The Science of Religion for Mankind - Shreemad Bhagwad Geeta: Yatharth Geeta

SUMMARY

Interpreters usually endeavour to hit upon somthing novel. But truth is, of course, truth. It is neither ever new, nor does it ever grow old. Fresh issues that find a place in newspaper columns are but temporal events that emerge one day and disappear on the next. But since truth is immutable and permanent, it is always what it is. If one ventures forth to change or modify it, he has evidently not known truth. So all sages who have trodden the path of seeking and reached the supreme goal cannot but proclaim the same truth. So they do not sow dissension between man and man. One who attempts to do so is evidently ignorant of truth. What Krishn has revealed in the Geeta is the same as sages coming earlier than him had known and which sages to come hereafter shall speak of if they have known it.

 SAGES pave and widen the felicitous path by opposing misconceptions and blind customs that but seem like truth and proliferate in its garb. This has been a vital need since the beginning, for many divergent ways come into being with the passage of time. So deceptively like truth do they appear that it is almost impossible to distinguish them from reality and assert that it is so. But since realized sages dwell in the essence, they can recognize ways that are at variance with it. They are capable of representing truth in a definitive form and prompting other men to its pursuit. This is what all seerprophets-Ram, Mahabir, Buddh, Jesus, and Muhammad-have done. And so it was with the more recent Tulsidas, Kabir, and Guru Nanak. Deplorably, however, after a sage has departed from the world, instead of following the path shown by him, his followers gradually begin to revere and worship such physical objects as the places of his birth and death or the spots he had frequented during his life. In other words, they proceed to idolize the great Soul. Their memory of the sage is indeed sharp and strong at the beginning, but it gets blurred with time, and men come increasingly under the sway of misguided and false notions that finally crystallize into stupid, irrational practices.

 Many such misguided customs, claiming to represent truth, had flourished in Yogeshwar Krishn's time, too. Being a realized sage who had perceived the highest spiritual reality, he opposed these false creeds and thus fulfilled his given obligation of bringing men back to the path of righteousness. Doesn't he tell Arjun in the sixteenth verse of Chapter 2 that "The unreal has no being and the real has no non-being; and the truth about both has also been seen by men who know the reality?" The unreal has no existence while, on the other hand, the real is never non-existent. Krishn also admits at the same time that he is not saying this as an incarnation of God: he is only saying what has also been affirmed by other sages who realized the truth of the Soul's identity with the all-pervading Supreme Spirit. His account of the human body as a sphere of action (kshetr) and of the one who grows spiritually dexterous by subduing it (kshetragya) is akin to what has also often been professed by other great men of discernment. Elucidating the essence of relinquishment and renunciation in Chapter 18, Krishn singles out one of the four differing creeds prevailing at his time and defends it.

 Since truth is one, eternal, and changeless, as a corollary ALL SAGES ARE ONE. Krishn discloses to Arjun in Chapter 4 that it was he who had taught the eternal yog to Vivaswat, the Sun-god. But how are we-like Arjun-to lend credence to this assertion? Vivaswat was born in the distant, obscure past, whereas Krishn has had a recent birth-in a remembered time. Krishn resolves Arjun's doubt by telling him that they have all undergone numerous births. But while men like Arjun, who have not yet completed their journey of quest, are unaware of their previous births, Krishn who has beheld his Self and realized the unmanifest God remembers them well. That is why he is a Yogeshwar! The state he has attained to is therefore ineffable and imperishable. Whenever the spiritual exercise that unites one with God was set in motion, it was initiated by some enlightened saint- be he a Ram or a Zarathustra. The verities that Krishn enunciates in the Geeta have also characterized the teaching of seers like Jesus, Muhammad, and Guru Nanak in later times.