More on the Bhagavad Gita
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The Bhagavad Gita forms the philosophical basis of the Vaishnava (followers of Vishnu) culture. Krishna, or Vishnu, speaks the Gita to His disciple Arjuna, and since ancient times Krishna has been accepted as an appearance of God on earth.
Krishna and Arjuna
In India and many places around the world, Krishna is the Supreme Lord. He’s God. However, He shouldn’t be understood in the way people conceive of the God of Abraham.
Some describe Krishna as the Supreme Personality of Godhead. The reason for this complex term is to emphasize two things: Krishna is a person; He has personality. And He’s the ultimate source of all forms of the Supreme. He’s the God of gods.
Krishna speaks the Gita to Arjuna, who is a prince, a great archer, and one of five brothers who are the sons of Pandu. They are on the battlefield in preparation for war with their cousins.
Arjuna’s friend, Krishna, has taken the role of charioteer. When Arjuna sees his relatives and friends arrayed before him in the fratricidal war, he becomes despondent and turns to his friend for counsel.
The advice Krishna
gives is simultaneously applicable to Arjuna the warrior and to all humanity.
The Gita, or Vaishnava, Culture
Bhagavad Gita (Song of the Lord) is the philosophical core of the culture. Based on various estimates, somewhere between 300-700 million people around the world, mainly in India, follow various forms of it, making it the world’s third largest religious culture.
According to tradition, it began 5000 years ago when Krishna and other sages reformed the much older Vedic or Indo-European religion.
Setting the Scene
Bhagavad Gita (Song of Bhagavat) is part of the great epic Maha-bharata, which culminates in a battle that lasts 18 days.
The sage Sanjay narrates, or rather sings, the divine song to his king, Dhrita-rashtra.
In the first chapter, among the warriors on the battlefield are Arjuna, a prince and renowned archer, and Krishna, the driver of his chariot. Arjuna expresses to Krishna his extraordinary grief at the prospect of participating in the war.
Although playing the role of charioteer, Krishna is Bhagavat, God. He’s the Supreme Person, beyond any other concept or representation of God.
From the second chapter until the end, Krishna explains His teachings to His friend and disciple Arjuna. Most of what He imparts is based on the knowledge contained in the ancient Upanisads, yoga doctrine, and Samkhya.
The Gita contains 700 verses in 18 chapters, each of which is entitled with a type of yoga, which means to connect with the Supreme.
Practicing Krishna’s instructions liberates one from illusion, characterized by the suffering of the world, and connects one to reality, the Supreme, at which point one experiences the highest enjoyment and divine love.
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Philosophical Concepts in the Gita
Dharma means duty or responsibility. It’s sometimes awkwardly translated as religion. More accurate would be a body of principles that govern the duties of individuals, families, and society.
Bhakti means attachment, love, or devotion. To most followers of the Vaishnava culture it means service to Vishnu or Krishna with loving devotion. Pure bhakti means complete absorption in love for Krishna, untainted or undistracted by worldly attachments.
Karma: Literally, karma means work. In the modern vernacular, karma means the good or bad reactions to one’s acts. However, this isn’t an adequate understanding.
As work, karma produces results like money or an agricultural harvest. Along with those results it also causes good or bad reactions.
For example, one may work earnestly as a farmer, tilling the fields and slaughtering animals for the benefit of one’s family and community. However, one may then suffer bad reactions from killing insects in the fields and animals for consumption.
Broadly speaking, karma means action, which implies all of one’s actions in life. However, rather than just good or bad actions committed in social interactions, in the Gita, karma principally applies to one’s occupation.
The Gita discusses karma, the results of karma (money or produce), and liberation from the bad reactions, or suffering, that one’s karma produces.
Soul: Krishna reiterates the primeval teaching that all living beings are souls. The eternal soul is distinct from the temporary body and mind. And the constitution of the soul is to connect with the Supreme. That connection is the function of yoga.
The soul’s misidentification with the body-mind is often called false ego. This mistaken identity, thinking oneself to be man, woman, black, white, is the primary cause of bondage to the world. It’s the source of suffering.
The identity of the soul is lover of Krishna, which implies that one serves Krishna. In this case, service means the active exchange of love. As a lover serves the beloved with various gifts and attentions or as people express love for their families by maintaining and nurturing them, so Krishna’s followers practice active love for Him through service. And that is called bhakti.
Creation: Krishna’s Creation, or His Nature, in its original form is one of His energies. Prior to the creative act it contains all the raw elements. These elements unfurl from subtle to gross. In other words, elements like false identity, intelligence, and mind come first and later come fire, water, and earth. This process, which is part of the Samkhya doctrine, is explained more elaborately in the Bhagavat Purana.
As creation unfolds, the myriad forms and indeed the panorama of color, shape, emotion, behavior, universal realms, gods, and everything else are influenced by Creation’s attributes of goodness, passion, and ignorance. These three interact something like the three primary colors—yellow, red, and blue—to create unlimited variety.
Krishna refers to these three attributes throughout and discusses their influence on humans in chapters 14, 17, and 18.
Senses: Krishna often refers to the senses. There are ten: The knowledge senses are hearing, sight, touch, taste, and smell. The action senses, or organs of action, are the tongue, hands, legs, excretory organs, and sexual organs.
Sense Objects: The objects of the knowledge senses are five: sound, tactile feeling, form or color, taste, and odor. Throughout the early part of the Gita, Krishna discusses the attraction that the senses have for their corresponding objects and how that creates a bondage to this ephemeral world.
Mind: In the Gita, mind is defined differently than the modern mind. Here the mind’s primary function is mechanical—that is, facilitating the senses, particularly in connecting with pleasurable objects and rejecting undesirable ones.
Discernment: Sometimes called intelligence or a component of intelligence, one’s ability to discern can control the mind, which in turn gains control of the senses.
Krishna teaches that yoga practice strengthens the power to discern.
Through yoga one learns to discern spirit from matter, reality from illusion. As one learns through practice, one gains knowledge of the soul and the Supreme Soul. That knowledge guides one’s discernment and enables it to control the mind, directing it away from the sense objects and toward the Supreme.