Essays on the Gita, First Series (Arya Publishing House, 1922)
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the Divine in the world and the Divine in man and Worships Desire only as its deity? It is not then from any such standpoint that the weakness of Arjuna merits rebuke. ‘‘Whence has come to thee this dejection, this stain and darkness of the soul in the hour of difficulty and peril?** asks Krishna of Arjuna. The question points to the real nature of Arjuna*s deviation from his heroic qualities. There is a divine compassion which descends to us from on high and for the man whose nature does not possess it, is not cast in its mould, to pretend to be the superior man, the master-man or the superman is a folly and an insolence, for he alone is^thje super- ^mn who most manifests the Highest nature of. the Godhead in humanity. This compassion observes with an eye of love and wi^om and calm strengA tHeibattle and the struggle, the strength and weak- ness of man, his virtues and sins, his joy and suffering, his knowledge and his ignorance, his wisdom and his folly, his aspiration and his failure and it enters into it all to help and to heal. In the saint and philanthropist it may cast itself into the mould of a plenitude of love or charity ; in the thinker and hero it assumes the largeness and the force of a helpful wisdom and strength. It is this compassipjn Jn the sour?of his chivalry, which will not break the bruised reed, but helps and protects thejwi^k and the opp ressed and the wounded and the fallen. But it is also the divine conpajssion that smites down the strong THE CREED OF THE ARYAN FIGHTER tyrant and the confident oppressor, not in wrath and with hatred, — for these are not the high divine qualities, the wrath of God against the sinner, God’s hatred of the wicked are the fables of half- enlightened creeds, as much a fable as the eternal torture of the Hells they have invented, — but, as the old Indian spirituality clearly saw, with as much love and compassion for the strong Titan erring by his strength and slain for his sins as for the sufferer and the oppressed who have to be saved from his violence and injustice.
But is not the compassion which actuates Arjuna in the rejection of his work and mission. That is not compassion but an impotence full of a ^alr*ielf-pit)^a recoil from the* mental suffering which his act must entail on himself, — “I see not what shall thrust from me the sorrow that dries up the senses,” — and of ,all things self- pity i s among the most ignoble and ur^ryan of moo^. Its pity for others is aIso“al6rm”of self-indulgence ; it is the phy sical shrinking of the nerves from the act of siaughter, the egois tic emotional shri nking of the heart from tl£~~de^ru ^^ of the~ f)hritarashfrians because they are “one’s own peo ple” and without them life will be empty. This j)ity Js a weakness of the min d and senses, — a weakness which may well be^beneficial to men of a lower grade of develop- ment, who have to be weak because otherwise they will be hard and cruel ; for they have to cure the harsher by the gentler forms of sensational egoism, they have to call in tamas, the debile principle, to
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