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.

Agent and Patient

 There’s a spectrum from agent to patient.  In the ordinary way of thinking about it the agent confronted by a possible  action can do it, not do it, do it differently.  The patient is the one we have been discussing, the powerless one, the end stage junkie, the alcoholic, the gamblers enormous guy.  An insidious HAL is in charge of his ship and unless he is reborn he is doomed.  He has to pause the course that he has set.  That path to homeostasis that is his fix  must be laid aside before he can begin to remove the programs and Daisy can give him his answer.

The agent has his own set of rules, habits and behavioural loops.  They smooth the path to immediate response.  The centipede wondering which leg to move first fell over.  Freedom is a project even if its unattainable as an end state of a-causality.  The Vedantic sage dismisses the merely causal as an illusory end, just karma, nevertheless spiritual practice engenders peace or the tranquillity of order.  Now the big question - Who Am I - is possible.

The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch (pub. 1978)

Did he really eat boiled onions for breakfast? One of the endearing if dysphagic elements of this book is the careful recipes nay concoctions the like children might assemble when their parents were away. The bizarre thing is that this was standard grub in the Bayley/Murdoch household. If you wish to follow through on that the Paris Review has an article:
cooking with Iris

Who he? Charles Arrowby renowned theatre director, now retired to Shruff End a house on a promontory right at the edge of the sea, the sea. Alone with his memories mainly of the women that he has subjugated by alternately wooing and leaving until their emotional life is imprinted with his personality. In the Platonic world of philosopher Murdoch the incarnation is preceded by the idea. They do turn up, all of them and for a section of the novel all at the same time. That’s the classic Murdoch stew. Don’t let it go off the boil and keep adding: stir, stir, stir.

Now I won’t even attempt to offer a summary of the novel but instead focus on a central moral theme that of the correlative sins of jealousy and envy which oppress Arrowby. He has to own and absolutely own the past and present of his women. He breaks them by clever direction and the creation of crisis, resolution and abandonment. One woman has escaped him, his first girl friend Hartley, a secret love that left him when they were both eighteen. They were chaste and therefore perfect lovers, the yolk and shell of the one egg. But why, why, why did she go off untraceably? In a karmic reversal he is owned by her: a lump remains like a Jungian serpent in the cave of his past.

I mentioned karma and that brings in the Tibetan theme. His cousin and only relative James Arrowby, retired general, scholar of Tibetan occult lore, spy, adept, and siddha has come back into his life. Charles has envied him all his life and measured his achievements by comparison with the soldier’s. In the completion of a cycle of incarnations all manner of coincidences abound. A siddha induces acceleration of prarabdha (unresolved) karma. Things happen around him. The director finds that the play is getting out of hand though he tries to force his interpretation on it. The past remains owned by Hartley and that is unacceptable.

The novel is a coup of narrative surge. There is no let up. (would cardomom pods go with this ?– crushed or whole?) But how is it finishable? Wonderfully. Read this, save it for the summer, get lots of sand in it. Great writing, good ideas, vile recipes.

Anatman and Karma

The well known conflict in Buddhism between the anatman doctrine and personal karma has been the focus of a discussion recently.
buddhism and merciful lies

On a rational level the paradox remains intractable but perhaps it is the result of a false dichotomy. If the theory arises out of a mistaken view of the vedic atma then the opposition to that other vedic core doctrine of karma might fade away. What they suppose atma to signify is not what the Upanishads hold.

Atma is not the ego or a constitutive identity that is an element of the personality. It does not act and it does not change. As is said in the Brhad.Up. “It moves as it were, it shakes as it were”. It is a mistake to identify it with the ego and the Buddhist motto ‘form is emptiness, emptiness is form’ is near to the essential vedic view. Consciousness that pervades the body, mind, and intellect is superimposed on them and becomes identified with them. Karma arises and is maintained by this and therefore liberation cannot come about through identification with personal action. Maya being the core of experienced reality the contradictions that ensue ought not to surprise or affright.

The corresponding paradox for the vedantin is the position that enlightenment is not personal.

Nishkama Karma (desireless action) and Nishkarma Karma (actionless action) In the Bhagavad Gita

Looking at this lecture
On Karma
by Professor Chris Framarin on the Bhagavad Gita I heard him mention that he demurred from the position on habits and dispositions which was the dominant one espoused by such luminaries as Professors Potter and Perrett. That seemed interesting although in an introductory lecture he could not go into it in any great detail. When I read the chapter on this very topic in Hindu Ethics by Roy Perrett I have to say that I agree.

Nishkama karma is translated as desireless action or action without being attached to its fruits. For some strange reason or I perhaps heard it wrong this sounded to me like nishkarma karma or 'actionless action'. Theres's a sense in which this is true. If desire for the fruits of the action is its mainspring, or what drives it or what is its chief mark then the absence of desire fundamentally alters it. Metaphysically speaking we are no longer captive in time. T.S. Eliot in his Four Quartets refers to this feature of action in Section III of The Dry Salvages:

Here between the hither and the farther shore
While time is withdrawn, consider the future
And the past with an equal mind.
At the moment which is not of action or inaction
You can receive this: 'on whatever sphere of being
The mind of a man may be intent
At the time of death' - that is the one action
(And the time of death is every moment)
Which shall fructify in the lives of others:
And do not think of the fruit of action.
Fare forward.
O voyagers, O seamen,
You who came to port, and you whose bodies
Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea,
Or whatever event, this is your real destination."
So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna
On the field of battle.
Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers.

Consider a clock whose mainspring is broken or removed. It's not even right twice a day because it isn't working and therefore not telling the time. It has 'clockness' without being a clock. Karma is a clockwork concept but without the 'mainspring' of desire it is 'nishkarma karma'.

Where Perrett goes astray is his narrow understanding of freedom in action as being linked to spontaneous response rather than habitual reaction. The cultivation of sattvic routines is the foundation of immediate morally sound reactions. It is arguable that the good man demonstrates his connaturality with the good by doing it without taking thought. He has freely conditioned his actions by training and attention to duty.

Perrett writes:

A response, in this sense, involves an agent directly encountering a situation in a non-­stereotyped way, taking account of the full variety of features present and selecting appropriately from a large range of non­-stereotyped actions. Notwithstanding the undeniable utility which accrues to acquiring at least some reaction repertoires, a response instances a special kind of value that a reaction does not. Many of us, I suggest, would prefer our lives to be lives of response, rather than of reaction, and we are well aware how much our dependence on our habits hinders our achieving this goal.

from:
Gita on Karma
It is perfectly intelligible to claim that a man or woman who have schooled themselves in courage in many different situations over a long period of time will do the courageous thing when it required of them. What they do spontaneously is built on that foundation.

The other point on which Perrett is mistaken is the characterisation of the ontology of the Gita as being a self/body dualism. My previous remarks on the jnana marga in Karma and the Gunas karma are centred on an understanding that is within the advaitic tradition. A self/body dualism is predicated on a Cartesian view. There are different emphases in the orthodox tradition but generally the mind is inert or more precisely the physical complex which is individual when pervaded by pure consciousness gives rise to an individual mind. I am using a distemper brush here.

There is an interesting discussion of first order and second order desires but really when the food is burnt nouvelle cuisine dribbles of jus won't rescue it.