Thursday, August 09, 2001


as you may recall, i have come to grief now attempting to read both the gita and patanjali's yoga sutras.

while i realize that the gita is a metaphor for one's internal struggles, still i'm disturbed by krishna's advice to prince arjuna. arjuna is standing in the middle of a bloody civil war when he realizes he doesn't want to kill anyone. he's tired of fighting. so he sets down his magic bow and weeps, begging his friend krishna for advice. and krishna basically tells him that as a warrior it is his fate to kill all these people and that he should act to fulfill his duty without attachment or concern for the consequences.

this upsets me, because of course i want krishna to tell arjuna to go make peace between the two sides. perhaps this is naive! i always thought of krishna as a cute blue guy with a cool flute and fun cowgirl friends. so it's sobering to see the so-called "supreme consciousness" counsel wholesale destruction; it makes krishna seem evil.

i mentioned this puzzlement to several people, one of whom said that it was this very problem that endeared buddhism to him. since buddha isn't a god, you don't have this problem of theodicy. the problem of evil and destruction is covered in the four noble truths.

another friend suggested that i was too hung up on the particulars and was missing the universal, timeless metaphors. after all, in life we really often have to act, and often those actions can result in destruction. wrong actions often result in harm to other people, while many right actions can result in the destruction of our own bad habits. this person encouraged me to understand that arjuna's civil war is the war against the hall-too-human qualities of laziness, complacency, ambition, unconcern for others, etc.

one of my yoga teachers thought the gita was too difficult to read by itself. she suggested the weighty and ponderous tome by sri aurobindo, essays on the gita. i have to confess that i'm a tad terrified of aurobindo too. his prose style is pretty high german; for example, take this passage from one of the essays --

"It is the Timeless manifest as Time and World-Spirit from whom the command to Just Action proceeds. . .What then is Man to do when he finds the World-Spirit turned towards some immense catastrophe. . .?"

uh-oh, World-Spirit. i've got the hegelian shivers, no doubt. i'm afraid later i'll run into Authentic Being or something even worse -- that buddhist alternative is beckoning!

but seriously, the first of these essays isn't bad at all and appears to make plain sense without Any Major Nouns or Important Historical Ideas. the book itself is a pleasant aubergine leather volume on 800 rice paper pages. they feel nice when turning, and somehow have been imbued with the strong scent of sandalwood. when you read it, the book literally envelops you with itself. it does have an index but sadly, like all these books, lacks a sanskrit glossary for the terms sprinkled through the text.

so what the heck is tapasya? i have no idea whatsoever! first person to write in with the answer receives a batch of chocolate chip cookies.

posted by fortune | 11:02 AM | top | link to this | email this: | | | 0 comments