The Rudolf Steiner Archive

12. The Bhagavad Gita

[ 1 ] The Bhagavad Gita, which presents the most sublime teachings on virtue in the Indian worldview in poetic form, constitutes a self-contained episode from one of the two great Indian heroic epics—the Mahabharata, meaning “the great war”—which is both the oldest and most famous of the two.

[ 2 ] What the Homeric epics are to the Greeks, and the Nibelungen saga to the Germanic peoples, the Mahabharata is to the Sanskrit-speaking peoples. At its core lie the ancient war chants and heroic sagas from the time of the Great Migration and the conquest battles along the Ganges. The origins of this epic date back to the 10th and 11th centuries B.C. and provide a faithful portrait of the customs of this oldest Indian heroic age. Historical facts and personalities, cloaked in poetic form, certainly underlie these descriptions just as much as they do the other folk songs.

[ 3 ] The story centers on the conflicts between the two related clans of the Kurus and the Pandavas, which culminate in the downfall of the heroic Kuru dynasty. The Bhagavad Gita features a magnificent religious-philosophical dialogue between the hero Arjuna and Krishna, the god incarnate. The luminous and sublime teachings of wisdom, along with the exceedingly refined sensitivity and discernment in the most subtle ethical questions, not only point to a culture of our ancestral forebears in this realm that remains unmatched to this day, but they also appear as direct revelations of the divine spirit. Wilhelm von Humboldt was so moved by the incomparable beauty and depth of this poem that he exclaimed with enthusiasm: “It is worth living this long just to encounter such a poem.” At the beginning, the two hostile armies face each other, ready for battle. Arjuna, the hero, has his golden chariot, drawn by white horses, steered into the center of the battlefield to take a closer look at the battle-hungry enemies. But when he discovers blood relatives in their ranks—fathers, sons, grandsons, cousins, and brothers—who, consumed by rage, are about to kill one another, his noble heart trembles with wild sorrow, and, overwhelmed by compassion, the bow he has already drawn slips from his hand. He shudders at the thought of shedding blood; he would rather renounce glory and dominion than bear this sin; he would rather die by their hand than be responsible for the death of one of his kin. But Krishna approaches the despondent warrior and settles the conflict within him by enlightening him about his duties as a warrior, about his dharma. Arjuna the hero is man, and his inner self is the battlefield where the soul’s fierce struggles are fought. Wavering between the earthly and the heavenly aspects of our inner life, caught in a conflict of emotions, plagued by anxious doubts, we often do not know where to turn or what our duty is. For every individual being has his own special duty, his dharma, which he must recognize.

[ 4 ] What do Indians mean by “Dharma”? Dharma has many meanings, but they complement one another and are all interconnected. Dharma is closely linked to karma; they relate to one another like fruit and seed. Dharma is what has come to be, the result of past karma, of past activity, and Dharma is the present creative principle within us that in turn generates the karma of the future. Dharma is the guiding force of our own thoughts and actions, our own personal truth. It denotes our inner nature, characterized by the degree of development attained; it is the law that determines growth for the future period of development, the continuous thread of life. Like ring upon ring, incarnation follows incarnation, a continuous chain. Dharma is our past, present, and future all at once and acts within us as father, mother, and son. The father as the transcendent being, as the higher self, as its truth and its law; the mother as the developing being, and the son as the future. An incarnation is worthless and lost if it does not, through activity, become a transitional stage toward higher development; equally futile is the striving, the desire for perfection, that is not acquired through prior activity. There is no leap in development; patiently we weave garment upon garment on the loom of time. What was practiced at a past stage becomes a predisposition at a future one, and activity in an earlier period becomes skill in a later one.

[ 5 ] It is always difficult for us to find our own Dharma, the law of our personal existence, and to fulfill the commandment “Know thyself.” It takes a long time to get used to being able to immerse oneself quietly within, uninfluenced by the things of the sensory world, by our own desires, and by the role models we admire, and to listen to the inner voice that shows us the path of our duty—the duty imposed on us by our position, our relationships, and the circle into which we were born. When we correctly recognize the stage of our being, our degree of imperfection, when we become truly clear about what truth and duty are at our stage of development, then self-knowledge does not serve egoism, but is Dharma, for Dharma is the observance of the law in the sense of true self-knowledge. We then find our personal touch and can bring it to resound powerfully within the eternal harmony of the world. We must learn to comprehend our intimate connection with the cosmos, as a part of it; our vibrations must harmonize with the rhythmic movement of the cosmos. Injustice and sin are, after all, nothing other than disharmony, when our irregular vibrations cause blockages and disturbances in the lawful course of cosmic events. The more we feel at one with the cosmos, the more it will reveal itself to us. Only the Spirit speaks to us, which we have learned to understand. To the extent of our knowledge, divine inspiration is bestowed upon us, and the higher Self, which is of a divine nature, reveals itself to us.

[ 6 ] We can only perceive a part of that great, eternal truth to the extent and degree that we have brought it to revelation within ourselves through our own actions, through our karma. Life after life, this scope expands in our course of development; we advance in knowledge and understanding, for it is our destiny to gradually absorb within ourselves the entire conceptual content of our world, of our cosmos. We can never do this without gradually experiencing within ourselves the full richness of the phenomenal world. Nature lives within us when we fully grasp it. Calm, peace, and contentment with one’s lot in life must come over everyone who clearly recognizes that they have been born into the circle for which they had prepared themselves through their past karma, and which they must now fulfill with complete fidelity, exhausting its full scope through their own activity. In this way, through his own experience, he has gained a field of knowledge and now works within his own line to expand it, in order to create higher and better conditions of existence for himself in the future. Thus, he will also extend a hand in loving understanding to the brother who is attempting to climb the ladder of beings below him, to help him, for he himself stood on the same rung only a short time ago and struggled laboriously upward, reaching out his hands to the brothers who had advanced ahead of him.

[ 7 ] Thus we see how each person, distinct from the other, has his own duties; how clearly we must learn to distinguish between them so as not to be led astray, to maintain our balance, and to obey our law. With wise foresight, the high leaders and enlightened kings had divided the Indian people into castes. As cruel as this may seem to us Westerners, who are accustomed to freedom and unrestricted choice, there is nevertheless a deeper meaning underlying this strict constraint. The caste system of the ancient Indians corresponds entirely to the natural division of the human race. Each person is born into the caste appropriate to them by their own karma; they must first fulfill the full range of duties within that caste before they become ready for a new incarnation in the next higher caste. As long as one’s own judgment is still undeveloped at a lower level, one must learn obedience; he must acquire the virtues of loyalty and devotion through service, and thus the Sudra caste serves as a school for unconditional obedience and subordination—these practiced virtues are what first enable self-mastery, self-determination, and a loving and gentle rule.

[ 8 ] In the second caste, the Vaisya, a person will engage in agriculture and animal husbandry, entering into the closest connection with the surrounding natural world. He will learn to till the soil by the sweat of his brow; he will sow and reap, thereby producing food for his fellow men; he will practice all the virtues of a farmer. Then, as a merchant, he will engage in trade and commerce, amass wealth, and must endure many of the vices of his station. It is often through selfishness and greed that he will first learn wise economy and the proper use of his wealth for the benefit and welfare of his fellow citizens. If he has learned his lesson to perfection at this stage, he will become a Kshatriya in his next incarnation and be born into the warrior caste. Here he must use his strength to protect and defend his fatherland; through courage, bravery, and self-denial, he gains the strength to face any danger. He can do this only if he is ready at every moment to sacrifice his life to duty. The warrior must give up physical life; then his soul attains the spirit of self-sacrifice and becomes the creator of an ideal. The body is intended solely to aid the development of the inner life; it must disappear when the soul needs a new body—that is, a more suitable garment for its advanced development. War is the school that must be endured in order to attain that highest caste of the Brahmins, for whom—at their stage of development and knowledge—fighting and killing are a mortal sin. “Kill your enemy” is commanded of the Kshatriya, but he knows that in truth he can never kill one of his brothers nor be killed by him, as Krishna says comfortingly to Arjuna.

[ 9 ] Only by attaining the highest perfection in all the duties of the other castes does one qualify to enter the Brahmin or priestly class. The Brahmin must keep himself aloof from strife and conflict; he gathers and safeguards the highest goods of humanity; he is its spiritual guide and teacher. He imparts peace, wisdom, and knowledge to his weaker brothers; within him rest all the experiences of past centuries as the capacity to guide humanity toward its eternal destiny.

[ 10 ] Thus we see how each stage of development must fulfill its own dharma. What is considered good at one stage must be avoided as evil at the next. Good and evil have their place in the eternal world order; within it, they lose the meaning we ascribe to them. They are necessary, for they are the poles of development; they have emerged from a single source. Good and evil, action and reaction, condition and complement one another like sleep and waking, like rest and activity, like light and shadow, like brightness and darkness, and they belong together like spirit and matter. It is Atma as the purest light, the primal source of all being, and Aima as the mirror image, the darkest point and the germinal force within the densest matter, which provides the impetus for the development and refinement of matter in the eternal alternation of forms, until the opposition has risen up to the light source of the spirit and, in Nirvana, reunites with its point of origin. From the original unity of world harmony, the eternal ground of all things, of being, the opposition breaks free —the eternal becoming of matter, which develops from within itself and upward in countless changing forms toward fulfillment, so that from the manifold of phenomena, the many, it may merge once more into unity, enriched by the countless experiences of the separate units. With Nirvana, the circle is complete: departure and return to the eternal Primordial Spirit.

[ 11 ] For the Western worldview, which sees the development of present existence as its highest goal, Nirvana signifies nothingness. Indeed, nothing of what it regards as perfect existence is present in Nirvana. Nirvana is the nothingness of karma; no more karma can arise because Dharma has become manifest.

[ 12 ] Past worldviews looked toward what is not yet, and present existence was, to them, an imperfect transition toward something higher. They viewed every state of activity as an intermediate link between imperfection and the absolute perfection of Nirvana. The goal and ideal for them was the state of a being who has revealed their entire Dharma, thereby burned away their karma, and entered Nirvana.