PARTIALITY

There is partiality in the universe, from what we can see.  One person is born happy, and another unhappy; one is rich and another poor.  Then there is cruelty also.  One animal tears another to pieces, and every person tries to get the better of the next guy.

If this world is a creation of a God, then that God is worse than cruel, worse than any devil that human beings have ever imagined.  How can we conclude otherwise?

No, says Vedanta, it is not the fault of a God that this apparent partiality exists, that this competition and cruelty exists.

But how then can this difference of some being born happy and some unhappy be explained?  It did not spring out of nothing, for that cannot be.

Who is happy and who is unhappy has nothing to do with it, Vedanta says.  It is not something in this life but something in a person’s previous life, or lives, that is to blame.

This is to say, each of us arrives here with a past.  We each come here to work out our own past deeds, and in this way each of us is the maker of his own fate.  We have no one to blame, or to thank, but ourselves.