Essays on the Gita, First Series (Arya Publishing House, 1922)
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in ennobling and elevating instead of brutalising those who performed it. It must be remembered that it is war of this kind and under these conditions that the Gita had in view, war considered as an. inevitable part of human life, but so restricted and regulated as to serve like other activities the ethical and spiritual development which was then regarded as the whole real object of life, war destructive with- in certain carefully fixed limits of the bodily life of individual men but constructiyg^of their inner life Md of the ethical elevation of the race. That war in the past has, when subjected to an ideal, helped in this elevation, as in the development of knight- hood and chivalry, the Indian ideals oJ_the Kshatriya, the Japanese ideal of the Samurai, can only be denied by the fanatics of pacifism. When it has fulfilled its function, it may well disappear ; for if it tries to survive its utility, it will appear as an un- relieved brutality of violence stripped of its ideal and constructive aspects and will be rejected by the progressive mind of humanity ; but its past service to the race must be admitted in any reasonable view of our evolution.
The physical fact of war, however, is only a special and outward manifestation of a general prin- ciple in life and the Kshatriya is only the outward manifestation and type of a general characteristic necessary to the completeness of human perfection. War typifies and embodies physically the aspect of battle and struggle which befongs to all life , both to oiir inner and our outer living, in a world whose method is a meeting and wrestling of forces which progress by mutual destruction towards a continually changing adjustment expressive of a progressive harmonising and hopeful of a perfect harmony based upon some yet ungrasped potentiality of oneness. The Kshatriya is the type and em^bodi- ment of the fighte r in man who accepts this principle in life and faces it as a warrior striving towards mastery, not shrinking from the des tr ucjion of bodii^and form^ bm through it all aimi ng a t the realisation of some principle of right, justke, law which shall be the basis of the harmony towards which the struggle tends. The Gita accepts Ais aspeci^ofjJie.WiQrld-eneigy and the physical facTpf war^which embodies it, and it adfkesses itself Jtp the inan „of_ action, the striver and figh ter, the Kshatriya, — ^war which is the extreme contradiction SF the soul’s high aspiration to peace within and harmlessness* without, the striver and fighter whose necessary turmoil of struggle and action seems to be the very contradiction of the soul’s high ideal of calm mastery and self-possession, — and it seeks for an issue from the contradiction, a point at which its terms meet and a poise which shall be the first essential basis of harmon y and transcendence.
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