Date: April 22, 2025
Part 3: Arjuna Viṣhāda Yoga – The Yoga of Arjuna’s Dejection
Continued from Part 2
On the battlefield of Kurukshetra when Arjuna, the representative man of his age, is overcome with dejection and sorrow at the most critical moment of his life, he raises a fundamental question regarding human life and action, a question that confronts every human being at some point of time, in varying intensity. In Sri Aurobindo’s words, Arjuna represents “the disciple who receives his initiation on the battlefield,… he is the type of the struggling human soul who has not yet received the knowledge, but has grown fit to receive it by action in the world in a close companionship and an increasing nearness to the higher and divine Self in humanity.” (Essays on the Gita, CWSA, Vol. 19, p. 20)
It is significant to note that Sri Aurobindo spends a considerable time describing Arjuna as a human disciple, which is important to understand to completely appreciate the teaching of the Gita. Arjuna typifies the human soul of action, which has been brought “face to face through that action in its highest and most violent crisis with the problem of human life and its apparent incompatibility with the spiritual state or even with a purely ethical ideal of perfection” (p. 21).
The image of Arjuna as the fighter in the chariot with the divine teacher Krishna as his charioteer has its source in the Veda. The Veda gives us similar image of the human soul (represented by Kutsa, one who constantly seeks the seer-knowledge) and the Divine (represented by Indra, the Master of the World of Light and Immortality) riding in one chariot through a great battle to the goal of a high-aspiring effort. Indra, the Divine in this symbolic image is the power of divine knowledge which “descends to the aid of the human seeker battling with the sons of falsehood, darkness, limitation, mortality; the battle is with spiritual enemies who bar the way to the higher world of our being; and the goal is that plane of vast being resplendent with the light of the supreme Truth and uplifted to the conscious immortality of the perfected soul, of which Indra is the master” (p. 21).
Kutsa is, several times in Rig Veda, referred to as Ārjuneya, ‘descendant of Arjuna,’. The word Arjuna, means clear, shining, silver, the White On. In other words, Kutsa is the sattwic or purified and light-filled soul which is open to the divine knowledge. As per the Vedic legend, when the chariot reaches the end of its journey, the home of Indra, the human Kutsa has grown into such an exact likeness of his divine companion Indra that only Sachi, Indra’s wife can distinguish the two, because Sachi is “truth-conscious”. This Vedic parable is obviously symbolic of the inner life of man. It represents human consciousness growing into the likeness of the eternal divine by the increasing illumination of Knowledge. But the difference between this and the image in Gita, Sri Aurobindo emphasises, is that in Gita, the starting point is action and “Arjuna is the man of action and not of knowledge, the fighter, never the seer or the thinker” (p. 22).
Like the majority of human beings, Arjuna, in the Gita, is subject to the action of the three gunas – tamas, rajas and sattwa. As his name suggests, he is pure and sattwic and governed by high and clear principles and impulses and habitually controls his lower nature by the noblest law of moral and social code of conduct, what he knows of the Shastra. “He is not of a violent Asuric disposition, not the slave of his passions, but has been trained to a high calm and self-control, to an unswerving performance of his duties and firm obedience to the best principles of the time and society in which he has lived and the religion and ethics to which he has been brought up” (pp. 22-23). Like other human beings, Arjuna is also egoistic but his is a purer or sattwic egoism which is not only focused on his own interests, desires and passions but gives greater regard to dharma, the claims of others and the larger society.
For Arjuna, the one standard to live by is dharma, “that collective Indian conception of the religious, social and moral rule of conduct, and especially the rule of the station and function to which he belongs.” He is a Kshatriya, the high-minded, self-governed, chivalrous prince and warrior and leader of Aryan men. He is conscious of virtue and right action, or at least he thought he understood what right action means, until suddenly he finds himself as a protagonist of a terrific and unparalleled slaughter. It is a “monstrous civil war involving all the cultured Aryan nations which…threatens their ordered civilisation with chaos and collapse” (p. 23)
Seeing his cousins, uncles, grandfathers, gurus and elders all lined up against him in the battlefield, Arjuna is confronted with some practical questions regarding his duty as a Kshatriya, the duty to fight the enemy. He is also faced with the question of his right as a prince, the due right to his kingdom. All he sees is an unsurmountable conflict between his right and duty on one side and Dharma on the other. Led by this sense of utter disgust, dejection and revolt, he declares, “I will not fight.”
Both in chapter 1 as well as in chapter 2 of the Gita, we see Arjuna defending his position using different arguments. They can be classified in four categories:
- sensational (the elemental feeling of horror, pity and disgust),
- vital (the loss of faith in the recognised and familiar objects of action and aims of life),
- emotional (the recoil of the ordinary feelings of social man, such as affection, reverence, desire of a common happiness and satisfaction, from a stern duty outraging them all), and
- moral (the elementary sense of sin and hell and rejection of “blood-stained enjoyments”).
Sri Aurobindo explains that Arjuna’s crisis is not the questioning of the thinker.
“It is the sensational, emotional and moral revolt of the man hitherto satisfied with action and its current standards who finds himself cast by them into a hideous chaos where they are in violent conflict with each other and with themselves and there is no moral standing-ground left, nothing to lay hold of and walk by, no dharma. That for the soul of action in the mental being is the worst possible crisis, failure and overthrow.” (pp. 25-26)
Thus, the whole exposition of the Gita revolves and completes its cycle around this original crisis of Arjuna, a very practical crisis in the application of ethics and spirituality to human life.