Akbar built temples and Aurangzeb destroyed temples – why the difference?

Answer Podcast:

So Akabar They had his generals build temples And Aurangzeb Destroyed temples So why this difference? Here We see that often We as devotees We accept the Philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita But often we carry on With A materialistic world or a material world view That means We may say we are Hindus They are Muslims And Muslims are people who destroy the deities And Rather than thinking of For a functional purpose We may have to Recognize these designations But from a more philosophical perspective We understand that Whether a person is a Hindu or a Muslim Or a Christian Everybody is within the three modes of material nature So there can be Hindus who are in ignorance And there can be Muslims who are in goodness So Aurangzeb Relatively speaking was a very fanatical And intolerant Muslim And he used He used A particular interpretation of Islam To exploit The minorities Not the minorities, the subordinates Hindus were still a majority But they were the subordinate population And he did destroy a lot of temples So That was just his Tamasic nature He was Controlled by the mode of ignorance That does not mean that he is not responsible Yes, he is responsible for what he did But as far as Akbar was concerned Akbar was relatively More broad minded We could say that he had some aspects of Sattva guna in him And he did study Or at least he had Some scholars study and tell him About the nature of The Hindu religion And He tried to come up With his own universal religion Taking elements from Islam And taking elements from Hinduism Especially he took elements from Sufism within Islam Which is a more Inclusive Experiential form of Islam And he tried to integrate it Together Of course that experiment did not work very well But he was relatively broad minded And in fact There were The elder brother Of Aurangzeb, Dara Shukoh And he was also quite broad minded In fact Dara Shukoh was the first person Who got all the Upanishads translated Into Arabic And those Upanishads are still there In the archaeological society The manuscripts are there in Delhi So He was quite broad minded also But Aurangzeb Used his Used Dara Shukoh’s Apparent Apparent sympathy for Hinduism To To instigate Popular Muslim Sentiment against him And then he overthrew Dara Shukoh Executed Dara Shukoh And he imprisoned his father And then he took the throne So basically There were There is overall as I said within Islam There is an antipathy towards Beauty worship But it is not that all Muslims Are going to be equally antipathetic Towards equally hateful beauty worship It will depend on their own understanding Their own nature Their own experience with people Who are in beauty worship So there were some individuals So relatively speaking Akbar was somewhat more Broad minded and spiritually We could say more evolved in his thinking And that’s why he was more tolerant Whereas Aurangzeb was extremely intolerant Even among The Muslim rulers In his own dynasty He was far more intolerant than others That was the expression of his Tamoguna.