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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Kamboji and Emotional Hijack

Kamboji is a brilliant Malayalam movie by Vinod Mankara based on a widely published real life incident that happened in Kerala in my younger days. It is the story of a man named Kunjunnni besotted with the highly sophisticated performing art kathakali which takes years of training to master. Kathakali is what Kunjunni lives for, all his dreams are about it. He has seen the great masters of the art performing and what he wants to become is what they are.

At a rather advanced age to learn kathakali, he comes to the guru he adores most and begins studying under him in his small school in a remote village. He is soon recognized as highly talented and almost fully accomplished in the art. A loving father-son relationship soon develops between the guru and his disciple. After some time the aged guru hands over the kathakali school to Kunjunni and goes away. Kunjunni is given a place to stay in the large house of the family that owns the school and soon their daughter Uma, herself an accomplished dancer, and Kunjunni develop love for each other.

The ugly face of jealousy now enters the picture and the village prostitute is bribed to accuse Kunjunni of making her pregnant. Without allowing him to say a word in his defense, he is asked to leave the school and go away immediately. It is the girl of the house who asks him to leave, her parents being away, thus bringing to an instant end his dream of becoming a great kathakali artiste and teacher as well as living the rest of his life with the girl as his wife. He rushes to his teacher – but the teacher too drives him away accusing him of shaming him. All these things happen in the first half of a single night, driving Kunjunni insane with pain and loss. In a state of fuming rage, Kunjunnni goes to the home of the prostitute and stabs her to death.

The movie begins with Kunjunni waiting in jail for the execution of his death sentence.

What happened to Kunjunni that night is what is called an emotional hijack. Under normal circumstances Kaunjunni wouldn’t harm an insect, but under the impact of the emotional hijack he brutally kills a woman. 

Modern psychology speaks of emotional hijacks as states in which we are completely taken over by our emotions, our thinking and reason are suspended, our intelligence itself is blocked by the amygdala glands in our brain and we either go wild and do the craziest things or collapse helplessly under the burden of our emotions, paralyzed, unable to stand on our legs, our body drained of all energy, our mind losing all clarity.

Emotional hijacks are common and a single hijack can destroy us completely. They can be avoided by mastering our mind and our emotions. The way to master them is practice, as Krishna teaches us in the Gita. Live mindfully so that emotions get no chance to overpower us. Also, remember to constantly breathe abdominally; avoid shallow chest breathing. Abdominal breathing relaxes us and so long us we are relaxed and alert, emotions will have no power to hijack us.  

Mindfulness not only keeps us relaxed but also brings to us many other everyday miracles.

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Living Bhagavad Gita 013: Arjuna Emotionally Hijacked

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.]

Arjuna seeing all the relatives gathered there was overcome by great compassion and said, “Seeing my kinsmen standing here eager for battle, my limbs are failing me, Krishna.  My mouth is dry, my body is shivering and my hair is standing on end. The gandiva is slipping from my hand, my skin is burning, my head is reeling and I am unable even to stand steady.” BG 1.27-30

Kamboji is a brilliant Malayalam movie based on a widely published real incident that happened in Kerala in my younger days. It is the story of a man named Kunjunnni besotted with the highly sophisticated performing art kathakali which takes years of training to master. Kathakali is what Kunjunni lives for, all his dreams are about it. He has seen the great masters of the art performing and what he wants to become is what they are.

At a rather advanced age to learn kathakali, he comes to the guru he adores most and begins studying under him in his small school in a remote village. He is soon recognized as highly talented and almost fully accomplished in the art. A loving father-son relationship soon develops between the guru and his disciple. After some time the aged guru hands over the kathakali school to Kunjunni and goes away. Kunjunni is given a place to stay in the large house of the family that owns the school and soon their daughter Uma, herself an accomplished dancer, and Kunjunni develop love for each other.

The ugly face of jealousy now enters the picture and the village prostitute is bribed to accuse Kunjunni of making her pregnant. Without allowing him to say a word in his defense, he is asked to leave the school and go away immediately. It is the girl of the house who asks him to leave, her parents being away, thus bringing to an instant end his dream of becoming a great kathakali artiste and teacher as well as living the rest of his life with the girl as his wife. He rushes to his teacher – but the teacher too drives him away accusing him of shaming him. All these things happen in the first half of a single night, driving Kunjunni insane with pain and loss. In a state of fuming rage, Kunjunnni goes to the home of the prostitute and stabs her to death.

What happened to Kunjunni that night is what is called an emotional hijack. Under normal circumstances Kaunjunni wouldn’t harm an insect, but under the impact of the emotional hijack he brutally kills a woman. 

Modern psychology speaks of emotional hijacks as states in which we are completely taken over by our emotions, our thinking and reason are suspended, our intelligence itself is blocked by the amygdala glands in our brain and we either go wild and do the craziest things or collapse helplessly under the burden of our emotions, paralyzed, unable to stand on our legs, our body drained of all energy, our mind losing all clarity.

It is Daniel Goleman, famous for his masterly books on Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence who coined the term amygdala hijack. As Goleman explains, even though evolution has taken us a long way ahead, we still retain within our brain the amygdala, an almond-shaped mass of nuclei, one in each of our brains, the left and the right. The amygdala is essentially a survival tool and what it does is to instantly respond to threats. Thinking takes time, assessing a threatening situation takes time but the amygdala that functions based on memories, instincts and impulses does not. The amygdala is fast, really fast, whereas our intelligence is not.

For instance, if we are driving on a fast road and all on a sudden another driver cuts in from a side road, our response to it has to be instant. If it is left to the intelligence to take a decision and then respond, it would try to assess the distance between the two vehicles, their speeds and so on. But the amygdala gives the order for instant action and your foot goes up from the accelerator and comes down on the break without any loss of time. 

However, this system designed for instant action has its weaknesses too. Since actions are taken before thorough assessments are made, they can often be wrong. Also, the amygdala does not differentiate between real threats and imagined threats. The amygdala reads a threat to the body or life and a threat to the ego – an emotional threat – the same. And, unless we are in control, guided by the amygdala we react the same way to a physical threat and an emotional threat. We experience increased heart rate and blood pressure, our breathing becomes quicker, faster and shallower, our body begins to shake, we sweat, our thinking brain is shut off and we respond to the situation with an instant and intense unconscious reaction produced by our emotional brain, sometimes frightening ourselves as in the case of Kunjunni.

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We saw how what Arjuna sees and what Duryodhana sees are very different, though they are looking at the same thing. To the power-intoxicated, war mongering Duryodhana the people assembled in the battlefield are fierce warriors whereas to Arjuna they are grandfathers, fathers, sons, uncles, nephews, brothers, gurus and so on, all his own people. And his limbs suddenly fail him, his mouth dries up, his body trembles, his hairs stand on end, his grip on his bow goes lose, his skin burns all over and his mind reels. He is unable even to stand, let alone fight. All these are typical signs of an emotional hijack.   

The Mahabharata speaks of several emotional hijacks. Later, during the war, when Abhimanyu is killed, for instance, such is Arjuna’s pain in spite of all Krishna’s teachings that undergoes another emotional hijack. On another occasion during the war Yudhishthira, defeated and humiliated by Karna, experiences an emotional hijack. He loses all control over himself and insults Arjuna’s prowess in war and his celestial bow gandiva leading to Arjuna taking a vow to kill him.

A young man was once sent to me by his father who had attended one my emotional intelligence workshops for corporate executives. The son used to work for a multinational company and was under tremendous pressure to perform for a boss obsessed with deadlines and constantly growing targets. Over time unable to manage his work stress, the young man developed low blood sugar, a physical condition ideal for emotional hijacks, and in that condition losing control over his emotions he exploded at his boss, shouting at him, abusing him and publicly humiliating him, which cost him his job. His father wanted me to help him master his emotions so that such situations did not arise in the future.

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One of the greatest lessons the Bhagavad Gita teaches us is samatvam, remaining balanced under all circumstances. Again and again, throughout his teachings, Krishna stresses the importance of samatvam and asks Arjuna to remain balanced in victory and failure, praise and censure, gain and loss, while dealing with enemies and friends. In spite of what the situation is and who you are dealing with, remaining mentally balanced is absolutely essential.  A warrior who is intimidated by the situation and loses his mental balance has no chance of victory, whether he is in a real battlefield or in a corporate one.

For success in any endeavour, we need what Krishna calls vyavasayatmika buddhi, mind that is resolute and one pointed. And that is possible only if our minds are steady and undisturbed by thoughts of success and failure, or any distracting thoughts for that matter, while engaged in doing something. That is why Krishna asks us to remain unaffected by thoughts of victory and failure while engaged in action.

Krishna does not mean pleasure and pain are the same, gain and loss are the same. What he means is none of these should make us lose our balance of mind. We have to remain unperturbed, collected and composed, fully in control, while we are acting if we are to succeed.

Which does not mean we should not celebrate when victory comes. The Mahabharata shows us Krishna celebrating joyously victories, for instance after Karna used on Ghatotkacha his all powerful, never failing shakti called Vaijayanti given to him by Indra. The shakti could be used only once, Karna had been keeping it for use against Arjuna, and Krishna was happy beyond words it had been used against Ghatotkcha and Arjuna was safe from it, which called for celebration.      

Krishna makes the importance of remaining balanced and not getting carried by our emotions absolutely clear repeatedly throughout the Gita. In spite of that, unless we have an open mind it is easy to misunderstand him. I remember an occasion when I was explaining to a large group of senior business school students the importance of remaining sama in all circumstances using a verse from the Gita when one of the students objected and asked me rather aggressively how we could deal with enemies and friends the same. She asserted she would never do that, she was going to deal with friends the way friends should be dealt with, and with enemies the way enemies should be dealt with.

Well, the Gita does not ask us to deal with enemies and friends the same. For instance, Krishna certainly does not want Arjuna to treat the warriors on his side and the warriors on the enemy side the same. You should stand with the people on your side and support them; and with those on the enemy side, you should fight. What Krishna says is that you should do this with a balanced mind, with a calm mind, centered and focused, without letting your emotions carry you away, without giving your emotions a free reign to take your decisions for you.

An HR manager, for instance, will have to take tough decisions against a corrupt person, whatever his feelings for him. To fail to do so will be to fail as a responsible manager. A person who is habitually unpunctual, who is lazy, who consistently shirks his responsibilities, will have to be dealt with as he deserves in spite of the fact that he may be your friend or nephew and you love him. But you should do it with a calm mind, and not in anger or vengefulness. That is what samata or samatvam means.  

We are familiar with the story of how Krishna killed his cousin Shishupala. Right from the beginning Shishupala was abusive of Krishna and Krishna quietly endured it all, never reacting. He had promised Shishupala’s mother, who was Krishna’s aunt, that he would not do anything against her son until he crossed a hundred occasions of insulting him.  There were numerous occasions that called for punitive action by Krishna but it was only when he went beyond all limits during Yudhishthira’s rajasuya sacrifice that Krishna acted against him, reminding him that he has crossed the limit of one hundred instnces. Before doing so, Krishna had warned him again and again. That is samatvam.

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In the battlefield of life, we all need control over our mind, control over our emotions, and should be able to resist the tendency of emotions to hijack us. Emotions are like the horses that pull the chariot of our life, and we should keep our mastery over them unless we are to end up in the nearest gutter or in a hospital.

Meditation is a powerful way of developing control over the mind and not letting our emotions hijack us. Practicing mindfulness while engaged in all kinds of activities like having a cup of coffee, taking a walk, trying to solve a tough problem, having a conversation with someone, or, to use some traditional examples, mowing the garden, splitting wood, or pulling up water from a well, helps us develop mastery over the mind. The Shiva Sutras, a book of Kashmir Shaivism frequently considered to be among the most advanced books on meditation and spirituality, asks as to be constantly mindful.

Regular practice of deep breathing can be very helpful. The first thing an emotional hijack affects is our breathing – it becomes rapid and shallow. So if we can keep breathing deeply – breathe abdominally, allowing our abdomen to expand and shrink as we breathe in and out, and not from the chest by holding our stomach tight – it will be of immense help. No emotional hijack is possible so long as our breathing is abdominal.

Arjuna’s grandson Parikshit is an unforgettable reminder to us for what happens when we are emotionally hijacked. He was on a hunting trip chasing a deer, was tired, hungry and drained of all energy. The deer had disappeared and seeing a rishi sitting in meditation nearby, he asks him if he had seen it. Unknown to Parikshit, the rishi, Shamika by name, was observing mauna, a vow of silence, and does not respond to the king’s repeated questions. Losing control over himself, Parikshit does the unthinkable: he picks up a dead snake he finds nearby and drapes it around the rishi’s neck, something no sane man would do, something unimaginable in a Bharata king, unless he had lost all control over his emotions, unless, to use the modern expression, he had been emotionally hijacked. When the rishi’s son Shringi later learns about the incident nd curses Parikshit to die within seven days. And that is how Parikshit loses his life.

One of the most brilliant examples for a woman who amazes us with her self-mastery is Draupadi in the dice hall of Hastinapura during what is perhaps the most shameful incident in all of Indian history. Wagered and lost by her husband in the game he was playing with Duryodhana, this magnificent woman is brought dragged into the dice hall by her hair from the women’s quarters of the palace by Dusshasana. There Karna calls her a prostitute for living with five men. Duryodhana calls her a slave and revealing his naked left thigh asks her to come and sit on it as though she was a common whore, while her husbands remain helpless spectators to the whole monstrous incident. On the orders of Karna, Dusshasana tries to disrobe her in that assembly of men that included her husbands, their cousins, her father-in-law, men like grandsire Bhishma and guru Drona and scores of other kings come to watch the dice game. And all this happens when she was in her monthly period and as custom required in those days was wearing a single piece of cloth. In spite of all this, she retains mastery over her emotions and has the presence of mind to ask if she had really become a slave to Duryodhana since her husband had already lost himself when he wagered her.

Not once does she allow her emotions to hijack her throughout the whole incident. When her appeals to the elders in the assembly fail, she prays to Krishna for help and is miraculously saved. Following the miracle and the terrible omens that began appearing everywhere, a terrified Dhritarashtra begs her for forgiveness. He then asks her to ask for boons and she asks for just two boons, first that Yudhishthira be freed from slavery and then that her other husbands who had also become slaves in the dice game be released from slavery and given their weapons and chariots. Asked to ask for still more boons, this woman, dignity personified, says no, saying a kshatrani is entitled to ask for only two boons and she has already asked for them.  And then she adds calmly that if her husbands are freed and have their weapons with them, then she does not need anything else, giving us goosebumps as we read of it after five thousand years, making us to want to stand up and clap for her from across five millennia.

Krishna teaches Arjuna throughout the Bhagavad Gita the importance of such self-mastery. He teaches him through the words of his divine song how to develop such self-mastery even in the middle of the most challenging situations. Through Arjuna, he teaches us how to fight the battles of our life without surrendering to feverishness, in full mastery of ourselves, without allowing emotional hijacks to overpower us – so that victory and glory are ours.    

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Photo courtesy: Devender Malhotra

Thank you in advance for your questions and comments. 

Bhagavad Gita and Asuri Sampada: “Who on Earth is my Equal?”

The Bhagavad Gita classifies people into two groups – those born with daivi sampada and those born with asuri sampada. Daivi sampada are positive virtues like fearlessness, purity of mind, and so on, twenty-nine of which the Gita lists. And then it moves on to the asuri sampada – negative qualities like pride, haughtiness, anger and so on, the list of which is small but which is discussed in greater details.

Krishna states here that people are born either with daivi sampada or with asuri sampada. Though Krishna does not expressly state this, since none of us is entirely positive or negative and all of us are grey, we must assume that he is speaking of our basic dispositions – some of us are basically disposed towards negativity and others towards positive virtues, just as in terms of modern psychology some of us are basically optimists and others are basically pessimists. Even the darkest people like Duryodhana in the Mahabharata, for instance, shows some good qualities and even the most positive ones, like Yudhishthira shows some negative qualities.

Krishna knows, as the whole east knows, that life does not begin at birth or conception – we all have had innumerable past lives and every time we take a new birth, we are born with our past gunas, karmas, vasanas and samskaras. We are all born with memories of our past lives lying buried just beneath the surface of our consciousness, becoming visible sometimes on their own and at other times when we peep beneath the surface, as during past life regression or deep meditation. It is these memories, gunas, karmas, vasanas and samskaras that make us daivi or asuri.

Describing people with asuri sampada, negative qualities, Krishna says each one of them thinks:

“I am the lord of all. I am a great bhogi who enjoys the best things in life. I am a siddha, a man of great power and achievements; balavan, a man of immense strength; sukhee, living a life of contentment and bliss. Of noble birth am I, master of heaps of wealth, famous everywhere. I conduct grand sacrificial rituals where wealth flows endlessly, I give in charity boundlessly, I revel in pleasures, I make merry, feast and celebrate.  Tell me, who on earth is my equal? Self-centered, willful, filled with all the insolence of wealth and bloated with the adulation they receive, arrogant, haughty, full of rage and lust, these people cling to their mighty egos, and lord it over everyone.”  BG Ch. 16

When I think of such people, a person who used to stay close to my house some years ago comes to my mind. Every word he spoke, every step he took, every breath of his, the way he sat and stood, the way he treated all except those who were his superiors, spoke of his boundless arrogance. The poor and the powerless were no better than worms that crawled in the gutter for him and he crushed them under his foot every chance he had. He owned a fairly big house in an affluent locality and walked as though he was the master of everything under the sun.

In his case it was money that made them so arrogant. Power can give us the same arrogance, fame can give us the same arrogance, victories can give us the same arrogance.

Most people get bloated up with pride even when their achievements are puny. The wisdom of ancient India understood that arrogance is unhealthy for us even when our achievements are big because they feed the ego and starve the soul. Healthy living requires that you feed your ego and starve the soul. That is wisdom in the truest sense of the term. 

Hell is the destiny of people with asuri sampada – hell not only for themselves, but for everyone around them too. One Hitler created hell for the six million Jews he killed in the concentration camps and the millions of soldiers and civilians killed in WW II. It is for this reason that their asuri sampada has to be destroyed and if that proves impossible, then they themselves have to destroyed, so that they could be saved from themselves and others could be saved from them.   

The Brahmavaivarta Purana tells us an amazing story of how a god of great achievements was taught humility and the asuri sampada in him was destroyed.

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The story begins with Indra slaying the mighty serpent dragon Vritra lying crouched on the high mountains in the shapeless shape of a massive cloud. Indra frees the waters Vritra had blocked making the world parch for want of water. With the monster’s death, the freed waters burst forth from the mountains joyously, nourishing the earth and quenching the thirst of all living creatures making them sing in delight and praise Indra as the mightiest hero ever. Much of the Rig Veda is the rapturous praises thus sung by the inspired poets of the ancient world. Here is one Vedic poet singing of Indra: 

I will declare the manly deeds of Indra,

the first that he achieved, the Thunder-wielder.
He slew the Dragon, then disclosed the waters,

and cleft the channels of the mountain torrents.
He slew the Dragon lying on the mountain:

his heavenly bolt of thunder Tvaṣṭar-fashioned.
Like lowing kine in rapid flow descending

the waters glided downward to the ocean

[From Rig Veda Mandala 1, Hymn XXXII. Griffith trans.] 

Indra killed the monster who had misappropriated what belonged to all and freed living water to benefit the plants and trees, the birds, beasts and humans, making mother earth throb with life once again. Earth turned green once again, birds soared up into the skies, animals roamed the jungles that sprang up everywhere and man was happy.  Clouds started raining from the skies again.

Indra destroyed the ninety-nine cities that belonged to Vritra, cities of repression and oppression. Saviour, savior, everyone called him. Truly, he had made life and light possible by destroying darkness and bondage. Now he wanted to rebuild the cities of the gods, cities of freedom and light, of joyfulness and celebration and a palace for himself.   

Indra instructed Vishwakarma to build the magnificent palace for himself. The palatial gardens should have streams running through it, Indra told him, and lakes teeming with waterfowl, divine trees everywhere, and everything else he could imagine. Vishwakarma was making great progress and as the first year neared its end and work was nearing completion, Indra started making frequent visits to see the work in progress. Which was fine with Vishwakarma, but every time he made a visit, he would ask the celestial architect to modify something or the other, micromanaging things and interfering the Vishwakarma’s work, making progress slow, putting him in unendurable stress, making sleep impossible to him, driving him nuts.

Indra had ceased to be the mighty hero and liberating leader he was earlier. Instead, with his own importance gone to his head, he had become an intolerable boss, always grumpy, always complaining, always looking for faults, insisting that his way alone was right, constantly insulting the intelligence and imagination of Vishwakarma in his attempt to show he was superior. It was possible that he was jealous of the miraculous powers of Vishwakarma as an architect. Frequently when a boss becomes jealous of his subordinate, he tries to ‘show him his place’ by trying to show he has better ideas about everything, even in subjects about which he has no knowledge. He refuses to see people as people, and instead sees them as his subordinates whom he can order about. And as an architect there was no equal to Vishwakarma who turned everything he touched into pure wonder, whose creations were beauty solidified. But Indra wanted him to do things Indra’s way. Life became hell for the celestial architect.

Vishwakarma just did not know what to do. He was the most creative architect, but, as it often happens, he did not know how to play games to outsmart his boss. That was not his area of expertise – he was a simple creative genius and not a politician. He decided to seek help and secretly went to Brahma, the Creator. Brahma listened to him patiently, assured him his troubles would soon come to an end and sent him back a relaxed man, or rather a relaxed god. 

Brahma informed Vishnu of the whole affair who instantly made a plan to solve the problem. Such things should not happen in the celestial world, Vishnu knew. Time had come for the lord of the gods to be shown his place.

India has always loved telling human stories in the name of the gods. Or let’s say, stories of gods as though they were human beings, subject to the same anger that men are subject to, the same jealousy and greed, the same intolerance and hostility, the same ignorance and narrow-mindedness, the same lust and illusions and delusions. These are teaching stories, stories told to teach men and women wisdom, to teach us that whoever we are, however powerful we are, we are all subject to the games the mind plays with us.

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It is a Purana that tells us this story – the Brahmavaivarta Purana. Indra in Vedic literature is different from Indra in the Puranas. In Vedic literature, Indra is the symbol of the enlightened mind, mind that has become still and empty, the yogic mind, the meditator’s mind, the free mind, the ‘mindless mind’, what Zen calls the no-mind, mushin, mind that is one with pure consciousness, mind that soars in the limitless skies of consciousness like Garutman, the eagle of the Vedas on whom Vishnu, the all-pervading being, travels. Whereas in the Puranas, he is the symbol of the ordinary human mind, the mind about which Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita complaints to Krishna: chanchalam hi manah krishna, pramaathi balavad drdham tasyaaham nigraham manye vayor iva sudushkaram – “The mind, Krishna, is restless, turbulent, strong and stubborn. I consider that it is as difficult to control as the wind itself.”

In the modern spiritual classic The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche speaks of the two completely different minds, or aspects of the mind: sem and rigpa. Sem, says Rinpoche, “is the mind that thinks, plots, desires, manipulates, that flares up in anger, that creates and indulges in waves of negative emotions and thoughts, that has to go on and on asserting, validating, and confirming its "existence" by fragmenting, conceptualizing, and solidifying experience. The ordinary mind is the ceaselessly shifting and shiftless prey of external influences, habitual tendencies, and conditioning. The masters liken sem to a candle flame in an open doorway, vulnerable to all the winds of circumstance.”

The higher mind, or the enlightened mind, the awakened mind, is the “primordial, pure, pristine awareness that is at once intelligent, cognizant, radiant, and always awake. It could be said to be the knowledge of knowledge itself.” The Vedic Indra stands for this mind, for rigpa.

The Indra of the Puranas, books written after the glorious age of the Vedas had come to an end and the worship and understanding of the Vedic gods had declined giving rise to the Pauranic gods in their place, is the symbol of sem, the ordinary mind. 

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Early next morning a radiant young brahmana traveler with brilliant eyes that spoke of his serene intelligence appeared at the gate of Indra. He was immediately received in great honour and given the traditional offerings of water, honey, milk and fruits made to brahmanas on arrival. Politely enquired of the purpose of his visit, the boy said he had heard of the great palace Indra was building and had come to see it. When the young boy spoke, his voice was rich, deep and soft. Indra’s hairs stood on their ends as he listened to the traveler.

“It is great that you are building this splendorous palace,” said the boy. “How long will it take for the work to be completed?” The boy paused and a gentle smile appeared on his lips as he added, “No other Indra of the past has completed a more magnificent palace.”

Indra too smiled at the comment. How conceited of the little boy to assume he has known the Indras before him and the palaces they had built! Was the boy mocking at him, ridiculing him? Or was he just being presumptuous? With the indulgent smile of an elder towards a child the lord of the gods asked him, making sure his voice remained polite, “Have you then known other Indras? Seen the palaces they built?” 

“Yes,” the boy replied calmly with no change in his serene voice. “I have seen numerous Indras and Vishwakarms and the many palaces they built.” There was no mockery in that steady voice, no boasting. “Vatsa,” said the boy addressing Indra as though the lord of the gods was no more than a toddler, “I have known your father, Maharshi Kashyapa, and his father, Maharshi Marichi. And I also know Brahma, whose son Marichi is, and, Lord of the Gods, I know Vishnu too, from whose naval lotus Brahma was born.”

“I have known the dissolution of universes. I have seen it happening again and again, and again and again new worlds coming into being form the cosmic waters of consciousness without end. I have seen that state in which all was one. How many times have I seen this happening? No one can count that.  Universe after universe is born endlessly and every one of them dissolves into the nothingness from which they come.  And right at this moment, King of the Gods, who can count the number of universes that exist simultaneously, each with its own Indras and Vishwakarmas. Who can count the grains of sand on the beaches of world?”  

      

Indra had grown completely silent listening to what the boy was saying. There was no doubt the wandering brahmana child was speaking the truth. There was the power of authenticity to every word he spoke. The bemused smile on the face of Indra had disappeared long ago. Without blinking his eyes, he was watching the miraculous being that had appeared before him that morning in the guise of a young pilgrim and wondering who it was. All arrogance had left him and his head that he haughtily held high was now bent in humility before the speaker whose words he was listening to holding his breath. He was about to ask him who he was when he noticed a procession of ants that had appeared in the royal chamber where they were seated. Indra saw the procession was almost as wide as the large hall itself and the ants were slowly moving towards them.

The young boy’s eyes too were on the ants now, watching them with curiosity and deep interest. All on a sudden the child burst out laughing – sparkling spontaneous, mirth filled, wondrous laughter the like of which Indra had never heard before. As the laughter died out, Indra got up from his seat, stood humbly before his guest, bowed deeply to him and asked, “Bhagavan, who are you? I have never met anyone like you and I never knew someone like you existed. Your brilliance surpasses that of a thousand suns simultaneously rising up, you look like a child but seem to be more ancient than time itself. Who are you, please tell me. And also tell me why you laughed at the parade of ants. You terrify me, though you exude nothing but love.”

“Let me tell you why I laughed, Lord of the Gods,” said the boy. “When I saw the parade of the ants I couldn’t control my laughter. But why the sight of the procession of the ants made me laugh is a secret that cannot be revealed to anyone who is not ready for it. It is the great secret of secrets, which very few even among great saints know. The axe of this secret destroys at a single stroke the mighty tree with its roots above and branches below, the tree that has existed from times without beginning, the tree that the wise speak of as eternal.”

The boy had become silent after he spoke these words, so silent as though he had never spoken at all. Indra fell at his feet and begged him to reveal the secret to him and the little boy knew that the lord of the gods is ready for the highest knowledge, the highest secret.

And in a long discourse the little boy who was none other than Vishnu himself told him the secret of karma which controls us from lifetime to lifetime, the result of our karmas which cannot be escaped even in a million lifetimes, and also how to free ourselves from the bondage of karma and become liberated. The little boy told him how every time we perform an action with the sense of I, we create a karma and these karmas accumulated become life scripts for future births and bind us. He also told Indra in great detail how to act without the I-sense, how to be the non-doer even when doing all kinds of actions. He taught Indra the secret of become asanga, unattached, to not only the results of one’s actions but also to the actions themselves. He taught Indra how to perform actions for the good of the world, as he had done when he had slain the snake monster Vritra and dedicate the results to the Divine.

The boy explained to Indra that each ant in the parade was once an Indra like him, from which Indra got visible proof, pratyaksha, that there had been endless number of Indras before him.  As Indras, the boy told him, prompted by their ego and arrogance, each one of them had asked the same question: Who in the universe is equal to me? This asuri sampada had led them to lower births and in their lower births too they had continued with asuri sampada until each of them had ended up an ant after countless lifetimes.

A little later an old wandering ascetic appeared on the scene wearing a deerskin as his loincloth, his hair matted, and taught Indra the same wisdom in different words. When the teaching was over and the ascetic disappeared on the spot, it became clear that he was none other than Lord Shiva. Following Shiva, the little boy too disappeared, revealing to Indra that he was none other than Lord Vishnu.

Indra now moved to the other extreme, like a pendulum, losing all interest in life, denying himself all joys, saying no to his wife, to all pleasures, to his responsibilities, saying no to life itself. A horrified Indrani, his queen, rushed to Brihaspati, the guru of the gods, who came and taught Indra how to balance between the extremes, how to remain in the world doing all that is expected of him, including his commitment to his wife and son and others, and yet remain free from karmas that bind us.

And yes, of course, he let Vishwakarma complete the palace without more micromanaging and constant squabbling. One other thing came to an end: he no more asked kon’yosti sadrisho mayaa, “Who on earth is my equal?” Every time the thought came to him, he remembered the parade of ants.

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One question that arises here is if a man with asuri qualities can become Indra, a position that according to Pauranic Indian tradition goes to the one who has done the highest number of powerful religious rites and asceticism. Well, as I said earlier, please keep in mind we are not discussing here the Vedic Indra, symbol of the enlightened mind, but the Pauranic Indra, who stands for the ordinary mind, sem. The ordinary mind can feel haughtiness, arrogance and pride in its achievements – success can go to the head of a man with such a mind. He can be proud of the rites themselves, of his asceticism, as it happened with Jajali. Second, though the Gita says we are all born either predominantly asuri or predominantly daivi, our qualities are subject to change from moment from moment. A man who is wicked now can become good later and vice verse.  

The Saptashloki  Durga says: jnaaninaam api chetaamsi devee bhagavatee his saa balaad aakrshya mohaaya mahaamayaa prayacchati. Even the minds of enlightened men, she, the Goddess, the Mahamaya, draws by force and leads to delusion.  

It is like moss on the surface of water, says the wisdom tradition of India. You clear it with your hands to drink the water and a moment later, it is back again, covering the surface. So you have to be constantly on the alert. The famous story of the great yogi Matsyendranath tells us of how he became infatuated with the queen of Sri Lanka long after his enlightenment and his disciple Gorakhnath had to go to him and awaken him by saying those words that have since become legendary: Jaag macchandar gorakh aayaa – Wake up, Matsyendra, Gorakh has come. 

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Living Bhagavad Gita 012: What was in the War for Krishna?

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]

At the end of the previous article we saw how Krishna wanted to destroy the philosophy that people could be used as a means to your egoistic goals, that people are expendable. The philosophy that considered power as the ultimate goal, power as an end in itself, was anathema to Krishna. He knew that power for the sake of power or power for the privileges it can give you was a danger to the world.

The Mahabharata states clearly that kingship came into being to serve the weak, to protect the weak from exploitation by the strong, to destroy what the epic calls the matsya nyaya or the fish-eat-fish philosophy, the way of life in which big fish eat small fish. To the epic, service to his subjects is the ultimate aim of the king, his raison d’etre. It considers this aim to be so noble that it asks rhetorically: What shall a king do with tapas, or with religious vows or sacrificial rituals? The king who has looked after his subjects well has already achieved the results of all sacrifices and rituals.

kim tasya tapasaa raajnah kim cha tasya adhvarairapi; supaalitaprajo yah syaat sarva-dharma-videva sah. [MB Shanti 69.73]

To the Mahabharata, this service to the people is his religion to the king – the highest spirituality, the highest yajna, yaga, homa, the highest everything sacred. There is nothing more sacred than service to the people. If the king has served his people, he has achieved the results of all sacred acts, all sacred rituals, it said.

The Mahabharata does not stop there. It says that for the king his personal likes should seize to be his likes if they are against the good of his people; and even if he does not like to do something, if it is for the good of his people, that is what he should do. The greatest rulers this land has known, like Rama, believed in this and practiced it. Some of his actions we vociferously criticize today were based on this philosophy. He himself did not matter to him, his likes and dislikes did not matter to him, his deepest feelings did not matter to him, his personal pain and agony did not matter to him, if he believed an action would do good to his people he went ahead and did that.  

The Mahabharata considered the garbhini, the pregnant woman, as the highest ideal for a ruler and said: Just as a pregnant woman gives up the things that are to her liking and does what is good for the baby in her womb, so too should a king, without a doubt, give up his pleasures and do whatever is for the good of his subjects. He should totally give up his own likes and do whatever is for the good of the world.

yathaa hi garbhinee hitvaa svam priyam manaso’anugam |

garbhasya hitam aadhatte tathaa raajnaapy asamshayam || 

vartitavyam kurushreshtha nityam dharmaanuvartinaa |

svam priyam samabhityajya yadyal-lokahitam bhavet || MB Shanti 56.45-46||

Chanakya of course came long, long after the Mahabharata times. But he, the genius behind the founding of the Maurya empire, too considered the job of the king as service to his people. Comparing the king’s job with the most sacred thing known to India in his days, a Vedic yajna, Chanakya says in the Arthashastra:  To a king, “readiness to action is his religious vow [vrata]; continuous discharge of duties is his performance of sacrifice [yajna]; equal attention to all is the offer of fees to the priests [dakshina]”.

According to Chanakya: In the happiness of his subjects lies the happiness of the king; in their welfare his welfare; whatever pleases himself he shall not consider as good, but whatever gives happiness to his subjects he shall consider as good.” [prajaasukhe sukham raajnah, prajaanaam cha hite hitam; na aatmapriyam hitam raajnah, prajaanaam tu priyam hitam // Artha 01.19.34//] [Shama Shastry translation]

All his life Krishna fought to bring this philosophy of kingship as service to the people back into the political life of the day, into the leaders of his times. He sided with the Pandavas because he saw in them the possibility of leadership becoming for the service of the people, unlike Duryodhana who was obsessed with power for himself, would do anything to achieve it and wouldn’t let anyone or anything stand in the way of his attaining it. Duryodhana loved himself too much to live for others.

A narcissistic leader does not serve others. He serves only himself, whether he is the head of a family, a corporate house, a political organization or a nation. Personal glory is his aim, not service to others. That is why if you have a narcissistic leader at the head of an organization, the organization is doomed. His first thought is always how something will benefit him, not how it will benefit others. A leader has to put the others first, not himself or herself.  

There were several powerful kings in the Mahabharata times who believed in Duryodhana’s philosophy. In those times kings in general had become power greedy –in the words of Sanjaya, they had become “like dogs that snatch meat from one another.”  It is them that Krishna fought to destroy throughout his life and the Mahabharata war too was fought for no different purpose, at least not from Krishna’s standpoint.

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Though the war was fought to counter this philosophy and to reestablish that leadership is service, to lead is to serve and a leader should live for others, especially for the weak, it did involve a throne. What throne was it? Was it the throne of a small kingdom, or was it the throne of the entire India, then known as Bharatavarsha? Let’s take a quick look at the Mahabharata to find this out.

Chapter IX of the Bhishma Parva of the Mahabharata is a discussion of what Bharata or Bharatavarsha is. Dhritarashtra calls the land for which his son Duryodhana and the Pandavas are fighting the war Bharatavarsha and asks his minister and companion Sanjaya for a description of it. In response, Sanjaya describes the mountains of this land, the rivers, the people living on this land and so on.

Important among the mountains that Sanjaya names are Mahendra, Malaya, Sahya, Shuktiman, Rakshavan, Vindhya and Paripatra, which are called the seven kula mountains. Besides these he says there are thousands of other mountains that are part of this land.

He then names the rivers of Bharata: Ganga, Sindhu, Saraswati, Godavari, Krishna, Narmada and Yamuna; Dhrishadwati, Vipasha, Vetravati, Iravati, Vitasta, Payoshni, Gomati, Gandaki, Sarayu, Charmanwati Vetravati; Kaveri, Bhima, Oghavati, Asikni, Vidisha, Varuna, Asi and Nila  Sanjaya mentions scores of other rivers by name, but this short selection will serve our purpose.   

As we can see, even this list contains rivers from every part of India, not just from the Kuru land or Kuru Jangala. The Iravati mentioned here is the river that flows through what was then Brahmadesha, Burma for the British and now Myanmar. Godavari and Krishna flow through today’s Andhra Pradesh, Kaveri through Tamil Nadu and Nila flows through Kerala, a river more widely known by the local name Bharatapuzha. Locate these rivers on a map and you will find that they cover all of modern India and much more.

Sanjaya now describes Bharata as the land where the following people are living: the Kuru Panchalas, Panchalas proper, Madras, Shurasenas, Kalingas, Matsyas, Kashis, Kosalas, Chedis, Karushas, Bhojas, Sindhus, Dasharnas, and the Utkalas; the Keralas, Shakas, Angas, Vangas, Abhiras, Kekayas, Andhras, Pundras; the Kashmiras, Tamraliptas, Malavas, Dravidas, Karnatakas, Cholas.....  Sanjaya’s list goes on and on describing scores of other people living on this land called Bharata.

Interestingly he mentions the Mushakas on his list. The Mushakas, or Mushikas, were a dynasty of people who ruled northern Kerala long ago. There is an epic poem in Sanskrit called Mushaka Vamsha Kavya, authored by the poet Atula in the 11^th century CE.

The description of the different peoples living in Bharata includes the Kiratas – they are the people of what we today call Tibet, an independent nation until 1954 and occupied by China since then.  Just like Tibet, Bahlika mentioned on the list is also no more part of Bharata. It is the place we know today as Balkh, a province of Afghanistan.

So this is the land for which the Mahabharata war was being fought according to Ch. X of the Bhishma Parva of the epic.

All this land had been brought both under the Pandava rule through conquests while they were ruling from Indraprastha, also known as Khandavaprastha.  Just before Yudhishthira’s rajasuya, Krishna, accompanied by Bhima and Arjuna, goes to Jarasandha and has the emperor killed, the eighty-six kings imprisoned by him released and Jarasandha’s virtuous son Sahadeva crowned king in his father’s place. Informed of the rajasuya Yudhishthira plans to perform, all these kings give Krishna their joyous assurance of going along with Yudhishthira. They go to Indraprastha along with Krishna, Bhima and Arjuna and pay their respects to Yudhishthira. After they depart, Krishna and the Pandavas have discussions with Yudhishthira and plan the digvijaya, conquest of all kings of the land as required by the rajasuya.  

Soon Arjuna proceeds in the northern direction and subjugates all kings in that direction. The epic mentions these kings by name one after another, in the order in which Arjuna conquered them. At the same time, Bhima proceeds in the eastern direction and conquers all the kings there. Sahadeva proceeds in the southern direction and conquers all the kings there, going right up to what is now Rameshwaram, from where he sends messengers to Lanka. The only serious challenge Sahadeva had on his long journey south was from King Nila of Mahishmati, about which we are told the fascinating story of an adulterous affair between Nila’s daughter and the god Agni, their subsequent marriage and Agni’s protection given to the king. On Sahadeva’s way to the extreme south, we are specifically told of his conquest of the Kalingas, the Andhras, and the Dravidas.  Later, after receiving tributes from the king of Lanka, Sahadeva returns to Indraprastha. 

Nakula proceeds in the western direction and conquers all the kings in that direction. Interestingly, one of the kingdoms that accepted his sway was Krishna’s Dwaraka. Nakula sends messengers to Krishna’s father Vasudeva and Vasudeva with all the Yadavas accepts his overlordship. Next, approaching Madra, he sends messengers to his uncle Shalya and Shalya, of course, happily accepts the sway of the Pandavas – out of affection, adds the Mahabharata. Nakula also conquers the Mleccha kingdoms on the western sea coast  such as the Yavanas and Shakas.  

The four brothers had thus brought within Yudhishthira’s overlordship all the kings in all the four directions of the land – north, east, south and west, thus making Yudhishthira the emperor of the entire land from the Himalayas to the southern sea. So it was not just the kingdom of Indraprastha that Yudhishthira lost in the dice game, but also lordship over all the kingdoms that the four brothers had conquered on his behalf.

The Mahabharata war was fought for all of India – all of Bharatavarsha, an India much larger than today’s India. It was throughout the length and breadth of this land that Krishna wanted kings to rule people based on the philosophy that kingship is service to the people.

We have a modern name for leadership as service: servant leadership. This style of leadership which was the very heart of Indian leadership philosophy, in which kings considered themselves the dasas, servants, of the people they ruled, was reinvented in the west in modern times by Robert Greenleaf. Greenleaf’s inspirations were Krishna, Jesus and Leo, a character in Journey to the East by Nobel Prize winner Herman Hesse, who himself was inspired deeply by India. Today servant leadership is fast growing as a leadership approach, many leading industrial and business houses across the world following it, including South West Airlines, the world’s largest low-cost carrier. I have taught servant leadership as a leadership approach in one of the leading business schools in the country to several batches of students over many years and have also given lectures to officers from various corporate houses of the country, including the Tatas.

Krishna wanted all kings across India to be servant leaders. It is for this that he fought wars with many arrogant kings of the land, it is for this that he helped Yudhishthira perform the rajasuya sacrifice and become the samrat, and it is for this that Krishna supported the Pandavas against Duryodhana. This is the dharma yuddha, war for dharma, Krishna was talking about, the purpose for which he took incarnation. He wanted kings to serve their people. Service to the people was rajadharma as Krishna understood it.

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This description of Bharatavarsha in the Mahabharata is also an answer to those who say that it was the British that for the first time brought India under one rule, that the very concept of India as a nation owes its existence to the British. India as a separate entity has existed for several thousand years before the arrival of the British in India, speaking of which the Vishnu Purana says: The land that lies north of the [southern] sea and south of the Himalayas, that is called Bharata and the people living there are called Bharati[yas].

uttaram yat samudrasya, himaadres chaiva dakshinam; varsham tad bharatam naama, bhaaratee yatra santati.  

Of course, the political set up we had in the Mahabharata days was different. We believed in a federal system rather than in centralized administration – a federal system in which each kingdom had its independence but accepted the overlordship of an emperor, called a samrat or a chakravatri, to whom he paid tributes. Later in modern historical times too, such as under Ashoka and under Chadragupa Maurya, we had most of India under a single emperor’s rule, as did Akbar have most of India under his rule centuries before the British became the rulers of India. Under the British too several independent kingdoms existed in India, though they all paid tributes to the British, exactly as independent kings paid tributes to Yudhishthira in his days.

Besides, this condition of ancient India existing as several independent kingdoms is not a unique condition in world history. In fact, that is how most large countries were in ancient days. The historian Sarah Bradford’s celebrated book Lucrezia Borgia:  Life, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy, for instance, begins by describing how Italy at that time was more a geographical expression than a country.  She says:  

“At the time of Lucrezia Borgia’s birth in 1480, Italy was famously a geographical expression rather than a country, a peninsula divided into independent states bound by the weakest sense of common nationality. Neapolitans, Milanese and Venetians were Neapolitans, Milanese and Venetians first and foremost: the concept of Italy as a political whole did not exist beyond a vague xenophobia in which non-Italians were perceived as barbarians...

“The principal Italian states in the late fifteenth century were (from north to south) Milan, ruled by the Sforza family; Venice, a merchant empire ruled by an oligarchy of patrician families headed by a doge; Florence, then ruled by the Medici as a hereditary despotism in the person of Piero, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent; the Papal States, the temporal dominion of the Pope whose authority in practice was devolved to ‘papal vicars’, principally the Este of Ferrara, but including smaller city states such as Bologna, Rimini, Pisa, Siena, Camerino, Forlì, Faenza and Pesaro, where families such as the Bentivoglio, the Malatesta, the Petrucci, the Varani, the Riarii and the Manfredi held sway. Mantua was held as a fief of the Holy Roman Empire by the Gonzaga family.”

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Photo courtesy: Devender Malhotra

Thank you in advance for your questions and comments.

Why I Love the Gita: A Westerner Sings in Ecstasy

[Culled from: A Bhagavad Gita­_A Walkthrough for Westerners, by Jack Hawley]

I love the Gita’s basic goodness, and how it pushes me beyond merely striving to be a good person, toward becoming my own Divinity within. I love that it provides me with page after page of methods for calling forth that extreme goodness. And I love how it continually reminds me to do that.

I love my inner peacefulness whenever I enter the Gita’s teachings. I love how almost all my anger has been eliminated, and how worldly agitations are largely things of the past for me.  I love the Gita for its depth, its breadth, and mostly its height — the way it pulls me upward. I love it for its humanness as well as its sublimity.  I love the ultra-honesty in the Gita about religion — how it lives in the open space beyond religious dogma and yet embraces a reverence for the scriptural teachings of all faiths.

I love the Gita’s clarity about how we have to live with the consequences of our actions, good or bad, but with no hint of punishment.  I love how it neither excuses nor overlooks humanity’s dark side, and yet doesn’t dwell there. Sanskrit, the precise, spiritual language of the Gita, has no word for damnation.

I love the antiquity of the Gita, appreciating that it precedes by thousands of years the societies we Westerners think of as the cradles of civilization. This isn’t merely “older is better” snobbery. The Bhagavad Gita has passed the persistent tests of countless centuries, and yet it remains the basis for all the spiritual teachings known in the world today. 

I love the Gita’s teachings on acceptance — not mere compliance, but acceptance as an overpowering state of mind and way of being, a receptiveness so elevated that one’s life forever soars when touched by the magic of it. This all-embracing acceptance is the most shining facet of love, the very essence of spiritual surrender.

I love the happiness in the Gita and thoroughly appreciate its careful explanation of how to attain real bliss. I also appreciate that it lays out what happiness is not and is so clear about the pitfalls in the way of lasting happiness.

I love that the all-powerful Divinity described in the Gita is loving and non-punitive.

Finally, I love the Gita’s emphasis on application rather than airy theology — insisting that putting the teachings into practice will lead to a happier, more graceful life.

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Courtesy: A Bhagavad Gita­_A Walkthrough for Westerners, by Jack Hawley. New World Library, Novato, California. 2001