WILL THE REAL GITA, PLEASE, STAND UP?

Mahatma Gandhi had been dead less
than eight years when I arrived to the Gujarat Vidyapeet, in Ahmedabad, to
study. Gandhi lived there and made a University out of it. I lived in one of
the small rooms, like the one in which 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. Outside the University it was a world in transition. How to get rid of
the legacy of colonial power, unify India and Pakistan, make a Nation out of a
multitude of tribes. It was a time of responsibility, celebration and open
joy. This was the time when the radio
stations were blaring “gori, gori, O
banki chori…” But at the
University it was very different. 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 learn about
the Mahatma and his transformations, from a small town lawyer in South Africa
to the leader of ahimsa; 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 non-violent
revolution became a success, and the Gita
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
long 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 East and West have claimed to
know its secrets that it is no surprise the Gita
has the greater number of interpreters among Indic texts. It was translated
relatively late by Charles Wilkins in 1785, under the false belief that he was
translating a text influenced by Christianity. German intellectuals, Schlegel,
Deussen, Schopenhauer; the English, Max
Mueller, a transplanted German, Aldous Huxley; the French Romain Rolland, a
friend and correspondent of Freud, the Russian Tolstoy and the Americans
Emerson and Thoreau followed later. In
modern times the translations have multiplied. The Editor of this volume
himself 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 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 with 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 anything no one else had
done 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 and brings it down to the consensual level of social
science. Could a presentation of the Gita
in this manner become a text of revelation for the individual seeker with the
help of his/her guru, or will it be reduced for ever to a simple human
interpretation fit only 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
following the path of the Fathers, on the succession of sperm, of violence, of samsara, of the wheel of transmigration,
from the rightful king to the rightful heirs, and this is the ethical reason
for the war, a war that is not only legitimate and ethical, 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 knowing, but only as a sixth sense, something to be careful
with, at best an aid to translation and, in the case of the Gita, a way for Krshna to distance
Arjuna from his initial trauma. 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 Chapter eleven, 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 it make a difference
today?

And so here
we are, in the middle of the battlefield, 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. What shall we do?

HOLY WAR: Violence in The Bhagavad Gita.

From a
sociological perspective, 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 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. They all 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, 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 the Gita but what Gandhi or Sri Aurobindo
thought of the Gita. You will be
surprised how interesting it is to read each essay and how 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 calling 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 in 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 took sides with their
favorite warriors.) And Professor Sharma establishes the historical coordinates
of Kuruksetra by offering the interpretations of precolonial and postcolonial
interpreters. Precolonial writers took it for granted that the war described in
the Mahabharata epic was a historical
one, Kuruksetra being “in the region about modern Delhi, then known as
Kuruksetra.” 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 Kuruksetra.” (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. It is 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 and in
translation.

Several essays on violence in the
Bible and the Qur’an follow with the appropriate commentaries and comparisons
to the Gita. . Of particular interest
to contemporary readers will be Prof. William Jackson’s article, which compares
the Mahabharata war with the Islamic jihad (Rosen also convincingly tackles
this issue 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, a different manifestation of what we understand by war. 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. My favorite essay in the whole collection is the one entitled “Of
meat-eaters and grass-eaters: An exploration of Human Nature,” by 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 “Matsya Niaya”
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 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,at
the appropriate time in their lives, when the “windows of malleability” were
open and exercised. But in most cases they are not, one brain overrides all the
others and dictates what to do, and the same with translations. As a result,
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 get out of your crisis, travel in memory with me the ten yogas that lead
to the vision of geometries emptied of form on chapter/yoga eleven; open your
frontal lobes; let your body become the field; embody all the structures of
knowing present in your brain and the 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/yoga 12: “this body is the field.” All we need to do is exercise it, as
Krishna does with Arjuna, or chanting does through modulation. Nature may be
transformed as the Avatara Krishna
shows, or it can overcome nurture as everyone else in the battlefield embodies,
and condemn people to eternal returns of the same. Remember, in the end
Pandavas and Kauravas are destroyed; only Yudisthira becomes immortal by saving
his heart (dog). The same that 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.

But how can one teach those that
teach that the fundamentalism of language they bring to the Gita is not in the Gita? That while there is talk at the beginning about war, while Arjuna
is in crisis and needs distance from the trauma of war, (Chapter/yoga one),
that this talk is only talk, the talk of a clinical philosopher to a
traumatized client. It is only at the
end of the Gita, chapter/yoga XVIII,
after Krishna and Arjuna have traveled the corridors of the memories of the
cultures, and Arjuna is ready to fulfill his dharma, that Krishna offers the most unexpected advice: “And now
that you know, Arjuna, now that your frontal lobes and heart are open,” “yatha iccasi tatha kuru, do as you
wish.” Whatever happened to violence in the Gita,
to the complicity of God to fight a war?

There is one hidden mystery, when
it comes to translations from the Classical Indic Texts, the sruti corpus, revelation, that makes a
farce of literally made or appropriated translations. I have seen translations
of the Gita into other languages I
know; translations into English are the most numerous and also the most
misleading. English is a colonial language, and continues to be so unless
challenged by other languages. Translations are mere projections of those
languages. The challenge is not to translate Sanskrit into English, but rather
to translate the English mind, that translates and reads, into the Sanskrit
mind that chanted and composed the Indic Classics. This is impossible unless
the translator knows more languages than just those two.

Cultures divide into at least two
recognizable groups: oral/audial and literary or logomachic. Oral/audial
cultures or texts are ruled by the correspondence between the innate auditory
sense of harmony and tone on the one hand and the arithmetic properties and
ratios of the vibrating strings on the other. They also possess inner mandalas,
or proto geometries homologous with musical arithmology charting the path of the
imagination. An audial culture or text takes the car as primary sense and
organizes sensation and the criteria of interpretation or of knowledge by the
criteria of a model based upon certain demonstrable criteria of sound
properties. The literary culture or text takes the eye as the primary sense and
organizes sensation by the criteria of a semiotic model that takes sight as
primary. These texts are based upon the properties of sentences as embodied in
grammar, two-valued logic, mathematics, classical physics, constructivism. Such
texts tend to reduce all issues, all languages, to one or another form of
logomachy: disputes about words, their meanings, relationships and
implications. Several elements contribute to establish certain variable
criteria as fixed or invariant. The invariant criteria determine the reading or
the listening. The process by which certain criteria become invariant is the
process of verification and it is always in the hands of one or more sciences.
In the case of oral texts, the sciences that formed and verified the invariant
criteria were music and acoustics. In the case of literary texts the invariant
criteria were fixed by a logic, physics, geometry and optics. Any culture or
text that would not take these sciences as the method of verification was never
considered a ‘text’ or a ‘culture’ and was automatically exiled to the limbo of
pre literacy or subcultures. What we normally call prose is the sediment of
many scientific and non-scientific, audial and logomachic translations and transliterations
of these texts and subtexts. In the wake of scientific verification
philosophers and others followed with justifications of what had already been
verified and epistemology was equated with a ‘theory of knowledge’. Depending
on the science of the times philosophers were mostly mathematicians,
physicists, theologians, biologists or musicians. My friend and Professor
Thomas Harris reminded me, on reading this article, of Joyce’s Fennigans Wake, for it “arose in my ear
as a purely aural document belonging to the ancient traditions…and making great
parody of the logocentric world. Yes, he said he wrote it to keep the
professors busy for a hundred years. His advise: “and don’t be so abcdarian, learn your ebro!. And he urges us, as we cross the
waters in our little boat, to keep our “ohren
in”.”

Returning, however, to India,
Ahmedabad, in order to close this visit, 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 and 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 stains 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)

 

© 2003 Antonio T. de Nicolas

 

Professor
Antonio T. de Nicolas, State University of New York at Stony Brook and The
Bio-Cultural Research Institute, Florida

Categories: Ethics, General