Bhagavat Gita - 7

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Bhagavat Gita - 7

 

Arjuna seeking refuge in Krishna (Chapter 2 verses 1-16)

 

To Arjuna thus overcome with pity for his doomed kith and kin, Sri Krishna

administers a strong dose of reprimand, saying that his attitude befits

only a enuch and not a hero. But Arjuna's sorrow and confusion are so

deep rooted that the reprimand has no effect on him, and he continues in

his attitude of self-pity, and finally takes refuge in Krishna as a

disciple, seeking solace and instruction.

 

The Immortal Atman (Chapter 2 verses 17-25)

 

Sri Krishna recognises that Arjuna's recoiling from his duty of leading

his forces stems from two presumptions in his mind. First, the people

threatened with destruction are his own kith and kin. This in turn has its

basis in his blindness to the essential spiritual nature of man. Ignorance

makes him equate man with his visible body, which in turn makes him think

of death as total destruction. But the truth is that man's spirit is

indestructible. Until man lives by this truth, there can be no abiding virtue

in him. In order to bring this home to Arjuna, Krishna, at the very start

of his discourse, expounds the high philosophy of the Atman in the following

words: You pretend to be a wise man in speech, but your behaviour is like

that of the most ignorant. Your sorrow is for persons who are not in need

of it. A wise man takes death as a trifle. For, he knows that the essence is

the atman, the birthless, the deathless, the eternal spirit whom weapons

cannot cleave, fire burn or air dry. Birth and death are only of the

body and not of the atman, and the body in relation to the atman is like

clothes one puts on and throws away; or like the passing stages of life

like childhood, boyhood, youth and old age. Pleasant and painful experiences

of life are passing episodes. A man who knows this and is never moved by

pleasure and pain, by life and death, is alone wise and fit for spiritual

freedom.

 

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