DEEPAK HERITAGE BOOKS
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Reviewed by WILL
THE REAL GITA, PLEASE, STAND UP? An essay-review of HOLY WAR:
Violence and the Bhagavad Gita, Ed.
Steven J. Rosen, Deepak Heritage Books, Virginia, 2002, Hardcover, pp. 240,
Index Introduction Steven Rosen’s latest book is
an edited volume bringing together scholars from various disciplines to discuss
a subject that should have been discussed many times: Violence in religion,
with special attention to the war alluded to in the Bhagavad Gita. Before examining this consequential series of
essays, however, it would be prudent to look at the Gita itself, and then to
examine Rosen’s book in light of what we have already discussed. Mahatma Gandhi had been dead
less than eight years when I arrived to the Gujarat Vidyapit, in Ahmedabad, to
study. As you may know, Gandhi lived here and made a University out of it. I
lived in one of the small rooms, like the one he used to meet the press and
spin his cotton wheel. I have never felt greater bereavement than in those
people at his absence. And yet they went about their work with a smile, even if
it was a sad smile. There we all chanted the
Gita daily and I knew its verses by heart before I learned Gujarati. Nehru
and Morarji Desai were frequent visitors. We all learned about the
Mahatma and his transformations –- how he went from being a small town lawyer
in South Africa to the leader of an ahimsa
movement, from his familiarity with the Isa
Upanishad to his learning and quoting the Gita when needed in political circles. He became a truer Hindu as
his nonviolent revolution became a success, and the Gita became our spiritual guide. Ahimsa and the Gita
stayed with us at the University, and with her,
Gandhi’s presence. Chanting the Gita,
became a daily memorial. There is little doubt that of
all Indic texts the Bhagavad Gita has
exerted the most influence on the aspirations of the would be spiritual person,
even mystic. So many outstanding individuals -- from both East and West -- have
claimed to know its secrets, and so it is no surprise that the Gita has the greatest number of
interpreters among Indic texts. Regarding translation, that
began relatively late: Charles Wilkins was the first, in 1785, under the false
belief that he was translating a text influenced by Christianity. Many
followed: German intellectuals, Schlegel, Deussen, and Schopenhauer; the English,
Max Mueller, of course a transplanted German, Aldous Huxley; the French Romain
Rolland, a friend and correspondent of Freud; the Russian Tolstoy and the
Americans Emerson and Thoreau.
In modern times the
translations have multiplied. The Editor of the volume here being reviewed also
has a previous book, Gita on the Green
and I myself have two volumes, a large one, Avatara:
The Humanization of Philosophy and The
Bhagavad Gita, a short volume with the minimum of introduction and the
maximum of its original Sanskrit
musical rhythm in the translation. I also included Winthrop Sargeant’s Bhagavad Gita, with Sanskrit text,
transliteration and translation, edited by Christopher Chapple, in my Series on
Cultural Perspectives at SUNY Press. All in all there are about two hundred
different translations, and now this volume. Do we really need it? In the past, studies on the Gita were mostly individual efforts,
individual perspectives of those of us who knew the culture, the language and
the rhythm of the work, trying to update what we thought was an incomplete
understanding on the part of our older fellow translators. After all, the world
had changed -- we were more sophisticated now and felt our past teachers were
also dated in regard to the work they produced; or, while the other translators
were focusing on the text as religion, its true context was philosophical, and
so on. The excuses for the proliferation of translations went on. Does Holy War add something that no one else
had added before? The answer is yes. Holy War places the Gita in the Mahabharata,
not as an addition to it but rather as the historical background on which the
text of the Gita stands. In this
manner the Gita becomes history, and
by doing so it avoids the pitfalls of trying to interpret it with the
individual lenses of religious revelation, bringing it down to the consensual
level of social science. This presentation of the Gita transforms the text from a sruti document, a revelation for the individual seeker with the
help of his/her guru, into a smriti
document, a human interpretation fit for the classroom. The oral/audial text, the
epistemology of sound on which the oral texts are based, disappears. The
written text and its statements take over. What is said is important and the
act of focusing on those sayings is the primary task of the student. The legitimacy
of the participants is key to making this a holy war, from Krishna, God, to
Arjuna, the disciple. The legitimacy of their claims to the throne is based on
the succession of sperm, the path of the Fathers, with violence, samsara, the wheel of transmigration --
from the rightful king to the rightful heirs. This is the ethical reason for
the war, a war that is not only legitimate and ethical -- as Rosen ably points
out in his essay in this volume -- but
also holy because God himself is one of the participants. Questions about the
mythical origin of the characters involved are not important; the fact that
royal sperm, for example, appears inside a fish, or lines of succession are
changed because of a curse, or women are impregnated by a mantra, or a royal child is put on a river inside a basket of
reeds, or one hundred heirs are born to a blind king, who is not supposed to be
the king, by simply cutting apart a ball of metal born of a woman that has been
bearing that fruit in her stomach for two long years. Haven’t we seen these
myths in other cultures, with Oedipus and the House of Cadmus, for example?
From the perspective of teaching, the problem becomes a bit more sophisticated
since a written text can be apprehended swiftly by a quick “mind.” However, at
that time in history Indic texts did not accept the mind (manas) as a faculty of learning, but only as a sixth sense,
something to be careful with -- at best, it was an aid to translation, often distancing us from current events. What happens to the real
faculties of the people of the Gita,
to the path of the gods, to breaking the chain of karmic conditioning, to memory, to imagination, to the heart, to
the frontal lobes, to geometries of geometries and forms, as in the Gita’s Eleventh Chapter, and most
importantly, to decision making? The contemporary reader, of
course, will not be intimidated by a text he/she can understand easily through
a simple reading. Let’s get the history first; faith will follow later. But is
this text as presented through a social science approach a continuation of the
Vedas and of the original culture, or has a different group of people,
outsiders, taken over the life and literature of Indic texts, when Ganesha, the
elephant scribe, wrote it down, or now, when interpreted by modern criteria of
social science? Is the Gita a text of
revelation, sruti, or a text of
interpretation, smriti? And does all
of this even make a difference today? And so here we are, in the
middle of the battle field, in the field of dharma,
trying not to take sides between the followers of the path of the gods, or that
of the fathers, among friends, to kill no one, to follow ahimsa, non-violence, and yet having already started the battle by
reviewing this book. What shall I do? Which dharma
is the present dharma? As you can see dharma, in my present battlefield, is each and every word, each and
every act, each and every faculty, and each and every geometry holding forms
and statements together, then and now. There is no one universal dharma we can follow and be done with.
So what shall we do? HOLY WAR: Violence and the Bhagavad Gita. From a sociological
perspective, the usefulness of this book, considering the variety of
perspectives of both teachers and students, is a remarkable accomplishment. The
book is divided into twelve chapters, plus a forward, and a summary biography
of the contributors. Almost all of them are Professors of Religion. They are
all from different parts of the world; some are Indian, some American, some
French, one Hispanic, a Harvard Professor and a Swami. Most work in the United
States, and the book is primarily directed to American readers. With the
exception of Steve Rosen, the Editor of this collection of Essays, well known
for his work on the Gita through his
book Gita on the Green, who writes
two chapters, the rest give us only one different perspective each. In some
cases the perspective is not about the Gita
but about what Gandhi or Sri Aurobindo thought of the Gita. You will be surprised how interesting it is to read each
essay and how intriguing if not surprising the themes are. It is not surprising that the
editor’s focus is on the events of 9/11 or the regrettable remarks of the
Professor of Chicago University, Wendy Doniger, who called the Gita, “a bad book that incites people to
war and violence with God’s complicity,” (my paraphrase). Isn’t the title of
this book under review Holy War: Violence and the Bhagavad Gita? These
two events frame the presentation of this book to American audiences. Steve
Rosen and Prof. Sharma set up the historical fact of a just war in the first
chapters. Steve Rosen claims: “The most just (war is) …that war in which God is
personally present…tangibly present,” and he adds: “no other religious
tradition makes an even remotely similar claim.” (This is not correct, of
course -- in the Trojan War all the gods are said to have taken sides with
their favorite warriors.) And Professor Sharma establishes the historical
coordinates of Kurukshetra by offering the interpretations of pre-colonial and
post-colonial interpreters. Pre-colonial writers took it for granted that the
war described in the Mahabharata epic
was a historical one, Kurukshetra being “in the region about modern Delhi, then
known as Kurukshetra.” With time, however, the meaning changed, “for Sri
Aurobindo it is an existential, martial, and typical (place); for Bal Gangadhar
Tilak, it is (a) national, political, and metaphorical (place); for S.
Radhakrishna, it is a universal, ethical, and allegorical (place); for Gandhi,
‘the human body is the battlefield where the eternal duel between right and
wrong goes on,’ and thus, according to Gandhi, the human body itself is
Kurukshetra.” p.38 We
are lucky the editor decided to stick with this plan, and immediately we have
Sri Aurobindo’s views on the Gita,
and those of Gandhi. Most interesting reading, especially for those working on,
or teaching the Gita. While Sri
Aurobindo feels so at home in the Gita,
Gandhi came to the Gita the way most
of us did, late in life and in translation. Several Essays on violence in
the Bible and the Qur’an follow with the appropriate commentaries and
comparisons to the Gita. In every
instance it is the fundamentalism of the word that destroys the balance in
humans, and violence against one another follows. Ahimsa and non-violence are more present in the Gita than in any other document, and the
cycle closes with a short, insightful essay and brilliant translation of Ahimsa in the Mahabharata by Prof. Chris
Chapple. Of additional interest to contemporary readers will be Prof. William
Jackson’s article, which compares the Mahabharata war with the Islamic jihad
(something Rosen also convincingly tackles in his paper) -- this is a subject
that all scholars of religion and many a layman wonder about, especially after
September 11. In easy-to-read format Jackson takes us through relevant
questions and answers, showing that, while there are no easy answers, there is
much to show that the battle of Kurukshetra is in a class by itself. This alone
is worth the price of admission. My favorite essay in the
whole collection is the one entitled “Of meat-eaters and grass-eaters: An
exploration of Human Nature,” by Prof. Patrick Olivelle. Following the textual
analysis of the Gita and of the Panchatantra, the author establishes
that no matter what arguments are put forward by the wisest sages, in the end,
the reality is “matsya Nyaya” -- the big fish eats the small one. The
meat-eaters, craving power and dominion, will always crush the grass-eaters,
the poor, the helpless, the good ones.
“Nature always triumphs over
nurture and individual aspirations… Nature (svabhava)
defines an individual’s habits, activities and duties… Trying to counter one’s
nature is not only immoral but also futile.” (Panchatantra,) p.115 “One’s own nature is hard to
transcend,” (Panchatantra,) p. 131
My question is, what did the
people of so many centuries ago know then that we in the West are beginning to
realize only now, and that thanks to neurobiology? War and violence are pursued
by those humans that have been unable to overcome nature through the nurturing
process. What is called, in the classical texts, nature: violence, meat-eating,
war, hate, fear is no more than a limitation in the brain development of those
individuals. Where a heart would be, we find only a rock, and where fear is, we
find only war. There is no limbic connection to the grass-eaters or
meat-eaters, there is no connection possible, and there are no brain receptors
to reciprocate. There are not enough brain-centers to exercise the heart in a
communion of eternal beings, and so the wheel of samsara goes on. And this,
above all other messages, is the message of Krishna in the Gita: Arjuna, says Krishna, get out
of your crisis! Travel in memory with me the ten yogas that lead to the vision
of geometries emptied of form; open your frontal lobes; let your body become
the field; embody all the structures of knowing that are present in your brain
and culture, and then you will make, by habit, wise decisions for the benefit
of all. This transformation exercise has taken place in the battlefield without
one single arrow being shot. As Gandhi understood and the Gita proclaims in Chapter 12: “this body is the field.” All we need
to do is exercise it, as Krishna does with Arjuna, or chanting does through
modulation. Otherwise, memory, imagination, musical-human spaces, multiple
cognition-centers, gods -- all will be lost. Nature may be transformed, as
Krishna shows, or one can overcome nurture, as everyone else in the battlefield
embodies, and condemn people to eternal returns of the same. Remember, in the
end, both the mass of Pandavas and Kauravas are destroyed; only Yudisthira
becomes immortal by saving his heart (dog). The same thing happened to the
House of Cadmus and Oedipus and his descendants in Phoenician Greece. If all I have pointed out in
this essay-review can be taught in a classroom, the book Holy War: Violence and the Bhagavad Gita, will accomplish what
previous, one-sided presentations, failed to do. The least we can do is to try
it and give it a chance.
I remember one memorable day
hearing a young woman cry outside the door of my student room. For more than half an hour I tried to
console her, to find out what had happened. At last she spoke: She had been
curious of a nest of birds across from my door… She could not reach the nest so
high…so, she pulled it down. For a second I felt relieved:
I knew the birds had gone hunting for the day.
But she started to cry and finally she showed me, on the lower fringes
of her sari, the yellow stain of birds’ eggs. “I killed them,” she said. There
was nothing I could do but let her cry. Ahimsa
was alive even if Gandhi was dead, and so was the Gita.
“He who sees me everywhere
and sees all in me, I am not lost to him, and he is not lost to me.” (B.G.6.30) |