18 Quotes by Gurcharan Das

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Modern India is a product of Hindu tradition, the religion of Islam, and Western civilization.

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?

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?

Dharma is precisely this ‘discipline of ordered existence’, a ’belief system that restrains and gives coherence to desires.