Chapter 16: The Divine and the Demonic

About 10 minutes

The Gita is closing on its final turns. Out on Kurukshetra the dust has yet to settle, yet the storm inside Arjuna has begun to quiet, and Krishna picks this moment to raise a mirror before him, one in which every human being can catch sight of his own true face. The chapter turns from the enemies on the field to two tendencies within, the divine and the demonic, lodged side by side in every heart.

Two natures, one heart

Krishna opens with a plain accounting of the world. There are, he says, only two orders of people in it. One kind feeds the light within; the other thickens the dark. He calls these the divine wealth and the demonic wealth, and a person assembles his own share out of small daily choices, with no stamp of birth or seal of family line to decide it for him. No one walks the earth wholly a god, and no one wholly a demon. Both seeds lie waiting in every chest, and whichever one you water is the one that grows.

The marks of the divine wealth

Then he strings a long garland, twenty-six qualities in all, each thread pulling a person toward the divine. Fearlessness, cleanness of the inner being, and steadiness in knowledge and in yoga. A hand that opens to give, a firm rein on the senses, yajna (fire-rite), self-study, and tapas (austerity). Simplicity, nonviolence, truth, and a temper that refuses to catch fire. Renunciation, inner peace, and a standing vow never to carry a tale against anyone. Tenderness toward every creature, freedom from greed, gentleness, and the modesty that shrinks from anything unfitting. Freedom from restlessness, radiance, forgiveness, fortitude, purity, malice toward none, and no quiet pride in one’s own greatness.

All these marks, Krishna tells Arjuna, sprout in the one who carries the divine wealth through the world. And notice something: they never descend on anyone all at once. Each quality is a practice in itself, a plot of ground to be watered on its own. Today, one step of fearlessness. Tomorrow, a sip of forgiveness. The day after, an unkind word caught at the lips and turned back. So the lamp inside grows larger by degrees. No one seizes all of this in a single stroke, yet every small effort threads one more bead onto the garland.

A few of these ask for a second look. The radiance on the list, tejas, is the kind of moral bearing that makes even a hardened wrongdoer lose his appetite for wrong while he stands near it. The forgiveness Krishna names reaches past holding one’s temper, all the way to dropping the wish to see an offender punished at all. And the purity here is the outer kind, clean money, clean food, clean conduct, set next to the inner cleanness he opened the whole list with.

Something else lies hidden in this list, and it should not slip past you. Every quality on it belongs to ordinary conduct, the kind no temple visit or pilgrimage can stand in for. How you speak. Whose burden you lift. What you do when anger flares. How far you bend when someone else goes wrong. Krishna takes divinity down from the sky and sets it in the middle of the daily round. The divine wealth carries a person toward liberation and leaves him lighter with every step, while the demonic wealth cinches one binding after another. So he steadies Arjuna: you were born with the divine nature, and this weight gives you no cause for alarm.

Recognizing the demonic tendency

Now he crosses to the other bank. The marks of the demonic nature run fewer in number and deeper in reach: pretense, arrogance, conceit, anger, harshness of speech, and ignorance. Qualities like these close a person down and rope him tight. Where the divine wealth walks a man toward freedom, the demonic tendency keeps slipping on chain after chain.

The trouble begins with a blindness about action itself. A person of this bent cannot tell what is worth doing from what is worth leaving alone, cannot see where to step forward and where to hold back. With that compass broken, the rest follows. No cleanliness of life, inner or outer. No steadiness of conduct. No truth on the tongue.

Then Krishna draws the full map of the demonic mind, and it still reads as if it were surveyed this morning. Such a person calls the world a lie with nothing solid beneath it, a place with no God running it, thrown up by the union of male and female and driven by nothing past appetite, and beyond that, nothing at all. No life before birth, none after it, no maker and no judge. Braced on that one flat conviction, these lost and small-minded people give themselves to cruel and violent work, and in the end they rise as enemies of the world, set on wearing it down to ruin.

They press on crammed with cravings that never fill, wrapped in hypocrisy and pride and the swagger of the self-intoxicated, clutching false doctrine with both hands and living by it. Anxieties beyond counting ride them to the last day of their lives, and they hold, with full conviction, that feeding the senses is the whole of joy. A hundred cords of expectation keep them bound. Ruled by desire and anger, they set out to pile up money by any crooked road on offer, all of it for one more round of pleasure.

Listen to the refrain that runs inside such a man. ‘Today I have gained this, and tomorrow that longing too will be mine. This wealth is already mine, and the rest will follow. That enemy I have cut down, and I will finish the others in their turn. I am the lord here, I the enjoyer, I the one who has arrived, the strong one, the happy one. I am rich, I come from a great house, who in all the world is my equal? I will sacrifice, I will give, I will make merry.’

Ignorance blinds them, a hundred stray thoughts drag their minds in every direction, the net of delusion closes over them, and hungry for one pleasure after another they drop into the foulest of hells.

When a man like this performs a yajna at all, it is a yajna in name only, staged for the watching eyes, run without the rites the scriptures lay down and without a grain of faith in the fire. Full of himself, unbending, drunk on his wealth and his standing, he makes the offering only to be seen making it.

And here Krishna names the thing at the root of it. These people have handed themselves over to ego, to force, to arrogance, to desire and anger, and their tongues spare no one, not even God, not even the good. In hating and harming the people around them, they are hating the one who lives inside those people, and inside themselves as well. Krishna says it without softening: seated in every body as its innermost self, it is Me they despise.

For these cruel and sinful haters, people sunk deepest in wrongdoing, Krishna hands down a hard verdict. Again and again he casts them into demonic wombs, born and reborn among their own kind. Never reaching him, they sink lower with each new birth. That is the harshest sentence the demonic tendency carries. The light stands close the whole time, and still it goes unseen.

The three gates of hell

And then Krishna presses the whole matter into one sharp warning. At the root of all this ruin sit three things, and every one of them is a doorway into hell.

Hell has three gates, and they destroy the atman (self). Desire, anger, and greed. Abandon all three. Of everything in this chapter, this is the verse to carry home, Gita 16.21. The one who steps clear of these three dark doorways, Krishna says, works his own true good and moves toward the highest goal.

Krishna sets a warning beside the promise. The man who throws out the rule of the scriptures and runs on his own appetite arrives at nothing worth having, no perfection, no happiness, and not the high goal he pictures for himself. Then he presses a touchstone into your hand. When you cannot tell what should be done from what should be left alone, let the shastra (scripture) be your measure, since your own craving makes an unreliable judge. Set your foot on the duty the shastra marks out. That is the straight road back to the divine nature.

The sixteenth chapter puts its message in the open. A choice runs through us every single day: grow the light, or grow the dark. No one is a finished god and no one a finished demon, and the verdict gets written fresh each morning. Once you can see where those three doors open, you are already most of the way clear of them.

Source: Srimad Bhagavad Gita