Tyaktvottiṣṭha! On Radical Compassion, Dharma and Doing the Right Thing
“Peace begins by not turning away from suffering”
-Michael Stone
I never wanted to believe that the world is evil.
I heard from a young age ideas like “Life is Suffering” and felt like it couldn’t be true. I’m an eternal optimist and have always believed in the innate goodness of people.
Since growing up a little, and especially since immersing myself in the yoga teachings for some years I realise that the world is evil. But it’s also good. It’s both and also neither, because things just don’t fall into a clean dichotomy like that. Good and bad is in everything - everything just IS.
Yoga teaches us how to hold space for everything - for good and evil and everything in between.
Yoga = Union
One of the ways Yoga is defined is as ‘union’ - based on the Sanskrit root ‘yuj’ which means ‘to yoke’. This means bringing things together - even opposites. And if yoga means bringing things together, it is necessarily an active undertaking.
If you think about āsana - physical practice, it’s obvious that yoga is active. But in fact all aspects of yoga are active - meditation, ethics, philosophy - they are all the dynamic, purposeful action of coming into presence with what is unfolding, really, and right now.
“klaibyaṁ mā sma gamaḥ pārtha naitat tvayyupapadyate
kṣudraṁ hṛidaya-daurbalyaṁ tyaktvottiṣṭha parantapa
You should never yield to cowardice, O Pārtha, it does not suit you. Abandon this lowly faintness of heart. Stand up! Scorcher of the Foe. ”
“na karmaṇām anārambhān naiṣkarmyaṁ puruṣo ’śnute
na ca sannyasanād eva siddhiṁ samadhigahchati
It is not by abstaining from action that one (puruṣa) attains freedom from action, nor by renunciation (saṁnyāsa) alone does one reach perfection.”
In the Bhagavad Gītā, the warrior prince Arjuna is faced by a crushing dilemma - he faces a battle in which he must fight against his family, his loved ones, his gurus. He is paralysed with fear and panic and doesn’t know what to do, and drops his bow in despair, and declares, “I will not fight”.
Krishna, his friend and charioteer responds straight away with - “Stand up” - Uttiṣṭha! - inaction is no solution.
When things are hard, when they seem impossible or don’t make sense, our impulse is to turn away. Throughout the Gītā, Arjuna’s humanity is sharply familiar. He is everyman, a troubled person like you or me, and we recognise his responses. This is why the text, which by the way, was composed not for forest ascetics, but for worldly warriors, kṣatriyas, people who are deeply involved with the material world, is so moving, so beautiful for us, because it realises that the world is not easy and we will come up against situations that seem impossible to cope with.
“yadā yadā hi dharmasya glānir bhavati bhārata
abhyutthānam adharmasya tadātmānaṁ sṛijāmyaham
paritrāṇāya sādhūnāṁ vināśāya ca duṣkṛitām
dharma-sansthāpanārthāya sambhavāmi yuge yuge
Whenever, wherever there is a waning of righteousness (dharma) and a rising up of unrighteousness (adharma) then I give forth myself.
To protect in all ways the good and to destroy the doers of evil, and for establishing dharma, I come into manifesting being, age after age.”
The thing is, in the Gītā, Arjuna is not alone. He has Krishna by his side, holding him up, holding space for his distress, advising and teaching him (and us).
Who is Krishna?
Olivia Fraser, Triptych Gopashtami
If you read on a bit in the text to chapter 11, it’s revealed that Krishna is not just Arjuna’s childhood pal, he’s also a worldly embodiment, an avatāra, of Vishnu, the sustainer of all life. So it’s not just good advice he’s giving, it’s a divine, omniscient (very zoomed out) perspective, an understanding of the very big picture and how things just gotta go.
Dharma and adharma
You might have heard this word ‘dharma’ - sometimes translated as ‘duty’ or ‘purpose’, it comes from the verbal root dhr- , meaning ‘to support’ - the same root that gives us dharana - concentration (the 6th limb of yoga). It’s what holds the world together, the force of ‘how things need to be’. This is how we get ‘duty’ - what needs to be done. And they also have the idea of adharma - things which go against this force of how things ought to be. One way you could think of this is as 'injustice.’
Krishna says in chapter four of the Gītā that whenever there’s a period of adharma, he manifests in physical form to bring things back on track. One might imagine him as a caped crusader coming down to earth to save the day. Yoga isn’t a mythology of superheroes and magic, though, it’s deeply human and practical, and Krishna is much closer than it seems.
“aham ātmā guḍākeśa sarva-bhūtāśaya-sthitaḥ
aham ādiś ca madhyaṁ ca bhūtānām anta eva ca
O Guḍākeśa, I am the ātman standing in the heart of all beings. I am the beginning, the middle, and also the end of beings. ”
Yes, Krishna is a powerful force for good, but he’s not a supernatural being, he’s in all of us. In the hearts of all of us, there is a voice that tells us what is right or wrong, that tells us what the right thing to do is, how we can act in the fullness of our humanity, which is divine and aligned with dharma and what is right.
““In the context of a work of literature, the Mahābhārata, Krishna functions as the procedural ideal that allows us to navigate personal interests in a world of hostility. “”
Krishna, you could think of him as representing conscience or an aspect of consciousness, is in all of us, and when things are going badly, he - or rather our understanding of what is Right, and what is to be done - rises up, reminding us of our humanity, of our purpose in making the wheel of dharma turn, bringing things back to how they need to go. It is so easy to forget, and the Gītā as a text and a tradition, is here to remind us of this force in us, to remind us that if we listen, our hearts will tell us what to do and give us the courage to take action.
Is that what happens?
When horrors are being perpetrated all around, do we rise up? Or do we look away?
What is the consequence of witnessing injustice and not taking action?
Central to the Indian tradition is the concept of karma - the understanding that everything we do, and everything that happens to us, makes an impact on us, creating imprints on us called saṁskāra. As humans it’s not actually possible for us to be unaffected by injustice and suffering. Biologically we are built for empathy, as our mirror neurons make us experience others’ pain as our own. This is our physical reality, although we don’t always act on it. Central to the problem of Compassion and Dharma is the fact that we are often incapable of holding the discomfort of witnessing others’ suffering, and so we turn away from it either by blocking it out or telling ourselves stories, rationalising, making excuses about why it’s nothing to do with us and we shouldn’t get involved.
But have you ever been in a situation where you saw bad things happening and did nothing? How did it make you feel?
This can be as simple as walking down the street and not giving your change to a homeless person on the street, or seeing news of a horrific conflict and switching over the channel to some light entertainment. We make a choice in the moment, and what effect does that choice have not only on the person in trouble, but also on us?
“ atha cet tvam imaṁ dharmyaṁ saṅgrāmaṁ na kariṣyasi
tataḥ sva-dharmaṁ kīrtiṁ ca hitvā pāpam avāpsyasi
Now, if you do not embark upon this proper lawful engagement, having avoided your own duty and glory, you will incur evil. ”
If we don’t do our dharma, we cause pāpa - often translated as ‘evil’.
The word pāpa isn’t as black and white as pure evil of course - it’s understood to be an action which creates more karmas.
When we don’t act, the cause and effect of inaction doesn’t pass us by. While we might rationalise and distract ourselves, the imprint is made. There is a residue - which might be feelings of guilt, which then lead us either to feel bad about ourselves and lose our courage, or conversely it can cement a narrative and system of avoidance, where we tell more and more stories to separate ourselves from the suffering. Ideas about why we are right and they are wrong, which then influence how we view the next situation and person we encounter, shutting us off more and more from our connection to others, isolating us in our selfishness and crucially, disconnecting us from our innate ability to feel what is Right and True.
Where is our humanity? In our ahiṁsā
“ahiṁsā-pratiṣṭhāyāṁ tat-sannidhau vaira-tyāgaḥ
In the presence of one who is established in nonviolence, enmity is abandoned. ”
The yoga we practise is based in the Eight-Limbed system of Patañjali, laid out in his Yoga Sūtras (you’ve heard of them, I’m sure).
The way sūtra discourse works, the idea at the top of the list (and the last) is the most important, and in the list of eight limbs, the first is Yama - practices of Ethics. And the first of these is ahiṁsā - non-harming. As commentator on the Sūtras Vijñānabhikṣu explained, “Just as the footprints of an elephant cover the footprints of all other creatures, says so does ahiṁsā cover all the other yamas.”
Nowadays ahiṁsā is often misunderstood as simply abstaining from violence, almost as passivity.
But as we established at the very beginning, yoga is never passive, it’s an active engagement with what is here and now. And ahiṁsā, thus, doesn’t mean avoiding violence, but rather ‘the opposite of violence’ - doing everything we can to stop violence happening and taking action to forge peace.
““Patañjali’s view of morality is activistic. It is about affecting change in ourselves and in the world. It is not about simple withdrawal.”
There must be a rising up - and I don’t mean being meeting violence with violence, but realising how we are participating in the suffering by turning away from it. Shyam Ranganathan poses two questions:
What are the harmful things that you are accepting in the world?
What are the harmful things that you are ignoring or have made peace with?
First, we accept harm - we let it happen, by turning away, by ignoring it, by negligence.
And then, even more dangerous, is how we integrate the harm into our own way of thinking by rationalising it and changing the narrative in our mind.
