Indian Civilization Lec 10

all right if I could have your attention please so I’m going to show you some slides but I also brought some posters for those of you sitting in the back you may not be able to get a very good view but you’ll be able to see the slides these I just wanted to have have you get a sense of what kind of posters of the gods and goddesses we’re speaking about these are sold by the millions tens of millions and not just outside temples but they’re sold in bazaars on street corners and they usually tend to be actually much bigger than this these are relatively higher quality because they’re from a store called Archie’s which sort of does you know slightly upper end posters so this here is a Krishna and Radha and you can see it’s kind of an idyllic scene you know they’re in some sort of paradise if we even put it this way Krishna you recall that one of the things I’d mentioned to you that all of the Gods have an iconography right so you can identify the Gods by the iconography and if you see a god with a flute so here’s Krishna with with a cow I recall that what I’d mentioned to you he is a cowherd and he usually placed the flute so one of the things that he lures the go P so the gopis are the the cowherd asses or the milk maidens as they’re sometimes called he lures them with the sweet sound of his flute right and there’s a very substantial literature that has developed around this hundreds of poets over the last seven eight hundred years have written on this sort of thing so this is the ideal representation of RAM with the Lakshmana and Sita and then Hanuman at their feet and if you look actually at Rama I think you get a fairly good sense of it from this poster over here you can see that it is almost a kind of an almost like an androgynous look like almost an androgynous kind of look one of the things that’s happened is that the iconography of Rama has changed very substantially over the course of the last 15 20 years as Hindu nationalism has become more prominent the iconography has Rohm its it’s a bit more masculine figure not always with the smiling countenance looking a bit stern right someone who wants to instill order that sort of thing and then here you have Shiva in the posture of a yogi in Samadhi each of these gods has a vehicle as its call so usually there’s a animal that you identify with the bull is usually a sign of Shiva the Trident over here is another sign of Shiva you know the snakes around him seated on a tiger skin very typical representation of the god Shiva over here and then here you have Hanuman by himself all right but this will this will be a little bit more clear in some of the slides and I’m going to show to you in a moment and so on and this is this is one of my favorites you’re going to see a slide of this as well this is Krishna the butter thief right so there’s a pot of butter there and he is licking the butter right so as I said you know one of the more common representations other cause let me just shut off the lights over here so I can show you some of the slides here and you’ll get a pretty good idea of what we’re speaking of so what you have here is this is the story of Narasimha this is the Lion King the incarnation that I’ve spoken to you about this is this is a very contemporary representation this over here is a sculpture at a place called baylor halibut and so you see Narasimha over there and in his lap is in fact the demon hidden ekishu boo he’s you don’t torn him apart in a way all right that’s what so you feasts you see his hands there in the middle there and he’s tearing him apart this is this is a miniature painting sometime later on in the course you’re going to get a separate lecture or portions of a lecture on Indian art and architecture so here I’m not going to discuss the merits of the different schools and the different styles of representation here the idea is to simply show you the kind of images that I’ve spoken about and and this is a representation of narsimha in Indian miniature painting the tradition of Indian miniature painting essentially goes back to the Mughals to about the 16th century but they’re going to be non Mughal schools as well to develop in western India in Rajasthan and here you have another representation from baylor halibut the area around that this the sculpture that you’re seeing in stone here as well as this one over here these date back to approximately 10th 11th century okay and here you have a very contemporary sort of poster where you have narsimha looking really ferocious and he’s not just simply you know dealing with here in acacia poo he’s actually remember what the purpose of an incarnation is an incarnation comes down to save the world from the wicked right so here he is dealing with the demons right now we have a representation here of shiva and parvathi so you’ve I’ve already mentioned the Trident to you and one of the reasons you see the mountains in the back is because the mountains is of one of the favorite abodes one of the favorite places worship or shiva in sanskrit i might say by the way yet you know if the the formal sanskritic name is shiva but in colloquial terms you usually drop off the a at the end because many of these names they first appear in poetry and an inverse you know there are certain certain kinds of syllables that you observe certain rhymes and so on but shave shiva it’s the same thing right and here you have a representation in in stone alright i in sculpture now this is that maken sure that I showed you before different renditions of different renditions of the god Krishna there are some poets such as a poet soothe us right soothe us and for him the Krishna that he’s really interested in is the child Krishna so you’re going to find a lot of his poetry devoted to the child Krishna there others were interested in Krishna as a lover and so much of their poetry will be devoted to that or the exploits of Krishna and so there’s a there’s a considerable variation over here and this is this scene that I had mentioned to you before the vastra Harun which is Krishna and the theft of the clothes so here you’ve got the gopis they’re taking a bath in the river and now you can see equation I sitting up sitting on the top of a tree and he’s taken their clothes way right and there’s a there by the way allegorical readings of this right I mean because I did mention to you the allegorical reading the allegorical reading of course has to do with the fact that that you are supposed to appear before God naked right that is to say you you should be completely devoid of any sense of ego if you want to be a true devotee of God so this so there is a particular text which has a long interpretation of this scene because he’s trying to explain why this kind of scene would appear in the biography if we can call it that of a God right and the argument that is given is that when these gopis realize that their clothes are no longer there right so they’re back Krishna they implore him you know would you please return your clothes return our clothes and Krishna says well you must step out of the water and of course because they’re stark naked they don’t want to do that all right so there’s actually even a text which will describe this whole scene and then say that one of the Gopi steps out and she covers her genitals with their hands and Krishna says you can’t do that you have to come to me completely naked right but the author is very clear that this is not to be this is not to be interpreted as a scene of pornography not even remotely because the point is very clear in his mind that the idea is that you appear before God short of any element of your ego okay and this is not to say that this is not a culture in which for example the idea of shame doesn’t appear of course it does which is one reason why the women are hesitant to step out of the water right on the other hand you don’t have to do only the allegorical reading there is obviously a certain element of eroticism right and this is where now you have to go back to the four ends of life remember that the four ends of life are not they don’t each one doesn’t exclude the other they complement each other so the four ends are artha and kama kama is pleasure that’s one of the ends of life but the other end of life is moksha moksha a spiritual emancipation so this is how the scene is to be read as a scene that can be viewed within the context of this larger scheme of life that is been delineated so they are going to show you several representations if this is from a much more contemporary painting and these scenes from the life of Krishna continue to animate Indian art we’re not really speaking only about 15 16th century 17th century representations I mean these there are contemporary artists who will continue to play with this theme now we go back again to a Indian miniature painting right so all of these are different renditions of the same scene and now what you have here is the rasa-lila krishna’s leela now there’s something extraordinary going on in this work right if you see there’s not one Krishna right with each Gopi there is a Krishna the Krishna of course exists in the singular but one of his properties as a god is his ability to multiply himself so every Gopi leaves with the satisfied feeling that Krishna exists only for her right so here he is he’s dancing there and you can see that with each Gopi with each woman there is going to be a Krishna generally right here you see actually four or five a couple more gopis but the idea here is again that Krishna can multiply himself right and this is of course one representation of a paradise if we may put it this way but it’s not simply supposed to be a paradise out there the Paradise can be within you why this is part of the argument of the text and you have to keep in mind by the way that all of these paintings would usually the Indian miniature paintings very often would have accompanied a text as well so you have manuscripts where you have the text on one side and then you have the miniature now they’ll be late in later tradition some of the paintings will exist by themselves but usually they exist alongside a text this is a Madhubani representation so Madhubani is a Indian art form which comes from Bihar practiced largely if not entirely by women right it’s become very very popular in the West as well in the last 20 30 years this would be a much more recent painting something on the order of 15 20 years and here again you have a representation of the rasa-lila under the under a under the moon right and if you look very carefully you’ll see exactly what I meant when I said that Krishna is somebody who can multiply himself he’s each Gopi thinks that Krishna exists for her that he’s there for her right and here you have its we won’t have time to really look at this in great detail but this combines two things it combines the rasa-lila with the Dasha Avatara - avatar is a ten avatars of Vishnu so if you look very carefully you can see the for example on the top right there you see the dwarf right and use end to the left of that you see varaha which is the boar so it goes through all the ten avatars of Vishnu and then in the middle you have when you have this sort of mandala there of this kind this is the rasa-lila that you have and you saw you saw a poster of this a variation of this Ram Lakshman Sita Hanuman Hanuman in a position of obeisance right paying his respects to the three and here you have romp with Hanuman right recent very recent contemporary poster right and this is this is something that I’ve spoken to you about very briefly a representation of Hanuman that is inquired encountered in painting and in sculpture where Hanuman rips open his chest and there is an image of Rama and Sita the meaning of it is that Rama and Sita are always inscribed in his heart no matter where he may be what he might be doing what do you might be thinking they are always inscribed within it right and so he rips him chest open and you see that image over there and this to give you an idea now another lecture will fill in the details this is a representation of Krishna and Arjuna and the chariot and the go Gaeta and this sculpture which is a monumental sculpture is at the main square in Jakarta Indonesia a country that is 99% Muslim and they have this and one of the reasons they have this is because of course Java in particular is an extraordinary example of a country well not a country part of a country Indonesia which an area which as I said is almost entirely Muslim but the cultural heritage of Indonesia is drawn almost entirely from India almost entirely from India their temple complexes that go back Hindu temple complexes prambanan Buddhist complex borobudur or right both in Java near a place called Georgia kartha and these temple complexes Hindu Buddhist they go back centuries right which was a time when Southeast Asia was heavily under Indian influence and it’s very interesting that a country that is as I said predominantly Muslim does not have any hesitation in putting a statue of Krishna and Arjuna in the middle of one of their main squares in the capital city right and this here is one of the more interesting representations of the Bhagavad Gita the the context of the Bhagavad Gita so you got the armies ranged on both sides and then in the middle of the field because recall the context of the bhagavad-gita that just as the battle is about to commence Arjuna says to Krishna I don’t think I really want to fight and Krishna says you have to fight your Dharma right I could use the English word duty but your Therma is to fight why is your Therma to fight because you’re a Kshatriya you’re a warrior right and arjun says i can’t do that because if i were to do it i would be killing my own kinsmen i would be killing my own relatives right and this is then of course the sermon right that Krishna is going to deliver where Arjuna is seated over there the chariot comes to a standstill in the middle of the battlefield right and it’s an extraordinary moment because I mean this sermon obviously let’s suppose it actually happen I mean would have lasted a few hours right it would have lasted a few hours the bhagavad-gita is an 18 chapters and everybody is just standing there right so is it only Arjuna who’s listening to the sermon or is it everybody else as well right and clearly there are certain protocols of battle because the other side the chorus just don’t decide that well while I’ll do not seat it there next to creation are listening to the sermon they’re going to go and start attacking the part of us there’s certain protocols to be followed in battle as well right I mean if you think about for example the Geneva Convention which regulates warfare right well in some ways I’m not saying there is a direct line from the bhagavad-gita don’t you know and I’m not saying the bug would get our influence the Geneva Convention that’s what what I’m saying even remotely what I’m saying is that you think about how such practices arise in history right and there are cultural entities because think of the context I mean nobody actually really talks about it everybody talks about the teachings of the Gita what is I think just as interesting is the fact that the sermon is being delivered well what is everybody doing and because the armies had been raged the armies were about to start the battle migite says it very clearly / McSherry Kurukshetra on the field of dharma on the field of gurus then right the armies are assembled and they blow their conscience which is the sign that war is going to begin and then at that point Arjuna lays down his bow and says well you know perhaps we need to reflect on what we are doing here right and here are the two armies and you can see thousands of the mass their soldiers cavalry this is the scene that the bhagavad-gita describes right a text that became I might say in passing we’re going to speak a little bit more about the Gita but since I’m on the subject I want to say this right now right that very often the Gita is sometimes referred to by contemporary writers particularly in the West I think as the text that in Hinduism becomes perhaps equivalent in some ways to the Quran and Islam or the Bible particularly the New Testament in Christianity I don’t I don’t agree with that reading at all right because it’s certainly true that the Bhagavad Gita became by the late 19th century the premiere text Hindu text and you can imagine why because after all it’s going to become an inspiration to those nationalists who are going to say that well our duty is to resist the colonial invader right if we have any doubts Krishna’s saying very clearly to Arjuna you must follow your Dharma you must follow your duty and the and the bhagavad-gita will then go on to elaborate several different ways and which one can perform one’s duty and several different ways in which one can achieve spiritual emancipation but the but the bhagavad-gita is not really a text that in my view has percolated down right percolate it down to the masses I mean if in North India for example their armchairs Manas which is the which is the version of the RAM katha that I’d mentioned to you once before right by Tulsi das that would be much more widely known much more widely known than the Bhagwad Gita the bhagavad-gita is by and large what I would this I would put it this way it’s war a text of the Hindu middle class and the educated middle class in particular and it’s a text set became widely known in the West first translated into English by a man called Charles Wilkins in 1785 or there abouts and then by the mid 19th century for those of you who you know had to read Emerson and throw a little bit of Emerson and Thoreau in American literature in high school right you might remember a book by Henry David Thoreau called Walden right one of the most Magisterial works of American literature and Thoreau says in that very clearly that I bathe my intellect I bathe my intellect every morning in the stupendous and cosmoGirl philosophy of the bhagavad-gita right 1850 approximately right so the apex said became highly influential for Western intellectuals as well because it’s if it’s a philosophical poem really right and the setting itself is as I said quite extraordinary all right so this is just to give you an idea of the kinds of things that I was talking about and you and and you can see in the images right what many of these gods look like how artists have worked with some of these questions that I’m interested in talking to you about all right now I had been speaking to you so let me resume my lecture from where I had stopped the on went on Monday and I had been speaking to you about potentially and I’d been speaking about the Yoga Sutras and I had read out I want to read that again now just to refresh your memory right the first four aphorisms of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali so this is what he says this is the teaching of yoga yoga is a cessation of the turnings of thought right the mind is constantly churning mind is constantly churning when thought ceases the spirit stands in its true identity as observer to the world otherwise you observer identifies with the turnings of thought okay now how do we interpret what yoga really means and and I want to again emphasize that yoga is not simply a set of essence right essence are these postures and if you look in the West it’s very clear that Yoga has largely been reduced to something called hatha yoga which is one of many schools of yoga and incidentally of course within each of these you know forms of yoga like hatha yoga for example or Raja yoga right Raja Yoga is very often translated as the king of yoga’s within each of these there are many different schools of thought and interpretation so in the United States Bikram Yoga is really a form of hatha yoga right but there’s the anger school for example right and so on they’re different schools of interpretation within that and some of the awesomes are common some of the are not common to all the schools and there are over a thousand awesome so asan’s are our postures but a sensor only one element of this and according to some practitioners of yoga perhaps not even the most important element right potentially himself so Patanjali is the author of this work it may be the same potentially who had also written a work all the Maharaja which is a grammar there’s also a grammar which I’ve mentioned by somebody called panini right so these are different works over here but we need not be concerned about whether this is the same person who wrote with a grammar or not what what is important for us is to understand what exactly he might mean when he speaks of yoga right and I don’t want to sort of give you a whole list of technical terms here because in fact yoga according to potentially has eight limbs as he says that is eight divisions or eight parts as some of these parts include one part for example is asan which is the postures one part is pranayama which is control over your breath control over your breath if you study yoga with a teacher in India good teacher in India generally half of the yoga class will be devoted to pranayama which is the control of your breath how do you control inhaling and exhaling the breath maintaining the breath right and why is the breath so important right so there’s a whole cosmology there right which we obviously cannot enter into in a class of this kind right but that’s one of the eight limbs one of the other limbs of it just to give you an illustration of two more limbs right just so that you have some sense of what we mean when we speak about yoga if it’s something more than the essence then what is it right so two of the other limbs are what are called yama which are the things you abstain from right yoga also deep demands of you that you must abstain from certain things and the things that you must abstain from in I include such things as violence all right or if you want to look at the other way yoga commands you to observe ahimsa which is non-violence a term that we’ve used quite often already a term that you should be aware of ahimsa because subsequently in the 20th century Gandhi is going to take it to different heights right yoga insists upon the observance of aparigraha non-possession brahma chharia celibacy right rap but celibacy here means when you become celibate the idea is that you discipline yourself so you become closer to God so brahmacharya is not simply abstention from sexuality or being celibate in the ordinary sense or what that word means in the English language right the idea is that when you abstain from those activities it prepares you to in fact come closer to God and if you don’t like the word God here let’s supposing you were a non-believer well some form of spiritual emancipation right some form of spiritual emancipation that’s what yoga aims at so it has a set of nians and yama yama Zorn Yama’s which is observances and abstentions things that you abstain from and things that you must observe right and this is what I mean when I say that there are many different parts which comprise the philosophy of yoga one way to understand it is that there is a kind of extraordinary paradox I want to put the paradox you this way and that will more or less conclude my discussion of the idea of yoga here the paradox is the following that if you look at it this way yoga the philosophy of yoga the argument behind it is that the true state of the human spirit is freedom that’s what we aspire to we aspire to freedom right but this freedom has been lost because we have a tendency to identify that which exists in the phenomenal word that is in the material world out there right which is constantly subject to change right we tend to think of that as permanent we confuse the near the real nature of reality and here you will see where Yoga goes back to some of the teachings of the Upanishads okay I mean as a Greek philosopher once said you cannot step into the same river twice that’s the ceaseless word of change the phenomenal word of ceaseless change so yoga asks us to first contemplate on the fact that there is this world out there and then we have a tendency to confuse this for the reality and therefore we are unable to understand the nature of freedom now the paradox is the following that you can really acquire the freedom of spiritual the freedom of spiritual integrity by the act of discipline only but of course most people view discipline as a restraint on freedom and so what yoga teaches you is that in the first instance we realize that there is a phenomenal world out there we achieve we try to we have some aspiration to have something permanent in life something enduring ok there is a ceaseless word of change out there yoga and say is that we need to understand that we have to discipline ourselves and in discipling ourselves we attain freedom ok freedom is not the lack of discipline the only fundamental discipline that you can get is within the world of discipline well then at that point that ceases to become a discipline altogether because you have trained your mind in a certain way right this is the paradox that Yoga essentially works on and one of the reasons we are speaking about yoga over here is because Yoga is one of the competing schools of thought that begins to develop in India right so I want to now refresh your memory because in order to understand the bhagavad-gita and the Mahabharat I mean we could have started with the Mahabharat because the bhagavad-gita is a part of it but the bhagavad-gita is very often read independently of the Mahabharat it as I mentioned you in Indian homes actually the Mahabharata is usually not read at all I mean it might be read as a work of literature by students of literature or by people who interpret literature but it’s not a devotional texts now the Gita is actually a portion of the maha-rathah and there’s an interesting question was it originally a part of the mob path or was it inserted into the mob earth later on of course you could ask that for many parts of the Mahabharat because it’s such a enormous work absolutely humongous right and so we know that it’s composed over a period of several hundred years and in all of these things what you have to do is you have to decide what is the kernel of the story what is the main part of the story and one of the ways in which the scholars try to interpret this is they look at different recensions or or versions let’s supposing there let’s just suppose hypothetically there are 200 different manuscripts of the mob Harith some dated to the 14th century some to the 15th century some in bengali some in hindi some in sanskrit right so some scholar or team of scholars would have to sit down and then see ah is there some element of the story which appears in every single version of the Mahabharat the likelihood is that that is the kernel then there might be elements that appear in word version of the labyrinth which do not appear in other versions other mahabharata right that’s how you need to think of this of this text of the story now let’s go back to the bhagavad-gita and yoga because one of the things that Krishna is going to say to Arjuna is that there are many different paths to spiritual emancipation there is bhakti-yoga all right this is important right but the yoga and it’s important because there are two things we have to keep in mind both of I will expound on one is how did we get to the Gita from the Vedas what does that transition imply and then what will be the future of these movements such as bhakti-yoga right so when we when we move into the 7th 8th century AD all the way until the 16th 17th century AD at 1000 year period we’ll find that there is going to be a great movement in India first originating in South India and the camel country which is called the bhakti movement right in order to understand the bhakti movement we have to understand what Krishna’s teachings are to Arjuna so there’s bhakti yoga this karma yoga okay and there’s Nana yoga or ganyo —ga which and I will explain the difference between these three so these are the three different paths that are enumerated in the bhagavad-gita the patch to what write the word yoga its route is huge which is to yoke how we yoke our mind to some higher end how the Atman yokes itself to Brahman okay now recall the context you’ve got these two themes or two sides lined up for battle the pandavas and the chorus right they’re related to each other they grew up together their teachers are in common they were trained by the same teachers instructed by the same teachers they grew up together and then there is going to be a dispute among them right that’s essentially the context of the maha-rathah right the Great War and as I’ve mentioned to you before Arjun comes to Krishna as the battle is about to commence and says that I can’t can’t fight this war and when Arjun lays down his bow and arrow it needs something because Arjuna is the mighty warrior right so the five Pandava brothers remember and the three that are discussed the most often are yudishtir who’s the oldest and Arjun and beam right and you this raise the one who embodies truth and there’s going to be a number of stories in the mob Harith which will play upon this idea of yuddhistir embodying truth now Krishna then comes to Arjuna and says and incidentally Krishna is a God but he’s driving Arjuna’s chariot right he’s riding Arjuna’s chariot so this is what I mean that you cannot think of because you might say why is God playing the role of the driver here driving the chariot means he’s essentially a driver right but Krishna in principle really ought not to be taking sides but there’s a scene that is described in the mob hard ways where do yo then had the option either he could take a whole army or he could get Krishna he opted for an army right and so Krishna is I’m going to end up becoming the spiritual advisor spiritual advisor he himself never takes up arms okay you can overlook that little fact he himself will never take up arms he’s a spiritual advisor or counselor to Arjuna and then the counsel that he gives the set of teachings is known as a Bhagavad Gita the song of the Lord right which is how its rendered into English now we can’t go into the whole philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita that’s a huge task what is important for us to understand at least this part of it that is the delineation of the three yoga’s to understand this let’s go back to the Vedas for a second so in the Vedas we started with the idea that if you performed certain rituals and certain sacrifices according to the correct protocols certain good consequences would occur for you right but the Vedas does not Rini instill the idea bottle responsibility in the individual simply a matter of doing things mechanically almost you perform the sacrifice in the right way make sure you put the right amount of butter in the fire you know the butter is one of many things or ghee that you put into the fire right you you various oblations various offerings chant the right shlokas that the right verse is right in the right intonation that’s what it means to perform the sacrifice in the right way but this it doesn’t really say anything about the human faculty to discriminate between good and evil between right and wrong then from there we move to the Upanishads where the managers say that well spiritual emancipation has to do something with being able to distinguish between what is permanent right and what is transient what is enduring and what changes we have to understand the nature of knowledge so we vote for the Vedas to the Punishers then we move to the heterodox teachings of buddhism and jainism and the buddha saying well this is still a level of abstraction right this is still a level of abstraction what we need to be thinking about is right speech right conduct right the Four Noble Truths the Eightfold Path all of that and one of the ways in which we gain some understanding of this is through stories now the Bhagwad Gita is going to take this yet one step further because the bhagavad-gita is going to argue or the Krishna is going to argue for Arjuna that different human beings have different capacities right different capacities so bhakti-yoga means the yoga or the way of devotion just be devoted to me just be devoted to me steadfast in your devotion to me if you are devoted to me Krishna is saying to Arjuna and he’s saying that to every individual right you shall gain spiritual emancipation think only of the name of God right and again there are similarities in Krishna there are similarities in Islam to all of this right what is the meaning of the Rosary for example and chanting it you know you keep if you keep on moving your hand around the Rosary and you keep on chanting something devotion however for people who are capable of intellectual discrimination discriminating between right and wrong right so this is more of the teachings of the Punishers we might say although yoga is in it is in fact a part of a school of thought we could say that is called some term which makes a distinction between between spirit and matter right so for those who are able to make that distinction the better path is nama yoga and then think of Luther in the Christian context the way of works Karma Yoga is the way of works let’s supposing that you were not the kind of person who was really into devotion right and you also found the idea of intellectual discrimination to be a little abstract a little difficult then you should follow Karma Yoga Karma Yoga is the yoga or the way of works meaning you do what is required of you in life fulfill your duties right do good service that’s what it means to be a karma yogi of course the world lofty meaning is many other things that you know if for example you’re a scholar you know and you’ve got four children and you’ve got a dog in your house and all day long this mayhem going on children are shouting the dog is barking well a real karma yogi will be able to do all that work with all the shouting going on there right because a karma yogi like every other yogi what has he achieved cessation of thought of the kind that is mentioned in the yoga sutras or potentially right but you remain absolutely devoted to the task at hand and you do not let the noise outside disturb you that’s a true karma yogi another way of understanding a karma yogi is to look at the life of Mahatma Gandhi right because Gandhi’s argument here is that if if you have achieved spiritual emancipation you shouldn’t retreat and become a fakir you go and start meditating in the mountains ideas you should do good to others and the true way to be a karma yogi is to be in the slum of politics because that’s what politics is it’s a slum right that’s where things really get nasty right just look at what’s happening at the Republican convention and you know what I mean right that’s Islam or politics now to be able to withstand all of that not withstand it in the in the sense in which they’re withstanding it but but to be in some sense above all of that and that’s the sign of a karma yogi okay and why is krishna giving these teachings to Arjuna because he’s trying to suggest to him that different people have different capacities okay and that may be not simply because of their biological inheritance it may have nothing to do with the biological inheritance it may have to do with the social structures so if you were for example a sudra right remember the shooter has a people at the rock bottom who have never gained any education at all were never permitted remember that what man who says that women and shudra should not be allowed to hear the Vedas and if they hear the Vedas their ears should be plugged with wax right and so what krishna is trying to do here if in his teachings to Arjuna is suggest that these teachings can be understood by everybody man or woman adult or child brahmin or sudra makes no difference it’s just that some will tend towards bhakti-yoga some will tend towards Nana yoga and some will tend towards karma yoga okay that’s what these teachings are now there are some very interesting aspects to the bhagavad-gita so for example in chapter 11 right what Krishna is going to do is he’s going to reveal his Universal form now that sounds a bit esoteric what does it mean to reveal his right viscera rupa nashville rupa is the universal form what i mean by that is that as krishna is giving these teachings to Arjuna Arjuna almost forgets at some point the Krishna is in fact a God because Krishna is there in the form of the drive the chariot er the driver of the chariot and then Krishna will remind him in book eleven that no I am NOT just a chariot er I’m the universal one right and so when he opens his mouth and Arjuna peeks into his mouth he sees all the universe encompassed inside his mouth that’s what’s called the universal form the vishwaroopa the vishwaroopa of krishna and just as a little just as a little footnote right to see how these kinds of passages and how these kinds of teachings travel in very different ways into very different context when Oppenheimer you know who was one of the principal people involved in the experiments that led to what became the atomic bomb okay Oppenheimer by the way was also conversant with Sanskrit all right you can read this in any history of the making of the atomic bomb I mean this is not I haven’t concocted it from anywhere like that okay so when they actually first tested the bomb in Nevada before they threw before they threw the bomb on Hiroshima and they tested it Oppenheimer was present at that explosion and when he saw that explosion that huge mushroom cloud which of course the more famous image of that is in Hiroshima or the more notorious image really I should say he started chanting verses from Chapter 11 of the Bhagavad Gita because the enormity of it seemed like the entire universe was being encompassed in this single act right the brilliant flash of color when the bomb explode the thunderous nests of it the only thing he could think of was Krishna showing his Universal form to Arjuna extraordinary how these passages travel into different cultural arenas right okay so this is what you need to bear in mind when you think of a text such as a Bhagavad Gita now let’s finally turn to the mob harap okay the other great epic as it’s called and recall what I mentioned to you that the mother earth is classified in Sanskrit as et Hafsa history please do not however interpret it as you might interpret a work of history that is imagine that these are historical facts that are being depicted right all the caveats that I mentioned to you when we were discussing the Ramayana should now be kept in mind having said that it is very clear that there obviously elements from various parts of the Indian past that went into the making of this text there’s but no question and that’s true of every text they had to be something there in the indian imagination which and the indian past particularly which gets incorporated into the memberid let’s begin for example with the story of Draupadi all right and some people have argued that the only strong characters in the Mahabharat are women the OPD is very strong all right extremely strong character also a bit vengeful perhaps good reason because she is humiliated right but there’s something very interesting that we need to think about right at the outset which is a draupadi has five husbands and we can’t get into the story of how she came to acquire five husbands right I mean polyandry is not common in Indian texts at all right polyandry is when a woman has multiple polygamy is much more common right where a man has multiple wives here we have polyandry right where she has five husbands okay now should we interpret this literally is it possible that it was polyandry in let’s say the Harappan civilization is this a Priya the audience did not practice polyandry that’s what the evidence seems to suggest now the audience did not practice polyandry where did it come from right and it’s possible that the pre Aryan past had an element of this polyandry one can make that argument you can also interpret it by the way allegorically she’s got five husbands Draupadi is the mind controlling the five senses we’ve got five senses don’t we right and each of the five Pandava brothers is supposed to represent the five senses this is an allegorical reading particularly favored by those who are uncomfortable with the idea polyandry so they say well you know we really need to read this allegorical okay so I’m going to stop over here now we just started on the story of Draupadi bring the text with you on Friday we’re going to look at some of the elements and in particular I want you to pay attention to the idea of Dharma how does the Dharma operate in the Mahabharata