The Gita on War and Action

By Michael Nagler

WHEN I WAS TEACHING Classics and Comparative Literature at Berkeley I had a colleague, who’s since passed on, who was our Plato scholar. When I began to drift into Sanskrit and spirituality Gerson and I had a heart-to-heart talk, and he confided in me that all through his “service” in WWII he had carried a copy of the Bhagavad Gita in his knapsack. He quoted (this was decades after his war experience) a famous line from Chapter XI, “If the red-handed slayer thinks that he can kill…”

The Gita is here expounding a central plank not only of India’s Vedanta but of most schools of mysticism worldwide: that it’s a profound mistake to think that we’re doing anything. God is the doer. Despite our firm belief that we are thinking, wanting, and doing, we are really living puppets. But the Gita is expounding that belief in a troubling context: Arjuna is hesitating to go to war against his relatives; Sri Krishna (the Godhead personified, who utters the above line) is egging him on. Successfully.

This is the poem, remember, that Gandhi called his “spiritual reference book!”

Now, the Indian sages, who like Shakespeare in his culture, recognizing that people have very different levels of understanding, taught on different levels at once. Shakespeare had his “groundlings” who loved the fight scenes (and ribald humor); he also had very sophisticated viewers and readers who would resonate with the existential questions about life and death raised — and sometimes left unanswered — by Hamlet, Macbeth, and others. Similarly, it is widely, but alas not universally, understood in India that the battle referred to in the Gita is allegorical: its deep meaning is the inner struggle we all must wage against the darker drives of our evolutionary heritage. Gandhi said as much, explicitly. But where does that leave us — who are not trained to see the deeper meaning, a call to nonviolence, encoded in an exhortation to fight?

My colleague Gerson may have been aware he was in good company: none other than Robert Oppenheimer (who knew Sanskrit) quoted the very same passage as he watched the atomic inferno that he, perhaps more than any other scientist, unleashed over the New Mexican desert in the hot summer of 1945. I have a theory that he quoted those lines for a poignant reason. The translation:

I am come as Time, waster of the people,
Waiting for the hour that ripens to their doom.
(Even) without you, these warriors will cease to be.

Was Oppenheimer trying to convince himself with the words rte’pi tvām, “without you,” that he wasn’t actually guilty of launching such a terrible device on the world? It was he, after all, who later said to Harry Truman, “We physicists have known sin.”

Now, back to the Gita. The chapter in which these lines occur, Chapter XI, is where Sri Krishna takes the veil from Arjuna’s eyes, as he requests, and shows him the wonderful/terrible reality of the transitory world we inhabit, where nothing lasts and everything flows on to its extinction. In terms of the Gita narrative, he, Sri Krishna, is preparing him to face the “terrible battle” his duty (dharma) has placed before him. He is preparing Arjuna to engage with that dreadful world. How?

Yes, with sublime detachment; but there’s more to it. The following chapter, XII, has been called the apotheosis of love. Love may require us to stop someone from a harmful action. Arjuna is thus being exhorted to “stand up and fight” on three levels: the inner struggle for which we all need support and guidance, the carrying out of his role in life, his dharma — Arjuna belongs to the warrior class whose duty it is to protect society — and finally the action itself.

As Gandhi said in the publication, The Hindu in 1926, when presented with a typical objection to nonviolence, which some think means non-action, without reference to one’s inner state or social duty:

“Taking life may be a duty.... Suppose a man runs amok and goes furiously about, sword in hand, and killing anyone that comes in his way, and no one dares capture him alive. Anyone who dispatches this lunatic will earn the gratitude of the community and be regarded as a benevolent man.”

Of course, this can be misinterpreted. That is especially true today, in a culture that places all emphasis on outward action and knows little or nothing about mental states — or responsibility to others. Even the greatest genius, be it Shakespeare, the composer of the Gita, or Mahatma Gandhi, cannot force all people to understand the deeper meaning of their creations.

But some of us can.