Excerpts from - The Difficulty of Being Good: On The Subtle Art of Dharma

What is here is found elsewhere.

What is not here is nowhere. - Mahabharata

I recently read "The Difficulty of Being Good: On The Subtle Art of Dharma". This is undoubtedly one of the best books I have ever read. "Why be good? What exactly is Dharma? How does one practise it, and to what effect?" - Gurcharan Das is looking for the answers to these question in the Mahabharata. He analyses the triumphs and failures of every key character - not sparing even Krishna, the God - and draws parallel to the contemporary world and what we could learn from it. I am posting some of my favourite excerpts so that I can come back to it again at some point in future.

Draupadi’s Courage

The immorality of remaining silent

Vidura, Duryodhana's fearless counsellor, explains by quoting the sage Kashyapa about the immorality of remaining silent when there is evil afoot. When honest persons fail in their duty to speak up, they 'wound' dharma and commit adharma. Thus, the leader of the conspiracy earns half the penalty; the immediate culprit a quarter, and the witnesses who do not speak up are also guilty by a quarter.


Dharma is subtle
The Mahabharata will keep returning to Bhishma's conclusion that 'dharma is subtle'. Moral dilemmas are confusing because when I make a moral judgement about somebody's action, I must make the same judgement about a similar act in similar circumstances- in other words, what kind of behaviour am l ready to prescribe to myself, given that I am prescribing it for everybody in the same situation?" This sort of reasoning does not come naturally to human beings.


‘Whom did you lose first, yourself or me?’
Meanwhile, Draupadi’s unanswered question hovers over the entire Mahabharata: no one ever resolves it, and Yudhishthira is still trying to figure it out in the end.

Draupadi's insistent question also raises the issue about who has the authority to decide about dharma. It is curious that no one in the Hastinapura assembly that day appealed to God to decide who is right and who is wrong. This is because God is not expected to be an authority on dharma among Hindus, Buddhists or Jains. Human reason and the search for a rational basis of dharma is often compatible with these religious traditions. But if God is not an authority, then who is? Who is responsible for dharma? In his influential law book, Manusmriti, Manu cited plural authorities for dharma two thousand years ago:

The root of dharma is the entire Veda, the tradition and customs of those who know the vedas, the conduct of virtuous people, and what is satisfactory to oneself.

But the Mahabharata, in its typically sceptical way, challenges Manu and questions if the vedas can be arbiters of true dharma:

In the opinion of the world the words of the Vedas are contradictory. How can there be scriptural authority over whether something is a true conclusion or not when such contradiction exists?

The epic also wonders if the wise can be relied upon to be authorities on dharma: 'intelligence appears differently in different men. They all take delight in their own different understanding.'

If God is not the arbiter of dharma, and if the vedas are contradictory, and if wise persons cannot agree about right and wrong, where does it leave the ordinary individual? Kulluka, who wrote a commentary in the fifteenth century on Manu's verse quoted above, declares that the 'satisfaction of the mind is the only authority in cases of conflicting alternatives'. The classical poet, Kalidasa, who lived in the fifth century AD, was of the same view: In matters where doubt intervenes, the natural inclination of the heart of the good person becomes the "authority or the decisive factor". This explains why the characters in the Mahabharata and in other texts of the classical Indian tradition prefer to depend on reason rather than on blind faith.

The idea of dharma based on one's reason sits side by side reason, thus, with deep faith in the existence of God in the Mahabharata. But it is left to individuals to decide how to best order their lives. Given the plurality of authorities, one has to depend on oneself. No wonder the epic says dharma is subtle.


Dharma as balance
Walter Lippmann, the distinguished American public intellectual, said in a speech in 1941 that people do not become happy by satisfying desires, Happiness comes from upholding a certain balance, by living according to a system of beliefs that restrains them and gives coherence to their desires. 'Above all the other necessities of human nature, above the satisfaction of any other need, above hunger, love, pleasure, fame - even life itself - what a man most needs is the conviction that he is contained within the discipline of an ordered existence.' He was speaking about dharma, which also means upholding a certain balance. Dharma is precisely this discipline of ordered existence, a 'belief system that restrains and gives coherence to desire.'

Yudhishthira's Duty

Why be good?
Draupadi asks Yudhishthira, what is the point of being good when it only brings grief? What kind of world is it where the bad seem to be rewarded while the good, who uphold dharma, suffer such hardship? Dharma is supposed to protect the good king, but I find it doesn't protect you. You have never strayed. You have treated everyone alike. Even after winning all the earth, your hand did not grudge. After losing the crooked game of dice, you remained faithful to your word. She cries out in anger :

When I see noble, moral and modest persons harassed in this way, and the evil and ignoble flourishing and happy, I stagger with wonder. I can only condemn the Placer, who allows such outrage.

In a typically modest way, Yudhishthira expresses his instinctive sense of duty act: 'I act because I must'. He does not follow dharma because of any hope of reward that might come. He acts from a sense of what he has to do. Dharma or what he has to do is a standard of conduct, and a society needs standards. He who doubts dharma finds in nothing else a standard,' Yudhishthira says, 'and ends in setting himself as a standard.' He is saying, in effect, that following dharma is its own reward. When one acts, thus, it is motives and not consequences that are important. Krishna will elaborate this idea later of acting without thinking of the 'fruits' of one's actions.

Immanuel Kant, the eighteenth century German philosopher, in trying to understand this sense of duty, said: "When moral worth is at issue, what counts is not actions, which one sees, but those inner principles of action that one does not see.' Kant also felt that one's sense of duty originates in one's humanity, but he added that the noble descent of duty lies in the autonomy of the rational being. Kant located the origin of dharma in man's ability to reason, and the ability to reason underpins men's autonomy. This condition, Kant wrote, requires that a person never be used as a means when it is an end in itself.


Means vs End
Consequentialist says: To save the family, abandon individual. To save the village, abandon a family; to sate the country abandon the village.

Vidura's position is that if an action produces good consequences, then it is good. Yudhishthira might not have abandoned an individual for the sake of the family. His sense of duty to ahimsa, might not have allowed him to sacrifice even a single life. He goes further than Kant: he looks upon sentient beings (not just human beings) as ends in themselves. When one sacrifices an individual for a village then one treats that individual as a means rather than an end.

It is dilemmas such as these - between intentions and consequences and ends and means - that make dharma subte as Bhishma pointed out to Draupadi in the assembly. Perhaps because he feels guilty for not saving Draupadi on that day. Bhishma will return to the difficulty of being good in Book Twelve when it comes to a trade-off between telling the truth and saving a life. He tells Yudhishthira about Kaushika, an ascetic without much learning, who is accosted one day by a group of thieving cut-throats who are seeking the man who had witnessed their crime. Kaushika had seen the witness run into the forest and he knows that if he reveals it, he is issuing a death sentence. He must choose between the dharma of satya, telling the truth, or of ahinsa, saving a life. Kaushika chooses the duty of satya over ahimsa. The robbers catch and kill their prey, and the ascetic ends in a gruesome hell because he failed to understand that dharma in this instance required him to tell a white lie to the villains.


Artha and Kama
But one who is destitute of wealth, can not practice dharma.


Can Dharma be taught?
Both Plato and Aristotle believed that virtue could be taught. A person's character is not something that one is born with. It is constantly evolving through repeated actions, and one can be educated to become more moral. To become a musician, Aristotle says, requires skill and repetitive practice. In the same way, to become virtuous requires repeating repeating virtuous actions. I tend to view the old concept of karma in this light. When I repeat certain actions, I accumulate karma of a certain kind, which builds a certain kind of character and predisposes me to act in a certain way. Karma for me is not something supernatural but svabhava, an inclination to act in a certain way as result of my habits, which have been formed as a result of past actions. So when Yudhishthira tells Draupadi that eventually human acts do bear fruit, even though the fruit is invisible, one might interpret 'fruit' to mean the building of character through repeated actions. Yudhishthira was certainly aware that repeated actions had a way of changing one's inclinations to act in a certain way. That inclination is character.

Bhishma's Selflessness

Do not renounce the world and become a hermit. Instead, learn to change your attitude while living and working in the world.

Nishkama Karma
Mahabharata and Indian tradition in general regards karma as bondage. Actions, both good and bad bind one to an unhappy of birth and rebirth due to the relentless moral accounting enforced by the law of karma. The purpose of life is liberation from the phenomenal world, which is 'a prison of kama'. Detaching ones actions from personal reward changes the quality of one's actions, according to the Gita. As one becomes less self-centered karma does not stick to ones actions By acting in a selfless way one also achieves liberation from the consequences of one's actions.

Addendum: I have been taking Gita classes at Google. Himanshu, in the last class brought my attention to a verse mentioning about the 3 kinds of karma: karma (good deeds), vikarma (bad deeds) and akarma (neutral deeds). Both karma and vikrama will need to be accounted for, the former as material pleasure and the latter as punishment. Also, karma and vikarma don't cancel each other. This means even good karma will lead you to being born again. The purpose of life is to burn the results of all your karma and vikarma and just do akarma which gets you nothing in accounting.

What is my duty?
Immoral selfless behavior could lead to disasters. E.g. Nazis justified their evil acts against Jews on the grounds that they were not acting in selfish ends: they were doing their duty to their country.

Krishna's Guile

The law of karma
Krishna seems to be suggesting that all of life is subject to the law of karma. A person is free to act, but once deed is done, no one can stop its relentless consequences. Even God cannot interfere. The law of karma is relentless and it trumps even God. ‘The Hindu conception of God doesn't include the attribute of omnipotence’, and this is in striking contrast to Judeo-Christian theology. To a Hindu, it makes sense for Krishna to tell Yudhishthira at the end of the war that the Pandavas won partly through ‘luck’. The Indian medieval philosopher Shankara explained this in his commentary on the Brahma Sutras. He said that one merely reaps the results of one’s moral actions sown in the past. One’s karma decides if one will experience pleasure or pain, and this is decided by one’s previous actions. God does not want to come in the way of this cosmic justice. Hence, God is not unjust. Accordingly, the problem of explaining unmerited suffering does not arise, and the problem of evil is a problem of ignorance. Karma explains it all.


Krishna's punishment
A few days later as krishna lies resting in the forest, an ordinary hunter mistakes him for an animal, and pierces the sole of his foot with an arrow. It kills him. He does not die the noble death of the warriors of the Mahabharata. Flowers do not fall from above as they did at Kama's death. He dies like any creature in the forest. 'It is the meanest death in history'. While recognizing his divinity, I believe it is the epic's way of showing disapproval of Krishna's misdeeds.


The ambiguous human condition
Krishna's role in the epic forces one to confront a moral dilemma. How does one explain that good persons, who had strong and persuasive reasons to make war, could win only by unfair means? How can one think of them as good if they can succeed only by fighting in unfair ways? How, then, does one distinguish between the 'wicked Kauravas' and the 'good Pandavas', and indeed between good and evil? The Pandavas, along with Krishna, were supposed to be the good guys yet they managed to kill every Kaurava commander - Bhishma, Drona, Karna and Duryodhana - by foul means. On the other hand, the Kaurava heroes - supposedly the bad guys fought honestly and heroically, especially Duryodhana and Karna.

These are genuine dilemmas, and the text does not offer easy answers. If the Mahabharata's editors had to defend themselves, they might have said something like this: like all human beings, the epic's characters are an ineradicable mixture of good and evil (sat, tam, rag). It is a mistake to slot them into compartments labelled good and evil "Both sides engage in good and bad deeds and there is greatness on both sides. It would have been easy to make Krishna a perfect god, who always upholds dharma. However, the point of the Mahabharata is that dharma is sukshma, subtle, and it is often difficult to tell right from wrong. Since Krishna's deceptions take place on the human stage, they are an expression of our ambiguous human condition. To have done otherwise would have been to miss the point.

Ashwatthama's Revenge

There are a number of reasons why I felt that revenge and retributive justice are wrong: "it employs the suffering of another human being to satisfy oneself; it is connected with obsession, rage, escalating violence - all of which are morally objectionable; those against whom we take revenge are unlikely to concur with our perceptions of the wrong; finally, revenge goes against our obligation to respect human beings and to limit their suffering." Thus, I sympathized with the earlier Yudhishthira and began to believe that the capacity to overcome and resentment anger amounts to a virtue. I realized that forgiveness allows the victim to see the wrongdoer also in a different light. It is not merely passive. By changing the way one perceives the other person, forgiveness makes one want to act rather than merely feel.

Yet, I felt that there are strict limits to forgiveness. It took Yudhishthir a thirteen harsh years in exile to realize this. The first sign of this change came, as we have seen, on the day after Abhimanyu's wedding, when Satyaki proclaims in Virata's court: "No law can be found against killing enemies who are plotting to kill us." As he took charge of the peace negotiations, Yudhishthira realized that he might have to go to war. His new pragmatic down-to-earth view of dharma recognizes the limits of goodness. It is grounded in human self-interest, but without being amoral. Retributive justice avoids both extremes--the amorality of Duryodhana and the idealistic super-morality of the earlier Yudhishthira.

Ultimately, Yudhishthira accepts that there will always be wrongdoing in the world, and if necessary, a king must go to war to protect the innocent. And he does. After the war, Bhishma instructs him on the dharma of a good king and teaches him that retributive justice protects the innocent, and indeed danda, the rod or retributive justice, is the source of civilized behaviour:

"If the rod of force did not exist in this world, beings would be nasty and brutish to each other. Because they far punishment, beings do not kill each other, Yudhishthira. As they are preserved by the rod of force day after day, king, his subjects make the king grow greater therefore the rod of force is what is most important. It puts this world into a stable order quickly, king."

Yudhishthira in the end agrees.

Mahabharata's Dharma

One should never do to another what one regards as injurious to oneself. This, in brief, is the law of dharma. - Mahabharata XVIII.113.8

Yaksha: "What is the highest dharma in the world?"
Yudhishthira: Compassion. At the center of this is the emphatetic question, "How would I feel if I was the one who was suffering?"

Yudhishthira exemplifies this quality at various points in the epic - "weeping with all the creatures" - by mourning for all those who died in the war, by choosing Nakula to be the one to get alive in the Yaksha prashna, by insisting the dog goes with him and by insisting that he says in hell with his brothers and wife.

Conclusion

Ultimately, it is left to individuals to decide how best to order their lives, and Indians seem to have come up with two broad approaches to the problem of living. The first we might call Draupadi's way (known in tradition as pravitti), which affirms world and believes that by observing one's social duties (such as the warrior duties of a kshatriya) one attains swarga-loka, the heaven of the gods. The second is Yudhishthira's way called nivratti), which is a tendency to deny this impermanent world and its worldly duties and seek liberation from its bondage via an ascetic life of meditation. 

Whichever way one chooses, there is the familiar pain of being human, being alive, and not knowing when one is going to die. Karna expresses his sense of mortality thus:

I see it now: this world is swiftly passing.

Whereas Yudhishthira thinks of mortality as time cooking us, Karna regards it as unyielding duration. This is the ultimate human dilemma. "Never very distant is the elegiac regret that no other way seems possible, that the relentless passage of time carries all before it, that the alternatives to this inescapable cycle can only be dimly sensed, like memories from a fading dream." What is dimly sensed, it seems to me, is the very modern possibility that an act of goodness might actually triumph over one's mortality, and this could also give meaning to one's life. To a person who may or may not find ultimate meaning in God, the Mahabharata offers an alternative life dedicated to dharma.