I couldn't resist but to comment on this as it is close to me also. The Bhagavad Gita (celestial song) grows on you each time you read and at each age, you read. Let us say you read it this year and again the next, it will have a different impact on you (at least for me.. it grows on me). It is as relevant today as it was at any time in the past and the future. It is not just a dialogue between 2 people but two identities. It can be of a friend, as is the case of Krishna and Arjuna, or can be considered as a conversation between dad and daughter, mother and son, doctor and patient, etc. And each of the Dharma, Karma, jnana(knowledge) and Bhakti(devotion) manifests.
So it can be a book that plays a part in psychology, administrative practises, management techniques, political study, yoga, and meditation etc. In the context of the space here and the article I cannot elaborate on those, but yeah it is an absolute good read for anybody and I would suggest it as such. Not getting into the details of the religion etc.
Krishna comes across like a great communicator and Arjuna as a great listener raising issues and relevant doubts at the right time/moment so that the rhythm of the discourse is not disturbed.
Oppenheimer and the Gita (2014)
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Re: Oppenheimer and the Gita (2014)
#62Great article, confirms what I always believed about Oppenheimer and many others in that time. My grandma used to read the Gita to me every day when I was a toddler before I started school. She had a stroke in December and in her final days, I would read verses from the Gita to her returning the favor. Death is the greatest teacher of all, teaches us the value of life and power of decision. Since her passing, I've gr…
My question is why as a Western dude who grew up with lots of exposure to Christian scripture and surrounding culture elements or churches I can visit am I gonna try and learn someone else’s religion (with none of those advantages) when even taking the “easy” route is extraordinary difficult?
Hinduism is not a religion instead it’s a Dharma. There is no equivalent English word for it as English has limited vocabulary and fails to describe yogic sciences.
Hinduism gives you a way to explore the life and even question the existence of God.
Can we redefine God better? Yes we can. Define in a way it works for everybody and removes extremism.
Re: Oppenheimer and the Gita (2014)
#63The Bhagavad Gita is a bit like Moby Dick in that it is abstract enough that everyone projects their own interpretation onto it, filtered through their own experiences. However, because it is a religious text, people have been fighting over the meaning for millenia, often to justify or motivate one political stance or another, no doubt because motivating the protagonist to political action of physical battle is itsel…
All of these long, ancient religious texts are palimpsests (by which I mean simply the work of multiple authors, over a period of time; I know that isn't the strict meaning, and indeed some of them are strictly palimpsests, i.e. documents that have been erased and written over). I don't know for sure that the BV is such a palimpsest; but it is not plausible that the Mahabharata as a whole is a record composed by a si…
> it is not plausible that the Mahabharata as a whole is a record composed by a single author, at a point in history.
I agree. I don't think I argued against that? Responding to the wrong comment perhaps?
The Bhagavad Gita in particular is a section of the Mahabharata that has seen more revisions over time than the rest of th epic. In fact the name of the purported author "Vyasa" itself means "arranger", implying that he was organizing stories he received from others.
Re: Oppenheimer and the Gita (2014)
#64Great article, confirms what I always believed about Oppenheimer and many others in that time. My grandma used to read the Gita to me every day when I was a toddler before I started school. She had a stroke in December and in her final days, I would read verses from the Gita to her returning the favor. Death is the greatest teacher of all, teaches us the value of life and power of decision. Since her passing, I've gr…
My question is why as a Western dude who grew up with lots of exposure to Christian scripture and surrounding culture elements or churches I can visit am I gonna try and learn someone else’s religion (with none of those advantages) when even taking the “easy” route is extraordinary difficult?
The Bible has been translated so many times, perhaps even changed for forgotten political motives, such that reading holy text from other enlightened messengers helps us discern original intent. Paul said “Every matter must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.” What if both teach correct principles?
Is it easier to stay a confused captive of ignorance or our own ego or be set free from our self-deception through knowledge and truth? Just a retorical questions, no judgement intended.
I have found incredible sympathy and cultural understanding by reading the defining texts of other cultures, and noticing the similarities.
Re: Oppenheimer and the Gita (2014)
#65I've wanted to study Sanskrit for a while now but nobody around where I live can teach it. So I've been nibbling at at occasionally. Some points of pronunication are a bit vague such as there being two kinds of T's and D's which sound almost identical to me. I've read the Gita and the Uphanishad s in English (Eaknath Easwaran's translation). Here's my impression. It's definitely worth reading through a translation. Y…
Hinduism can not be compared with Judaism. Hinduism is fundamentally build to protect the Brahmin supremacy and caste system is used to deny access to education to the majority of people and to control the society by the priestly class. All the scriptures are there to divert the attention from the main subject when questioned. This essay "Annihilation of caste" by Ambedkar http://www.ambedkar.org/ambcd/02.Annihilatio…
Please don't take HN threads further into religious flamewar. We don't want that here; it leads nowhere good.
Re: Oppenheimer and the Gita (2014)
#66This is best summary of the Gita. https://nilayashokshah.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/zzzzz-git...
Possible explains this https://www.teoalida.com/world/india/
Re: Oppenheimer and the Gita (2014)
#67I've wanted to study Sanskrit for a while now but nobody around where I live can teach it. So I've been nibbling at at occasionally. Some points of pronunication are a bit vague such as there being two kinds of T's and D's which sound almost identical to me. I've read the Gita and the Uphanishad s in English (Eaknath Easwaran's translation). Here's my impression. It's definitely worth reading through a translation. Y…
"two kinds of T's and D's which sound almost identical to me" Sanskrit is a dead language. Nobody has used it as a spoken language for nearly a thousand years; and even those Sanskrit speakers a millennium ago were using the language only for specialist discourse, not as a mother-tongue. I'm saying it was already a dead language a thousand years ago. We don't really know how English was pronounced in London, England…
The Sanskrit tradition is uniquely centered around language itself, starting with its origins in the preservation of the Veda. There is an ancient tradition of Śikṣā (≈phonetics) for the correct pronunciation thereof, and there are further detailed descriptions of sounds given by Pāṇini and Patañjali. Most importantly, there is still a robust oral tradition of reciting the Śruti (Veda), which has often been compared to a tape-recorder from at least 2500 years ago.
All of this is to say, we know very well (except for some much-debated rare words) what the correct pronunciation of Sanskrit is: it is what the Śikṣā śāstra says, what the grammarians elaborated, what is still heard at every Veda-pāṭhaśāla, and what is still spoken by at least tens of thousands of paṇḍits whenever they want to debate anything technical, or even just as a link language to make chit-chat across (other-)language barriers.
Sanskrit is as alive as it has ever been. It is “dead” only in a very restricted sense of the word — e.g. if you only consider usage as a mother tongue rather than as a language for poetry, technical topics, debate, etc — a sense that is irrelevant in the context of Sanskrit, because by this definition (classical, as opposed to the older Vedic) Sanskrit has been “dead” since the moment of its birth (its codification by Pāṇini, which was so exhaustive that it has become, for millenia, a de facto definition of correct Sanskrit), and you'd have to say that everything of value written in it was written after this moment of death/birth (including, according to scholars, most of the Bhagavad Gita itself). Oh and also, I personally know at least a few dozen people who can and do speak in Sanskrit routinely, and at least three families where Sanskrit is the children's mother tongue, and the primary language spoken at home. So the claim of “Nobody has used it as a spoken language for nearly a thousand years” is hard to take seriously.
In any case, the two kinds of Ts and Ds (retroflex and dental) are contrasting phonemes in Sanskrit, meaning that if you mix them up you'll get different words with unintended meanings — it would be hard to consider the outcome “correct”.
Re: Oppenheimer and the Gita (2014)
#68I know, I know ... deep stuff. But, I read the Gita (German translation) and - frankly speaking - I was quite underwhelmed and didn't see the big deal about it. It's a rather dull and repetitive story about a guy going to war and having a chat over it with some Hindu god. The famous quotes masterfully recited by Dr. Oppenheimer are not being built up to - they just appear out of nowhere. My conclusion is that this pa…
Thank you for sharing your experience. It may be useful for, say, those writing an introduction to the Gita for certain audiences.
Contrary to your impression, the Bhagavad Gita is not a “story”. Although the first chapter (of 18) does have some setting (owing to the place it occurs in the broader epic Mahabharata), when most people talk of the Gita they mean the content of the “chat” itself: what Krishna (“some Hindu god”) said to Arjuna (“a guy”). (Starting with Chapter 2, which is where many commentators began their commentary.)
Also, the Gita is in a sense a concise summary of various ideas, also more extensively covered in the Upanishads and elsewhere. As one of the verses often recited before it says “sarvopaniṣado gāvo dogdhā gopālanandanaḥ / pārtho vatsaḥ sudhirbhoktā dugdhaṁ gītāmṛtaṁ mahat” — the analogy is that if you think of all the Upanishads as cows, then the cowherd Krishna to the calf Arjuna gave divine milk by extracting the Gita from them. It is not someone's thesis or argument — Krishna just reminded Arjuna of what he needed to be reminded of (and by extension, what most of us need to be reminded of). So it would make sense that to someone who's already familiar with the ideas, seeing them in one place in the Gita would have a different effect than to someone encountering them for the first time, and (apparently) without context.
Re: Oppenheimer and the Gita (2014)
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hinduism can not be compared with Judaism. Hinduism is fundamentally build to protect the Brahmin supremacy and caste system is used to deny access to education to the majority of people and to control the society by the priestly class. All the scriptures are there to divert the attention from the main subject when questioned. This essay "Annihilation of caste" by Ambedkar http://www.ambedkar.org/ambcd/02.Annihilatio…
Please don't take HN threads further into religious flamewar. We don't want that here; it leads nowhere good. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This thread is about a religious book my intention is to clear the general misconception among westereners that Hinduism is in the same league as Buddhism, which it is not. Bhagavat Gita, Mahabharata and Ramayana are all about preserving the caste system. Even RMS has blogged about it https://stallman.org/articles/ramayana.html . For these reasons i think my post should not be flagged. Thanks.
Re: Oppenheimer and the Gita (2014)
#70Great article, confirms what I always believed about Oppenheimer and many others in that time. My grandma used to read the Gita to me every day when I was a toddler before I started school. She had a stroke in December and in her final days, I would read verses from the Gita to her returning the favor. Death is the greatest teacher of all, teaches us the value of life and power of decision. Since her passing, I've gr…
My question is why as a Western dude who grew up with lots of exposure to Christian scripture and surrounding culture elements or churches I can visit am I gonna try and learn someone else’s religion (with none of those advantages) when even taking the “easy” route is extraordinary difficult?
I grew up in the Bible Belt in post 9/11 America. Being first generation, I was given the culture of India from my family while also playing baseball and having Windows '95 when I was 5. Also, I was introduced to the Gospel of Jesus when a youth pastor decided to give me his Bible as a gift because he sensed my hunger for wisdom, which I still have 12 years later. My grandma told me Christ and Krishna had the same gospel but for different people of different temperaments, all rivers lead to the Ocean. I have never explored Islam but can understand what a Muslim feels because I've been bullied for being brown and 'looking like a terrorist'. I've felt very lonely at times being an outcast amongst my culture and in America for being a dropout, for not getting married at 25, for choosing experiences over things, for not resenting or worshipping success. Having the Dharma and the Gospel as a guide has helped me stay aligned with what really matters in life: service to others and savoring life in the moment. Without them, I would be lost in the rat race chasing after desires that would never satisfy me fully.
tl;dr - All rivers lead to the Ocean, take whatever raft works for you but see it through to the end and know all the others who preach love and truth as the highest virtues as equally valid.