Inhale, become light inside your torso. Step back enough Yoga for kids to fully extend your arms and bend forward with your entire trunk, bending your knees slightly Yoga for kids to ensure that you can lengthen your spine. Stretch your arms fully. Arch your sitting bones upward and separate them. Lengthen the tailbone back and firm your lower belly. Lower your upper chest toward the floor without dropping your arms. Stretch fully from your core out through your arms, legs, and spine. If you can, straighten your legs.
Krishna here not only legitimises the actions of the king but also delivers blanket support for Brahmin hegemony. The aim of life, according to this teaching, is to perform our rituals and cosmically defined social duties and otherwise to abstain from actions motivated by either positive or negative personal motives. This however generates a crucial question: how do we know what our duties are? Krishna does not give an answer to this question as everybody -especially the Brahmins – knows where to find it. The answer is that you will find an outline of your svadharma – your ritual and social duties – and samsara – your life cycle rituals – in the Vedic injunctions. At the time of the Gita, the Brahmins re-codified these cosmic grounded rules for correct living. Each caste, gender and phase of life became regulated in texts like the Dharma-sastras, the laws of Manu (Manu-smirti) and the Grhya-sutras (household rules). Here even the king was subjected to Brahmin rituals and services (Malinar 2009).
As soon as we enquire who are the authors, guardians and interpretators of these texts defining cosmic order, we realise how the Krishna’s yoga places the Brahmins in power. Any king subscribing to Krishna’s theistic yoga, legitimising the king’s power, will from now on have to consult and involve the Brahmins. The king’s absolute and divine grounded power has its limitations: it always needs the consensus of the Brahmins who decide whether or not the king is following his dharma. This is a holy alliance between religious ideology (the Brahmins) and the state (the elite warriors of Kshatriyas). It turns the institution of the king into an extension of religious rituals and Indian society into a caste society.
