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]
CHAPTER 2: INTRODUCTION
The Upanishads are among the world’s rarest jewels of wisdom. While other cultures have produced wisdom books, no other culture in the world has given us anything like the Upanishads, those books of highest wisdom to which the authors refused to add their names. The rishis who gave us these treasure chests said that they did not write them, they just came through them, they were mere channels for them and are not their authors, not their sources, they are not born of their brains. They said the Upanishads are apaurusheya – come from a world far beyond that of men. That refusal to give their names to their works too is part of the wisdom of their authors, for how can Krishna’s flute claim it produced Krishna’s music? It was just a channel for his music, an empty reed through which his breath flowed out as divine music the like of which the earth has never heard, to hear which ancient sages rich in asceticism took birth as cowherd women of Vrindavan.
And the Bhagavad Gita is the soul of the Upanishads, their most precious essence. There are a group of Sanskrit verses called Gita dhyana shlokas, meditation verses on the Gita, traditionally chanted before any study of the scripture. I remember chanting them before each of the hundreds of classes I had in the gurukula when I studied the Gita under my gurus, experiencing as I chanted them a deep serenity of the mind that is a requirement for understanding Krishna’s teachings. One of these verses says:
sarvopanishado gavo dogdhaa gopaalanandanah;
paartho vatsah sudheer bhokthaa dugdham gitaamrtam mahat.
“The Upanishads are cows and the son of the cowherd, Krishna, is the milkman. Arjuna is the calf and men of purified intellect are those who get to drink the milk. And the supreme nectar called the Gita is the milk.”
The Gita is also the confluence of all the innumerable streams of the rich Indian thought. Over millennia India developed countless paths to the Supreme, for awakening and experiencing our essential nature, for what is called self-realization or God-realization. We developed ways of living that led to growing within us the qualities required to walk this path: qualities like inner purity, fearlessness, readiness to surrender to the higher, straightforwardness, self-mastery, mastery over the senses, detachment, love for solitude and so on. We developed scores of paths to climb the mount of self-realization. And the Bhagavad Gita is a confluence of all these paths and all those ways of living. As innumerable rivers flow into the ocean to lose their separate identities in it, so do all streams of Indian thought and ways of spiritual living flow into the Gita and become one with it.
SOME GREAT MINDS ON THE GITA
Speaking of the Gita, Henry David Thoreau of
Walden fame who was in awe of the scripture said, "In the morning I bathe
my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita,
in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and
trivial.”
Mahatma Gandhi said that when doubts haunted
him, when disappointments stared him in the face, and when he saw not one ray
of hope in the horizon, he turned to Bhagavad Gita and always found a verse to
comfort him and he began to smile in the midst of overwhelming sorrow.
"I owed a magnificent day to the
Bhagavad Gita,” said Emerson. “It was the first of books; it was as if an
empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent,
the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered
and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us… The Bhagavad-Gita is
an empire of thought.”
GITA AS KRISHNA’S HEART
There is a Sanskrit line in which Krishna
tells Arjuna that the Gita is his heart – geeta me hrdayam paartha. The Gita, as Krishna says, is truly his
heart, that is what he lived all his life. In some cultures we have
philosophers who do not feel any need to live what they teach – Rousseau for
instance. It is difficult to imagine anyone who has done more good to children,
such were his ideas on education that became the power behind modern naturalism
in education. What education today is to a large extent what he made it. And
yet he left his own children uncared for on the streets. But in the east the
belief has always been that a philosopher should live what he teaches. So the
rishis of ours lived what they taught – whether it is Gautama, Kanada,
Patanjali, Vyasa, Yajnavalkya, Agastya, Lopamudra, Sulabha or whoever. Krishna
too lived exactly what he taught. He never taught anything that he himself did
not live, nor did he ever live anything that he did not teach. His teachings
and his life – he and his teachings – were the same. So to understand the Gita
perhaps the best way is to study Krishna’s life.
Krishna’s lived one of the most active lives
known to us. He was at the center of all the political activities that happened
in his days. Rulers in his days had become deeply corrupt, there was an evil
conglomerate consisting of such rulers as Jarasandha, Kamsa, Duryodhana, Paundraka
Vasudeva, Kashiraja, Shalva, Shishupala and Kala Yavana who believed in power
for the sake of power with no commitment to the people. Krishna wanted to
create a climate in which rulers will rule for the good of the people inspired
by the ancient wisdom that a ruler should be like a pregnant woman who ignores
herself and her interests and lives for the good of the baby in her womb. He
wanted kings to ignore their personal interests and live for the good of the
people in the spirit of sacrifice. In fact, from Krishna’s standpoint the
purpose of the Mahabharata war was to dethrone Duryodhana who believed in the
philosophy of power for the sake of power and have in his place Yudhishthira
who believed that a king should live to serve the people – something like the
servant leadership model we speak about today.
Krishna sang and danced throughout his life
in spite of constant threats to his life and other difficulties that surrounded
him all his life. He is always a complete master of himself, living life fully,
with the spirit of festivity, with his wives and friends. We cannot imagine
Krishna without a smile on his lips. Both the Mahabharata and the Harivamsha,
which is considered an appendix to the Mahabharata or its nineteenth chapter,
show us Krishna offering elaborate, festive parties to his people. Even when
his friend Arjuna is overwhelmed by the Mahabharata war situation as he stands
between the two armies and watches those who have come to do the battle risking
their lives, the smile on Krishna’s face never fades. The first words of his
teachings in the Gita are Gita wants us to live us in the same spirit – in the
spirit of festivity and celebration.
The Bhagavad Gita is Krishna’s teachings to
Arjuna, as we all know. But it has been a wisdom guide to all humanity for the
last more than five thousand years [according to Indian understanding, the
Mahabharata War took place in 3102 BCE and the Gita was, of course, born on the
first day of the war.] and is going to remain so for a long, long time to come.
In that sense, the teachings of the Gita are actually given to us. Arjuna is
only a nimitta, a medium, through which the teachings are given to us. The Gita
is thus Krishna teaching us how to live our life meaningfully, joyously.
Though born in a battlefield, the Gita is not
about the art of war. Throughout the Gita Arjuna asks Krishna questions –
questions about all kind of things. He asks a large number of questions, but
not one of them about the art of war. His questions are all about the art of
living.
And as a book teaching us the art of living,
it is a complete book. While there is no harm in reading other books – I love
reading, am a voracious reader who read for several hours every day – the Gita
is a complete book on the art of living. There is nothing that it does not
teach us, including what food to eat, how to respond to situations, how to
understand people, how to understand ourselves, how to master our mind with all
its passions and so on. These are exactly the kind of questions my students ask
me in the different business schools where I teach. Right now I am teaching a
course in Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow and the questions Arjuna asks
Krishna are no different from the questions my students there ask me.
Yesterday, for instance, a student asked me how he can live consciously
throughout the day rather than a few moments now and then.
CHALLENGES IN UNDERSTANDING
THE GITA
I remember my youngest sister asking me many
years ago why the Gita is difficult to understand, unlike some other religious
books that are comparatively so easy. One of the many reasons why is Gita’s
simplicity. The Gita tells the truth without beating about the bush, tells us
straight forward how to reach the ultimate goal of our life, without ever
indulging in pep talk. It does not treat us as children incapable of
understanding higher truths. And it talks about reaching our goals now – while
we are alive, not after our death. It tells us do this and this will happen. In
that sense there is no place for belief in the Gita. There is nothing in the
entire teachings of the Gita that you cannot experience here and now, provided
you do the right kind of things with the right frame of mind.
So that is one challenge in understanding the
Gita. Another is that it was produced by a culture that was philosophically
highly advanced, far more advanced than we are, a culture for which enquiries
into the meaning of life and the nature of the world were far more central than
they are to us, a culture in which advanced philosophical terms were part of
the common man’s everyday speech.
Speaking of Indian Philosophy, E. W. F.
Tomlin has this to say on the subtleties of Indian Thought in his book on the
history of eastern philosophy: “The philosophical terms [in Indian thought] in
their vocabulary exceed in number those of any other form of intellectual
belief. No language of ancient or modern times contains more philosophical
terms than Sanskrit. Indian thought arrives at subtleties of distinction so
varied and acute that the uninitiated and unprepared reader may well receive
the impression that Indian philosophers enjoy the use of half a dozen
intellects instead of one. We are accustomed to the idea of scientists
constructing artificial brains to effect calculations which neither a single
individual nor a team of individuals devoting a lifetime to the task could hope
to achieve. The elaborate system of certain Indian philosophers sometimes
appears to be the product of such socially-constructed intellects.”
Yet another challenge in understanding the
Gita is that in spite the culture that produced the Gita being philosophically
highly advanced, it does not believe in philosophy! Yes, there a huge number of
books written on Indian philosophy, but India has not really ever believed in
philosophy. it might come to some as a surprise that there is actually no
Indian word for philosophy. The word used in place of philosophy is darshana –
and darshana is very different from philosophy. Darshana means perception,
seeing, vision, from the Sanskrit root drsh or darsh, meaning to see. Philosophy
is the product of thinking, of analytical and synthetic thought processes,
whereas seeing is not.
A world renowned modern master once pointed out
the difference between philosophy and darshana beautifully. Philosophy is, he
said, like a man who is asleep, with his eyes closed and a bed sheet drawn over
his head, the windows of his room closed, trying to understand and tell others what
the morning is like – though he has never seen it. Whereas darshana is, said
the master, waking up from sleep, throwing away the bed sheet, getting up and
going to the windows and looking out – and seeing the glory of the morning with
your own eyes, seeing the sun coming up in the east, hearing the morning
sounds, smelling the morning air, watching the plants and trees dancing in the
freshness of the new day, hearing the sounds of birds and animals, seeing
people moving about, breathing in the fresh morning air and feeling the daybreak
rush of energy and life in your veins. In the first case, in the case of
philosophy, you are bound to be wrong because there is no way of understanding
what the morning is without personally seeing it and in the second case you
will always be right because you have seen it, experienced it, lived it as part
of it, felt it in your veins.
The Gita is not interested in explaining to
you intellectually what truth is, what your true nature is, what the nature of
the world is, but helping you to experience it directly. The discussions of the
Gita are not for helping you understand reality cerebrally but so that you
experience it. It is like the finger pointing at the moon – say, someone
pointing out the moon to you by saying that it is what you see between the two
large eastern branches of a tree. The moon has nothing to do with the branches
of any tree, a minute later the position of the moon would have changed, and
even if the tree were not there, the moon would have been where it is. But the
pointing out helps you see it. And the pointing out has just one purpose, just
one meaning – so that you see it.
All darshana begins with a master’s
experience and ends when the disciple sees what he has seen. Gita is Krishna’s
attempt to help Arjuna see what he has seen, know what he has known, experience
what he has experienced, live what he is living, and through Arjuna, help us do
these. The Gita is not a book to be cerebrally understood, it is not something
to be neatly arranged within our brain and then debated and discussed with
others. So that is another challenge.
Speaking of the truth that the Gita points
at, the Upanishads say yato vacho nivartante, apraapya manasa saha – it is
something from which words return, having not reached, along with the mind.
This truth that is the subject matter of the Gita is beyond words and even
beyond the mind. It is not a bunch of concepts that can be expressed in words
or understood by the mind. All words have to cease before we reach there. We
have to go beyond the mind to reach there. Where the mind is, there is no way
we can understand this truth. The mind is like an opaque glass which does not
let the light of the truth in, it blocks it. When the mind becomes thin,
translucent, almost completely transparent, then we get glimpses of the Gita’s
truth. And then like the Upanishad rishi we cry out:
hiranmayena paatrena satyasya
apihitam mukham
tat tvam pooshann-apavrnu satya-dharmaaya drshtave.
Isha Up. 15
“The face of the Truth is hidden by a disk of
pure gold. O Pooshan, Lord of the Sun, do you remove that so that I have the
vision of Truth and Dharma.”
And so long as the mind is thick, filled with
thoughts and ideas and concepts and images and memories and plans, there is no
way we can know it.
It is this truth that the mind cannot
comprehend and the senses cannot reach that we Gita is speaking about. And that
forms another challenge.
Yet another challenge is that the Gita is a
poem and poetry is suggestive and invariably means more than what it says. It
is not like a thesis where each word means exactly one and only one thing.
Krishna, the teacher of the Gita, is a rebel
who gives original meanings to the words he uses – meanings born of his own
understanding of spirituality and meanings he revives from traditions that had
more or less disappeared by his time.
Krishna uses terms like sannyasa, yoga and akarma in senses that were
totally different from the sense in which they were understood in his days. He
also rejects many of the spiritual practices that were very common in his days,
like Vedic rituals for pleasing the gods, extreme forms of asceticism and so on.
For instance, he says traigunya-vishayaa vedaah, nistraigunyo bhava arjuna –
the Vedas deal with [the world of] the three gunas; go beyond the three gunas,
Arjuna. He also uses terms like nishkama karma and akarma in highly technical
senses, with meanings very different from the senses in which they were
understood in his days.
The fact that a large number of us today are
‘Macaulay’s children’ whose minds have been trained to look down upon things of
Indian origin, our awe of things that come from the west, that we tend to think
and speak in a language that has no roots in the Indian psyche and so on also
pose challenges before us.
THE GITA AND PATRATA
Krishna and Arjuna had been together much of
their life – they were friends, cousins and brothers-in-law and yet Krishna
never taught Arjuna the Gita until the situation in the battlefield arose. That
is because the wisdom of the Gita is not for us until we are ready for it. All
people at all times are not eligible for its teachings – its teachings can be
dangerous for those who are not ready for it and in the hands of such people,
it can be dangerous for others too.
Learning the Gita also requires a certain
maturity that comes from living the life of the world – a life based on the
belief that the fulfillment of what Abraham Maslow calls physical and
physiological needs, safety and security needs, acceptance and belongingness
needs and esteem needs can give us contentment, can make our lives fulfilled.
From a slightly higher standpoint, we may include even self-actualization needs
in this group.
While everyone at all levels can learn
valuable lessons from the Gita, it is only after realizing that the life of the
world of actions do not give us what we are ultimately seeking that we become
qualified for the teachings of the Gita that take us to the higher dimensions
of life. After the realization through personal experience that what we are
searching for is the uncreated and that the uncreated cannot be the result of
actions.
Also, it is only when we become ready to do
prapatti, surrender, to the guru, as Arjuna does in the battlefield when he
tells Krishna in the second chapter of the Gita shishyaste'ham shaadhi maam
twaam prapannam – I am your disciple. Protect me, for I seek refuge in you –
that we become ready for the highest teachings of the Gita.
KRISHNA’S SPIRITUAL
REVOLUTION
The Gita teaches the path to lasting good, the
ultimate good. And the path to achieve that, as traditionally understood is the
path of nivritti, withdrawal from all other activities, from the outer journey,
and devoting all your energies and time exclusively to the inner journey by
living a life of renunciation, sannyasa. Perhaps the most revolutionary
teaching of Krishna in the Gita is that we need not do anything special for
travelling on that path, that we need not do anything other than what we are
doing now, that what we are doing at this moment itself can take us to that
goal, the ultimate universal goal, the goal that every human being is seeking
nisshreyasa, a word that means freedom from all bondages, including the bondage
to the ego, to our life scripts, to time itself.
Krishna says that whatever we are doing at
the moment, whether it is fighting a war as Arjuna is doing, or administering a
kingdom or farming or tending cattle, or service to others could all equally
become the path of that journey, just as meditation and prayer are.
As Krishna teaches it, the supervising,
planning and organizing that an executive does, his actions of decision making,
controlling, representing, consulting and administering, can all become
spiritual paths leading him to the ultimate good, nisshreyasa. Marketing his
products can become the spiritual path to a marketing executive, selling
vegetables from a pushcart his spiritual path to a street vendor, tending cows
his spirituality to a cowherd, cooking a meal for a cook, driving car for a
driver, mowing the lawn for a gardener, chopping wood for a woodcutter, dancing
for a dancer, painting for a painter, weaving cloth for a weaver, weaving
baskets for a basket maker all can lead to the ultimate when done with the
right mindset and understanding.
India speaks of the butcher Dharmavyadha
using butchering as his spiritual path, the prostitute Bindumati transforming
her work into her spiritual path – and Krishna would approve of all these. And
Krishna does not hesitate to declare that openly: sve sve karmany abhiratah
samsiddhim labhate narah – each man achieves the highest by engaging in his own
karma. [BG 18.45]
For Krishna what you is not the important
thing, but how you do it. After all he
is teaching Arjuna in the Gita how to transform the battles in the warfield
themselves into his spiritual path – slaughtering enemies can become his
spiritual path for a soldier, for a kshatriya, if that cannot be avoided, if there
is no other means left.
Krishna calls this karma yoga, the miracle of
transforming your karma into your yoga, whatever your karma is. Until his days,
pravritti, actions in the world, and nivritti, withdrawal from the world, were
two different paths. Krishna beautifully blended the two to form the path of
karma yoga. He combined pravritti and
nivritti and called it by the ancient name of sannyasa, giving the new meaning
of nivritti in pravritti to sannyasa – withdrawal while actively engaged in
action, detachment while working with full commitment. He taught Arjuna that
running away from karma is not sannyasa, but doing karma with a different
mindset is. Krishna teaches that you do not have to do anything different, but
only do the same things differently.
At the same time, Krishna does not forget
that there are other paths to reach that goal too – after all the spiritual
search has been man’s greatest adventure and over millennia humanity has
developed innumerable paths to reach that goal. So Krishna gives us many paths
to reach that goal – for no path is for all people. Each man’s journey has to
begin from where he is now and for that reason there are innumerable paths
leading to nisshreyasa and the Gita is a compendium of all these paths.
FINAL WORDS BEFORE WE BEGIN
One last thing before we begin the discussion
of the second chapter of the Bhagavad Gita.
The Bhagavad Gita is not a book that tells
you what to do and what not to do. It is not a book of prescriptions or
proscriptions. It is a book about awakening, about seeing the truth face to
face, and about living rooted in that awakening. It is a book that leads you to
enlightenment, in the light of which you will be able to decide for yourself
what is right and what is wrong, what to do and what not to do, how to live and
how not to live. So if you are seeking readymade solutions for your problems in
the Gita you might be disappointed. It will give you light in which you can see
things as they are, and you will know what to do with each problem facing you.
It will also show you many paths to walk on, and will tell you where each path
will take you, and ask you to choose for yourself as Krishna does at the end of
the Gita by telling Arjuna:
iti te jnaanam aakhyaatam guhyaad guhyataram
mayaa
vimrshyaitad ashesheṇa yathechchhasi tathaa kuru
“Thus, have I revealed to you knowledge that is
more hidden than the deepest secret. Think over it deeply and then do as you
wish.”
The Gita is a book of freedom, not of
bindings. It does not put you in shackles by saying do this and don’t do this,
but removes all your shackles. It does not clip your wings, but shows you the
sky and asks you to flutter your wings and soar.
Krishna believes that rather than fitting
into the society as it is, with all its maladies and shallowness, we should
change it. On his way to India, Pythagoras discovered in Egypt that people live
as though in sleep. The Gita wants us to wake up ourselvss and then help others
wake up.
Apart from leading individuals to the highest
goal of life, the Gita can also help us create an enlightened society in which
life will be meaningful rather than meaningless, people will have something
genuine to live for rather than feel life and work have no meaning. With the
help of the Gita, life can become a song of joy, a dance of celebration. It can
create a society in which people will not be running madly all the time to
reach where they know not, but will have time for their souls to catch up with
them.
Gurudev Tagore sang:
Where the mind is without fear and the head held
high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert
sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening thought and action;
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake!
The Gita can make not only our country but
the entire world awaken into that heaven of freedom.
O0O
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