Religion 101 (19 page)

Salt in Water

A verse in the Upanishads illustrates the oneness of the universe: “When a chunk of salt is thrown into water, it dissolves into that very water, and it cannot be picked up in any way. Yet, from whatever place one may take a sip, the salt is there! In the same way this Immense Being has no limit or boundary and is a single mass of perception.”

In the way of knowing that pertains to Brahman, the highest kind of knowledge is to recognize that only Brahman is real. By logical implication, all that is not Brahman is unreal. The novice may labor under the illusion that Brahman and the rest of reality are separate. In fact no object, not even our own selves, are separate from Brahman.

This emphasis on philosophy, in this case monism (the belief in the oneness of the universe), sets the Upanishads apart from the Vedas. In the Vedas, the stress was on how to worship the various Aryan gods by means of sacrifice, but the Upanishads emphasize dispassionate meditation on the ultimate nature of reality.

True Knowledge

According to the Upanishads, the proper diagnosis of our human illness is that we live in ignorance (
avidya
) of the true nature of reality. The prescription for this philosophical illness is to arrive at true knowledge. In Hinduism, liberation only comes with right thinking.

Much of this philosophy is a metaphysical search for Brahman, the absolute ground of all being. According to the Upanishads, a single, unifying principle underlies the entire universe.
Brahman
is a Sanskrit word meaning “the eternal, imperishable, absolute.” This being is also unknowable and has no past, present, or future. Brahman is also impersonal, not completely unlike the god of the deists at the time of the European Enlightenment. In fact,
Brahman
also means “ever growing.”

If we remove all the materials and living things from the universe, strip away all its furniture, and empty it of all being, fullness will still be left behind. That is because even without material objects, there will always be Brahman.

The Shvetashvatara Upanishad emphasizes the idea that separateness is an illusion.

It proceeds as follows:

1 What is the cause of the cosmos? Is it Brahman?

From where do we come? By what live?

Where shall we find peace at last?

What power governs the duality

Of pleasure and pain by which we are driven?

2 Time, nature, necessity, accident,

Elements, energy, intelligence —

None of these can be the First Cause

They are effects, whose only purpose is

To help the self rise above pleasure and pain.

3 In the depths of meditation, sages

Saw within themselves the Lord of Love,

Who dwells in the heart of every creature.

Deep in the hearts of all he dwells, hidden

Behind the gunas of law, energy,

And inertia. He is One. He it is

Who rules over time, space, and causality.

All Is Brahman

The underlying monism of the Upanishads says that all of the living beings that inhabit the world are manifestations of Brahman. These living things bear souls (
atman
) that, when taken together, make up Brahman. The world of senses (tenth stanza) tells us of the separateness of the world. But to see the phenomenal world as separate is to see the world in an illusory fashion. To see Brahman is to see one, not many; to see changeless being, not superficial differences; to see unity, not separation.

Brahman is a state of pure transcendence that cannot be grasped by thought or speech.

The greatest spiritual ill of human beings is that they fail to recognize reality for what it is. “Those who worship ignorance enter blinding darkness,” says the Upanishads.

THE BHAGAVAD GITA

Song of the Blessed Lord

Bhagavad Gita
means “song of the blessed lord,” and is sometimes translated as “the song of the adorable one.” Believed to have been composed between the second and third century, it is an epic poem of Indian culture and religion. It is to Hinduism what the Homeric poems are to Greek and Hellenistic culture. Like those Homeric poems, the Gita is about a great battle. Through stories of the struggles of notable heroes and gods, it relays much of the basic philosophy of life and states the guiding principles of yoga. The main theme is yoga — the attainment of union with the divine. Krishna distinguishes three forms of yoga: knowledge, action, and devotion.

The Bhagavad Gita is part of a segment of a longer poem called the
Mahabharata
, which is the story of the struggles between two leading families from the beginning of Indian history. These two families face off in the battle of Kurukshetra, which historians place between 850 and 650
B.C.

The Gita begins when the hero, Arjuna, a warrior, hesitates over entering into battle against members of his own family. Arjuna’s conscience revolts at the thought of the war and the idea that it involves the killing of friends and relatives. He asks his charioteer Krishna to pull the chariot up between the two battling armies. It becomes apparent that the charioteer Krishna is God himself. The conversation is a revelation given by a friend to a friend, a young god to his companion, the prince Arjuna.

Religion 101 Question

Is there a philosophy of karma in the Bhagavad Gita?

Yes, though the meaning of karmic action has changed from earlier texts. Krishna reveals to Arjuna that action performed out of a sense of one’s duty or dharma, with no thought of selfish gain, leads to spiritual fulfillment.

In the course of the conversation, Krishna begins a lecture on the nature of reality. He sets out to outline several yogas that will help Arjuna fight the battle. Krishna is not only playing the part of spiritual advisor to his friend, he is also using this moment to proclaim to all mankind his doctrine of salvation for the world. His doctrine, known as the “Yoga of Selfless Action” (
karma yoga
), entails self-surrender and devotion (
bhakti
) to the Lord, who is identical with the Self within all.

Krishna instructs Arjuna about the nature of reality. The things of this world are not lasting, are unreal, and men are too attached to the things of the senses.

These attachments include the impermanent pleasures and pain of their own bodies.

If any man thinks he slays, and if another thinks he is slain, neither knows the ways of truth. The Eternal in man cannot kill: the Eternal in man cannot die.

He is never born and never dies. He is in Eternity: he is for evermore. Never-born and eternal, beyond times gone or to come, he does not die when the body dies.

What then, Arjuna asks, is the nature of wisdom? Krishna replies:

When a man puts away all the desires of his mind, O Arjuna, and when his spirit is content in itself, then he is called stable in intelligence.

He whose kind is untroubled in the midst of sorrows and is free from eager desire amid pleasures, he from whom passion, fear, and rage have passed away, he is called a sage of settled intelligence.

He who is without affection on any side, who does not rejoice or loathe as he obtains good or evil, his intelligence is firmly set in wisdom.

Now Krishna instructs Arjuna in the manner of selfless action. The unselfish man does an action not for its consequences or rewards, but out of devotion and for the action itself. Indeed, the Bhagavad Gita recommends that the way to escape meaningless cycles of rebirth is to perform all one’s actions without egotistical concern for their fruits.

Moderation in All Things

The Bhagavad Gita presents what might be called a “prescriptive ethic,” ordering a way of life for the common man. In fact, it doesn’t require that one be austere in physical or mental discipline; a yoga that required such extreme behavior was beyond the reach of the common man. The Gita has but one prescription for self-discipline — temperate behavior.

Krishna explains that all that is required is self-control.

The Spiritual Outlook of the Bhagavad Gita

The Bhagavad Gita is a lengthy discussion on the nature of duty toward others and personal obligations, and it is also rich in metaphysical thought. The poem manages to interweave our yearning to know, to act, and to have faith.

While spirituality deals with matters that are timeless, our ideals must be in accord with the highest ideals of the age; however, these ideals may vary from age to age. So the
yugadharma
, the ideals of the particular age, must be kept in view.

Hindu Time

In Hindu cosmology, a Yuga, or age, is the smallest unit of cosmological time. Four Yugas make up one Mahayuga, or Great Age: the Golden Age (Krita), the Silver Age (Treta Yuga), the Bronze Age (Dvapara Yuga), and the Iron Age (Kali Yuga). We are currently in the Kali Yuga, the most corrupt of the ages.

The message of the Gita is not sectarian or addressed to any school of thought. Rather, it is universal in scope, intended equally for Brahmin or outcaste. “All paths lead to me,” the Gita says. Because it possesses such universality, it finds favor with all classes and schools. In the roughly 2,200 years since the Gita was written, India and the world have gone through various processes of change and stagnation, prosperity and decay. No matter; each age has found something relevant to its time in the Gita
.
It applies to the moral, social, and spiritual problems that afflict each age.

KARMA AND SAMSARA

Action and Rebirth

After the completion of the Upanishads, the interconnected doctrines of karma and samsara became prominent in Hindu thinking and persist even today. Both have to do with a philosophy of action and the results of that action. According to the ethical concept of karma (often spelled
kharma
), the actions or karmas of individuals in their current births shape their lives in their next births. This is connected to reincarnation, or the cycles of lives. Souls are believed to cycle through human or animal lives until they are liberated and merge with a higher reality.

Karma

The Sanskrit word
karma
comes from a root that means “to do or act.” The law of karma says that people reap what they sow. In essence, the law of karma is a law of justice that implies that every thought or deed, whether good or bad, counts in determining how a person will be born in his next life on earth.

Actions Have Consequences

The idea of karma is that every thought, word, or deed will influence whether individuals achieve liberation or will have to repeat the cycle of birth and death. Karma might be understood as the spiritual or ethical residue of every action; in other words, beyond its external, visible effects, every action has a deep impact on our spiritual relationship.

At the dawn of Indian philosophy, Indians came to believe that every action and every thought had a consequence, which would show up in the present life or in a succeeding one. Most Indian sects believed karma operated as an automatic moral sanction, ensuring the evildoer suffered and the righteous prospered.

A person with bad karma could suffer being reborn many times into lower castes of humans — or even lower animals — and then could not be released until he or she had been reborn in the Brahmin, or priestly, caste.

Karma and Good Qualities

In our own time, when an individual is described as talented, kind, or intelligent, it is believed they have genetics or their environment to thank. But ancient thinkers preferred to think that a person possessed or lacked particular qualities due to choices she made in past lives.

A person’s good qualities were attributed to good actions he had taken in a past life. On the other hand, a person possessing bad qualities was also the product of his past choices. Every thought, word, and action — and even nonaction — was believed to have deep effects on a person’s spiritual relationships.

On the one hand, karma stresses recurrence — continual renewal and rebirth. On the other hand, the doctrine of the identity of atman and the Brahman stresses the permanent and unchanging. This apparent contradiction between the two concepts was solved by the understanding that the cycle of rebirth is caused by ignorance of the true nature of the self and the failure to realize that it never changes.

Emancipation becomes, therefore, a process of coming to an awareness of that state of being that is beyond process, the identity of atman and Brahman. To have that intuitive knowledge is to become immortal, for “knowing All, he becomes All.”

Samsara

Samsara is the round or cycle of birth and rebirth that all Hindus are subject to in the Hindu worldview. Each person at the time of death possesses a karmic account balance; whether the actions are good or bad determines that agent’s future destiny.

The literal meaning of the word
samsara
is “to wander across.” It signifies that, in Indian thought, a person’s life force does not pass on with the death of the body, but instead wanders across. That is, the life force migrates to another time and body, where it continues to live.