What Should I Do?

The Bhagavad Gita

Religious Text

Vyasa (Attributed)

400 BCE - 200 CE

Sanskrit Language

India

What Should I Do?

It is 3,000 years ago in India and the celebrated archer Arjuna is lined up to do battle. On the other side is the enemy — but there Arjuna sees only cousins and uncles and mentors. 

If I am Arjuna, I am meeting the eyes of young men I once played cards with and confided in. I know that my youngest cousin, having been jumpy all his life, is particularly scared. I am paralyzed — How can I kill my own family and friends? Isn’t my duty to protect them, not kill them? What good would it do to win under these circumstances? 

Eyes filling with tears, Arjuna drops his bow and cries out — he cannot fight.

Arjuna and His Charioteer Krishna Confront Karna; Final Battle of the Mahabharata

Artist/maker unknown, c. 1820, India, Philadelphia Museum of Art

My own nature is struck 

by pity, and a sense of wrong, 

and my mind is clouded

as to dharma:

I ask you which is best — 

tell me! I am your student!

Correct me, who lies 

fallen before your feet.

- The Bhagavad Gita

This is the Bhagavad Gita (the “Song of God”), part of the epic poem the Mahabhartha, one of the central texts of the Hindu religion, believed to have been written by the poet-sage Vyasa approximately 2,000 years ago in India. A conversation between the prince-archer Arjuna and the god-charioteer Krishna rendered in poetic verse, it offers some of the most fundamental — and the most unsatisfying — answers of all time.

The Mahabharata

Film

Peter Brook (Writer and Director)

Jean-Claude Carriere and Mari-Helene Estienne (Writers)

1989

English Language

England-France

The Mahabharata is frequently depicted, often elaborately, in India and around the world. This 1989 film production, based on a play and featuring a multi-ethnic cast, aims to show that the Mahabharata is a universal epic on par with the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Bible.

Responding to Arjuna, Krishna suggests that in not fulfilling his duty (“dharma” in Sanskrit) as a warrior, he risks disgrace, a pain worse than death.

But what can it possibly mean to be told, in response to the question, “Why should I kill my relatives?”, that you should do it because it is your duty? The modern mind recoils instinctively — this is the philosophy of death squads, of Nazis, of that phrase: “I was only doing my duty.” 

It is on the wrong side of history.

Reading about Arjuna as I was growing up in Toronto, I could not — and I still cannot — get over the circularity of the answer Arjuna receives from Krishna, a problem I raised again and again with my Hindu parents: Why should our chance birth into particular families give us special rights? If our aim is to generate the right behaviour in ourselves and in society, is it not more morally effective to insist that our rights are earned by our conduct and not by our mere birth? 

The answer, in the Hindu worldview, is not really — 

We are all born into our roles in society and each of us must play our part in maintaining society’s structure (the main social castes, or classes in Hinduism are that of the priest, warrior, merchant and servant). At your birth, you inherit both the rights and the obligations of your group. Arjun’s obligation as a warrior to risk his life in serving others is one example. Another is that of familial duty — marrying someone of your own caste and producing the male offspring that would perpetuate your group. 

As stultifying and preposterous as much of this seems to us today, it strikes me that this worldview gets at something I still recognize — just how good it feels to be told what to do, and in doing it, to take up our rightful place in the world, the way it can feel good to wear the right symbols and repeat the right words at your wedding ceremony irrespective of how religious you actually are.

And while I (still) cannot understand a system of morality that is based on the arbitrariness of your birth, I can understand the morality of subsuming yourself under the good of the whole — we admire unity when we see it in families, armies and social justice movements.

But much can and does go wrong when individuals cannot assume their roles without psychological self-immolation, such as when, to stay within a group we love, we have to give up loving the ‘wrong’ person due to religion, economic class or sexual orientation. And human societies often fail to uphold, in action, the idea that every part of a whole is equal — that the Gita suggests that each caste (and in the larger Hindu worldview, each gender) is equally valuable to the whole of society does little to assuage the nightmare reality of discrimination, violence and rape experienced in communities defined by these categorizations then and now. 

Through words 

that seem contradictory, 

you confuse

my insight; 

tell me one thing

that is without doubt — 

how might I reach 

the higher good?

— The Bhagavad Gita

Even for those privileged by the Hindu worldview, it is still hard to determine the right action for every situation. Arjuna’s own duty is far from clear — his duty to act as a warrior is pitted against his duty to his family. Indeed, one of the enduring questions about the Mahabharatha is why particular protagonists (from Drona, Arjuna’s teacher, to Bhisma, Arjuna’s great uncle) choose to fight for either the Kaurava or Pandava princes in their battle over rightful heredity, a myriad of considerations resulting in thousands of possible individual decisions and life trajectories.

And yet, for all my misgivings about the Bhagavad Gita’s ability to tell me what to do in a way that makes sense to me, one part of Arjuna’s story has always stayed with me — the rather shocking implication that sometimes, you have to kill your uncle.

To be able to do what he feels to be right (in his particular situation, supporting the rightful heirs to the throne), Arjuna must grapple with his fears — not only of death, but of failure and that other living death — the breaking of familial and social bonds.

“To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep

No more; and by a sleep, to say we end

the heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks

that Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation

devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep,

To sleep, perchance to Dream; aye, there's the rub,

for in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,

when we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

must give us pause. There's the respect

that makes Calamity of so long life:

For who would bear the Whips and Scorns of time,

the Oppressor's wrong, the proud man's Contumely,

the pangs of despised Love, the Law’s delay,

the insolence of Office, and the spurns

that patient merit of the unworthy takes,

when he himself might his Quietus make

with a bare Bodkin? Who would Fardels bear, 

to grunt and sweat under a weary life,

but that the dread of something after death,

the undiscovered country, from whose bourn

no traveller returns, puzzles the will,

and makes us rather bear those ills we have,

than fly to others that we know not of.

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,

and thus the native hue of Resolution

Is sicklied o'er, with the pale cast of Thought,

And enterprises of great pitch and moment, 

with this regard their Currents turn awry, 

And lose the name of Action.” 

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

Text: Play

William Shakespeare

1599-1602

English Language

England

In one of the world’s most well-known plays, Prince Hamlet cannot decide whether he should kill his father’s murderer — his uncle Claudius — or instead commit suicide. Hamlet’s words here, often referred to as the “To Be or Not To Be” soliloquy (a speech in which a character talks to themselves in front of the audience), has been the subject of intense philosophical and psychological scrutiny: Is Hamlet’s mental paralysis a personal flaw or all too human?

Of course, we do not (normally) kill, but it can feel almost as tortuous to stand up to or cut off a parent, relative or friend who is doing us harm. And we can and often do disappoint our family and transgress the expectations of our society, a knowing reflected in this common English expression: It would kill my family if I leave law school/am gay/marry out of my religion.

And here, the Bhagavad Gita and I both arrive at the only answer I have ever been able to give myself with any conviction as to the question of what I should do with my life — 

Do what you have to do. 

It is, admittedly, very little to go on, but the Bhagavad Gita’s words have also remained with me because of what it goes on to say about how to do what I have to do — it is not every day that a god coaches us through performance anxiety.

Know this: 

that with which 

all this world is woven 

is not to be destroyed. 

No one is able 

to effect 

the destruction 

of the imperishable.

— The Bhagavad Gita

Through teeming stanzas, Krishna urges us to put the pain of our challenges into proper perspective — our lives are a tiny part of a larger cosmic reality which endures before our life and after our death. To some, the largesse of the words conceals a rather sparse solution — accept that your life is an illusion — which is hardly bolstering (indeed the opposite) until you find yourself drawn in by the rhythm of Krishna’s words which build and reinforce and confuse again and again before culminating in this advice for Arjuna which has been copied out by many a person trying to do something hard: The warrior acts without expectation.

 How to Do Hard Things: Three Key Takeaways from the Bhagavad Gita

1. Do what you have to do.

2. Without any expectation of reward.

3. Keeping things in proper perspective.

I have long wondered why I seem to have chosen as my duty in life something that I find excruciatingly hard to do — to write. I’m terrified of failing to get better quick enough to make any impact with my words before I’m no longer able to write due to illness or old age; my procrastination, however, suggests that some part of me believes that I, like Krishna, am immortal. And given the writer’s propensity for and duty to authenticity, it does kill me to have to reveal myself in a way that my normally private self doesn’t and to have to say things that may also kill those I truly love.

The War of Art

Text: Self-Help 

Steven Pressfield

2002

English Language

United States

A popular book on writing advice, the War of Art reflects screenplay and fiction writer Steven Pressfield’s interest in the Bhagavad Gita. Writing on the difference between an amateur, one who only thinks of doing, and a professional, someone who actually does (regardless of their level of success), Pressfied writes, “A professional schools herself to stand apart from her performance, even as she gives herself to it heart and soul. The Bhagavad-Gita tells us we have a right only to our labor, not to the fruits of our labor. All the warrior can give is his life; all the athlete can do is leave everything on the field.

At some point in our lives, we will all, like Arjuna, be brought to our knees by the remorselessness of our pursuits. Dharma is a critical concept when your career does not pan out or your child disappoints — when your goals, even those you have freely chosen as a duty to yourself, cause you to buckle in pain: 

Oh god, I can’t do this anymore!

And here, concealed in religious poetry is the advice of a rather brusque coach who believes in you: 

Remember your goal.  Let go of your expectations. Remember the bigger picture, that you are a small part of a much bigger universe. Pick up your bow. Breathe. Loosen your grip a bit. Breathe. Om Shanti Shanti Shanti. Go in. Go in!

Questions

1. What is your main duty in life?

2. Did you choose it for yourself or inherit it from someone or something?

3. What duty are you afraid to fulfill? 

4. Who or how does your duty “kill” (i.e., anger or disappoint someone else or cause you pain)?

5. How do you stick to your duty?