The Essence of the Gospel of the Bhagavadgita - 4. Swami Krishnananda.

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Monday 20, May 2024 07:20.
Article
Scriptures
The Essence of the Gospel of the Bhagavadgita -4.
Swami Krishnananda
(Spoken at a conference in Delhi on December 27, 1973.)

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We many a time put on an air of understanding as if we are omniscient, and then under the pretext of this apparent knowledge of ours—which is another form of ignorance—we assume a sense of duty from the point of view of our own personal interpretation of it. Even a devil can quote scripture, as they say, and the error of judgment in which we mostly get rooted in life becomes the guiding factor in the judgment of values, as it happened to Arjuna and happens to every person in the world.

“Knowledge is to be the rock bottom of action; wisdom should guide the sense of duty,” is the advice of Bhagavan Sri Krishna to Arjuna. Knowledge is the guiding factor, the motive power, the determining principle behind the execution of your duty in life. You cannot know what your duty is if you do not know what your position in this world is. The knowledge of your placement in this world, in this human society, is to be the guiding light behind your performance of duty. Unless you know what you are and where you are placed, you cannot know what to do at any given moment of your life. “Where am I, first of all?” you must know. Then only can you know what to do at that moment of time. “What is around me? Whom am I facing just now? What are the conditions prevailing here? What are the circumstances in which I am placed? What is happening outside and inside me?” These factors are the constituents of that knowledge which will tell you what steps you have to take at that particular time.

Hence, the question of the Bhagavadgita is a world question. It was not a problem of a single man called Arjuna, but a problem of mankind as a whole. It was a question of human duty in a world of various endowments and colours and sounds. The answer of Bhagavan Sri Krishna to the man in Arjuna is really the response of God to the call of man, the Eternal responding to the urges of the relative. This is the gospel of the Bhagavadgita. The great instruction of Bhagavan Sri Krishna through the Gita boils down to a simple recipe of maintaining a balance of attitude under conflicting situations. The great advice of Bhagavan Sri Krishna to Arjuna was that he should not take sides when a conflict has arisen. You should not belong to either party. You should be like an umpire in a game, judging both sides equally with a balanced vision.

What is conflict? It is the collision of two opposite forces. And what is going to be your stand in the situation of that conflict? Are you to take the Kauravas' side or the Pandavas' side? Arjuna was the representative of one side, Duryodhana was the representative of the other side, and Bhagavan Sri Krishna was a balancing force between the two. That is why when Duryodhana and Arjuna went to Dvaraka, the abode of Sri Krishna, and requested the Lord for help, he said, “Well, I am ready to help. Equal are you both to me. Duryodhana is as much a concern of mine as Arjuna. What do you want? You can take whatever I have. I have only two things. You can choose between the two. I have a large army called the Narayani Sena. It is invincible; nobody can face it. That is one thing that I have. And I am here, which is the other thing. You can choose me, or you can choose the large army. Which do you want? But there is a condition. The army will fight vigorously and fiercely, but I will do nothing; I will keep quiet. Do you want this individual Krishna Vasudeva who will simply sit quiet doing nothing, or do you want that fierce army which will fight until death? What do you want?”

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Continued

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