Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy - Osho - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 2. KRISHNA IS COMPLETE AND WHOLE
Under the circumstances there was no other course for Gandhi but to say that the war of Mahabharat
was a parable, a myth, that it did not happen in reality. He cannot acknowledge the reality of the
Mahabharat, because war is violence, war is evil to him. So he calls it an allegorical war between
good and evil. Here Gandhi takes shelter behind the same dialectics Krishna emphatically rejects.
Krishna says a dialectical division of life is utterly wrong, that life is one and indivisible. And Gandhi
depicts the Mahabharat as a mythical war between good and evil where the Pandavas represent
good and the Kaurawas represent evil, and Krishna urges Arjuna to fight on behalf of good. Gandhi
has to find this way out. He says the whole thing is just allegorical, poetic.
There is a gap of five thousand years between Krishna and Gandhi, and so it was easy for Gandhi
to describe a five-thousand-year-old event as a myth. But the Jainas did not have this advantage,
so they could not escape like Gandhi by calling the whole Mahabharat a metaphor. For them it had
really happened. Jaina thinking is as old as the VEDAS.
Hindus and Jainas share the same antiquity. So the Jainas could not say like Gandhi – who was a
Jaina in mind and a Hindu in body – that the war did not really take place or that Krishna did not
lead it. They were contemporaries of Krishna, so they could not find any excuse. They sent Krishna
straight to hell; they could not do otherwise. They wrote in their scriptures that Krishna has been put
in hell for his responsibility for the terrible violence of the Mahabharat. If one responsible for such
large scale killing is not committed to hell, what will happen to those who scrupulously avoid even
killing a fly as the Jainas do? So the Jainas had to put Krishna in hell.
But this is how his contemporaries thought. Krishna’s goodness was so outstanding and vast that
even his contemporary Jainas were faced with this difficulty, so they had to invent another story
about him. Krishna was a rare and unique man in his own right. It is true he was responsible for a
war like the Mahabharat. It is also true he had danced with women, had disrobed them and climbed
up a tree with their clothes. Such a good man behaving in such a bad way! So after dumping him
into hell they felt disturbed: if such good people as Krishna are hurled into hell then goodness itself
will become suspect. So the Jainas said that Krishna would be the first Jaina tirthankara in the next
kalpa, in the next cycle of creation. They put him in hell, and at the same time gave him the position
of their tirthankara in the coming kalpa.
It was a way of balancing their treatment of Krishna, he was so paradoxical. From a moralistic
viewpoint he was obviously a wrong kind of man, but otherwise he was an extraordinary man,
worthy of being a tirthankara. Therefore they found a middle way: they put him in hell for the time
being and they assigned him the hallowed position of their own future tirthankara. They said that
when the current kalpa, one cycle of creation, would end and the next begin, Krishna would be their
first tirthankara. This is a compensation Krishna really had nothing to do with. Since they sent him
to hell, the Jainas had to compensate. They compensated themselves psychologically.
Gandhi has an advantage: he is far removed from Krishna in time, so he settles the question with
great ease. He does not have to send Krishna to hell, nor to make him a tirthankara. He solves his
problem by calling the Mahabharat a parable. He says the war did not really take place, that it is just
an allegory to convey a truth about life, that it is an allegorical war between good and evil. Gandhi’s
problem is the same one that faced the Jainas of his time. Non-violence is the problem. He cannot
accept that violence can have a place in life. It is the same with good. Good cannot admit that bad
has a place in life.
Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy 27 Osho