The question about non-violence
is not easy to answer. There has been a strong movement all over
the world that violence leads nowhere, that non-violence, ahimsa,
is the best and the only way, that 'the principle of an eye for
an eye will only end with the whole world becoming blind', that
it is better to suffer than to respond by violence which can never
be justified. The right way is to conquer violence through goodwill
and love.
There is no doubt a great
truth in this, but like all truths seen and grasped by the mind
it is too trenchant and limited to be applied at all times, in every
situation and by everybody. And perhaps the best answer to this
question has been given by Krishna to Arjuna in the Gita showing
the spiritual way to the seeker.
This is what Sri Aurobindo
wrote in his journal Bande Mataram, many years ago:
"Ages ago there
was a priest of Baal who thought himself commissioned by the god
to kill all who did not bow the knee to him. All men, terrified
by the power and ferocity of the priest, bowed down before the
idol and pretended to be his servants; and the few who refused
had to take refuge in hills and deserts. At last, a deliverer
came and slew the priest and the world had rest. The slayer was
blamed by those who placed religion in quietude and put passivity
forward as the ideal ethics, but the world looked on him as an
incarnation of God.
A certain class of
mind shrinks from aggressiveness as if it were a sin. Their temperament
forbids them to feel the delight of battle and they look on what
they cannot understand as something monstrous and sinful. 'Heal
hate by love', 'drive out injustice by justice', 'slay sin by
righteousness' is their cry. Love is a sacred name, but it is
easier to speak of love than to love. The love which drives out
hate is a divine quality of which only one man in a thousand is
capable. A saint full of love for all mankind possesses it, a
philanthropist consumed with a desire to heal the miseries of
the race possesses it, but the mass of mankind does not and cannot
rise to the height. Politics is concerned with masses of mankind
and not with individuals. To ask masses of mankind to act as saints,
to rise to the height of divine love and practise it in relation
to their adversaries or oppressors is to ignore human nature.
It is to set a premium on injustice and violence by paralysing
the hand of the deliverer when raised to strike. The Gita is the
best answer to those who shrink from battle as a sin, and aggression
as a lowering of morality…
Justice and righteousness
are the atmosphere of political morality, but the justice and
righteousness of a fighter, not of the priest. Aggression is unjust
only when unprovoked; violence, unrighteous when used wantonly
or for unrighteous ends. It is a barren philosophy which applies
a mechanical rule to all actions, or takes a word and tries to
fit all human life into it.
The sword of the warrior
is as necessary to the fulfilment of justice and righteousness
as the holiness of the saint. Ramdas is not complete without Shivaji.
To maintain justice and prevent the strong from despoiling, and
the weak from being oppressed, is the function for which the Kshatriya
was created. "Therefore," says Sri Krishna in the Mahabharata,
"God created battle and armour, the sword, the bow and the
dagger.
*
Man is of a less terrestrial
mould than some would have him to be. He has an element of the
divine which the politician ignores. The practical politician
looks to the position at the moment and imagines that he has taken
everything into consideration. He has, indeed, studied the surface
and the immediate surroundings, but he has missed what lies beyond
material vision. He has left out of account the divine, the incalculable
in man, that element which upsets the calculations of the schemer
and disconcerts the wisdom of the diplomat."
And this is what Sri
Aurobindo wrote in a letter:
"There is a truth
in Ahimsa, there is a truth in destruction also. I do not teach
that you should go on killing everybody every day as a spiritual
dharma. I say that destruction can be done when it is part of
the divine work commanded by the Divine. Non-violence is better
than violence as a rule, and still sometimes violence may be the
right thing. I consider dharma as relative; unity with the Divine
and action from the Divine Will, the highest way."
The value of an action
is determined not by its nature but by the consciousness in which
it is done, whether it is done without desire for the results and
fruits of works, with complete inner equality, as an offering to
the divine and impelled by the divine.
Here are some excerpts
from Sri Aurobindo's Essays on the Gita and Synthesis
of Yoga, showing the way to the spiritual seeker, the karmayogin:
"Arjuna, still
in the ignorance, may feel in his heart the call of right and
justice and may argue in his mind that abstention from battle
would be a sin entailing responsibility for all the suffering
that injustice and oppression and the evil karma of the triumph
of wrong bring upon men and nations, or he may feel in his heart
the recoil from violence and slaughter and argue in his mind that
all shedding of blood is a sin which nothing can justify. Both
of these attitudes would appeal with equal right to virtue and
reason and it would depend upon the man, the circumstances and
the time which of these might prevail in his mind or before the
eyes of the world. Or he might simply feel constrained by his
heart and his honour to support his friends against his enemies,
the cause of the good and just against the cause of the evil and
oppressive.
The liberated soul
looks beyond these conflicting standards; he sees simply what
the supreme Self demands from him as needful for the maintenance
or for the bringing forward of the evolving Dharma. He has no
personal ends to serve, no personal loves and hatreds to satisfy,
no rigidly fixed standard of action which opposes its rock-line
to the flexible advancing march of the progress of the human race
or stands up defiant against the call of the Infinite. He has
no personal enemies to be conquered or slain, but sees only men
who have been brought up against him by circumstances and the
will in things to help by their opposition the march of destiny.
Against them he can have no wrath or hatred; for wrath and hatred
are foreign to the divine nature. The Asura's desire to break
and slay what opposes him, the Rakshasa's grim lust of slaughter
are impossible to his calm and peace and his all-embracing sympathy
and understanding. He has no wish to injure, but on the contrary
a universal friendliness and compassion, maitrah karuna eva ca:
but this compassion is that of a divine soul overlooking men,
embracing all other souls in himself, not the shrinking of the
heart and the nerves and the flesh which is the ordinary human
form of pity: nor does he attach a supreme importance to the life
of the body, but looks beyond to the life of the soul and attaches
to the other only an instrumental value. He will not hasten to
slaughter and strife, but if war comes in the wave of the Dharma,
he will accept it with a large equality and a perfect understanding
and sympathy for those whose power and pleasure of domination
he has to break and whose joy of triumphant life he has to destroy.
For in all he sees
two things, the Divine inhabiting every being equally, the varying
manifestation unequal only in its temporary circumstances. In
the animal and man, in the dog, the unclean outcaste and the learned
and virtuous Brahmin, in the saint and the sinner, in the indifferent
and the friendly and the hostile, in those who love him and benefit
and those who hate him and afflict, he sees himself, he sees God
and has at heart for all the same equal kindliness, the same divine
affection. Circumstances may determine the outward clasp or the
outward conflict, but can never affect his equal eye, his open
heart, his inner embrace of all. And in all his actions there
will be the same principle of soul, a perfect equality, and the
same principle of work, the will of the Divine in him active for
the need of the race in its gradually developing advance towards
the Godhead.
*
"The worship of
the Master of works demands a clear recognition and glad acknowledgment
of him in ourselves, in all things and in all happenings. Equality
is the sign of this adoration; it is the soul's ground on which
true sacrifice and worship can be done. The Lord is there equally
in all beings, we have to make no essential distinctions between
ourselves and others, the wise and the ignorant, friend and enemy,
man and animal, the saint and the sinner. We must hate none, despise
none, be repelled by none; for in all we have to see the One disguised
or manifested at his pleasure. He is a little revealed in one
or more revealed in another or concealed and wholly distorted
in others according to his will and his knowledge of what is best
for that which he intends to become in form in them and to do
in works in their nature. All is ourself, one self that has taken
many shapes. Hatred and disliking and scorn and repulsion, clinging
and attachment and preference are natural, necessary, inevitable
at a certain stage: they attend upon or they help to make and
maintain Nature's choice in us. But to the Karmayogin they are
a survival, a stumbling-block, a process of the Ignorance and,
as he progresses, they fall away from his nature. The child-soul
needs them for its growth; but they drop from an adult in the
divine culture. In the God-nature to which we have to rise there
can be an adamantine, even a destructive severity but not hatred,
a divine irony but not scorn, a calm, clear-seeing and forceful
rejection but not repulsion and dislike. Even what we have to
destroy, we must not abhor or fail to recognise as a disguised
and temporary movement of the Eternal.
And since all things
are the one Self in its manifestation, we shall have equality
of soul towards the ugly and the beautiful, the maimed and the
perfect, the noble and the vulgar, the pleasant and the unpleasant,
the good and the evil. Here also there will be no hatred, scorn
and repulsion, but instead the equal eye that sees all things
in their real character and their appointed place. For we shall
know that all things express or disguise, develop or distort,
as best they can or with whatever defect they must, under the
circumstances intended for them, in the way possible to the immediate
status or function or evolution of their nature, some truth or
fact, some energy or potential of the Divine necessary by its
presence in the progressive manifestation both to the whole of
the present sum of things and for the perfection of the ultimate
result. That truth is what we must seek and discover behind the
transitory expression; undeterred by appearances, by the deficiencies
or the disfigurements of the expression, we can then worship the
Divine for ever unsullied, pure, beautiful and perfect behind
his masks. All indeed has to be changed, not ugliness accepted
but divine beauty, not imperfection taken as our resting-place
but perfection striven after, the supreme good made the universal
aim and not evil. But what we do has to be done with a spiritual
understanding and knowledge, and it is a divine good, beauty,
perfection, pleasure that has to be followed after, not the human
standards of these things. If we have not equality, it is a sign
that we are still pursued by the Ignorance, we shall truly understand
nothing and it is more than likely that we shall destroy the old
imperfection only to create another: for we are substituting the
appreciations of our human mind and desire-soul for the divine
values."
- Sri
Aurobindo
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