A series
of 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.]
hato vaa praapsyasi swargam jitwaa vaa bhokshyase
maheem tasmaad uttishtha kaunteya yuddhaaya kritanishchayah ll 2.37 ll
If you are killed in battle, you will go to heaven;
and if you win, you will enjoy the earth. Therefore, Arjuna, resolve to fight
and get up.
O0O
In the previous article, discussing verse 36,
we saw how Krishna comes down to the level of Arjuna to motivate him using his
need for keerti, a strong need all kshatriyas shared. Krishna uses the word
samarthya there:
avaachya-vaadaamsh-cha
bahoon vadishyanti tavaahitaah
nindantastava
saamarthyam tato duhkhataram nu kim ll 2.36 ll
Krishna’s choice
of the word there is brilliant but for reasons of space we could not go into
the implications of the word but we shall do so here before proceeding further.
Samarthya or
samarthata means competence, the ability to do something, a competence which at
its height becomes excellence, the ability to do something brilliantly, a word
that was extremely close to India’s heart in the ancient days. Our name for the
master of all beings, the prajapati, was Daksha. Dakshata, competence or
excellence was the Indian ideal in every field and India excelled in whatever
field it went into, be it spirituality, literature, music, medicine, astrology,
astronomy, mathematics, linguistics, erotics, aesthetics, natya-shastra, just
name it.
No other culture went
into such depths of spirituality as India did. For instance, moksha or
apunarbhava, which the Buddhists call nirvana, is an understanding spiritual
traditions from no other land speak of, most of them stopping at heaven, which
is something that India holds in contempt saying that heaven is just a state of
mind, a happy state no doubt, and even if you imagine it as a place of pure
happiness, it is going to come to an end when your good karmas end and you are
going to be born again on this earth – ksheene punye martya-lokam vishanti, as
the Upanishads say.
Krishna in the
Gita says speaking of heaven:
yaam
imaam pushpitaam vaacham pravadanty-avipashchitah
veda-vaada-rataah
paartha naanyad asteeti vaadinah ll 2.42 ll
“Unwise are those,
Arjuna, who speak about [the rituals of] the Vedas, who are obsessed with
desires, who look upon heaven as the highest and argue that there is nothing
beyond it, that there is nothing beyond pleasures.”
Just as India went
deeper into spirituality, we also developed so many spiritual paths for man:
ashtanga yoga, shakta tantra, shaiva tantra, vaishnava tantra, Buddhist tantra,
jain tantra, swara yoga, laya yoga, nada yoga, raja yoga, bhakti yoga, karma
yoga, janna yoga, kundlaini yoga, sahaja yoga, the list is endless.
India achieved
such excellence in literature that we see Vedic poetry can compete with the best
and the latest in world poetry. Look at this poem from the Rig Veda called
Suryaa’s Bridal Journey for instance:
The raibhi metre was
her bridal friend,
The narashamsi hymn
her escort home.
Lovely was Suryaa’s
robe,
Decorated by the gatha
song.
Thought was the pillow
of her couch,
Sight was the unguent
of her eyes.
Her jewellery was the
sky and the earth,
When Suryaa to her husband
went.” [RV.X.85.6-7]
Or take the Hymn of Creation from the Rig Veda,
called the Nasadiya Sukta, frequently called the most beautiful philosophical
or mystical poem in existence, of which I am giving here only an English
translation but to know the real beauty of which you should listen to it in the
original Sanskrit:
There was neither
non-reality nor reality then,
There was no air nor
sky.
What covered it and
where?
And whose was the
shelter?
Was water there,
fathomless and deep?
Death then existed
not, nor life immortal,
Neither of night nor
of day
Was there any sign.
The one breathed,
Airless, by
self-impulse.
Apart from it was
nothing whatsoever.
Darkness was hidden by darkness in the beginning
With no distinguishing sign.
All this was water.
The life force that was covered with emptiness
That one arose through the power of heat.
There arose primal
Desire in the beginning
The first seed of the
mind
Wise sages searched
into the heart of mystery
and found Existence’s
kinship with Non-existence.
We were easily the most
advanced people in medicine in the ancient world, including in surgery. The
book Bharat ke Pranacharya or Masters of Medical Science in Ancient India, a
product of Ratnakar Shastry’s lifelong research into the subject, speaks of the
excellence we achieved in medicine. The Shushruta Samhita gives us drawing of
125 surgical instruments used by him!
And in mathematics, there were
no rivals to India. Advanced mathematics in the west begins with Pythagoras who
came to india with the specific aim of learning Indian philosophy and
mathematics. What we have all studied as the Pythagoras theorem in school is
actually an Indian theorem by Baudhayana, several hundred years prior to
Pythagoras, originally used for constructing fire pits for Vedic sacrifices.
And the numerals known all over the world today actually originated in India
from where it went to the Arabs and cme to be known as the Arabic numerals.
Zero, of course, so central to all mathematics and to computers, was originally
an Indian number which no other culture had.
Our achievements in music are
unparalleled. To us music was divine, a subsidiary Veda called the Gandharva Veda,
and we associated each of the basic six ragas of music with a season, a time of
the day and a deity. Indian music divides the octave into twenty-two shrutis or
demi-semitones, says the You Tube video Origin of Music: Sama Veda. These
microtonal intervals permit, continues the video, fine shades of musical
expression unattainable by western chromatic scale of twelve semitones.
To us, music was one of the
paths that led to God.
We raised excellence to such an extent that we said
excellence is divine and wherever there is excellence, it is divinity itself,
God himself. Yad yad vibhootimat sattvam shreemad oorjitam eva va; tattad eva avagachhas
tvam mama tejo’msha-sambhavam, says the Gita: “Whatever is splendid, whatever
is endowed with glory, whatever is filled with energy, understand that as born
of a part of me [God].”
We saw God in excellence.
O0O
When Krishna says those
who wish bad for Arjuna will ridicule his samarthyam, Krishna means much more
than what the words say.
Arjuna is one of the highest
examples for excellence from ancient India. His samarthya, his dakshata, was
the highest in his chosen field. Even as a student, he excelled. He was born
with a passion to excel as subsequent events show. Podf course, none of us
comes into this world as empty slates – we all bring with us karmas, vasanas
and samskaras from our innumerable past existences. Our past life scripts
accompany us into this lifetime, which is one reason why we must write positive
life scripts in this life time.
No learning we do, no
good karma we do, is ever wasted. Avashyam anubhoktavyam krtam karma
shubhaashubham, the past masters said, and they meant neither our bad karmas
nor our god karmas ever abandon us.
There is an interesting
story about how his own guru, Dronacharya, tried to stop Arjuna from excelling in
archery and failed. The story found in the Adi Parva of the Mahabharata says
that one day Drona told the gurukula cook never to serve a meal to Arjuna in
the dark. The instruction was specifically about Arjuna, not about all the
students, and the as we read the story we are confused – why would the great
acharya give such an instruction to his cook?
We reaslize the why of it
only after subsequent events happen. As ordered, the cook was careful never to
serve Arjuna a meal in the dark but one day while Arjuna was having his supper
the wind blew out the lamp and Arjuna continued to eat in the dark. And in the
middle of that night Dro0na was woken up from his sleep by the booming sound of
a bow string being released. Drona came and saw exactly what he had feared:
Arjuna was practicing shooting in the dark.
Drona until that day
wanted his own son Ashwathama to be his best student and the best archer in the
land. He had done things a guru should not do to to make Ashwatthama the best
and to prevent any other student from becoming the best and in every one of
these dark games the guru played Arjuna had beaten him. This time too Arjuna
had done exactly that. Just as he could eat in the dark, Arjuna had intuited
that he could also shoot in the dark. Whch is the eventuality that Drona had
foreseen and wanted to prevent with his cunning.
It should be said to
Drona’s honour that on that night he changed. He hugged Arjuna with tears in
his eyes moved by his commitment and dedication and said that now he would see
that Arjuna became the best archer in the whole world. And that is what happened
too, as we all know.
That was Arjuna – a man
whose name is synonymous with samarthya.
Karna’s bitter rivalry
with Arjuna was about their samarthya. Karna wanted to beat Arjuna in samarthya.
When Karna entered the rangavedi and challenged Arjuna while Drona’s students
were displaying their skill in dhanurvidya, it was to prove that he was
superior to Arjuna in samarthya – at least no less than Arjuna in samarthya –
that Karna wanted. He was denied the opportunity because of his supposedly lower
birth as we all know. But Karna kept his rivalry with Arjuna alive till his
very end. When his mother Kunti asked him to join the Pandavas he told her he
cannot do that but instead would promise to spare the lives of all her sons
except that of Arjuna. He told her
either Arjuna or he would live, thus still leaving her with five sons, such was
his rivalry with Arjuna, for which there was no reason other than the question
who had greater samarthya as a warrior.
Perhaps the darkest stain
on Drona is the Ekalavya incident in which seeing that the nishada has superior
samarthya in archery than Arjuna had, he asked for the boy’s thumb as his
gurudakshina though he had not given Ekalavya a single lesson – this too was to
retain Arjuna’s fame as the best young man in samarthya in archery.
How Arjuna won Draupadi
as is wife was also through his samarthya,
Samarthya is so important
to Arjuna that he had vowed to kill anyone who had questioned his samarthya and
the samarthya of his bow Gandiva. At one stage during the eighteen-day war
Yudhishthira, smarting from defeat and humiliation by Karna, questioned both
Arjuna’s samarthya and the samarthya of the Gandiva for failing to kill Karna
in that day’s battle. When he did that, Arjuna wanted to kill Yudhishthira from
which it was only with great difficulty that Krishna could prevent him, such
was Arjuna’s feelings towards his samarthya.
It is this samarthya that
Krishna says people would laugh at if he refused to fight the war. Krishna
knows that the one thing Arjuna is more proud of than anything else is his
samarthya and that saying people would question that will really hurt Arjuna.
For all men of excellence, samarthya is important
and they cannot tolerate an insult or a wound to it. When I was young and used
to live and study in an ashram, I used to help in the international
headquarters of the organization to which the ashram belonged – it was a huge
organization with branches in more than a hundred countries across the world. Working
voluntarily with me after his retirement was someone who in his earlier days
used to be the Managing Director of several leading corporate houses of the
country. He was an excellent driver with a passion for driving but one day, now
in his seventies, for the first time in his life he had a driving accident. A
very simple man, a wonderful human being, sensitive to the core, he took the
accident as a failure of his skill and I remember how he remained in deep gloom
about it and couldn’t sleep for many, many nights.
Krishna wanted to awaken
in Arjuna’s heart lokabheeti, the fear of censure by the world, in order to reawaken
in Arjuna his commitment to dharma and make him fight the war for dharma. The world needed the war for destroying the
philosophy among leaders of the day that power was an end in itself. And
Krishna knew more than anything else this is what was going to work because
people questioning his competence is something that Arjuna will not be able to
accept at all.
I am sure when Krishna tod Arjuna people would
laugh at him ridiculing his skill, the image of Karna and Duryodhana laughing
at him came to his mind.
During Yudhisthira’s
rajasuya sacrifice, while touring the ‘palace of illusions’ that Maya had made
for them, Duryodhana had experienced sthala-jala-bhranti, had taken the floor for
water and water for the floor, while Draupadi was standing and watching along
with her maids. The maids had burst out laughing at Duryodhana’s embarrassment
though Draupadi did not. She maintained a dignified silence. But when
Duryodhana reported the incident to Dhritarashtra back at Hastinapura, what he said
was that she had laughed at him along with her maids, which insult to his
intelligence is something that couldn’t forgive. [A dialogue that has become
very popular about this scene is that seeing Duryodhana stepping into water
thinking it was solid floor Draupadi had laughed aloud and said ‘andhe ka beta
andha hi hoga,’ the son of the blind too will be blind. There is nothing like
this in the Sanskrit epic and it is totally illogical. We know the children of
the blind are not necessarily blind. Besides, such speech befits a common woman
of the street and not the stately Draupadi.] It is in part to avenge this
insult to his samarthya that he humiliates Drauapdi in the dice hall so
horribly, perhaps the most shameful and shocking incident in all of Indian
lore.
O0O
In our last
article we discussed how Arjuna’s predominant guna is rajas, how his needs are
predominantly rajasic and how the way to motivate him is the way rajasic people
are motivated. Understanding people from the standpoint of the gunas is one of
the most important ways of understanding people. But there are other ways too,
though none of them is totally unrelated to the gunas. As we just saw, Arjuna’s
whole life is a search for excellence, a constant striving for excellence. A
lifelong learner, he excelled in what he did and his self-image as an
outstanding individual is extremely important to him. Just as Karna had a need
to prove that he is superior to Arjuna, he too had a need to prove that he is
superior to everyone in his chosen field, including Karna. Esteem needs are
extremely important to rajasic individuals, just as power needs are. Just as a
brahmana’s life is driven by his intellectual and spiritual needs, by his
search for peace and serenity, by his
constant striving for the higher in life driven by his sattva guna, a kshatriya
is driven by the need for esteem which
comes through power and authority over others. the German philosopher Nietzsche
speaks of ‘the will to power’ – if anyone can exemplify the will to power, it
is the kshatriya – and I don’t mean a
kshatriya by birth but a kshatriya by gunas, exactly as Krishna means the word
in the Gita. The kshatriya seeks power because it is through power that
prestige comes, which is his central need.
Insulting
samarthya leads to loss of prestige which a kshatriya cannot tolerate. He may
even go on a war because his prestige, his honour, has been challenged by someone.
All
people have egos. Speaking about one of the seven people truths, Tom Peters,
author of the world’s first Management best seller, says: people are people and
they have egos. It is a universal fact, something true even about very saintly
people. And one of the most effective ways of mentoring, guiding, counseling,
teaching, and leading people is to appeal positively to their egos and to their
ego needs. These ego needs differ from person to person. During one of my
Management Development Programmes for senior corporate executives I asked them
what they expected from their jobs and here are some of answers they gave me in
writing, showing how people’s needs differ:
o “I want to make a difference in what I do at work.”
o “I love to travel and this job provides me with the opportunity.”
o “I’m a bit of a show-off really so that’s why I demonstrate products to
people.”
o “I get a kick from solving
problems. The bigger the problem, the more I love it.”
o “I look forward to coming to work because we have a great team and I love
to be with them.”
o “I like this job because I am always learning new things. I have
developed enormously here.”
o “I’ll be honest. I need the money and I work here because the pay is
good.”
o “What motivates me is a fear of failure. I never let people down.”
o There is nothing like a challenge. It’s great when my boss throws a
challenge at me.”
o “I just want to be liked and loved, to be honest with you. When I am
praised and appreciated then I am motivated.”
o
“A sense of achievement
is what motivates me. I am always wanting to achieve things.”
Don’t think what motivates you is what motivates others. Each one of us
is motivated by different things. The deer is delighted by fresh grass. The
lion by the young deer’s meat.
I have heard:
You cannot put a big load in a small bag,
Nor can you, with a short rope,
Draw water from a deep well.
You cannot talk to a politician
As if he were a wise man.
Have you not heard how a bird from the sea
Was blown inshore and landed
Outside the capital of Lu?
The Prince ordered a solemn reception,
Offered the sea bird wine in the sacred precinct,
Called for musicians to play the compositions of Shun,
Slaughtered cattle to nourish it:
Dazed with symphonies, the unhappy sea bird
Died of despair.
How should you treat a bird?
As yourself
Or as a bird?
Ought not a bird to nest in deep woodland
Or fly over meadow and marsh?
Ought it not to swim in river and pond,
Feed on eels and fish,
Fly in formation with other seabirds,
And rest in the reeds?
Bad enough for a sea bird
To be surrounded by men
And frightened by their voices!
That was not enough!
They killed it with
music!
Play all the symphonies you like
On the marshlands of Thung-Ting.
The birds will fly away
In all directions;
The animals will hide;
The fish will dive to the bottom;
But men will gather
around to listen.
Water is for fish
And air for men.
Natures differ, and needs with them.
Hence the wise men of old
Did not lay down
One measure for all.
That is why Tom
Peters says: Motivation is a door closed from the inside. Only a person himself
can truly motivate him, no one else. Of course if you know that person well,
from deep within him, you can help him motivate himself. That is what Krishna
is doing here: help his friend motivate himself. Giving him the drive needed to
motivate himself. Krishna knows Arjuna well, even better than Arjuna knows
himself. After all, Krishna is the antaryami, the antaratma of all – the one
inside us all, the one who controls us from within us. Sarvasya chaaham hrdi
sannivishtah, as he says in the Gita: I am present in the heart of all.
Remember the words
emotion and motivation come from the same root word. What motivates us is our
emotions, what will motivate others is their emotions. Lokaninda, the censure
of the world, is a powerful motivating factor and that is what the master guru,
the best friend, philosopher and guide a man can ever have, Krishna, is using
with Arjuna.
In many primitive
societies they have no rules, no laws for social control, to maintain social
order. All they have is ridicule and the fear of ridicule by one’s own people
keeps the entire society ethical, bound to its mores, customs and traditions. They
do not need any other means of social control, any other means of social
regulation.
O0O
Be careful about
stepping on people’s egos. A man might forgive someone stepping on his foot,
but never on his ego. Stepping on someone’s ego is like stepping on a deadly snake-
the snake turns around and bites. There is no escaping that.
The bard of avon
said hell hath no fury like a woman spurned. Being spurned is unbearable to all,
men and women. And arrogant people tend to spurn others, which is the reason
why an arrogant person cannot be a good friend, a good colleague, a good boss,
a good husband or a good wife, or anything good for that matter. Arrogance
antagonizes all.
Humiliate the ego,
you become an enemy forever. Even Rama, always the model for behaviour with
people, had to pay a high price for once
for humiliating someone. When Shurpanakha came to him and requested him to
marry her, he sent her to Lakshmana, telling her he is without a wife.
Lakshmana sent her back to Rama and then an infuriated Shurpanakha attempted to
eat up Sita – the rakshasas were cannibals. The subsequent actions of Lakshmana
on the orders of Rama led to the entire later events of the Ramayana, including
Sita’s abduction by Ravana and her subsequent imprisonment in Lanka for almost
one full year, every day of which was like everlasting hell of Sita.
One of my students
once submitted to me an article as her assignment on leadership. The article
was almost ninety percent from Wikipedia and, besides, was totally irrelevant
to the topic. You cannot expect high marks for copy-pasting form the Net and
her marks were naturally low. The student was so furious with me for the rest
of the year – she was my student for two consecutive semesters, doing two
different courses – and I remember her turning abusive in her fury, making me
sad for her.
There is a
widespread belief that Hitler became the monster he eventually became because
he was spurned by women for his short height, his lack of self confidence, his
plain looks and other poor qualities. Six million jews were forced to live nightmare
lives in concentration camps and eventually killed there, either poisoned in
gas chambers or by other means. A man’s ego wounded and hell results.
Wounding the ego
creates hell.
But the ego can also
be used constructively, creatively, for noble purposes. Which is what Krishna
is doing here. He is using the power of the ego to motivate Arjuna to fight for
the good of all, to take up weapons against adharma, and to accept the golden
challenge the samashti has brought to Arjuna as agift – the dharma yuddha.
Krishna asurres Arjuna he has nothing to lose,
whether he wins or loses. “If you are killed in battle, you will go to heaven;
and if you win, you will enjoy the earth. Therefore, Arjuna, stand up,
determined to fight.”
hato
vaa praapsyasi swargam jitwaa vaa bhokshyase maheem
tasmaad uttishtha kaunteya yuddhaaya
kritanishchayah ll 2.37 ll
Veeraswarga, the heaven of the heroes, is something
every Mahabharata warrier looked forward to and that is what Krishna is talking
about here, having climbed down from the heights of Upanishadic wisdom to
Arjuna’s current level. In doing that, Krishna is following the ancient Indian
tradition of beginning teaching at the highest level and then gradually
climbing down to lower levels.
O0O
Photo Courtesy: Unknown artist
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