Isn’t the idea that everyone can’t understand dharma elitist?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
So, if you say that the Mahajanath alone understand Dharma, isn’t that elitist? That that knowledge is reserved with some people only. Actually, rather than elitist, you can say it is specialist.
Just like any field of knowledge if I go, if I have a disease, I have to go to a doctor. And if I have certain symptoms, I cannot understand what the symptoms mean. So, doctor is a specialist, doctor can understand.
And further, if I have some heart problem, I may have to go to a cardiac specialist. And if you go deep into fields of knowledge, there are actually, there are super specialties also. So, if there are, I met, I was on a flight from America, so I met one person.
He is a prenatal cardiac specialist. That means he performs surgery on the heart for babies who are not yet born. So, we can have that level of specialization also.
So, the point is that broadly principles of medicine everyone can understand. But even in medicine, if you go into deeper and deeper, subtler things in that aspect, then specialization is required. So, when that specialization, speciality becomes an elitist mentality, when that knowledge is deliberately withheld or it is not shared and people are made to, people are made, people are deprived of that knowledge.
So, say if doctors have some skills or some knowledge and they charge exorbitantly, they have to charge something. But if they charge exorbitantly, then that becomes, that puts off people. So, in any field of knowledge we go, there is a specialist, the specialists who know the certain things are going to be few.
So, somehow this idea that even religious knowledge or spiritual knowledge is also a deep sophisticated body of knowledge. That idea many people don’t understand because people think that, as people begin with the idea of relativism, you have your view, I have my view. Well, if I have a disease, you cannot say that I have my view and you have your view.
There is some disease which is there and some disease that has to be treated. So, this idea, as far as we function in this world, we always base it on some objective knowledge. If my computer is not working, if one person says, maybe your hard disk is spoilt, somebody else says, no, your motherboard is spoilt.
Somebody else says, your CPU is spoilt. No, I need one diagnosis on which I can act. And that requires, maybe if two, three different people have different diagnoses, then you have to go to a bigger expert to resolve it.
So, like that, there is a chain where more and more specialist knowledge, that you have to go to greater and greater experts. Yudhishthira is considered dharma raj. So, he has a lot of knowledge of dharma.
But even he is consulting Bhishma, he is hearing from Bhishma. So, everybody has knowledge, but people have different levels of knowledge. And it is not illiterate because they all are ready to share that knowledge, to those who approach and seek.