aurobindo | Hindu History

The Ideals of the Kshatriya – Warrior

It is clear to Sri Krishna that Arjuna will not be swayed by philosophical considerations alone, and he therefore next turns his attention to the role and highest ideals of the warrior caste, the kshatriya, to which Arjuna belongs. The principles enunciated here speak to the entire background, training and education that Arjuna has received and if anything, they speak to a deeply-ingrained sense of nobility and chivalry that was the highest ideal of the warrior.

Arjuna should not let the sorrow of the loss of friends, family and loved-ones intervene in the high ideals that he has adopted. Sri Aurobindo explains Sri Krishna’s argument: ” ‘There is no greater good for the Kshatriya than righteous battle, and when such a battle comes to them of itself like the open gate of heaven, happy are the Kshatriyas then. If thou dost not this battle for the right, then has thou abandoned thy duty and virtue and they glory, and sin shall be they portion.’ ”

Arjuna’s despair sets forth the sin of undertaking the action. Sri Krishna counters with the sin of failure to act when the cause is just and the situation demands it. “Battle, courage, power, rule, the honour of the brave, the heaven of those who fall nobly, this is the warrior’s ideal. To lower that ideal, to allow a smirch to fall on that honour, to give the example of a hero among heroes whose action lays itself open to the reproach of cowardice and weakness and thus to lower the moral standard of mankind, is to be false to himself and to the demand of the world on its leaders and kings.”

For Arjuna is fixated on his own individual suffering, but he is the representative man of his age, and his actions provide guidance and direction to others. He has a duty to fulfill and a role to play and abandoning that would lead to confusion and a retrograde motion in society.

Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, First Series, Chapter 7, The Creed of the Aryan Fighter, pg. 60,

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These day modern day Hindus have turned the Kshatriya Dharma to fight intellectual battles, In hope that miraculously word drones are going to win wars.- HH editor )

‘Buddhism with its exaggerated emphasis on quiescence & the quiescent virtue of self-abnegation, its unwise creation of a separate class of quiescents & illuminati, its sharp distinction between monks & laymen implying the inﬁnite inferiority of the latter, its all too facile admission of men to the higher life and its relegation of worldly action to the lowest importance possible stands at the opposite pole from the gospel of Srikrishna and has had the very effect he deprecates; it has been the author of confusion and the destroyer of the peoples.

Under its inﬂuence half the nation moved in the direction of spiritual passivity & negation, the other by a natural reaction plunged deep into a splendid but enervating materialism. As a result our race lost three parts of its ancient heroic manhood, its grasp on the world, its magniﬁcently ordered polity and its noble social fabric.

It is by clinging to a few spars from the wreck that we have managed to perpetuate our existence, and this we owe to the overthrow of Buddhism by Shankaracharya. But Hinduism has never been able to shake off the deep impress of the religion it vanquished; and therefore though it has managed to survive, it has not succeeded in recovering its old vitalising force.

The practical disappearance of the Kshatriya caste (for those who now claim that origin seem to be with a few exceptions Vratya Kshatriyas, Kshatriyas who have fallen from the pure practice and complete temperament of their caste) has operated in the same direction.

The Kshatriyas were the proper depositaries of the gospel of action. But when the Kshatriyas disappeared or became degraded, the Brahmins remained the sole interpreters of the Bhagavadgita, and they, being the highest caste or temperament and their thoughts therefore naturally turned to knowledge and the ﬁnal end of being, bearing moreover still the stamp of Buddhism in their minds, have dwelt mainly on that in the Gita which deals with the element of quiescence.

Time, however, in its revolution is turning back on itself and there are signs that if Hinduism is to last and we are not to plunge into the vortex of scientific atheism and the breakdown of moral ideals which is engulﬁng Europe, it must survive as the religion for which Vedanta, Sankhya &Yoga combined to lay the foundations, which Srikrishna announced & which Vyasa formulated.

– Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings.

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