Poverty

[Dominik Wujastyk]

Sadhunathan says of beggars that
> In India, they have the
> honorable profession of begging.  They get more fresh air and sunshine.
> The populace is taught the benefit of giving alms.  In fact, begging
> and the care of beggars are both highly spiritual acts when taken
> as part of sanyasa ashrama, the fulfillment of old age.  

I can't believe I'm reading this!  "Fresh air and sunshine"!  Has 
Sadhunathan ever been to India?  That's a genuine question.

Beggars are poor because they don't have any money.  To argue otherwise
is to use terms metaphorically.  

Metaphor is important and useful, but let's not get carried away to the 
point at which our social consciences are lulled to comfortable sleep
while the poverty, pain, degradation, disease, and death which 
our fellow humans experience is metaphorized into spiritual riches.

It is another fact of Sanskrit, Tamil and other classical Indian
literature that poverty is rarely, if ever, glamorized or treated as
metaphor, in the manner in which Sadhunathan has done.  Perhaps other
INDOLOGY members might know of passages which do or don't exemplify
this.  It seems to me that the daily contact which most writers in 
India had with poverty probably prevented them developing a romanticized
attitude towards it.

Dominik