{"id":4930,"date":"2015-01-01T13:04:13","date_gmt":"2015-01-01T18:04:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/?p=4930"},"modified":"2015-01-01T13:04:13","modified_gmt":"2015-01-01T18:04:13","slug":"seeking-the-gita","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/seeking-the-gita\/","title":{"rendered":"Seeking the Gita"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Gita has been used for everything from “Just War” political theory to pacifism, eclectic claims of medicine, and as a handbook for the secret forms of yogic practice. But whatever we think the Bhagavadgita means, it is surely a gateway through which every yogin must pass before taking any next step. It has always implied more than it has said and perplexed as much as it has inspired. No modern reader should feel the slightest reluctance to interpret the text as she or he sees fit: this is exactly what has always been done without the least amount of compunction.<\/em> (Brooks, Loc 163)<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

Will the \u2018Real\u2019 Bhagavad Gita Please Stand Up?<\/h4>\n

I’ll begin with\u00a0a note on where I’m coming from.\u00a0I can\u2019t write\u00a0in any way for the hundreds of millions of people\u00a0who have grown up and lived with a more or less unified reading of the Bhagavad Gita<\/em> through one of many religio-cultural lenses.\u00a0I’m writing from the position I share with those\u00a0who have been exposed to it (and fallen in love with it) through\u00a0a synthesis of secular academic study and the \u201cspiritual-but-not-religious\u201d milieu of the modern\u00a0yoga studio and its trainings.<\/p>\n

For this demographic, the first matter to address is\u00a0the conundrum of\u00a0being aware of multiple Gitas<\/em>.\u00a0The Sanskrit\u00a0dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna has been translated into (or\u00a0colonized by) non-Indian\u00a0languages more times than any other text of yoga\u2019s vast literature, with each version\u00a0carrying the insights, biases, and blindspots of the translator\u2019s community. Beneath this globalizing\u00a0layer there is a\u00a01500-year history of the text at war\u00a0upon\u00a0its native battleground, bloodied by\u00a0conflicting readings that reflect both its malleability and its\u00a0internal tensions. I’ll roughly sketch some of these readings below, and then offer two additional reading stances\u00a0— from a globalized, secular, and deconstructive perspective — that might broaden this old conversation even further.<\/p>\n

I would argue that simply being\u00a0aware of many\u00a0Gitas exposes the sensitive secular student to\u00a0the “incredulity towards metanarratives” by which Francois Lyotard characterized the postmodern mood (Lyotard, 1984). In other words: when one\u00a0starts to investigate\u00a0how a book like the Gita evolves against the backdrop of\u00a0its many uses and readings through time, its monolithic potential\u00a0as a a pillar of\u00a0sanatana dharma (<\/em>“eternal\u00a0teaching”, according to the favoured expression in orthodox Hinduism) becomes less accessible. It becomes\u00a0hard to commit to a stable point-of-view, to invest in the hero, to worship its central speaker, or to be romanced by his\u00a0promise of salvation.\u00a0If one is to generate\u00a0awe and wonder before the text — if this is even desirable — it will be as one who finds religion less\u00a0in the book’s presumed\u00a0meaning than in the complexity of how that meaning is produced.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Multiple Gitas: An Incomplete Survey of Readings<\/h4>\n

Shankara (788-820)\u00a0sidestepped\u00a0the Gita\u2019s Samkhya-heavy dualism to read the text as the crowning achievement of transcendent\u00a0non-dualism.\u00a0The Tantric commentator Abhinavagupta (950-1020) rejected this Vedantic presentation in favour of a radically immanent non-dualism.\u00a0\u00a0Ramanuja (1017-1137) split the difference in favour of an immanent-and-transcendent reading. Commentators\u00a0have typically emphasized either the wisdom or the action encouragements of the text. And because the character of Krishna seems to support the old Vedic order in some verses and reject it elsewhere, writers\u00a0have used it to support\u00a0either pro-or anti-ritualistic positions. In the 13th century, the 16 year-old Marathi prodigy-poet Jnaneshvari bubbled over\u00a0with his manifesto of personal bhakti, modeling an intimacy with the holy song\u00a0he insisted\u00a0would lead the reader inevitably\u00a0to love, and then to freedom.<\/p>\n

Centuries later, many\u00a0early Indologists twisted the text to support the presumed moral superiority of the pro-Christian Raj, or into a lowish rung on Hegel\u2019s romantic ladder\u00a0towards\u00a0the world \u201csupermind\u201d. Fighting back against such\u00a0racist or abstracting appropriations, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, co-founder of the All India Home Rule League, saw the text as a pro-Hindu rallying cry for violent uprising against the colonizers. Specifically, he taught\u00a0that Krishna’s lesson\u00a0on detachment in\u00a0action meant that a freedom-fighter\u00a0who held no hope for personal reward could murder an occupier with a clear conscience. Writing about another\u00a0anti-colonialist trend, Richard Davis reports that<\/p>\n

\u201cto gain entry to the inner circle of the Anushilan Samiti (Self-Culture Association]\u2026 an initiation was required. Lying flat on a human skeleton, holding a revolver in one hand and a copy of the Bhagavad Gita<\/em> in the other, the initiate had to recite the group\u2019s oath.\u201d (Davis, Loc. 1609)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In his youth, this sort of ritual might have been Aurobindo Ghose’s cup of chai. But his prison epiphany turned him away from armed resistance. Upon his release, Aurobindo\u00a0retreated to\u00a0Pondicherry to focus upon the Gita\u2019s cosmology in isolation from its politics.<\/p>\n

Mohandas K. Gandhi pushed back against writers like Tilak, presenting\u00a0the Gita as an uncompromising hymn to non-violence, based upon a debatable argument that one cannot be unattached to the results of a violent action, and therefore Krishna must only be speaking about the internal strife of psychic conflict. A similarly internalized Gita, though stripped of its activist\u00a0import, was favored by American Transcendentalists dating back through\u00a0Thoreau and Emerson to Walt Whitman, and stretching forward through many secular interpreters familiar to modern global yoga, who see in the text\u00a0the invitation to a posthistorical contemplative trance.<\/p>\n

Then there’s the reading stance of\u00a0Indian Marxism. I’ll quote liberally from two giants\u00a0here,\u00a0because they will be the least known to the largely neoliberal vibe\u00a0of modern global yoga.<\/p>\n

Historian Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi (1907-1966) writes in\u00a0Myth and Reality<\/em>\u00a0(1962, wonky pdf available\u00a0here<\/a>): “the utility of the Gita derives from its peculiar fundamental defect, namely dexterity in seeming to reconcile the irreconcilable”, designed to reify\u00a0state power and class structure whilst bamboozling the underclasses with a devotional mirage.\u00a0Kosambi breathes proletarian\u00a0fire upon the old scroll:<\/p>\n

The high god repeatedly emphasizes the great virtue of non-killing (ahimsa<\/em>), yet the entire discourse is an incentive to war. So, 2.19\u00a0says that it is impossible to kill or be killed. The soul merely puts off an old body as a man his old clothes, in exchange for new; it cannot be cut by weapons, nor suffer from fire, water or the storm. In the eleventh chapter, the terrified Arjuna sees all the warriors of both sides rush into a gigantic Visnu-Krsna’s innumerable voracious mouths, to be swallowed up or crushed. The moral is pointed by the demoniac god himself (11.33): that all the warriors on the field had really been destroyed by him; Arjuna’s killing them would be a purely formal affair whereby he could win the opulent kingdom. Again, though the yajna sacrifice is played down or derided, it is admitted in 3.14 to be the generator of rain, without which food and life would be impossible. This slippery opportunism characterizes the whole book. Naturally, it is not surprising to find so many Gita lovers imbued therewith. Once it is admitted that material reality is gross illusion, the rest follows quite simply; the world of “doublethink” is the only one that matters.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Social reformer Bhimrao Ramji<\/span>\u00a0Ambedkar (1891-1956) served as Drafting Committee Chairman for the Indian Constitution of 1947 and was a leading voice\u00a0in\u00a0India’s Modern Buddhist Movement. He had little time for the Song of God, perhaps because he was too busy trying to end\u00a0discrimination against oppressed peoples such as the Dalits. He saw the modern Gita’s legacy as an anti-democratic religiosity serving the desires\u00a0of upper-caste counter-revolutionary elites. He dismisses the old book out-of-hand: “It uses philosophy to defend religion”, he writes — such as the creeds\u00a0of transmigration, the innateness of caste, and the efficiency of Vedic ritual. Ambedkar suggests<\/a>\u00a0that the Gita enjoys its modern\u00a0pride of place in Hindutva discourse\u00a0because it posed an early and effective pushback against\u00a0Buddhist rejections of essentialism, social inequality, sacrifice, and Vedic authority, while, paradoxically co-opting poetic\u00a0aspects of Buddhist philosophy, which, if taken at their word, would forbid Krishna’s obvious militarism:<\/p>\n

Why did the Bhagvat Gita feel it necessary to defend the dogmas of counter-revolution? To my mind the answer is very clear. It was to save them from the attack of Buddhism that the Bhagvat Gita came into being. Buddha preached non-violence. He not only preached it but the people at large\u2014except the Brahmins\u2014had accepted it as the way of life. They had acquired a repugnance to violence. Buddha preached against Chaturvarnya<\/em> [the system of four castes]. He used some of the most offensive similes in attacking the theory of Chaturvarnya<\/em>. The frame work of Chaturvarnya<\/em> had been broken. The order of Chaturvarnya<\/em> had been turned upside down. Shudras and women could become sannyasis<\/em>, a status which counter-revolution had denied them. Buddha had condemned the Karma kanda<\/em> and the Yajnas<\/em> [older priest-controlled rituals of Vedic sacrifice]. He condemned them on the ground of Himsa<\/em> or violence. He condemned them also on the ground that the motive behind them was a selfish desire to obtain bonus. What was the reply of the counterrevolutionaries to this attack? Only this. These things were ordained by the Vedas, the Vedas were infallible, therefore the dogmas were not to be questioned…<\/p>\n

[At the same time, Hindutva scholars like Telang, Radhakrishnan and Tilak are]\u00a0most reluctant to admit that the Bhagvat Gita is anyway influenced by Buddhism and [are]\u00a0ever ready to deny that the Gita has borrowed anything from Buddhism… Where there is any similarity in thought between the Bhagvat Gita and Buddhism too strong and too close to be denied, the argument is that it is borrowed from the Upanishads. It is typical of the mean mentality of the counterrevolutionaries not to allow any credit to Buddhism on any account.<\/p>\n

The absurdity of these views must shock all those who have made a comparative study of the Bhagvat Gita and the Buddhist Suttas. For if it is true to say that Gita is saturated with Sankhya philosophy it is far more true to say that the Gita is full of Buddhist ideas.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The gritty legacies\u00a0of Kosambi and Ambedkar bother few of those who gather weekly in London or Manhattan or Toronto or Oakland or Buenos Aires to\u00a0chant the name of Krishna with tears streaming down their\u00a0faces. (Most of these faces are non-Indian.) I\u2019ve joined them sometimes. I’ve noted with warmth and ambivalence the austere portrait of Swami Prabhupada, founder of ISKCON, in their spaces. I’ve wondered how a retired pharmacist from Calcutta inspired millions to chant this name all over the world.<\/p>\n

But at times my tears have mingled with theirs. Perhaps because the Sanskrit reminds me of the Latin of my Catholic youth — something old, distant, and terribly sacred that points to a forgotten world. Perhaps it’s because I realize with a jolt that I never really understand what I’m saying anyways, so why can’t I just enjoy the sounds? But sometimes, as Erika Abrahamian wrote\u00a0in her last post<\/a>, \u201csinging the praises of gods I did not grow up with tastes like cold wax in my mouth.\u201d<\/p>\n

I’m fascinated with all of these readings of the Gita, and for better or worse am developing my own. I\u2019m intrigued by the hallucinogenic qualities of the battlefield dialogue. It seems to carry a story of evolutionary psychoneurology\u00a0resonant with\u00a0the framework of Julian Jayne\u2019s controversial thesis<\/a>\u00a0on the emergence of \u201cmodern\u201d consciousness, which in the growing isolation of accumulation economy evolves beyond a state of constant God-possession.<\/p>\n

The Gita presents\u00a0a man talking to (someone he believes to be) God — someone who looks just like him. They\u2019re discussing whether or not the man\u2019s sense of individual agency is meaningful \u2013 whether, in fact, it is to his advantage that he is expressing doubts about his role in history. The discussion takes place at\u00a0a moment of psychic trauma and rupture, but also\u00a0at\u00a0the\u00a0historical crossroads Ambedkar describes:\u00a0a democratizing wind is blowing through India, stirred up by the mass migration of youth from all castes thrilled to be breaking orthodox rank on the cue of Siddhartha.<\/p>\n

One of the key things at stake socio-politically at Kurukshetra is whether or not the human being will continue to be governed by the notion of\u00a0divinized power, and, if not,\u00a0how divinized power will be transmuted to the state. Krishna’s presumed answer is given to us clearly. The God\u00a0is written to say: You don\u2019t have an individual self. You are inside me. I\u2019ve already ground you up with my teeth. You have no choice but to act, and to act as I say.<\/em> With Arjuna\u2019s surrender to Krishna, an older order is seen to resist the inevitable drift towards a more modern subjectivity.\u00a0Through the lens of Jaynes, we can read Arjuna as struggling with the nascent feelings of autonomy which compel the person\u00a0within the warrior beginning to view himself as casteless to resist the duties dictated by a warrior\u00a0God.<\/p>\n

Where do all of these readings\u00a0leave us? Of one thing we can be\u00a0sure: there can be no “correct” or stable view\u00a0for someone acutely aware of the “plural set of responses” (Larson, 666), each with their own purpose and elegance to their readerships.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0shards\u00a0of a\u00a0fragmented\u00a0text\u00a0can prick the bubble of the modern practitioner who wants answers instead of inquiry, or who has turned to yoga to either find or reinvigorate a sense of devotion denied to an age of\u00a0irony. How can\u00a0an acute awareness of endlessly\u00a0conflicting views generate heat and presence, and avoid academic dessication?<\/p>\n

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Paths of Demystification and Presence<\/h4>\n

Readings\u00a0of the Gita seem to range from “tight” to “loose”. On the “tight” side of the spectrum, Shankara, Prabhupada, and Kosambi make for\u00a0odd bedfellows. The first\u00a0insists that the text is an extended proof of Advaita Vedanta; the second claims\u00a0it is the testament of the one true creator-and-sustainer God to whom the world must submit for its very survival, and the third decries the whole affair\u00a0as\u00a0a bourgeois fraud. These views\u00a0admit no daylight through their dense\u00a0verbiage — a sure sign of authorial anxiety. On the “loose” side, one finds the rather tepid universalism of Eknath Easwaren, but then also Douglas Brooks’ piquant Tantric gloss in\u00a0Poised for Grace<\/em>, which frames the old book\u00a0as an ongoing conversation to which each reading provides fruitful digression.<\/p>\n

Tight or loose, every reading I’ve encountered wants the Gita\u00a0to transmit something particular, even if, as in Brooks’ case, it is a generous promise\u00a0of the reader’s potential. More importantly,\u00a0every reading wants\u00a0Krishna to be someone, and for the reader to form a personal relationship with him by imagining herself as Arjuna.\u00a0<\/em>I sometimes wonder how\u00a0much different this is from\u00a0the “personal relationship to Jesus” which serves as a threshold for admission to Evangelical identity. Such readings proceed as if,\u00a0for the secular reader,\u00a0Krishna can be someone\u00a0more than a character on a page, speaking more than\u00a0an accretion of aphorisms from assorted philosophies co-opted\u00a0by a committee of ancient writers for purposes now buried in a tangle of yearning\u00a0and realpolitik.\u00a0Tight or loose, each reading wants Krishna to be a real person who we can identify, love, worship, or dismiss.<\/p>\n

Poised for Grace<\/em>\u00a0provides a breakthrough in\u00a0Brooks’ insistence\u00a0upon the Gita as a living document\u00a0into which the modern reader must\u00a0interlope. He cheerleads a\u00a0strategy\u00a0of using the Gita to debate\u00a0competing visions of God and\u00a0philosophy against the pragmatics\u00a0of present circumstance. In the spirit\u00a0of this approach, I\u00a0offer a sidewards tack:\u00a0for\u00a0the truly secular\u00a0yogin, the Gita invites a deconstructive conversation with the very process by which meaning is created.<\/p>\n

In addition to holding multiple and conflicting readings of the Gita in one’s heart with respect for each, and additional respect for their dialectics, I have two suggestions that may broaden our “plural set of responses” (Larson, 666) even further:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Readers can begin to dis-identify with Arjuna, and thereby de-reify Krishna, in order to explore a larger and more granular narrative process.<\/li>\n
  2. After extricating themselves from identification with Arjuna, readers can begin to meet\u00a0the Gita\u00a0not as a “teaching”, but as a mirror of their own meaning-production. We might find a workable model for this relationship in the modern\u00a0psychotherapeutic encounter.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

     <\/p>\n

    Dis-identifying with Arjuna<\/h4>\n

    Every commentator I’ve read\u00a0so far wants the reader\u00a0to put herself on that battlefield, kneeling at Krishna’s feet. This implicitly demands\u00a0imagining\u00a0Krishna as a living presence. But does this harmonize\u00a0with the secular reader’s\u00a0actual\u00a0condition?<\/p>\n

    Today’s reader is hurtling through the subway\u00a0tunnels of a\u00a0digital matrix\u00a0with a paperback or an e-reader in her\u00a0hand. Between chapters — verses even — she is overwhelmed\u00a0with waves of\u00a0data from across the globe. She is so saturated in neoliberal propaganda it has become\u00a0invisible to her, but something\u00a0hasn’t felt\u00a0right for a long time. She\u00a0knows that climate change will be catastrophic. And the book she’s\u00a0holding — which\u00a0her YTT director assigned her to read without much\u00a0explanation — describes how a male\u00a0Iron Age warrior\u00a0talks\u00a0with God in a chariot, and is eventually convinced of the necessity of war.<\/p>\n

    Personally identifying with Arjuna might\u00a0mimic\u00a0the way she\u00a0read books as a child. It could\u00a0invoke\u00a0a forced na\u00efvet\u00e9\u00a0that may be comforting. But is it honest? Does it really work?\u00a0<\/span>As an adult, doesn’t her\u00a0reading of the book\u00a0tell more about\u00a0how she\u00a0relates\u00a0and doesn’t relate<\/em> to stories like this? Doesn’t it speak to how she\u00a0absorbs the\u00a0unspoken devices and politics of the metanarratives still gasping for breath around her? Isn’t her reading more about how she\u00a0negotiates infinite perspectives, and how she\u00a0responds to the chaotic patterns of history?<\/p>\n

    Releasing identification with Arjuna may\u00a0also de-divinize Krishna and recast him as an abstract agent\u00a0of Foucauldian power<\/a>. He might\u00a0become\u00a0as slippery\u00a0as any any other charismatic polymath at the heart of an epic novel: intuitive, bombastic, tender, Machiavellian. Judge Holden in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian<\/em> comes to mind.<\/p>\n

    If we weren’t identified with Arjuna, and no longer\u00a0beholden to Krishna’s instruction, who would we identify with, and whose counsel would we seek? Suddenly, the men and boys who stand behind the duo\u00a0come into sharper\u00a0focus. The Mahabharata<\/em> records that there were millions of them, on both sides. Their\u00a0mothers and sisters and wives waited at home, in vain.<\/p>\n

    The book records that at the end of the eighteen-day battle, only twelve men were left standing. Not commoners. Arjuna and Krishna are among the few survivors of the slaughter\u00a0their dialogue sets in motion. That bears repeating:\u00a0Arjuna and Krishna are among the few survivors of the\u00a0slaughter\u00a0their dialogue sets in motion.<\/em><\/p>\n

    I’m reminded of this famous quote from the first chapter of Howard Zinn’s People’s History<\/em> of the United States\u00a0<\/em>(1980):<\/p>\n

    The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    Dis-identifying with Arjuna might allow today’s reader to consider the untold stories buried beneath\u00a0the metaphysical\u00a0angst of heroes and gods, and the wreckage it\u00a0leaves behind.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    Moving From Meta-Lens to\u00a0Metta<\/em>-Lens: the Gita in Treatment<\/h4>\n

    Disidentifying and de-reifying reframes\u00a0the entire text. The Gita can suddenly be felt to mimic\u00a0the infinite strangeness of a\u00a0person,\u00a0<\/em>as\u00a0confused as any other, or perhaps moreso: split by competing identities, desires, and readings of those identities and desires, and habitually revising the past as she encourages, doubts, rationalizes, aggrandizes, erases, and rebirths herself.<\/p>\n

    The Gita-as-person is sung by the triple-voices of Sanjaya, Arjuna, and Krishna, backed by its\u00a0chorus of editors and commentators. The music starts at the pause of dawn, before the battle of the day, in a kind of dream-time. Its liminal and meandering\u00a0dialogue is fuelled by multiple internal contradictions. Its allusions\u00a0are endless, transhistorical, and transcultural. The arguments\u00a0remix multiple streams of philosophy and sentiment, blending generations of practice and meaning, describing visions and wishes. Krishna’s pronouncements turn upon neuron-frying oxymorons, as in the description of atman<\/em> in 13:15 (as Mascaro translates): “He is far and near, he moves and he moves not, he is within all and he is outside all.” Nor can we forget typical\u00a0non-sequiturs such as in 4:13, in which Krishna both claims and disclaims creating\u00a0the four castes of human beings: “Know that this work is mine, though I am beyond work, in eternity.”<\/p>\n

    Reading the Gita with an ear for\u00a0its many conflicting voices\u00a0is, I imagine, a lot like being a psychotherapist sitting with a client.\u00a0A client\u00a0like any other, with all the usual hopes, fears, deflections, and\u00a0defense mechanisms. A client with a rich and impenetrable past\u00a0marked by\u00a0intergenerational wisdom and trauma. A client we attune to through active listening and\u00a0psychodynamic conversation, in which no statement can be taken at face value nor interpreted in any definitive way, but may be used as a prism to refract the\u00a0multiple colours that constitute a personality, and prompt\u00a0us\u00a0to ask: how do these colours blend today?<\/em><\/p>\n

    If the Gita is considered as a person, the deconstruction of its plural and competing readings — along with their performances — can become as much a devotional and healing act as any therapeutic encounter, in which uncertainty, dishonesty, and even aggression\u00a0invite tenderness. The reader of the Gita is sitting in treatment across from\u00a0an entire canvas of human confusion, bombast, and possibility, stretched between the poles of the private\u00a0and the political. She moves from enthrallment\u00a0with metanarrative into the intimacy of dialogue. Her\u00a0purpose for reading changes. The goal\u00a0is no longer to grasp over-arching themes, any more than it would be the goal of a\u00a0\u00a0conversation to establish eternal truths about the conversants. Her goal would be stay present to\u00a0the shifting\u00a0textures of whatever emerges.<\/p>\n

    In a therapeutic encounter, theology\u00a0is recognized\u00a0as\u00a0poetic grandiosity, metaphysical assertions\u00a0are but\u00a0yearnings, impossible dictates are\u00a0the defences\u00a0of anxiety, contradictory impulses project unresolved conflicts, and militaristic rhetoric is clearly\u00a0the consolation of the fearful. In such an encounter, the Gita doesn\u2019t tell us\u00a0what we\u00a0should do so much as it mirrors what we\u00a0have always done in the face of what we do not know<\/em>: fret, assert, question, decide, hedge, dread, bargain, threaten, pretend, reframe, weep, dream, and carry on. Remaining open to every reading, the reader-as-therapist encounters humanity in fullness as she reads, and through the text she recognizes her own unresolvable tensions. Empathy surges for the\u00a0part of the Gita-person that expresses the need for parental guidance, the\u00a0part that wants to dissociate from battle, the part that wants an ancient order re-established,\u00a0the part that categorically distrusts authority, and the part that\u00a0wakes up in a cold sweat from apocalyptic nightmares.<\/p>\n

    This process might be part of what Brooks is pointing\u00a0at in the epigraph up top: “[the Gita]\u00a0is surely a gateway through which every yogin must pass before taking any<\/em> next step.” In other words: the pursuit of yoga\u00a0is catalyzed by an analysis of one’s own dilemma: on the existential level of vulnerability and mortality, then more subtly\u00a0on the cognitive plane\u00a0that holds\u00a0the infinite ways we tell\u00a0our troubles to ourselves, and subtler still in\u00a0the interdependent sphere\u00a0in which our stories can only have meaning if\u00a0we really listen to\u00a0the stories of others.<\/p>\n

    I have already fully acknowledged<\/a> the cultural and political minefield\u00a0of using Western-derived psychology\u00a0to read Indian wisdom literature in translation. The\u00a0territory is fraught with appropriative and othering tendencies. But what I’m suggesting here is substantially different than the\u00a0approaches that have made Wendy Doniger and Jeffrey Kripal targets of both pious and postcolonial\u00a0ire. While both have used psychoanalytic principles to mine the content<\/em> of the Indian pantheon\u00a0(Doniger in\u00a0Siva: The Erotic Ascetic,<\/em>\u00a0among others) and the purported pathologies\u00a0of modern saints (Kripal in\u00a0Kali’s Child<\/em>), I’m proposing a relationship\u00a0to the overall\u00a0process<\/em>\u00a0of the book as a provocation\u00a0of the postmodern reader’s growing\u00a0psycho-political transparency. How does the reader acknowledge otherness? How does she hold space\u00a0for the divergent views that call out to her many aspects? How does she recognize the Gita’s tangles of power and submission in her own social construction?<\/p>\n

    I’m proposing\u00a0that the secular\u00a0reader, who, because they are aware of the multiplicity of readings, cannot in good conscience submit to any unified or religious interpretation, no longer consider it a failing\u00a0that they cannot look to the\u00a0book itself for certain answers, or to its heroes as credible guides. It is good that they resist\u00a0interpretations defined either academically or through the forced ideals of a neo-parampara. I propose that the modern reader, both burdened and liberated by her awareness of conflicting views, look to the process of the book’s reading and production through time as a reflection of how she herself will\u00a0evolve, according to circumstance and the never-ending flow\u00a0of knowledge-in-creation.<\/p>\n

    Ironically,\u00a0this approach of considering book-as-person might even be supported\u00a0by the text itself. Throughout the old book,\u00a0Krishna identifies himself as puroshottama<\/em>: the \u201csupreme person\u201d. In 18:70, he suggests\u00a0that anyone who studies the Gita will know him directly. Perhaps reading the Gita alongside the countless readings of the Gita to which we add our own brings us in touch with this\u00a0supremely regular\u00a0person: this amalgam of history, desire, intercultural confusion, tender truths and unconscious lies, no more\u00a0fragile and no less\u00a0resilient than anyone with whom you might sit one early morning, discussing\u00a0this joy and strife.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    _______<\/p>\n

    Thank you to several colleagues who have modelled “deconstruction without cynicism” for me, directly and indirectly: Jody Greene, Sean Feit, Douglas Brooks, Don Stapleton, and Jason Hirsch.<\/em><\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    References:<\/h4>\n

    Brooks, Douglas Renfrew.\u00a0Poised for Grace: Annotations on the Bhagavad Gita from a Tantric View<\/i>. The Woodlands, TX: Anusara, 2008.<\/p>\n

    Buitenen, J.\u00a0The Bhagavadg\u012bt\u0101 in the Mah\u0101bh\u0101rata: Text and translation<\/i>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Davis, Richard H.\u00a0The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography<\/i>. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2014.<\/p>\n

    Doniger, Wendy.\u00a0\u015aiva, the Erotic Ascetic<\/i>. New York: Oxford UP, 1981.<\/p>\n

    Jaynes, Julian.\u00a0The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind<\/i>. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976.<\/p>\n

    Kosambi, D. D.\u00a0Myth and Reality: Studies in the Formation of Indian Culture<\/i>. Bombay [India: Popular Prakashan, 1962.<\/p>\n

    Kripal, Jeffrey J.\u00a0K\u0101l\u012b’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna<\/i>. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1995.<\/p>\n

    Gerald James Larson, \u201cThe \u2018Bhagavad G\u012bt\u0101\u2019 as Cross-Cultural Process: Toward an Analysis of the Social Locations of a Religious Text,\u201d Journal of the American Academy of Religion <\/i>43, no. 4 (1975): 651-669.<\/p>\n

    Lyotard, Jean, and Geoffrey Bennington.\u00a0The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge<\/i>. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1984.<\/span><\/p>\n

    McCarthy, Cormac.\u00a0Blood Meridian, Or, The Evening Redness in the West<\/i>. New York: Vintage, 1992.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Malhotra, Rajiv.\u00a0Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism<\/i>. New Delhi: HarperCollins India, a Joint Venture with The India Today Group, 2011.<\/p>\n

    Mascaro, Juan.\u00a0The Bhagavad Gita<\/i>. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962. Print.<\/p>\n

    Zinn, Howard.\u00a0A People’s History of the United States<\/i>. New York: Harper & Row, 1980.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    \u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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