The Gita according to Gandhi 125

The Gita according to Gandhi -Mahadev Desai

INDIVIDUAL ETHICS (Discourses 16 and 17) We have had throughout the previous discourses constant references to a pair of characters enlightened and unenlightened (III. 25-26; IV. 40-41), the disciplined and the undisciplined (V. 12; XV. 11), the man of faith and the man without faith (III. 31-32; 40-41), the good- doer and the evil-doer (VII. 15-16), and so on. The author now classifies them broadly into the good and the bad, men of God and men of the devil. In doing so the Gita is using the language of the Upanishads. George Sand has somewhere divided mankind into two classes — the healthy and the unhealthy, and Coleridge says that as there is much beast and some devil in man, there is some angel and some God in him. Though broadly we may make the divisions, there are no water-tight compartments of the kind. We sometimes run towards God, harkening to the God within us, and often enough to the devil. The stably good are the rarest on earth, and yet if one were to ask them, they would say they were far away from God. Let no one, therefore, misunderstand these labels and misapply them. We may only say that when particular characteristics pre-dominate us we are of God, and when the opposite ones do so we are of the devil.