In that verse, Krishna is intentionally mentioning those that society considers subordinate or unclean. What’s crucial is that he can find examples; society wasn’t functioning correctly then, either. (If it were, the civil war wouldn’t have been taking place.) He is speaking against that hierarchy. Differences are everywhere, but there’s no reason to perceive those differences as unequal.
That is why only tamas, Darkness, gives gifts out of contempt (Session 17). Contempt arises when we internalize the hierarchy. It is an emotion we direct “down.” People do different work because everybody has his or her own dharma (svadharma). One person translating this scripture and another person laying tile and a third person flying a plane aren’t in a competition. There is no reason to rank us. Either we do right or do wrong or do not do. There is no work that is inherently better than any other. To understand Brahman is to understand the equality of all who constitute it.
Notice that even when the Gita lays out unflattering differences, like Darkness (tamas) or the demonic inheritance, the yogi is never enjoined to chastise, slaughter, enslave, or otherwise clobber people who possess these characteristics. This, the Gita is saying, is just how people are: various, but on a continuum, and striving to transcend it. Krishna never exhorts his human followers to punish. He appropriates to himself alone (see Session 16) the right to punish them, through rebirth.
Let me make something clear: None of this is an apologia for the historical cruelties of the caste system in India. I am not justifying Indian social practices. I am explaining the Gita—and how the Gita tried (and failed) to take the hierarchy out of multiplicity. It tried to do so by teaching the unity between the atman and Brahman. The most recent Hindu to learn this lesson fully, and live it fully, was Mahatma Gandhi. The rest of us are striving.
LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 5
This is the first time Arjuna points out Krishna’s tendency to praise two opposed or irreconcilable things. There may even be a note of frustration in that “definitely,” suniscitam, with which he ends the opening question. Do I renounce all action, or do I pursue yogic action? Which is it? Session 5 consists of this one, four-line question followed by a long answer from Krishna.
Naturally, given the context, Krishna’s preference is for the active yogi. He reconciles the seemingly irreconcilable through one of the Gita’s central insights. Krishna explains how a yogi can act (and how, by extension, an archer can shoot) without letting the sin of the action “smear” him.
The key is to let go of the fruits, or results, of the action. You have to shift all the emphasis onto the action itself.
This is, almost incidentally, also a key to human happiness. (The Sanskrit word for happiness, sukham, occurs more than once in this session.) When you take your focus off the action at hand and put it on the results, you link your emotions to the future, which is out of your control.
The Gandiva bow and arrow are in Arjuna’s hands—or were, before he threw them down in despair. Only the course of the arrow is in his control. The deaths of his Kaurava adversaries, as Krishna will explain later, are not. Arjuna’s dharma is to make war on Kurukshetra. That is where he must focus: on the bird in hand, not on the weather next week.
Incidentally, that throwing down of bow and arrow in Session 1 has a connection to this session. Samnyasa, translated here as “renunciation” in keeping with most other translations of the Gita, has a closer etymological equivalent in rejection. Rejection has a Latin root that means “to throw,” just as samnyasa has a sense of “to throw down” or “to cast aside.” I opted against rejection because it doesn’t quite fit; its connotations are off; and renunciant, while rare enough in English, is at least literary English, unlike rejector. Samnyasa is also the final stage of the idealized Hindu life—a final phase of old age when, children fathered and raised and the wealth passed on, a man casts away every last connection to his life. He leaves his worldly life behind him like a snakeskin. He is all lived out. This Sanskritic image has a clear connection to the Western idea of “renouncing” the world. So the common choice—even though it comes from the Latin nuntiare, “to report, to announce, to deliver a message,” a nuncio being a papal ambassador—strikes me, alas, as the best one.
Of course, you can’t be completely unaware of the results of your actions. That kind of willed ignorance is not advisable or even possible. Imagine an Arjuna who shoots his arrows without checking his target. You can keep the results clearly in mind; the point is to redirect your focus and your hope. You should hope to do the work well. You should not hitch your hope to the rewards that the work, if done well, will bring you.
Consider this translation. If I kept myself totally unaware of the existence of readers, I wouldn’t write anything in the first place. But I must admit, even as I translated Session 5, even as I write this guide to it, that I do desire people to read what I am typing. I would love for the tapping action of my fingers to bear that “fruit.” Yet my focus, dear reader, is not on you. If it were, I might massage the translation to make it more “accessible,” or soft-pedal the metaphysics and present the Gita as a self-help book (it’s only a matter of time before someone does that successfully). Instead, I keep my focus on the work itself as I do this, and it takes its own shape, line by line. What a literary critic or Sanskritist says, or how many stars an online reviewer gives it, is none of my concern. That is what makes the work possible in this form. That is what will keep it, no matter what evil is said or thought about it, “unsmeared.”
LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 6
This session presents the classic image of the yogi, serenely sitting in lotus position with hooded eyes crossed, the spine perfectly upright, at once balletic and still. The description even details how he prepares his seat. This idealized yogi is one of the earliest Indian images of religious enlightenment, dating back to the Upanishads and before. It has become familiar to many in the West—either from yoga class or from images of the seated Buddha.
That ideal was originally Hindu, and it didn’t have that much to do with various yoga-studio asanas from Downward Dog on down. That form of yoga, “Hatha-yoga,” developed later. Krishna makes no mention of it. For him, yoga is ethical and spiritual. I imagine that the more physical Hatha-yoga might have developed as a response to this seated pose—for the same reason today’s sedentary office workers jump on the treadmill (or go to yoga class) after work.
* * *
In two successive verses, Krishna proliferates a word. He has done this before. Last time, it was Brahman, and this time, self. So many selfs bewilder us at first, just as so many Brahmans did then, and it can seem like a tongue-twisting tautology at first glance.
The image makes sense when you think of the essential unity of self and Brahman—and of Arjuna gazing out at the two armies. A yogi confronting the “self” resembles a soldier facing an enemy in battle: hostility on both sides, until the surrender…but after that, clemency on one side, cooperation on the other. Once you defeat your own selfishness, you are no longer self-serving. You are your own master, and the self is your helpmate.
While Krishna conjures this exalted ideal of the yogi, always emphasizing self-control and self-restraint, Arjuna feels less and less worthy of fancying his own face on that idealized, seated yogi.
Why would he? Consider the memories in Arjuna’s mind. See him taking part in an archery competition as a boy, showing up his Kaurava cousins. See him setting a fire in the Khandava Forest, and the wild twisting death throes of the serpents and demons that burned to death in it. See him and his four brothers sitting, passive and shocked, around a game board, that fateful Game of Dice in which the Pandavas gambled and lost their kingdom to Prince Duryodhan….Arjuna has acted and refrained from action in his life, but he has been far from a yogi.
This realization prompts his question. With meditative yoga being so difficult, what happens to someone who fails at it? A yogi dismisses worldly
ambitions in favor of this higher one, but success isn’t a given. In fact, it’s a lot easier to get fame or money or glory than it is to unite with Brahman. You put all your metaphorical eggs in this one metaphysical basket: Now what?
Krishna assures Arjuna that no effort is lost. The system of rebirth ensures that he will take birth again and pick up where he left off. Krishna says this rebirth takes place after a temporary sojourn in heaven. This conception of the afterlife is yet another instance of the pluralistic Gita having it both ways at once. The belief in reincarnation is coupled with a belief in heaven and hell. It’s just that, in the Gita, neither heaven nor hell is eternal. That certainly seems fairer than judging someone on a few years of life, then packing him or her off to one place or the other forever.
It isn’t just mercy, though. Using time to limit death is how the frame story can continue. That frame story is the same for every living being: the atman’s progress toward, into, Brahman. According to the Gita, people get the rebirths they have earned; after death, they get the heaven or hell they deserve, for the length of time they deserve to get it; but every inch of progress toward Brahman carries over from rebirth to rebirth. The births and afterlives are episodes. The yogi’s progress is the frame story. Those episodes have the same theme as the frame story: justice.
LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 7
More than once, over the course of Session 7, Krishna refers to knowing things whole, in their entirety, without remainder, without exception. There is a pun here, repeated elsewhere, on his own name. The term krtsna sounds almost exactly like his own name, and it means entire. The pun is meaningful. Whole knowledge is to know the entirety, and the entirety is synonymous—and nearly homophonous—with Krishna.
Krishna is all. This entirety allows for a generosity rarely seen in other scriptures: the broad-minded assurance that the worship of this or that other God is perfectly valid. This applies to the Vedic or Hindu pantheon, which was the only one known on the subcontinent at the time. In the modern day, however, the wisdom could apply to other traditions, too. Krishna explains that whatever good things come of their worship actually come from himself. This is not the attitude of a threatened or insecure deity. In the immense body of Krishna stories, from his childhood to his death, he experiences the gamut of human emotions, but he is never wrathful or irritable.
* * *
Notice how little emphasis the vast Hindu myth-hoard places on Krishna’s death. Different religions place varying degrees of emphasis on the deaths of their central figures. Christianity makes the death of Christ the hinge of history; to find the marvels and miracles of his childhood, we have to seek out the purged, apocryphal gospels. While the Prophet Mohammed’s death, of fever, bears little emphasis, Shia Islam does glorify the far more spectacular death of Ali. These fixations on death translate readily into the cult of the martyr, the glorification of the shaheed.
In Hinduism, the deaths of Rama and Krishna are almost afterthoughts. The childhoods of both figures burgeon with tales. So do their youths and adulthoods, which are literally epic tales of love and war. But the Hindu imagination took no interest in their deaths. In both cases, the death scenes are quite anticlimactic. Rama wades into a river—about as symbolic a gesture as you are likely to come up with. Krishna gets shot in the heel by a hunter. (A skeptical mind might sense a failure of invention here; this story bears a suspicious resemblance to Achilles getting shot in the heel by Paris.) Most tellings of the story rush to point out Krishna died by his own wish. He used the wound as an excuse to decamp.
Clearly the ancient Indians genuinely believed in the atman’s immortality and in Vishnu’s certain return. A sense of continuity across lives kept Hinduism away from any glorification of death, either of an avatar or of an individual. Even the Goddess Kali, with her necklace of skulls, is a lively dancer.
* * *
Krishna ends this session with a series of jargon words. They may look and sound strange to you—as they should, because they also seem strange to Arjuna. In fact, the very next session is going to open with his questions about them.
LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 8
The first task of translation is finding a way to sound as little like a translation as possible while still maintaining accuracy. The terms that Arjuna asks about gave me great trouble. They consisted of familiar terms—self, God, being, sacrifice—but linked to a prefix that made them specific theological terms which have no English equivalent. The solutions of other translators, from direct transliteration of each term into Roman script (Sargeant) to “material manifestation” (Prabhupada) to “elemental-basis” (Feuerstein), were not for me. I decided I would carry out a process in English identical to the one carried out in the ancient Sanskrit. After all, these were not terms used in the everyday parlance or poetry of ancient India. They were theological terms, unusual enough that Arjuna asks Krishna to define them. So I hooked the familiar word to the equivalent English prefix. Adhi and meta are similar, and both have theological connotations. So if metaself, metagod, metabeing, and metasacrifice seem neither spoken nor poetic English but more like theological jargon, that is because I’m staying faithful to the original Gita.
* * *
Sanskrit is notorious for the way a given word has many meanings. In a particularly decadent, “late” period of its poetry, entire poems were written as elaborate double entendres—that is, two different poems made of the exact same words.
One such word has led my translation to deviate a bit from others. This word is purusha. Over time, this word has accrued several meanings. It can mean “sentience,” or human consciousness, or any number of similar-sounding concepts. In some places in the Gita, Krishna uses this word to mean the highest goal to be attained. In the line param purusha divyam, the word param means “highest” and divyam means “divine.” Yet in contemporary Gujarati, purusha can be used, simply, to mean “man.”
Purusha’s simultaneity—the way it can mean something essentially human or essentially divine—is the reason I made a point to juxtapose, where I could, its human and divine aspects. After all, the Gita’s ideal future for the individual human atman projects it rejoining, or becoming, Brahman.
Hence “human godhood.” The inherently divine nature of the atman is coded into this Sanskrit word, and its translation ought to span the extremes, too. The word means both things the same way the atman itself is both things: human and divine.
Purusha is by no means the only word that presents this issue. Bhuta, for example, can mean “being,” “spirit,” “creature,” “species,” “ghost.”…Is it any surprise that Sanskrit, the language of polytheism, is polysemic?
* * *
This session concludes with some lines about the time of death. It’s important to keep two things in mind about Krishna’s assertions here. Whether you or I will be reborn or not does not depend on the time of year we die, the first six months or the second six months. What Krishna says applies only to yogis, who are said to have control over their own deaths. They are capable of svicchamrityu, “self-willed-death.” Just as bodhisattvas in Buddhism are enlightened souls who stay behind by choice, the yogi can come back for another birth by choosing his time of death in the latter half of the year. Krishna associates that death with the moon—the moon that wanes and disappears, but then waxes again; the moon in whose blotches ancient Hindus saw a rabbit, symbol there, too, of fertility.
The yogi who does not want to get reborn decides to die under the sign of the sun and, most tellingly, of fire. Fire, at the center of the sacrificial mandala, is the mouth of the God. The yogi, in a sense, is “consumed” by that fire. Once eaten, he is digested. Food, digested, becomes part of its eater. In the same way, a yogi—consumed, assimilated, consummated—ends up as a permanent part of the Permanent.
LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 9
This session makes a point of describing the wisdom and the secret as royal. Toward the
end as well, Krishna mentions kings who reach a level of sainthood. An Indian example is the father of Princess Sita from the Ramayana: King Janaka was Krishna’s own father-in-law from a prior incarnation. The European Christian equivalent would be France’s Louis IX or Hungary’s Stephen I, both canonized; India’s King Asoka is considered an enlightened ruler in the Buddhist tradition. The mention of royalty brackets Session 9, hinting at Krishna’s highest dream for Arjuna—that Arjuna might go on to become not just a victor on Kurukshetra but a rajarishi or “king-seer” himself.
The session begins and ends on telling personal notes. Krishna confides the “royal secret” because his friend will not scoff or sneer. The Godsong is delicate; the listener must be open to it. It isn’t just the God who must be willing to connect. The session ends with an exhortation to devotion and an assurance that it will not be in vain. That final assurance contrasts with the vain hopes, works, and knowledge of those who put “no faith in dharma.”
Between these personal notes, though, Krishna waxes expansive. He speaks of producing and rendering extinct, cyclically, the whole plethora of living species; he identifies himself, systematically, as every part of the traditional fire sacrifice, and the three major Vedic scriptures. (You will notice he does not mention the fourth Veda, the Atharva, which joined the Vedic corpus in the second half of the first millennium b.c.)
In this expansive mood, Krishna also proclaims his agency in the weather, and asserts himself as the cause of being, and declares himself the ultimate recipient of the worship of other Gods, too. That may sound like insufferable presumption to the jealous or infidel-hating God of many another scripture, but the Gita insists, never more clearly than this, on the trivial distinction between polytheism and monotheism from the perspective of Brahman.
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