Page 29 - All India Magazine Jun-2026

ways calm and precisely merciless lex talionis.
This commercial and mathematical accountant is some-
times supposed to act with a startling precision. A curious
story was published the other day, figuring as a fact of con-
temporary occurrence, of a rich man who had violently de-
prived another of his substance. The victim is born as the son
of the oppressor and in the delirium of a fatal illness reveals
that he has obliged his old tyrant and present father to spend
on him and so lose the monetary equivalent of the property
robbed minus a certain sum, but that sum must be paid now,
otherwise — The debt is absolved and as the last piece is ex-
pended, the reborn soul departs, for its sole object in taking
birth is satisfied, accounts squared and the spirit of Karma
content. That is the mechanical idea of Karma at its acme of
satisfied precision. At the same time the popular mind in its
attempt to combine the idea of a life beyond with the notion
of rebirth, supposes a double prize for virtue and a double
penalty for transgression. I am rewarded for my good deeds in
heaven after death until the dynamic value of my virtue is ex-
hausted and I am then reborn and rewarded again materially
on earth. I am punished in hell to the equivalence of my sins
and again punished for them in another life in the body. This
looks a little superfluous and a rather redundant justice, and,
even, the precise accountant becomes very like an unconscio-
nable hundred per cent usurer. Perhaps it may be said that
beyond earth it is the soul that suffers — for purification, and
here the physical being — as a concession to the forces of life
and the symmetry of things: but still it is the soul that thus pays
double in its subtle experience and in its physical incarnation.
CWSA 13: 367-69 Sri Aurobindo

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