Arjuna Quotes

“Your commitment is to action alone, not to the fruits of action. That must never be: you must not be motivated by the fruits of your actions. Yet you must not become attached to inaction. Perform your duties as a warrior and cast off attachment, Arjuna, indifferent alike whether you gain or gain not. This indifference is called yoga. Action is far lower than the rule of understanding, Arjuna. Seek refuge in wisdom. They are unworthy who are moved only by gain. Lesson Two, verses 47-49”

“My dear Arjuna, only by undivided devotional service can I be understood as I am, standing before you, and can thus be seen directly. Only in this way can you enter into the mysteries of My understanding.”

“You have the right to work, but never to the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should you long for inaction. Perform work in this world, Arjuna, as a man established within himself - without selfish attachments, and alike in success and defeat.”

“A psychiatrist on the Baader-Meinhof gang: „They seek salvation in a paranoia that blinds them to reality, because they believe everything that surrounds them is an evil machination”. On this point they are not blind. Man cannot, however, look upon the underlying evil and thus cannot escape the punishment of total blindness and corruption meted out to all except inspired seers, and especially those athletes who have overcome evil and been immunized before approaching the vision. For Arjuna the sight of God in his terrifying aspect is cathartic; he remains a warrior and a righteous man. For a Baader, a glimpse behind the veil produces mental upheaval.”

“The battlefield is symbolic of the field of life, where every creature lives on the death of another. A realization of the inevitable guilt of life may so sicken the heart, that like Hamlet, or like Arjuna, one may refuse to go on with it. On the other hand, like most of the rest of us, one may invent a false finally unjustified image of oneself as an exceptional phenomenon in the world--not guilty as others are, but justified in one's inevitable sinning, because one represents the good. Such self-righteousness leads to a misunderstanding, not only of oneself, but of the nature of both Man and the Cosmos. The goal of the myth is to dispel the need for such life-ignorance by affecting a reconciliation of the individual consciousness with the universal will, and this is affected through a realization of the true relationship of the passing phenomena of time to the imperishable life that lives and dies in all.”

“The greatest book in the world, the Mahabharata, tells us we all have to live and die by our karmic cycle. Thus works the perfect reward-and-punishment, cause-and-effect, code of the universe. We live out in our present life what we wrote out in our last. But the great moral thriller also orders us to rage against karma and its despotic dictates. It teaches us to subvert it. To change it. It tells us we also write out our next lives as we live out our present.The Mahabharata is not a work of religious instruction.It is much greater. It is a work of art.It understands men will always fall in the shifting chasm between the tug of the moral and the lure of the immoral. It is in this shifting space of uncertitude that men become men. Not animals, not gods. It understands truth is relative. That it is defined by context and motive. It encourages the noblest of men - Yudhishtra, Arjuna, Lord Krishna himself - to lie, so that a greater truth may be served.It understands the world is powered by desire. And that desire is an unknowable thing. Desire conjures death, destruction, distress.But also creates love, beauty, art. It is our greatest undoing. And the only reason for all doing.And doing is life. Doing is karma.Thus it forgives even those who desire intemperately. It forgives Duryodhana. The man who desires without pause. The man who precipitates the war to end all wars. It grants him paradise and the admiration of the gods. In the desiring and the doing this most reviled of men fulfils the mandate of man. You must know the world before you are done with it. You must act on desire before you renounce it. There can be no merit in forgoing the not known.The greatest book in the world rescues volition from religion and gives it back to man.Religion is the disciplinarian fantasy of a schoolmaster.The Mahabharata is the joyous song of life of a maestro.In its tales within tales it takes religion for a spin and skins it inside out. Leaves it puzzling over its own poisoned follicles.It gives men the chance to be splendid. Doubt-ridden architects of some small part of their lives. Duryodhanas who can win even as they lose.”

“O MAN! Offer Thy labyrinthine longings into a monotheistic bonfire consecrated to the unparalleled God.Burn desire for human affection in the fire of aspiration for GOD alone, a love solitary because omnipresent!Throw faggot of ignorance to incandesce the blaze of insight! Devour all sorrows in the sorrow for God's absence. Consume all regrets in meditative bliss!”