Scripture Study: Bhagavad Gita, book two verses 11-14

We are doing a scripture study together: reading along through some scriptures and discussing the passages.

From the Winthrop Sargeant translation of The Gita...

11.
The Blessed Lord spoke:
You have mourned those who should not be mourned,
And you speak words as if with wisdom;
The wise do not mourn for the dead or for the living.

12.
Truly there was never a time when I was not,
Nor you, nor these lords of men;
And neither will there be a time when we cease to be
From this time onward.

13.
Just as in the body childhood, adulthood, and old age
Happen to an embodied being,
So also he (the embodied being) acquires another body.
The wise one is not deluded by this.

14.
Physical sensations, truly, Arjuna,
Causing cold, heat, pleasure, or pain,
Come and go and are impermanent.
So manage to endure them, Arjuna.

This is the heart of the Gita. One of its most quoted and well known parts and it’s amazing that it is the very first thing Krishna said. He really went straight to the point. In reality we cannot kill or be killed. The thing that dies is not us. The thing that dies is just a shell.

As beautiful as these passages are, it’s a little dangerous to apply them too directly to our lives, I think. It is worth knowing that in the ultimate reality there is no cause for grief, there is no death, but we still have to participate within maya, the illusion of the world we’re in. There would be chaos otherwise!

I wonder what makes it okay to kill here and now within the Gita and not at other times. It must be about dharma. There are times when it is necessary to kill and times when one should not. As Krishna will go on to say, karmic consequences will attach to the action of killing if one does not do it with perfect non-attachment. We’ll get to that soon.

It’s interesting to me to note the last section I’ve included here. Before I would consider myself of such a level as to decide when it was dharmically appropriate to kill someone else, I would have to master that instruction as well. To be indifferent to cold, heat, pleasure, or pain. There’s not many people able to experience maya as the illusion that it is in that way.

As Sargeant points out, the “embodied” that Sri Krishna speaks of is the soul, the Atman. It is who we really are and it experiences the body and the world. Then it experiences another one.