All human beings are bestowed with an inborn quality of perceiving beauty. Everyone likes beauty. Everyone wants to look beautiful and appreciate beautiful living beings and objects; but yes, each person has his own perception of beauty. The same object may appear beautiful to one and ugly to another and this entirely depends upon the perception of each person. Every bit of this world has been endowed with beauty by its Creator, one need to have the right eyes to discover it.
Due to the influence of consumerist culture, our concept of beauty has also become very materialistic. All the measures of beauty have shrunk down to the level of glamorous physical appearances today. In reality, physical body is only a means of expressing beauty. The real beauty emanates from thoughts and emotions. It expresses itself not by the skin colour or external appearance but how one conducts oneself. There is a big difference between appearing beautiful and being beautiful. Just to appear beautiful it is possible to guise oneself with artificial means, but to become greatly beautiful one needs to acquire the beauty that exists in the form of higher inner human qualities.
Beauty is that which attracts our mind and which gives us an experience of inner happiness. Indeed, any quality of a person or an object that gives us a pleasing experience is beautiful. Often people consider as a measure of beauty only physical appearance, especially the fairness of skin, and waste their precious resources, time and energy in skin and beauty products.
In reality, only that person is beautiful who has a good attitude towards himself and towards others. More important than external beauty and charm is a person’s inner beauty. A person’s beauty should reflect not through the skin but through the behaviour in the form of virtuous traits of personality. Beauty means – oneness of a person’s thinking, character and behaviour, and evolution of his inner qualities. When good inner traits begin to express themselves in a person’s external conduct then that person can be called truly beautiful. There are innumerable people in our country who have a dark complexion and they want to look fair. People believe that they will look beautiful only if they get a fair complexion. As a result markets are flooded today with innumerable beauty products, which entice psychologically weak people to spend huge amounts of money on them, only to enhance beauty that is just skin deep. While on one side this leads to monetary loss, on the other side any efforts that such people would put in to enhance inner beauty also go dry.
Most people cannot even imagine that nonwhite or dark tones can also be pretty and so try their best to become fair. Lupita Nyongo, who was born in Mexico City and was black, also thought exactly the same. She recently won an award for Best Performance in a Supporting Role in the Hollywood movie ‘Twelve Years a Slave’. After she won the award she received a letter that said something like this—“Dear Lupita, I think you’re really lucky to be this black but yet this successful in Hollywood overnight. I was just about to buy Dencia’s Whitenicious cream to lighten my skin when you appeared on the world map and saved me.” The girl who wrote this letter was also black and used to believe that black girls can never be successful.
We assess beauty by the fairness of the skin, but the truth is, beauty is determined by the glow of our personality. And this glow appears only when a person’s thoughts, emotions and behaviour is righteous and pure. If a person is fair skinned but his behaviour is unworthy, he cannot be called beautiful. Such a person may temporarily impress and attract others by his external charm, but he would never be able to establish deep and lasting personal relationships, since these can be established only by inner beauty.
We always like children, no matter who they are, what colour they are and whether they are pretty or not. This attraction towards children is because of the innocence and purity that exist within them. So they always look beautiful and everyone gets drawn towards them. This innocence is an intrinsic quality of their personality and has nothing to do with their external beauty.
People from different regions of the world like Japan, China, America, Russia, France, Africa, India, etc. all have different facial features. There is something unique in the physique and facial features of all the people of a region which identifies them with the region they belong to. People of some region are fair skinned while of another region are black. People of some region have a flat nose and another region have small eyes. There is no unique measure of beauty; the measures change according to features specific to each race of human beings. But even then, in all corners of the world we can find people who have either a charming smile, or a melodious voice, or courteous behaviour, or exceptional talent. It is not necessary that only a person who looks beautiful shall be called beautiful. Beauty can manifest itself in myriad forms.
If a person regards only external beauty as beauty and cannot appreciate the other qualities that make a person beautiful, then his thinking is flawed, and with such thinking he would never appreciate his own inner beauty too. To awaken the realization of beauty within our own inner being, we first need to awaken self-confidence, then we need to assess our own good qualities, and only then, finally we will be able to assess our inner beauty. There are many people who look beautiful from outside and are filled with pride about that but usually such people, out of self-conceit, never perform any exceptional deeds that are remembered by others for a long time.
An individual’s true beauty lies in the good deeds they perform. Param Pujya Gurudev Pt Shriram Sharma Acharya ji used to say – ‘It is million times better to do what should be written as a sermon than to write a sermon’. This means – the higher the quality of sentiments a person applies in his work, his inner beauty gets enhanced to the same extent. The beauty of physical body is transient. With the increasing age this beauty slowly begins to fade. As the body ages, the beautiful looking skin of youth has to lose its suppleness and grow wrinkles, and the dark hair have to turn grey. As time passes by, only good deeds performed by a person accumulate and enhance his radiance and make him a centre of attraction. An old, mature person is respected and loved for his good actions and vast experience by the society and he is regarded no less beautiful a person.
The biggest irony of today’s age is that even though the significance of inner beauty over the physical beauty is known to all, success is yet associated with physical beauty, and due to this non-holistic narrow-minded point of view, enhancing physical beauty has become a big commercial business. As a result, our sensitivity towards beauty that fills our hearts with pleasant experiences has got lost in our inner selves. It is necessary that we reclaim and reawaken the awareness about true beauty. Beauty cannot be limited to physical appearances, its definitions are boundless. Why should then we bind beauty to these narrow confines?
True beauty means – pleasant experiences and good feelings. True beauty is that which pleases heart and soul. Beauty is not that which is seen from outside, it is a pleasant experience that exists inside every human being. Nature and God have together cast beauty in one form or the other uniquely in every human being; one only needs to realize and express it. So let us observe and appreciate the unparallel beauty of this majestic life and nature and let these pleasant experiences cast their imprint on our inner beings.
Akhand Jyoti Magazine Sept Oct 2013