If someone dies because of drunken driving, was the death due to destiny or drunkenness?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
So, if someone dies, say, because of whatever, some drunk driving or some accident because of that, so is it that that was the destiny that the person was supposed to die at that time? Or is it that the person, because of the drinking, they died? Destiny and karma, they are not unrelated. And it’s not that we can analyze and fragment them.
In Mahabharata, when Vidura repeatedly tries to convince Dhritarashtra that he should stop Duryodhana from his policy of antagonizing the Pandavas. Otherwise, there will be a war in which everyone will be destroyed. So, at that time, Dhritarashtra tries to rationalize his inactivity, his passivity.
And he argues, if destiny has willed, if it is the will of destiny that our dynasty be destroyed, then what can I, a tiny mortal, do to stop almighty destiny? So, at that time, Vidura cut through his hypocrisy. Dhritarashtra did not use destiny earlier. He could have used destiny earlier to say, maybe it is destiny that Yudhishthira has to be king.
Why am I doing so much to try to have Duryodhana as the king? He did not think about destiny at that time. So, it’s a very self-serving interpretation of destiny. So, Vidura cut through that.
And what did Vidura say? He explained that destiny determines the consequences of our actions. Destiny doesn’t determine our actions themselves. Destiny determines the consequences of our actions.
It doesn’t determine our actions. We have free will. So, for example, a student fails in the exams.
Now, if the student doesn’t study at all, then failure is a natural result. That’s not because of destiny. That’s because of irresponsibility.
So, destiny means that after we do a work, we often think my work produces the result. Yes, our work is one factor in producing the result. But our work is not the only producer of the result.
To give you an example, consider a farming metaphor. In farming, the farmer has to plough the land and sow the seeds. That is karma.
And then the rains have to come in an appropriate quantity at the right time. The rains coming is daiva. And karma and daiva when both come together and there is passage of time, then the harvest comes.
So the harvest, the fruit, the phala comes. The phala requires karma, daiva and karma. All three things together.
So, there are two extremes of thought. One is what is called karmava. It is a prominent modern philosophy that everything is in our hands.
By the sweat of my brow, by the toil of my hands, I have become a millionaire. There are so many other people who may work harder than us. They may not have become millionaires.
So our karma is important. The farmer doesn’t plough the land, the farmer doesn’t sow the seeds. The crops will not grow there.
So the karma is important. Karma matters, but karma is not all that matters. Now daiva is also important.
So sometimes people’s thinking goes to the opposite extreme and there is daivavada. Daivavada means what is called fatalism. Everything is predestined.
Nothing is in my hands. Some people just become pessimistic and morose. My destiny is rotten.
But it’s not like that. No matter how many things are going wrong in our life, we always have free will. And we can make things better by our present choices.
So now the daiva, whether the rains fall or not, that is destiny. Now what determines the destiny? That is determined by our past karma. God arbitrarily decides, this is going to happen, this is not going to happen.
No, by the kind of karma that we have done, that is going to determine the destiny. So the important thing is that we always do our karma well. So if the farmer ploughs the land, ploughs the seeds, and still rains don’t come, and it may seem that the farmer just wasted his time in doing all that.
But actually no. Because that karma is going to contribute to future positive life. Even if now the result doesn’t come, that karma is not going to go waste.
It’s going to contribute to future positive destiny. So coming to your specific example, when someone dies in an accident, now was that accident destined? We can’t, if that person, suppose, I’ll give you a simple example. Suppose I overeat.
Today after the class I gorge a lot, and then tomorrow morning my stomach is upset. Then was that stomach upset because of destiny? We don’t need destiny as an explanation over there. See the idea is, there is effect and there is cause.
Every cause produces an effect, every effect has a cause. So the principle of karma, correlates action and reaction, cause and effect. So when there is an instant correlation, I slip and fall, that slipping was there because the water was there.
So when we can correlate the cause and effect here and now, there is no need to stretch for some explanation in the past. Now I can stretch, say, if I slip and fall, I slip and fell because the water was there. I could also think, someone else could have slipped and fallen over there.
Why did I alone slip and fall? So others, they did not slip and fall because they did not have that karma. I had the karma. But still, if I had noticed carefully, if I had not been in my own world, I would have seen the water, I would not have slipped.
So it is not that everything is determined only by our past karma. Our past karma, I refer to destiny, our destiny may put us in certain situations, certain adversities also. But the magnitude of the suffering, the magnitude of the trouble that will come in those adversities, that may well depend on how I am functioning right now.
So for example, it may be that I was supposed to meet with an accident by destiny. But if at that time, I am driving drunk, then that accident may be much worse than what it needs to be. So we focus primarily on making the right choices right now.
And if in spite of our best choices, in spite of our right choices, things go wrong, we understand that that is because of destiny and we accept it and focus on trying to make the best choices in that situation. So destiny is not meant to rationalize irresponsibility. Now what is our responsibility? We have to do it properly.
And whenever, despite doing our responsibility, the results don’t come, then we understand that it is destiny at work. So destiny is never meant to rationalize irresponsibility. So if somebody is drinking and driving, we should focus on the fact that the drink to driving was the cause of the problem and therefore, that sort of drunk driving should be avoided.
Does it address your question? Thank you very much.