An Atheist Explores the Bhagavad Gita Part One: Introduction

New year, new religion. For this next series I leave behind the Near East and head off to India for:

Bhagavad Gita:  Introduction.

 Welcome to a new instalment of the Atheist Explores Sacred Texts series. Having ploughed through the Near Eastern Monotheisms for a while now, it’s time to go further east, starting with a look at the Bhagavad Gita.

 Hinduism and Buddhism both seem to be less about following a particular holy text, but are dealt with more in a vast corpus of theological and philosophical works, so distilling them down to any particular piece of writing is tricky.

 As far as I’ve worked out, Hindu sacred texts are comprised of two large bodies of work. The Vedas are four collections of ritual instructions, prayers, mantras, commentaries on the rituals, and philosophy and meditation. Of these, the Rig Veda is probably the most well known, the others being the Yajurveda, Samaveda, and Atharvaveda. These include the earliest known writings on the Hindu/Vedic religion.

 Within the Vedas are the Upanashids, often referred to separately, but also as the later portions of each of the Vedas, the parts dealing with meditation and spirituality.

Now, although I’m sure these are fascinating and wonderful, I’ve learned from the Bible read-through that it’s not easy to give much of a commentary on prayers and rules. It’d be like combining Leviticus and Psalms; not much fun. And they’re huge. The Rig Veda alone comprises ten books each with about 200 different hymns and mantras. So, maybe I’ll tackle them one day, but not today.

Next there are the epic tales – the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. The Mahabharata deals with clashes of kings and armies, the Ramayana is more personal with the hero Rama seeking to rescue his love Sita from a demon king. The Iliad vs. the Odyssey in terms of focus, in other words.

Again: huge! Eighteen books in the Mahabharata. Book One has 236 chapters, although this does vary wildly (Book 17 only has three chapters).  The Ramayana is shorter, and I may well come back to do a read-through of that one because, well, demons and an army of monkeys?  Yes please!

There are also the Puranas, which are a cosmological chronology, seemingly cobbled together under a range of different texts. Which also sound pretty vital, but I’ve not even looked at these yet so I can’t tell if they’re going to be vibrant mythic tales or dry genealogies, or both.

The Bhagavad Gita, aka The Song of God, is actually chapters 23-40 of Book Six of the Mahabharata. It’s a moveable section of a wider narrative, where the god Krishna visits Prince Arjun to discuss philosophy with him just before a big battle (one of many, as I understand it). It’s a Wisdom piece rather than a Narrative piece, and so can be read on its own. And at only 18 chapters it makes a good gateway into the Hindu corpus.

It also has a mercifully small cast of characters; the epics are rife with lengthy names, honourifics and genealogies that put even Russian authors to shame – “Ugrasrava, the son of Lomaharshana, surnamed Sauti, well-versed in the Puranas, bending with humility, one day approached the great sages of rigid vows, sitting at their ease, who had attended the twelve years' sacrifice of Saunaka, surnamed Kulapati, in the forest of Naimisha“, for example (from about three verses in to the Mahabharata). If you’ve followed me this far you’ll know that as an avid reader of fantasy and science fiction this kind of thing doesn’t phase me too much, but it’s nice to have a break.

I used this website https://www.holy-bhagavad-gita.org/ because the translation was fresh and readable, and it also has very useful commentary not only on each chapter as a whole but verse by verse; useful for getting a better handle on unfamiliar Sanskrit terms. (This site https://www.bhagavad-gita.org/ is also useful as an adjunct, but I found that the translation was a little more stilited).

If you’re familiar with my readings of the Bible and Qur’an, you’ll know that my aim here isn’t to mock or belittle beliefs, but to get a better understanding of what the roots of those beliefs are. I’m approaching this text with the intent of understanding what it’s trying to tell me, on its own merits, without the burden of having to assume that it’s the only truth out there.

I’m interested in where this one will go.

Namaste.

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