[[Mohan K.V 2014-05-24, 19:29:47 Source]]
सदास्वादः
61
नीतिर् अस्मि जिगीषताम्
(nītir asmi jigīṣatām)
Meaning
“I am the moral conduct of ambitious men.” ‘jigīṣat’ is literally ‘those with the desire to win’, so ‘ambitious’ fits reasonably; but ‘nīti’ is a very loaded word, evoking shades of moral conduct, ethics and fairness. So who is the speaker, who identifies himself with the delicious idea of moral restraint in a setting of high ambition? Read on!
Context
The chapter’s phrase is taken from the 10th chapter of the Bhagavad-Gīta, the Vibhūti yoga. The Gīta is easily the most widely read text in Sanskrit literature, and has gathered thousands of commentaries over the centuries. It is part of the prasthāna-trayī, “The Three Origins”, upon which all debate in Vedanta philosophy is based (the other two texts in the triad are the collective Upaniṣads and the Brahma-sūtras).
The Gīta appears enmeshed in the context of the Mahābhārata, and is considered to have been composed at around the same time as the epic, i.e., 2500-3000 years ago. However, many of the ideas in it stretch back even further, into the Vedic period. There is a general consensus among scholars that the Gīta was not part of a system of perfect preservation of texts (unlike the Vedas), and so has undergone numerous changes over the centuries. There is much debate about what was in the original core, and what was gradually appended later on. These issues are critical to those who need to work on it as a foundational philosophical text, but are peripheral to our purpose here of seeking beautiful poetry.
There are a number of fascinating structural factors that emerge when we consider the Gīta as a work of poetry. For example, the first chapter, ‘Arjuna-viṣāda-yoga’ (The lamentation of Arjuna) makes for an interesting character portrait. Arjuna sees his closest friends and family standing ready to kill each other, and understandably becomes depressed. But then this depression leads him into all kinds of stray lines of thought – from personal grief, he goes on into rambling digressions on sin, dilution of family traditions, chastity of women and even concern for his dead forefathers in heaven missing out on ritual offerings!
Everywhere else in the Mahābhārata, such weakness and rambling is most strongly associated with Yudhiṣṭhira. From the very start of the epic, there is probably not a single senior character in the Mahābhārata whom Yudhiṣṭhira has not pathetically, helplessly whined to about his situation; Bhīma has always been the manliest of the lot, and openly conflicts with Yudhiṣṭhira’s pusillanimity. Arjuna is the mediator of sorts, being sensitive and respectful, but always remaining brave and valorous – the well-balanced hero.
But when they all stood on the battle lines, Śatāvadhāni Dr. R. Ganesh notes that the ever-cowardly Yudhiṣṭhira was rearing to go, but the hitherto brave and valorous Arjuna began shivering. His weakened mind began seeking out justifications for retreat, and he lost the judgment to see that his ramblings were completely off kilter. It was the well-balanced hero who needed Krishna’s firm rebuke and lesson, not the whiny coward!
To us, this reads as a brilliant demonstration of what modern psychologists call the perils of ‘affective forecasting’. Humans are in general bad at predicting anything, but it turns out we are particularly bad at predicting what our emotions would be in a given situation. When an event occurs, we often find that something we were very worried about earlier doesn’t seem to matter at all, whereas minor things we’d never even thought of seem to completely sway our feelings. Arjuna’s situation demonstrates this in two levels: first, Arjuna himself is unable to see that walking away from the battlefield in a moment of weakness will not erase in his mind the sting of the lifetime of humiliation his family has suffered; second, it is a gentle warning to us to not try to predict who will be a coward and who will stand courageous.
Affective forecasting has been a very active field of research in the last several years, with everyone from economists to public policy makers to psychologists sussing out its space. Maybe they should turn their gaze towards Vyāsa every once in a while!
Typically, the most striking image most people have of the Gīta is from the 11th chapter, where Krishna shows Arjuna his Viśvarūpa, ‘the cosmic form’. This makes for quite arresting imagery, and Arjuna is shocked and awed. He sees Bhīṣma and Droṇa and Karṇa and many others enter the flaming mouths of fierce Lord, who proclaims that he is Death itself. This is an object lesson in dealing with someone caught in a depressive web – certainly, there is an intellectual part of the conversation (which speaks of duty and knowledge and dharma, as espoused in the earlier chapters), but there has to be something beyond, something that touches the emotional core. The Viśvarūpa was just that perfect touch.
Dr. Ganesh acutely notes, though, that there is no mention of Arjuna seeing his dear son Abhimanyu die. And yet, within a week from the start of the war, Abhimanyu was mercilessly killed. This was an emotional turning point in the battle, and there is no option but a fight to the end for the Pāṇḍavas. What happened here? Was Arjuna wilfully blind? Was Krishna censoring an unpalatable future? Or was even Krishna unable to stop Abhimanyu’s death? Vyāsa does not say, and our justification to this Rorschach blot will probably tell us more about ourselves than the epic: those convinced of Krishna as God will likely want to believe that Arjuna was too overwhelmed by the Viśvarūpa to notice a detail like Abhimanyu’s death; those who consider Krishna to be all-knowing and a clever political manipulator will likely think he hid it from Arjuna to not depress him; those who consider him simply a political manipulator may think that the Viśvarūpa was merely a well-constructed trick to get Arjuna out of his stupor, and Krishna had no more of an idea of the future than Arjuna did.
Another structural feature is that throughout the work, Krishna talks of a mindset that is equanimous to victory and defeat; he never goes the way of inspiring Arjuna by visions of victory. This is telling. Most readers would readily agree that Draupadī’s humiliation was a major force behind the war. If we then asked, was Draupadī happy at the end of the war, after a resounding victory for her side, what would one say? If the ‘frame’ of the question was about setting the goal (to destroy the Kauravas) and achieving it, culminating in the grand dramatic gesture of Bhīma tying Draupadī’s braid with his hands soaked with the blood of Duryodhana, it certainly seems that she was thrilled at her revenge. Indeed, in derivative works like the Veṇī-samhāra, the story “begins” with Draupadi’s humiliation, and “ends” in Bhima avenging her. It is the classic ‘good ending’.
But if we stretch the frame a little bit and ask, in what way was Draupadī different from Gāndhārī, a whole new perspective emerges. All of Draupadī’s children were killed, just like Gāndhārī’s children. Can we imagine a mother being happy at any event when all her children are killed? What is more, how heavy must the guilt be, of the destruction of humanity itself – 18 akshauhiṇīs, the great Kuru family, her own children, all killed – just because she wanted to get her personal revenge! If a mother has to choose between swallowing some personal humiliation and the death of her children, what cruel rākshasī will choose the latter? Of course, Draupadī did not know this before the war and really had no choice, but 20:20 hindsight would surely have wracked her afterwards, like it would have for any of us.
It is only Krishna’s vision of detachment, not a simplistic one of victory, that can help endure such vagaries of Fate. Of course, it is another matter that Arjuna barely remembered Krishna’s message a few days into the war, and it was as if the Gīta never happened – perhaps another structural feature that reminds us of Gibbon’s quip, “The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous”!
Coming now to this chapter’s topic, in our view the 10th chapter, ‘Vibhūti yoga’, ‘The Yoga of Pervasion’ or ‘The Yoga of Manifestation’, is the most poetic in an abstract sense (the 11th with the viśvarūpa is the most poetic in an imaginative sense). Near the beginning, Arjuna asks this:
वक्तुम् अर्हस्यशेषेण दिव्या ह्यात्मविभूतयः ।
याभिर् विभूतिभिर् लोकान् इमांस् त्वं व्याप्य तिष्ठसि ॥
कथं विद्याम् अहं योगिंस् त्वां सदा परिचिन्तयन् ।
केषु केषु च भावेषु चिन्त्यो ऽसि भगवन् मया ॥
विस्तरेणात्मनो योगं विभूतिं च जनार्दन ।
भूयः कथय तृप्तिर् हि शृण्वतो नास्ति मे ऽमृतम् ॥
vaktum arhasi aśeṣeṇa divyā hi ātma-vibhūtayaḥ |
yābhiḥ vibhūtibhiḥ lokān imāṃs tvaṃ vyāpya tiṣṭhasi ||
kathaṃ vidyām ahaṃ yogiṃs tvāṃ sadā paricintayan |
keṣu keṣu ca bhāveṣu cintyaḥ asi bhagavan mayā ||
vistareṇa ātmanaḥ yogaṃ vibhūtiṃ ca janārdana |
bhūyaḥ kathaya tṛptiḥ hi śṛṇvataḥ nāsti me amṛtam ||
“Please tell me of your manifestations, by which you pervade these worlds.
How am I to think of you, and in what forms?
Tell me of them in detail, O Janārdana, I can never have enough of your divine words!”
Krishna then replies that his forms are infinite, but that he’d list the most important ones. 72 of these are recorded in Gīta, mostly as halves of śloka verses. They form an interesting exercise in metaphorical writing – each of them goes, ‘I am X of the Y’, where Y is a group and X is a quality or the best specimen of the group. Examples include ‘bhūtānām asmi cetanā’ – ‘I am the consciousness of living beings’, and ‘jyotiṣāṃ ravir aṃśumān’ – ‘I am the sun of the luminaries’.
Of the 72, a large number of the metaphors are mythological references – ‘I am Śaṅkara of the Rudras, Skanda of the divine generals, Nārada among the divine sages,…’ etc. Some go a little further, such as ‘prahlādas cāsmi daityānām’ – ‘I am Prahlāda of the Daityas’, demonstrating that Supreme divinity makes no distinctions between groups of men, and is best thought of as a relation more than as an object. All these are predominantly informative in nature, and tell us of the kind of structure that was envisioned in these mythologies.
But interspersed among them are metaphorical gems that stand resplendent in any context, that make us do a double-take when their insightfulness hits us:
कालः कलयताम् अहम्
kālaḥ kalayatām aham
“I am Time of the inciters” or “I am Time of the counters”
‘kal’ is a very old verb root, and means many things, including ‘count’ or ‘incite’. ‘kāla’ can mean Time or Death. One reading can be that the Supreme may be thought of as the relation that Time has to all other possible causes. These other causes could be individual will or a group’s efforts. We have internalized this idea so much that we almost unconsciously say things like ‘That was just the right time for it’ or ‘It just wasn’t the right idea for the time’. All of us are instinctively aware of the absolute dominance that the ‘right time’ plays in anything. Circumstances coming together to cause something to happen have the feel destiny to them. Questions like, “Why did this same thing not happen fifty years ago?”, after much recursion, eventually end up with this answer. What a fascinating way to conceive of God!
In an alternative reading, with ‘kal’ meaning ‘count’, Time is held in relation to all other means of judgment. Clearly, there too it is a class apart.
द्यूतं छलयताम् अस्मि
dyūtaṃ chalayatām asmi
“I am gambling of the deceivers”
Krishna instructs us to think of him as the relation that gambling has to all possible things that deceive or cheat men. This demonstrates a very profound power of the relational method to describe the Supreme: if the Supreme is all-pervasive, nothing in this world, not even ‘negative’ things, can be out of bounds in describing it. Of the innumerable ways of cheating, gambling is by far the most insidious because every player is convinced that he has a chance. Robert Sapolsky describes the arresting power of chance in his famous Class Day 2009 lecture:
How we go about reward: now this brings in a little bit of neurobiology, the involvement of a neurotransmitter (a brain chemical messenger) called dopamine. Dopamine is all about reward. […] This is not pleasure of getting the reward. This is, ‘I know how this one works, this is great, I’m all on top of this. I know exactly what to do. Piece of cake, I got this under control. I’m on this one.’ It is not about reward, it’s about the anticipation of reward … [and] … about the goal-directed behavior it is able to fuel.
[…]
Very subtle additional piece of this. A wonderful study some years ago where you take this scenario: okay, the individual, the monkey, does the work and, after the delay, gets the reward 100% of the time. Now, instead, in this setting, it gets the reward only 50% of the time. What happens now when that signal comes on, what [the dopamine levels] looks like is this: you switch over to 50% and the dopamine levels explode through the roof there.
What have you just done? You’ve introduced the word “maybe” into your equation, and that is reinforcing like nothing on Earth. That signal comes on, and that monkey is sitting there saying, ‘Piece of cake, I’m on top of this, but I’m such a screwup, and I’m not gonna get it—oh, but today, I’m gonna be on it—but it’s not gonna work out….’ And you just have him teetering there on this fulcrum, and that is pushing dopamine out like there’s no tomorrow.
Just to show that, now instead of the 50% reward rate, give the monkey either a 25% or 75% reward rate. Totally opposite things: this one is bad news, this one’s good news. What’s the one thing they have in common? Both reduce the unpredictability, both lower the dopamine surge to the same extent.
Take a monkey and there’s nothing more addictive out there than the notion that there’s a reward lurking out there and it’s a maybe. And what some of our best social engineers, many of them making a good living in Las Vegas, learn how to do is how to turn what seems like a 50% reality of reward to make it that salient when it’s one tenth of a hundred percent of a chance of reward; how to make one get that dopamine surge and get that goal directed behavior out of there.
So, it turns out that brain chemistry works exactly the same way in [humans]. In us, dopamine is about the anticipation of reward, uncertainty boosts it up further, it drives the work needed for the reward.
Moving on, there are number of metaphors which are about relation of the essence of a man to himself: ‘tejas tejasvinām aham’ ‘sattvaṃ sattvavatām aham’, ‘jñānaṃ jñānavatām’ – ‘I am the lustre of the lustrous; the spirit of the noble-spirited; the wisdom of the wise’.
In the brilliant TV series The Wire, there’s a character named Cutty who is a foot soldier of a drug kingpin. He is undergoing a sort of internal turmoil, and is simply not able to be the efficient killing machine he was earlier. In one poignant scene, he is shaken by his own failure to do something he could have done with his eyes closed just a few years ago:
“Hold on. It’s on me. I had that kid in my sights, close enough to take off his kangol and half his dome wit’ it. Couldn’t squeeze the trigger. Couldn’t do it, man.”
“Why not?”
“Wasn’t in me, I guess. You know, whatever it is in you that lets you flow like you flowin’, do that thing, it ain’t in me no more.”
“A-ight. So you done soldierin’ but […]”
“Aw, man. I ain’t makin’ myself clear. The game ain’t in me no more. None of it.”
“Whatever it is in you that lets you flow like you flowin’” – we couldn’t think of a better exposition of Krishna’s words than these!
We’ll end this chapter with another brilliant metaphor:
नीतिर् अस्मि जिगीषताम्
nītir asmi jigīṣatām
“I am the moral conduct of ambitious men”
We so often hear thoughts like “It’s good, but a bit extreme. If only it was balanced by […]”. This balance is often hard to find, because whatever forces shaped the original form could likely only operate if given free rein; balance is a very desirable property in a finished form, but probably a destructive one in a growing one.
The most significant of such balances is that of power; the rightly restrained use of power can make a veritable heaven on earth, while its abuse can leave one longing for the well-defined tortures of a hell. The Lord here says that he is exactly that restraining force. ‘jigīṣā’ is ‘the desire to win’, and has a distinctly military connotation; ‘nīti’ is a moral force in all its shades of conduct, ethics and fairness. These two forces, which may often be at loggerheads, combine to produce something far greater than the capacity of either. Jigīṣā without nītī is naked ambition. Its use can certainly evoke awe, like it does with Alexander. But like with Alexander, even a cursory reading will indicate the utter transience of it. Barely a year passed after his death before every single victory fell away to local squabbles.
In the same vein, nīti without jigīṣā is merely learned impotence. Yudhiṣṭhira is a prime example, as are some modern leaders who mistakenly trust that history will be kind them, after somehow forgetting their fatal inaction!
Together however, jigīṣā and nīti are the foundation of every civilization that has flourished, and it is remarkable that Krishna identifies himself with their delicate balance!
Parting Thought
The epitaph on Alexander’s tomb in Egypt is supposed to have read, “A tomb now suffices him for whom the world was not enough”. We wondered how that would sound in Vyāsa’s Sanskrit:
खट्वार्धे विरमत्यस्मिन् अलेक्सान्द्रो महायशाः ।
यस्य नापूरयामास तृष्णां पूर्णमिदं जगत् ॥
khaṭvārdhe viramatyasmin aleksāndro mahāyaśāḥ |
yasya nāpūrayāmāsa tṛṣṇāṃ pūrṇamidaṃ jagat ||
“In this half-a-bed rests the mighty Alexander,
whose thirst this entire world could not satisfy.”
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