| The modern mind
prefers destroying evil by attacking it. But Indian thought believes in eradicating it and
conquering it by suffering, until it becomes nothing to the sufferer. By doing so, man has
the supreme spiritual satisfaction of doing his duty and attaining immortality. Thus we
have the tragedy of King Harischandra enacted in ancient days on the holy soil of Benares,
in quest of this absolute ideal of truth. In our own day, Mahatma Gandhi sacrificed his
life at the altar of the absolute ideal of ahimsa. Vyasa
declares in the last verse of the Bharata Savitri, which is the essence of the whole
teaching of the Mahabharata: Not out of passion or avarice, not even for the sake of
life should one ever abandon Dharma. Dharma is ever lasting. Happi- ness and misery are
transitory. The soul is eternal. That which embodies it is not eternal. Indian
thinkers are keenly alive to the great difficulty of determining the true Dharma or right
conduct in a particular situation under the varied circumstances of the station, rank,
class or functional group to which the individual belongs and an critical occasions when
conflicts of duties and ideals arise which is called Dharma- sankata .
It was such a fateful crisis that presented itself to Arjuna
when, as Yamunacharya says in the Gitartha- sangraha, The mind of Arjuna was perplexed to
the extreme about Dharma or Adharma, of his duty to fight, by friendship and compassion
entirely out of place in a battlefield. The great Gita-sastra arose for mankind with a
view to allays his fears and removes his perplexity. |
