Living Bhagavad Gita 18_The Question of Varna Sankara

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.]

When families are destroyed, timeless family traditions are destroyed. And when that happens, families plunge into lawlessness. And with families plunging into lawlessness, women become corrupt. And when women become corrupt, Krishna, varna sankara results. Varna sankara [the intermixture of varnas] leads to hell both those who destroy the families and the families themselves. Deprived of the offerings of water and food, the spirits of the ancestors fall. By these evil deeds of those who destroy families, causing confusion of varnas, the eternal dharmas of families and castes are destroyed. BG 1.40-43  

We heard Arjuna arguing earlier that one’s own people should not be killed, however wicked they are, even if they are atatayis, the greatest of criminals. In fact, he calls the people against whom he is waging the war by the name atatayis and then says they should not still be killed because they are his swajana, his own people, and asks how one can achieve happiness after killing one’s own people. Perhaps he feels his argument to justify the decision he has already taken under his emotional hijack to abandon the war and run away from the battlefield preferring to become a monk is not strong enough. So here he is putting forward another argument. This time the argument is that the war will eventually lead to varna sankara, intermixing of varnas. This would happen because the death of the kshatriya men in the war would misbalance the man-woman ratio among kshatriyas, many kshatriya women would not find kshatriya men to marry and then they would either have relationships with non-kshatriya men or marry non-kshatriya men, leading to the birth of huge numbers of children whose varna would be indeterminate.

Let’s take a look at this argument that Arjuna gives now to justify his decision to abandon the war.  

The varna system is very different from what we speak of as the caste system today. The varnas are just four, brahmanas, kshatriyas, vaishyas and shudras, whereas casts are hundreds and hundreds. Every modern state in India has scores of different castes, counting major and minor ones.

The varna system is as old as the Vedas, which according to current understanding are some ten to twelve thousand years old. Modern scholars studying the age of the Vedas point out that the Taittiriya Samhita belonging to the Krishna Yajur Veda places the constellation Pleiades at the winter solstice, which correlates with astronomical events that took place around 8,500 BCE.  Dr. B.G. Siddharth of Birla Science Institute points out that the Taittiriya Brahmana refers to the Purva Bhadrapada star as rising due east – an event that occurred no later than 10,000 BCE, which makes the brahmana around 12000 years old. Since the Samhita parts of the Vedas are much older than the brahmana books, these are much older than 12000 years. And the Rig Veda in its Purusha Sukta speaks of the birth of the four varnas from the cosmic person, the Virat Purusha, or God.

However this system was very different from what we know as the varna system today. For the Rig Veda, the system was based not on birth, but on psycho-spiritual qualities of the individual called the gunas. They were a way of describing people by their nature and not by their birth.

The Bhagavad Gita speaks of the varna system in its fourth chapter where Krishna speaking as God says that the system of fourfold varnas was created by him based on the differences of gunas and karmas:

chaaturvarnyam mayaa srishtam guna-karma-vibhaagashah; tasya kartaaram api maam viddhyakartaaram avyayam BG 4.13

There is no mention of birth [jaati, janma] here. As the verse says, the system was based on gunas and karmas, psychological tendencies and professions followed, and not on birth.

Ancient India understood that all human beings are not the same, individuals differ from one another in their temperaments, longings, drives, aspirations, needs, talents, competencies and so on and based on these differences divided people into four broad categories, just as modern psychologist Carl Jung divided people into the three categories of extroverts, introverts and ambiverts and modern social psychology divides people into Type A and Type B.

People who loved calmness and serenity, who were highly intellectual and spiritual, contemplative and meditative, dominated by the need to understand themselves and the world around them, who sought the meaning of life, loved solitude and serenity and had strong, to use a term by Dr Abraham Maslow, transcendence needs, were given the name brahmanas. These were people who sought growth in their inner worlds, wanted to grow vertically, so to speak.  

People who were oriented towards power and leadership, who felt the need to take charge of others and to command and control them, were called kshatriyas. Their orientation was towards expansion on the horizontal plain, at the level where they were. They needed to conquer the world, were aggressive and territorially oriented, tended to give generously, were excited by danger and adventure and loved taking risks. They had tremendous energy, were steadfast and tenacious, frequently acted impulsively not caring for consequences, had strong belongingness and acceptance needs and were marked by raw courage and great strength of purpose. These were the movers and shakers of the society. 

   

And a third group were the wealth producers of the society whose basic interest was in producing more and more material wealth through all possible means such as agriculture, cattle rearing, business and commerce and so on. They were called vaishyas. They used their wealth to produce more wealth, and in a way it is they who sustained the society since no society can survive and grow without wealth.  

People who did not belong to any of these three categories belonged to the fourth group and were given the name shudras. The largest number of people in the society belonged to this group. They did not share the aspirations of the first three groups of people: they did not have the strong spiritual needs of the first group of people, the strong territorial and authority needs of the second group and were not driven by the wealth and possession needs of the third group. They were contented with their lives as they lived it every day and wanted to make sure that their tomorrows were taken care of.

Since this division was based on your gunas and karmas, on our drives, motives and aspirations and the professions we chose for ourselves based on these, it was a highly flexible and mobile system and anyone could move from any group to any other group as their gunas and karmas changed, as their nature and drives changed.

In the Vedic literature we find examples of people being treated as belonging to one varna or another on the basis of their gunas – their psychological nature. For instance the Chhandogya Upanishad belonging to the Sama Veda tells us the story of Satyakama, the son of a poor woman called Jabala who earned her living by doing odd jobs in different houses and was contented with her simple life. Jabala herself did not have any higher aspirations in life, but her son wanted to know the Truth, to become what the varna system of the day called a brahmana. The boy approached the famous guru of the day, Rishi Haridrumata Gautama who asked him what gotra lineage he belonged to. When he said he did not know, Rishi Gautama sent Satyakama back to his mother to find out, and she told him she herself did not know it, she worked in different houses and a man in one of those house should be his father. She told him, “Go and tell your guru that my name is Jabala and you are therefore Styakama Jabala.’

When the boy came and told his guru the exact words of his mother without any embarrassment or shame, repeating his desire to seek the Truth, Gauytama’s face beamed with pleasure and he told Satyakama that anyone who had the desire he had to learn and that kind of integrity and commitment to truth is a brahmana and therefore he was a brahmana. Stayakama Jabala becomes Gautama’s disciple and eventually one of the greatest Vedic rishis in his own right.

The purpose of this division into four categories was so that people could understand themselves and live their life in accordance with their essential nature and drives, follow professions they had maximum aptitude for so that individuals reached self-actualization and the society was assured of maximum benefit from each individual. It was an elitist system that provided lots of opportunities for the three ‘upper’ classes who were also given plenty of privileges. An important weakness of the system was that it did not take into consideration and provide for the needs of the vast majority of ‘average’ people who neither had the brahmanical orientation nor the kshatriya or vaishya orientation. The word shudra, a word of unknown etymology, for all we know did not have any negative connotations to begin with, and probably just meant an ordinary person, though eventually it came to be associated with a lot of social prejudices and became for all practical pruposes a word of abuse. 

     

However, soon the sons of the brahmanas started claiming they too were brahmanas, the sons kshatriyas that they too are kshatriyas and the sons of vaishyas that they are vaishyas too. The sons claimed for themselves too the privileges their fathers were given, whether they had the temperaments and competencies required or not, forgetting that the human being is not just the body born of his parents but much more than that, that each one of comes into this world with a rich collection of vasanas, sanskaras and karmas that we have acquired through the endless lifetimes we have lived. Over time the varna system that was based on gunas and karmas was reduced to one based exclusively on birth.

Thus in the Mahabharata we find Karna refused the privileges of a kshatriya because he was supposed to have been a non-kshatriya by  birth even though he had all the qualities of a kshatriya. We also find that Drona and his son Ashwatthama treated as brahmanas though by temperament and karma they were kshatriyas, particularly Ashwatthama. Vidura, being calm, serene, intellectual and spiritual, a great yogi filled with inner light and every inch a brahmana by guna and karma, was never given brahmanical privileges and was throughout his life treated as a shudra because he was the son of a shudra maid.

Once it fell from its original form and the original ideas died out, the varna system decayed further and eventually became a thoroughly dreadful thing and one of the worst human institutions ever. It bound and shackled with invisible chains the vast majority of people who fell into its all-powerful hands, refused them all human dignity, denied them all social mobility, condemned them to the dirtiest jobs society wanted to be done and then treated them as dirty for doing these jobs.

The battle against the caste system is old. The Buddha revolted against it two thousand six hundred years ago, enlightened men like Basaveshara, chief minister of the Kalachuri king of Karnataka and founder of the Lingayats revolted against it a thousand years ago. All the Sikh gurus and the Natha saints rejected it. In modern times Mahatma Gandhi and Dr Ambedkar fought against it, the constitution of India holds discrimination based on cast illegal, but in spite of all this, it is still very much with us, condemning to the peripheries of society some eighty percent of India’s population, denying them social dignity and in some cases even basic human dignity.

One of my students in a teacher-education college where I taught, a young lady who had already taught in a school for many years, once told me about a student in one of her classes. The student sat away in class from all other students, wouldn’t ask any questions and volunteer any answers, in the lunch break she wouldn’t join the other students but would go away to a distant corner and eat there all alone. In the games periods she wouldn’t join the other students but would stand under a tree quietly and watch other students playing. The young teacher took interest in this lonely, sad girl and eventually after much effort discovered that the girl was born into a cast that was considered untouchable and it was the fear of social rejection that kept her away from active school life.

Another student of mine in the same college was bright, one of the toppers of the college, beautiful, lighted up any place she went to, but came from a village where the entire community shared a common well. The villagers did not stop her from drawing up water from the well but every time she came and fetched water from the well, they came and washed up the walls of the well and its cemented surroundings and only then would they use the well.

One of my friends witnessed a sad and shocking scene in a village in Vaishali – the sacred land where the Buddha walked and taught, one of the oldest democracies in the world – just a few years ago while travelling by bus. A city-educated young man was pulled out of a bus and thoroughly beaten up with slippers for daring to sit next to another youth from his village in the bus – the beaten up young man belonged to one of the ‘lower castes’.

The Shatarudriya – One Hundred Prayers to Rudra – is one of the most beautiful prayers anywhere in the world, belonging to any religion, still ritually chanted everyday in millions of Hindu homes. The prayer, also known by such names as the Rudri Path, Rudradhyayi, Rudra Prashna and so on, is an ancient prayer from the Taittiriya Samhita of the Krishna Yajur Veda which sees divinity in everything and everyone. Among the prayers addressed to Rudra we find:

namo mahadbhyah kshullakebhyas cha vo namo...

“Salutations to you, O Lord! The great ones and the small ones alike you are! Salutations to you, O Lord! The carpenters and the chariot makers are none other than you! Salutations to you, O Lord! The potters who mold clay and make pots and the smiths who work in metals are none other than you! Salutations to you, O Lord! The fowlers who trap birds and fishermen who catch fish are none other than you! Salutations to you, O Lord! You are the bow and arrow makers, the hunters and the leaders of hounds. Salutations to you, O Lord! You the source of all things and you are the destroyer of all things too!” 

That is the spirit of the Vedas! To the Shatarudriya everything is divine and nothing pollutes And once the varna system began decaying and in its decayed form became the caste system based on jati, birth, it started seeing some people polluting and untouchable, whose very shadow falling on your shadow would pollute you!

When Arjuna says the war will lead to varna-sankara, intermingling of varnas, through corruption in women and the birth children of mixed varnas, he is not speaking of the varna system based on gunas and karmas. He is speaking of the highly corrupt system of classifying people based exclusively on birth and totally ignored competencies, drives, and other elements of human nature. He is speaking of the system that made the saintly Vidura a shudra for life, that denied the glorious Karna kshatriyahood, that called the vicious, monstrous Ashwatthama a brahmana in spite of the darkest deeds he did in the kalaratri of the Sauptika Parva of Mahabharata. He is speaking of a system that would soon become the highly corrupt caste system we have today and is one of the greatest evils in our society: a system that limits opportunities for social participation, social mobility, job opportunities, selection of life partners, etc. exclusively to what is decided by one’s birth, a system that reduces the vast majority of population to the lowest rungs of the society forever with no chance of escape.

The destruction of such a system is perhaps one of the prices that have to be paid for establishing dharma in the society and among its leaders.

O0O

Even if we do not go to the profound depths of ancient Indian understanding of the gunas and what they teach us about human nature, human growth, human excellence and so on, which we will have plenty of opportunities to talk about during our discussions of the Gita later since the gunas are central to three of the eighteen chapters of the Gita, and confine our discussion at this stage to varnas as birth-based, Arjuna’s fears about varna-sankara still do not have a strong foundation. Just as varna purity – somewhat like racial purity – has its strengths, genetically speaking mixing of varnas too has several advantages. When we do not mix the genes, children inherit both the strengths and weaknesses our parents. Many genetic groups have become extinct just because they did not mix with other groups and many others have widespread defects because of inbreeding. Of course we are not discussing incest but that too is a form of inbreeding. There are several reasons why the incest taboo exists all over the world, but the most important of them is the fear of possible genetically inherited defects. On the whole, nature prefers mixing of genes rather than purity of genes. Basically, sex itself is nature’s way of making sure of genes being mixed to produce stronger and varied offspring.  

  

Arjuna cannot escape the call to the war for establishing dharma hiding behind the argument that varna-sankara will take place and that will be disastrous. That is another lame argument, like his earlier argument that felons should not be destroyed if they are one’s own people.

Arjuna has become temporarily blind to truth because of his attachment and refuses to see things as they are. The Gita will teach him to come out of this blindness and help him see things objectively, through eyes that are detached, and practice anasakti yoga which is one of the central teachings for the Gita.

O0O 

Living Bhagavad Gita 17: Journey to True Greatness

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.]

For that reason, we should not kill the Dhartarashtras, our relatives. How can we be happy after killing our own people, Krishna? Because their hearts are overpowered by greed, they see no evil in destroying the family and no sin in harming friends. But we know what evil it is to destroy families. How then can we not, Krishna, turn back from this sin? BG 1.37-39

O0O

In his book Forerunner, Kahlil Gibran paints a beautiful picture of greed:

“In my wanderings I once saw upon an island a man-headed, iron-hoofed monster who ate of the earth and drank of the sea incessantly. And for a long while I watched him. Then I approached him and said, “Have you never enough; is your hunger never satisfied and your thirst never quenched?”

“And he answered saying, “Yes, I am satisfied, nay, I am weary of eating and drinking; but I am afraid that tomorrow there will be no more earth to eat and no more sea to drink.”

Krishna considers greed one of the three gates of hell, lust and anger being the other two, and asks us to free ourselves from them: trividham narakasyedam dvaaram naashanam aatmanah kaamah krodhas tathaa lobhas tasmaad etat trayam tyajet.  BG 16.21

It is our insecurities about the future that give birth to greed in our mind. And so long as insecurities are there, greed will be there too. The insecure man will never be contented with what he has, however much he has, and will constantly try to acquire more, whether it is power, position, wealth, or whatever else he thinks will make his future secure.

In Abraham Maslow’s triangle of needs, security needs come as the second group of needs from below, after physical and physiological needs. Insecurities about the future are built into human nature and until man wakes up from the life of illusions he is living and realizes his true nature, or learns to surrender to Existence, to God, they will be there.

A botanist was in the Himalayas along with his young son, exploring the Valley of Flowers. He tied a rope to his son’s waste and slowly lowered him to explore a deep gorge in the valley. As the son disappeared from sight and started going deeper and deeper into the gorge, the father’s heart started beating faster and faster, his head started nearly reeling in fear. Unable to control his fears any more, he called out, “Son, are you all right? Are you afraid?”

And he heard his son’s laughter from the gorge. Laughing, the young boy answered, “Why should I be afraid when the rope is in my father’s hands?!”

That is how surrender is. As we shall see later, Krishna concludes his teachings to Arjuna by asking him to surrender to him. By surrendering to Existence, you give yourself over into the safest of hands. And awakening to your true nature, you realize you are what the Gita speaks of as what neither weapons, nor fire, not water can touch, what is unborn and deathless. And with that all insecurities and fears disappear and so does the need to acquire more and more, to hoard.

A difficult path to practice, of course. That is why the Upanishads say that religion is for the truly brave – to walk the spiritual path, to tread the path of shreyas, you have to be truly strong and courageous.  Listing divine qualities, daivi sampada, Krishna lists abhayam, fearlessness, as the very first quality on his list. 

Duryodhana’s is the sad story of a man who cannot surrender to God, even though God was there in the form of Krishna all the time. His asuri nature prevents that surrender, his ego prevents him from surrendering to Krishna and accepting him as his protector and guide. Instead, he would like to imprison the Divine and make him do his bidding, as he tries to do when Krishna comes to speak of peace in the Kuru assembly. Before the war begins, Arjuna and he both approach Krishna seeking his help and Arjuna is given the first choice: to choose between Krishna’s army and an unarmed, non-combating Krishna. The epic tells us that while Arjuna happily chose Krishna, Duryodhana was worried all the time that he might choose Krishna’s army, as he himself would have done instantly given the first choice to him. For Duryodhana, Krishna is of no value.

Greed is truly a gate that leads to hell. Greed makes us forget no amount of wealth, no amount of power, no position, nothing we can acquire from the world is going to make us joyous, nothing is going to help us live our life in utsava bhava, the spirit of festivity and celebration, as life is meant to be lived.

One of my favourite passages from Kahlil Gibran is a conversation between the serpent and the lark:

Said the serpent to the lark, “Thou flyest, yet thou canst not visit the recesses of the earth where the sap of life moveth in perfect silence.”

And the lark answered, “Aye, thou knowest over much, nay thou art wiser than all things wise – pity thou canst not fly.”

And as if he did not hear, the serpent said, “Thou canst not see the secrets of the deep, nor move among the treasures of the hidden empire. It was but yesterday I lay in a cave of rubies. It is like the heart of a ripe pomegranate, and the faintest ray of light turns it into a flame-rose. Who but me can behold such marvels?”

And the lark said, “None, none but thee can lie among the crystal memories of the cycles: pity thou canst not sing.”

And the serpent said, “I know a plant whose root descends to the bowels of the earth, and he who eats of that root becomes fairer than Ashtarte.”

And the lark said, “No one, no one but thee could unveil the magic thought of the earth – pity thou canst not fly.”

And the serpent said, “There is a purple stream that runneth under a mountain, and he who drinketh of it shall become immortal even as the gods. Surely no bird or beast can discover that purple stream.”

And the lark answered, “If thou willest thou canst become deathless even as the gods – pity thou canst not sing.”

And the serpent said, “I know a buried temple, which I visit once a moon: It was built by a forgotten race of giants, and upon its walls are graven the secrets of time and space, and he who reads them shall understand that which passeth all understanding.”

And the lark said, “Verily, if thou so desirest thou canst encircle with thy pliant body all knowledge of time and space – pity thou canst not fly.”

Then the serpent was disgusted, and as he turned and entered into his hole he muttered, “Empty-headed songster!”

And the lark flew away singing, “Pity thou canst not sing. Pity, pity, my wise one, thou canst not fly.”

Greed is a curse. Where there is greed, there is no joy. One of the most joyless men I have come across is a rich man I once knew who lived for making money. He was my neighbour and I would hear him talking loudly over the phone from five in the morning till ten or eleven in the night every day. He had only one topic: how to make more money through investment in shares and the business of gold, diamonds and real estate.

Tibetan culture speaks of accursed beings they call the hungry ghosts – ghosts, pishachas, surrounded by all kinds of delicacies, but with such tiny mouths, like that of anteaters, they can eat no more than the tiniest morsels and remain hungry forever. 

O0O

In the 1987 movie classic Wall Street, the Michael Doughlas character Gordon Gekko says: “Greed...is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.” This is the philosophy that has dominated the world, particularly the industrial western world, for quite some time and we can see all round us what greed has done to us. In his book Is the American Dream Killing You? Paul Stiles speaks of the power of the greed-driven market: “The ability of the Market to overcome the most important human bonds, the natural bonds between man and woman, and between parents and children, and to subvert traditions that have arisen out of millions of years of biological and social evolution, in a short fifty years, is stark testimony to the power of the Market in modern life. That power has now placed us in a position where we are serving the Market from birth, rather than having it serve us.”

A 1909 cartoon shows the inside of a huge boat where a large number of children are rowing oars like galley slaves and a muscular man stands overseeing them which a whip in his hand. The writing on his clothes reads: GREED.  

That is what happens when greed takes over the world and we say greed is good!

A Psychology Today article on greed says:

“Greed is also associated with negative psychological states such as stress, exhaustion, anxiety, depression and despair, and with maladaptive behaviours such as gambling, scavenging, hoarding trickery and theft. By overriding reason, compassion and love, greed loosens family and community ties and undermines the bonds and values upon which society is built.

“Greed may drive the economy, but as recent history has made all too clear, unfettered greed can also precipitate a deep and long-lasting economic recession. What’s more, our consumer culture continues to inflict severe damage on the environment, resulting in, among others, deforestation, desertification, ocean acidification, species extinctions, and more frequent and severe extreme weather events. There is a question about whether such greed can be sustainable in the short term, never mind the long term.”

By the laws and traditions of the day that governed royal succession, Duryodhana had no right over the kingdom of the Kurus, as both his father Dhritarashtra and his mother Gandhari tell him openly in royal assembly during discussions on the subject in the Udyoga Parva of the epic. But in spite of that when he usurps power through crooked means, the kingdom is divided and the Pandavas, the rightful heirs to the throne, are sent to the wilderness of Khandava Prastha, which they soon turn to the most glorious kingdom on earth. And when that happens, Duryodhana’s greed for power and wealth once again makes him snatch from the Pandavas their kingdom and wealth. It is this greed of Duryodhana for wealth and power and his refusal to give the Pandavas so much as five villages that make the Mahabharata war necessary. And what Arjuna  tells Krishna now is that even though Duryodhana is deprived of his intelligence because of his greed, we should not fight the war because Duryodhana is after all his cousin.

The first commitment of a kshatriya, of all leaders of men, should be to righteous ways of living. You cannot condone because the perpetrator is your own cousin. A kshatriya is bound to destroy adharma wherever he finds it, going beyond relationships. When he condones adharma because it was done by his own people, he is failing in his basic duty as a protector of dharma.

O0O

Modern psychology tells us that the human mind does not take decisions based on reason; instead it first takes decisions and then seeks reasons to justify those decisions. The actual decision makers are our feelings and emotions, not our reason.  This is true whether it is an individual who is taking the decision or a group. The individual in a shop trying to decide whether to buy a shirt or not and the marketing group in a corporate meeting trying to decide what marketing strategy to adopt take decisions based on their emotions and feelings, though they not be aware of this.

Arjuna has made up his mind not to fight – that was an impulsive, instant decision taken under the impact of his emotional hijack he suffered when he saw his people standing in the battlefield ready to slaughter each other and realized that he will have to kill, among others, his own beloved grandfather and revered guru to win the war. Now he is giving Krishna reasons to justify that decision.

But in truth the reasons are sought less for Krishna’s sake and more for himself.  These reasons are the ways of his ego to defend itself – in his own eyes and in the eyes of the others. The first and the last concern of the ego under all circumstances is to save itself. But unfortunately, the ego is our greatest enemy. In fact it is our only enemy. It is the enemy of our happiness, the enemy of spiritual welfare, the one thing that separates us from the joyfulness that life should be. And spirituality is the process of starving the ego and feeding the soul so that we can wake up from the illusions we are suffering from and live life as it should be lived.

For the ego the only thing that matters is that it wins. Losing is one thing that the ego cannot accept – it has to win under all circumstances. So Arjuna’s ego tries to turn even abandoning the war and running away from it too into a victory.

Arjuna says however bad they are, if they are his own people he will not do anything against them because doing anything against one’s own people is wrong. Which is exactly what a corrupt politician practices today, though he does not openly say that because that is bad publicity.

Political organizations thrust incompetent leaders on people because they are their swajana. Numerous organizations and business houses have fallen because of this tendency to impose swajana on people, whether they are good or bad, competent or not. In politics, as in industry and business to a smaller extent, it is a common practice to promote one’s own people however ignorant, unethical and incompetent they are. And nations have to pay huge prices for this. 

Arjuna says taking actions against swajana is a sin – papa.  The opposite is true: not taking actions against one’s own people if they are evil is the sin. The most important reason why the Mahabharata war had to be fought was because Dhritarashtra failed to take action against his son who kept sinking lower and lower into the quicksand of adharma. When you do not take actions against the wrong deeds of your people over whom you have authority, you are not only condoning their wrong deeds but also encouraging them.  

Arjuna is among the most virtue-conscious people of the Mahabharata. But because of the impact of the emotional hijack, his buddhi has for the time being taken over by tamas and because of that he sees everything as the opposite of what it is. At this moment what is right is wrong for him and what is wrong is right for him.  Speaking of tamasic buddhi, the Gita says:  

adharmam dharmam iti yaa manyate tamasaavritaa

sarvaarthaan vipareetaamshcha buddhih saa paartha taamasee

The intelligence that regards adharma as dharma and views all things in a distorted light because it is enveloped by darkness – that intelligence, Arjuna, is tamasic. BG 18.32

Like everything else in existence, intelligence too can be sattvic, rajasic and tamasic.

O0O

The Mahabharata tells us how Karna sacrifices his loyalty to Duryodhana immediately before the war at the altar of the victory of dharma – loyalty that had sustained him all his life. Right from his childhood, he had been loyal to Duryodhana but eventually the light that Duryodhana is evil penetrates his mind in spite of that loyalty. Just before the war Krishna offers him the entire kingdom asking him to join the Pandava side and telling him he is really the eldest son of Kunti and hence the eldest of the Pandavas. He rejects the offer saying he does not want the kingdom to go to Duryodhana who does not deserve it because he evil and if Krishna gave the kingdom to him, he would give it to Duryodhana out of his friendship with him. Against the interests of Duryodhana, Karna also gives away his divine armour and earrings that made him invincible in war, thus causing damage to Duryodhana. Not only that, he promises his mother Kunti that he would not kill any Pandava other than Arjuna, a promise that he keeps though he defeats each one of them in the war.   

Yudhishthira makes a great sacrifice by agreeing to tell the lie that Ashwatthama has been killed so that Drona would lay down his weapons and then he could be killed. In one of the two narrations of the incident found in the epic, there is no equivocation on his part, his words are not blown away by Krishna’s conch sound; he really tells Drona in so many words that his son Ashwatthama has been killed.  Yudhishthira thus sacrifices his lifelong truthfulness at the altar of dharma – knowing well he is lying, initially refusing to do so, but finally persuaded by Krishna.

Krishna makes a sacrifice by agreeing to be a mere driver in the war, though he is without a doubt the greatest warrior of the age and the most respected man.

Now it is time for Arjuna to make a sacrifice of his own by agreeing to kill those two pillars of Durdyodhana’s evil empire, both of whom he loves and reveres: Bhishma and Drona.  Which is what his ego is refusing to do at this moment.

There are times in our lives when we all feel the call to greatness too tough a challenge to accept. In the movie Saala Khadoos, we see that the wrestler Madhi [Mati] at one stage in her life is so crushed by darkness that she feels the life she was living as a fish seller in the market is preferable and thinks of abandoning the challenge of becoming world wrestling champion.. That would have been choosing preyas over shreyas, the easy path over the right but tough path. Fortunately in the movie she finds the right guru – her inspiring and tireless boxing coach Prabhu. 

Happy are the ones who find a guru. The right guru.

Arjuna is lucky to find the right guru in Krishna. Krishna helps him  make that sacrifice and journey into the world of true greatness.

O0O

Living Bhagavad Gita 016: Heroic Leadership

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

[Continued from the previous post.]

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

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

yogarato vaa bhogarato vaa sangarato vaa sanga-viheenah

yasya brahmani ramate chittam nandati nandati nandaty-eva

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

That is how Krishna is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baapji and his son are atatayis.

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

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

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

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

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

O0O  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

O0O

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

O0O

Living Bhagavad Gita 015: Cowards Worship Destiny

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

[Continued from the previous post.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is Arjuna, the winner.

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

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

O0O

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

O0O

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

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

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

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

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

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

O0O

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doing good is more important than being right.

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

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

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

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

O0O

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

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

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

Sometimes killing is kindness too.

O0O