Hindu stories! Hindu stories!, W. cries as the bus makes its way through the night to Nashville. I'll tell him a great one, I promise, the greatest one of all.
The Maharabharta, the great Indian epic, tells of a battle between two great armies, many of whom knew and loved one another in peacetime. Uncle was set against nephew; friend was to fight against friend. These were the end of times; this was the last battle, or rather, the battle that would set the paradigm of everything to come, in this, the last and lowest of the great Ages.
Arjuna, the great archer and leader of the Pandavan army, felt unable to fight. Why should he kill members of his own family? Isn't that a great sin against dharma, duty? He throws his bow aside and he sinks down in melancholy.
Krishna, a king in his own right, but who has agreed to participate in the war only as Arjuna's charioteer, begins to speak. Only the atman, the absolute self is permanent, says Krishna; the body is doomed to die. The soul outlives the bodies it puts on and then discards them like worn-out garments. As such, neither the living nor the dead deserve our grief; Arjuna has not understood what is ultimately real.
Krishna now proceeds to teach the wisdom of Yoga, which points a way beyond karma, beyond the path of action, and beyond the duty, dharma, that enjoins one to work. The wise man, the true Yogi, acts without desire, in pure detachment. Free from earthly passion, untroubled in the midst of woe, he draws his senses from the world as a tortoise draws its limbs into its shell. In this way, the Yogi is close to the eternal soul, to atman, and thus to supreme happiness.
Does this mean Arjuna should become a Yogi? Should he relinquish the world and follow the path of contemplation? Action is necessary, Krishna says. One must act, even as all work causes bondage. One must act, but in view of the good of all – of the cosmic balance of the whole.
'What's your dharma, do you think?', W. says. 'Have you set the universe into imbalance?' I've set him into imbalance, there's no question of that, W. says. Him, his career, every aspiration he's ever had … 'Anyway, go on'.
Now, I continue, the Bhagavad Gita, the song of the Lord, begins to soar. Krishna explains it was he who taught these doctrines to the ancients, including Manu, who formulated the laws under which all Hindus should live. He was at the beginning, and he will be there at the end.
At this moment, Krishna reveals his true identity to Arjuna: He is an avatar of God, being reborn - as many have been reborn before him – to protect the good and to destroy the wicked. He has lived through many births, reappearing to teach Yoga when the sacred wisdom seems to have been lost.
Then Krishna, though a man, is also God. And as God, he explains, he is also all things in the universe.
What does this mean?, Arjuna wonders. What does it mean that Krishna is God, and as God, everything? He asks his charioteer whether he can see him as he really is. Krishna grants him his wish. Arjuna sees the entire cosmos turning within Krishna's body. He sees the light of God, the Lord of Yoga, as a fire that burns to consume all things. He sees, in the fire, a million divine forms, and the manifold forms of the universe united as one.
And there too he sees the battle on the Kurukshetra plains, pre-ordained and necessary for the balance of the cosmos. He sees friends and relatives on both sides; he sees the ones who will die and the ones who will live.
And he sees that the battle is part of the great sacrifice that is the universe also is. The battle is part of God, as all things are part of God. It is part of Time, which destroys all but also lets the new emerge the ashes of destruction. This is what is revealed in Krishna's celestial form.
Now Arjuna can see his actions in a clear light. He picks up his bow and remounts his chariot. Krishna blows his conch, and the battle began.
'What does your celestial form look like?', says W. – 'Go on, show me'. Actually, he thinks he's already seen it, W. says, or parts of it. – 'Your vast, white belly. Your flabby arms. The trousers that billow round your ankles …' What does he see turning in my body? A vast quantity of alcohol and discounted sandwiches.
Whose avatar are you?, says W. Who caused you to appear? The avatar of shit. The avatar of obesity …
He sees more, W. says. He sees all the people I've wronged, for thing, as well all the people's he's wronged. He's sees the sins we have committed. He sees the carbuncle of our stupidity swelling from the plains. He sees the winds of our stupidity stirring up the deserts of our ignorance.
And now he sees more still. W. has a vision of the apocalypse itself. Fortresses spring up in the dust. The desert grows, the scorched earth where nothing will grow and nothing can live. Great wars between nations, and when there are no more nations, a war of all against all.
And what's this? What final horror? He sees our very friends turning upon one another. Our friends, our dear friends, turning one upon the other! It's all my fault, he says. He can tell.
Can't he see in me, the decline of all things? Can't he see Time itself as entropy and dissolution? Can't he discern the boiling sea and the burning skies? And isn't that the earth itself, a fireball plunging through space?
Now what?, W. says. Is he going to blow his conch? Am I? Ah fuck it, he says, and we go back to looking out of the window.
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