Reading the Gita

I don’t usually read religious scriptures because, whenever I tried to read them, I found them absurd, silly or utterly nonsensical. Nevertheless, I ordered an annotated copy of the Bhagavat Gita from Amazon the other day. When the book was delivered all too promptly, Maggie asked why I wanted to read the Gita now. I had read it once, some twenty years ago, when I was teaching in Delhi. Almost all of my students and colleagues there were Hindus and the school was run by a Hindu organisation too. So I wanted to be familiar with the Gita. When I read, it didn’t appeal to me any more than the other scriptures I had read such as the Bible or the Quran.

“Our country is going to be a Hindu Rashtra soon. Nay, for all practical purposes, it is already one.” I told Maggie. “Shouldn’t we know what the scriptures of our nation’s official religion say?”

Maggie dismissed my explanation as yet another instance of my habitual crankiness. But I was serious. I really wanted to find out whether I had missed something substantial in my earlier reading of the Gita, which is now gaining putative international reputation.

I am stuck with the second chapter. Too many questions come bombarding my simple common sense and I can’t proceed. Not easily, at least.

The divine is the only reality. The rest is all illusion, maya. You and I are illusions. We fail to realise that we are divine sparks and instead imagine ourselves as different entities, egos. That’s the illusion.

I accepted that. Though I’m not fascinated by the divine and all that supernatural stuff, I know that my ego has been a dreadful thing throughout my life. Even now, when my country is eager to dump me on some garbage heap that is labelled as ‘senior citizen’, I keep grappling with my stupid ego. I know that the ego is a serious problem for quite many of us. If the Gita can really teach us to control that monster, it’s great.

But then the second chapter makes me feel that Lord Krishna is kicking up Arjun’s ego as a remedy for the depression that the hero experienced in chapter one.

We are souls with bodies. The body is an illusion. The soul is the reality. And the soul can’t be killed. You are only killing the bodies, killing illusions. Kill your uncles and cousins and teachers and whatever. Those are all illusions.

I’m not saying all that. Lord Krishna is counselling Arjuna, standing on the warrior’s chariot in a battlefield. I love the metaphor of the battlefield as the background for preaching scriptures. There’s much more than irony in that. There’s divinity.

Great warriors will consider you a coward for having fled from war due to fear. [2:35]

Hey, what’s this? Didn’t you say that we should shed our egos? What others say and how that affects our behaviour – isn’t all that what ego is about to a great extent? Arjun was actually rid of his ego, I think, until Krishna came and inflated that balloon with his own ulterior motives.

Even your enemies will defame you for your lack of strength and courage. The fame that you earned by winning battles with mighty weapons and armour will be reduced to nullity. Nothing will be more painful than that situation. [2:36]

Well, my reading of the Gita ended with that for the time being. The very basis of the scriptures is the shedding of one’s ego. And now the Lord is telling the hapless devotee to consider what will happen to his self-image [ego] if he refuses to kill!

Something doesn’t sound ok.

This is my problem whenever I try to read scriptures – of any religion. They just refuse to make sense to me. I think I’m stupid. Maybe, I should stay contented with simple things like Eliot’s Waste Land or Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov.