The Crisis of the Human Soul in Action

I

सेनयोरुभयोर्मध्ये रथं स्थापय मेऽच्युत

senayorubhayormadhye rathaṃ sthāpaya me’cyuta

Arjuna, as we have seen, is the representative man of a great world-struggle and divinely-guided movement of men and nations; 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 life and its apparent incompatibility with the spiritual state or even with a purely ethical ideal of perfection.

The Gita does not open in the hush of a forest hermitage, where the seeker has already turned from the world and the Teacher waits for him beneath the trees. It opens on a field where two hosts stand arrayed, where the conches have sounded and the first missiles are already in flight; and its first words are spoken by a blind king asking what his people did there. Dharmakṣetre kurukṣetre, “on the field of Kurukshetra, the field of the working out of the Dharma” (1·1): before a single doctrine is uttered, the scene itself has named the problem. Here the law by which men live is to be tried in the fire of the act, and here a soul that has lived nobly by that law is to discover that it can no longer find in it any ground on which to stand.

It is to this moment that a cycle of essays on the Gita must first return, because the Gita itself returns to it again and again, even in the midst of its profoundest disquisitions. The long discourse on the Self and Nature, on sacrifice and knowledge and love, is not a philosophy delivered at leisure and applied afterwards; it is the answer to a crisis, and it cannot be understood apart from the crisis which calls it forth. To see what breaks in Arjuna, and in what order, is already to see what the Teacher must rebuild and from what depth; and to see that the chariot of this breaking is driven by the Divine is to understand why even this darkness is called, at the close of the first chapter, a Yoga.

dharmakṣetra

The Field of the Dharma

There is a way of reading the Gita in which the battle dissolves into allegory: the Kauravas become the passions, the Pandavas the virtues, and the whole epic is turned into a picture of the war within. Sri Aurobindo will not accept it. The Gita, he observes, is written in plain terms and professes to meet the great ethical and spiritual difficulties which the life of man raises; its setting is not symbolical, though it is certainly typical. Kurukshetra is an actual field, with actual kinsmen on either side and an actual slaughter impending; and precisely because it is actual, it can stand for every field on which a human being must act and finds that his action and his ideal have parted company.

What then does the field typify? Not the wars of nations only, though it includes them, but that whole aspect of existence which the ethical mind would rather not look upon: that the world advances by struggle, that there is no construction here without destruction, that life feeds upon life, and that the Lord of creation is also the Lord of dissolution. The Gita does not veil this truth or slip past it by a side-door. It sets its teaching in the very midst of it, and in the eleventh chapter it will show the same truth unveiled, in the form of the Time-Spirit “arisen huge-statured for the destruction of the nations” (11·32).

It is one and the same truth seen first indirectly and obscurely in the facts of life and then directly and clearly in the soul’s vision of that which manifests itself in life. The outward aspect is that of world-existence and human existence proceeding by struggle and slaughter; the inward aspect is that of the universal Being fulfilling himself in a vast creation and a vast destruction. Life a battle and a field of death, this is Kurukshetra; God the Terrible, this is the vision that Arjuna sees on that field of massacre.

Yet the same field bears another name, and the Gita speaks it first. It is dharmakṣetra, the field on which the Dharma is worked out; and the one who stands upon it is not only the Destroyer but the Friend of creatures. We must, Sri Aurobindo writes, “acknowledge Kurukshetra,” and learn to look upon the Lord of Time and Death “with a less appalled gaze than Arjuna’s”; but he insists in the same breath that the lord of Kurukshetra is the divine comrade and charioteer, the attracter of beings, and that whithersoever he drives through all the strife and confusion, it is towards some transcendence of them. The field of death is also the field of the Law’s unfolding. On this double truth, held without flinching from either side of it, the whole Gita is raised.

senayor ubhayor madhye

The Chariot Between the Armies

The conches have sounded. Bhishma’s lion-roar has been answered from the great chariot yoked to white horses in which Madhava and the son of Pandu stand together (1·14), Krishna blowing Panchajanya and Arjuna the god-given Devadatta. Then Arjuna lifts his bow and asks a thing that seems simple enough: “O Achyuta, stay my chariot between the two armies,” so that he may look upon those whom he has to meet “in this holiday of fight” (1·21–23). There is no foreboding in the request. It is, as Sri Aurobindo notes, the proud intention of the champion of the right to look in the face the champions of unrighteousness whom he has come to conquer.

अर्जुन उवाच

सेनयोरुभयोर्मध्ये रथं स्थापय मेऽच्युत ॥

senayorubhayormadhye rathaṃ sthāpaya me’cyuta

But mark to whom the request is made, and by what name. Arjuna calls his charioteer Acyuta, the one who does not fall, the Immovable; and it is the Immovable who is asked to set the chariot in the one place where everything in Arjuna will be moved. Krishna obeys the letter of the command and fulfils a purpose of his own. He stays the chariot not anywhere between the hosts, but “in front of Bhishma, Drona and all the princes of earth,” and speaks his first word in the Gita: “O Partha, behold these Kurus gathered together” (1·24–25). The first act of the divine Teacher is not a doctrine but a placing. He does not argue with Arjuna about the war; he shows it to him. And the place where he sets him is exactly between: between the two armies, between an old certainty and a knowledge not yet born, between the warrior who came to fight and the soul who must learn why.

Arjuna and Krishna, this human and this divine, stand together not as seers in the peaceful hermitage of meditation, but as fighter and holder of the reins in the clamorous field, in the midst of the hurtling shafts, in the chariot of battle.

Here is the distinctive setting of the Gita and its distinctive gift. In the Veda, Indra and Kutsa ride through the battle in one chariot; in the Upanishad two birds sit upon one tree; but there the companionship of the human and the divine moves towards knowledge, while here it moves through action, and the Divine is himself the one who holds the reins. The phrase “between the two armies,” senayor ubhayor madhye, will return. Sanjaya repeats it as he tells how the chariot was stayed, and it will sound once more when Krishna, smiling, begins to answer the stricken man (2·10). The teaching does not lift the disciple out of the field. It is given in the very place of the fracture.

dṛṣṭvā svajanam

The Blow at the Centre

Arjuna knew long before this morning that his grandsire and his teacher stood in the opposing ranks. He had known it through all the years of wrong and embassy and failed peace that led to the war. Why then does the sight of them break him now, and never before? Sri Aurobindo’s answer goes to the root of the difference between knowing a thing and realising it.

It is not that he did not know these things before, but he has never realised it all; obsessed by his claims and wrongs and by the principles of his life, the struggle for the right, the duty of the Kshatriya to protect justice and the law and fight and beat down injustice and lawless violence, he has neither thought it out deeply nor felt it in his heart and at the core of his life. And now it is shown to his vision by the divine charioteer, placed sensationally before his eyes, and comes home to him like a blow delivered at the very centre of his sensational, vital and emotional being.

It is typical of the man of action, Sri Aurobindo remarks, that he awakens to the meaning of his act through his sensations. The thinker recoils from the appearances of life and turns his eye inward to ask what existence means; Arjuna does nothing of the kind. He sees, dṛṣṭvemaṃ svajanam, “seeing these my own people,” and the seeing enters him through the body before it has reached the mind: “my limbs collapse and my mouth is parched, my body shakes and my hair stands on end; Gandiva slips from my hand, and all my skin seems to be burning” (1·28–30). The bow which the gods gave him for this hour will not stay in the hand that was trained to hold it.

This order is of consequence for everything that follows. The crisis does not begin in the reasoning intelligence and descend; it begins in the nerves and the flesh and rises. Only afterwards will the heart speak, and only after the heart the moral sense, and only after the moral sense the bewildered understanding asking to be taught. What the Gita sets before us is the order in which a human being actually breaks, from the most outward instrument inward, and therefore the order in which the Teacher must reach him: first rousing the collapsed strength, then correcting the heart’s false reading of itself, then giving the understanding a truer ground, and at last speaking to the soul beneath them all. Nothing in Arjuna is to be passed over. The whole instrument has come apart, and the whole instrument must be made new.

viṣāda

The Anatomy of a Recoil

Once the body has given way, the other members of the being follow, each with its own voice. First the vital being withdraws its consent: “I desire not victory, nor kingdom, nor pleasures” (1·31). The ordinary motives of the man of action, possession and enjoyment and rule, lose their savour at a stroke, for what are they worth when those for whose sake they were desired stand in the ranks to be slain? Then the emotional being cries out for “my own people,” the teachers and fathers and sons whom not even the kingdom of the three worlds could persuade him to strike (1·32–35). And then, last and most eloquent, the moral mind arrives to defend what the senses and the heart have already decided: this is sin; the destruction of the family will destroy its eternal traditions; lawlessness will overcome the house, the orders will be confounded and the ancestors will fall (1·36–44).

Sri Aurobindo gathers the whole anatomy of this revolt into a single sentence which should be read slowly, for it is a map of the human being as the Gita will have to treat it.

The revolt itself is the most elemental and simple possible; sensationally, the elemental feeling of horror, pity and disgust; vitally, the loss of attraction and faith in the recognised and familiar objects of action and aims of life; emotionally, the recoil of the ordinary feelings of social man, affection, reverence, desire of a common happiness and satisfaction, from a stern duty outraging them all; morally, the elementary sense of sin and hell and rejection of “blood-stained enjoyments”; practically, the sense that the standards of action have led to a result which destroys the practical aims of action.

We must not despise these arguments; they are not the pleading of a coward. Arjuna is no Titanic nature driven by passion, but a man trained to self-control, “the rajasic man who governs his rajasic action by a high sattwic ideal”; his egoism, as Sri Aurobindo describes it, is of the purer kind which regards the moral law and society and the claims of others, and not only its own desire. His case against the war has real moral substance, and it rises from private grief to the fate of a whole civilisation. And yet the order of its arrival betrays it. The sense of sin comes after the trembling of the limbs, not before; “now the moral sense awakens to justify the revolt of the sensations and the emotions.” The reason is not leading. It is being led.

Here is the first of many discernments the Gita will require of us: that a movement may clothe itself in the noblest language and still spring from a lower source. Arjuna closes his plea with a resolution that has the look of a saint’s renunciation, that it would be better for him if the sons of Dhritarashtra slew him unarmed and unresisting (1·45). Then he sinks down upon the seat of the chariot and lets the bow and the inexhaustible quiver fall.

सञ्जय उवाच

एवमुक्त्वार्जुनः संख्ये रथोपस्थ उपाविशत् ।विसृज्य सशरं चापं शोकसंविग्नमानसः ॥

evamuktvārjunaḥ saṃkhye rathopastha upāviśatvisṛjya saśaraṃ cāpaṃ śokasaṃvignamānasaḥ

kṛpā

Pity and the Divine Compassion

Twice Sanjaya names the power that has invaded Arjuna. He is kṛpayā parayāviṣṭaḥ, “invaded by great pity” (1·27); and again, when Krishna turns to answer, he is “by pity invaded, his eyes full and distressed with tears” (2·1). Krishna’s first words to him are a rebuke so sharp that many readers have been troubled by it: “Whence has come to thee this dejection, this stain and darkness of the soul in the hour of difficulty and peril?… Shake off this paltry faintheartedness and arise” (2·2–3). Is pity then to be despised? Is the Gita, at its very opening, a gospel of hardness?

Sri Aurobindo meets the question squarely. To the Indian mind compassion has always been among the largest elements of the divine nature, and the Gita itself will number “compassion to all beings” among the riches of the man born into the godlike nature (16·1–3). But there is a compassion that descends from above and a pity that rises from below, and the whole teaching depends on not confusing the two.

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.

Arjuna’s pity is not this. It does not see the whole; it sees “my own people,” and the emptiness his own life will suffer without them. It is, in Sri Aurobindo’s unsparing phrase, “an impotence full of a weak self-pity,” the shrinking of the nerves from the act of slaughter and of the heart from its own loss; and Arjuna himself confesses its true centre when he says that he sees nothing that can thrust from him “the sorrow that dries up the senses” (2·8). The rebuke of Krishna is therefore not the harshness of a war-god against tenderness. It is the refusal of a truer love to let a weakness wear the mask of a virtue. The divine compassion will not break the bruised reed, and yet it can smite down the oppressor without wrath, holding in one regard both the Titan who errs by his strength and the sufferer who must be saved from him. Arjuna is to be raised, not out of pity into hardness, but out of pity into that compassion whose strength is equal to its tenderness.

dharmasammūḍhacetāḥ

The Bankruptcy and the Breach

The rebuke does not at once prevail. Arjuna accepts it and resists it in the same breath. How shall he strike Bhishma and Drona, who are worthy of worship (2·4)? Better in this world to live even on alms than to taste of blood-stained enjoyments (2·5). He does not even know which would be the worse, to conquer or to be conquered (2·6). Here the recoil shows its direction: it turns towards the mendicant’s bowl, towards renunciation. But it is not the renunciation of one who has seen the Timeless. It is, in Sri Aurobindo’s exact diagnosis, “the tamasic recoil from action of the sattwa-rajasic man,” an uprush of inertia and bewilderment into a nature made for strength; and the Teacher will not confirm it. It is to an inner askesis, and not to the outward abandonment of works, that he means to call his disciple.

Then, in the very midst of his resistance, Arjuna speaks the verse on which the whole Gita turns.

कार्पण्यदोषोपहतस्वभावःपृच्छामि त्वां धर्मसम्मूढचेताः ।यच्छ्रेयः स्यान्निश्चितं ब्रूहि तन्मेशिष्यस्तेऽहं शाधि मां त्वां प्रपन्नम् ॥

kārpaṇyadoṣopahatasvabhāvaḥpṛcchāmi tvāṃ dharmasammūḍhacetāḥyacchreyaḥ syānniścitaṃ brūhi tanmeśiṣyaste’haṃ śādhi māṃ tvāṃ prapannam

Every phrase of it is a confession. Kārpaṇyadoṣopahatasvabhāvaḥ: my own nature is smitten by a fault of poorness of spirit. Dharmasammūḍhacetāḥ: my whole consciousness is bewildered as to the law. Yac chreyaḥ syān niścitaṃ brūhi tan me: tell me decisively which is the better. Śiṣyas te ‘haṃ śādhi māṃ tvāṃ prapannam: I am thy disciple; I have taken refuge in thee; enlighten me. Sri Aurobindo draws out what lies beneath the words.

But the whole upshot is that all-embracing inner bankruptcy which Arjuna expresses when he says that his whole conscious being, not the thought alone but heart and vital desires and all, are utterly bewildered … 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.

This is the breach through which the Divine can enter. So long as Arjuna argued, he was defending a position; now, for the first time, he asks. A mind that still believes it sees has no room for a Teacher; a mind that confesses it cannot see has become a disciple. And yet the demand is still the demand of the practical man. He wants a dharma, a rule by which to walk again; he does not ask for the secret of life and the world. It is precisely that secret, unasked, which he will be given. Having spoken, he says to Govinda, “I will not fight,” and becomes silent (2·9), a silence that is at once the last stand of the old nature and the first waiting of the new.

prahasann iva

Smiling As It Were

Into that silence falls the most luminous half-line of the opening: “To him thus depressed and discouraged, Hrishikesha, smiling as it were, O Bharata, spoke these words between the two armies” (2·10). The chariot has not moved. The hosts still stand; the missiles have begun to fly; the disciple sits collapsed with the bow at his feet. And in the very place of the fracture, senayor ubhayor madhye, the Master of the senses smiles.

तमुवाच हृषीकेशः प्रहसन्निव भारत ।सेनयोरुभयोर्मध्ये विषीदन्तमिदं वचः ॥

tamuvāca hṛṣīkeśaḥ prahasanniva bhāratasenayorubhayormadhye viṣīdantamidaṃ vacaḥ

What is this smile? It is not mockery, for the Teacher is about to give the whole of himself to this man. In one of his Bengali writings on the Gita, Sri Aurobindo pauses over it.

On hearing Arjuna’s words, Sri Krishna’s face betrayed signs of a smile, a smile that was amused yet happy. The Knower of the hearts of men recognised in Arjuna’s delusion the old delusion of mankind, so He smiled.

The smile is the first sign of the Gita’s hidden delight. It is the ānanda of one who sees the whole where the human being sees only the part; the gladness of the Friend who knows that this collapse is not an ending but a birth; the tender amusement of the Lover at the grief of one who has not yet remembered what he is. The same pages go on to let Krishna speak of human beings as “children of delight, children of immortality,” come upon earth to play at hide and seek with life and death. Beneath the stern rebuke there was always this smile; beneath the conch of battle, for one who can hear it, the flute. The Gita will be a severe gospel of works and will demand of Arjuna the whole labour of his being; but it is given, from the first, by one who is not grieved to one whom he loves, in a light in which grief itself is seen to be a passing shadow on the face of the eternal.

So the first word of the teaching proper goes straight to the first mood of the disciple: “Thou grievest for those that should not be grieved for, yet speakest words of wisdom” (2·11). Grief, śoka, has been the colour of the whole first chapter; it is the first thing the Teacher names, and the last thing, at the close of the supreme secret, that he will forbid.

arjunaviṣādayoga

Why the Gita Begins Here

The first chapter ends with its colophon, and the colophon calls it arjunaviṣādayogaḥ, the Yoga of the dejection of Arjuna. The title is not a pious convention. Sri Aurobindo reads it as an exact statement of what has happened: this is the dejection and discouragement felt by the human being when he is made to face the spectacle of the universe as it really is, “with the veil of the ethical illusion, the illusion of self-righteousness torn from his eyes, before a higher reconciliation with himself is effected.” Viṣāda is a Yoga because it is the first loosening of the knot. The standards that held Arjuna’s life together were high, but they were constructions of the mental and social being, and they could not bear the whole weight of the world’s truth. Their collapse is a grief; it is also a deliverance.

This is why the Gita must begin here and not elsewhere. A teaching of the divine life in action cannot be given to one who is still satisfied with the human law of action, for he will only use the new words to decorate the old consciousness. It can be given only when that law has failed from within, completely and at its highest strain, and to one who has not been weak but strong, not lawless but faithful, and who finds that his very faithfulness has brought him to this field.

He seizes him at a moment of his psychological development by egoistic action when all the mental, moral, emotional values of the ordinary egoistic and social life of man have collapsed in a sudden bankruptcy, and he has to lift him up out of this lower life into a higher consciousness, out of ignorant attachment to action into that which transcends, yet originates and orders action, out of ego into Self, out of life in mind, vitality and body into that higher nature beyond mind which is the status of the Divine.

And so the end of the Gita is folded into its beginning. Arjuna asked for a dharma; he will be told at last to abandon all dharmas and take refuge in the Divine alone (18·66), and he has already said, without knowing its depth, tvāṃ prapannam, “I have taken refuge in thee.” He said, “I will not fight”; he will hear that this resolve, made in egoism, is vain, for his own nature will appoint him to his work (18·59). He began in grief; the last word of the supreme secret is mā śucaḥ, “do not grieve.” He began with a consciousness bewildered, sammūḍha; he will end, “Destroyed is my delusion, I have regained memory through Thy grace” (18·73). Every term of the crisis is answered, and not one of them by a better rule. Each is answered by a change in the one who acts.

The Layers of the Crisis and Their Transfiguration

The field of Kurukshetra is not far from any of us. It lies wherever the law by which we have honestly lived brings us before an act from which every part of our nature recoils, and we find that our standards, turned against one another, leave us nowhere to stand. The body trembles first; then the heart pleads; then the moral mind assembles its reasons; and when all have spoken, the soul is left with its bewilderment and, if it is blessed, with a Friend beside it who does not share the bewilderment.

Such a crisis is not a fall from the path; for the soul of action it is the gate of the path. It is not escaped by leaving the field, nor resolved by a harder will to do one’s duty. It is answered when the disciple consents to remain where the Charioteer has set the chariot, between the two armies, confesses that he cannot see, and asks to be taught. Then the one who holds the reins begins to speak; and the first thing he gives, before any doctrine at all, is a smile.

The verses of this essay

Chapter 1

1. 1
2. 21
3. 24
4. 28
5. 31
6. 36
7. 45
8. 46

Chapter 2

1. 1
2. 2
3. 3
4. 5
5. 7
6. 8
7. 9
8. 10
9. 11

Chapter 18

1. 59
2. 66
3. 73

• The Divine Teacher
• The Human Disciple
• Kurukshetra
• Man and the Battle of Life
• The Creed of the Aryan Fighter
• The Vision of the World Spirit; Time and Destroyer