10 Mar 2021
[An online spiritual discussion was conducted on February 13, 2021, in which several devotees participated. Some of the questions of devotees answered by Swāmi are given below.]
[Śrī Durgaprasad asked: You have said that God never breaks His own rules. But when God came in the form of Śrī Rama, He broke the rule of justice in battle. He killed Vāli by shooting an arrow from the back. However, to compensate for that violation, He also took a similar arrow shot from a hunter when He reincarnated as Śrī Kṛṣṇa. How can we correlate the concept that God never breaks His own rules with the few occasions, when He actually breaks some rules?]
Swāmi replied: “Ends justify the means” is also one of the rules of God. Nobody could defeat Vāli when attacking him from the front since he had received such a boon from God. In such situations, the means can be altered to achieve righteous ends. Vāli was a sinner. He had sinned against his younger brother Sugrīva. Had Vāli not got such a boon, Rāma would have easily attacked Vāli from the front and punished him for his sin. But the boon obtained by Vāli was from God. So, Rāma did not choose to break that boon and kill Vāli by attacking him from the front. Instead, Rāma preferred to alter the means of killing him, which was by attacking him from behind. Thus, the justified end was achieved without breaking the boon given by God. But Rāma accepted the punishment for deviating in the means. He gave the punishment to Himself. This was done to prevent people from using wrong means to achieve their unjust ends in the future. Otherwise, clever people might exploit this concept and use wrong means to achieve their desired unjust ends and then justify that their end was righteous. This is the background from which we understand that God never break His own rules.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★