Bhagavadgita Chapter 2 continued Krishna Speaks at the Battleground by Dr Ramesh Chandra Mukhopadhyaya

The remaining part of the chapter II  Bhagavadgita         If Arjuna cannot make up his mind on the issues of life and death he had better play his role as ordained by his class. This Ramchandra did. Ramchandra was the king of Ayodhya. His wife was stolen by a demon called Ravana. Ravana kept her in prison until Ramchandra rescued her. Now that she is the queen of Ayodhya, the people of Ayodhya question her chastity since she lived in the custody of the demon for a long time. Ramchandra knew well that she was a pure. But since Ramchandra was born and brought up as a warrior and king, he chose to please the people and gave up his wife. In the world of the Ramayana, that dwells on the Rama story, the king was he who would rule at the pleasure of the subjects.         If we look upon life as a short interregnum between the two unknowns, birth and death, we are apt to assert that existence is before essence. Hence there cannot be principles or rules before we are born into this world. So we cannot refer to any fixed principles when we are faced with the problem of choice. All moral principles rest upon the individual’s choice; there is no objective ground of morality. Thus, Arjuna can act either way; he can join the war; he can also retire from war. Ramchandra could act the role of a devoted husband instead of playing the role of a devoted king. No one could blame Arjuna or Rama for that. But in this hour of indecision one had better take into account one’s station and duties. If someone is a director or a chief minister of a state his first duty is to the people. But think of a populous state, rich in jute and tea and considerably prosperous in industry with a chief minister who deems his duties to his wife and kinsmen more important than his duties to the people. He lives like a sheikh; in order that his wife and odalisques go on pilgrimage, the daily commuters of the local train are forced to get down to make room for the travel, accompanied by his wife, son-in-law, grand-children and their friends and relatives. Each break-fast for him alone costs five thousand dollars. And every penny of the chief minister and his party’s expenditure is borne by the exchequer of the state. Quite naturally, the industries are closed down. People become restless. They are often tortured for that by the party cadres devoted to the chief minister. Even women and children are not spared; often they are burnt to death. Like the dead bodies rotting in the jails, the economy of the state is also rotting. Thus we have forged here a vision of a dystopia where the ruler serves his own family instead of serving his people. The vision is so ugly that we shudder to re-enact it in real life. Thus though there are no criteria governing the choice between devotion to the family and devotion to the state, a chief minister should act according to his station and duties as determined by the society. Every one of us, has a particular kind of education, bringing-up and a profession or occupation; one should act accordingly.  The warrior must not renounce the world. The god-man must not be on the look out for a clout in the corridors of politics. The rich man over head and ears in business activities need not think of becoming a monk. Let every man stand firm wherever he stands in whichever rank and fight accordingly in the battle of life. Arjuna earlier observed that a global war would destroy the time-honoured caste-system based on station and duties. Krishna in retort points out that if people do not act in consonance with their station and duties, the same disorder will follow. Push any system – a digestive system, a computer system, an urban traffic system, or a social system too far, it violates its traditional rules and acts bizarrely. If that happens to the society of the Mahabharata Krishna does not mind. Because change is the category of life in the phenomenal world so Krishna asks Arjuna to obey the duties of a warrior at the battle-field. One who belongs to the warrior class has no greater duty than that. The trade union must play the role of a friend of the workers. The chamber of commerce must see to the profit of the capitalists. When one tries to work in behalf of another, forgetting one’s own role, the companies run on loss and the factories are closed down. This is what ails an underdeveloped country like India where the labour leaders are but the boot-lickers of the owners of the factory and where the cntrepreneurs protest that they are the foremost among the socialists. Hence once Arjuna knows what he is ordained to do by his station in the society, he need not vacillate any more. The warrior class has no other task greater than that of fighting. Merry are the warriors for whom such a war arrives of its own accord as an open gate to heaven. This does not mean that Krishna beats war drums. He does not preach war for its own sake. Otherwise he would have himself joined in the war. But when war is a must, a warrior by birth education and profession should rejoice in it. If Arjuna refuses to fight this righteous war, he will transgress his station and duties and lose his honour; he will commit sin thereby. Nay, people will shower upon him undying infamy. For those who enjoy popular esteem, ill-fame is worse than death. The great warriors who have golden opinion about him, will now despise him. They will say that he has retired from war. The enemies will speak unseemly words variously exaggerating his worthlessness. Krishna is right. Public memory is short. They will forget in no time what great feats Arjuna achieved earlier. They will not understand why Arjuna does not want to participate in the war. There is nothing more deplorable. Thus Krishna refers to honour as a social value. In the face of all these Arjuna should be up and go forth to war.         When Arjuna wept saying that he did not want to kill his kinsmen in the war he took it for granted that no one could beat him. But Krishna points out that no one knows the outcome of a war. For there are stalwarts like Bhisma in the enemy camp. If one is victorious in the war, one will rule the earth; that is the popular belief. If one is killed, one is promised heaven. Such notions as heaven and hell, of course, belong to popular belief and Arjuna used them in his arguments. For last few minutes, Krishna was arguing from worldly considerations. So honour was his theme but he can set the goal of action from higher knowledge. He asks Arjuna to go to the war heedless of victory and defeat, pleasure and pain. Then no sin will touch him. Krishna has already observed how pleasure and pain are immaterial. So are victory and defeat. However great a victory might be, its effects are not permanent. The boast of heraldry and the pomp of power and all that wealth and glory can give await alike the inevitable hour with the scythe and the spade. And they say, foxes hold their court where Ravana – the great conqueror of mythology gloried and drank deep. Therefore no material end in view need not move us to act. Once we try to win a war, what we want is to possess our enemy. Pleasure is the aftermath of possession. That way we are imprisoned by our own desires. But when we look at the skies, or look upon the waves, do we ever seek to roll them like a mat to carry it home in our armpits? Similarly, could we not go to war, just as one visits the seas or sees the Himalayas? Could every one of us look upon life, as we look upon the landscape from a railway carriage, without any attachment to them? Once we do this, we can look upon life as it is, in a light unborrowed from the eye. The world of matter is subject to decay and death. We are attached to it through desire. And once we get rid of the attachment to the world of matter, we are beyond time and beyond space. Hence, one must not go to the war with any attachment. One joins the wars because war comes on his way. Once we do not have any desire, come what may and we could meet its exigencies without any anxiety. But is it possible to have no desire at all? Such a man acts in an emotional vacuum. The death of a mother, the wishes of a girl friend, the chance killing of an unknown person, such incidents would have evoked a whole range of varied emotions that reveal a man in all his humanity. But when a man is neither sad nor jubilant over such actions he just is. Call him sad of life? Of course, he does not understand such comments on our part. He is a hollow man. Or else, think of a man who responds thoughtlessly to the invitation of the world to act. He will be a mere animals, slave to his own senses. But Krishna does not ask Arjuna to go to the war as a robot. In the epic battle of the Ramayana, Kumbhakarna the demon goes to the war as a robot. As a consequence he devours up the demons of his own side also in a fit.         Krishna says that so long he has been telling of the higher truths of the self. Now he will tell him how to attain that higher self through the faculty of intellect. Contrary to popular belief one need not renounce the world or join a monastery to achieve one’s higher self. One has to act wherever life intends one to act. It is the battle- field for Arjuna. Action or inaction as such are not important. The problem is how should one act? Man is surely an animal on a plane. But on a higher plane he is a mind that hopes and despairs, rejoices and laments. On a still higher plane he is an intellect with which he sees into the hopes and fears of the worldly life. Still he must not escape the world woven with the two threads of weal and woe. He must act there only and play his part well. This is possible only through great exertion on the part of intellect. If with the intellect one can rise above emotions and feel himself an alien in the world, it is a great achievement. But still greater heights have to be scaled. Just as one visits a bereaved family and weeps with them if the occasion demands, although it is no personal loss to one, so should one sympathise with the hopes and fears of the world, however much childish they might be. Just as one walks on all four and becomes a horse to humour one’s child so need we join in the fray of the worldly life and take sides if necessary. Thus though one is indifferent to happiness and joy, one must play the part as it is the custom during a festival or a funeral. The exercise of intellect is no formal task. In ordinary rituals one has perhaps to chant a hymn hundred and eight times with definite prayer in mind. If it is done hundred times only and then if the worshipper has to leave his prayer half way at a telephone call, his whole project fails. This is not all. It is said that worships left in its middle might harm him. But no such formality is necessary. We have to attend to the telephone call; be it a call from a girl friend or from a cop; we must not mind at it; we have t overcome our mind with the intellect; we must do all that is in our power to act in response to our telephone call.         Thus Krishna’s call to battle gradually takes a different turn. He asks Arjuna to join in the battle at Kurukshetra. It asks him to fight out his despondency. It asks him to transcend the limitation of his vision. It asks him to fight out desire with the sharp blade of intellect. Krishna says that even a little progress in this direction will save us from great dangers. Horrid imaginings are more fearsome than present fears. If we do not have any desire, why should we look before and after? Those who mean business know what to do. Those who toy with the idea of self-development have thousand fresh projects; before anyone of them are tried, thousand fresh projects replace the old ones. Precisely Krishna will not give Arjuna the leave to take decisions only to be reversed by indecisions and revisions and so on to rot ever in the hell of limbo. There are fools who claim that the Vedas are the only scripture. There is a gossip that there was a solemn gathering of vedic pundits and scholars at Benaras, a city renowned for studies of Hindu Scripture. There it was assumed at the outset that whatever is not there in the Vedas cannot be valid. A young man raised his voice and asked whether such an opinion is at all there in the Vedas or not. The meeting is dispersed. Still there are people who advocate that the Vedas alone contain the whole truth. They ask the people in flowery words to cherish the desire for heaven which is in their opinion the summum bonum of man’s life. They cite the Vedas to advocate certain rituals whereby one might attain luxury and wealth. Lured with such words the minds of men wander aimlessly; they cannot look inward. Krishna says that the Vedas as explained traditionally is very much materialistic. One must be indifferent to every kind of opposites – joy and sorrow, heaven and hell, success and failure. One must be ever in league with one’s self. One must have no desire to preserve the past acquirements and pine for what is not. Even one must not perhaps act to attain one’s higher self. One must not thrust one’s head into the sand of celestial things and promises of heaven. One must carry it freely a terrestrial head that should look inward and outward and give meaning to the earth and humanity. Krishna’s comments on the traditional interpretation of the Vedas is very significant. The Vedas are the most revered scriptures in the world of the Mahahbarata. It is said that it was Vedavyasa who had edited the Vedas and who wrote the Mahabharata also.  If we read the Bhagavad Gita as a poem written by Vedavyasa , we must appreciate his predicament. Marx exclaimed in modern times: Thank God! I am not a Marxist. Similarly the poet himself shudders at the mechanical interpretation of the golden treasury he edited. Or else, if we take the viewpoint of Krishna, we understand that the Vedas are being used to lesser ends in the days of the Mahabharata. Of course there is truth in heaven: it is a world loud with cheers beyond the sphere of sorrow. There is love without love’s sad satiety. There is joy sans its fellow melancholy. There is activity unaccompanied by weariness. But is that the limit of human wishes? Krishna asks Arjuna to excelsior higher still in the expense of his inner world. He must get rid of the opposites. Joy and sorrow, victory and defeat are but the opposites. The notions of heaven and hell are the opposites. One cannot remain without the other. Even “me” and “thou” are the opposites. Arjuna must transcend these opposites. And surely he will attain the flood of beatitude. The small pools of the Vedic scriptures will be of little use to him then. Literature cannot be an end in itself. It is always just a lever to lift our souls up. When one soars to the height of beatitude, the scripture still remain dear to one just as lovers when unite i marriage might fondly read their letters to each other written earlier.         Krishna says that one has the right to action; but he does not have the right to its results. He should not however will an action. He must at the same time desist from inaction. These sound paradoxical indeed. Inaction, it must be remembered, is not absence of action. It is but letting oneself go wherever the wanton wishes carry one willy- nilly. Man in normal state is always active. If he does not do anything physically, his mind works. The work should not be tantamount to inaction. If he does not have any work at hand, Krishna has given a task sufficient for a life time to achieve. That is to observe one’s own mind from the height of intellect and see that no desire pops up there. Desire is at the root of all action. So one must not desire anything. One must not will any action. Will it or not, actions will be thrust upon one and they must be faced four square. There must be readiness at any time. The action might result in success or failure in the worldly sense. But the doer should be indifferent to that.  A businessman may mint money. A politician may achieve power. A scientist may discover world moving theories. An author might bring the readers to melting mood. They will reap applause no doubt from many corners. There will be detractors also. But one must look upon both the upholder and the detractor with equanimity. To that end the doer must get rid of his ego. That is the most clever way to act. This must be accomplished through the efficiency of the intellect. Action with a purpose is far inferior to this. One might join politics to bring about an egalitarian society on earth. One might preach religion to lift up the hearts of men. They also, rather, pale beside the selfless doer. Those who work with the hope of enjoying the good results thereof are very dull indeed. One must give up the awareness of good and bad. Only then one learns how to be cleaver in action. Wherefrom do such notions as good and bad spring? Surely from delusion. In the phenomenal world, as we have already, observed good and bad are relative. There is no ground for objective moral values. Yes, Krishna, on a particular level of his realised self flings ethics into the four winds. Krishna observes that once man swims across the serbonian bog of despondency and delusion, he realises in real life, all that have been taught and all that could be taught. The ocean of knowledge is boundless. It is ever expanding. One cannot comprehend it i hundred lifetimes perhaps in the face of the information boom taking place today. Even then it should be remembered that knowledge is becoming day by day more important as capital. Just as farmers are only two percent of the total American population, so will be the industrial workers reduced to a small fraction in no time. Mind workers will multiply in the age of information revolution. They cannot be interchangeable. Because the tool of workers will be in the brain. These are all true. They speak of hyperbolic increase in the volume of knowledge; but it is a pity that wisdom lingers. Just as measuring the vital statistics of a woman will never help one to win her heart, similarly, a survey of information can never give us wisdom. Wisdom is attained through selfless action without and intellectual struggle within. When the intellect attains its poise in the face of conflicting ideas one attains bliss.         Arjuna seems to have been carried away by Krishna’s call to war inward. The victory at Kurukshetra is ignoble in comparison to the victory over one’s own self. When one takes up a career, one must know about those persons who have excelled in that. Arjuna asks Krishna to tell him about them whose intellect has attained poise. How do those blessed ones speak? How do they live? How do they walk?         Krishna says that when a person thoroughly dismisses the cravings of the mind and is over head and ears in conversation with his own greater self, he has stable intellect. He is not shaken by sorrows. He is not elated with joys. He is sans love, sans fear and sans anger. He is attached to nothing in the world. He neither curses the evil nor greets the good, when he encounters them. An earthquake, a loss in the share market, a war, anything might happen to one for which he is not responsible. Again good luck might move one from the log cabin to the chair of the president of a country. A boot polisher might become a Henry Ford. A labourer in a petroleum mine might become a Rockfeller. A Corsican adventurer might become a Napolean. Let fortune smile if she lists. One need not be beyond oneself. When does one bless or curse? Only when one has attachment to the worldly life. This attachment is possible through the aid of our senses. But the blessed man withdraws them inward so that there is little contact with the external world. He does it just as the tortoise withdraws itself within its shell. The withdrawal of the senses inward has a plethora of meanings. We have five senses. Mind presides over them. Mind cannot see on its own. It is blind like the king of Dhritarastra. Just as the blind king sees the battle of Kurukshetra through the eye of Sanjaya, so the mind perceives the external world with the aid of the senses. This implies mind to possess the external world with the help of all the faculties in man. But once the mind is made to scan itself, the senses need not bring the message from the outer world. Then the senses are busy comprehending the inner self. The ears try to hear the inner voice. The eyes closed try to espy the light of the inner self. The skin tries to touch the image of the inner self to believe it and to remain ever in touch with it as if in a blessed swoon. No, this is not narcissism. This is not mere infatuation with one’s own visage. It is an adventure and a seeking.         The readers are already on the path of adventure. Kurukshetra is nothing other than the human body itself. Blind Dhritarastra is the mind that cannot see on its own and that lords over the body. His hundred children are but the symbol of the hydraheaded desire. They have usurped the body. Each sense is like Janus liking inward and outward. The five Brothers are but the inward looking aspects of the five senses. They now want to wrest the body from the many desires. The personality of the reader is under-going convulsions. Arjuna is also the ego. We generally identify the hero of the story with our ego. At the hour of the battle royal between the inward looking senses and the numerous desires, the ego all on a sudden seems to give up the war. The ego feels that being true to the kindred points of heaven and home would be better. The ego wants to have the cake of selfrealization and yet wants to eat or pertake of the pleasure of the external world. But wisdom springs from the unconscious mind in Krishna. The ego tries to prevail upon the unconscious mind. But the unconscious mind protests and says its says . thus the body is a big wisdom, a plurality consisting of body, senses, mind, ego etc, with one inner voice, a war and a peace, flock and a shepherd.         True that even when the senses are withdrawn from without, they still continue to be enamoured of the pleasures of the external world through the reminiscing of the mind. The mind feeds upon the pleasures of the past. But such actions vanish with the glimpse of the higher self in the mind itself. But this is not that easy. The senses with the inclination for the outward are as powerful as the demons. They overwhelm the god or the inward looking senses and takes the control of the three worlds of the conscious the subconscious and the unconscious of a being. They forcibly carry away the mind that could give whatever one wishes. But once the mind is taken prisoner by the demons, it loses its genial current and can give only what it receives from outward perception through the senses.         Krishna says that the only help that could one expect at this hour is possible when one pines for Krishna at the bottom of one’s heart.         There is a story that during the hour of creation, the whole existence disappeared in the water of the cosmic mind. On that boundless deep rested the primordial atom Narayana, a manifestation of the god head plunged in deep sleep on the cushion of the spread thousand hoods of the primordial snake symbolic of the id or the desires of the unconscious on which the creation is held. The creation is as such the playground of the thousand desires leaping forth from the hell of the unconscious. From the navel of Narayana, who is both father and mother, Brahma – the creator of the universe is born. If the eros or the creative spirit is born, thanatos or the killer’s instinct is also born. They are the demons Madhu and Kaitava. They at once find the child Brahma and rush to kill him. Helpless the creative spirit prays to the energy that has lulled Narayana – primordial matter to sleep. Matter and energy are at bottom of the same. Now-a- days it is called matterergy by science. But for functional need we need both the concepts. Energy appears in the form of a woman from the body of the matter Narayana. At once Narayana is awake. He fights the demons who are his own children and kills them. Narayana thus paves the way to creation by removing the hurdles of unimaginative minds in the demons. Arjuna, in course of his conversation again and again refers Krishna as Madhusudana or one who kills the demon of unimaginativeness. Despite that he tried to prevail upon Krishna. That is why Krishna never refers to his own divinity. But now he has to refer to himself as divinity impelled by the exigencies of truth.         No one can fight the demons of the desire on one’s own. One can only conquer them if one is devoted to the Lord. The love for Krishna has to be inculcated. One must cling to Krishna like a lover craving for his mistress. In a patriarchal society males enjoy more freedom than woman. Hence the paradigm of the lover could be better understood if we take a woman for a lover. In an Indian joint family, a house-wife is tied hand and feet by her duties to her husband, to her mother-in- law, to her sister-in-law, to her neighbours. She cleans the house, cooks the food, attends the ailing, looks after the family poultry and dairy, washes the linen and the utensils and so on. She has hardly time to breath. Habit is internalised and she mentally becomes docile to the system. If such a woman falls i love with a bohemian youngster for his ethereal notes on the flute, one can imagine what hardship and hindrance she has to face. But nothing can stop her. She incloses the young man and seats him on the lotus of her bosom. She washes his feet with the precious drops of love that wells forth the lake of her heart. She fans with the very breath, she inhales and exhales. Cooking, cleaning, washing, brooming she always worships her lover. So the outer world peopled with her demanding husband and in-laws become as unsubstantial to her, as a dream, though they veritably exist.         Krishna is surely physically present before Arjuna as his charioteer. Man cannot explore himself wholly without some external aid. There must be god himself as the aid. But god must communicate with man as man. He must don man’s attire. And he must come not as a master but as a slave. Physical presence of god does not convince one. He must be internalised and solicited. This internalisation is possible because human body is the temple of god. God is our higher self. Hence though Krishna is out there physically, his words were heeded not. Krishna advises to solicit for help from the Krishna within. The true preceptor is not there without; it is there within the seeker himself, he only fingers at the real teacher within the self. The self must guide the self.         Let us enthrone the higher self Krishna in our heart. We have to meditate upon him walking, sleeping, eating, shitting, pissing, fucking, flirting in the work-a-day world. One need not abandon even an iota of his activities or possessions in the worldly life. Let the executive be more busy than ever with the company meetings. Let the college teacher take French leave from the college to make more money through private tuitions (Because that is the way of the world in India). But constant meditation upon Krishna will change the world for him. The more the image of Krishna will be pronounced at heart, the more the world will be as unreal as a nightmare.         If the meditation is otherwise, the shape of things become different. If one meditates on riches, or power or erudition, one naturally wants it close to one’s heart. One visits the rival man’s house. One visits share-markets or race-course where getting and spending is the rule. Now he wants to possess them. But material wealth is always scarce in comparison to our ever increasing want. Hence the economic rat race. Two persons cannot possess the same car. Hence the seeker finds that his coveted object is in other hands. He is angry. From anger, one becomes more determined than ever to attain one’s heart’s desire. One forgets everything else. One forgets his wife and children and friends. One becomes a tyrant eating into his own heart pent up in a castle removed from the fellowmen called love and sympathy and kindness. They are ruthlessly killed like the million youths protesting love at Tian-an-men square in China. From forgetfulness appears the syndrome of loss of wit. The demon of worldly life thus wrests one from the hand of God and yells out “I have won!”         Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. One who is always vigilant in mind and shoots at sight any emotion like love or hatred, just as Indian B.S.F. jawans shoot instantly at the sight of any Pakistani hanadar sneak in Indian territory, is not deprived of worldly pleasures as such. If a woman comes to one, let one enjoy her. Or if it is a woman. If a man comes to her, she might enjoy him. That way no Mahabharata or no Bible is polluted. There is no sacrilege. If money or fame comes to him, of course, he enjoys them. But he is ever in control of himself. A hitch-hiker gets a car-lift and becomes a guest of the multi-millionaire non-resident Indian, Swaraj Paul for time; he enjoys his hour. But as soon as Time the bell-man asks him to get out from the guest house, he is just as happy as ever. This is how one attains placidity of mind.         Once the mind attains placidity it is all quite with the battle- field. The demons of materialistic distraction are destroyed once for all. The ego rid of its narcissism is shorn of its face that casts a longing lingering look towards the worldly-life. Its only face left now is engrossed with the sublime feet of the highest beatitude. All this happens due to the ceaseless efforts on the part of the intellect to control the mind. Now that the control is complete the intellect can wholly engage itself in the pursuit of the higher self.         One who cannot control one’s senses, has no intelligence at all. Even animal have control over their senses. Take any domestic animals whom we can observe closely. Cats are no doubt fond of milk and fish. The main entree of the Bengali people generally consists of rice and fish. Once we become a little careless at diner the cat furtively comes and picks up the fish from the bowl and vanishes through the window. But take the case of dogs. If a dog is a representative animal, then animals have control over their senses, but think of a mild and humble college teacher. Every day on his way to college in the local train he is left to himself. In a brown study he imagines himself at the summit of material success in his career as a teacher. At once he remembers his enemies. He becomes a famous author in his imagination. Some four bright and intellectual ladies are enamoured of him. He enjoys them. A few years later he begets the Magsaysay aware for his writings. Now he comes by eight fresh beautiful girls who admire him. He enjoys them. On a still higher plane of success he is courted by sixteen more women. He enjoys them. All on a sudden his brown study shatters with a jerk of the train. And he finds that his lust is more than that of Harun-Al- Rashid of the Arabian Nights who killed a woman every night after sleeping with her.  The passenger sitting next to the professor thinks that his neighbour is an ideal man. But what is his real self? Is he not less than a dog? He has been imagining of the objects of the world. He has nothing else to think over. If one gives free rein to senses, eating, sleeping, womanising, bullying. He has no one aim. His thoughts now drawn to this object and now to that object have no one purpose. Engrossed with senses and the objects of senses he cannot think. Those who cannot think are doomed to be in the hell of eternal unrest. What is the worldly life like? The people like our professor fight among themselves overtly and correctly to possess more and more comforts in the forest of life like the normads who roam ahunting  and who fight among themselves. When sense gratification is the point, no one woman can satisfy a man. There are limitations on all sides. If desire burns with greater heat and energy, the flesh is weak. That brings sadness with it.  Furthermore, no possession is forever. Thousand flowers bloom in the morning to shed their petals on the ground with the sunset. If the mind follows the inclination of the senses the state of a person is like that of a raft tossed by the wanton winds. The world of senses jerks it on all sides. Therefore, as Krishna observes one who restrains the senses from their objects of love have their intellect stable. In other words, Arjuna’s dilemma has resulted from his want of control over the senses. His mind has been a slave to his senses of loss of his possessions. He should get rid of it.         Arjuna must not imitate what other men do. When all the world is plunged into sleep, the man who rules himself, keeps awake. Unless one burns one’s midnight candle one does not learn. When everybody rushes after the pleasures of life like mad, the seeker quietly contemplates on the way of the world. That which is daytime for the world is the night for the seer. Civilized western countries fell upon Africa with the wake of the twentieth century like a pack of curs and quarrelled among themselves over the booty. That bore fruit in the two great wars. If in retrospection, anyone thinks that it was the awakening of the west, the nations who were too shy to take part in the gold rush should congratulate themselves for remaining asleep at that time.         Whether one wants it or not, one cannot keep oneself away from the pleasures of the world. For the breeze blows when it lists. The birds sing. The flowers bloom. The sky holds its canopy over the happenings in the world. The list has no end. In human life, friends will flock. Love will come uncalled for. One need not turn out one’s guests, just as the sea does not refuge the rivers that pour their waters into it. The sea is full and still it does not refuge the gifts. Similarly the men whose intellect is lodged in the contemplation of the self to gladly receive whatever the worldly life has to give him; nothing disturbs his peace. This is not all. Once a man attains peace he is inpossession of all the wealth of both the worlds physical and spiritual. A man named Nanda left the world for the life of a mendicant at the feet of Lord Buddha. But the pleasures of worldly life still haunted him. He went t his master and told that he would go back to his wife. Buddha asked him to stay with him a while. He took Nanda to heaven where he met five hundred fairies. Buddha assured Nanda that he would give all those five hundred fairies to Nanda, once Nanda succeeded in meditation. Nanda agreed to Buddha’s proposal. Once Nanda attained peace through meditation, he no longer needed those dames. Because nothing in the two worlds was then beyond his powers.         A man who has no pride, no attachment, no desire, freely moves about in the world in peace. He forsakes every object of desire.         Thus a man stations himself in the cosmic self. Once there, he has no fear of being displaced. He lives all along in his state. When he dies, he sojourns to a world where no desire burns.         Such is the glory of a conqueror, who scatters and slays the misbelieving black horde of fears and sorrows that infest the soul. Once Arjuna becomes like that, need he desist from war? Once Arjuna strives to be like that, should he step back from war? War after all is the point where the opposites meet s

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