Sri Rudra Prasna or Satarudriya -A Flag Post of Universality and Inclusiveness of Hinduism

Conclusion: Inclusiveness of Hinduism
The purpose of this magnificent hymn, the Sri Rudra  Prasna, is to instill into the minds of people the knowledge that God is not  merely the creative Parent of the universe, but He is also immanent in every  particle, in every speck of space, in every unit of time, in every nook and  corner, in every particle of such creation.

God has been painted here through every conceivable  notion of dual character of the universe such as the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the right and the wrong, the positive and the negative,  the high and the low, the gross and the subtle, the wise and the ignorant, the  strong and the weak, the believable and the unbelievable, the mortal and the  immortal, existence and non-existence and so on.

Synonyms and antonyms, parallels and the opposites  personify the existence of God. Thus the contrast of white is black, and God is  both the white and the black. This is logical because we cannot understand what  is white unless there is black. Thus if we say that something is good, there  has to be something else that is bad, as otherwise our mind is incapable of  imagining what can be good. If we want to know what is heat there has to be  some thing which is cold.

Hence God has to be blended in both the aspects in a Transcendent  Presence which is neither the good nor the bad, yet is the good and the bad,  the subject and the object. Every experience, every perception, every way of  human thought is involved in this predicament of juxtaposing, blending or  bringing together contraries in the God-Being.

This blending is typically brought out  in the iconographic representation of Siva called Ardha Nareesvara which  shows him with one half of the body as male  and the other half as female the principle behind which is portrayed in  a soothing poetical form  in the Sri  Rudra Prasna. In Hindu  philosophy, this portrayal visualizes the belief that the sacred ultimate power of the universe as being both feminine  and masculine, being mutually complementary and corollary to each other signifying the bipolar  nature of the world.

The whole of life is nothing but an arena of battle  where forces collide with one another, because the universe is not a uniform,  featureless, range of a single form of existence, but is a mixture of opposing  constituents. We may call them the centripetal and the centrifugal movements - energies  that tend towards the centre and energies that direct them away from the centre  towards the periphery, towards the objects of senses. The battlefield of life  is nothing but the field of the conflict of these two tendencies, everywhere.

Thus, whenever our conceptions and perceptions get  tuned to the tendencies in the universe that move toward the centre of the  cosmos (centripetal forces), we appear to be seeing good things, beautiful  things, happy things, pleasant things; but whenever perceptions, cognitions,  outlooks get entangled in those tendencies which move outwards, away from the  centre (centrifugal), towards the objects, things appear unhappy, ugly, bad and  evil.

So, the perception of this disparity of characters in  things is not due to any actual disparity in the cosmos, as disparity is not  really there, but is due to the incapacity of the human individual to conceive  its totality at one go.. The weakness of the faculty of human perception is  that it can only conceive sharp divisions but not a unified whole.

Sri Rudra Prasna puts an iron curtain before such  human way of looking at things, and helps us to recognize the All Mighty Being  in every little thing in the cosmos, whether they are liked ones or disliked  ones, good ones or bad ones, necessary ones or unnecessary ones, pleasant ones  or unpleasant ones, beautiful ones or ugly ones and so on.

To our shock, it is only here that we come across God  being praised as the Lord of thieves, the Lord of bandits, the Lord of dacoits  marauding on the mountain tops, and as He who is present in workshops, in  marketplaces, in the streets, in earth, water, fire, air and ether, in  vegetation, in animals—in all things and every thing in creation.

Sri Rudra Prasna opens before us the wide canvas of the cosmos, or the  Virat-Svarupa of the Lord, as the original Almighty before creation and also  after creation, in whom the whole of creation is absorbed in a blend of unity  with its own existence. The effort here is to lift the human mind above the  bodily and empirical perceptions and to envisage the universe as one single unit  in which the subject and the object are blended together.

This description of Siva, in Sri Rudra Prasna is comparable to what we  see about Vishnu in the Vibhuti Yoga (Chapter 10) and Visvarupa  Sandarshana Yoga (Chapter 11) of the Bhagavad Gita or in the Purusha  Suktam or in the Vishnu Sahasra Nama Stotram.

Sri Rudra Prasna is generally  interpreted to show that Vishnu is another aspect of Siva and accordingly to hold  that Vishnu and Siva are one and the same God from an Advaita viewpoint.  Interestingly, the Vishnu Sahasranamam, in a similar manner, states Siva is an  aspect of Vishnu.

Usually, the human being is regarded as the subject  and the universe and the world as objects, as something external. Here, in this  hymn the Almighty, Rudra or Siva, is conceived as the Universal Presence in all  creation. The distinction usually drawn between the thinker and the thought,  consciousness and matter, subject and object, is wiped out by making  consciousness itself to deeply  commune  with that Being who is not only the consciousness that meditates, but also that  which is meditated upon.

It is obvious that no one who has not lifted himself  above the limitations of human thought can offer prayers in this manner. Thus, Satarudriya  is a Universal Vedic prayer to the Supreme Being, denoted by the epithet -  Rudra and Siva - demonstrating in abundant measure the universality,  catholicity and inclusiveness of Hinduism.

None is left out, nothing is omitted, and no wish has  remained unfulfilled, no detail escaped attention, while painting the universe as  an all-embracing form of the Supreme Being Himself. Every thing in creation is  illustrated as Satyam-Sivam-Sundaram.

1. Talks on Sri Rudram by Swami Dayananda Saraswati
2. Sri Rudram and Purusha Suktam by Swami Amritananda
3. Daily Invocations by Swami Krishnananda

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