Acharya Mahaprajna
Fences are built to protect cultivated fields and embankments are built to protect water reservoirs. Fences are useful when there is a rich harvest and embankments are useful only when water is flooding and billowing. For a field without any cultivation the presence or absence of fences is irrelevant. Likewise, if the dam has no water, how does it matter whether it has embankments or not? Fences and embankments have no intrinsic usefulness. They acquire usefulness only when there are cultivated fields and water filled dams. Spiritual observances also have utility only when moral restraints are there. There are five moral restraints - non-violence, truthfulness, non-stealing, all round self-control and nonpossession.
Whenever the curtain is rung down on moral restraints and spiritual observances are put on the centre stage, religion loses its lustre. Both religion and its followers add lustre to themselves when the first place is given to moral restraints and the second place to spiritual observances.
Religion seems to be losing its vigour today because it is losing imperative presence of moral restraints and making spiritual observances imperative. An Acharya has put it succinctly thus:
