Leadership and hard decisions

Lulla family library · Three stops, at your pace

A decision reaches other people. They live with what it sets in motion, and some learn a rule from watching. Three scenes: the claim a person has to the work alone, the measure the foremost sets for everyone behind him, and Karna on a chariot outside Hastinapura, offered a throne and refusing it.

1. Stop 1

   The work that is yours

   Bhagavad Gita 2.47 to 48

   Your claim is to the work alone, never to its fruit, Krishna says, and the fruit is not to become the motive either. Evenness of mind whether the work succeeds or fails is what he calls yoga. Bring one decision of your own to the two verses.

   Open the reading →

   A moment to consider. In the decision in front of you, what is the work, and what is the fruit you have been treating as the work?

2. Stop 2

   The example others can see

   Bhagavad Gita 3.19 to 26

   Whatever the foremost among us does, everyone else does after him, Krishna tells Arjuna; the measure he sets becomes the measure the whole world lives by. He offers himself as the proof: nothing in the three worlds is left for him to gain, and still he never steps out of the work, because the worlds would come apart behind him. Janaka and kings like him kept at theirs to the end of their days.

   Open the reading →

   A moment to consider. What rule might someone learn from your behavior even when you never state it?

3. Stop 3

   When obligations pull apart

   Mahabharata, Udyoga 140 to 146 · Gita Press

   Krishna takes Karna onto his chariot and tells him whose son he is: Kunti’s, born before Yudhishthira, with a throne waiting. Karna answers with Radha, whose breasts filled with milk the day Adhiratha carried him home, and with Duryodhana, who won him and built the war around him. Then Kunti comes, and he gives her a pledge that keeps her sons at five.

   Open the reading →

   A moment to consider. Karna answers Krishna with Radha, Adhiratha and Duryodhana. Whose claim, in your own decision, has not yet been named?

A place to stop

Karna and Kunti go off each in a different direction, she with a pledge, he with his word to Duryodhana unbroken. Before returning to your own decision, write down whose voice you have not yet heard.

Explore other paths

Further reading with this question

1. Bhagavad Gita · Chapter 3: Karma Yoga
   Krishna’s answer to Arjuna’s question about action runs through the wheel of creation turning without pause, the example of Janaka, and the three strands of nature that are the real doers of every act.
2. Mahabharata · Bhishma on the bed of arrows: the dharma of kings
   Yudhishthira, in grief on the bank of the Ganga with the dead given their water, is brought to Bhishma on the bed of arrows for the whole law of kings: the duty of a ruler, the science of the rod, the guarding of counsel, the treasury, the protecting of the people.
3. Vidura Niti · Udyoga Parva
   War is a step away and Dhritarashtra cannot sleep. At midnight he sends for Vidura, the brother who tells him exactly what is true, however bitter, and the answer grows into a whole treasury of statecraft.
4. Mahabharata · Krishna’s peace mission
   At Upaplavya Yudhishthira asks for five villages, Bhima is unexpectedly gentle, Draupadi lifts her hair as she speaks, and Krishna decides to go to the Kuru court himself, setting out among omens.
5. Ramayana · Rama’s reign and the exile of Sita
   The allied kings and the vanaras go home, and then the slander rises in the city. Rama sends the pregnant Sita to Valmiki’s hermitage, and through the night that follows tells Lakshmana the old stories of Nriga, Nimi and Yayati.
6. Characters · Krishna
   Charioteer, envoy, strategist of the whole war, and before any of that a newborn carried out of a Mathura prison at midnight in the rains, across a Yamuna standing off on either hand no higher than his father’s thighs.
7. Characters · Bhishma
   On the tenth day at Kurukshetra a man who never once lay on a couch of comfort comes down from his chariot pierced by Arjuna’s arrows and lies on them above the ground, at an hour he has chosen himself. His story begins far back, with the vow that gave him his name.

Sources and the scope of this path

Each stop opens onto a passage inside a longer reading. Commentaries are not assumed to agree on any of them.

• Gita passages: Gita Press edition; comparison: 2.47, 2.48, 3.21.
• Mahabharata: Gita Press Udyoga 140 to 146; comparison: Ganguli CXLI · Sanskrit Udyoga 138 to 144.

Passages and sequence checked against the editions above.