Chapter 4 - The Core of the Teaching

The Core of the Teaching

 

By this time we have known about the divine Teacher. We have also seen the human disciple. Now it remains to form a clear conception of the doctrine. A clear conception fastening upon the essential idea and the central heart of the teaching is especially necessary here. Gita is susceptible, even more than the other Scriptures, to one-sided  misrepresentations born of a partisan intellectuality.

This happens because Gita is having

• Rich and many-sided thought
• Synthetical grasp of different aspects of the spiritual life, and
• The fluent winding motion of its argument

People have the habit of unconscious or half-conscious wrestling of fact and word and idea to suit a preconceived notion or the doctrine or principle of one’s preference. The Indian logicians have attributed this tendency as one of the most fruitful sources of fallacy. Even for the most conscientious thinkers it is most difficult to avoid this temptation. The reason for this difficulty lies in the incapability of the human reason to always play the detective upon itself in this respect. It is the very nature of human reasoning faculty to seize upon some partial conclusions, idea, principle and become its partisan. It then makes it the key to all truth. Interestingly, it has an infinite faculty of doubling upon itself so as to avoid detecting this necessary and cherished weakness in its operations.  The Gita lends itself easily to this kind of error. It is easy to turn Gita into a partisan of our own doctrine or dogma

This is achieved

• By throwing particular emphasis on

                        one of its aspects or

                        even on some salient and emphatic text

            and putting all the rest of the eighteen chapters into the background, or

• By making them a subordinate and auxiliary teaching,

We can see following different viewpoints on Gita by people having a partisan approach :

1         Renouncement of Life and Works, ‘Sannyasa’

Circumstance in favour of the doctrine

            There are those who make the Gita teach, not works at all, but a discipline of preparation for renouncing life and works. The indifference performance of prescribed actions or of whatever task may lie ready to the hands becomes the means and the discipline for achieving this purpose. The final renunciation of life and works is the sole real object. It is quite easy to justify this view by citations from the book. It can be done by a certain arrangement of stress in following out its argument. This is especially true if we shut our eyes to the peculiar way in which it uses such a word as sannyasa, renunciation.

The actual reality which rejects this exclusivity

           However, we have to admit that it is quite impossible to persist in this view on an impartial reading, This is in face of the continual assertion that action should be preferred to inaction. This assertion is found throughout Gita to the very end of the discourse.

Gita teaches that the superiority lies with

• The true, the inner renunciation of desire by equality and
• The giving up of works to the supreme Purusha.

2        Doctrine of Devotion

Circumstance in favour of the doctrine

Others again speak of the Gita as if the doctrine of devotion were its whole teaching. They put in the background its monistic elements and the high place it gives to quietistic immergence in the one self of all. Here we must acknowledge that undoubtedly its following elements are most striking and most vital part of the teaching of Gita.

These elements are :

• Its emphasis on devotion
• Its doctrine of the Purushottama, the Supreme Being who is superior both          

                        to the mutable Being and

                        to the Immutable and

            who in His relation to the world is what we know as God

These elements are conducive to the belief that Gita advocates the doctrine of devotion as a sole or main doctrine.

The actual reality which rejects this exclusivity

At the same time, it is also true that this Lord is

• The Self in whom all knowledge culminates and
• The Master of sacrifice to whom all works lead, as well as
• The Lord of Love into whose being the heart of devotion enters.

It is important to note here that the Gita preserves a perfectly equal balance. It emphasizes all the following aspects at different course of its teaching :

• Knowledge
• Works
• Devotion

This is only done for the purposes of the immediate trend of the thought. It is NOT done with any absolute and separate preference of one over the others. Gita unequivocally proclaims that ‘He in whom all three meet and become one, He is the Supreme Being, the Purushottama’.

3        Doctrine of Works

Circumstance in favour of the doctrine

The present day is in fact the time when the modern mind began to recognise and deal at all with the Gita. At the present day the tendency is to subordinate Gita’s  elements of knowledge and devotion in favour of the path of Action. It takes advantage of its continual insistence on action and to find in it a scripture of the Karmayoga, a Light leading us on the path of action, a Gospel of Works.

The actual reality which rejects this exclusivity

Undoubtedly, the Gita is a Gospel of Works. However, the term ‘Works’ relates to the works which culminate in knowledge, that is in spiritual realisation and quietude. It is of works which is motivated by devotion, that is, a conscious surrender of one’s whole self first into the hands and then into the being of the Supreme. Gita not at all refers to the works as they are understood by the modern mind.

It is not at all an action dictated

• by egoistic and altruistic,
• by personal, social and humanitarian

motives, principles and ideals.

Wrong persistence of its supporters

Yet precisely this is what the present day interpretations seek to make of the Gita.

We are told continuously by many authoritative voices that the Gita proclaims with no uncertain sound the gospel of

• Human action
• The ideal of disinterested performance of social duties,

            It may even go the extent of promoting

• The quiet modern ideal of social service

Interestingly, in respect to above theories, Gita seems to oppose rather than support the ordinary ascetic and quietistic tendency of Indian thought and spirituality.

The right perspective

Very obviously and even on the very surface of it, the Gita does NOTHING of the kind. This is purely a modern misreading, a reading of the modern mind into an ancient book. It is an interpretation of the present-day European or Europeanised intellect into a thoroughly antique as well as a thoroughly Oriental and Indian teaching. What Gita teaches is not the human but a divine action. It is not the performance of social duties, but the abandonment of all other standards of duty or conduct for a self-less performance of the Divine Will working through our nature. It is not social service, but the action of the Best, the God-possessed, the Master-men. It is done impersonally for the sake of the world. It is done as a sacrifice to Him who stands behind man and Nature. To put it differently, the Gita is not a book of practical ethics but of spiritual life.

Modern Philosophy and the Doctrine of Gita

The modern mind has just recently emerged as the European mind. It has now abandoned the philosophic idealism of the highest Graeco-Roman culture from which it started. It has also abandoned the Christian devotionalism of the Middle Ages. There it has been replaced or transformed into a practical idealism and social, patriotic and philanthropic devotion. It has got rid of God or kept Him only for Sunday use. It has erected in His place man as its deity and society as its visible idol. At its best it is having practical, ethical, social, pragmatic, altruistic and humanitarian philosophy. We are not denying the utility of this development for the good of the humanity at large. It is especially needed at the present day. It is part of the divine Will, otherwise it would not have become so dominant in humanity in the first place. There is no reason to believe that the divine man, the man who lives in the Brahmic consciousness, in the God-being should not be all of these things in his action. Surely, he will be all of these things if they are the best ideal of the age, the Yugadharma. There can not be any higher ideal to be established, no radical change to be effected from this philosophy. Even in Gita, Krishna has advocated that Arjuna, his disciple should be the best who has to set the standard for others. Going further, Arjuna is called upon to live according to the highest ideals of his age and the prevailing culture. However, here Gita has not just stopped at this point. It has stressed that the Ideal Man should live with understanding of that which lay behind, and not as ordinary man who follows merely the outward law and rule.

The essential difference between the Modern Mind and the Gita is as follows :

• Modern mind has excluded from its philosophy

                        the God or the Eternal and

                        spirituality or the God-State,

            On the other hand, these two things are the master conceptions of the       Gita.

• Modern mind lives in humanity only, and the Gita would have us live in God, though for the world in God.
• Modern mind lives in its life, heart and intellect only, and the Gita would have us live in the spirit,
• Modern Mind live in the mutable Being who is “all creature”, and the Gita would have us live also in the Immutable and the Supreme
• Modern Mind live in the changing march of Time, and the Gita would have us live in the Eternal.

The modern mind has recently emerged to vaguely envisage these higher things as advocated by the Gita. However, here also, it is only to make these higher things subservient to man and society. However, we have to note that the God and spirituality exist in their own right and not as supplementary things.

It is important that in practical life,

• The lower in us must learn to exist for the higher

in order that

• The higher in us may also consciously exist for the lower

so as to draw the lower to its own altitudes.

Disinterested performance of duty and divine life

The above discussion leads us to the conclusion that 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. If we give just a little thought to the actual incident (war of Kurukshetra) with which Gita deals, we will easily understand that this could not be its meaning. The whole incident of the teaching has its origin in an unavoidable and unsolvable clash of the various related conceptions of duty. This clash has the devastating effect of the complete collapse of the structure made up of useful intellectual and moral concepts which was built upon by the human mind. This incident is the trigger point for the teaching of Gita. It is also the compelling reason for the disciple (Arjuna) to seek the Teacher (Krishna).

In human life some sort of a clash arises fairly often. For example, the clash between :

• Domestic duties and the call or cause of the country
• Claim of the country and the good of humanity or some larger religious or moral principle

An inner situation may even arise in which all duties have to be abandoned, trampled on, thrown aside in order to follow the call of the Divine within. This situation as arisen in the life of Buddha. It is unthinkable that the Gita would solve such an inner situation by :

• sending Buddha back to his wife and father and the government of the Sakya State.
• directing a Ramakrishna to become a Pundit in a vernacular school and disinterestedly teach little boys their lessons.
• bind down a Vivekananda to support his family and for that purpose to follow dispassionately the law or medicine or journalism.

The above solutions are precisely what the modern mind, taken to its logical conclusion would have us to adopt.

The Gita does NOT teach the disinterested performance of duties. It advocates the following of the divine life, the abandonment of all Dharmas, sarvadharman, to take refuge in the Supreme alone. The divine activity of a Buddha, a Ramakrishna, a Vivekananda is perfectly in consonance with this teaching. 

Certainly, the Gita prefers action to inaction. Even then, it does not rule out the renunciation of works. It accepts it as one of the ways to the Divine. If, in a particular instance, the Divine can only be attained by renouncing works, life, all duties and the call is strong within us, then in such a situation, into the bonfire they must go and there is no help for it. The call of God is most important and it can not be overtaken by any other considerations.

Arjuna has a valid basis for his dilemma

In the case of Arjuna, the situation is still more complicated. The action which he must do is one from which his moral sense recoils. It may be said that it is his duty to fight. But this very sense of duty has now become to his mind a terrible sin. It will not help him a bit if he is told that he must do his duty disinterestedly, dispassionately. Nor will it solve his difficulty. Arjuna will then want to know as to how the above advice can be his duty when it leads to a bloody massacre of his kin, his race and his country. Arjuna is told that he has right on his side. But that does not and can not satisfy him. His very point is that the justice of his legal claim does not justify him in supporting the notion of duty which results in pitiless massacre destructive to the future of his nation. In such a dilemma, does it mean that Arjuna has to perform his duty by acting in a dispassionate manner in the sense of not caring whether it is a sin or what its consequences may be so long as he does his duty like a soldier. This concept of the duty of a soldier may be the teaching of a State, of politicians, of lawyers, of ethical casuists. It can never be the teaching of a great religious and philosophical Scripture of the Gita which sets out to solve the problem of life and action from the very roots. If we accept that it is what the Gita has to say on a most stirring moral and spiritual problem, then we must put it out of the list of the world’s Scriptures. We have to then thrust it , if anywhere, into our library of political science and ethical casuistry.

Relative applicability of the teaching of the Gita

We have to note that the Gita advocates separate teaching for

• A man in the advanced stage of spiritual development and
• A man living in ordinary consciousness

There is no doubt that the Gita does teach the equality which rises above sin and virtue, beyond good and evil. It is similar to the teaching of the Upanishads. However, the Gita does it only as a part of the Brahmic consciousness and for the man who is on the path and advanced enough to fulfill the supreme rule. It does not preach indifference to good and evil for the ordinary life of man. If it does preach this indifference, then it would have the most destructive consequences to the ordinary life of man. In fact, the Gita has exactly the opposite advice. It affirms that the doers of evil shall not attain to God. Therefore, it may seem that even the Gita supports the viewpoint of Arjuna when he is tempted to refrain from what his conscience abhors though a thousand duties were shattered to pieces. Arjuna thinks and the teaching of the Gita is with him in this respect, that it is wrong to simply seek to fulfill in the best way the ordinary law of man’s life, disinterested performance of what he feels to be a sin, a thing of Hell. This is so even when that sin is his duty as a soldier. Therefore, the dilemma of Arjuna is not simple confusion of mind. It is based on a clash of profound truths.

The concept of duty Vs moral law

We must remember that duty is an idea which in practice rests upon social conceptions.

We may stretch the meaning of this term beyond its proper connotations and

• talk of our duty to ourselves,
• or we may, if we like, say in a transcendent sense that it was Buddha’s duty to abandon all,
• or even that it is the ascetic’s duty to sit motionless in a cave !

But this is obviously amounts to a play of words. The concept of Duty is a relative term and depends upon our relation to others.

For example :

• It is a father’s duty, as a father, to nurture, and educate his children;
• a lawyer’s to do his best for his client even if he knows him to be guilty and his defence to be a lie;
• a soldier’s to fight and shoot to order even if he kills his own kin and countryman;
• a judge’s to send the guilty to prison and hang the murderer.

So long as these positions are accepted, the duty remains clear, a practical matter of course. This is so even when it is not a point of honour or affection. It is also OK if it overrides the absolute religious or moral law.

Now take the situation when the inner view is changed :

• If the lawyer is awakened to the absolute sinfulness of falsehood
• The judge becomes convinced that capital punishment is a crime against humanity
• The man called upon to the battlefield feels, like the conscientious objector of today or as a Tolstoy would feel, that in no circumstances is it permissible to take human life any more than to eat human flesh.

It is obvious that in such situations, the moral law must prevail. It is above all the concept of the duty, which is only a relative term. The moral law depends on no social relation or conception of duty but on the awakened inner perception of man, the moral being.

Brahmic consciousness

We have seen that there are two different laws of conduct – based on practical necessity and on moral law. Each of these is valid on its own plane. Its role is principally dependent on external status. However, the advice of the Gita is independent of status. It is entirely dependent on the thought and conscience. The Gita does NOT teach us to subordinate the higher plane to the lower. It does not ask the awakened moral consciousness to slay itself on the altar of duty as a sacrifice and victim to the law of the social status. As a solution to the conflict, it calls us higher and not lower. From the conflict of the two planes it evokes us to ascend to a supreme poise above these two lower levels of :

• mainly practical, and
• purely ethical,

to the Brahmic consciousness. The Gita replaces the conception of social duty by a divine obligation. The subjection to external law gives place to a certain principle of inner self-determination of action. This principle proceeds by the soul’s freedom from the tangled law of works. We shall see that this concept of the Brahmic consciousness is the kernel of the Gita’s teaching with regard to action. This concept is based on the soul’s freedom from the tangled law of works. It puts forward the principle of the determination of works in the nature by the Lord within and above us.

Gospel of Duty

Like any other great work of the kind, the Gita can only be understood by studying it in its entirety and as a developing argument. However, the modern interpreters have laid an exclusive stress on the first three or four chapters. It all started with the great writer Bankim Chandra Chatterji. He first gave to the Gita this new sense of a Gospel of Duty. Even amongst these first few chapters, they have laid stress on the idea of equality, on the expression kartavyam karma, the work that is to be done. This they interpret as duty. They have relied on the phrase “Thou hast a right to action, but none to the fruits of action”. This doctrine is now popularly quoted as the great word, mahavakya, of the Gita. The rest of the eighteen chapters with their high philosophy are given a secondary importance, except indeed the great vision in the eleventh. This perfectly suits the modern mentality. It is, or has been till very recent past, inclined to be impatient of metaphysical subtleties and far-off spiritual seekings. It is eager to get to work and, like Arjuna himself, mainly concerned for a workable law of works, a dharma. It is indeed a wrong way to handle this Scripture.

Equality and disinterestedness

The equality which the Gita preaches is not disinterestedness. Arjuna is given the great command “Arise, slay thy enemies, enjoy a prosperous kingdom”. It is given after the foundation and main structure of the teaching have been laid and built. It has not the ring of an uncompromising altruism or of a white, dispassionate abnegation. It is a state of inner poise and wideness which is the foundation of spiritual freedom. We have to do the “work that is to be done” in that poise and in that freedom. The Gita uses this phrase with the greatest wideness including in it all works, sarvakarmani. Although it includes the elements of social duties or ethical obligations, it far exceeds them in its full scope and meaning. What is the work to be done is not to be determined by the individual choice. Similarly, the popular concept of  ‘right to the action and the rejection of claim to the fruit’ is NOT the greatest advice of the Gita. It is only a preliminary advice governing the first state of the disciple when he begins ascending the hill of Yoga. It is practically superseded at a subsequent stage. The Gita goes on to affirm emphatically that the man is not the doer of the action. It is Prakriti. It is Nature. What really works through man is the great Force with its three modes of action. He must therefore learn to see that it is not he who does the work. Therefore, the “right to action” is an idea which is only valid so long as we are under the illusion of being the doer. It must necessarily disappear from the mind just like the concept of the “claim to the fruit”, as soon as it no longer appear to our own consciousness as the doer of our works. All pragmatic egoism, whether of the claim to fruits or of the right to action, then disappears.

But the determinism of Prakriti is not the last word of the Gita. The equality of the will and the rejection of fruits are only means for entering with the mind and the heart and the understanding into the divine consciousness and living in it. The Gita expressly says that they are to be employed as a means as long as the disciple is unable so to live or even to seek by practice the gradual development of this higher state. What is this Divine, whom Krishna declares himself to be ? It is the Purushottama beyond the Self that does not act. It is beyond the Prakriti that acts. It is the foundation of the one (Purushottama) and master of the other (Prakriti). It is the Lord of whom all is the manifestation. The Lord, who even in our present subjection to Maya, sits in the heart of His creatures governing the works of Prakriti. He is the one by whom the armies on the field of Kurukshetra have already been slain while they live. He is the one who uses Arjuna only as an instrument or immediate occasion of this great slaughter. Prakriti is only His executive force. The disciple has to rise beyond this Force and its three modes or Gunas. He has to become trigunatita.  He has no longer any claim or “right” to his actions. He has to surrender his actions not to Prakriti, but into the being of the Supreme. Reposing his mind and understanding, heart and will in Him he has to do works as an offering to the Master of all self-energisings and all sacrifice.

He has to do this :

• with self-knowledge,
• with God-knowledge,
• with world-knowledge,
• with a perfect equality,
• a perfect devotion,
• an absolute self-giving,

He has to become identified in will, conscious with that consciousness of the Supreme. Then the Supreme will decide and initiate the action. This is the solution which the Divine Teacher offers to the disciple.

We have not to seek the great, the supreme word of the Gita, its mahavakya. The Gita itself declares it in its last utterance which is the crowning note of the great orchestra. “With the Lord in thy heart take refuge with all thy being. By His grace thou shalt attain to the supreme peace and the eternal status. So have I expounded to thee a knowledge more secret than that which is hidden. Further hear the most secret, the supreme word that I shall speak to thee. Become my-minded, devoted to Me, to Me do sacrifice and adoration. Infallibly, thou shall come to Me, for dear to Me art thou. Abandoning all laws of conduct seek refuge in Me alone. I will release thee from all sin; do not grieve.”

The argument of the Gita resolves itself into three great steps. They result in the action being risen out of the human into the divine plane. It leaves the bondage of the lower for the liberty of a higher law.

• First, works have to be done by the renunciation of desire and a perfect equality. They have to be done as a sacrifice by man with a sense of the ‘Doer of Action’. It is a sacrifice to a deity who is the supreme and only the one Self above all. At this stage he has not yet realized in his own being this Supreme. This is the initial step.
• Secondly, not only the desire of the fruit, but the claim to be the doer of works has to be renounced. It has to be done in the realisation of the Self as the equal, the inactive, the immutable principle. The realisation of all works is to be seen as simply the operation

                        of universal Force.

                        of the Nature-Soul,

                        of Prakriti

                        of the unequal, active, mutable power.

• Thirdly and lastly, the supreme Self has to be seen as the supreme Purusha governing this Prakriti. Of this Purusha, the soul in Nature is a partial manifestation. He directs all works through Nature in a perfect transcendence, To him love and adoration and the sacrifice of works have to be offered. The whole being has to be surrendered to Him. The whole consciousness has to be raised up to dwell in this divine consciousness. This will enable the human soul to share in His divine transcendence of Nature and of His works and act in a perfect spiritual liberty.

These three steps are presented as follows :

• The first step is Karmayoga, the selfless sacrifice of works. Here the Gita’s insistence is on action.
• The second is Jnanayoga, the self-realisation and knowledge of the true nature of the self and the world.  Here the Gita’s insistence is on knowledge. At this stage the sacrifice of works continues. Here the path of Works becomes one with the path of Knowledge but does not disappear into it.
• The third and the last step is Bhaktiyoga, adoration and seeking of the supreme Self as the Divine Being. Here the insistence is on devotion. But the knowledge is not subordinated It is only raised, vitalized and fulfilled. At this stage also the sacrifice of works continues. The double path becomes the triune way of knowledge, works and devotion. And the fruit of the sacrifice, the one fruit still placed before the seeker, is attained.

The fruit is in the form of union with the divine Being and oneness with the supreme divine Nature.