SECOND CHAPTER

THE CREED OF THE ARYAN FIGHTER

1. Sanjaya said: To him thus by pity¹; invaded, his eyes full and distressed with tears² ,his heart overcome by depression and discouragement, Madhusudana spoke these words.

2. The Blessed Lord said: Whence³ has come to thee this dejection, this stain and darkness of the soul in the hour of difficulty and peril, O Arjuna? This is not

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1. This pity of Arjuna is quite different from the godlike compassion mentioned later on in the Gita, which 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, and enters into it all to help and to heal. Arjuna's pity is 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.

2 Invaded by the self-indulgent pity Arjuna has lapsed into unheroic weakness which first draws a strongly worded rebuke from the divine Teacher.

3 This question points to the real nature of Arjuna's deviation from his heroic qualities. The Gita is not a mere gospel of war and heroic action, a Nietzschean creed of power and high-browed strength which holds pity to be a weakness. There is a divine compassion which descends to u? from on high and for the man whose nature does not possess it, is not cast in its mould, to pretend to be 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. But such is not

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the way cherished by the Aryan man; this mood came not from heaven nor can it lead to heaven, and on earth it is the forfeiting of glory.

3. Fall not from the virility of the fighter and the hero, O Partha! it is not fitting in thee.¹ Shake off this paltry faint-heartedness! Standup, Parantapa (Scourage of the foes)!

4. Arjuna said: How, O Madhusudana, shall I strike Bhishma and Drona with weapons in the battle, they who are worthy of worship, O Slayer of foes ?

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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, and of all things self-pity is among the most ignoble and un-Aryan of moods.

1. Arjuna's 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. 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. 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.

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Better in this world to live even on alms than to slay these high-souled Gurus. Slaying these Gurus, I should taste to blood-stained enjoyments even in this world.

6. Nor do I know which for us is better, than we conquer them or they conquer us, —before us stand the Dhritarashtrians whom having slain we should not care to live.

7. It is poorness of spirit that has smitten away from me my (true heroic) nature¹, my whole consciousness

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1. Arjuna is the man of action and not of knowledge, the fighter, never the seer or the thinker. 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 He and its apparent incompatibility with the spiritual state or even with a purely ethical ideal of perfection. The nature of the crisis which he undergoes is an all-embracing inner bankruptcy which he 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. That for the soul of action in the mental being is the worst possible crisis, failure and overthrow. 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 his disciple; for he means him to give up all dharmas

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is bewildered¹ in its view of right and wrong I ask thee which may be the better—that tell me decisively. I take refuge as a disciple with thee; enlighten me.

8. I see not what shall thrust from me the sorrow that dries up the senses, even if I should attain rich and unrivalled kingdom on earth or even the sovereignty of the gods.

9. Sanjaya said: Gudakesha, terror of his foes, having thus spoken to Hrishikesha, and said to him, “I will not fight!” became silent.

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except the one broad and vast rule of living consciously in the Divine and acting from that consciouness.

Dharma means literally that which one lays hold of and which holds things together, the law, the norm, the rule of nature, action and life.

1. It is a mistake to interpret the Gita from the standpoint of the mentality of today and force it to teach us the disinterested performance of duty as the highest and all-sufficient law. For the whole point of the teaching, that from which it arises, that which compels the disciple to seek the Teacher, is an inextricable clash of the various related conceptions of duty ending in the collapse of the whole useful intellectual and moral edifice erected by the human mind. The Gita does not teach the disinterested performance of duties but the following of the divine life, the abandonment of all dharmas, sarvadharman, to take refuge in the Supreme alone,

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11. The Blessed Lord said: Thou grieved for those that should not be grieved for, yet speakest words of wisdom. The enlightened man does not mourn either for the living or for the dead.

(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 found 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 basis of Aryan Society.)

12. It is not true that at any time I was not , nor thou, nor these kings of men; nor it is true that any of us shall ever cease to be hereafter .

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13.As the soul passes physically through childhood and youth and age, so it passes on to the changing of the body. The self-composed¹ man does not allow himself to be disturbed and blinded by this.

14. The material touches, O son of Kunti, giving cold and heat, pleasure and pain, things transient which come and go, these learn to endure, O Bharata.

15. The man whom these do not trouble nor pain O lion-hearted among men, the firm and wise who is equal in pleasure and suffering, makes himself apt for immortality^2.

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1 The calm and wise mind, the dhira, the thinker 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 t he world are only a long progress by which the human being prepares and makes himself fit for immortality.

2 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 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 a? the tranquil eternal Spirit secret within us receives them,

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16. That¹ which really is, cannot go out of existence, just as that which is non-existent cannot come into being. The end of this opposition of 'is' and 'is not' has been perceived by the seers of essential truths.

17. Know that to be imperishable by which all this is extended. Who can slay the immortal spirit ?

18. Finite bodies have an end, but that which possesses and uses the body, is infinite, illimitable, eternal, indestructible. Therefore fight, O Bharata.

19. He who regards this (the soul) as a slayer, and he who thinks it is slain, both of them fail to perceive the truth. It does not slay, nor is it slain.

20. 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.

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1. The soul is and cannot cease to be, though it may change the forms through which it appears. 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.

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21. Who knows it as immortal eternal imperishable spiritual existence, how can that man slay, O Partha, or cause to be slain?

22. The embodied soul casts away old and takes up new bodies as a man changes worn-out raiment for new.

23. Weapons cannot cleave it, nor the fire burn, nor do the waters drench it, nor the wind dry.

24. It is uncleavable, it is incombustible, it can neither be drenched nor dried. Eternally stable, immobile, all-pervading, it is for ever and for ever.

25. It is unmanifest¹, it is unthinkable, it is immutable, so it is described (by the Srutis); therefore knowing it as such, thou shouldst not grieve.

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1 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.

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26. Even if thou thinkest of it (the self) as being constantly subject to birth and death, still, O mighty-armed, thou shouldst not grieve.

27. For certain is death for the born, and certain is birth for the dead; therefore what is inevitabble¹ ought not to be a cause of thy sorrow.

28. Beings are unmanifest in the beginning, manifest in the middle, O Bharata, unmanifest likewise are they in disintegration. What is there to be grieved at?

29. One sees it as a mystery or one speaks of it or hears of it as a mystery, but none knows it. That (the Self, the One, the Divine) we look on and speak and hear of as the wonderful beyond our comprehension, for after all our learning from those who have knowledge, no human mind has ever known this Absolute.1

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1 Constant subjection to birth and death 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.

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30. This dweller in the body of everyone is eternal and indestructible, O Bharata; therefore thou shouldst not grieve for any creature.

31. Futher,² looking to thine own law of action thou shouldst not tremble; there is no greater good for the Kshatriya than righteous battle.

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1 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.

2 But how does this self-knowledge 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 swadharma* 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.

*The Kshatriya ideal, the ideal of the four orders is here placed in its social aspect, not as afterwards in its spiritual meaning

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32. When such a battle comes to them of itself like the open gate of heaven, happy¹ are the Kshatriyas then.

33. But if thou does not this battle for the right,² then hast thou abandoned thy duty and virtue and thy glory, and sin shall be thy portion.

34. Besides, men will recount thy perpetual disgrace, and to one in noble station, dishonour is whose than death.

35. The mighty men will think thee fled from the battle through fear, ³ and thou, that wast highly

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1 The Teacher 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.

2 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. 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.

3 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.

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esteemed by them, wilt allow a smirch to fall on thy honour.

36. Many unseemly words will be spoken by thy enemies, slandering thy strength; what is worse grief than that ?

37. Slain thou shalt win Heaven, victorious thou shalt enjoy the earth; therefore¹ arise, O son of Kunti, resolved upon battle.

38. Make grief and happiness, loss and gain, victory and defeat equal to thy soul and then turn to battle; so thou shalt not incur sin.²

1 Indian ethics has always seen the practical necessity of graded ideals for the developing moral and spiritual life of man. This, says Krishna In effect, is my answer to you if you insist 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, sviadharmam api chavekshya. 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. Hence the next verse.

2 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,

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