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To Be or Not To Be A MORAL problem, un cas de conscience (a
case of conscience), as they say
in French. To defend yourself against your attacker and kill him who comes to
kill you or stand disarmed and let yourself be killed-which is better, which
has the greater moral value? To fight your enemy is normal, is human. To
preserve yourself, that is to say, your body, is the very first injunction of
Nature. That is Nature's primary and fundamental demand. And to preserve one's
life one has to take others' life. That is also Nature. But then, it is said,
man is meant to rise above Nature, live (even if it means to die) according to
a higher law – not the biological law, the law of tooth and claw. The higher
law is for the preservation of life indeed, but others' life, not one's own, if
it comes to that; it is not self-centred, but wholly other-regarding, it is for harmony, for peace and amity,
not violence and battle. If one demurs and points out that it requires two to
be friends and at peace, the answer is that one side must begin, and the merit
goes to him who begins. One need not worry about the other side, which may be
left to follow its own law of life, which, however, can be gained over only in
this way and not by compulsion or coercion or violence. Na hi vairena
vairani samyantiha kadacana. Never by enmity is enmity appeased, says the
Dhammapada.¹ This is a way of cutting the Gordian knot.
But the problem is not so simple as the moralist would have it. Resist not
evil: if it is made an absolute rule, would not the whole world be filled with
evil? Evil grows much faster than good. By not resisting evil one risks to
perpetuate the very thing that one fears; it deprives the good of its chance to
approach or get a ¹Canto I 5 Page – 159 foothold. That is why the Divine Teacher
declares in the Gita that God comes down upon earth, assuming a human body,¹to
protect the good and slay the wicked,² slay not metaphorically but actually
and materially, as he did on the field of the Kurus. It is a complex problem and the solution too
is complex. The Gita – Hinduism generally – does not posit a universal dharma,
but a hierarchy of dharmas. Men have different natures; so their duties,
their functions and activities, their paths of growth and development must
naturally be different. A rigid rule does not fit in with the facts of life,
and the more absolute it is, the less efficacy it possesses as a living
reality. Therefore in the Indian social scheme, there is one dharma for the
Brahmin and another for the Kshatriya, a third for the Vaishya and a fourth for
the Shudra. The Brahmin is he who represents in his
nature and character the principle and movement of knowledge, of comprehension
and inclusion, of peace and harmony – all the qualities that are termed sattwic.
A Brahmin does not fight, the very build of his consciousness prevents him
from wounding and hurting; he has no enemy; even if he is attacked or killed,
he does not raise his arm to protect himself (although Ramakrishna would
prescribe even for him a modified or mollified mode of resisting the evil,
hissing at least if not biting). The Biblical injunction, we know, is to
present the other cheek too to the smiter. This is for those who follow the
Brahminical discipline. But a Kshatriya, who in his nature and consciousness
is a warrior, has another dharma; he is the armed guard of knowledge and truth,
he is strength and force. He has to resist the evil in the name of the Lord, he
has to raise his arm to strike. He is the instrument of Rudra and Mahakali.
Does not the mighty goddess declare - I draw the bow for Rudra, I hurl the
arrow to slay the hater of the truth"?³ If the Kshatriya does not follow
his own dharma, but seeks to imitate the Brahmin, he brings about a confusion
liable to disintegrate the society, he is then un-Aryan, inglorious, unworthy
of heaven, deserving all the epithets which Sri
¹ Manusim tanu asritam, IX.
11 ² ParitraNaya sadhunam vinasaya ca duskrtam, IV.
8 ³ Aha rudraya dhanurakanomi brahmadiswe saprobes
kantaba u -Rig Veda, IX. 126
Page – 160
depressed and
confused Arjuna. So long as the world is held by brute force, so long as there
is the sway of evil power over the material earth and the physical body, there
will be the need to resist it physically: if I do not do it, other instruments
will be found. I may say like Arjuna, overwhelmed with pity and grief, "I
shall not fight", but God and the cosmic deities may refuse my refusal and
compel me to do what in my ignorance and wrong headedness I would not like to
do. Here lies the secret and the solution of the
problem. It is, indeed, the solution given for all ages by the Gita. There will
always be a problem, a difficult decision to make – a division in the
consciousness – so long as one is in the realm of dualities, in one's mental
being and consciousness, ruled by relativities and contingencies. There one
cannot but have a divided loyalty. A part of you, for example, is loyal to your
family, another to your country, a third to yourself or to some ideal which you
have set up. And naturally man feels confused in the midst of their conflicting
claims and is at a loss to choose. Therefore, the Gita says, the highest law,
the supreme code of conduct, is the Divine Will. And the only work and labour
for man is to discover and identify oneself with this Divine Will.
"Abandon all other standards of conduct, take refuge in Me alone."¹
That is the supreme secret of human life – as well as of the Life Divine. To know the Divine Will and to be one with it
is not easy, to be sure. But that is the only radical solution. That has got to
be done, if one is to come out of the chaos he is in. Once in this status of the divine
consciousness, one passes beyond the three Gunas. That is to say, one bids
good-bye to one's (the human sense of) freedom and option or choice. One can
say no longer, I cannot do it, for it seems immoral, I have to do that, because
that seems good. One goes beyond good and bad and awaits the divine command.
One does what one is ordered to do from above, what is needed to fulfil the
Cosmic Purpose. You do not act then, it is the Divine who acts in you. It may be asked
if even then there are not some types of activity and impulsion that
are intrinsically evil, undivine – ¹ The Gita, XVIII.66
Page –161 they can under no
circumstances be godly or God's instruments, they have to be rejected, cast
aside in the very beginning, also in the middle and naturally in the end. But
it must be remembered that the human mind cannot be the judge of what is divine
or undivine, there are things the Divine may sanction which the mental being
fights shy of. It must leave into the Divine to choose His instrument and His
mode of activity – it is sufficient if the mental being knows by whom it is
impelled and. where it fallsas an arrow shot to its mark:kenesitampatatipresitam.¹ Yes, there is one thing intrinsically evil and undivine and that has to be rejected and cast aside ruthlessly – that is nothing else than the egoistic consciousness. It is this that has passions and prejudices, likes and dislikes, ideas and ideals, formations of its own, other deities installed in place of the Divine Truth and Reality. The ego goes, indeed, and with it also those rhythms and stresses, lines and shades germaneto it that bar the free flow of the Supreme Breath. But the instrument remains and the arms and the weapons-they are cleansed and sanctified: instead of the Asura wielding them, it is now the gods, the Divine Himself who possess and use them.
¹Kena Upanishad,I.1
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