The Bhagavadgita's Message of Knowledge and Action: 3. Swami Krishnananda.

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Friday 27, September 2024, 06:40.
Article
Scriptures
The Bhagavadgita's Message of Knowledge and Action: 3. 
Swami Krishnananda
(Spoken on Gita Jayanti in 1974)

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One of the difficulties in understanding the gospel of the Bhagavadgita or any such message is that we are expected to think here in an absolutely reoriented fashion. A new educational value is presented to us. One of the things, or perhaps the most important thing that the Bhagavadgita tells us is that we have to think in a new fashion altogether, and the greatest knowledge conceivable is perhaps the art of thinking correctly. Knowledge does not mean the study of Plato or Kant or Sankara or Ramanuja. Knowledge is the system of thinking correctly, and we are masters of not thinking correctly. Why? Because we have been caught up in a muddle of circumstances whose values we cannot properly understand; and the relationship we bear with whom, we understand much less.

To come to the crux of the whole matter, we cannot easily understand our relationship with the world. This is our difficulty; and therefore, we cannot understand our relationship with other people in the world. Therefore, also, we cannot understand our relationship with God. Everything is a confusion, and this confusion is called samsara. In Sanskrit we have a very beautiful word – samsara. “I am caught up in samsara” means, “I am caught up in a mess, a muddle, a mire, a confused state of affairs,” which is what Arjuna cries out at the very outset in the First Chapter of the Bhagavadgita. “I am confused. I cannot understand what is right, what is wrong, what is proper and improper. What am I to do now?” This is the question which Arjuna posed before Bhagavan Sri Krishna, and every one of us is posing the very same question. What is my duty here? There is only one question before us into which we can boil all other questions of life: the question of what we are supposed to do in this world after we are born. What am I to do, what are you to do, what is anyone to do?

The Bhagavadgita is the answer. It is very difficult to give a complete conspectus of everything the Bhagavadgita says, but we can pinpoint the essential emphasis of the Bhagavadgita in this context, namely, our duty is to harmonise ourselves with the environment in which we are living. Harmony is called yoga – samatvaṁ yoga ucyate (B.G. 2.48) – and the action that proceeds from our personality on the basis of this understanding is called karma yoga.

What is karma yoga? It is an intelligent action, not a foolish action; it is an action that is engendered by a correct understanding of all the factors involved in our relationship with the entire atmosphere in which we are placed. This is a very difficult thing. You may be thinking, “What is it that you are saying? How am I to understand the implications of all the aspects of my relationship with the total atmosphere in which I am placed? What is this atmosphere?”

The Bhagavadgita tells us sankhya is to precede yoga or, in other words, knowledge is to precede action. In the terminology of the Bhagavadgita, sankhya means knowledge and yoga means action. We should not do anything without understanding what we are doing, but how are we to understand what we are doing? What is the meaning of understanding? Everybody understands what he is doing. Don't we know what we are doing? When we get up in the morning, take our tea, go to the bazaar and purchase something, quarrel with somebody, we are doing so many things with an understanding of what we are doing, so what is the Bhagavadgita for? Everyone has knowledge of what he is doing, so in that sense the Bhagavadgita is useless.

Well, this is not the type of understanding that is expected of us. Whenever there is tension in our action, it means we have not understood the nature of our action. If an action that we perform, even if we regard it as a so-called duty, brings about an adverse reaction or sorrow as a result, it means we have not understood it, because the good cannot bring a bad result. Similia similibus curentur, as medical people tell us. There is similarity, harmony, between the means and the end. If good proceeds from us, how can the result of it be bad? How can we cry and grieve as a consequence of what we have done? “Oh, I have done so much good and yet people are abusing me and throwing stones at me.” We have not done good. We may be thinking that we have done good, but there has been a small error creeping into our goodness, on account of which nature has revolted against us.

Continued

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