Chapter Two:
The Yog of Analytical Knowledge (Sankhya Yog)
Reasons why it’s okay to kill.
Welcome to the next instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts
(Bhagavad Gita).
In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the
Bhagavad Gita, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as
literature and mythology.
For more detail, see the introductory post https://bit.ly/2XAch2A
For the online Bhagavad Gita that I use, see here https://www.holy-bhagavad-gita.org/
And now:
“The
Supreme Lord said: My dear Arjun, how has this delusion overcome you in this
hour of peril? It is not befitting an honorable person. It leads not to the
higher abodes, but to disgrace.”
Sankhya Yog apparently means the “Knowledge of the Soul”, or “Spirit”, or however you want to
translate “Sankhya”. The bulk of this chapter is Kirshna explaining matters of
the soul to Arjun, and is quite heavy in terms of spiritual teaching.
First of all, this text refers to “Shree” Krishna, which is evidently this translations version of “Sri”, an honorific. So “Sri (or Shree)
Krishna” is roughly equivalent to “Lord Krishna”, but I think it has overtones
of holiness as much as power. We also get some other names for Krishna used by
Arjun – “Madhusudan”, the “Slayer of the Madhu demon”, and “Govinda”, which I think is “Lord of the Morning”. Krishna in turn
refers to Arjun by a variety of different titles, but because it’s just the warrior
and the god talking, it’s pretty easy to follow.
Arjun tells Krishna that he’s afraid to fight, because he doesn’t
feel right in killing his relations; or, indeed, in killing at all. Krishna
tells Arjun not to worry, because the soul is immortal and will be reborn – “Just as the embodied soul continuously
passes from childhood to youth to old age, similarly, at the time of death, the
soul passes into another body. The wise are not deluded by this.” The soul
is “unchangeable”, so it seems to be
more the essence of a person than any kind of “self”, since a person’s personality will change throughout their
life.
Likewise, it won’t be Arjun’s soul that does the killing, due to slightly
spurious sounding reasons – “Neither of
them is in knowledge—the one who thinks the soul can slay and the one who
thinks the soul can be slain. For truly, the soul neither kills nor can it be
killed.” In other words, you aren’t killing anyone’s soul, it simply moves
on to the next incarnation. But you are, however, killing that particular
incarnation, surely?
Krishna addresses this too: “If,
however, you think that the self is subject to constant birth and death, O
mighty-armed Arjun, even then you should not grieve like this”. Death is
inevitable, but also rebirth is inevitable. You didn’t exist before you were
born, you won’t exist when you are dead. Why fight against what is inevitable?
But Krishna also puts it in terms of duty. It is the duty of a
warrior to fight, in doing so Arjun will be “upholding righteousness”. Krishna also says that not to fight will
bring Arjun infamy and disrepute. This philosophy seems to me to contradict the
previous concepts, and also what is explained later in the chapter, because it
seems to place a lot of emphasis on Arjun’s present situation, not on his
immortal soul (which, one presumes, will be as immune from reputation as it is
from death). The idea seems to be accepting your role in life and fulfilling it
to your best ability - “Fight for the
sake of duty, treating alike happiness and distress, loss and gain, victory and
defeat. Fulfilling your responsibility in this way, you will never incur sin.”
Krishna then goes on to explain the Buddhi Yog, or Yog of
Intellect. This involves recognising that the rituals described in the Vedas
are but superfluous rituals compared to true knowledge – “Those with limited understanding, get attracted to the flowery words of
the Vedas, which advocate ostentatious rituals for elevation to the celestial
abodes, and presume no higher principle is described in them. They glorify only
those portions of the Vedas that please their senses, and perform pompous
ritualistic ceremonies for attaining high birth, opulence, sensual enjoyment,
and elevation to the heavenly planets,” he says in a tour de force.
But, says Krishna, that’s not to say that the Vedas don’t contain
wisdom. Just don’t be misled by the superficialities. There is greater
knowledge to be found by abandoning attachment to ideas of success and failure,
ideas of pleasure and material success. “The
wise endowed with equanimity of intellect, abandon attachment to the fruits of
actions, which bind one to the cycle of life and death. By working in such
consciousness, they attain the state beyond all suffering”. This all sounds
very Buddhist to me, and since this is the culture into which the Buddha was
born its perhaps not surprising, but it does suggest that the Buddha wasn’t
that original in his thinking.
The path, according to Krishna, requires learning to ignore the
temptations offered by the senses, and he gives a very Yoda-like progression. “While contemplating on the objects of the
senses, one develops attachment to them. Attachment leads to desire, and from
desire arises anger. Anger leads to clouding of judgment, which results in
bewilderment of the memory. When the memory is bewildered, the intellect gets
destroyed; and when the intellect is destroyed, one is ruined.”
We get another verse that this time has echoes of Judaeo-Christian
thought – “By divine grace comes the
peace in which all sorrows end, and the intellect of such a person of tranquil
mind soon becomes firmly established in God”. The concept of “divine grace” is one argued over by
Christians for centuries, but comes down to the notion that a human needs an
element of divine support in order to achieve what is called here the “transcendent state”. We slip back into a
more Buddhist style interpretation at the end of the chapter – “That person, who gives up all material
desires and lives free from a sense of greed, proprietorship, and egoism,
attains perfect peace”. This person is described as being “liberated from the
cycle of life and death”.
Very interesting. It’s amazing how old these ideas are.
Comments
Post a Comment