Justina's Writing Corner

In the Bhagavad Gita’s Chapters 1 and 2, the author set the stage for deep philosophical inquiries about duty, morality, and the nature of existence. First, it opens with profound inquiries into the nature of duty, morality, and the world as expressed in both the first and second chapters. The core of Arjuna’s original dilemma is represented by the central question: How can anyone act in this world without guilt and entanglement by worldly consequences? This is a complicated question, as Arjuna stands in a tragic conflict between his duty-qua-warrior’s obligations and the moral implications of such an action. To begin the fight means to fulfill one’s role and responsibility but at the same time to injure people who are not different from himself in substance. The tragic predicament exhumes a contradiction in Dharma, where one’s moral duty to act opposes itself to the moral consequence of harm.

This paradox has a close relation to the affirmation made by Socrates in The Republic: a really just man never causes damage, even in a case when justice or survival may demand it. In theory, by joining the warfare, Arjuna would become as tainted by violence as the people he struggles against. This, of course, raises the very thorny question of whether so-called absolute duty exists independently of any individual contingency or if every action contains inherent moral ambiguity. Can an action truly be “right” when it runs counter to our deepest moral instincts in such dilemmas?

In Chapter 2, Krishna turns the discussion away from worldly duty and to the nature of the self, which he says is eternal, beyond life and death. He feels Arjuna is despairing because of a limited understanding of the true nature of life, that his grief rises because of attachment to things that are transient. That which truly exists can never be destroyed, that which truly is never dies. This argument is in contrast to Arjuna’s view, which remains confined in the phenomenal world and in the thought that the loss of human life is irretrievable and catastrophic. Krishna, however, specifies the immortality of the soul, the Atman-True being is concealed in an eternal principle and not in the transitory body.

This modulates the whole argument to all sorts of issues concerning identity, ego, and even the nature of reality itself.

In short, the self, which we normally think of as the source of our individuality, is thus illusory-a construct that ensnares us in ill-being-if it is the case that the soul is eternal and independent of the body. Krishna introduces the idea of the transcendence of the ego: namely, he insists that one can understand Brahman only if one casts off the shackles of personal identity. That too agrees with the concept of non-dualism, wherein the self is one continuum and part of the whole. It is held that the belief in the ego as something separate from others, as well as from the universe, constitutes the fundamental source of human delusion and suffering.

Which brings up a difficult question: if there is no such thing as individuality and ego, then how does this concept compare on the ground of experiences regarding consciousness and personal identity? Then, of course, there is the further question: If ultimately all beings are one, how can this be? How do dead objects and living beings belong to that oneness? It is somewhat easier to imagine living beings interdependent, but that everything, living and dead, belongs to one and the same reality, certainly puts our conventional idea of self and other, life and death, existence and lack of existence. In this light, the Gita is a text that ultimately makes one reflect upon her notion of duty, existence, and reality. Does our separate individualities stand in the way of an expanded reality, some interwoven web? If so, what does this have to say about action in this world as one strives to transcend one’s individual desires and fears? Krishna instructs him to act, yet ‘act without attachment, keeping in mind the deeper, eternal self with which the results of action will not affect’. Thus, Gita claims not for a withdrawal from responsibilities but for a higher perspective beyond ego and attachment, serving without suffering. The question is, in other words, whether detachment and universal awareness can really absolve us from worldly sufferings and bring us closer to a higher understanding of duty, morality, and truth.