Krishna presents a comprehensive view of every individual’s day-to-day acts in the Bhagavad Gita, said Sri Goda Venkateswara Sastrigal in a lecture. When one is prompted to act, the action manifests as physical activity of the gross body, mental activity such as thinking, contemplating, meditating, etc, and as speech or verbal utterances. Krishna says that to perform any action, which includes whatever is done by thought, word or deed, and is characterised as good or bad, five components are indispensible. These are the seat of action or the place where the act is done, the agent or the doer, the senses, their functioning capacities, and finally the element of divine grace.
When a potter fashions a mud pot, the entire act of pot-making is made possible by the place or seat of action where he engages in this act; the potter’s wheel, mud, clay, water and other materials are as much essential as his own skill; and over and above all these, there is an unseen and most decisive element that can be best described as divine grace, also perceived variously as luck, or fate or fortune.
Karna’s end in the battlefield happens when Arjuna is prompted by Krishna to aim his swift shaft even as Karna tries to lift the chariot wheel that has sunk in the mud. Arjuna hesitates to take unfair advantage, but finally accepts the command and the arrow severs the head asunder from the body. Krishna explains that a variety of reasons conspire the fall of this great warrior and noblest benefactor, namely his preceptor’s curse, Indra’s ploy divesting him of his armour, Kunti, the Brahmin’s curse and finally Krishna’s divine will.
A self-analysis of one’s daily actions in the light of Krishna’s explanation of acts, their causes and consequences can help to unseat the delusion that makes one perceive the self as the sole doer of acts. The ego-sense is seen only as one of the main factors of human actions that belong to a greater cosmic pattern. This self-vision leads one beyond attachment and frees him from the ego-sense that binds.
