External Vinaya

Question: Why should we touch feet of elders, when we have respect for them in our hearts.

Answer: In order to understand it, first we need to understand how the following things affects our emotions.
1. the words we speak, or our language
2. our body actions, or body language

I will go through both of them one by one.

1. Language

Lets focus on our language first: When somebody does a favor to us, we feel thankful and express it by saying "Thank you", or "Thank you very much" etc. Lets imagine a world without such kind of good words which convey the emotions- in this world may be most of the people won't have thankful emotions if they didn't have to say thanks after some favor is done. Now if we compare the real world with this imaginary world- people are expressing their emotions by saying "Thanks"- it helps them have good emotions as well. Saying "thanks" does not mean that one really have emotions within- but it definitely helps in bringing those emotions within. And those are good emotions- because we should have a thankful feeling for someone who has done favor to us. And good emotions means good social health, and good karma. So this explains why our language is important in order to have good emotions.

Let me give another example, where language helps bring emotions. When one listens to a patriotic song, one feels great for his nation. Also in gujarata I have seen married man calling other women as "ben(sister)" which helps them reduce physical attraction for other girls.

So in a nutshell, our words- what we listen and what we speak affects our emotions. So the conclusion is we should listen and speak things which are good so that we can have good emotions, and which will build up good karma for us. And good social health also in our present life.

2. Body action or body language:

Now lets consider whether our body has an affect on our emotions or not. For that lets consider an example of a king, who has an army. The king wants to defeat his enemy who has attacked his state. Here the army has to defeat the enemy. And outcome of a war depends a lot on how patriotic the soldiers are. If they are pumped up with emotions, their strength gets doubled. Therefore the King makes them listen to patriotic songs, which helps in their emotion building- as we talked earlier. And he also does something innovative- He brings the effigies of enemy soldiers and asks his soldiers to aim to the effigies when they practice with their guns. And this builds up their emotions more, and hence motivates them more for the battle, and the army strength increases.

Therefore, we see that body action has an effect on our emotions. However it is not necessary that body action will always result in the corresponding emotions, but it does, in general.

Now lets see our parents- if we touch their feet every morning- it helps us have the right emotions- which are respecting our elders. It has other benefits too: Other friends also get inspired when you do that, and this habit gets passed down generation to generation. Since parents have done an exceptionally great favor by bringing us up, and we should have great respect for them.

So the conclusion is we should touch feet of parents in the morning, and in the evening before going to bed.

Other Examples:

Similar kind of thing applies to other situations:
- when a guest comes in our home, we handshake, or hug and invite him in our house. And this body language has a great affect on our emotions.
- Bow down before the God
- Doing worship with 8 dravya
- Keep the sacred books at high level to show respect, and not eating, drinking while reading them.
- etc