THREE
The Human Disciple
SUCH then is the divine Teacher of the Gita, the eternal
Avatar, the Divine who has descended into the human consciousness, the Lord
seated within the heart of all beings, He who guides from behind the veil all our
thought and action and heart’s seeking even as He directs from behind the veil
of visible and sensible forms and forces and tendencies the great universal
action of the world which He has manifested in His own being. All the strife of
our upward endeavour and seeking finds its culmination and ceases in a
satisfied fulfilment when we can rend the veil and get behind our apparent self
to this real Self, can realise our whole being in this true Lord of our being,
can give up our personality to and into this one real Person, merge our
ever-dispersed and ever-converging mental activities into His plenary light,
offer up our errant and struggling will and energies into His vast, luminous
and undivided Will, at once renounce and satisfy all our dissipated outward-moving
desires and emotions in the plenitude of His self-existent Bliss. This is the
world-Teacher of whose eternal knowledge all other highest teaching is but the
various reflection and partial word, this the Voice to which the hearing of our
soul has to awaken.
Arjuna, the
disciple who receives his initiation on the battlefield, is a counterpart of
this conception; he is the type of the struggling human soul who has not yet
received the knowledge, but has grown fit to receive it by action in the world
in a close companionship and an increasing nearness to the higher and divine
Self in humanity. There is a method of explaining the Gita in which not only
this episode but the whole Mahabharata is turned into an allegory of the inner
life and has nothing to do with our outward human life and action, but only
with the battles of the soul and the powers that strive within us for possession.
That is a view which the general character and the actual
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language of the epic does not
justify and, if pressed, would turn the straightforward philosophical language
of the Gita into a constant, laborious and somewhat puerile mystification. The
language of the Veda and part at least of the Puranas is plainly symbolic, full
of figures and concrete representations of things that lie behind the veil, but
the Gita is written in plain terms and professes to solve the great ethical and
spiritual difficulties which the life of man raises, and it will not do to go behind
this plain language and thought and wrest them to the service of our fancy. But
there is this much of truth in the view, that the setting of the doctrine
though not symbolical, is certainly typical, as indeed the setting of such a
discourse as the Gita must necessarily be if it is to have any relation at all
with that which it frames. Arjuna, as we have seen, is the representative man
of a great world-struggle and divinely-guided movement of men and nations; in
the Gita he typifies the human soul of action brought face to face through that
action in its highest and most violent crisis with the problem of human life
and its apparent incompatibility with the spiritual state or even with a purely
ethical ideal of perfection.
Arjuna is the
fighter in the chariot with the divine Krishna as his
charioteer. In the Veda also we have this image of the human soul and the
divine riding in one chariot through a great battle to the goal of a
high-aspiring effort. But there it is a pure figure and symbol. The Divine is
there Indra, the Master of the World of Light and Immortality, the power of
divine knowledge which descends to the aid of the human seeker battling with
the sons of falsehood, darkness, limitation, mortality; the battle is with
spiritual enemies who bar the way to the higher world of our being; and the goal
is that plane of vast being resplendent with the light of the supreme Truth and
uplifted to the conscious immortality of the perfected soul, of which Indra is
the master. The human soul is Kutsa, he who constantly seeks the
seer-knowledge, as his name implies, and he is the son of Arjuna or Arjuni, the
White One, child of Switra the White Mother; he is, that is to say, the sattwic
or purified and light-filled soul which is open to the unbroken glories of the
divine knowledge. And when the chariot reaches the end of its journey, the own
home of Indra, the human Kutsa
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has grown into such an exact likeness
of his divine companion that he can only be distinguished by Sachi, the wife of
Indra, because she is “truth-conscious”. The parable is evidently of the inner
life of man; it is a figure of the human growing into the likeness of the
eternal divine by the increasing illumination of Knowledge. But the Gita starts
from action and Arjuna is the man of action and not of knowledge, the fighter,
never the seer or the thinker.
From the
beginning of the Gita this characteristic temperament of the disciple is
clearly indicated and it is maintained throughout. It becomes first evident in
the manner in which he is awakened to the sense of what he is doing, the great psychological
motives which make him recoil from the whole terrible catastrophe. They are not
the thoughts, the standpoint, the motives of a philosophical or even of a
deeply reflective mind or a spiritual temperament confronted with the same or a
similar problem. They are those, as we might say, of the practical or the
pragmatic man, the emotional, sensational, moral and intelligent human being
not habituated to profound and original reflection or any sounding of the
depths, accustomed rather to high but fixed standards of thought and action and
a confident treading through all vicissitudes and difficulties, who now finds
all his standards failing him and all the basis of his confidence in himself
and his life shorn away from under him at a single stroke. That is the nature
of the crisis which he undergoes.
Arjuna is, in
the language of the Gita, a man subject to the action of the three gunas or
modes of the Nature-Force and habituated to move unquestioningly in that field,
like the generality of men. He justifies his name only in being so far pure and
sattwic as to be governed by high and clear principles and impulses and
habitually control his lower nature by the noblest Law which he knows. He is
not of a violent Asuric disposition, not the slave of his passions, but has
been trained to a high calm and self-control, to an unswerving performance of
his duties and firm obedience to the best principles of the time and society in
which he has lived and the religion and ethics to which he has
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been brought up. He is egoistic
like other men, but with the purer or sattwic egoism which regards the moral
law and society and the claims of others and not only or predominantly his own
interests, desires and passions. He has lived and guided himself by the
Shastra, the moral and social code. The thought which preoccupies him, the
standard which he obeys is the dharma, that collective Indian conception of the
religious, social and moral rule of conduct, and especially the rule of the
station and function to which he belongs, he the Kshatriya, the high-minded,
self-governed, chivalrous prince and warrior and leader of Aryan men. Following
always this rule, conscious of virtue and right dealing he has travelled so far
and finds suddenly that it has led him to become the protagonist of a terrific
and unparalleled slaughter, a monstrous civil war involving all the cultured
Aryan nations which must lead to the complete destruction of the flower of
their manhood and threatens their ordered civilisation with chaos and collapse.
It is typical
again of the pragmatic man that it is through his sensations that he awakens to
the meaning of his action. He has asked his friend and charioteer to place him
between the two armies, not with any profounder idea, but with the proud intention
of viewing and looking in the face these myriads of the champions of
unrighteousness whom he has to meet and conquer and slay “in this holiday of
fight” so that the right may prevail. It is as he gazes that the revelation of
the meaning of a civil and domestic war comes home to him, a war in which not
only men of the same race, the same nation, the same clan, but those of the
same family and household stand upon opposite sides. All whom the social man
holds most dear and sacred, he must meet as enemies and slay, – the worshipped
teacher and preceptor, the old friend, comrade and companion in arms, grandsires,
uncles, those who stood in the relation to him of father, of son, of grandson,
connections by blood and connections by marriage, – all these social ties have
to be cut asunder by the sword. It is not that he did not know these things
before, but he has never realised it all; obsessed by his claims and wrongs and
by the principles of his life, the struggle for the right, the duty of the
Kshatriya to protect justice and the law and fight and beat down injustice and
lawless
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violence, he has neither thought
it out deeply nor felt it in his heart and at the core of his life. And now it
is shown to his vision by the divine charioteer, placed sensationally before
his eyes, and comes home to him like a blow delivered at the very centre of his
sensational, vital and emotional being.
The first result
is a violent sensational and physical crisis which produces a disgust of the
action and its material objects and of life itself. He rejects the vital aim
pursued by egoistic humanity in its action, – happiness and enjoyment; he
rejects the vital aim of the Kshatriya, victory and rule and power and the
government of men. What after all is this fight for justice when reduced to its
practical terms, but just this, a fight for the interests of himself, his
brothers and his party, for possession and enjoyment and rule? But at such a
cost these things are not worth having. For they are of no value in themselves,
but only as a means to the right maintenance of social and national life and it
is these very aims that in the person of his kin and his race he is about to
destroy. And then comes the cry of the emotions. These are they for whose sake
life and happiness are desired, our “own people”. Who would consent to slay
these for the sake of all the earth, or even for the kingdom of the three
worlds? What pleasure can there be in life, what happiness, what satisfaction
in oneself after such a deed? The whole thing is a dreadful sin, – for now the
moral sense awakens to justify the revolt of the sensations and the emotions.
It is a sin, there is no right nor justice in mutual slaughter; especially are
those who are to be slain the natural objects of reverence and of love, those
without whom one would not care to live, and to violate these sacred feelings
can be no virtue, can be nothing but a heinous crime. Granted that the offence,
the aggression, the first sin, the crimes of greed and selfish passion which have
brought things to such a pass came from the other side; yet armed resistance to
wrong under such circumstances would be itself a sin and crime worse than
theirs because they are blinded by passion and unconscious of guilt, while on
this side it would be with a clear sense of guilt that the sin would be
committed. And for what? For the maintenance of family morality,
of the social law and the law of the nation? These are the very standards that
will be destroyed by
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this civil war; the family itself
will be brought to the point of annihilation, corruption of morals and loss of
the purity of race will be engendered, the eternal laws of the race and moral
law of the family will be destroyed. Ruin of the race, the collapse of its high
traditions, ethical degradation and hell for the authors of such a crime, these
are the only practical results possible of this monstrous civil strife.
“Therefore,” cries Arjuna, casting down the divine bow and inexhaustible quiver
given to him by the gods for that tremendous hour, “it is more for my welfare
that the sons of Dhritarashtra armed should slay me unarmed and unresisting. I will
not fight.”
The character of this inner
crisis is therefore not the questioning of the thinker; it is not a recoil from
the appearances of life and a turning of the eye inward in search of the truth
of things, the real meaning of existence and a solution or an escape from the
dark riddle of the world. It is the sensational, emotional and moral revolt of
the man hitherto satisfied with action and its current standards who finds
himself cast by them into a hideous chaos where they are in violent conflict
with each other and with themselves and there is no moral standing-ground left,
nothing to lay hold of and walk by, no dharma.¹ That for the soul of action in
the mental being is the worst possible crisis, failure and overthrow. The
revolt itself is the most elemental and simple possible; sensationally, the
elemental feeling of horror, pity and disgust; vitally, the loss of attraction and
faith in the recognised and familiar objects of action and aims of life;
emotionally, the recoil of the ordinary feelings of social man, affection,
reverence, desire of a common happiness and satisfaction, from a stern duty
outraging them all; morally, the elementary sense of sin and hell and rejection
of “blood-stained enjoyments”; practically, the sense that the standards of
action have led to a result which destroys the practical aims of action. But
the whole upshot is that all-embracing inner bankruptcy which Arjuna expresses
when he says that his whole conscious being, not the thought alone but heart
and vital desires and all, are utterly bewildered and can find nowhere the dharma, nowhere any valid law of action.
¹Dharma means literally that
which one lays hold of and which holds things together, the law, the norm, the
rule of nature, action and life.
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For this alone he takes refuge as
a disciple with Krishna; give me, he practically asks,
that which I have lost, a true law, a clear rule of action, a path by which I
can again confidently walk. He does not ask for the secret of life or of the
world, the meaning and purpose of it all, but for a dharma.
Yet it is
precisely this secret for which he does not ask, or at least so much of the
knowledge as is necessary to lead him into a higher life, to which the divine
Teacher intends to lead this disciple; for he means him to give up all Dharmas except
the one broad and vast rule of living consciously in the Divine and acting from
that consciousness. Therefore after testing the completeness of his revolt from
the ordinary standards of conduct, he proceeds to tell him much that has to do with
the state of the soul, but nothing of any outward rule of action. He must be
equal in soul, abandon the desire of the fruits of work, rise above his
intellectual notions of sin and virtue, live and act in Yoga with a mind in
Samadhi, firmly fixed, that is to say, in the Divine alone. Arjuna is not
satisfied: he wishes to know how the change to this state will affect the outward
action of the man, what result it will have on his speech, his movements, his
state, what difference it will make in this acting, living human being. Krishna
persists merely in enlarging upon the ideas he has already brought forward, on
the soul-state behind the action, not on the action itself. It is the fixed
anchoring of the intelligence in a state of desireless equality that is the one
thing needed. Arjuna breaks out impatiently, – for here is no rule of conduct
such as he sought, but rather, as it seems to him, the negation of all action,
– “ If thou holdest the intelligence to be greater than action, why then dost
thou appoint me to an action terrible in its nature? Thou bewilderest my
understanding with a mingled word: speak one thing decisively by which I can
attain to what is the best.” It is always the pragmatic man who has no value
for metaphysical thought or for the inner life except when they help him to his
one demand, a dharma, a law of life
in the world or, if need be, of leaving the world; for that too is a decisive
action which he can understand. But to live and act in the world, yet be above
it, this is a “mingled” and confusing word the sense of which he has no
patience to grasp.
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The rest of
Arjuna’s questions and utterances proceed from the same temperament and
character. When he is told that once the soul-state is assured there need be no
apparent change in the action, he must act always by the law of his nature, even
if the act itself seem faulty and deficient compared with that of another law
than his own, he is troubled. The nature! but what of this sense of sin in the
action with which he is preoccupied? is it not this very nature which drives
men as if by force and even against their better will into sin and guilt? His
practical intelligence is baffled by Krishna’s assertion that it was he who in
ancient times revealed to Vivasvan this Yoga, since lost, which he is now again
revealing to Arjuna, and by his demand for an explanation he provokes the
famous and oft-quoted statement of Avatarhood and its mundane purpose. He is
again perplexed by the words in which Krishna continues
to reconcile action and renunciation of action and asks once again for a
decisive statement of that which is the best and highest, not this “mingled”
word. When he realises fully the nature of the Yoga which he is bidden to
embrace, his pragmatic nature accustomed to act from mental will and preference
and desire is appalled by its difficulty and he asks what is the end of the
soul which attempts and fails, whether it does not lose both this life of human
activity and thought and emotion which it has left behind and the Brahmic
consciousness to which it aspires and falling from both perish like a
dissolving cloud?
When his doubts
and perplexities are resolved and he knows that it is the Divine which must be
his law, he aims again and always at such clear and decisive knowledge as will
guide him practically to this source and this rule of his future action. How is
the Divine to be distinguished among the various states of being which
constitute our ordinary experience? What are the great manifestations of its
self-energy in the world in which he can recognise and realise it by
meditation? May he not see even now the divine cosmic Form of That which is
actually speaking to him through the veil of the human mind and body? And his
last questions demand a clear distinction between renunciation of works and
this subtler renunciation he is asked to prefer; the actual difference between
Purusha and Prakriti, the Field and
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the Knower of the Field, so
important for the practice of desireless action under the drive of the divine
Will; and finally a clear statement of the practical operations and results of
the three modes of Prakriti which he is bidden to surmount.
To such a
disciple the Teacher of the Gita gives his divine teaching. He seizes him at a
moment of his psychological development by egoistic action when all the mental,
moral, emotional values of the ordinary egoistic and social life of man have
collapsed in a sudden bankruptcy, and he has to lift him up out of this lower
life into a higher consciousness, out of ignorant attachment to action into
that which transcends, yet originates and orders action, out of ego into Self,
out of life in mind, vitality and body into that higher nature beyond mind
which is the status of the Divine. He has at the same time to give him that for
which he asks and for which he is inspired to seek by the guidance within him,
a new Law of life and action high above the insufficient rule of the ordinary
human existence with its endless conflicts and oppositions, perplexities and illusory
certainties, a higher Law by which the soul shall be free from this bondage of
works and yet powerful to act and conquer in the vast liberty of its divine
being. For the action must be performed, the world must fulfil its cycles and
the soul of the human being must not turn back in ignorance from the work it is
here to do. The whole course of the teaching of the Gita is determined and
directed, even in its widest wheelings, towards the fulfilment of these three
objects.
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