Living Bhagavad Gita 006: Take My Chariot between the Two Armies, Krishna

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.  

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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

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’!

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Image courtesy: Devender Malhotra

Thank you in advance for your questions and comments.

Living Bhagavad Gita 005: War Conches Blown

Short articles on the Bhagavad Gita for the busy, stressed working people of today. The series discusses how to live the Gita in our daily life in these volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous times.

[Continued from the previous post]

Then conches, kettle drums, tabors, trumpets and cow-horns suddenly blared forth from the Kaurava side creating a tumult.

Stationed in their splendid chariot with white horses yoked to it, Krishna and Arjuna too then blew their sacred conches – Krishna blew his Panchajanya and Arjuna, the Devadatta.

Bhima of terrible deeds joined them blowing his great conch Paundra. King Yudhishtira blew his conch Anantavijaya and Nakula and Sahadeva blew the Sughosha and the Manipushpaka.

Then Kashiraja, the outstanding bowman; Sikhandi, the mighty chariot-warrior; Dhrishtadyumna and Virata; Satyaki, the unvanquished; Drupada, the sons of Draupada, and the mighty-armed son of Subhadra, O Lord of the earth, all blew their conches.

The tumultuous bellow of the conches, resounding through the sky and earth, tore through the hearts of the Kaurava warriors. BG 1.13-19

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Just as the Gita does not tell us the names of the conches the Kaurava warriors blew, it also does not tell us anything about what effect the blowing had on the Pandavas.

As a rule, the warriors of the Mahabharata war were excited about wars. For them it was a parva, a festival, a celebration, a sacrifice in the Vedic sense of the term, a sacred ritual in which you offered yourself as the ahuti in the fire of the yajna that the war was. For, everyone in the Mahabharata society knew that death was no more than a change of clothes, as the Gita later says. They knew that no one ever really died nor did anyone ever kill anyone: naayam hanti na hanyate – “this [soul] neither kills nor dies.”  

Sage Vyasa describes with immense thrill the ecstasy the warriors experience in the battlefield as they meet with their heroic death. The only thing they were worried about was they should not die the death of cowards! Death was the bride they courted in war with as much ardour as a young man courts his beloved.

A warrior was taught from his birth to look upon glory in battle as the most desirable goal of life. To him battles were peak experiences, accompanied by rapturous ecstasies. The warriors lived for such experiences and when an opportunity arose, even the possibility of death did not deter them from courting these. If anything, that threat added excitement to the challenge. They believed that “the death that a Kshatriya meets with at home is censurable. Death on one's bed at home is highly sinful. The man who casts away his body in the woods or in battle after having performed sacrifices, obtains great glory. He is no man who dies miserably weeping in pain, afflicted by disease and decay, in the midst of crying kinsmen.”

Many people came to join the Mahabharata war without caring which side they joined so long as they got an opportunity to fight! Shishupala first approached the Pandava side requesting them to take him and when they refused, went to the Kauravas requesting them to take him on their side! Karna did keep the promise he made to his mother Kunti about not killing any of her sons other than Arjuna but apart from that, he fought to his best in the war calling the war a Vedic yajna, a fire sacrifice, though his heart is not in it because of the unethical ways of Duryodhana,

Howevr, speaking of the impact of the conches blown by Krishna and the Pandavas verse 19 of the chapter says that the tumultuous boom echoed and reechoed in the sky and on the earth and cleaved through the hearts of the warriors on the Kaurava side.

They were terrified by the power of the challenge thrown at them by the Pandavas.

Now, if warriors in the Mahabharata times excitedly looked forward to death and glory in battles, why should the Kaurava warriors be terrified all on a sudden?

Being on the side of right gives one immense strength whether it is while taking an important decision in personal life or in the corporate boardroom or while facing an enemy in the battlefield. In the previous article we saw how absolutely fearless ordinary Indians were as they faced the might of the British Empire in the freedom struggle, as when they did satyagraha in front of the Dharasana Salt Works in Gujarat.  “Rang de basanti chola, maiye rang de, mera rang de basanti chola,” our freedom fighters sang with a thrill in their voice: “Colour my clothes saffron, O Motherland, colour my clothes saffron!” “Sarfaroshi ki tamannaa ab hamare dil mein hai, dekhnaa ki zor kitnaa baazu-e-qaatil mein hai” – these immortal lines written by Bismil Azimabadi that spoke of the freedom fighters desire to offer their heads for their cause became the war cry of millions of soldiers of India’s battle for freedom from British shackles. That is the kind of fearlessness you have in your heart when you are on the side of the right cause.

The warriors in the Kaurava army knew they were on the side of the wrong cause and hence the fear in their hearts as they stand ready to battle and hear the sound of the battle challenge of the Pandavas.

Faith in dharma was strong in the Mahabharata society and they strongly believed that final victory will go to where dharma is: yato dharmas tato jayah.  Satyam eva jayate, said the Mundaka Upanishad [3..1.6] and they believed satya is the highest dharma and where satya is, victory will be.  

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Blowing conches at the beginning of all sacred acts is part of the timeless Indian tradition. Morning and evening worships in India both in temples and in homes begin with the blowing of conches. Even today in Bengal homes, for instance, no evening worship is conducted without the blowing of conches, traditionally done by women. Blowing conches here at the beginning of the war is thus not just announcing the war and challenging the enemy to fight but also declaring to oneself and to others that what is about to begin is as much an act of worship as a puja is.

For our ancestors, a dharma yuddha was a sacred yajna in which offerings of human life were made into the sacrificial fire of battle lit in the battlefield. And the goal to be attained through the yajna was the common good for the world and glory and the bliss of battle for the individual soldier.

Anything we do can be a sacred act if it is done with the right attitude. It is not the act that makes it sacred but the attitude behind it.

There was once a saintly old man who never ate or drank while the sun shined in the sky. And the people noticed that the heavens were delighted with his vow. For, there appeared a bright star above the nearby mountain whenever the man was in the village. The star remained in the sky not only at night but also throughout the day for everyone in the village to see. People revered the man and his penance that made this miracle possible.

Every once in a while the man made a solitary trip to the mountain top to spend some time there in solitude. But one day when he started a little girl from the village said she too would go with him. The man tried to dissuade the girl telling her the journey was very tough and also, he would neither eat nor drink during the entire trip. But the little girl insisted and the man did not know how to say no to her without hurting her.

As they started, people looked up at the mountain top: the star was bright in the sky above the mountain.  

The journey was indeed tough and the climb very steep. An hour or two after they started, the little child was very thirsty. The man told her to drink some water from one of the tiny streamlets of fresh water along the mountain path they were using. But the girl said she would not drink unless he too drank. This happened three or four times and finally the man realized the child will not be able walk another step unless she had a drink of water. Very reluctantly he decided to do what he had never done before – break his vow and drink some water so that the little girl too can drink.

The man was now afraid to look at the sky above the mountain. He had broken his vow!  The miracle star will no more be there! Shivering inside, the man slowly raised his head and looked up.

And the story tells us his eyes met with a greater miracle. Where the lone star used to be, there now stood two stars in the sky, each shining more brightly than the lone star ever did.

Keeping a religious vow is a sacred act. But breaking the vow can be spiritual too, if it is done for the right reasons.

Killing in battle can be a sacred act if it is done for the right reasons and with the right attitude.

The Mahabharata speaks of the professional butcher Dharmavyadha who climbs to such great heights of spirituality that a great ascetic is sent to learn from the butcher! The butcher had practiced butchery as his dharma, with the right attitude.

A war in which thousands of people are killed can be sacred too under the right circumstances. It can be fought as a sacred ritual.       

The Saundarya Lahari of Adi Shankracharya is one of most precious gems the acharya gifted to the world. It has this beautiful prayer made to the Goddess so that everything we do becomes an act of worship. The shloka says:

japo jalpah shilpam sakalam api mudraa-virachanaa
gatih praadakshinya-kramanam ashanaady-aahuti-vidhih
pranaamah samveshah sukham akhilam atmaarpana-drishaa
saparya-paryaayaas tava bhavatu yan me vilasitam. Saundarya Lahari 27

The shloka says: O Goddess, may all my meaningless talk be your prayer, all the movements of my body be the sacred gestures of your worship, my walk pradakshina around you, my eating and drinking oblations offered to you! May my lying down be prostrations to you and everything else that I do for my comfort and joy be acts of your worship and my surrender to you!

Yad yad karma karomi tattadakhilam shambho tavaraadhanam – “May every single act of mine become worship offered to you, O Lord,” says another famous shloka.

Krishna himself says in the Gita: yat karoshi yad ashnaasi yaj juhoshi dadaasi yat
yat tapasyasi kaunteya tat kurusva madarpanam – “All that you do, O Arjuna, all that you eat, all offerings you make and all that you give away, all austerities that you perform – dedicate all that to me.” BG 9.27  

While everything you do or have could be offered in worship, it is the best you have that you offer to the Lord, and in the life of a kshatriya there is nothing superior to a dharma yuddha. Certainly his offering of a leaf, or a flower, or a lighted lamp, or the words of a prayer is not superior to that. The highest worship is offering actions originating from the best in you. For an artist, the best he can offer in worship is his art, for a singer it is his song, for a writer it is his writing, for a leader it is his leadership. What better offering can a warrior, a kshatriya, make at the feet of the Lord than a dharma yuddha?

Krishna makes all this clear beyond a doubt when he says in the concluding chapter of the Gita: swakarmanaa tam abhyarchya siddhim vindati maanavah – “Man achieves the highest by worshipping Him through his actions.” Gita 18.46

Nothing would be more appropriate than the blowing of the conches by the chief warriors at the beginning of the Kurukshetra war.  

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Photo courtesy: Devender Malhotra

Thank you in advance for your comments and questions.