Chapter
One: Lamenting the Consequences of War (Arjun Vishad Yog)
I’ve Trained For This With The Silmarillion
Welcome to the first instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred
Texts (Bhagavad Gita).
In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the
Bhagavad Gita, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as
literature and mythology.
For more detail, see the introductory post https://bit.ly/2XAch2A
For the online Bhagavad Gita that I use, see here https://www.holy-bhagavad-gita.org/
And now:
“Dhritarashtra
said: O Sanjay, after gathering on the holy field of Kurukshetra, and desiring
to fight, what did my sons and the sons of Pandu do?”
There’s a framing device to the Bhagavad Gita, or at least to this
chapter, wherein blind King Dhritarashtra is told about the goings on at a
distant battlefield by his minister Sanjay, who has the ability to see and hear
events happening far away.
The reason why Dhritarashtra is interested in the battle is
because his sons are involved. Whether his actual sons or figurative “sons”, I’m
not sure yet, as the text also has Sanjay reference “The terrific sound thundered across the sky and the earth, and
shattered the hearts of your sons, O Dhritarasthra”, implying that the
army, the King’s subjects, are his “sons”.
And what does Sanjay report? The battle lines are drawn up between
the Kaurava (also referred to as Kuru), led by Grandsire Bheeshma (the King’s
side), against the Pandava (also referred to as Pandu), led by Bheem. Got that?
There will be tests. I don’t yet know if the different names are some
grammatical convention in Sanskrit that derive adjectives from nouns (kind of
like saying “France” and “French”), or if everyone has several different names.
When a character later calls upon Vishnu, he uses a range of different names,
but then Gods go by many titles, and Vishnu, as I recall, has many
incarnations.
Sanjay gives a list of loads of other great warriors on both
sides, who I’m not going to report here yet, unless they recur, because
otherwise it’s a sudden onslaught of Indian names. This is compounded by
everyone seeming having a conch shell or war horn that also has a name (“King Yudhishthir, blew the Anantavijay,
while Nakul and Sahadev blew the Sughosh and Manipushpak” as a sample). I
wonder if most of the names would be familiar to the original audience, much as
Greek audiences would probably nod in recognition at the names Odysseus and
Ajax when learning who was among the warriors of the Iliad. And horns with
names is quite Norse.
One warrior worth noting, though, is Arjun, fighting on the Pandu
side under the banner of Hanuman (the Monkey God, my favourite Hindu deity).
Arjun rides his magnificent chariot between the two battle lines and surveys
the Kuru forces, noticing how many are his kinsmen. “Seeing all his relatives present there, Arjun, the son of Kunti, was
overwhelmed with compassion, and with deep sorrow, spoke the following words.
Arjun said: O Krishna, seeing my own kinsmen arrayed for battle here and intent
on killing each other, my limbs are giving way and my mouth is drying up.”
He goes on at some length about how he loses the will to fight
what is essentially a civil war, and expounds the futility of war – “O Krishna, I do not desire the victory,
kingdom, or the happiness accruing it. Of what avail will be a kingdom,
pleasures, or even life itself, when the very persons for whom we covet them,
are standing before us for battle?”
He also follows a train of logic that leads from the downfall of a
great family into the general breakdown of tradition, and from the breakdown of
tradition into immorality and the collapse of society. At the end of this
chapter, Arjun casts down his bow and arrows and sinks down in the seat of his
chariot overcome with grief.
Aside from the sudden onslaught of unfamiliar names, this was a
great chapter to read, some lovely intense poetry from Arjun as he decries the
outcome of war, but also some great imagery of these arrays of archers and
charioteers, resplendent heroes all bristling for a fight. I can just picture
the Bollywood epic in my head.
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