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Chapter 1 of 35
What Desire, Hope and Ambition Do to Us
Chapter 1 of 35 — a single teaching, 4 min in total.
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Desire, hope, expectation and ambition — the four engines of almost every choice in the epic.
The Mahabharat is, among other things, a study of what wanting does to people. Duryodhana's ambition, Dhritarashtra's hope for his son, Karna's longing for recognition, Yudhishthira's appetite at the dice game — the war has many causes, but most of them start as an ordinary wish that was never examined.
Krishna's counsel throughout is not that desire is wicked. It is that desire attaches itself to outcomes, and outcomes are the one thing nobody controls. The Gita's most quoted line makes exactly this distinction: you have a claim on your action, never on its fruit.
- Kama
- Desire or longing; one of the four legitimate aims of life, and dangerous only when it governs the others.
- Phala
- Fruit, result. The thing Krishna repeatedly tells Arjuna to stop reaching for.