Why Hindus should weed out Gita?s message - Columns - livemint.com
The message of the Bhagavad Gita is so electrifying that its narrator Sanjay reports that his hair is standing on end (roma-harsanam). But what exactly is that message? When he began reading Indianauthors, V.S. Naipaul noticed a strange thing. They only recorded inner experience, ignoring the world around them.
In 1888, on his first visit outside India, Gandhi landed in Southampton. In his autobiography he noted two things: It was Saturday, and he was the only person wearing white flannel (it was October). The scale of London, its foreignness, its buildings and architecture, its cleanliness, its people—all of that is taken for granted by Gandhi, a 19-year-old villager from Porbandar. He should have been stunned by the differences. But he notices nothing.
Indians, Naipaul observes, have “no feeling for the physical world”. He is right, but why do we look away from the physical world? To see what our culture says about this let us look at the Bhagavad Gita.
The Gita has three messages:
• We must work without expectation of reward
• The soul is immortal: The body and the outside world are unimportant— Chapter 2
• We must aspire not to a state of action (rajas) or inaction (tamas) but purity (sattva)—Chapters 14 and 18
The Gita’s definition of sattva—goodness (14:5), serenity (14:6), wisdom (14:17)—will puzzle someone who wants to follow Krishna’s advice and become sattvik.
On the other hand it is easy to be rajasik—driven to action (14:9), passionate (14:12), hungry for reward. Human experience tells us that those asked to work without expectation of reward normally do no work, or do shoddy work. The Gita believes otherwise.