The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity

The First Six Chapters of the Bhagavadgita

by Swami Krishnananda

Chapter 9: The Classification of Society

Yesterday we noticed that our involvements in life determine the extent of reality in which we are also involved at the same time, which practically mean one and the same thing. The response from Bhagavan Sri Krishna came as an appeal to all these involvements, all the levels of connection of the human individual that Arjuna was, which is so dear to each person.

Every one of our involvements is a dear object of ours. If you are involved in something as a part and parcel of your requirement in that given condition of your life in this world, that becomes yourself. It is your kith and kin. It is dear and near, and an appeal to that relation also is a part of the treatment of the human personality. Even in a medical treatment which may be considered as related to the illness of the physical body, there is a necessity for consideration of other involvements of the patient also. The illness of a person need not necessarily mean a physical nonalignment exclusively. It may look like that, but it may have relations with many other things. When a person is ill, that person is ill in every way, not merely in one sense.

So as a good instructor, as a good physician, as a good friend, as a good philosopher, as a well-wisher, as a real benefactor, the Lord's response comes from all sides. There is an appeal to the social sense, which is important; there is an appeal to the physical sense, there is an appeal to the emotional sense, there is an appeal to the rational sense, and then there is at the same time an appeal to the deepest core of everything, the spiritual, the bottom of all things.

As a social individual, it is incumbent on every person to perform that duty which is related to social relation. It becomes an obligation, an unavoidable necessity. It is unavoidable because that relation called social does exist as a reality, and anything that is real is unavoidable. A totally unreal thing may not be your concern, but your social relation is not an unreality. Any person with some common sense will know to what extent each person is social – socially related, socially conditioned, socially dependent – and to that extent there is a debt that one owes to that on which one is dependent, and to that which conditions, to a large extent, even one's own existence. It is one of the principle teachings of the ancient masters, particularly in this country, that every debt has to be discharged. One cannot be a debtor. It is very, very awful to be in that condition. It is no use living by owing something to somebody else. You owe something to that with which you have an inviolable relation, which contributes something, visibly or invisibly, to your welfare and existence, and which decides your existence itself in some measure.

Dispassionate thinking is a great virtue, the greatest of virtues. To analyse one's circumstance in this world honesty is an endowment and a great achievement indeed. To the extent I receive support from others, to that extent I also have to contribute my support to that. The world is a cooperative existence. Individuals do not exist in the world. There are no such things as individuals, finally. The whole human society is a fabric of interconnections, interrelations and interdependence. In that sense, we may say the whole of human society is one person. Taken to the logical limits, this one person is extolled as the cosmical person in a great hymn of the Veda, called the Purusha Sukta. The whole cosmic relation of living beings is considered as one body, and he is the Purushottama who is hymned in this great sukta called the Purusha Sukta, commencing with that wondrous statement sahasraśīrṣā puruṣaḥ (P.S. 1): All these heads of people, all these locations of individuals, are planted in the body of this large society to which this great man, Purusha, is compared.

'Society' is an intriguing term. It begins with your own body, which is also a little society. It extends itself to all its outward relations, and ordinarily it is difficult to understand what are your outward relations. It requires a little bit of tutoring, some sort of an education. In a purely egoistic attitude, one may imagine that one is dependent on nothing at all. “I am a totally independent person. I owe nothing to anyone, and I seek nothing from any person in the world.” This is not true, because such an independent existence is not sanctioned by the nature of things. It is an ignorance of the state of affairs that prompts a person to imagine this.

So, positioned as you are in a particular context in human society, are you not required to contribute your might to the solidarity of this large body of which you are a part? You have to sustain the body in order that you may exist as a limb thereof. You want to be independent of the whole to which you belong, but this is not possible. The concept of society takes us to philosophical considerations, and it ranges beyond the philosophy of ordinary social welfare. We need not go into that depth at present, because the Bhagavadgita will take us to that point also in its coming chapters. But pure common sense will tell you, apart from its philosophical foundations, that you owe a debt to human society. There is none who does not contribute something for your welfare. Sometimes it is known, sometimes it is not known. Sometimes it is visible to the eyes, sometimes not. In Indian tradition, this is the reason behind the great injunction of the Pancha Mahayajnas that every person should perform the five great yajnas.

Everyone has an obligation to the welfare of every living being, not merely human beings. You have an obligation to your parents, and even the parents of your parents, your ancestors. Sometimes the obligation is carried to even sixteen generations ahead. In practice, this is adumbrated in the performance of the libations and rituals we call shradas. Sixteen generations are remembered, and their influence is accepted as part of the blessing that we have received. Gratitude is, again, a great virtue. Ingratitude is a vice. Not to accept that we have received beneft from others is egoistic arrogance, and it will defeat its own purpose. It is not merely a vice; it is a self-destructive tendency. It will ruin one's own self. You are trying to be ungrateful to that which has sustained you, which is going to sustain you even in the future, and without which you may not even live.

Each person has a duty in this world. Now, this is a very important point which is brought out in many a way through the injunctions occurring in a variegated manner in different verses of the Bhagavadgita. Everyone has a duty. There is no one who can be free from duty. But what is duty? This was the question. In the beginning itself it was mentioned, “I cannot understand what my duty is. I am floundering. I am completely upset with my very basic understanding. What is my obligation at this moment?”

Now, this is not an easy issue that is raised by a person. You will find that even the tentative answers given by the Lord were not adequate to the purpose. Several replies, several answers, several suggestions are given, but they do not seem to be adequate because doubts persist in spite of these answers, and they appeared to cease only when the total vision of all things was made possible. Our vision is limited. We have do not have a total vision of the whole of things. However much we may try to stretch our imagination, we will find the total picture of any situation does not easily present itself before us. Something is missing, and there we are likely to make a little mistake.

So, incidentally, Bhagavan Sri Krishna says, “As a social individual I consider you as belonging to one class of humans, and in traditional terms your class is categorised as Kshatriya.” Now, this point that a person is designated by the type of performance expected of that person requires deeper analytical thought. To which class do we belong? To which class do I belong, and yourself, and anybody? The station of oneself in a society is supposed to decide one's obligation. Somebody has written a big book entitled “My Station and its Duty”. Here a precise answer is given to this question. Your obligation, your position in society, is to be decided by the makeup of your personality. Your knowledge and your capacity will decide what can be expected of you. There is no one so poor in this world who cannot do some sort of charity. There is something in you with which you can help others. You are not so very bereft of that capacity, because help need not necessarily mean doling out a material thing. It is a contribution of assistance in any manner whatsoever to the welfare of any level of any personality. Guṇakarmavibhāgaśaḥ (BG 4.13) is a phrase that occurs somewhere in the Bhagavadgita. This classification of society is done by the gunas and the karmas of the person or the group of persons.

Now, the gunas are the properties which constitute the personality of an individual. This is, again, to go into philosophical issues like the Sankhya, to which the Bhagavadgita will make reference. The gunas, in the language of the Bhagavadgita, are known as sattva, rajas and tamas. These properties are said to constitute everything in the universe. Na tad asti pṛthivyāṁ vā divi deveṣu vā punaḥ, sattvaṁ prakṛtijair muktaṁ yad ebhiḥ syāt tribhir guṇaiḥ (BG 18.40). In one place the Gita says that there is nothing on earth or in heaven which is free from these inner constituents called sattva, rajas and tamas. Everything that is living, non-living, visible, invisible, empirical or transcendent is constituted of these properties sattva, rajas and tamas. There is nothing in the whole of creation which has not these three ingredients making up its constitution. Hence, each person is also an embodiment of these three gunas.

What are these gunas? Sattva, rajas, tamas – what do these imply? What is meant by sattva, rajas, tamas? It is an impulsion, a tendency and an instinct for behaviour, conduct and operation. It is a tendency, a kind of implied projectile which wishes to take a direction. Every individual has a potentiality to take a particular direction of behaviour and action. That potentiality may be considered as the guna, or the property, of each person. This property, this guna, may be manifest or unmanifest. The gunas may sometimes be manifest, sometimes not. Your tendencies may be submerged as a potentiality or a possibility, or they may be actually manifest in your visible behaviour and conduct. Whatever that be, the tendency decides what kind of person you are.

Now, these tendencies are sattva, rajas and tamas. Rajas is a term implying a tendency to extrovert direction, action in an outward sense, the urge of the inner constituents of the personality to move outward in the direction of space, time and objects. The tendency of these three gunas decides, marks, indicates the nature of your subtle body. The subtle body is called the linga sharira in Sanskrit. Linga is a mark or an indication, an insignia which indicates what kind of person you are. It is the force behind your physical body. It is mould into which the physical body is cast. In a way, we may say the physical body is just a visible form of this invisible inner potentiality called the subtle body.

The three gunas, sattva, rajas and tamas, manifest themselves as the various limbs of the subtle body. What are these limbs of the subtle body? They are many in number. For instance, the character of your intellect, the manner of the performance and the action of your intellect, is also decided by the proportion of the distribution of these three forces in your personality. The preponderance of any one of these sattva, rajas or tamas gunas in your intellect, in your understanding, will decide the extent of your understanding. Hence, it does not mean that everyone can understand things in the same way. Tamas can predominate, rajas can predominate, or sattva can predominate. Your emotions are also decided by the proportion of the distribution of these three gunas. The manas, the mind, is also conditioned by these three gunas.

Then there are the sense organs – the eyes, the ears, the nose, the tongue and the sense of touch. These are the senses of knowledge, and the senses through which the desires of the psyche inside get manifested outside. The eye has a desire, the ear has a desire, and all the senses have desires. It does not mean that every eye has the same desire. But what kind of desire can the eye have? What do you want to see, what do you want to hear, what do you want to taste, what do you want to touch? This nature of the object that the sense organs in a particular individual crave will depend upon the kind of preponderance of the gunas in that particular individual, so it does not mean that everyone wants the same thing. You may not like to see what I want to see, and so on. The sense organs operate in different individuals according to the particular vehemence of the gunas in the individual.

Then the pranas are there – prana, apana, vyana, udana, samana. They are the soldiers of action which are prompted to perform their duties according to the propulsion of the understanding and the emotions, and the energy of the sense organs. They are like the army or the police. They are driven to act, and the instruments they use are the physical body, the physical limbs. They are the vehicles. So finally it means that everything that anyone is consists of just these three principal forces. They are the chief ministers of the cabinet of the government of the human personality, as it were. Whatever they say is to be done.

Your relationship to things in the world, and your obligation to the world in terms of these relationships, will be dependent upon the extent of the manifestation of these gunas which constitute you, and you will be fit to act only in that manner, to that extent, as would be permitted by the preponderance of any one of these gunas or any two of the gunas, etc., because you cannot be other than what you are. You cannot try to do something differently than what is permitted by your nature. The word 'nature', prakriti, is sometimes used in the Bhagavadgita. Prakriti in a cosmical sense is 'something'. It also means 'the natural tendency of a person'. You cannot go contrary to your natural tendency.

Now, here is a very peculiar mandate before us. 'You cannot go contrary to your tendency' does not imply that you have a sanction or a license to do as you like. It does not mean that. It means something very subtle. Very careful we have to be in understanding what it means. Who can go against one's own nature? This does not mean a license to act as one likes. It is a caution exercised: Beware! Red light! The red flag is shown there; be cautious. There is a road breaker or a tollgate or some such thing. Beware!

What is meant by this bewareness? It shows that inasmuch as your conduct is decided and determined by your nature, and you cannot act contrary to it – you can act only in accordance with it, not more, not less – your contribution to the solidarity of society will be to the extent of the permission granted by your nature at that given moment in that state of your evolution. It is not a license to act in a libidinous or a selfish way, but it is a concession given to you to do only that much as you can under the conditions in which you are placed because of the preponderance of the gunas. Nobody will ask you to lift an elephant's weight. You have not got that strength. Only the elephant can lift a larger weight, but you can also lift some weight. That will depend upon what you are.

It has already been noticed that human society is an interrelated, interconnected, interdependent organism. It is one person, as it were, and humanity, therefore, may be considered as one thought in a general sense. It is not one thought in a detailed or particular sense, just as the legs are not the head, the nose is not the eyes, yet they all constitute one body, and we can consider them as one organism. I am not you; you are not another. Everyone is different from everybody else. Yet, in spite of this difference in detail, we are the human species. As humans we are categorised under a particular class of thinking. We think as human beings. We do not think like trees and hills and reptiles, and so on. Therefore, the human way of thinking is considered here as the standpoint of the observation of duty and the performance thereof.

The duty you are expected to perform is whatever you are capable of contributing to the welfare of the whole. Here again, a little analogy of the human body will be good. You do not expect the leg to think as the brain thinks. You do not expect the head to walk. You do not expect the nose to see, or the ear to smell. It is expected of each organ to perform a particular function. Now, the difference in the performance of these functions does not imply any kind of ethical or moral superiority, or even a social difference. Which part of your body is inferior, and which part is superior? Even a little hair of mine is dear to me. How can I say it is not dear? Even a nail is me. It is not merely mine, it is me – so dear, so loving, so beautiful, so necessary, because it is myself.

We are now considering your performance in the context of your whole relation in the fabric of human society, and we will consider the larger society of the universe afterwards. For the time being, let us confine ourselves to human society only. In the beginning of the Second Chapter of the Gita, the emphasis is on the social side first. The other sides come later on, gradually, stage by stage, when we go deeper and deeper. So your position in society, as conditioned and dictated by the preponderance of the gunas, will decide what your contribution should be.

You may ask, “Why should I contribute anything? Why should I not be inactive? I will not do anything. It is better to keep quiet.” Now, this is not possible. Na hi kaścit kṣaṇam api jātu tiṣṭhaty akarmakṛt (BG 3.5): No one sits for a moment without doing something. It is not possible to be inactive, because you are per force goaded to act in a particular way by the very fact of your relation to this larger organisation called society. It is goaded to perform that function, merely because of the fact of its being a part of that mechanism. It is integrally related to it. When the train moves, every part of the train also moves. There is no need to tell each part to start moving. It goes because it is connected.

It is important to realise that we are basically connected to everything in the world. It is not visible to open eyes. The naked eye does not see this relation. From the physical, material, bodily point of view, it looks as if we are totally independent. This wrong point of view, which erroneously tells us that we are independently located in this body, is the cause of the egoism of human nature. The adumbration of pride and self-assertion in a person arises due to the wrong notion of there being no connection of oneself with anybody. Therefore, we do what we like. We forget that we have invisible relationships with everything, apart from the visible difference that seems to be there between one and the other. Socially, pure common sense tells us to what extent we are connected to others. But even common sense is only a superficial understanding. A scientific probe is necessary to know what deeper relationships are involved in our connection with things. We are connected to even the stars in the distant heavens. The naked eye cannot know this. Even the empirical understanding, the mind, cannot appreciate to what extent the sun determines us, the moon determines us. The stars condition even our brains, what to think of other things. Even the cells of the brain are conditioned by the operation of the stars in the sky. Who can accept this if we are to accept only what our senses tell us?

The great Lord does not go so deep in the beginning, but it becomes necessary to go deep later on when the patient is not listening. So in the beginning he suffices with, “Okay. As a social individual at least, you have to contribute your might.”

I shall revert for two or three minutes to the point of this classification of society which the ancient masters classified as Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Sudra. We have to be very careful in understanding what these terms mean. They mean the obligations of a person, and not the person himself or herself. We sometimes mistake the obligation for the person, and try to put the cart before the horse. There are people who say these distinctions do not exist and they should not exist. It is no use talking like that. They do exist, and they cannot but exist, just as you cannot deny the difference between the leg and the head. However much you may be humanitarian and equilibrated in your opinion, they do what their functions are because they are expected to do only that function. You have to be honest and generous enough to understand the spirit behind this instruction. It is not possible for all people to do all things. This kind of equality is unknown. You cannot eat grass and give your sweet porridge to the swine because the human being and the swine are the same in the eye of the Lord, and everything is equal. There is a final unity of all things. It is said in a passage of the Bhagavadgita that one should look equally upon a Brahmin, a dog, an elephant, an elephant driver, a dog eater, etc. You can understand the spirit in which this is said. It does not mean you should walk with four legs because you are like a cow. That is not the idea. You do not develop a trunk because you are like an elephant. This kind of literal interpretation is not to be permitted.

The classification of society – the word 'caste' may be avoided, if you like – becomes necessary on account of the differentiating capacities and the needs of people. Everyone's need is not identical. The capacity and the need will decide the kind of function that you have to perform. As you know very well, your capacity is not the same as another's capacity, and your need is also not the same as the need of another. Society is to be protected in four ways, among many other things which may also be necessary. For the welfare of society, we require manpower. Who says manpower is not necessary? There are also the group of people who engage in commercial transactions and the movement of goods, and work for their production. There is a necessity for the power of social economy; therefore, the production of goods, commodities which are necessary for the maintenance of society, becomes the obligation of some people. Now, would you like everyone to produce only, and do nothing else? Production requires distribution. You cannot have commodities locked up somewhere, without distribution. And finally, there is a need to exercise understanding and a reason to operate this whole machinery of human society, which works variously for its welfare. The reason is the Brahmin, the understanding, something like the judiciary in an administration. It requires the operation of a final judgment of values, and also an administrative setup.

Now, these needs, among the many other needs of human society, should be considered as the foundation for the institution of these classifications. It has nothing to do with the superiority or the inferiority of a person. It is nothing but the classification of function and performance as an obligation for mutual cooperation and social welfare. It is necessary that I should do what I am expected to do from the point of view of my knowledge and capacity as dictated by my inner constitution, for my welfare as well as another's welfare, because my welfare is decided by the welfare of others, and vice versa.

Therefore, a total organic view is taken by the Bhagavadgita, and not merely a political view, a tradesman's view or a commercial view. It is a difficult thing to appreciate, because all life seems to move from gradations of organisms to organisms, from wholes to wholes. Every part of life, every stage of living is one kind of organism, right from the cell in the body. A little cell in this body is one organism. It is a complete society in itself. One cell can be taken out from your body, and they say that DNA, RNA, etc., are contained in these little cells, and the whole Mr. So-and-so is reflected in that little cell. By studying one cell of the body, one can know the whole person. From the iris of the eye, the whole person can be studied. From one line on the palm of the hand, you can know the whole person. One little line on the sole of the foot can tell what kind of person you are, and so on, and it will also tell you the organic structure of the universe.

Therefore, the classification of society is not the distribution of work to different individuals by the personal motives of anybody. It is a necessity arisen on account of the very organic structure of human society, inasmuch as it is one organism among the several levels of organism, until you reach the final organism of the universe itself. From the little cell of your body until the whole cosmos, you will find there are levels of organisms. There are no individuals in the world; therefore, selfish action is not possible. Selfish action is unthinkable because the whole of life is organically connected right from the lowest level of an atom up to the highest concept of the total universe. Such will be the apex to which we will be taken. Unselfishness is the philosophy of the Bhagavadgita because we cannot but act unselfishly under the nature of things. There is no other way of working.