Half Knowledge Is More Dangerous Than Ignorance🔗

Q: Swamiji, if Krishna is the Jagat Guru, Lord of the universe, why was he only with the Pandava and Kaurava princes? Why did he not help the world?

Again and again, Krishna happens on planet Earth, but nowadays He simply does not bring his peacock feather! Krishna is the only master who has assured us that He will be here again and again.

To protect the good and to destroy the evil, and to establish righteousness

I shall incarnate again and again.

Krishna always fulfills his promises. It is only you who need a little openness to experience Him, that is all. Never think that He is not here.

A group of devotees was telling Ramakrishna that if they had been there during the period of Chaitanya, then they would have received his divine love. Ramakrishna replied that there were some fools who were sitting before Chaitanya and saying that they missed Krishna! These were the same people who were now before Ramakrishna saying that they had missed Chaitanya! These were the people who told Ramana Maharshi that they had missed Ramakrishna, and today, some of these people are sitting here saying that they missed Ramana!

Understand that all you need is a little openness and sensitivity. If you can, you may listen to Krishna’s flute here and now! If you miss it, you are missing it, but Krishna comes down again and again to fulfill His promise. With a little more openness and sensitivity, you can experience Him wherever you are.

Krishna’s Gita had very little to do with Pandava and Kaurava princes. He delivered it to every ordinary being, so that this individual mortal can realize that he too is an inherent part of universal energy. Krishna has done His job by giving you Gita. His purpose is to help the entire world across time and space. It is upto you to sit up and listen.

Do not sit here and complain or wonder what there is for you in Gita. Open your mind and receive. You will be helped. That is the promise of the master.

Q: How can Krishna who is Vedas Himself denigrate the Vedas saying that they are useless?

The differentiation that Krishna makes here is between acquired knowledge and experiential knowledge. He refers to the Vedas and Sānkhya as acquired knowledge, at least insofar as Arjuna and the rest of humanity are concerned.

As I mentioned before, no experience remains an experiential truth once it is expressed. Acquired knowledge can never be your truth. It is someone else's truth, not yours.

In Mahabharata there is this description of how Duryodhana borrowed the invincible armor of his teacher Drona.

Jayadratha killed Abhimanyu, Arjuna's son. Arjuna swore to kill Jayadratha before the next sunset. Arjuna was wreaking havoc in his fury and Duryodhana wailed in frustration to Drona, the Commander of his army. Since Drona was protecting Jayadratha he lent his invincible magical armor to Duryodhana and told him to stop Arjuna's onslaught.

When Arjuna rained arrows from his mighty gāṇḍīva (Arjuna's bow) at Duryodhana, they seemed to have no effect at all. Arjuna understood what had happened. He cut loose Duryodhana's chariot from the horses, got Duryodhana down on foot upon the ground and disarmed him. He then pierced parts of his body not covered by the armor till Duryodhana fled the battlefield.

Like borrowed armor, borrowed knowledge is useless; in fact it can be more dangerous. It can boost one's ego to the point of self-destruction.

That is what happens to many philosophers and preachers. With the superficial knowledge that they have acquired by reading the scriptures, they believe that they have the same powers as the masters who experienced and expressed those scriptures. They consider themselves experts in Vedānta, Sāṅkhya, Mimamsa and so on, and argue endlessly with no idea of what they are saying.

For someone who understands the oneness of divinity, there is no difference between what Shankara says and what Ramanuja says. There is no difference ultimately. It is only the approach that is different.

A small story:

In a bookstore there was a display of the commentaries of Shankara and Ramanuja on the Gita. A learned scholar went to the bookseller and demanded, ‘Do you know the difference between the commentary by Shankara and the one by Ramanuja? I see that you have them both here.’

‘Oh, just forty rupees Sir,’ said the bookseller. Just one dollar, that is all!

That is all the difference! No need to be puffed up with knowledge as if one knows the difference. You may say Shankara is steeped in gnana, knowledge, and Ramanuja is steeped in bhakti, devotion. But no work of Ramanuja or anyone else can match the devotion of Sankara in his description of Devi in Soundaryalahiri. And Ramanuja’s commentaries are just as logical and convincing as those of Shankara. An enlightened master’s experience is always total. There is no separation as devotion, knowledge or meditation; all are paths of excellence. They all lead to the same point.

Krishna tells Arjuna here to go beyond the three attributes explained in the Vedas. Once expressed, even the scriptures are governed by the attributes; they are in satva or goodness. Krishna urges Arjuna to transcend them and also transcend like and dislike, in order to reach the state of equanimity of a sage. In that state, He says the knowledge gained from the Vedas becomes as irrelevant as water to a person sitting in a river.

Krishna is not degrading knowledge; He is not insulting the scriptures. He is telling Arjuna to go beyond acquired knowledge represented by the Vedas and sāṅkhya into the experiential knowledge of yoga. Here the yoga that Krishna is talking about is not the noun form of union, but the process of uniting.

Yoga is often referred to as union. As long as you call it this, you are only talking about the acquired knowledge of this great science and art. Only when you practice it, it becomes ‘uniting’. This is what Krishna is referring to.

When a water drop in the ocean unites with the ocean, it is undifferentiated. It has no attributes anymore. It has merged with the source from where it came. As long as it feels separate and retains its individuality, however much it may know about where it came from, it will remain separate. It has to drop its identity. This dropping of identity can never be intellectual; it can never be based on knowledge. It must be experiential; it must arise from the being.

Q: Krishna mentions sānkhya as the knowledge that has been taught to Arjuna. He says He wants to take Arjuna through yoga. What is the difference?

Arjuna had earlier quoted extensively from the scriptures in the first chapter of Gita, Arjuna viṣāda yoga, Arjuna’s dilemma. He said that if he killed his kinsmen, the Kuru race would be destroyed. The destruction of the lineage would bring in social evils. Social evils would then break up families and women would go astray. This would lead to degeneration of morals. Moral degeneration would lead to neglect of ritual offerings to ancestors. Finally there would be destruction. This was the sum and substance of Arjuna’s understanding of what would happen if he continued to battle his foes.

Arjuna quoted the scriptures with his understanding of what he had been taught. Krishna refers to all this as sānkhya. Sānkhya here not only means the sānkhya philosophy developed by Sage Kapila, but encompasses all scriptural knowledge as well. As I said earlier, Krishna does not pull down this knowledge, but implicitly warns that knowledge without experience is dangerous. So, He says he will take Arjuna from knowledge into experience, from sānkhya into yoga.

The scriptures of all evolved cultures have arisen out of the experiential wisdom of enlightened beings. They get diluted and distorted as others without the same experience start expounding on that experience. Most others understand these scriptures at only the physical or gross level of knowledge, as it is understood literally. There are many other layers of understanding.

For instance, in this verse about sānkhya alone, one can get into endless arguments about the different interpretations of the scriptures without coming to any practical conclusion. Such argument is the territory of philosophers. What Krishna tries to do is take us beyond these arguments.