Tomichan Matheikal's blog

The ultimate purpose of the Bhagavad Gita is to teach egolessness to humans. There are three ways of achieving the state of egolessness, according to the Gita. The first is Karma Yoga, which was discussed in the previous post . Today we are going to look at the second way, Bhakti Yoga, the yoga of devotion. Chapter 12 of the Gita discusses bhakti in particular though chapters 7 to 12 are more or less about bhakti and I’m going to look at that section today. Bhakti or devotion is another name for love. Bhakti yoga is the process of discovering the divine through love. The love is so intense that the devotee surrenders himself totally to the divine. As a result, the devotee begins to see the divine in everything, in every creature. All that exists is now holy for the devotee. No real devotee can distinguish between people on the basis of caste, creed, language, etc. There is no place for such divisions since everything, everyone, is an extension of the divine. The Gita speaks abo

I bought a copy of annotated Bhagavad Gita a few months back with the intention of understanding the scripture better since I’m living in a country that has become a Hindu theocracy in all but the Constitution. After reading the first part [chapters 1 to 6] which is about Karma, I gave up. Shelving a book [literally and metaphorically] is not entirely strange to me. If a book fails to appeal to me after a reasonable number of pages, I abandon it. The Gita failed to make sense to me just like any other scripture. That’s not surprising since I’m not a religious kind of a person. I go by reason. I accept poetry which is not quite rational. Art is meaningful for me though I can’t detect any logic in it. Even mysticism is acceptable. But the kind of stuff that Krishna was telling Arjuna didn’t make any sense at all. To me. Just a sample. When Arjuna says he doesn’t want to fight the war because he can’t kill his own kith and kin, Krishna’s answer is: Fight. If you are killed, you win he

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