[nukkad] Fw: BHAGAVAD GITA - A New Translation by Stephen Mitchell - Introduction

[":\) Ameer ~* 'Ali" <>]

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The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe 
for living that suits all cases. -Carl Gustav Jung, psychiatrist and 
psychologist (1875-1961)
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fwding one from my brother Abdul Rehman; 
take your patience and time to read thru; DONT DELETE. 
                                                             ```````````
--------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Mackwani, Rehman" 
To: "'Amirali Mackwani (Juno)'" ,
         'Nizar Mackwani' 

This is long - so please Excusez Moi!

I came across this book and found the Introduction very enlightening.
Thought I should share with the two of you who can understand this
better.
YAM - Rehman

BHAGAVAD GITA
A New Translation
by Stephen Mitchell

Introduction

I

One of the best ways of entering the Bhagavad Gita is
through the enthusiasm of Emerson and Thoreau, our
first two American sages. Emerson mentions the Gita often in
his Journals. with the greatest respect:

   It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spake
   to us, nothing small or unworthy but large, serene.
   consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in
   another age & climate had pondered &thus disposed
   of the same questions which exercise us.

Thoreau speaks of it in awed superlatives:

   The reader is nowhere raised into and sustained in a
   higher, purer, or rarer region of thought than in the
   Bhagvat-Geeta. Beside [it], even our Shakespeare
   seems sometimes youthfully green and practical merely.

What a revelation the Gita must have been for minds
predisposed to its large-hearted vision of the world. And
what a delight to stand behind Emerson and Thoreau, read-
ing over their shoulders as they discover this "stupendous
and cosmogonal' poem in which, from the other side of the
globe, across so many centuries, they can hear the voice of
the absolutely genuine Here is a kinsman, an elder brother,
telling them truths that they already. though imperfectly,
know, truths that are vital to them and to us all. In the Gita's
wisdom, as in an ancient, clear mirror, they find that they
can recognize themselves.

Souls who love God, a Sufi sheikh said a thousand years
ago, "know one another by smell, like horses. Though one be
in the East and the other in the West, they still feel joy and
comfort in each other's talk, and one who lives in a later gen-
eration than the other is instructed and consoled by the
words of his friend."


II

Bhagavad Gita means "The Song of the Blessed One." No
one knows when it was written; some scholars date it as
early as the fifth century B.C.E.' others as late as the first cen-
tury C.E. But there is general scholarly consensus that in its
original form it was an independent poem, which was later
inserted into its present context, Book Six of India's national
epic, the Mahabharata.

The Mahabharata is a very long poem-eight times the
length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined-that tells
the story of a war between the two clans of a royal family in
northern India. One clan is the Pandavas, who are portrayed
as paragons of virtue; they are led by Arjuna, the hero of the
Gita, and his four brothers. Opposing them are the forces of
the Kauravas, their evil cousins, the hundred sons of the
blind King Dhritarashtra. At the conclusion of the epic, the
capital city lies in ruins and almost all the combatants have
been killed.

The Gita takes place on the battlefield of Kutu at the
beginning of the war. Arjuna has his charioteer, Krishna
(who turns out to be God incarnate), drive him into the open
space between the two armies, where he surveys the combat-
ants. Overwhelmed with dread and pity at the imminent
death of so many brave warriors-brothers, cousins, and
kinsmen -he drops his weapons and refuses to fight. This is
the cue for Krishna to begin his teaching about life and death-
lessness, duty, nonattachment, the Self, love, spiritual prac-
tice, and the inconceivable depths of reality The "wondrous
dialogue" that fills the next seventeen chapters of the Gita is
really a monologue, much of it wondrous indeed, which often
keeps us dazzled and asking for more, as Arjuna does:

   for I never can tire of hearing
   your life-giving, honey-sweet words. (10.18)

The incorporation of the Gita into the Mahabharata
has both its fortunate and its unfortunate aspects. It gives
a thrilling dramatic immediacy to a poem that is from
beginning to end didactic. Krishna and Arjuna speak about
these ultimate matters not reclining at their ease, or
abstracted from time and place, but between two armies
about to engage in a devastating battle. We see the ranks of
warriors waiting in the adrenaline rush before combat, key-
ing up their courage, drawing their bows, glaring across the
battle lines: we hear the din of the conch horns, the neighing
of the horses, the thunder of the captains and the shouting.
Then, suddenly, everything is still. The armies are halted in
their tracks. Even the flies are caught in midair between two
wing beats. The vast moving picture of reality stops on a
single frame, as in Borges's story "The Secret Miracle." The
moment of the poem has expanded beyond time, and the
only characters who continue, earnestly discoursing between
the silent. frozen armies, are Arjuna and Krishna.

In one sense, this setting seems entirely appropriate. The
subject of Krishna's teaching is, after all, a matter of the
gravest urgency: the battle for authenticity, the life and death
of the soul. And in all spiritual practice, the struggle against
greed, hatred, and ignorance, against the ingrained selfishness
that has covered over our natural luminosity, can for a long
time be as ferocious as any external war. During this time
even the slightest clarity or opening of the heart is a major tri-
umph, and metaphors of victory and defeat, of conquering our
enemies and overcoming fierce obstacles, seem only too accu-
rate, as if they were straightforward description.

Yet from a clearer perspective, not only is there nothing
to overcome, there is no one in particular to overcome it.
Metaphors of struggle may just make the phantom dramas
of the mind more solid, thus perpetuating the struggle,
since even high spiritual warfare is one of the ego's self-
aggrandizing dreams. After a while, all this struggle drops
away naturally. The spiritually mature human being lets all
things come and go without effort, without desire for any
foreseen result, carried along on the current of a vast intelli-
gence. As the great twentieth-century Hindu sage Ramana
Maharshi said. "The idea that there is a goal .... is wrong.
We are the goal; we are always peace. To get rid of the idea
that we are not peace is all that is required."

Actually, a good case can be made that the Gita's answer
about war -- according to which, since the war is "just,"
Arjuna should do his duty as a warrior, stand up like a man,
and fight -- is directly contradictory to the deeper lessons that
Krishna teaches. How indeed can an enlightened sage, who
cherishes all beings with equal compassion because he sees
all beings within himself and himself within God, inflict harm
on anyone, even wicked men who have launched an unjust
war? This is still an open question, whatever Krishna may say.
No fixed statement of the truth can apply to all circumstances,
and honorable men, during every war within memory, have
come to opposite conclusions about what their duty is. Gandhi,
who thought of the Gita as his "eternal mother," is almost
convincing when he says that the deepest spiritual awareness
necessarily implies absolute nonviolence. On the other hand, I
can imagine even a buddha enlisting in the war against Hitler.

Nevertheless, whether or not Arjuna should fight is at
most a secondary question for the Gita. The primary ques-
tion is, How should we live?


III

Or, more essentially, How should I live? For the Gita is a
book of deeply personal instruction. When you approach it
as a sacred text, you can't help standing, at first, in the place
where Arjuna stands, confused and eager for illumination.
Whatever intellectual or esthetic satisfaction it may provide,
its purpose is to transform your life.

The Gita presents some of the most important truths of
human existence in a language that is clear, memorable. and
charged with emotion. It is a poem, of course, and not a sys-
tematic manual. Its method is not linear but circular and
descriptive. It returns to its central point-letting go of the
fruits of action-again and again, addressing not only
superior students but also the great majority, who are spiri-
tually unfocused and slow to grasp the point: "Let go." ---What
does that mean? "It means this,"---I don't get it. "It
means that." ---I still don't get it. "Then let me paint you a
picture." --- But how do I let go? "Just act in this way." ---But
I can't. "All right, then act in that way." ---But what if I can't
do that either? "All right, here's still another approach."
Thus, generously, patiently, the poem guides even the least
gifted of us on the path toward freedom.

One of the Gita's most effective methods of teaching is
its portrait of the sage, the person who has entirely let go.
This portrait is among the finest in world literature. Though
not as subtle as the portrait of the Master in the Tao Te
Ching, it is more easily comprehensible. Though not as pro-
found as the wild. marvelous nonfigurative image that
emerges from the dialogues of the Chinese Zen Masters, it is
profound enough, and more obviously filled with the ines-
timable quality that we call "heart." In elaborate, loving
detail. the Gita poet describes what it is like to have grown
beyond the sense of a separate self, to live centered in the
deathless reality at the core of our being. It is a theme
he never tires of. He returns to it in almost every chapter of
the poem, emphasizing now one aspect, now another, lavish
with his adjectives, trying in any way he can to ignite the
reader with a passionate admiration of the enlightened
human being, the mature and fully realized "man of yoga,"
the person that all of us, men and women alike, are capable
of becoming because that is who we all essentially are.

Of the various paths to self-realization---karma yoga
(the path of action), jnana yoga (the path of knowledge or
wisdom), raja yoga (the path of meditation), and bhakti
yoga (the path of devotion or love)---the poet clearly prefers
the last. But he is aware that for people of different constitu-
tions and affinities, different paths are appropriate. When he
says that one particular path is superior, his statement
doesn't come at the expense of the other paths. All paths and
all people are included.

Whatever their differences, the basic progression along
each of these paths to no goal is similar. We begin spiritual
practice by confronting, with a rude shock, the selfishness
and obstinacy of the raw mind. This mind. as Arjuna says,

        is restless, unsteady.
   turbulent, wild, stubborn:
   truly, it seems to me
   as hard to master as the wind. (6.34)

Any genuine path will, with sincere practice, result in a
gradual, deepening surrender of selfishness into the ultimate
reality that the Gita calls the Self, Just as our primordial
craving leads to all the manifold forms of our misery, letting
goof our ideas about reality and our desires for particular
results leads to freedom.

"Renunciation of the fruits of action," Gandhi wrote, "is
the center around which the Gita is woven. It is the central sun
around which devotion, knowledge, and the rest revolve like
planets." This lesson is repeated over and over throughout the
Gita, in seemingly endless variations. Just as the essence of
Judaism is "Love God with all your heart, and love your
neighbor as yourself" (as Jesus once reminded a sympathetic
scribe), the essence of Hinduism is "Let go." The two state-
ments are, in fact, different entrances into the same truth,
which is the beginning and the end of all spiritual practice.

   You have a right to your actions,
   but never to your actions' fruits
   Act for the action's sake.
   And do not be attached to inaction.

   Self-possessed, resolute, act
   without any thought of results,
   open to success or failure. (2.47-48)

Or, to rephrase it in the language of the Tao Te Ching:

   Do your work, then step back
   The only path to serenity.

The Gita's portrait of the sage may seem like an idealiza-
tion. It is not. Anyone who has seen the famous photograph
of Ramana Maharshi and looked into those inexpressibly
beautiful eyes will know what I am talking about.

Ramana Maharshi is only the most dazzling modern
instance of a long tradition in India. It is a tradition with a
strongly ascetic flavor. This kind of sage barely notices his
body and its needs. has no use for money or possessions, and
is blithely indifferent to art, society, and sexual love. not to
speak of life and death. Such dispassion may at first appear
repulsive to some readers. But pure dispassion is a kind of
compassion. Here is how Ramana Maharshi expresses it:

When you truly feel equal love for ail beings, when your
heart has expanded so much that it embraces the whole
of creation, you will certainly not feel like giving up this
or that. You will simply drop off from secular life as a
ripe fruit drops from the branch of a tree. You will feel
that the whole world is your home.

There are other modes of enlightenment. Lao-tzu's model
of the Master who is fully involved in the world and fully
present in her body seems more appropriate to our Western
circumstances. But the Gita's portrait is one of the classic
exemplars, and it is worthy of our deepest respect.


IV

As fine as its chapters about spiritual practice and the sage
are, the Gita's finest chapters are about God. The passages in
which the poet has Krishna speak of himself are written at
white heat, with an energy and a clarity that far surpass sim-
ilar attempts in the other sacred texts of the world. These
passages are sublime, crystalline, electric, stunning in their
passion, their nimbleness, their density, the hugeness of their
imagination, their metaphysical grace, and their readiness to
cut free from rational limits. Krishna says, for example, that
he is all that is. But all that is, is in him, though he is not in
it. But he is the best of all that is. But he is beyond is and is
not. Thus the poet keeps switching modes of reference, as
our minds whirl, from one set of "I am" 's to the next.

The Gita is usually thought of as a great philosophical
poem. It is that, of course. It is also an instruction manual for
spiritual practice and a guide to peace of heart. But essen-
tially it is. as its title implies, a love song to God. However
powerful its thinking, its intention is not to be a treatise but a
psalm. The Gita is a love song to reality a hymn in praise of
everything excellent and beautiful and brave. It is a love
song to both the darkness and the light, to our own true Self
in the depths of being, the core from which all the glories and
horrors of the universe unfold.

The passages in which Krishna speaks about himself are
so splendid that a few short examples will suffice. First, a
passage of great delicacy, where the poet's love for the most
fundamental elements in human life shines through his
philosophical disdain for "this sad, vanishing world":

   I am the taste in water,
   the light in the moon and sun,
   the sacred syllable Om
   in the Vedas, the sound in air.

   I am the fragrance in the earth,
   the manliness in men, the brilliance
   in fire, the life in the living,
   and the abstinence in ascetics.

   I am the primal seed .
   within all beings, Arjuna:
   the wisdom of those who know,
   the splendor of the high and mighty. (7.8-10)

Next, in the wonderful ninth chapter, a passage that starts
by seeing Krishna as all parts of the sacrificial rite and
expands until he is not only all parts of the cosmos but even
vaster than the category of "being":

   I am the ritual and the worship,
   the medicine and the mantra,
   the butter burnt in the fire,
   and I am the flames that consume it.

   I am the father of the universe
   and its mother, essence and goal
   of all knowledge, the refiner, the sacred
   Om and the threefold Vedas.

   I am the beginning and the end
   origin and dissolution,
   refuge, home, true lover,
   womb and imperishable seed.

   I am the heat of the sun,
   I hold back the rain and release it;
   I am death, and the deathless,
   and all that is or is not. (9.16-19)

And from chapter 8, this startling quatrain, which seems to
move at the speed of light, breathless with adoration:

   Meditate on the Guide,
   the Giver of all. the Primordial
   Poet, smaller than an atom,
   unthinkable. brilliant as the sun. (8.9)

The long passages in which Krishna describes himself
are extraordinarily moving. They keep brimming over with
love and boldness. Krishna's first-person pronoun is a
resplendent act of the human imagination: it is the poet him-
self speaking as God so that he can speak about God. His
love here is so intense and intimate that the reader must step
into the words to see that every "1" is really a "you,"

One element of Krishna's attitude that will impress even
the most casual reader is his tolerance and inclusiveness.
Even those who don't know him are held in the truly magnifi-
cent embrace of the following quatrain:

   However men try to reach me,
   I return their love with my love;
   whatever path they may travel,
   it leads to me in the end. (4.11)

And, at least in the first two-thirds of the poem, Krishna's
large-hearted attitude toward the wicked reminds us of Jesus's
God, who "makes his sun rise on the wicked and on the good,
and sends rain to the righteous and to the unrighteous":

   Even the heartless criminal,
   if he loves me with all his heart,
   will certainly grow into sainthood
   as he moves toward me on this path.

   Quickly that man becomes pure,
   his heart finds eternal peace.
   Arjuna, no one who truly
   loves me will ever be lost.

   All those who love and trust me,
   even the lowest of the low--
   prostitutes, beggars. slaves--
   will attain the ultimate goal. (9.30-32)

The climax of the Gita is its eleventh chapter, in which
Krishna appears to Arjuna in his supreme form. It is a
terrifying theophany, a glimpse into a level of reality that is
more than the ordinary mind can bear. Arjuna sees

        the whole universe
   enfolded, with its countless billions
   of life-forms, gathered together
   in the body of the God of gods. (11.13)

Krishna dazzles his sight, blazing

   in the measureless, massive, sun-flame
   splendor of [his] radiant form. (11.17)

This is a vision of pure energy, which does not discrimi-
nate between good and evil, creation and destruction, No won-
der it entered modem history through the story of Robert
Oppenheimer's response to the first atomic explosion at
Alamogordo on July 16, 1945. What other image from world
literature could have been so uncannily right for that occasion?

   If a thousand suns were to rise
   and stand in the noon sky, blazing,
   such brilliance would be like the fierce
   brilliance of that mighty Self. (11. 12)

As the bomb exploded, Oppenheimer thought of another,
later verse:

   I am death, shatterer of worlds,
   annihilating ail things. (11.32)

The appropriateness of this reference, too, is uncanny.

The vision of God as elemental undifferentiated energy
is an aspect of the truth. a difficult' aspect for many Western
readers to understand or accept. There is little precedent for
it in our own scriptures, which split the universe into good
and evil and place God solely on the side of the good. The
only exceptions are the Voice from the Whirlwind at the end
of the Book of Job and a single, hair-raising verse from
Second Isaiah: "I form the light, and create darkness: I make
peace. and create evil: I the Lord do all these things."

Realizing that both the creative and the destructive issue
from the infinite intelligence of the universe allows us to
accept the whole of reality:

   The Tao doesn't take sides;
   it gives birth to both good and evil.
   The Master doesn't take sides;
   she welcomes both saints and sinners.

Arjuna is not yet at this stage; in fact, he is at the very begin-
ning of his spiritual practice. The vision of the whole terrifies
him: his blood chills; the hair stands up on his flesh. He has
the presence of mind to sing an ecstatic paean to God's
infinite darkness-and-light-embracing power. But then dread
overwhelms him, he begs for the vision to be taken away, and
Krishna resumes his "kind and beautiful" human form.

The eleventh chapter of the Gita is one of the great
moments in world literature. The only fitting sequel to it in
the rest of the poem would be pure silence.


V

The most profound sacred texts have a way of self-
destructing. They undermine their own authority and glee-
fully hoist themselves with their own petard. Because they
don't confuse what they are with what they are about, they
encourage us to see them as, in the end, disposable.

   As unnecessary as a well is
   to a village on the banks of a river,
   so unnecessary are all scriptures
   to someone who has seen the truth. (2.46)

   When your understanding has passed
   beyond the thicket of delusions,
   there is nothing you need to learn
   from even the most sacred scripture.

   Indifferent to scriptures, your mind
   stands by itself unmoving,
   absorbed in deep meditation,
   This is the essence of yoga. (2.52-53)

We need to take these sacred texts with ultimate seriousness.
But the tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. If we take
them too seriously, they become obstacles rather than means
of liberation.

The healthiest way to begin reading and absorbing a
text like the Bhagavad Gita is to understand that ultimately
it has nothing to teach. Everything essential that it points
to-what we call wisdom or radiance or peace-is already
present inside us. Once we have practiced meditation sin-
cerely and seen layer after layer of the inauthentic fall away,
we come to a place where dualities such as sacred and pro-
fane, spiritual and unspiritual, fall away as well.

   Zen Master Hsueh-feng asked a monk where he had
   come from. The monk said, "From the Monastery of
   Spiritual Light."
   The Master said, "In the daytime, we have sunlight;
   in the evening, we have lamplight. What is spiritual
   light?"
   The monk couldn't answer.
   The Master said, "Sunlight. Lamplight."

In that place, God is the ground we walk on, the food we eat,
and the gratitude we express, to no one in particular, as nat-
urally as breathing.

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