The Hindus (49 page)

Dharma needed all the subtlety it could muster to meet the challenges of Buddhism but even more those of
moksha
, which had made major headway since the early Upanishads. Ideas about both dharma and
moksha
had been in the air for centuries, but now they were brought into direct confrontation with each other, in the
Bhagavad Gita
.

The
Gita
is a conversation between Krishna and Arjuna on the brink of the great battle. Krishna had been gracious enough to offer to be Arjuna’s charioteer, an inferior position, though appropriate to Krishna’s quasi-Brahmin nature.
^fs
Arjuna, assailed by many of the doubts that plagued Ashoka,
³
asks Krishna a lot of difficult, indeed unanswerable age-old questions about violence and nonviolence, this time in the context of the battlefield, questioning the necessity of violence for warriors. The sheer number of different reasons that Krishna gives to Arjuna, including the argument that since you cannot kill the soul, killing the body in war (like killing an animal in sacrifice) is not really killing, is evidence for the author’s deep disquiet about killing and the need to justify it. The moral impasse is not so much resolved as blasted away when after Krishna has given a series of complex and rather abstract answers, Arjuna asks him to
show
him his true cosmic nature. Krishna shows him his doomsday form, and Arjuna cries out, “I see your mouths with jagged tusks, and I see all of these warriors rushing blindly into your gaping mouths, like moths rushing to their death in a blazing fire. Some stick in the gaps between your teeth, and their heads are ground to powder (11.25-290).” And right in the middle of the terrifying epiphany, Arjuna apologizes to Krishna for all the times that he had rashly and casually called out to him, saying, “Hey, Krishna! Hey, pal!” He begs the god to turn back into his pal Krishna, which the god consents to do.

The worshiper (represented by Arjuna) is comforted by the banality, the familiarity of human life, but inside the text, the warrior with ethical misgivings has been persuaded to kill, just as the god kills, and outside the text, the reader or hearer has been persuaded that since war is unreal, it is not evil. And this political message is made palatable by the god’s resumption of his role as an intimate human companion. The
Mahabharata
as a whole is passionately against war, vividly aware of the tragedy of war, despite the many statements that violence is necessary. Nor, despite the way that Krishna persuades Arjuna to fight, is the
Gita
used in India to justify war; it is generally taken out of context and used only for its philosophy, which can be used to support arguments for peace, as, notably, in the hands of Gandhi.

Krishna’s broader teaching in the
Gita
resolves the tension between dharma and
moksha
by forming a triad with bhakti (worship, love, devotion) as the third member, mediating between the other two terms of the dialectic. When Arjuna can choose neither dharma (he doesn’t want to kill his relatives) nor renunciation (he is a Kshatriya), Krishna offers him a third alternative, devotion. The
Gita
sets out a paradigm of three paths (
margas
) to salvation, also called three yogas: karma (works, rituals),
jnana
(cognate with “knowledge” and “gnosis”), and bhakti (2.49, 3.3). Karma contains within it the worldly Vedic path of rebirth, the world of dharma (here, as elsewhere, functioning as the equivalent of
sva-dharma
), in contrast with
jnana
, which represents the meditational, transcendent Vedantic path of Release, the world of
moksha
.
^ft
Bhakti bridges the conflicting claims of the original binary opposition between what Luther would have called works (karma) and faith (
jnana
). But each member of the triad of
jnana
, karma, and bhakti was regarded by its adherents as the best, if not the only, path to salvation. One way in which bhakti modifies
moksha
is by introducing into the Upanishadic formula—that you are
brahman
(the divine substance of the universe)—a god with qualities (
sa-guna
) who allows you to love the god without qualities (
nir-guna
). By acting with devotion to Krishna, Arjuna is freed from the hellish consequences of his actions.

The
Gita
employs some Buddhist terminology (“nirvana,” for instance, the blowing out of a flame, which is a more Buddhist way of saying
moksha
), and Arjuna starts out with what might appear to be a quasi-Buddhist attitude that Krishna demolishes. But “nirvana” is also a Hindu word (found, for example, in the Upanishads), and it is the tension within Hinduism itself that the
Gita
is addressing, the challenge to assimilate the ascetic ideal into the ideology of an upper-class householder.
⁴
The
Gita
’s brilliant solution to this problem is to urge Arjuna (and the reader/hearer of the
Gita
) to renounce not the actions but their fruits, to live with “karma without
kama
,” actions without desires. This is a way to maintain a renouncer’s state of mind, a spiritual state of mind, in the midst of material life, a kind of moral Teflon that blocks the consequences of actions. “Karma without
kama
” means not that one should not desire certain results from one’s actions, but merely that one should not expect the results (for so much is out of our control) or, more important, regard the results as the point; it’s the journey that counts, not where you end up.
^fu
In the
Gita
, this means that each of us must perform our own
sva-dharma
—in Arjuna’s case, to kill his kinsmen in battle—with the attitude of a renunciant. This is a far cry from the social ethics of Buddhism. “Had the Buddha been the charioteer,” says Romila Thapar, “the message would have been different.”
⁵

The adherence to one’s own dharma that the
Gita
preaches is part of a new social system that was taking shape at this time,
⁶
the system of castes, which could not be neatly and automatically subsumed as subcategories of classes (though Manu tried to do it [10.8-12]). Class (
varna
) and caste (
jati
) began to form a single, though not yet a unified, social system. New communities were beginning to coalesce, their identities defined by a shared occupation and caste status, or by religious sectarian affiliation, or by the use of a particular language.
⁷
Most of the castes probably derived from clans or guilds, in which, increasingly, families specialized in professions. (The Sanskrit word for caste,
jati
, means “birth.”) But other castes might have consisted of alien sects, tribes, and professions, of people of various geographical, sectarian, and economic factions. Now invaders like the Shakas or Kushanas and tribal forest dwellers like the Nishadas, as well as other groups on the margins of settled society, could also be absorbed into a specific caste (
jati
), often of uncertain class (
varna
), or sometimes into a class, mainly Kshatriya for rulers, seldom Brahmins. Tribes such as Nishadas and Chandalas sometimes seem to have amounted to a fifth
varna
of their own.
⁸

The division of society into castes facilitated the inclusion of new cultures and groups of people who could eventually be filed away in the open shelving of the caste system, “slotted into the caste hierarchy, their position being dependent on their occupation and social origins, and on the reason for the induction.”
⁹
This was an effective way to harness the energies and loyalties of skilled indigenous people who were conquered, subordinated, or encroached upon by a society that already observed class distinctions. For while the system of classes (
varnas
) was already a theoretical mechanism for assimilation,
¹⁰
the system of castes (
jatis
) now offered the practical reality of a form of integration,
¹¹
from outside the system to inside it. Caste thus paved the way for other conversions, such as that of Hindus to Buddhism or Jainism or to the new non-Vedic forms of Hinduism—renunciant or sectarian.

Many of the assimilated castes were Shudras, who were excluded from participating in the Vedic rituals but often had their own rituals and worshiped their own gods.
¹²
Below the Shudras were the so-called polluted castes; beside, rather than below them, were the tribals and unassimilated aliens (
mlecchas
). The logic of class placed some tribal groups in a castelike category, albeit one standing outside the caste hierarchy; tribals are relegated not to a distinct level within a vertical structure, but rather to a horizontal annex that could not be integrated into any cubbyhole in the system.
¹³
But some tribals are peculiarly intimate outsiders, recognized as neighbors whom the system can ultimately assimilate within the system more easily than alien invaders like Turks or Europeans. The system of castes was rationalized through an ideology of purity and pollution that was applied to the subgroups, both ethnic and professional, within the four classes. As some professions were defined as purer than others, the hierarchy took over.

Like the Buddhists and Jainas, many of the new sects disavowed caste or at least questioned its assumptions.
¹⁴
At the same time, there was an increasing tendency, which Ashoka did much to popularize, to define a dharma that could be all things to all men, a dharma/
dhamma
so general (
sadharana
, “held in common”), so perpetual (
sanatana
) that it applied to all right-thinking people always, transcending the differences between various sects. And though the Brahmins quickly manipulated the system to keep individuals from moving up in the hierarchy of castes, vertical mobility was possible for the caste as a whole, if the entire group changed its work and, sometimes, its location. In this way, a particular caste might begin as a Shudra caste and eventually become a Brahmin caste. Some of the assimilated castes did become Brahmins, Kshatriyas, or Vaishyas and thus had access to the rites of the twice born. So many kings were of Shudra or Brahmin origin rather than Kshatriyas that by the time the Muslim rulers reached India they found it difficult to make a correct identification of either a class or a caste among their opposite numbers.
¹⁵

The
Mahabharata
both challenges and justifies the entire class structure. The word for “class” (
varna
) here begins to draw upon its other meaning of “color.” In the course of one of the long discussions of dharma, one sage says to another: “Brahmins are fair [white], Kshatriyas ruddy [red], Vaishyas sallow [yellow], and Shudras dark [black].” The adjectives can denote either skin color or the four primary colors that are symbolically associated with the four classes,
¹⁶
as well as with the three qualities of matter plus yellow (saffron? ocher?) for the transcendent fourth of spirit. In one passage, someone asks a sage a series of questions that show us something of the perceived need, at this time, newly to justify the (mis)treatment of the lower classes:

The implication is that in the beginning, everyone had not only the same general physical makeup (the Shylock argument: Cut us and we bleed) and the same general dharma of good behavior, but the same
sva-dharma
, “one’s own-dharma,” the particular dharma of each class (and, later, each caste), and that that primeval
sva-dharma
was the
sva-dharma
of Brahmins: maintaining dharma and sacrificial rituals. But then each of the other classes voluntarily took up other activities—the Kshatriyas indulged in pleasure and anger (a contradiction of the earlier statement that we all share these emotions), the Vaishyas in commerce, and the Shudras in violent and unclean professions—leaving the Brahmins alone in possession of the original dharma that had been meant for everyone, that had been intended as, in effect, the common (
sadharana
) dharma.

Krishna’s declaration to Arjuna in the
Gita
that “it is better to do your own duty poorly than another’s well” (echoed in
Manu
[10.97]) ignored the fact that Arjuna’s own duty as a warrior would forever doom him to relative inferiority vis-à-vis Brahmins whose
sva-dharma
just happened to conform with the universal dharma that dictated nonviolence. Here is the catch-22 that Manu perpetuates: the hierarchically superior prototype is also the generalizable archetype. Although, in reality, power was largely in the hands of the rulers, the Brahmin imaginary relegated the violent ruler to a place inferior to that of the nonviolent prototype, the Brahmin.