Chapter II ( VERSE 7 & 63 )
Sankhya Yoga – The Yoga of Knowledge
CHAPTER II
Verse 7
कार्पण्यदोषोपहतस्वभावः
पृच्छामि त्वां धर्मसम्मूढचेताः ।
यच्छ्रेयः स्यान्निश्चितं ब्रूहि तन्मे
शिष्यस्तेऽहं शाधि मां त्वां प्रपन्नम् ॥ २-७॥
My heart is overpowered by the taint of pity; my mind is confused as to duty. I ask Thee. Tell me decisively what is good for me. I am Thy disciple. Instruct me, who have taken refuge in Thee.
In this stanza, when Arjuna has completely realised the helpless impotency in himself to come to any decision, he surrenders totally to Krishna. He, in his own words, admits the psychological shattering felt and lived by him in his bosom. He has instinctively diagnosed, correctly, even the cause of it to be “an uncontrollable amount of over-whelming pity.” Of course, Arjuna does not realize that it is his misplaced compassion; but, whatever it be, the patient is now under the mental stress of extreme confusion and bewilderment.
Arjuna confesses that his intellect (Chetas) has gone behind a cloud of confusions regarding what Dharma and Adharma are at that moment for him. The problem — whether to fight and conquer the enemies or not to fight and allow the enemies to conquer him — which needed an urgent solution, could not be rationally judged with the depleted mental capacities of Arjuna.
We have already explained Dharma and found that the Dharma of a thing ‘is the law of its being.’ A thing cannot remain itself without faithfully maintaining its own nature, and ‘THAT NATURE, WHICH MAKES A THING WHAT IT IS’ is called Dharma. Hinduism insists on the Manava Dharma, meaning, it insists that men should be true to their own essential nature, which is godly and divine, and, therefore, all efforts in life should be directed towards maintaining themselves in the dignity of the Soul and not plod on through life like helpless animals.
Here Arjuna indicates that he is quite ready to follow all the instructions of the Lord and maintain perfect faith in the wisdom of his Divine Charioteer. The Pandava must also be considered to have indicated that, if he, in his foolishness, were to raise doubts, even for the thousandth time, Krishna should have the large-heartedness, compassion and kindness patiently to explain them again to his disciple. All through the Geeta we come across many occasions when Arjuna punctuates Krishna’s message with his own doubts. Never does Krishna, even once, grow impatient with his disciple. On the other hand, each question, as it were, is seen to have added more enthusiasm and interest to the discourses on the battlefield.
Verse 63
क्रोधाद्भवति सम्मोहः सम्मोहात्स्मृतिविभ्रमः ।
स्मृतिभ्रंशाद् बुद्धिनाशो बुद्धिनाशात्प्रणश्यति ॥ २-६३॥
From anger comes “delusion” ; from delusion “loss of memory” ; from loss of memory the “destruction of discrimination” ; from destruction of discrimination, he “perishes.”
From this verse onwards, Lord Krishna explains in five noble stanzas, the Hindu psychological theory of the fall of man from Godhood. This is only to bring home to Arjuna that he, the mighty-armed, must try to conquer all his Indriyas from all sides. Such a man, concludes Krishna, is a-man-of-Perfection as conceived in and contemplated upon, as explained in and glorified by the scriptural books of the Hindus.
This section also gives us a clear pattern of the autobiography of all seekers who have, after long periods of practice, come to wreck themselves upon the rocks of failure and disappointment. To a true seeker in Vedanta, no fall is ever possible. Instances of unsuccessful seekers are not few, and in all of them the mistake that we notice is that they ultimately fell back to be victims of sense entanglement; and in all those cases we also notice that the fallen one drank the very dregs of it; there is no half-way house for such victims — a slip for them means total destruction !!
The ladder-of-fall is very beautifully described here. The path of destruction for a seeker is so elaborately detailed in these stanzas that, fallen as we are, we shall know how to get back to our pristine glory and inward perfection.
Like a tree emerges from a seed, the source of all evil starts from our own wrong thinking, or false imaginations. Thought is creative; it can make us, or mar us. If rightly harnessed, it can be used for constructive purposes; if misused, it can totally destroy us. When we constantly think upon a sense-object, the CONSISTENCY OF THOUGHT creates in us an ATTACHMENT for the object of our thought; and, when more and more thoughts flow towards an object of attachment, they crystallize to form a BURNING DESIRE for the possession and enjoyment of the object-of-attachment. The same force of the motion, when directed towards obstacles that threaten the non-fulfilment of our desires, is called anger (Krodha).
An intellect fumed with anger (Krodha) comes to experience DELUSION and, the deluded intellect has no power of discrimination, because it loses all MEMORIESOF- THE-PAST. Any one filled with anger is capable of doing acts totally forgetting himself and his relationship with all others. Sri Shankaracharya says in this connection that a deluded fool, in this mental condition, might even fight with his own teachers or parents, forgetting his indebtedness to these revered persons.
Thus, when an individual, through wrong channels of thinking, becomes ATTACHED to an object, the attachment matures into a burning DESIRE to posses that object. Then, when an obstruction to possess that object of- desire shoots him up into a fit of ANGER, the mental disturbance caused by the emotion DELUDES the intellect and makes the individual FORGET his sense of proportion and his sense of relationship with things and beings around him. When thus, a deluded intellect forgets its dignity of culture, it loses its discriminative capacity, which is called, in common parlance, as ‘conscience’ (Buddhi). Conscience is that knowledge enjoyed for differentiating the good from the evil, which often forms a standard in ourselves, and, whenever it can, warns the mind against its lustful sensuousness and animalism. Once this ‘conscience’ is dulled, the man becomes a two legged- animal with no sense of proportion, and with no ears for any subtler call in him, than the howling urgent hungers of the flesh. Thereby, he is guaranteeing for himself a complete destruction inasmuch as such a bosom cannot come to perceive, or strive for, the Higher, the Nobler and the Diviner.