B.G. 13.2 : Are the Scriputures Useless?

There may be a profound lack of interest for the student of advaita in the rather hypothetical conundrum: what is the point of the scriptures if they are surpassed by the state of liberation? Are they rendered vacuous? Hardly is the firm answer. The vast majority of people, sincere seekers though they be, are not realized. They flounder in a state of avidya or primal ignorance. They need a guide to action even if the perfection of that action, so to speak, ends in inaction there being no identification with the motions of the gunas or the persistent dispositions of the erstwhile agent.

“Similarly, in our case let the scriptures be useless when the knowers of the field become identified with God; and purposeful within the sphere of ignorance.” further: “Nor do the scriptures become purposeless, because the scriptures are applicable to the commonly known unenlightened person. It is indeed in the case of the ignorant person- not in the case of the enlightened one - that there occurs the perception of identity of the Self with the effect (i.e. enjoyership) and the cause (agentship) which are not-Self.”

What isn’t treated here is the ethical problem which is created by the Perfected ones being beyond good and evil. Can they commit what would be regarded as sin by normal ethical standards? Persuading others that they remain pure has been the practice of many false teachers in all traditions. Of course they are scoundrels who manipulate the gullible who also may be willing participants in an illusion.�

Bhagavad Gita: Real and Really Real B.G. 13.2

Q: What does ignorance/avidya really mean? A: It is not being aware of the true nature of things or working on false assumptions. Now the paradox is that as a working hypothesis those fundamental assumptions can be perfectly effective. They represent the norm of the commonly shared understanding of reality. In plain terms the philosopher distinguishes between what is ‘real’ and what is ‘really real’. More technically ‘ignorance’ is a metaphysical condition not an epistemological one. There is no question of there being an organic defect. In Plato’s thought the same disjunction occurs between what is real i.e. unchanging truth and what is false/unreal constantly changing and in dispute, what never is. Q: How is ignorance to be overcome? A: By knowledge.

“If one has realized here, then there is truth; if he has not realized here, then there is great destruction.” (Kena Up. 2:5)

Following the rubric of this particular verse B.G. 13:2

“And, O scion of the Bharata dynasty, understand Me to be the ‘Knower of the Field’ in all the fields. In My opinion, that is Knowledge which is the knowledge of the field and the knower of the field.”

To put it in philosophical terms the question boils down to an investigation of self knowledge and self identity. Allied to that inquiry is the ‘Binding Problem’ as succinctly defined by Wikipedia as: “The consciousness and binding problem is the problem of how objects, background, and abstract or emotional features are combined into a single experience.” Shankara goes through the usual pattern of point and counterpoint in his explication of the Advaitin view. Identification with the body-mind and its experiences is the primal form of ignorance. It is akin to the confusion of a stump of a tree at dusk being taken for a man. A simple analogy but like all analogies it can be taken up too linearly and not as a focus on a clarification.

Objection: “The stump and the man, which are verily objects of perception, are superimposed on each other through ignorance by their perceiver. On the other hand, in the case of the body and the Self, the mutual superimposition occurs verily between a knower and an object of perception. Thus the application is not equally applicable.

The conclusion that the objector offers is that the experiences of the body are those of the Self and that there is no other knower other than the body-mind. Shankar’s counter reveals an important aspect of the teaching methods that prevail in Vedanta. Instruction is tailored to the student’s presumed level or the reader’s likely level. Shankara therefore in the response draws on the common assumption, un -argued for, of the permanence of the Self. If the Self is identified with the perturbations of the mind, death, and disease then it can no longer be regarded as permanent. As I have observed in a previous post the philosophical argument for the permanence of consciousness and its independence of mental modifications is explicated in Upadesa Sahasri. Here in this commentary the discussion on that level is curtailed which brings the objector to his next ‘gotcha’.

“Objection: Well, if this be so, then owing to the nonexistence of the world and the mundane creatures, there will arise the defect of the uselessness of the scriptures, etc.”

That is an important sticking point for the skeptical and it requires separate treatment. More anon.

Bhagavad Gita Chapter 13: The Field and the Knower of the Field

Strictly speaking the Bhagavad Gita though revered as a sacred text is not regarded in the same light as the Vedas and the Upanishads and the Vedanta Sutras. They are collectively known as the Triple Canon. Shankara wrote a commentary on the Gita bringing out the deep philosophical implications of the text. It runs to over 800 pages in the translation by Swami Gambhirananda published by Advaita Asrama. Chap. 13 is on the topic of the ‘Field and the Knower of the Field’.

13:2 “And, O scion of the Bharata dynasty, understanding Me to be the ‘Knower of the field’ in all the fields. In My opinion, that is Knowledge which is the knowledge of the field and the knower of the field.”

As pure being Brahman pervades all existence as its being. How is it that we do not know this?

“This being so, the Knower of the field, who in reality is God Himself, appears to have become a mundane soul owing to the various adjuncts which are products of ignorance; as for instance the individual soul becomes identified with the body etc.”

Shankara gives various examples of how this sort of superimposition takes place. In low light a stump of a tree might be mistaken for a man but that does not mean a man is a stump of a tree. What the analogy tries to bring out is that our identification with the body is that sort of mistake. Shankara does not explicate the full doctrine of adhyasa/superimposition. That is in the more abstruse commentary on the Vedanta Sutras. In short what I interpret him as saying there is that this ‘error’ is what makes perception and knowledge posssible. The perceptuality of things is based on the unity of being which allows the object to be present to the consciousness of the subject as that object is. It can be superimposed because of the unity of the substratum. In this commentary he also revives the objection : is not the mixing up of things that you propose as a standard analogy be due to their similarity. That is different from the body and the self. Here you have a single unitary experience.

“On the other hand, in the case of the body and the Self, the mutual superimposition occurs verily between a knower and an object of perception. Thus the illustration is not equally applicable. Therefore may it not be that the properties of the body, though objects of knowledge, belong to the Self which is the knower?”

Here the objector is making the standard mistake of taking a focused analogy which is meant to bring out a metaphysical concept via an everyday occurrence and generalizing from it. An analogy has limited scope and breaks down if we overextend it. Shankara’s response to this is that when you so identify the Self with the changeful, what Hume called bundles of perceptions, you accept that the Self is mortal and transient. In his Upasdesa Sahasri he presents the argument against the identification of Consciousness with a state of awareness. When we awake from Deep Dreamless Sleep (Sushupti) we are aware that we have been asleep even though there were no contents of consciousness during that state. A profound argument which I have written on in several posts, topics below. Superimposition of the changeful on the changeless is the most significant error that human beings fall into it. To cease to do this is to have achieved liberation/moksha.

Bhagavad Gita: Bookend verses in Chapter 9

The Gita contains two what might be called bookend metaphysical verses which may seem to contradict each other when one is simply juxtaposed with the other. “

This whole world is pervaded gby Me in My unmanifest form. All beings exist in Me, but I am not contained in them! (B.G. 9.4)

Pure Being as such is the reality behind all manifestation. We are in it and our awareness is saturated by it in a direct immediate way. Even so it cannot be perceived or intuited as we might grasp any other awareness. We have no direct intuition of being, or any experience of it as a ‘something’. At the same time it makes all experience possible. Etienne Gilson rejected the idea of an intuition of being as proposed by Jacques Maritain which seemed to suggest an experience of some kind. It may be that Maritain meant something akin to a universal realisation of connaturality, a major theme of his in his brilliant monograph on ‘Art and Scholasticism’.

 

Sankara in his commentary on the Gita:

“For, no created thing that is bereft of the Self (i.e. of Reality) can be conceived as an object of practical use. Therefore, being possessed of their reality through Me who am their Self, they exist in Me. Hence they are said to be established in Me.”

He further makes it clear that pure Being is not contained within the individual as its receptacle.

“Since unlike gross objects I am not in contact with anything, therefore I am not the inmost core even of space. For a thing that has no contact with anything cannot exist like something contained in a receptacle.”

The following verse 9.5 amplifies this point:

“Nor do the beings dwell in Me. Behold my divine Yoga! I am the sustainer and originator of beings, by My Self is not contained in the beings.”

The rest of Chapter 9 up to what I have been calling the bookend is the teaching of how to achieve realisation of pure being. Without that liberation however righteous a person might be they are reborn after a period of heavenly bliss.

B.G. 9.29: I am impartial towards all beings; to Me there is not detestable or none dear. But those who worship Me with devotion, they exist in Me, and I too exist in them.

Karma is the key to the endless round of transmigration. It simply means action. Strictly there is no such thing as good or bad karma, there is only karma. The salient aspect of work is that it is goal directed, we act towards an end. Surely it is impossible to get beyond that. We must have a plan or drift aimlessly. Renunciation is the answer. Even though we act the spring of action is subverted, grasping after a goal.

B.G. 9.27: O son of Kunti (Arjuna), whatever you do, whatever you eat, whatever you offer as a sacrifice, whatever you give and whatever austerities you undertake, (all) that you offer to Me. B.G. 9.28: Thus, you will become free from bondages in the form of actions which are productive of good and evil results. Having your mind imbued with the yoga of renunciation and becoming free, you will attain Me.

Karma being surpassed the boundaries and limitations of the individual are transcended and the erstwhile devotee becomes dissolved into the divine completely liberated and not any longer subject to reincarnation.

Man's Fate by Andre Malraux

Gisors is the remote,  detached sage representing the pole of wise impassivity with his son Kyo as the active hero and Communist.  He gets to say the title of the book:

The king’s power is the power to govern, isn’t it? But man has no urge to govern: he has an urge to compel, as you said. To be more than a man, in a world of men. To escape man’s fate, I was saying. Not powerful: all-powerful. The visionary disease, of which the will to power is only the intellectual justification, is the will to god-head: every man dreams of being god.”

The god like plan is to create a utopia after the Marxian pattern. The Moscow international brigade is in Shanghai.  They are in power here but their plan is to allow the Kuomintang Nationalists (K.M.T.) to take charge of the revolution army and carry the bourgeoisie with them and satisfy the workers and peasants with gaudy promises of debt forgiveness etc.  The Chinese Communist Party want to have an understanding with Chiang Kai-Shek.  Chiang is wary of the communists bearing arms and so to keep him happy they must surrender their weapons which they are unwilling to do.  The drama is set up for what the Chinese euphemistically call ‘the Shanghai incident’, or mass slaughter of the communists by the K.M.T.

The deep chess strategy from Moscow seems to be to sacrifice the local communists and allow the more stable K.M.T. to govern and from that position subvert it.

“First extend the Revolution, and then deepen it … ” answered Kyo, more as a question than as an answer. “The line of the International seems to be to leave the power here to the bourgeoisie. Provisionally. … We shall be robbed. I have seen couriers from the front: all workers’ movements are prohibited behind the lines. Chiang Kai-shek has had strikers fired on—after taking a few precautions. . ..”

That in short, as the man said, puts you in the picture.  Malraux had a deep knowledge, from his reading, of the machinations of the several factions.  His claim to having a role in the K.M.T. was one of his confabulations.  To have imagined the situation, to have become deeply immersed in its detail, was for him to have been really there.  Does he bring us there?  Yes.  Right from the start we are engaged, knowing what will come and yet feeling the tension, hoping for ‘with one bound he was free’.  No, sorry.  Not the case; only poltroons evade their fate.

The cast of characters is truly international with only Ch’en the assassin being the only pure blood Chinaman as the translator calls les indegenes.  Remember this was published in 1933 and won the Goncourt in that year.  Political correctness was still the province of Marxist pedants. Ch’en is revealed in the opening pages steeling himself for his first assassination.

SHOULD he try to raise the mosquito-netting? Or should he strike through it? Ch’en was torn by anguish: he was sure of himself, yet at the moment he could feel nothing but bewilderment—his eyes riveted to the mass of white gauze that hung from the ceiling over a body less visible than a shadow, and from which emerged only that foot half-turned in sleep, yet living—human flesh.

It seems almost like a panel of a graphic novel.  Through several pages we are there with a man who has yet to be initiated into murder.  Razor or dagger which to use.  Hysteria grips him but it is the mundane fact of a sudden snore that -

The body turned gently towards the right. Was he going to wake up now? With a blow that would have split a plank Ch’en struck through the gauze. Sensitive to the very tip of the blade, he felt the body rebound towards him, flung up by the springs of the bed. He stiffened his arm furiously to hold it down: like severed halves drawn to each other, the legs sprang together towards the chest; then they jerked out, straight and stiff.

Brilliant opening.  There are several set piece actions in the novel that seem made for casts of thousands cinema. Eisenstein, Zinneman, Costa-Gravas, Cimino, Bertolucci all failed to bring it to the screen.  We ask whether the metaphysical discussions would travel into the more gross realms of celluloid?  Probably not but there’s a lot left over.  Malraux who loved the cinema as an art form would have been delighted by these accolades and intrigued by the problem: what shall we do with John Malkovich, Uma Thurman, Daniel Day-Lewis and Johnny Depp.  That was in 2001, the vision of Michael Cimino but funding, the money men were not shown the envelope with the plot on it and faithlessly dropped away.

From that starry line up, tag line I propose - ‘When made in China was made’.  But it brings out the salient feature of the book.  All the elements of the conflict are there and not simply starry names dragged in to appeal to producers.  There is the earnest assassin ‘Chinaman’ Ch’en, Kyo and Katov opposite numbers as foreign elements of the Communist Party, May Kyo’s German doctor wife, Hemmerlich a sympathiser, Ferrel the rich businessman doyen of the French Concession, Clappique comedian, scoundrel, poltroon.  Oddly there are no Americans, at least not in the foreground of events though likely business interests were an invisible hand.

In rapid brisk scenes the dramatis personae are revealed to us.  The cynical manipulation of the Comintern is well exposed as it was in reality.  Chiang Kai-Shek wishes to get rid of the socialist element in his army and in Shanghai.  Stalin wants to keep in with him.  There may be a large omelette but such is historical necessity.  Katov justifies it:

Katov listened in silence.

“That’s in the fut’re,” he said finally. “At present they’re killing our comrades. Yes. And yet, Kyo, I’m not sure I agree with you, you know. At the b’ginning of the Rev’lution, when I was still a socialist-rev’lutionary, we were all against Lenin’s tactics in Ukraine. Antonov, the comm’ssar down there, had arrested the mine-owners and had given them ten years of hard labor for sab’tage. Without trial. On his own authority as Comm’ssar of the Cheka Lenin congrat’lated him; we all pr’tested. They were real exploiters, y’know, the owners, and several of us had gone into the mines as convicts; that’s why we thought we should be p’rticularly fair with them, to give the example. However, if we had let them go, the prol’tariat would not have understood. Lenin was right. Justice was on our side, but Lenin was right. And we were also against the extr’ordinary powers of the Cheka. We’ve got to think carefully. The present slogan is good: extend the Rev’lution, and afterwards deepen it. Lenin didn’t say right away: ‘The whole power to the Soviets.’”

Later on Malraux developed the common ‘man of the left’ carapace which forgave Soviet reality as the necessary enemy of Fascism.  The sense of truth and betrayal which characterise this book make it essential political fiction.  There's a very true culminating scene - the financial report or what we can rescue from the debacle.

FERRAL, fanning himself with the newspaper in which the Consortium was being most violently attacked, was the last to arrive in the waiting-room of the Minister of Finance: in groups were waiting the vice-director of the Mouvement Général des Fonds—Ferral’s brother had wisely fallen ill the week before—the representative of the Bank of France, the representative of the principal French business-bank, and those of the credit establishments