Gita Gyan #2 – Material Desires or Discriminatory Intuition ?

Ever since I started reading this book “God Talks With Arjuna”, I have started looking at the Bhagavad Gita with a very different lens. It’s truly the divine song that can guide us through our everyday challenges and our spiritual quest. Without the Mahabharata war, there would be no Bhagavad Gita and what a profound loss to humanity it would have been.

Just goes to show that every incident, event, war, is always happening at the right time… we don’t understand the Universe’s rhythm and get entangled in our individual rhythms. That’s the dissonance we feel sometimes, not every time because we are so engrossed in our individual rhythms :).

The second verse is as follows –

सञ्जय उवाच ।
दृष्ट्वा तु पाण्डवानीकं व्यूढं दुर्योधनस्तदा ।
आचार्यमुपसङ्गम्य राजा वचनमब्रवीत् ।। 2।।

Translation – Sanjay said: On observing the Pandava army standing in military formation, King Duryodhan approached his teacher Dronacharya, and said the following words.

Verse three is also important to be read along with verse 2

पश्यैतां पाण्डुपुत्राणामाचार्य महतीं चमूम् ।
व्यूढां द्रुपदपुत्रेण तव शिष्येण धीमता ।। 3।।

Translation – Duryodhan said: Respected teacher! Behold the mighty army of the sons of Pandu, so expertly arrayed for battle by your own gifted disciple, the son of Drupad.

Both these verses have been copy pasted from this link – BG1.2: Chapter 1, Verse 2 – Bhagavad Gita, The Song of God ; BG1.3: Chapter 1, Verse 3 – Bhagavad Gita, The Song of God

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Sri Paramahansa Yogananda describes Duryodhan as “Material Desire” and Guru Dronacharya as “Samsara”. Beautiful descriptions and the meaning of their names is simply outstanding. The Sanskrit “Dur” means “difficult” and “yudh” is “to fight”. Material desire, is the King of all sense tendencies, and material desire is difficult to fight !!

Look around yourself and within yourself – all that we do is to fulfil our material desires !!!!! The house(s), car(s), FB post(s), Clothes, Phone(s), other Gadgets…. every single thing we wish to possess is material and we spend our entire life earning to fulfil these desires.

When Duryodhan sees the Pandava army deployed before him, he reaches out to his teacher, Guru Dronacharya and says to him “Respected teacher ! behold the mighty army of the sons of Pandu, so expertly arrayed for battle by your own gifted disciple, the son of Drupad.” Lots of hidden messages and meanings in this verse..

Drona represents “samsara”. What is samsara ? Well, every thought and action we take leave an impression on our conscious and subconscious… reinforcement of certain thoughts and actions leads to habits. Samsara is the collective impression of our thoughts and action on our conscious and subconscious. Who better to represent that than the “teacher” !! Again, he taught both the Pandavas (discriminatory good tendencies of the soul) and Kauravas (the indulgent unaware sense tendencies), the art of archery, but when the time came to choose sides, he chose to be with the Kauravas.

A karmic debt is also involved in this action of Dronacharya. The Pandava army is led by Dhristadhyumna, son of Drupad, born out of the sacrificial fire. Drupad and Drona were close friends and when Drupad became the King of Panchala, he refused to give half his kingdom to Drona as promised. Dronacharya feels insulted and decides to take revenge. As Guru Dakshina, he asks Pandavas to attack the Kingdom of Panchala and capture Drupad which they do. Dronacharya then releases Drupad and returns half his kingdom to him.

Drupad was humiliated and after a lot of penance he sought a son and a daughter who will destroy Dronacharya. Drupad, after his defeat at the hands of Pandavas, introspects, meditates and thus becomes dispassionate and deeply spiritual. His son Dhristadhyumna is born out of fire “intuition”, is bold, daring “Dhrista” and has tremendous strength “Dhyumna” – a combination that can be summarised as discriminative light of intuition. While Drona is still engulfed in “samsara”, Dhristadhyumna is the light of intuition.

The allegory is samsara or habits born out of material desires being fulfilled can be defeated through meditation, the inner awareness (loosely translates to intuition). No wonder, Dronacharya is killed by Dhristadhyumna in the Kurukshetra war !

So, the question for today – are you acting out of “Samsara” and pursuing material desires or are you spending time developing your inner intuition through meditation ?

Would love to hear back from everyone reading this with your comments.

Have a great day.

Note : the picture that I have used is a painting done by Giampaolo Tomassetti, an Italian painter who was fascinated by the Mahabharata. He studied the scripture for five years before making a series of paintings. This picture has been taken from the internet, not sure about copyright.