Arjuna refers to stitha-prajna, where stitha means, roughly, “steady,” and prajna is a word that comes from the root word for knowledge but has an intensifying prefix attached to it. This root word, jna, is shared with another Indo-European language, Greek, where it blossomed into gnosis. Gnosticism shares an uncanny, not-entirely-coincidental resemblance to Vedantic thought, but using “steady gnosis” and “steady gnostic” would muddy the linguistic waters.
I settled on “steady mystic” because the phrase is less specific to a different religious tradition. It focuses on the subject of that “intensified” knowing—the mystical understanding of the many being the One. Every mystical tradition that bears the name, from Mansur al-Hallaj’s Sufi fana’a to Meister Eckhart’s Christian unio mystica, has arrived at this numerical conclusion, like independent geometers around the globe deriving the same value for pi. In other words, I substitute for the word that refers to the most intense knowing (Sanskrit, prajna) the word that refers to the most intense secret (Greek, mystikos).
* * *
Krishna, in the course of his answer, hints at the larger transformation to come: from theologian to Theos. He drops this hint very casually, with no portentous change of form or size or appearance. It comes in a phrase that takes up very little space in Sanskrit—mat param—“with me his zenith,” literally, “with me his highest [goal or object].” I resisted the urge to capitalize that “me.” Arjuna’s friend has just referred to himself as someone greater than a charioteer or prince or philosopher. The voice—the voice whose mouthpiece is the mouth of Krishna—has spoken up for the first time, no ventriloquy. It has referred to itself as what it is, divine.
* * *
Notice that Arjuna’s despair arises from a perversion of empathy and identification—a self-destructive, adharmic application of Vedantic teaching.
Vedanta, after all, encourages the seeker to empathize and identify with everything alive. It does so by teaching how your atman and all the other atmans in all the other species are identical (identical comes from the Latin word for “same”). You realize you are the same as they are because you realize we are all Brahman. This is a simple idea that is very hard to practice in real life, so hard it takes multiple births to do it right. It’s hard not just because it’s hard to perceive the spiritual sameness in a human being, an animal, and a plant. (How easy protecting the environment would be if that weren’t the case!)
In Arjuna’s case, this idea, incompletely understood, makes him vulnerable. Arjuna’s empathy and identification exist, at this early stage in the Gita, without a balancing sense of dharma—his duty in the world, to the world.
Arjuna’s despair originates when he identifies with all his extended family, including the relatives who want to kill him. He even prefers being killed by them to killing them. This is the moha, the delusion, that Krishna’s wisdom will seek to correct. Krishna will do this through a variety of philosophical and psychological tactics—maybe wisdoms is the right word here.
Parked between the two armies, Arjuna identifies with the multiplicity before him. This is what weakens his will and makes him refuse to fight. Krishna’s task will be to teach his friend how to differentiate between his own side and the opposing side—and how, for the sake of dharma, he must fight for one, and against the other.
* * *
I can imagine an alternative, more contained Gita in which the last lines of Session 2 bring us close to the end of the whole interpolated episode. Arjuna has despaired; Krishna has given him a pep talk, first as a worldly warrior, then as an otherworldly thinker. Tack on the last segment of Session 18, and that’s a fine episode.
Fortunately, episodes and interpolations in that longest of all epics, the Mahabharata, don’t bother much with dramatic economy. The Gita creates its own nested frame of reference, its own sense of time, and unfolds at its leisure, according to its own poetic biorhythm. So Krishna and Arjuna actually have sixteen more sessions in which to talk things out.
Arjuna has his next question ready.
LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 3
Arjuna sets off this session by making a reasonable enough objection. With all this exaltation of wisdom and knowing, whose ultimate goal is attaining extinction in Brahman, why do all this battlefield killing in the first place? Why not go off somewhere and meditate?
It’s a question that had special relevance in the Hindu world. Most religious traditions have some sense of the active life and the contemplative life—the mission in the bad part of town, and the monastery on the mountaintop—but always to varying degrees. In Hindu India, the tendency to retreat from the world seems to have been particularly strong, helped along, perhaps, by the fourth and last stage of the idealized Hindu life, ascetic renunciation. The earliest known reference to Indian wise men in Western literature, in the Histories of Herodotus, refers to “Gymnosophists” who lived off in the forest, naked, and did what were probably yogic austerities. It’s not that Krishna wants to discredit this choice. He just doesn’t think it’s the right one for a warrior like Arjuna on a battlefield like Kurukshetra.
The word that Arjuna uses twice in reference to the prospect of violence has the same root as yoga—“to yoke” or “to join.” Krishna has spoken of yoking Arjuna’s atman to Brahman, and Arjuna’s life to the practice of yoga. Arjuna turns this around, speaking of someone (himself) “yoked” to a horrific action, “even if unwilling.” Arjuna’s use of the word comes from the agricultural source-image of yoga: that of a beast, yoked to the plow and goaded forward. His use of the word is a way of telling Krishna, implicitly: You preach this exalted joining, but on this battlefield, what you’re doing is enjoining me to butcher.
So Krishna spends much of Session 3 encouraging Arjuna to act. Part of his argument involves drawing an equivalence between the divine and the human when it comes to activity. The move hinges on a double meaning in Sanskrit that fortuitously matches one in English: the way loka can mean both the planet itself and the people of the planet. When we say the “whole world is talking about” something, we are referring to people, while when we say “map of the world,” we mean a map of the earth. (French does this, too, with le monde.)
Krishna compares what would happen if he, the God, stopped working. Krishna, of course, is also the Sustainer, Vishnu, and so he speaks of worlds dropping away and species dying out. But if Arjuna, as one of the best of men, doesn’t do his work, something similar would happen to the world—that is, to society. Krishna makes a point of how important it is for someone as prominent as Prince Arjuna to set an example for the rest of his society.
The role the two sustainers have in common relates to cohesion. The cohesion of planets in orbit around the sun and the cohesion of matter itself, with electrons orbiting a nucleus, are the macrocosm and microcosm that Krishna sustains. He functions as invisibly as gravity. A great leader, like Arjuna, has a similar function in making people cohere in a society. Through dharmic action, he must “hold the world together.” He need not be the center point, holding court, like a sun or a king or a nucleus. Arjuna, after all, is fighting to restore his eldest brother, not himself, to the throne. But he must work as the gravity that helps a society cohere.
That is the social role of the “best of men.” Not retreat: engagement. He doesn’t just go to work in the world. He encourages others to do so as well, attached to action though they are. Krishna explains the wise man’s role in encouraging unwise people to do the right thing even as he encourages Arjuna to do the right thing. And so he continues the analogy between the divine and human, Brahman and atman, that scaffolds all of Hindu metaphysics—and all of Session 3.
* * *
The event is in the hand of God.
In 1787, just before the Constitutional Convention, George Washington met informally with delegates from several states. At this point, any future was still possible, from monarchy (with Washington himself as King George I
) to an every-state-for-itself anarchy. These were the classic centripetal and centrifugal tendencies whose agon would go on to underlie American democracy. Washington heard the delegates chewing over all sorts of compromises, half-measures, and betrayals of the ideal that motivated the successful war against Britain. According to Gouverneur Morris, Washington spoke of striving for a Constitution, and a country, that would have all the radical nobility of that ideal.
It is too probable that no plan we propose will be adopted. Perhaps another dreadful conflict is to be sustained. If, to please the people, we offer what we ourselves disapprove, how can we afterwards defend our work? Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. The event is in the hand of God.
Here, independently of the Gita, we find another uncommonly wise soldier-statesman living the same attitude toward action. Washington, too, sought to “hold people together”—what the Gita calls lokasamgraha. Washington wanted the Convention of 1787 to focus on the ideal action itself, a dharmic action that would sustain the society. And he, too, exhorted Morris and the other delegates not to focus on the outcome. The outcome—the “event”—was not in their hands. Only the raising of the standard.
Like Krishna’s, Washington’s ethics concerned not just what to do or what not to do. He cared equally how the work was done. In the run-up to the momentous work—in Philadelphia as on Kurukshetra—both Washington and Krishna identified the root problem: Focusing too hard on the end result was stifling the necessary action. Their exhortations, though phrased in the languages of two different religious traditions, are identical.
LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 4
Krishna recounts an impossible guru-student lineage: He places himself before the Sun God, Vivasvat, in time. At this still early point in the Gita, Arjuna thinks of Krishna as a friend but knows he is much more (though the great revelation of his friend’s true nature is still several sessions away).
When Arjuna, perplexed by this lineage, asks Krishna what he means by this assertion of precedence, he does so respectfully—using the formal “you,” the equivalent of vous in French. (Contemporary English, secularized and democratized, has forsaken the word for Thou.) Krishna explains that he and Arjuna have a history. Krishna remembers his past lives, which include all the avatars of Vishnu, most recently, Rama. Arjuna, like the rest of us, lives his life with no memory of his long biography. If he did, he would see how his own past works, good or ill, justify every new occurrence in his life—much like the “work” or steps preceding a mathematical solution. In Hinduism, what looks like chance is really causality, too complex to process for any mind but a God’s.
This underlies the question the fourth session sets out to answer. As Krishna himself phrases it—what is action?
* * *
“Even poets,” he notes, are confused about this. (Poets, let us not forget, were the original theologians.) The metaphor by which the Gita explains action is sacrifice.
The word sacrifice, or yagna, is meant to conjure a very specific image. The main Vedic religious ritual, which most modern-day Hindus experience most intimately during their weddings, has a fire at the center of it. The Brahmin chants and pours the offering into the fire. The fire is thought of as the “mouth” of the God or Gods, and the Gods “eat” the sacrifice. You are supposed to set aside a portion of everything you eat (and, metaphorically, do) for the Gods. There is a verse in Session 3 that talks about this: You do this to feed them and to keep them alive. Our Gods depend, for their existence, on our refusal to let them starve away.
* * *
Acting in the world gets your hands dirty: in Arjuna’s case, with the blood of his relatives. Metaphorically, that blood is sinful—the bad karma that will keep Arjuna from advancing toward Brahman.
How can Krishna reconcile the two ideals—worldly action, and otherworldly transcendence? Civil war, and inner peace?
There has to be some way to continue performing action while not accumulating karma. To become like the Gods themselves, who are not “smeared” with karma. The actions this war demands of Arjuna will be horrific. Krishna explains how to ground their karmic charge in Brahman: or better yet, how to burn away the actions, and their associated karma, entirely.
The trick is to make every action a yagna, a sacrifice. Spiritual knowledge makes every action a sacrifice, a series of ritual actions. The “fire of knowledge,” at the center of the metaphorical mandala, reduces those actions to ashes. No actions, no karma.
As Krishna explains, every part of the sacrifice—the priest, the offering, the fire—is Brahman. By this poetic logic, Arjuna spilling the blood of his enemies is no different than a priest pouring ghee into the sacrificial fire.
The Gita consistently uses epithets for Fire, whether pavaka, “purifier,” or vahnir, “carrier” (implicitly carrying things away). These would have been awkward to jam into a translation, but their significance is clear: The mouth of Agni, God of Fire, will consume Arjuna’s violent action, will purify it, will carry the bad karma away.
* * *
I created four castes….
I want to talk about the caste system. When a non-Hindu sees the word Hinduism, I suspect caste is one of the first things he or she thinks of. So let me first assert that it’s possible to be a Hindu and repudiate India’s caste system. I, and hundreds of thousands of Hindu Americans (and Hindu Indians) like me, are living examples of that. But I believe it’s still important for me to think and write about this. After all, if the only part of the world where my coreligionists have been in the majority enshrined this system, and if it’s mentioned pretty clearly in our scriptures, it strikes me as inappropriate to look away simply because it’s not essential to living the religion.
I don’t think it’s enough, either, to point out that India’s caste system was how a more or less universal human contradiction manifested itself. No one’s history is a secret from anybody else. Our ideologies and religions conceive of equality, but our societies are always—and I mean always literally—unequal. European Christianity, both Catholicism and Protestantism, existed in conjunction with the Atlantic slave trade abroad and aristocracies at home. Orthodox Christianity, in Russia, had no problems with serfdom. Islam preached “brotherhood” and promptly established, in the original Caliphate, one of the largest slave-running operations of its day. Non-Muslims found themselves in a hierarchy, with “People of the Book” (Jews and Christians) above the infidel polytheists (like yours truly), but all subordinate to the rightly guided believers. American democracy was built by slave labor; the Founding Fathers, for all those fine phrases at the beginning of the Declaration of Independence, created an oligarchy for landowning white males. Liberté, égalité, fraternité culminated in Napoleon grabbing his crown from the fingers of the Pope and setting it on his own head; the latest gospel of equality, Marxism, transferred power from a czar to a Stalin.
Is this all some primate reflex toward hierarchy, wired deep in us? We dream of equality, yet we organize ourselves into hierarchies. Or might this just be how large groups work?
The Gita explains both our differences and our sameness. It acknowledges the different classes of people and the different work they do in the world, but it asserts their underlying, metaphysical sameness. The Gita refuses to lump all of humankind into an in-group of believers and an out-group of infidels. While he makes no division into “believer” and “nonbeliever,” Krishna proclaims our multiplicity in multiple ways, separating people according to the three gunas, or the four castes, or the two “inheritances.”
Even as he describes this multiplicity of people, though, he describes their essential equality—in fact, their unity. It’s not a contradiction for Krishna to say, in Session 4, “I created four castes” and then, in Session 5, to say, “Brahman is faultlessly egalitarian.” The two assertions must not be considered separately. Separate them, and all manner of cruelty becomes possible. The differences
among people—whether in their natures, or their “own work,” svakarma—are divinely created. Because their true, spiritual identity is also divinely created, there are differences but no inequalities. In other words, Krishna introduced differences among people; human beings attached relative values to these differences, introducing inequality.
Several things start to make sense once we understand that these ideas are conjoined. First, the perfect willingness of Vishnu to dive into avatars other than the “highest” Brahmin caste. Krishna is a kshatriya, or warrior, just like Rama. Before Krishna’s avatar came a Fish, a Tortoise, a Boar: This most radically egalitarian perspective draws animals into its realm of identification. This is why Hindus have a sacred animal; “pagan” religions commonly regarded a given grove, tree, river, bird, or beast as sacred. From that perspective, a cow—or a golden sculpture of a calf—might well be considered worthy of reverence and celebration. Wise eyes could see the atman (which is to say, Brahman) even in a pig. Or, as the Gita puts it in Session 5:
A wise and cultured Brahmin,
A cow, an elephant,
A dog, a man who cooks dog:
Scholars see them all the same.
Godsong Page 14
