No good deed can cancel the bad deed

I will give you a small example.


A daughter-in-law is serving her mother-in-law or father-in-law. The service is inevitable. If the service is done with good intention by treating the father-in-law as father or mother-in-law as mother, the good fruit in heaven is fully enjoyed. Suppose the daughter-in-law serves them sincerely due to unavoidable circumstances and scolds them with hatred in mind, what is the result? The good fruit in heaven is reduced to half and half bad fruit appears in the hell for the bad intention.

The good fruit of good deed can never cancel the bad fruit of bad deed. Fruits of goods deeds and bad deeds have to be enjoyed separately. If you create a provision to cancel a bad deed by doing a good deed, every one will commit sins by emotion and then will try to cancel the sins later on by doing good deeds. Therefore, when the Priest says that by doing a ritual, all your sins are destroyed, it is a point of climax of ignorance. No good deed can cancel the bad deed.

Kauravas(demons) had ninety nine per cent sins and one per cent good deeds. They went to heaven first to enjoy the little good deeds and went to hell later on to enjoy the major bad deeds. Pandavas(devotees) are vice-versa and hence went to hell first and then to heaven later on. In both cases, mutual cancellation is not exhibited as we see in the Mahabharata (Swargarohana parva). Now, I pity the daughter-in-law who has sincerely served the in-laws but went to hell simply for the sake of bad intention. The daughter-in-law who has not served in-laws with bad intention goes to permanent hell. The daughter-in-law who has served her in-laws sincerely but had bad intention in her mind goes to both hell and heaven separately. The daughter-in-law who has served her in-laws with good intention thinking them as her own parents has gone to permanent heaven. The daughter-in-law who has good intention in her mind to serve her in-laws will some how serve them directly or indirectly and will not go to hell.


At the Lotus Feet of His Holiness Sri Dattaswami

Anil Antony

Universal Spirituality
Universal Spirituality for World Peace
antonyanil@universal-spirituality.org