II: 4

[Krishna Jaya]

Chapter 2, Verse 4

 

Arjuna says,

 

"Bheeshma and Drona are noble and ancient,

Worthy of the deepest reverence.

How can I greet them

With arrows in battle?”

 

Sri Aurobindo:

 

"Arjuna is the man of action, the fighter and not the thinker.  In the Gita he typifies the human soul brought face to face with the problem of human life and its apparent incompatibility with the spiritual state.  The crisis which he undergoes is an all-embracing inner bankruptcy which he expresses when he says that his whole conscious being, not his thoughts alone, but his heart and everything else, are utterly bewildered and can find nowhere the Dharma, nowhere any valid law of action.  'Give me,' Arjuna practically asks Krishna, 'that which I have lost, a true law, a clear rule of action, a path by which I can again confidently walk.'  He does not ask for the secret of life, the meaning and purpose of it all, but for a Dharma.  Yet it is precisely this secret for which he does not ask to which the Teacher intends to lead his student; for he will teach him to give up all rules except the one broad and vast Dharma (the divine law by which the Godward effort of humanity is kept from decisively regressing and instead conclusively carried forward in spite of the natural order of action and reaction, the rhythm of advance and relapse by which nature proceeds) of living consciously in the divine and acting from that consciousness."

 

[Arjuna wonders:  how can it be my duty to participate in this war with my beloved teachers and relatives?  Reasonable points of view can be presented on both sides.  There is no absolute right or wrong answer once and for all time; situations change constantly and participants in those situations choose rightly sometimes not by “reasoning it out” but by getting in touch with that still, quiet place inside which intuitively encourages the optimum path in a given situation.  For one person in a certain situation, the optimum path may point in one direction, whereas for another it may not.  Moral codes are guidelines and only helpful up to a point in those extraordinary circumstances when conflicting codes induce a state of mental/emotional paralysis as in Arjuna’s case.]

 

Daniel Clark:  “sometimes Dharma means ethics.  But the root of the word in Sanskrit is Dhri - "service."  The essential service is service to God.”

 

[“Yes, Dharma (like reality) has many levels.  Remembering this sometimes helps sort through seeming inconsistencies.”]