Bhagavadgita Chapier 2: Krishna Speaks at the Battlefield

CHAPTER – II  WHO IS AFRAID OF DEATH As Sanjaya reports, Arjuna is in tears. He is overwhelmed with grief and compassion. Such a fit is quite natural with creative men. There is a woman in every man and there is a man in every woman. The creative genius is often possessed by this underground self in a fit. Thus Ramchandra weeps like a woman when he lost Sita in the Ramayana. Even Captain Bluntschli after three days under fire, says that Raina, a lady, could make him weep like a child with little effort, if she wished, in Bernard Shaw’s drama Arms and the Man. Hence Chaucer describes his knight as ‘though so much distinguished he was wise and his bearing modest as a maid’. Krishna, however, is visibly annoyed with the bemoaning Arjuna. Whence does this mindlessness appear in Arjuna at this critical moment? This is ignoble. It will neither bring fame to hi in this life nor will it lead him to heaven in after-life. There will be sheer disgrace. Krishna asks him not to indulge in languor. It does not become him. He must get rid of his petty mental weakness. He is the one who punishes the wicked.         But Krishna’s speech seems to fall on deaf ears. He asks Krishna, how could he fight Bhisma and Drona? How could he retaliate upon them who should be worshipped instead? He had better live on alms and not kill them than to enjoy blood stained pleasures killing the best of men. Arjuna is in a fix. He does not know which one is desirable? To conquer or to be conquered that is the question. Arjuna reminds one of Shakespeare’s heroes and Michael Angelo’s portraits vacillating between to do or not to do.         This is due to inherent contradictions in the super-ego itself. Arjuna belongs to the warrior class. He has been brought up accordingly as a warrior; his task is to rid the earth of its evil doers. The same super-ego has taught him to respect the elders and noble minded persons, and to love the brothers despite their shortcomings. What if when the respected ones and the loved ones do wrong? The predicament of Arjuna is not unique.  If we do heart searching, we shall find that every man in the society is in a similar fix. Indian parents seem to live for their children. They accumulate wealth and acquire property with the sweat of their brow, only to give them away to their children, just as Arjuna can conquer the world for the joy of his own kin. But when the children are against their father life seems to be meaningless to the old parents. The same might happen to the children in relation to their wilful parents. This is a queer world indeed where every dollar one earns deprives another of the same. If Monica Seles wins the Wimbledon Tennis Tournament, Steffi Graf cannot. Thus even if love becomes universal, the social system as such can never deliver goods and services equally to all and sundry. What should man do in the face of such contradictions?         Arjuna points out that the sons of Dhritarastra, without whom, he cannot think of living any longer, stand yonder in the enemy camp.         Arjuna is a great warrior. He can kill anyone on earth. He is confident about that. His prowess is so great that he can also suffer to any extent. He can let himself be killed. Here is the true mettle of a military hero. But every one of us has power over some of our fellowmen. It is a pity that we cannot always use it for the well- being of our dear and near ones. And of course, what else is love than sadism or masochism. We cannot be one with our loved ones. Each one of us knows intuiting through his or her consciousness that he or she is alive. But how about men who are in contact with him or her? They are as good as objects to him or her. That they differ from a chair or a table is reached through inference only. When one finds an object one wants to possess it or wants to be possessed byit. Imprisoned in the cycle of sadism and masochism what way out there can be for Arjuna than to kill others or to be killed.         However great his personal attainments might be Arjuna is dismayed with the riddle of life. We can imagine – the woe be gone knight-at- arms has a lily on his brow with anguish moist and fever dew; the roses on his cheek fast wither too.         Arjuna frankly admits that he is not in his elements; he has been overwhelmed with such commonplace questions regarding the conflict between his duty to his kinsmen as kinsmam and his duty as ordained by his station as a warrior. He does not know what one should do in such a situation. He falls at the feet of Krishna and asks him to exhort him what he should do; he is Krishna’s disciple.         At the outset Krishna tried to verbally coerce him to agree to fight. But Arjuna, the mighty warrior cannot be bullied. He will not fight despite Krishna’s remonstrance. That must have provoked secret similes on the face of Duryodhana.         Krishna now smiles heartily and tells Arjuna, it is not worth-while to weep for what he weeps; still he speaks as if he is very wise. The wise never lament over what is already destroyed and what is subject to destruction. We must agree with Krishna that everything is transitory in the world of senses. The flower that blows proudly soon sheds its silken tassel and its petals are scattered on the ground. However, men cannot but grieve its wearing out. This is vain attachment to the transitory world. This is all due to man’s ignorance, he does not know of anything which is more valuable.         But Krishna says that though everything on earth is fleeting, never was there a time when he himself, Arjuna and the lords who assemble at the battle- field were not their; there will be never a time when they will not exist. This is paradox indeed. When nothing is permanent in the world how is it that everything was without any beginning, everything is, and everything will be through all futurity ? It is through such paradoxes that the deeper truths could be unravelled. The phenomenal world is ever in flux. There one cannot dip into the same waters twice. But there is always a water ripple lurking in the water- ripple, there is always a tree lurking in the tree, there is always a man lurking in the man, that are beginningless and endless. In other words there is a world behind the passing show of the world where you and I and they exist through eternity. The universe is a vast concourse of such ever-living atoms. Thus, if Arjuna thinks that man is mortal, he should not wail if man dies. On the other hand if he knows that no man dies, why should he sigh for the dead; death is not real.         How is it that there is a man behind the show of a man who does not die? We men are not our bodies. We don our bodies. The body has its childhood, youth and old age. In the same way it has its death and destruction. So we need not be surprised at that. This sounds quite reasonable. Indeed the Ramesh who prattled as a baby, and the Ramesh , who was a whinning boy on his way to school and the Ramesh , the middle aged man who pours his tears into a parchment are three different Ramesh. How is it that the Ramesh is there in the three different Ramesh unless Ramesh is someone who is the same, hidden under the changing bodily apparel of Ramesh. The cells that constitute his body wear out in short time and are continuously replaced and yet its owner Ramesh remains as ever. So Ramesh is not the body. If he were the body which body is he? The child’s body?  Or the young man’s body? He is neither body, nor mind, nor intellect, nor sense.  He is something else. So is everyone in the world. Everyone puts on a magic apparel called body that repairs itself and changes itself on its own. Krishna does not, therefore, pay heed to the sorrows of Arjuna.         Joys and sorrows are like the feeling of heat and cold; they are not substances. When we are in contact with the external world through our senses, we feel heat or cold. If the particular nerves of the body that carry heat were insensitive, I would not feel them. If I put on fireproof dress, I can walk in fire. Similarly joys and sorrows take place when there is the contact between mind and the external world. Man is not the mind. What the mind feels is not the feeling of the man that wears the mind. The self seems to put on a magic robe in the body with the aid of which he undergoes certain kinds of sensations and thought just as a space-traveller puts on his robe to go in the air and feels differently from what men would have felt there in their natural attire. Joys and sorrows are passing events. The joys and sorrows of a child stealing a raft of the boatmen to row upstream, till he confronts the hills seeming to grow larger and larger tearing his heart with fear, no longer remains with the adult. Therefore, happiness cannot be the universal standard for our actions. There are so many kinds of happiness. There is animal pleasure in such things as sexual coitus. One who is on the animal level only seeks it. It is not a strange thing to find men and women copulating in cemeteries. On one level, the soldiers here on the battlefield want victory over their enemies, but if one is not so much wrapped in oneself, one could find like Arjuna that war is a stupid thing. On the level of Arjuna, happiness consists of not fighting in the war. These are but happiness in the contingent. If happiness is to be at all pursued, it must be the happiness that knows no ebb and tide. It cannot be the happiness of the body or the mind. The body and the mind, become now happy and now unhappy as events in the objective world come and go. Happiness eternal is possible only if we are in constant touch with something or some event that is ever the same, timeless and spaceless. This was what Moitreyee asked for.         In olden times in India there was a woman named Moitreyee. She was the second wife of Yajnavalkya. In ancient India, they commonly observed four different goals in the four stages of life. In childhood they studied. They joined in the worldly life in youth and pursued gold. At old age they would however leave the world in quest of higher values. The fourth stage was a hand-shake with death. Then the pursuit was the crossing of the bar of the worldly life to sail in the uncharted ocean where one might meet his pilot face to face. Now, the husband Yajnavalkya at the third stage of life made up his mind to renounce the world. He summoned his two wives, elder Katyayani and the younger Moitreyee. He told them that he would parcel out all his property between them before his parting to the woods. But Moitreyee protested in tears. She asked him whether the agricultural land, the cowshed, the tanks, the residential building and the like would give her everlasting happiness? If not, she does not need them. Indeed, any kind of attainment through war, or through non-violence, through acquirement or renunciation in the worldly life, cannot bestow upon one the never-waning joys. Hence set honour in one eye and dishonour in another and one should look upon both with equanimity.         In other words happiness or no happiness, one might join in war or one might not. So Arjuna’s argument that there is no point in joining in the war since it will not give him the desired happiness does not hold water. Arjuna should learn to bear both the warm waves of enthusiasm and the cold current of dejection just as one tolerate hot weather and cold weather. He who is never grieved with this change in worldly situation is alone earmarked for happiness. With him weal and woe make no difference. Human life indeed seems to confront an alien universe. The values of human life have no foothold. Hence imagine a man who has no normal human emotions or responses. Things happen to him and he performs actions, but all in an emotional vacuum. He neither hopes nor despairs. He just is. So the being exists. That which is false does not exist. That which is true, cannot afford to change. In the contingent world any truth must allow the possibility of error. But the truth of all truths cannot have any possibility of error. Truth must have a belief external to and independent of the belief itself. Whether one perceives or not, the existence of the changeless being is beyond all dispute, let nature change herself every hour, every minute, every second. The wise can discern that. The ground on which the phenomenal world is raised, the invisible tissue with which the phenomenal world is woven, is indestructible. Who dares destroy the indestructible?         Krishna had earlier referred to numerous changeless selves behind the show of change of the world of eye and ear. Right now does he refer to that universal concourse of living atoms as the ground and the material for the phenomenal existence. Is the falsehood called the phenomenal world the lair for timeless truths? Of course, the human body has decay and destruction. But the wearer of the human body knows no death. So why should not Arjuna take part in the war? When children fight among themselves, they tear off each other’s shirts sometimes. That does not kill their bodies. Similarly war is just a sport where we tear off each other’s body; that does no harm to those who wear the body. It is bad faith to believe that man is the body. When one understands one’s higher self, which is absolutely undetermined by physiological constitution, all social customs seem to have no intrinsic merit. The barmaid going about her job is acting a part. Suppose she refuses to admit to herself her would-be seducers intention, what she does actually is a series of happenings and not series of actions; there episode follows episode without any responsibility on her part; she is a model of bad faith. Let us suppose that she realises this and wants to get rid of the custom that hangs heavy on man. She tries to achieve something on her own, free from bad faith, free from custom. She goes to Rwanda as a volunteer on her own and fights for the Hutus, a tribe there, and dies. Can she give a dying declaration, hand on heart, that she has achieved her martyrdom herself? So, the scruples that Arjuna posed from social awareness are hollow indeed. He should know that those who think that they are being killed, and those who think that they are killing are both in the fool’s world. They do not know that the self in man neither kills, nor is killed by anyone. The self has neither birth nor death unlike things created in the phenomenal world. It does not come into being,  being born and so it knows no death. It is unborn, eternal and primeval. It does not die with the demise of the body. The man who knows this self to be imperishable, eternal and free from birth and decay, how and whom will he cause to be killed, how and whom will he kill? Just as men don and doff their clothes so does the self change the body when the body is worn out.         The weapons cannot tear the self. The fire cannot burn the self. The water cannot wet the self. The wind cannot dry the self. Yes, the wind can parch the body, water can drench the body, fire can burn the body, weapon can tear the body. Because the body is made of earth, water, air, fire etc. But the self is a simple substance made of nothing. It is its own material. It cannot be further divided. However far we divide matter in the external world we will never reach the self. Because anything capable of division will be capable of further division and so on, having its existence in space and time. The same applies to time also. Time could be broken into smaller and smaller units. In India, a manufacturer of cloths needs at least six months to manufacture cloths of a particular design. The American in the meantime change their clothing fashions thrice. And thus the delivery delayed from India becomes delivery denied. The Americans move faster than us. In the 21st century they are planning to move faster still making each smaller than smallest possible unit of saved time more valuable than the last unit. Existing communication network which moves 1.5 million bits of information a second in the U.S.A. is deemed to be slow. The country looks forward to new nets that would make 3 billion bits of information flow per second through the length and breadth of the country. Now the avant grade countries in the world of technology are trying to use every millisecond. So, the more we break up time, the more it could be divided. The soul is not subject to division. Hence the self is beyond time and space. It is not combustible. It does not melt. It does not thin into air. It is always there; it is everywhere; it is inert; it does not change or move; it is forever. It not manifest. Even ether does not constitute it; hence it cannot be manifest through sound. It is beyond the phenomenal world, being changeless. Knowing the truth of it, Arjuna should not murmur against the horrors of war.         But, everyone may not accept the truth of the soul as independent of the body. The soul, one might posit?  is to body as the fact of being in tune is to the violin. If the chords are in certain relationship, the violin is in tune. When the chords are disrupted no such attunement can exist. Similarly what we call the soul is no more than a certain relationship between the elements of the body and cannot survive the destruction of the body. Krishna says that even if it is granted that the self is born with the body and dies with it, then Arjuna should not lament over death. Because, whoever is born is subject to death. Only thing is that one’s death might take place earlier since one takes part in the war. But does it make much difference if one dies two days or two years earlier than when one would die? Krishna may be right. But we are reluctant to accept it. It is our duty to live as long as we can, and make the most of what we yet may spend before we too into the dust descend. Krishna however seems to know this. Hence he does not linger long on this point. He emphatically says that our apprehensions that once departed we may return no more is not true at all. That which is born must die; that which dies must be born again.         Does Krishna seem contradictory? The answer is an emphatic  no. Only thing is that he is very fast in his dialectic. Because Krishna does not talk for its own sake. He talks only to bring Arjuna round to his own opinion. Arjuna must go forth to the battle. The discourse here is itself an action, the Shreemad Bhagavad Gita  being a drama of conversation. The battle has been suspended for a time, it may resume at any moment.         What Krishna says is that a man might think in different ways. He might think that the self dies with the body only. In that case, if death is a must, there is no point in trying to live longer denying the invitation of war.         But on another level it is the self that puts on the fleshly robe called body; when the robe wears out, it i thrown on the ground ; the self opts for another body. So death being mere change of robes, none of the heroes at the battle-field can be annihilated. By body, here we mean not just the body. It includes body, mind, intellect and ego among other things. In this life my body changed so radically from a chattering baby leaping up to its mother’s arms to an old man of fifty whose eyes are dim, whose hair is gray. In this short span of life, one plays so many roles. No drama or novel can ever grasp it. Just as the child becomes man, his flesh showing wear, he plays so many parts that he himself cannot recollect them fully. He might be a bearer in an office for three months; he might be a flying crew, for next one year; then he might an income tax inspector, in the following year. Finally he becomes a college-teacher. Every time he changes his job, he lands up a new environment where he must behave accordingly. When he dies as an inspector he is born as a teacher. But his name remains the same. If he was named Ramesh as soon as he was born in the year 1947 he will die Ramesh in the year 2001. But as soon as he dies he begins life over again with fresh body and mind, a name and a locality that are also fresh. This is just like playing the role of a king in the country theatre for the first three months in a drama entitled Alexander and Campapse.  The next three months one has to play perhaps the part of a valet in another drama. When one plays the role of Alexander, one must not be the role. In that case one might forget one’s part only to be booed by the spectators. Arjuna should know he is just playing the role of the most valiant among the Five Brothers and he has to play his part in the battle-field. Once he becomes the role, it will be all over with him. If a person, who plays the role of a king of Britain on the stage, begins to believe that he is really a king, he will behave in the same theatrical manner off-stage. And perchance, he feels like entering into Downing Street to remonstare Mr. John Major, the British Prime Minister, for his faulty foreign policy in Bosnia, hell will be let loose upon him, British cops beating his crown with batons. Just as he is a king only on the stage, similarly all of us, what we are, are only actors playing particular roles. So we should try to play our roles properly with necessary improvisations. A teacher in the college must play the part of a teacher. He must not take the air of a Member of Parliament. Thus Ajuna born in warrior class must play his part; he must not act like a mendicant friar. The life-time over, he will be born elsewhere in a different family and different caste to play a new role in a new drama for another life-time. The same is true for everyone in the battle- field at Kurukshetra, and for everyone in the battle of life.         The Jataka Tales narrate many such births and deaths of the Bodhisatva who was finally born as Siddhartha, the prince of Kapilavastu and attained enlightenment. There we find Siddhartha Buddha playing the role of a hawker in one of his earlier births. In another birth he became a widely wandering merchant. In a third birth he was a deer-king. Thus he became a prince, a thief, a tree, and so on in one or other birth, similarly everyone will have endless opportunities to begin life fresh in every possible role that the imagination can conceive of.  When the self can play the role without being one with the role, it becomes itself, just as a country  girl while playing the role of a Maharani on the stage is aware of her country girl self. Then only she knows that the scenic background of the stage, the light upon the stage, the action in the stage are illusions. Similarly, in and out, above, about and below, we are shut up on all sides to live a d suffer like phantom figures that come and go in a Magic Shadow. The Sun and the Moon are the light upon the stage. If we realised that our life on earth is really a magic show, just as the country girl knows that the stage is a stage, we would know who we are, and we would know where we are. The knowledge of a stage does not deter us from appreciating the beauty of the stage. Rather we can appreciate the cruel and the horrible and the ugly as well on the stage since we know that they are clever manipulations only. Arjuna also need not be overwhelmed with the show of a devastating war. He should enjoy its beauty and his part in the drama.         Once the country girl who plays the Maharani knows that the stage is not the world but stage only, she is aware of the off stage world. That leads to the realisation of a soul on third level. On a third level, however, all these births and deaths do not exist for the self. Each self is eternal, all wise and absolutely independent of anything else and pure. It does not normally undergo births and deaths. When the being seeks to discover itself, it unfolds deeper and deeper self. For example, everyone else at Kurukshetra is engaged in battle, Arjuna alone speaks and acts from his greater self which compasses the collective mind hidden below the mind of the multitude. But what Krishna suggests is that Arjuna must delve deeper into his self. The deeper he fathoms his own being, he will find greater and more comprehensive self therein. A small quantity of matter, if probed into, will disclose great atomic energy that can turn a whole prosperous city into utter ruins in the flash of a second. Similarly a puny human being caught up in the snare of senses a working in the theatre of time and space might find in him a self that is free from the yoke of senses. He is also released from the prison house of Time and Space.         What Krishna does is to take into account every possible kind of world view and tries to argue that whichever world view Arjuna might cherish, Arjuna cannot defend his stance of not joining the war.         So Krishna changes over to another point of view. He admits that people might not agree with him as to the nature of the self. They might pose as agnostics. It seems that we wandered into the universe not knowing why not knowing whence like a cloud borne by the wind willy-nilly blowing. And our exit is like that of the rains that vanish in the pores of ocean and shore. We know not whither the living beings were originally unmanifest; they become manifest in the theatre of the world for an hour or two; then return to the unmanifest, it that be the reality there is no occasion for tears at the battle- field.         Life is indeed the riddle of sphinx. No Oedipus can solve it for the entire humanity. How sweet is mortal sovereignty think some. Others look forward to a paradise to come. Some husband the golden grain and others fling it to the winds like rain and so on. Hence some look upon life as a wonder. Another hears of its secret as a marvel. And even after that no one whatsoever has known what life is. No one has been able to solve the problem of human death and fate.         But Krishna says that Arjuna had better take it from him the self or the owner of the body is deathless and can never be slain. Therefore one should not grieve for any creature. ......TO BE CONTINUED