The Creed of the Aryan Fighter
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,
krpaya avishtam. 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,
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 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 selfindulgence;
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 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 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 dh¯ıra, 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 theman 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 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.
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 selfdiscipline
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 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.
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 tomake
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 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 c ¯aveks.ya. 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.”
VOLUME 19
THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SRI AUROBINDO