Background Notes: The Mahabharata, Bhagavat Gita, Dhammapada, Katha Upanishad, and Sakuntala by Thomas Palakeel
Hindu Tradition and Basic Concepts:The Hindu Trinity:(Brahama who “creates” the universe, Vishnu who sustains all creation, and Shiva who dissolves created world). The totality of the Trinity is called Brahmam. (This is different from Brahman, a member of the highest caste.) It is in his role as the preserver that Vishnu intervenes in human history; every time there is a major violation of dharma, he takes an avatar in order to re-establish dharma . The myth of Ten Avatars and dozens of partial avatars illustrate this belief. In the first avatar, Vishnu came as a Fish; this is the Hindu Flood story, quite similar to Gilgamesh and the Noah’s Ark story. Hayagrivan, the asura, steals the scriptures and escapes. What will happen to the world without scriptures? So Vishu takes birth as tiny fish and enters king Satyavan’s water-bowl and starts growing exponentially and the king transfers the fish to a pot and then to a pond and to a lake and finally to an ocean as it kept growing. The fish confides in the king about his plan to expand further in the ocean and create a flood. The fish entrusts the truthful king to gather up seeds and animals and medicinal herbs in a ship. Everyone perishes in the great flood and the scripture is recovered from the asura and the world is given a new beginning.) Other avatar stories include Vishnu arrival as a Tortoise (partially a creation story), a Boar, a Man-Lion, and as Vamana, Parasurama, Rama (the ideal man), Krishna (practical logic for the new age), Buddha (obviously a shrewd recent entry, which replaces Balarama), and the final one, Kalki, who is yet to come at the end of our time. Oh! Oh! Several of the heroes in The Mahabharata are partial avatars of gods who were initially atmospheric deities (sun, wind, fire.) and so are all of us, manifestations of the single divine essence.
Time and Cosmology: Vishnu's avatars are linked to the Hindu notion of Time, which is quite complex, at times it even appears to be "unsound" from a Western perspective. Creation and existence of the universe itself is measured from different human and divine scales. Four Ages (Yugas) of the universe. Kali Yuga (the shortest, 432,000 years and the worst in terms of the quality of dharma among the people; it is so bad the “Cow” of Dharma has to stand on one foot. We are said to be in this phase and this is the one that will end with Kalki!); Treta Yuga (864,000 years, Dharma must stand on two feet), Dwapara Yuga (1,296,000 years, Dharma stands on three feet) and Kreta Yuga (1,728,000; this is the age of perfection; Dharma stands on all four feet. Think of it as prelapsarian, paradise phase. In the epic, you see Shiva and Narayana (Krishna) appear throughout, helping the heroes, and Brahma appears in the story Duryodhana tells Aswathama in their final moments, when the fallen Kaurava king explains how everyone was immortal at one time and the weight of the population crushed the earth and how Lady Death was created and how she refused to kill anyone and then Brahma had to create greed and jealousy and passions and war and disease to deliver the living to Death. And the story reminds us yet again The Gilgamesh and the concerns of all Flood stories.
All the four ages discussed above totals 4,320,000,000 in human years, but such an interminable amount of Time is only ONE SINGLE DAY for Brahma. And Brahma puts an end to all Reality at the end of the day, and creates the world anew in the morning. What the Hindus are trying to do is to thumb their nose at the seriousness of human affairs and our notions of self-importance by inventing a concept of “time” that is vast enough to accommodate the key concept of Maya, and of course, the nature of worldly reality, which is explained as an illusion, a misunderstanding that needs correction.
The concept of Maya is introduced throughout the Hindu scripture, some of them are popular in taste (the epics, the Puranas that provide the raw materials for faith and belief) and the rest are philosophical (the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Gita that provide ideological basis of the tradition); hundreds of commentaries and literary versions spun off from the original scriptures add to these vast tradition. Several of these may not add up neatly, but there is, indeed, a general agreement on the basics, and homogeneity and coherence remarkable for a tradition that is so old and largely unbroken to this day.
Dharma, personal duty, a set of rules for each individual, pre-ordained; “Hindu dharma” means Hindu religion.
Each individual’s life is divided into neat phases according obligations and goals. Brahamacharya (the phase of a student seeker who learns about dharma and knowledge), Grihastham (householder using dharma in his expected role in family and society; seeker of artham and kamam), Vanaprastham (upon concluding the previous dharma well an individual moves on toward a pilgrimage--going into the jungle-- gradually attaining moksha through the final stage, Sanyasam, asceticism.Life itself is all about acquiring knowledge about Reality of Existence, and learning to deal with Maya, the wheel of samsara the cycle of birth and rebirth into which one gets trapped on account of ignorance, Avidya, something that has to be removed. The highest form of understanding is when an individual recognizes that his or her soul (atman) is no different from Brahman(m), the universal soul, God. Of course, there is nothing but God. Nothing but Brahman. Following a Guru, is an integral part of the tradition: the guru can bring a flashlight and show the frightened student that reality is only a rope, not a serpent. Our experience of this world is equated to the same fear that grips anyone who comes upon a snake in the dark! Imagine, how one is relieved upon seeing that the snake is only piece of rope on the ground. All our suffering has no basis!
Understand all these concepts as a culture’s effort to reconcile and organize enormous social and historical events relating to migration, settlement, development of agriculture, civilization, and a gradual move from matriarchy to patriarchy, and from primitive religion to organized systems of belief, and finally, sophisticated efforts to develop philosophical ideas about the best way to live in this world; all of these we have already seen in the context of The Epic of Gilgamesh, a story that resonates throughout The Mahabhrata and Katha Upanishad as well as The Dhammapada excerpts we read.
The Katha Upanishad is a short philosophical story in which a young man confronts the god of Death, who is so impressed by the youth’s thirst for knowledge and his insistence, the god teaches him a thing or two about what happens to a man when he dies. Several Upanishads are widely available in English translation.
The Dhammapada is a collection of teachings by Buddha, and unlike the other works we have read, he is a historical figure and much of his thinking critiques the ancient Hindu tradition from within.
The Bhagavat Gita is a small section of in the middle of Chapter 12 of The Mahabhrata, in the form of a dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna, soon after Arjuna faints at the battlefield when he looks at the whole family lined up in a battle formation.
The following is a description of each chapter in a nutshell--as I understand it on the basis of Nitya Chaitanya Yati’s commentaries and teachings:
Basically The Gita is a discussion of the Upanishadic meaning of dharma and an effort to find a new meaning. Whatever it is, at the end of the dialogue, Arjuna takes up arms and goes out and joins the battle.
Dharma is the first word in The Gita--What happened in the battlefield of Dharma? The blind patriarch, Dritarashtra asks Sanjaya the ministral or suta, whom the poet Vyasa assigns as an omniscient narrator--the poet also happens to be the father of Dritrashtra. Of course, is it the poet who fathers every character in an epic? Obviously, The Gita is a later addition to The Mahabharata, which is an epic with a rather popular taste (it's suta literature), the placement of the Gita, a philosophical treatise (mantra literature) into the context of battle signals the fact that The Gita is no armchair philosophy. It is asking to be read in the context of battles between values, between old ideologies and the new.
Chapter 1: Arjuna Vishada Yoga; (Vishadam--sadness, moral dilemma, internal crisis) none of these can be called a Yoga, so the chapter title is a bit misleading. In fact, the section describes how Arjuna is suffering from a lack of understanding of Yoga, the principle of unity and harmony that is being developed by the author.
Chapter 2: Samkhya Yoga (Rationalism and Self-Discipline) the fact that Krishna is answering Arjuna's questions in the format of a typical Guru-Disciple relationship--a structural element in the Indian spiritual tradition--is already obvious, although Krishna is only Arjuna's chariot driver. Samkhya is the name of one of the Six Systems of Indian Philosophy (developed by Kapila). The followers of Samkhya may have rebelled at the Vedic tradition of aggressive culture of war and sacrifice and what can be characterized as their "active" life, resulting from the patriarchal culture that came to erase much of the matriarchal culture prevalent in the pre-Aryan India. In this chapter, Krishna seems to be in the process of a new Upanishad, if not alluding to the Upanishadic tradition that followed the rather practical Vedic tradition brought by Aryans into India. Arjuna seems to be asking for a cure for his Vishadam, but the Guru seems to be more interested in describing the nature of Reality. Arjuna seems to have absorbed Krishna's Samkhya Yoga teaching as a privileging of reason and understanding.
Chapter 3: In this section, Karma Yoga, (Action) Arjuna asks if reason is better than action, then why urge him to fight at all. Krishna's explanation seems to be illustrating the fact that action is unavoidable. Even God has no rest. Even the universe is in flux. Krishna's explanation is partly derived from Mimamsa (another one of the Six Systems) and he does point at a certain level of psychological inevitability resulting from the three guna in each individual: sattva (virtue), rajas (passion), and tamas (darkness). Indeed karma is a result of the Avidya, illusion, but Krishna takes into account various schools of thought and seems to be aiming at a radical restatement of the meaning of karma: Seize every action as an opportunity to perform karma that unifies the individual with the divine, and this is what he labels as "Yoga" which he uses in the title of each of the 18 teachings. Most of us know Yoga as an exercise, involving a lot of postures and sitting. Learning to sit calmly is indeed a key teaching here. How many of us know how to sit calmly, without some inner agitation?
Chapter 4: Jnana Yoga. (Knowledge) Krishna tells Arjuna that the secret of Yoga in the way he means it has been lost now, although he did pass it on to humans so long ago. He is repeating the age-old knowledge, the perennial wisdom, to Arjuna who is ready to abandon the battleground and accept renunciation and a return to the exile in the jungle where he and his family had been at peace, as a matter of fact.
Chapter 5: Karma Samnyasa Yoga (Renunciation). The dialectics of revaluation of ancient systems of thought continues, primarily between rationalist thought and the discipline of faith. This section highlights the need to adopt Yoga as a discipline and describes the model of the yogi.
Chapter 6:Dhyana Yoga (Contemplation). The inner dimension of the yogi
Chapter 7: Jnana-Vijnana Yoga: Synthesis of Wisdom and Knowledge
Chapter 8: Aksara Brahma Yoga (Spiritual Progress)
Chapter 9: Raja Vidya Raja Guhya Yoga (Secret Knowledge)
Chapter 10. Vibhuti Yoga (Positive Values)
Chapter 11: Visvarupa Darsana Yoga (the Vision of the cosmic unity all once)
Chapter 12: Bhakthi Yoga (Devotion)
Chapter 13: Kshetra-kshetranjna Vibhaga Yoga (Need to distinguish between what is actual and what is merely perception. The need to achieve an awareness of the bliss of existence. How many of us are aware that we are Sat-chid-ananda?)
Chapter 14 Gunatraya Vibhaga Yoga (How to overcome the three instincts, of Sattva, the pure, Rajas, the passionate, Tamas, the dark, the psychological elements that condition an individual. One who transcends the conditioning is a sthita pranja, a stable individual.)
Chapter 15: Purushothama Yoga (The secret path to becoming a stable individual who becomes like a tree that is upside down, all its roots rooted in heaven and the leaves and the branches constantly branching out into the earth, which is here asked to be trimmed if one wants to become a better man, purushothama. )
Chapter 16: Daivasura Sampad Vibhaga Yoga. ( How to distinguish between higher and lower values. How to avoid the trap of desire, lust, deluding anger, and greed.)
Chapter 17: Sraddhatraya Vibhaga Yoga: (Attention, sraddha, to the three instincts of the pure, the passionate, and the dark in us; by learning, to give, to practice austere living, and by steady and constant attention to values.)
Chapter 18: Samnyasa Yoga. (Reviews all the complex arguments so far and helps an individual arrive at a personal dharma, abandoning much that passes for dharma. Krishna advises Arjuna to relinquish all action prompted by desire.)Folks, I know this is too much. Don’t worry. Just learn to sit calmly and read The Mahbharata. Keep Gilgamesh in mind also. They all started as stories. Read for the stories. Slowly, things will begin to make sense. Remember, this, too, is a literary work, the fruit of human beings creating stories about the enigma of our lives. My students from the past have left these materials for you