The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma

One should never do to another what one regards as injurious to oneself. This, in brief, is the law of dharma. —Mahabharata XVIII.113.

a man who wishes to profess goodness at all times will come to ruin among so many who are not so good. Hence it is necessary for a prince who wishes to maintain his position to learn how not to be good, and to use this knowledge . . . according to necessity.’25

What sort of ideas, I wondered, might help to give meaning to life when one is in the midst of fundamentalist persons of all kinds who believe that they have a monopoly on truth and some are even willing to kill to prove that?

The human tendency to evaluate one’s well-being by comparing it with that of another is the cause of Duryodhana’s distress.

So when Yudhishthira tells Draupadi that eventually human acts do bear fruit, even though the fruit is invisible,56 one might interpret ‘fruit’ to mean the building of character through repeated actions. Yudhishthira was certainly aware that repeated actions had a way of changing one’s inclinations to act in a certain way. That inclination is character.

Despite the many occasions when its characters feel frustrated before the weight of circumstances, and despite blaming their feeling of impotence on daiva, 'fate', moral autonomy shines through in the epic. Because they have some freedom to choose they can be praised when they follow dharma or blamed when they follow adharma. At the moment of making a decision they become conscious of their freedom, and it is this perception of autonomy that gives them the ability to lead authentic moral lives.

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.

Be intent on the action, not on the fruits of action.

I have learned that the Mahabharata is about the way we deceive ourselves, how we are false to others, how we oppress fellow human beings, and how deeply unjust we are in our day-to-day lives. But is this moral blindness an intractable human condition, or can we change it? Some of our misery is the result of the way the state also treats us, and can we redesign our institutions to have a more sympathetic government?

Yudhishthira taught me that moral integrity begins with the awareness of other human beings. The reality of others looms large in Yudhishthira’s consciousness—it is the shining feature of his personality,

ahimsa paramo dharma’, ‘non-violence is the highest dharma’.

The concept of dharma evolved over time, its meaning shifting from a ‘ritual ethics of deeds’ to a more personal virtue based on one’s conscience.

The envy I encountered in the business world, however, was nothing compared to what I would see later in the academic world. ‘The reason academic politics are so bitter is that so little is at stake,’ Henry Kissinger was fond of saying.59 There is a certain misery attached to the academic life, no doubt, in which envy plays a considerable part. As Max Weber noted, ‘Do you think that, year after year, you will be able to stand to see one mediocrity after another promoted over you, and still not become embittered and dejected? Of course, the answer is always: “Naturally, I live only for my calling." Only in a very few cases have I found [young academics] able to undergo it without suffering spiritual damage.’60

Yudhishthira answers Yaksha's question - what is man? by saying, 'The repute of a good deed touches heaven and earth; one is called a man as long as his repute lasts.

By deceiving Drona, Yudhishthira corrupts his teacher's relationship with the world. So do we every time we lie - we corrupt the 'other' in the same way.

envy is a sin of socialism, greed is the failing of capitalism

It was an unhurried pursuit. I did not want information. I wanted to be cultivated, and thus I read at leisure with lingering appreciation.

If a good person suffers, then the bad person should suffer even more: this is an idea that seems embedded in the human psyche. Consciously one denies it, of course, and proclaims piously, ‘I’m not the sort of person who holds grudges.’ Yet one unconsciously applauds when the villain ‘gets what he deserves’. Wanting to punish a villain or seeing him punished is ubiquitous in literature, movies and politics.

You’ll waste a lot less time worrying about what others think of you if only you realized how seldom they do.’ To this we might add Albert Camus’ wise words: ‘To be happy one must not be too concerned with the opinion of others. One should pursue one’s goals single-mindedly, with a quiet confidence, without thinking of others.

However, ‘tit-for-tat’ should not be confused with an aggressive strategy. It calls for presenting a friendly face to the world—the first move in the game is always to be nice. Yudhishthira presents an affable face during the interminable peace negotiations. And he will make an exceptionally generous offer to Duryodhana, as we shall soon see. The difference is that Yudhishthira is no longer willing to be exploited. It has taken him thirteen long years to realize that Draupadi may have been right.

Manu’s verse quoted above, declares that the ‘satisfaction of the mind is the only authority in cases of conflicting alternatives’. 54 The classical poet, Kalidasa, who lived in the fifth century AD , was of the same view: ‘In matters where doubt intervenes, the [natural] inclination of the heart of the good person becomes the “authority" or the decisive factor.’ 55

to remember this in a country that has long been mesmerized by the romantic figure of ‘the renouncer’, even before the Buddha came along.6 My mother, however, was spot on in recognizing ‘my third stage melancholy’. During my second stage, I had felt as though I was waking up each morning, going to work, and feeding my family—only to repeat it the following day, as my children would after me and their children after them. What was the point of it all? Now in my third stage, I wanted to find a better way to live. Meanwhile, my friends and acquaintances were incredulous. ‘So, what is this I hear about wanting to go away to read old books?’ one asked me at a dinner party. ‘Don’t tell me you are going to turn religious on us!’ exclaimed another. My wife began to explain my idea of an ‘academic holiday’ to some of the guests, who reciprocated with suitable looks of sympathy. ‘Tell us, what books are you planning to read?’ asked a retired civil servant. A self-proclaimed ‘leftist and secularist’, who had once been a favourite of former prime minister Indira Gandhi, he had the gruff, domineering accent of an English aristocrat, not surprising in a former civil servant of the old school. I admitted reluctantly that I had been thinking of reading the Mahabharata, the Manusmriti, the Kathopanishad perhaps, and ... ‘Good Lord, man!’ he exclaimed. ‘You haven’t turned saffron, have you?’ The remark upset me. Saffron is, of course, the colour of Hindu right-wing nationalism, and I wondered what sort of secularism is it that regards the reading of Sanskrit texts as a political act. I was disturbed that I had to fear the intolerance of my ‘secular’ friends as much as the bigotry of the Hindu Right, which had become a force in Indian politics over the past two decades with the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Envy is felt more strongly between near equals than those widely separated in fortune. It does not make sense to envy the Queen of England.

Why should one like you envy Yudhishthira? . . . Be content with what you have, stay with your own dharma—that is the way to happiness. —Dhritarashtra to Duryodhana, Mahabharata II.5.3, 61

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. The attraction of a clean ethical theory like Utilitarianism is that it attempts to resolve moral issues on the basis of a single criterion. Pluralism is more complex but no less rational. One needs to order different virtues in a hierarchy in order to help one to choose in the case of a conflict.

people do, in fact, act against their moral convictions and this is an unhappy fact about ourselves’.

Dharma, the word at the heart of the epic, is in fact untranslatable. Duty, goodness, justice, law and custom all have something to do with it, but they all fall short.

The task of an inspiring leader in Kali Yuga is not just to think about the difficulty of being good but how to confront that difficulty—and to place that thinking in the great textual confrontations of the past.

It was a stronger, more positive attitude, exhibiting maitri, ‘benevolence’, which is entailed in acting ‘for the sake of others’, and this is ultimately ‘the highest dharma’.

The Upanishads trace these problems of the self to our sense of ‘Iness’ or ahamkara (literally ‘I-maker’) which is our subjective sense of identity and which has its origin in our consciousness (aham). In classical Sankhya philosophy, the empirical world of the senses and the mind emerges from the evolution of the aham, and liberation from this empirical existence requires the negation of ahamkara.