An appreciation of the Bhagavad-Gita, concerning Krishna's Dialogue of the Soul, as it appears in the Mahabharata.
“I will reveal again a supreme wisdom, of all wisdom the highest: sages who have known it have gone hence to supreme perfection.”
The poem that is Krishna’s Dialogue of the Soul is also known as the Bhagavad-Gita, which is included in the longer work, the Mahabharata. This lengthy work, of more than one hundred thousand couplets (slokas), is perhaps the most well-known of all the great works of Sanskrit literature. The Mahabharata concerns itself with the nature of good and evil and is set in a historical period of warfare. The Bhagavad-Gita, on the other hand, is a dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna which is supposed to occur in the midst of battle. It is, consequently, deliberately unrealistic from a time-space perspective but, in the context of the longer poem, it makes a great deal of sense to consider the nature of the soul at a time of existential crisis.
The main struggle in the Bhagavad-Gita prefigures that of Hamlet, which was written two millennia later. In a world in which good and evil are contending, each disguising itself in different forms, it is very difficult for the individual to determine which is the correct path to take. Further, the effort of identifying the appropriate path and following it to the end can be intensive and wearying. How much easier it might be, therefore, to take the easier path and withdraw from the fray? For Hamlet, this would take the form of suicide. For Krishna and Arjuna, withdrawal would take the form of the descent into the forest, living an ascetic life as a hermit monk. There are plenty of hermit monks leading useful and holy lives but this is not a path that everyone is free to take. Some are designated by karmic fate to take a more active role in the struggles of the world and, for these individuals, they must take the role of warriors, spiritual or temporal as it may be.
“There is a wisdom which knows when to go and when to return, what is to be done and what is not to be done, what is fear and what is courage, what is bondage and what is liberation – that is pure wisdom.”
The purpose of life, therefore, is to search for this wisdom as part of the search for enlightenment, which follows the example of Gautama Buddha. Wisdom brings freedom from fear and all the other tribulations of the flesh and spirit and also leads the individual to divine wisdom and supernatural power.
(Translation by Juan Mascaro from the Penguin Classics.)
