Now the Gita will spend whole sessions on the three gunas, but the purpose is the same: to unite with Brahman. The first set of three details what you need to do; the second set of three, what you need to transcend.
What you need to transcend is human nature itself. The point of understanding the gunas is to go beyond the gunas, just as the point of understanding the Gita is to go beyond the Gita.
Where is that beyond? The Singer might point at his own heart, or at the heart of the friend to whom he sings. The point of discovering the ultimate Elsewhere is to discover it is Here.
LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 15
This session opens with the Gita’s longest extended metaphor—a surreal, upside-down tree, suspended in the sky. Unlike Dadaism, the Gita conjures this striking image programmatically, with every detail of the picture possessing a meaning. To understand Krishna’s tree metaphor is to understand much of the Gita’s conception of human life and its purpose.
After the tree, the session is straightforward and sublime: Krishna segues naturally from the tree to his role sustaining plant life and human life; the fire, or agni, is literally central to the Brahmin sacrifice, and the chemical fire of gastric acid (“metabolic fire”) is central to the human body. The two sustaining roles are connected, too. The word for herb is aushadi, a word that implies a medicinal value and lives on in spoken Hindi and Gujarati to this day.
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But about that tree.
Elements of the metaphor have puzzled translators and interpreters for centuries. At one point the roots are above, but some lines later, the roots are clearly stated as being below. The best explanations have come from those who have looked at an asvattha tree. Frequently the roots are highly individuated around the base and course visibly up the trunk, directly into the branches. They look thick and corded, like so many enormous Achilles tendons. That may be one explanation.
Another explanation requires us to visualize the tree’s entire root system, without the obscuring earth. Imagine a tree completely uprooted and flipped. It flares into branches at both ends, top and bottom; only in one case, the branches are the roots. The reference may be figurative in the second instance—that is, the branches occupy the expected (lower) place of roots. A metaphor within the metaphor, as it were. Let’s allow Krishna some poetic license and move on.
The asvattha tree is a conduit between the otherworldly and the worldly. It has its roots, or origin, in the heavens. Its leaves are Vedic hymns; to chant or read those Vedic hymns is to nourish the tree. We give those leaves the breeze of our breath, the sunlight of our gaze. The tree itself is “nourished by gunas,” that is, by the fertile soil of human tendencies and desires. (Literature and art have no other soil.) The asvattha tree is a fig tree, and these sprouted fruits—always a loaded word in the Gita—are sweet things of the senses. Actions, too, here “below” on earth, get entangled in the wide sweep of the inverted tree, which brushes the ground of Kurukshetra.
Much is included in this metaphorical tree. The atman is meant to climb up this inverted tree, toward the heavens, then cut the tree down with “detachment’s hard weapon.” Weapon is the word that Krishna uses, not axe; Arjuna is not a lumberjack but a warrior. To fell that tree is to see it drop away, sweet sensory figs and green Vedic leaves and all.
From there, as Krishna explains, Arjuna must go above the celestial network of asvattha roots. That is where Arjuna can find Krishna—sustaining not just the tree but all of life.
This may be why Krishna describes his “highest home” as devoid of light, solar or lunar. It is located somewhere more profound than any root. Its darkness is at once on high and deep, celestial and subterranean.
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Ficus religiosa has other names. Another name for the asvattha tree is the Bo tree—the very tree under which the Buddha went on to have his enlightenment. The historical “Blessed Lord” antedates the historical “Awakened One,” but if we consider the Gita as a poem composed and inserted into the Mahabharata, we can guess at its historical date based on some internal evidence.
From this perspective, the Gita was written after the Upanishads (the same “Vedanta” Krishna mentions having crafted) but before the Atharva Veda joined the original three Vedas (Krishna always refers to the Vedas as three, not four). Historians have vague ideas about when each of those scriptures coalesced into its respective form. To elide the controversies a bit, the Gita may have been composed around or a little after the Buddha’s enlightenment. It may well have been an answer to the challenge of Buddhism in India.
In this light, there is a bit of wordplay in the penultimate line of this arboreal session.
etad buddhva buddhiman syat
Is this a double entendre, doubled for effect? I chose to retain the word Awakening in the translation to honor this implication. If the Gita were truly written after the dissemination of Buddha’s teachings, the Gita-poet’s gesture of generosity is ahead of its time.
It would take centuries for the rivalry between these two religions to end, well beyond even the latest estimates of the Gita’s composition date. Indian Buddhism converted its Constantine-equivalent in Asoka (ruled 268–232 b.c.), and Buddhism became the official religion of empire. It never managed to root out the religion that gave rise to it, just as Christianity and Islam could not break Judaism. Buddhism’s quietus on the subcontinent came a millennium and a half later, with the arrival of Islam. Islamic armies destroyed Nalanda and the other Buddhist centers of learning and monasteries; they could not eradicate the decentralized, multitudinous Hinduism of peasants and village Brahmins.
Why is the Gita’s gesture, if such it is, ahead of its time? Hinduism has a well-known assimilative tendency, and metaphysically (after Buddhism was out of the subcontinent and no longer a threat, I suspect), the rivalry ended in a very Hindu way: Hindus today consider the Buddha the penultimate avatar of Vishnu. Rama is Vishnu’s seventh avatar, Krishna his eighth, the Buddha his ninth.
The Gita-poet gives more than one nod to the avatar preceding Krishna, referring to Rama’s father-in-law by name, and to the monkey (Hanuman) on the banner of Arjuna; Krishna declared himself Prince Rama in Session 10. The Bo tree and wordplay in this session may well be two nods to Krishna’s successor.
Of course, for every one Hindu who thinks the Gita was a poem composed circa 500 B.C.E. by an anonymous Brahmin and inserted into the Mahabharata, there are about a hundred thousand who think it the painstaking transcription by Vyasa of a conversation that really occurred during the Heroic Age, in meter. For those readers, this business about the tree and the double entendre is best considered coincidental—but, I trust, uncannily so.
As for myself, I almost never think about the date of the Gita’s composition. When I do think about its chronology, I enjoy watching it take on different meanings, depending on where I slide it along the time line. The Gita, like any scripture, is perpetually timely, composing itself afresh in the reader or listener, even after repeated readings and listenings. Historical quibbling isn’t just irrelevant when it comes to scripture; it’s a buzz kill. A scripture welcomes the imagination to place it in any context and see how the moment demanded this timelessness. So I prefer to let my Gita float free of history and geography. It travels great distances without being diminished. What if the Gita had been composed in India, about a hundred years after the Buddha? An interesting enough question, but there are others just as interesting, if not more interesting. What if the Gita had been composed in Europe, in 1939? Or here in America, in 2001? Or right now?
LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 16
The key Sanskrit word in this session is sampadam. You will find this word rendered, depending on the translator, as “destiny,” “endowment,” “qualities,” and “nature.” There are shades of all of these in the Sanskrit word. The 1899 Sanskrit-English Dictionary of Sir Monier Monier-Williams points out how the word comes from sam + panna
, or “furnished with.” And there are also instances in which this word has been used as “wealth” or “opulence.”
The full meaning lies in the summation of those past English equivalents. Nature and destiny, specifically: Session 16 gives the sense of nature being destiny. The Gita begins by listing qualities, and then, in each case, divine or demonic, it mentions that whoever has them is born with them.
The many-minded Gita, recall, includes ways of thinking that conceive of things in singular or dualistic terms as well. In this discussion of contrasts, the divine sampadam or demonic sampadam, each present at birth, leads to certain traits manifesting in the adult. The Gita is referring to what we, today, would call genetic inheritance, those traits and predispositions with which each human being is born. This notion of heredity—of an “endowment” you are born with, for good or ill—guides my choice of “inheritance” for sampadam. It is a word which has not, to my knowledge, been used before in any translation of the Gita. The way I arrived at it may be tinged with modern science, but the justification, as I hope you can see, lies in the ancient Sanskrit itself.
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One of the few outlooks missing from the Gita is the Utopian ideal: this runaway fantasy (in Session 16, the metaphorical Sanskrit is “mind-chariot”) that, one day, if the right set of ideas is put into practice, all people will end up happy and productive in some workers’ paradise, or singing in a choir in the kingdom of heaven on earth, or bowing clockwork-pious in the same direction.
The Gita is just too pragmatic for that. It believes human diversity is intractable. Not just in svabhava, someone’s “own nature,” and svadharma, someone’s “own dharma,” and not just in the group identities of tribe or caste (or nationality, or sect, or party…). Humanity’s stubborn diversity includes innate qualities, an individual’s divine or demonic “inheritance.”
The Gita, and Hinduism generally, does not daydream about the perfectibility of mankind. It believes only in the perfectibility of the individual. And that occurs through the atman’s homecoming—over many births, along “the highest path”—to Brahman.
LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 17
Three is the first polytheistic number. Once you move beyond the monomaniacal one and get through the two of dualism, the road is clear, all the way to infinity. The major monotheistic traditions either destroyed three, as early Islam did the three pre-Islamic goddesses of Arabia, Al-Lat, Al-Manat, and Al-Uzza, or forced three into one, as early Christianity did through the doctrine of the Trinity.
The Gita revels in threes. Three is the manageable multiplicity by which the Gita orders the infinite world. Session 17 uses the three gunas to classify faiths and diets. It goes on to classify, again according to the three gunas, the varieties of religious acts. Religious acts are themselves of (surprise!) three kinds: sacrifice, austerity, and charity. There are different sorts of austerities, by the way—austerities of body, speech, and mind.
The session finishes by expanding a verbal gloss on Brahman. I use the word gloss purposefully: The phrase is not a name or definition, and unlike “Neti neti,” it is not a formula, either. The Gita calls it a nirdesa, and diligent hunting has found this word showing up in several ancient Sanskrit grammatical treatises, sometimes in the title, usually with the meaning of “exposition.” The gloss of something is its paraphrase and gist, and Aum Tat Sat glosses Brahman. In three syllables.
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I have saved some room here, in the next to last of these guides, to talk about our subject itself. I want to point out how much of “theology,” “metaphysics,” and “religious thought” is really just storytelling.
In Asia, the most widely disseminated story, found everywhere from Indian television serials to the Javanese puppet theater, is a religious one, the Ramayana. Not for nothing do the Christians call the Gospels “the greatest story ever told.” These are the stories that take the form of stories, with heroes, struggles, and happy or tragic endings, or else an ending that combines the tragic and the happy. Rama rules his kingdom justly for a long time—but does so alone, having exiled to the forest the very woman he fought Ravana to retrieve. The Crucifixion, too, is a hybrid ending: Jesus suffers and loses his life, but humankind gains a Savior. Storytelling—parable, myth, or mythistory—forms the body of religion.
But even a religion’s more abstract ideas are just another kind of story. The plot is more suspenseful than any airport paperback’s, and the hero is more sympathetic. Where did I come from? What will become of me? You are the protagonist. This is your origin story. You read to find out what happens to you.
You may believe the story that you are born once and will die once. What you do in that interval will determine where you go. If you were virtuous, you go to heaven for eternity (unless you were born before God’s son died, in which case you end up in Limbo). If you were a sinner, you go to hell.
Or you may believe the story in which your people made a special Covenant with God. Or you may believe the story in which an Arab merchant became the last and most authoritative in a long line of (Jewish) prophets. Or else you may believe the story about the angel Moroni telling Joseph Smith about golden plates covered in ancient Egyptian writing buried in Ontario County, New York. The one-birth plotline also appeals to people who think they decompose into nitrogen and sustain plant life after they die. Christian, Jew, Muslim, Mormon, scientific materialist: They are defined by which set of stories makes sense to them.
I am a Hindu because I believe the story Hinduism tells about me. I have read enough accounts of Hinduism by non-Hindus (from the age before political correctness) to know that its ideas seem absurd, grotesque, or silly to others. But the Gita has told me its story about myself, and nothing else sounds right anymore.
My atman is a salmon, thrashing upstream to my source. The river it strives against consists of waterfall after waterfall, each one steeper than the next, until the last one, the one beyond which is Brahman. That last one is a Niagara. The river is rage and lust and greed; it’s sloth and slacking; it’s a finicky purity and the puritan’s contempt for human failings: in other words, the three gunas of our natures, all of which, even Purity, work to keep my atman from reaching the “highest goal,” Brahman. Every leap against the waterfall is a birth; every splashdown is a death.
I have cleared waterfalls to reach this human form. If I relent, I will be swept downstream. So I read and I write and I translate and I think and I do right by my family and I practice radiology and I strive always to pluralize myself because every life I live from here on out must be a salmon jump upstream to my source, to Brahman. I want to return there for good. I feel it is close, just up Niagara Falls over there. I am singing God’s song to get ready. When I jump I will jump for joy.
LISTENER’S GUIDE TO SESSION 18
After all that he has taught and shown, Krishna the charioteer has not let go of the reins—as though the whole song were a mere pause in the work to be done. Maybe both Krishna and Arjuna sense that the time has come to stop speaking and get to the bitter work of war.
Arjuna’s question concerns the final phase of the traditional Hindu life, a retreat from the world and final renunciation, or sannyasa. This word, sannyasa, comes from a word that means “throwing down”—everything you own and treasure, cast off like the sand sacks from a hot-air balloon. Arjuna’s confusion is understandable: He wants to know how this throwing down of the world differs from letting the world go in a philosophical sense—the difference between rejecting it and relinquishing it.
Krishna’s answer is one of his lengthiest. He is trying to order the universe for Arjuna before they finish their talk. A simple contrast between the two forms of renunciation gives way to a discussion of the three gunas. Krishna lays out the threefold natures of work, will, intellect, knowledge, resolve, and happiness.
Three factors give way to four as Krishna moves on to the four castes. In this section, we see the o
riginal ideal of castes—which was not hierarchical, not some justification for one group to behave snobbishly or cruelly toward another. In fact, as Krishna explains it, caste acknowledges all the different roles of people as natural and fitting, parts of a societal ecosystem. His conception has its real-world analog in the Pandava Army behind him. That army is more than just its massed soldiers. It’s the coolies who make up the train of the army, carrying equipment and supplies on their backs; the merchants who supply the army, for a price, immense quantities of buckles and axles and harnesses and horses and swords and hilts; the priests cracking coconuts against the wheels of each chariot, murmuring mantras, legitimizing the Pandava cause. None of the classes of people involved in the war effort resent their roles, no more than a foot soldier resents Arjuna’s chariot and Gandiva bow. This army, this contained society, does not fester with rage at hierarchy and group enmities. They all know that any healthy collective life consists of many differences of function, but a unity of purpose.
* * *
At one point, Krishna says, “Do what you want to do….” He seems to have finished speaking; for a moment, he waits for his friend to respond. When Arjuna doesn’t answer, words rush out of Krishna—“Hear me out again”—only this time, his words are not philosophical. His words focus instead on their relationship. Worried, maybe, that cosmic visions and detailed teachings have not been enough to persuade his friend, Krishna looks him in the eyes and makes one last, personal appeal. “The secret of all secrets,” he explains, is, simply, “I love you.”
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