Dharma

Chapter 8: Dharma in the Bhagavad Gītā

CHApTEr 8 Dharma in the Bhagavad Gı̄tā The Bhagavad Gītā makes a number of philosophical points, and no one would deny that it also deserves a reputation as a text about dharma. Yet it really says only a few things about dharma per se. Most of its prominent references to dharma occur in what I will call an informal ring structure: not a formal ring of the type appreciated by folklorists, where a text exhibits a self-conscious geometry of units and themes converging on a central nugget, but one that allows the Gītā to be also about other things to which dharma is kept pertinent through deepening reminders of its relevance.There may be yet a further ring that is off-center or deferred. We shall examine what these patterns tell us about dharma as these rings close in on the text’s grand spiritual teachings. Dharma Rings in the Bhagavad Gītā Let us peel away the outer layers. We return to terms that we have been meeting increasingly. I render them mainly as I have done there, leaving svadharma to speak for itself and translating svabhāva and svakarma as “inherent nature” and “own jobs,” respectively. Ring 1: a. In the Gītā’s very first words, Dhṛtarāṣṭra asks Sañjaya what happened “on the field of dharma, the Kuru field” (Bhagavad Gītā 1.1), between “my sons,” the Kauravas, and their foes. b. As the Gītā ends, Sañjaya tells Dhṛtarāṣṭra that the last thing Kṛṣṇa told Arjuna, before asking him if he understood, was that theirs was a “righteous dialogue”—that is, it was dharmya, about dharma—and that whoever learns it will offer it up as a sacrifice of knowledge to Kṛṣṇa, and whoever listens to it will be released to blessed worlds. (18.70–72) 110 DHARMA To grasp this first ring one must know that the Gītā’s Kṛṣṇa–Arjuna dialogue is framed by a dialogue between Dhṛtarāṣṭra, blind father of the doomed Kauravas, and the bard Sañjaya. Thanks to a recent gift of the “divine eye” from the epic’s putative author Vyāsa, Sañjaya can report the entire war as an account of what the blind old king—and all other audiences—would otherwise be missing. The Gītā ends with Sañjaya telling Dhṛtarāṣṭra that its supreme secret comes to them by “Vyāsa’s grace” (18.75). In fact, this framing dialogue makes dharma the Gītā’s very first word, while the last mention of dharma, by Kṛṣṇa, confirms the “righteous ” nature of the whole exchange. Arjuna then replies that he will stand firm and do as Kṛṣṇa bids with his confusion gone and his memory restored (18.73), after which Sañjaya again speaks from the frame to wrap things up (74–78). These opening and closing usages are more subtle than they look. The opening has several reverberations. The reference to a “field of dharma” recalls that the rules of fair fighting were agreed upon earlier that day, when both sides “established the dharmas (laws, rules of engagement) of battle” (Mahābhārata 6.1.26–33). Most of these rules will be broken on this very field, and not infrequently at the advice of Kṛṣṇa. That this dharma-field is “the field of Kuru” also recalls an ancestor of the Kuru line, Kuru, who “made Kurukṣetra meritorious by his austerities” (1.89.44). During the war narrative, we learn that King Kuru did such severe austerities at Kurukṣetra that Indra granted that both ascetics and warriors who died there in battle would go straight to heaven cleansed of their wicked acts by its very dust (9.52.13–18). These uses converge when the aged legal expert of the family, Bhīṣma, is about to give his lengthy dharma oration after the war. As Kṛṣṇa and the Pāṇḍavas come to the spot where Bhīṣma lies on his hero’s bed of arrows, Kurukṣetra is called “the field of the whole of the law” (12.53.23), expanding on the first words of the Gītā and projecting them toward some kind of completion in the dharma instructions of Bhīṣma, which the war’s survivors are arriving to hear before he dies and goes to heaven. Further, the opening “field” references resonate with what Kṛṣṇa...