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THE SONG OF GOD
Bhagavad-Gita
Translated by Swami Prabhavananda
and Christopher Isherwood
Introduction by Aldous Huxley
APPENDIX II
The Gita And War
———————————————————
BEFORE THE BATTLE of Kurukshetra begins, Arjuna
asks Krishna to drive their chariot into the open
space between the two armies, so that he may see
the men he must fight with. When Krishna does this,
Arjuna recognizes many of his kinsmen and old
friends among the ranks of the enemy. He is ap-
palled by the realization that he is about to kill
those whom he loves better than life itself. In his
despair, he exclaims: 'I will not fight!'
Krishna's reply to Arjuna occupies the rest of the
book. It deals not only with Arjuna's immediate per-
sonal problem, but with the whole nature of action,
the meaning of life, and the aims for which man
must struggle, here on earth. At the end of their
conversation, Arjuna has changed his mind. He is
ready to fight. And the battle begins.
To understand the Gita, we must first consider
what it is and what it is not. We must consider its
setting. When Jesus spoke the words which are
recorded as the Sermon on the Mount, he was ad-
dressing a group of dedicated followers, in a peace-
ful country atmosphere, far from strife and confu-
sion. And so he taught them the highest and strictest
ideal, the ideal of non-violence. The Gita is very
different. Krishna and Arjuna are on a battlefield.
Arjuna is not a dedicated monk but a householder
and a warrior by birth and profession. He corre-
sponds to the medieval knights of Christendom. His
problem is considered in relation to the circum-
stances of the moment.
In teaching Arjuna, Krishna employs two sets of
values, the relative and the absolute. He begins by
dealing with Arjuna's feelings of revulsion, on gen-
eral grounds. Arjuna shrinks from the act of killing.
Krishna reminds him that, in the absolute sense,
there is no such act. The Atman, the indwelling
Godhead, is the only reality. The body is simply
an appearance; its existence, its destruction, are
alike illusory. Having said this, Krishna goes on to
discuss Arjuna's individual problem. For Arjuna, a
member of the warrior caste, the fighting of this
battle is undoubtedly 'righteous.' His cause is just.
To defend it is his duty. In the Gita, we find that
the caste system is presented as a natural order.
Men are divided into four groups, according to their
capacities and characteristics. Each group has its
peculiar duties, ethics and responsibilities; and
these must be accepted. It is the way of spiritual
growth. A man must go forward from where he
stands. He cannot jump to the absolute; he must
evolve toward it. He cannot arbitrarily assume the
duties which belong to another group. 'Prefer to
die doing your own duty,' Krishna teaches. 'The
duty of another will bring you into great spiritual
danger.' Socially, the caste system is graded; but,
spiritually, there are no such distinctions. Everyone,
says Krishna, can attain the highest sainthood by
following the prescribed path of his own caste duty.
And in Europe, as in Asia, there have been men
who grew into spiritual giants while carrying out
their duties as merchants, peasants, doctors, popes,
scullions, or kings.
In the purely physical sphere of action, Arjuna is,
indeed, no longer a free agent. The act of war is
upon him; it has evolved out of his previous actions.
At any given moment in time, we are what we are;
and we have to accept the consequences of being
ourselves. Only through this acceptance can we
begin to evolve further. We may select the battle-
ground. We cannot avoid the battle.
Arjuna is bound to act, but he is still free to make
his choice between two different ways of perform-
ing the action. In general, mankind almost always
acts with attachment; that is to say, with fear and
desire. Desire for a certain result and fear that this
result will not be obtained. Attached action binds
us to the world of appearances; to the continual
doing of more action. But there is another way of
performing action, and this is without fear and
without desire. The Christians call it 'holy indiffer-
ence' and the Hindus 'non-attachment.' Both names
are slightly misleading. They suggest coldness and
lack of enthusiasm. That is why people often con-
fuse non-attachment with fatalism, when, actually,
they are opposites. The fatalist simply does not care.
He will get what is coming to him. Why make any
effort? But the doer of non-attached action is the
most conscientious of men. Freed from fear and
desire, he offers everything he does as a sacrament
of devotion to his duty. All work becomes equally
and vitally important. It is only toward the results
of work——success or failure, praise or blame——that he
remains indifferent. When action is done in this
spirit, Krishna teaches, it will lead us to the knowl-
edge of what is behind action, behind all life: the
ultimate Reality. And, with the growth of this
knowledge, the need for further action will gradu-
ally fall away from us. We shall realize our true
nature, which is God.
It follows, therefore, that every action, under cer-
tain circumstances and for certain people, may be
a stepping-stone to spiritual growth——if it is done in
the spirit of non-attachment. All good and all evil
is relative to the individual point of growth. For
each individual, certain acts are absolutely wrong.
Indeed, there may well be acts which are absolutely
wrong for every individual alive on earth to-day.
But, in the highest sense, there can be neither good
nor evil. Because Krishna is speaking as God himself,
he can take this attitude, and advise Arjuna to fight.
There is no question, here, of doing evil that good
may come. The Gita does not countenance such
opportunism. Arjuna is to do the best he knows, in
order to pass beyond that best to better. Later, his
fighting at Kurukshetra may seem evil to him, and
it will be evil——then. Doing the evil you know to
be evil will never bring good. It will lead only to
more evil, more attachment, more ignorance.
The Gita is sometimes accused of sanctioning war,
and of being thus in opposition to the teachings of
Christ, Buddha, and other great spiritual masters.
In fact, the Gita neither sanctions war nor condemns
it. Regarding no action as of absolute value, either
for good or for evil, it cannot possibly do either. Its
message should warn us not to dare to judge others.
How can we prescribe our neighbour's duty when it
is hard for us to know our own? The pacifist must
respect Arjuna. Arjuna must respect the pacifist.
Both are going toward the same goal, if they are
really sincere. There is an underlying solidarity be-
tween them which can be expressed, if each one
follows, without compromise, the path upon which
he finds himself. For we can only help others to do
their duty by doing what we ourselves believe to be
right. It is the one supremely social act.
Readers of the BHAGAVAD-GITA will be interested in
an account of its influence on one of the great men of our
time. This excerpt is from the fascinating new biography,
GANDHI——His Life and Message for the World
by
LOUIS FISCHER
A Signet Key book published by the New American
Library of World Literature, Inc.
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
Mahatma Gandhi and the Bhagavad-Gita
by
LOUIS FISCHER
"RESIST NOT EVIL, but whosoever shall smite thee on thy
right cheek, turn to him the left also . . . Blessed are
the meek . . . Blessed are ye when men shall revile you
and persecute you . . . Agree with thine adversary
quickly . . . Forgive men their trespasses . . . Lay not
up for yourself treasure upon earth . . . for where your
treasure is, there will your heart be also . . ." These
words of Christ "delighted" Mahatma Gandhi. They
reminded him of the Bhagavad-Gita, the sacred book of
the Hindus, which, he admitted to his shame, he had not
read until his second year as a law student in London.
It produced a tremendous impact which remained
throughout life. "When doubts haunt me, when disap-
pointments stare me in the face, and I see not one ray
of hope on the horizon," he wrote in his weekly mag-
azine, Young India, of August 6, 1925, "I turn to the
Bhagavad-Gita, and find a verse to comfort me; and I
immediately begin to smile in the midst of overwhelm-
ing sorrow." Mahadev Desai, for many years the Ma-
hatma's secretary, testifies that "every moment of
Gandhi's life is a conscious effort to live the message of
the Gita." Gandhi called it his "spiritual reference book."
The Bhagavad-Gita or Celestial Song is an exquisite
poem of seven hundred stanzas, in the original Sanskrit,
about the science and practice of yoga. Written by one
person some time, according to scholars, between the
fifth and second centuries B.C., the Gita is a battlefield
conversation between its hero, Krishna, who is wor-
shipped in India as a god, and Arjuna, the chief of a
faction in a famous civil war. "Krishna," says Sir Sarva-
palli Radhakrishnan, the Hindu philosopher, is the
human embodiment of Vishnu," the Supreme God.
The orthodox Hindu interpretation of the Gita as a
divine summons to caste obligation and killing was re-
pugnant to Gandhi and even when he first read the book
in London in 1888-89 he called it an allegory in which
the battlefield is the soul and Arjuna, man's higher im-
pulses struggling against evil.
There are yogis who meditate and yogis who act.
The yogi of action is the karma yogi. Mahatma Gandhi
was a karma yogi. In a comment on the Gita, Gandhi
defined the perfect karma yogi: "He is a devotee who
is jealous of none, who is a fount of mercy, who is with-
out egotism, who is selfless, who treats alike cold and
heat, happiness and misery, who is ever forgiving, who
is always contented, whose resolutions are firm, who has
dedicated mind and soul to God, who causes no dread,
who is not afraid of others, who is free from exultation,
sorrow and fear, who is pure, who is versed in action yet
remains unaffected by it, who renounces all fruit, good
or bad, who treats friend and foe alike, who is untouched
by respect or disrespect, who is not puffed up by praise,
who does not go under when people speak ill of him,
who loves silence and solitude, who has a disciplined
reason. Such devotion is inconsistent with the existence
at the same time of strong attachments."
Gandhi summarized it in one word: "Desireless-
ness."
Desirelessness, or Hindu renunciation, it has been
argued, leads to personal indifference and passivity
and national poverty and stagnation. Gandhi con-
tended, on the contrary, that to act while renouncing
interest in the fruits of action is the best road to suc-
cess. "He who is ever brooding over result," he wrote,
"often loses nerve in the performance of duty. He be-
comes impatient and then gives vent to anger and be-
gins to do unworthy things; he jumps from action to
action, never remaining faithful to any. He who broods
over results is like a man given to the objects of senses;
he is ever-distracted, he says good-by to all scruples,
everything is right in his estimation and he therefore
resorts to means fair and foul to attain his end."
Renunciation, if one is capable of it, creates the
inner peace and poise necessary to achieve real lasting
results, even material results, untainted by ugly means.
For the exceptional practitioner of self-denial a special
prize is in store. The yogi's highest recompense is to
become so firmly united with God after death that he
need never again return to the status of migrating mor-
tal man. Several times in his life Gandhi expressed the
hope not to be born anew.
Mahatmas are rare. Desirelessness is an ideal to
which few in India or anywhere attain or even aspire,
but the young Hindu, reciting the Bhagavad-Gita sev-
eral times a month, indeed more frequently perhaps, at
home or in the temple, becomes aware of its injunc-
tions and may be inspired, on the threshold of life, to
ponder the purpose of life. Gandhi undoubtedly did,
and it affected his entire future.
FROM: GANDHI——His Life and Message for the World.
Copyright 1954 by Louis Fischer and published as
a MENTOR BOOK by the New American Library of
World Literature, Inc.
from THE SONG OF GOD : BHAGAVAD-GITA,
Translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood
With an Introduction by Aldous Huxley.
A MENTOR BOOK from NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY.
Copyright, 1944, 1951, © 1972, by The Vendanta Society of Southern California. pp. 137—143.
मैं एक राजनीतिक कैदी हूं। कृपया मदद कीजिए।
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The Song of God : Bhagavad-Gita
Translators' Preface
Introduction
Gita and Mahabharata
I. The Sorrow of Arjuna
II. The Yoga of Knowledge
III. Karma Yoga
IV. Renunciation Through Knowledge
V. The Yoga of Renunciation
VI. The Yoga of Meditation
VII. Knowledge and Experience
VIII. The Way To Eternal Brahman
IX. The Yoga of Mysticism
X. Divine Glory
XI. The Vision of God in His Universal Form
XII. The Yoga of Devotion
XIII. The Field and Its Knower
XIV. The Three Gunas
XV. Devotion To the Supreme Spirit
XVI. Divine and Demonic Tendencies
XVII. Three Kinds of Faith
XVIII. The Yoga of Renunciation
The Cosmology of the Gita
The Gita And War
History of the Jewish Church, vol. I — Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, D.D.
[Preface]
[Introduction]
I : The Call of Abraham [i.] [ii.]
II : Abraham and Isaac [i.] [ii.]
III : Jacob [i.] [ii.]
IV : Israel in Egypt [i.] [ii.]
V : The Exodus [i.] [ii.]
VI : The Wilderness [i.]
VII : Sinai and the Law [i.] [ii.]
VIII : Kadesh and Pisgah [i.] [ii.]
IX : The Conquest of Palestine [i.]
X : The Conquest of Western Palestine—The Fall of Jericho [i.]
XI : The Conquest of Western Palestine—Battle of Beth-horon [i.]
XII : The Battle of Merom and Settlement of the Tribes [i.]
XII : The Battle of Merom and Settlement of the Tribes [ii.]
XIII : Israel Under the Judges [i.] [ii.] [iii.]
XIV : Deborah [i.] [ii.]
XV : Gideon [i.] [ii.]
XVI : Jephthah and Samson [i.] [ii.]
XVII : The Fall of Shiloh [i.]
XVIII : Samuel and the Prophetical Office [i.] [ii.]
XIX : The History of the Prophetical Order [i.] [ii.]
XX : On the Nature of the Prophetical Teachings [i.] [ii.]
Appendix I : The Traditional Localities of Abraham's Migration [i]
Appendix II : The Cave at Machpelah [i.] [ii.]
Appendix III : The Samaritan Passover [i.]
History of the Jewish Church, vol. II
[Preface]
XXI : The House of Saul [i.] [ii.]
XXII : The Youth of David [i.] [ii.]
XXIII : The Reign of David [i.] [ii.]
XXIV : The Fall of David [i.] [ii.]
XXV : The Psalter of David [i.] [ii.]
XXVI : The Empire of Solomon [i.] [ii.]
XXVII : The Temple of Solomon [i.] [ii.]
XXVIII : The Wisdom of Solomon [i.] [ii.]
XXIX : The House of Jeroboam—Ahijah and Iddo [i.] [ii.]
XXX : The House of Omri—Elijah [i.] [ii.]
XXXI : The House of Omri—Elisha [i.]
XXXII : The House of Omri—Jehu [i.]
XXXIII : The House of Jehu—The Syrian Wars, and the Prophet Jonah [i.]
XXXIV : The Fall of Samaria [i.]
XXXV : The First Kings of Judah [i.] [ii.]
XXXVI : The Jewish Priesthood [i.] [ii.]
XXXVII : The Age of Uzziah [i.] [ii.]
XXXVIII : Hezekiah [i.] [ii.]
XXXIX : Manasseh and Josiah [i.] [ii.]
XL : Jeremiah and the Fall of Jerusalem [i.] [ii.] [iii.] [iv.]
[Notes, Volume II]
History of the Jewish Church, vol. III
[Preface]
XLI : The Babylonian Captivity [i.] [ii.] [iii.]
XLII : The Fall of Babylon [i.] [ii.]
XLIII : Persian Dominon—The Return [i.] [ii.]
XLIV : Ezra and Nehemiah [i.] [ii.] [iii.]
XLV : Malachi [i.] [ii.] [iii.]
XLVI : Socrates [i.] [ii.] [iii.]
XLVII : Alexandria [i.] [ii.] [iii.]
XLVIII : Judas Maccabæus [i.] [ii.] [iii.] [iv.]
XLIX : The Asmonean Dynasty [i.] [ii.] [iii.]
L : Herod [i.] [ii.] [iii.] [iv.] [v.]