SIX
Man and the
Battle of Life
THUS, if we are to appreciate in its catholicity
the teaching of the Gita, we must accept intellectually its standpoint and courageous
envisaging of the manifest nature and process of the world. The divine charioteer
of Kurukshetra reveals himself on one side as the Lord of all the worlds and
the Friend and omniscient Guide of all creatures, on the other as Time the
Destroyer “arisen for the destruction of these peoples.” The Gita, following in
this the spirit of the catholic Hindu religion, affirms this also as God; it
does not attempt to evade the enigma of the world by escaping from it through a
side-door. If, in fact, we do not regard existence merely as the mechanic
action of a brute and indifferent material Force or, on the other hand, as an
equally mechanical play of ideas and energies arising out of an original
Non-Existence or else reflected in the passive Soul or the evolution of a dream
or nightmare in the surface consciousness of an indifferent, immutable
Transcendence which is unaffected by the dream and has no real part in it, – if
we accept at all, as the Gita accepts, the existence of God, that is to say of
the omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, yet always transcendent Being who manifests
the world and Himself in the world, who is not the slave but the lord of His
creative Consciousness, Nature or Force (Maya, Prakriti or Shakti), who is not
baffled or thwarted in His world-conception or design by His creatures, man or devil,
who does not need to justify Himself by shifting the responsibility for any
part of His creation or manifestation on that which is created or manifested,
then the human being has to start from a great, a difficult act of faith.
Finding himself in a world which is apparently a chaos of battling powers, a
clash of vast and obscure forces, a life which subsists only by constant change
and death, menaced from every side by pain, suffering, evil and destruction, he
has to see the omnipresent Deity in it all and conscious that
Page 43
of this enigma there must be a
solution and beyond this Ignorance in which he dwells a Knowledge that
reconciles, he has to take his stand upon this faith, “Though Thou slay me, yet
will I trust in Thee.” All human thought or faith that is active and
affirmative, whether it be theistic, pantheistic or atheistic, does in fact
involve more or less explicitly and completely such an attitude. It admits and
it believes: admits the discords of the world, believes in some highest
principle of God, universal Being or Nature which shall enable us to transcend,
overcome or harmonise these discords, perhaps even to do all three at once, to
harmonise by overcoming and transcending.
Then, as to
human life in its actualities, we have to accept its aspect of a struggle and a
battle mounting into supreme crises such as that of Kurukshetra. The Gita, as
we have seen, takes for its frame such a period of transition and crisis as humanity
periodically experiences in its history, in which great forces clash together
for a huge destruction and reconstruction, intellectual, social, moral,
religious, political, and these in the actual psychological and social stage of
human evolution culminate usually through a violent physical convulsion of
strife, war or revolution. The Gita proceeds from the acceptance of the
necessity in Nature for such vehement crises and it accepts not only the moral
aspect, the struggle between righteousness and unrighteousness, between the
self-affirming law of Good and the forces that oppose its progression, but also
the physical aspect, the actual armed war or other vehement physical strife
between the human beings who represent the antagonistic powers. We must
remember that the Gita was composed at a time when war was even more than it is
now a necessary part of human activity and the idea of its elimination from the
scheme of life would have been an absolute chimera. The gospel of universal
peace and goodwill among men – for without a universal and entire mutual
goodwill there can be no real and abiding peace – has never succeeded for a
moment in possessing itself of human life during the historic cycle of our
progress, because morally, socially, spiritually the race was not prepared and
the poise of Nature in its evolution would not admit of its being immediately
prepared for any such transcendence. Even now we have not actually progressed
beyond the
Page 44
feasibility of a system of
accommodation between conflicting interests which may minimise the recurrence
of the worst forms of strife. And towards this consummation the method, the
approach which humanity has been forced by its own nature to adopt, is a
monstrous mutual massacre unparalleled in history; a universal war, full of
bitterness and irreconcilable hatred, is the straight way and the triumphant
means modern man has found for the establishment of universal peace! That
consummation, too, founded not upon any fundamental change in human nature, but
upon intellectual notions, economic convenience, vital and sentimental
shrinkings from the loss of life, discomfort and horror
of war, effected by nothing better
than political adjustments, gives no very certain promise of firm foundation
and long duration. A day may come, must surely come, we will say, when humanity
will be ready spiritually, morally, socially for the reign of universal peace;
meanwhile the aspect of battle and the nature and function of man as a fighter
have to be accepted and accounted for by any practical philosophy and religion.
The Gita, taking life as it is and not only as it may be in some distant
future, puts the question how this aspect and function of life, which is really
an aspect and function of human activity in general, can be harmonised with the
spiritual existence.
The Gita is
therefore addressed to a fighter, a man of action, one whose duty in life is
that of war and protection, war as a part of government for the protection of
those who are excused from that duty, debarred from protecting themselves and
therefore at the mercy of the strong and the violent, war, secondly and by a
moral extension of this idea, for the protection of the weak and the oppressed
and for the maintenance of right and justice in the world. For all these ideas,
the social and practical, the moral and the chivalrous enter into the Indian
conception of the Kshatriya, the man who is a warrior and ruler by function and
a knight and king in his nature. Although the more general and universal ideas
of the Gita are those which are the most important to us, we ought not to leave
out of consideration altogether the colouring and trend they take from the
peculiar Indian culture and social system in the midst of which they arose.
That system differed from the modern in its conception. To the modern mind
Page 45
man is a thinker, worker or producer
and a fighter all in one, and the tendency of the social system is to lump all
these activities and to demand from each individual his contribution to the
intellectual, economical and military life and needs of the community without
paying any heed to the demands of his individual nature and temperament. The
ancient Indian civilisation laid peculiar stress on the individual nature,
tendency, temperament and sought to determine by it the ethical type, function
and place in the society. Nor did it consider man primarily as a social being
or the fullness of his social existence as the highest ideal, but rather as a
spiritual being in process of formation and development and his social life, ethical
law, play of temperament and exercise of function as means and stages of
spiritual formation. Thought and knowledge, war and government, production and
distribution, labour and service were carefully differentiated functions of society,
each assigned to those who were naturally called to it and providing the right
means by which they could individually proceed towards their spiritual
development and self-perfection.
The modern
idea of a common obligation in all the main departments of human activity has
its advantages; it helps to greater solidarity, unity and fullness in the life
of the community and a more all-round development of the complete human being
as opposed to the endless divisions and over-specialisation and the narrowing
and artificial shackling of the life of the individual to which the Indian
system eventually led. But it has also its disadvantages and in certain of its
developments the too logical application of it has led to grotesque and
disastrous absurdities. This is evident enough in the character of modern war.
From the idea of a common military obligation binding on every individual to
defend and fight for the community by which he lives and profits, has arisen
the system by which the whole manhood of the nation is hurled into the bloody
trench to slay and be slain, thinkers, artists, philosophers, priests,
merchants, artisans all torn from their natural functions, the whole life of
the community disorganised, reason and conscience overridden, even the minister
of religion who is salaried by the State or called by his function to preach
the gospel of peace and love forced to deny
Page 46
his creed and become a butcher of
his fellow-men! Not only are conscience and nature violated by the arbitrary
fiat of the military State, but national defence carried to an insane extreme
makes its best attempt to become a national suicide.
Indian
civilisation on the contrary made it its chief aim to minimise the incidence
and disaster of war. For this purpose it limited the military obligation to the
small class who by their birth, nature and traditions were marked out for this
function and found in it their natural means of self-development through the
flowering of the soul in the qualities of courage, disciplined force, strong
helpfulness and chivalrous nobility for which the warrior's life pursued under the
stress of a high ideal gives a field and opportunities. The rest of the
community was in every way guarded from slaughter and outrage; their life and
occupations were as little interfered with as possible and the combative and
destructive tendencies of human nature were given a restricted field, confined
in a sort of lists so as to do the minimum amount of harm to the general life
of the race, while at the same time by being subjected to high ethical ideals
and every possible rule of humanity and chivalry the function of war was
obliged to help in ennobling and elevating instead of brutalising those who
performed it. It must be remembered that it is war of this kind and under these
conditions that the Gita had in view, war considered as an inevitable part of
human life, but so restricted and regulated as to serve like other activities
the ethical and spiritual development which was then regarded as the whole real
object of life, war destructive within certain carefully fixed limits of the
bodily life of individual men but constructive of their inner life and of the
ethical elevation of the race. That war in the past has, when subjected to an
ideal, helped in this elevation, as in the development of knighthood and
chivalry, the Indian ideal of the Kshatriya, the Japanese ideal of the Samurai,
can only be denied by the fanatics of pacifism. When it has fulfilled its
function, it may well disappear; for if it tries to survive its utility, it
will appear as an unrelieved brutality of violence stripped of its ideal and
constructive aspects and will be rejected by the progressive mind of
humanity; but its past service to the race must be admitted in any reasonable
view of our evolution.
Page 47
The physical
fact of war, however, is only a special and outward manifestation of a general
principle in life and the Kshatriya is only the outward manifestation and type
of a general characteristic necessary to the completeness of human perfection.
War typifies and embodies physically the aspect of battle and struggle which
belongs to all life, both to our inner and our outer living, in a world whose
method is a meeting and wrestling of forces which progress by mutual
destruction towards a continually changing adjustment expressive of a
progressive harmonising and hopeful of a perfect harmony based upon some yet
ungrasped potentiality of oneness. The Kshatriya is the type and embodiment of
the fighter in man who accepts this principle in life and faces it as a warrior
striving towards mastery, not shrinking from the destruction of bodies and
forms, but through it all aiming at the realisation of some principle of right,
justice, law which shall be the basis of the harmony towards which the struggle
tends. The Gita accepts this aspect of the world-energy and the physical fact
of war which embodies it, and it addresses itself to the man of action, the
striver and fighter, the Kshatriya, – war which is the extreme contradiction of
the soul's high aspiration to peace within and harmlessness¹ without, the striver and fighter
whose necessary turmoil of struggle and action seems to be the very
contradiction of the soul's high ideal of calm mastery and self-possession,—and
it seeks for an issue from the contradiction, a point at which its terms meet
and a poise which shall be the first essential basis of harmony and
transcendence.
Man meets
the battle of life in the manner most consonant with the essential quality most
dominant in his nature. There are, according to the Sankhya philosophy accepted
in this respect by the Gita, three essential qualities or modes of the
world-energy and therefore also of human nature, sattva, the mode of poise, knowledge and satisfaction, rajas, the mode of passion, action and
struggling emotion, tamas, the mode
of ignorance and inertia. Dominated by tamas,
man does not so much meet the rush and shock of the world-energies whirling
about him and converging upon him as he succumbs to them, is overborne by
¹ahimsā.
Page 48
them, afflicted, subjected; or at
the most, helped by the other qualities, the tamasic man seeks only somehow to
survive, to subsist so long as he may, to shelter himself in the fortress of an
established routine of thought and action in which he feels himself to a
certain extent protected from the battle, able to reject the demand which his
higher nature makes upon him, excused from accepting the necessity of farther
struggle and the ideal of an increasing effort and mastery. Dominated by rajas, man flings himself into the
battle and attempts to use the struggle of forces for his own egoistic benefit,
to slay, conquer, dominate, enjoy; or, helped by a certain measure of the
sattwic quality, the rajasic man makes the struggle itself a means of
increasing inner mastery, joy, power, possession. The battle of life becomes
his delight and passion partly for its own sake, for the pleasure of activity
and the sense of power, partly as a means of his increase and natural self-development.
Dominated by sattva, man seeks in the
midst of the strife for a principle of law, right, poise, harmony, peace,
satisfaction. The purely sattwic man tends to seek this within, whether for
himself alone or with an impulse to communicate it, when won, to other human
minds, but usually by a sort of inner detachment from or else an outer
rejection of the strife and turmoil of the active world-energy; but if the sattwic
mind accepts partly the rajasic impulse, it seeks rather to impose this poise
and harmony upon the struggle and apparent chaos, to vindicate a victory for
peace, love and harmony over the principle of war, discord and struggle. All
the attitudes adopted by the human mind towards the problem of life either derive
from the domination of one or other of these qualities or else from an attempt
at balance and harmony between them.
But there
comes also a stage in which the mind recoils from the whole problem and,
dissatisfied with the solutions given by the threefold mode of Nature, traigunya, seeks for some higher
solution outside of it or else above it. It looks for an escape either into
something which is outside and void of all qualities and therefore of all
activity or in something which is superior to the three qualities and master of
them and therefore at once capable of action and unaffected, undominated by its
own action, in the nirguna or
the trigunātīta. It
aspires to an absolute peace
Page 49
and unconditioned existence or to a dominant
calm and superior existence. The natural movement of the former attitude is
towards the renunciation of the world, sannyāsa;
of the latter towards superiority to the claims of the lower nature and its
whirl of actions and reactions, and its principle is equality and the inner
renunciation of passion and desire. The former is the first impulse of Arjuna recoiling
from the calamitous culmination of all his heroic activity in the great
cataclysm of battle and massacre, Kurukshetra; losing his whole past principle
of action, inaction and the rejection of life and its claims seem to him the
only issue. But it is to an inner superiority and not to the physical
renunciation of life and action that he is called by the voice of the divine
Teacher.
Arjuna is
the Kshatriya, the rajasic man who governs his rajasic action by a high sattwic
ideal. He advances to this gigantic struggle, to this Kurukshetra with the full
acceptance of the joy of battle, as to “a holiday of fight”, but with a proud confidence
in the righteousness of his cause; he advances in his rapid chariot tearing the
hearts of his enemies with the victorious clamour of his war-conch; for he
wishes to look upon all these Kings of men who have come here to champion against
him the cause of unrighteousness and establish as a rule of life the disregard
of law, justice and truth which they would replace by the rule of a selfish and
arrogant egoism. When this confidence is shattered within him, when he is
smitten down from his customary attitude and mental basis of life, it is by the
uprush of the tamasic quality into the rajasic man, inducing a recoil of
astonishment, grief, horror, dismay, dejection, bewilderment of the mind and
the war of reason against itself, a collapse towards the principle of ignorance
and inertia. As a result he turns towards renunciation. Better the life of the
mendicant living upon alms than this dharma
of the Kshatriya, this battle and action culminating in undiscriminating
massacre, this principle of mastery and glory and power which can only be won
by destruction and bloodshed, this conquest of blood-stained enjoyments, this
vindication of justice and right by a means which contradicts all righteousness
and this affirmation of the social law by a war which destroys in its process
and result all that constitutes society.
Page 50
Sannyāsa is the renunciation of life and action and of
the threefold modes of Nature, but it has to be approached through one or other
of the three qualities. The impulse may be tamasic, a feeling of impotence,
fear, aversion, disgust, horror of the world and life; or it may be the rajasic
quality tending towards tamas, an impulse of weariness of the struggle, grief,
disappointment, refusal to accept any longer this vain turmoil of activity with
its pains and its eternal discontent. Or the impulse may be that of rajas
tending towards sattwa, the impulse to arrive at something superior to anything
life can give, to conquer a higher state, to trample down life itself under the
feet of an inner strength which seeks to break all bonds and transcend all
limits. Or it may be sattwic, an intellectual perception of the vanity of life
and the absence of any real goal or justification for this ever-cycling
world-existence or else a spiritual perception of the Timeless, the Infinite,
the Silent, the nameless and formless Peace beyond. The recoil of Arjuna is the
tamasic recoil from action of the sattwa-rajasic man. The Teacher may confirm
it in its direction, using it as a dark entry to the purity and peace of the
ascetic life; or he may purify it at once and raise it towards the rare
altitudes of the sattwic tendency of renunciation. In fact, he does neither. He
discourages the tamasic recoil and the tendency to renunciation and enjoins the
continuance of action and even of the same fierce and terrible action, but he
points the disciple towards another and inner renunciation which is the real
issue from his crisis and the way towards the soul's superiority to the
world-Nature and yet its calm and self-possessed action in the world. Not a
physical asceticism, but an inner askesis is the teaching of the Gita.
Page 51
HOME