So the Gita’s universe is profuse without confusion. What about someone who wants to follow the Gita in his or her life? Embracing all these multiplicities, acknowledging so many perspectives as valid, what do you exclude and resist? If you are so many ways at once, who are you, really?
All these questions can be collapsed into one immediate and very specific question. Luckily for us, it’s the same question this God’s song was meant to answer in the first place.
What do you do when the other fellow wants to kill you?
5
This requires a word or two about the Gita and history.
Not the Gita’s own history, which is very uncertain and quite possibly irrelevant. Did Krishna “really” sing it? Did Vyasa, the poet of the Mahabharata, transcribe it? Does Vyasa even exist, or is he, like Homer, a construct? Was the Gita written centuries later by that omnipresent genius, Anonymous? Was it inserted into the Mahabharata, which is known to have proliferated episodes like a modern fan-fiction website?
None of this matters to our experience of the Gita. Such questions matter more to historians, who regard the Gita not as a life-guide but as a “text,” and to people who want to discredit the Gita by proving its fallible human origin—never quite getting that the human can be divine, in the Gita’s worldview. So I am going to bypass the Gita’s history and “mythistory” alike.
I want to explain instead the Gita’s place in Hindu history. A millennium of free speculation and religious multiplicity in India had allowed hundreds of sects, cults, and schools of philosophy to flourish. Even atheism had its sages; the Samkhya school, which Krishna mentions so reverently, was an atheistic one. In India, religion flourished on the principle of the rainforest.
The Gita, no matter its exact date of composition or transcription, clearly arrives on a scene crowded with philosophers. At one point, Krishna recounts a statement of materialism or nihilism. It sounds contemporary, but such ideas were tired even then.
“No truth, no base,” they say, “no lord
Is in the world. It came to be,
But one thing doesn’t follow from another.
What else causes it but lust?”
Holding to this view,
Lost souls with small minds
Emerge as enemies, cruel
In action, to destroy the world.
Do rituals today seem shucked of their meaning—stiff, rote, empty? Does the priesthood seem corrupt? Krishna seems as irked with hypocritical Brahmins as any campus atheist with the Catholic Church.
Such flowery words they declaim, these
Ignoramuses! Delighting,
Partha, in the letter of the Veda,
Saying there is nothing else….
They act out many different rituals
With the goal of glut and grandeur.
Krishna’s song of multiplicities is always aware of other schools and outlooks. When discussing union through knowledge (gyana-yoga), he seems partial to the Samkhya school of thought, one of the oldest. But his panoptic view of Indian religious thought sees into the future, too. His discussion of devotional worship would resonate with vernacular Bhakti poets more than a thousand years later. The Gita’s discussion of karma-yoga, the yoga of Action, would inform, through Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian Independence struggle. Its central idea—focus on the action itself, not the result of it—sustained Indians through year after futile year of jail time and failed negotiations.
For all that acceptance of multiplicity, though, Krishna has favorites. Extended passages in the Gita provide detailed portraits of the ideal seeker. Krishna even describes the way such a seeker prepares his seat before meditating. Krishna acknowledges the difficulty of meeting that ideal, of course, and even tiers the different ways of reaching him.
Keep your mind on me alone,
Have me absorb your intellect,
And from then on, without a doubt,
You will reside in me.
Or, if you just can’t keep on
Thinking steadily of me,
Then practice yoga, Arjuna,
To seek and reach me.
If you cannot even practice that,
Make my works your highest goal.
Merely doing work for me,
You will reach perfection.
If even this is something that you can’t
Quite do, take refuge in my power.
Let go of all the fruits of action
And act with self-control.
Devotion is the one thing that must not be lost. Devotion, as it turns out, is the one emotion underlying all relationships between a human subject (or lover or parent or child or student) and his or her divine object.
Krishna motivates Arjuna by conjuring, in more than one chapter, an ideal human being, an aspirant to aspire toward. This portrait is familiar from the Upanishads, seated and meditative and full of serenely wise qualities.
Holding torso, head, and neck upright,
Motionless, steady,
Staring at the tip of his own nose,
Not looking in any direction.
To connect this detached ideal to the ethos of the righteous warrior, the resister of evil, to assert that you can be that meditating aspirant and still fight hard in the arena of history: This is Krishna’s masterstroke. It had no precedent, to my knowledge, in all of Hindu thought.
It came just in time.
6
Classical India’s rainforest-profuse spirituality expressed its strength and life. That profusion, had it not been for the Gita, might have been a fatal weakness.
The past two millennia have seen a drastic, worldwide loss of theodiversity. Today we are living through an age of rapid biological extinctions; in the age preceding the Anthropocene, people exterminated deities instead of beetles.
Tellingly, the original Pantheon was a shrine “to all the Gods” built by Agrippa, twenty-five years before Christ. Today it is the Church of Santa Maria Rotonda. A much earlier pantheon could be found in Arabia, a shrine full of statues and sacred objects set side by side: the Ka’aba. Polytheistic traditions of the Near East, Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Australia were crowded out by one of two invasive species of monotheism. After two millennia of extinctions worldwide, only the Hindu pantheon—pan + theion, “All Holy”—would survive.
And not for want of exposure to the pesticides and chain saws. Hindu India had already spawned its proselytizing heresy. Just as Jesus was born a Jew, Gautama Buddha was born a Hindu. Some centuries later, the Mauryan emperors adopted the new religion just as Constantine adopted Christianity. After that, Hindu India lived for nearly a thousand years under Muslim warlords and emperors. Some, like Akbar, picked up the pluralism in their environment, while others, like Ibrahim Lodi and Aurangzeb, slaughtered infidels in the grand old style. In the best cases, these rulers were effete rose sniffers and sherbet sippers, taxing their peasants to build lavish mausoleums for dead begums. In the worst cases, they were Taliban warlords before their time.
After Muslim rule, India came under European domination for two centuries. Great Britain’s religious proselytizing increased over time, as laissez-faire East India Company hands gave way to hymn-singing Victorian sahibs and memsahibs.
How did Hindu India—with no native horses, a technological disadvantage in weaponry, and little political or social unity—survive?
There are physical reasons, of course. The subcontinent had enough disease already, so smallpox couldn’t wipe its inhabitants out, as it did the “Indians” on the other side of the world. The Hindus had numbers on their side. Slaughter on the necessary, industrial scale simply was not possible until the twentieth century. Hinduism also had an orthodox priestly class, insufferably convinced of its own superiority. This supremacism, however odious to outsiders, is a sine qua non when it come
s to building an empire—or resisting one. The Jews have it in their rabbis; the Hindus have it in their Brahmins. Both are survivor religions, and both, accordingly, are hated. Simply by living on, they cast into doubt the universalist fantasies of the faiths that have failed to destroy them.
Of course, these factors aren’t enough to guarantee the survival of a tradition. Physical factors help ensure the physical survival of the people. Hinduism’s spiritual survival owes much to the Gita. The hymns of the Vedas, the high philosophy of the Upanishads, the fantastic tales of the Puranas each had their place and appeal. Yet each one had equivalents in the bygone pagan civilizations of the classical Mediterranean world or Persia.
Only the Hindus had armor, and that armor was the Gita. As late as 1919 C.E., Mahatma Gandhi could use it to stiffen the resolve of his followers against the British Raj. You hold the scripture he sang before dawn on the day of his assassination.
Indestructibility: Be aware
It spreads through all this.
Destroying this imperishable part
Is something no one can accomplish.
They say these bodies that embody
Indestructible, immeasurable
Eternities must have an end.
So fight, Arjuna!
7
I have been rereading the Gita for a quarter of a century. Now, after a crash self-study of Sanskrit and word-by-word research that didn’t feel as tedious as it would have been with any other book, I have translated it. I can’t really explain how I ended up here.
I was born in the United States into a secularized Hindu family. We are all four of us medical doctors, and no one else in my family is particularly religious. My parents maintain a small shrine in the corner of the master bedroom. Whenever we were on a plane, my mother would produce from her purse, before takeoff, a small laminated card with images of Ganesha and Durga. I had to touch my right ring finger to it and then to my forehead so the plane wouldn’t crash. As for scriptures, I sought them out by myself. I found my Gods in the library.
There weren’t any books of fiction or poetry in the house, either, only medical journals and textbooks. They held, and hold to this day, though I, too, am a doctor, no interest for me. So I found all humankind in the library as well.
I have never gone hungry. I have never gone thirsty. When I was a boy, I wanted objects but didn’t get them; I must have internalized those restraints, because now I do not want objects. I have never not gotten something I needed, and my loving, hardworking immigrant parents saw to that. I do not know why religiosity has surged in me. It is an incongruity I hide from the other bespectacled Indian doctors of my cohort, entering middle age like me, trying to stay fit like me, suburban and midwestern like me. My wife is the only person I can talk to about these things; and someday, when they are older, I trust, my children.
Yet I am least religious in a congregation. I dislike a crowd of the like-minded. I have come to realize that religion and literature are things I learned to treasure when I was alone in early adolescence. Dead writers and living Gods became my truest friends, and I prefer to be alone with them.
The Gita must have played into this. It is the greatest poem of friendship, after all, in any language. Twenty-five years ago, a friendless, nearsighted brown kid set it at the center of his universe. It has been there ever since.
Amit Majmudar
DUBLIN, OHIO
OCTOBER 2016
A NOTE ON THE WORDS I DIDN’T TRANSLATE
This translation contains a few words that are transliterated directly from Sanskrit into English. They express concepts absent from the Western tradition, and hence from English itself.
GUNA
Animals and insects are entirely what they are. Their inner lives (judged from the outside, at least) possess a oneness that is alien to human beings. I guess it’s this that led more than one tradition to deny them souls. We experience internal conflicts in a way they don’t, or don’t seem to.
Intensely dualistic traditions, like the major monotheistic ones, set an angel and a devil on your shoulders. Freud imagines your selfhood in three parts: id, ego, and superego; premodern European medicine imagined four humors: yellow bile, black bile, blood, and phlegm; modern Western medicine tallies more than a hundred neurotransmitters (and counting).
Session 16 describes our natures as either “divine” or “demonic,” in the dualist fashion; toward the end of Session 18, people are divided into four groupings, corresponding to the four traditional castes, each with its own dharma.
Elsewhere, and much more extensively, the Gita describes three factors in a braid, and these are the gunas. I won’t go into each guna here because the Gita does so at length. That is the same reason I didn’t translate the word. Attribute and trait are not the right words because the gunas are best thought of as groups of traits. The specific traits that come under each heading are numerous; the Gita spends several verses listing telltale traits of each guna, or describing what faith or resolve or charity looks like under the influence of this or that guna. So the hundredfold nature of the human being, too, finds its way into the Gita’s outlook. The Gita, in keeping with the spirit of multiplicity, manages to have it every way at once.
DHARMA
Sometimes the word dharma gets translated as duty, sometimes as law. Depending on the context, English translators also use righteousness. The word seems to hang, ungraspably cloudlike, over a few related concepts. I would like to condense its meanings into prose for a moment, then turn it back into the mist of the original Sanskrit.
Everybody has his or her dharma, as an individual. More than one dharma, in fact: You have certain obligations as a son or daughter, wife or husband, mother or father, and so on; certain obligations, too, as a member of society. In this sense, dharma relates to the various roles we have in life. There is no handbook that details exactly, in a ten-point to-do (or not-to-do) list, what your dharma is. Some ancient treatises, like the Law-Book of Manu, have tried to do this, but they have always fallen away, while the concept of dharma hasn’t.
This indefinite aspect is, to my mind, crucial. It makes law the wrong English word. Each person has his or her own dharma. Deciding the proper dharmic action is not always easy. (Note how proper comes from the Latin proprius, “one’s own.”) Arjuna’s despair arises from the conflict between his dharma as a family member and his dharma as a warrior.
Notice that Krishna solves Arjuna’s dharma dilemma by signaling toward the larger sense of dharma. This is dharma in its collective sense, at the level of society, of humankind itself. Krishna promises to reestablish it by taking a mortal birth, time and time again, whenever he is needed.
The Gita is occasioned by a moment of supreme tension between these two simultaneous definitions of dharma. An action which may seem personally adharmic (shooting your own cousins, in Arjuna’s case) can uphold the larger dharma.
Fanatics and madmen, such as exist in every society and twist every scripture, have never seized on this idea to justify slaughter. In India, that is: Heinrich Himmler kept a copy of the Gita in his pocket, and he was recorded as calling it the ideal scripture to shape the SS man for his “most difficult task.” Himmler’s October 1943 Posen speech is the negative image of the Gita, the Gita’s ethics of compassionate contemplative action as reinterpreted by the thieving, usurping, power-seeking, murderous Kauravas: “We have the moral right, we had the duty to our people to do it, to kill this people who would kill us….And we have suffered no defect within us, in our soul, or in our character.”
The word dharma has already entered English. Google’s Ngram viewer, which tracks the frequency of use of specific words, shows its sudden upsweep in the 1960s. Rather than switch among three or four approximate words, I have kept this word intact.
No English word could convey its etymological beauty. Dharma has its origin in the Sanskrit root dhrt, meanin
g “basis” or “support.” It is related to the word for “earth,” dharti. Societies are built on dharma just as cities are built on the earth. One supports the other; if one gets corrupted, the other sinks. As early as Session 1, Arjuna envisions how the corruption of dharma makes a civilization sink—first morally, and then out of history entirely.
To this end, I should point out that Hindus, when the Gita was written, never called themselves Hindus or their religion Hinduism. They spoke of it—if they thought of it at all in such a detached and self-reflexive way—as sanatan dharma, the eternal dharma. That dharma, as laid out in the Gita, has been the ever-enduring foundation (acyuta, “ever-enduring,” is Arjuna’s first and last epithet for Krishna in the Gita) of this survivor religion. The eternal dharma renews itself in every generation. It doesn’t do so by itself; it does so through the hard work of individuals.
I considered it my dharma, for example, to prepare this book.
BRAHMAN
The word Brahman does not refer to the same entity as God. God would be Deva, a word often used in the plural in the Gita. Brahman is (or rather, neither is nor isn’t) a concept unique to Vedic thought, and I have discussed it in sections 3 and 4 of the foreword.
If I could have come up with a satisfactory substitute, I would have. Change the second a to an i, and Brahman becomes Brahmin, which is the word for a priest. Take off the n and Brahman becomes Brahma, the Creator of the universe, who is a God like Vishnu or Shiva and not the same entity as Brahman. This is important to know because both Brahma and Brahmin do show up elsewhere in the Gita.
If you choose to read this translation aloud, you should stress the second syllable of Brahman. For Brahmin and Brahma, stress the first.
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