The Bhagavadgita's Message of Knowledge and Action: 2. Swami Krishnananda.

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Saturday 21, September 2024, 06:40.
Article
Scriptures
The Bhagavadgita's Message of Knowledge and Action: 2. 
Swami Krishnananda
(Spoken on Gita Jayanti in 1974)

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As I mentioned, in one sense the Upanishads may be regarded as a complete gospel, but the temporal values which necessitate a particular type of action or activity on the part of man seem to assume a new orientation altogether in the light of the Upanishads, and we are faced with a similar predicament as a child would be faced when confronted with a genius of mathematics, physics or philosophy. We cannot say that the child's values are ignored by the genius, but the child cannot understand the genius, notwithstanding the fact that all the values of childhood are comprehended in the values of a genius. Likewise, the values held as ultimately real by the Upanishads seem to go over our heads and speak a language which we cannot understand. We want to be told in our own language, in the tongue that we speak, and with a sympathy that is consonant with that which we regard as valuable and dear to our heart.

Here comes the Bhagavadgita to comfort us, to console us, to solace us, and to tell us that everything is all right. Nothing is wrong in this world and there need not be despair either in the religious attitude or in the secular attitude. It may be emphasised that here in the Bhagavadgita we have an eternal message of the reconciliation between the empirical and the transcendental, the secular and the religious, the human and the divine, the relative and the Absolute, the visible and the invisible, the matter of fact that is before us and the glorious ideal that is beckoning us with its relentless and resistless force ever since the creation of the world. Now, what is this reconciliation that the Bhagavadgita offers us? What is its message to mankind, to humankind, to everyone? The message is precisely the message of duty because we are faced with a problem of what we are expected to do in this world after we are born.

The whole of our life is one of action. From birth to death we are in a network of activity, some meaningful, some appearing to be meaningless. Even babies are active, though to the adult it may look childish, senseless, idiotic and meaningless. It is activity that seeps into the very essence of our temporal being and we are expected to do something; we are impelled to act and do something or the other from morning till evening, whether or not we are inclined to intelligently understand the implications of an action.

This was exactly what Bhagavan Sri Krishna told Arjuna: You have to act and you will act, whether or not you have an inner inclination to be for it or against it. You have not the right to say, “I shall act”; you also have not the right to say, “I shall not act.” And in a similar vein, the great lawgiver Manu tells us in his Smriti: Neither are you to say, “How beautiful is life, how grand is life, how dear is life,” nor are you to say, “How stupid is life, how idiotic is life, how ugly is life,” because both these statements are born of a misunderstanding. Life is neither beautiful nor ugly, it is neither dear nor hateful; it is an impersonal presentation of values which we have to take in the way in which it is presented before us at any given stage of life under any given moment or circumstance.

Continued

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