Short articles on the Bhagavad Gita for busy, stressed people
living and working in these volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous times.
The teachings of the Gita, originally meant for leaders, can help us improve
our relationships, combat energy drain and solve our personal and professional problems.
The scripture born in a battlefield teaches us to live fully and achieve excellence
in whatever we do. Based on my years of experience as a Management Professor
and Corporate Officer Trainer.
[Continued from the previous post]
Then, O Lord of the earth, seeing Duryodhana's men in
position and the armies about to clash, Arjuna, raising his bow, told Krishna,
“O Krishna, take my chariot between the two armies. I want to see the warriors I
am about to fight. I want to have a look at those gathered here for battle,
wishing to please the evil-minded son of Dhritarashtra. BG 1.20-23
Arjuna already knows who the main warriors on his side and on the enemy
side are. But in spite of that he wants to have a look at them before the
battle begins.
Arjuna could not have meant that he wants to have a look at the hundreds
of thousands of ordinary soldiers gathered in the battlefield. Obviously, if he
meant to assess his chances of victory and the magnitude of the challenge, he
must have meant the leading warriors on the enemy side. And who are they? Karna
will not be fighting so long as Bhishma stands in the battlefield, so Arjuna
couldn’t have meant him. Could he have meant Bhishma, Drona, Kripa,
Ashwatthama, Duryodhana, Dusshasana, Shalya, Bhoorishrava and so on? But he
does not have to take a good look at any of them – they are his grand uncle,
his gurus, his uncle, cousins and so on. He knows them only too well. Still he
says he wants to take a good look at them: “I want to have a look at those
gathered here for battle, wishing to please the evil-minded son of Dhritarashtra.”
Why does he
say so?
A lot of the time in our life, particularly on
momentous occasions crucial for us, for others or for the world in general, words
come out of us in spite of ourselves, we do certain things not originating in
us but happening through us, for which we are just instruments, just nimittas.
Ancient Indian literature talks of several such
incidents. In the Ramayana we have the example of Kaikeyi who loved Rama more
than her own son Bharata but in a weak moment, under the influence of the
jealousy and intolerance incited by Manthara, asks Dasharatha to exile Rama to
the forest for fourteen years and in his place crown Bharata as the yuvaraja of
Ayodhya. Kaikeyi’s action here is completely uncharacteristic of her. Reading
the original Ramayana of Valmiki, we find that Kaikeyi is a loving, generous,
talented, highly competent person untouched by cunning and other evils of the
world – in fact, there is no one like her in the Ramayana, she is so beautiful
as a person. Nothing she had done before that or anything she does subsequently
explains her stubborn demand in those moments. Various Ramayana traditions
explain her behavior in those moments as Goddess Saraswati sitting on her
tongue and saying through her the words she speaks so that the purpose of the
gods, the slaying of Ravana, could be achieved. Kaikeyi here is just a nimitta
for the purposes of the gods.
In the Mahabharata itself we have the story of close
friends Devayani and Sharmishtha, one the daughter of Guru Shukracharya who was
the priest and advisor of the Asura king Vrishaparva and the other
Vrishaparva’s daughter. The two girls go out to bathe and sport in a nearby
river and enter the water after leaving their clothes on the bank. When they
come out later, their clothes have been mixed up and Sharmishtha by mistake
wears Devayani’s clothes. In the social order of the day the position of the
guru and the brahmana was far above that of the king and socially Devayani,
Shukra’s daughter was much superior to Sharmishtha, the princess. When Devayani
angrily asks Sharmishtha why she wore her clothes, the princess arrogantly tells
the guru’s daughter that she had no right to protest, after all she was the
daughter of a man living on her father’s wealth. For her act of wearing
Devayani’s clothes, and much more for her haughty words, Sharmishtha had to
live her entire remaining life as Devayani’s slave. The consequences of this
incident are far reaching and become the crux of several incidents in Indian
mytho-history, including why the Yadavas [Krishna is a Yadava.] came to be
considered of lower caste status than kshatriyas who they originally were.
The epic tells us the whole incident was orchestrated
in the world of the gods. It was Indra who commanded the wind god Vayu to blow
and mix up the clothes, thus confusing Sharmishtha and making her pick up and
wear Devayani’s clothes. Sharmishtha and Devayani are mere tools for their
purposes.
Sometimes we all become helpless tools in the hands of
daiva, the samashti. That is what is happening here, which is one way
understanding Arjuna’s demand to Krishna to take his chariot between the two
armies standing ready to pounce upon each other. Had he not asked Krishna to do
that, the momentous event of the birth of the Gita, the scripture that has
guided vast chunks of humanity over millennia, would not have happened.
Sometimes the samashti, or God if you will, makes us
do strange deeds and say strange things that puzzle us later. We wonder why we
said or did such those things. All of us
experience moments when events happen through us, we say things that are not
spoken by us but through us, for which we are mere nimittas.
A few days ago the city in which I live celebrated
Khatu Shyam Mahotsav, the festival of Khatu Shyam, also known as Barbarika, the
son of Ghatotkacha and his wife Maurvi. In folk imagination, Barbarika was the
fiercest of all warriors in the Mahabharata. He was sacrificed by Krishna
before the Mahabharata war begins, with a blessing given to him that his head
would, as he wanted, remain on a peepal tree in the Kurukshetra battlefield and
witness the whole war. According to folk traditions, again, after the war was
over an argument broke out among the Pandava brothers as to who among them should
be given maximum credit for the victory and each of the five brothers claimed
that honour. Krishna took all the brothers to the peepal tree and asked Khatu
Shyam to tell them who among the brothers should be credited for the victory.
Barbarika laughs and says during the entire war he saw only one thing:
Krishna’s Sudharshana chopping off the heads of all the warriors and Draupadi
drinking up all the blood.
According to this legend, the war was actually fought
by the two did not actively participate in it: Krishna and Draupadi. All the
others were nothing but instruments in their hands, or let’s say, instruments
in the hands of the power that uses all of us for its purposes.
The Unknown makes us tools in its hands for the
purposes of the samashti.
O0O
The Unknown works in mysterious ways.
I spent the summer months of 1979 in Uttar Kashi,
staying in Tapovan Kuti, the ashram in which my param guru Swami Tapovanam used
to live. One day hearing that the Mahamandaleshwar from Rishikesh had come to
the nearby Kailas Ashram and was giving a lecture there, I went to listen to
him. The Mahamandaleshwar was an engaging story teller and told us a beautiful
story about a passenger in a bus on a Himalayan road.
From the moment this passenger got into the bus, the
other passengers noticed strange, inexplicable things happening. Once they saw
a tree just falling across the mountain road ahead of them, making further
journey impossible until it had been removed and the road cleared. Another time
the engine heated up and had to be cooled before the journey could continue. A
third time the driver felt unwell and had to rest. On mystery filled mountain
roads where danger lurks at every turning, people tend to be superstitious, as
it happens whenever we feel in the presence of powers greater than ourselves
over which we have no hold. Soon a whisper started making rounds among the
passengers of the bus – it’s all because of the new passenger, before he
boarded the bus everything was fine, now nothing seems to be all right.
Two more incidents, and the passengers started demanding
loudly – the new passenger had to get down from the bus. It was because of him
all these bad events were happening. They started threatening the driver too,
saying that they wouldn’t allow the bus to proceed unless the passenger was
sent out of the bus.
Eventually that is what was done. And after the
passenger was forcibly disboarded on the lonely mountain road, the bus had
travelled not more than five minutes more when all on a sudden the old bridge on
which they were started loudly cracking and violently shaking. And then, before
the driver or the passengers could realize what was happening, the bridge
collapsed under them and the entire bus plunged into the deep gorge beneath,
killing everyone on board.
The Mahamandaleshwar concluded the story saying all
the passengers on board were destined to die, except the new passenger. It was
destiny that made the passengers vociferously demand that the new passenger be
thrown out of the bus, he said, so that the accident could take place.
We do not do everything that happens through us. We
become the corridor for much that the samashti does for its own purposes. We tend
to take pride in those actions and incidents if they are good, and feel guilty
when they are bad. Wisdom is neither taking pride for the good things that
happen through us and nor feeling guilty about the bad things that happen
through us.
Which does not absolve us from responsibilities for
the actions originate in our ego. We
must pay the price for such actions, says the Indian tradition: avashyam
anubhoktavyam kritam karma shubhaashubham. naabhuktam ksheeyate karma
kalpakotishatairapi. “We must experience the results of actions we have done,
both good and bad. Even after endless years our karmas are not exhausted unless
they are lived.”
Later in the Gita Krishna asks Arjuna to fight the
entire battle without ego. In verse 30, Chapter 3 of the Gita, Krishna asks
Arjuna: “Surrendering all your actions to me, with your mind rooted in the
self, without any selfish motivation, without the sense of ownership and
without feverishness, fight!”
mayi sarvaani karmaani sannyasya-adhyaatma-chetasa
niraasheer nirmamo bhutva yudhyasva vigata-jvarah
niraasheer nirmamo bhutva yudhyasva vigata-jvarah
This is one of the central verses that summarises of the
philosophy of action Krishna teaches in the Gita.
Actions happen through us whether we like it or not. But
by letting our ego come in between, we can disturb their free flow. The wisdom
of the Gita asks us not to let our ego come in the way of this flow of the will
of the samashti and to become free paths for actions originating in the
samashti. That is what Krishna means when he asks Arjuna to become a mere
instrument in the hands of God: nimittamaatram bhava savyasaachin.
Interestingly, modern neurobiology and performance
psychology tell us that in our moments of the highest performance excellence,
we are without our ego, we transcend the ego. In fact modern performance
psychology insists: without ego transcendence high excellence is just not
possible. And once the ego is transcended, whatever we do will have the stamp
of excellence. Ego transcendence is the basic requirement for
excellence in action.
Ego transcendence is also the secret of all
creativity. Our most creative ideas come to us in moments when we temporarily
go beyond the ego. Ego transcendence is the secret of intuition. All scientific
discoveries and all technological inventions are made by us in those moments
when we are without the ego. So is all great art, all great music, dance,
literature and everything else that is beautiful in the world.
When Arjuna asks Krishna to take his chariot between
the two vast armies, the samashti is acting through him so that the Bhagavad
Gita could be born. Arjuna of course does not understand this, but Krishna
does. I am sure Krishna’s beautiful smile must have appeared on his face as he
obeyed his friend Arjuna’s ‘command’!
O0O
Image courtesy: Devender Malhotra
Thank you in advance for your questions and comments.
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