Godsong

by Amit Majmudar

  It’s that perspective, incidentally, that explains this expansiveness. Krishna is speaking, more frankly than ever, in the voice of his simultaneous, divine nature. The mask of the human slips; the God is showing. He is about to show this even more unabashedly. The escalating assertions of Session 9 are a preview of the poetic and, finally, literal dilations of Sessions 10 and 11.

  LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 10

  Arjuna’s questions, until now, have been a student’s. His curiosity has been ethical, philosophical, metaphysical. Now, for the first time, his curiosity is personal. He inquires after the stranger inside his friend. Krishna has made it impossible not to wonder.

  Addressing Krishna, Arjuna, in the first line he speaks in Session 10, twice uses the word param, “highest” or “supreme.” This idea of supremacy informs Krishna’s answer. His answer takes the familiar form of a catalogue, another feature of the heroic epic that finds its way, transfigured, into the Gita. Homer catalogues ships; the poet of the Gita catalogues the splendors of the universe. Walt Whitman would use this poetic technique centuries later in Leaves of Grass to express grandeur in all its details, the one self in all its multiplicity. Session 10 is the pre-echo of “Song of Myself.”

  Krishna’s first-person singular voice diffracts, polytheistically, into other deities: He locates himself in the Gods of money and desire, for example. He even names two prior avatars of Vishnu. Abstractions, like Time and Death, crowd into the list. Still, the dominant mode is pantheistic, naming individual people, mountains, seasons, trees, and animals, both mythical and real.

  Metaphysically, of course, divinity dwells in every creature, of every species. The splendor specific to each, the “highest” of each kind, is Krishna. His height is the limit to which each kind aspires. This holds true of people as well: Arjuna implies as much, calling Krishna purusottam, “Highest Man.”

  As for the people Krishna mentions, many of the names are historical, like Kapila, the philosopher who founded Samkhya. Some are so far in the past as to be almost legendary, like the ancient priest Brihaspati, after whom Indian astronomers later named a planet. Still other names are ones that Arjuna has heard only in stories about the Gods, like Skanda, the son of Shiva and Parvati. (It is no small reassurance that, by Krishna’s poetic logic, Arjuna’s charioteer is none other than the War God himself.)

  Krishna names all three kinds of names with perfect familiarity. It’s as if an ancient Greek were to speak of being the historic philosopher Plato, the distant figure of Orpheus, and the war god Ares; or, in the Biblical tradition, of being Aquinas, Aaron, and the archangel Michael. Arjuna realizes with a thrill that his friend has been and will be present everywhere, from myth to prehistory to history to now to eternity.

  Eventually Krishna tires of his catalogue. He knows it could go on forever, and now that he has begun to reveal himself, he gets impatient with words. This is an idea unique, as far as I know, to the Gita: Here, and only here, the mystery is eager to be understood. To tell is to proliferate verses. It would be much more effective to show.

  Which brings us to Session 11.

  LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 11

  Arjuna asks to see what he has heard about. What follows is one of the climactic sequences in the Gita, the Vision of the Universal Form.

  Once asked, Krishna reveals himself in his entirety—but in the poem, it’s implied that Arjuna reacts with a dumbfounded stare into space. That is why Krishna realizes that his friend cannot see the Vision with regular, human eyes. “I’ll give you a divine eye.” It’s a very human false start of this friend overeager to let his friend in on a Secret.

  Dante, in the final canto of the Paradiso, speaks of la forma universal, the exact Italian equivalent of the Sanskrit vishwa-rupa. The Commedia’s Vision reconciled an abstract Trinity with the divine-human body of Jesus. So in Canto 33, Dante sees, initially, a radiance, just as Arjuna does. Then Dante sees a circle that has three colors; after that, in some way he says he cannot fully describe, he sees our human likeness, la nostra effige, radiating out of that circle, or around it.

  Dante presents a geometrical Vision. Its human aspect is only vaguely adumbrated. The Commedia ends with Dante trying and failing to puzzle out how the human “effigy” emerges from that radiant, tricolored circle. Other monotheistic Visions, before Dante’s, refrained from mixing human imagery and the divine. Moses sees and hears a burning bush; the Book of Job presents a meteorological Vision, with its voice inside a whirlwind; the Prophet Mohammed sees the archangel Gabriel, but his direct experience of the divine is purely auditory, devoid of imagery. In all three cases, the human element is limited to language.

  The Gita’s Vision, in love with multiplicity, explodes with language, light, and human bodies. This Vision is the most vibrantly polytheistic part of the Gita. More is more. Everything crowds into this expanded Form at once, the whole universe “standing here as one.” Krishna’s human body diffracts, prismatically, into an infinite number of body parts. Arjuna sees not just dazzling light but arms, bellies, mouths, eyes. The Gita’s image reconciles abstract, philosophical Hinduism (the radiance) with the Hinduism of the pantheon (the human bodies). It reconciles the sublime formulas of the Upanishads and the anthropomorphic deities of mythology and popular worship. The Gita even manages to reconcile polytheism and monotheism: The divine form and the human form are the same thing because the divine Brahman and the human atman are one. It’s just that the oneness takes the form of multiplicity.

  This unabashedly polytheistic Vision codes itself into the very structure of the verse. The first words of six lines early on in the description are aneka, aneka, aneka, divyam, divyam, divyam. Many, many, many, divine, divine, divine. I made a point to preserve this exactly. This word many, in Sanskrit, is, technically, “not-one.” It is a preemptive rebuke to the monotheistic credo, though understandable as such only in retrospect. Krishna and the Gita-poet both were blissfully unaware of the Bible’s contempt for polytheism, blissfully prior to the Qur’an’s hatred of polytheists. Singling out a way of worship, or a way of conceiving the divine, as evil and deserving of aggression—this is one of the few things not to be found in the Gita’s everything-at-onceness.

  * * *

  Arjuna’s stunned awe gives way to terror. This universe, though full of recognizably human forms, does not itself recognize human “good” and human “evil.” After marveling awhile, Arjuna sees horrific images of death, the warriors around him vacuumed into all these mouths, their heads stuck between chomping teeth. Time means nothing from the perspective of the universe. Krishna says he has already killed the people Arjuna is going to kill. What Arjuna thinks he should not do has already happened. The arrows will glide through preexisting tunnels in the air.

  This grotesque cruelty is an aspect of the Universal Form, too. The eyes above those faces do not see such mass death as grotesque or cruel. They are indifferent. That is why Arjuna begs Krishna to make it stop, to resume a human form. Arjuna, who at the beginning of this session asked to see, at the end of it asks not to see. He asks Krishna to cover up the glowing/glowering multiplicity of the Universal Form with the mask of a single familiar face. And Krishna complies.

  LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 12

  This is the shortest chapter in the Gita. Krishna’s body is the same as before, only utterly estranged. Krishna has fanned and shivered the universe like a peacock. From now on, he will always hide this possibility.

  The new estrangement does not silence, rather it fosters Arjuna’s questioning. The first question that occurs to him concerns how best to meet again that Stranger he glimpsed in his friend. He has heard about a multiplicity of ways to get to the same place.

  Krishna’s answer epitomizes the multiplicities of the Gita. He understands that different people have different temperaments; some like singing together in a crowd, others like ladling out soup for the homeless, while still others like reading (a
nd translating) ancient scriptures. Still others like a combination of these. Krishna offers method after possible method.

  Just as he acknowledges different temperaments and tendencies, he acknowledges different capabilities. His priority is reunion with whoever loves him. So he goes down a list from most difficult (the contemplation of a divine abstraction) to the very easiest (total surrender, coupled with self-restraint).

  He finishes out with another portrait of the ideal devotee. This is a common theme of the Gita: Unlike many other scriptures that spend their time praising the divine, the Gita spends a lot of time, in session after session, praising the ideal devotee. This may be because the individual atman, as it approaches through yoga the asymptote of its being, becomes Brahman. Tat tvam asi: I imagine a sage in saffron pointing at the heavens with one hand and at me with the other, shouting, “That’s you!”

  To praise one is to praise the other.

  * * *

  A personal note, if I may, about devotion.

  I had my first sense of a “false god” at a concert once, surrounded by what felt like a thousand lifted cigarette lighters. I thought of the candles set before an altar I had seen some years before, in a church in France. This, I thought, is what those scriptures were talking about: frenzy, reverence, devotion, directed—misdirected—toward a mere singer of songs. These responses, at this intensity, were the rightful due of the divine. Only a God deserved this frenzy, this reverence, this devotion, because a God did more than entertain you. A God elevated your conduct and your thinking.

  The polytheist in me interpreted the monotheistic scriptures in this way for some time. I took “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me” to mean “Don’t worship celebrities.” Dancing around the golden calf meant, to me, working for the sake of wealth and fame. I took “infidels” to mean the people, seemingly in the millions, who had no particular religion and burned with devotion for sports figures or actors or musicians (or, among “highbrows,” for poets and artists).

  My thinking changed with time and study. What were these celebrity-worshipping “infidels” responding to? The beauty of a body’s movement or the power of a mind’s. Yoga is finesse in action. The smiling power forward spinning the ball on his finger might mirror, iha loke, here in the world, a God supporting the spinning earth. Music was a Mystery, wasn’t it? It communicated independently of its placeholder lyrics. As I knew from experience, the sung text didn’t have to be a prayer or a sermon for the musically mediated, inward transfiguration to take place. Why not revere the human being who communicated it to you? Artists of any kind are apertures. Through them, we glimpse “expansive glories.” If Brahman is atman, the divine is human, and the human, too, is divine—if only in snatches on the court or stage, or holding a guitar, or at a laptop assembling lines of poetry.

  But that explained only the reason for the devotion. Was devotion to a God, or to yoga, better? And if yes, why?

  I believe that the highest devotion is the one that makes demands on us. It says: Do this, or Do this differently. It also says: Don’t do that, or, in a more familiar form, Thou shalt not. But most consistently, it whispers that line of Rilke’s that became one of my mantras: Du musst dein Leben andern. You must change your life.

  The right human apertures on the divine, I thought, might change my life. I would devote myself only to people who would make demands on me, goad me to discipline myself, behave selflessly, become better. I went on to gain four such divinely human objects of devotion: my wife, my twin sons, and my daughter.

  Fostering each other,

  You will attain the highest good.

  LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 13

  This session begins with a request from Arjuna that seems to hint at private study, incomplete and unsatisfying. Warriors in that era had Brahmins as preceptors, and their training, especially in the case of the Pandavas, was theological as well as martial. They were not quite the equivalent of Loyola’s Jesuits, but they were not Homeric brutes, either. Among the best of the Mahabharata warriors, martial spirit and spiritual martiality blended, as they did among the ancient samurai. This is why Arjuna can ask a question that begins with very technical terms—prakriti and purusha—and connect them to a metaphorical “Field” and “Knower of the Field.”

  I have translated purusha elsewhere differently; here, the context of the Field and the Knower of the Field demands a different English word. Session 13 pairs Purusha with Prakriti throughout. Prakriti is mere materiality, and Purusha what experiences and navigates it. Notice, however, the alliteration between these two words in the original Sanskrit. They are distinct but entangled, and that entanglement is reflected at the level of consonant sounds. Hence my choice, for Purusha and Prakriti, of Sentience and Substance.

  As in other sessions, Krishna recounts the qualities of an ideal human being. In this session, one of his longest lists defines the knowledge that makes for a “Knower of the Field.”

  * * *

  In one sloka (17), a little prestidigitation was necessary on my part. I feel compelled to “show my work” on this one, if only to point out how ingenious the Sanskrit can get.

  The Vishnu who nourishes species,

  Known as their devourer and evolution

  The original sloka hides a piece of complex verbal signaling. Basically, Krishna is saying that the force that nourishes species—Krishna-as-Vishnu, the Sustainer God—is simultaneously their Creator and Destroyer. This is signaled, in the Sanskrit, by a deliberate rhyme:

  grasishnu prabhavishnu ca

  Those are two words, occurring here and nowhere else, for Destroyer and Creator—literally, and alliteratively, “devourer” and “developer.” As you can see for yourself, the second word, prabhavishnu, actually contains the name of Vishnu inside it. In one creation myth, Brahma emerges from the navel of Vishnu. The Sanskrit encodes the threefold identity through the repetition of the ishnu sound for Creator and Destroyer, and by collapsing the name of the Sustainer into the name of the Creator. A pretty slick line—and definitely not an accident. I had to do something here.

  First, I called the Sustainer God by the name that’s “buried” in the original. I could have replicated the Gita’s replication of the ish sound by “As their demolisher and establisher.” (No words in English with the full -ishnu ending, alas.) While it’s true we generally don’t use the word establisher in English, the whole point would be to use a word for each of them that’s not used anywhere else. I ended up doing this anyway, but not with those ungainly ish words.

  What would be lost is the image of “devouring” that is present in grasishnu. That dovetails with the idea of the sacrificial fire devouring the offering, and the devouring mouths of Session 11. It’s a major theme. After consideration, I gave more weight to that image than to the repeated ish sound. Instead of introducing a construction-destruction metaphor, which isn’t present in the Gita, I carried over the eating metaphor intact. Simultaneously, I unpacked and emphasized the Vishnu, and I echoed the phonetic interconnectedness of the Sanskrit words by alliterating on v instead of sh for all three.

  * * *

  This session’s “Field,” the kshetra, dovetails with the very first line of the Gita, which repeats the word twice: Dharmakshetre Kurukshetre.

  For Arjuna, becoming a “Knower of the Field”—the Field in any sense, physical or ethical—means becoming a better warrior and better man. What Krishna teaches is theological knowledge of the Field—and, metaphorically, martial mastery of the battlefield.

  LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 14

  Anyone who listens to the Gita can’t help but notice how much time is spent on human beings. The Song is sung by a God about people and what they can become. What they can become is divine.

  The Gita was written long before psychology became its own field. So the study of human motivation and personality—and their pathologies—was just one
more branch of religious thought. (Psyche is a Greek word for “soul.”) Krishna’s Purity, Power, and Darkness don’t exactly correspond to Freud’s superego, ego, and id, but there are some uncanny resemblances in the two models. The human psyche exists as a combination of all three; one of the three can dominate the others, and a person’s behavior will show it.

  One of the first things to go in a psychiatric disorder is insight. This session of the Gita describes each guna and what it looks like when one or another predominates. This three-part way of dividing everything human will recur in subsequent sessions, especially the last one, as Krishna imposes a conceptual order on the motley tendencies of the human race.

  This session also makes explicit the end point of knowing all this about the gunas: transcending them. Krishna tells Arjuna about the gunas to give Arjuna insight and help him overcome the bondage of being human.

  Because all three of the gunas—even sattva, here translated as “Purity”—work against the ultimate goal of being human, which is becoming divine. Purity, for example, binds you to knowledge, even if it’s “good” knowledge, like knowledge of a scripture such as this.

  * * *

  The Gita, early on, spent whole sessions on the various kinds of yoga, or ways of uniting with Brahman. Perhaps not coincidentally, these, too, were three in number: knowledge, action, and devotion.