SEVEN
The Creed of the Aryan Fighter¹
THE answer of the divine Teacher to
the first flood of Arjuna's passionate self-questioning, his shrinking from
slaughter, his sense of sorrow and sin, his grieving for an empty and desolate
life, his forecast of evil results of an evil deed, is a strongly-worded
rebuke. All this, it is replied, is confusion of mind and delusion, a weakness
of the heart, an unmanliness, a fall from the virility of the fighter and the
hero. Not this was fitting in the son of Pritha, not thus should the champion
and chief hope of a righteous cause abandon it in the hour of crisis and peril
or suffer the sudden amazement of his heart and senses, the clouding of his
reason and the downfall of his will to betray him into the casting away of his
divine weapons and the refusal of his God-given work. This is not the way
cherished and followed by the Aryan man; this mood came not from heaven nor can
it lead to heaven, and on earth it is the forfeiting of the glory that waits
upon strength and heroism and noble works. Let him put from him this weak and
self-indulgent pity, let him rise and smite his enemies!
The answer of a hero to a hero,
shall we say, but not that which we should expect from a divine Teacher from
whom we demand rather that he shall encourage always gentleness and saintliness
and self-abnegation and the recoil from worldly aims and cessation from the
ways of the world? The Gita expressly says that Arjuna has thus lapsed into
unheroic weakness, “his eyes full and distressed with tears, his heart overcome
by depression and discouragement,” because he is invaded by pity, krpayāvistam.
Is this not then a divine weakness? Is not pity a divine emotion which should
not thus be discouraged with harsh rebuke? Or are we in face of a mere gospel
of war and heroic action, a Nietzschean creed of power and high-browed
strength,
¹Gita, II. 1-38.
Page 52
of Hebraic or old Teutonic hardness which holds
pity to be a weakness and thinks like the Norwegian hero who thanked God
because He had given him a hard heart? But the teaching of the Gita springs
from an Indian creed and to the Indian mind compassion has always figured as
one of the largest elements of the divine nature. The Teacher himself
enumerating in a later chapter the qualities of the godlike nature in man places
among them compassion to creatures, gentleness, freedom from wrath and from the
desire to slay and do hurt, no less than fearlessness and high spirit and
energy. Harshness and hardness and fierceness and a satisfaction in slaying enemies
and amassing wealth and unjust enjoyments are Asuric qualities; they come from
the violent Titanic nature which denies the Divine in the world and the Divine
in man and worships Desire only as its deity. It is not then from any such standpoint
that the weakness of Arjuna merits rebuke.
“Whence has come to thee this
dejection, this stain and darkness of the soul in the hour of difficulty and
peril?” asks Krishna of Arjuna. The question points to the real nature of
Arjuna's deviation from his heroic qualities. There is a divine compassion
which descends to us from on high and for the man whose nature does not possess
it, is not cast in its mould, to pretend to be the superior man, the master-man
or the superman is a folly and an insolence, for he alone is the superman who
most manifests the highest nature of the Godhead in humanity. This compassion
observes with an eye of love and wisdom and calm strength the battle and the
struggle, the strength and weakness of man, his virtues and sins, his joy and suffering,
his knowledge and his ignorance, his wisdom and his folly, his aspiration and
his failure and it enters into it all to help and to heal. In the saint and
philanthropist it may cast itself into the mould of a plenitude of love or
charity; in the thinker and hero it assumes the largeness and the force of a
helpful wisdom and strength. It is this compassion in the Aryan fighter, the
soul of his chivalry, which will not break the bruised reed, but helps and
protects the weak and the oppressed and the wounded and the fallen. But it is
also the divine compassion that smites down the strong tyrant and the confident
oppressor, not in wrath and with hatred, – for these
Page 53
are not the high divine qualities, the wrath of
God against the sinner, God's hatred of the wicked are the fables of
half-enlightened creeds, as much a fable as the eternal torture of the Hells
they have invented, – but, as the old Indian spirituality clearly saw, with as
much love and compassion for the strong Titan erring by his strength and slain
for his sins as for the sufferer and the oppressed who have to be saved from
his violence and injustice.
But such is not the compassion which actuates
Arjuna in the rejection of his work and mission. That is not compassion but an
impotence full of a weak self-pity, a recoil from the mental suffering which
his act must entail on himself, – “I see not what shall thrust from me the
sorrow that dries up the senses,” – and of all things self-pity is among the
most ignoble and un-Aryan of moods. Its pity for others is also a form of
self-indulgence; it is the physical shrinking of the nerves from the act of
slaughter, the egoistic emotional shrinking of the heart from the destruction
of the Dhritarashtrians because they are “one's own people” and without them
life will be empty. This pity is a weakness of the mind and senses, – a
weakness which may well be beneficial to men of a lower grade of development,
who have to be weak because otherwise they will be hard and cruel; for they
have to cure the harsher by the gentler forms of sensational egoism, they have
to call in tamas, the debile principle, to help sattwa, the principle of light,
in quelling the strength and excess of their rajasic passions. But this way is
not for the developed Aryan man who has to grow not by weakness, but by an
ascension from strength to strength. Arjuna is the divine man, the master-man
in the making and as such he has been chosen by the gods. He has a work given to
him, he has God beside him in his chariot, he has the heavenly bow Gandiva in
his hand, he has the champions of unrighteousness, the opponents of the divine
leading of the world in his front. Not his is the right to determine what he
shall do or not do according to his emotions and his passions, or to shrink
from a necessary destruction by the claim of his egoistic heart and reason, or
to decline his work because it will bring sorrow and emptiness to his life or
because its earthly result has no value to him in the absence of the thousands
who must perish. All that is a weak
Page 54
falling from his higher nature. He has to see
only the work that must be done, kartavyam
karma, to hear only the divine command breathed through his warrior nature,
to feel only for the world and the destiny of mankind calling to him as its
god-sent man to assist its march and clear its path of the dark armies that
beset it.
Arjuna in his reply to Krishna admits the rebuke even while he
strives against and refuses the command. He is aware of his weakness and yet
accepts subjection to it. It is poorness of spirit, he owns, that has smitten
away from him his true heroic nature; his whole consciousness is bewildered in
its view of right and wrong and he accepts the divine Friend as his teacher;
but the emotional and intellectual props on which he had supported his sense of
righteousness have been entirely cast down and he cannot accept a command which
seems to appeal only to his old standpoint and gives him no new basis for
action. He attempts still to justify his refusal of the work and puts forward
in its support the claim of his nervous and sensational being which shrinks
from the slaughter with its sequel of blood-stained enjoyments, the claim of
his heart which recoils from the sorrow and emptiness of life that will follow
his act, the claim of his customary moral notions which are appalled by the
necessity of slaying his gurus, Bhishma and Drona, the claim of his reason
which sees no good but only evil results of the terrible and violent work
assigned to him. He is resolved that on the old basis of thought and motive he
will not fight and he awaits in silence the answer to objections that seem to
him unanswerable. It is these claims of Arjuna's egoistic being that Krishna sets out first to destroy in order
to make place for the higher law which shall transcend all egoistic motives of
action.
The answer of the Teacher proceeds
upon two different lines, first, a brief reply founded upon the highest ideas
of the general Aryan culture in which Arjuna has been educated, secondly,
another and larger founded on a more intimate knowledge, opening into deeper
truths of our being, which is the real starting-point of the teaching of the
Gita. This first answer relies on the philosophic and moral conceptions of the
Vedantic philosophy and the social idea of duty and honour which formed the
ethical
Page 55
basis of Aryan society. Arjuna has sought to
justify his refusal on ethical and rational grounds, but he has merely cloaked
by words of apparent rationality the revolt of his ignorant and unchastened
emotions. He has spoken of the physical life and the death of the body as if
these were the primary realities; but they have no such essential value to the
sage and the thinker. The sorrow for the bodily death of his friends and
kindred is a grief to which wisdom and the true knowledge of life lend no
sanction. The enlightened man does not mourn either for the living or the dead,
for he knows that suffering and death are merely incidents in the history of the
soul. The soul, not the body, is the reality. All these kings of men for whose
approaching death he mourns, have lived before, they will live again in the
human body; for as the soul passes physically through childhood and youth and
age, so it passes on to the changing of the body. The calm and wise mind, the dhīra, the thinker who looks upon
life steadily and does not allow himself to be disturbed and blinded by his
sensations and emotions, is not deceived by material appearances; he does not
allow the clamour of his blood and his nerves and his heart to cloud his
judgment or to contradict his knowledge. He looks beyond the apparent facts of
the life of the body and senses to the real fact of his being and rises beyond
the emotional and physical desires of the ignorant nature to the true and only
aim of the human existence.
What is that real fact? that highest
aim? This, that human life and death repeated through the aeons in the great
cycles of the world are only a long progress by which the human being prepares
and makes himself fit for immortality. And how shall he prepare himself? who is
the man that is fit? The man who rises above the conception of himself as a
life and a body, who does not accept the material and sensational touches of
the world at their own value or at the value which the physical man attaches to
them, who knows himself and all as souls, learns himself to live in his soul
and not in his body and deals with others too as souls and not as mere physical
beings. For by immortality is meant not the survival of death, – that is
already given to every creature born with a mind, – but the transcendence of
life and death. It means that ascension by which man ceases to live as a
mind-informed
Page 56
body and lives at last as a spirit and in the
Spirit. Whoever is subject to grief and sorrow, a slave to the sensations and
emotions, occupied by the touches of things transient cannot become fit for
immortality. These things must be borne until they are conquered, till they can
give no pain to the liberated man, till he is able to receive all the material happenings
of the world whether joyful or sorrowful with a wise and calm equality, even as
the tranquil eternal Spirit secret within us receives them. To be disturbed by
sorrow and horror as Arjuna has been disturbed, to be deflected by them from the
path that has to be travelled, to be overcome by self-pity and intolerance of
sorrow and recoil from the unavoidable and trivial circumstance of the death of
the body, this is un-Aryan ignorance. It is not the way of the Aryan climbing
in calm strength towards the immortal life.
There is no such thing as death, for
it is the body that dies and the body is not the man. That which really is,
cannot go out of existence, though it may change the forms through which it
appears, just as that which is non-existent cannot come into being. The soul is
and cannot cease to be. This opposition of is and is not, this balance of being
and becoming which is the mind's view of existence, finds its end in the
realisation of the soul as the one imperishable self by whom all this universe has
been extended. Finite bodies have an end, but that which possesses and uses the
body, is infinite, illimitable, eternal, indestructible. It casts away old and
takes up new bodies as a man changes worn-out raiment for new; and what is
there in this to grieve at and recoil and shrink? This is not born, nor does it
die, nor is it a thing that comes into being once and passing away will never
come into being again. It is unborn, ancient, sempiternal; it is not slain with
the slaying of the body. Who can slay the immortal spirit? Weapons cannot
cleave it, nor the fire burn, nor do the waters drench it, nor the wind dry.
Eternally stable, immobile, all-pervading, it is for ever and for ever. Not manifested
like the body, but greater than all manifestation, not to be analysed by the
thought, but greater than all mind, not capable of change and modification like
the life and its organs and their objects, but beyond the changes of mind and
life and body, it is yet the Reality which all these strive to figure.
Page 57
Even if the truth of our being were a thing
less sublime, vast, intangible by death and life, if the self were constantly subject
to birth and death, still the death of beings ought not to be a cause of
sorrow. For that is an inevitable circumstance of the soul's
self-manifestation. Its birth is an appearing out of some state in which it is
not non-existent but unmanifest to our mortal senses, its death is a return to
that unmanifest world or condition and out of it it will again appear in the
physical manifestation. The to-do made by the physical mind and senses about
death and the horror of death whether on the sick-bed or the battlefield, is
the most ignorant of nervous clamours. Our sorrow for the death of men is an
ignorant grieving for those for whom there is no cause to grieve, since they
have neither gone out of existence nor suffered any painful or terrible change
of condition, but are beyond death no less in being and no more unhappy in
circumstance than in life. But in reality the higher truth is the real truth.
All are that Self, that One, that Divine whom we look on and speak and hear of
as the wonderful beyond our comprehension, for after all our seeking and
declaring of knowledge and learning from those who have knowledge no human mind
has ever known this Absolute. It is this which is here veiled by the world, the
master of the body; all life is only its shadow; the coming of the soul into
physical manifestation and our passing out of it by death is only one of its
minor movements. When we have known ourselves as this, then to speak of
ourselves as slayer or slain is an absurdity. One thing only is the truth in
which we have to live, the Eternal manifesting itself as the soul of man in the
great cycle of its pilgrimage with birth and death for milestones, with worlds
beyond as resting-places, with all the circumstances of life happy or unhappy
as the means of our progress and battle and victory and with immortality as the
home to which the soul travels.
Therefore, says the Teacher, put
away this vain sorrow and shrinking, fight, O son of Bharata. But wherefore
such a conclusion? This high and great knowledge, this strenuous
self-discipline of the mind and soul by which it is to rise beyond the clamour
of the emotions and the cheat of the senses to true self-knowledge, may well
free us from grief and delusion; it may well
Page 58
cure us of the fear of death and the sorrow for
the dead; it may well show us that those whom we speak of as dead are not dead
at all nor to be sorrowed for, since they have only gone beyond; it may well
teach us to look undisturbed upon the most terrible assaults of life and upon
the death of the body as a trifle; it may exalt us to the conception of all
life's circumstances as a manifestation of the One and as a means for our souls
to raise themselves above appearances by an upward evolution until we know
ourselves as the immortal Spirit. But how does it justify the action demanded
of Arjuna and the slaughter of Kurukshetra? The answer is that this is the
action required of Arjuna in the path he has to travel; it has come inevitably
in the performance of the function demanded of him by his svadharma, his social duty, the law of his life and the law of his
being. This world, this manifestation of the Self in the material universe is
not only a cycle of inner development, but a field in which the external
circumstances of life have to be accepted as an environment and an occasion for
that development. It is a world of mutual help and struggle; not a serene and
peaceful gliding through easy joys is the progress it allows us, but every step
has to be gained by heroic effort and through a clash of opposing forces. Those
who take up the inner and the outer struggle even to the most physical clash of
all, that of war, are the Kshatriyas, the mighty men; war, force, nobility,
courage are their nature; protection of the right and an unflinching acceptance
of the gage of battle is their virtue and their duty. For there is continually
a struggle between right and wrong, justice and injustice, the force that protects
and the force that violates and oppresses, and when this has once been brought
to the issue of physical strife, the champion and standard-bearer of the Right
must not shake and tremble at the violent and terrible nature of the work he
has to do; he must not abandon his followers or fellow-fighters, betray his
cause and leave the standard of Right and Justice to trail in the dust and be
trampled into mire by the blood-stained feet of the oppressor, because of a
weak pity for the violent and cruel and a physical horror of the vastness of
the destruction decreed. His virtue and his duty lie in battle and not in
abstention from battle; it is not slaughter, but non-slaying which would here
be the sin.
Page 59
The Teacher then turns aside for a
moment to give another answer to the cry of Arjuna over the sorrow of the death
of kindred which will empty his life of the causes and objects of living. What
is the true object of the Kshatriya's life and his true happiness? Not
self-pleasing and domestic happiness and a life of comfort and peaceful joy
with friends and relatives, but to battle for the right is his true object of
life and to find a cause for which he can lay down his life or by victory win
the crown and glory of the hero's existence is his greatest happiness. “There
is no greater good for the Kshatriya than righteous battle, and when such a
battle comes to them of itself like the open gate of heaven, happy are the
Kshatriyas then. If thou doest not this battle for the right, then hast thou
abandoned thy duty and virtue and thy glory, and sin shall be thy portion.” He
will by such a refusal incur disgrace and the reproach of fear and weakness and
the loss of his Kshatriya honour. For what is worst grief for a Kshatriya? It
is the loss of his honour, his fame, his noble station among the mighty men,
the men of courage and power; that to him is much worse than death.
Battle, courage, power, rule, the honour
of the brave, the heaven of those who fall nobly, this is the warrior's ideal.
To lower that ideal, to allow a smirch to fall on that honour, to give the
example of a hero among heroes whose action lays itself open to the reproach of
cowardice and weakness and thus to lower the moral standard of mankind, is to
be false to himself and to the demand of the world on its leaders and kings.
“Slain thou shalt win Heaven, victorious thou shalt enjoy the earth; therefore
arise, O son of Kunti, resolved upon battle.”
This heroic appeal may seem to be on
a lower level than the stoical spirituality which precedes and the deeper
spirituality which follows; for in the next verse the Teacher bids him to make
grief and happiness, loss and gain, victory and defeat equal to his soul and
then turn to the battle, – the real teaching of the Gita. But Indian ethics has
always seen the practical necessity of graded ideals for the developing moral
and spiritual life of man. The Kshatriya ideal, the ideal of the four orders is
here placed in its social aspect, not as afterwards in its spiritual meaning.
This, says Krishna in effect, is my answer to you if
you insist
Page 60
on joy and sorrow and the result
of your actions as your motive of action. I have shown you in what direction
the higher knowledge of self and the world points you; I have now shown you in
what direction your social duty and the ethical standard of your order point
you, svadharmam api cāveksya.
Whichever you consider, the result is the same. But if you are not satisfied
with your social duty and the virtue of your order, if you think that leads you
to sorrow and sin, then I bid you rise to a higher and not sink to a lower
ideal. Put away all egoism from you, disregard joy and sorrow, disregard gain
and loss and all worldly results; look only at the cause you must serve and the
work that you must achieve by divine command; “so thou shalt not incur sin.”
Thus Arjuna's plea of sorrow, his plea of the recoil from slaughter, his plea
of the sense of sin, his plea of the unhappy results of his action, are
answered according to the highest knowledge and ethical ideals to which his
race and age had attained.
It is the creed of the Aryan fighter. “Know
God,” it says, “know thyself, help man; protect the Right, do without fear or weakness
or faltering thy work of battle in the world. Thou art the eternal and
imperishable Spirit, thy soul is here on its upward path to immortality; life
and death are nothing, sorrow and wounds and suffering are nothing, for these
things have to be conquered and overcome. Look not at thy own pleasure and gain
and profit, but above and around, above at the shining summits to which thou
climbest, around at this world of battle and trial in which good and evil,
progress and retrogression are locked in stern conflict. Men call to thee,
their strong man, their hero for help; help then, fight. Destroy when by destruction
the world must advance, but hate not that which thou destroyest, neither grieve
for all those who perish. Know everywhere the one self, know all to be immortal
souls and the body to be but dust. Do thy work with a calm, strong and equal
spirit; fight and fall nobly or conquer mightily. For this is the work that God
and thy nature have given to thee to accomplish.”
Page 61
HOME