section_path: Themes covered/The Gita and War/Allegory of war
section_name: Allegory of war
paragraph_text: Allegory of war
  
  Unlike any other religious scripture, the Bhagavad Gita broadcasts its message in the centre of a battlefield. Several modern Indian writers have interpreted the battlefield setting as an allegory for "the war within". Eknath Easwaran writes that the Gita ' s subject is "the war within, the struggle for self-mastery that every human being must wage if he or she is to emerge from life victorious".
  
  Swami Nikhilananda, takes Arjuna as an allegory of Ātman, Krishna as an allegory of Brahman, Arjuna's chariot as the body, and Dhritarashtra as the ignorant mind. Nikhilananda's allegorical interpretation is shared by Huston Smith. Swami Vivekananda interprets the first discourse in the Gita as well as the "Kurukshetra war" allegorically. Vivekananda states that "when we sum up its esoteric significance, it means the war which is constantly going on within man between the tendencies of good and evil".
  
  Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, in his commentary on the Gita, interprets the battle as an allegory in which the battlefield is the soul and Arjuna embodies man's higher impulses struggling against evil.
  
  In Aurobindo 's view, Krishna was a historical figure, but his significance in the Gita is as a "symbol of the divine dealings with humanity", while Arjuna typifies a "struggling human soul". However, Aurobindo rejected the interpretation that the Gita, and the Mahabharata by extension, is only "an allegory of the inner life" and therefore that it has nothing to do with our outward human life and actions.