Swadharma » Scriptures

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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Selections from Rajaji’s Mahabharata

Anjali — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 04:48:21 +0000

One of my many purchases on a recent trip to India was a copy of Chakravarti Rajagopalachari’s English translation of the Mahabharata. Rajaji (1878-1972) was an important Indian statesman, but he spent a bit of his active life on literature and religion rather than politics. His Mahabharata is ~450 pages long, which can hardly include everything from Vyasa’s masterpiece, so I am attempting the following: during the next few months, I plan to also read Kamala Subramaniam’s ~750 page version and K.M.Munshi’s 7-volume Krishnavatara. Perhaps I’ll also (finally!) watch the entire dvd series, made by B.R.Chopra and Ravi Chopra. We’ll see how far I get! If anyone has recommendations for any other version that I should take a look at, please let me know.

Many of us Hindus, as children, were told (or read ourselves) the basic story of the Mahabharata over and over. I have taken so much from it, and it has truly affected my perspective on life. That being said, I cannot truly give the epic that responsibility without studying it more thoroughly. Before this, I had never read more than a children’s version! I am sure many of you readers may feel similarly, and so one reason why I have chosen to write about my experiences reading these versions is for you to find one that appeals to you. I hope that all of you will someday (if you haven’t already) pick up a more thorough version of Vyasa’s story.

Having finished Rajaji’s version, I thought I might share with you all a few memorable passages from it. (If you’d like to read it yourself, here is an online version, which is only 217 pages!) What I particularly like about this version (who knows, it may be true with others as well) is Rajaji’s delicate commentary throughout the story. Sometimes it gets to be a bit too much. Here is a passage from when the Pandavas are attempting to make peace with the Kauravas while simultaneously preparing for battle:

In December 1941, the Japanese were carrying on negotiations with the Americans and, immediately on the breakdown of those talks, took them unawares and attacked Pearl Harbour destroying their naval forces there. Drupada’s instructions to the brahmana would show that this was no new technique and that, even in the old days, the same method was followed of carrying on negotiations and even sincerely working for peace, but simultaneously preparing, with unremitting vigour, for outbreak of war and carrying on peace talks with the object of creating dissensions in the enemy’s ranks. There is nothing new under the sun!

A bit much, right? At other times, Rajaji’s words precisely capture the idea of the story. He details a side story of a brahmana and a dutiful wife with the following end remarks:

The moral of this striking story of Dharmavyadha so skilfully woven by Vedavyasa into the Mahabharata, is the same as the teaching of the Gita, that man reaches perfection by the honest pursuit of whatever calling falls to his lot in life, and that this is really worship of God Who created and pervades all (Bhagavad Gita XVIII: 45-46). The occupation may be one he is born to in society or it may have been forced on him by circumstances or he may have taken it up by choice but what really matters is the spirit of sincerity and faithfulness with which he does his life’s work.

There are too many times in the Mahabharata where people clearly make the wrong decision. Rajaji comments thus:

The Puranas wherein right conduct is always preached, sometimes set out stories in which conduct, not in conformity with Dharma, seems condoned. Is it right, one may ask, for religious books thus to seem to justify wrong?

A little reflection will enable one to see the matter in proper light. It is necessary to bring home the fact that even wise, good and great men are liable to fall into error. That is why the Puranas, although ever seeking to instill Dharma, contain narratives to show how in this world even good people sometimes sin against Dharma, as though irresistibly driven to do so. This is to press home the truth that howsoever learned one may be, humility and constant vigilance are absolutely necessary if one wishes to avoid evil.

Why indeed, did the great authors of our epics write about the lapses of Rama in the Ramayana and Yudhisthira in the Mahabharata? Where was the need to make mention of them and then labour arguments to explain them away, thereby disturbing men’s minds? It was not as though other had discovered the lapses and Vyasa and Valmiki had to defend their heroes. The stories are artistic creations in which lapses themselves impress the desired moral. The parts dealing with the lapses deeply distress the reader’s mind and serve as solemn warnings of pitfalls which wait to engulf the careless. They dispose the mind to humility and watchfulness and make it realise the need for divine guidance.

The modern cinema also projects on the screen much that is bad and immoral. Whatever may be the explanation offered by the protagonists of the cinema, evil is presented on the screen in an attractive fashion that grips people’s minds and tempts them into the path of wickedness. Not so in the Puranas. Although they do point out that even great now and again fell into error and committed wrong, the presentation is such as to warn the reader and not to allure him into evil ways. This is the striking difference between our epics and the modern talkies, which arises from the difference in the character of the people who produced them.

Ok, he again goes a little too far in the last paragraph (or sentence). Rajaji is clearly not of our generation! But I find the rest of his discussion illuminating.

Rajaji presents an interest view of choices in a chapter on Balarama’s lack of involvement in battle (Krishna’s elder brother is torn between sides and loses all interest in the world):

This episode of Balarama’s keeping out of the Mahabharata war is illustrative of the perplexing situations in which good and honest men often find themselves. Compelled to choose between two equally justifiable, but contrary, courses of action, the unhappy individual is caught on the horns of a dilemma.

It is only honest men that find themselves in this predicament. The dishonest ones of the earth have no such problems, guided as they are solely by their own attachments and desires, that is, by self-interest. Not so the great men who have renounced all desire. Witness the great trials to which, in the Mahabharata, Bhishma, Vidura, Yudhisthira and Karna were put. We read in that epic how they solved their several difficulties. Their solutions did not conform to a single moral pattern but reflected their several individualities. The conduct of each was the reaction of his personality and character to the impact of circumstances. Modern critics and expositors sometimes forget this underlying basic factor and seek to weigh all in the same scales, which is quite wrong. We may profit by the way in which, in the Ramayana, Dasaratha, Kumbhakarana, Maricha, Bharata, and Lakshmana reacted to the difficulties with which each of them was faced. Likewise, Balarama’s neutrality in the Mahabharata war was a lesson.

Perhaps I include these specific passages because I agree with them, but I cannot avoid that bias. One of the reasons I feel compelled to read the epic in so many different ways is because the story itself appeals to me in so many ways. For me, the Mahabharata is the truth of life: that we humans are all faced with difficult decisions and we navigate these decisions by following our moral compass, our Swadharma. That is all we can do to make peace with, and in, the universe.

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The Ashramas of Life

Anish — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 03:50:07 +0000

It is noted that in almost every religion, there are ceremonies that celebrate rites of passage throughout a person’s life. In Judaism, there is the bar/bat mitzvah. In many sects of Christianity, the confirmation is held to declare that the individual is a participating member of the church. In Hinduism, for young individuals around the age of 13, a thread ceremony, known as an Upanayanam, is held to initiate the individual into his Brahmacharya stage — the part of his life where the individual lives as a student.

Interestingly enough, the Upanishads have essentially set 4 stages or ‘ashramas’ of life as a Hindu that we all tend to follow, to an extent. After the Brahmacharya stage, at around the age of 25, the individual will enter the Grihasta stage of life, which is also known as the householder stage. It is here where the individual will marry, build a family and work toward his career. The third and fourth stages of life, known as the Vanaprastha stage and the Sanyaasa stage, require the individual to renounce and retire from social and professional life and be totally devoted to God. The last two ashramas mark the end of life, where the individual will either become one with God or be reborn into the cycle.

I feel that it’s rather interesting how the ancient sages had set these rules with such accuracy that these ashramas can be followed even today to an extent.

A general question to all: do other religions also have set sections of life in which an individual must follow a certain way of life?

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