To be beautiful from within

‘Tis not a lip or eye we beauty call/But the joint force and full result of all,’ wrote the English intellectual poet Alexander Pope. So very true. Beauty is not the ostensible features of an individual. Beauty consists of a person’s whole persona.

A heart full of goodness has a face beautiful to look at. Humans tend to judge a person on the basis of society’s standard parameters of beauty. We all harbour a mundane perception of beauty. Mahabharat’s noble and exalted character Vidur wasn’t good-looking conventionally, but Krishna called him, ‘Sundartam sudhesham’ (epitome of beaut). It was Vidur’s wisdom and his nous that made him so graceful.

Every individual is beautiful because a beautiful soul resides in all of us. Once Anand, Buddha’s favourite disciple asked him, “Master, who’s beautiful?” Buddha calmly replied, “One whose thoughts are beautiful and who’s full of care, compassion and empathy for all the living and non-living creatures in the universe.” True beauty has an all-encompassing compassionate streak to it.

Handsome is one who handsome does is a popular aphorism in English. This maxim has great profundity. A person’s (good or bad) deeds make him/her beautiful or ugly as per the inner fabric. Michelangelo used the same person to make statues of Jesus Christ and Satan! When he bumped into a young man who looked like an angel, he sculpted Jesus with the angelic looks of that young man and after many years, when he again ran into the same person waiting to be executed in a prison in Florence, Michelangelo used the same man to sculpt the Satan! When the great Renaissance master’s subject was good at heart, he looked like Jesus in his innocence and when the same person turned a rogue and a criminal to be executed, he appeared devilish like Satan.

It is the inner beauty that seals and settles one’s appearance. Roop, rang pe marta aaya sadiyon se ye zamana/Main man ki sundarta dekhoon, pyaar ka main deewana (The world is enamoured of external appearance/But I prefer the internal and immanent goodness). To encapsulate, beauty is to be beautiful from within.