Personal Reflections in the Month of Gandhi Jayanti

The month of October got a good start with Gandhi Jayanti on October 2nd. I'm especially moved this year by the celebration of Mahatma Gandhi's birthday.  Mahatma Gandhi promoted "ahimsa" - non-violence. He led a Satyagraha movement. 

Satyāgraha (Sanskrit: सत्याग्रह; satya: "truth", āgraha: "insistence" or "holding firmly to"), or "holding firmly to truth",^[1] or "truth force", is a particular form of nonviolent resistance or civil resistance. Someone who practises satyagraha is a satyagrahi.

In January, I posted about the Ukraine war.  These days, I am posting about the October 7th 2023 attack in Israel.  In shock and with great sorrow I watch  the news from the comfort of my home.  In this age of telecommunications, graphic images appear instantaneously for us to see in real-time - something that could not have happened in WWII when my parents were imprisoned in German concentration camps.  But does this new technology help us in any way? Does it instead lull us to sleep, saddened, but ineffective? Gandhi understood the challenges of new technologies when he spun and wove, using a "charka" - a hand-operated spinning wheel when the great automated spinning and weaving factories were transforming the culture of India and the world.  He understood the power plays of the mighty and protested with the Dandi Salt March symbolically extracting salt from the ocean.

In the process of aging, I reflect more and more on Gandhi, who was one of the heroes of my youth.  As time marches on, I remember more and more of my youth, while I forget where I have put my glasses or car keys on a daily basis. It's well known that a senior's long term memory gets better than short term memory. This is a personal reflection - I am doing some personal life review about how Mahatma Gandhi became an important influence in my life. 

Gandhiji came into my awareness initially in the 1960s during the civil rights movement in the USA, when Martin Luther King Jr. led a movement emulating Mahatma Gandhi's non-violent principles of civil disobedience against injustice. Living in Canada, we were not untouched by what was happening south of the border.  I also had a regular correspondence with a friend studying in Berkley California, a hot spot of civil rights action in those days - especially in protest against the Vietnam War.

In my first year of college, my English professor introduced me to two core Indian texts - the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads and the Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramhansa  Yogananda. Something about this literature resonated with me, as if I had uncovered long forgotten knowledge.  It awoke in me a desire to "return" to my India, though I had never been there and was born into a family which had no association with that country or its culture.

My parents were keen that I should be a well-informed person about the wider world.  But my fascination with India was completely unexpected.  Determined at a young age to return there, I made an overland expedition to India in 1965-66.  The India-Pakistan war at that time did not deter me, though it frightened my family.  In India, I sought out the :"khadi" shops, searched for books by Gandhi.  

"Khadi" is homespun cotton cloth.  While my first sari was made of factory woven cloth, when I settled later in India during the 1970s, I chose a khadi sari which was quite impractical.  Living simply in the rural area around Haridwar by the Ganges river, I washed my clothes by hand, Indian style. Khadi was heavy, took longer to dry, and did not wrap elegantly or comfortably.  But I wore it with pride, as if somehow it connected me with the spirit of my hero - Gandhiji.

Wistfully, I wonder what has happened to that spirit.  Perhaps this reflection on choosing khadi may seem quite petty in the face of the violence of our times and the devastating humanitarian crises that ensue. But it actually points to a need to return to the principle of simplicity,  non-violence, and a spirit of collective co-operation, rather than a war-like mindset.  

Isaiah 2:4

"He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore."

War : My Sorrow Awakened

In the Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 1, we read of the Sorrow of Arjuna as he faces a war.  In my first reflection on the sorrow of Arjuna, I looked at the text philosophically, as a way of describing humanity's dilemmas facing the challenges of ordinary living in peace time.  But now, I reflect on its application literally to a time of war.

I had always resonated with Arjuna's sorrow, but now, more than ever before, as I watch what is unfolding in Ukraine, that scripture from aeons ago seems to speak not only to the present, but reawakens the sorrow within me for generations past of my own family.

I am a child of survivors of the Shoah.  Some 77 years ago, my parents were liberated by Russian soldiers from German concentration camps.  After trying to resettle in their homes in Poland, they eventually made their way to the American zone of Germany where United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration  (UNRRA) had set up Displaced Persons (DP) camps.  I was born there.  

Images of refugees fleeing, of roads backed up with traffic to get out of the city/country, brought back memories of my mother's stories of flight from the Nazis. This is all very personal to me, not just an interest in geopolitical history.  Sadly, such images are also within the memories of so many others across the globe.

In reflecting on how I came to a spiritual path that centered around the Bhagavad Gita, it is largely because the teachings were set in the context of a war.  It was a familiar topic. My parents did not shirk from talking about their experiences in the war. I grew up in a community who had survived the most dreadful inhumanities. From my earliest childhood days, I yearned to know how such suffering came to be and whether there was a remedy for suffering or a way of preventing it.

Naively, in my youth, I had thought that Gandhi's ahimsa, which brought down colonial rule over India brought light  to such darkness.   Perhaps so - in a momentous release bringing political self-rule. But it too was followed by horrors in the unfolding of partition. Since the Holocaust in Europe of the 1930s & 40s, genocides and other holocausts have arisen worldwide within my own brief lifetime, too numerous to mention here.

As destiny would have it, life brought me to contemplate the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita over and over again,  learning to apply its principles within my personal life and sphere of influence,  however small that might be.  Today, I engage with people of all nationalities and faiths in the most sacred way to untangle the web of sorrow in their own lives through psychotherapy. The battlefield is both external and internal.  Each one is called to face their own memories, inter-generational traumas, personal challenges and dilemmas and become the hero and heroine of his/her own story, as Arjuna was called to do.

Be kind.

Everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.

Phyllos

Mahabharat and Bhagavad Gita

The Bhagavad Gita is embedded in the great epic of India, the Mahabharat.The story of the Mahābhārata revolves around a conflict for the throne of an ancestral kingdom Bharat, with its capital in the "City of the Elephant," Hāstinapura on the Gaṅgā river in north central India.  The contenders for the throne are two sets of paternal first cousins:the five sons of the deceased king Pāṇḍu, the five Pāṇḍavas and the one hundred sons of blind King Dhṛtarāṣṭra, the 100 hundred Dhārtarāṣṭras who became bitter rivals.

The Pandavas - Sons of Pandu

The five sons of Pāṇḍu were actually fathered by five Gods and these heroes were assisted throughout the story by various Gods, seers, and brahmins, including the seer Kṛṣṇa Dvaipāyana Vyāsa, who later became the author of the epic poem telling the whole of this story, who was also their actual grandfather (he had engendered Pāṇḍu and the blind Dhṛtarāṣṭra upon their nominal father's widows in order to preserve the lineage).

The names of the Pandavas are: Yudhisthir, Arjuna, Bhima,and the twins Sahadeva and Nakula.  They share a wife Draupadi.

The Kauravas-Sons of Dhristarastra

The one hundred Kauravas, sons of a blind king Dhārtarāṣṭra are said more than once in the text to be human incarnations of the demons who are the perpetual enemies of the Gods.  The head of these is named Duryodhan.

Krishna the Avatar

The most dramatic figure of the entire Mahābhārata is Kṛṣṇa, son of Vasudeva of the tribe of AndhakaVṛṣṇis, located in the city of Dvārakā in the far west, near the ocean. His name is, thus KṛṣṇaVāsudeva. He is the human avatar of the supreme God Vāsudeva-Nārāyaṇa-Viṣṇu descended to earth in human form to rescue Law, Good Deeds, Right, Virtue and Justice -  all different facets of "dharma," the “firm-holding” between the ethical quality of an action and the quality of its future fruits for the doer and the effects on society.

KṛṣṇaVāsudeva was also a cousin to both Bhārata families of the Pandavas and Dristarastras. He was a friend and advisor to the Pāṇḍavas, became the brother-in-law of Arjuna, and served as Arjuna's mentor and charioteer in the great war. It is Krisna who delivers the message of the Bhagavad Gita to Arjuna for the sake of all humanity.

Work as Worship and Servant Leadership

What if today's leaders performed their roles under the guidance of the Bhagavad Gita? What if leaders saw themselves as Dharma Warriors? The ever-increasing pressure of modern life, the great changes taking place worldwide demand of our leaders vision beyond the limited view of the ego-mind and require instead servant leadership inspired by eternal wisdom.

What is servant leadership? The phrase “Servant Leadership” was coined by Robert K. Greenleaf in The Servant as Leader, an essay that he first published in 1970. In that essay, he said:

"The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions…The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature."

"The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived?"

In his second major essay, The Institution as Servant, Robert K. Greenleaf articulated what is often called the "credo." He said:

" This is my thesis: caring for persons, the more able and the less able serving each other, is the rock upon which a good society is built. Whereas, until recently, caring was largely person to person, now most of it is mediated through institutions - often large, complex, powerful, impersonal; not always competent; sometimes corrupt. If a better society is to be built, one that is more just and more loving, one that provides greater creative opportunity for its people, then the most open course is to raise both the capacity to serve and the very performance as servant of existing major institutions by new regenerative forces operating within them." Servant leadership is a philosophy that would ultimately create a more just and caring world.


A question I am asking myself, when reflecting on the Bhagavad Gita in modern life, whether we can find in this model, a congruence with its spiritual teachings.  I think of this especially for those for whom the old traditional ways are no longer a reality- for those who have already become immersed in corporate urban life, who are either westerners by birth, or for Indians who have become westernized but who still at heart wish to live a spiritual life rooted in their ancient scriptures.  And perhaps we need to revitalize those whose traditional ways are still very vibrant, but who follow their traditions more by rote than from the heart.  I think the world over, we need renewal of our desire, our capacity and will to serve each other.

Chapter 6: The Yoga of Meditation

Who burns with the bliss

And suffers the sorrow

Of every creature

Within his own heart,

Making his own

Each bliss and each sorrow:

Him I hold highest 

Of all yogis.

More than anything, the Bhagavad Gita is a call to work with heart, to lead, to have courage, to serve others. to be even-minded and to engage fully with life.  It is a classic guide to servant leadership.

Chapter 3 Karma Yoga

Let them show by example

How work is holy

When the heart of the worker

Is fixed on the Highest.

When Arjuna wishes to withdraw from the battlefield, Krishna teaches him to stand his ground and engage.  He teaches him the role of leadership by using Himself as an example:

Chapter 3 Karma Yoga

Whatever a great man does, ordinary people will imitate; they follow his example.Consider me: I am not bound by any sort of duty.There is nothing in all the three worlds, which I do not already possess; nothing I ave yet to acquire.But I go on working nevertheless.  If I did not continue to work untiringly as I do, mankind would stillfollow me, no matter where I led them.  Suppose I were to stop? They would all be lost.

He also teaches to be even minded - to have equanimity.

Chapter 2 The Yoga of Knowledge

Perform every action with your heart fixed on the Supreme Lord.Renounce attachment to the fruits.  Be even tempered in success and failure; for it is this eveness of temper which is meant by yoga.

Work done with anxiety about results is far inferior to work done without such anxiety, in the calm of self surrender.  Seek refuge in the knowledge of Brahman. They who work selfishly for results are miserable.

One of the most important teachings of the Bhagavad Gita is one of inner alignment rather than outwardly directed strategies.  No doubt, in every field of life, we must learn skills to perform our roles and consider strategies for action.  However, it is inner intent to serve, inner development and inner surrender to the Highest that makes a genuine leader worth following in any field of human endeavour.