Dear Editor,
On the evening of April 6 last, on the campaign trail in Canal Polder 1, a senior and respected politician is reported to have appealed to his audience to take to action recalling Krishna’s famous exhortation to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. Reference was also made to boy devotee Prahlad, who defied his father, king Hiranyakashipu.
As the Prahlad story goes, to frame it only in terms of the young man’s defiance of his arrogant father and king is to impose on it a limited and distorted perspective. It is also clearly a story of honour and respect, restoration and reconciliation.
However, the most important motif of the story is of Prahlad’s unswerving devotion to Lord Vishnu. When, for example, the order was given to kill him in the very first instance, his response was, “O soldiers, as surely as Vishnu is present in your weapons and in my body so truly shall these weapons fail to harm me.” Speaking to his father on another occasion he remarked that, “the divine Vishnu is in you, me and in all other beings, how then can I can have friends and foes distinct from myself?”
At the end of the episode when he was offered a final boon, his request was, “Lord, in all the thousands of births I may have to endure, my devotion to you never decay or waver. Just as the worldly-minded are attached to sense pleasures, may my heart be always devoted to you.” Whoever, therefore, wishes to interpret this event will need to bear this central motif in mind.
It would augur well for our country if the message of the Shrimad Bhagavad Gita is brought into public discourse. Some of the greatest modern exponents and devotees of the Gita have done exactly this with and with great success. The best example of this tradition is Mahatma Gandhi.
The Gita begins with Arjuna, a warrior of great renown, who had become intensely delusional and despondent at the prospect of facing his friends, relatives, elders and teachers in battle. To shock him out of this state of inertia and stupor Krishna gives a stirring call (2:2-3) for him to stand up and do his duty, and to shake off all faint-heartedness.
But the Gita is not concerned with mere action of the type encouraged by some of our commentators who frequently urge revolution and encourage people to take to the streets to give vent to their anger and frustration. The Gita distinguishes between mere action (karma) that leads to bondage and action (karma yoga) that leads to ultimate liberation.
It is in this latter sense that Gandhi employed the Gita. For him it was a sadhana, a discipline to be lived. He understood it as brahma vidya, the knowledge of the eternal. Tradition accepts the Gita as one of the most important adhyatma texts, which are concerned with the investigation into the nature of the self which makes, it is first and foremost, a moksha shastra, a science of liberation from the cycle of birth and death.
According to the Gita’s philosophy of action, all actions lead to bondage or a continuation of the cycle of birth and death, as all actions spring from desires motivated by attraction (raga) and repulsion (dwesha). On the other hand, our human condition and constitution are such that we cannot remain inactive even for a moment. With this in mind, the Bhagavad Gita offers a number of methods out of this dilemma.
One of the earliest solutions the Gita gives to overcome this dilemma is through the discipline of equanimity in relation to the outcome, positive or negative, of any course of action. Politics is driven by the desire for success and victory, and the fear of failure and defeat. In success and victory there is joy and celebration while in failure and defeat there is despondency and grief.
On the contrary, the Gita teaches us to view the results of all actions yielding pleasure or pain, gain or loss, victory or defeat with the same sense of detachment. This is what it calls action grounded in yoga, or karma yoga. In fact, one of the definitions (2.48) given for yoga in the Gita is evenness of the mind (samatvam yoga ucyate).
So the Gita tells us (2:51) that the wise, endowed with this attitude of karma yoga, having given up the desire for results of action are freed from all afflictions and from the bondage of rebirth. This yoga is also known as perfection in action (yogah karmasu kaushalam), which is really another definition of yoga (2:50).
As noted above all actions are grounded in desires. In what sense then the Gita speaks of desirelessness in action as its ideal? It helps us to understand its grand ideal with the help of three concepts already introduced above: attachment (raga), repulsion (dwesha) and mental equipoise (samatvam).
The Gita is implying here that it is not the desire per se that constitutes the human problem. Krishna himself says in the Gita that he is desire itself that is not opposed to dharma (7:11). The problem for us arises when we do not get what we desire or when we get what we do not desire, but when the mediating principle is evenness of mind, then this problem is resolved. By this practice knowledge dawns and delusion is banished.
What has been written here is merely the first step in the Gita’s philosophy of action, but this is how we have to understand Krishna’s call for action and it will be a great day for us if and when politicians present the Gita in its entirety to their audience with faithfulness and respect. All will be inestimably enriched.
Having said this, there are political treatises in Hinduism that are meant specifically for political purposes, such as Kautilya’s Artha Shastra and Narayana Pandita’s Hitopadesha. The latter work deals with alliance, dissension, war and peace. It is of interest to us that the book on alliance called mitralabha ends with this verse: If you leave what is certain for something uncertain then you may lose what is certain – and what is uncertain is as good as dead.
Yours faithfully,
Swami Aksharananda
