The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity : 10.5. Swami Krishnananda.

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Tuesday, April  13, 2021. 09:30. AM.
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Chapter - 10 : The Need for Sankhya -5.
The First Six Chapters of the Bhagavadgita
(Spoken on Bhagavadgita Jayanti)
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Now comes the third argument. Emotionally, you will be disturbed. If you are a renegade, a runaway, or a parasite, you would consider this life of degradation worse than death. Suppose that nobody wants to talk to you. “This stupid ass,” they call you, and nobody considers you as worthwhile. You would be a nobody in this world. You would be considered as a renegade, and for a person such as yourself who has enjoyed a reputation as a respected hero, worshipped, adored, to live with this ignominy would be worse than dying.

Now, these are tentative replies, not the real reply. You cannot start replying in a positive and philosophical, mathematical, logical manner in the beginning itself. Whatever has been said up to this time is a kind of reply, as a friend speaking to a friend. “It is good, it is interesting, it is understandable, and I accept it, yes. But still, that is not sufficient.” The more potent aspect and pertinent feature of this argument is that all these things that the individual trots out as arguments for non-action are based on non-understanding. What makes you conclude that non-action is a great virtue and is going to bring you great good? How do you conclude that this is the way of living? It would be the argument of many people that not doing anything and keeping quiet is a blessed way of living. “Why should I do anything? Let me be happy.” Now, how do you come to this conclusion? On what grounds? This is not possible. 

There is some mistake in your way of thinking. Your understanding is clouded. Let alone what little things I have told you in a friendly manner from the point of view of pure common sense, but there is something more serious about it, namely, that your understanding itself is unclear. You do not know the nature of things. You have no idea as to how the world is constituted. Sankhya is what you lack. The great Lord has put his finger on the knob. You have no knowledge of sankhya. Sankhya means originally the wisdom of life, the knowledge of life, the art of living, and an insight into the structure of the world. 

This you lack. If you know what this world is made of and how you are related to it, you will certainly understand what your position is in this world. Then one need not tell you what you should do. If you know your position under a given condition, you will know what to do at that time. But you do not know where you are placed. You are clouded in your understanding of the circumstances of your very existence; therefore, yoga, which is right action, is barred from you due to the absence of sankhya, which is right knowledge.

You cannot have access to the field of right action unless you are equipped with right knowledge first. All right action is based on right knowledge. Understanding always comes first, and behaviour comes afterwards. You cannot move a finger unless you know how to move it, so it is theory first and practice afterwards, as it is in the case of our secular sciences also. The methodology is to be clear first. The technology has to be appreciated in the beginning. We have to be trained well in the theoretical side, the logical side, the scientific side; then we will come to the practical side. So in one way we may say that the word ‘yoga’ used in the Bhagavadgita, especially in the earlier stages, say from the beginning of the Second Chapter, may be considered as indicating action rightly performed; and sankhya is knowledge.

To be continued .....

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