Bhagawad Gita – Guidelines for an Ideal Social Order
Bhagawad Gita will convince you that it envisages a comfortably rich and prosperous society as a desirable objective.
On more than one occasion, the Gita speaks approvingly of happy affluent society. Lord Krishna exhorts Arjuna to rise up and fight and win glory and success and enjoy the prosperity of the kingdom. If Arjuna dies in that, the Lord says that he will attain heaven. If he wins, he can rule over a prosperous empire.
In fact, the whole Bhagawad Gita was meant to dissuade Arjuna from the path of mendicancy and penury for which he had opted out of frustration and delusion. And bring him back to the path of victory and prosperity deserving of a Kshatriya.
Even those who pursue the path of Yoga, Lord Krishna assures that in cases one misses the goal in his life, he will be re-born in a pure and rich family, where he can continue his Yoga Sadhana in an unpolluted atmosphere, undistracted by problems of poverty.
The Gita never endorsed poverty. Poverty is not spirituality. Prosperity is to be striven for, but by pure and Dharmic methods. The ideal of the Bhagawad Gita does not approve of extremes, neither extreme poverty nor extreme affluence.
Yoga chooses the middle path. The Bhagawad Gita emphatically states that one who eats (consumes) too much or too little cannot become a Yogi. Nor one who sleeps too much or sleeps too little.
“Natyashnatastu Yogosti Na Chaikantamanshnata:
Na Chati Swapnaseelasya Jagrato Naiva Charjuna”.
Yoga brings happiness to him whio is moderate in eating (consuming), sleeping and exerting.
“ Yuktaharaviharasya Yuktacheshtasya Karmasu
Yuktaswapnavabodhasya Yogo Bhavati Dukhaha ”.
The same is the case with the society. The Bhagawad Gita keeps a moderately rich society in which the needs of all the members are attended to, as an ideal one and not one in which there is extremem disparity. Like individuals, society also must follow the Yoga way.
When our ancestors had kept this ideal before them, we (Bharat) reached the zenith in progress. It is only when corrupting influences crept into the society that degeneration set in.
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