Swami Gober's Bhagavad Gita Commentary: Introductory Essay - 4

Dark Country, Duffer King

For, should I not ever engage Myself in action, unwearied, men would in every way follow My path, O Arjuna!

Bhagavad Gita, chap 3, ver 23

Alternative translation:

O Pärtha, if I ever failed to engage vigilantly in My prescribed duties, common people would certainly imitate Me in all respects.

As Bhisma lay preaching wise words to people gathered around him on his deathbed, Draupadi abruptly cuts him short and questions him what moral credentials he has to be preaching wisdom to others. That is the right question! Bhagavad Gita is a most preposterous teaching on the face of it for a very simple reason: the man who preaches it has never practiced nor even tried to practice any of his own preaching. The Gita is absolutely disconnected from the life of Krishna as it is portrayed in the Mahabharata. There is not so much as an allusion to the teaching nor even a slight pretense of practice of any of the philosophy expounded in Gita. First of all, we cannot understand the gobbledygook Krishna goes on spinning off in the Gita, and then he doesn't make the least effort to clarify or simplify what he meant even as the teaching progresses chapter after chapter; added to this, there are no examples provided except for a rare simile here and there, and to top it all, his own deeds and his whole role in the Mahabharata doesn't serve in the slightest degree to illustrate any of his teaching even on very practical concepts like work, desire, self-control etc.

But, funnily enough, the Lord seems to be acutely aware and concerned about setting an example by his own action and life, highly conscious of the fact that people would be more inclined to follow the ways of Lord rather than his teachings. And so he declares, O Arjuna, even if I lazed off a bit, the whole world would follow my example, and it could get difficult for everyone. That’s so true! But wait a minute, he is not talking about himself, He is talking about Himself! Got it? Firstly Krishna ascribes a personal agency in all movements of Nature, and then he attributes all that work to himself, he is the one pushing the earth in its orbit, he is the one making all that nuclear fusion happening at the core of the sun, he is the one manually stretching the universe and expanding the physical universe (although at that time they didn’t know about the accelerating expansion of the universe). He is the one making the plants sprout, he is the one making the clouds precipitate, that sort of thing. Most remarkably, or not so remarkably, in many other verses of the Gita, he keeps saying I the Supreme Lord do nothing at all, it is only Nature that does it all. But here he assumes all the responsibilities of Nature and the natural forces upon himself. So one can imagine what a helluva lot of activity all that amounts to. These are the prescribed duties of the Lord, in all of which he is diligently and vigilantly ever engaged. So taking a cue from the Lord of the Universe, we have to ever engage in our prescribed duties too. This is the most pathetic, ridiculous, silliest twaddle I have ever heard (or at least, it would feel so until I go to the next verse of the Gita)! Are these people in their senses at all? This is just pure berserk loony raving. The Lord of the Universe is far away, let’s just try to imitate the sun for a day or two. The sun burns 24 hours, either on this side of the earth or the other, so let us burn continuously for one day, we would know then, we would have become a dead ember by the next day. Imagine a 1000-page book with these two words ‘twaddle, bunkum’ ‘bunkum, twaddle” written all over, and nothing but those. This book would make much more sense than the Bhagavad Gita.

‘O Lord, it is great that you have referred to what a fantastic work load you are handling in your capacity as the Lord of the Universe who created everything and who is running everything, but you are talking to mere men here and not to fellow Lords of other Universes, so you should be talking about your work as a man.’ See the point? But perhaps even he would have been deathly embarrassed to talk anything about it! Strangely though, people down the ages have been awe-inspired out all of their awe at Lord’s numerous capricious capers. Someone insults him, and he kills him on the spot, and everybody is mesmerized by the power of his wrath (Remember Jesus Christ cursing the fig tree and turning it into ashes just because it has no fruits to give him during the off season, Krishna too has around that level of intelligence). Then he elopes with a few ladies, again everyone is mesmerized with his divine mischief. Spends all the time placating his shrew of a favorite wife, Satyabhama, again everyone is mesmerized as to how ideal an husband he is. Collects all the pretty girls in his kingdom and beyond into his harem, again everyone is mesmerized how great a lover he is. Interacts much with his cousins Pandavas, and but never even by mistake offers one word of commonsense advice even as they go on bungling and botching everything for themselves and others. Again everyone is awed, just like that, for no reason at all!

After the Kurukshetra war is over and nearly everyone is dead, Bhishma the Grandsire, the eldest of the Kuru dynasty, sometimes regarded as an embodiment of wisdom at least because of the age factor, is on the verge of dying, just waiting for the right Muhurta, astrologically auspicious time, to pass away. On Krishna’s advice, Yudhishthira goes to Bhishma and for several days learns all about a king’s prescribed duties. This runs into literally hundreds of pages. Towards the end of it, all the Pandavas pay a final visit to him. The grandsire again launches into a solemn dharma talk, this is perhaps 110^th lecture in the series. And right in the midst of it Draupadi breaks into a laughter. The brothers are shocked at this rude gesture. But Bhishma himself calms them, says there must be some reason behind Draupadi's laughter, and requests her to disclose it. She says, ‘Stop talking all this nonsense about Dharma and Karma, it doesn't suit you, where was all this wisdom when I was being humiliated and disrobed in front of everyone? And why didn't you try to preach this wisdom to your own king Duryodhana?’ This episode cannot be found in the original epic, and could have been most probably expunged. If one looks at the place where this story should be, it looks very suspicious:

Then Yudhishthira, addressing all the other sons of Pandu, said unto them, 'Let the words which our grandfather has said command your faith.' At this, all the Pandavas with the famous Draupadi amongst them, applauded the words of Yudhishthira and said, 'Yes'.

‘Yes’? The characters of the Mahabharata are unbelievably prolix, two sentences of content, Vyasa typically drags into ten pages! And here, just ‘yes’? And all five of them put together? It is not just terse, but incredibly curt too. I therefore feel that this very interesting anecdote has been crudely expunged from the main corpus, obviously because of its seditious nature. The Pandavas depart from the scene, and Yudhishthira continues the dharma discussions with the grandsire:

Yudhishthira said, 'I desire, O chief of the Bharatas, to hear from thee what the rewards are which are attached, O best of the Kurus, to the planting of trees and the digging of tanks.'

This is in fact one of the more meaningful questions that Yudhisthira asks, and Bhishma again launches into a long dharma talk:

…The man who causes a tank to be dug becomes entitled to the respect and worship of the three worlds. A tank full of water is as agreeable and beneficial as the house of a friend. It is gratifying to Surya himself. It also contributes to growth to the deities. It is the foremost of all things that lead to fame (with respect to the person who causes it to be excavated). The wise have said that the excavation of a tank contributes to the aggregate of three, Righteousness, Wealth and Pleasure….

In the epic of Mahabharata, this water tank man Bhishma comes out as a spineless wimp of a character who simply sits there, rotting and rotting, doing nothing, when he could have done everything, being the guy who started it all! Seems like after his thundering vow of celibacy that shook the heavens and the earth, he has simply lost the will to live and goes on vegetating, perhaps contemplating about the virtues of water tanks. He appears startlingly paralyzed after adopting permanent celibacy. Before that event he was a young lion, after that event immediately he becomes an old goat! And remains so all through the epic drama except towards the climax when he mysteriously transforms into the lion again, the supreme commander of the Kaurava forces. Right now, though, he is dying a rather prolonged death, dragging it out for nearly two months in a literally paralyzed state on a bed of arrows under the open sky; he should be using this time to wallow in bitterest of regrets for a totally wasted life and perhaps to learn something from his mistakes, but instead he goes on preaching about water tanks and sundry things, spanning volumes. Draupadi naturally felt all this unending useless dharma talk emanating from him to be hideous. And the same logic applies to Krishna too.

Krishna and Draupadi share a very deep fondness for each other besides their names (Draupadi’s original and commonly used name is Krishna). If this were not the case I think she could have come to the battlefield while the Gita was being dispensed and bashed Krishna too. Or maybe not, since no one wanted the war more than she did, and here is Krishna desperately instigating Arjuna not to call off the war under any circumstances. So it would have been just alright with her. Even so, there was no need for all the nonstop nonsense, high spiritual-sounding rigmarole that Krishna went on and on to achieve a simple objective. Had Draupadi been around, she would have anyway stopped Krishna and just stood in front of Arjuna showing him her beautiful open tresses, that long hair by which Dusshashana dragged her into the courtroom on that day of public humiliation. And that would have done the trick. In fact, had Gita been delivered by Draupadi rather than Krishna, perhaps it would have sounded much less ridiculous. Draupadi is extremely good at lecturing too. She keeps lecturing Yudhishthira, and one occasion she lectures Krishna’s wife Satyabhama black and blue, almost knocking her unconscious! It is on the subject of the duties of a housewife and how to keep the husband or husbands in control.

She could have just as well reminded Arjuna of the duties of a warrior now, how duty comes before relationships for every policeman and thief. (Arjuna is not a policeman of course, but he can easily fit into the category of a thief). Even if nothing else, we would have at least perfectly understood the “O great warrior, rise up!” part, and her motivation in provoking and challenging Arjuna, but with Krishna everything gets so confusing and falls flat. What does he want, what is he saying exactly, what are all these continuously contradicting statements he keeps making, we can't make out anything. There is no connect between one verse and another in the long sermon sprawling 700 verses, between all this talk and his real motives, between his preachings and the real world, between his advice and his own life, the whole thing is an awful mess. He goes on blathering about pointless action, desireless action, motiveless action, rewardless action, and is himself engaged in pointless, motiveless, mindless action, while preaching all this! So there is this an example after all! Beyond that though, not much.

In the course of the events in the epic, Krishna moves around here and there, keeps doing something or other, all normal actions motivated by desire, hatred, lust, violence and so on, and none of his actions or dialogues throughout betray any particular wisdom or insight. No-one in the epic gets motivated or anything seeing Krishna, nothing like inspiration or anything. At least Bhishma had a false reputation of being wise, Krishna doesn't even have that. He is only famous for being the Lord God of the universe, all of which started when he killed a big snake as a child, and except for this fabled childhood all of which is grand-mother's concoction of stories, he doesn't show any particularly outstanding talent for anything in his adult life, least of all any proclivity for wisdom. Seems like he had great looks, unique charm and a way with women, but that's about it. And that is all that is needed too, to become a superstar! He becomes a little more than a superstar though, he becomes the infinite reality of the universe, whom people go hymning about whenever they would need to flatter Krishna a little or just in case.

Being the God of the Universe is cool, but due to the popularity of Gita, in much later ages Krishna acquired a reputation of being the supreme karma yogin, though on what basis is not clear in the least! The only example of unbinding and nonattached action, that is to say, Karma Yoga, he demonstrated was to do all kinds of girls and leave them at that, without feeling any attachment or bondage! Binding action, oh the anathema, always be unattached! In fact, one of those very few miracles that turned him into the Almighty God is the feat of copulating with all the girls in the town simultaneously, while each of them thought he was in bed only with her. This is really inspiring, isn't it! And now, just in the manner a rickety, paralyzed Bhishma is transformed into the supreme commander of the greatest armed force on the earth shining in all his glory, only much much worse, Krishna transforms into the mighty All-wise World Teacher! There is at least some verisimilitude in Bhishma's transformation, because about 200 years before or so, when he was only 16, Bhishma at least fought a whole army and rounded it up singlehandedly. In Krishna's case, there is simply no precedence. Just out of blue he materializes the World-Teacher hat, dons it, and starts pounding poor Arjuna's head.

In our expurgated anecdote, Bhishma gives the silliest imaginable excuse in trying to meet Draupadi's brave affront. He says because he was eating Duryodhana's food, his blood got vitiated and dimmed his intellect during all that time, and now that all that bad blood had flown out of him, he regained his senses. These people live for 200-300 years, it is pathetic to see what kind of morons they remain all through the life and unto the very last! First of all, he was not eating Duryodha's food, for god's sake he is the family patriarch, the god father, the one who started the family, not some meek servant in the court to eat somebody else's food. Moreover, food is produced by peasants, and all food comes from the bounty of nature, from God (real one, not our joker Krishna); just because some idiot owns the food doesn't taint it or make it poisonous in any way. Bhishma just can't come out with the simple truth even on his deathbed – Yeah I have been a total freaking idiot all my life! But some crappy excuses, the food was corrupted, the water was adulterated, the air was polluted, or Duryodhana farted! But the thing is, at least he has some excuse which many gober swamijis and their saintly disciples would gladly buy. Some gober swami on the TV was discussing exactly this and elucidating the concept of “ashrama dosha,” or sometimes some swami may use this example to illustrate the importance of eating right food! But in the case of Krishna, there is simply no excuse. No one has asked him of course, and no one has the guts, but if Arjuna himself just got fed up with the loads of baloney being gratuitously dished out to him, and saying enough is enough questioned back Krishna, one can only imagine! ‘Tell me, Krishna, what is your authority in speaking all this, provide me some example from your life so far. Or right now, for example, if I say you are a total freaking idiot, would you stay calm and unruffled, or if I go kill all your wives, would you be supremely detached, saying that no one ever dies, no one ever kills?’ Bhishma had some kind of eligibility and some kind of excuse, Krishna had neither. Bhishma may have been slow-witted, but he was a struggling soul, he at least had a concept of wisdom, and now and then he kept trying to change Duryodhana, albeit in vain. In Krishna's case, the concept of wisdom or spirituality or yoga simply never existed prior to Gita, he never tried to change himself or any one around him. However, all of a sudden, when Arjuna is finally trying to change, to see the light, to shake himself off of all the nonsense that had been going on, Krishna goes bonkers, bullshitting Arjuna with a flood of pseudo-spiritual verbiage. Still, nobody ever questions Krishna, nobody can even conceive of it, because prima facie what the Lord God of the Universe does is correct and the most appropriate thing to do, in all situations! He is the paramdham, the antaryamin, the all-knowing, the all-seeing, the inner soul of every one, the ultimate abode of existence!

And yet, it must have bothered some people that if Draupadi's seditious type of thinking caught on, it could get tough even for the God beings present among us. These people had to do something, just as a precautionary measure. They could of course expurgate the Draupadi question episode, which they did. There was also one more thing which they could do, and which they accomplished with brilliant success, though it doesn't address the deeper question at hand. Draupadi's direct question to Bhishma was “Where were you, where was all your wisdom, when I was being publicly disrobed?” In the original version of Mahabharata, Krishna was fighting with some neighboring king and later apologized Draupadi that he too could do nothing to help her. It was actually a character named Dharma — equated to the Yudhisthira’s father, the Lord of death, or sometimes equated with his incarnation Vidura, Duryodhana's uncle — who miraculously supplies Draupadi with the unending saree. This is still so in the original epic. But in all the versions of the Mahabharata, we find Krishna himself supplying the saree. Most probably it is Vaishnavaite devotees of the Lord who grafted Krishna in the place of the original mysterious character. It worked perfectly. Nowadays, except for some scholars and well-read people, everyone familiar with Mahabharata story thinks it was Krishna who saved the day for Draupadi when that atrocity was committed. Simply thanks to the Vaishnava influence.

The Vaishnava impact goes much deeper than that. The Bhagavad Gita became a smashing hit, the holiest of holies, owing to them. The Bhagavad Gita enjoyed tremendous hype and publicity, and why? Not because of any unique intrinsic value of it has or any particularly great philosophical depth, but simply because of the personality cult of Sri Krishna. It is a disgrace to the whole philosophical acumen of this nation that such cheap personality cult nonsense as the Bhagavad Gita became one of the three “text books” of Vedanta, placed alongside Upanishads and Brahma Sutras. The whole of Bhagavad Gita (excluding some brief portions, especially in the 13^th chapter) — the whole of Bhagavad Gita as people generally know it — is not worth the first sentence, in fact the first three words of the Brahma Sutras “Athatho Brahm Jignasa.” ‘Jignasa’ means curiosity or inquiry, such a most precious word but hardly found anywhere else in Indian spiritual literature, except sometimes in a derogatory sense usually contrasted with mumuksha or soul-searching. The sentence means “Now begins the inquiry into the Brahman” but can also mean “Now begins the infinite universal curiosity.” Bhagavad Gita does have its great portions, but they are not what made it a hit, most definitely!

Bhagavad Gita became a hit because Krishna goes on relentlessly asserting I am the Supreme Lord, worship me, offer something to me, I will took good care of you. Now, the masses have only the intelligence of four-five year olds, they can only understand this type of language which offers them a divine father-figure, security, protection and potential wish fulfillment. They are the least bothered with any philosophy, metaphysics, yoga or any such thing. Even if Krishna wrote Machiavelli's Prince instead of the Bhagavad Gita, the name of the Prince would have been changed to the Bhagavad Yuvaraj and it would have become the central holiest text of Hinduism: How the Prince is the manifestation of divine order on the Earth, how only godly souls are reincarnated and born as princes, how princes kidnap, torture and murder their enemies for the welfare of the population, and so on. Just any nonsense will do, as long as there is someone in the book who offers supernatural protection to all those who faithfully worship him, and sings in Sanskrit “Yo yo yam yam tanum bhaktah...” People can only understand yo yo yam yam language. They do the yo yo, and some one in the sky has to do the yam yam for them! And add a little Vedantic touch to this Prince, let's say, the prince is his people, the people are the prince, there is no difference whatsoever, and the Prince would be put shamelessly next to the Upanishads and revered down the ages. Imagine what kind of dark ages those would be when people form an exoteric and esoteric religion around Machiavelli's Prince. Well, as a matter of fact, we are not lagging far behind — with this Bhagavad Gita cult that has been raging on for ages. In the Hindi language, there is a famous expression, ‘Andheri nagari, chaupat raja’, ‘dark country (city), duffer king.’ That is the sad story of Krishna and India too.