This custom of external cleanliness, like all other customs, sometimes turns out to be, in the long run, rather a tyranny or the very reverse of Achara (cleanliness).
The European says that all bodily matters have to be attended to in private. Well and good. "It is vulgar to spit before other people. To rinse your mouth before others is disgraceful."
So, for fear of censure, they do not wash their mouth after meals, and the result is that the teeth gradually decay.
Here is non-observance of cleanliness for fear of society or civilisation.
With us, it is the other extreme -- to rinse and wash the mouth before all men, or sitting in the street, making a noise as if you were sick -- this is rather tyranny.
Those things should, no doubt, be done privately and silently, but not to do them for fear of society is also equally wrong.
- Swami Vivekananda,
The East and The West
The European says that all bodily matters have to be attended to in private. Well and good. "It is vulgar to spit before other people. To rinse your mouth before others is disgraceful."
So, for fear of censure, they do not wash their mouth after meals, and the result is that the teeth gradually decay.
Here is non-observance of cleanliness for fear of society or civilisation.
With us, it is the other extreme -- to rinse and wash the mouth before all men, or sitting in the street, making a noise as if you were sick -- this is rather tyranny.
Those things should, no doubt, be done privately and silently, but not to do them for fear of society is also equally wrong.
- Swami Vivekananda,
The East and The West
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