Sri Aurobindo
Early Cultural Writings
(1890 — 1910)
Part Two. On Literature — The Poetry of Kalidasa
On the Mahabharata
Notes on the Mahabharata [3]
Vyasa is the most masculine of writers.1
When Coleridge spoke of the femineity of genius he had in mind certain features of temperament which whether justly or not are usually thought to count for more in the feminine mould than in the masculine, the love of ornament, emotionalism, mobile impressionability, the tyranny of imagination over the reason, excessive sensitiveness to form and outward beauty; a tendency to be dominated imaginatively by violence and the show of strength, to be prodigal of oneself, not to husband the powers, to be for showing them off, to fail in self-restraint is also feminine.
All these are natural properties of the quick artistic temperament prone by throwing all itself outward to lose balance2 and therefore seldom perfectly sane and strong in all its parts.
So much did these elements form the basis of Coleridge’s own temperament that he could not perhaps imagine a genius in which they were3 wanting.
Yet Goethe, Dante and Sophocles4 show that5 the very highest genius can exist without them.
But none of the great poets I have named is so singularly masculine, so deficient in femineity as Vyasa, none dominates so much by intellect and personality, yet satisfies so little the romantic imagination.
Indeed no poet at all near the first rank has the same granite mind in which impressions are received with difficulty but once received are ineffaceable6.
In his austere self-restraint and economy of power he is indifferent to ornament for its own sake, to the pleasures of poetry as distinguished from its ardours, to little graces and self-indulgences7 of style; the substance counts for everything and the form has to limit itself to its proper work of expressing with precision and power the substance.
Even his most romantic pieces have a virgin coldness and loftiness in their beauty.
To intellects fed on the elaborate pomp and imagery of Kalidasa’s numbers and 
the somewhat gaudy, expensive and meretricious spirit of English poetry, Vyasa may seem bald and unattractive.
To be fed on the verse of Spenser, Shelley, Keats, Byron and Tennyson is no good preparation for the severest8 of classics.
It is indeed, I believe, the general impression of many “educated” young Indians that the Mahabharata is a mass of old wives’ stories without a spark of poetry or imagination.
But to those who have bathed even a little in the fountain-heads9 of poetry and can bear the keenness and purity of those10 mountain sources, the naked and unadorned poetry of Vyasa [is a perpetual refreshment.]11
To read him is to bathe in a chill fountain in the heats of summer; they find that one has [available an unfailing source] of tonic and [refreshment] to the soul; one [comes into relation] with a [mind] whose [bare strong contact] has the [power] of infusing strength, courage and endurance.12
There are certain things which have this power inborn13 and are accordingly valued by those who have felt deeply its properties, such are the air14 of the mountains or the struggle to15 a capable mind with hardship and difficulty; the Vedanta philosophy, the ideal of the निष्काम धर्म (niṣkāma dharma), the poetry of Vyasa, three closely related entities, are intellectual forces that exercise a similar effect and attraction.
The style of this powerful writer is perhaps the one example in literature of strength in its purity; a strength undefaced by violence and excess yet not weakened by flagging and negligence.
It is even less16 propped or helped out by artifices17 and aids than any other poetical18 style.
Vyasa takes little trouble with similes, metaphors, rhetorical turns, the usual paraphernalia of poetry; nor when he uses them, is he at pains to select such as shall19 be new and curiously beautiful; they are there to define more clearly what he has in mind, and he makes just enough of them for that purpose, never striving to convert them into a separate grace or 
a decorative element.
They have force and beauty in their context but cannot be turned into elegant excerpts; in themselves they are in fact little or nothing.
When Bhema20 is spoken of as breathing hard like a weakling borne down by a load too heavy for him, there is nothing in the simile itself.
It derives its force from its aptness to the heavy burden of unaccomplished revenge which the fierce spirit of the strong man was condemned to bear.
We may say the same of his epithets, that great preoccupation of romantic artists; they are such as are most natural, crisp and firm, best21 suited to the plain idea and only unusual when the business in hand requires an unusual thought, but never recherché or existing for their own beauty.
Thus when he is describing the greatness of Krishna and hinting his claims to be considered as identical with the Godhead, he gives him the one epithet अप्रमेयः (aprameyaḥ) immeasurable, which is strong and unusual enough to rise to the thought, but not to be a piece of literary decoration or a violence of expression.
In brief, he religiously avoids overstress; his audacities of phrase are few, and they have a grace of restraint in their boldness.
There is indeed a rushing vast Valmekeian22 style which intervenes often in the Mahabharata; but it is evidently the work of a different hand; for it belongs to a less powerful intellect, duller poetical23 insight and coarser taste, which has yet caught something of the surge and cry of Valmekie’s24 Oceanic poetry.
Vyasa in fact stands at the opposite pole from Valmekie25.
The poet of the Ramayan26 has a flexible and universal genius embracing the Titanic and the divine, the human and the gigantic at once or with an inspired ease of transition.
But Vyasa is unmixed Olympian; he lives in a world of pure verse and diction, enjoying his own heaven of golden clearness.
We have seen what are the main negative qualities of the style; pureness, strength, grandeur of intellect and personality are its positive virtues.
It is the expression of a pregnant and forceful mind, in which the idea is sufficient to itself, conscious of its own intrinsic greatness; when this mind runs in the groove of narrative or emotion, the style wears an air of high and pellucid ease in the midst of which its strenuous compactness and brevity moves and lives as a saving and strengthening spirit; but when it begins to think rapidly 
and profoundly as often happens in the great speeches, it is apt to leave the hearer behind; sufficient to itself, thinking quickly, briefly and greatly it does not care to pause on its own ideas or explain them at length, but speaks as it thinks, in a condensed often elliptical style, preferring to indicate rather than expatiate, often passing over the steps by which it should arrive at the idea and hastening to the idea itself; often also it27 is subtle and multiplies many shades and ramifications of thought in a short compass.
From this arises that frequent knottiness and excessive compression of logical sequence, that appearance of elliptical and sometimes obscure expression, which so struck the ancient critics in Vyasa and which they expressed in the legend that when dictating the Mahabharata to Ganesha, the poet in order not to be outstripped by his divine scribe — for it was Ganesha’s stipulation that not for one moment should he be left without matter to write28 — threw in frequently knotty and closeknit passages which forced the lightning-swift hand to pause and labour slowly over its29 work.
To a strenuous mind these passages, from30 the exercise they give to the intellect, are an added31 charm just as a mountainclimber takes an especial delight in steep ascents which let him feel his ability.
Of one thing, however, we may be confident in reading Vyasa, that the expression will always be just to the thought; he never palters with or labours to dress up the reality within him.
For the rest we must evidently trace this peculiarity to the compact, steep and sometimes elliptical, but always strenuous diction of the Upanishads in which the mind of the poet was trained and his personality tempered.
At the same time like the Upanishads themselves or like the enigmatic Aeschylus, he can be perfectly clear, precise and full whenever he chooses; and he more often chooses than not.
His expression of thought is usually strong and abrupt; his expression of fact and of emotion strong and precise.
His verse has similar peculiarities.
It is a golden and equable stream that sometimes whirls itself into eddies or dashes upon rocks; but it always runs in harmony with the thought.
Vyasa has not Valmekie’s32 movement as of the sea, that33 wide and unbroken surge with its infinite variety of waves, which enables him not only to find in the facile anustubh 
metre a sufficient vehicle for his vast and ambitious work but to maintain it through [ ] couplets without34 its palling or losing its capacity of adjustment to evervarying moods and turns of narrative.
But in his narrower limits and on the level of his lower flight Vyasa has great subtlety and finesse35.
Especially admirable is his use, in speeches, of broken effects such as would in less skilful hands have become veritable discords; and again in narrative of the simplest and barest metrical movements, as in the opening Surga36 of the Sabhapurva37 to create certain calculated effects.
But it would be idle to pretend for him any equality as a master of verse with Valmekie38.
When he has to rise from his levels to express powerful emotions39, grandiose eloquence or swift and sweeping narrative, he cannot always effect it in the anustubh metre; he falls back more often than not on the rolling magnificence of the [tristubh] which40 best sets and ennobles his strong-winged austerity.
Be its limits what one will, this is certain that there was never a style and verse of such bare, direct and resistless strength as this of Vyasa’s or one that went so straight to the heart of all that is heroic in a man.
Listen to the cry of insulted Draupadie41 to her husband
उत्तिष्ठोत्तिष्ठ किं शेषे भीमसेन यथा मृतः ।
नामृतस्य हि पापीयान्भार्यामालभ्य जीवति ॥
“Arise, arise, O Bhemasena42, wherefore sleepest43 thou like one that is dead?
For nought but dead is he whose wife a sinful hand has touched and lives.”, or the reproach of Krishna to Arjoun44 for his weak pity which opens the second surga45 of the Bhagavadgita.
Or again hear Krishna’s description of Bhema’s46 rage and solitary brooding over revenge and his taunting accusations of cowardice: “At other times, O Bhemasena47, thou praisest war, thou art all for crushing Dhritarashtra’s heartless sons who take delight in death; thou sleepest not at night, O conquering soldier, but wakest lying face downwards, and ever thou utterest dread speech of storm and wrath, breathing fire in the torment of thine48 own rage; and thy mind is without rest like a smoking fire; yea, 
thou liest all apart breathing heavily like a weakling distressed49 by his load; so that some who know not even think thee mad.
For as an elephant tramples on uprooted trees and breaks them to fragments, so thou stormest along with labouring breath hurting earth with thy feet.
Thou takest no delight in all the50 people but cursest them in thy heart, O Bhema51, son of Pandou52, nor in aught else hast thou any pleasure night or day; but thou sittest in secret like one weeping and sometimes of a sudden laughest aloud, yea, thou sittest for long with thy head between thy knees and thy eyes closed; and then again thou starest before thee frowning and clenching thy teeth; thy every action is one of wrath.
‘Surely as our53 father Sun is seen in the East when luminously he ascendeth, and surely as wide with rays he wheeleth down to his release in the West, so sure is this oath I utter and never shall be broken.
With this club I will meet and slay the54 haughty Duryodhan55’, thus touching thy club thou swearest among thy brothers.
And today thou, thou!, thinkest56 of peace, O warrior!
Ah yes, I know the hearts of those that clamour for war, alter very strangely when war showeth its face, since fear findeth out even thee, O Bhema57!
Ah yes, son of Pritha, thou seest adverse omens58 both when thou sleepest and when thou wakest, therefore thou desirest peace.
Ah yes, thou feelest no more the man in thyself, but an eunuch and thy heart sinketh with alarm, therefore art thou thus overcome.
Thy heart quakes, thy mind fainteth, thou art seized with a trembling in thy thighs, therefore thou desirest peace.
Verily, O son of Pritha, wavering and inconstant is the heart of a mortal man, like the pods of the silk cotton driven by the swiftness of every wind.
This shameful thought of thine, monstrous as a human voice in a dumb beast, makes the hearts59 of Pandou’s60 sons61 to sink like (shipwrecked) men that have no raft.
Look on thine own deeds, O seed of Bharat62, remember thy lofty birth! arise, put off thy weakness; be firm, O heart of a hero; unworthy of thee is this languor; what he cannot win by the mightiness of him, that a Kshatriya will not touch.”
This passage I have quoted at some length because it is eminently characteristic of Vyasa’s poetical method.
Another poet would 
have felt himself justified by the nature of the speech in using some wild and whirling words, in seeking63 vividness by exaggeration, at the very least in raising his voice a little.
Contrast with this the perfect temperance of this passage, the confident and unemotional reliance on the weight of what is said, not on the manner of saying it.
The vividness of the portraiture arises from the quiet accuracy of vision and the care in the choice of simple but effective words; not from any seeking after the salient and graphic such as gives Kalidasa his wonderful power of description; and the bitterness of the taunts arises from the quiet and searching irony with which [each]64 shaft is tipped and not from any force used in driving them home.
Yet every line goes straight as an arrow to its mark; every word is the utterance of a strong man speaking to a strong man and gives iron to the mind.
Strength is one constant term of the Vyasic style; temperance, justness of taste is the other.
Strength and a fine austerity are then the two tests which give us safe guidance through the morass of the Mahabharata; where these two exist together, we may reasonably presume some touch of Vyasa; where they do not exist or do not conjoin, we feel at once the redactor or the interpolator.
I have spoken of another poet whose more turbid and vehement style breaks continually into the pure gold of Vyasa’s work.
The whole temperament of this redacting poet, for he is something more than an interpolator, has its roots in Valmekie65; but like most poets of a secondary and fallible genius, he exaggerates while adopting the more audacious and therefore the more perilous tendencies of his master.
The love of the wonderful touched with the grotesque, the taste for the amorphous, a marked element in Valmekie’s66 complex temperament, is with his follower something like a malady.
He grows impatient with the apparent tameness of Vyasa’s inexorable self-restraint, and restlessly throws in here couplets, there whole paragraphs of a more flamboyant vigour.
Occasionally this is done with real ability and success, but as a rule they are true purple patches, daubs of paint on the stainless dignity of marble.
For his rage for the wonderful is not always accompanied by the prodigious sweep of imagination which in Valmekie67 successfully grasps and compels the most reluctant materials.
The result is that puerilities and gross breaches of taste fall easily and hardily from his pen.
Not one of these could we possibly imagine as consistent with the severe, self-possessed intellect of Vyasa.
Fineness, justness, discrimination and propriety of taste are the very soul of the man.
Nowhere is his restrained and quiet art more visible than when he handles the miraculous.
But since the Mahabharata is so honeycombed68 with the work of inept wondermongers, we are driven for an undisturbed appreciation of it to works which are no69 parts of the original Mahabharata and are yet by the same hand, the Nala and the Savitrie70.
These poems have all the peculiar qualities which we have decided to be very Vyasa, the style, the diction, the personality are identical and refer us back to him as clearly as the sunlight refers us back to the sun; and yet they have something which the Mahabharata has not.
Here we have the very morning of Vyasa’s genius, when he was young and ardent; perhaps still under the immediate influence of Valmekie71 (one of the most pathetic touches in the Nala is borrowed straight out of the Ramayana); at any rate able without ceasing to be finely restrained to give some rein to his fancy.
The Nala therefore has the delicate and unusual romantic grace of a young and severe classic who has permitted himself to go-a-maying in the fields of romance.
There is a remote charm of restraint in the midst of abandon, of vigilance in the play of fancy which is passing sweet and strange.
The Savitrie72 is a maturer and nobler work, perfect and restrained in detail, but it has still some glow of the same youth and grace over it.
This then is the rare charm of these two poems that we find there the soul of the pale and marble Rishi, the austere philosopher73, the great statesman, the strong and stern poet of war and empire, when it was yet in its radiant morning, far from the turmoil of courts and cities and the roar of the battlefield and had not yet scaled the mountaintops of thoughts74.
Young, a Brahmachari75 and a student, Vyasa dwelt with the green silences of earth, felt the fascination and loneliness of the forests of which his earlier poetry is full, walked76 by many a clear and lucid river white with 
the thronging waterfowl, perhaps Payoshni, that ocean-seeking stream, or heard the thunder of multitudinous crickets in some lone tremendous forest; with77 Valmekie’s78 mighty stanzas in his mind, saw giant-haunted glooms, dells where faeries gathered, brakes where some Python from the underworld came out to bask or listened to the voices of Kinnaries79 on the mountaintops.
In such surroundings wonders might seem natural and deities as in Arcadia might peep from under every tree.
Nala’s messengers to Damayanti are a troop of goldenwinged swans that speak with a human voice; he is intercepted on his way by gods who make him their envoy to a mortal maiden; he receives from them gifts more than human; fire and water come to him at his bidding and flowers bloom in his hands; in his downfall the dice become birds which80 fly away with his remaining garment; when he wishes to cut in half the robe of Damayanti, a sword comes ready to his hand in the desolate cabin; he meets the Serpent-King in the ring of fire and is turned by him into the deformed charioteer, Vahuka81; the tiger in the forest turns away from Damayanti without injuring her and the lustful hunter falls consumed by the power of82 offended chastity.
The destruction of the caravan by wild elephants, the mighty driving of Nala, the counting of the leaves of83 the [ ], the cleaving of the Vibhitaka tree; every incident almost is full of that sense of beauty and wonder which were awakened in Vyasa by his early surroundings.
We ask whether this beautiful fairy-tale is the work of that stern and high poet with whom the actualities of life were everything and the flights of fancy counted for so little.
Yet if we look carefully, we shall see in the Nala abundant proof of the severe touch of Vyasa, just as in his share of the Mahabharata fleeting touches of wonder and strangeness, gone as soon as glimpsed, evidence a love of the ultranatural84, severely bitted and reined in.
Especially do we see the poet of the Mahabharata in the artistic vigilance which limits each supernatural incident to a few light strokes, to the exact place and no other where it is wanted and the exact amount and no more that85 is necessary.
(It is this sparing economy of touch almost unequalled in its beauty of just rejection, which makes the poem an epic instead of a fairy tale in verse.)
There is for instance the incident of the swans; we all know to what prolixities of pathos and bathos vernacular poets like the Gujarati Premanund86 have enlarged this feature of the story.
But Vyasa introduced it to give a certain touch of beauty and strangeness and that touch once imparted the swans disappear from the scene; for his fine taste felt that to prolong the incident by one touch more would have been to lower the poem87 and run the risk of raising a smile.
Similarly in the Savitrie88 what a tremendous figure a romantic poet would have made of Death, what a passionate struggle between the human being and the master of tears and partings!
But Vyasa would have none of this; he had one object, to paint the power of a woman’s silent love and he rejected everything which went beyond this or which would have been merely decorative.
We cannot regret his choice.
There have been plenty of poets who could have given us imaginative and passionate pictures of Love struggling with Death, but there has been only one who could give us a Savitrie89.
In another respect also the Nala helps us materially to appreciate Vyasa’s genius.
His dealings with nature are a strong test of a poet’s quality; but in the Mahabharata proper, of all epics the most pitilessly denuded of unnecessary ornament, natural description is rare.
We must therefore again turn for aid to the poems which preceded his hard and lofty maturity.
Vyasa’s natural description as we find it there, corresponds to the nervous, masculine and hardstrung make of his intellect.
His treatment is always puissant and direct without any single pervasive atmosphere except in sunlit landscapes, but always effectual, realizing the scene strongly or boldly by a few simple but sufficient words.
There are some poets who are the children of Nature, whose imagination is made of her dews, whose blood thrills to her with the perfect impulse of spiritual kinship; Wordsworth is of these and Valmekie90.
Their voices in speaking of her unconsciously become rich and liquid and their words are touched with a subtle significance of thought or emotion.
There are others who hold her with a strong sensuous grasp by virtue of a ripe, sometimes an overripe delight in beauty; such are Shakespeare, Keats, Kalidasa.
Others again approach her 
with a fine or clear intellectual sense of her charm91 as do some of the old classical poets.
Hardly in the rank of poets are those who like Dryden and92 Pope use her, if at all, only to provide them with a smooth or well-turned93 literary expression.
Vyasa belongs to none of these, and yet often touches the first three at particular points without definitely coinciding with any.
He takes the kingdom of Nature by violence.
Approaching her from outside his masculine genius forces its way to her secret, insists and will take no denial.
Accordingly he is impressed at first contact by the harmony in the midst of variety of her external features, absorbs these into a strong94 and retentive imagination, meditates on them and so reads his way to the closer impression, the inner sense behind that which is external, the personal temperament of a landscape.
In his record of what he has seen, this impression more often than not comes first as that which abides and prevails; sometimes it is all he cares to record; but his tendency towards perfect faithfulness to the vision within leads him, when the scene is still fresh to his eye, to record the data through which the impression was reached.
We have all experienced the way in which our observation of a scene, conscious or unconscious, forms itself out of various separate and often uncoordinated impressions, which if we write a description at the time or soon after and are faithful to ourselves, find their way into the picture even at the expense of symmetry; but if we allow a long time to elapse before we recall the scene, there returns to us only a single self-consistent impression which without accurately rendering it, retains its essence and its atmosphere.
Something of this sort occurs in our poet; for Vyasa is always faithful to himself.
When he records the data of his impression, he does it with force and clearness, frequently with a luminous atmosphere around the object, especially with a delight in the naked beauty of the single clear word which at once communicates itself to the hearer.
First come the strong and magical epithets or the brief and puissant touches by which the soul of the landscape is made visible and palpable, then the enumeration sometimes only stately, at others bathed in a clear loveliness.
The fine opening of the twelfth surga95 of the Nala is a signal example of this method.
At the threshold we have the great and sombre line वनं प्रतिभयं शून्यं झिल्लिकागणनादितं [vanaṁ pratibhayaṁ śūnyaṁ jhillikāgaṇanāditam96 ]
A void tremendous forest thundering
With crickets
striking the keynote of gloom and loneliness, then the cold stately enumeration of the forest’s animal and vegetable peoples, then again the strong and revealing epithet in his “echoing woodlands sound-pervaded”; then follows “river and lake and pool and many beasts and many birds” and once more the touch of wonder and weirdness [ sā bahūn bhīmarūpāṁśca piśācoragarākṣasān… dadṛśe97 ]
She many alarming shapes
of fiend and snake and giant. . . . .
. . . . . . beheld;
making magical the bare following lines and especially the nearest, पल्वलानि तडागानि गिरिकूटानि सर्वशः [palvalāni paḍāgāni girikūṭāni sarvaśaḥ98 ] “and pools and tarns and summits everywhere”, with its poetical delight in the bare beauty of words.
It is instructive to compare with this passage the wonderful silhouette of night in Valmekie’s99 Book of the Child
निष्पन्दास्तरवः सर्वे निलीना मृगपक्षिणः ।
नैशेन तमसा व्याप्ता दिशश्च रघुनन्दन ॥
शनैर्विसृज्यते सन्ध्या नभो नेत्रैरिवावृतम् ।
नक्षत्रतारागहनं ज्योतिर्भिरवभासते ॥
उत्तिष्ठते च शीतांशुः शशी लोकतमोनुदः ।
ह्लादयन्प्राणिनां लोके मनांसि प्रभया स्वया ॥
नैशानि सर्वभूतानि विचरन्ति ततस्ततः ।
यक्षराक्षससङ्घाश्च रौद्राश्च पिशिताशनाः ॥
niṣpandāstaravaḥ sarve nilīnā mṛgapakṣiṇaḥ
naiśena tamasā vyāptā diśaśca raghunandana
śanairvisṛjyate sandhyā nabho netrairivāvṛtam
nakṣatratārāgahanaṃ jyotirbhiravabhāsate
uttiṣṭhate ca śītāṃśuḥ śaśī lokatamonudaḥ
hlādayanprāṇināṃ loke manāṃsi prabhayā svayā
naiśāni sarvabhūtāni vicaranti tatastataḥ
yakṣarākṣasasaṅghāśca raudrāśca piśitāśanāḥ
“Motionless are all trees and shrouded the beasts and birds and the quarters filled, O joy of Raghu, with the glooms of night; slowly the sky parts with evening and grows full of eyes; dense with stars and constellations it glitters with points of light; and now yonder with cold beams rising100 up the moon thrusts101 away the shadows from the world gladdening the hearts of living things on earth with its luminousness.
All creatures of the night are walking to and fro and spirit bands and troops of giants and the carrion-feeding jackals begin to roam.”
Here every detail is carefully selected to produce a certain effect, the charm and weirdness of falling night in the forest; not a word is wasted, every epithet, every verb, every image is sought out and chosen so as to aid this effect, while the vowellation102 is subtly managed and assonance and the composition of sounds skilfully and103 unobtrusively woven so as to create a delicate, wary and listening movement as of one walking in the forests by moonlight and afraid that the leaves may speak under his footing or his breath grow loud enough to be heard by himself or by beings whose presence he does not see but fears.
Of such delicately imaginative art as this Vyasa was not capable; he could not sufficiently turn his strength into sweetness.
Neither had he that rare, salient and effective architecture of style which makes Kalidasa’s “night on the verge of dawn with her faint gleaming moon and a few just-decipherable stars”
तनुप्रकाशेन विचेयतारका प्रभातकल्पा शशिनेव शर्वरी ।
Vyasa’s art, as I have said, is singularly disinterested निष्काम (niṣkāma); he does not write with a view to sublimity or with a view to beauty, but because he has certain ideas to impart, certain events to describe, certain characters to portray.
He has an image of these in his mind and his business is to find an expression for it which will be scrupulously just to his conception.
This is by no means so facile a task as the uninitiated might imagine; it is in fact104 considerably more difficult than to bathe the style in colour and grace and literary elegance, for it demands vigilant concentration105, firm intellectual truthfulness and unsparing rejection, the three virtues most difficult to the gadding, inventive and self-indulgent spirit of man.
The art of Vyasa is therefore a great, strenuous and difficult art106; but it unfitted him, as a similar spirit, unfitted the Greeks, to voice fully the outward beauty of Nature.
For to delight infinitely in Nature one must be strongly possessed with the sense of colour and romantic beauty, and allow the fancy equal rights with the intellect.
For all his occasional strokes of fine Nature description he was not therefore quite at home with her.
Conscious of his weakness Vyasa as he emancipated himself from Valmekie’s107 influence, ceased to attempt a kind for which his genius was not the best fitted.
He is far more in his element in the expression of the feelings, of the joy and sorrow that makes this life of men; his description of emotion far excels his description of things.
When he says of Damayanti
विललाप सुदुःखिता ।
भर्तृशोकपरीताङ्गी शिलातलमथाश्रिता ॥
In grief she wailed,
Erect upon a cliff, her body aching
With sorrow for her husband,
the clear figure of the abandoned woman lamenting on the cliff seizes indeed the imagination, but has108 a lesser inspiration than the single puissant and convincing epithet भर्तृशोकपरीताङ्गी (bhartṛśokaparītāṅgī), her whole body affected with grief for her husband.
Damayanti’s longer laments are also of the finest sweetness and strength; there is a rushing flow of stately and sorrowful verse, the wailing of a regal grief; then as some more exquisite pain, some more piercing gust of passion traverses the heart of the mourner, golden felicities of sorrow leap out on the imagination like lightning in their swift clear greatness.
हा वीर ननु नामाहमिष्टा किल तवानघ ।
अस्यामटव्यां घोरायां किं मां न प्रतिभाषसे ॥
Still more strong, simple and perfect is the grief of Damayanti when she wakes to find herself alone in that desolate cabin.
The restraint of phrase is perfect, the verse is clear, equable and unadorned, yet hardly has Valmekie109 himself written a truer utterance of emotion than this
हा नाथ हा महाराज हा स्वामिन्किं जहासि मां ।
हा हतास्मि विनष्टास्मि भीतास्मि विजने वने ॥
ननु नाम महाराज धर्मज्ञः सत्यवागसि ।
कथमुक्त्वा तथा सत्यं सुप्तामुत्सृज्य मां गतः ॥...
पर्याप्तः परिहासोऽयमेतावान्पुरुषर्षभ ।
भीताहमतिदुर्धर्ष दर्शयात्मानमीश्वर ॥
दृश्यसे दृश्यसे राजन्नेष दृष्टोऽसि नैषध ।
आवार्य गुल्मैरात्मानं किं मां न प्रतिभाषसे ॥
नृशंस बत राजेन्द्र यन्मामेवङ्गतामिह ।
विलपन्तीं समागम्य नाश्वासयसि पार्थिव ॥
न शोचाम्यहमात्मानं न चान्यदपि किञ्चन ।
कथं नु भवितास्येक इति त्वां नृप रोदिमि ।
कथं नु राजंस्तृषितः क्षुधितः श्रमकर्षितः ।
सायाह्ने वृक्षमूलेषु मामपश्यन्भविष्यसि ॥
hā nātha hā mahārāja hā svāminkiṃ jahāsi māṃ
hā hatāsmi vinaṣṭāsmi bhītāsmi vijane vane
nanu nāma mahārāja dharmajñaḥ satyavāgasi
kathamuktvā tathā satyaṃ suptāmutsṛjya māṃ gataḥ...
paryāptaḥ parihāso'yametāvānpuruṣarṣabha
bhītāhamatidurdharṣa darśayātmānamīśvara
dṛśyase dṛśyase rājanneṣa dṛṣṭo'si naiṣadha
āvārya gulmairātmānaṃ kiṃ māṃ na pratibhāṣase
nṛśaṃsa bata rājendra yanmāmevaṅgatāmiha
vilapantīṃ samāgamya nāśvāsayasi pārthiva
na śocāmyahamātmānaṃ na cānyadapi kiñcana
kathaṃ nu bhavitāsyeka iti tvāṃ nṛpa rodimi
kathaṃ nu rājaṃstṛṣitaḥ kṣudhitaḥ śramakarṣitaḥ
sāyāhne vṛkṣamūleṣu māmapaśyanbhaviṣyasi
“Ah my lord!
Ah my king!
Ah my husband! why hast thou forsaken me?
Alas, I am slain, I am undone; I am afraid in the lonely forest.
Surely, O King, thou wert good and truthful; how then having sworn to me so, hast thou abandoned me in my sleep and fled?
Long enough hast thou carried this jest of thine, O lion of men; I am frightened, O unconquerable; show thyself, my lord and prince.
I see thee!
I see thee!
Thou art seen, lord110 of the Nishadhas111, covering thyself there with the bushes; why dost thou not speak to me?
Cruel king! that thou dost not come to me thus terrified here and wailing and comfort me!
It is not for myself I grieve nor for aught else; it is for thee I weep thinking what will become of thee left all alone.
How wilt thou fare under some tree at evening hungry and thirsty and weary not beholding me, O my King?”
The whole of this passage with its first pang of terror and the exquisite anticlimax “I am slain, I am undone, I am afraid in the desert wood” passing quickly112 into sorrowful reproach, the despairing and pathetic attempt to delude herself by thinking the whole a practical jest, and the final outburst of that deep maternal love which is a part of every true woman’s passion, is great in its truth and simplicity.
Steep and unadorned is Vyasa’s style, but at times it has far more power to move and to reach the heart than more113 elaborate and ambitious poetry.
As Vyasa progressed in years, his personality developed towards intellectualism and his manner of expressing emotion became sensibly modified.
In the Savitrie114 he first reveals his power of imparting to the reader a sense of poignant but silent feeling, feeling in the air, unexpressed or rather expressed in action, sometimes even in very silence; this power is a notable element in some of the great scenes of the Mahabharata; the silence of the Pandavas during the mishandling of Draupadie115, the mighty silence of Krishna while the assembly of kings rage116 and roar117 around him and Shishupal118 again and again hurls forth on him his fury and contempt and the hearts of all men are troubled, the stern self-restraint of his brothers when Yudhisthere119 is smitten by Virata; are instances of the power I mean.
In the Mahabharata proper we find few expressions of pure feeling, none at least which have the triumphant power of Damayanti’s laments in the Nala.
Vyasa had by this time taken his bent; his heart and imagination had become filled with the pomp of thought and genius and the greatness of all things mighty and bold and regal; when therefore his characters feel powerful emotion, they are impelled to express it in the dialect of thought.
We see the heart in their utterances but it is not the heart in its nakedness, it is not the heart of the common man; or rather it is the universal heart of man but robed in the intellectual purple.
The note of Sanscrit poetry is always aristocratic; it has no answer to the democratic feeling or to the modern sentimental cult of the average man, but deals with exalted, large and aspiring natures, whose pride it is that they do not act like common men (प्राकृतो जनः prākṛto janaḥ).
They are the great spirits, the महाजनाः (mahājanāḥ), in whose footsteps the world follows.
Whatever sentimental objections may be urged against this high and arrogating spirit, it cannot be doubted that a literature pervaded with the soul of hero worship and noblesse oblige and full of great examples is eminently fitted to elevate and strengthen a nation and prepare it for a great part in history.
It was as Sanscrit literature ceased to be universally read and understood, as it became more and more confined to the Brahmins that the spirit of our nation began to decline.
And it is because the echoes of that literature still lasted that the nation even in its downfall has played not altogether an ignoble part, that it has never quite consented as so many formerly great nations have done to the degradation Fate seemed determined to impose on it, that it has always struggled to assert itself, to live, to be something in the world of thought and action.
And with this high tendency of the literature there is no poet who is so deeply imbued as Vyasa.
Even the least of his characters is an intellect and a personality and of intellect and personality120 their every utterance reeks, as it were, and is full.
I have already quoted the cry of Draupadie121 to Bhema122; it is a supreme utterance of insulted feeling, and yet note how it expresses itself, in the language of intellect; in a thought.
उत्तिष्ठोत्तिष्ठ किं शेषे भीमसेन यथा मृतः ।
नामृतस्य हि पापीयान्भार्यामालभ्य जीवति॥
The whole personality of Draupadie123 breaks out in that cry, her chastity, her pride, her passionate and unforgiving temper, but it flashes out not in an expression of pure feeling, but in a fiery and pregnant apophthegm.
It is this temperament, this dynamic force of intellectualism blended with heroic fire and a strong personality that gives its peculiar stamp to Vyasa’s writing and distinguishes it from that of all other epic poets.
The heroic and profoundly intellectual national124 type of the great Bharata125 races, the Kurus, Bhojas and Panchalas who created the Veda and the Vedanta, find in Vyasa their fitting poetical type and exponent, just as the mild and delicately moral temper of the more eastern Coshalas has realised itself in Valmekie126 and through the Ramayana so largely dominated Hindu character.
Steeped in the heroic ideals of the Bharata, attuned to their profound and daring thought and temperament, Vyasa has made himself the poet of the highminded Kshatriya caste, voices their resonant speech, breathes their aspiring and unconquerable spirit, mirrors their rich and varied life with a loving detail and moves through his subject with a swift yet measured movement like the march of an army towards battle.
A comparison with Valmekie127 is instructive of the varying genius of these great masters.
Both excel in epical rhetoric — if such a term as rhetoric can be applied to Vyasa’s direct and severe style, but Vyasa’s has the air of a more intellectual, reflective and experienced stage of poetical advance.
The longer speeches in the Ramayan128, those even which have most the appearance of set, argumentative oration, proceed straight from the heart; the thoughts, words, reasonings come welling up from the dominant emotion or conflicting feelings129 of the speaker; they palpitate and are alive with the vital force from which they have sprung.
Though belonging to a more thoughtful, gentle and cultured civilisation than Homer’s they have, like his, the large utterance which is not of primitive times, but of the primal emotions.
Vyasa’s have a powerful but austere force of intellectuality.
In expressing character they firmly expose it rather than spring half-unconsciously from it; their bold and finely-planned consistency with the original conception reveals rather the conscientious painstaking of an inspired but reflective artist than the more primary and impetuous creative impulse.
In their management of emotion itself a similar difference becomes prominent.
Valmekie130 when giving utterance to a mood or passion simple or complex, surcharges every line, every phrase, turn of words or movement of verse with it; there are no lightning flashes but a great depth of emotion swelling steadily, inexhaustibly and increasingly in a wonder of sustained feeling, like a continually rising wave with low crests of foam.
Vyasa has a high level of style with a subdued emotion behind it occasionally breaking into poignant outbursts.
It is by sudden beauties that he rises above himself and not only exalts, stirs and delights as131 at his ordinary level, but memorably seizes the heart and imagination.
This is the natural result of his132 peculiarly disinterested art which never seeks out anything striking for its own sake, but admits it only when it arises uncalled from the occasion.
From133 this difference in temper and mode of expression arises a difference in the mode also of portraying character.
Vyasa’s knowledge of character is not so intimate, emotional and sympathetic as Valmekie’s134; it has more of a heroic inspiration, less of a divine sympathy.
He has reached it not like Valmekie135 immediately through the heart and imagination, but deliberately through intellect and experience, a deep criticism and reading of men; the spirit of shaping imagination has come afterwards like a sculptor using the materials labour has provided for him.
It has not been a light leading him into the secret places of the heart.
Nevertheless the characterisation, however reached, is admirable and firm.
It is the fruit of a lifelong experience, the knowledge of a statesman who has had much to do with the ruling of men and has been himself a considerable part in some great revolution full of astonishing incidents and extraordinary characters.
With that high experience his brain and his soul are full.
It has cast his imagination into colossal proportions and provided136 him with majestic conceptions which can dispense with all but the simplest language for expression; for they are so great that the bare precise statement of what is said and done seems enough to make language epical.
His character-drawing indeed is more epic137, less psychological than Valmekie’s138.
Truth of speech and action give139 us the truth of nature and it is done with strong purposeful strokes that have the power to move the heart and enlarge and ennoble the imagination which is what we mean by the epic in poetry.
In Valmekie140 there are marvellous and revealing touches which show us the secret something in character usually beyond the expressive power either of speech or141 action; they are touches oftener found in the dramatic artist than the epic, and seldom fall within Vyasa’s method.
It is the difference between strong142 and purposeful artistic synthesis and the beautiful subtle and involute symmetry of an organic existence evolved and inevitable rather than shaped or143 purposed.
Vyasa is therefore less broadly human than Valmekie144, he is at the same time a wider and more original thinker.
His supreme intellect rises everywhere out of the mass of insipid or turbulent redaction and interpolation with bare and grandiose outlines.
A wide searching mind, historian, statesman, orator, a deep and keen looker into ethics and conduct, a subtle and high aiming politician, a theologian and philosopher, — it is not for nothing that Hindu imagination makes the name of Vyasa loom so large in the history of Aryan thought and attributes to him work so important and manifold.
The wideness of the man’s intellectual empire is evident throughout his145 work; we feel the presence of the Rishi146, the original thinker who has enlarged the boundaries of ethical and religious outlook.
Modern India, since the Musulman advent, has accepted the politics of Chanakya in preference to Vyasa’s.
Certainly there was little in politics concealed from that great and sinister spirit.
Yet Vyasa perhaps knew its subtleties quite as well, but he had to ennoble and guide him a high ethical aim and an august imperial idea.
He did not, like European imperialism, unable to rise above the idea of power, accept the Jesuitic doctrine of any means to a good end, still less justify the goodness of the end by that profession of an utterly false disinterestedness which ends in the soothing belief that plunder, arson, outrage and massacre are committed for the good of the slaughtered nation.
Vyasa’s imperialism frankly accepts war and empire as the result of man’s natural lust for dominion147, but demands that empire should be won by noble and civilized methods, not in the spirit of the savage, and insists once it is won not on its powers, but on its duties.
Valmekie148 too has included politics in his wide sweep; his picture of an ideal imperialism is sound and noble and the spirit of the Coshalan Ixvaacous149 that monarchy must be broad-based on the people’s will and yet broader-based on justice, truth and good government, is admirably developed as an undertone of the poem.
But it is an undertone only, not as in the Mahabharata its uppermost and weightiest drift.
Valmekie’s150 approach to politics is imaginative, poetic, made from outside.
He is attracted to it by the unlimited curiosity of an universal mind and still more by the appreciation of a great creative artist; only therefore when it gives opportunities for a grandiose imagination or is mingled with the motives of conduct and acts on character.
He is a poet who makes occasional use of public affairs as part of his wide human subject.
The reverse may with some appearance of truth be said of Vyasa that he is interested in human action and character mainly as they move and work in relation to a large political background.
His deep preoccupation with the ethical issues of speech and action is very notable.
His very subject is one of practical ethics, the establishment of a Dharmyarajya151, an empire of the just, by which is meant no millennium of the saints but the practical ideal of a government152 with righteousness, purity and unselfish toil for the common good as its saving principles.153
It is true that Valmekie154 has155 a more humanely moral spirit than Vyasa, in as much as ordinary morality is most effective when steeped in emotion, proceeding from the heart and acting through the heart.
Vyasa’s ethics like everything else in him takes a double stand on intellectual scrutiny and acceptance and on personal strength of character; his characters having once adopted by intellectual choice and in harmony with their temperaments a given line of conduct, throw the whole heroic force of their nature into its pursuit.
He is therefore preeminently a poet of action.
Krishna is his authority in all matters religious and ethical and it is noticeable that Krishna lays far more stress on action and far less on quiescence than any other Hindu philosopher.
Quiescence in God is with him as with others the ultimate goal of existence; but he insists that this156 quiescence must be reached through action and so far as this life is concerned, must exist in action; quiescence of the soul from desires there must be but there should not be and there cannot157 be quiescence of the Prakriti from action.
न कर्मणामनारम्भान्नैष्कर्म्यं पुरुषोऽश्नुते ।
न च सन्न्यसनादेव सिद्धिं समधिगच्छति ॥
न हि कश्चित्क्षणमपि जातु तिष्ठत्यकर्मकृत् ।
कार्यते ह्यवशः कर्म सर्वः प्रकृतिजैर्गुणैः ॥
नियतं कुरु कर्म त्वं कर्म ज्यायो ह्यकर्मणः ।
शरीरयात्रापि च ते न प्रसिध्येदकर्मणः ॥
na karmaṇāmanārambhānnaiṣkarmyaṃ puruṣo'śnute
na ca sannyasanādeva siddhiṃ samadhigacchati
na hi kaścitkṣaṇamapi jātu tiṣṭhatyakarmakṛt
kāryate hyavaśaḥ karma sarvaḥ prakṛtijairguṇaiḥ
niyataṃ kuru karma tvaṃ karma jyāyo hyakarmaṇaḥ
śarīrayātrāpi ca te na prasidhyedakarmaṇaḥ
“Not by refraining from actions can a man enjoy actionlessness nor by mere renunciation does he reach his soul’s perfection; for158 no man in the world can even for one moment remain without doing works; everyone is forced to do works, whether he will159 or not, by the primal qualities born of Prakriti. . . .
Thou do action self-controlled (or else ‘thou do action ever’), for action is better than inaction; if thou actest not, even the maintenance of thy body cannot be effected.”
Hence it follows that merely to renounce action and flee from the world to a hermitage is but vanity, and that those who rely on such a desertion of duty for attaining God lean on a broken reed.
The160 professed renunciation of action is only a nominal renunciation, for they merely give up one set of actions to which they are called for another to which in a great number of cases they have no call or fitness.
If they have that fitness, they may certainly attain God, but even then action is better than Sannyasa.
Hence the great and pregnant paradox that in action is real actionlessness, while inaction is merely another form of action itself.
कर्मेन्द्रियाणि संयम्य य आस्ते मनसा स्मरन् ।
इन्द्रियार्थान्विमूढात्मा मिथ्याचारः स उच्यते ॥
सन्न्यासः कर्मयोगश्च निःश्रेयसकरावुभौ ।
तयोस्तु कर्मसन्न्यासात्कर्मयोगो विशिष्यते ॥
ज्ञेयः स नित्यसन्न्यासी यो न द्वेष्टि न काङ्क्षति ।
निर्द्वन्द्वो हि महाबाहो सुखं बन्धात्प्रमुच्यते ॥
कर्मण्यकर्म यः पश्येदकर्मणि च कर्म यः ।
स बुद्धिमान्मनुष्येषु स युक्तः कृत्स्नकर्मकृत् ॥
karmendriyāṇi saṃyamya ya āste manasā smaran
indriyārthānvimūḍhātmā mithyācāraḥ sa ucyate
sannyāsaḥ karmayogaśca niḥśreyasakarāvubhau
tayostu karmasannyāsātkarmayogo viśiṣyate
jñeyaḥ sa nityasannyāsī yo na dveṣṭi na kāṅkṣati
nirdvandvo hi mahābāho sukhaṃ bandhātpramucyate
karmaṇyakarma yaḥ paśyedakarmaṇi ca karma yaḥ
sa buddhimānmanuṣyeṣu sa yuktaḥ kṛtsnakarmakṛt
“He who quells his sense-organs of action but sits remembering in his heart the objects of sense, that man of bewildered soul is termed a hypocrite.”
“Sannyasa (renunciation of works) and Yoga through action both lead to the highest good but of the two Yoga through action is better than renunciation of action.
Know him to be the perpetual Sannyasi who neither loathes nor longs; for he, O great-armed161, being free from the dualities is easily released from the chain.”
“He who can see inaction in action and action in inaction, he is the wise among men, he does all actions with a soul in union with God.”
From this lofty platform the great creed rises to its crowning ideas, for since we must act but neither for any human or future results of action nor for the sake of the action itself, and yet action must have some goal to which it is devoted, there is no goal left but God.
We must devote then162 our actions to God and through that rise to complete surrender of the personality to him, whether in the idea of him manifest through Yoga or the idea of him Unmanifest through Godknowledge.
“They who worship me as the imperishable, illimitable, unmanifest, controlling all the organs, oneminded to all things, they doing good to all creatures attain to me.
But far greater is their pain of endeavour whose hearts cleave to the Unmanifest; for hardly can salvation163 in the unmanifest be attained by men that have a body.
But they who reposing all actions in Me, to Me devoted contemplate and worship me in singleminded Yoga, speedily do I become their saviour from the gulfs164 of death and the world, for their hearts, O Partha, have entered into me.
On Me repose thy mind, pour into Me thy reason, in Me wilt thou have then165 thy dwelling, doubt it not.
Yet if thou canst not steadfastly repose thy mind in Me, desire, O Dhananjaya, to reach me by Yoga through askesis.
If that too thou canst not, devote thyself to action166 for Me; since also by doing actions for My sake thou wilt attain thy167 soul’s perfection.
If even for this thou art too feeble then abiding in Yoga with me with a soul subdued abandon utterly desire for the fruits of action.
For168 better than askesis is knowledge, and better than knowledge is concentration and better than concentration is renunciation of the fruit of deeds, for upon169 such renunciation followeth the soul’s peace”.
Such is the ladder which Vyasa has represented Krishna as building up to God with action for its firm and sole basis.
If it is questioned whether the Bhagavadgita is the work of Vyasa (whether he be Krishna of the Island is another question to be settled on its own merits), I answer that there is nothing to disprove his authorship, while on the other hand allowing for the exigencies of philosophical exposition the style is undoubtedly either his170 or so closely modelled on his as to defy differentiation.
Moreover the whole piece is but the philosophical justification and logical enlargement of the gospel of action, preached by Krishna in the Mahabharat171 proper, the undoubted work of this172 poet.
I have here no space for anything more than a quotation.
Sanjaya has come to the Pandavas from Dhritarashtra and dissuaded them from battle in a speech taught him by that wily and unwise monarch; it is skilfully aimed at the most subtle weakness of the human heart, representing the abandonment of justice and their duty as a holy act of self-abnegation and its pursuit as no better than wholesale murder and parricide.
It is better for the sons of Pandou173 to be dependents, beggars174 and exiles all their lives than to enjoy the earth by the slaughter of their brothers, kinsmen and spiritual guides: contemplation is purer and nobler than action and worldly desires.
Although answering firmly to the envoy, the children of Pandou175 are in their hearts shaken; for as Krishna afterward tells Karna, when the destruction of a nation is at hand wrong comes to men’s eyes clothed in the garb of right.
Sanjaya’s argument is one Christ and Buddha would have endorsed; Christ and Buddha would have laboured to confirm the Pandavas in their scruples.
On Krishna rests the final word and his answer is such as to shock seriously the conventional ideas of a religious teacher176 to which Christianity and Buddhism have accustomed us.
In a long and powerful speech he deals at great length with Sanjaya’s arguments.
We must remember therefore that he is debating a given point and speaking to men who have not like Arjouna177 the adhikar to enter into the “highest of all mysteries”.
We shall then realise the close identity between his teaching here and that of the Gita.
अस्मिन्विधौ वर्तमाने यथावदुच्चावचा मतयो ब्राह्मणानाम् ।
कर्मणाहुः सिद्धिमेके परत्र हित्वा कर्म विद्यया सिद्धिमेके ।
नाभुञ्जानो भक्ष्यभोज्यस्य तृप्येद्विद्वानपीह विहितं ब्राह्मणानाम् ॥
या वै विद्याः साधयन्तीह कर्म तासां फलं विद्यते नेतरासाम् ।
तत्रेह वै दृष्टफलं तु कर्म पीत्वोदकं शाम्यति तृष्णयार्तः ॥
सोऽयं विधिर्विहितः कर्मणैव संवर्तते सञ्जय तत्र कर्म ।
तत्र योऽन्यत्कर्मणः साधु मन्येन्मोघं तस्यालपितं दुर्बलस्य ॥
कर्मणामी भान्ति देवाः परत्र कर्मणैव प्लवते मातरिश्वा ।
अहोरात्रे विदधत्कर्मणैव अतन्द्रितो नित्यमुदेति सूर्यः ॥
मासार्धमासानथ नक्षत्रयोगानतन्द्रितश्चन्द्रमाश्चाभ्युपैति ।
अतन्द्रितो दहते जातवेदाः समिध्यमानः कर्म कुर्वन् प्रजाभ्यः ॥
अतन्द्रिता भारमिमं महान्तं बिभर्ति देवी पृथिवी बलेन ।
अतन्द्रिताः शीघ्रमपो वहन्ति सन्तर्पयन्त्यः सर्वभूतानि नद्यः ॥
अतन्द्रितो वर्षति भूरितेजाः सन्नादयन्नन्तरिक्षं दिशश्च ।
अतन्द्रितो ब्रह्मचर्यं चचार श्रेष्ठत्वमिच्छन्बलभिद्देवतानाम् ॥
हित्वा सुखं मनसश्च प्रियाणि तेन शक्रः कर्मणा श्रैष्ठ्यमाप ।
सत्यं धर्मपालयन्न अप्रमत्तो
asminvidhau vartamāne yathāvaduccāvacā matayo brāhmaṇānām
karmaṇāhuḥ siddhimeke paratra hitvā karma vidyayā siddhimeke
nābhuñjāno bhakṣyabhojyasya tṛpyedvidvānapīha vihitaṃ brāhmaṇānām
yā vai vidyāḥ sādhayantīha karma tāsāṃ phalaṃ vidyate netarāsām
tatreha vai dṛṣṭaphalaṃ tu karma pītvodakaṃ śāmyati tṛṣṇayārtaḥ
so'yaṃ vidhirvihitaḥ karmaṇaiva saṃvartate sañjaya tatra karma
tatra yo'nyatkarmaṇaḥ sādhu manyenmoghaṃ tasyālapitaṃ durbalasya
karmaṇāmī bhānti devāḥ paratra karmaṇaiva plavate mātariśvā
ahorātre vidadhatkarmaṇaiva atandrito nityamudeti sūryaḥ
māsārdhamāsānatha nakṣatrayogānatandritaścandramāścābhyupaiti
atandrito dahate jātavedāḥ samidhyamānaḥ karma kurvan prajābhyaḥ
atandritā bhāramimaṃ mahāntaṃ bibharti devī pṛthivī balena
atandritāḥ śīghramapo vahanti santarpayantyaḥ sarvabhūtāni nadyaḥ
atandrito varṣati bhūritejāḥ sannādayannantarikṣaṃ diśaśca
atandrito brahmacaryaṃ cacāra śreṣṭhatvamicchanbalabhiddevatānām
hitvā sukhaṃ manasaśca priyāṇi tena śakraḥ karmaṇā śraiṣṭhyamāpa
satyaṃ dharmapālayanna apramatto
The drift of Vyasa’s ethical speculation has always a definite and recognizable tendency; there is a basis of customary morality and there is a higher ethic of the soul which abolishes in its crowning phase the terms virtue178 and sin, because to the pure all things are pure through an august and selfless disinterestedness.
This ethic takes its rise naturally from the crowning height of the Vedantic philosophy, where the soul becomes conscious of its identity with God who whether acting or actionless is untouched by either sin or virtue.
But the crown of the Vedanta is only for the highest; the moral calamities that arise from the attempt of an unprepared soul to identify Self with God is sufficiently indicated in the legend of Indra and Virochana.
Similarly this higher ethic is for the prepared, the initiated only, because the raw and unprepared soul will seize on the nondistinction between sin and virtue without first compassing the godlike purity without which such nondistinction is neither morally admissible nor actually conceivable.
From this arises the unwillingness of Hinduism, so ignorantly attributed by Europeans to priestcraft and the Brahmin, to shout out its message to the man in the street or declare its esoteric thought to the shoeblack and the kitchenmaid.
The sword of knowledge is a doubleedged weapon; in the hands of the hero it can save the world, but it must not be made a plaything for children.
Krishna himself ordinarily insists on all men following the duties and rules of conduct to which they are born and to which the cast of their temperaments predestined them.
Arjouna179 he advises, if incapable of rising to the higher moral altitudes, to fight in a just cause because that180 is the duty of the caste, the class of souls to which he belongs.
Throughout the Mahabharata he insists on this standpoint181 that every man must meet the duties to which his life calls him in a spirit of disinterestedness, — not, be it noticed, of self-abnegation, which may be as much a fanaticism and even a selfishness as the grossest egoism itself.
It is because Arjouna182 has best fulfilled this ideal, has always lived up to the practice of his class in a spirit of disinterestedness and self-mastery that Krishna loves him above all human beings and considers him and him alone fit to receive the higher initiation.
स एवायं मया तेऽद्य योगः प्रोक्तः सनातनः ।
भक्तोऽसि मे सखा चेति रहस्यं ह्येतदुत्तमम् ॥
sa evāyaṃ mayā te'dya yogaḥ proktaḥ purātanaḥ
bhakto'si me sakhā ceti rahasyaṃ hyetaduttamam 183
“This is that184 ancient Yoga which I tell thee today; because thou art My adorer and My heart’s comrade; for this is the highest mystery of all.”
And even the man who has risen to the heights of the initiation must cleave for the good of society to the pursuits and duties of his order; for if he does not, the world which instinctively is swayed by the examples of its greatest, will follow in his footsteps; the bonds of society will then crumble asunder and chaos come again; mankind will be baulked of its destiny.
Srikrishna illustrates this by his own example, the example of God in his manifest form.
लोकसंग्रहमेवापि संपश्यन् कर्तुमर्हसि ॥
यद्यदाचरति श्रेष्ठस्तत्तदेवेतरो जनः ।
स यत्प्रमाणं कुरुते लोकस्तदनुवर्तते ॥
न मे पार्थास्ति कर्तव्यं त्रिषु लोकेषु किञ्चन ।
नानवाप्तमवाप्तव्यं वर्त एव च कर्मणि ॥
यदि ह्यहं न वर्तेयं जातु कर्मण्यतन्द्रितः ।
मम वर्त्मानुवर्तन्ते मनुष्याः पार्थ सर्वशः ॥
उत्सीदेयुरिमे लोका न कुर्यां कर्म चेदहम् ।
सङ्करस्य च कर्ता स्यामुपहन्यामिमाः प्रजाः॥
सक्ताः कर्मण्यविद्वांसो यथा कुर्वन्ति भारत ।
कुर्याद्विद्वांस्तथासक्तश्चिकीर्षुर्लोकसंग्रहम् ॥
न बुद्धिभेदं जनयेदज्ञानां कर्मसङ्गिनाम् ।
योजयेत्सर्वकर्माणि विद्वान्युक्तः समाचरन् ॥
lokasaṁgrahamevāpi saṃpaśyan kartumarhasi
yadyadācarati śreṣṭhastattadevetaro janaḥ
sa yatpramāṇaṃ kurute lokastadanuvartate
na me pārthāsti kartavyaṃ triṣu lokeṣu kiñcana
nānavāptamavāptavyaṃ varta eva ca karmaṇi
yadi hyahaṃ na varteyaṃ jātu karmaṇyatandritaḥ
mama vartmānuvartante manuṣyāḥ pārtha sarvaśaḥ
utsīdeyurime lokā na kuryāṃ karma cedaham
saṅkarasya ca kartā syāmupahanyāmimāḥ prajāḥ
saktāḥ karmaṇyavidvāṃso yathā kurvanti bhārata
kuryādvidvāṃstathāsaktaścikīrṣurlokasaṃgraham
na buddhibhedaṃ janayedajñānāṃ karmasaṅginām
yojayetsarvakarmāṇi vidvānyuktaḥ samācaran
“Looking also to the maintenance of order in the world thou shouldest185 act; for whatever the best practises, that other men practise; for the standard set by him is followed by the whole world.
In all the Universe there is for Me no necessary action, for I have nothing I do not possess or wish to possess, and lo I186 abide always doing.
For if I abide187 not at all doing action vigilantly, men would altogether follow in my path, O son of Pritha; these worlds would sink if I did not actions, and I should be the author of confusion (literally illegitimacy, the worst and primal confusion, for it disorders the family which is the fundamental unit of society) and the destroyer of the peoples.
What the ignorant do, O Bharata, with their minds enslaved to the work, that the wise man should do with a free mind to maintain the order of the world; the wise man should not upset the mind of the ignorant who are slaves of their deeds, but should apply himself to all works doing customary things with a mind in Yoga.”
It is accordingly not by airy didactic teaching so much as in the example of Krishna — and this is the true epic method — that Vyasa develops his higher ethic which is the morality of the liberated mind.
But this is too wide a subject to be dealt with in the limits I have at my command.
I have dwelt on Vyasa’s ethical standpoint because it is of the utmost importance in the present day.
Before the Bhagavadgita with its great epic commentary, the Mahabharata of Vyasa, had time deeply to influence the national mind, the heresy of Buddhism seized hold of us188.
Buddhism with its exaggerated emphasis on quiescence and the quiescent virtue of self-abnegation, its unwise creation of a separate class of quiescents and illuminati, its sharp distinction between monks and laymen implying the infinite inferiority of the latter, its all too facile admission of men to the higher life and its relegation of worldly action to the lowest importance possible stands at the opposite pole from the gospel of Srikrishna and has had the very effect he deprecates; it has been the author of confusion and the destroyer of the peoples.
Under its189 influence half the nation moved in the direction of spiritual passivity and negation, the other by a natural reaction plunged deep into a splendid but enervating materialism.
As a result our race lost190 three parts of its ancient heroic manhood, its grasp on the world, its magnificently ordered polity and its noble social fabric.
It is by clinging to a few spars from the wreck that we have managed to perpetuate our existence, and this we owe to the overthrow of Buddhism by Shankaracharya.
But Hinduism has never been able to shake off the deep impress of the religion it vanquished; and therefore though it has managed to survive, it has not succeeded in recovering its old vitalising force.
The practical disappearance of the Kshatriya caste (for those who now claim that origin seem to be with a few exceptions Vratya Kshatriyas, Kshatriyas who have fallen from the pure practice and complete temperament of their caste) has operated in the same direction.
The Kshatriyas were the proper depositaries of the gospel of action; Srikrishna himself declares
इमं विवस्वते योगं प्रोक्तवानहमव्ययं ।
विवस्वान्मनवे प्राह मनुरिक्ष्वाकवेऽब्रवीत् ॥
एवं परम्पराप्राप्तमिमं राजर्षयो विदुः ।
imaṃ vivasvate yogaṃ proktavānahamavyayaṃ
vivasvānmanave prāha manurikṣvākave'bravīt
evaṃ paramparāprāptamimaṃ rājarṣayo viduḥ
“This imperishable Yoga I revealed to Vivaswan, Vivaswan declared it to Manou191, Manou192 to Ixvaacou193 told it; thus did the royal sages learn this as a hereditary knowledge”,
and when in the immense lapse of time it was lost, Srikrishna again declared it to a Kshatriya.
But when the Kshatriyas disappeared or became degraded, the Brahmins remained the sole interpreters of the Bhagavadgita, and they, being the highest caste or temperament and their thoughts therefore naturally turned to knowledge and the final end of being, bearing moreover still the stamp of Buddhism in their minds, have dwelt194 mainly on that in the Gita which deals with the element of quiescence.
They have laid stress on the goal but they have not echoed Srikrishna’s emphasis on the necessity of action as the one sure road to the goal.
Time, however, in its revolution is turning back on itself and there are signs that if Hinduism is to last and we are not to plunge into the vortex of scientific atheism and the breakdown of moral ideals which is engulfing Europe, it must survive as the religion for which Vedanta195, Sankhya and Yoga combined to lay the foundations, which Srikrishna announced and which Vyasa formulated.
No apeings or distorted editions of Western religious modes, no Indianised Christianity, no fair rehash of that pale and consumptive shadow English Theism, will suffice to save us.
But Vyasa has not only a high political and religious thought and deepseeing ethical judgments; he deals not only with the massive aspects and worldwide issues of human conduct, but has a keen eye for the details of government and society, the ceremonies, forms and usages, the religious and social order on the due stability of which the public196 welfare is grounded.
The principles of good government and the motives and impulses that move men to public action no less than the rise and fall of States and the clash of mighty personalities and great powers form, incidentally and epically treated, the staple of Vyasa’s epic.
The poem was therefore, first and foremost, like the Iliad and Aeneid and even more than the Iliad and Aeneid, national — a poem in which the religious, social and personal temperament and ideals of the Aryan nation have found a high expression and its197 institutions, actions, heroes198 in the most critical period of its history received the judgments and criticisms of one of its greatest and soundest minds.
If this had not been so we should not have had the Mahabharata in its present form.
Valmekie199 had also dealt with a great historical period in a yet more universal spirit and with finer richness of detail but he approached it in a poetic and dramatic manner; he created rather than criticised; while Vyasa in his manner was the critic far more than the creator.
Hence later poets found it easier and more congenial to introduce their criticisms of life and thought into the Mahabharata than into the Ramayana.
Vyasa’s poem has been increased to threefold its original size; the additions to Valmekie’s200, few in themselves if we set apart the Uttarakanda, have been immaterial and for the most part of an accidental nature.
Gifted with such poetical powers, limited by such intellectual and emotional characteristics, endowed with such grandeur of soul and severe purity of taste, what was the special work which Vyasa did for his country and in what beyond the ordinary elements of poetical greatness201 lies his claim to world-wide acceptance?
It has been suggested already that the Mahabharata is the great national poem of India.
It is true the Ramayan202 also represents an Aryan civilisation idealised: Rama and Sita are more intimately characteristic types of the Hindu temperament as it finally shaped itself than are Arjouna and Draupadie203; Srikrishna though his character is founded in the national type, yet rises far above it.
But although Valmekie204 writing the poem of mankind drew his chief figures in the Hindu model and Vyasa, writing a great national epic, lifted his divine hero above the basis of national character into an universal humanity, yet the original purpose of either poem remains intact.
In the Ramayan205 under the disguise of an Aryan golden age the wide world with all its elemental impulses and affections finds itself mirrored.
The Mahabharata reflects rather a great Aryan civilization with the types, ideas, aims and passions of a heroic and pregnant period in the history of a high-hearted and deep-thoughted nation.
It has, moreover, as I have attempted to indicate, a formative ethical and religious spirit which is absolutely corrective to the faults that have most marred in the past and mar to the present day the Hindu character and type of thought.
And it provides us with this corrective not in the form of an alien civilisation difficult to assimilate and associated with other elements as dangerous to us as this is salutary, but in a great creative work of our own literature written by the mightiest of our sages (मुनीनामप्यहं व्यासः Krishna has said), one therefore who speaks our own language, thinks our own thoughts and has the same national cast of mind, nature and conscience.
His ideals will therefore be a corrective not only to our own faults but to the dangers of that attractive but unwholesome Asura civilisation which has invaded us, especially its morbid animalism and its neurotic tendency to abandon itself to its own desires.
But this does not say all.
Vyasa too beyond the essential universality of all great poets, has his peculiar appeal to humanity in general making his poem of worldwide as well as national importance.
By comparing him once again with Valmekie206 we shall realize more precisely in what this appeal consists.
The Titanic impulse was strong in Valmekie207.
The very dimensions of his poetical canvas, the audacity and occasional recklessness of his conceptions, the gust with which he fills in the gigantic outlines of his Ravana are the essence of Titanism; his genius was so universal and Protean that no single element of it can be said to predominate, yet this tendency towards the enormous enters perhaps as largely into it as any other.
But to the temperament of Vyasa the Titanic was alien.
It is true he carves his figures so largely (for he was a sculptor in creation rather than a painter like Valmekie208) that looked at separately they seem to have colossal stature but he is always at pains so to harmonise them that they shall appear measurable to us and strongly human.
They are largely and boldly human, impressive209 and sublime, but never Titanic.
He loves the earth and the heavens but he visits not Pataala210 nor the stupendous regions of Vrishopurvan211.
His Rakshasas, supposing them to be his at all, are epic giants or matter-of-fact ogres, but they do not exhale the breath of midnight and terror like Valmekie’s212 demons nor the spirit of worldshaking anarchy like Valmekie’s213 giants.
This poet could never have conceived Ravana.
He had neither unconscious sympathy nor a sufficient force of abhorrence to inspire him.
The passions of Duryodhana though presented with great force of antipathetic insight, are human and limited.
The Titanic was so foreign to Vyasa’s habit of mind that he could not grasp it sufficiently either to love or hate.
His humanism shuts to him the outermost gates of that sublime and menacing region; he has not the secret of the storm nor has his soul ridden upon the whirlwind.
For his particular work this was a real advantage.
Valmekie214 has drawn for us both the divine and anarchic in extraordinary proportions; an Akbar or a Napoleon might find his spiritual kindred in Rama or Ravana; but with more ordinary beings such figures impress the sense of the sublime principally and do not dwell with them as daily acquaintances.
It was left for Vyasa to create epically the human divine and the human anarchic so as to bring idealisms of the conflicting moral types into line with the daily emotions and imaginations of men.
The sharp distinction between Deva and Asura is one of the three distinct and peculiar contributions to ethical thought which India has to offer.
The legend of Indra and Virochana is one of its fundamental legends.
Both of them came to Vrihaspati to know from him of God; he told them to go home and look in the mirror.
Virochana saw himself there and concluding that he was God, asked no farther; he gave full rein to the sense of individuality in himself which he mistook for the deity.
But Indra was not satisfied: feeling that there must be some mistake he returned to Vrihaspati and received from him the true Godknowledge which taught him that he was God only because all things were God, since nothing existed but the One.
If he was the one God, so was his enemy; the very feelings of separateness and enmity were no215 permanent reality but transient phenomena.
The Asura therefore is he who is profoundly conscious of his own separate individuality and yet would impose it on the world as the sole individuality; he is thus blown along on the hurricane of his desires and ambitions until he stumbles and is broken, in the great phrase of Aeschylus, against the throne of Eternal Law.
The Deva on the contrary stands firm in the luminous heaven of self-knowledge; his actions flow not inward towards himself but outwards toward the world.
The distinction that India216 draws is not between altruism and egoism but between disinterestedness and desire.
The altruist is profoundly conscious of himself and he is really ministering to himself even in his altruism; hence the hot and sickly odour of sentimentalism and the taint of the Pharisee which clings about European altruism.
With the perfect Hindu the feeling of self has been merged in the sense of the universe; he does his duty equally whether it happens to promote the interests of others or his own; if his action seems oftener altruistic than egoistic it is because our duty oftener coincides with the interests of others than with our own.
Rama’s duty as a son calls him to sacrifice himself, to leave the empire of the world and become a beggar and a hermit; he does it cheerfully and unflinchingly: but when Sita is taken from him, it is his duty as a husband to rescue her from her ravisher and as a Kshatriya to put Ravana to death if he persists in wrongdoing217.
This duty also he pursues with the same unflinching energy as the first.
He does not shrink from the path of the right because it coincides with the path of self-interest.
The Pandavas also go without a word into exile and poverty, because honour demands it of them; but their ordeal over, they will not, though ready to drive compromise to its utmost verge, consent to succumb utterly to Duryodhana, for it is their duty as Kshatriyas to protect the world from the reign of injustice, even though it is at their own expense that injustice seeks to reign.
The Christian and Buddhistic doctrine of turning the other cheek to the smiter, is as dangerous as it is impracticable.
The continual European see-saw between Christ on the one side and the flesh and the devil on the other with the longer trend towards the latter comes straight from a radically false moral distinction and the lip profession of an ideal which mankind has never been either able or willing to carry into practice.
The disinterested and desireless pursuit of duty is a gospel worthy of the strongest manhood; that of the cheek turned to the smiter is a gospel for cowards and weaklings.
Babes and sucklings may practise it because they must, but with others it is a hypocrisy.
The gospel of the निष्काम धर्म and the great poetical creations which exemplify and set it off by contrast, this is the second aspect of Vyasa’s genius which will yet make him interesting and important to the whole world.