BHAGVAD GITA adapted by Nisha Vyas (from "Gandhi the Man" by Eknath Easwaran)

It is one thing to translate the Gita into another language and quite a different thing to translate it into daily living. The first is an intellectual exercise on the surface, no matter how much talent and education be involved. The latter reaches into the deepest of consciousness and leads to a complete change in character and conduct.

The second chapter of Bhagvad Gita ends with a description of the hightest state of consciousness a human being can attain. "When your love is deep enough," says Krishna to Arjun, "every selfish attachment falls away and takes with it all frustration, insecurity and despair." Arjun then questions: "How can I recognize such a person? What marks the man who lives always in wisdom and is completely self-confident? Tell me how he behaves and conducts himself when under attack?" Krishna replies:

He lives in wisdom, Who sees himself in all and all in him, Whose love for the lord of love has consumed Every selfish desire and sense-craving Tormenting the heart. Not agitated By grief, not hankering after pleasure, He lives free from lust and fear and anger. Fettered no more by selfish attachments, He is not elated by good fortune Nor depressed by bad. Such is the seer .... When you keep thinking about sense-objects Attachment comes. Attachment breeds desire, The lust of possession which when thwarted, Burns to anger. Anger clouds the judgement And robs of the power to learn from past Mistakes. Lost is the discriminitive Faculty, and your life is utter waste. But when you move amidst the world of sense >From both attachment and aversion freed, There comes the peace in which all sorrows end, And you live in the wisdom of the self. The disunited mind is far from wise, How can it meditate? How be at peace? When you know no peace, how can you know joy? When you let your mind follow the siren Call of the senses, they carry away Your better judgement as a cyclone drives A boat off the charted course to its doom... He is forever free who has broken Out of the ego-cage of I and MINE To be united with the lord of love This is the supreme state. Attain thou this And pass from death to immortality.

For more than fifty years Mahatama Gandhi meditated on those words morning and night and devoted all his effort to translating them into his daily life.

This article was originally published in Cross Cultures Magazine in Volume 1 - Issue 3 - 1992. Unauthorized copying, distribution or other usage without express written permission of the publisher is prohibited.