Doing What is Right v. What is Easy

Arjuna’s problem is having to choose between fighting – which would involve killing friends and family members – or refusing to fight and allowing evil to pervade the world. He’s leading the Good army against the Bad guys because a corrupt king has usurped the throne and is passing off the throne to his own, corrupt son instead of to Arjuna’s brother, the rightful owner of the throne. Arjuna is attempting to right this wrong and fight for what is right. However, as he surveys the battle, he realizes that “doing the right thing” will be very difficult – and possibly immoral – because it would mean killing family members and friends. As he contemplates this matter, Krishna assures him that he is meant to fight and that killing his family members and friends is not immoral because his Dharma (duty) is to fight evil, which the friends and family members have aligned themselves with.

This took a while for me to wrap my head around. Krishna is actively telling Arjuna to just kill members of his family and his friends. If anything, it seems like abstaining from the fight should be the obvious thing to do, so why does Krishna encourage him to do the opposite and just kill them?

It’s hard to understand, but I think I get the gist of the issue; since Arjuna’s Dharma is to fight and rid the world of the evil that has opposed him, he must fight. In fact, since fighting evil is his dharma, doing anything else – including refusing to fight – would actually be considered sinful because it would be opposing him dharma. I think this becomes easier for Arjuna to wrap his head around because Krishna also goes on (and more in-depth later) about how life is temporal and that there’s nothing wrong with ending the lives of these people because he would merely be helping them get to their next life faster.

I am unsure how to reflect on Thursday’s class because we did not have class. I tried – and failed – to avoid future suffering in the form of stress/anxiety by utilizing the time I would normally be in class to study, but that failed because I simply have too much to do. In fact, it’s gotten so bad that my out of class practice has suffered tremendously; I only practiced once since our last class meeting and it was very short because I was having too much anxiety about all of my upcoming midterms. Worse still, it doesn’t seem like I’ll have time to practice much outside of class because I have an exam every day from now until next Thursday. It’s all I think about and just the realization that I still need to practice yoga outside of class raises my blood pressure because it doesn’t seem like there are enough hours in the day to do everything. Maybe taking some time to practice would help with stress management, but I think the practice session would just be ruined because I would only be thinking about all the studying/work I have to do.