Swadharma » Scriptures

Gita Study Group 2.21.11

ryan — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 14:40:45 +0000

In this week’s Bhagavad Gita study group with Swami Tyagananda, we discussed chapter 6 of the Gita, titled The Yoga of Meditation. This semester we will be using the Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood translation of the Gita. Swami told us that this translation is not as literal as the one that we used last semester, but he feels that the style makes it more conducive to understanding the text.

Our discussion touched on slokas 1, 3, 5, 10, 13-17, and 32 of the sixth chapter. The first sloka begins, “He who does the task / Dictated by duty, / Caring for nothing / For fruit of the action, / He is a yogi, / A true sannyasin.” These lines evoke the idea of detachment which, as Swami Tyagananda reminded us, does not mean a neglect of work, but, as the lines state, a detachment from the results of work. Swami Tyagananda emphasized that the ideal of detachment does not mean that we should never be attached to anything. For example, when working, we should be attached to the task at hand in the sense that the task has our full concentration, but when we have finished the task we should be able to detach our mind from that task and move on to the next. Thus, we should strive to have control over our mind in both attachment and detachment. This same idea reappears in slokas 10, 13-15 which describe a yogi’s meditation: “…He must exercise control over his mind and body. He must free himself from the hopes and possessions of this world. He should meditate on the Atman unceasingly.”

The fifth sloka of chapter 6 reads:

What is man’s will

And how shall he use it?

Let him put forth its power

To uncover the Atman

Not hide the Atman:

Man’s will is the only

Friend of the Atman:

His will is also

The Atman’s enemy.

Swami Tyagananda explained the apparent contradiction in this sloka by diagram. He showed us that the state of the spiritual seeker could be represented by the relationships between the mind and body with each other and with the rest of the world and the divine spirit. All of these relationships are fraught with tensions which keep us away from our ultimate goal of realizing the Self. The will is our enemy (and Atman’s enemy) in the sense that it creates and perpetuates these tensions. For example, it may be the will of the body that urges us to overeat, but this may be in tension with our mind’s desire to eat moderately. In the same way that it may reinforce tensions, the will is also a source of strength which can help us to resolve our tensions and, in that way, the will is our friend. It is only after we have resolved our tensions with the world around us and the tensions between our mind and body that we can more clearly see the divine spirit and make progress in that direction. Thus, it is valuable to be reflective and to try to identify the various tensions in our lives so that we may have a chance to utilize our will as a friend to resolve these tensions.

During the discussion, we also discussed other ideas regarding meditation, love, and monastic life. I encourage anyone else who attended this week’s reading group to add any thoughts they may have and to correct any points where I have misinterpreted Swami Tyagananda or the text of the Gita.

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A beautiful verse on Kṛṣṇa

Gokul — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 15:05:36 +0000

This is a gorgeous verse on Kṛṣṇa, in a style that I’ve never seen before. I found it in Michael Coulson’s Teach Yourself Sanskrit (which is a good heavy introduction to the language, but no substitute for personal instruction ), and I was immediately struck by its unusualness of description.

mand(r)a-kvāṇita-veṇur ahni śithile vyāvartayan gokulam / barhâpīḍakam uttamâṅga-racitaṃ go-dhūli-dhūmraṃ dadhat |

mlāyantyā vana-mālayā parigrahaḥ śrānto ‘pi ramyâkṛtir / gopa-strī-nayanôtsavo vitaratu śreyāṃsi vaḥ keśavaḥ ||

I’m going to try to translate it thus:

As the day slackens—

His flute’s music slow and soft, he circles Gokula,

the crest-jewel peacock feather adorning his head all red from the cows’ dust;

embraced by a garland of wildflowers, withered;

tired, and yet beautiful to look at,

May Keśava—

the delight of the gopīs’ eyes!—

bestow felicity upon us.

I’m curious about the possible theological implications of such a depiction of Kṛṣṇa. What does it mean to depict a form of God (and at least for Rūpa Gosvāmin and many modern Hindus, the supreme form of God) in this particular mode? This is a very human portrayal of Kṛṣṇa, much more so than those of Kṛṣṇa as a playful child or a beautiful young man, and associates with him the human qualities (some would call them “failings”) of exhaustion and dustiness; even the flowers he wears are withered. And despite all of that, he is gopa-strī-nayanôtsavaḥ, the limitless joy and exultation of the eyes of the lovely women of Vraja. Why? How? What does this mean?

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Who/What is God?

Sonali — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 03:01:31 +0000

In a post Saketh wrote a while ago, he asked us all what one of our objects of devotion was; he divided objects of devotion into 3 categories:

1. A deity

2. A person

3. A goal or inanimate object

Today, I want to bring up a similar question:

Hinduism is a religion with many different viewpoints — and consequently, many divisions and categories. In my experience, the division between dvaita (dualism, or the worship of a personal God that is separate from us) and advaita (non-dualism, or the worship of an impersonal God that is all-pervading, and part of us as well as everything around us) is a major one. I realize that one discussion may not suffice, but it is an important point to bring up:

How do you choose to think of God? Are dualism and non-dualism irreconcilable? And if so, does Hinduism, as a unified religion, actually even exist?

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Hindu Conception of Time

Divya Kishore — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 13:13:31 +0000

My last section of one of my classes met outside, on the grass and in the sun. We weren’t learning any new material, but were reviewing and talking about what things in the class we’d remember and take away with us. As the teaching fellow talked for a bit about the format of the final exam, my mind wandered and I thought about Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” a collection of poems that starts out as the narrator examines individual blades of grass that come together to form a larger sea of green. The poems in the anthology move from this particular instance of reckoning to larger observations of Americans and people as a whole. Basically, Whitman acknowledges the beauty of the smaller things in life (blades of grass) and builds up to put many of these small things together.

This in itself is a fairly abstract concept, but I thought about how we we can apply this idea of building larger things from small units, to the idea of time. Classical Hindu cosmology views time in terms of the gods Brahma and Vishnu, with Vishnu reclining in the cosmic sea, and Brahma sitting upon a lotus that stems from Vishnu’s navel. Time is measured in various terms: a nimesha is an atom of time, described by the analogy of a blink of an eye, whereas a kalpa is a large amount of time - described as the amount of time it takes for a large mountain, the size of Mt. Everest, to be eroded if a bird were to sweep across the top with a silk scarf once a day. One day for Brahma is one kalpa.

There are even more units of time and outlined eras — both infinitesimal and infinitely large — that I won’t go into; but I found it interesting that the Hindu concept of time acknowledges both the significance and insignificance of how we perceive time. A nimesha can be a pivotal moment in someone’s life, while our entire lifespan can be construed as a less than significant nimesha for Brahma, or in the larger scope of the universe. While I don’t think we can deem insignificant and cast away the small events and emotions of each day, I do think a healthy balance of acknowledging both the small things in our lives (or Whitman’s blades of grass) and the larger reality (what all these small units come together to form) is essential to both appreciating life and living it fruitfully. After all, during trying times, it’s comforting to know that time passes and life continues.

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Faith, truth, and reality

Divya Kishore — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 19:05:45 +0000

On Friday we discussed the convergence of, and tension between, reason and faith. Harvard in particular is an interesting environment — as a leading educational institution in the world, its values are well-grounded in ideals of reason and truth. Faith — widely known to be that which we believe in, but which doesn’t often manifest itself in tangible forms of proof — can be a difficult thing to reconcile with our ideals of knowledge and truth.

How do we go about approaching what we know and what we believe?

Someone once told me that before you can move forward with what you believe, you have to hold what you believe to be true. To be honest, I somewhat disagree with this point of view. This goes back to the idea that one religion is “right” while others aren’t. For example, should faith be guided by historical accuracy? Should we try to prove which religious texts are accurate, and in effect, follow them? Should we try to prove a monotheistic or pantheistic view of the world? Should we question whether the mythology of Krishna and Arjuna and Shiva and Parvati really occurred, and should the answer influence our belief in God?

I think back to the story of Narada, a devotee who asks Vishnu to show him the truth of Vishnu’s maya. Vishnu instructs Narada to jump into a pond, from which Narada emerges as a princess named Sushila. Sushila is married and bears children, but when her father and husband break out in a bloody feud, resulting in her son’s death, she throws herself upon the funeral pyre from her grief. Narada wakes up in his previous form, but when Vishnu asks him what was the name of the child who died, Narada cannot answer.

This story tells us that the world surrounding us is maya, an illusion that we construct to perhaps assign false meaning to our lives. Hinduism teaches that it is through the goodness of our deeds and actions that we are liberated from our maya, so our current lives are certainly not useless or completely insignificant. However, using the “truths” we extract from the world (maya) around us to guide our beliefs in a higher power can be a faulty method. For all we know, we could very well be like Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy in Narnia, or like Vladimir and Estragon waiting for Godot… or like Sushila, currently stuck in a pond of ignorance, with Vishnu, symbolizing the reality of the supreme, divine, and infinite, waiting to pull us out.

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