Living Bhagavad Gita 016: Heroic Leadership

A series of short articles on the Bhagavad Gita for people living and working in our volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous times filled with stress and fear. This scripture born in a battlefield teaches us how to face our challenges, live our life fully, achieve excellence in whatever we do and find happiness, peace and contentment.

[Continued from the previous post.]

What pleasures can be ours, Krishna, by killing these sons of Dhritarashtra? Only sin will be ours by killing these atatayis. BG 1.36

There is a big difference between the way Arjuna looks at the Kurukshetra war and the way Krishna sees it. For Krishna, it is essentially a dharma yuddha, a war for establishing dharma, righteous ways of living and leading, and for destroying evil, which is the purpose of his incarnation, for which he has been waging wars throughout his life.  He does not expect any preeti, pleasures, from the war. As a great yogi, a yogeshwara, his pleasures do not depend upon the success in the war, or on any external factor for that matter. As Adi Shankaracharya says in Bhaja Govindam:

yogarato vaa bhogarato vaa sangarato vaa sanga-viheenah

yasya brahmani ramate chittam nandati nandati nandaty-eva

Whether he is engaged in yoga or in bhoga [sensual pleasures], whether he is in the company of others or without company, he whose mind revels in Brahman rejoices and rejoices and just rejoices.

That is how Krishna is.

But for Arjuna, the war is still a preeti yuddha: a war for acquiring the pleasures of power and wealth and also for the cold pleasure of vengeance for what was done to Draupadi. That is what he means when he rhetorically asks ‘what pleasure [preeti] can be ours by killing these sons of Dhritarashtra?’ Standing there between the two armies, the highly sensitive Arjuna suddenly realizes those pleasures are not going to taste very sweet because all said and done, Duryodhana and his brothers are his own people, his cousins, however evil they are.

The epic tells us that this is what actually happens too – after the war is over, Yudhishthira feels so guilty about it all that he refuses to accept the crown. And Vyasa, Narada and so many other wise men have to explain to him again and again what happened was inevitable under the circumstances and he has to accept that reality and fulfill his responsibilities towards the Bharata dynasty and its subjects by accepting the crown.  Arjuna is now getting a foretaste of what Yudhishthira later feels. He feels he will get no pleasure from killing Duryodhana and his brothers and will only accrue sin from it, even though they are atatayis.     

Atatayi is a Sanskrit word that means someone who commits the most heinous of criminal acts. As far as a kshatriya is concerned, said ancient India, not only does he accrue no sin from killing atatayis, but it is his duty to do so since he is a warrior bound to protect virtuous ways of living and leading.

To give an example for an atatayi from the epic itself, let’s take a look at what Ashwatthama does in the Sauptika Parva of the epic.

On the evening of the eighteenth day of the war, Ashwatthama, Kripa and Kritavarma learning of the fall of Duryodhana in the mace fight with Bhima approach him as he lies in writhing agony. There Ashwatthama vows vengeance on the Pandavas for what they have done to Duryodhana and had earlier done to his father. As desired by Duryodhana, Kripa crowns Ashwatthama the commander of Duryodhana’s army that now consists of just these three people. As they proceed toward their camp, they hear the sound of the victorious Pandavas celebrating and running away in fear, hide under a banyan tree in a thick jungle.

That night as Ashwatthama lies awake unable to sleep, he watches an owl attacking and killing the crows asleep on the tree. That gives him the idea of attacking the camp of the sleeping Pandavas and taking Kripa and Kritavarma with him he goes there. Inside the Pandava camp, Ashwatthama brutally strangles to death a half-asleep Dhrishtadyumna, ignoring his pleas to be killed like a warrior and not like an animal.  He then kills Shikhandi and Draupadi’s five children, all unarmed, and all the remaining Pandava warriors while they were hardly out of their exhausted sleep. Screaming, confused and terrified warriors run helter-skelter thinking some deathly monster is attacking them and Ashwatthama brutally pursues and butchers them all. Kripa and Kritavarma hack down to death the warriors who manage to escape the wrath of Ashwatthama and reach the gates of the camp.

Ashwatthama, Kripa and Kritavarma in that night the epic calls a kalaratri are examples for atatayis. 

Let’s take one or two contemporary examples for atatayis. In November 2008, ten members of an extremist terrorist organization carried out ruthless shooting and bombing attacks that lasted for four days across Mumbai, brutally killing 166 innocent people and wounding three hundred others, several of them guests and tourists in India from such countries as the United States, Israel and so on.

The terrorists reached India using a hijacked fishing trawler. In Mumbai they seized cars and split into different groups to carry out their relentless attacks at some of the most popular and prestigious places in the city, including the Taj Hotel. Using automatic weapons and grenades they wrecked havoc at the sites. The first site to be attacked was the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus [CST] where they opened indiscriminate fire into the teeming crowds there at the peak hour. Fifty-eight people fell victims to these shootings and over one hundred were injured.

Elsewhere they blew up a petrol pump. Attacking the Nariman House complex, they killed a Jewish rabbi and his wife and five other Israelis during a three-day siege. The terrorists had no mercy for women, old people or children. The two-year-old child of the rabbi survived only because of the presence of mind showed by his nanny who smuggled him away to safety.

Entering the popular Leopold Café, they shot and killed ten people dining there.

Entering the prestigious Taj Hotel, India’s national pride, by a side door that they broke down, they began spraying bullets at random and set off bombs under the hotel’s world famous central dome causing a massive fire that raged through the top floors of the hotel.

The terrorists continued to viciously spread death and devastation in other chosen locales in the city, putting into effect the plans they had made before they reached India. 

The men who did these barbaric acts fit into what the Mahabharata called atatayis.

The Hindi movie Rowdy Rathore is centered on the asuri activities of a man called Baapji who rules a vast network of villages with an iron hand ruthlessly torturing men, looting their wealth and raping women. With the help of a few pitiless henchman, Baapji has enslaved all the villagers who have no option but to submit themselves to his and his son’s lust, greed and sadism. They enjoy torturing the hapless villagers, their pain thrills them, and they laugh fiendishly watching them writhing in agony. It is a picture painted in a single colour: black. Pitch black with no shades of grey to it.

Even the police have no power over them because of Baapji’s political influence. They are constantly humiliated and made to dance to their tune. In a very disturbing scene we see a police inspector standing humbly before Baapji begging for his wife to be given back to him – she has been carried away by Baapji’s son who is keeping her with him until his lust for her is satiated. Hearing her husband’s voice, the wife comes running out of the room where she is kept and Baapji’s son follows her, walking fearlessly with a lecherous smirk on his face.  The son bluntly raises two fingers to say he would give her back to the inspector after two days and the inspector has no choice but to quietly go back. Such is the terror unleashed by Baapji even among the police.

Baapji and his son are atatayis.

“My name is Elena and I used to be a human being. Now I am a sex slave. If you are reading this diary then I am either dead or I have managed to escape…” thus begins Trafficked: The Diary of a Sex Slave by Sibel Hodge, a gritty, gripping novella inspired by accounts of real victims of sex slavery and research into the dark underworld of sex trafficking, an international business with networks spread across the world trafficking hundreds of thousands of victims including children and turning their lives into pure hell. Few escape this hell that usually lasts so long as the victims can be used for the purposes of the business. It has been estimated that around 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders every year – eighty percent of whom are women and girls according to the US State Department. The trafficked women and girls are crowded into rundown apartments and cramped filthy trailers and are forced to have sex with up to thirty customers a day. They are closely guarded at all times and many are beaten and repeated raped by brothel guards and the trafficking bosses.

The tens of thousands of men and women involved in running this ruthless business are all atatayis.

Unspeakable atrocities were committed against young Nirbhaya in Delhi in 2012 by a group of rapists, arousing the righteous anger of the entire nation. The men who made hapless Nirbhaya undergo hell on earth are atatayis in ancient Indian terms.

While these are extreme cases of atatayis from the fast paced modern world where the nature of crime itself has changed and new forms of crimes are invented every day, another perfect example for an atatayi from the Mahabharata world itself is Duryodhana. While he was still a child, even before he began his education under Kripa and later under Drona, he had already committed several monstrous crimes against the Pandavas and he continues to do these throughout his life. And, apart from what was done to them during the dice game, when he sends them to the forest for twelve years, horrible things to happen to them there too.    

Duryodhana fits the term atatayi perfectly. And it is him and those who are in the battlefield fighting for him that Arjuna says he does not want to kill even though they are atatayis – because they are his swajana, his own people. The Gita is taught to Arjuna to show him how he is bound to do that unpleasant act in spite of his compunctions, since he is a soldier for dharma, a dharma yoddha, sworn to protect righteousness and destroy unrighteousness.  

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When the world is corrupt and men in power follow wickedness, we have two options: We can either join hands with the corruption or fight to destroy it. Joining the corruption is the way of the ordinary man. He finds it not only easier but the right thing to do in his personal interest and in the interest of his family. This is what the Upanishads call the path of preyas – the road widely travelled, the tempting, easy path that takes us nowhere. Fighting to end corruption and to destroy the corrupt is the way of the hero, which very few opt to do. The Upanishads call it the path of shreyas, the road less travelled, the path of the heroes, of the dhiras, the path that leads to success for the individual and the good of the world. Speaking about these two paths, the Katha Upanishad, from which several verses appear in the Gita verbatim, says:

anyachchreyo’nyadutaiva preyah
te ubhe naanaarthe purusham sineetah
tayoh shreya aadadanasya saadhu bhavati
heeyate’rthaad ya u preyo vrneete

Shreyas and preyas are different from each other. Man comes across a choice between these two and good happens to those who choose shreyas. Those who choose preyas miss their goal and fall.

Shreyas is the path of lasting good, the path less travelled, the path that leads to fulfillment and glory, the path that makes life worth living. And preyas is the path widely travelled, the path of short-lived success, of illusory victories and joys, and ultimately of disappointments and depression. The man who travels by that path finds in the end that he has wasted his life.    

When Arjuna says ‘only sin will be ours by killing these atatayis,’ he is choosing the path of preyas, the path of momentary joys and illusory successes that will eventually lead him nowhere.    What he wants to do is to abandon his responsibilities as a kshatriya and as a prince and to run away from the scene of the war because it is his own people he will have to fight against. He forgets that not doing anything against the wicked and letting them continue with their wickedness amounts to practicing wickedness himself.

Destroying atatayis is one of the first duties of a kshatriya, something he is taught to live for right from his infancy as a warrior for manusham, everything human, all that makes life worth living. He is taught from his earliest days that felons who commit felony have to be punished for their crimes not only to prevent them from committing more such crimes but also as a lesson for others who might have a tendency to do commit such crimes.

Running away from the battlefield and handing over the land into the hands of wicked people who see power as an end in itself and not for service to the world is not a choice that Arjuna has.

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India has always been interested in leadership as a subject. Both of our grand epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, could be seen as studies in effective leadership in their entirety. Besides, while the Ramayana has chapters devoted exclusively to leadership, much of the largest parva of the Mahabharata, the Shanti Parva, is devoted to the exploration of leadership. Apart from this, several of our Puranas and all our dharma shastras contain sections of raja dharma, the dharma of leaders.

The Mahabharata clearly states that kingship was invented to end the matsyanyaya, to protect the weak from exploitation by the strong. And according to Krishna, the teachings of the Gita are the same as what was taught to rajarshis – seer kings or philosopher kings – in India from the beginning of time: how to live for others, how to make service to the people their religion, their way of worshipping the Divine.

And in its discussions of leadership, India insisted that a leader has to be heroic and fearless in destroying evil and protecting the good. When adharma raises its head in the society, it is the duty of the leader – the king in the old days and modern leaders today – to destroy it from the roots. It is this role of the leader that Krishna is reminding Arjuna by asking him to stay in the warfield and fight and destroy ways of evil by destroying those who practice them. As Krishna sees it, turning away from this noble responsibility would make Arjuna a coward, which is what Krishna would call him when he lashes out at his friend for contemplating running away from the battlefield.

Several students of the Bhagavad Gita see the battle of Kurukshetra as a battle between the powers of darkness and the powers of light, among them Mahatma Gandhi. Just as in political life today and in the past, in our organizational life too darkness is widespread. Not all organizations are committed to the good of the society, the basic commitment in most of them being to the single motive – profit. And some of these organizations do not mind going to any extremes for maximizing profits. While we cannot do without organizations, it is important that the practices of the organizations are founded on ethics and they are committed to what ancient India called lokasangraha, the common good. And when they fail to do so, it becomes the duty of leaders within and outside the organization to fight and end organizational corruption.       

The numerous whistle blower movies and books we have speak of ethically committed leaders raising their voices against corruption from within the organization, a brilliant example for which is whistleblower Mathew Lee whom a Wall Street Journal article called ‘perhaps the lone hero of the ugly collapse of Lehman Brothers.’ Mathew Lee, an employee of the corrupt firm, showed the tremendous will power to stand up against his powerful employers and raised red flags about the company’s accounting, risking his life itself.  Movies like Erin Brockovich based on the life of a real life activist too speak of leaders – anyone who has leadership qualities is a leader, whether he or she is in the position of an organizational leader or not – risking their lives to fight against the evil that these organizations do.    

Active opposition to evil does not necessarily mean violent opposition to evil. For Krishna the war was always the very last choice. As the Mahabharata shows us again and again, Krishna would do all that is within his powers to avoid the war – sometimes risking his life, sometimes accepting humiliation on himself. But all that failed and he was left with no other option but to approve of the war with the Kauravas. And even then the war he approves of is a declared war between two armies with specific rules for both parties to follow.

Heroic leadership is not a path you follow so that you are seen as a hero by the people. It is not an egoistic path at all. On the contrary, it is a path on which you sacrifice your ego for the good of the world.

Heroic leadership is not a path you follow so that you are seen as a hero by the people and they applaud for you. It is not an egoistic path at all. On the contrary, it is a path on which you sacrifice your ego for the good of the world and expect nothing in return.  

And that is the path of leadership Krishna wants all of us to walk. And he teaches us through Arjuna how to walk that path fearlessly, with unwavering attention on the goal, keeping our mind balanced, in samatva, for the good of the world, the common good, lokasangraha. 

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Living Bhagavad Gita 015: Cowards Worship Destiny

A series of short articles on the Bhagavad Gita for people living and working in our volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous times filled with stress and fear. This scripture born in a battlefield teaches us how to face our challenges, live our life fully, achieve excellence in whatever we do and find happiness, peace and contentment.

[Continued from the previous post.]

I see evil omens, Krishna. And I do not see any good in killing kinsmen in war. I have no desire for victory, Krishna, or for the kingdom or pleasures. What good is the kingdom, Krishna, or pleasures, or life itself? Those for whose sake we desire kingdoms, enjoyments and pleasures, they stand here before me staking their wealth and life in the war – teachers, fathers, sons, grandfathers, uncles, fathers-in-law, grandsons, brothers-in-law and other kinsmen. I do not want to kill them, Krishna, even if they kill me – no, not even for all the three worlds, what to speak of this land.  BG 1.31-35

Winners don’t quit and quitters don’t win, goes a popular saying. That may be true with regard to a particular venture, but in life that is not how things work. To win a war, sometimes you have to lose battles. People who never give up a single battle frequently end up by losing the war. However that may be, one sure way to lose, whether it is a battle or a war, or an argument or a negotiation, is to give up before it begins.

And that is exactly what Arjuna is doing here. The war conches have just been blown, Arjuna asks Krishna to take his chariot between the two armies so that he can see those assembled for the war. He takes a good look at them and straight away begins speaking of giving up the war.

Arjuna is a loser in no sense of the term. One of his names is Vijaya, meaning victory, and that name is absolutely appropriate for him. He is a consistent winner, has been so from his earliest days. He was only a little boy in Drona’s gurukula when he beat his own guru in a mean game the master was playing and won Drona’s heart.

This is how it happened. As in all other gurukulas, it was part of the education to do some menial work for the gurukula whoever you are. One of the errands the royal pupils of Drona had to do was to fetch water for the ashram every morning. For this work Drona gave small pots to all the students and a much larger pot to his son Ashwatthama who too studied along with the princes. Since his pot was bigger, Ashwatthama had to make fewer trips and finished fetching his share of water earlier than the other students. As soon as he did that, Drona started giving him lessons, and these lessons were more advanced than the lessons the others received.   Arjuna understood what was happening and with the help of the varuna astra started finishing his errand at the same time as Ashwatthama. Drona was left with no option but to give him too the lessons he gave his son.

The Mahabharata tells us that one day Drona gave an order to the gurukula cook never to serve a meal to Arjuna in the dark. The instruction was specifically about Arjuna and when we read it we are puzzled – why should the guru give his cook such an instruction?. But the mystery is solved as we are told the rest of the story. One day as the students were having their supper the wind blew out the lamps and Arjuna continued eating. Later that night, Drona was woken up from his sleep by the booming sound of the bow string being released. It was Arjuna practicing shooting in the dark! From eating in the dark, Arjuna had learnt that just as you can eat without seeing, you can also shoot without seeing.

That is Arjuna, the winner.

That night Drona moved by Arjuna’s commitment and dedication to dhanurvidya hugged his young disciple and promised that from now he would make sure that Arjuna became the best archer in the world!

Arjuna is not a loser in any sense of the term, but right now, standing between the two armies, he is behaving like a typical loser by giving up the war even before it begins. And one of the reasons he gives for giving up the war is that he is seeing evil omens.

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The Mahabharata does talk about omens and omens have a decisive role in some important incidents in the epic. Dhritarashtra frees Draupadi and the Pandava brothers staked and lost to Duryodhana in the dice game because, the epic narrator tell us, following the failed attempt to disrobe Draupadi in the royal hall ominous portents appear everywhere. But the epic is primarily a book for kshatriyas, for ambitious men of action, like most of us are today. It was written by Sage Vyasa keeping in mind primarily such men of action, the Kshatriyas, and is primarily about kshatriyas. And the Bhagavad Gita too is primarily for men of action, for leaders of men, as Krishna himself says in the opening verses of chapter four of the Gita.

Men of action believe in action, in the power of action to make things happen, in what is called purushartha in Sanskrit. They do not believe in giving up – and certainly not in giving up before the battle begins.

In the Shanti Parva of the epic, one of the questions the newly crowned King Yudhishthira asks grandsire Bhishma lying on the bed of arrows is what is more powerful: daiva or purushartha? As he always does, Bhishma gives a beautiful answer and then concludes his reply with three words: daivam kleebaa upaasate. These three words, I believe, sum up the spirit of the men and women of the epic. Translated literally, the three words mean: Eunuchs worship destiny. The word used by the epic that I have translated as destiny is daiva, which is not exactly destiny but for the time we can take it to mean destiny. And the word eunuch also does not mean a eunuch but is the Mahabharata word for a coward. These three words that sum up the spirit of the epic and of its men and women actually means: It is cowards that bend their knees before powers greater than themselves.

The men and women of the epic do not give any powers in the universe the authority to decide their destiny. They fight destiny and carve out their lives through that fight, just as men and women who decide the destiny of nations and organizations do today. No leader of a nation can today say that he leaves it all to destiny. Nor can the leader of a political party, a multinational corporation, a small industry or a department in an industry or a business house today can afford to say I leave it all to destiny. Which is one of the most important reasons why the Gita and the Mahabharata are so completely relevant to us today.  

Let us take the example of Karna. Abandoned at birth, he is a foundling brought up by a driver – albeit the driver of the king, his charioteer, a suta. In a world of kshatriyas, he grows up as an outsider, a non-kshatriya. He was not really a low caste man in the Mahabharata world as we commonly assume today because in social status the sutas stood just beneath the kshatriyas and above the vaishyas. But they were certainly not equal to the kshatriyas in that world and that lower caste status and social position were constant obstacles on Karna’s path. But through his competence and purushartha, his efforts, overcoming all kinds of obstacles, he becomes arguably the best warrior of the day. He becomes a king in his own right and ultimately the commander-in-chief of the entire Kaurava army. A powerful king like Shalya, the king of Madra and uncle of Nakula and Sahadeva, has to submit himself, albeit unwillingly, albeit after a flat refusal, to become his driver. The rules of the day said that Karna should live his life as a driver since he was a driver’s son, but he refuses to accept that role and rises to such a position that he commands an army of powerful kings and kshatriyas of the day. Karna’s is the story of the victory of purushartha over daiva, or destiny. This is what Bhishma means when he tells Yudhishthira daivam kleebaa upaasate, it is cowards who worship destiny.      

Let’s take another example from the epic, that of a woman this time, Empress Satyavati, the mother of Sage Vyasa, the greatest sage this land of sages has known, a man of ceaseless action himself. She was born the illegitimate daughter of a glorious king through what the epic ambiguously calls jimha, sin, in the context of a very confusing story that covers up more things than it reveals. When brought to her father after her birth along with her twin, a boy, the king rejects her because she was a girl and gives her back to the fisherman who had brought her to him, Dasharaja, and keeps the boy. She grows up as a fisher girl, her body exuding the foul smell of dry fish for miles around. This girl engaged by her loving father in ferrying people across the Yamuna eventually bargains with a scholar-sage and gets rid of her foul body smell before surrendering her body to him to give birth to the sage whose birthday we still celebrate all over the country five thousand years after his death as guru purnima, teacher’s day.  She marries the most powerful emperor of the day after taking from him a promise that after his death the crown would go to his first son born to her. She thus becomes the empress and gives birth to two sons one of whom becomes an emperor who inherits the crown from his father. Satyavati, brought up as a fisher girl, carves out for herself an unsurpassed destiny and presides over the fortunes of the vast land of Bharatavarsha as its most powerful woman. Crowned heads from all over the land bow before her. All this she achieves through her purushartha.

That is the spirit of the men and women of the Mahabharata.

You can of course argue that whatever happens is destiny, that they should use purushartha and achieve these things was their destiny. That is the kind of argument that silences all arguments, an argument against which no arguments are possible.  It is like asking if God is all powerful can he make a stone so heavy that he himself cannot lift it. In the language of logic, we call it a fallacy. 

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It is one of the most brilliant men of this age of heroic men of action, perhaps the most brilliant man of the age barring Krishna, who is now talking of abandoning the war just before it begins, at the very last possible moment, with the armies standing face to face in Kurukshetra.  As we saw, one of the arguments he gives is he is seeing evil omens around.

That statement about evil omens speaks of the failure of Arjuna’s will to act as clearly as the shivering of his body, the drying up of his mouth, the burning of his skin, the reeling of his mind and the slipping of the Gandiva from his hand speak of it. It is in moments of weakness that we turn to the adrishta, powers not known to us and over which we have no control. Omens fall in this category. It is in moments of weakness we start worrying about such things – when are strong from within, they have no power over us.

During an important battle, says a Zen story, a Japanese general decided to attack his powerful enemy. He was confident they would win, but his men were filled with doubt because their army was weak. They happened to pass a holy Buddhist shrine on their way and the army stopped there to pray and take a short rest. The general looked into the eyes of his soldiers and knew what they needed was confidence more than anything else and nothing he would say would give them that confidence. So he took out a coin from his wallet and said, "I shall now toss this coin. If it is heads, we shall win. And if it is tails, we shall lose. Destiny will now reveal itself."

He threw the coin into the air and all watched intently as it landed. It was heads. Instantly the soldiers felt energy coursing through their veins. Filled with confidence and enthusiasm, the attacked the enemy and won.

After the battle was over one of his lieutenants, laughing happily, told the general, "No one can change destiny, Sir."

"Quite right," was the general’s reply. And then he showed the lieutenant the coin. It had heads on both sides!

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It has been said that Arjuna was overcome by great pity – kripaya paraya aavishtah. But is kripa the real reason behind what is happening to him?

Behind everything we do, there is a real reason and a good reason. The real reason of course is just that – the real reason. And the good reason is the reason that is acceptable to the society, to other people. It is also the reason that is acceptable to ourselves, a reason that does not pose psychological threats to our egos. The pity that Arjuna feels is not the real reason behind his reactions, but the good reason. He would be tormented by guilt for the rest of his days and nights if he killed his guru and grandfather Bhishma and other kinsmen and he wants to avoid it. The kripa Arjuna feels is his route of escape from the conflict he is in.

Arjuna wants to win back his kingdom from Duryodhana who has usurped it, he wants to fight the war for Dharma that Krishna wants him to fight, but he does not want to lose his name and fame as a highly ethical person, as someone who will not do anything wrong. He does not want anyone to say that he killed his grandsire and his guru, or that he was responsible for their death.

Arjuna, like all of us and unlike Krishna, is very much a prisoner of his ego. He does not want to be blamed for going out of his maryadas, the ethical limits his society and its culture has set for him. He wants to remain a maryada purusha.

Krishna has no such compunctions. For the sake of dharma, if no other means are available, he does not mind occasionally stepping outside the Lakshman rekhas set by society. Thus in order to avoid the war and save innumerable human lives, he does not mind taking Karna away from everyone and in solitude trying to tempt him with power and with Draupadi. Krishna knows what he is doing is wrong, but he would go ahead and do that for the sake of the hundreds of thousands of lives he can save through it. As for the disgrace that would be his for doing it, well, that did not bother him. Krishna never cared for his name and fame. The only thing he ever cared for was for doing good to the people, as when he abandoned Mathura and took his people to Dwaraka safely away from Jarasandha, an action that gave him the name Ranchhod, a run way from war, a coward.

One of my favourite Kahlil Gibran stories is about a sheet of snow-white paper:

“Said a sheet of snow-white paper, "Pure was I created, and pure will I remain for ever. I would rather be burnt and turn to white ashes than suffer darkness to touch me or the unclean to come near me."

“The ink-bottle heard what the paper was saying, and it laughed in its dark heart; but it never dared to approach her. And the multicoloured pencils heard her also, and they too never came near her.

“And the snow-white sheet of paper did remain pure and chaste for ever. Pure and chaste -- and empty.”

Arjuna is now behaving like that sheet of snow-white paper.

The physical and mental symptoms Arjuna is speaking about are the symptoms of his reluctance to come out of social conventions – even for lokasangraha, for the common good.

Ethics is without a doubt one of man’s greatest strengths. But it should remain our strength and not become our weakness. It becomes our weakness when it limits us, binds us, prevents us from doing good to others, becomes shackles on our hands and legs. There are occasions that ask of us to go beyond ethics for the good of the world and on such occasions we should do good by going beyond ethics.

Speaking of ethics, the psychologist Abraham Maslow said that self-actualized individuals are ethical, but their ethics is not the ethics dictated by the society, by the masses, but born of their own enlightened mind. There come occasions in everyone’s life when he or she will have to rise to the level of enlightened ethics, where decisions will have to be taken as guided by the light in our heart.

That is why Krishna boldly declares in the Mahabharata satyaad jyeyo’nritam vachah: a lie is [sometimes] superior to the truth. A lie that saves is superior to the truth that kills, a lie that does good is superior to the truth that harms.

Doing good is more important than being right.

India makes a clear distinction between satyam and tathyam – truth and facts. The two are not the same, says India. And India defines satyam as whatever is of the highest good of the people: yal-lokahitam atyantam tat satyam,

Arjuna is now called upon to sacrifice his feelings of love and reverence to his guru and Grandfather Bhishma and others at the altar of dharma, the good of the world. It is a terrible thing to have to do that, but he has no choice. Deserting the war and surrendering Bharatavarsha to powers of adharma is not a choice. But that is what he will be doing if he abandons the war and goes away to become a monk who lives on alms.

Just as there are many forms of courage, there are many kinds of cowardliness too. The cowardliness to act because the action will be against the people you love and revere too is a form of cowardliness – ethical cowardliness. And no leader worth his name can afford to do that. If Arjuna refuses to act now because that action will be against Bhishma and Drona, he will then be no different from blind Dhritarashtra who refused to take actions against Duryodhana because he was his son and he loved him. There were a thousand occasions when Dhritarashtra should have acted against his son – beginning with the elaborately planned poisoning of Bhima at Pramanakoti done when Duryodhana was still a child. But Dhritarashtra acts against his son not once in his entire life, which is in fact what leads the Mahabharata war.

Not acting against corrupt people because they are one’s own people, swajana, is something we come across every day in politics and in organizational culture these days. Corruption is an asuri pravritti and all asuri pravrittis have to be acted against, particularly if you are in a leadership position. Failing to do so encourages and empowers asuri powers and that destroys the world.     

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The Mahabharata tells us an interesting story about Drona and Arjuna that happened years before the war when Arjuna still received lessons from Drona. One day Drona told Arjuna in the presence of his other disciples about a weapon called Brahmashira. The acharya said that the weapon had no equal in the world, it had the power of lightning and was capable of reducing the world to ashes instantly. Drona told Arjuna that he was going to give Brahmashira Astra to him but he would have to first promise that he would give him whatever he asked for as his gurudakshina for it. Arjuna touched Drona’s feet and made the promise. And after he did it, Drona gave Arjuna the astra and then asked for his gurudakshina. Arjuna then asked him what he wanted. Drona wanted him a promise from Arjuna: “You must fight with me when I fight with you.”

Perhaps Drona had the intuition that one day the two of them would stand face to face in the battlefield and when that happened Arjuna would refuse to fight his guru. It is this possibility that Drona wanted to avoid through the promise he took from his beloved disciple..   

Nine days after Krishna teaches the Gita to Arjuna in the battlefield, on the night after the ninth day of the war, Bhishma begs Arjuna to put an end to his life and suffering by killing him in battle the next day. Weeping he says that he is tired of fighting for the evil Duryodhana all his life and does not want to do it anymore. It is after this request for death that Arjuna mortally wounds him on the tenth day of the war and he falls in the battlefield pierced by a thousand arrows.

Sometimes killing is kindness too.

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Living Bhagavad Gita 014: Arjuna’s Prasuti Vairagya

A series of short articles on the Bhagavad Gita for people living and working in our volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous times filled with stress and fear. This scripture born in a battlefield teaches us how to face our challenges, live our life fully, achieve excellence in whatever we do and find happiness, peace and contentment.

[Continued from the previous post.]

I have no desire for victory, Krishna, or for the kingdom or pleasures. What good is the kingdom, Krishna, or pleasures, or life itself? Those for whose sake we desire kingdoms, enjoyments and pleasures, they stand here before me staking their wealth and life in the war – teachers, fathers, sons, grandfathers, uncles, fathers-in-law, grandsons and brothers-in-law and other kinsmen. I do not want to kill them, Krishna, even if they kill me – no, not even for all the three worlds, what to speak of this land.  BG 1.31-35

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Before we enter the verses, let us spend a minute or two with a major difference between the Vedic way of living and subsequent Indian way of living, to both of which spirituality was central.

Speaking of the greatness of the Vedas, Dr Radha Kumud Mukherjee, one of the greatest modern Indian Vedic scholars and author of several books based on the Vedas, says:  “The Vedas and especially the primordial work known as the Rig Veda, represents not merely the dawn of culture, but also its zenith. Indian thought is seen at its highest in the Rig Veda… On the one hand it is the first book of India and also of mankind. At the same time it shows the highest point of human wisdom…

“The Vedas accept life in its fullness. The malaise caused by the loss of balance between the primary biological instincts [the body] and man’s active and contemplative faculties [the mind] is completely absent in them. There is no clash between the flesh and the spirit.”

The highest ideal for the Vedic Indians was the rishi and for that reason ancient Indian culture is frequently called arsha samskriti, culture with its foundation on the rishi vision and way of life. The rishis accepted life in its fullness and. as Dr Mukherjee points out, found no contradiction between the flesh and the spirit. For them all our actions were essentially spiritual – which included the sexual life too. Sex became non-spiritual only when it sank to a life of the senses and we were reduced to slaves to our senses – only when we were driven about blindly by our instincts and impulses, making us lose our contact with the soul, only when we lived our lives unconsciously rather than consciously. The Upanishads, for instance, speak of the sexual act between man and woman as a sacred yajna, another sacrificial ritual.

However, with the decline of the Vedic culture, our ancestors found this way of life too difficult – conscious living, in which you live every moment wakefully, is tough indeed, however great the rewards are. So over time a new way of life evolved into being: the ashrama system. Life past early childhood was divided into four ashramas or stages of life. The first was called brahmacharya, the stage in which we devoted all our energy to acquiring knowledge, the word brahma standing here for the Vedas or all knowledge worth acquiring in general. This began with the initiation given by the guru between the ages five and eight, after which the young boy or girl lived in the kula of the guru, as a member of his extended family.

This period usually lasted for about twelve years and then the next period, the family life, called garhasthya, began. In the period of brahmacharya, sex was forbidden and for that reason the word brahmacharya itself came to be known as celibacy, though the word does not mean it. During garhasthya social relationships, social commitments, sexual relations, production of wealth, service to others, religious rituals, all became central.

At the end of garhasthya, the third stage known as vanaprastha, life in the seclusion of the forest away from the society began, though here too the husband and the wife still lived together. Typically vanaprastha started when your children had children of their own – apatyasya apatyam. And vanaprastha eventually led to sannyasa, the final stage of your life.

Thus the rishi way of life which did not divide life into separate ashrams was subdivided into four stages for the convenience of people with the decline of the Vedic culture But even in this period there was a provision for entering the sannyasa way of life whenever one was ready for it because it was considered the highest way.  Yad ahareve virajet, tad ahar eva pravrajet, brahmacharyat va grihat va vanat va, said the ancient wisdom of India: Become a wanderer [on the spiritual path, a sannyasi] the very day you develop vairagya – from brahmcharya, or garhasthya or from vanaprastha.

The deciding factor was vairagya – absence of raga or longing for security, possessions, relationships, sex, name, fame, power over others and so on. With vairagya came readiness to surrender to Existence, to float with life, to let the current of life carry you where it willed, to become a cloud in the sky freely going where the wind takes you. You became a bird of the skies, a lily of the field.

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And this is way of life Arjuna chooses for himself as he stands and watches the armies of his own people on both sides standing armed to the teeth, ready to die or to slaughter one another in the terrible war. Arjuna here is choosing the highest way of life when he says life is meaningless, kingdom is meaningless, wealth is meaningless, pleasures are meaningless. [Soon he would use the word bhaikshya, the way of living on alms, on the charity of other people, for what he prefers to winning this terrible war.]

Unfortunately the very words in which he expresses his choice tells us he is not yet ready that way of life. A sannyasi is one for whom the world is his home and all people are his own people, even the animals and plants and birds and beasts are his own people.

The Bhagavata Mahatmya has one of the most beautiful verses in all of Sanskrit literature as its first shloka. The shloka speaks of Shuka, who is so young that his upanayana has not yet taken place, leaving his father Sage Vyasa and going away as a pravrajaka, a wandering monk. Sage Vyasa calls back, agony in his voice because his child is so young and still leaving him and going away. As Vyasa calls out in pain “Oh Son,” it is not however Shuka who responds to him, but the trees around because Shuka has become one with the trees, one with the birds and the beasts, one with the moving wind, one with all existence,

In his incredibly beautiful poem Say I’m You, the great Sufi sage Jalaluddin Rumi says:

I am dust particles in sunlight.
I am the round sun...

I am morning mist, and the breathing of evening.
I am wind in the top of a grove and surf on the cliff.
Mast, rudder, helmsman, and keel,
I am also the coral reef they founder on.

I am a tree with a trained parrot in its branches.
Silence, thought, and voice.
The musical air coming through a flute,
a spark of a stone, a flickering in metal...

This is what Shuka had become and that is what a sannyasi means in the ultimate sense.  Rumi is a sannyasi, Shuka is a sannyasi.

But by extension, we can call sannyasis even those who are living lives leading to that vision, whose entire energies are devoted to awakening into that state. The word ashrama means complete shrama, total effort. Sannyasa ashrama is the lifestyle in which every drop of your energy, every minute of your time is spent towards awakening into that vision in which we are one with all, one with everything.

Arjuna is not at all ready to live such a life. He just does not want to kill in battle his own people. He would like to run away from the harsh responsibility, the very unpleasant reality facing him at the moment. 

Sannyasa is only for the bravest of people, not for everyone. To let go of all securities and surrender to the winds of life needs boundless courage. It is certainly not for people who want to run away from responsibilities because they are not pleasant.

India speaks of what are known as prasooti vairagya. Prasooti vairagya is the vairagya, dispassion, a woman experiences towards sexual life in the moments she is giving birth to a baby – the intolerable pain of giving birth kills all desire for sex in her. But that is only a very temporary state, a passing thing. Soon the needs and longings natural to being a woman will take her over again, her body and mind will make demands on her again. And she will be driven to what she rejects now.

So is Arjuna’s vairagya. It is just a passing thing. Very ephemeral, with no true substance to it.

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Krishna has known Arjuna all his life. Apart from being same age cousins and brothers-in-law, they are best friends and have been so practically all their lives. Krishna knows Arjuna is not yet ready for sannyasa.

Spirituality is the flowering of the highest possibilities in man – something that happens, says in the Indian spiritual tradition, only with the grace of God: ishwara-anugrahaad eva pumsaam advaita-vaasanaa. Being blessed with spirituality is the greatest blessing man can have – not being blessed with wealth, not being blessed with power or position, not being blessed with fame or pleasures, not being blessed with anything else for that matter. When we wake up from the dream we call samsara, the life of illusion where we are dominated by the ego and made to run helter-skelter to fulfill its constant endless demands, we do not just awaken from this vicious dream that has held us prisoner for endless ages, says Indian wisdom, but also make our mothers blessed, the families into which we are born blessed, the very earth itself blessed. The very desire to wake up from the illusion of samsara is the highest blessing God can give us.

Swami Vivekananda once approached his master Bhagavan Sri Ramakrishna, deeply in distress because of the poor economic conditions of his family. His family that was once well to do had by then been reduced to extreme poverty and was finding even two meals day difficult. Vivekananda, young Naren then, was a very sensitive young man and found unable to focus on his sadhanas because of his family’s suffering. In this agony one day he approached Bhagavan Sri Ramakrishna and the master told him to go and ask the Mother for wealth, the Mother would give him anything he asked for, after all the Mother was all-giving and he was her child.

Young Naren went to the temple of Mother Bhavatarini to ask her for wealth but once he stood before the mother, he was bathed in such bliss he forgot everything. He stood there repeating the Mother’s name endlessly and felt wave after wave of love for him emanating from her and washing over him. After remaining in that samadhi-like state for a long time, Naren pulled himself out of that state in order to ask her for wealth, as he had originally intended, but what he asked for was spiritual knowledge and unceasing devotion to her. 

When Naren comes out and answering Bhagavan Ramakrishna’s question tells him what happened, the master sends him back to the Mother a second time and then a third time, instructing him to make sure he asked for wealth. But precisely the same thing happens again both the times and Naren came out of the temple rather shamefacedly. But of course this is precisely what the master wanted and he hugged his disciple happily and congratulating him for his devotion assured him that his family would always have enough for their food and clothing, he should not worry about them.  

     

There is a story about a man who prayed to Goddess Lakshmi for wealth. Day after day for years he prayed to Mother Lakshmi asking her for wealth and finally, disappointed, stopped all the prayers and became a monk, making fast spiritual progress by practicing sadhana with the same commitment with which he had prayed for wealth for years. One day as he sat bathed in the bliss of meditation, the goddess appeared before him with a beautiful smile on her face, her eyes aglow with love and the whole place radiant with her brilliance. She offered him all the wealth he wanted and more. He told her he did not want wealth anymore and asked her why she did not bless him wealth when he prayed for it. Smiling, the goddess asked him what would have been batter – her giving him wealth at that time, or not giving him wealth and making what he has now become possible. In deep reverence, the man bent and touched the mother’s feet with his head. 

Krishna is not just the greatest statesman of the day but the greatest guru, spiritual master India has known. And a spiritual master never misses an opportunity to awaken his disciple, to help him grow spiritually. The greatest blessing Krishna can shower on Arjuna is leading him to spiritual awakening, giving him spiritual knowledge, making him realize his true nature, his swaroopa, as the atman that is never born, never dies, about which he says in the Gita: It is never born nor does It ever die; after having become, It does not ever cease to be again. Unborn, eternal, changeless and primeval, It is not killed when the body is killed. [BG 2.20]

That is what Krishna does to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita at the highest level: seizing . He senses an opportunity to awaken his friend Arjuna from his illusions and makes the best use of it.  

In the Mahabharata there is a story about Krishna taking Arjuna through a world where darkness is so thick that, in the words of the epic, if you stretch your hand out you will feel you are pushing it through wet clay. Here Krishna is taking Arjuna through a world in which light is so bright it is as though a thousand suns have simultaneously risen up in the sky – divi soorya-sahasrasya bhaved yugapad utthitaa.

At the highest level, Gita is spiritual scripture. It is guidance given by God to man, his friend, to wake up from the drugged dream in which he has been from the beginning of time. As we shall see as we proceed, Arjuna asks scores of questions in the Bhagavad Gita and not a single one of them is about anything other than spirituality.

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As Krishna teaches Arjuna here, he has simultaneously two purposes. He wants Arjuna to wake up from the illusion of the ego, from maya, from ignorance and realize his true nature. He also wants Arjuna to successfully fight the war for the sake of dharma and win it. He wants Arjuna to master his emotions, to overcome the emotional hijack he is suffering from, to regain his mental focus, to become sama, calm and centered, to retain his mental balance, to attain again performance excellence, and fight the war without feverishness – yuddhyasva vigatajvarah – so he can win the victory for goodness in the world, particularly among leaders of men, for which Krishna himself has been waging wars all his life.

What Krishna does for achieving these dual purposes of his is instructing Arjuna in the Vedic way of spiritual life where everything you do becomes spirituality, where you do not have to do any special spiritual acts but do whatever you have always been doing with a changed attitude, whereby everything you do – yad yad karma karomi tattad akhilam – becomes your spiritual sadhana. Krishna calls this by several names, the most common of which is karma yoga, where your karma itself becomes your yoga, your ordinary actions themselves become your yoga, your meditation, your spiritual path.

And Krishna tells Arjuna he is not teaching him anything new, this is what he has taught leaders of men from the beginning of time, this is the arsha way, the way of the rishis, what he taught the great rajarshis of the past beginning with the first rajarshi Vivaswan and then his son Manu and then his son Ikshwaku.

I taught this eternal Yoga to Vivasvan, he taught it to Manu and Manu taught it to Ikshvaku. This knowledge, thus handed down from one generation to the next was known to all royal sages. Over a long time this yoga was lost to the world. It is the same ancient wisdom, Arjuna, this yoga that is a supreme secret, that I taught you today, because you are my devotee and my friend. BG 4.1-3

For that reason, as we shall see, throughout the Gita, at every stage, we are both invited to practice spirituality as well as are shown ways to achieve performance excellence, to excel in whatever we choose to do.

The Bhagavad Gita is simultaneously the highest book of spirituality and the best book of performance excellence in existence. 
 

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