My Gita

by Devdutt Pattanaik

In nature, plants and animals use their strength and size and cunning to survive. This is called ‘matsya nyaya’, literally ‘fish justice’, which means the same thing as ‘jungle law’ in English— might is right, survival of the fittest. But words like justice and law are human concepts that we impose on nature to make sense of it. Justice and law presuppose the existence of a judicial system of judges and lawyers; in nature, there is no such system. Forces and counter-forces within nature ensure self-regulation. Dominating the weak, consuming the weak, in order to survive, is the way of animals. For them, it is instinct, not aspiration. When humans display animal behaviour, such as domination and territoriality, it is adharma, as they are indulging the self.

Dharma thus has nothing to with rules or obligations. It has to do with intent and caring for the other, be it your kingdom or your family.

Ravana argues his case passionately, as do those who fight on the Kaurava side, from Bhisma to Drona, Karna and Shalya. They justify their actions on grounds of justice, fairness, legitimacy, duty, loyalty, fidelity and commitment. None of them sees the other (para); they are too blinded by the self (aham). Logic serves as a lawyer to defend their stance.

When humans behave as animals do, despite the human ability to outgrow animal nature, it is adharma. It evokes compassion in Vishnu. For him, the villainy of Ravana and Duryodhana is viparit-bhakti, reverse love, born of hunger, fear and a yearning for love.

Dharma is more about empathy than ethics, about intent rather than outcome. I follow dharma when I am concerned about your material, emotional or intellectual hunger. I follow adharma when I focus on my hunger at the cost of yours.

Empathy enables exchange. I can satisfy a hunger of yours and you can satisfy a hunger of mine. This refers not just to physical hunger, but psychological hunger as well. This act of mutual feeding informs the yagna, the ancient Vedic ritual, which establishes the human ecosystem of mutuality, reciprocity, obligations and expectations that we shall explore in this chapter.

In Vedic tradition, technically, the word ‘karma’ refers to yagna. Karma yoga begins when we acknowledge that we are always part of an exchange.

He who initiates the yagna is called the yajamana. He invokes a deity (devata) and offers him food (bhog) exclaiming, ‘Svaha!’, meaning, ‘This of mine I give you’. He hopes that the invoked deity will give him what he desires (prasad), exclaiming, ‘Tathastu!’ or ‘So be it’. This indicates an exchange.

Feeding the other is dharma. Not expecting reciprocation is nishkama karma.

In the Kalpa-sutras, which elaborate Vedic household rituals, the yajamana is advised to perform five yagnas (pancha-yagna) to feed everyone around: the self, the other, family, birds and animals and ancestors. When we do that, the boundary between family and stranger is removed. As the Upanishads say: the whole world becomes family (vasudaivah kutumbakam).

But the Puranas show yagna in a very different light. In the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, kings perform yagna to get children. Mantras chanted yield instant results: a god is obliged to give a woman a child, or turn an ordinary arrow into a deadly missile. Yagna thus assumes expectation and obligation, giving in order to get. Yagna is clearly an exchange. The word ‘exchange’ is rarely used to explain yagna. It is problematic. It lacks nobility. We have learned to valourize sacrifice, where there is giving without getting. We even celebrate worship, where getting is a surprise, a bonus, not the outcome of any expectation. This, despite the fact that the last hymn of every yagna and puja is always the chant of expected outcomes (phala-stuti). Perhaps we have been conditioned to be ashamed of human yearnings, maybe by mendicants of the Buddhist, Jain and Hindu orders who chose to renounce the world.

By calling the battle at Kuru-kshetra a yagna, Krishna indicates that Arjuna is part of an exchange. Either he is the yajamana who will please his brothers, or he is the devata who has to repay the debt he owes his brothers. The Pandavas depend on him, and he is indebted to the Pandavas. To deny these dependencies, these expectations and obligations, is to deny humanity.

In the Shiva Purana, when the hermit Shiva beheads Daksha and destroys his yagna, all the gods beg him to give life back to the yajamana and restore the yagna, for without it they will starve. Thus, the devatas depend on the yajamana as much as the yajamana depends on the devatas. There is interdependence at play here.

It all begins with choosing an action. Rather than choose to give up the world, choose to understand the brahmana, which demands action, hence yagna. Thus, informed by the wise, you will see all beings in yourself, and all beings as part of me. There will be no confusion.

In Puranic lore, he who gives upon getting is a deva; he who seeks retrieval of what he thinks has been stolen is an asura; he who grabs, takes without giving, is a rakshasa; he who hoards is a yaksha! He who does not participate in the yagna, does not give or want to get, is a shramana or tapasvi, the hermit, much feared in the Puranas as the cause of drought, hence starvation. Within us is the yajamana, the devata, the asura, the rakshasa, the yaksha and the shramana. They manifest in different interactions.

Krishna asks Arjuna to fight the war not for his own sake but for the sake of others. He has to consider himself merely the instrument, for the karma-bija of the war has already been sown and the karma-phala of carnage is inevitable.

To do yagna is to recognize that we live in a sea of assumed expectations and obligations. You and I can hoard, grab, give in order to get, get before giving or simply withdraw from the exchange. We can act out of desire, duty or care. We can choose to expect or control outcome, or not.

The process of discovering the source of disconnection is called yoga, though the word yoga itself means ‘to connect’. It involves moving through the many containers that constitute deha in order to discover dehi.

Each of the eighteen chapters of The Gita is titled ‘yoga’. These are then bunched together to give us three types of yoga: behavioural (karma), emotional (bhakti) and intellectual or cognitive (gyana). So what does the word ‘yoga’ exactly mean? Colloquially, Indians use the word ‘jog’ for yoga. In astrology, jog means alignment of the stars that results in favourable conditions for an activity. From jog comes the word ‘jogadu’, the resourceful individual, a word typically used in the eastern parts of India for one who is able to create alignment and connections in a world full of misalignment and disconnections. The word ‘jogadu’ has given rise to the words ‘jugad’ and ‘jugadu’ in the northern parts of India, where it means improvisation and even by-passing the system. Sadly, today, jugad is used in a negative sense, for it is practised for the self at the cost of the other, in the spirit of adharma, not dharma.

Sankhya means enumeration and refers to analysis, the tendency to break things down into their constituent parts. Yoga is its complement and refers to synthesis, the tendency to bind parts to establish a composite whole.

In art, sankhya is visualized as an axe (parashu), used to slice things into parts, while yoga is visualized as a string (pasha), used to tie things together. Ganesha, the scribe of the Mahabharata—and hence The Gita—holds these symbols in his hands to remind all of these two techniques of enquiry. Krishna uses both sankhya and yoga to solve Arjuna’s problem. He establishes boundaries using sankhya and then dissolves them all using yoga.

Thus, yoga has much to do with the mind, and it complements yagna that has much to do with society. Yagna is the outer journey, while yoga is the inner journey that Arjuna has to undertake.

Arjuna feels that if he withdraws from the battle, all problems will be resolved and there will be peace. However, not fighting a war does not tackle the underlying hunger and fear. It simply denies and suppresses the hunger and fear and the consequent rage, which then ends up festering secretly as people ‘pretend’, awaiting to explode more intensely at a later date. Outer peace does not guarantee inner peace. Further, it does not take into consideration the other’s thoughts and feelings. Arjuna’s desire for peace, howsoever noble, may not be shared by Bhima or Duryodhana, who are ready for war. Forcing his noble view on them would be judgement, devoid of empathy, hence adharma. Arjuna may not want to do yagna, but he cannot stop others from doing so. Our decision to act or not act cannot be insensitive to the feelings of those around us. Hence, any discussion on yagna is complemented with discussions on yoga. While yagna focusses on tangible giving and getting, yoga focusses on discovering intangible thoughts and emotions of the yajamana as well as the devata, the boundaries that we create and use to include some as family and exclude others as enemy.

Arjuna, your mind is your friend and your enemy. If you control the mind, it is your friend. If your mind controls you, it is your enemy.

The value of the mind slowly amplifies as The Gita progresses. In Chapter 3 of The Gita, Arjuna asks whether Krishna values knowledge over action. Krishna replies that he values informed action.

Arjuna asks if Krishna values action over renunciation. Krishna replies that he values detached action. Informing the mind about the exchange and detaching action from the expectation of results demand that Arjuna take an inner journey.

Krishna introduces yoga as an inner yagna, where we are our own yajamana and devata, our own beneficiary and instrument. We choose our stimulus. We choose our response. Here, the fire is not in the altar outside, but can be our body, our senses, our mind, even our breath and our digestive fire.

Patanjali, in his Yoga-sutra, written around the time of The Gita, defines yoga as stopping the rippling and twisting of the mind (chitta-vritti-nirodha) caused by various experiences and memories that result in disconnection.

Fear (bhaya) is a neuro-biological fact. It is the first emotion that manifests with the arrival of life. It is a critical emotion, essential in the struggle for life. For it evokes hunger (kshudha) and makes the organism seek food (bhog) to nourish itself.

This is where The Gita departs from the Yoga-sutra. While the Yoga-sutra speaks of samadhi as complete withdrawal from the material world, Krishna’s Gita speaks of samadhi very differently, as the ability to see the world with perfect equanimity, without judgement.

This divergence from the Yoga-sutra is not surprising, as mythological tales inform us that Patanjali was a serpent who overheard Shiva revealing the secret of yoga to Shakti. Shiva is a hermit. His path is suitable for the tapasvi who does not wish to engage with the world. Krishna speaks to the yajamana, the householder, and the whole point of yoga is to facilitate engagement with the world. If the tapasvi is focussed on the inner journey, and if the yajamana is focussed on the outer journey, then the yogi takes the inner journey in order to be better at the outer journey.

Arjuna, the yogi is far superior to a hermit who withdraws from the world, to a scholar who understands everything but does nothing, or a householder who does everything without understanding.

Connecting with the other is not easy, especially when we look upon each other as predator or prey, rival or mate. In such a situation we trust no one but ourselves, as animals tend to do. Or we trust the other only in situations of extreme helplessness, as only humans can. Thus, we become asuras and devas.

The words ‘deva’ and ‘asura’ refer to divinities in the Veda, and are roughly translated as gods and demons, but Krishna uses them differently. A deva is one who accepts the reality of atma; an asura does not. Thus, Krishna sees devas and asuras not in supernatural terms or as inherently good or evil, but as people who value the dehi and those who don’t, respectively. The asuras are trapped by the literal and the measurable, while the devas appreciate the metaphorical and the non-measurable. Those who do not look beyond the body and material reality, says Krishna, have no hope of freedom, despite any material accomplishments.

The Gita presents atma as a fact, hence in Chapter 17, Verse 23, the phrase ‘om tat sat’ is used, which roughly translates as ‘that which is forever true’. It is the closest we get to the definitive article ‘the’ in Sanskrit. This fact, however, can never be measured, therefore from a scientific point of view it can never be proven. It can, however, be experienced (anu-bhava).

Believing is a cognitive process, an acceptance of a conceptual truth. Experience is an emotional process, the journey from the head to the heart. To enable anu-bhava, one has to simultaneously perform the inner journey of yoga and the outer journey of yagna.

the word tapasya is used interchangeably with yoga, tapasya refers to the inner journey, while yoga refers to the inner journey that eventually leads to an outer journey.

In the Puranas, this rupture is made explicit. The devas prefer yagna but not tapasya. The asuras prefer tapasya but not yagna. Both are the children of Brahma. Indra, leader of the devas, who is not committed to the inner journey, is eternally insecure: he fears those who perform yagna and tapasya, and considers them as rivals. So he disrupts the yagna of kings by stealing their horses.

Asuras, on the other hand, are visualized as performing tapasya and obtaining, from Brahma, many powers that overpower Indra. Thus, devas are portrayed as entitled, insecure beings while asuras are portrayed as deprived, angry beings. Though half-brothers, these sons of Brahma do not like each other: the devas fear the asuras and the asuras hate the devas.

We overlook the fact that in popular Hinduism neither devas nor asuras are given the same status as ishwara or bhagavan. We need to see devas and asuras as our emotions that prevent us from completing the outer and inner journeys.

Puranic stories typically begin with Indra not paying attention to the yagna while an asura is deep in tapasya. Indra’s power thus wanes while the asura’s power waxes. The asura is able to invoke Brahma and get boons from him, using which he attacks, defeats and drives the devas out of their paradise, swarga. Dispossessed, Indra and the devas go to Brahma, not for boons but for help. Brahma then directs them either to Shiva, Vishnu or the Goddess, who form the foundation of the three major theistic schools of Hinduism.

In many ways, these stories echo the history of Indian thought: the decline of the yagna rituals of Vedic times, the rising popularity of monastic orders that practise tapasya, and eventually the triumph of theistic traditions. They also reflect the rise of the ritual known as ‘puja’ that forces the devotee to look at the divinity outside hims...

It is significant to note that the asuras seek Brahma’s boons and the devas seek Brahma’s help. The asuras are not interested in Brahma; only in his possessions. They perform tapasya not to attain wisdom that takes away insecurity, but to simply acquire powers known as siddhis. The devas are interested in Brahma and are directed to Shiva, Vishnu and the Goddess, a calling for the inner journey that grants wisdom, hence takes away insecurity. But the devas do not complete this inner journey.

The asura is one who is striving for success. The deva is one who is, or has been, successful. A determination to be successful drives the asura to do tapasya. Fear of losing what they have or fear of never getting back what they lost makes the devas seek Brahma. The asura does not believe that anyone will help him. The deva believes that God exists only to help him while he does not exist to help anyone. In other words, the asura does not believe in atma whereas the deva believes in param-atma, but has yet to realize jiva-atma, the human potential.

In the Puranas, the residence of the asuras is called pa-tala, the subterranean realm; this is where they belong, just as the devas belong in the celestial realm, the sky above. But in The Gita, the residence of the asuras is called naraka, or hell. Pa-tala is a physical description but naraka is a psychological description: lack of faith results in hopelessness and rage and hence creates hell.

Yagna of the devas is good, as it forces us to look at the param-atma outside. Tapasya of the asuras is good, as it makes us discover the jiva-atma inside. But we need the two to inform each other. Only yagna is action without understanding. Only tapasya is understanding without action. When understanding impacts action and action impacts understanding, then it is yoga.

We all ride waves of fortune and misfortune. If you and I believe we alone control the waves, then we are asuras. If you and I feel entitled in fortune and remember God only in misfortune or in fear of misfortune, then we are devas. We are not yet in touch with the atma within and without.

We are not rational creatures who feel; we are emotional creatures who rationalize.

the Puranic bhagavan sees the devas as a part of his being.

God is also ‘in us’ and ‘in others’.