Sept 23, 2022 - Grade 9 (Friday)

Hari Om,

We began class with starting prayer Sahanavavatu lead by some students. After that we started to learn Lingashtakam. It gives us great joy to say that many students were familiar with the chant and even those who were not, picked it up and chanted beautifully.

After the chanting segment, we did a small activity - where kids had to answer some fun questions written on the board and then unscramble the circled letters to come up with the word of the day! They enjoyed doing it and soon came up with Dharma - which was our topic for the day. We discussed how the best name for our religion is Sanatana Dharma - many of them already knew it. We discussed how the term Hindu came about.  

We examined what Dharma is. Being a central tenet of Hindu culture, we explored its various connotations- duty, righteousness, essential nature, what sustains/nourishes and living in harmony with what is around us. To illustrate the meaning of dharma being the essential nature of a thing, that which holds it together- we shared a display. A box with a ring, earring and necklace in gold. And another display of a diya, planter, and cooking pan in clay. Very quickly the class arrived at the conclusion that the ring, earring, and necklace are various shapes and names for their substance gold. Also, the diya, planter and pan are different shapes and names for clay alone.  Hence gold is then dharma of the ornaments and clay of the second set.
Which lead to the reflection question- what is the essential substance holding you and I together without which we cease to exist? The class came up with life- the touch of life is our dharma and that is what Swami Vivekananda exhorted us to remember when he called us all Amritasya Putraha! We will learn later how this life is force, is eternal, and that which dies is something else.

We next examined dharma  as righteousness. We looked at some examples from Mahabharata that we would consider righteous.

Dharma as duty- depending on one's position and role in life. This will be explored in detail later.Duty as soldier, as teacher, as student etc.

Dharma as that which sustains/nourishes - we asked the kids to brainstorm what is the dharma and adharma with respect to the body, and mind- toward the earth and fellow beings. They came up with very good answers - eating properly, sleeping well, exercising, keeping it clean etc are dharma - doing drugs, weeds etc, excessive eating or not sleeping enough  are adharma. They then came up with an interesting question - what if the Dharma of one is against the Dharma of another - what if there is a clash - sleeping on time and enough is Dharma of the body, but studying well for an exam is the Dharma of the mind so we need to sometimes stay awake later and lose sleep. How do we decide in such cases what is Dharma?

We discussed how Dharma is very nuanced and not just commandments and that is why we have our scriptures to guide us when there is a conflict! We discussed how Dharma is one of the four goals of life - we will touch on the other 3 goals in the coming weeks. And we discussed how it is one of our goals to ensure that our earth and the creation is protected and preserved as well - Living in harmony with nature is one of our important tenets! We discussed how we can do that - students said that means keeping the earth clean, being kind to animals, not eating meat, reducing waste of any natural resource etc. 

We requested everyone to take notes on whatever had been discussed in class. The Geeta segment with the primer came next wherein the key words for Chapter 3 were introduced.

We will not be meeting this weekend but will meet on Oct 7th. Happy Navaratri to all! 

Thanks & Regards
Jayashree & Uma