''The sharp distinction between Deva & Asura is [...one of the contributions...] to ethical thought which India has to offer.
The legend of Indra & Virochana is one of its fundamental legends.
Both of them came to Vrihaspati to know from him of God; he told them to go home & look in the mirror. Virochana saw himself there & concluding that he was God, asked no farther; he gave full rein to the sense of individuality in himself which he mistook for the deity.
But Indra was not satisfied: feeling that there must be some mistake he returned to Vrihaspati and received from him the true God-knowledge which taught him that he was God only because all things were God, since nothing existed but the One. If he was the one God, so was his enemy; the very feelings of separateness and enmity were no permanent reality but transient phenomena.
The Asura therefore is he who is profoundly conscious of his own separate individuality & yet would impose it on the world as the sole individuality; he is thus blown along on the hurricane of his desires & ambitions until he stumbles & is broken, in the great phrase of Aeschylus, against the throne of Eternal Law.
The Deva on the contrary stands firm in the luminous heaven of self-knowledge; his actions flow not inward towards himself but outwards toward the world.
The distinction that India draws is not between altruism and egoism but between disinterestedness and desire.
The altruist is profoundly conscious of himself and he is really ministering to himself even in his altruism; hence the hot & sickly odour of sentimentalism and the taint of the Pharisee which clings about European altruism.
With the perfect Hindu the feeling of self has been merged in the sense of the universe; he does his duty equally whether it happens to promote the interests of others or his own; if his action seems oftener altruistic than egoistic it is because our duty oftener coincides with the interests of others than with our own.
Rama's duty as a son calls him to sacrifice himself, to leave the empire of the world and become a beggar & a hermit; he does it cheerfully and unflinchingly: but when Sita is taken from him, it is his duty as a husband to rescue her from her ravisher and as a Kshatriya to put Ravana to death if he persists in wrongdoing. This duty also he pursues with the same unflinching energy as the first. He does not shrink from the path of the right because it coincides with the path of self-interest.
The Pandavas also go without a word into exile & poverty, because honour demands it of them; but their ordeal over, they will not, though ready to drive compromise to its utmost verge, consent to succumb utterly to Duryodhana, for it is their duty as Kshatriyas to protect the world from the reign of injustice, even though it is at their own expense that injustice seeks to reign.''
Sri Aurobindo - Notes on the Mahabharata
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