Every government promises its subjects happiness of one style or the other. Whether it be the holy Roman Empire or the American Revolution or the Hindu state, they would create a condition or conditions for the total fulfilment of man, this fulfilment being that realization of God, of Truth or Peace. Wisdom then would be the knowledge of Truth or God or Peace, and power will then be the means or techniques by which the ultimate (whatever name you give it) could be reached. Whether you call the entity of wisdom, the Sage, the Supreme Court, or the president of the republic, or the presidium of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the names indicate the same principle now only differently called, and also viewed from different levels of knowingness. Yet it’s still the same instinctive need for an authority of wisdom, impersonal, all-knowing and considerate (or loving) of which this principle is the supreme repository. Those who look at this repository of wisdom at the level of the material world (or of the body) see its functions as the advisory entity or the party secretary who offers more apartments or better boots or better manure for your communes. Secondly, those who would view the world psychically, that is, through the subtler aspects of the self, would offer man liberty, equality and fraternity—a very paradise on earth, or in heaven, but in every way very pictorial and concrete. Thirdly, he who would understand the true nature of sacrifice, would know that dissolution is in happiness, that paradise is here and now, and he who would show the world thus, revealing there is nothing to change but only to understand, he the sage of sages: the guru, the raja guru, the wise being behind the king. Thus it’s Mao or Brezhnev who gives authority to Chou En-lai or Kosygin to rule, it’s the Pope or the Supreme Court which swears in king or president, or it’s Gandhi who makes Nehru his heir, and gives him his blessing to rule in the name of India. These are therefore archetypal figures. In India, of course, the supreme example is of Krishna, the sage, conducting Arjuna through the battle which after all is life.

Whereso is Krishna, the Lord of the Rule, whereso is the archer, Pritha’s son (Arjuna), there, I know, are fortune, victory, sure weal and glory.

(Bhagavadgita, XVIII, 78)