Ep. 204: The Bhagavad Gita’s Hindu Theology (Part One)

0:00 Mark: The partially examined life 2019 wall calendar is now available. Wonderfully crafted portraits of many of the philosophers we've covered in the last year, drawn by Charles Valsechi with quotes, information, birthdays for every figure we've ever covered, and more. An excellent gift for yourself or the philosophy lover in your life. Find it on our store page or at partiallyexaminedlife.com calendar. You are listening to the Partially Examined, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it.

Our question for episode number 204 is something like what grounds duty? Or what is wisdom? We read the classic Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita, written probably around the 2nd or 3rd century BC, possibly by the poet Vyasa. Our translation with commentary is Philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita, a contemporary introduction by Keya Maitra from 2018. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer with a big juicy piece of the fruit of action in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:09 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, indifferent to the fruits of this podcast in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1:15 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey alone as the clarified butter in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:21 Sean: And this is Sean, ever Deluded, also in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:25 Dylan: Sean, I didn't know you were here in Madison.

1:28 Sean: That's awesome. Yeah, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

1:31 Mark: Are you being a one named guest like Cher, or are you revealing your Shah name? All right, Shah name, what is your deal?

1:40 Sean: I'm a graduate student studying political science, but I'm interested in the political outcomes associated with religious and ethnic identities in South Asia and Southeast Asia. I'm also a practicing Hindu from a Hindu family, and I really grew up immersed in the Gita, the Mahabharata which surrounds it, and various other sort of the mythos of Hinduism. So I hope to be able to provide some context. And yeah, I thought this was a great translation, so I'm excited to jump into it.

2:10 Mark: So we always have requests for more non western philosophy. I had hooked up with Sean as somebody who did you email us out of the blue or did I post something on Facebook asking for people versed in this? I forget.

2:24 Sean: I think that I emailed somewhat out of the blue, but I remembered you saying in an earlier podcast that you were excited to sink your teeth in. I think on the Nagarjuna episode you were excited to sink your teeth into non western philosophical work.

2:39 Mark: That was a long damn time ago, so it took a long time to do anything else. From India here there are only a

2:46 Dylan: billion People that live there, Mark.

2:47 Mark: Right, exactly. And it was a coincidence that this is coming very close after more stoicism, even though it's pretty darn similar in a lot of ways. Not just the be even handed, but also the kind of way of nature and why you should act at all, given that you should be divorced from the fruits of action, given that you shouldn't care so much about outcomes. Lots of parallels there. So that's just plain old synchronicity. In our last discussion, we talked a little about H.P. lovecraft and religion and the overwhelmingness of God. So we actually have one of the characters here reveal himself to be God, God in all of his many mouths and many faces. And it's a pretty crazy little section, but why don't you start us, Sean? Give us a little background. Maybe. You know how this fits in with the other Hindu holy texts, why we picked this one in particular.

3:36 Sean: The Gita is situated in the broader text of the great epic, the Mahabharata in India. And there's various datings. I think that Maitra dates it between 400 BC and 480. Zaehner says 500 to 100 BC. Davis dates it between about 250 BC to 550 AD.

3:57 Mark: So we don't know.

3:58 Sean: Yeah, so we don't know. And there's a lot of uncertainty about it. It's not one of the foundational texts of Hinduism. Interestingly enough, the foundational texts are arguably the Vedas, the first version of which are compiled around 1500 BC and then over the next couple of centuries trundle along the Upanishads, which are getting more into philosophy, into sort of the metaphysical implications, really questioning the nature of God and the nature of the cosmos, whereas the previous Vedas were more ritualistic. And then the Gita comes along, synthesizes a lot of these early forms of what will become the schools of Hindu philosophy to engage with these Upanishads, which themselves are building off of and becoming part of the oldest version of the Vedas.

4:48 Mark: All right, so, yeah, this is the most popular Hindu text now, but really that was only the case, I guess, as of the early 20th century. And famously, Gandhi referred to this a lot as his favorite text. And the people that shot Gandhi used this text to defend their actions. So like many religious texts, you can get a lot out of it.

5:07 Wes: Well, you can see why, right? Because it's the frame for this. It's a situation in which Arjuna. Is that the right pronunciation?

5:15 Sean: Yeah, yeah, you can use Arjuna. You can use Arjun, the A can be dropped.

5:20 Wes: I am using a different translation than you guys, just because I wanted to do it on the Kindle. It's by Stephen Mitchell. Maybe some of the comparisons will be enlightening, but he's hesitating to kill his enemies in war. And his. I think it's his charioteer, right, who turns out to be Krishna, or God.

5:40 Mark: Yeah, so that's. The characters have showed up earlier in the story and he was called Krishna. It's just revealed that he's.

5:45 Wes: So Arjuna doesn't want to kill all of his kinsmen and, you know, all these people who are fathers, grandfathers, teachers, uncles and so on. He gives a few reasons for that, surrounding the killing of law and the corrupting of family and the mixing of castes and things like that. And then Krishna basically says, no, kill

6:03 Dylan: them, do it, because no one really dies.

6:08 Wes: And then here's why. And why you should do this is because. Well, there's a few reasons, but ultimately has to do with the fact that to be pious, and that's my word, that's not a word that occurs here. But it's not to refrain from acting, but it's to act to have a certain comportment towards one's actions, one that involves, as Mark mentioned, not being oriented towards the fruits of one's actions. And then there's a larger theme of not being attached in general to objects of the senses, potential objects of desire. And so the whole thing is framed around this. This argument that, look, wisdom is not inaction. Go ahead and be who you are, be that warrior and kill all these guys. I'm sorry, sorry to be so flippant, but that's the frame for this, which actually drew me in and was immediately

6:56 Sean: fascinating to give just a quick moment of context on where these people are coming from. The Mahabharata is basically a long story of this succession crisis in a kingdom between one faction of five brothers and then their cousins, who are a faction of 100 brothers. And the five brothers are the good guys. Arjuna is one of the princes of the good guys. He is arguably their greatest warrior. He's probably the most charismatic hero. He's not the morally, the most virtuous one, but this is who he is. How Krishna gets involved is that Krishna is the ruler of a neighboring kingdom who befriends these five princes while they're in exile earlier on in the course of the epic, and he sort of becomes their negotiator.

The months leading up to the war, or weeks leading up to the War trying to defuse the conflict, or so it seems. And when this doesn't happen, both of the sides come to him asking for his kingdom's aid. He offers to one side that they will be able to get his entire army, the other will just get him as a non combatant. The good guys choose God as their charioteer and the bad guys choose this insanely powerful, near invincible army. This is why God is in a non combatant role inside this thing. It's also not always clear and different people have different perspectives on who knows exactly that he is God on earth.

In the Gita, as you've probably saw, Arjuna is pretty freaking shocked when he sees exactly what who his buddy Krishna really is. So that's just something that might help understand the dynamic between these two people. These two people are very good friends and that is why God is charioteering for this prince.

8:50 Mark: Well, and just one other thing about the framing device, which is barely relevant, but it comes up at one key point in the middle, that this whole thing, this whole conversation is being relayed by another charioteer, this guy Sanjaya, who to his master, the blind Kuru king Dhritarashtra or something like that. Somebody on the bad side, basically. So yeah, that this whole thing is being related secondhand I thought was a little strange.

9:16 Sean: I mean, there's this whole symbolic thing where Sanjaya is basically a servant endowed with this divine vision, so he has no authority and infinite sight versus the blind king Dhritarashtra who has this great authority and is literally blind. So there's this tension that sort of goes in there and that's. And that will animate the conflicts later on. But that's just something which is an interesting symbolic frame to ideas of enlightenment and what it means to see and things like that.

9:48 Mark: Dylan, what was your initial impression? What do you want to get out of today?

9:52 Dylan: I found when I was reading it over and over again that it reminded me of lots of stuff that I've read. I'll just call it out of the Western tradition because that's the one that I'm most familiar with. And I'm a little interested in the conversation to find out how much of that is my western tinted glasses reading through it and missing things, or if it's themes that are resonant in lots of different kinds of philosophy regarding action and inaction, regarding what one's duties are, what nature is, those metaphysical questions and epistemological questions which run through here and how the take is.

I'll say that there's A willing tension throughout between the notion of action, rightly understood as unattached action, and also complete detachment, which seem to be at odds with one another. In fact, Arjuna at one point asks, well, which is better on attachment fully or right action? But it turns out that both will get you to Krishna. And there's this role of devotion and self, which also seem to be intention, right? That the notion of self and the disposition and the focus one has one on oneself and one's action seems to be one conduit towards.

The word in my translation is never used, but made me think of this notion of nirvana, of getting out of the cycle of rebirth, seems to be in tension with the notion of getting there through devotion, through complete submission of oneself. Those things, I guess would be most on my mind is that back and forth tension of multiple ways, sometimes feeling on the face of it, contradictory ways of getting out of the cycle of rebirth that seems to be the big carrot actually is getting out of the cycle of rebirth and sort of becoming somehow one with the universe.

That seems to be the one thing that's constant throughout the primary end of a person ought to be.

11:53 Sean: I think that one of the things that I actually running off that, that I think that I would love to interrogate is something that I've always struggled with, which is buying the idea that an endless cycle of increasingly awesome lives of pleasure where you can't remember them so you won't get bored and you just enjoy your sensory pleasures in heaven, your mind is wet, you're brought into an even better and more virtuous existence and this just continues. It's hard for me to imagine wanting to strive for non existence and that level of hedonism will probably lead me to be hurled through ever lower rebirths. But that's something which I would love to talk about. This actually seems like an effective carrot.

12:37 Wes: Well, the theory here, right, is that desire and attachment, whatever one's pleasures, ultimately lead to frustration and to anger and to more pain than pleasure. Is that the premise that you want to see whether we ought to reject that or what's your.

12:53 Sean: One of the things that strikes me, at least in the tone that's a lot different than some of maybe Buddhist texts that we read is it seems a lot less pessimistic about how the experience of earthly life is when they're talking about sort of moving on and recognizing that this is all illusory. It doesn't seem to be explicitly motivated to me in the same way by you are suffering in this position, you're suffering through this earthly thing. I guess in the context of this particular battle, he's suffering from the delusion that he's going to be the one killing his family, because Krishna has already killed them. But it strikes a tone that's really different to me than a lot of the Buddhist texts.

13:38 Wes: I was struck by in chapter eight, near the beginning, where Krishna calls the world a world of sorrow and pain, which I think that's the only sort of very global characterization of the world as such in this. But I was struck by that and also just struck by the early descriptions, say, in chapter two. So when there's talk of withdrawing senses from the objects of sense, there's this long list of sort of causal relations. If you dwell on the objects of a sense, there's a danger of becoming attached to them, which arouses desire, which arouses anger, and then confusion, problems with memory.

It messes up your understanding, and then the result is ruin. We do get this picture of a life of attachment being ruinous and in several places, causing a lot of suffering. And that's the thing to be avoided. The whole idea, at least in my translation, the word freedom comes up a lot, and it seems to be freedom from suffering. It seems to be equanimity.

14:39 Sean: One of the big motivations of this is to sort of motivate people to act rightly and to sort of act devoid of these attachments to the fruits of actions, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. An interesting piece of context for this is that Arjuna, at the end of the epic, does not achieve what in Hinduism is called moksha, which is the equivalent concept to Nirvana, oneness. He goes to heaven, but he doesn't make it to this oneness and reunion with God.

15:06 Dylan: He doesn't transcend.

15:08 Sean: He doesn't transcend. And moreover, in fact, at the end of the battle, there's this scene again where Arjuna says, and it's something which some scholars have even thought might be an example of satire, he doesn't remember the content of the Gita. He says, hey, Krishna, could you refresh me on what you said before the battle? Because it. It seemed really important and I remember really valuing it. But we've been in the middle of this really intense battle, and I just. I lost it. And Krishna is really annoyed, and then he just recapitulates some of the ideas inside it. But this prince doesn't reach that goal, which I don't know if that changes the fact that you should strive for the goal or not. But I think it does condition the way that we read it.

15:50 Wes: I just want to go back to your question of whether we buy into the premise that. So here's one. Pleasures from external objects are wombs of suffering. Arjuna, you were saying you might be tempted by hedonism, or is there enough here to draw us away from hedonism? Do we buy that this world is just a. That we can't just pleasure our way through the world?

16:12 Dylan: Well, there are multiple reasons why you wouldn't pleasure your way through the world. It seems to me, according to Krishna, one would be that it corrupts you and so you end up being the lowest of the low. One would be, is that you fail in the eyes of Krishna, in your devotion, in your right action, and so you end up getting punished in your sequences of rebirth, going into lower and lower forms of existence. It reminded me a bit of the kind of argument you get in the Republic for why you should be dedicated to the good and why the nature of the just man and the just city is that it's oriented towards the truth and it's also better for your soul.

It's not to say there aren't powerful arguments against it. I don't see in here the powerful arguments for the life of hedonism. There isn't a representative of that. Arjuna isn't pushing on that side. There isn't a thrasymachus who makes an argument contrary to Krishna, against the main tenets and then just walks out of the room, right in principle and maybe in reality genuinely un replied to effectively. So I think it's kind of left open.

17:27 Mark: I think there's a lot of teleology built into here. So one of the reasons why it's not really argued for, as you say, because it's not raised as an objection to this, but just that everybody has, due to their nature, certain duties. And I don't think we should forever keep away from the political with this. That for the character in question, his cast was. He was a warrior, he was in the situation, sort of what society expected of him, corresponded with his internal nature and his internal teleology. And so sort of everybody has something that they're supposed to do like this, and the ones that are on top, in fact are the Brahmins, the priests, who seem to have more duties than anybody else, I would think. It's not that once you get to be the top of the heap, then your teleology is to bow before no one and serve only yourself.

18:17 Dylan: There's a big aspect of the political in here, there's whole sections of it where that notion that right action is performing your duty and in fact performing your duty poorly is better than performing someone else's duty. Well, and that seems to be like straight up a political argument for keeping people in their places. At least that's the way my liberal democratic soul reads it.

18:41 Sean: Absolutely. And I'm really glad that's something I'd love to talk about. Because in many ways the Gita is sort of rising out of and the way that Hindu philosophy rises out of in response to the challenge of Buddhism. Because a lot of people, from Buddhism's founding to even sort of Ambedkar, the sort of the Dalit or untouchable leader of the independence movement, really urged the conversion of low caste individuals to Buddhism to escape the hierarchy of the caste system and to move into the equality of the Sangha of the Buddhist community. And so this is a really forceful argument for the legitimacy of this stringent system of inequality, that people are designed to operate at certain levels and in certain ways and that is what they should do. So I think that that is a spot on observation.

19:36 Mark: It's a really interesting parallel between this and Marcus Aurelius. In particular, the things that Wes was quoting sound very much exactly out of the Stoic playbook, that pleasure ultimately leads to pain. So the hell with it all. Renunciation, rise above your desires. But like with Stoicism, by the time of Marcus, this is supposed to be a very practical philosophy. Whereas if you read the Upanishads, you might think that you should become a monk and retreat. Right. I actually asked our guest on the Marcus Aurelius episode, like, shouldn't you do less and less every day till you do nothing at all?

Which I believe is a quote from Taoism. And no, according to Marcus, you've got your duty. You've also just got your nature as a human being, which like a lot of teleological stories, sort of mix up the descriptive and the prescriptive. It says in here that even just taking care of your body requires that you do stuff like your essence as a physical body means you're going to be constantly in motion, changing acting, so you don't just act any old way. Then you've got a particular place in the social hierarchy, particular situation regarding your family, your duties, that that will direct what your proper action is, what your duty is.

I don't know, what did you think? I felt like in many other things I saw in here maybe as an attempt to compromise between past traditions, the whole distinction here between what you must do by your nature and what you're just caused to do because you are the kind of person, you are kind of really mixed together here and probably not a very illuminating way for me. Like Aristotle mixes those things too, but he's very specific and kind of critical about it. This was more just stating doctrines.

21:27 Wes: So I think chapter three is illuminating here. It starts out with the idea that no one can exist without acting. And then anyway we are compelled to act by nature, more specifically by these three strands, these gunas, which will turn out to be different temperatures of porridge, no different qualities. The idea that comes up is that the point isn't to refrain from action and that refraining from action could even leave you susceptible to becoming focused on passive sensory experience, which would definitely be disastrous. And the other part is that worship requires action. Action is a form of worship. So in a way it's essential to the right comportment of one's mind. It's not just that it can't be done away with that we're going to do it anyway, it's that we actually need it as long as we're doing it in this certain way as a form of worship and without being oriented towards its fruits.

22:28 Mark: Yeah, I should say it doesn't like go on and on about, you know, your caste specific duties. Like it uses the example Arjuna, what his duties are and says a couple things about, you know, if there's a breakdown then got a breakdown in caste and order, you know, so there are gestures in that. But yeah, it is more just whatever it is you're going to do, you have to do it with the right attitude. You have to do it as non attached. And if you can do that then really you don't need to learn some very difficult form of self torturing, doing some super advanced yogic technique. It's the yoga of everyday life of just walking around, concentrating on whatever you're doing is doing it without attachment or what is the same thing doing it as a sacrifice to God.

23:15 Dylan: It's important to acknowledge that they're both there, but they're different. Right. So you're right that you have this whole role of rightly oriented action, but that's one way of getting to the pinnacle of self. Right. There's also devotion and there's also, and I'm not sure that it's completely separate, this focus on the cultivation of self through right action. So they're probably the same.

23:43 Sean: I think that there's something interesting to interrogating the relationship between the yoga of devotion, the Bhakti Yoga, or the Yoga of Action, the Karma Yoga. Because to me, oftentimes when I read them, the only real difference is just that it's basically the same thing. It's acting and renouncing the fruits of action. But. And really when they touch upon how there seems to be a preference for the Yoga of devotion, it seems almost pragmatic. Like there's the line in the yoga 12, sort of verse 5. It is more arduous for those whose minds are set on the unmanifest, for the path to the unmanifest is hard to attain for embodied beings.

But those who renounce all actions to me, regard me as their supreme goal. Worship me by meditating on me with unwavering yoga. That seems very much the same thing. You're still not attaching in any way to the actions of what you're doing. You just now have an entity that you can sort of hand off these fruits to, so you don't have to psychically deal with the idea of the fruits not being relevant in any way, shape or form.

24:52 Wes: So what's the difference here between devotion and worship? Because I think I was about to conflate the two. They're two different words in my translation. And this chapter 12 is where devotion comes up specifically, and I can't say I fully understood it. Which is better, loving you with devotion or loving the unmanifest?

25:14 Mark: So that struck me as loving. The unmanifest is a more philosophical and hence esoteric way of getting at God, whereas just love, you know. And in fact, this introduces the idea of a personal God, even though the metaphysics here is very much like we saw in Spinoza, where there's really just one substance, it has different aspects, it has kind of a mind like aspect and it has a physical like aspect. It's not exactly the same breakdown in here as it is in, say, Descartes or even Spinoza, I think, because it seems a lot of your character is actually part of the physical, it's part of the changing, whereas the mind part is really.

There's no change at all. So it really is almost more like Plato's the world of the forms versus the phenomenal world than Spinoza's mind versus body, where they both have causal chains within them that run in parallel. So it's not exactly the same as Spinoza's, but ultimately it's still. There's a unity in Spinoza. And of course, Spinoza was accused of being an atheist. He. He denied being an atheist. We saw in the episode we did on him and religion, that it seemed to be kind of optional. Whether you identify a personal God that you say hi to and you love, as long as you're kind of acting with the right comportment, Whether you personify the God is up to the particular sect.

And I guess I'm seeing something similar in here, that if you're an Upanishad kind of Brahmanist pre Hindu tradition, then you acknowledge that all is one. But why would you draw a smiley face on that one and say hi to it and worship it in that way? Like, so there was a tension, at least the way Maitra puts it and the way I think you described it at the beginning, Sean, that the old Vedas are really just like any sort of ancient worship of God. You know, how do we do the sacrifices? Of course, the gods are personal. In fact, there are a lot of them and they're stories about them, the normal kind of mythology stuff that you would run into by the Upanishads.

We get a very intellectual, yes, there's a supreme God, but is it of a personality or not? Maybe not. I don't know enough about that. But here we're really just trying to slam the two together. So we acknowledge what the Upanishads have concluded, that, yes, all is one. So really you're God and I'm God and everything. But the emphasis by having God actually appear in the avatar of Krishna. Here, Vishnu appears as Krishna and says, in fact, I subsume all the other gods. I have all the gods within me. But he's still a personality who shows back up on Earth whenever he is needed, is reborn.

He has motivations. So there's a weird account of like, well, how can he be eternal and unchanging, but yet also have this lower nature that is changing? It is born in various places and driven seemingly by the gunas in the same way that we are. I feel like, again, they're trying to have it all. And if you want to actually understand how these things are related, well, here it's just sort of papered over. I'm sure that in the 2000 commentaries on this book, there's quite a lot of dwelling on how these things can be reconciled.

28:17 Sean: I also definitely thought of Spinoza. I actually took a small excerpt from one of his propositions. But getting to the idea of the Earth sort of being, oh, like, well, this Earth, can it be God but also not be God? I mean, Spinoza says they show that they think corporeal or extended substance wholly apart from the divine nature. And Say it was created by God. And then he basically goes on to say how absurd they are to think that this corporeal substance is apart from the divine. So I think that Spinoza would be sympathetic to the having it all sentiment. I actually. I like the Prakriti Purusha sort of dichotomy and the way that it's established.

28:58 Mark: Yes, slow down and spell those two terms out.

29:00 Sean: Those are important, the Prakriti and the Purusha. It's a way of getting at the mind body problem, I feel like. But it's in a very different sort of a way, because the Prakriti isn't just the body. It's also your intellect, your emotion, your energy, and a lot of other things that we would think to be the seat of the personality or the mind.

29:22 Mark: Anything that changes.

29:23 Sean: Yeah. And the purusha is something extra and sort of fixed, which we might think of as awareness or consciousness or the capacity to be a witness. So once I had a concussion, and when I had a concussion, I didn't. The entire way I thought about things, the way that I structured my, like, sentences, the way that I talked about things for a couple of weeks, significantly changed. And that really made me think, oh, I am sort of made out of meat and my brain is made out of meat. And I thought that this is a really interesting way of getting at the idea that our intellect and emotion and energy, a lot of the things that we consider to be personality are entwined with our body. But there's also room for something extra. Like there's something that's sitting outside of that that might be motivating it.

30:08 Wes: Are these untranslated terms in your translation, or are they translated as something?

30:12 Mark: They're purposefully untranslated, but they're explained at. Great.

30:15 Wes: Yeah. So in mine, I think they are self with a capital S and self with a small S. I'm just guessing here.

30:25 Sean: That sounds hard.

30:28 Wes: I might be wrong, but in my translation, it's the capital S. Self is sort of this. It seems like this form, like, thing which is sort of transcendent entity. And then the smaller case self is the. But maybe I'm conflating two different things, but.

30:42 Mark: Well, so for instance, chapter 15 is called the Yoga of the Supreme Purusha. What is that called in yours?

30:49 Wes: It's called the ultimate person.

30:51 Mark: Okay. This describes the Purusha as being kind of the spiritual side. It actually, in this place, you know, it's not entirely consistent with the way these things are used. But you've got your ego selves. So sort of what you would consider to be the mind normally, which the way that Sean was just describing it is actually part of the material part. But then there's also the fragment of Krishna. So that's kind of what each of us, that thing that has the multiple lives, that remains consistent, that is immortal, that is unchanging, that is a fragment.

And again, we could entirely have the same discussion that we had in our Plato's Parmenides episode to figure out like, well, how do the individual selves relate to Krishna, the over self? Because then there's the highest Purusha, which is really just Krishna considered as God as the whole thing. And that these are ultimately the same thing, and they're ultimately the same thing as the Prakriti as the material. But still there's a practical difference. Certainly it's the higher nature and the lower nature is the way he puts it.

31:55 Wes: So just to get at the whole self, Chapter six, the Yoga of Meditation. Like the fifth stanza, he should lift up the self, smaller case, by the self, uppercase, and not sink into the selfish. For the self is the only friend of the self and its only foe. What is the translation for you guys?

32:15 Dylan: One should raise the self by the self. One should not degrade the self. For indeed the self alone is the self's friend and the self alone is the self's enemy. And there's no capitalization distinction.

32:25 Wes: Okay, so I must be conflating. So I was wrong about that.

32:29 Dylan: So if you look at 15, verse 4 says the realm that must be sought after, which upon reaching they don't return from, I take refuge in that primeval Purusha from whom issued forth the primordial entire cosmic activity.

32:45 Wes: For me it's cut down this deep rooted tree with the sharp edged axe of detachment. Then search for that primal person from whom the whole universe flows.

32:54 Mark: Yeah, so the primal person in primal Purusha, that's the translation.

32:57 Dylan: Okay, and then in seven, only a fragment of me in the living world becomes the eternal essence of life. It pulls along the five senses, including the mind is the sixth, which abide in Prakriti.

33:10 Mark: So what is Prakriti for you, Wes? Verse 7.

33:14 Wes: One fragment of me becoming an eternal soul in the world, draws to itself the mind and the other five nature born senses.

33:23 Dylan: Nature born?

33:24 Sean: Yeah.

33:24 Mark: Oh, so nature born. Prakriti is nature born.

33:27 Dylan: Yep.

33:27 Mark: So that makes sense that Prakriti would be nature. Yep.

33:30 Wes: Okay, so what are we saying the translations are.

33:35 Mark: Yeah, Purusha's Person with a capital P, Right?

33:39 Dylan: Yeah. So like later on in the Yoga of the Supreme Purusha, verses 16, 17, 18, there are two Purushas in the world, the destructible and the indestructible. The destructible is all beings. The indestructible is called sublime at the summit of existence. But there exists a highest Purusha other than these, designated as the Supreme Self, the immutable Lord, who, entering into the three worlds, sustains them. So there that notion that you have levels of self, levels of person, I mean, calling them one level as the level of the destructible, the level of the indestructible, and then the transcendent, I guess that's. That would be the immutable Supreme One.

34:20 Mark: Yeah. So this idea that it's just a witness, because it would be much cleaner if we could just say the Purusha is just the mere point of consciousness and it is the realm of the unchanging. It is a creation of a point of view within existence. Like that's one way of understanding, how could there be. Everything is one, but yet there are many of us. Well, even if everything is one, still maybe there's points of view within the one. It's hard for me to not start spouting that stuff from the Parmenides episode again because, yeah, how could it all be one if it. Could it have a shape? Could you have a place within it or his point of view? Not a physical location within it, but merely some sort of. How do you even have aspects if something is. Is really one and indivisible?

35:06 Dylan: Maitra has a glossary at the end of about a dozen, maybe less terms. Purusha has a short definition, primordial spirit of humans, Krishna. There's an identification there. And then Prakriti glossary definition is primal material nature, which contains all change in actions, actual and potential unconsciousness, material substratum aspects of Krishna's nature. So in some ways it feels like the unmanifest and the manifest between Purusha and Prakriti.

35:41 Wes: So I'm looking elsewhere and I'm seeing now that Prakriti is translated nature, and Purusha is usually translated self with a

35:47 Sean: capital S. So to get at Mark's frustration, I think that one of the commentaries that came after that was very influential, argued that the characteristics of subjectivity created this false superimposition on the categories of objects like having a body or being in time, and that creates this individual human psyche or this individual human soul. That self identifies with this Unique personal history. But that's where you're messing up. Basically. That's where you're making the mistake of individuating yourself from your purusha. And that's how your mind and emotions and all those other things that we think of as being maybe tied to consciousness become distinct because you begin superimposing all those things into this personal narrative around you and based on the world around you.

36:41 Mark: Yeah, I mean, of course it's hard not to think about Buddhism and texts that we read a year ago as a part of our Robert Wright episode about no self. And of course this is one of the main places where even though the common picture of rebirth and wanting to escape the cycle of rebirth and wanting to disassociate from the objects of desire and desire is bad and the world is suffering, like there's so much that they have in common. And so you might ask, like Hinduism believes in the Atman, the self, and Buddhism believes in anatman, no self. Like whether that actually really is a difference.

Because you're just saying, Sean, that thinking that your Purusha is individual is a mistake. So in fact, the Atman. Yeah, okay. It's useful to say that there's something in the Buddhist text, it was, you look at, oh, this body, is this me? No, these thoughts, are these me? No. So the Hindu can follow that and say, okay, well then what is left? Well, let's just posit there's an Atman that gets engaged and entangled with all these things. But it seems that's almost just a theoretical temporary entity, because ultimately there's not an individual Atman, it's just the supreme Purusha that is mistaking itself for lots of individual Atman, Atmans, not at men.

So really there's no self ultimately for them either.

38:07 Dylan: There's this funny thing about articulating one's definition and then that the ultimate transcendence involves a complete obliteration of distinction. There's a consistency there, just like there is in the notion of devotion as well as of action without attachment, where in the end you're supposed to be a motion filled entity doing what you're supposed to do, but without any driven sense attachments to the world that would make you deviate from the natural activity of your soul. And this would be a manifestation of the natural activity of your soul as a piece of the universal soul. Right. Doing that thing that it's supposed to be doing.

38:58 Wes: But nature includes all three gunas, right, which will ultimately be this Sattva. And then is it Rajas and then tamas. So at a certain point it seems to include even activities, even the sorts of things we do that are driven out of qualities within us that aren't so virtuous. And in chapter 14, we get this idea that we shouldn't even be attached to one sort of guna or another. We should be unattached to them. And we shouldn't dislike the presence of a guna or desire it when it's not there. We should just be aware that those things are sort of acting through us and not think that we ourselves are the doer, not have this illusion of an agent that sort of transcends nature.

39:45 Dylan: I agree with you, but I think that there's the kind of tension in this, right, because in division of the three gunas, he says, sometimes goodness prevails, overpowering passion and dark inertia. Sometimes passion prevails, overpowering goodness and dark inertia. And likewise, dark inertia prevails, obscuring goodness and passion. And in this translation, there's goodness, passion and dark inertia. Those are the three gunas. And then, he continues, when the light of knowledge shines through all of the sense gates of this body, then also one should know that goodness is prevalent.

Predominance of passion causes greed, activity, the undertaking of actions, restlessness and longing. Predominance of dark inertia causes lack of illumination, inactivity, negligence and mere delusion. So there seems to be a way in which that's just the activity of nature. But on the other hand, there's clearly a ranking of them and such that it's not the case that there's no distinction to be made between being moved or activity of dark inertia. And it's not even like there's a, properly speaking, a balance between them.

40:54 Sean: No, there definitely isn't. I mean, looking in sort of Yoga 17, where we go to yoga of the Threefold Faith for our version, it goes in this almost discombobulating list of things that wouldn't seem to be related. I mean, food, sacrifices, the ways that people speak, the reasons people commit austerities, and they're all sort of. They're not just ranked as sort of material objects that people should be indifferent to, although that is what is stated earlier. But they're also related very clearly to the quality of humans. Like it is the men of goodness who eat foods that promote longevity, obviously.

41:34 Wes: Yeah, so I wasn't trying to say earlier that we're not supposed to think of these. Obviously these are Ranked. These are normative.

41:42 Dylan: Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

41:43 Wes: There's. There's one on top. And then. But I'm just saying that it's complicated, to use Dylan's word, by the. Trying to combine that ranking with the picture of non attachment and what's said in chapter 14 about. Because we might think, oh, well, you know, the solution here is to make sure I'm acting out of virtue and to sort of try to exert certain sorts of control over myself. And chapter 14 makes it look more like a. The way forward is sort of a. More of a mindfulness approach where you simply observe what's happening. I'm just trying to think through the difference between saying, look, we have these natures and they operate through us.

And there's a certain determinism and fatalism to that. Right. And ultimately it comes down to having a certain kind of character, having certain dispositions, having certain virtues and vices. For the existentialists, that's the essence side of things. That's the deterministic side of things. The other idea is that there's some way forward. There's some way to become a wise man, to use the phrase in my translation. And that the way to do that involves. I'm unsure, but the primary focus is on a sort of comportment towards one's actions as opposed to trying to do the right thing versus not doing the right thing.

For instance, it's more about this idea of doing things. Doing the things that we're going to do because it's our nature to do them could mean, for instance, trying to get the job that I really want. At the same time, it could mean somehow being detached from whether I'm going to get it.

43:21 Dylan: Especially for the second version, you're talking about Wes, there's a comportment that is cultivated by practice. So there's all this stuff in here, like there's a discussion that's basically of how to meditate and what you should do. And at some level there's all these yogas, which I kept on thinking, well, these yogas are really kind of ways of activity in each one. And that when you are a yogi, you are participating in that activity in a particular way in order to get there. In order to get that comportment, as Wes was saying, you have to engage in a kind of practice.

And in that way, it reminds me a lot, a lot, a lot of the way you become virtuous by doing virtuous things. In Aristotle, it's not framed in the terms of virtue in the terms of excellence. But it's the same. A similar notion that the way you get to the state of acting rightly is you engage in a practice that involves cultivating your acting rightly.

44:25 Wes: The way I'm thinking about this is that instead of habituation, it's more about, I would say mindfulness over habituation. So in this sense it's not about saying, oh, I'm always doing the wrong thing. In this particular circumstance, I've got to change that. I'm going to prescribe a change in my behavior and resist that part of my nature. It may be about simply becoming observant about it and becoming aware of what I'm doing, aware of where it comes from. So to speak about the nature here, to speak about the guna that's operating, we could get very specific.

We could become psychologists or psychoanalysts with regard to that and describe some detailed psychological mechanisms. We would be essentially just going into a finer detail about the guna, the nature that's operating. But the idea would be instead of simply trying to prescribe from on high some change to say I'm going to will myself into doing something different, just observing it and understanding, understanding where it's coming from. Maybe connecting the thoughts and feelings that I might not even be aware of because. Right. To be unaware that to think that I'm the doer and to be unaware that the gun is operating through me might be another way of saying that I'm not aware of even of the feelings that motivate me or some other motivations.

There could be things that are unconscious. So I'm just getting it. I'm not saying it's one way or the other, but I'm wondering to what extent are we engaging in mindfulness and self observation and then letting change sort of come about through that, or to what extent I am habituating myself and trying to do new things in order to change my character and. And become a different person that way.

46:08 Dylan: But you remind me in that distinction, Wes, that the path of knowledge is one of the ways to do this. And so that that mindfulness would be directed towards self understanding and knowledge such that once you really knew, you would begin to act in the appropriate way in a way that's reminiscent of something like a Platonic condition, right? That the reason you're acting wrongly is that you misunderstand the good. And if you really understood the good, you would act rightly.

46:40 Wes: Good connection. And the Platonic view is in tension with the Aristotelian view to Some extent. Although in the Nicomachean Ethics he sort of says Plato. He's both right and wrong in typical Aristotle style about that. But anyway.

46:52 Mark: Well, but I think that Wes, what you pointed to is mindfulness maybe is a way of bridging that divide, that there is a conditioning of yourself that you do just like Aristotle recommends. But the conditioning is not. Well, actually it is part that you eat right and exercise and things, but it's specifically, it's the yoga of meditation, he thinks is kind of a prerequisite to some of these other things. So that just being able to slow down and not just chase after every sensation and let desires take hold of you, let the things of this world capture your imagination and pull you this way and that way, that just being able to back off, you're not going to really be able to internalize the philosophical point of that you should be doing this and that you're ultimately one with Krishna and all the information that he thinks he's laying down.

47:42 Wes: Yeah, but I might be doing that while I'm doing bad things, let's say, or while I'm doing, let's say, tamasic things. So if I'm eating tamasic food, which might be, oh, that's actually the bland food, let's say rajasic food, like a big bowl of ice cream. And one mode of activity is to do that mindlessly and feel guilty about it and berate myself and then say I'm going to stop it. The other way is to actually I might approach even that sort of action. I might just observe what's happening and I might observe what's motivating me while I do it. And that actually might end up changing my desire and lead me in the more sattvic direction. You see what I'm saying? And so that's still like a top down versus habituation versus mindfulness question I think there. So I don't know the answer.

48:30 Mark: I just feel like these issues of moral psychology are more or less papered over that it's really. He just states that if you're dominated by the guna of goodness, then you will perform the right actions and you will see.

48:43 Wes: I read this as a self help manual.

48:47 Mark: There's definitely parts of that in there. But again, looking at that end part where Sean was referring to, where it's even like what kind of foods do the good people versus the desire dominated versus the dark inertia dominated people eat. Yeah. So some of that could be prescriptive that if you want to be these things you eat that. But the way it's actually just stated is the bad people will do the wrong kind of sacrifices. In fact, there was an active school of materialism at the time. So, like it's a swipe at heretics, just lumping all the people that don't obey the doctrines that are being outlined here as negative and just stating as just alleged fact that these things go together, that you're not going to have somebody who's acting immorally but yet is hyper aware and mindful of, you know, there's no moral monster of that sort.

49:38 Wes: Well, he does say in chapter nine, even the heartless criminal, if he loves me with all his heart, will certainly grow into sainthood as he moves towards me on this path.

49:47 Dylan: Yeah, we should talk about that tension more. Maybe the tension between the ability to move from one level to another or to be higher than one's nature and the repeated reminders, I should say, of the fact that you can't

50:05 Mark: remind me of what verse is that of with the sainthood?

50:08 Wes: It's chapter nine towards the very end, a few stanzas back. So even the heartless criminal, yep, if

50:14 Dylan: he worships me with undeviating devotion, must indeed be regarded as virtuous, for he has the right resolve.

50:21 Wes: And before that he's been talking about worship and the idea of doing things as a. Like, do everything as an offering to me, Arjuna. And that's Sean, as you'd mentioned before, one of the really interesting things about, because I sort of thought a little bit about worship too in this context is the displacement of desire. If one is going to become unattached to what one is doing and not do it for its fruits. You need this receptacle for worship. You need someone else to be the receiver for that. It's done for them instead of for oneself. And then seem to me the idea is that you could do anything, including going and killing a whole bunch of people, killing all your kinsmen.

You could do that with a certain kind of comportment as flying from one's nature, one's role as a warrior, and do that as worship, do that as obligation, not as attached to some particular result. And it would be the right thing.

51:14 Sean: Yeah, there's some really questionable maybe implications of what this says. And then in fact, in the battle which ensues immediately after the quote unquote, good guys frequently violate the rules of war in ways that are distinctly troubling. There are a lot of very good people on the bad guy side who are extremely powerful and they deceive them and they violate rules of combat in order to kill unarmed generals and to do things like that. And a lot of it is done with the encouragement or sometimes even at the suggestion of Krishna. And it's something where it's like it sort of gives them the pass of God having told them it's okay.

And that those direct plot points seem to relate very strongly to the fact that this isn't just something where they're saying even that the inherently wicked are doing things like who do things with devotion can get away with it. But even just that wicked acts when done with devotion or done at the behest of God might be okay. And it's left up for debate amongst scholars on whether or not those actions were appropriately virtuous or not.

52:28 Wes: And my more milquetoast version of that is just that I might eat my bowl of ice cream, and by employing a little mindfulness, I might eat a little less the next time. I might, instead of being in this cycle of self condemnation and then acting out against that sort of tyranny of the self and then going back and forth, that kind of thing.

52:49 Sean: Well, in the Yoga of Meditation, they talk about how hard it is very often to control oneself. And Krishna gives him this sort of consoling idea that if you try, even if you don't get moksha, you'll just be reborn into an even better life and you can try again.

53:08 Wes: Because he's. Arjuna is asking, well, isn't all my effort wasted if I get to the end of my life? And I'm not. I didn't get there. No, you just continue in the next life.