Lord Krishna is Vaayu, Yama, Agni, Varuna and the Moon. He is Brahma and the father of Brahma. In other words, Krishna is the Supreme One, who is in everything. In fact, He is everything, and Arjuna describes this with wonder. In a discourse on the Bhagavad Gita , Rukmini Ramamurthy said that having described the Lord’s unfathomable, immeasurable, immutable nature, Arjuna offers his obeisance to the Lord. Arjuna says he worships the Lord from all directions. Since the Lord is Omnipresent, He is everyone and everything. Arjuna is truly blessed to have had the Lord’s viswaroopa revealed to him.
The Gita enjoins upon us the need to do our duty, and Arjuna’s duty on the battlefield is to fight, with the realisation that it is the Lord who is the master who is in control, and that he (Arjuna) is merely the instrument God has chosen to carry out certain tasks. The Lord can be realised only through devotion, and not through a mere study of the scriptures. As human beings, certain things are expected of us. One of them is to be generous and give according to our means to those in need. It is difficult to be generous, and the more we have, the less we want to share with others. It is said Prajapati told celestial beings to practise self-control (damyata), because this is what they find difficult to do. His advice to the demons was to cultivate compassion (dayadhvam) because that is what they lacked. His advice to mankind was to give generously and practise charity (Datta), because this is what we find difficult to do. So for each of the different categories, Prajapati had a different piece of advice for everyone must cultivate desirable qualities they lack.
When a person dies, and he has been buried or cremated, the relatives return home. Who or what goes with the dead man? Only the good deeds he has done in his life accompany him. So we must give to others while we are still young. Once Yama comes in search of us, he will not wait for us to perform good deeds. When our time is up, we have to leave. So we must do good as soon as possible, instead of postponing good deeds to our old age, for who knows when Yama will come for us?
