Hindus: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (The Library of Religious Beliefs and Practices)

by Julius Lipner

  The story pivots now on the struggle for succession between the Kauravas and the Pāṇḍavas, for the Kauravas view the Pāṇḍavas as their rivals (remember Yudhiṣṭhira as the eldest son of Pāṇḍu is really heir to the throne), and wish to get rid of them. We are told how Dhṛtarāṣṭra, the blind regent, while acknowledging the Pāṇḍavas'claim, is blinded to the dharma of the situation by his affection for his eldest son, Duryodhana, who plots to win the throne. There is a famous episode where Duryodhana tries to have his cousins and their mother burnt to death in a house built of lacquer in a distant town, but the latter escape secretly through a tunnel with Vidura's help. The Pāṇḍavas then form an alliance with two bordering peoples, the Vṛṣṇis (of whom Kṛṣṇa Vāsudeva, proclaimed in the Bhagavad Gītā as the Supreme Being who has descended to earth, is a chieftain) and the Pāñcālas. Arjuna, the third Pāṇḍava brother, wins Draupadī, daughter of the Pāñcāla king, for his wife through his expertise in archery, and by a remarkable occurrence she becomes the joint wife of the Pāṇḍavas. This instance of polyandry, or having more than one husband, is exceptional in the annals of Sanskrit literature and results in a major twist of the plot.

  If the reader is still with me, the kingdom of Kurukṣetra is then divided between the Kauravas and the Pāṇḍavas, the latter being given the wild tract of the Khāṇḍava forest, where they rule from their capital, Indraprastha. Yudhiṣṭhira engages in various campaigns to extend his power; he has a fabulous palace built for him where he plans to hold a great Vedic sacrifice to proclaim himself emperor of the whole region. Duryodhana, hardly delighted at the prospect, is invited for the occasion and is humiliated in all sorts of ways by the wondrous design of the Pāṇḍavas’ palace. Enraged, he returns to his own capital and challenges Yudhiṣṭhira to a game of dice.

  The fateful game of dice – a pivotal incident in the story – is duly played, for Yudhiṣṭhira, model of dharma though he may be, has a fatal flaw in his character, especially for a king: he is addicted to gambling. With the help of his uncle, Śakuni, who cheats, Duryodhana wins from Yudhiṣṭhira all his wealth, his four brothers, Yudhiṣṭhira himself and finally Draupadī, their joint wife; the Pāṇḍavas and Draupadī are then humiliated in the Kaurava assembly hall. One of the Kauravas, the second eldest son, Duṣśāsana, with the connivance of Duryodhana, attempts to strip Draupadī, dharmically more vulnerable than ever because she is having her period, in full view of the crowded assembly hall, but fails; Draupadī’s modesty is preserved in a wonderful fashion. As one can imagine, this is another famous episode of the story; it also provides a fine opportunity to discuss dharma in analytic detail, which will be our task in Chapter 11.

  Troubled by all that has happened, Dhṛtarāṣṭra, the regent, nullifies the dicing match, but Duryodhana succeeds in calling back Yudhiṣṭhira to play one last throw. The stake is the restoration to the Pāṇḍavas of all their wealth, etc. or their banishment for 13 years (the last year to be spent incognito if they are to recover their kingdom). They throw (Śakuni once again cheating on behalf of Duryodhana) – and Duryodhana wins again! The Pāṇḍavas survive the years of banishment according to the rule of the game (though not without a scare or two in the final year), but then have their claim to their realm rebuffed. Deciding that there is no other solution, they prepare for war. At this point, Kṛṣṇa offers the two parties a choice: one side can have his troops to fight on their behalf, the other side can have him in the role of non-combatant adviser. Arjuna chooses Kṛṣṇa, while Duryodhana is delighted to get Kṛṣṇa's army.

  Both sides, 18 armies in all, meet on the battlefield of Kurukṣetra. Kṛṣṇa, as Arjuna's charioteer, uses this opportunity to explain (in Book 6 of the epic) the dharma of spiritual combat to his friend, in the form of the Bhagavad Gītā, revealing in the process that he is God in human form. The great battle is then fought for eighteen days, a terrible, remorseless, devious, incident-laden conflict in which most of the heroes of both sides are slain. Bhīma, the second brother of the Pāṇḍavas, whose larger-than-life character bears a distinct resemblance to that of Hanumān in the Rā., rips open Duṣśāsana's chest and drinks his warm blood as he had promised, to avenge Draupadī’s humiliation at his hands in the Kaurava assembly hall. During the course of the battle, the ‘wise Bhīṣma, dying on a bed of arrows, interminably expounds on the varieties of dharma in what must be the longest deathbed sermon on record’ (van Buitenen 1973:xxiii). On the last day, Duryodhana himself is felled by Bhīma in violation of the Kṣatriya code (controversially at Kṛṣṇa's instigation), and dies the following day, leaving Kṛṣṇa and the Pāṇḍavas and one or two others to survive the battle.

  The Pāṇḍavas are then reconciled with Dhṛtarāṣṭra, and Yudhiṣṭhira asserts his supremacy by performing the horse-sacrifice (thereby endorsing Vedic values again). Some years later Dhṛtarāṣṭra, his wife Gāndhārī, and Kuntī (mother of the three eldest Pāṇḍavas) repair to the forest to live a hermit's life, and die subsequently in a fire. Years later, Kṛṣṇa destroys the men of his tribe after they indulge in a drunken brawl in which his own son is killed. Subsequently, Kṛṣṇa, while meditating, is slain mistakenly by a hunter and, on hearing of Kṛṣṇa's death, the Pāṇḍavas and Draupadī resolve to leave the world, and eventually, one after another, they attain heaven.

  Perhaps we have been too ruthless in our précis of the story and this is too skeletal an outline. We have left out so many episodes and tales, some more extraneous to the story-line, some less so – the story of Sāvitri restoring her dead husband to life by a clever trick on Yama, lord of death (Book 3);Yudhiṣṭhira's less-than-honourable manoeuvring of the death of Droṇa, the weapons-teacher of both the Kauravas and Pāṇḍavas, who out of duty was fighting on the side of the Kauravas (Book 7); Droṇa's son, Aśvatthāman's own ignoble revenge-slaying of five sleeping Pāṇḍava children during a night-raid on the Pāṇḍavas’ camp (Book 10);the dying Bhīṣma's discourses on dharma (Books 12 and 13), and dozens more – from a rambling narrative that can itself be likened to the proliferating roots and branches of an ancient banyan. The voluminous Mbh., which has grown by accretion over centuries, is a multi-layered text, and several scholars have claimed to have discovered more or less hidden interpretive keys to unlocking inner or core meanings.

  Yet there does seem to have been a historical seed to this narrative. It is believed that a great inter-tribal war did take place in north India at about the beginning of the first millennium B.C.E., and a number of individuals who then became some of the main characters of the epic may well have taken part; these would have included Kṛṣṇa, who becomes the avatāra or descent of the deity in the Mbh. Two of the choicest fruits of this great epic-tree are the Bhagavad Gīta and the Harivarṃśa.

  The Bhagavad Gītā, literally, ‘The Song (gītā) of the Lord (bhagavad-)’, occurs as part of the Bhagavadgītāparvan or Book of the Bhagavad Gītā which, as van Buitenen points out in his translation from the Poona critical edition, ‘is the sixty-third of the Hundred Minor Books of the Mahābhārata, and forms the third episode of the Bhīṣmaparvan, The Book of Bhîsma, the sixth of the Eighteen Major Books’ (van Buitenen 1981:xi). It has come down in 18 chapters and 700 verses, so it is not a very long text and devout Hindus still read parts or all of it daily. The Gîta, as it is generally called, is in the form of a dialogue between Kṛṣṇa and his close friend, Arjuna (the third of the Pāṇḍava brothers). Kṛṣṇa, who had earlier promised to be a non-combatant in the great internecine battle of the Mbh., appears on the battlefield as Arjuna's charioteer. As the battle is about to start, Arjuna, a great warrior, recoils from the prospect of fighting – and killing – not only his kith and kin, but a number of revered elders, his weapons-teacher, Droṇa, among them. Kṛṣṇa uses this pretext to explain to him the true dharma of life's spiritual combat.

  Like the rest of the Mbh., the Gītā is in verse, so nobody believes that it constitutes t
he actual words of Kṛṣṇa to Arjuna, or that such a wide-ranging discourse could be held on the cusp of battle. It is the ‘Song’ of the Lord in the sense that in its received form it is a versified and therefore polished composition believed to have been produced under divine inspiration, and to bestow salvation to all those prepared to take its teaching to heart. The Gītā is not therefore a philosophical treatise; to describe its content as ‘an ill-assorted cabinet of primitive philosophical opinions’ (Washburn Hopkins as cited in Hill 1953:20) is completely to miss the point. This quotation does indicate, however, that the Gītā is not a straightforward text. It was composed probably between 150 B.C.E. and 250 C.E., and though Vaiṣṇava in tone, it has been regarded as a self-contained text proclaiming a broadly non-sectarian teaching, by a long line of Hindu thinkers and spiritual gurus to the present day, many of whom have produced virtually word-for-word commentaries or shorter reflections on its meaning. Gandhi, for one, thought extremely highly of the Gītā and regarded it as one of the major inspirations of his life (see Iyer1986:71–100).

  In itself, the Gītā is a revealing comment on the relationship between smṛti and īruti. Not itself a part of the canonical Veda (hence ‘smṛti’), in the original Sanskrit, or in translation, it has functioned as ‘the word of God’ for countless Hindus down the centuries and across sectarian divides with the same force that this phrase evokes for Christians or Muslims reading the Bible or Koran. Its open-endedness, an authentic mark of religious depth, has generated commentaries ranging from the monistic to the starkly dualistic. Susceptible to various interpretations it may be, yet there are limits to interpretive open-endedness. There seems to be no doubt that the Gītā is a genuinely devotional text, recommending the establishing of a loving relationship between the devotee and a personal Supreme Being (‘God’). Though it may be mistaken to regard the Gītāa as a coherent philosophical treatise, it is not mistaken to understand it as promulgating a coherent religious message, and it is this latter feature that must occupy our attention now.

  We can divide the Gītās content into three parts: (i) its instruction about the nature of the human person; (ii) its teaching on the nature of the Supreme Being and this Being's relationship with the self and world; and (iii) its view on the ethics recommended to help achieve salvation.

  (i) For the Gītā, the human person is a composite of individual spirit, called ātman or puruṣa (whose nature is pure consciousness), and a complement of materiality or prakṛti. Prakṛti comprises not only the visible body but also such mental processes known in Western thought as will, intellect, the imagination, dispositions, passions and emotions. One side of this composite is irreducible to the other, yet both co-exist in an intimate relationship that constitutes the human person with its unique sense of ‘I’ and ‘mine’. Incorporated into this production of the human self or embodied spirit – comprising a particular body, personality traits and life-context – is the karmic influence of previous lives, for the Gītā, in common with most other Hindu points of view, accepts the doctrine of karma and rebirth. In Chapter 2 of the Gītā we have a clear description of the composite nature of the human person, divided into the mutually irreducible components of ātman and prakṛti, and its susceptibility to reincarnation.

  Because the spirit whose nature is pure awareness is essentially not of this world, in itself it is not an agent in the world;it is the person as composite that acts. ‘[The embodied spirit] is never born or dies, nor is it the case that having existed it will exist again. It is unborn, continuous, everlasting, ancient; it is not slain when the body is slain ... As a man discards worn-out clothes and puts on other clothes that are new, so the embodied spirit discards worn-out bodies and enters other new bodies’ (2.20,22). Here the separate nature of each component of the living self is distinguished. In a further teaching, Kṛṣṇa drives home the point that action in the world derives from the prakritic or empirical component of the composite: ‘In every instance, actions are performed by the constituents of prakṛti: the ātman bemused by the sense of “I” thinks “I am the agent!”’ (3.27). But the prakritic component of the person cannot exist as such by itself, independent of its supporting base that is the ātman. It is in this sense that the composite as a whole can be said to act in the world.

  (ii) The God of the Gītā, who appears as Kṛṣṇa, is essentially pure spirit, the highest Person – unborn, immutable, all-knowing, all-present, all-powerful (4.6, 6.30, 7.13, 7.25–6, 15.17, 15.19, etc.). He is the source and end of all being (7.6, 10.20), and everything depends on Him. ‘There is nothing superior to Me, Arjuna. On Me all this [viz. the universe] is strung, like clusters of pearls on thread’ (7.7;see 10.39). The material world of prakṛti, made up of the primary elements, is His lower nature (7.4), and the world of living beings (jīva-bhūta) is His higher nature (7.5). Such verses show the dependence of all being on Kṛṣṇa, but do they not also indicate a pantheistic theology, that ‘everything is God’, that there is no core of absolute transcendence in the Supreme Being?

  In its own way, the Gītā guards against this conclusion. In fact, there are several passages that have a pantheistic ring to them, e.g. 7.8: ‘In water I am its flavour ... in the sun and moon its radiance; in all the Vedas I am Oṃ’, and so on (see also 10.21–38). In these passages, Kṛṣṇa speaks graphically, indicating that nothing can exist apart from Him and that it is He who is the high point or best part of each item, making it distinctively what it is. In other words, the divine Being is an immanent Being, existing in the closest relationship to His creation. But this does not imply that Kṛṣṇa has no being apart from produced being, as in the case of genuine pantheism. He exists in His own right, as the sovereign Lord of all, so that wherever we find immanentist passages such as those mentioned above, the Gītā provides a corrective statement, indicating Kṛṣṇa's intrinsic otherness and transcendence. Thus the immanentist verses of Chapter 7– 7.8–7.12 – are framed by transcendentist statements: the proclamation in 7.7 given above that higher than Kṛṣṇa nothing whatsoever exists, and the adjusting declaration at the end of 7.12 that the very constituents of prakṛti exist in Kṛṣṇa, He does not exist in them (na tv ahaṃ teṣu, te mayi; see also 7.13). Similarly for the passages in Chapter 10. At the end of this string of verses proclaiming Kṛṣṇa as the essence or representative feature of various items, we are told: ‘Having set apart (viṣṭabhya) this whole world as one portion [of Me], I stand firm’ (10.42).

  We recall that the Gītā is not a philosophical treatise. It imparts its teaching through figures of speech, conveying in distinctive Hindu fashion an interactive metaphysical balance between divine transcendence and immanence with respect to creaturely being (in contrast to the way the Abrahamic faiths tend to stress, each in its own manner, the overwhelming metaphysical transcendence of God). In the verse quoted immediately above (10.42), the word used for ‘part’ is aṃīa – which can be given the sense of ‘aspect’ – rather than khanndda, viz. quantitative part. It is left to the theologians to tease out in their commentaries and treatises how the distinctive tension between the divine transcendence and immanence is to be explained.10 There can be no doubt that the God of the Gītā is a God worthy of worship in utter reverence (for impressive evidence of this, see Gītā, Chapter 11).

  He is also a righteous and benevolent God, descending to earth in human form to impart an effective teaching – through Arjuna – that can rescue human beings from the travails of the human condition: low caste, rebirth, unrighteousness, oppression by evil, and other predicaments. For the first time in Hindu religious teaching, the Gītā mentions a doctrine of avatāra, or (periodic) descent by the deity in embodied form for the welfare of the world. Kṛṣṇa declares:

  Being unborn, my Spirit is imperishable. As Lord (īśvara) of all being and established in my creation (prakṛti), I take birth by my spiritual power (māyā). For whenever dharma wanes, Arjuna, and adharma grows strong, then do I generate an embodied self. For the
protection of the good and the destruction of evil-doers, and for the establishing of dharma, I take birth age after age.

  (4.6–8)

  So this is a purposeful descent, undertaken again and again to establish dharma for the benefit of the virtuous. This idea accords well with our analysis of dharma at the end of Chapter 6, where we described dharma as a transcendent, eternal principle of order, both natural and moral, that manifests repeatedly, over time, in different contexts in our world. In the Gītā, it is the Almighty who brings this about. And this act of repeated descent of the Lord is an act of pre-emptive love, which generates the opportunity for loving commitment (bhakti) between the Supreme Person and individual selves.

  Kṛṣṇa first creates the conditions for bhakti, which enables the individual to respond. He says: ‘There is nothing I need do, Arjuna, nothing unachieved to be achieved, but I engage in doing ... If I did not act these worlds would collapse and I would be the agent of chaos; I would destroy my creatures’ (3.22,24). Then we are told, as quoted above, that He descends repeatedly, as dharma wanes, to uphold dharma and protect the virtuous. Finally, after imparting instruction that He sustains all beings and guides them from within (see above), He invites human beings to enter into a loving relationship with Him, notwithstanding social and other predicaments, for he is their Deliverer and End:

  Whether it be a leaf, or a flower, or a fruit, or water –