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PREFACE
As it has already been said, instead of providing skills needed for the sustenance of worldly, mortal life, the Geeta instructs its votaries in the art and discipline that will surely bring them victory in the battle of life. But the war the Geeta portrays is not the physical, worldly war that is fought with deadly weapons, and in which no conquest is ever of a permanent character. The war of the Geeta is the clash of innate properties and inclinations, the symbolic representation of which as “war” has been a time-honoured literary tradition.
What the Geeta portrays as a war between Dharmkshetr and Kurukshetr, between the riches of piety and the accumulation of impiety, between righteousness and unrighteousness, is no different from the Vedic battles between Indr and Vrit-between awareness and ignorance, or the Puranic struggles between gods and demons, or the battles between Ram and Ravan and between the Kaurav and the Pandav in the great Indian epics Ramayan and Mahabharat. Where is the battleground on which this “war” is fought? The Dharmkshetr and Kurukshetr of the Geeta are no geographical locations. As the poet of the Geeta has made Krishn reveal to Arjun, the physical, human body itself is the sphere-the patch of earth-on which the sown seeds of good and evil sprout as sanskar. The ten organs of sense, mind, intellect, sensibility, ego, the five primary substances, and the three nature-born properties are said to be constituents of the whole extension of this sphere.
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