THE GOSPEL OF ACTION

1. THE GOSPEL OF ACTION BHAGAVAD GITA

2. BalGangadharTilak 1856-1920 • SrimadBhagavad Gita Rahasya in Mandayaljail • Gita is the essence of Vedic religion • combination of traditional Indian and modern scholarship • The Father of Indian Discontent • Swaraj is my birth right and I shall have it ! • Was a devout and scholarly Brahmin and an ardent nationalist • To awaken in India feelings of pride and self sufficiency in her tradition and culture, to build on these feelings a pragmatic political program • LokamanyaTilak ‘Beloved of the people’

3. “If we lay stress on it (common heritage) forgetting all the minor differences that exist between different sects, then by the grace of Providence we shall be able to consolidate all the different sects into a mighty Hindu nation. This ought to be the ambition of every Hindu.” Religious unity is foundation for national unity

4. TILAK’S ACTIVISM • no man is free from action, action should not be stopped (3.5) • Krishna revives in the BG the original Bhagavata religion knowledge combined with desireless action • Shankara forced his own doctrine upon the Gita • karma yoga founded on knowledge in which devotion is the principal factor • Krishna in the BG - both seeking release and maintaining society • The highest ideal is that one who performs karma-yoga for the benefit of all (lokasamgraha)

6. On the sthitaprajna(2.54-58) That man whose Pure Reason has become capable of realizing the destiny, that ‘there is only one atman in all created beings’ must also possess a Desire which is pure. And when his Practical Reason has in this way become pure….such a preceptor as will give to us a visible reply, in the form of his own life, to the difficult question…what is the duty and what is not a duty. Gita RahasyaVol ii p.511-512 • Act in a selfless, desireless way. Fight with equanimity. • Even realized man should not abandon action, but should work desirelessly for the universal welfare lokasamgraha 3.20 • Example of king Janaka

7. Karmayogais a skill in performing any human activity, involves the immediate knowledge, experience, jnana of Brahman as the absolute

8. the BG deals only with karma and jnana • The idea of 3 independent paths is dismissed as the invention of “doctrine supporting commentators” • Jnana possible through desirelles action, such action is not possible without jnana

9. bhakti • Bhakta’s goal is to realize identity, to imbibe nature and form of Parameshvara by love • achieved through worship of a perceptible form of Parameshvara • BG teaches bhakti as an easier path of jnana yoga • No matter which deities humanity worships – amounts to the worship of Brahman • Bhakti is based on duality which disappears when one experiences the knowledge of Parameshvara • Devotion is a means for acquiring knowledge, not the goal itself

10. NationalismOur nation is one of God’s forms Just as the worship of the quality full (saguna) Brahman is necessary in order to attain to the quality less (nirguna) Brahman, so also is the ladder of pride of one’s family, pride of one’s community, pride of one’s religion, pride of one’s country etc. necessary in order to acquire the feeling of ‘vasudhaivakutambakam’( that is the whole universe is the family’) and as every generation of society climbs up this ladder, it is always necessary to keep this ladder intact. Gita RahasyaVol ii p.556

11. Thou art knowledge, thou art conduct,thou art heart, thou art soul,for thou art the life in our body.In the arm, thou art might, O Mother,in the heart, O Mother, thou art love and faith,it is thy image we raise in every temple.For thou art Durga holding her ten weapons of war,Kamala at play in the lotusesAnd speech, the goddess, giver of all lore,to thee I bow! I bow to thee, goddess of wealth pure and peerless richly-watered, richly-fruited, The Mother. BandeMataram ‘MotherI bow to thee’ by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838-1894) translated by Aurobindo in karmayogin on 20th Nov 1909 I show gratitude to thee, Mother,richly-watered, richly-fruited,cool with the winds of the south,dark with the crops of the harvests,The Mother!Her nights rejoicing in the glory of the moonlight,her lands clothed beautifully with her trees in flowering bloom,sweet of laughter, sweet of speech,The Mother, giver of boons, giver of bliss.

12. On Violence The Gita neither advises nor intends that when one becomes inimical, one should also become non-retaliatory….Karma-Yogins, who have reached the most perfect state….never fail to do that duty which has befallen them according to their own status in life…with a frame of mind which is unattached; and that any Action that is performed in this manner, does not in the least prejudicially affect the equability of Reason of the doer. Gita Rahasyavol ii p 555-556

13. Wolpert, Tilakand Gokhale: Revolution and Reform in the Making of Modern India, 87.

14. AurobindoGhose 1872-1950 one’s inner experience as the basic principle for interpretative approach to any scripture

15. The Motherland in all her beauty and grandeur represents the goddess of our worship. Nationalism is an avatar and cannot be slain. Nationalism is a divinely appointed shakti of the eternal and must do its God-given work before it returns to the bosom of the Universal Energy from which it came. To shrink from bloodshed and violence under such circumstances is a weakness deserving as severe a rebuke as Srikrishna addressed to Arjuna when he shrank from the colossal civil slaughter on the field of Kurukshetra. Liberty is the life-breath of a nation; and when the life is attacked, when it is sought to suppress all chance of breathing by violent pressure, any and every means of self-preservation becomes right and justifiable The Doctrine of Passive Resistance III

16. the BG is our chief national heritage, our hope for the future (Karmayogin) • BG - not a book of practical ethics but of spiritual life. • Interprets the Gita as a combination of Vedanta (Upanishads), Sankhya (prakrti vs. purusha, soul vs. body) and yoga (attaining higher state of consciousness) • Centers on 3. 4-8, 20-26 – rejects renunciation of activities as a religious, impossibility of inaction, detached, disinterested action= surrender to Krishna (Upanishadic Brahman) “…and even the most transcendental aspirations of the Vedanta presuppose a preparation in life, for it is only through life that one can reach to immortality.” • active spirituality as opposed to renunciation Two works on the BG: translation and commentary, Essays one the Gita

17. “This imperishable Yoga I revealed to Vivaswan, Vivaswan declared it to Manu,Manu told it to Ikshwaku; thus did the royal sages learn this as a hereditary knowledge.” And when in the immense lapse of time it was lost, Sri Krishna again declared it to a Kshatriya. But when the Kshatriyas disappeared or became degraded, the Brahmins remained the sole interpreters of the Bhagavadgita, and, they, being the highest caste or temperament and their thoughts therefore naturally turned to knowledge and the final end of being, bearing moreover still the stamp of Buddhism in their minds, dwelt mainly on that in the Gita which deals with the element of quiescence. They have laid stress on the goal, but they have not echoed Sri Krishna's emphasis on the necessity of action as the one sure road to the goal. Time, however, in its revolution is turning back on itself and there are signs that if Hinduism is to last and we are not to plunge into the vortex of scientific atheism and the breakdown of moral ideals which is engulfing Europe, it must survive as the religion of Vyasa for which Vedanta, Sankhya and Yoga combined to lay the foundations, which Sri Krishna announced and which Vyasaformulated. Notes on the Mahabharata, 331.

18. From Essays on the Gita 1st series , The Core of the Teaching Karmayogin, ourselves 1909 Undoubtedly the Gita is a Gospel of Works, but of works which culminate in knowledge, that is, a conscious surrender of one’s whole self first into the hands and then into the being of the Supreme, and not at all of works as they are understood by the modern mind, not at all an action dictated by egoistic and altruistic, by personal, social, humanitarian motives, principles, ideals. We have faith and we believe in the great rule of life in the Gita, “Remember me and fight.” We believe in the mighty word of assurance to the Bhakta: “If thou reposest thy heart and mind in Me by My grace thou shalt pass safe through all difficulties and dangers.” We believe that the Yoga of the Gita will play a large part in the uplifting of the nation, and this attitude is the first condition of the Yoga of the Gita.

19. 1st experience yogi Vishnu Basker, after 3 days of practice attained advaitic experience “they made me see with a stupendous intensity the world as a cinematographic play of vacant forms in the impersonal universality of the Absolute Brahman.' Inspired to surrender to the divine guru within • Importance of hearing voice within – intuitive understanding, for nationalists equally important as scriptural understanding • After his 2nd experience/realization, his focus is not on swaraj, but to promote his religious view, sanatanadharama • identifies sanatana dharma with the Gita 4.7.

20. Brahmateja is the thing we need the most of all and first of all… What Europeans mean by religion is not brahmateja, which is rather spirituality, the force and energy of thought and action arising from communion with or self-surrender to that within us which rules the world. Without it political activity would accomplish little. (Karmayogin, June 1909) • Yoga of Gita, to surrender to the Divine, to act as an instrument of the Divine • “Yoga is communion with God for knowledge, for love, or for work”

22. I looked at the bars of my cell, the very grating that did duty for a door and again I saw Vasudeva. It was Narayana who was guarding and standing sentry over me. Or I lay on the coarse blankets that were given me for a couch and felt the arms of Sri Krishna around me, the arms of my Friend and Lover. This was the first use of the deeper vision He gave me. I looked at the prisoners in the jail, the thieves, the murderers, the swindlers, and as I looked at them I saw Vasudeva, it was Narayana whom I found in these darkened souls and misused bodies. His experiences while reading Gita in the jail resemble Arjuna’s experiences in the 11 chapter samata look indiscriminately God is all – freedom from dvandava Utarrpara speech

23. EVOLUTIONISM - Universe – absolute in eternal becoming But there are two kinds of divine birth; one is a descent, the birth of God in humanity, the godhead manifesting itself in the human form and nature, the eternal Avatar; the other is an ascent, the birth of man into the godhead, man rising into the divine nature and consciousness; it is the being born anew in a second birth of the soul.

24. evolution also includes pain, distraction • Kuruksetraitself represents that life as an activity of divine is battle, a field of death, destruction has its place in evolution • was no pacifist • BG is about yoga, sadhana, practice, metaphysical ideas only as explanatory of its practical system Letters on Yoga, Volume 3, part 4

25. Last 2.5 decades Gita is out of focus • second phase: our yoga is not identical with the yoga of the Gita, although it includes all that is essential in the Gita’s yoga. the Gita seems to admit the cessation of birth in the world as the ultimate aim or at least the ultimate culmination of yoga; it does not bring forward the idea of spiritual evolution or the idea of the higher planes and the supramental Truth-Consciousness and the bringing down of that consciousness as the means of the complete transformation of earthly life. • Experience is authority to interpret a scripture, experience has taken him above the BG, not to reject it but to surpass it.