All the above are sāttvika qualities. “Abhijāta” means one who is born after performing puṇya. Such a person is blessed with daivī qualities. Whoever thinks he is born in a good family and acts accordingly — one who has earned the qualification to worship the Divine — he will be blessed with the wealth of these above qualities. It releases the jīva from bondage. All this is divine wealth.
The qualities opposite to the above are āsurī qualities.
dambho darpo’timānaśca krodhaḥ pāruṣyam eva ca ।
ajñānaṃ cābhijātasya pārtha saṃpadam āsurīm ॥BG 16.4
Dambha is the display of pride, and conceit that one possesses something that others do not. Darpa is vanity, hardness of the manas. It is the feeling that others are inferior to oneself. Excessive infatuation, malice, cruelty, lack of knowledge, lack of discernment — all these are tāmasic qualities. They are the result of pāpas committed in past lives. They tighten the bonds of the jīva.
Svāmī now elucidates the results of these two kinds of qualities.
daivī saṃpad-vimokṣāya nibandhāyāsurī matā ।
mā śucaḥ saṃpadaṃ daivīm abhijāto’si pāṇḍava ॥BG 16.5
“Daivī qualities are those that help in attaining mokṣa. Āsurī qualities are those that cause bondage. Arjuna, do not grieve thinking whether you are qualified to strive for mokṣa. You are born with daivī qualities. You are eligible to tread the path towards mokṣa”.
There is one thought here. Bhagavān listed daivī qualities; he listed āsurī qualities as well; he will describe them further. Why did he not mention human qualities? Are there no such qualities as human qualities? The purport here is that all the above qualities are human only. There is no human trait that does not fall into either daivī or āsurī category. Humans are a mix of divine and demonic aspects. This is what the Vedas say:
puṇyena puṇyaṃ lokaṃ nayati । pāpena pāpam । ubhābhyām eva manuṣyalokam ॥
Praśnopaniṣat
When both kinds of traits commingle, he comes to the mortal world. This is an opportunity for him; he can either ascend to better states, or plummet to viler states. In his management of this universe, Bhagavān has given this freedom to humans. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka says the following -
sa vā … kāmamayo’kāma-mayaḥ krodhamayo’krodhamayo dharmamayo’dharmamayaḥ sarvamayas-tadyad-etat-idaṃmayo’domaya iti yathākārī yathācārī tathā bhavati ॥
Since we cannot give a finite list of human traits, the upaniṣat says “idammayaḥ adomayaḥ”. A jīva is full of all necessary and unnecessary qualities. He becomes what he does and how he conducts himself.
Since a human is thus a mix of both good and bad qualities, he cannot be steady where he is, and should continuously move up or down every second.
Plato gives the same instruction:
“In the human soul, there is a better and also a worse principle; and when the better has the worse under control, then a man is said to be master of himself (which is a term of praise); but when, owing to evil education or association, the better principle, which is also the smaller, is overwhelmed by the greater mass of the worse — in this case he is blamed and is called the slave of self and unprincipled.”
(The Republic, Book IV)
The same feeling is echoed in the poem “A Death in the Desert” by Browning.
Man is not God, but hath God’s end to serve —
A master to obey, a course to take, —
Somewhat to cast off, somewhat to become.
Grant this, that man must pass from old to new,
From vain to real, from mistake to fact,
From what once seemed good to what now proves best.
How could man have progression otherwise?
Progress, man’s distinctive mark alone,
Not God’s and not the beasts’; God is, they are;
Man partly is and wholly hopes to be.
What the Gīta calls ‘āsura’, Browning calls beastly or animalistic. Every second, daivī aspects keep pulling man upward, or āsurī aspects keep pulling him down. There is progress if he ascends; if he descends, he will deteriorate. He cannot keep quiet even for a second and say that he wants neither progress nor deterioration. He cannot remain where he is. Indeed, prakṛti does not leave him alone! She keeps poking him with the trident that is the three guṇas and troubles him constantly. Daivī and asurī are both the energies of prakrti.
dvau bhūtasargau loke’smin daiva āsura eva ca ॥
BG 16.6
Prakṛti has placed man on a greasy pole. He cannot embrace it and remain where he is. He should fold his hands in front of it and keep moving upwards with fortitude. Even if he forgets himself for a moment, he will slide down. Our daily life is this dangerous game.
Divine beings do not face this instability. They reside perpetually in the higher worlds. They do not get down from there. If they do climb down, the balance of the universe will go haywire. The sun, moon, clouds and lightning, air and water should perform their assigned tasks constantly, without fail. That is what prakṛti has decreed. They cannot make mistakes there. They do not slip down.
On the other hand, Asuras do not have even an iota of an idea of progress. They do not understand the difference between high and low, honorable and contemptible. They do not even worry that they are inferior and that they might fall further. Such is āsurī delusion or beastly confusion. They are born again and again in low forms and thus spend their accumulated pāpa. They might be born as humans at some point of time and then they might qualify to discern the difference between progress and regress. It is an uncertain future.
Humans have the freedom to examine progress and retreat wilfully and with full volition and use of one’s buddhi . It is not required for divine beings; and not possible for āsurī beings. In this creation, the opportunity to progress towards better states is possible only for humans.
After suggesting this principle, Bhagavān explains the grimness of āsurī qualities — we might choose to think that it is to create dread and alarm in common people and awaken them. Bhagavān did not need to create fear in Arjuna. He had not displayed āsurī qualities. There was absolutely no doubt that he was rich with the wealth of daivī qualities. Didn’t Śrikṛṣna himself say this? Love for truth, devotion to dharma, sympathy towards all beings — all these are clearly manifest in Arjuna. Therefore it is possible that this instruction is for other common people of this world. I feel that Śrikṛṣna had the people of 1963 CE (or 2023 CE perhaps) in his mind when he spoke this. I believe you would think the same if you see these sentences from the Gita.
asatyam- apratiṣṭhaṃ te jagad-āhur-anīśvaram ।
aparaspara-sambhūtaṃ kimanyat-kāma-haitukam ॥BG 16.8
“What is Truth? There is nothing called Truth. If there is Truth, who has seen it? Where is the Īśvara who rules the universe? This is anarchy. It is haphazardly placed (apratiṣṭhaṃ); the establishment of dharma is fake. All things in the universe are born out of randomness; there is no relationship between them — they are not related to one another in accordance with precepts like “Ākāśād-vāyuh”, etc., or from other lives. If you say there are so many life-forms, they are all the results of lust between male and female” — this is what asuras say. That is atheism. That is the theory of cārvākas.
They do not agree that jīvas are born out of interaction between various karmas, by set rules, and obligations between jīvas and that they are thus related to one another. They do not agree that the rope of karma binds the whole universe within a single sack.
“aparaspara-saṃbhūtaṃ” can mean two things. First meaning is “from the union of male and female”: “aparaḥ+ca+paraḥ+ca” — when one joins another. Since there is “kāmahaitukam” next to this word, we can understand it as a union between male and female. Another meaning could be the union of two completely unrelated things that have randomly and arbitrarily somehow come together.
In ancient Greece, there were philosophers called Atomists. They had not accepted the existence of Īśvara. They believed that interactions between atoms was the reason for the birth, death, and rebirth of the universe. They believed that the nature of these atoms drove them to behave in this way. The energy that makes them move or stops them from movement does not come from the external environment. They unite with other atoms and divide from them, of their own volition. They do not have an authority that makes them do this.
We see that many animate and inanimate things constantly collude together and disperse from one another. What is the reason for this? The atheist says that it is by chance, and that it does not have a reason. The theist says that it is because of impressions from the past. From the point of view of a theist, nothing happens without reason.
To be continued...
The present series is a modern English translation of DVG’s Kendra Sahitya Akademi Award-winning work, Bhagavad-gītā-tātparya or Jīvana-dharma-yoga. The translators wish to express their thanks to Śatāvadhāni R Ganesh for his valuable feedback and to Hari Ravikumar for his astute edits.
