The job of the King

The discipline of Zen comes from India originally. There are quite considerable differences between the Yoga I’ve been presenting to you, the Yoga of the Gita, which was the Yoga of kings and people who had active responsibility in the world to protect communities. This was the job of the king. He was the hardest working man in the kingdom. According to Manu, he had only three hours allowed him for sleep every night and there was no sinecure of the job. The Karma Yoga of Shankara is for kings, those who have responsibility, those who are engaged in organisation, those who engage in agriculture and those who want to do service in their lives. It’s quite wrong to suppose that the castes, the so-called castes – it’s a Portuguese word, it’s not a Sanskrit word at all – in the Gita were originally hereditary.

The Gita said nothing about a Brahmin being the son of a Brahmin father or mother, but the Brahmin is one whose actions naturally tend towards seeking for peace, seeking for truth, seeking forgiveness. Uprightness; he had to speak out the truth. The warrior is the born leader of men. He is energetic, he’s very courageous and the essence of his job and his calling is to protect the weaker and to protect the Brahmins, those who have a calling for the higher spiritual truth. The Vaishya, the organisational man and the so-called Shudra – which simply means  service – many of us want to join some movement or follow some person and give  service to the community, to the movement.  We have this phrase of ‘public servant’.  The Gita very roughly divides these four groups and says that people are born with these tendencies but, of course, the tendencies have to be cultivated. If not, they lapse, as the Gita also says, and they’re not exclusive either. Those who are of the so-called Kshatriya – it is not found in other Indo-European languages the word Kshatriya – it can mean a leader. Their job was to uphold and protect, so they fought when there were invasions.

© Trevor Leggett

Titles in this series are:

Part 1: Yoga, Zen and Peace

Part 2: Ethics and the Cosmic Self

Part 3: Desires beyond our needs are ghosts

Part 4: Gifts, sacrifice and austerity

Part 5: The merchant’s way

Part 6: The job of the King

Part 7: Seeking for realisation in Yoga and Zen

Part 8: The way of praying the cosmic current

Part 9: Melting Ice

Part 10: No distinction