हतो वा प्राप्स्यसि स्वर्गं जित्वा वा भोक्ष्यसे महीम् ।तस्मादुत्तिष्ठ कौन्तेय युद्धाय कृतनिश्चयः ॥
hato vā prāpsyasi svargaṁ jitvā vā bhokṣyase mahīmtasmāduttiṣṭha kaunteya yuddhāya kṛtaniścayaḥ
Slain thou shalt win Heaven, victorious thou shalt enjoy the earth; therefore arise, O son of Kunti, resolved upon battle.
Compiled rendering · Anilbaran Roy
His translation
And now if yet thou deemest of the Spirit as ever born or ever dying, even so thou hast no cause to grieve for him, O strong-armed. For of that which is born the death is certain, and of that which is dead, the birth is sure; therefore in a thing inevitable thou oughtest not to grieve. Unmanifested in their beginning are creatures, manifested in the middle, O Bharata; they become but unmanifest again at death; what room is here for lamentation? As a Mystery one seeth Him, as a Mystery another speaketh of Him, as a Mystery a third heareth of Him, but even with revelation not one knoweth Him. The embodied One is for ever unslayable in the body of every man, O Bharata, and from Him are all creatures; therefore thou hast no cause for grief. Moreover if thou considerest the law of thine own being, thou oughtest not to tremble, for than battle in a just cause the Kshatriya knows no greater bliss. Happy are the Kshatriyas, O Partha, who win such a battle to their portion; ‘tis as though one came past by chance and found the door of Paradise open. Now if thou wilt not wage this just & righteous battle, then hast thou cast from thee thy glory and the law of thy being, and brought sin upon thy head; yea thy shame shall be eternal in the mouth of all creatures, and for one who has been honoured, shame is worse than death. The warriors will think that from fear thou hast ceased from battle, and in their eyes who thought highly of thee, thou shalt be belittled. And thine illwishers will speak of thee many unutterable words, disparaging thy might and thy greatness, than which there is no worse bitterness under the skies. Slain thou shalt conquer heaven, victorious thou shalt enjoy earth for thy kingdom, therefore, O son of Coonty, arise with a heart resolute for war. Make thou thy soul indifferent to pain and pleasure, to gain and loss, to victory & defeat, then gird thyself to the combat; sin shall not touch thee then.
Essays on the Gita
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.2·31–32 “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;2·33 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,2·37 victorious thou shalt enjoy the earth; therefore arise, O son of Kunti, resolved upon battle.”
The kinetic man is not satisfied with any ideal which does not depend upon the fulfilment of this cosmic nature, this play of the three qualities of that nature, this human activity of mind and heart and body. The highest fulfilment of that activity, he might say, is my idea of human perfection, of the divine possibility in man; some ideal that satisfies the intellect, the heart, the moral being, some ideal of our human nature in its action can alone satisfy the human being; he must have something that he can seek in the workings of his mind and life and body. For that is his nature, his dharma, and how can he be fulfilled in something outside his nature? For to his nature each being is bound and within it he must seek for his perfection. According to our human nature must be our human perfection; and each man must strive for it according to the line of his personality, his svadharma, but in life, in action, not outside life and action. Yes, there is a truth in that, replies the Gita; the fulfilment of God in man, the play of the Divine in life is part of the ideal perfection. But if you seek it only in the external, in life, in the principle of action, you will never find it; for you will then not only act according to your nature, which is in itself a rule of perfection, but you will be—and this is a rule of the imperfection—eternally subject to its modes, its dualities of liking and dislike, pain and pleasure and especially to the rajasic mode with its principle of desire and its snare of wrath and grief and longing,—the restless, all-devouring principle of desire, the insatiable2·37–40 fire which besieges your worldly action, the eternal enemy of knowledge by which it is covered over here in your nature as is a fire by smoke or a mirror by dust and which you must slay in order to live in the calm, clear, luminous truth of the spirit. The senses, mind and intellect are the seat of this eternal cause of imperfection and yet it is within this sense, mind and intellect, this play of the lower nature that you would limit your search for perfection! The effort is vain. The kinetic side of your nature must first seek to add to itself the quietistic; you must uplift yourself beyond this lower nature to that which is above the three gunas, that which is founded in the highest principle, in the soul. Only when you have attained to peace of soul, can you become capable of a free and divine action.
Other writings
A great man has fallen, perhaps the greatest force in the field of political action that the nineteenth century produced, the maker of Japan, the conqueror of Russia, the mighty one who first asserted Asia’s superiority over Europe in Europe’s own field of glory and changed in a few years the world’s future. Some would say that such a death for such a man was a tragedy. We hold otherwise. Even such a death should such a man have died, in harness, fighting for his country’s expansion and greatness, by the swift death in action which, our scriptures tell us, carry the hero’s soul straight to the felicity of heaven. The man who in his youth lived in imminent deadly peril from the swords of his countrymen because he dared to move forward by new paths to his God-given task, dies in his old age by a foreign hand because, at the expense of justice and a nation’s freedom, he still moved forward in the path of his duty. It is a difficult choice that is given to men of action in a world where love, strength and justice are not yet harmonised, and he who chooses in sincerity and acts thoroughly, whether he has chosen well or ill, gathers punya for himself in this world and the next. Then he was building a nation and he lived to do his work, for his death would not have profited. He was building an Empire when he died and by his death that Empire will be established. The soul of a great man, fulfilled in development but cut off in the midst of his work, enters into his following or his nation and works on a far wider scale than was possible to him in the body. Korea will gain nothing by this rash and untimely act, the greatest error in tactics it could have committed. The Japanese is the last man on earth to be deterred from his ambition or his duty by the fear of death, and the only result of this blow will be to harden Japan to her task. She has science, organisation, efficiency, ruthlessness, and she will grind the soul out of Korea until it is indistinguishable from Japan. That is the only way to perpetuate a conquest, to kill the soul of the subject nation, and the Japanese know it. A subject nation struggling for freedom must always attract Indian sympathy, but the Koreans have not the strength of soul to attain freedom. Instead of seeking the force to rise in their own manhood, they have always committed the unpardonable sin against Asiatic integrity of striving to call in a European power against a brother Asiatic. The Koreans have right on their side, but do not know how to awaken might to vindicate the right. The Japanese cause is wrong from the standpoint of a higher morality than the merely patriotic, but they believe intensely in their religion of patriotic duty and put all their might into its observance. It is not difficult to predict with which side the victory will lie.
Writings in Bengali
He was preparing the future Japanese empire. Whatever he did he achieved mostly from behind the scenes. The world learns immediately of what the Kaiser or Lloyd George is thinking or doing. But no one knew what Ito was thinking or doing—when his secret imagination and effort bore fruit, only then the world learnt with astonishment: this was being prepared so long. And yet what great effort, what wonderful genius is manifested in his achievement. If Ito had been used to publicise his great vision, the whole world would have laughed at him as a mad idealist given to fruitless dreams and bent upon achieving the impossible. Who would have believed that within fifty years, Japan would, maintaining its priceless independence, absorb western culture, become a very powerful nation like England, France and Germany, defeat China and Russia, spread Japanese trade and commerce and painting, and also induce admiration for the Japanese intelligence and fear of Japanese courage, capture Korea and Formosa, lay the foundation of a great empire, achieve the utmost progress in unity, freedom, equality and national education. Napoleon used to say: “I have banished the word ‘impossible’ from my dictionary”. Ito did not say but in fact did so. Ito’s achievement is greater than Napoleon’s. We should have no regret that the great man has been killed by a bullet of an assassin. It is a matter of gratification, of good fortune and something to be proud of that one who dedicated his life to Japan, whose one preoccupation and object of worship was Japan, has also sacrificed it for his country. “Slain thou shalt win heaven, victorious thou shalt enjoy the earth”. In the destiny of Hirobumi Ito we witness the attainment of both these fruits in the same life-tree.
বৎসরের মধ্যে জাপান দুর্লভ স্বাধীনতা রক্ষা করিয়া সমস্ত পাশ্চাত্য সভ্যতা আয়ত্ত করিবে, ইংলণ্ড জার্ম্মাণী ফ্রান্সের সমকক্ষ প্রবল পরাক্রমশালী জাতি হইবে, চীনকে পরাভূত করিবে, রুশকে পরাভূত করিবে, দূর দেশ-বিদেশে জাপানী বাণিজ্য, জাপানী চিত্রকলা, জাপানী বুদ্ধির প্রশংসা ও জাপানী সাহসের ভয় বিস্তার করিবে, কোরিয়া অধিকার করিবে, ফরমোজা অধিকার করিবে, বৃহৎ সাম্রাজ্যের ভিত্তি স্থাপন করিবে, একতা, স্বাধীনতা, সাম্য, জাতীয় শিক্ষার চরম উন্নতি সাধিত করিবে। নেপোলিয়ন বলিতেন, আমার শব্দকোষে অসাধ্য কথা বাদ দিয়াছি। ইতো সেই কথা বলেন নাই, কিন্তু কার্য্যে তাহাই করিয়াছিলেন। নেপোলিয়নের কার্য্য অপেক্ষা ইতোর কার্য্য বড়। এইরূপ মহাপুরুষ হত্যাকারীর গুলিতে নিহত হইয়াছেন, ইহাতে কাহারও দুঃখ হইবার কারণ নাই। যিনি জাপানের জন্য প্রাণ উৎসর্গ করিয়াছেন, জাপানই যাঁহার চিন্তা, জাপানই যাঁহার উপাস্য দেবতা, তিনি জাপানের জন্য প্রাণত্যাগ করিয়াছেন, ইহা বড় সুখের কথা, সৌভাগ্যের কথা, গৌরবের কথা। হতো বা প্রাপ্স্যসি স্বর্গং, জিত্বা বা ভোক্ষ্যসে মহীম্। হিরোবূমি ইতোর ভাগ্যে এই দুইটী পরম ফল এক জীবনবৃক্ষে পাওয়া গেল।
क्रूरासि रुद्राण्यथवा जघन्ये क्रूरे प्रजापीडनरूढगर्वे । दयेव भूतेयमलं यदार्थं स्वर्गप्रदं मृत्युमवाप युद्धे ॥ ६९ ॥
