The Great Conversation

The Great Conversation

Between the two armies...

   What makes the Bhagavad-gita such a singular work? There are many epic and heroic poems, sagas of war from the ancient world. Perhaps the Iliad and the Odyssey are the most well-known. Many books describe ancient combat, the lust for battle, the tragedy of war. Many of these confront important moral dilemmas. And yet, when the time for battle comes, the hero accepts his fate and enters the fight. A hero who refuses the call to adventure is a coward. It is rare to find a hero who enters a great conversation at the moment of truth. And yet at the outset of battle in Kurukshetra, all the action pauses to hear a dialogue between a man in great crisis and God Himself.

   To find a similar argument against war in Greek Mythology one might cite the example of Odysseus feigning madness to avoid Agamemnon's calle to arms in his siege of Troy.

Odysseus feigning madness

Then there's Achilles refusal to fight. But Odysseus avoids war out of self-preservation and family affection where Achilles sulks in his tent out of anger and pride. At no point in the ancient Greek epic do we find any metaphysical discussion between gods and men about the nature of soul and karma.


 
The central conflict in Mahabharata is the battle of Kurukshetra.  And the key moment is the beginning of the battle. The pivot point of the entire 100,000 verse work is Arjuna's crisis of conscience. If Arjuna decides not to fight, the battle is lost. Without Arjuna, the Pandavas are finished.

And yet his crisis of conscience is not based on weakness, although Krishna tells him not to be weak. He is concerned with the future of the dynasty. If war destroys all the great heroes of an age, what will be left? Society will be ruined. The very principles of religion will suffer. Customs and traditions will fall by the wayside, women and children will be corrupted. The whole system of caste and social order will never recover.


 
Arjuna is not concerned with pride and adventure, booty or gold, kingdom and fortune. Even his duty as a warrior, a principle he has always cherished, has no value for him. He stops his chariot just as hundreds of thousands of warriors are ready for blood, and in the heart of the battlefield puts down his weapons. He will not pick them up again until he is convinced.

   The dialogues of Plato are set in the gardens of the Greeks, where young men discuss abstract ideas about justice. But the dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna is set on the plains of Kurukshetra where men of iron and steel are about to commit wholesale slaughter. The ideas they discuss are far from abstract, but would influence the fates of thousands of heroes.



  The highest ideals of the Greeks may be expressed in the Platonic dialogue called "Crito" where Socrates drinks poison while discussing the soul. http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/crito.htm But Socrates is always more interesting for the questions he asks than for any real answers about the meaning of life. Whereas Arjuna will not be satisfied simply by putting interesting questions. Unlike Socrates who seems satisfied to merely ask questions, Arjuna wants to get to the meaning of life before he sacrifices his own in battle.


   Sometimes we overlook the nobility of Arjuna when looking deeply into the meaning of the Bhagavad-gita, since Krishna Himself dismisses many of his questions as being superficial. But it is Arjuna's nobility which elevates the conversation to the highest level.

    Nor do we find such a conversation anywhere in the Bible or the teachings of Christ to his disciples. Jesus Christ found himself teaching in parables to fishermen and carpenters.  If he were able to discuss the inner meaning of spiritual life with an intimate disciple, we have no record of such a discussion. For a true parallel, we would need to know what conversation Jesus Christ had with his Heavenly Father while in the Garden of Gethsemane. There it is said the Lord Jesus asked his Father to remove the cup of wrath he was about to drink. What dialogue He may have had with His Son, we can only imagine. What would God have said to Jesus Christ in his moment of doubt?

Christ in the Garden of Gethsemene, Heinrich Hofmann, 1890

     In the Gita we have a conversation by a man in crisis with God Himself, Krishna. If you could have a conversation with God in a moment of crisis, what questions would you ask? Arjuna asked about karma, dharma, yoga, work, action, sin, knowledge, religion, duty, the goal of life, self-realization, the nature of reality, God, time, and the world. As hardened warriors held their bow-strings tight, Arjuna paused his long enough to ask about the nature of the soul, death, and the Supreme Reality.
   Any one of us who have passed through a moment of crisis know what Arjuna felt. And like Arjuna, we can take solace and inspiration from the  words of Krishna and the message of Bhagavad-gita even in our darkest hour of need.