Acharya Prashant addresses the question of whether holy texts should be revised over time. He begins by stating that the very purpose of spiritual texts is to tell you that whatever is in the stream of time will change and is hence not dependable or reliable. This fact itself, that everything changes, does not change. When you see that everything changes, you are standing a little apart from all that which changes, and your position is now unchangeable because you are outside everything that can potentially change. He explains that every religious book contains two types of material. The first type is time-dependent, specific only to the period in which the book was written. This part, which pertains to the particular period the book was composed in, obviously has very little relevance today. You are right when you talk of revision; you can even go beyond revision and say that those parts, having no relevance today, are fit to be dropped. There is no blasphemy in that, and you are not being disrespectful. In fact, the ones who brought those books to you would be proud if you are able to discretely see what remains relevant today and what has been made obsolete by the passage of time. However, one must be careful not to throw the baby away with the bathwater. There are precious bits in the scriptures that time will never be able to touch. There is so much there that the passage of time cannot render old. If you discard even that, you are doing yourself a great disservice. In our eagerness to reject everything that is old, we often tend to overlook that which can never get old because it is not time-dependent at all. Spirituality is not something ancient or new; it is simply timeless. It is as relevant today as it was then, and as relevant 5,000 years from today as it is now. Spirituality is about addressing the fundamental concerns of human existence, which are timeless. The scriptures truly talk about these things. The sages would ask about your life now, your worries, your relationships, because that is what spirituality is about—your life, which is at the center of all your concerns.
