Page 29 - All India Magazine Oct-2025

The physical act of war
The physical fact of war, however, is only a special and out war
d manifestation of a general principle in life and the Kshatriya is
only the outward manifestation and type of a general characteristic
necessary to the completeness of human perfection. War typifies
and embodies physically the aspect of battle and struggle which
belongs to all life, both to our inner and our outer living, in a world
whose method is a meeting and wrestling of forces which progress
by mutual destruction towards a continually changing adjustment
expressive of a progressive harmonising and hopeful of a perfect
harmony based upon some yet ungrasped potentiality of oneness.
The Kshatriya is the type and embodiment of the fighter in man who
accepts this principle in life and faces it as a war rior striving towards
mastery, not shrinking from the destruction of bodies and forms,
but through it all aiming at the realisation of some principle of right,
justice, law which shall be the basis of the harmony towards which
the struggle tends. The Gita accepts this aspect of the world-energy
and the physical fact of war which embodies it, and it addresses
itself to the man of action, the striver and fighter, the Kshatriya, —
war which is the extreme contradiction of the soul's high aspiration
to peace within and harmlessness without, the striver and fighter
whose necessary turmoil of struggle and action seems to be the
very contradiction of the soul's high ideal of calm mastery and self-
possession, — and it seeks for an issue from the contradiction, a
point at which its terms meet and a poise which shall be the first
essential basis of harmony and transcendence. CWSA 19: 52

The Battle of Life
Man meets the battle of life in the manner most consonant
with the essential quality most dominant in his nature. There are,
according to the Sankhya philosophy accepted in this respect by
the Gita, three essential qualities or modes of the world-energy and
therefore also of human nature, sattva, the mode of poise, knowl-

All India Magazine, October 2025 29