy in 'losing' and 'not doing'; and the biggest surprise is that, in spite of this constant effort and persistence, he cannot lose what he wants to give up. What he renounces through struggle, continues to be with him in some mysterious way. He can hardly rest when he find that what he had left far behind have all returned to him. The currents that he suppresses appear to be gaining speed and he does not know why. The desires with he is at war, whose heads he cuts off from the body and throws away, stand surrounding him again and again,
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