Godsong

by Amit Majmudar

  Than someone else’s dharma done well.

  Working as your nature dictates,

  You will not take on sin.

  {47}

  You shouldn’t give up work

  That you were born to, even if

  It’s flawed. Fault envelops all

  Endeavors, as smoke does fire.

  {48}

  Intellect on all sides unattached,

  Self overcome and longing gone,

  Renunciation gets him to

  The stasis of supreme perfection.

  {49}

  Perfection once attained, the highest

  State of knowledge is Brahman.

  Briefly, Arjuna, learn from me

  How you can gain that, too.

  {50}

  Sensual things relinquished, words first,

  Intellect cleansed and yoked,

  Resolved on self-reserve,

  Rejecting hate and passion,

  {51}

  Living alone and eating light,

  Controlled in body, talk, and thought,

  Constantly exalted in his yogic focus,

  Neutrality his refuge;

  {52}

  Egoism, brute force, pride,

  Lust, rage, possessiveness

  Abandoned; selfless, calm:

  He has evolved to become Brahman.

  {53}

  Once it has become Brahman, the atman

  Does not mourn and does not yearn. At peace,

  The same toward and in all beings,

  He gains the height of my devotion.

  {54}

  By devotion to me, he comes to know

  Just how and who I really am,

  And once he knows the real me

  He enters me immediately.

  {55}

  Always doing all his works

  With me his sanctuary,

  By my grace he gains

  A home eternal, deathless.

  {56}

  Surrendering in mind all works

  To me, with me your highest object,

  Take refuge in an intellectual yoga.

  Always think of me.

  {57}

  Think of me, and by my grace

  You’ll get through all kinds of hard going.

  But if your ego will not listen,

  You are going to be destroyed.

  {58}

  If you shelter in your egoism,

  Thinking to yourself, “I will not fight,”

  This resolve of yours will be in vain.

  Your nature will command you.

  {59}

  Bound by your own karma,

  Born to your own nature,

  What you in your confusion do not want

  To do, you will do. Even against your will.

  {60}

  The Lord of all creatures

  Lives in the homeland heart.

  It whirls all the creatures

  Maya ties to the machine.

  {61}

  Go with all your being,

  Arjuna, and shelter in him.

  By his grace you will gain

  The highest peace, the perpetual home.

  {62}

  I’ve explained to you a knowledge

  More secret than the Secret.

  Mull this over, the whole of it.

  Do what you want to do….

  {63}

  Hear me out again. My highest word,

  The secret of all secrets:

  I love you. Hard. That’s why

  I speak, to do you good.

  {64}

  Mind on me, to me devote yourself,

  Sacrifice for me, to me make reverence,

  And it’s to me that you will come—

  I promise you—because you’re dear to me.

  {65}

  Relinquish all your dharmas.

  Come shelter in me,

  And I will free you

  From all sins. Never grieve.

  {66}

  Don’t speak of this to anyone

  Who lacks for rigor, shirks devotion,

  Or doesn’t care to hear what’s said,

  Nor to anyone who envies me.

  {67}

  Whoever glosses this, the highest

  Secret, for my devotees

  Enacts the highest devotion to me,

  And he will come to me without a doubt.

  {68}

  No one in all mankind

  Will do a thing to please me more.

  No one on earth will be

  Dearer to me than he is.

  {69}

  And anyone who studies this

  Dharmic dialogue of ours

  Through the knowledge sacrifice

  Loves me: This is my belief.

  {70}

  Even if a man just hears it,

  Full of faith and never scoffing,

  He, too, will gain his freedom,

  The work of virtue, its joyful worlds.

  {71}

  Have you heard this, Partha,

  Single-mindedly?

  Has your unknowing,

  Your delusion, perished?

  {72}

  Arjuna said,

  My delusion has perished. My memory gains.

  By your grace, ever-enduring one,

  I stand here now. My doubts are gone.

  I will do what you command.

  {73}

  Sanjaya said,

  I have heard this conversation

  Between that great soul Arjuna

  And Krishna. It’s so wondrous

  It makes my hair stand on end.

  {74}

  By Vyasa’s grace, I heard

  This highest, secret yoga

  From the Lord of yoga. Krishna

  Himself related it, before my eyes!

  {75}

  King, I recall and recall

  This holy, wondrous conversation

  Of Arjuna and Krishna,

  And again and again I rejoice.

  {76}

  I recall and recall that

  Beyond-wondrous form of God,

  And great is my amazement, King,

  And once more, and once more, I rejoice.

  {77}

  Wherever Krishna Lord of yoga is,

  Wherever Arjuna the archer is,

  There must be splendor, triumph, wealth,

  And ethics. This is my belief.

  {78}

  Listener’s Guides

  LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 1

  The Gita opens in a palace deserted except for two men: an elderly king, Dhritarashtra, sitting forward nervously on his throne, and his preternaturally calm advisor, Sanjaya. Something is wrong with both men’s eyes. The King is blind, and he blinks rapidly but blankly at the floor. Sanjaya’s eyes focus ahead of him, into the distance.

  This is a palace that has known the clamor of a hundred rowdy sons, but the King’s sons, the Kauravas, are all gone now, mustered with their allies for battle on a far-off plain. They are fighting a civil war against their cousins.

  The King is desperate for news from the front. Luckily for the blind King, Sanjaya possesses eyesight mystically keen. Long before any messenger can gallop the distance, Sanjaya can give an eyewitness report of everything happening on Kurukshetra. He stares through eyes c
ataract-grayblue toward a faraway battlefield. He sees a hot, dusty plain in North India on which two armies have lined up, facing each other.

  His gaze projects the figures on the throne room floor: a haughty-looking, handsome young prince, Duryodhan, stands next to an elderly man, Drona. Drona wears, under his armor, diagonally across his chest, the white thread of the priesthood, his original calling.

  Duryodhan is Dhritarashtra’s eldest son. With his fists on his hips, he surveys the Pandava Army.

  Sanjaya’s lips murmur like a sleeptalker’s. No wonder the first word he says is seeing.

  A voice impossibly deep erupts out of Sanjaya’s throat. It isn’t his; it belongs to Duryodhan. Sanjaya has drifted up onto his feet in the blind King’s throne room. Now, inhabiting his role, inhabited by his role, he starts strutting back and forth, pointing out warrior after opposing warrior, just as Duryodhan is doing, hundreds of miles away.

  * * *

  Duryodhan’s verses, as reported by Sanjaya, are the least philosophical ones in the Gita, and with good reason. The blind King’s eldest son is a character familiar from classical literature—he resembles a chest-thumping Homeric brute like Agamemnon, or the miles gloriosus (braggart soldier) of ancient Latin literature.

  So immediately after admiring the Pandava Army, Duryodhan falls back on bragging. He brags to his own elderly instructor in the arts of war, the “twice-born” Brahmin Drona. One imagines the young prince does this out of stung pride, and also out of creeping fear.

  This fear explains his shout, at the end, to all his officers to guard Bhishma. Bhishma is not just one of the most powerful warriors on the battlefield. He is also, by far, the oldest, wearing a gray beard for a second breastplate. The civil war is not just between two sets of cousins; it is multigenerational, having drawn in a relative of their grandfather’s generation.

  * * *

  A major division in the poem is marked by the sounding of the conch shells. To my mind, it signals the transition from the framing Mahabharata epic to the stand-alone philosophical poem we know as the Gita.

  Accordingly, Sanjaya and Dhritarashtra are only implicit presences from this point onward. All that is left of them is their absence—and Sanjaya’s voice. With Sanjaya as our guide, our focus flies to the opposite end of the field, to the Pandava Army, quiet until this moment. A chariot detaches from the formation and heads for the no-man’s-land between the two armies.

  That chariot holds Krishna and Arjuna. Both princes come of illustrious ancestry, and Sanjaya refers to that in his epithets for them. He is placing them in the context of their families, Arjuna in particular. After all, Kurukshetra is about to witness an intrafamilial war. Family considerations trigger the tragic aria that forms the climax of this introductory chapter—and best expresses its theme: “Arjuna Despairs.”

  * * *

  Such subtitles, by the way, are found in every edition of the Gita, and I have included them here. I thought about not doing so: They were appended to the text by the theologian Adi Shankara (ninth century C.E.), possibly a millennium into the Gita’s history. The Gita’s original listeners, including Arjuna himself, did not have them.

  At this point, though, they have been part of the Gita for longer than they haven’t. So I have kept them as headings for the capsule summaries on the title pages of the sessions.

  Why session? Other English translations label each section of the Gita a “book,” “chapter,” or “discourse.” The Sanskrit word is adhyaya, which also has the meaning of “lesson” or “lecture.” Yet the image those words conjure—of a professor giving a student lesson after lesson, lecture after lecture—is a bit wrong for the Gita.

  The Gita is a conversation between friends. It is also a polyphonic song. After all, it’s not like Sanjaya’s narration and Arjuna’s questions are in prose, while Krishna alone gets the poetry. The Gita, to borrow a term from the parlance of music drama, is “sung-through.”

  In English, session has a place in music parlance. A “music session” or “jam session” implies collective, informal, spontaneous creativity. It fits the Gita better. Etymologically, too, the word session comes from the Latin for “sitting.” Adi Shankara was also the first to classify the Gita as the last Upanishad. The word Upanishad derives, in part, from the Sanskrit word for “sitting.”

  Because the subtitles are ones a theologian made up rather than words of the Gita itself, I allowed myself a little freedom in their translation. The Sanskrit titles contain the word yoga after every phrase. Even the first session is literally the “Arjuna-Despair-Yoga.” Following Shankara’s formula in English would elide how the Gita is not just a didactic poem but an imperative one. Yoga, whether the modern physical version or the ancient existential one, is something you learn by doing. I translated the purely descriptive titles into purely descriptive titles and the rest into forms that are at once descriptive and imperative. So “Bhakti Yoga” becomes not “The Yoga of Devotion” but “Devote Yourself.”

  LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 2

  The first session of the Gita has bits and flourishes that resemble a heroic epic—the residuum of the Mahabharata. Starting with this first question from Arjuna, the Gita takes on the traits of another peak of Hindu scripture—the middle Himalaya, between the Vedas and the Gita, known collectively as the Upanishads.

  The Upanishads are frequently question-and-answer sessions between a guru and a pupil. Inquiry is central to their structure and spirit. Kena Upanishad, for example, means, literally, “The From-What-Cause? Upanishad,” and Prasna Upanishad means “The Question Upanishad.”

  Arjuna, at this point, is merely asking a question of his friend and counselor. He does not know he is speaking to an avatar of Vishnu. Even after he finds out, in Session 11, he still keeps asking questions. This boldness—and the highest possible Authority’s openness to being questioned—is not new in the tradition of the Upanishads. In Katha Upanishad, for example, a fearless boy named Nachiketa heads down to interrogate Yama, the God of Death, about the nature of life.

  So the Gita switches its model here, moving from the heroic epic to the dialogue. The dialogue will concern theology and philosophy. It will encompass what we would today call psychology and ethics as well.

  In the Indian tradition, theology and philosophy are not so distinct as they are in the West’s part-pagan, part-Judeo-Christian tradition. Imagine if the work of thought between Aristotle and Aquinas were unbroken by any continent-wide conversion. Our even later division of thought into university departments is still more alien to the Gita’s world, just as it was to that of Aristotle—who lectured in the morning about Nicomachean Ethics, in the early afternoon about Metaphysics, in the late afternoon on Politics, and finished with an evening session On Youth, Old Age, Life and Death, and Respiration. Krishna, too, covers all those subjects, and then some.

  * * *

  Just as the Gita shifts its nature in this session, so does Krishna—and more than once. From the obedient charioteer of Session 1 he turns, at first, into a brother-in-arms, shaming Arjuna into action.

  Our narrator, Sanjaya, is right to notice the laughter of Krishna at the moment of that first transition. He is making light of Arjuna’s despair. This trivialization is also present when Krishna calls the dead and the living gatasun and agatasun, people whose breath has gone out of them and people whose breath hasn’t. As if dead bodies are just balloons that happen to have deflated. This way of saying it trivializes death in order to trivialize killing—which is exactly what Krishna, the counselor, wants to do for his despondent warrior right now: show the task from a perspective that will make it less horrific.

  Yet his laughter vanishes almost immediately. Krishna follows this perspective out, out, until he has zoomed out to the most detached vantage point possible, and the cold eye of the soldier becomes the cold eye of eternity. The despair seems a minor thing, and so does the war itself.
That hectoring, drill sergeant’s tone was just Krishna testing out an approach. After working the shame angle a bit, Krishna shifts personae again, this time to a sublime religious philosopher.

  In this role, he speaks of Samkhya, one of the oldest traditional schools of philosophy. He speaks of yoga, using the word in its broadest sense, as a many-faceted spiritual practice, with its roots in “joining” and “yoking.” And inevitably—how could he not?—he speaks of karma, the cycle of action and consequence, the very thing Arjuna fears most.

  With his new, philosophical tone, Krishna refers to “this.” By “this,” he doesn’t mean Arjuna’s body, the more present, visible external self. Instead he means “this” embodied atman. Grammatically, he refers to the inapparent part of Arjuna as the nearer of two things—not that, there, but this, here.

  It is a well-known division: You are not your body, you are what your body embodies. Krishna says more about the atman, beginning with a metaphor that, ingeniously, uses the body as a stand-in for the atman.

  At one point, Krishna lays into the shiftless, shallow wisdom of the irresolute—but the example he gives isn’t the expected one, that of people with short attention spans, who are trend-obsessed and frenetic. Instead, he depicts a specific religious type: rigid, narrow-minded, ritual-bound—and, under the holy exterior, utterly worldly.

  * * *

  Until now, these conversations have been best friend to best friend, prince to prince, and, since the war began, archer to charioteer. For years before this war, Krishna served as a strategist and diplomat on behalf of Arjuna and the Pandava brothers. Arjuna has only rarely seen Krishna grow openly philosophical like this.

  The shift inverts the usual relationship between archer and charioteer, the one calling out where and when to turn, the other steering the horses. Now the archer subordinates himself to his charioteer’s direction. Arjuna takes the opportunity, this glimpse of a hidden and private depth, to get more out of Krishna. His question has to do with how to behave—what the external signals of enlightenment are, in speech and deportment.