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On October 2nd of 1869, in Porbandar, India, in the state of Gujarat, a child was born to Karamchand and Putlibai Gandhi. They named the child Mohandas. He was raised a Hindu and was exposed early on to many of its sacred texts, including the epic poems the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. In 1888, Gandhi went to London to study law. He spent 21 years as a lawyer fighting for civil rights in South Africa, and after returning to India, led an independence movement — notable for its use of nonviolent resistance — that, in 1947, resulted in the British departing from the Indian subcontinent and returning governance to the newly-partitioned nations of India and Pakistan. He had stated that one of his greatest inspirations in life was a Hindu sacred text, the Bhagavad Gita, which chiefly concerns the ethics of duty.
On May 19th of 1910, in the Indian city of Baramati, a child was born to Vinayak and Lakshmi Godse. They named the child Ramachandra, though early on he acquired the nickname Nathuram. He became a Hindu nationalist early in his life, dropping out of high school to become an activist. On January 30th of 1948, he came to a prayer led by Mohandas Gandhi and shot him three times in the chest, killing him. At his trial, Godse stated that Gandhi’s support of and concessions to the Muslim minority had been his primary motivation for the assassination, and cited the Bhagavad Gita as part of his inspiration.
In an interview conducted by Time Asia and published February 14th, 2000, Nathuram’s brother and co-conspirator Gopal said that Gandhi had to be assassinated because, by preaching tolerance towards the Muslims, whom they saw as violently oppressing the Hindus, Gandhi was actually encouraging violence:
For months he was advising Hindus that they must never be angry with the Muslims. What sort of ahimsa (non-violence) is this? His principle of peace was bogus. In any free country, a person like him would be shot dead officially because he was encouraging the Muslims to kill Hindus. But his philosophy was of turning the other cheek. He felt one person had to stop the cycle of violence… The world does not work that way.
The fact that this same book, the Bhagavad Gita, “The Song of the Lord,” was a major inspiration for both Gandhi and the man who assassinated him has fascinated me ever since I learned it. I’ve examined the text before, in a piece about hedonism; here, I’ll be taking a broader look at the text and also the matter of the proper interpretation of sacred texts.
The Bhagavad Gita is properly a chapter of the great epic poem the Mahabharata, which details a great war of succession. However, some scholars (such as Eknath Easwaran in his 1985 translation of the book, which is the one I will be primarily using here) believe that the Bhagavad Gita was composed separately and later inserted into the Mahabharata. The Bhagavad Gita is chiefly a philosophical dialogue between the prince Arjuna, who is about to enter a battle against an army that includes many of his friends and relatives, and his charioteer Krishna, an avatar of the god Vishnu. Arjuna is reluctant to enter the battle, and Krishna counsels that he must do his duty and fight.
It seems odd that a book that seems like an exhortation for war would inspire the nonviolent resistance of Mohandas Gandhi, but the text is subtle and the matter is complex.
In the introduction to the first chapter of his translation, Easwaran says:
First, there is the orthodox Hindu viewpoint that the Gita condones war for the warrior class: it is the dharma, the moral duty, of soldiers to fight in a good cause, though never for evil leaders. (It should be added that this is part of an elaborate and highly chivalrous code prescribing the just rules of war.) According to this orthodox view, the lesson of the Mahabharata (and therefore of the Gita) is that although war is evil, it is an evil that cannot be avoided — an evil both tragic and honorable for the warrior himself. War in a just cause, justly waged, is also in accord with the divine will. Because of this, in the Mahabharata, Yudhishthira and his noble brothers find their peace in the next world when they have finished their duty on earth.
The mystics’ point of view is more subtle. For them the battle is an allegory, a cosmic struggle between good and evil. Krishna has revealed himself on earth to reestablish righteousness, and he is asking Arjuna to engage in a spiritual struggle, not a worldly one. According to this interpretation, Arjuna is asked to fight not his kith and kin but his own lower self. Mahatma Gandhi, who based his daily life on the Gita from his twenties on, felt it would be impossible to live the kind of life taught in the Gita and still engage in violence.
Easwaran states as well that these two views are “almost (but perhaps not completely) irreconcilable.”
Three years prior to Gandhi’s assassination, on July 16th, 1945, the United States conducted the Trinity test, detonating the first nuclear bomb in the desert of New Mexico. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the project that developed the weapon, upon seeing the mushroom cloud, thought of verses from the Bhagavad Gita. According to Robert Jungk’s 1958 book Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists, Oppenheimer had read the Bhagavad Gita, in the original Sanskrit no less, and considered it one of the most influential books in his life. It was read as well by both the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson and the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, which means that it must have made its way as well, either directly or indirectly, to Friedrich Nietzsche, who was strongly influenced by both.
I wonder about Oppenheimer in particular. The Bhagavad Gita has great philosophical relevance to the development of the nuclear bomb and its eventual use against Japan in order to end the war. Oppenheimer knew that he was working to develop a weapon of incredible destructive power, but he certainly did not desire the widespread death and terror that he must have known the weapon would inevitably cause. Why accept such an undertaking, then? On the one hand, there was the concern that the Germans would develop such a weapon first, which would have been a terrible outcome. I’m not the person to say whether it would have been better if we had never used nuclear weapons against Japan or if we had never developed nuclear weapons in the first place, but given that the Germans were also working towards this goal, I’d rather we had them first. Certainly it would have been better if no one had ever developed nuclear weapons, but we find ourselves here in yet another prisoners’ dilemma in which everyone ends up in a worse situation because we can’t trust the other side to take the option that’s best for everyone. As such, while the Manhattan Project may have been among the dirtiest of dirty jobs, the alternative was potential annihilation by the enemy, so someone had to accept that duty.
I grew up in the 80’s, and remember a world in which nuclear armageddon seemed like an omnipresent threat. I have had to train for being bombed by nuclear weapons at multiple points in my life1. Some of those happened because I was in the Army for a while, but I distinctly remember seeing designated fallout shelters in the city as a child. Apparently they’re still out there, though considerations of their use no longer seem to be much of a public priority.
Both of the quotes from the Gita that are attributed to Oppenheimer come from the book’s eleventh chapter, which takes the form of a theophany, a literary exposition of a manifestation of the divine:
If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.
11:12, source of translation uncertain and may be Oppenheimer’s own, although Swami Nikhilananda’s from 1944 is very close
And here is Oppenheimer himself speaking on the second verse he recalled from that same chapter:
We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
I disagree that Vishnu was simply trying to impress Arjuna by showing him his true form, but that’s a matter for another time. Easwaran’s translation of that line is a little different:
I am time, the destroyer of all; I have come to consume the world. (11:32)
Easwaran comments on that critical turn from “death” to “time” in his introduction to the chapter:
Terrified, Arjuna wants to know the identity of this awesome God, who bears no resemblance now to the Krishna he had known as his teacher and friend. In answer to the question, “Who are you?” Krishna’s reply is the verse (11:32) that burst into Robert Oppenheimer’s mind when he saw the atomic bomb explode over Trinity in the summer of 1945: “I am become death, the shatterer of worlds…” But the word kala means not just death but time, which eventually devours all.
Easwaran’s translation continues:
Even without your participation, all the warriors gathered here will die. Therefore arise, Arjuna; conquer your enemies and enjoy the glory of sovereignty. I have already slain all these warriors; you will only be my instrument…. Kill those whom I have killed. Do not hesitate. Fight in this battle and you will conquer your enemies.
11:33-34
Vishnu is identical with Brahman, ultimate reality, the very ground of being, and thus it is not Arjuna who will truly be doing the killing on the field of battle. Life and death, warfare and killing, are not Arjuna’s creations; rather, they are manifestations of the true nature of reality. That being the case, so long as Arjuna is fighting only out of his duty as a warrior rather than for his own personal gain (as Krishna counsels in the book’s third chapter), he is morally free — even morally obligated — to participate in the battle.
I have difficulty placing these verses in Gandhi’s more mystical interpretation of the text. Returning to Easwaran’s description of this interpretation, Gandhi “felt it would be impossible to live the kind of life taught in the Gita and still engage in violence.” And returning to the verses from the Gita: “Kill those whom I have killed. Do not hesitate. Fight in this battle and you will conquer your enemies.” I can’t reconcile these things, and am inclined to follow what seems the more literal interpretation of the Gita. I indeed believe that certain circumstances make it morally incumbent upon us to kill, and the Gita seems to me to be a poetic reflection on this difficult and troubling matter and an exhortation for how such circumstances may be morally addressed. At the same time, Gandhi’s non-violent revolt against the British occupation of India was entirely laudable; a military revolt would have doubtlessly resulted in a great many deaths and may not have even been successful. Godse’s assassination of Gandhi, however, seems entirely pointless, more an act of vengeance than one of duty, and on this matter the Bhagavad Gita is quite explicit:
Do not get angry or harm any living creature, but be compassionate and gentle; show good will to all. Cultivate vigor, patience, will, purity; avoid malice and pride. Then, Arjuna, you will achieve your divine destiny. ().
16:2-3
While this places Arjuna’s coming battle in a more ambiguous moral status, it does seem to clearly repudiate individual acts of vengeance.
The Qur’an is another book that has inspired hosts of interpretations, many of them contradictory. In his book Reading the Qur’an (2011), the Muslim scholar Ziauddin Sardar writes on the matter:
…Readers can only strive to do their best to arrive at conviction in their tentative, contextual and timebound understanding of the text. The eternal and infinite are not qualities of human knowledge, understanding or experience. By definition, not all the scholarship of all the ages, individual and/or collective, can ever be an absolute and permanently fixed reading of the divine word. To accept the Qur’an as eternal means acknowledging that there is always more to the text than our partial intellect will comprehend and to begin one’s reading from that premise with humility.
Later, speaking on sacred texts in a more general fashion, he writes:
Sacred texts, by their very nature, are complex, multi-layered, allegorical, metaphorical and an embodiment of pluralistic meanings. A Divine Text does not yield a divine meaning: the meaning attributed to it can only be the product of human understanding. A timeless book has meaning only in time. It can only speak to us in our own time and circumstances. Our understanding of ‘the Final Word of God’ cannot be final. It can only be transitory and limited by our own abilities and understanding.
And yet some interpretations are clearly better than others. Anyone who reads the gospels and believes that Jesus was preaching subservience to the Pharisees and to their interpretation of Jewish law has clearly missed some significant points. Similarly, it’s hard to understand how an organization like the infamous Westboro Baptist Church, who have taken very deplorable and hateful actions in the course of denouncing homosexuality, can be said to have interpreted the Bible in a manner that is at all reasonable. Certainly there are verses that support their actions — individual verses from the Bible can be taken out of context and used to support almost any action imaginable — but the overall message of the text seems to strongly contradict their actions from every angle, and, as evidence to this, their interpretation is highly inconsistent: the Levitical codes also prohibit the wearing of clothes made from two different materials, but the Westboro Baptist Church does not seem nearly so concerned about this matter.
I think that sacred texts are best understood as being descriptive rather than normative. That is, they are reflections of who we are rather than statements about who we should be, though these reflections naturally encompass our highest aspirations for ourselves as well. And to that end, I think that, for our own good, we as a species should immediately give up the notion that there is any one correct interpretation of any sacred text, though there may be incorrect interpretations. And Sardar’s call for humility here is absolutely essential: to claim to have a definitive understanding of a sacred text is inherently hypocritical, because to hold a text as sacred in the first place is to hold it above and beyond oneself, and to claim an absolute and perfect understanding of it is to usurp that sacred role. One cannot simultaneously hold the text as sacred above oneself and hold oneself as authoritative over the text. I don’t think such a view would have necessarily changed much in the course of history: Gandhi would still have seen in the Bhagavad Gita a reflection of his desire to see the people of India free from the yoke of the British Raj, Nathuram Godse would still have seen in the text a reflection of his desire to avenge the deaths of Hindus at the hands of Muslims, and Oppenheimer would still have seen a reflection of his duty to build a nuclear weapon before the Germans, but I think that this view would point us towards using the texts to gain a broader and deeper understanding of ourselves rather than using them as weapons and as justifications for deplorable behavior.
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