Often, bhagavadgita, actually, the words used in there, are stretched beyond
imagination to sanctify them, especially when it comes to talking about castes;
instead of plainly admitting that there were mistakes either because of the
author's lack of pan-human-nature/understanding or the society's lack of
pan-human-understanding, or both. I see this disturbing trend even here,
on TELUSA.
Let me start with the most controversial: caste references in Bhagavadgita.
Most people refer to the so-called "Chatur varnam maya srishtam..." verse to indicate
that castes are after all indicative of peoples' gunas and tattvas, but not from
birth. Hence, Krishna got it right, and hence Hinduism has no caste-discrimination
in its constitution and all we have got is the mistaken practice, which we
only have ourselves to blame but not the founder, the Krishna or the Krishna-dwaipayana (depending on how much you distinguish between them -- vyasaya vishnu rupaya
....)
In fact, chinmayanda goes way into the extreme of comparing castes with professions
of the modern day (doctor, tailor, etc.)
For those (including the great Chinmyananda -- whom I heard in Kanpur a while back;
he is no longer with us), I ask the following question: read the verses 38-42 in
the first chapter (arjuna vishada yogam) and interpret them for me.
And read chinmaya's explanation! I can't provide a more incoherent explanation.
In the vernacular, these verses translate as follows: he (Arjuna) tries to justify
to himself and to Him the wastefulness of the war; so he says: after war, the
men will be killed. Then, the women will have to sleep with men of lower castes,
and produce children of mixed-varnas, and these children can not offer pindas
to the pitru devas (i.e., ancestors) because they are ill-born (mixed-varnas).
Of course, Chinmaya sugar-coats these verses by stretching varna to mean
profession, and then I wonder why a tailor-doctor's child can't offer pindam
to a doctor? Beats me.
Honestly, Gita has more to offer than many other religious texts I read:
e.g. Koran, Old and New Testaments (at large).
It also has less to offer than many religious texts I read:
Dharma Padham and parts of N. Testament
That's that.
To somehow provide divine interpretations to explain away everything in Gita as
infallible is at best a matter of faith. Once faith enters into an argument,
logic takes leave (and so do I).
As to someone who compared reading gita with a sanskrit dictionary with
reading the principia with an English Dictionary, I might
add that I did just that. And, I had no problems following it. Except that it made
me understand how many mistaken routes did Newton take.
For example, his (Newton's) original approach to compute the differential of
x^n involves binomial theorem, and then he got a wrong proof for it (Gauss fixed
it -- much later).
To give a modern time example, read the celebrated declaration of independence.
After saying "all men are created equal" in one para, the authors, including
my favourite (Jefferson), goes on to refer to the native americans as "savages".
To somehow stretch "savages" to mean "not-all-bad people" is ludicrous.
Jefferson and co messed up and messed up real well.
Inter-racial marriages are illegal in this country in our own (my own) life time.
Early sixties, that is. So, if there is a netter out there who married a different
colored woman (or, man), beware! 30 years ago, it was a crime punishable by
imprisonment. US constitution was messedup. There is no reason to somehow justify
such acts by giving divine (i.e., capitalistic) interpretations.
So, I stand by what I said: Gita, when examined without *faith*, has some mistakes
and some great *nuggets* of wisdom. I take what I like. Dharma Padham is a better
book on castes (there is an entire chapter "Brahmana vargam" in which Gautama
defines what is a brahmin).
Gautama knows first-order classical logic well. He clearly defines what is a
brahmin and what is NOT. He does not leave anything for interpretation, not
because he was not capable of but because he was careful. If you are interested,
I can post Brahmana Vargam.
Kumar.
Usual Note: I have not written this because I am a brahmin-hater. I am a born
brahmin, and therefore, have no biological biases you may otherwise potentially
attribute to me. Not that non-brahmins have biological biases, but it is easy
to attribute such to them. Hopefully, I am not attributed of the same.
I welcome replies especially of non-brahmins, and the so-called dalits. Yes, yes,
I know this will be out of the scope of the forum of TEULSA, and therefore,
we should keep going on playing the violin while the world burns because this forum
is for playing the violin only. Thank you.