Human Nature & The Chariot
This blog piece turns to ancient Indian mythology for basics of living a greater life.
If there were just 10 of us on this earth, no one would be losing sleep over big questions or curiosities or visions for the future et cetera. That is the simplest social unit, whose only task between sunrise and sunset would be to worry for food, run for food, and then rest for food, to repeat every day. In our abundance on earth, supported by basic amenities for our sustenance, we begin forming various pathways like our brains do. These pathways of curiosity begin at one end and culminate with satisfaction at the other. With the development of our brains also followed the development of our inquiries into what makes us, the world, and how this world works, beyond mere survival and sustenance. We grew into complex beings from a simple and single organisms.
We freely inquire into the aspects of life in general and ours in particular. The ones who do this are few but their impact is farther. I too bear curiosity as a cross, it perhaps lives through me. My solace is in the bibliosmia of rectangular cubes with black ink on the white background of varying lengths, size, fun, leisure and wisdom. One of my neural circulatory stays piqued by human nature. Being human is explorable within the confines of rules of life because without such guiding principles and rules we are just primitive minded beings driven by instinctual needs.
A good starting point for ‘how we are’ can go through ‘how we ought’ to be. This quest goes back millennia on the shoulders of professional inquirers who carry suffixes of -ologists, -ians, or -phers. Being from a science background, I have had the opportunity to learn the ancient and the subsequent history into how our evolution, married with civilization, travelled through time. But this time I wished to slide down the folklore path of mythology. I happen to be at a lucky place on this earth for this particular richness-India.
Indian mythology is voluminous in its breadth and depth. From vedas to puranas to upanishads (technically part of vedas but deserve separate mention because of their superhero status) to the ‘brahma-sutras’ to the ‘bhagavad-gita’ and lastly to the school of philosophies, one finds that just one of these are enough for a lifetime if one were to start knitting his understanding of them for their his sake of appreciation. Two great epics particularly hold the Indian thought from someone’s childhood to the final shiver of their life’s flame: Ramayana and Mahabharata. Out of these two, the epic Mahabharata contains a lot of lengthy discourses and that’s where I turn to; thanks to Ami’s tremendous and everlasting task of undertaking the interpretation of both the epics.
I turn to Mahabharata Unravelled-II by Ami Ganatra; this is my first reading of any of her works and I picked this one particularly first because it specifically covers the dharma discourses.
In the Indian tradition of living aka sanatana dharma (timeless fundamental truth), four pillars ought to govern life called purusharthas. For the sake of convenience let’s call them ‘four pillars of the Indian way of living’. Joking! Why would I want to change that beautiful and poetic word and offer some english word for the irreplaceable sanskrit. The four purusharthas are: dharma (righteousness), artha (financial stability), kaama (various desires and their fulfilment) and moksha (liberation from the cycle of the previous three). The great upanishads deal with the moksha while the remaining three are intertwined and there is a single body of work called nitishastra which deals with them.
When the great battle of Mahabharta was over and yudhishthira was taking the invaluable wisdom from Bhishma, he asked Bhisma why the need for a king arose in the first place? Bhishma told him that in the beginning there was satyuga where people were free from ill will and no ruler was required as everyone got along nicely at the time for a long time. With the coming of age and our progress, society developed aversion, animosity, selfishness, and ego. People began fighting amongst themselves, got out of touch with nature, their duties towards each other and the world.
Reading this in the book, I could not help but draw the parallels between how we evolved from hunter gatherers to agriculturalists, craftsmen, traders, and small societies over the various ages over thousands of years. If in a time zone called satyuga people had no ill will then wouldn’t it be possible that there were no aspects of abundance, like in a fairly developed civilisation, which make people envious or desirous, and therefore, greedy, self-interested, and egoists? For us to have the negative traits, there has to be an environment which enable those traits. After thousands of years of slow evolution, we finally reached a point where smaller groups formed bigger unions and eventually societies which then inspired the need to form rules within which those settled people should live in order for a balanced and sustaining society. It is definitely true that once we form bigger unions, we need more defined rules to co-exist because everyone can’t be allowed to have their own ways.
The development of society, coupled with its devolution into negative human traits, got the devatas (deities, so many of them in the Indian pantheon) worried who then approached the creator Lord Brahma of the Hindu Trinity of Lord Vishnu (caretaker), Lord Shankra (culminator).
Lord Brahma created the nitishastra for human life, polity and administration which required a king to implement it. The unabridged version nitishastra by Lord Brahma contained one hundred thousand chapters called Trivarga. Lord Shankra then learned all that to reduce it to an abridged version of ten thousand chapters called Vaishalaksha. This is a serious compression ratio! Lord Shankra gave it to Guru Brihaspati (reducing to five thousand chapters) --->Lord Indra (reducing to three thousand chapters), and lastly Guru Shankracharya (reducing to just a thousand chapters). There we have the universal constitution covering the intertwined aspects of righteousness, finances, and desire fulfilment.
We definitely need framework to live as a society and our thoughts need a similar framework to operate well in such a society. Both the answers lie in nitishastras but the focus of this piece is internal improvement.
The rules of living within the three purusharthas requires foremost the indriya nigraha as ordained by all the scriptures fundamentally. Indriya nigraha means the control of senses by control of mind and the sense and mind cannot be reined in by buddhi (intellect) only. The most beautiful analogy can be found in the Yamraj (Lord of Death) and Nachiketa discourse where the lord gives the Chariot analogy as,
Know the self (atma) as rider in the chariot, body as the chariot, know intelligence as the driver, know the mind as the reins, the senses are the horses, the objects which senses perceive are the path where the horses desire to take; the self in association with body, mind and senses is the experiencer of pleasure and pain.
The charioteer has to ensure that the horses stay on the right track reined by the intellect and mind control; otherwise, if the horses go berserk then we slide through life riled by miseries, obsessions, and ill will.
Dharma is not set as a specific tenet which one follows objectively. Dharma is subjective and sense control is the first requirement for that. The scriptures provide a basic idea for dharma which fundamentally means such actions which leads to sustainability, prosperity and well-being of the society. Therefore, it may vary from society to society, tradition to tradition, and person to person. Such a concept was less amorphous in the societies of the past where there were kingdoms and rule of the one to ensure everyone followed them. One might find it harder to understand dharma today in this highly connected and globalised world driven by scientific aptitude that many concepts appear amorphous like culture and dharma. Individualism prevails more than the cohesions of a group and if such cohesion does exist it is found in the protected tribes and self-sustaining smaller units which are fewer in the world.
Alas, the fundamental truth doesn’t differ even in this age that if indriya nigraha is understood and followed, human nature would operate within a sensible and rational framework which cushions our existence and results in peaceful co-existence. A lot of lifestyles based mental disorders or health issues can be limited by being mindful of tongue, eye and nose senses and then some sense of sense-control. Being mindful of these three will save us from junk for the stomach and the mind.