Human beings are the very producers of impurity and defilement — yet when the time comes to cleanse and restore what has been made unclean, one invariably finds only a circle of mutual deflection, each party shifting the responsibility onto another. This habit of evading the task of purification has thus become a form of unwholesome conduct — a subtle and unconscious moral failing that human beings cultivate within themselves without awareness. It is, in its most fundamental expression, the elementary unwholesomeness of the human condition.
What, then, is the most elementary goodness of a human being? It is the act of cleansing — the prevention of impurity — and the preservation and elevation of cleanliness to ever higher degrees. And this extends to the following: should one have oneself produced the impurity, one must hasten without delay to cleanse it. Or should the impurity have been produced by another — yet it falls within the sphere and scope of one’s own capacity to address — one must equally hasten to cleanse it, even though one was not the one who created it. For without such willingness, the defilement of this entire world shall know no end.
January 18th, 2014
