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]
naasato vidyate bhaavo naabhaavo vidyate satah
ubhayorapi drishto’ntas twanayos tattwadarshibhih // 2.16 //
avinaashi tu tad viddhi yena sarvam idam tatam
vinaasham avyayasya asya na kaschit kartum arhati // 2.17 //
antavanta ime dehaa nityasyoktaah shareerinah
anaashino'prameyasya tasmaad yudhyaswa bhaarata // 2.18 //
ya enam vetti hantaaram yashchainam manyate hatam
ubhau tau na
vijaaneeto naayam hanti na hanyate // 2.19 //
“Those
who have seen the truth know this: the unreal has no existence, and the real can
never cease to exist. Understand that that by which all this is pervaded is
indestructible; no one can cause the destruction of that imperishable. The wise
say that bodies come to an end but the embodied self that is beyond the grasp
of the mind is deathless and eternal. Fight therefore, Arjuna, fight! He who
thinks of the self as the slayer and he who thinks of it as the slain, neither
of them truly understands. For the self neither slays nor is slain.” BG
2.16-19
O0O
“Fight,
Arjuna, fight!” [yuddhyasva bhaarata] is something we will hear again and again in the Gita from Krishna.
Krishna is keen that Arjuna should fight the war for the good of the world; for
the sake of dharma now that all efforts for avoiding the war have failed. He
had tried with Duryodhana sama [negotiations as equals], dana [give and take],
bheda [dividing the enemies] and all of them had failed and now the only path
open was that of danda – the path of force, fighting it out. And since the
cause is so important – survival of dharma, ending the unethical ways of the
rulers of the day and reestablishing righteous ways among them – he is ready
even for that.
For
Krishna the Mahabharata war was of course so that the Pandavas got their
kingdom back from Duryodhana, but that was not just because they were his friends
but because they were righteous people. Krishna’s main purpose was establishing
dharma in this our land then known as Bharatavarsha – the land that consisted
of all of modern India and much more, spreading right from the Himalayas in the
north to modern Kanyakumari in the south and from Gandhara [modern Afghanistan]
and Bahlika [ancient Bactria] in the west to Brahmadesha, modern Myanmar, in
the east.
And
for that eliminating Duryodhana was essential. Duryodhana was evil right from
the beginning. His basic hunger was for power – and he would go to any length
to appease that hunger. He would poison his enemies, set fire to their house,
and would do anything else necessary to destroy them. Politicians all over the
world today are known for their power hunger – and he was a representative of
such people. Perhaps this is the reason why the epic tells us Duryodhana was an
incarnation of the Age of Kali. No ethics, no morals, no values stood in his
pursuit of power.
Yatha
raja tatha pratha, said ancient Indian wisdom: As the king, so the people. Modern
leadership studies tell us people model their behaviour after their heroes. The
Gita too says: “yad yad aacharati shreshthah, tat tad eva itaro janah. sa yat
pramaanam kurute lokah tad anuvartate.” “Whatever a great man does, that is
what others do. Whatever he considers as the ideal, the others follow.” So if
the king does not walk the path of values, the people will not either. And when
neither the king nor the common people follow the path of dharma, the entire
country will plunge into abysses of darkness.
Dharma
is what makes life worth living, dharma is what sustains life and society,
dharma is what helps joyfulness flower in life. So dharma has to be sustained
and if for that no other path is available, then the wicked king himself has to
be eliminated. This was Krishna’s mission throughout his life, what he kept
doing right from his years. He was only around thirteen when he eliminated his
own uncle Kamsa, the wicked king of Mathura who had grabbed power by throwing
his own father Ugrasena into the dungeons. If men who should model righteous
ways of living themselves should follow corrupt ways, common men and women
would follow them and dharma will have no place in the world. So dharma had to
be protected – dharma which protected people if it was protected, as the epic
puts it: dharmo rakshati rakshitah.
In the
Mahabharata, as is well known, Yudhishthira represents dharma and Duryodhana
adharma. When Duryodhana says he will not give Yudhishthira as much land as the
tip of a needle, he was in effect saying dharma will not get so much land in
his kingdom as the tip of a needle. That is why it become necessary for Krishna
to eliminate him – if a war is the only means through which it can be done,
then through it.
In the
Gita Krishna makes crystal clear what he is: God himself, incarnated to
eliminate adharma and to reestablish dharma. He declares to Arjuna in thrilling
words that has kept all of this land spellbound for millennia:
yadaa yadaa hi dharmasya glaanir bhavati bhaarata
abhyutthaanam adharmasya tadaa'tmaanam srijaamyaham
paritraanaaya saadhoonaam vinaashaaya cha dushkritam
dharma samsthaapanaarthaaya sambhavaami yuge yuge BG 4.7-8
Whenever
there is a decline of dharma and rise of dharma, then I create myself. For the
protection of the good, for the destruction of the evil, and for the
establishment of righteousness, I take birth age after age.
When
Krishna says he comes down to the earth, takes an avatara, he does not mean
just those few avataras our ancient scriptures mention, like Narasimha,
Parasurama, Rama and so on. As Krishna himself tells Uttanka in the
Mahabharata, incarnations are endless. In fact whenever someone fights against
adharma and tries to establish dharma, the divine is working through him.
Speaking
of India’s recent history, there was a time when our land had sunk into
pathetic darkness and at that time our society threw up masters like Raja Rammohan
Roy. One of the evil social customs of the day was sati in which widows were
forced to enter the funeral pyres of their husbands and ‘accompany them into
other worlds’. The society in those days did not approve of remarriage, even
when young girls were married off before the age of puberty to old dying men
and these men died soon after the marriage. The only options available to these
teenage widows were either to become ‘satis’ or to live lives of complete self
denial as widows the rest of their lives, saying no to all that made life good.
Rammohan Roy fought against both of these evil customs.
A
little later came Swami Vivekananda who lived and fought to restore the self
confidence of our youth at a time when that had taken a plunge into bottomless
worlds. Later during our freedom struggle masters like Mahatma Gandhi came up
whose successful battle against the empire in which the sun never set not only
ended our slavery to the British but also freed every nation on the earth from
the colonial yoke. The inspiration of Gandhiji put an end to centuries of
atrocities on enslaved populations all over the world by their ruthless
colonial masters, whether it was the insane cruelties of the Spanish in Latin
America, atrocities by the likes of King Leopold in Belgian Congo and elsewhere
in Africa, colonial atrocities of the British and the French throughout the
world.
All
such leaders have the divine with them when they battle against adharma and try
to reestablish dharma. The divine manifests in them.
Modern
literature and cinema, today’s mirrors of the society, tell us countless stories
of battles against adharma by modern heroes and heroines, both historical and
fictional. The Hollywood movie Erin Brockovich brilliantly starred by Julia
Roberts tells us the story of the real life Erin Brockovich, ‘an American legal clerk, consumer advocate, and environmental
activist, who, despite her lack of education in the law, was
instrumental in building a case against the Pacific Gas and Electric Company
(PG&E) of California in 1993” as Wikipedia describes her.
Numberless
movies have been made in different Indian language cinemas on the theme of
battles against one form of evil or the other. The vigilante movies are a class
of movies that tell stories of battles against evil – whether it is evil that
is widespread in the medical and pharmaceutical world, the horrid evil of women
trafficking, bureaucratic corruption, corruption in the world business and
industry, political coruption or any other form of corruption. Na maanushaad
param dharmah, said the Mahabharata: there is no dharma higher than maanusha, the
good of all. The highest dharma is the good of all and all that is against the
common good is adharma. All that benefits a few but harms others is adharma.
Krishna’s
message is clear: dharma is what sustains the individual, the society and the
world and anything that destroys dharma has to be destroyed. And Krishna
assures all: na hi kalyaanakrt kaschid durgatim taata gachchhati, those who do
good never come to evil ends. What Krishna is doing here is assuring everyone
who fights against adharma that he is with him or her.
Therefore
fight fearlessly, says Krishna. Tasmad uttishtha kaunteya yuddhaaya
krtanischayah: Therefore, Arjuna, decide to fight and stand up.
Awaken
the will to fight. For dharma.
However,
Krishna wants us to make sure that we are battling for the common good, dharma.
And Krishna wants us to be calm, poised, centered and focused in these battles.
He wants us to fight these battles without feverishness and with our mind
focused on our ultimate goal: inner purification.
Purifying
the outer society is also a path to inner purification. It can become our yoga
– the yoga of action, karma yoga.
When
Krishna asks us to fight our battles for inner purification, he is asking us to
become yogis in the battlefield for dharma. And he assures Arjuna, and through
Arjuna us, that battling for dharma in the spirit of yoga, you shall not incur
sin: naivam paapam
avaapsyasi.
Because
he wants us to be fearless as we fight these battles. The path of spirituality
is the path of fearlessness, of abhayam. Where there is fear, there is no
spirituality and where there spirituality, there is no fear.
O0O
Man’s
greatest fear is of death. And yet when we look into the Mahabharata War at the
opening of which the Gita came into existence, what meets our eyes is a strange
sight: The warriors in general show no fear of death. They rush into the
battlefield as though intoxicated by death. And when they meet their death,
they embrace it as though they are embracing their beloveds in bed.
To the
warriors of the epic, battles
were peak experiences, accompanied by rapturous ecstasies. They lived for such
experiences and when an opportunity arose they accepted the challenge
exultantly, entered the battle ecstatically and fought as though in throes of
joy. Death was but a small price they
paid for such ecstatic experiences. It was something before which they did not
flinch, something they even courted as desirable. They considered death in bed
surrounded by relatives and friends a matter of shame. Glorious was the death
one achieved in the battlefield. To slaughter the enemy ruthlessly in
honourable battle was noble indeed in their eyes. And to be pierced by a
hundred arrows in every limb, to have one’s head chopped off with a single
stroke of the enemy’s sword or a well-shot arrow was equally noble. And equally
desirable.
Warriors in the Mahabharata
came to the battlefield dressed in their best, as though for a festive
occasion. For instance, as they begin their march, the mood in the army of
Shalya, one of the first to start their journey to join the war, is one of
celebration. They have their weapons with them, of course. But they also wear
wonderful clothes and lovely necklaces and other beautiful ornaments. All the
other alankaras are on, too. It is indeed a festive occasion!
There is a general air of
festivity, of celebration, of sports, even to the fiercest of battles. Bheeshma
in the middle of a terrifying battle is several times described as ‘as though
playing’ – kreedanniva. Once the Mahabharata says that he looked as though he
was dancing in the battlefield – nrittyanniva – and at that time he was engaged
in one of the fiercest encounters in the eighteen-day war! And it is not just
individual soldiers that dances, but whole armies do so, too: “The two armies,
as they advanced to meet each other, seemed to dance,” says the epic.
As we read the epic we realize
that death did not matter to them. They embraced it with the same eagerness
with which they embraced life. And death too welcomed them with the same warmth
and passion as they had found in the arms of life. They had lived as masters of
the Earth and in dying, they were only resting on her breast. Describing the
death of Shalya, Sanjaya tells the blind king: “Stretching his arms, the ruler
of the Madras fell down on the Earth, with face directed towards king
Yudhishthira the just, like a tall banner erected to honour Indra falling down
on the ground. Like a dear wife advancing to receive her dear lord about to
fall on her breast, the Earth then seemed, from affection, to rise a little for
receiving that bull among men as he fell down with mangled limbs bathed in
blood. The invincible Shalya, having long enjoyed the Earth like a dear wife,
now seemed to sleep on her breast, embracing her with all his limbs.”
We often get the feeling that
the kings and warriors who came to fight came not caring much for the cause for
which they fought. What mattered was the battle itself. They enjoyed a battle
and they did not want to be left out. The Mahabharata war was the most glorious
event in a long, long time, and they wanted to be part of it and celebrate it.
Who would want to miss the greatest mela on earth? Did it really matter on
whose side they fought, so long as they fought?
Shalya is Madri’s brother and
so he is the uncle of the Pandavas. He is invited by the Pandavas to join their
side and fight for them. He begins his journey towards them along with his
maharathi sons and a vast army. However, Duryodhana goes forward and meets them
on the way, offering his splendid hospitality. Pleased by his hospitality,
Shalya decides to join the Kauravas! Which does not make him an enemy of the
Pandavas, though. He visits them, too, affectionately and gives them his
blessings! Eventually towards the end of the war, after the death of Karna,
Shalya becomes the commander-in-chief of the Kaurava army. He had started out
to fight against them!
Relationships did count. But
the battle was bigger than all relationships. As the epic says, “There the son recognized
not the sire, the sire not the son of his loins, the brother not his brother,
the nephew not his uncle, the friend not the friend.” They just fought.
Rukmi, Rukmini’s brother and Krishna’s
brother-in-law, first approached the Pandavas – Krishna was there and so
charged up was Rukmi that he was willing to forget the old enmity between them
and begin with him on a new footing, while also finding glory in the battle. He
had come with a full akshauhini just as Shalya had. But he committed the faux
pas of telling Arjuna, in the presence of his brothers, Krishna and other
kings, that if he, Arjuna, was afraid, he was there to help him in the war.
Smiling, Arjuna replied that he was born in the line of the Kurus, was the son
of Pandu, was a disciple of Drona, had Krishna as his helper and had the Gandiva
in his hand – how could he then say he was afraid? He told Rukmi he was free to
stay or go, as he pleased. An insulted Rukmi departed with his akshauhini and
approached Duryodhana and repeated his words there. Duryodhana did not consider
himself any more scared than Arjuna was, of course! And Rukmi returned to his
kingdom. The Mahabharata specially mentions that Rukmi and Balarama were the
only two great warriors to keep away from the war.
Truly, what counted was that
you fought – not for whom or for what cause you fought in the sacrifice called
war – the rana-yajna. Many who fought on the Kaurava side were very close to
the Pandavas and some who fought for the Pandavas, close to the Kauravas.
Of course, how you fought
counted. How valiantly you fought, how fearlessly you fought, how skillfully
you fought, how heroically you fought, how recklessly you fought – these
counted. You had to laugh at death. See beauty in flowing red blood. See beauty
in the writhing of severed arms. See beauty in the tumbling down of brave
heads. The most savage battle should delight you, should enthrall you. Then you
are a true Kshatriya, true blue blood.
Why is this so? The mystery is
solved when we her Krishna’s words in the Gita: “The unreal has no real
existence. And the real never ceases to really exist. No one can cause the
destruction of the imperishable. Only the bodies that are the temporary homes
of the deathless die. Ya enam vetti
hantaaram, yashchainam manyate hatam, ubhau tau na vijaaneeto, naayam hanti na
hanyate: He who understands this [the indwelling spirit] to be the slayer and
he who sees this as the slain, neither of them knows right. For what lives in
the body neither kills nor is killed.”
The secret of the festivity
and the celebration of the warriors of the Mahabharata is that they knew they
are immortal, deathless, death is just another passage, as the passage from
childhood to youth and youth to old age.
Everything Krishna teaches in
the Gita is not knew, much of it was common knowledge in his days. For we are
talking of India, of the land of the Upanishads – and the Upanishads had
declared thousands of years before Krishna that man is deathless. One of the groups of mantras that took me to
the gurukula in my youth to live there as an inmate for several years and study
sitting at the feet of my gurus is from the Taittiriya Upanishad. The mantras
say: bheeshaasmaad vaatah pavate, bheeshodeti sooryah; bheeshaasmaad agnishchendrash
cha, mrtyur dhaavati panchama it. What these mantras say is that we are that
out of fear for which the wind blows, out of fear of which the sun rises every
day, out of fear for which the fire burns and Indra performs his duties, out of
fear for which death stalks the world!
The Upanishad is talking about
what I truly am. I am that out of fear for which death stalks the world! How
can I then be afraid of death? That was the attitude of the Mahabharata warrior
towards death.
Man who covers under the fear
of death is very different from man unafraid of death. And Krishna wants to
take his friend Arjuna into those worlds where the fear of death does not
exist. And through the bahaana of Arjuna, Krishna wants to take each and every
one of us into those worlds where we do not fear death and if anything, death
fears us.
O0O
What Arjuna has to do in the
war is to slaughter his enemies who are fighting for adharma in the battlefield
and that is what Krishna is asking Arjuna to do. He is not asking his friend to
mindlessly kill innocent people, as a terrorist does. The Mahabharata war is a
declared war between two armies, fought based on conditions both parties agreed
to, for a cause for which no other option was available. Just as for us today
the military option is the last option, for the Pandavas too the war had become
the last option. But in spite of that, the highly sensitive Arjuna still cannot
make up his mind to do that because among the people to be killed in battle are
his grandfather and his guru and many other dear and near ones. So Krishna tells
him some high truths, some ultimate truths, truths that are very difficult to
accept, truths we would like to ignore, close our eyes to in the belief that if
we close our eyes to them, those truths will cease to exist, cease to be true.
But are true all the same: they have been ‘seen’ by tens of thousands of yogis.
Krishna tells Arjuna those who have seen the truth know this: the unreal has no existence,
and the real can never cease to exist. The body is perishable and the spirit
cannot be touched by time, cannot be touched by death. We are imperishable
souls living in perishable bodies. And that soul neither slays nor can be
slain.
The soul does not say because
it neither does anything nor causes others to do anything: naiva kurvan na
kaarayan – neither doing anything nor causing anything being done. It is
akarta, abhokta. In the language of India’s highest wisdom, it is the non-doer
behind all doings, the non-actor behind all actions, and the non-enjoyer behind
all enjoying. Even the shadow of death cannot fall on it So Krishna wants Arjuna to go ahead and play
role in this grand cosmic drama that is being unfolded before his eyes, whether
he likes it or not. From the standpoint of the cosmic drama, from the stand
point of samashti karma, from the standpoint of God, from the standpoint of
Krishna, the people standing in the battlefield are already dead: mayaivete
nihataa poorvam ava [Gita 11.33]. All Arjuna has to do is to become an
instrument in the hands of that cosmic power: nimittamatram bhava savyasachin.
Here are the powerful words of
Krishna, the knower of past, present and future, the knower of everything, the
cause behind all that happens, from whom arises the universe, in whom exists
the universe, and unto whom the universe will go back at the time of dissolution,
declaring that cosmic truth: “Verily by me have they already been slain; you be
a mere instrument, Arjuna! Do slay
Drona, Bhishma, Jayadratha, Karna and other great warriors who have already
been slain by Me and gain glory!”
O0O
Sometimes we have to accept
the inevitable and do what we have no choice but to do. In such cases the best
we can do is to do what Existence wants us to do and offer our work at the feet
of the Divinity accepting the results as his grace, his prasada.
This is equally true about our
personal life as a member of our family or the community and about our
professional life in the business or corporate world.
But we must make sure that we
are not putting the blame for doing what we want to do, what our egos want us
to do, on powers beyond us.
That is why Krishna concluded
his teachings of the Gita by saying this knowledge is rajavidya and rajaguhyam,
the highest knowledge and the highest secret and should never be given to those
who have not performed austerities, those who have no devotion in the Supreme,
those who are willing to sit at the feet of the guru and serve him, and those
who are closed to higher truths and consider the life of the word as the
beginning and the end of everything.
idam te na atapaskaaya
na abhaktaaya kadaachana
na
cha ashushrooshave vaachyam na cha maam yo'bhyasooyati. BG 18.67
The
wisdom that Krishna teaches Arjuna through the Gita is no ordinary knowledge
and should be given only to those who are ready for it.
O0O
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