The Rudolf Steiner Archive

12. The Bhagavad Gita

[ 1 ] The Bhagavad Gita, which contains the most sublime teaching of virtue in the Indian world view in poetic form, is a self-contained episode from one of the most famous and oldest of the two great heroic epics of the Indians, the Mahabharata, which means the great war.

[ 2 ] What the Homeric poems are to the Greeks and the Nibelungenlied to the Germanic peoples, that is the Mahabharata to the Sanskrit people. Its core is formed by the ancient war songs and heroic sagas from the time of the great migration and the conquest struggles on the Ganges. The origins of this poetry go back to the 10th and 11th century BC and provide a faithful portrait of the mores of this, the most ancient of India's heroic ages. These descriptions are based as much on historical facts and personalities in poetic guise as on other folk songs.

[ 3 ] The centerpiece is the struggles of the two related clans of the Kurus and Pandus, which end with the decline of the heroic age of the Kurus. The Bhagavad Gita is the account of a wonderful religious and philosophical conversation between the hero Arjuna and Krishna, the incarnate God. The luminous and exalted wisdom teachings and the extremely finely differentiated capacity for feeling and discernment in the most subtle ethical questions not only suggest that our tribal ancestors had an unrivaled culture in this area, but they also seem like direct revelations of the divine spirit. Wilhelm von Humboldt was so moved by the incomparable beauty and depth of this poetry that he exclaimed enthusiastically: “It is worth living so long to get to know 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 steeds, steered into the middle 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 are about to kill each other in a rage, his noble heart trembles in wild sorrow, and overwhelmed by compassion, his already tensed bow falls away from him. He shudders at the thought of bloodshed, preferring to renounce glory and kingship rather than incur this sin; he would rather die at their hands than be responsible for the death of one of his relatives. But Krishna approaches the fainthearted man and settles the fight within him by explaining to him his duties as a warrior, his dharma. Arjuna the hero is the human being, and his inner being is the battlefield where the hard struggles of the soul are fought. Torn between the earthly and heavenly parts of our mental life, in the conflict of feelings, plagued by anxious doubts, we often do not know where to turn, what our duty is. For every special being has its own special duty, its dharma, which it must recognize.

[ 4 ] What does the Indian mean by “Dharma”? Dharma has many meanings, but they are all complementary and interrelated. Dharma is closely linked to karma; they are related to each other like fruit and seed. Dharma is the result of past karma, of past activity, and Dharma is the present creative principle within us, again creating 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 achieved; 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 at the same time and works in us as father, mother and son. The Father as the Overself, as the higher self, as one's truth and law; the Mother as the developing being and the Son as the future. An incarnation is worthless and lost if it does not become a stepping stone to higher development through activity; likewise, striving and desiring perfection that has not been acquired through previous activity is futile. There is no leap in development; we patiently weave our way through the loom of time, garment upon garment. What has been practiced in a past stage becomes a predisposition in 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, to fulfill the commandment “know thyself”. It takes a long time to become accustomed to being able to immerse ourselves in ourselves, uninfluenced by the things of the sensual world, by our own desires and admired role models, and to listen to the inner voice that shows us the path of our duty, which our position, our relationships, the circle into which we were born impose on us. When we correctly recognize the level of our being, our degree of imperfection, when we become quite clear about what the truth and duty is at our level of development, then self-knowledge does not serve selfishness, but that is Dharma, because Dharma is the observance of the law in the sense of true self-knowledge. We then find our personal note and can make it resound powerfully in the eternal harmony of the world. We must learn to understand 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 nothing more than disharmony, when our irregular vibrations cause disruptions and disturbances in the lawful course of cosmic events. The more we feel at one with the cosmos, the more it will reveal to us. Only the spirit speaks to us, which we have learned to understand. According to the extent of our knowledge, divine inspiration is bestowed upon us, the higher self, which is of divine nature, reveals itself to us.

[ 6 ] We can only recognize a part of that great, eternal truth, to the extent and magnitude that we have brought it to manifestation in us through our own activity, through our karma. Life after life, this scope increases in our process of development, we progress in knowledge and insight, for it is our destiny to gradually absorb the whole conceptual content of our world, our cosmos, into ourselves. We can never do this without gradually experiencing the whole richness of the world of phenomena. Nature lives in us when we fully grasp it. Calm, peace and contentment with one's life must overcome everyone who clearly recognizes that he has been born into the circle for which he had prepared himself through his past karma and which he must now fulfill with all his loyalty and exhaust in its entirety through his activity. In this way he has gained a field of knowledge through his own life and is now working in his own line to expand it, in order to create higher and better conditions of existence for himself in the future. And so he will also reach out his hand in loving understanding to his brother, who is trying to climb up under him on the ladder of beings, to help him, because he himself was still on the same rung not so long ago, struggling laboriously upwards, stretching out his hands to his brothers who had gone before him.

[ 7 ] Thus we see how each of us has different duties, how clearly we must learn to distinguish in order not to be led astray, to maintain our balance, to follow 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 a deep meaning behind this strict compulsion. The caste system of the ancient Indians corresponds entirely to the natural division of the human race. Each person is born through his own karma into the caste appropriate to him; he must first fulfill the full range of duties within that caste before he becomes ripe for a new incarnation in the next higher caste. As long as one's judgment is still undeveloped at a lower level, one must learn obedience; one must acquire the virtues of loyalty and devotion through service, and so the caste of the Sudra is the school for unconditional obedience and subordination – these practiced virtues that make one capable of self-conquest, self-determination, and a loving and mild rule.

[ 8 ] In the second caste, the Vaisya, man, engaged in agriculture and animal husbandry, will enter into the most intimate relationship with the surrounding nature. He will learn to work the soil with the sweat of his brow, he will sow and reap and thus produce food for his fellow brothers; he will practice all the virtues of a farmer. Then he will become a merchant, engage in trade and industry, accumulate riches and undergo many of the vices of his class. It is only through selfishness and avarice that he will often learn the first wisdom of economics and the proper use of his wealth for the benefit and worship of his fellow citizens. When he has learned his lesson to perfection at this level, he will be born as a Kshatriya in the next incarnation, in the warrior caste. Here he must use his powers to protect and defend his homeland; he must gain strength through courage and bravery and self-denial to be able to face any danger. He can only do this if he is prepared to sacrifice his life to duty at any moment. The warrior must give up his physical life, then his soul acquires the spirit of self-denial and is the creator of an ideal. The body is solely intended to help 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 passed through to reach that highest caste of the Brahmins, for whom - at their level of development and knowledge - fighting and killing is a mortal sin. “Kill your enemy” is commanded to the Kshatriya, but he knows that he can never truly kill one of his brothers nor be killed by him, as Krishna says to Arjuna in consolation.

[ 9 ] Only by attaining the highest perfection in all the duties of the other castes does one become qualified to enter the Brahmin or priestly caste. The Brahmin must keep away from fighting and quarrelling; he collects and guards the highest goods of humanity, he is its spiritual leader and teacher. He imparts peace and wisdom and knowledge to his weak brothers, and in him rest all the experiences of the past centuries as an ability to guide humanity to 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 other stage. Good and evil have their place in the eternal world order; in it they lose the meaning that we attach to them. They are necessary because they are the poles of development, they have emerged from a single origin. Good and evil, action and reaction, condition and complement each other like sleep and waking, like rest and activity, like light and shadow, like brightness and darkness, and they belong to each other like spirit and matter. It is Atma as purest light, the original source of all being, and Aima as its mirror image, darkest point and germinal power in the densest matter, which gives the impetus for the development and refinement of matter in the eternal change of form structures, until the contrariness has risen to the light source of the spirit and reunites with its starting point in Nirvana. From the original unity of world harmony, the eternal reason of all things, being, contrast breaks away – the eternal becoming of matter, which develops out of itself and upwards in countless changing forms to fulfillment, in order to merge from the diversity of appearances, the many, back into a unity, enriched with the countless experiences of the separate units. With Nirvana, the circle closes: the beginning and return to the eternal original spirit.

[ 11 ] For the Western world view, which sees the highest goal in the development of the present being, Nirvana means nothingness. However, there is nothing of what is considered a perfect being in Nirvana. Nirvana is the nothingness of karma; no more karma can arise because Dharma has become apparent.

[ 12 ] Past worldviews looked at what is not yet, and the present being was an imperfect transition to something higher. They saw every state of activity as an intermediate link between imperfection and absolute perfection in Nirvana. The goal and ideal for them was the state of an entity that has revealed all its dharma and thus burned its karma and enters nirvana.