Warrior's guide in the battlefield...

Disclaimer: This is my views based on my understanding of things I read.


Warrior's guide in the battlefield might be a possible title if the Bhagavad Gita is written today instead of it being writen in 3000 BC. The Gita (Bhagavad Gita), one of the most coveted religious texts in Hinduism is the counsel that Krishna offers to Arjuna (the archer) in the battlefield of Kurukshetra.

Arjuna has to fight this enemies, but faces a great distress before fighting because the enemies consists of his teacher, other persons whom he has greatest respects for. Arjuna faces a lot of conflicts thinking about fighting his Guru who has taught him archery. Arjuna wants to drop his weapons and run away from the battlefield because of the same. The Gita is about how krishna counsels arjuna to fight and helping him overcome his internal conflicts.

Why is it important to me? I am not an warrior and I am not gonna fight any battle in my life time. So why should I care about somebody's counsel to a warrior in a battlefield.

I think that the battlefield is a metaphor (or a simili dont know which is correct), and we are the warriors. To give examples, to a basketball player the court he plays is the battlefield, to a student his school is the battlefield, this could be extended in every possible walks and dimensions. The whole idea of Gita (as i understand) is to do our duties in the battlefield with discipline and not quitting the battlefield at any time because of our inner conflicts. So if I were a student (warrior) I must perform the duties in my school (battlefield) so on and soforth for all walks of life.

(Often) We stumble upon conflicts and problems in performing duties in our battlefield, there are times that we face so much stress that we opt to quit the battlefield as we have some problem or the other in performing duties. This spirtual text is for Arjuna in us not to quit the battlefield but to stay in it and perform our duties with discipline.

On a relevant note, I happened to read what Vivek Paul has said in reply for being asked what is the secret of success (i have paraphrased the question )...Paul replies that having large goals and having the strictest discipline in working towards it is the secret of sucess...

The Gita ends with this words...

"Where Krishna is the lord of discipline,
and Arjuna is the archer,
there do fortune, victory, abundance,
and mortality exist, so I think"

I see a lot of same thing being said in Vivek Paul's reply and in the last few lines of the gita and I think it is totally cool way to end the awesome book.

This is what I think how the Gita does touch upon Existentialism, here is a previous post for the context and background.

The Gita speaks all the time that in a battlefield a man must perform his duties with discipline, but it never explains what the duties of the man in the battlefield is...which may hint subtly that man is free to choose his duties but must perform the duty he chose with utmost discipline which correlates well with the ideologies of existentialism...