Quotes from The Difficulty of Being Good by Gurcharan Das

Some of the best quotes from the book, 'The Difficulty of Being Good. On the subtle art of Dharma' by Gurcharan Das.

Hinduism is not a 'religion' in the usual sense. It is a civilization based on a simple metaphysical insight about the unity of the individual and the universe and has self-development as its objective. It employs innovative mental experiments of yoga that evolved in the first half of millennium BC, and does not have the notion of a 'chosen people', of a jealous God; it does not proselytize, does not hunt heretics. (p xxxvi)

In this cauldron fashioned from delusion, with the sun as fire and day and night as kindling wood, the months and seasons as the ladle for stirring, Time (or Death) cooks all beings: this is the simple truth. (p xliii)

The Mahabharata is suspicious of ideology. It rejects the idealistic, pacifist position of Yudhishtira as well as Duryodhana's amoral view. Its own position veers towards the pragmatic evolutionary principle of reciprocal altruism: adopt a friendly face to the world but do not allow yourself to be exploited. (p xlvii)

To save the family, abandon an individual. To save the village, abandon a family; to save the country, abandon a village. To save the soul, abandon the earth. (Vidura neeti, p6)

The Mahabharata sees a vice behind every virtue, a snake behind every horse, and a doomsday behind every victory, an uncompleted ritual behind every completed sacrifice. (p10)

Duryodhana's philosophy: A smart person pursues power and uses it to exact as much as possible from the weak. If he does not do that he leaves himself vulnerable to attack from an enemy. (p14)

It is thus possible for the envier to want something but without wishing the envied to lies it at the same time. This positive sort of envy .. that leads to emulate the successful, but without the malicious desire to deprive the rival of the possession. This is called 'benign' or 'emulative' envy and it is the one on display where one says to a friend, 'I envy you for such and such skill'. One obviously does not want to deprive the friend of the talent or the skill. Nor is one filled with ain in the case of benign envy. (p 18)

Envy is thus a great leveller, and it levels downwards. Instead of motivating one to better performance, .. envy prefers to see the other person fall. The envious person is willing to see both sides lose. 'Envy is collectively disadvantageous; the individual who envies another is prepared to do things that make them both worse off, if only the discrepancy between this sufficiently reduced,' says John Rawls. (p26)

By creating equality socialism was supposed to eliminate human envy. But the opposite happened. Oddly enough, as levelling increases in society, it actually increases envy. The Soviet Union was pervaded with envy because tiny differences, such as a new tablecloth, got exaggerated in neighbours' eyes. If greed is the vice of capitalism, envy is the flaw of socialism. (p29)

The Mahabharata does not think envy is a sin. It is just 'poor mental hygiene'. It makes Duryodhana pale and sickly and shrivels his heart. (p32)

Draupadi's insistent ('What is dharma of the king'?) question also raises the issue about who has authority to decide about dharma. It is curious that no one in the Hastinapura assembly that day appealed to God to decode who is right and who is wrong. This is because God is not expected to be an authority on dharma among Hindus, Buddhists or Jains. Human reason and the 'search for a rational basis of dharma is often compatible with these religious traditions'. But if God is not an authority then who is? Who is responsible for dharma? In his influential law book, Manu cited plural authorities for dharma two thousand years ago: "The root of dharma is the entire Veda, the tradition and customs of those who know the Vedas, the conduct of virtuous people, and what is satisfactory to oneself." (p46)

The epic also wonders if the wise can be relied upon to be authorities on dharma: 'intelligence appears differently in different men. They all take delight in their own different understanding of things'. (p48)

Draupadi's question also brought home to me the immorality of silence. Vidura accuses the nobles, kings and the wise elders - all the less-then-mad Kauravas, who stood silently as Draupadi is dragged by her hair before their eyes. When honest persons fail in their duty to speak up, the 'wound' dharma, and they ought to be punished, says the Kashyapa. (p59)

Yudhistira's answer to Draupadi (Q: 'Why be good', A: 'I do not act for sake of dharma. I act because I must') implies that consequences or ends do not justify the means. Although the Pandavas have a perfectly legitimate end in regaining their stolen kingdom, they must recover it only by honest means, without compromising dharma. (p69)

The great divide in ethical thinking is between those who judge an act based on its consequences versus those who judge it based on duty or some rule. (p73)

The Mahabharata reminds us that it is natural and desirable for human beings to want happiness and pleasure as they seek to be good. Kama is one of the legitimate goals of human life. The Christian denial of physical pleasure, especially sexual pleasure, is happily absent from the epic and most ancient Indian texts. So is the 'thou shalt not' approach, which makes one feel guilty, and turns one off the moral project. The notion of dharma as it emerges from the Mahabharata is a plural one. Being plural makes greater demands on one's reason, for human objectives sometimes conflict with each other, and this forces one to choose. (p87)

'War has no limits to violence.. [The reason is that] each of the adversaries forces the hand of the other, and this results in continuous escalation, in which neither side is guilty even if it acts first, since every act can be called pre-emptive' - Karl von Clausewitz (p92)

When an individual acts for the sake of his work rather than for the personal reward from it, Krishna says, the individual is likely to do the right thing. This moral insight is famously called nishkama karma or nishphala karma.. literally, 'disinterested action' or an action performed without thinking of its fruit. (p95)

Be intent on the action
not on the fruits of action. (Book II)
Krishna does not define what the right action is. Any action performed in a selfless spirit is superior. (p95)

Towards the end of the Gita, Krishna makes an extraordinary proposition to Arjuna. He says that now that Arjuna has learned about the truth, he should think about it and do what he thinks fit. 'Act as you choose' - these are remarkable words from the mouth of God! (p99)

The Mahabharata calls its war a dharma-yuddha, a 'just war'. The epic's language is full of words of moral judgement - aggression, self-defence, appeasement, cruelty, atrocity, and massacre. It is profoundly aware that a just war can be fought unjustly, just as an unjust war can be fought in strict accordance with the rules. (p108)

Perform actions, firm in discipline,
relinquishing attachment;
be impartial to failure and success -
this equanimity is called yoga. (p119)

'Your work will succeed as long as you don't care who gets the credit'. - Harry Truman (p127)

'It was my big fat ego that was making me want to be more important than others. What was often an exciting job became 'work' and an unsatisfactory life.' - Iris Murdoch (p128)

Difference between rational self-interest and selfishness: One should not make the common mistake in believing that the opposite of selflessness is selfishness. There is a liberal middle ground of 'self-interest', which drives ordinary human beings. This is what successful liberal institutions depend upon. (p139)

About Krishna: ' a cynic, who preaches the highest morality and stoops to practice the lowest tricks.. An opportunist who teaches a god fearing man to tell a lie, the only lie he told in all this life! [He is a[ charlatan who.. advises a hesitating archer to strike down a foe who is defenceless and crying for mercy.' - V S Suktankar (p190)

.. on my dharma journey when one begins to see the 'other' as a human being with empathy, as someone like oneself,  that is the moment when the moral sentiment is born in the human heart. (p191)

(Uttanka hasn't heard about the Kurukshetra war and when Krishna tells him, he's angry that a God like Krishna couldn't prevent it. Krishna says he was helpless and couldn't stop the war. Moreover once he is in the form of human, he has to operate within the its confines. Uttanka is still angry that Kirshna did not prevent the massacre)
Uttanka's innocent question reminded me of the classic 'problem of evil' in Christian theology: how can God, who is supposed to be perfect, allow evil to exist? Epicurus, one of the first to raise this question, asks: 'Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to.. If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked.. If, as they say, God can abolish evil, and God really wants to do it, why is there evil in the world?' (p208)

(Krishna's claim of helplessness to prevent the war) seems to be suggesting that all of life is subject to the law of karma. A person is free to act, but once the deed is done, no one can stop its relentless consequences. Even God cannot interfere. The law of karma is relentless and it trumps even God. 'The Hindu conception of God does not include the attribute of omnipotence, and this is in striking contrast to Judeo-Christian theology. (p208)

Karma has its optimistic side in a human being's ability to act with freedom, and be responsible for this act. Its pessimistic side is a feeling that we cannot escape from our past. (p209)

Yudhisthira also expresses remorse and repents. The irony is that many Indians have a low opinion of him. 'Dharmaputra Yudhisthira' is a derogatory epithet.. While Arjuna is brave and valiant warrior, remorseful Yudhisthira is considered weak and indecisive. The contempt for Yudhisthira tells us something about our contemporary society. What we need is more remorse, not less, but it is somehow considered unmanly in most society. (p253)

When Yudhisthira rejects the kshatriya tradition of dharma, he teaches us to question society's values rather than lead an unquestioning life. (p281)

What is Mahabharatha?
The epic is a 'series of precisely stated problems imprecisely and therefore inconclusively resolved, with every resolution raising new problems, until the very end, when the question remains: whose heaven and whose hell?' (p 294)

Nasadiya temper
The tentativeness of the Mahabharata's dharma reflects a sceptical streak both in the epic and in the Indian tradition. It goes back .. to Rig Veda, and it may well have originated in the charming humility of its 'Nasadiya' verse, which mediates on the creation of the universe.
"There was neither non-existence nor existence then.. There was neither death nor immortality then. There was no distinguishing sign of night nor day.. Who really knows?.. The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe. Who then knows whence it has arisen? Whence this creation has arisen - perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not - the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows - or perhaps he does not know."
This verse ends with a doubt if even gods know how the universe was born. This questioning attitude is quite unlike the mindset of the Christian, Jewish or Islamic traditions which proclaim an omniscient and omnipotent God. (p 299)

What's significant about the Mahabharatha?
The epic's tentative world of moral haziness is closer to our experience as ordinary human beings in contrast to certainty of the fundamentalist. Its dizzying plural perspectives are a nice antidote to narrow and rigid positions that surround us amidst the hypertrophied rhetoric of the early twenty-first century. (p 303)