THE HOLY GITA
CHAPTER NUMBER 13
VERSE NUMBER 08
KSHETRA KSHETRAJNA VIBHAGA YOGA OR THE YOGA OF THE DISCRIMINATION OF THE KSHETRA AND THE KSHETRAJNA:
TEXT IN TRANSLITERATION:
indriyaartheshu vairaagyam anahamkaara eva cha
janma mrrtyu jaraa vyaadhi duhkha doshaanudarsanam
SANSKRIT WORDS AND PHRASES AND THEIR MEANING IN ENGLISH:
indriya artheshu = of sense-objects: vairaagyam = dispassion: anahamkaarah = absence of egoism: eva = even: cha = and: janma mrrtyu jaraa vyaadhi duhkha dosha anudarsianam = perception of evil in birth death, old age, sickness and pain.
TEXT IN ENGLISH:
Dispassion towards the objects of the senses, and also an absence of egoism; perception of evil in birth, death, old age, sickness and pain;
COMMENTARY BY SRIMAT SWAMI CHIDBHAVANANDA:
Nature bears evidence to the truth that beings evolve surely, though slowly, from the low order of existence to the high. Evolution of the body is complete at the human level. But there are stages of mental evolution to be striven after. The man has to perfect his mind in ethical and spiritual discipline. He should not, therefore, stagnate at the physical plane. His ideal in life is to emerge from the earthly existence into the divine. This is best effected by detachment from the mundane and attachment to the supra-mundane. Craving for the objects of the senses gives place to holy hankering after the divine. It is egoism when a man identifies himself with the body. Instead, he strives to feel himself as Atman. Bodily existence is necessarily associated with birth, death, old age, sickness and pain. This evil is transcended by him who rises above body-consciousness. It is in this wise that spiritual life commences for the aspirant.
SRIMAT SWAMI RAMAKRISHNA PARAMAHAMSA AS QUOTED BY SRIMAT SWAMI CHIDBHAVANANDA:
Man grows in devotion to the Lord in direct proportion to his detachment from the objects of the senses.
COMMENTARY BY SRIMAT SWAMI SIVANANDA:
The feeling of renunciation towards the objects of the senses is constant in the man of wisdom. He does not even like to talk about them. His senses do not run towards them.
Vairagyam: Indifference to the sense-objects such as sound, touch, etc., for pleasure seen or unseen, heard or unheard (for pleasure in heaven, too).
Anahankara: The idea that arises in the mind: “I am superior to all”, is egoism. The absence of this idea is Anahankara or absence of egoism.
Reflection on the evils and miseries of birth, death, old age and sickness: One has to dwell in the womb for nine months and to undergo the pangs of birth. These are the evils of birth. The man of wisdom never forgets the troubles of birth, death, old age, etc. He wants to avoid being born. In old age the intellect becomes dull and the memory is lost and the senses become cold and weak. There is the decay of power and strength. The old man is treated with contempt by his relatives. These are the evils of old age. A sick man who suffers from piles suffers from weakness and anaemia through loss of blood. A man suffering from malaria gets an enlarged spleen. These are the evils caused by sickness.
Pain: The three types of pain or afflictions are referred to in the ‘Introduction’.
Pain itself is evil. Birth is painful. Birth is misery. Death is a misery. Old age is misery. Sickness is misery. Birth, death, etc., are all miseries because they produce misery or pain.
By such reflection and perception of the evil in these arises indifference to the pleasures of the body and the sensual pleasures. Then the mind turns within towards the innermost Self to attain knowledge of the Self. As the perception of the evil of pain in birth helps to obtain knowledge of the Self, it is spoken of as knowledge.
Comments by the blogger:
The child, the moment it is ejected out of the womb, cries its lungs out. The child’s cry, according to the doctor, is a healthy portent. If a child does not cry immediately after delivery, the doctor’s would become concerned for the newborn's health and normalcy. But why does the child starts to cry the moment it is born? First, it feels the change in temperature. The child is quite accustomed to the temperature in the womb. Being born is a painful experience. And the room temperature could be too hot or too cold, according to the labour ward or the operation room is under the air conditioner. Pain is the substratum of human birth and it continues till the death of the individual. I portrayed what had happened to two people, one a rustic woman and another a lean teenager. The rustic woman, when the realisation dawns on her mind that she would die at some time in future made the woman mad. But the teenager, when it dawned on him that he would be no more someday, ran out of his house and became a Magarishi or Saint. It all depends on how we react to various types of pain in life, and the prospect of death is hovering over us irrespective of our station in life. I read Kushwant Singh’s interview to The Reader’s Digest, Indian Edition. In that interview, he was asked how he would react to death. At the time Kushwant Singh was on the wrong side of 90! I distinctly remember Kushwant Singh’s answer; he had stated that he was not worried about death. But what he worried about was the activities that preceded death. “I am not worried about death. But what precedes it is horrifying; one has to be hospitalised and lie on the bed surrounded by various apparatus and wires. Thus I am afraid of the suffering before death”.
The Gita says one should develop dispassion towards the objects of the senses. And one should cultivate the culture of his mind so he would not suffer from any egoism.
But next the Lord of Gita says that we should develop a perception of evil in birth, death, old age, sickness and pain.
Most of us might not have readied ourselves to look at birth, death, old age, sickness and pain as EVIL!
Could birth of a child be an EVIL?
About death, old age, sickness and pain we could easily see through them and come to consider them as a very saddening state of body and mind. And the pain itself is dependent on the degree of dispassion we have developed as a self-culture. All pains are unbelievably acute. In Tamil, there is a proverb which says that the headache and stomach ache would be painful only when one comes under the particular ache. When we have a splitting headache, that ache and how to withstand it is material. And when we have a stomach ache we will not think of the headache we were suffering from previously.
Life itself is painful. The lover declares to his beloved that he or she loved her or him so much that it hurts! What a wonderful statement that is! Even an all-devouring passion like the delectable feeling of love cannot be described so accurately unless one views it as an exquisite PAIN!
If we want freedom from all sorts of pains, we must know how to transcend them. No doubt life itself is progress from one pain after another. If we believe in God, we would not feel so much pain. And if our passion for God becomes an all-devouring one and we could not go through life without constantly thinking of our personal God, then we can be dispassionate towards the objects of the senses. We can, in devotion to our personal God, forget about the conditions of life such as birth, death, old age, sickness and pain.
We should daily practise devotion to our Lord. How to do it? Srimat Swami Ramakrishna says like a stranger to a city would first find a good place to stay and then roam around the city, we must first develop Self-culture. If one roams around the city, it would be a difficult thing to find a place to spend the night peacefully. And this is how says the Great Saint, we should behave in life; after coming into this world, as soon as we attain the age of maturity, we must seek God and thus become a nice devotee. And then we can do whatever our sense of Swadharma dictates. So we must first become well established in devotion. And then we can fearlessly indulge in worldly life carrying out our duties.
We are not ready as yet to view birth as an evil. We are very solicitous about the birth and growth of our children and or our grandchildren. But as we come to this world repeatedly after repeated deaths, there would be a lessening of attraction towards things and sense objects of this world. We are slowly but surely evolving in the Culture of Atman. At some point or the other, we would become so fed up with the objects of senses and as a result the increasing sense of devotion to the Lord that the mindset to view even birth as an evil! Till then we must condition our mind so that we would not eat without first praying to and worshipping of the Lord.
The Lord of Gita Himself has assured us that indulging in Yoga as described by Him in Srimad Bhagavad Gita would have a salutary effect on our self-culture and it would dispel the fear of all sorts. Certainly, we are afraid of death which is a certainty. But Yoga-practice takes the sting out of the fear of death. All it takes is to cultivate a habit of worshipping a personal God every day. And the meditation on the Holy Name of the Lord or repeating His Name every day will slowly but surely attach ourselves with the Lord, the chosen personal God. Chanting the Holy Name of the Lord is identified by Great Sages as a spiritual must. My only achievement in the spiritual field is this ability to chant the Name of my personal God, Lingeshwar. It brings great solace to our Soul.
Dispassion to the worldly things can surely be cultivated by regularly studying the Gita. Apart from chanting His Name, we must cultivate this habit of regularly studying the Scriptures. These habits will go a long way in the lessening of the illusory pull of the worldly objects. This is how I have been able to live in the world peopled by my fiend and enemy, Viswanathan and his minions. We will take many re-births. At some stage, we will become highly interested in the Study of the Holy Scriptures and continually reciting God’s Name. This will drive away all sorts of temptations to the objects of the world and we will start to consider as evil even the birth of ourselves. This is a healthy habit. To view repeated births as an EVIL then nothing can make us crave for the material objects.
The absence of egoism is considered by the Lord as a great virtue in the spiritual field.
We have already dealt with this subject. Egoism is a must for us to live as a human being, and one of the societies of human beings. But for egoism, LIFE on this earth is not possible. The psychiatrists call this as self-worship. If we lose self-worship, they say, we become affected in our minds and need hospitalisation! Ego is a must to appreciate worldly life. But for egoism, the World itself will not exist. We identify ourselves with this body and thus we see the world and the beings and non-beings surrounding us as part of the world. Thus the world is born for each of us! If all the human beings of the world become dispassionate at one and the same time, the world will soon attain closure!
So egoism is a must for us to live a ‘normal’ life in this world. The trick is to gradually lose this staunch sense of egoism. All human beings are not going to attain Moksha one and the same time. We are in various degree in the Self-culture. Only repeated births can bring about the change in us so we would not attach a fair amount of importance to this worldly life. That is the time to practise unflinching faith in and devotion to God.
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