In this passage that I have just quoted to you, Mahatma Gandhi was referring to what is perhaps the most famous of all the spiritual classics of India. The Bhagavad Gita—or Bhagavad: “the Lord,” Gita: “song;” “The Song of the Lord.” It is spelled Bhagavad Gita. The Song of the Lord—the Lord in this case being Sri Krishna, who in Hindu mythology is regarded as an incarnation and embodiment (in the Sanskrit language an avatar) of Vishnu, the Supreme Lord, the personification of the ultimate reality underlying this universe.

The Bhagavad Gita was probably compiled about the fifth century B.C., and it forms a part of a great epic called the Mahābhārata. It is attributed to a sage by the name of Vyāsa, and contains a complete epitome of the whole central doctrine of Hinduism known as the Vedānta. It is a very fascinating and (to us) puzzling fact that Gandhi, preeminently the man of non-violence in modern times, was so devoted to this book. Because the scene with which the book opens is a battlefield, the field of Kuru, where a young prince by the name of Arjuna is riding in his chariot, and Sri Krishna, the incarnation of Vishnu, is his charioteer. As the opposing armies face each other and the battle is about to begin, and Arjuna is faint in heart, oppressed with the senselessness of this struggle and the internecine warfare. And the Gita says in the first chapter:

He was overcome with great compassion and uttered this in sadness: “When I see my own people arrayed and eager for fight, O Krishna, my limbs quail, my mouth goes dry, my body shakes and my hair stands on end. And I see evil omens, O Krishna. Nor do I foresee any good by slaying my own people in the fight. I do not long for victory, O Krishna, nor kingdom, nor pleasures. Of what use is kingdom to us, O Krishna, or enjoyment, or even life?”

And having spoken thus on the field of battle, Arjuna sank down on the seat of his chariot, casting away his bow and arrow, his spirit overwhelmed by sorrow. And to this complaint his charioteer, the Lord Krishna, replies, “Whence has come to thee this stain, this dejection of spirit in this hour of crisis? It is unknown to men of noble mind. Yield not to this unmanliness, O Arjuna, for it does not become thee. Cast off this petty faint-heartedness and arise, O oppressor of the foes.”

And to give point to his words, Krishna goes on, “Thou grievest for those for whom thou shouldst not grieve, and yet thou speakest words about wisdom. Wise men do not grieve for the dead, nor for the living. Never was there a time when I was not, nor thou, nor these lords of men, nor will there ever be a time hereafter when we shall cease to be. As the soul passes in this body through childhood, youth, and age, even so is its taking of another body. The sage is not perplexed by this. Heat and cold, pleasure and pain come and go, and do not last forever. These learn to endure.

The man who is not troubled by these, O chief of men, who remains the same in pain and pleasure, who is wise, makes himself fit for eternal life. Of the nonexistent, there is no coming to be. Of the existent, there is no ceasing to be. The conclusion about these two has been perceived by the seers of truth. Know thou that that by which all this is pervaded is indestructible. Of this immutable being, no one can bring about the destruction. It is said that these bodies of the eternal embodied, which is indestructible and incomprehensible, come to an end.

Therefore fight, O Arjuna. He who thinks that this slays, and he who thinks that this is slain, both of them fail to perceive the truth. This one neither slays nor is slain. He is never born, nor does he die at any time. Nor having come to be, does he again cease to be. He is unborn, eternal, permanent, and primeval. He is not slain when the body is slain.

Now it’s obvious, I think, to those of you who have listened to any other of these programs, what Sri Krishna is talking about here. When I was talking to you about the Upanishads, I explained at several points the fundamental doctrine of the Hindus. And that is that the innermost reality of man is not quite what we, who have been brought up in a Christian tradition, call the soul. We have an inherited teaching, of course, of an immortal and individual soul which is the root principle of every human being. But in the Hindu doctrines, the soul is not individual. The soul is supra-individual, or as they would say in their technical language, the Ātman, the “soul,” or “self.” “Self” is really a better translation than “soul.” The Ātman is identical with Brahman. And Brahman is the name which they use for the ultimate reality which underlies this whole universe

Now, I don’t want you to think of Brahman as a sort of vast blob of perfectly transparent jello which penetrates the whole world. I think that’s what many people imagine when they hear this kind of thing. The whole point of the Brahman idea is missed when you form any image of it in your mind at all—even jello, even empty space, or boundless light. Brahman is what we ourselves really are, what this whole universe is, fundamentally and actually. There is no way of thinking about or imagining that. For a very simple reason: that, as water cannot rise higher than its own level, thought cannot think what is higher than thinking. It cannot conceive the mind which thinks, and still less the power which generates the mind. Our symbols for, our ideas about this supreme reality are vague-ish and void-ish not at all because that reality is vague and void, but because thought and imagination are annihilated in trying to grasp it.

The essential teaching which the Gita is trying to convey is that the real center and soul, the basic reality of you and I, is not the superficial consciousness which we ordinarily call myself. What we are, fundamentally, is this unthinkable source of life and existence named Brahman, the expansive. Nor must we confuse this unthinkable center of our lives with a sort of inert stuff, a so-called blind force. For one doesn’t derive life and consciousness, feeling and reason, from mere stuff, as if the dead were able to give birth to the living.

You know, this notion of blind force as the ultimate reality—which has been popularized by a facile scientism—is merely the result of the fact that when the human mind gets out of its depth, it drowns and vomits up a lot of dead ideas.

And so Sri Krishna goes on:

He who knows that it is indestructible and eternal, uncreated and unchanging, how can such a person slay anyone, O Arjuna, or cause anyone to slay? Just as a person casts off worn out garments and puts on others that are new, even so does the embodied soul cast off worn out bodies and take on others that are new. Weapons do not cleave this self, fire does not burn him, waters do not make him wet, nor does the wind make him dry. He is uncleavable. He cannot be burned. He can neither be wetted nor dried. He is eternal, all-pervading, unchanging, and immovable. He is the same forever. He is said to be manifest, unmanifest, unthinkable, and unchanging.

Therefore, knowing him as such, thou shouldst not grieve. Even if thou thinkest that the self is perpetually born and perpetually dies, even then, oh mighty arm, thou shouldst not grieve. For to the one that is born, death is certain, and certain is birth for the one that has died. Therefore, for what is unavoidable thou shouldst not grieve.

Perhaps that last passage needs a little bit of interpretation. “For to one that is born, death is certain” is a statement, of course, which is obvious enough. But not so obvious to us is, “and certain is birth for the one that has died.” I should try to explain this a little bit, because it’s a passage expressive of what is called in India the doctrine of rebirth or reincarnation.

If you will think for a moment of what you were before you were born, you will come to the rather puzzling conclusion that “you before you were born” are impossible to think about. Before you were conceived by your father and mother in the womb, you can’t remember anything. You don’t even remember darkness, not even a blank. Your background, your past history, right at its beginning, seems to be a state of complete annihilation of your ego, of your personality. And yet, oddly enough, here you are. After you die, you may presumably go again into a state which we can imagine only as complete annihilation, of complete nothingness. And, if so, you will—won’t you?—be in the same sort of condition as you were before you were born. You came out of that state, though. Should you be afraid to return to it?

And this is perhaps a rather elementary way of expressing the Hindu doctrine of rebirth, but I don’t want to give the impression that the Hindu doctrine is—as it is imagined to be by many people in the West—a doctrine of the reappearance again and again in this life of an individual soul. I think it is true to say that, according to the strict doctrine of the Vedanta, there is not an individual soul which passes from life to life. The one who transmigrates is precisely this Ātman or Brahman, and this is why we have to imagine the state before birth and after death as blank annihilation. Because thought is annihilated in trying to grasp the reality which lies deeper than thinking. The finger that struggles to touch its own tip finds only the empty air.

And so Krishna goes on:

The dweller in the body of everyone, O Arjuna, is eternal and can never be slain. Therefore, thou shouldst not grieve for any creature. Further, having regard for thine own duty, thou shouldst not falter. There exists no greater good for a kshatriya than a war enjoined by duty.

I think it is just at this point that we puzzle about this book in relation to Mahatma Gandhi. Let me explain the passage that I just read. A kshatriya is a member of one of the three great castes of Hindu society—those castes being, respectively: brahmana, which is the priestly caste, the sacerdotium; kshatriya, the caste of warriors and rulers; vaishya, the caste of merchants. And they are roughly equivalent to the Lords spiritual, the Lords temporal, and the commons of medieval European society. And each caste has its proper duty in life, which in Sanskrit is svadharma. And this is the phrase which Krishna uses here when he says, having regard for thine own duty, for thine own svadharma. Sva: “self,” dharma: “function.” Or svadharma is probably best translated into English as “vocation.” The kshatriya is one who has a vocation to fight. That’s his job. Whereas a brahmin—or more particularly, one who has gone beyond caste altogether, one who in India is called a sannyasin, corresponding in the medieval West to the monks and hermits—those who have gone outside society, they do not have the vocation or the duty of fighting.

I think the clue to the problem of the Gita, especially in relation to that great nonviolent man, Gandhi, is this. Primarily, Arjuna’s objection to taking part in war is a sentimental one. He is unwilling to fight in the battle because of his depressed emotions in regard to slaying his kinsmen—or we would say in regard to slaying one’s fellow man. If one would be a pacifist because one is merely squeamish, and is the kind of person of whom one would say, “Well, he couldn’t even heard a fly,” then surely there is something phony about such pacifism because it is sentimental. This does seem to be Arjuna’s objection. And this is why Krishna says, in effect: your objection to slaying is a fear of slaying, a squeamishness to slay, and because of this you do not have a genuine objection to slaying. If you refrain from taking part in battle because you are frightened of soldiering, or because you are sentimental, you are not the kind of person who really has a right to abstain from battle.

Now, why does he say this? The reason is that, to the Hindu mind, one who abstains from what might be an evil action through fear has not really liberated himself from evil action. Krishna would say that so long as our conduct is motivated by fear on the one hand, or by desire on the other, we are incapable of performing a truly moral action. Only those actions are truly moral which are unmotivated. Because if you are motivated to do good by fear, your good may, under other circumstances, be evil.

This is the case with Arjuna. He wants to refrain from war for the same reason for which many other people would engage in war. Many people engage in war because they’re afraid, and not at all because they hate. The world situation at the present time might be said to be a situation of mutual fear, where the only reason why someone might start a war would be for fear of the other side starting it first. After all, we all know now that modern warfare is something in which neither side wins. It is, then, fear more than anything else. Fear that the other fellow should send the bombs over first is what starts a war. And thus, you see, fear is no deterrent to war at all.

A person whose reluctance to fight is based on fear or squeamishness does not, then, in Krishna’s view, have the right to renounce it. And you see, here, the view is one which would probably commend itself to a man like Gandhi. Because you could turn it round in the other way, and say that a person who has to take the step of being a nonviolent man—a man of peace, a pacifist—he would have his vocation and his duty to do in exactly the same way as the kshatriya, the warrior. He must not be nonviolent on sentimental grounds, but rather because he sees it as his svadharma—that is to say, his vocation in life.

And so, a moment later, Krishna formulates the principle of action. He says:

Therefore arise, O son of Kunti [Arjuna], resolved on battle, treating alike pleasure and pain, gain and loss, victory and defeat. To action alone hast thou right, never at all to its fruits. Let not the fruits of action be thy motive. Neither let there be in thee any attachment to inaction.

Fixed in yoga [that is to say, in union with the principle, with the self], do thy work a winner of wealth, abandoning attachment with an even mind in success and failure, for evenness of mind is called yoga. One who has yoked his intelligence with the divine casts away even here both good and evil. Therefore strive for yoga. Yoga is skill in action.

The principle, you see, which he annunciates is to act without attachment to the fruits of action: to do what you have to do without seeking either evil or good from it. Now, this is simply another way of saying: to act without motive. It seems, of course, from our point of view, impossible that a human being should act without motive. In our Western way of thinking about ethics, we judge the quality of an action by the quality of the motive. And the whole notion of an action without a motive at all seems to be extraordinarily foreign to us. But, as a matter of fact, if there is no such thing as an action without motive, there is no such thing as a free or moral action. Because so long as we have a motive, our actions are not actions, they are simply reactions.

Surely it’s obvious that our motives are determined by our conditioning, by our environment, our heredity, our social structure. They give us motives, and these motives of the past determine the way in which we act. Now, if my motive for doing good is for the sake of some sort of a reward—whether it’s in the ancient sense of going to heaven, or the modern sense of being a real person or a regular guy, or whether it’s a fear in the ancient sense of going to hell, or in the modern sense of being a cad—I act motivatedly. And therefore, the things which I do by way of moral action are not actually free.

If, as we in the West have rather inconsistently but nevertheless rightly insisted, a moral man must be a free man, a free man must be an unmotivated man. In Western Christianity it has always been thought that there is only one unmotivated being, and this would be God. In the words of the ancient hymn in the Catholic breviary: “God is creation’s secret force, thyself unmoved, all motion’s source.” God, then, would be the one who would act without motive, who would act spontaneously from himself without having to be pushed around. The point, you see, of the Hindu teaching is that in reality each one of us is that unmoved one, that unmotivated one. The root and ground of our soul and mind is the same as the root and ground of this whole universe. Therefore, one in whom this is fully realized can act in an unmotivated way.

In studying the philosophy of the Hindus we have to get used to the idea that it’s really an illusion to suppose that every event is motivated, determined, or caused by the past. What they call karma (or “causation by the past”) is in fact māyā (or “unreality”). For in the Hindu philosophy the present of the universe, or the eternal now of the universe, is not the consequence of its past, but rather the past is always the consequence of the present, of the eternal now. It trails behind it like the wake of a ship. It does not stand before it and push it.

And thus it is through the realization that he is that eternal now, not his past, that Arjuna is able to act in a free way, in an unmotivated way, and thus go into battle—not because he is moved to fight by hate, by squeamishness, or fear, but because he carries out his appointed place in a society in which it’s his vocation to be a warrior.

We may think it regrettable that societies exist in which there is a vocation to be a warrior, but let’s not be sentimental in this respect also. Because every one of us is unable to live at all without killing something. Some of us would like to rule out altogether the killing of our fellow men. But, you see, in the Hindu view of life, there isn’t this rigid distinction between man on the one hand and animals and plants on the other, which exists for us in the West. Therefore, there are times in the Hindu view when killing is an unavoidable condition of being alive. And this is one of the problems which the Gita sets itself to solve.

I have read these selections from the translation of the Bhagavad Gita. That’s spelled B-H-A-G-A-V-A-D, hyphen, G-I-T-A. translated by Dr. S. Radhakrishnan; R-A-D-H-A-K-R-I-S-H-N-A-N. As you may know, Dr. Radhakrishnan is the Vice President of India. The translation is published by Harper and Brothers of New York. It is one of the best of the many translations that I know, and is provided throughout with an excellent commentary.