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Ascending the hill of yoga
DEC 14 - It is a mistake to interpret the Gita from the standpoint of the mentality of today. Nor is it advisable to free the Gita to teach us the disinterested performance of duty as the highest and all sufficient law. A little consideration of the situation with which the Gita deals will show us that this could not be its meaning. 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 created by the human mind.
In human life some short of clash arises fairly often, due to distance between domestic duties and the call of the country or the cause, or between the claim of the country and the good of humanity or some larger religious or moral principle. An inner situation may either arise, as with the Buddha, in which all duties have to be abandoned, trampled on and flung aside in order to follow the call of the Divine within.
Swami Arobindo does not think that the Gita would solve such an inner situation by sending Buddha back to his wife and father and the government of the Shakya State, or would direct a Ramakrishna to become a Pundit in a Vernacular school and disinterestedly teach little boys their lessons, or bind down a Vivekananda to support his family and for that to follow dispassionately the law or medicine or journalism.
According to the interpretation of Swami Arobindo, the Gita does not teach the disinterested performance of duties but the following of divine life, the abandonment of all Dharmas, Sarvadharman, to take refuse in the Supreme alone. He says that the divine activity of a Buddha, a Ramakrishna and Vivekananda is perfectly in consonance within this teaching of the Gita. Although the Gita prefers action to inaction, it does not rule out the renunciation of works but accepts it as one of the ways to the Divine.
The Gita can only be understood, like any other great work of the kind, by studying it in its entirety and as a developing argument. But some of the modern interpreters, starting from the great writer Bankim Chandra Chattopadhya who first gave to the Gita this new sense of a Gospel of Duty, have laid an almost exclusive stress on the first three or four chapters and in those on the idea of equality, on the expression KARTAVYAM KARMA, the work that is to be done, which they render by duty. They have stressed on the phrase “Thou has a right to action, but none to the fruits of action” which 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 is natural enough for the modern mind which is, or has been till yesterday, inclined to be impatient of metaphysical subtleties and far off spiritual seekings, eager to get to work and like Arjuna himself, mainly concerned for a workable law of works, a Dharma. But, according to Swami Arobindo, it is a wrong way to handle this scripture.
The equality which the Gita preaches is not disinterestedness,- the great command to Arjuna given after the foundation and main structure of the teaching have been laid and built, “Arise slay thy enemies, enjoy a prosperous kingdom”, 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. With that poise, in that freedom we have to do the “Work that is to be done.” It is a phrase which the Gita uses with the wideness including in its all works, SARVAKARMANI, and which far exceeds, though it may include, social duties or ethnical obligations. What is the work to be done is not to be determined by the individual choice; nor is the right to the action and the rejection of claim to the fruit as the great word of the Gita says but only a preliminary word governing the first state of the disciple when he begins ascending the hill of yoga.Posted on: 2003-12-15 05:02
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