Emotionally overwhelmed, Arjuna drops down, casts aside his bow and arrows, and decides to quit. He prefers to withdraw from battle; he prefers inaction instead of being responsible for the death of the people he loves. His chariot driver is the god Vishnu, who has taken the form of Krishna. Krishna sees Arjuna quitting and begins to persuade Arjuna that he should stick to his duty as a warrior and engage the enemy.
The Bhagavad Gita is presented as a conversation between Arjuna and Krishna, a man and a god, a seeker and a knower. Arjuna is worried about entering the battle and destroying his own family, so Krishna begins by explaining five reasons why Arjuna should not be troubled by this. Essentially Krishna shows Arjuna why he will not get bad karma from taking part in the war. Established in meditation, they are truly wise.
Fettered no more by selfish attachments, they are neither elated by good fortune nor depressed by bad. Such are the seers. From attachment longing, and from longing anger grows. From anger comes delusion, and from delusion loss of memory. From loss of memory comes the ruin of understanding, and from the ruin of understanding he perishes. Each of these three ways to act without getting bad karma is suitable for different people or castes.
Priests would follow the way of knowledge; peasants, merchants, and commoners might be inclined to the way of devotion; warriors would identify themselves with the way of action. Finally, Arjuna understands, after a philosophical revelation where he is able to apprehend the message that Krishna has been communicating to him through this lengthy dialogue on a battlefield before a cataclysmic war.
And then Arjuna rises and acts. Privacy Policy. Skip to main content. Module 3: Exploring Axiology. Search for:. The first reason Krishna mentions is that because atman the Self is eternal; it is a mistake to think that one can actually kill someone. What actually happens is that people are sent to the next stage of reincarnation.
Both are ignorant; there is neither slayer nor slain. You were never born; you will never die. You have never changed; you can never change. Unborn, eternal, immutable, immemorial, you do not die when the body dies. Arjuna is a member of the warrior class; the battle is the very reason of his existence within this particular order now.
The third reason Krishna gives is that inaction is impossible. Withdrawing from battle is in itself a conscious decision; not choosing is still a choice. This is, in a way, a criticism of some world-views, such as asceticism, which claim that leaving everything behind is inaction. Withdrawing from society is always a deliberate act.
And so it was that Oppenheimer seared a piece of this yogic scripture into the minds of another generation of Americans.
In fact, he had long been a student of the Gita, reading it in translation as an undergraduate at Harvard and later in Sanskrit with Arthur W. Ryder when Oppenheimer taught physics at the University of California at Berkeley. But what of seeing this divinity for oneself? Krishna gave Arjuna the gift of a divine eye. Thoreau found this possibility so compelling that he tried to practice yoga based solely on his reading of the Gita and other Indic texts in translation.
There the American essayist tells the story of the artist of Kouroo who possessed a rare and complete single-pointed concentration and set out to carve a perfect wooden staff. He had made a new system in making a staff.
More recently, people like Ram Dass as well as contemporary yoga teachers have conveyed, in supremely accessible vernacular, this more practical element of the Gita. In the summer of , Ram Dass, who had been a professor of psychology at Harvard until , taught a course called the Yogas of the Bhagavad Gita. The setting was historic—a summer session of the newly created Naropa Institute today a university in Boulder, Colorado, founded by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist.
Ram Dass treated reading and teaching! Many contemporary yoga teachers, including Mas Vidal, the spiritual director of Dancing Shiva Yoga and Ayurveda in Los Angeles, turn to the Bhagavad Gita to balance the overemphasis on the asana practice in the West.
He is also quick to emphasize the coherence of its approach. The branches are bhakti love , jnana study , karma service , and raja meditation. True, Arjuna must renounce the fruits of his actions, but he also must give up the idea that it is ever possible not to act.
Historian James A. Just as Krishna insisted that renouncing action was far worse than taking disciplined action and was ultimately not possible in any case , so Oppenheimer rejected the ivory tower, and its illusion of remove, for the Manhattan Project.
That they have pulled out different strands and woven them into their lives and our culture is even more remarkable considering how apologetically that first English translator presented this work. Undeterred by such difficulties, Americans have long sung this celestial song, harmonizing it with the peculiar temperament of each era.
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