Zitat von Vedanta am 12. April 2017, 14:28 Uhr

Class on Hinduism (Part 8)
HH Shri Satyanarayana Dasa Babaji Maharaja

We are reading from Bhagavad Gita, 1^st Chapter. We start with the first verse. The first verse is spoken bei King Dhritarashtra, the father of the 100 Kaurava brothers. Among them, Duryodhana was the eldest, who did not want to return the kingdom to the Pandavas. Then both the armies had assembled at Kurukshetra. Dhritarashtra was blind and, naturally, he wanted to know the news. He had a minister as personal assistant and secretary whose name was Sanjaya. Before this battle begun, Vyasa - who is the father of Dhritarasthra - had come to see Dhritarashtra. Vyasa tried to tell him:

Why do you want this war?
Your family will be destroyed.
You should return their kingdom back.

Dhritarashtra did not agree. Then Vyasa asked him:

If you want I can grant you vision
so that while sitting here in your palace
you will be able to see everything what is happening at the battlefield.

It is just like you can sit in your room and watch TV, some football match or soccer match, live. That means Dhritarashtra would have a live vision of everything. Yet Dhritarashtra refused and said:

I have been blind all my life.
What is the point in seeing my family members being killed?

This is human nature. When you have something you also get used to it - even if it is a handicap, you get used to that also. People are usually loath to change.

Dhritarashtra refused to have vision. But he further said:

Although I don‘t want to see it,
but I would like to hear about it.
You may give this power to my secretary
so that he can give me running commentary on what is happening.

Therefore, Sanjaya reveived from sage Vyasa the power to see everything. And not only see everything, but he would also know the thoughts of people on the battlefield. Usually, when observing some live match in TV, you can only see what is happening, you don‘t know what the respective players are thinking. But Vyasa said:

Not only will you see everything not focussed only on one part,
whatever you want to see you will see.
But you will also know
what is in the mind of people who are on the battlefield.
If you want to know what Arjuna is thinking
or what Duryodhana is thinking,
what is he planning …
you will know everything.

Therefore, here in the first Chapter of Bhagavad Gita, after Dhritarashtra‘s question, Sanjaya is describing now all this to Dhritarashtra.

dhṛtarāṣṭra uvāca
dharma-kṣetre kuru-kṣetre samavetā yuyutsavaḥ
māmakāḥ pāṇḍavāś caiva kim akurvata sañjaya

King Dhṛtarāṣṭra said:
O Sañjaya, having assembled in the holy land of Kurukṣetra eager to fight, what did my sons and the sons of Pāṇḍu do?

- Bhagavad Gita 1.1

So this is the question. And the question is asked by a blind man. It is natural for a blind man to ask questions, because he cannot see. But this question is very important. If you look at the translation of the verse, it is very simple. Yet Sanskrit is a very beautiful language and thus words can have many meanings and one can derive many meanings from these verses. Of course, this question seems to be a little rhetorical or redundant because he himself is saying samavetā yuyutsavaḥ, „they assembled to fight“. Yuyutsavaḥ means they are willing to fight. Now, if they are willing to fight, what will they do? Play, or have a feast? They will fight! So what is this question they assembled there to fight, what will they do? If they assembled to fight, and it is very well-known that they are going to fight - so they fought! He should have asked, the assembled to fight, how did the fight go? But when he asked what did they do it implies that maybe they did something other than fighting. Doing can be anything. Did they relax, or did they have some philosophical discourse … what did they do? Therefore, this is a very interesting question coming from a blind person.

Again, as I have explained, the stories are there to teach us. Although in the story the blindness is physical, yet it is more blindness of ignorance. Like sometimes you may say:

Are you blind don‘t you see this?
You don‘t understand this? Are you foolish?

Blindness is here is because of attachment. The whole story of Gita and Mahabharata is actually based on the topic of attachment. When you become attached to something, then you become conditioned by that. And what does it mean, conditioning? Conditioning means that now, your pure vision becomes biased. You will see something which is not there, and you will not see something which is there. That is what biasness means. When you are biased then you don‘t judge things properly. You don‘t do justice. That‘s why in the court the sign for justice is the lady with a blindfold. Why there is a blindfold, what is the meaning? It looks very strange that somebody has to do justice and she is blindfolded. If she is blindfolded, she cannot see anything. The meaning is that the person should only hear what is being said without making biased judgement. By seeing the person you may think that this person looks nice, this person looks ugly, this person looks compassionate, he looks cruel. But when you hear you just listen, you don‘t see. So the idea of blindfoldedness is being unbiased, that is the significance, because only then you can give proper judgement.

In the same way, Dhritarashtra is also blindfolded, but for a different reason: that he does not want to see reality. Because if you are blindfolded, it goes both ways, you don‘t see good, you don‘t see bad. He does not want to see the good thing. He does not want to see how the Pandavas are being exploited by his sons. That‘s why he is blind, because he is attached to his sons. When you become attached to somebody you see good qualities in that person. And if there is somebody who wants to harm that person then you see all bad in that, although it may be the other way around. That is the significance of being blind. His vision of judgement is blinded by attachment. Now he cannot think clearly, but as a king it is his duty to not be biased because the post of king in the past was also the post of a judge. The king would also pronounce judgements. Therefore, he cannot favor just his own sons against the sons of his brother. That‘s why he is blind because he cannot see the truth. He is not blind in the sense of being unbiased. And that‘s why he is asking this question because he was worried that maybe his sons may surrender. For this reason also the use of the word dhārma-kṣetre. The first word of Bhagavad Gita in this verse is dhārma-kṣetre, which means the land of dhārma. Kṣetra means land or field. And dhārma are the principles of righteousness. Dhritarashtra is thinking that because they are having this battle at the field of righteousness, maybe that field influences my sons and they decide to give the kingdom. And he did not want that. That‘s why he says dhārma-kṣetre kuru-kṣetre, otherwise there was no need for him to use the word dhārma-kṣetre. He would have simply asked that my sons and the sons of Pandu assembled at Kurukshetra to fight so what did they do? Why the word dhārma-kṣetra has been used as an adjective of Kurukshetra? This has a significance. In these verses the words are chosen very carefully, they are not used just like that. Those people who study Bhagavad Gita deeply they study the words and they try to understand what is the significance of this word here, why it has been used. Because really speaking, if you don‘t use the word dhārma-kṣetre in this verse, nothing is lost. And still the question would be understood, he just wants to know what happened at the battlefield. Why the word dhārma-kṣetre has been used, what information does it give us?

This is how we have to study.

Because Bhagavad Gita is a scripture and our understanding is that in the scriptures, the words are not useless, what to speak of sentences or verses. Every word has some significance. This is how the commentators or the students of Gita try to unpack the meaning. Dhārma-kṣetre signifies that maybe this place can have an influence on them. Or maybe even Yudhisthira himself becomes influenced and decides not to fight. Because he is a very religious person and coming to a religious place he may become renounced and may say anyway, why shall I kill my family people for the sake of kingdom? This is not right. So he may drop out, and there may be no battle. That is the significance of this word.

And then there is a further significance. In the 13^th Chapter Krishna Himself says:

śrī-bhagavān uvāca
idaṁ śarīraṁ kaunteya   kṣetram ity abhidhīyate
etad yo vetti taṁ prāhuḥ   kṣetra-jña iti tad-vidaḥ 

Śrī Bhagavān said:
This body, O son of Kuntī, is called the field (kṣetra). The knowers of reality call the one who knows the field (or realizes this), knower of the field (kṣetrajña).

Bhagavad Gita 13.1
(in Bengali editions of Bhagavad Gita: 13.2)

This is the signified meaning that our human body is the field of action - Kurukshetra. Kuru means action, so it is the field of action. And it is also dhārma-kṣetra , i.e. it is also the field where we can execute dhārma. And the battle also goes on in this body because there are two sides inside us, the good side and the bad side. As I said yesterday, all types of sentiments, emotions and qualities are lying inside us. Love is inside us as well as hatred. You love somebody, you hate somebody, you like somebody, you dislike somebody, so all these emotions are inside. You are charitable, you are also greedy. You are kind, you are also angry. The seeds of all these emotions are contained inside us. And many a times, a tension arises between them. You may have experienced in your life those tensions. There is a battle going on in our head.