Chapter 90. The Epics and the Bhagavad Gita: War, Duty and the Avatar

Buddhism and Jainism had made renunciation the high road to liberation. Brahmanical religion answered them with stories. The Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa turned the ethics of king and warrior into sacred narrative. Within the Mahābhārata, the Bhagavad Gītā argued that a man could kill in battle and still reach mokṣa, provided he acted without desire and in devotion to a god who descends to earth “in age after age”. The Gita is political scripture. It has been read as a manual of inner warfare, as a charter of Krishna-devotion, as a defence of caste, as a gospel of non-violence and as a licence for armed revolt. This chapter sets these readings side by side as their authors present them.

The epics as answer to the śramaṇas

Sorajjakool places the epics in what he calls the Ancient Period of Hinduism (600 BCE–1000 CE). He describes it as an era that “saw the rise of myths and narratives as a response to challenges posed by Jainism and Buddhism”. It produced the six philosophical systems and “the epics of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, which explored themes of dharma and the relationship between the self and Brahman”. Within the Mahābhārata, “the Bhagavat Gita … offered guidance on detachment and duty”. The same period brought the first devotional (bhakti) cults of Vishnu and Shiva [Sorajjakool, World Religions for Healthcare Professionals, #35015, “Ancient Period of Hinduism (600 BCE – 1000 CE)”].

Karen Armstrong frames the same moment within the Axial Age. In the “dark age” after Ashoka, “Indian religion became theistic, and the people discovered God”. The Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad first joined yoga to a personal Lord, and in its last verse “we find an important new word … bhakti”. Armstrong calls the Gita “one of the last great texts of the Axial Age”. She reports that “some scholars believe” it was written in the late third century BCE, and that it “may originally have been a separate text” later “inserted into the sixth book of the Mahabharata” [Armstrong, The Great Transformation, #82303, ch. 9 “Empire”]. Wikipedia gives a later date, “likely composed in the second or first century BCE”, and calls it “a composite work by multiple authors” [Wikipedia: Bhagavad Gita]. Bibek Debroy, the scholarly translator, agrees: “There is no reason to presume that the Gita had a single author. The Gita is a text that synthesizes and incorporates many teachings of the Upanishads.” He places it in the Bhīṣma Parva: “Chapters 14–40 of Bhishma Parva deal with the Bhagavad Gita, although the Bhagavad Gita proper begins with Chapter 23 … and ends with Chapter 40.” His introduction opens: “If there is one text that captures the essence of Hinduism, it is the Gita” [Debroy, The Bhagavad Gita, #81665, Introduction].

The teaching on the battlefield

Armstrong sets out the dilemma clearly. Arjuna, facing his kinsmen and his teachers Bhishma and Drona, lays down his bow. Krishna first gives “all the traditional arguments for war”: the ātman cannot die, a fallen warrior goes to heaven, and refusal would violate “the dharma of the kshatriya class”. Arjuna is not persuaded. Krishna must then counter “the arguments of the Jains, the Buddhists, and those ascetics who believed that all worldly action was incompatible with liberation”. His answer is karma-yoga: “It was not the actions themselves that bound human beings to the endless round of rebirth, but attachment to the fruits of these deeds.” Armstrong quotes the verse: “Be intent on action / Not on the fruits of action.” She links the problem directly to Ashoka: “The emperor Ashoka had been committed to nonviolence but he could not decommission his army. … somebody had to defend the community” [Armstrong, The Great Transformation, #82303].

Debroy notes the structure of the text. The first six chapters “constitute almost a distinct sub-component” with an emphasis on karma yoga. “With the seventh chapter … there is a switch in emphasis to bhakti yoga.” Chapter 18 makes clear that renunciation does not mean giving up action: “The Gita advocates detached action” [Debroy, The Bhagavad Gita, #81665, notes to chs. 7 and 18]. Mark Ferrara gives a summary reading. “In his unwillingness to fight, Arjuna clings to a popular, but ultimately unnuanced, understanding of karma and dharma”: he believes that “slaying fathers, grandsires, uncles, brothers, and their sons would bring negative consequences upon himself, his family, and the kingdom”. “Krishna explains to the doubt-ridden warrior that desireless action will not generate karma”, so that “Arjuna need only to act in battle as if he were doing so by proxy, in another’s stead, to avoid enslavement to a karmic circuit of cause and effect, and reincarnation”. On Ferrara’s Advaita reading, “Arjuna’s salvation comes in discerning that no distinction between self and other remains tenable to one who identifies with the undifferentiated energy that flows through all things” [Ferrara, Sacred Bliss, #66945, ch. 1].

The avatar doctrine

The Gita’s political core is the descent of God to restore order. Armstrong quotes Krishna: “To protect men of virtue / And destroy men who do evil / To set the standard of sacred duty, / I appear in age after age”. In the theophany of chapter 11, Krishna as Time has already slain the armies: “They are already / Killed by me. / Be just my instrument.” Armstrong comments: “Too many politicians and warriors have insisted that they were simply the instruments of destiny, and used this to justify horrendous acts.” She also stresses the text’s social reach: “women, vaishyas, shudras, even men born in the womb of evil, reach the highest way” [Armstrong, The Great Transformation, #82303].

The Oxford missionary scholar D. M. Thornton, writing on the origin of Sikhism, follows Monier-Williams in tracing medieval bhakti to this Vishnu theology. “Vishnu is represented as a god that evinced sympathy with mundane suffering, was interested in human affairs, and active for the welfare of all created things. This caused his frequent descents (avatara) on earth under various forms.” Thornton then connects this personal devotion to the Sikh doctrine of salvation through “the name of Hari” [Thornton, Parsi, Jaina and Sikh, #55051, “Origin of Sikhism”, citing Monier-Williams, Religious Life and Thought in India]. Harris adds a modern twist on the avatar’s elasticity: “many Hindus consider Jesus an avatar of Vishnu” [Harris, Sfârşitul credinţei, #21476].

Rival commentaries

Prabhupada (ISKCON). In Bhagavad-gītā As It Is, Krishna is “the Supreme Personality of Godhead”. “No living entity, including Brahmā, Lord Śiva, or Nārāyaṇa, can possess opulences as fully as Kṛṣṇa.” “The individual fragmental spirit soul is represented by Arjuna” [Prabhupada, Bhagavad-gita As It Is, #39455]. In The Perfection of Yoga, chapter one, “Yoga as Rejected by Arjuna”, he notes that Arjuna calls the eightfold sitting meditation of chapter 6 “impractical and unendurable to me, for the mind is restless and unsteady” (Bg 6.33). Prabhupada concludes that the mind is “more difficult than controlling the wind”, and that the real perfection is service to Krishna: of the “three basic types of yoga … karma-yoga, jñāna-yoga and bhakti-yoga … the service to the Supreme Lord is the same” [Prabhupada, The Perfection of Yoga, #51185, ch. 1]. He also takes the battlefield literally: “All the warriors on both sides were poised to fight, so there was very little time indeed-at the utmost, one hour. Within this one hour, the whole Bhagavad-gītā was discussed” [Prabhupada, The Perfection of Yoga, #51185, ch. 1].

Yogananda (Kriya Yoga). God Talks with Arjuna reads the war as interior. “On the battlefield of man’s body—Kurukshetra, ‘the field of action’—the offspring of the blind sense-mind and those of the pure discriminative intelligence now confront each other.” The blind Dhritarashtra “symbolically represents the sense-mind”, Duryodhana is “material desire”, and the devotee prays that the “chariot of my intuition” be stationed “in the spinal centers” [Yogananda, God Talks with Arjuna, #63655, ch. 1].

Vivekananda / Ramakrishna Mission. Ravi Mj’s essay summarises Vivekananda’s Karma Yoga: “the method of performing any activity, rather than the activity itself, is key to spiritual transformation”. In the Mission, “all the work is done as Karma Yoga and not as a drudge, or even as duty”. The essay also criticises “modern misinterpretations that justify unethical behavior under the guise of spirituality” [Ravi Mj, Efficacy of Karma Yoga, #74353]. Wikipedia records Vivekananda’s own allegorical reading of Kurukshetra as “the war which is constantly going on within man between the tendencies of good and evil” [Wikipedia: Bhagavad Gita, “Allegory of war”].

Osho. Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy rejects the ascetic Krishna. “Krishna alone accepts the body in its totality … Apart from Krishna, Zarathustra is another.” He is “a lonely dancing island in the vast ocean of sorrow”, and “Krishna symbolizes acceptance of the opposites together”. Osho reads Arjuna’s pacifism as a failure of goodness: “Goodness suffers from a basic weakness: it wants to keep away from conflicts and wars.” He finds it “extraordinarily amusing that Arjuna is persuaded to fight by one who is not going to fight himself” [Osho, Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy, #44995, chs. 1 and 4].

Perennialists. Bruce Burger quotes Aldous Huxley’s view that the Gita “is one of the clearest and most comprehensive summaries of the Perennial Philosophy ever to have been made”. He notes that “Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman were students of The Bhagavad Gita”, and quotes Thoreau: “In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous cosmological philosophy of The Bhagavad Gita” [Burger, Esoteric Anatomy, #68445, ch. 4]. Wikipedia adds Eknath Easwaran’s formula that the Gita’s subject is “the war within, the struggle for self-mastery that every human being must wage” [Wikipedia: Bhagavad Gita, “Allegory of war”].

The Gita in politics

Judith Walsh summarises Gandhi’s achievement in one sentence: “Gandhi used Hindu images and language to create a nonviolent nationalism” [Walsh, A Brief History of India, #38599]. Gandhi read the Gita as allegory, with “the battlefield … the soul and Arjuna … man’s higher impulses struggling against evil”. Others read it militantly. Lala Lajpat Rai saw its message as “the bravery and courage of Arjuna to fight as a warrior”. Bal Gangadhar Tilak “saw the Gita as defending killing when necessary for the betterment of society, such as … the killing of Afzal Khan”. According to Nicholas Owen, Savarkar, “the father of Hindutva”, “often turned to Hindu scriptures such as the Bhagavad Gita, arguing that the text justified violence against those who would harm Mother India” [Wikipedia: Bhagavad Gita, “The Gita and war”]. Walsh’s chapter “Hindu Race/Hindu Nation” traces how early nationalists imagined the nation both as citizenship and as a religious-racial community, a tension that led to the “rise to political dominance of Hindu nationalism in the 1990s” [Walsh, #38599].

The text also has radical critics. D. D. Kosambi wrote that “practically anything can be read into the Gita by a determined person, without denying the validity of a class system”. He noted that “the high god repeatedly emphasizes the great virtue of non-killing (ahimsa), yet the entire discourse is an incentive to war”. Ambedkar called the doctrine that only the body is killed an “unheard of defence of murder” and said that a lawyer pleading it “would be sent to the lunatic asylum”. P. Lal called Krishna “the militarist” who used “forked-tongue speciousness” [Wikipedia: Bhagavad Gita, “Criticism” and “Ethics, war and violence”]. Armstrong’s own reservation has already been noted: the text “seemed to absolve human beings of any responsibility for the carnage they committed” [#82303].

Key points

• Sorajjakool treats the epics and the Gita as Hinduism’s narrative response to the Jain and Buddhist challenge, centred on dharma, Brahman and devotion [#35015].
• Debroy and Wikipedia regard the Gita as a composite synthesis of Upanishadic teachings, embedded in the Bhīṣma Parva. Armstrong calls it one of the last Axial texts [#81665; #82303].
• Its core teaching is karma-yoga: action without attachment to fruits, which lets a kshatriya kill and still reach liberation. Ferrara reads this as Arjuna’s resolution of karmic fear [#82303; #66945].
• The avatar doctrine (“I appear in age after age”) makes divine descent the guarantor of dharma. Thornton, after Monier-Williams, ties Vishnu’s “sympathy with mundane suffering” to his “frequent descents (avatara)” [#55051].
• The commentaries diverge sharply. Prabhupada reads the text literally and as Krishna-centred, Yogananda yogically and inwardly, Vivekananda through service, and Osho iconoclastically [#39455; #51185; #63655; #74353; #44995].
• Huxley, Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman received the Gita as perennial philosophy [#68445].
• Walsh says Gandhi built a non-violent nationalism from Hindu imagery. Tilak, Lajpat Rai and Savarkar read the Gita as justifying violence [#38599; Wikipedia: Bhagavad Gita].
• Kosambi, Ambedkar and Lal attack the Gita as a defence of caste and killing, while Emerson and “most pandits and yogis” read it as allegory [Wikipedia: Bhagavad Gita].